Untitled (Mother India)

“In one of [Rabindranath Tagore’s] novels a male protagonist says to the heroine, ‘Have I not told you that, in you, I visualise the Shakti (power) of our country? The geography of a country is not the whole truth. No one can give up his life for a map.’ Resisting official British mapping was part of the story of anti-colonialism in the early twentieth century. Indeed, instead of British cityscapes, artists in Bengal visualised a maternal bodyscape not unlike artists in Europe who portrayed the motherland in the figure of a woman.” (M.K. Landrus, Bengal and Modernity: Early 20th Century Art in India, exhibition catalogue, Oxford, 2015, unpaginated)