Visualising India's geo-body

Globes, maps, bodyscapes

Bibliographic Data

ID4848901
AuthorsSumathi Ramaswamy (University of Michigan, corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume36
Issue1-2
Pages151-189
Publication date2002-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueContributions to Indian Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0069-9659 • E-ISSN: 0069-9667
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/006996670203600106
OpenAlexW1999169961
LanguageEN
Citations received30
References cited27

This article focuses on the national longing for cartographic form by exploring the deployment of globes, maps, and bodyscapes in patriotic visual practices in colonial and postcolonial India. I suggest that popular cartography is marked by the convergence of two modalities of seeing India-a disenchanted geographic habit in which its territory is visualised as a geo-body, and an enchanted somaticism in which India is the affect-laden body of Bharat Mata. Patriotic cartography transforms the nation's territory into an object of visual piety, even as it makes more visible a hitherto unfamiliar entity-the map of India. But most of all, popular patriotic cartography encourages the citizen-beholder to engage the nation's territory corporeally, affectively, and interestedly, so that it is not some empty social space, but the motherland) worth dying for. Patriotism in modernity requires peculiarly novel technologies of persuasion. Maps of the national territory are among the most intriguing-and compelling-of these

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Cartography · Colonialism · Geography · Immediacy · Media studies · Modernity · Persuasion · Political science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Psychology

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