Similarly, Bipin Chandra Pal, one of her most passionate of votaries, observed
in an essay entitled “India: The Mother,” that “[t]he outsider knows her as
India”:
The outsider sees only her outer and lifeless physical frame. The outsider sees her
as a mere bit of earth, and looks upon her as only a geographical expression and
entity. But we, her children, know her even today as our fathers and their fathers
had done before, countless generations, as a Being, as a Manifestation of [S ́akti]... And we have always, and do still worship her as such. (Pal 1923: 106)
While her devotees may think and present her thus, I believe it would be a
mistake to assume, as some scholars have indeed, a seamless and transparent
connection between Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ and other female goddesses such as Durga ̄ or
the goddess of earth, Pr.ithvı ̄. So, Vidya Dehejia notes in passing that “[s]ince the
land itself is spoken of in Sanskrit as Pr.ithvı ̄ or goddess earth, it is perhaps not
surprising that kingdoms, cities, districts, and boroughs are gendered feminine.
India is ‘Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄’ or ‘Mother India’...” (Dehejia 1997: 14–15). Diana Eck
argues more insistently that since “Bha ̄ratavarsha” or “India” is imagined in
Puranic Hinduism as “the dismembered body of the Goddess,” it would be erro-
neous for scholars to link the imagination of Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ to modernity alone,
for “such a view of its history lacks a longer historical perspective.”
It is clear that the identification of devis [goddesses] with the land has much older
roots in the symbolisation of the body-cosmos as inscribed in the land through its
system of devi shrines. A considerable history of pilgrimage to the multitude of
India’s hilltop, cave, and cliff-side devis preceded the use of the rhetoric of the
mother-land in 20th-century Hindu nationalism. (Eck 1999: 34)I agree with Eck that there indeed is a long tradition within Puranic Hinduism
of identifying the earth as female and as the goddess Pr.ithvı ̄, and of perceiving
the land that we today know of as “India” as sacred (see also Kinsley 1987:
178–96). All the same, I would also insist that an entirely novel way of relating
to national territory marks the modern moment in India, as it does elsewhere,
and that this novelty manifests itself in the manner in which Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ has
been imagined by her patriotic devotees as the presiding goddess of a modern
geopolity. But before I detail this, I want to address the various “subterfuges of
antiquity” through which “modern” goddesses like Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ (and Tamil
̄
tta ̄y)
have managed to persuade even the learned scholar to forget their modernity.
Subterfuges of Antiquity
Quite simply, the principal reason one can be lulled into believing that Tamil
̄
tta ̄y
and Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ are timeless ancient goddesses is because their devotees unam-
biguously assert so, and consciously endow them with personalities and powers
560 sumathi ramaswamy