Abstract
The concept and image of Bharat Mata, the Mother of India, developed along with the struggle for Independence during the British reign in India at the beginning of the 20th century. The iconography of Bharat Mata is thereby closely connected to topography of India. This chapter focuses on the alternate tradition of mapping territory with regard to national identity and the sacredness of landscape in the South Asian world. The author will, therefore, discuss the perception of land by the Indian nation on the basis of maps and images of Mother India.
I show gratitude to thee, Mother, richly-watered, richly-fruited,
cool with the winds of the south, dark with the crops of the harvests,
The Mother!
Vande Mataram by Rabindranath Tagore (English translation of the first verse)
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Notes
- 1.
The painting was originally not titled by M.F. Husain and the artist never commented on the identification of the female figure depicted on the poster. Still, the resemblance to his earlier paintings depicting Bharat Mata is evident.
- 2.
Maqbool Fida Husain was born on the 17th September 1915 in Pandharpur, Maharashtra and was one of the founding members of the Progressive Artist Group in Bombay in 1947. Beside his great painterly oeuvre, he became also well known as film director. After having left India in 2006, he passed away in London on the 9th June 2011 at the age of 95 without having had a chance to visit his motherland India again. See also his website: http://www.mfhussain.com.
- 3.
A block print from 1537, kept in the Map Library at the Michigan University in Ann Arbor, and attributed to Johann “Bucius” Butch has been published by Ramaswamy 2010, p. 88, Fig. 45—The image was later reprinted in the “Cosmographia”, the earliest German description of the world, by Sebatian Münster in 1570.
- 4.
Darby Lewes calls these kind of depictions visual somatopia, pointing out the sexual component of such representations and referring on the one hand to familiar cliché and domestic tasks of women, and on the other hand to the protective energy of women. (Lewes 2000, pp. 129–164, see also Ramaswamy 2010, pp. 88–89).
- 5.
http://www.hindubooks.org/culture_course/book1/bharthamata/page1.htm. There are different versions and songs, but in general they are variation of the “Vande Mataram” by Rabindranath Tagore.
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Widorn, V. (2013). When Countries Become Gods: The Geospatial Aspect of Deities in India. In: Kriz, K., Cartwright, W., Kinberger, M. (eds) Understanding Different Geographies. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29770-0_7
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