‘India within the Ganges’ was the beautiful name Euro¬peans gave to our India to distinguish it from various other Indias, vague and unknown, lying somewhere yonder in their conception. It is the slow, long drawn-out process of focussing on this India on map-sheets and of bringing the representation of the earth and soil of this region into approximation with reality that Susan Gole has reconstructed with remarkable facility. Cartography can hard¬ly be a subject holding a non¬technical readership in thrall. Yet Ms Gole traces the history of cartography in India preci¬sely for such a readership with great simplicity and charm. She reproduces the old maps essentially for their ‘aesthetic value’, for the glimpses they allow of the way early travellers viewed the country, as evidence of the changing importance of towns and districts over the years, in any way people enjoy looking at them. (Preface)
May-June 1984, volume 8, No 6