MAPPING INDIAN

HISTORY
Challenges and Issues*

ARUNDHATI
VIRMANI

W ith the Renaissance and the shift from cartographic

speculation on the cosmos and its spaces to a precise
observation of geographical realities, cartographic
representations of the world on various scales made maps an
indispensable tool, equally for military conquerors, administrators
or travellers. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, maps invaded
books of all kinds, not only relating to geography but also novels.
The map appeared as a means of procuring readers a synthetic, visual
knowledge of distant territories with their geophysical, political, but
also economic or cultural dimensions. The invention of the atlas is
attributed to Abraham Orteleus who, in 1570, published a collection
of 53 maps at Antwerp under the Latin title Thetrum Orbis Terrarum.
This was a systematic collection of maps giving a global knowledge
of the entire world. Barely in existence, the atlas was given different
forms. European sovereigns attentive to their territorial possessions
rapidly acquired methodical descriptions of their kingdoms in
the form of complete collections of regional maps, giving birth to
the first national atlases such as the volume featuring the maps of
the counties of England and Wales, produced by Christopher
Saxton and published in London in 1579, or the Theatre François
of M. Bouguereau dedicated to the French king Henry IV in 1594
(Akerman, 1995: 138–54). They would gradually contribute to the

* This paper is an abridged version of a talk presented at the inauguration of

the exhibition ‘Mapping Indian History’, at the India International Centre,
25 September–1 October 2012, presenting my Atlas Historique de l’Inde du VIe
siècle av. J.–C. au XXIe siècle, Paris, Autrement, 2012. (Historical Atlas of India,
6th Century BC–21st Century)

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growth of national consciousness. More than three centuries later,

the potential of atlases in representing and understanding national
realities still remains to be exploited (Lehmann, 1984: 91–96; Black,
1994: 643–67). This is particularly so in the case of India where
atlases, more often than not, reflect current situations and have been
sparingly used as tools that locate contemporary India in long-term
dynamics. How then can a historical atlas of India be conceived to
serve as a tool of knowledge and how can it contribute to a public
debate on its history?

MAPPING AS AN IMPERIAL STRATEGY

Maps of temples, forts, battle sites or territories, and their uses
for purposes of navigation, pilgrimage or revenue collection in
pre-colonial times is today well recognised (Gole, 1989; Raj, 2006:
60–94; Gogate and Arunachalam, 1998:126–40; Philimore, 1952:
111 –14). Nevertheless, under British colonial administration,
cartography acquired a new importance, extending to the whole
subcontinent (Kalpagam, 1995: 87–98). The British conquest
of Bengal in the 18th century stimulated the production of maps,
beginning with James Rennel’s first cartographic surveys of the
Bengal region. His Bengal Atlas (1781) was dedicated to Robert Clive
and to his victory in the Battle of Plassey (1757), and it was clearly
destined to facilitate the collection of revenue in the province. He
extended his surveys and went on to produce a highly detailed
and precise Map of Hindoostan (1782), which proved a decisive
turning point, accelerating cartographic productions of the country
and its regions. The production of several regional surveys from
Colin MacKenzie’s topographical survey of Mysore in 1800 to
A. Arrowsmith’s Atlas of South India (1822) was to inspire the East
India Company’s Atlas of India project, launched in 1823. The desire
to promote a knowledge of local realities among administrators
as well as ordinary British citizens led the London Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in the 1830s and 1840s to publish an
atlas featuring detailed maps of India that projected the country as
an imperial possession and a significant element of British identity,
at the same time underlining the need for a rational control of the
territory (Barrow, 2004: 677–702). Simultaneously, in India, the
great ambitious, large-scale project of the trigonometrical survey
of India (1802–1892) was begun. Conceived as a key tool for

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military conquest and a ‘standard instrument of government’ for

the administrative control of the territory, it even anticipated spatial
realities (Edney, 1997).

