A history of the role that images of Mother India played in helping a vast, heterogeneous population to imagine the Indian nation and associate themselves with it.

Sumathi Ramaswamy is Professor of History at Duke University. She is the author of Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories and Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India and the editor of Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India.

List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xv
Prologue: Yearning for Form 1
1. Formal Concerns 13
2. Other Women, Other Mothers 73
3. Vande Mataram 117
4. Enshrining the Map of India 151
5. Between Men, Map, and Mother 177
6. Daughters of India 237
Epilogue: Pictorial History in the Age of the World Picture 283
Notes 301
References 353
Index 371