page_title: Cartography of India
section_title: Middle Ages
hierarchical_section_title: Cartography of India / Middle Ages
caption_attribution_description: Anonymous map c.1550 of Eastern Africa, Asia and Western Oceania.
context_page_description: The cartography of India begins with early charts for navigation and constructional plans for buildings. Indian traditions influenced Tibetan and Islamic traditions, and in turn, were influenced by the British cartographers who solidified modern concepts into India's map making.
  A prominent foreign geographer and cartographer was Hellenistic geographer Ptolemy who researched at the library in Alexandria to produce a detailed eight-volume record of world geography. During the Middle Ages, India sees some exploration by Chinese and Muslim geographers, while European maps of India remain very sketchy.
  A prominent medieval cartographer was Persian geographer Abu Rayhan Biruni who visited India and studied the country's geography extensively.
  European maps become more accurate with the Age of Exploration and Portuguese India from the 16th century. The first modern maps were produced by Survey of India, established in 1767 by the British East India Company. Survey of India remains in continued existence as the official mapping authority of the Republic of India.
context_section_description: The 8th-century poet and dramatist Bhavabhuti, in Act 1 of the Uttararamacarita, described paintings which indicated geographical regions. In the 20th century, over 200 medieval Indian maps were studied in the compilation of a history of cartography. Also considered in the study were copper-plate text inscriptions on which the boundaries of land, granted to the Brahman priests of India by their patrons, were described in detail.  The descriptions indicated good geographical knowledge and in one case over 75 details of the land granted have been found. The Chinese records of the Tang dynasty show that a map of the neighboring Indian region was gifted to Wang Hiuen-tse by its king.
  In the 9th century, Islamic geographers under Abbasid Caliph Al-Ma'mun improved on Ptolemy's work and depicted the Indian Ocean as an open body of water instead of a land-locked sea as Ptolemy had done. The Iranian geographers Abū Muhammad al-Hasan al-Hamdānī and Habash al-Hasib al-Marwazi set the Prime Meridian of their maps at Ujjain, a centre of Indian astronomy. In the early 11th century, the Persian geographer Abu Rayhan Biruni visited India and studied the country's geography extensively. He was considered the most skilled when it came to mapping cities and measuring the distances between them, which he did for many cities in the western Indian subcontinent. He also wrote extensively on the geology of India. In 1154, the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi included a section on the cartography and geography of India and its neighboring countries in his world atlas, Tabula Rogeriana.
  Italian scholar Francesco Lorenzo Pullè reproduced a number of Indian maps in his magnum opus La Cartografia Antica dell'India. Out these maps two have been reproduced using a manuscript of Lokaprakasa—originally compiled by the polymath Ksemendra (Kashmir, 11th century CE)—as a source. The other manuscript, used as a source by Francesco Pullè, is titled Samgrahani. The early volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica also described cartographic charts made by the Dravidian people of India.
  The cartographic tradition of India influenced the map making tradition of Tibet, where maps of Indian origin have been discovered. Islamic cartography was also influenced by the Indian tradition as a result of extensive contact.
  The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama reached the subcontinent on 20 May 1498, anchoring off Calicut, on Malabar Coast. He would, with other Portuguese, navigate and chart much of the sub-continents coast line, within decades. These charts were rapidly reproduced, and appeared in say the 1502 Cantino planisphere.
caption: 16th century Portuguese navigational chart of the region
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