Maps and mother goddesses in modern India

J. B. Harley notes that ‘maps as an impersonal type of knowledge tend to “desocialize” the territory they represent; they foster the notion of a socially empty space’. Focusing on twentieth‐century India, this paper considers an alternate tradition of mapping territory in which the nation is cartographically presented to its subject‐citizens not as ‘empty social space’, but as ‘Mother India’, the Indian nation imagined as woman, mother, goddess. Through an analysis of such ‘bodyscapes’ of Mother India, I ask what is at stake in cartographically deploying the female body to map national territory. And I consider how such bodyscapes, even as they systematize a particular visual image of ‘India’, also consolidate the notion of the nation as motherland.