India from Authorities principally for the use of the Officers of the Army of India

1831

Steel engraving on paper

Print size: 25.5 x 17.5 in (65 x 44.5 cm)
Sheet size: 28.25 x 18.25 in (71.5 x 46.5 cm)
Folded: 14 x 9.75 in (35.5 x 24.5 cm)

Teesdale’s India from Authorities (1831)—A Handsome Victorian Synthesis of East India Company Cartographic Intelligence

This outline hand-coloured map is among the most substantial plates in Teesdale’s New General Atlas of the World, and represents a highly detailed Victorian synthesis of the best contemporary British “authorities” on India. Teesdale specialised in producing updated imperial maps grounded in the most advanced geographic intelligence available in the early nineteenth century—a term that by this period encompassed the Great Trigonometrical Survey, military surveys from the Mysore and Maratha campaigns, Admiralty coastal charting, and administrative boundary reports issued from the Bengal, Bombay, and Madras Presidencies.

India from Authorities reflects this compilation with clarity and ambition. The map delineates the subcontinent shortly after the consolidation of company rule, presenting detailed administrative divisions, cities, towns, and major systems of roads and rivers. Princely states and British-controlled territories are differentiated through subtle colour wash, and the sheet often incorporates a list of British possessions alongside significant boundary demarcations, underscoring its administrative and bureaucratic utility.

Beyond its reference function, the map’s structure reveals a strategic logic shaped by imperial mobility and military governance. Roads and navigable rivers are emphasised as critical arteries for the movement of troops, supplies, and artillery between the three presidencies, while relief is rendered through fine hachures, allowing officers and officials to assess terrain, slopes, and march feasibility—an essential consideration in a landscape still marked by recent conflict and continuing expansion.

The map stands at a political inflection point. The Mughal Empire had effectively collapsed; Sind was on the verge of annexation; and the Punjab remained just beyond British control, soon to become the theatre of conquest. Teesdale’s representation thus provides a precise snapshot of India at the dawn of the high Victorian imperial moment, when geography, administration, and military infrastructure converged in the cartographic imagination of empire.

Decoratively restrained yet elegant, the plate avoids excessive ornament while retaining the refined hand-colouring characteristic of early Victorian atlas production, making it both an important historical document and an aesthetically compelling example of British imperial cartography.

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