Visualising India's geo-body: Globes, maps, bodyscapes

Abstract

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.