🗺 Geography · Physical India
The land of Bharat
Mountains, plains, plateaus, rivers, coasts and islands — the physical geography that shaped India’s history, on one map. Every fact is from NCERT’s Class 11 geography book; click anything on the map, or test yourself with the map quiz.
Maps show India’s boundaries as officially depicted by the Government of India. Rivers, ranges and regions are drawn from Natural Earth’s public-domain data and are approximate.
The six physiographic divisions
NCERT divides India into six physical divisions based on its geology and relief.
Mountains and plateaus
River systems
Himalayan rivers
Peninsular rivers
Lakes, seas and islands
Peaks and passes
Passes are marked only where public map data gives their location; the rest are described without a pin.
Key ideas for exams
The area drained by a river and its tributaries is a drainage basin; the line separating one basin from another is the watershed. Large rivers have basins; small rivulets have watersheds.
📘 NCERT Class 11, India: Physical Environment, Ch. 3 (Drainage System) ↗Dendritic (like tree branches — the rivers of the northern plain), radial (rivers flowing out in all directions from a hill — the Amarkantak range), trellis (tributaries parallel, joined at right angles) and centripetal (rivers draining into a lake or depression).
📘 NCERT Class 11, India: Physical Environment, Ch. 3 (Drainage System) ↗Himalayan rivers are fed by snow and rain, so they are perennial; they cut deep gorges and meander over the plains. Peninsular rivers are older, with fixed courses, no meanders and non-perennial flow.
📘 NCERT Class 11, India: Physical Environment, Ch. 3 (Drainage System) ↗Rivers older than the mountains they cross, cutting through as the land rose. NCERT names the Satluj, the Kosi and the Subansiri.
📘 NCERT Class 11, India: Physical Environment, Ch. 3 (Drainage System) ↗Geologists believe a mighty river, the Shiwalik or Indo-Brahma, once ran the length of the Himalaya from Assam to Sind (5–24 million years ago). It later split into the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra systems.
📘 NCERT Class 11, India: Physical Environment, Ch. 3 (Drainage System) ↗How we check: every fact is written from NCERT Class 11, India: Physical Environment (chapters 1–3), and our build fails unless key phrases from each passage are found in the chapter’s own text. Lengths, heights and areas are given only as NCERT gives them. Shapes come from Natural Earth’s public-domain physical data; features with no reliable map data are described but not drawn.