Suchergebnisse

Formal concerns -- Other women, other mothers -- Vande mataram -- Enshrining the map of India -- Between men, map, and mother -- Daughters of India

AbstractThis 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 documents of the colonial state, he appears as a rapacious moneylender and behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealer, a member of that hated class of 'Madrasdubashes', a 'most diabolical race of men'. In contrast, Tamil memory work since at least the 1840s has differently recalled this shadowy eighteenth-century man as a selfless philanthropist whose vast wealth financed some of the earliest educational institutions in the Madras Presidency. I track the posthumous fate of Pachaiyappa's bequest to argue that even as the founding of the public trust and its educational philanthropy departed radically from his willed intentions, a new complex of living, dying, and giving for the sake of native education was put in place in the Tamil country in the age of colonial capital and pedagogic modernity.

The increasing preoccupation of the scholarly community in recent years with globalization appears to have left its impact on postmodern geographers and historians of cartography as well, several of whom have turned their attention recently to the history and politics of the image that is at the center of this new problematic, namely, the terrestrial globe. As Denis Cosgrove notes in his provocative analysis of cartographic representations of Earth in the Western imagination, "Whether pictured as a networked sphere of accelerating circulation or as an abused and overexploited body, it is from images of the spherical earth that ideas of globalization draw their expressive and political force" (2001: ix). Its very ubiquity as a symbol of the times in which we live underscores the preoccupation with the image of the globe in the late modern imagination. However, as Jerry Brotton observes, its pervasiveness may also point to an increasing redundancy of its appearance in our times, and the image of the globe has suffered what might be called "a waning of affect" (1999: 73). This argument leads him to a study of the early modern period in Europe when the terrestrial globe first emerged in his assessment as "a socially affective object" (ibid.: 72). In hisTrading Territories(1997), Brotton considers how the terrestrial globe came to not just reflect an increasingly "global" world but also to constitute it over the course of the sixteenth century. Its power lay "in the ideological representation of the world it purported to describe. Its lack of cognitive specificity was not its weakness but ultimately its greatest strength, because the very perceptions of distance and space upon which the terrestrial globe rested stressed speculation and conjecture over the extent and possession of distant territories" (1999: 87–88). From the early years of the sixteenth century, even as the Copernican revolution was slowly undoing medieval Christian cosmological conceptions of the universe, terrestrial globes became increasingly crucial to the exercise of state power in Europe, as well as to the surging search for new markets and tradable goods. As importantly, as prestige objects, globes and maps became part of a new gift economy of circulation and exchange, and were sought after like "the spices, pepper, silk and precious metals to which [they] appeared to give directional access" (Brotton 1997: 25; see also Jardine 1996: 295–309, 425–36). In the process, they helped fashion new bourgeois modalities of the self, mostly but not exclusively male. Not surprisingly, as Brotton notes, "It is upon the figure of the globe, as both a visual image and a material object, that many of the social and cultural hopes and anxieties of the period came to be focused" (1997: 21).

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.

Draws on Tamil narratives & poems from colonial/postcolonial India to discuss the complex erotic formations within Tamil nationalism & the use of erotic desire as a nation-building technique. The discourse of the mostly male nationalists involves a "triangle of desire" consisting of a virile, heterosexual, young male nationalist; a beautiful, desirable, but virginal Mother; & a young, beautiful, female nationalist destined to marry a male nationalist in order to reproduce the nation. The underlying meanings of each figure in the triangle are explored to show how the triangle of desire is beneficial to the nationalist cause. The sentiments expressed link longing & belonging & present the state as a space for the play of erotic desire that merges personal passion with love for one's nation/country. A discussion of the significance of these works for the broader issue of gender relations focuses on the oppressive implications for women's identities of the gendering of Tamil as female, & ways in which nationalism transforms ideologies of marriage. Excerpts from Tamil narratives & poems are included. 63 References. J. Lindroth

. . . the people of India love and venerate Sanskrit with a feeling which is next only to that of patriotism towards Mother India.Report of the Sanskrit Commission, 1956–57This 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 words 'curious' and 'puzzling' deliberately, for the Sanskrit issue unsettles many well-entrenched assumptions about language and nationalism that circulate in scholarly circles and popular imagination. Just as crucially, Sanskrit's (mis)adventures in the past century or so, draw our attention to the troubling linguistic turns taken by the nationalization process in India with its disquieting complicity with colonial categories and certitudes. The concerns of this paper have thus been shaped by three related issues pertaining to language, nationalism, and modernity.

The modern nation resides, literally and symbolically, in the bodies of its citizenry. These bodies in turn constitute the national body politic. The female embodiment of the nation is frequently the ground on which the two bodies intersect. This essay explores this intersection through the analytic of the 'somatics of nationalism', with examples drawn from Tamil‐speaking India in this century. Through an analysis of how images of the shared womb, blood, milk, and tears of the female embodiment of the nation were circulated by nationalist narratives, the author suggests that these were somatic building blocks with which the nation and its constituency were constructed in southern India. In turn, Tamil citizens were called upon to demonstrate their loyalty by putting their own bodies on line, shedding their own blood and that of their enemies, for the sake of the embodied nation. Nations and citizen‐patriots may relate to each other politically, materially and emotionally, but they also do so somatically.