Scholars@Duke
Sumathi Ramaswamy

Sumathi Ramaswamy

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of History
History
sr76@duke.edu
Box 90719, Duke University, Department of History, Durham, NC 27701
Dept of History, 325 Classroom Bldg, Durham, NC 27708

Scholarly Works

Disobedient Subjects: Bombay, 1930-1931

Artistic production · October 30, 2025 Disobedient Subjects takes you on a visual journey through Bombay — today’s Mumbai — so that you too can bear witness, nearly a century later, to the unfolding of the Civil Disobedience Movement against colonial rule in British India’s most important comme ... Cite

Salt of the City

Book section · 2025 Cite

MAQBOOL FIDA HUSAIN

Other Marg · January 1, 2023 Cite

The goddess and the nation: Subterfuges of antiquity, the cunning of modernity

Book section · May 13, 2022 This chapter focuses on two goddesses who put in an appearance in late colonial India - Tamilttay (Mother Tamil), and Bharat Mata (Mother India). It also focuses on some of these contradictions, inspired by Sudipta Kaviraj's observation. The chapter argues ... Full text Cite

Light Writing on the Lathi Raj: Bombay, 1930–31

Journal article History of Photography · January 1, 2021 This article explores the intersection between policing and photography in the course of the Civil Disobedience Movement in colonial Bombay in 1930–31 by focusing on historical photographs compiled in a recently discovered album. When the ‘disobedient’ men ... Full text Cite

B is for Bapu: The Art of the Child in Modern India

Artistic production · October 2020 The project pays tribute to the art produced by child artists of Mumbai on Mahatma Gandhi—or Bapu—the father of the nation. It draws on their colorful paintings to show the importance of the child in the making of the Mahatma. Gandhi is the most painted, ... Link to item Cite

Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience

Book · 2020 Mohandas K. Gandhi has been described as ‘an artist of non-violence,’ crafting as he did a set of practices of the self and politics that earned him the mantle of Mahatma, ‘the great soul.’ His philosophy and praxis of satyagraha, non-violent civil disobed ... Cite

B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child of Modern India

Digital publication · 2020 The project pays tribute to the art produced by child artists of Mumbai on Mahatma Gandhi—or Bapu—the father of the nation. It draws on their colorful paintings to show the importance of the child in the making of the Mahatma. Gandhi is the most painted, ... Cite

"Reducing Myself to Zero" The Art of Aparigraha

Journal article MARG-A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS · December 2019 Link to item Cite

The Unbearable Lightness of Image Travel: The Work of Curation in the Digital Age

Journal article ASIANetwork Exchange A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts · December 21, 2018 Considers the work of the image in our digital age, and the challenges to traditional notions of bricks-and-mortar curatorship posed by digital humanities but also by the digital proliferation of the image. ... Full text Cite

Charity and philanthropy in South Asia: A preamble

Journal article Modern Asian Studies · January 1, 2018 Full text Cite

Giving becomes him: The posthumous fortune(s) of pachaiyappa mudaliar

Journal article Modern Asian Studies · January 1, 2018 This article explores the ways in which Pachaiyappa Mudaliar (1754?-1794) has been panegyrized as the quintessential benefactor of our times in Tamil prose, poetry, and pictures over the course of the past century and a half. In the bureaucratic and legal ... Full text Open Access Cite

Charity and Philanthropy in South Asia

Journal issue Modern Asian Studies · 2018 Cite

Iconic Interruptions, Selected Works of Gigi Scaria

Artistic production · September 2017 or the secular citizen-artist of our times, is the inheritance of the twentieth century a burden to be overcome, or a gift to be embraced? Iconic Interruptions explores this question with the help of some select works of Indian artist Gigi Scaria who lives ... Link to item Cite

The wretched of the nation

Journal article Third Text · May 4, 2017 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 ... Full text Open Access Cite

Artful Mapping in Bazar India

Book section · 2015 Cite

Going Global in Mughal India

Artistic production · October 2014 This project uses the tools of digital humanities to track the itineraries of the terrestrial globe in Mughal India. Supported by grants from the Arts and Sciences Committee on Faculty Research and the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, I h ... Link to item Cite

