Sumathi Ramaswamy's book examines the historical confluence of two kinds of images in late colonial and postcolonial India—the cartographic map of India, and the figural representation of the mother/goddess, Mother India—in order to understand why the modern nation “yearns for form, and where that yearning has taken it” (p. 287). She begins by surveying a range of images in which cartographic forms are combined with the figure of Mother India. Such images date from approximately 1880 through the present and take various forms, from those depicting her perching atop or occupying a cartographic outline of India, to others in which her body is arranged to approximate the map's shape. Also introduced is the key agent in the visual realization of Mother India: the “barefoot cartographer,” an ideal type that comprises the many named and unnamed artists from across India who produced the images that form Ramaswamy's archive.

Chapter 2 argues that Mother India emerged conjuncturally, from the three-way meeting between scientific cartography, the Victorian feminization of territory and polity as “Britannia,” and Hinduism's mythic conflations of goddess and territory. As explored in Chapter 3, this conjunction was catalyzed by “Vande Mataram” (“I worship the Mother”), a late-nineteenth-century hymn that associated India's landscapes and population with Hindu goddesses and served subsequently as an anthem of anti-colonial nationalism. In Chapter 4, Ramaswamy documents another manifestation of the conjunction between scientific cartography and divinized territory: the maps that, beginning in the late colonial period, were installed as icon-like objects in new Hindu temples. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the images’ gendered codes and, especially in Chapter 6, attend to the experiences and concerns of creators of images, texts, and cinematic characters that evoked Mother India. Chapter 5 analyzes the models of male filial piety—principally martyrdom—that are on display in images of Mother India, while Chapter 6 explores the marginality of female political actors in her imagery. With its many visual and textual artifacts (lithographs, paintings, cinema, logos, speeches) and its broad historical range (the past 150 years), the latter chapter seems overcrowded and thus under-analyzed. Its central question—“Do women indeed own and inhabit a country in the same way that men do?” (239)—and the range of answers to which Ramaswamy alludes, are worthy of their own book-length study.

Ramaswamy's pictorial archive is impressive, as is her narrative of the contentious practices of Indian nation-making. While building on Benedict Anderson's notion of the nation as an imagined community, she has drawn also on the work of W.J.T. Mitchell, Christopher Pinney, and Kajri Jain in attending closely to the nation's pictorial rendering and to the contributions that images make to nationalism. Her work, a visual genealogy of the nation's becoming, poses important questions about the visual practices with which images are engaged and their affective charge realized. Some of these questions are directly engaged in her examination of the historical path taken by Mother India, while others will no doubt be launched as a consequence of her efforts.