A new exhibition at Kathmandu Art Gallery is shedding light on how Nepal gradually took shape on the world’s maps. Titled Imaging South Asia: Nepal in the Making, the show opened at Baber Mahal Revisited and brings together a rare selection of nineteenth-century maps from the private collection of the Rajbhandari family.
The exhibition focuses on maps produced during the colonial era, many of them created under institutions linked to the East India Company and later British administrations in South Asia. These maps were not simply geographic records. They were tools used for military strategy, taxation, trade routes and territorial control.
