the previous decades to make her a part of political landscape of the subconti-
nent in the name of a “secular” India.
It is surprising, therefore, given her ubiquity in twentieth-century India, that
Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ has not been subjected to the kind of critical scholarly scrutiny that
a comparable figure like Marianne of France has received from Maurice Agulhon
(1980) and others (see e.g. Hunt 1984; Mosse 1985). For instance, Bha ̄rat
Ma ̄ta ̄’s remarkable presence in the nationalist aspirations of diasporic Indians
in the early decades of the twentieth century, such as the members of the San
Francisco-based Ghadar Party, has barely been noticed, nor indeed has the
poetry produced on her by Muslim and Sikh devotees (Bose 1997: 63–4; Puri
1993: 140–4), and by even the occasional white Christian votary like C. F.
Andrews (Andrews 1914). There is some scholarly work on her place in the
patriotic imaginations of her Tamil and Hindi devotees, although we know little
yet about the differences that might set apart these regional manifestations from
each other (Baskaran 1981; Goswami 1998: 332–45; Ramaswamy 1997).^2
Most of the existing scholarship on the goddess is narrowly focused on Bha ̄rat
Ma ̄ta ̄ in her Bengali guise (writ large as “Indian”), and largely limited to her place
in the imagination of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–94) (see Bose 1997).
Although Bankim’s well-known musings from the 1870s and 1880s have been
undoubtedly crucial to the popularization of the idea of the nation as a goddess
and a mother, recent scholarship suggests that the ground had already been
cleared for such an imagination to surface through the work of others. As Indira
Chowdhury’s work shows, Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ had already put in an appearance
in the poetry and plays of various Bengali patriots associated with the “Hindu
mela” (Hindu fair) in the late 1860s and early 1870s (Chowdhury 1998:
95–119). The notion of India as the female deity “Adibha ̄rati,” had also appeared
by 1866 in the imagination of Bankim’s contemporary, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay
(1827–94), who turned for patriotic inspiration to an ancient Puranic legend in
which the body of the goddess Satı ̄ was dismembered and scattered across the
subcontinent in 52 different places which became pilgrimage spots in Hindu
sacred geography (Raychaudhuri 1988: 39–41; 63–5). As Tapan Raychaudhuri
writes, “Bhudev read into this myth a new meaning”:
When I was a student of Hindu College, a European teacher told [us] that patrio-
tism was unknown to the Hindus, for no Indian language had any word to express
the idea. I believed his word and was deeply distressed by the thought. I knew then... the mythical account of...Sati’s death, but that knowledge did not help me
refute the teacher’s statement or console myself. Now I know that to the descen-
dant of the Aryans the entire motherland with its fifty-two places of pilgrimage is
in truth the person of Deity. (quoted in Raychaudhuri 1988: 39)
Bhudev’s somaticization of the motherland, thus enabling the transformation of
its inhabitants into each other’s siblings by virtue of being born of her womb
and raised on her milk, clearly anticipates the prolific use of similar somatic
imagery in numerous poems on Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ which came to be composed and
circulated over the course of the next century and more (Ramaswamy 1998b).
the goddess and the nation 557