In The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, Sumathi Ramaswamy places visual representations and practices at the center of her analysis, making a compelling case for the importance of visual artifacts in the study of history. She focuses on the role of such artifacts—specifically, images of Mother India—in building the Indian nation between 1880–1947, and argues for the power of the visual, not only to represent political climates, but to create them.

Ramaswamy proposes that the emergent Indian nationalist movement needed a tangible icon of “nation” capable of mobilizing patriots to sacrifice themselves. A small elite group of politically activist citizens embraced the theoretical Western, modern, secular concepts of “nation” and of “map” as the nation's geobody; but, as Rabindranath Tagore famously remarked, “No one can give up his life for a map.” Ramaswamy shows how the solution to the dilemma of mobilizing the masses emerged in the form of a new goddess: Bharat Mata, the brainchild of Bengali nationalist artists and writers, whose lithographed image—combining the female body with the map of India—came to dominate popular culture from the 1880s onward.

Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” appeared first in popular literature as a symbol of a virtuous woman, specifically a mother, who suffers at the hands of unscrupulous male exploiters and who calls upon her sons for protection and defense. This figure is melded with indigenous goddess traditions to produce a national mythology of past glory, present suffering, and future triumph. Her visual persona resonated with familiar images of female deities associated with the earth and with motherhood. Represented in the colors of the new national flag, she was shown emerging from and encompassing the map of the subcontinent. The visual coextension of mother-goddess and map enlivened in the popular mind the image of a mother-nation worth protecting and dying for. In late-colonial India, a country with myriad languages and varied literacy levels, the visual representation of a pan-Indian goddess was uniquely able to transcend linguistic barriers, and to provide a unifying, culturally resonant reference point for a pan-national consciousness.

Ramaswamy argues that the ancient Indian habit of anthropomorphizing the country in feminine form was updated and transformed in late colonial modernity via two paths, the “scientific/geographic,” represented by formal cartography, and the “anthropomorphic/sacred,” represented by pictorial representations of Bharat Mata. Scientific cartography created a measurable geobody for the new nation, but the scientific ordering of space was also a work of colonial appropriation of the world, and one that the nationalist agenda was bound to challenge. By juxtaposing a factually accurate map with the body of the goddess, “barefoot” (indigenous) cartographers gave her a distinct personality in the pantheon of mother goddesses. Mother-as-map-as-nation was a very different entity from Bhudevi, the earth goddess of antiquity, but her religious antecedents made her a potent rallying point for popular sentiment. Ramaswamy's cultural history, viewed through the lens of goddess-as-map, reveals the mutual imbrication of the patriotic and pictorial realms, and the creative tensions between colonial/scientific and traditional/religious thinking at a particular moment in time.

Much of this book involves a close study of Bharat Mata's genealogy in the early nationalist print media. The author's focus on mother-as-nation-as-map contributes a new perspective to the scholarly discourse on nationalist uses of religious images. Ramaswamy's framing of “barefoot cartographers” helps the reader understand why these artists’ grassroots representations of female power were so effective in mobilizing resistance to colonial rule. These unnamed and largely amateur artists created lithographs, patriotic letterheads, postcards, calendars and merchandise labels which broadcast Bharat Mata's image through the mass media, reaching across language barriers and class lines to strengthen burgeoning anticolonial impulses and inspire her “devotees” to the service of, and sacrifice for, a unique hybrid of nation as political territory and sacred space.

Ramaswamy's thesis is supported by a wealth of illustrations, one hundred of them in color, many previously unpublished. Through this visual richness she demonstrates, by example, the cumulative impact of images on the viewer's consciousness. This is an engrossing, meticulously researched, beautifully presented book, whose scholarly reach transcends South Asian historiography to embrace cartography, feminist studies, nationalist and colonial studies, and politico-religious iconography. The Goddess and the Nation contributes a fresh perspective to discussions of imagined political and religious communities, to feminist discourse on gendered identities, to the study of Indian “bazaar” images, to religious studies, and to visual studies.