Empires of Vision: A Reader

Book · February 2014 Cite

Postcolonial Looking

Book section · 2014 Cite

The Imperial Optic

Book section · 2014 Cite

Global Encounters, Earthly Knowledges, Worldly Selves

Book section · January 2013 Focused on the colonial school in the British India as the principal site for disciplined encounters between the learning child and the terrestrial globe as a scientific instrument, this essay considers the work of Geography in transforming young Indians i ... Cite

Bhārat Mātā

Digital publication · 2012 Cite

Midnight’s Line

Other Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space · 2012 Cite

Artful Mapping in Bazaar India

Digital publication · March 2011 Cite

The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India

Book · 2010 From the cover copy: Making the case for a new kind of visual history, The Goddess and the Nation charts the pictorial life and career of Bharat Mata, “Mother India,” the Indian nation imagined as mother/goddess, embodiment of national territory, and unify ... Cite

Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India

Book · 2010 Barefoot across the Nation is the first inter-disciplinary effort to engage with the work and recent travails of Maqbool Fida Husain, arguably his country’s most celebrated modernist, whose professional life is intimately entangled with and revelatory of t ... Cite

Mapping India after Husain

Book section · 2010 Cite

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

Book section · 2008 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 ... Cite

Maps, Mother Goddesses and Martyrdom in Modern India

Journal article Journal of Asian Studies · 2008 Explores the convergence of mqps, mother/goddesses, and acts of martyrdom in patriotic pictures produced during the twentieth century in India in order to understand how artists pictorially transformed national territory into a tangible and enduring object ... Cite

Conceit of the Globe in Mughal India

Journal article Comparative Studies in Society and History · 2007 Cite

Home away from Home? The Spatial Politics of Modern Tamil Identity.

Book section · 2005 Considers the spatial imagination around a lost continent in the Indian ocean imagined as a disappeared homeland of the Tamil peoples. ... Cite

The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories

Book · 2004 This is a fascinating study of Lemuria--a mythical continent which was once believed to bridge the land masses of India and Africa millennia ago before ultimately sinking into the Indian sea. ... Cite

Mapping Loss

Book section · 2004 Link to item Cite

Occult Losses

Book section · 2004 Link to item Cite

Placing Loss

Book section · 2004 Link to item Cite

Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India

Journal issue Contributions to Indian Sociology · 2002 Cite

Remains of the race: Archaeology, nationalism, and the yearning for civilisation in the Indus valley

Journal article Indian Economic and Social History Review · January 1, 2001 Full text Cite

History at land's end: Lemuria in Tamil spatial fables

Journal article Journal of Asian Studies · January 1, 2000 Full text Cite

Catastrophic cartographies: Mapping the lost continent of Lemuria

Journal article Representations · January 1, 2000 Full text Cite

Sanskrit for the nation

Journal article Modern Asian Studies · May 1, 1999 This essay raises the language question in its relationship to the wider problematic of the nationalization of pasts by focusing on the curious and puzzling status accorded to Sanskrit in the nationalization of the Indian past in this century. I use the wo ... Full text Cite

The Politics of Prayer

Other Frontline · 1999 Cite

The Demoness, the Maid, the Whore, and the Good Mother: Contesting the National Language in India

Journal article International Journal of Sociology of Language · 1999 Cite

Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India

Journal article Gender and History · 1998 Cite

The Nation, the Region, and the Adventures of a Tamil `Hero'

Journal article Contributions to Indian Sociology · July 1994 Full text Cite

En/gendering Language: The Poetics of Tamil Identity

Journal article Comparative Studies in Society and History · October 1993 Cite

B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child of Modern India

Digital publication This digital project pays tribute to the art produced by child artists of Mumbai on Mahatma Gandhi—or Bapu—the father of the nation. It draws on their colorful paintings to show the importance of the child in the making of the Mahatma. ... Link to item Cite