Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c26.10

c26.10

A good deal of information on early Indian cartography under Hindu and Muslim inspiration is given by Francesco I. Pullé in his interesting work in Italian, entitled *La Cartografia Antica dell' India*, Parte I.² In section II of the work³ dealing with Indian sources, there are reproductions of three maps, drawn by ancient Indian cartographers according to the Puranic ideas of cosmography and geography. As is well known, the world was regarded as consisting of seven concentric islands, each one of them encircled by a sea. The island at the centre was called Jambu-dvīpa, the southern division of which was called Bhārata-varṣa, bounded by the Himalayas in the north and the waters of the sea in the other directions.⁴ Two of the three maps have been reproduced from a manuscript of the *Lokaprakāśa* which seems to have been originally composed by the celebrated Kashmiri polymath Kṣemendra in the eleventh century A.D. but contains a good deal of much later interpolation,⁵ while the third¹ from a manuscript of another work entitled *Saṃgrahaṇī*. Figure 2 represents the concentric islands and the encircling seas, while Figures 8 and 9 are representations of Jambu-dvīpa. The map of Jambu-dvīpa published in Gladwyn’s translation of the *Ain-i-Akbarī*, Vol. I, was no doubt copied from an origial like those found in the manuscripts of the *Lokaprakāśa* and *Saṃgrahaṇī*, noticed by Pullé. Similar maps were found by Wilford in a manuscript of a work entitled *Kṣetrasamāsa* and were characterised by him as ‘several fanciful delineations of the world’. ² The cosmographical map from a Tibetan Buddhist source reproduced in Figure 4 at p. 23 of Pullé’s work is also interesting in this connection as its origin is certainly Indian. It is, however, difficult to say whether other Tibetan drawings such as the sketch of the Cathedral of Lhāsa published in the *Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal*, Vol. LXIV, Part i, 1895, Plate XXVI, were similarly of Indian inspiration.