33 Facts About Colin Mackenzie

Colonel Colin Mackenzie was a Scottish army officer in the British East India Company who later became the first Surveyor General of India.

Colin Mackenzie was a collector of antiquities and an orientalist and an indologist.

Colin Mackenzie surveyed southern India, making use of local interpreters and scholars to study religion, oral histories, inscriptions and other evidence, initially out of personal interest, and later as a surveyor.

Colin Mackenzie was ordered to survey the Mysore region shortly after the British victory over Tipu Sultan in 1799 and produced the first maps of the region along with illustrations of the landscape and notes on archaeological landmarks.

Colin Mackenzie's collections consisting of thousands of manuscripts, inscriptions, translations, coins and paintings, which were acquired after his death by the India Office Library and are an important source for the study of Indian history.

Colin Mackenzie was awarded a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 4 June 1815.

Colonel Colin Mackenzie was born in Stornoway on Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, the second son of merchant Murdoch Mackenzie and Barbara around 1753 or 1754.

When Lord Napier died in 1773, Kenneth Mackenzie helped Colin to obtain commission with the British East India Company to join the Madras Army.

Colin Mackenzie joined as a Cadet in the Infantry division but was transferred in 1786 as a Cadet of Engineers.

The biography project appears to have been subsequently dropped but Colin Mackenzie continued to take an interest in antiquities.

Colin Mackenzie began in Coimbatore and Dindigul around 1783 followed by engineering duties in Madras, Nellore and Guntur and during the campaign against Mysore from 1790 to 1792.

Colin Mackenzie was posted as a commanding engineer to Ceylon and returned in 1796.

In 1799, Colin Mackenzie was part of the British force in the Battle of Seringapatam, where Tipu Sultan, Maharaja of Mysore was defeated.

Colin Mackenzie wrote to Barry Close that he would not "descend to the minutiae" of measuring cultivated and uncultivated land but would instead focus on that which was of political and military importance.

Colin Mackenzie pointed out that enquiries into revenues created uneasiness.

One of his chief interpreters was a man named Kavelli Venkata Boria who Colin Mackenzie first met in 1796, shortly after his return from Ceylon.

In 1797, Colin Mackenzie visited Mudgeri and found the ruins of a Jain temple.

Colin Mackenzie wrote an extensive note on the Jains based on interviews through his translator "Cavelly Boria".

Boria died in 1803 and Colin Mackenzie took in his brother Venkata Lechmiah.

Colin Mackenzie appears to have first visited the site in 1798 and conducted more systematic studies between 1816 and 1820 after he became a Surveyor General and three copies of these documents were made.

Colin Mackenzie believed that the site was related to the Jain religion and had no idea of Buddhism in India.

About 79 stones depicted in the Colin Mackenzie drawings are unaccounted for and are not traceable to collections in museums.

Colin Mackenzie spent two years in Java, during the period of British occupation during the Napoleonic Wars.

Since Mackenzie had then moved back to India, the team was led by H C Cornelius who was responsible for the work involved in removing the debris from the buried ruins of Borobodur.

Colin Mackenzie was appointed Surveyor General of Madras Presidency in 1810 but these posts were abolished in 1815.

Colin Mackenzie returned to continue surveys of eastern India from the Krishna to Cape Comorin.

Colin Mackenzie stayed there till May 1817 during which period he worked on planning surveys and examining earlier surveys.

Colin Mackenzie however set about to his work and did not board the yacht.

Colin Mackenzie finally set sail to Calcutta on 17 July 1817 aboard Sophia.

When Colin Mackenzie moved from Madras to Calcutta, Lechmiah was retained.

Colin Mackenzie died on 8 May 1821 at his home in Calcutta, India, and was buried in South Park Street Cemetery.

Colin Mackenzie applied to the Madras division of the Asiatic Society to continue work on the collections made by his master.

Studies of the maps made by Colin Mackenzie's survey are considered to have the potential to highlight interesting archaeological sites as well as provide information on the organization and structure of poligar chiefdoms which were dismantled after British takeover.