The geographical imagination of Malabar, even though changing across time and sources, is located as bound by the regions of Canara, Coorg, Nilgiris, Mysore, Coimbatore, the princely state of Cochin and the Arabian sea (Logan, 1887). The late Eighteenth century witnessed a series of changes which completely reshaped the political geography of this region. A group of highly fragmented territorial entities forming sites where multiple nodes of power simultaneously functioned (Joseph, 1991) was replaced by a highly centralized form of state administered by the Madras presidency of the East India Company. Another aspect of this change was the formation of the political geography of the modern state in the region, in a process which extended to the early decades of the 19th century. This structuring of the company state in the region, reproduced it as a province, cartographically defined and integrated to the larger administrative apparatus of the East India company in south Asia. Multiple surveys by Malabar Joint Commissioners, the military surveys during Anglo- Mysore wars, and various topographical surveys during the subjugation of the regional political powers shaped a specific geographic knowledge which is represented in early British maps as the region of Malabar. The territorial conceptions of the premodern political formations, even though it would be incorrect to claim any uniformity, were religiously defined (Frenz, 2003) and commercially oriented towards western coastal networks of trade and the larger maritime world of the Indian ocean(Nightingale, 1970). Its spatial imaginations of political-territorial patches dispersed among black spaces where no definite political authority was exercised (Winichakul, 2009) contrasted with the Weberian ideals of the modern colonial state which reimagined the territory as a bound entity with chronologically defined time and cartographically defined space(Carter, 1988). This presentation examines the formation of the geo-body of Malabar though an analysis of a set of maps produced as a part of this process. It also attempts to relocate the larger discussions on colonial cartography in India, as an exercise of legitimacy (Barrow 2003) and of colonial science(Raj, 2007; Edney, 1997) to the shaping of regions that formed the body of the colonial state.