As promised, my current WIP for the Raj. It's a little rough around the edges, and for now only covers southern India (specifically, the southern half of the Bombay Presidency, Hyderabad and most of Madras), but it's good enough for now. Also, bear in mind that this is just the stuff that's finalised - I've got a fair amount of the modern Indian states of Chhattisgarh and Odisha done as well, but unfortunately that's nowhere near finished.
Later I'll see if I can whip up an alternate version that gives each small state a different colour, to show which enclave is who's, but for now I'm just too busy. I'll edit that map, and the appropriate colour key, into this point at some point later today or tomorrow once I have the time to make it.
But first, a very long digression - I lost nearly two days trying to confirm or reject what I'm now 95% certain is a case of Wikipedia vandalism, the almost certainly fictitious "Nimsod State".
The whole saga started when I noticed a state I hadn't seen before in a list on Wikipedia's article on the
Deccan Agency, an overarching framework whereby the British government conducted relations with two dozen small states in what is today Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. Curious, I followed
the link. I'll skip the two days of confused research as I tried to confirm or deny the existence of the "State", and instead focus on my conclusion - that the state never existed - and my evidence for that conjecture.
Firstly, period historical sources make no mention of any Princely State with a capital in the small town of Nimsod. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
is available in full to search on wikisource; searching for "Nimsod" and "Nimsod State" yields no results, while other small states in the area, such as Aundh, Akalkot or Mudhol do have brief articles.
More notable is the absence of any mention of the "State" in the 1909 edition of the Imperial Gazetteer of India, handily
digitised here. Every other small state in the southern Deccan gets a mention. In
some cases two or three related States are lumped together in the same entry, but all are mentioned at least once by name, and even checking grouped entries, not once is the name "Nimsod" brought up.
Trust me,
I checked all of them, and have the links to prove it. The linked articles will often name-drop other states in the same general area, but again, reading through all of them, not once is "Nimsod State" mentioned. I also went to the place where it would be if there was an article on it, but
there is nothing between "Nimrana" and "Nipal" (an old name for Nepal, get your mind out of the gutter).
While looking for something completely different I also stumbled on
this site, which archives old Indian historical governmental documents. Once again, searching for "Nimsod" draws a blank, while searching for other small states in the same area does come back with some scant results.
Aside from the
original wikipedia article (and various clones of the same article dotted around the web) I can't find any mention of 'Nimsod State' predating November 2021, when the original article was first drafted. Links and references to the state have since been crow-barred into other articles on wikipedia (including the one on the Deccan Agency, where I would see it and begin my research), as can be seen by the absence of references to it in
past versions of the relevant articles available on the Internet Archive. Older lists of Princely States conspicuously do not mention a state by the name "Nimsod", including the relatively comprehensive
list of worldstatesmen.org, or
this list, that includes not just Princely States but other forms of non-sovereign feudal landholders and even vassals of vassals.
In my mind however, the clincher comes from historical maps. I was first caught off-guard by the unfamiliar name because I didn't recognise it from the
Hisatlas map of the Southern Deccan. Hisatlas is a very useful resource,
and even if the free version of the site leaves much to be desired, fortunately somebody (can't remember who) posted a link on this forum to a google drive with the high-def versions of all the maps back in 2020. While I can't for the life of me find the original link, at the time I downloaded every map I could get my hands on, and I've been using them ever since (If somebody else has the original link, please post it here). The apparent absence of an entire state from an otherwise excellent resource was what first clued me on to the fact that something didn't add up here, kicking off the research chain summarised above.
So I got digging through as many historical maps as I could find to corroborate or disprove the existence of the state. In no period map I have yet seen is there a marked state or estate around the town of Nimsod. It was actually during my search for good sources that I I stumbled on the
trove of old maps I linked to yesterday, and they provide the best cartographic evidence against the "state".
In particular, two maps stand out. Firstly, Sheet No. 47 Bombay (1915) in the
16 miles per inch series, which shows most of the small Deccan states including the area around Nimsod town (which isn't actually big enough to be found on the map - it should be just west of the small central road junction in Mayni). This both corroborates the vast majority of the states and enclaves shown on the hisatlas map, while once again shows no small state in the relevant area. Secondly, Sheet No. 47 K Poona (1918)(provisional) from the
4 miles per inch series, which shows a more detailed view of the relevant area. This map is detailed enough to actually show the small town of Nimsod (a little south of the centre of the map), and tellingly, it is not associated with a marked state or territory. There are several enclaves of other small states dotted around the map (most notably the capital district of Aundh, just to the west of Nimsod), but nothing marking the town as a state, or even in any way notable. In addition, that map, and the other maps in that series of that area of the Deccan, further corroborate the original hisatlas map, in greater detail.
So yeah. In summary; otherwise extremely accurate period maps don't show it, period records don't mention it, all evidence of the state's supposed existence appears after November 2021 and internet resources made before then also make no mention of it. Hence why I'm almost certain that article is a hoax.
As you can probably tell, that was a rant I really wanted to get off my chest. I put a lot of work into confirming or denying the non-existence of that tiny state, and I wanted to lay out in detail how I came to my conclusions
somewhere, considering how much time I wasted researching it. At least I'm now extremely confident that it is indeed a hoax.
Anyway, extremely lengthy tangent aside, here's the promised map. I'll hopefully post the next WIP in a week or so;
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