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We can show you where every important control lives — the map, timeline, chapters, modes, search and your notes. Nothing advances until you choose Next.
This atlas asks how the largest colony in history came to free itself, and what its freedom delivered. It opens in 1857, when a mutiny in the East India Company’s Bengal Army became a rebellion across the Ganges plain and ended with the British Crown taking India from the Company. For the next ninety years the map barely changes colour: charcoal for the provinces Britain ruled directly, tan for the princely states, more than five hundred of them, that it ruled through their own rulers. The change happened underneath, as the Indians who staffed, paid for and policed the Raj learned to organise, petition, march and finally withdraw the cooperation it depended on.
Fifteen chapters carry the story from the siege of Delhi to Nehru’s death in 1964: the famines and the founding of Congress, Curzon’s partition of Bengal, Amritsar, the salt march traced step by step, the elected map of 1937, Quit India and the Bengal famine, the year of the knife, and freedom at midnight with the Radcliffe line drawn across it in five weeks. The last chapter follows the republic that came after, as it wrote a constitution, held the largest election the world had yet seen, redrew its states by language and lost a war with China. Take the guided tour, or scrub the timeline and question the map yourself.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
This is one of twenty-one atlases — the ★ at the top left returns to the library at any time.