Indian cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 6 learning regions, matching the rounds on the India guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 16 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Mumbai

Mumbai was seven islands when the Portuguese handed them to the English crown in 1661 as part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry, and reclamation joined them into one over the next two centuries. It is the financial center of India, home of its Hindi-language film industry, and by some counts the most densely populated large city in the world.

Delhi

There have been capitals on this stretch of the Yamuna for a thousand years, and the Red Fort was Shah Jahan’s, finished in 1648. The British moved the capital here from Calcutta in 1911 and built New Delhi to the south of the old city; it was inaugurated in 1931. The city and its surroundings hold well over 30 million people.

Kolkata

Kolkata grew from an English trading post on the Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges, and was the capital of British India until 1911. The Howrah Bridge, a cantilever span opened in 1943 that carries no bolts, only rivets, is still one of the busiest bridges anywhere. The city is the center of Bengali literature, film and the Durga Puja festival.

Chennai

The English East India Company bought the land here in 1639 and built Fort St George, which makes Chennai one of the oldest British-founded cities in India. Marina Beach along its front is among the longest urban beaches in the world. The city is the home of Tamil cinema and, since the 1990s, of a large share of the country’s car industry.

Bengaluru

Bengaluru sits at about 900 meters, which gives it a climate mild enough that the British moved their south Indian garrison here. Public research institutes and defense electronics settled around it from the 1950s, and software firms followed from the 1980s, which is why more of India’s technology industry is here than anywhere else.

Hyderabad

Hyderabad was founded in 1591 by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, who built the Charminar at its center, and was later ruled by the Nizams, whose state was among the wealthiest in India and did not join the union until 1948. Golconda, the fortress above the city, gave its name to the diamond trade that ran through it, the Koh-i-Noor included.

Jaipur

Jaipur was laid out in 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II on a grid of nine rectangles, one of the first planned cities in India, and painted terracotta pink in 1876 to welcome the Prince of Wales. Jai Singh was an astronomer, and the Jantar Mantar he built here, a yard of stone instruments including the largest sundial in the world, is a World Heritage Site.

Varanasi

Varanasi is one of the oldest continuously lived-in cities in the world and the holiest of seven cities in Hinduism, and its stone ghats step down into the Ganges for some six kilometers. Pilgrims come to bathe and to be cremated here. The Buddha gave his first sermon a few kilometers away at Sarnath.

Kochi

Kochi has been a pepper port for centuries and was the first European colonial settlement in India. The Portuguese fortified it in 1503, the Dutch took it in 1663 and the British in 1795. The cantilevered fishing nets on its shore came from China, and the synagogue in Mattancherry, built in 1568, served a Jewish community that had been on this coast far longer.

Amritsar

Amritsar grew around the pool the fourth Sikh guru had dug in the 1570s; the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, stands in the middle of it and serves free meals to tens of thousands of people a day. In 1919 British troops fired on a crowd in the walled garden at Jallianwala Bagh here, killing hundreds, which turned much of India against the Raj.

Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad was founded in 1411 by Sultan Ahmad Shah and became India’s first World Heritage City in 2017, for the dense old quarters of wooden-fronted houses inside its walls. Gandhi ran his ashram on the river bank here from 1917 and set out from it on the salt march in 1930. The city has spun and woven cotton long enough to be called the Manchester of India.

Patna

Patna is built over Pataliputra, capital of the Mauryan empire under Chandragupta and Ashoka in the fourth and third centuries BC, when it was one of the largest cities in the world. Megasthenes, a Greek ambassador, described its wooden walls and moat. The tenth Sikh guru, Gobind Singh, was born here in 1666.

Guwahati

Guwahati is the largest city in northeastern India and the way into it: road, rail and air all funnel through here on the way east. It stands on the south bank of the Brahmaputra, where the Kamakhya temple sits on Nilachal Hill above the river, among the most important Shakta pilgrimage sites in the country. Dispur, the seat of the Assam government, is a locality of the city rather than a place of its own.

Shillong

Shillong sits at about 1,500 meters on the plateau of the same name, which is why the British made it the capital of the whole of Assam in 1874 and called it the Scotland of the East. It became the capital of Meghalaya when that state was cut out of Assam in 1972. The wettest places on earth, Mawsynram and Cherrapunji, are within about sixty kilometers of it on the southern edge of the same plateau, where the monsoon comes off the Bangladeshi plain and straight up a cliff.

Imphal

Imphal lies in a valley ringed by hills, and Kangla in the middle of the city was the seat of the Meitei kings who ruled from it. Ima Keithel, the Mothers’ Market, is run entirely by women and has been for generations, which makes it one of the largest markets of its kind anywhere. In 1944 the Japanese advance into India was stopped here and at Kohima, and this valley is as far as it got.

Aizawl

Aizawl is built along the tops of ridges above the Tlawng valley, at about 1,100 meters, so its streets run in lines up and down the spines of hills rather than across them. It is the capital of Mizoram, a state of about a million people that is among the most literate in India and one of the few with a Christian majority, following missions that arrived in the 1890s.

How this one works

The other maps of India

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the India atlas page, the country itself on the India guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.