ABSTRACT
How Mughal territories or Hindustan got appropriated and extended to what later became known as British India, was an outcome of long drawn cartographic practices undertaken in the home territory. In the South Asian subcontinent, British cartographic methods progressively made claims to accuracy and observation as a service to European scientific knowledge. Implemented with a quintessentially mercantile pragmatism, the material charting of an imaginary layout was complete with naturalised frontiers. This imaginary layout heavily relied on efficacies of trade and commerce. James Rennell and his successor, William Lambton, could be called the chief architects of cartographic exchanges in the subcontinent, fabricating a colonial geography upon what existed as merely an imagination.