NEW USES OF CARTOGRAPHY IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

Although these cartographic exercises of measuring and
classification, produced from hybrid endeavours and re-workings
between British surveyors, engineers and Indians, provided
the necessary infrastructure for governing the colonial state,
Indians were equally conscious of the power of cartographic
representations in inspiring a patriotic sentiment for their
motherland. Nationalists actively used representations of India
as an instrument of national pedagogy through the production of
images of the country in the form of ‘Bharat Mata’ or in the form of
a map (Ramaswamy, 2001: 97–114). After independence, a series
of stamps printed in 1957 featured the map of India, thus diffusing
a political and geographical consciousness of the country’s new
national reality to its citizens.
The same year, the Indian government published Bharat:
Rashtriya Atlas, presenting the physical, economic and social features
of India as an independent country on the path of development.
Directed by the geographer S.P. Chatterjee, this atlas had been
sanctioned as a government project, approved by Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953, and carried forward through the recently
organised National Atlas Unit under the Ministry of Natural
Resources and Scientific Research. It broke with colonial traditions:
written in Hindi, the new official language, it used a common
system of measurement—the metric system—for the whole country,
as opposed to the British ‘imperial’ measures, as well as to the
prevailing mosaic of systems at the local and regional level. It thus
gave a material reality to the unification that the new Indian state
affirmed. Available at a relatively high price of `100, this official
work, containing 26 coloured maps, aimed at strengthening the
relationship of Indians with their land through a precise knowledge
of the resources of their country, which was in the throes of economic
and social development. Thus, it included a detailed presentation
of the country’s administrative divisions down to the villages, land
forms, watercourses of major rivers, rainfall and temperature maps,
different categories of soils, used land, forests, cash crops, the

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geographical distribution of industries, communication networks,

urban and rural population, literacy, irrigation and health, among
others. A new edition in eight volumes in English then appeared
in 1968, including further regional data. Nationalism and political
change motivated the production of this atlas as a national project.
It provided the nation with a political portrait of its geography,
administrative, political and social characteristics, recognising its
diversity, yet englobing it in a collective experience. Later atlases
(Muthiah, 1987) continued this trend of presenting an up-to-date
picture of economic and demographic data, and developments in
the country. As such, they could serve as a political, administrative
history, transforming statistical data into graphic images. In the eyes
of national governments, atlases were inspired by a national impulse
and demands of national planning. They were seen to play a key role
in projects of national construction and as a means of representing
the territory of the nation space to Indian citizens.

$&$572*5$3+,&$3352$&+727+(m,'($2),1',$n
None of these atlases took the diachronic dimension of the
construction of state and territory into account. This coincided with
the official position and state efforts devoted to the construction of
the future; efforts, which, as Nehru had clearly affirmed, required
Indians to liberate themselves from the burden of the past or the
nostalgia of an ancient golden age. The end of the 1970s saw the
emergence of the first historical atlases of the subcontinent, a
production that had no link with the construction of independent
India. The Historical Atlas of South Asia (Schwartzberg, 1978) was
an American academic initiative, in the shape of a major project
launched by the University of Minnesota in September 1964 under
the direction of the American geographer Jan Otto Marius Broek
and the historian Burton Stein. It was finally completed by the
geographer Joseph Schwartzberg. The latter had worked in close
contact with the Office of the Registrar General of India, in particular
to ‘prepare the detailed outlines for a series of atlases to accompany
the 1961 census of India at both the national and the state levels’.
This long, costly, and collective operation terminated with the
publication of a masterwork, which remains till today, a significant
reference point. The desire to present exhaustive, complete
information without taking into account the atlas’ prohibitively high

