The second Obaid Siddiqi Lecture of 2026 will be hosted at NLSIU, Bengaluru in collaboration with Archives at NCBS on 16th July 2026, 5:30 PM at the Conference Hall (Ground Floor), Training Centre.

Please carry a government-issued ID when you arrive at the NLS Main Gate.

Walking the Dotted Line: Mapping Borders Before the Nation

Dr. Samira Sheikh

Obaid Siddiqi Chair in the History and Culture of Science, 2025-26

Indian surveyors walked the territories they mapped, armed with precise strides and bamboo rods. Astronomers measured locations in the sky and on land. Seafarers plotted rhumb lines between ports and along coasts. But few marked political boundaries on their maps. This second lecture explores what it meant when such boundaries began to appear in Indian cartography. Do pioneering mapmaker Sadanand’s dotted lines in 1780 mark a moment when mapping became newly legal, administrative, and extractive?

About the Speaker

Dr. Samira Sheikh is a historian of South Asia and Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She is currently the Fifth Obaid Siddiqi Chair at the Archives at NCBS. Her research focuses on early modern and modern western India, with particular attention to Gujarat, riverine and coastal histories, mapping, and the social worlds of trade, labour, and governance. She is the author of Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders, and Pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200–1500 (Oxford University Press, 2010) and is currently working on two book projects on mapping and mapmaking in South Asia. Her work combines archival research with spatial and digital methods to rethink how Indian spaces were historically known and made.

For more information, please visit Obaid Siddiqi Lectures 2026.