Nepal, March 2 -- 'Imaging South Asia: Nepal in the Making' at the Kathmandu Art Gallery is a rare exhibition that offers a sweeping account of Nepal's cartographic historiography from the 18th to the 20th century.

Maps are often defined as a scaled representation of terrain. It reduces distance, converts relief into symbol, and renders spatial relationships legible at a glance. Yet the maps on display at the exhibit demonstrate that cartography exceeds technical measurement. It constitutes a structured way of imagining space, one that evolved over time. Through successive generations of mapping, South Asia, and Nepal in particular, were transformed into a legible and bounded region, with political borders increasingly represented as rig...