Indian states, 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 12 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Rajasthan

Rajasthan covers about 342,000 square kilometers, a tenth of India and more than any other state, and the Thar desert fills most of its western half. Jaipur, the capital, was laid out on a grid in 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II and painted the pink it is still known for in 1876, to welcome the Prince of Wales. The desert cities further west, Jaisalmer and Jodhpur among them, grew up on the caravan routes between India and Central Asia.

Gujarat

The Gulf of Kutch and the Gulf of Khambhat give Gujarat the longest coastline of any Indian state, around 1,600 kilometers. North of the Kutch gulf lies the Rann, a salt flat that floods with the monsoon and dries white for the rest of the year, and the Gir forest in the south is the only place Asiatic lions still live in the wild. Mohandas Gandhi was born on this coast, at Porbandar, in 1869.

Kerala

Kerala was put together in 1956 out of the Malayalam-speaking districts along the coast, and it is nowhere more than about 120 kilometers wide. Its literacy rate, around 96 percent, is the highest of any state. Behind the beaches run the backwaters, a chain of lagoons and canals stretching much of the length of the coast, and Kochi has been selling pepper to the rest of the world for some two thousand years.

Tamil Nadu

The Palk Strait between Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka is between about 40 and 85 kilometers wide, with the chain of shoals called Adam’s Bridge running across it. Tamil, spoken here, has a literature going back over two thousand years and was the first language India recognized as classical, in 2004. The Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur was finished around 1010 under the Chola king Rajaraja I and is a World Heritage Site today.

Maharashtra

Mumbai grew out of seven islands joined together by reclamation, and it is the financial center of the country and the home of its Hindi film industry. Most of the state sits up on the Deccan plateau, built from lava that poured out around 66 million years ago and left basalt hundreds of meters thick. The rock-cut halls of Ajanta and Ellora, carved into cliffs in the north of the state, are both World Heritage Sites.

West Bengal

Kolkata was the capital of British India until 1911, when the government moved to Delhi. The state was cut out of the rest of Bengal at partition in 1947, which is why it is the shape it is. The strip in its north, about 22 kilometers across at its narrowest, is the Siliguri corridor, all that joins the northeastern states to the rest of India. In the south lie the Sundarbans, shared with Bangladesh, the largest mangrove forest in the world and the only one where tigers live.

Uttar Pradesh

Around 200 million people were counted here at the 2011 census, which would put Uttar Pradesh among the half dozen most populous countries in the world if it were one. Agra, on the Yamuna, holds the Taj Mahal, finished about 1653 for Shah Jahan’s wife Mumtaz Mahal, and Varanasi upriver on the Ganges is one of the oldest continuously lived-in cities anywhere.

Manipur

Manipur is a valley ringed by hills, and most of its people live on that floor around Imphal, the capital. Loktak, the largest freshwater lake in northeast India, carries phumdis, floating mats of vegetation solid enough to walk on. One of them is Keibul Lamjao, the only floating national park in the world and the last home of the sangai deer. Sagol kangjei, the game the British watched here in the nineteenth century, is where modern polo comes from, and Meiteilon, the state language, is written in the Meitei Mayek script.

Andaman and Nicobar

The chain runs roughly north to south for about 800 kilometers and is governed from Port Blair, over 1,000 kilometers from the Indian mainland and much closer to Myanmar. The British ran a penal colony here from 1858, and its cellular jail still stands at Port Blair. North Sentinel Island, in the middle of the group, is home to people who have refused contact for as long as anyone has tried, and Indian law now keeps visitors away from it.

Karnataka

Most of Karnataka sits on the Deccan plateau behind the Western Ghats, high enough that Bengaluru, at about 900 meters, stays mild all year and grew into the software capital of the country on the strength of it. Hampi in the north was the capital of the Vijayanagara empire and, by some counts, one of the largest cities in the world in the early sixteenth century; its temples and boulder fields are a World Heritage Site.

Assam

Assam is a floodplain between hills, and the Brahmaputra braids across it in channels that move with every monsoon. Majuli, the river island in the middle of it, is among the largest in the world and is losing ground to that same water. The state grows a large share of India’s tea, on gardens laid out by the British from the 1830s after a tea plant native to these hills was identified, and Kaziranga on the south bank holds most of the world’s one-horned rhinos.

Madhya Pradesh

Madhya Pradesh means middle state, and it was the largest in India by area until Chhattisgarh was cut out of its eastern side in 2000, leaving it second. The Narmada crosses it westward in a rift between two ranges. The temples at Khajuraho, built by the Chandelas between about 950 and 1050, and the Buddhist stupas at Sanchi, begun under Ashoka in the third century BC, are both World Heritage Sites.

How this one works

The other maps of India

Mexico has the same map in Mexican states. United States has the same map in American states. Germany has the same map in German states. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian states. All three together on the India atlas page, the country itself on the India guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.