Atlas of India Maps

The Atlas of India was the main topographical map creation of British India.  Started under the patronage of the British East India Company, the Atlas sheets were in production for almost eighty years, from 1827 till 1906.  Its purpose was to compile available surveys, standardize them to a uniform scale, and print them along pre-defined sheet lines covering the whole of British India.  Each sheet was to be engraved and produced separately as soon as reliable information became available.  In this respect, its relationship with the Great Trigonometrical Survey was very important.  Scale was 4 miles to an inch, and sheets were issued as full sheets and quarter sheets (NE, NW, SE, SW).  Initially, the sheets were printed in London by commercial cartographers but its production process was transferred to India in 1870.

After 1906, Atlas sheets and their data continued to be used by the Survey of India until 1947.

The accompanying set consists of scans of more than 200 sheets printed during the period from 1827 till 1904. The file naming convention for each file is to first give the sheet number for whole sheets followed by the NW SW NE SE designation for quarter sheets; it also includes the date of publication in parenthesis. The files are listed in numerical order by sheet number. 

An Index Map with the title "0 Index to the Indian Atlas" showing the sheet numbering system is provided as the first entry in the list of files.  The red dots in the index map mark availability of the particular sheet.  A large dot in the center marks availability of a full sheet, and a smaller dot in a corner marks availability of a quarter sheet.  The index map can be downloaded to assist in selecting particular maps of interest to the viewer. 

The map originals are held in many libraries, and scans shown here were sourced from the Library of Congress, Washington DC and other libraries.