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...