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Click to enlargeIndia XI
The Punjab sheet — covering Lahore and Ladakh — from the SDUK Atlas of India, the educational, regional companion to the Society's Bombay sheet. The newly annexed north-west presented as plain, useful knowledge.
Authorship and object
Sheet "India XI" of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge's Atlas of India, revised by John Walker, engraved by J. & C. Walker, sold by Edward Stanford (London, c.1856). Colour, relief by hachures, with a reference table.
The north-west, mapped for the public
Covering the Punjab, Lahore and Ladakh, the sheet appears within a few years of the British annexation of the Punjab in 1849. The SDUK's purpose — cheap, accurate maps for education — meant the empire's newest province was promptly available to the general reader in clear regional form.
The gaze
Like its Bombay counterpart, this is India as instruction. The freshly conquered Punjab is absorbed almost at once into the orderly, didactic atlas of useful knowledge — last decade's war frontier now a tidy sheet for the British schoolroom.