NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 5 Reading the physical map of the Indian Subcontinent (Fig. 5.2) — THINK ABOUT IT
Book page 77 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
Consider the physical map of the Indian Subcontinent at the start of the chapter. What are its natural boundaries that you can make out?
Answer
Fig. 5.2 on page 76 shows a land almost completely walled in by nature — mountains on the land side, sea on the other three sides. That is exactly why it is called a subcontinent: it is a large, clearly separated part of a bigger continent.
Direction
Natural boundary
How you can make it out on the map
North
The Himalayas
The long brown-and-white arc labelled H I M A L A Y A S, curving from Kashmir all the way east to Assam. Beyond it the map turns purple — that is the high Tibetan Plateau, higher still.
North-west
The Hindu Kush
Labelled in white at the top-left corner. Together with the unnamed ranges south of it, it closes off the land route to Central Asia and Iran.
North-east
Hill ranges east of the Brahmaputra
The brown ridges drawn beyond the Brahmaputra towards Myanmar. The map shows them but does not name them.
West
The Arabian Sea
Labelled in the blue area to the west of Gujarat and the Konkan coast.
East
The Bay of Bengal
Labelled in the blue area east of Odisha and Andhra.
South
The Indian Ocean
Labelled across the bottom of the map, beyond the tip of the peninsula, with Sri Lanka just offshore.
The Subcontinent's natural boundaries, arranged as a frame. Every one of these is visible on Fig. 5.2, page 76; only the north-eastern hills are drawn without a name.
Why these boundaries mattered so much in history: mountains and seas made this region hard to enter and easy to recognise, so people living inside it came to feel it was one land long before it was one country. That is why the Viṣhṇu Purāṇa could define Bhārata in a single line (page 80), and why a Tamil poet 2,000 years ago described the same four edges — mountains in the north, Cape Kumari in the south, oceans east and west. The gaps in the wall — the passes of the north-west — are exactly where the Persians, and later many others, came in.
Look again: the map also names the rivers that flow out of those boundaries. From the Himalayas and Hindu Kush come the Indus (with the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej), the Sarasvati, the Ganga, the Yamuna and the Brahmaputra. From the peninsula's own hills come the Narmada and Tapti — flowing west into the Arabian Sea — and the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri, flowing east into the Bay of Bengal.