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cost made this work difficult to use for the reader because of the
density and complexity of data presented in each map.
In their turn, Indian historians too produced important
atlases, the most significant production coming from Aligarh Muslim
University, where Irfan Habib completed two big atlases: the first
on the Mughal empire (Habib and Habib, 1986) and the second
on ancient India (Habib and Habib, 2012). These detailed political
and economic maps, based on extensive research work, offer a
precise detailed geographical image of the territorial construction
and workings of the Mughal state, and are a masterly synthesis of
scholarly knowledge and research on the subcontinent in the 16th
and 17th centuries. This difficult and complex exercise has been
repeated for ancient India, providing the reader with a rich mine of
information and precise details on periods that are comparatively
little known to non-specialists and particularly mired in stereotypes
and myths.
The publication of my historical atlas of India from 6th
century BC to the present day (Virmani, 2012) must be considered
against this background. Though it covers a long period, it is not
intended as a description of three millennia of India’s history or
as an encyclopaedic inventory of its economic, political, social or
cultural movements. It clearly takes position in the larger debate
ongoing since the last 20 years on the ‘idea of India’ (Khilnani,
1997; Virmani, 2008) by using instruments that only cartography
can provide, that is to say, synthetic and dynamic information that
takes account of historical processes inseparable from local, regional,
subcontinental spaces in which they unfold. It takes the expression
‘mapping’ seriously, an expression that has become quite fashionable
but is sometimes treated only metaphorically in exercises of
‘mapping histories’, excluding any cartographic operation.
The historical atlas proposes an exploration of the ‘idea of
India’ through maps that trace geographical, political, cultural and
social developments in connection with the world. The succession
of maps shows the instability and fluctuations in India’s internal
and external boundaries. Within its northern and southern limits,
these are constantly shifting according to conflicts and battles
conducted along an impressive defence system of fortresses,
built and reinforced since the Delhi sultanate by successive ruling
dynasties and their rivals. The building of contemporary India is

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approached in terms of the constitution of a space and territory and

the construction of spatial relationships in the long term, which is
quite different from the Braudelian sense of the longue durée, taken
in the sense of relatively stable physical, climatic and environmental
conditions. Indeed, it is also about people’s relations with space,
with processes of urbanisation, transport networks, or cultural and
religious activities. The Atlas Historique draws equal attention both to
economic and social changes over time, to the gradual institution of
pluralist societies, and to the coexistence and toleration of different
religious systems and cultural modes under strong political regimes.
This long-term perspective forces us to move beyond thinking the
history of India within established colonial or nationalist categories
and clichés. On the contrary, mapping this history highlights the
gradual, non-linear construction of a national space, shaped by
external and internal exchanges, migrations and circulation of
peoples, ideas and institutions.
The first challenge for a historical atlas is assembling large
and precise data or statistical series on historical moments or
developments. In this respect, the methods it mobilises do not differ
greatly from the classical historical approach to sources, namely, the
search for and constitution of a corpus, its critical treatment, cross
checking of sources and eschewal of obvious prejudices and biased
positions. However, in comparison to the historian’s task, an atlas
is grounded on sources that must furnish comprehensive data and
precise information for a large, coherent space on different scales.
A map is the spatial representation of a georeferential database.
The availability of this kind of data finally determines what can
and cannot be mapped. Thus, not all themes that would merit
representation can be cartographically translated. Many important
phenomena have not left records with these kinds of data. Or else,
these data exist but demand considerable preliminary research
work to make them available. For instance, Johanna Blayac’s recent
research work has assembled the complete corpus of the first Arabic
inscriptions from 8th–13th centuries in the Indian subcontinent
(Blayac, 2010). This publication permits us for the first time to
establish a precise cartography of the earliest principal settlements of
Muslim merchants and soldiers in India and follow their progression.
Documents are more rare for ancient periods. The expedition
of Alexander the Great to India (330–324 BC) clearly reveals some

