Room 04

Home Ground Bombay and Deccan

The gaze tightens from a subcontinent to a region. Harbour plans, district sheets and mission maps render the Bombay Presidency and the Deccan at working scale — the colonial eye no longer surveying an empire in the abstract but administering a particular ground, street by street and taluka by taluka. It is also the collection’s most deliberately situated room: the foreign archive viewed from the collector’s own home ground.