Of Gods and globes: The territorialisation of Hindu deities in Indian popular visual culture

Considers the appearance of cartographic imagery in the form of maps and globes in the so-called god pictures that are such a ubiquitous feature of poular Indian visual culture of the past century. A special focus is on tracking the transformations through time of representations of the Hindu deity Varaha who is shown in much of twentieth-century popular art in the company of a terrestrial globe and the map of India. Through the considerations of such images, I suggest that the ’modern’ and ’secular’ science of cartography has enabled the transformation of "Hindu" deities into "Indian" gods.

Duke Scholars

Author Sumathi Ramaswamy History