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specific difficulties of ancient Indian history that Indian historians

have analysed at length. A rich scholarly tradition enables us to trace
in detail Alexander’s itinerary, the cities he founded and the battles
he fought. An attentive cartography of the geophysical geography of
the regions of Central Asia and the Indus valley crossed by Alexander
reveals the intentions, hesitations and difficulties confronted by
the Macedonian king. Textual documentation and archaeological
findings from the major excavations of the different cities founded
by Alexander is still entirely asymmetrical. As opposed to the rich
Greek sources, it is impossible to map with accuracy the territorial
organisation of the Indian states and rulers whom Alexander fought.
Nonetheless, the only conclusion this cartography helps us draw is
still significant: Alexander arrived up to the river Beas in the Indus
valley whereas the dynamic centre of northern India at the time was
the Gangetic plain from where the powerful Mauryan empire was
soon to expand.
Nevertheless, for ancient India, maps can be made on the
basis of data constituted by archaeologists or elaborated by historians
on the basis of archaeological findings. For example, the numerous
rock inscriptions of the Ashokan period indicate the extension of
territories under his control, perhaps even the boundaries of his
empire, the Mauryan system of centralised administration, and the
prevalent languages and scripts. Recent works on Indo-Roman trade
are based on archaeological discoveries of ancient coins or Roman
amphoras in south India where the presence of Roman coins informs
us about the active commercial links between India and the Roman
Middle East, and permit conclusions about the zones that benefitted
from this commerce, mainly the Malabar and Coromandel coast, but
also a large part of the Deccan plateau. The debate on the port of
Muziris on the Malabar coast as an important centre for Roman trade
has thus added another element to our knowledge of ancient trade
links. For a more recent period, the recently published catalogue
of inscriptions in the Syriac language in the south enables us to
establish a first cartography giving exact indications of the presence
of Syrian Christians from the 16th century onwards (Chatonnet,
et al., 2008); this also gives a historical depth to the studies of
Christian settlements during the colonial period. The inventory
of monasteries and temples, very well documented for the end of
the first millennium, reveals a religious geography that contrasts

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with colonial and contemporary situations, especially concerning

the sizeable presence of Buddhism in present-day Gujarat. It is
possible to follow the spread of Buddhism outside India in the same
millennium, towards Central Asia, first to China then to Japan and
to the whole of South-East Asia. In return, we can follow the travels
of Buddhist Chinese monks who, during the first millennium, came
to India as pilgrims in the upper Indus and Gangetic valley in search
of sacred texts.
Sources and records are richer for the medieval period.
The institution of a developed administrative apparatus and
bureaucracy and the chronicles of the period contained detailed
information about the territories, administration, resources, routes,
trade and circulation, revenue collection, forts or coinage. The
cartographic possibilities of tracing change and developments
in this period are many, but, equally, on a political plane Islam’s
expansion can be understood in the broader context of the
Islamic world in interconnection with the Safavid and Ottoman
empires or Central Asia. The cartographical approach allows us
to simultaneously show the political expansion of Islam and the
development of temple architecture from wood to stone, testifying
the emergence of new architectural forms in central India and
their progressive development all over India with strong regional
differentiations in style.
The modern period too is particularly rich in source material,
generated by the colonial administration’s need for knowledge to
manage and control its empire: in the form of imperial gazetteers
of India edited by W. W. Hunter, first published in 1881 on the
direction of Lord Mayo, imperial surveys (Geological Survey,
Archaeological Survey, Statistical Survey, among others) and
censuses, the latter becoming regular from 1872 onwards until
the last British census in 1941. Compiled by British colonial
administrative departments, these records contain exhaustive
information on demographic trends, size and localisation of religious
communities, race, tribe, religion and caste. Still, the colonial
methods underlying these big descriptions and British inventories
or categories for classifying this information raise many questions.
Recent debates on the subject show the difficulties of pursuing an
analysis that depends exclusively on categories narrowly linked
to the exercise of colonial power. Whilst it is difficult not to use

