Abstract
Excerpt: In The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Sumathi Ramaswamy makes a theoretically and visually engaging contribution to the disciplines of Indian colonialism and postcolonialism, bazaar art, and feminist cartography. The question driving the inquiry of this handsomely produced book is: How do we understand the relationship between Bharat Mata (Mother India), the glorious Hindu goddess who embodies the nation for the bazaar’s ‘barefoot cartographers’, and the precisely charted map on which she is usually perched, which is ‘one of the Enlightenment’s and colonial sciences’ proudest innovations’ (293)? Ramaswamy has collected a voluminous body of evidence in exploring the prolific dialectic between the anthropomorphic-sacred form of the goddess informed by Hindu traditions and the secular precision of colonial (and later Indian bourgeois) knowledge-practices. Her argument tracks across framing pictures, calendar art, cinema, Mother India temples, popular god-posters in shops and homes, as well as feminist and dissident critiques by painters and filmmakers.