Sumathi Ramaswamy is Professor of History at Duke University. She is the author of Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories and Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India and the editor of Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India.

THE GODDESS AND THE NATION

MAPPING MOTHER INDIABy Sumathi Ramaswamy

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4592-3

Contents

List of Illustrations………………………………………………….xiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………….xvPROLOGUE Yearning for Form……………………………………………..1CHAPTER 1 Formal Concerns………………………………………………13CHAPTER 2 Other Women, Other Mothers…………………………………….73CHAPTER 3 Vande Mataram………………………………………………..117CHAPTER 4 Enshrining the Map of India……………………………………151CHAPTER 5 Between Men, Map, and Mother…………………………………..177CHAPTER 6 Daughters of India……………………………………………237EPILOGUE Pictorial History in the Age of the World Picture…………………283Notes………………………………………………………………..301References……………………………………………………………353Index………………………………………………………………..371

Chapter One

FORMAL CONCERNS

Maqbool Fida Husain is one among a long line of artists and illustrators who since the early years of the twentieth century have felt persuaded to visualize India as a carto-graphed mother/goddess. They have turned to oil and watercolor, pen and ink, and even rough drawing to portray her on canvas and paper; in posters, calendars, and book wrappers; on mastheads and covers of newspapers, magazines, and journals; in advertisements, street hoardings, manufacturers’ labels, and on walls and as murals; as clay figurines, marble statues, and icons in temples, schools, and civic gardens; and as a figure on the movie screen. These images are products of visual labor that I gloss as patriotic, although many of them also participate in other pictorial regimes of late colonial and postcolonial India. While I hope to make apparent the complexities and transformations of patriotic visual work over the course of the twentieth century, I should also note that my primary concern is to underscore the pictorial investment, in the age of mechanical reproduction and mass replication, in the territorial idea of India as it is variously configured and imagined. In particular I wish to draw attention to the interested, motivated, and sustained deployment of the mapped configuration of India and the anthropomorphic form of Mother India in printed pictures, sometimes each by itself but more often than not in each other’s company. How and what these forms are doing with one another is my dominant interest in this chapter and in those that follow.

While some visual votaries of the carto-graphed mother/goddess are well-known artists with a body of work not necessarily limited to patriotic themes, the majority are relatively unknown or completely anonymous. Correspondingly, many of their works are difficult to date with precision and occasionally are mass produced under different production banners whose circulation contexts are frequently elusive and indeed “profoundly recursive” (Pinney 2005, 265). The creators of these images have at times been products of the various art schools set up in colonial India from the 1850s, but they have also been the unschooled who have nevertheless been moved to participate in a dynamic new patriotic habit of picturing nation and country. Almost all of the known artists have been men (with the few exceptions that I discuss in chapter 6) and the vast number have been nominally Hindu, with many hailing from the upper and artisanal castes of the subcontinent. Novel though Bharat Mata might have been when she first became manifest in the closing years of the nineteenth century, by the 1930s a visual standard for the mother/goddess emerges across the land as a consequence of such efforts, which few have questioned or caricatured. The stabilization of a familiar look does not mean, however, that her image is free of contradictions or traces of the struggles that have gone into her shaping as embodiment, symbol, and sign of the emergent nation and its territory. Symbolic representations, the feminist scholar Joan Landes reminds us, “are counters in symbolic actions” that are “risked” as they are deployed (2001, 9). In this chapter I analyze how Mother India’s look is formalized, mobilized, and risked as she is fashioned under the pressures of an evolving visual patriotism. In the course of this analysis I consider as well how and why the mapped form of India becomes an intimate part of her familiar look.