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them, especially when they relate to demography or urbanisation,

alternative corpuses and sources of diverse origins need to be
tapped in order to map a social and cultural history of that period.
These sources may include the internal records of socio-religious
reform movements or of political parties. Thus, the minutes of the
Theosophy Association or the directory of the Brahmo Samaj allow
us to follow the spatial dynamics of these movements. With the turn
of the century, the rich archives of the Congress and the Muslim
League enable us to trace the nationalisation of political life and
the development of a political culture with an essential difference
between British India where these parties were active and a weaker
presence in princely India. Broadening these data sources takes us
beyond the actions of the colonisers or the immediate uses of that
information for British political and strategic interests in the Indian
empire. It extends our field of analysis of colonial processes to
include Europe’s intellectual interest for India. Mapping the unequal
multiplication of Chairs of Sanskrit in European universities in the
19th–20th centuries reveals Europe’s fascination for the Indian
civilisation, greater in the German world with its ancient philological
tradition than in Britain.
This information becomes even more meaningful when
presented in connection with other elements besides the traditional
topographical features present in a map. The map is then not only
a simple description of a territory in its geographical, political,
economic or cultural aspects, but proposes an explanation of
the phenomenon studied. The Atlas Historique has systematically
mobilised the opposition between British and princely India, and
taken account of corresponding urban changes. The map of the
1857 revolt shows the distinction between British provinces and
the princely states: the revolt is clearly concentrated in British
India, then spreading to the Gangetic valley, from Punjab to
Bengal; the scattered revolts in a few small princely states do not
favour its expansion and it does not rally the entire subcontinent
in a nation-wide anti-colonial struggle. Including important urban
centres in a map presenting Protestant missions in Bengal from 1790
to 1840 indicates that they are founded in 70 per cent important
cities but they also appear in smaller market towns. A similar
inclusion of important cities along the route of Gandhi’s salt march
in March–April 1930 informs us that his action in this protest

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Gandhi’s Travels in India, 1915–1941.
Map of Kerala
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was inscribed entirely in rural India. With some rare exceptions

(Ahmedabad or Surat), his 25-day-long march did not take him
across any big city. Maps showing interconnections between
different elements, without necessarily imposing causal links,
present both a synthetic and analytic assessment of the question, at
times elucidating developments in one region in contrast to others.
Whilst the quantity of data for the contemporary period is
immense, the challenge of mapping change in postcolonial India lies
at another level if we wish to show more than religious, linguistic,
or demographic patterns or administrative, political and territorial
changes. Combining different layers of information permits the
creation of new maps. Some of the maps in the Atlas Historique
are made from data already accumulated and known to historians,
but which has never been mobilised to make maps. Maps opening
up a new field can thus jolt our ideas of a period. This is so for
Gandhi’s displacements in India or in Europe. Gandhi’s collected
works covering the period from 1884 to 1948, published between
1960 and 1994, and even available as an electronic book since
1999, allow us to reconstruct the itineraries of his journeys and
displacements and stays in the country and abroad. Mapping this
data gives visibility to the material ties that linked Gandhi to the
subcontinent in its diversity, draws attention to the cities and states
he visited regularly, and places where he resided for many days. It
informs us of the knowledge he acquired of India in its diversity
but also the links he could have woven with the local people, the
forms of political mobilisation that his direct presence and visibility
to locals could have encouraged, and the national dimension
built through the personal attachments he formed with Indians in
different places. Cartographic analysis highlights this new territorial
aspect of Gandhi’s political action.
Despite the elaboration of a national dimension in the
colonial and independent period, the subcontinent equally presents
a strong diversity that the Atlas Historique tries to reveal through
different examples. Maps often shift from the national to the regional
scale. On a national scale, the construction of the railway network,
the institution of the bank network, the possibility of following
All India Radio programmes throughout the country illustrate the
importance of internal connections. But observations on a regional

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scale demonstrate the persistence of differences and inequalities.

