Such a declaration reflects a new sentiment in which the language comes to
be imagined, for the first time, as the personal property of their speakers as a col-
lective. The myriad practices of Tamil devotion place the people who speak Tamil
at the very center of the project, as an imagined community of “Tamilians”
(tamil
̄
ar). This people-centered ideology of modernity inaugurates a patrimonial
imagination in which language is constituted as a tangible, material possession
that is transmitted from one generation of its speakers to another who relate to
it as a property-owning “collective individual.” It is such a new imagination
which enables, indeed needs, the figure of Tamil
̄
tta ̄y as the “mother” of all Tamil
speakers who are converted into each other’s siblings by virtue of the fact that
they have been borne by her “womb” and nurtured on her “milk,” and who in
turn reproduce other future speakers.
The geopiety that produces the imagination of India as Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ is simi-
larly new because the national territory that she embodies is configured in a
novel way – as a clearly delineated piece of Earth that is imagined as the exclu-
sive, sovereign, and collective property of its inhabitants, the nation’s citizens.
The proprietary relationship between the nation’s citizens and the territory they
inhabit comes to be best signified by maps of the nation that proliferate in the
age of nationalism across the modern world, India included. Not surprisingly,
visual representations of Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄, the “mother” of the nation, show her in
the company of maps and globes (on which “India” is delineated) from the early
years of the twentieth century. In some cases, she occupies the entire map of
India, in other cases, she appears to rise from it, in still others she replaces the
cartographic outline of India with her own body (Ramaswamy 2001; 2002). It
is the territorialization of the goddess thus, through her association with a
specifically delineated “geo-body” (Thongchai 1994) that colonial and post-
colonial geographical identify as “India,” which arguably sets apart Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄
from Pr.ithvı ̄, the older goddess of Earth. The incorporation of the modern
map (as indeed the Indian tricolor flag which she frequently holds) into the
iconography of Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ signifies a novel way of relating to territory – as a
geobody that is rendered visible to the citizen-devotee’s eye through cartographic
practices.
In both Tamil devotion and Indian geopiety, the objects of their adulation –
the Tamil language and the Indian territory – are transformed from rarified
abstractions into embodied entities that can be seen and touched. They are, in
other words, framed as “pictures.” In a provocative essay that has been the
subject of much critical discussion, Martin Heidegger has observed that “the
fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.”
In making this observation, he was in essence underscoring the emergence of
the modern subject who stands abstracted from a world that he could observe
as “a whole,” and in turn, manipulate and have at his “disposal.” “There begins
that way of being human that means the realm of human quality as a domain
given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over
that which is as a whole” (Heidegger 1977: 132–5). In the last analysis, it is
because Tamil
̄
tta ̄y and Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ are such “pictures,” allowing their devotees564 sumathi ramaswamy