Cartographic Anxiety on the Thar Desert: The Border Security Force and Jaisalmer’s Tanot Mata Mandir

Abstract

The spatiality of the Tanot Mata Temple, in Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan, places it at the crossroads of religion and nationalism. Firstly, its location near the international border makes it a marker of territorial integrity as well as the bearer of a ‘cartographic anxiety’ which aspires to keep the periphery intact and unharmed. Secondly, its spatiality is defined in terms of majoritarian religious beliefs which have been shaped in postcolonial India over a period of cultural and ideological interactions between the dominant and the marginal, mainstream and vernacular. Despite its past, which attests to fluid regional connections and itinerant migratory circuits, the temple’s sacredness operates today within a repository of visual registers which celebrates a specific kind of patriotism that is both exclusive and retaliatory. This paper will discuss a range of literary and visual material that establishes the temple’s legend on precincts founded on an imagined relationship of the citizen with the land.