The national atlas is a state-sponsored, scientifically informed territorial imagining. The state is a political arrangement that claims monopoly power over the land and the people of a specific territory. The national atlas is an embodiment of this claim to authority, a technical performance of power and legitimacy. In this chapter, I will look at the land. The next chapter I will consider the people.

The national atlas depicts the physical space of the nation-state. I will look at the constants as well as the changing notions of what constitutes this physical space. I will consider four main themes: the origins of the science of the national atlas; how the national atlas involves the coproduction of science and state; how the national atlas condenses national imaginaries; and the contested discourses of the national atlas, paying particular attention to boundaries, toponymic issues and the changing understandings of the physical nature of territory in the Anthropocene.

Origins

If we agree that the national atlases contain information, as well as imaginings, then what exactly is the type of information considered suitable. In the traditional national atlas, there is a usual sequence of maps. A map of the nation-state in the world is often followed by maps of the national territory. Then there are the thematic maps that depict specific topics. Some sense of the scope is given in the second edition of the National Atlas of India produced in 2003–9. It is one of the largest national atlases with 243 separate maps in 10 volumes. Table 6.1 lists the comprehensive list of topics. These are found in similar, though often smaller variants, in most national atlases. Where and when did this intellectual ambition arise?

A long tradition of cosmography

The ambitious range of topics in the national atlas is the continuation of a long tradition. The national atlas of the twentieth century owes much to the cosmography of earlier centuries. Cosmography emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Europe as an attempt to encompass the world of knowledge with a knowledge of the world. It has roots in the work of Persian and Arab scholars of centuries earlier. Cosmography had the goal of trying to understand the totality of the world, the macrocosm of the celestial order as well as the microcosm of terrestrial arrangements. Based part on measurement and empirical inquiry, it also had a mystical basis.