Carte de l`Inde Dressee pour la Compagnie des Indes

1752

North India: 21 x 43.5 in (52.5 x 108.7 cm)
South India: 21.5 x 43 in (52.5 x 107.5 cm)
Will form a huge map of 42.5 x 43.5 in (107.9 x 110.4 cm) approximately, when both the sheets are joined together

D’Anville’s Monumental Map for the French East India Company — Featuring One of the Earliest Cartographic Mentions of Bangalore (Benguluru Fort)

This monumental map of India by Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville represents one of the most important eighteenth-century scientific cartographic treatments of the subcontinent. Prepared expressly for the French Compagnie des Indes, it marks a decisive shift away from decorative or speculative geography toward a rigorously critical, source-based approach that would define modern cartography.

Conceived as a unified geographical and administrative vision, the map extends from the Indus and the Arabian Sea across the peninsula to the Bay of Bengal and onwards into Burma and Southeast Asia. River systems, coastal outlines, and inland routes are rendered with exceptional clarity, while political boundaries are selectively delineated in accordance with the commercial and strategic priorities of French imperial trade. Ports, river mouths, and trading centres are plotted with particular care, underscoring the sheet’s function as an operational instrument of commerce rather than a purely decorative atlas production.

A notable feature of this vast composition is the inclusion of eight smaller inset maps, providing intensified detail of regions of special interest to European navigation and mercantile power. These include, among others, the town of Goa, the mouth of the Ganges—carefully furnished with soundings—and the Strait of Malacca near Banda Aceh, situating India within a broader Indo-Oceanic theatre of global trade.

Equally revealing is d’Anville’s methodological restraint. Much of the Indian interior, particularly a large triangular zone south of the Ganges extending toward the mouth of the Krishna River, remained imperfectly known to European geographers. In contrast to earlier mapmakers who filled such spaces with conjecture, d’Anville opposed the inclusion of unverified information and left this region almost entirely blank—an eloquent demonstration of Enlightenment critical discipline and scholarly integrity.

The map is further distinguished by its early documentation of emerging inland centres. Of particular note is what may be among the first cartographic mentions of Bengaluru Fort, marked symbolically on the sheet. Originally founded in 1537 as a mud fort by Kempe Gowda I, a vassal of the Vijayanagara Empire and founder of Bangalore, the fort was later rebuilt in stone by Hyder Ali in 1761—an evolution of power that this map registers at an exceptionally early stage.

D’Anville’s methodology—grounded in the critical evaluation of travellers’ accounts, indigenous sources, and astronomical observation—profoundly corrected earlier distortions of scale, orientation, and interior geography. His work exerted lasting influence on later French and British cartographers, including Delisle, Rennell, and the East India Company’s own mapping establishment.

Stylistically restrained yet visually commanding, the map exemplifies Enlightenment cartography at its most accomplished. Fine engraving, elegant clarity, and monumental scale combine to present India not as an exotic periphery, but as a coherent and intelligible space of imperial, commercial, and geopolitical significance.

As such, Carte de l’Inde stands as a cornerstone in the cartographic history of the subcontinent—bridging scholarship, commerce, and empire in one of the defining maps of eighteenth-century India.

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