Sheet 38 — North-West Frontier Province

Original survey 1916; printed 1933

Large engraved and lithographed map, issued by the Survey of India, Dehra Dun, 1933 (surveyed 1916)
Mounted on linen (as typically issued for wall maps) with sectional folds, designed for practical administrative, educational, and commercial use.

Folds down to 16.5 x 11 cm, opens to 65 x 45 cm, with key, in English.

A detailed 1933 Survey of India map of the strategically sensitive North-West Frontier Province, based on a 1916 survey—an authoritative late-colonial sheet recording military roads, tribal territories, administrative boundaries and mountain topography along the Afghan frontier

This 1933 Survey of India sheet of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), compiled from surveys conducted in 1916, represents one of the most technically accomplished expressions of late-colonial cartography. Issued during a period of sustained military and administrative engagement along the frontier, the map documents a region central to British imperial strategy—both as a defensive buffer against Afghanistan and as a politically complex zone shaped by Pashtun tribal confederacies and semi-autonomous frontier agencies.

The sheet encompasses the rugged mountain districts north of Peshawar and west of the Indus, including Swat, Dir, Chitral and Hazara, as well as the strategic corridor leading toward the Khyber Pass. Military roads, mule tracks, cantonments, pickets and rest-houses are recorded with precision, while dense contouring, triangulation points and relief modelling reflect the advanced survey techniques perfected by the Survey of India in the early twentieth century. Such maps were essential operational instruments for the Indian Army, the Frontier Constabulary and colonial political officers tasked with administering the volatile borderlands.

The 1930s marked a transitional phase in frontier governance, shaped by evolving imperial policy, ongoing tribal campaigns and the constitutional reforms that culminated in the Government of India Act (1935). This sheet therefore preserves the administrative and strategic geography of the NWFP shortly before the geopolitical transformations brought about by Partition in 1947.

Within the broader narrative of this sale’s exploration of Indian cartography, the map serves as a late-imperial counterpart to earlier Mughal and Company-period representations: here, India’s north-western frontier is rendered not as an imaginative margin, but as a rigorously measured, militarised and administratively codified landscape.

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