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Click to enlargeIndia and Southeast Asia
Sanson's map of "the southern part of India in two peninsulas, one on each side of the Ganges" — the peninsular subcontinent and mainland Southeast Asia treated as a single region. A clear statement of the persistent Ptolemaic two-peninsula scheme in French dress.
Authorship and object
Another sheet from the posthumous Sanson atlas published by Guillaume Sanson; outline colour, relief by hill-sketches. The full title — Partie Méridionale de l'Inde en deux presqu'îles, l'une deçà et l'autre delà le Gange — names the organising idea outright.
The two peninsulas
The map carries the inherited division of "India within the Ganges" (the subcontinent) and "India beyond the Ganges" (Indochina) into the eighteenth century, treating them as twin peninsulas of one greater India. The southern subcontinent is drawn with the French school's characteristic clarity, though the interior remains thinly known.
The gaze
Even at the height of its critical ambition, French cartography still organised India through a frame inherited from Ptolemy fifteen centuries earlier. The sheet captures a transitional moment: a modern, disciplined hand still working inside an ancient conceptual geography it had not yet set aside.