The Tamil Nadu Archaeological Society has published an interesting atlas which was prepared by Professor Y Subbarayalu, Muttusankar and Balamurugan. Though the Atlas is in Tamil, it provides a wealth of information about the Nadu units and village settlements during the Chola period. The only major Historical Atlas for medieval India is the prepared by Irfan Habib using the information found in the Ain-i- Akbari. Y Subbarayalu's own work, the Political Geography of the chola Country which was published more than four decades back has remained the only published source for locating the nadu -s, valanadu -s, and ur mentioned in medieval inscriptions. The work undertaken by Subbarayalu as part of his thesis was based entirely on the published inscription which were available uto 1968. Since then many more inscriptions have come to light.
The book under review is a collection of 13 maps which cover all the major regions of the Chola Empire: Tondaimandalam, Cholamandalam, Gangai Mandalam, Naduvil Nadu and pandya Mandalam. The maps have been prepared using the standard Survey of Indian Topographic Sheets. The palaces mentioned in the inscription are marked in the maps using the GPS coordinates. Since there is a minor error factor in the use of GPS data, the overall accuracy of the maps may be called to question. However since we are dealing with place names which have survived from the medieval past, slight variation will not rally affect the utility of these maps.
The small volume brought out is an important contribution to the study of the historical geography of the medieval period.
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