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