One of the most prominent and challenging works left by the Ottoman scholar and polymath Katip Çelebi is his massive geographical work, the Cihânnümâ, which was never completed. The noted Ottoman founder of its first printing-press, Ibrâhîm Müteferrika, considered it important enough to expand upon its foundations and print the work in 1732. The development of the Cihânnümâ is remarkable, at least in part, because Katip Çelebi recognized the utility of several treatises of European geographical literature that had been emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Having had these works translated by intermediaries, he was in the process of rewriting the work with the input from this foreign literature when he died in 1657. While the work has since attracted the attention of a number of German scholars, interest in it has otherwise languished in favor of Katip Çelebi's other, more accessible works, such as The Balance of Truth or his catalogue of medieval and early modern works of Islamic civilization. Having recently completed a translation of the relevant chapters, the goal of this paper is to examine how Katip Çelebi presented the Indian Subcontinent and Indian Ocean world to his contemporaries. Through an examination of these chapters of the work and others related to the topic, the paper will address the question of how an Ottoman intellectual like Katip Çelebi envisioned and imagined parts of the world that he encountered only through textual intermediaries, both Muslim and European. It will also examine the interplay between the Muslim and non-Muslim sources in the compilation of the Cihânnümâ as a whole.