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Click to enlargeGenealogie des Empereurs Mogols
A remarkable composite sheet from the Atlas Historique (Amsterdam) combining a genealogical tree of the Mughal emperors from Tamerlane to the present, two maps (the Empire of the Great Mogul and the Kingdom of Kashmir), and three vignettes of Indian life. It is the Enlightenment's encyclopaedic gaze applied to India: geography fused with dynasty, history and spectacle.
Authorship and object
From Henri Abraham Chatelain's Atlas Historique (7 vols, 1705–1720), with text by Nicolas Gueudeville — a hugely ambitious work that wedded maps to history, chronology, genealogy and ethnography. This Asia-volume sheet centres on a dynastic tree of the house of Timur, flanked by maps of the Mughal empire and of Kashmir, with scenes including an elephant fight.
Geography as total history
The Atlas Historique treated a map as only one element in understanding a place; around it the reader was given the ruling dynasty, the customs and the notable sights. Here India appears not merely as territory but as a civilisation with a lineage — the Mughal succession from Tamerlane diagrammed like a European royal house.
The gaze
This is the Enlightenment impulse to comprehend the whole: to know India was to chart its land, trace its rulers and illustrate its manners on a single page. It is an early, systematising attempt to make the subcontinent fully legible — and, in its elephant fights and court scenes, to serve it up as exotic spectacle for the armchair reader.