Indian cities, found on the map

Forty-nine dots, every city of a million or more plus the four largest in the northeast, and no labels or state borders to help. What is left is the coastline, the shape of the peninsula and how far up the plain a place sits.

49 to find, 8 a run.

7 rounds, 6 of 8 to pass each. Pass one and its places are yours.

⚔️ Challenge someone to Indian cities

Get to know Guwahati before you go.

Explore Guwahati through two interactive maps, fifteen sights and a ten-section course.

Explore Guwahati →

Get to know Bengaluru before you go.

Explore Bengaluru through two interactive maps, fifteen sights and a ten-section course.

Explore Bengaluru →

Get to know Delhi before you go.

Explore Delhi through two interactive maps, fifteen sights and a ten-section course.

Explore Delhi →

49 cities · 4 regions

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for the 16 of the 49 that have one. Reading them first is not cheating.

North India13 on the map

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.
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.
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.

Also on the mapAgra · Allahabad · Faridabad · Ghaziabad · Kanpur · Lucknow · Ludhiana · Meerut · Srinagar

East and Northeast India12 on the map

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Also on the mapAsansol · Bhilai · Dhanbad · Haora · Jamshedpur · Ranchi

West and Central India14 on the map

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.
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.

Also on the mapAurangabad · Bhopal · Indore · Jabalpur · Kalyan · Nagpur · Nasik · Pune · Rajkot · Sholapur · Surat · Vadodara

South India10 on the map

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.
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.
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.
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.

Also on the mapAmaravati · Coimbatore · Madurai · Vijayawada · Vishakhapatnam · Warangal

Now find all 49 on the map

How this one works

How many cities are on the map?

49. Every one of them is on the map, and a run asks 8 of them. Pass a round and the places you found in it drop out of the pool, so the next run is what you have left.

What is a round?

A run of 8 questions, and 6 right passes it. 7 rounds cover the whole map, and the counter at the top of the India page counts the ones behind you. Passing is what banks a round's finds: miss the mark and nothing is taken off the map, so every place that round asked about is still there to be asked again. A round is always the places you have not found yet, and when fewer than five are left it is topped up with a few you have found as review, so the last round is never one or two questions. Three quarters of it passes it.

Can I start the map over?

Yes. "Reset this map" under the counter puts all 49 back in the pool and sets the rounds to zero the moment you press it, so the whole map is there to be found again from nothing. It clears this map only; the other maps of India keep their progress.

Do I need an account?

No. The game plays in the page, and a guest's progress is kept in their own browser. Signing in carries it between devices and earns XP for a run.

What happens when I get one wrong?

The map names what you actually hit, then lights up the right answer in green and tells you something about the place. Missing one is how most of this map gets learned.

The other maps of India

Indian states36 to find Indian waters26 to find

The same map for other countries

North America

Oceania

South America

All of India’s maps together on the India atlas page, the country itself on the India guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.