There is something striking about the confidence of this map. Across the immense and internally varied landscape of Punjab, each tehsil is assigned a prevailing religious identity, and the province is transformed into a field of discernible communal patterns. The precision of the image is almost at odds with the nature of the thing being measured. Religion, lived through custom, kinship, sect, pilgrimage, memory and locality, has been gathered into administrative units and made visible as territorial predominance.
The map could only exist after a considerable process of reduction. Individual responses had first to be recorded, then classified, aggregated and separated into categories sufficiently stable to be counted. Maclagan's own census report acknowledges the difficulty of obtaining definite religious statistics and devotes considerable attention to the problems of classification, including the complicated recording of sects. The apparent simplicity of the finished map therefore conceals a long chain of decisions about what constituted a religion, where one category ended and another began, and which distinctions were significant enough to enter the official record.
That process becomes especially consequential when the figures are given geographical form. A numerical difference between communities acquires an entirely different force once it is coloured onto a map. Population ceases to appear as a collection of individual lives and begins to resemble a landscape of communal territories. The map does not claim that a tehsil belongs to one religion in any absolute sense, yet its visual grammar inevitably encourages the eye to read Punjab through precisely such territorial distinctions.
Placed beside the census tables, and beside the maps of language, caste and population density published from the same administrative enterprise, it becomes part of a larger attempt to render society intelligible through categories that could be counted, compared and spatially arranged. What survives here, therefore, is more than a record of religious distribution in 1891. It is a record of the moment when difference was being given boundaries, colours and a place on the map.