some Brahmins to obtain information on Hindu mathematical traditions as part of the biographical memoir on John Napier and the history of logarithms. The biography project appears to have been subsequently dropped but Colin continued to take an interest in antiquities. For the first thirteen years in India, he was busy with military duties. He 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. In 1793 he saw action in the Siege of Pondicherry. He was posted as a commanding engineer to Ceylon and returned in 1796. He rose in rank starting from a second lieutenant on 16 May 1783, first lieutenant on 6 March 1789; and captain 16 August 1793. Major by 1 Jan 1806 rising on to become a colonel on 12 August 1819. It was after his return from Ceylon that he was able to follow his interest in antiquities. Mysore survey In 1799, Mackenzie was part of the British force in the Battle of Seringapatam, where Tipu Sultan, Maharaja of Mysore was defeated. After the defeat of Tipu, he led the Mysore survey between 1799 and 1810 and one of the aims was to establish the boundaries of the state as well as the territories ceded by the Nizam. The survey consisted of interpreters, a team of draftsmen and illustrators who collected material on the natural history, geography, architecture, history, customs, and folk tales of the region. When he began the survey, he was concerned that he had no linguistic skills and was more appalled by the lack of British competence in south Indian languages. Around the same time, the trigonometric survey was proposed by William Lambton but there was little collaboration between the two during the Mysore survey. Mackenzie was told that his survey was not to be "mere military or geographical information, but that your enquiries are to be extended to a statistical account of the whole country." However he was not provided enough resources for this grand plan. He 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. He pointed out that enquiries into revenues created uneasiness. One of his chief interpreters was a man named Kavelli Venkata Boria (IAST kāvelī veṃkeṭā boraiyāḥ, there