Historical Geography of India: From Indus Valley to Colonial Cartographies
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https://doi.org/10.66871/trf-j.v1i2.014##semicolon##
Historical geography of India, Indus Valley Civilisation, Vedic period; Mauryan Dynasty, Mughal Empire, Colonial cartography, Spatial theory, Postcolonialism, Territorial evolution.सार
The Historical geography of India reflects the profound transformation of spatial cognition, territorial organisation, and cartographic visualisation over several millennia, thus reflecting changes in political power, cultural paradigms, economic subsistence, and epistemic production. This conceptual investigation traces the history of the temporal trajectory between the Indus Valley Civilisation (c. 3300-1300 BCE) and the British imperialism of colonial cartography (until 1947) by utilising analytical tools of historical geography, postcolonial theory, and critical spatial analysis. During their antiquarian stage, the Indus Valley Civilisation was distinguished by advanced urban planning, where such cities as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro are typical, with grid patterns, sophisticated hydrological systems, homogenous architecture, and strong trade connections as far as Mesopotamia and other far-off lands. In the theoretical frameworks of cultural landscapes and nascent globalisation, these settlements bring out a proto-urban geography that is based on riverine fertility and environmental adaptation, as opposed to the explicit territorial sovereignty demarcation. The Vedic and classical periods, through their successive mappings, followed cosmological mappings, which are reflected in the textual content of Vedic literature in which the subcontinent is visualised as a sacred land (e.g., the Sapta Sindhu and Bharatavarsha). Administrative road networks and spatial subdivisions were used to ensure spatial dominance because concurrent imperial expansions under the Mauryan and Gupta empires deployed these concepts to their administrative domains. The administrative cartographies were further stratified by medieval Islamic sultanates and the Mughal Empire, in which schemes like the revenue schemata in the *Ain-i-Akbar* reconciled the native knowledge systems on the one hand with the Persianate models of spatial aesthetics and state on the other.The period of colonialism marked a radical break, with European powers, which reached its climax in the British occupation, injecting scientific cartography in various measures, such as the Great Trigonometrical Survey (1802-1871). Based on Foucault's power-knowledge paradigm and Said's conceptualisation of orientalism, this paper criticises the use of colonial maps as an instrument of territorial inscription, extraction of resources, and epistemic hegemony, which obscured or subjugated already existing spatial stories and restructured India as a governable, limited zone. Through their synthesis, the paper highlights continuities (e.g., the centrality of rivers) and abrupt discontinuities (e.g., the dissolution of sacred-cosmological to secular-scientific cartography). It also highlights the postcolonial backlash on the modern geographical imaginaries, thus showing how geography has been constructed, challenged, and changed in the Indian milieu socially.This conceptual mapping continues the process of decolonising historical geography by prefiguring indigenous spatial epistemologies as possibilities of imperial legacies, and thus providing subtle contributions to the social construction and struggle over geography in the Indian context.
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