Carte de l‘Inde Dressee pour la Compagnie des Indes par le Sr. d‘Anville Secretaire de S.A.S.Mgr. le Duc d‘Orleans Novembre 1752

1752

Copper engraving on paper

North India: 21 x 43.5 in (52.5 x 108.7 cm)
South India: 21.5 x 43 in (52.5 x 107.5 cm)
Will form a huge map of 42.5 x 43.5 in (107.9 x 110.4 cm) approximately, when both the sheets are joined together

D’Anville’s 1752 scientific map of India—the foundational Enlightenment cartographic statement on the subcontinent, commissioned for the Compagnie des Indes and built upon Jesuit, Mughal and Arabic–Persian geographic knowledge

Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, the most influential French geographer of the Enlightenment, brought to mid-eighteenth-century cartography a level of methodological rigor unprecedented in European mapping of Asia. His Carte de l’Inde dressée pour la Compagnie des Indes (1752) stands as the first truly systematic attempt to portray the Indian subcontinent using a critical evaluation of sources—rejecting conjectural coastlines, decorative flourishes, and inherited mediaeval geography in favour of evidence-based spatial reconstruction.

Prepared for the French Compagnie des Indes, the map synthesises field reports from Jesuit missionaries, Mughal administrative geography, Persian–Arabic itineraries, and selective borrowings from earlier Dutch and Portuguese charts. D’Anville meticulously compared travel distances, astronomical observations, and Indian administrative divisions (subahs, provinces, and major riverine systems), creating a map that reoriented European understanding of India’s political and physical structure.

The sheet gives sustained attention to Bengal and the Ganges basin, regions of central importance to the Company’s commercial and political ambitions. The Hugli estuary appears with rare clarity, accompanied by inset detail of Goa’s environs—an acknowledgement of the declining but still influential Portuguese presence. The Mughal Empire’s residual administrative geography is delineated with restraint, reflecting a world transitioning from imperial cohesion to regional successor states.

D’Anville’s disciplined, nearly austere cartographic style—eschewing ornament in favour of intellectual authority—set a new scientific baseline. His Indian mappings were adopted by savants across Europe, influenced later British surveyors including James Rennell, and directly shaped the geographic consciousness of the early colonial state. As an Enlightenment artefact, the map encapsulates a moment when European scholars sought not merely to depict foreign lands but to understand them through critical methods.

This example, printed on fine laid paper with elegant original outline colour, represents one of the most consequential cartographic documents for India made prior to the advent of British trigonometrical surveying.

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