CHAPTER 26
The Goddess and the Nation:
Subterfuges of Antiquity, the
Cunning of Modernity
Sumathi Ramaswamy
The “fragile social achievement” (Appadurai 1996: 179) that is the modern
nation has needed many symbolic fictions – some enduring, others more
ephemeral – to sustain itself over time. Among the most intriguing of these
fictions is the imagination of the modern nation as an ancient goddess who, as
the embodiment of timeless values and cherished ideals, arouses adoration and
commands reverence among her citizen-devotees. We see this fiction at work in
many different parts of the modern world – the Americas, Britain, western
Europe – but it is perhaps in colonial and postcolonial India, on the putative
margins of the metropolitan West where it first started, that the contradictions
of thinking the nation simultaneously as ancient and modern become most
apparent. In this chapter, by focusing on two such goddesses who put in an
appearance in late colonial India – Tamil
̄
tta ̄y (Mother Tamil), and Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄
(Mother India) – I reflect on some of these contradictions, inspired by Sudipta
Kaviraj’s observation that “the nation, in India... is a thing without a past”:
It is radically modern. It can only look for subterfuges of antiquity. It fears to face
and admit its own terrible modernity, because to admit modernity is to make itself
vulnerable. As a proposal for modern living... in a society still knowing only one
legitimizing criterion – tradition – it must seek to find past disguises for these
wholly modern proposals. (Kaviraj 1993: 13)I will argue that although both Tamil
̄tta ̄y and Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ cloak themselves
in the mantle of great antiquity, strategically borrowing for their “disguise” from
a vast repository of symbolic practices and beliefs that I gloss here as “Hindu,”
they are products of a modern imagination, and telltale signs of their modernity
set them apart from the pantheon of older Hindu goddesses on whom they are
quietly parasitic. In making this argument, I want to obviously resist the notion,
shared by both their devotees and some scholars, that these mother-goddesses