The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India
THE GODDESS AND THE NATION is Sumathi Ramaswamy’s pictorial history of Indian nationhood as seen through images of Bharat Mata, or Mother India, a divinity who emerged at the turn of the 20th century. Ramaswamy argues that everyday Indian citizens did not understand the Western concept of nationhood through maps or other technical instruments of communicating territorial boundaries and identity. She shows how the culturally appropriate medium of a goddess instead provided a symbol around which Indians speaking more than a thousand dialects and coming from diverse ethnic backgrounds could organize. In other words, while the British defined India as a territory within certain boundaries on a map, the goddess Bharat Mata was necessary to inspire belief in that nation. Ramaswamy analyzes over a hundred archival illustrations of Bharat Mata, ranging from posters to fly-by-night publications, in the study of what she calls barefoot cartography, or popular understandings of what nationhood means. These drawings commonly bring together depictions of the goddess with the physical map and colors of the flag, as a way of introducing the concept of nationhood to the masses. Though Mother India initially represented the British colonialist’s understandings of a unified India, the divinity eventually became a rallying point for anti-colonialist political forces and an independent nationalist consciousness.
Througout the book, Ramaswamy looks to how depictions of Mother India reflected the collision of the traditional and religious with the modern, British, and secular. Rather than phrase this contradiction in terms of a simple power struggle between the two, Ramaswamy contends that these two conceptions of India are meaningless without each other. Bharat Mata at once had connotations as a nurturing mother figure, a fierce warrior, and a divine creature, all of which conflicted with British masculine, rational understandings of nationhood and would eventually serve to undermine colonial authority. She explores why the female body was such an important symbol of nationalism, and how this conceptualization was necessary for the definition of post-colonial Indian masculinity. In the end, Ramaswamy makes an argument for the importance of visual artifacts in the study of history. She contends that they do not just mirror political climates but actually help create them; this is demonstrated through her analysis of the Indian national anthem, government discourse, and the design of shrines, all of which were influenced by the image of Mother India.
