Maps of Mughal India
Susan Gole, Maps of Mughal India, New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2003
Large-format illustrated volume containing numerous facsimile reproductions of Mughal maps, cosmographies, manuscript diagrams, and early colonial interpretations of Indo-Persian cartographic traditions; original publisher’s printed wrappers
13.1 x 19 in (33.5 x 48.5 cm)
A foundational modern reference work on Mughal cartography—Susan Gole’s Maps of Mughal India, the standard scholarly study of early South Asian mapping traditions and a cornerstone resource for collectors, historians and institutions
Susan Gole’s Maps of Mughal India remains the most influential modern study of the cartographic traditions of the Mughal Empire. Bringing together manuscript paintings, imperial cosmological diagrams, route maps, topographical scrolls and courtly representations of space, Gole reconstructs a body of material that had long remained understudied in comparison with European mapping of Asia.
Her work demonstrates that Mughal mapping was never conceived as a purely geographic or scientific exercise in the Western sense but instead functioned within a richly layered intellectual and cultural framework. It drew upon courtly knowledge systems, integrated principles from Perso-Islamic cosmology, and served as a tool for administrative record-keeping and imperial communication networks, while also operating as a form of artistic visualisation that expressed territory, authority, and power. In this context, maps were not merely spatial documents but complex instruments that mediated governance, worldview, and political imagination within the Mughal imperial world.
Book on an illustrated series of maps of the Mughal provinces (Subahs), commissioned from local artists by Jean Baptiste Joseph Gentil in ca. 1770. These are possibly the very first Indian maps based on an indigenous literary source, the 'Ain-i-Akbari' of Abul-Fazl. The maps are reproduced here in full colour. The maps include Chadjeanabad (Delhi), Agbarabad (Agra), Bear (Bihar), Haidarabad, and Bidar, amongst others, along with contrasting maps from d'Anville's Carte de l'Inde (1752).
For collectors and researchers, the volume is indispensable. It establishes a clear interpretive framework for understanding the maps, battle plans, administrative diagrams and cosmographies that appear in imperial Mughal albums and court chronicles. It also situates these within a broader South Asian history of knowledge-making—bridging the gap between art history, administrative history and scientific cartography.
Maps of Mughal India serves as the intellectual anchor for the entire sale: a modern distillation of the long arc of Northern Indian cartographic tradition, from early-modern imperial visuality to colonial survey precision and, finally, to postcolonial scholarship.
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