The Mapmaker

Author: Moulik, Maitry Roy

Brand: Niyogi Books

Edition: First Edition

Binding: paperback

Number Of Pages: 376

Release Date: 02-11-2025

Details: In the foggy alleys of Enlightenment-era England, where coffeehouse discourses could topple the limits of human knowledge over bites of squab pudding and dinner parties could determine the course of natural history, a singular mind moved in eccentric circles, crisscrossing paths with the aristocracy, academia, and clergy, but always forging his own, off-beaten tract. His vision was steadfastly different—a map that could show the layers of the earth. What he envisioned was not just a map, but a subterranean archive of the earth’s secrets. Balancing between stumbling across a discovery and the manic rush of invention, Moulik reimagines William Smith’s intellectual trajectory through the landscapes that shaped him—rural austerity, industrial upheaval, scientific circles marked by class division and exclusion, and long, labouring hours in canal routes and coal mines. The Mapmaker evaluates the cost of independent research, the ethics of ‘owning’ knowledge, and the often-overlooked private lives that underpin public contributions to human knowledge.
About the Author: Maitry Roy Moulik is a renowned author and a geologist by profession. Primarily operating in Bengali, her writings have been published by renowned publishers in Bengal like Ananda Publishers, Desh, Sananda, Bartaman and other magazines, Durba Prakashani, Platform Prakashani, and Boibondhu Publishers to name a few.
She has also contributed her work to Women’s Writings from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, The Worlds of Bangla and Urdu. She has translated the New York Times bestselling The Rise of Birds by palaeontologist Dr Sankar Chattopadhyay into Bengali. Moulik was a recipient of the Krittibas Award for literature in 2018.
About the Translator: Chandana Dutta, author, editor and translator, has a Ph.D from JNU, New Delhi. She was Assistant Director for Katha Vilasam, the publishing wing of Katha; set up the publishing outfit Indialog, and was Editor, Indian Horizons, a quarterly journal on art and culture published by the ICCR, New Delhi. She was Adjunct Faculty for the Masters Programme in Publishing at Ambedkar University Delhi.
She translates from Hindi and Bangla into English. Among her books are My Other Half: Krishna Paul in Conversation with Chandana Dutta. She has also conceptualised and curated a volume on the iconic Tamil poet, Salma. She is series co-editor of the Writer in Context series being published by Routledge UK. She is based in Delhi.

EAN: 9788199249493

Languages: Bengali