India's history on OpenHistoricalMap

Hi! I’m a member of the OpenHistoricalMap (OHM) community and getting ready for my first visit to India, which is very exciting.

I’m embarrassed to say that we have very little coverage of the history of Indian administrative states and earlier on OHM. So, I’ve embarked on adding to that.

My first steps are based on looking at Shepherd’s Historical Atlas, Joppen’s A Historical Atlas of the India, and Davies’ An Historical Atlas of the Indian Peninsula. These old atlases were made by European and American historians, so not only are they somewhat crude, they may also lack some appropriate perspective.

Survey of India maps can certainly provide much better detail after 1760ish, but I’m wondering if anyone has any advice on good sources of information prior to that, great sites for servers of these oldmaps, or even pre-existing shapefiles of these states. And… better yet, I’m wondering if anyone has any advice on how to best recruit people to help with this project.

Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks in advance for any help or advice!

1 Like

As someone who hasn’t done much with OHM, I’m not sure what counts as a valid source for mapping, but these resources for shapefiles/vector data might be of interest

Besides these, Wikimedia has a bunch of old maps, some of which may not be available on other sites: Category:Old maps of India - Wikimedia Commons

1 Like