Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and Martyrdom in Modern India

This essay explores the convergence of maps, mother/goddesses, and acts of martyrdom in patriotic pictures produced during the twentieth century in India in order to understand how artists pictorially transformed national territory into a tangible and enduring object deemed deserving of the bodily sacrifice of the citizenry. The archive for the essay is constituted by visualizations of Indian national territory produced by “barefoot” cartographic practice, which routinely supplemented the scientific map form of the nation with the anthropomorphic presence of Mother India. Such anthropomorphized maps, the author argues, prepared the ground pictorially for the map of the nation to receive the sacrifice of the passionate patriot.