Almost exactly a century before Husain produced his controversial nude, Bharat Mata appeared in a watercolor painting-arguably for the first time, in a new technique referred to as “wash”-in a completely contrary guise (for a slightly later mass-produced version, see figure 6). Its creator was one of late colonial India’s best-known artists, if not the most illustrious of them all, Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951). The historical context in which he painted Bharat Mata was the nativist swadeshi (“of one’s own country”) movement sparked off in 1905 around the territorial partitioning of Bengal, British India’s largest presidency. Probably completed around 1905 Abanindranath’s Bharat Mata, albeit envisioned in the throes of unrest produced around a catastrophic territorial event, does not incorporate the mapped image of India. Instead it followed the protocols of an emergent “neoBengal” revivalist style of depicting the female form as ethereal and austere, even wispy. A well-known admirer of one version of this painting-the Irish-born Sister Nivedita (1867-1911), whom I discuss in greater detail in chapter 6-responded to it in 1906 soon after it was printed in a local magazine with the caption title The Spirit of the Motherland: “In this picture-which would need to be enlarged and printed … in two or three bright but delicate colours-we have a combination of perfect refinement with great creative imagination. Bharat-Mata stands on the green earth. Behind her is the blue sky. Beneath the exquisite little feet is a curved line of four misty white lotuses. She has the four arms that always, to Indian thinking, indicate the divine power. Her sari is severe, even to puritanism, in its folding lines. And behind the noble sincerity of eyes and brow we are awed by the presence of the broad white halo. Shiksha-Diksha-Anna-Bastra[,] the four gifts of the Motherland to her children, she offers in her four hands.”

Modeled though she clearly was on the everyday Bengali woman-even possibly the young girls of the artist’s aristocratic family-Bharat Mata’s divine stature in this painting is most obvious from her four arms and from the delicate halo that rings her head. Goddess though she may be, nothing indicates that she is indeed a new deity of country, even if the artist apparently first named her Banga Mata (Mother Bengal) and only later called her Bharat Mata. The tricolor banner and the mapped form of India that most obviously signal her pictorial appearance as novel goddess of nation and country are nowhere present. Indeed, even as a female deity her ethereal ascetic air sets her apart from the “poster” goddesses that were becoming increasingly visible in the glossy chromolithographs and colorful calendars of the subcontinent’s burgeoning popular art industry, as well as apart from the sensuous deities in oils painted in the illusionist academic style and even from the long-established divinities who adorned the sanctums and walls of the innumerable Hindu temples, high and low, across the country.

Bharat Mata was used as a mobilizing artifact-enlarged and transferred to a silk banner by a Japanese artist-during the anti-partition processions of 1905-1906 in Bengal, and in its own time and since, it has been appreciated by art critics for inaugurating a new “nationalist” aesthetic. Nonetheless, Abanindranath’s picturing of the goddess has had minimal impact on her subsequent visualizations. Sister Nivedita may have fervently hoped that she would publish the painting, “by tens of thousands, and scatter it broadcast over the land, till there was not a peasant’s cottage nor a craftsman’s hut between Kedarnath and Cape Comorin, that had not the presentment of Bharat-Mata somewhere on its walls,” but this has not been its fate despite the early attempt to print it as free-standing poster (figure 6) (1967, 3: 61). Instead, in the mass-produced images of her artists, Mother India wears a very different look. Frequently flanked by one or more ferocious lions, she is armed and in turn, she arms her sons to battle for her; she is variously attired and adorned but certainly not in the garb of a virginal ascetic; and most importantly for the argument of this book, she appears as a carto-graphed form associated with the mapped configuration of the nation. For the large majority of her visual votaries Bharat Mata is a worldly mother/goddess, and her rootedness in the mundane politics of the terrestrial earth is suggested fairly early in her pictorial career by the incorporation of the mapped configuration of the country into her visible persona. In fact, roughly around the same time that Abanindranath attempted his otherworldly Bharat Mata, fellow artists had begun to place the new mother/goddess in the company of the map of India. A confidential government report records that in the course of a raid in November 1908 on the premises of the Dacca-based Anushilan Samiti (a secret society notorious for its violent militancy) the colonial police recovered a “framed” and “glazed” picture, apparently in a prominent place at the entrance to the building, of “Bharat Mata-the map of India represented by a woman in flowing garments.” This is possibly the first time that the carto-graphed Mother India leaves a trace (albeit fleeting) in the official archive of the colonial state.