Region-specific maps draw attention to processes sometimes too
easily relegated to the periphery of national history. If the Punjab
National Bank is present in all the states, its implantation is denser
in the north, around Mumbai and Calcutta and in the south. The
map showing non-governmental organisations in the country
reveal their specifically regional profiles. Women’s cooperatives are
well implanted in the north of Kerala. And NGOs in Haryana, in
their attempts to oppose female infanticide, develop especially in
sectors like health, education and public hygiene. Some states are
particularly affected by communal conflicts than others.
Finally, in the contemporary moment, it is necessary to
highlight the external presence of India and understand its reasons.
Beyond a general fashionable interest since the 1960s and 1970s
in Indian religions abroad, henceforth it is primarily the presence
of strong Indian communities that favours the construction of
Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras. In contrast, without any direct
link with an Indian diaspora, India also draws advantage from the
transformation of Gandhi as a hero of the anti-colonial struggle to
the status of founding father of non-violence and civil disobedience
movements. This becomes important from the 1960s onwards,
in the USA and in numerous former colonised countries: the
multiplication of Gandhi stamps in the world accompanies Gandhi’s
ascension to the status of a global icon, recognised by the United
Nations in 2007.
Historians interested in social relations often base their
work on the identification of groups, whether communities, castes
or tribes, and their emergence, action, expansion or organisation.
Unfortunately, these questions are not always treated as dependent
upon a spatial, territorial ordering, except in moments of conflict on
frontiers or as part of military strategy in the affirmation of borders.
History is then reduced to the ancient tradition and preoccupations
of administrative geography. The Atlas Historique de l’Inde maps this
history in relation to territories and lived spaces but also in terms
of internal and external relations. It proposes an interpretation of
history that treats social questions of communities or the nation as
community on the level of territory in order to highlight how men
organise and reorganise this space and territory.

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The last decades have seen the birth of violent polemics

around questions of ethnic origins (Aryans vs. Dravidians), religious
and regional identities that have made national history a crucial
stake. In this context, a historical atlas, without necessarily being
an encyclopaedic, descriptive inventory of the Indian space and
territory, brings new elements to these debates and inquiries, even
if it can cover three millennia of this history only through selected
moments, regions and themes. First, it demythifies the notion of a
sacred land of ancestors, a matri bhumi, by showing fluctuations,
advances and retreats of boundaries, redrawing of external and
internal frontiers and reshaping of states. Secondly, it contextualises
the Indian experience by linking it with a larger central Asian,
south Asian, European, and today, a global space. Thirdly, detailed,
regional maps show the contrasts in material growth as well as the
development of a composite culture in some regions through the
settlement and social displacement of different communities.
The idea of a space that was eternally and unchangingly
Indian is graphically refuted by these perpetual shifts,
displacements and interactions. Limits and boundaries fluctuate,
as do sites of domination, showing India to be a mobile space.
Today, India does not correspond to the geography evoked in
the Ramayana, because political experiences and exchanges
transformed the country, its territory, and people’s relationships
with their territory and its different landmarks. Maps show
that although the peninsula is the central focus, it is constantly
shaped by exchanges with other countries, undergoing incessant
modifications and transformations. Hence, viewing India
sometimes from a distant perspective, from Greece, Rome or
China in ancient times and, of course, inevitably, from Europe in
the 19th–20th centuries and then from a world perspective today
is equally important. The Historical Atlas highlights the different
experiences of India that shift the political centres of power from
the west to the north and to the south, the impact of sudden
political upheavals and cultural movements in the medieval period,
the elements of unequal change in society in some regions under
the colonial thrust, and the beginnings of uneven development.
Last but not least, the advantage of maps over texts can be
considered to lie in their nature of open texts, giving the viewer
the liberty to produce his own interpretation from the information

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and connections provided in the maps. The titles orient the reader
without imposing a particular interpretation or imprisoning her
within a closely defined problematic. An atlas can thus serve as a
democratic means and tool for putting a current state of knowledge
before people in a society where knowledge is still unequally
accessible and controlled by deep-rooted notions of hierarchy.

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