Map of India with Ceylon, Burma & Baluchistan

Circa 1920s

Large-format engraved map, printed in Edinburgh by John Bartholomew & Son Ltd, with sectional folds, designed for practical administrative, educational, and commercial use.

Folds down to 5.12 x 8.46 in (13 x 21.5 cm.), opens to 40.16 x 30.71 in (102 x 78 cm.), with key, in English.

A substantial late-nineteenth-century Bartholomew wall map of India, extending from Baluchistan to Burma and Ceylon—an authoritative visual synthesis of British India at the height of the Raj, produced by one of the most respected mapmaking houses of the Victorian period

This large Bartholomew wall map represents one of the most characteristic and practically used forms of late-Victorian cartography. Produced by John Bartholomew & Son, the pre-eminent Scottish cartographic firm of the nineteenth century, the sheet captures British India at a moment of administrative maturity—after the annexations of the 1850s–1880s, before the partitioning of Burma (1937) and long before Independence.

The map encompasses the full territorial extent of British India, extending from Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier, and the Punjab in the northwest across the United Provinces, Oudh, Bengal, and the Central Provinces in the north and east, and down through the Bombay and Madras Presidencies in the west and south. It further incorporates Burma, then administered as an integral part of British India, and Ceylon, which is delineated with its own distinct provincial boundaries, reflecting the administrative and geopolitical structure of the late nineteenth-century Raj.

Bartholomew’s maps were admired for their clarity, chromatic subtlety, and rigorous compilation from official sources. The present example synthesises information from the Survey of India, the India Office, and the growing corpus of railway and postal survey data. The result is a remarkably legible political and physical portrait of the subcontinent, showing provincial and princely boundaries, the arterial railway network, telegraph lines, major roadways, river systems, and administrative capitals from Lahore and Quetta to Rangoon and Colombo.

The inclusion of Baluchistan, Burma, and Ceylon is historically significant: these regions reflected the outward extension of British India into Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean. Their combined representation on a single sheet demonstrates how, by the late nineteenth century, the Raj conceived of itself not merely as a territorial entity but as a geopolitical system spanning multiple frontiers.

Bartholomew’s signature engraving style—precise hachuring, delicate coastlines, and a restrained use of colour—lends the map an aesthetic balance that belies its administrative purpose. Large wall maps of this type were used in government offices, railway headquarters, shipping firms, missionary societies, and schools, making them central instruments in shaping public and bureaucratic understanding of the subcontinent.

For a Northern India-focused auction, this map marks a crucial transition: it reflects the scale, cohesion, and infrastructural reach of the Raj during its zenith, and it stands in marked contrast to the more fragmented Mughal and early-colonial maps featured earlier in the sale. It is both an authoritative historical document and a visually arresting artefact of imperial cartography.

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