Nagendranath Sen Gupta, who was a school child during these momentous years, retrospectively offers a graphic description of one such cartographed image that has unfortunately not survived. He writes, “A celebrated artist of Western India painted an adorable picture of the Mother within a map of India which brought out beautifully the idea of the living Mother India. The head and halo around it covered the Punjab and Kashmir; the feet touched the southernmost parts of Madras; one hand stretched towards Gujarat and the other through Central India towards Bengal; the hair swept the region of the Himalayas; Ceylon formed a lotus at the feet of the Mother. We gazed at the picture and saw the soul” (Sen Gupta 1974, 27). The power of printed images such as this to move young patriots is apparent from Sen Gupta’s passionate declaration in his memoir tellingly titled Repentant Revolutionary, “I remember seeing that picture over and over again and every time having my heart filled with emotion and hope. There was nothing I could desire more than to be a solider in the army of such a Mother. What was the use of life unless it could be dedicated to this service?” (28).

MOTHER INDIA IN TAMIL INDIA

Elsewhere Bengal’s swadeshi protests incited the appearance of the cartographed form of the mother/goddess in the distant southern Indian presidency of Madras, which around the same time was “awakened” from its much-talked about state of stupor by the political journalism of the Tamil poet-patriot Subramania Bharati (1882-1921). In the Tamil newsweekly Intiya, which he founded and edited from 1906 to 1910 first in Madras and then in exile in the neighboring French colony of Pondicherry, Bharat Mata appears, possibly for the first time in southern India, in the company of the mapped configuration of India. Inspired by the fiery oratory of Bipan Chandra Pal (1858-1932) and the devotional fervor of Sister Nivedita, Bharati’s Intiya featured a number of political pictures visually proclaiming the new religion of swadeshi nationalism sweeping across the country that in turn consolidated the adulation, even worship, of the new mother/goddess. On April 20, 1907, the paper printed on its cover an illustration of a sari-clad seated woman with one arm resting in a proprietary manner on a terrestrial globe displaying only the rough outline of an unnamed India and with the other arm extended to bless a group of men-variously attired possibly to signify the diverse communities of the Indian geo-body-who pay homage to her (figure 7). The picture was meant to commemorate the start of the Tamil New Year, and although the woman is identified as the “Goddess of the New Year” she could very well be Bharat Mata, with her association with the map form of India and the accompanying editorial supporting this possibility.

By the time this picture was published in Intiya Bharati was already intensely involved through his writings in spreading the message of swadeshi nationalism, for which in Tamil he composed poems on India as a sacred female personage and mother figure. Indeed, Happy New Year’s Day is accompanied by one of his poems that eventually would become famous in the Tamil country because of its attempt to harmonize pride in a regional identity with devotion to the newly forged idea of India:

Long live glorious Tamil, long live the fine Tamil people! Long live the auspicious precious Bharata country! The troubles that plague us today, may they vanish! May goodness gather among us! All that is evil should wither! Virtue should grow among us! All that is sinful should disappear! The manly efforts of the noble inhabitants of this country, may they excel day by day! May my fellow citizens flourish forever! Vande Mataram! Vande Mataram!

The April 20 edition of Intiya was not the only time that it featured India as female. From September 1906 until 1910 when the newsweekly ceased publication, the image of a feminized country appeared on a fairly routine basis, including as a fecund cow milked dry by the British; as a woman wasting away while her children played about unheedful of her plight, or while her home was being plundered by outsiders; and most often, as a Hindu goddess. Such visual imaginings took another cartographic detour on April 10, 1909, when the paper published an advertisement for a new Tamil daily called Vijaya (which Bharati hoped to launch in Madras) that featured Bharat Mata as a four-armed figure occupying the outline map of India (figure 8). While the crown adorning her head sketches the rough outline of Kashmir, her feet peep out from under the folds of her sari to rest at the southern end of the peninsula and her body masks the heartland of the Indian geo-body. Although Bharati’s proposed daily was named after the Hindu goddess of victory Vijaya, the female form used to advertise the new venture is unambiguously named (in the north Indian Devanagari script, but with Tamil spelling) Bharata Mata.

