Trace the history of India through this new unique book of maps

Made in 1613 in Western India, Gujarat this 83.8 x 155 is made by Gum tempera, ink, and gold on cloth and is preserved in The Cleveland Museum of Art. This was part bought and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim

If you had been a map maker back in the 13th century, you'd be the equivalent of a techie in today's job market. If you were really good at it, there'd have been a bidding war over your services between two rich kings or businessmen of the time. Today, map making is an art form that's all but disappeared, and along with it, so has our perspective on how our country has grown and shrunk through the rigours of time.

Perhaps this is what drove the trio behind a new, first-of-its-kind book - India Through Iconic Maps published by Roli Books - to travel across the country for two-and-a-half years in search of obscure map rooms. From Jodhpur to Odisha, their search unearthed a collection of 254 maps that shows us how this country evolved in the centuries before it became the India we know.

A Plan of the Battle of Plassey Fought on 23 June 1757 that is 17.5 x 23.5 cm in size and is engraving technique found The Mapping Bengal Collection

Ironically, the authors - heritage professional Deepti Anand, archivist-curator Sanghamitra Chatterjee, and contributing author Juhi Valia, had no road map for their efforts, right from decoding iconographies to identifying the land and borders of the time. "Early maps of India varied wildly in shape and accuracy. Yet, as India took form on these maps, its evolving identity came alive. This book traces that ironically unmapped journey by exploring the stories behind its most iconic maps," says Anand.

The book, released on October 7, is divided into five large sections; the first is Early Interpretations of the World, which refers to the scientific surroundings of the physical universe around us. In this section, cosmographies and mappa mundi (western counterparts of religious, mythological mapping) with earliest representations of India on some western and Arab maps are the focus. As the trio kept going ahead chronologically, they could see what some of the iconographies meant. For example, there is a symbol where several thin discs are bunched together, and then at the centre, there are four lines with circles. "We later realised that it's a representation of the cosmos through concentric circles of land and ocean with the human world right at the centre," Anand says.

The second section, The Quest of Explorers, covers the 13th to 16th centuries, with sea routes leading to India. "The third section, Europe Meets India, will make you realise how each European nation came to our shores in quick succession, leading to some of the earliest European efforts to map India's cities, ports, and towns. And as each coloniser arrived, one could see the map of India rapidly transitioning territorially," say the author. The maps show how the Europeans set up settlements along the coast in Goa, Calicut in "Vieux India" (historical India, dating back to 2500 BC), and then in Bombay. When the French arrived, maps of Pondicherry were drawn.

"You start seeing maps of parts of India being taken over and the scramble that happens between them [colonisers], taking over more and more of the land, until the British Raj. The maps from this era are just for war purposes; in fact, there are maps titled ‘Theatre of war' that date right up to the Battle of Plassey [1757]," adds Anand.

This was also one of India's most colourful mapping eras, "We were identifying India with the context of the Indian Ocean. Then you have upper India, lower India. They have these little descriptions of serpents that could eat up an ox. There are elephants, there are crowns [to symbolise a king's rule]. The Ganges is visible everywhere, as is the Indus Valley. It tells us just how limited the knowledge was at that time; it was not necessarily about locating where India actually is [on the world map]," she says, adding that the context grew as "over time, people started to draw our coastline across the country in bits and pieces".

Deepti Anand is a heritage professional, Co-author Sanghamitra Chatterjee is an archivist (right) Juhi Valia, contributing author

The last section, India from Conquest to Freedom, takes us through the advent of scientific mapping in British India, up to 1947. "In this era, maps were drawn to form military strategies, for administrative plan and revenue collection. The maps almost tell you what must have happened in that time period, and the planning that went into conquering us," says Anand.

Each map also holds its maker's personality. For instance, they discovered a Jodhpur map that was unique - for its time - in its use of the trigonometrical method, which was more precise in scale. After a little digging, the authors found the map maker's diary, in which he had journalled about how he was transported from one army unit to another. "Suddenly, we noticed how he'd mapped the settlements and wells around the city, and what certain lines on the maps meant," says Anand.

An entire section is dedicated to indigenous maps from the 18th century. On one of Valia's searches, she found a hidden treasure trove in Jaipur which housed these maps that had never been published before. They were drafted by indigenous communities with an intimate knowledge of the land, and became an invaluable resource for the British map makers, who drew up the modern maps we are familiar with today, say Anand and Valia.

"Repositories like these don't have the means to store these maps or to even open them up; some of the maps are so large that they can't even fit in the room that the cataloguing collection team is working out of," says Valia. "For them to even gauge the condition of these records, they have to find the time and space to unroll them, and then photograph or document them," she adds, expressing that although grand to see, it does limit access to these maps," she adds, expressing that although grand to see, it does limit access to these maps.

Hundreds of people would work at a time on sections of these maps, which were nothing less than works of art, the authors say. "For me, it's not so much about the size or the accuracy of the maps but the story they tell and the art and the traditional knowledge. While today's maps are accurate, they do not tell us the stories of where our culture came from. These [modern] maps are plain and rarely illustrative, but the maps in the book are like art pieces," says Valia.

The book's listed price of Rs 30,000 might give you pause but is a true collector's item for history buffs. The book also comes at a time when India has become a powerhouse in the tale of the global south. "While we trace how we developed as a nation through these maps, it's refreshing to see why India was so important to the world. They [the maps] talk of India with the most descriptive vocabulary. It was more than just land of snake charmers and elephants…" says Anand signing off.

Rs 30,000
Price of the book