Chaitanya Giri’s erudite volume recasts India’s early modern past as a struggle over epistemic power. In 1802, as the East India Company consolidated its dominion over large parts of the subcontinent, a young officer named William Lambton began what would become the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Stretching over nearly seven decades, completed under George Everest by 1871, it was one of the most ambitious scientific enterprises of its age: a project to measure India with mathe