The image in the advertisement also proclaims Bharati’s pluralistic vision of Indian national territory as the patrimony of the several communities that occupy it, symbolized by the figures of the four men who stand embracing each other in elaborately carved boats at Bharat Mata’s feet. Their clothing visually marks them as Hindu and Muslim, and their banners declare (in Tamil and Telugu) that disunity had to be resisted. Overtures to India’s two dominant religious communities are also made in the two slogans inscribed in the picture: Bharat Mata might look like a Hindu goddess in her visual appearance, but in one of her four hands she carries a banner proclaiming in Urdu script “Allahu akbar” (God is great). This conventional nod to Islam is graphically complemented not with a phrase from the Hindu scriptures but by a new phrase that had recently become the rallying call for swadeshi patriots in Bengal and elsewhere-namely “vande mataram” (I worship the mother) inscribed in Devanagari (itself in the process of being stabilized as the “national” script). As I discuss in chapter 3, this signature salutation and slogan, originating in Bengal and mobilized to propagate the new religion of Bharat Mata, is itself rooted in a nationalized Hindu sensibility. It is used here (as elsewhere and at other times), however, to stand in for an emergent Indian patriotism, thereby betraying not just the undertow of Hinduism in Bharati’s thought and practice (as indeed in that of almost all votaries of Bharat Mata) but also the easy convergence of “India” with “Hindu” from nationalism’s earliest moments on the subcontinent. The graphic subordination as well of “Allahu akbar” to “vande mataram” and “Bharata Mata” in the picture is a visual reminder that twentieth-century India’s vaunted pluralism rarely escapes entirely from the sensibilities and aesthetics (however varied) of its numerically most dominant religious community.

An intriguing story told in later days by the Tamil poet Bharatidasan (1891-1964), one of Bharati’s ardent young followers from those heady years, recalls an incident, probably around 1911, when the poet and some of his associates, ostensibly inspired by a Bengali picture of the mother/goddess (possibly Abanindranath’s Bharat Mata), commissioned a clay figurine of Bharat Mata from a local potter. In Bharatidasan’s recollection, when the potter noted that the goddess in the Bengali picture wore no jewels one of Bharati’s associates, the fiery London-returned barrister V. V. S. Iyer (1881-1925) who was bred on a growing expatriate penchant for political radicalism, apparently agreed with such a visual rendering when he stated, “What does India have now? Foreigners have plundered its wealth. Is it appropriate to adorn our Bharat Mata with jewels when she languishes away amid the famine and poverty that surrounds her?” Bharati, however, is believed to have demurred and then retorted, “What indeed have the foreigners taken away? Have the Ganga and the Yamuna been rolled up and taken away? Have the Himalaya and Venkatam [Tirupati] mountains been borne away on their heads? And [what of] our culture, heroism, and religion …? Our Bharat Mata is indeed an Empress … Go forth and adorn her with jewels” (Ilavarasu 1990, 53-54). The clay images were accordingly cast, and then were put to an astonishing subversive use: hidden in their hollow cores were small revolvers smuggled into British India by revolutionaries traveling from French Pondicherry (Ramalingam 1995). Apocryphal though the story might be, it is worth noting that in the surviving replicas of these clay dolls Bharat Mata is an explicitly carto-graphed figure: she is a four-armed goddess whose sari is arranged to roughly outline a map of India that includes British Burma. Sri Lanka is transformed into a floral bud at her feet, and even the sovereign (Hindu) kingdom of Nepal is claimed by her flowing tresses (figure 9). It is important to underscore that Bharati’s territorial nationalism as it finds expression in his poetry and prose is far less ambitious and imperialistic in its reach than in such a material expression in clay.

(Continues…)

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