The wretched of the nation
In 2010, the author published a book titled The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Duke University Press) in which she demonstrated how the deified body of Mother India and the geo-body of India – as iconised by the outline map – are put to work over the course of the long twentieth century by India's ‘barefoot cartographers’ to transform the nation-space into a sacred pastoral landscape worth living and dying for. In this article, Ramaswamy takes up for consideration ten contrary watercolors also featuring the map of India that make up Atul Dodiya’s series Tearscape (2001), Dodiya lives and works in Mumbai. Produced at the beginning of a new century, these works evacuate the glorious goddess from her occupation of the map of India, and populate it instead with abject figures that disenchant, even desecrate, the national geo-body. What is dared in transforming thus the map of the nation from a repository of pastoral plenitude into the dystopian address of the (female) abject? And to what end does Dodiya undertake such a risky maneuver, fifty years after the nation's geo-body was created out of the conflagration that was the Partition of India?.
Duke Scholars
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- Literary Studies
- 3601 Art history, theory and criticism
- 2102 Curatorial and Related Studies
- 1905 Visual Arts and Crafts
- 1901 Art Theory and Criticism
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Published In
DOI
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Literary Studies
- 3601 Art history, theory and criticism
- 2102 Curatorial and Related Studies
- 1905 Visual Arts and Crafts
- 1901 Art Theory and Criticism