When a Language Becomes a Mother/Goddess
An Image Essay on Tamil
This may not be surprising given that she too is deemed an embodiment of language, literature and learning; some devotees in fact do imagine her as a Tamil incarnation of Saraswati, and every now and then, icons or images of the latter have been appropriated and re-named Tamiḻttāy (Figure 7).
Figure 7
All the same, there is another figure with whom Tamiḻttāy has found herself increasingly paired with, or pitted against, in the modern Tamil visual imagination. I refer to Bhārat Mātā, “Mother India,” the Indian national territory similarly imagined as a mother/goddess, a novel personage who also became popular in the Indian visual landscape in the early years of the century, and who gained in importance as the Indian national movement gathered strength. Indeed, I would contend that in her pictorial career, Tamiḻttāy’s personage develops in tandem with and as a riposte to the development of the “national” figure of Bhārat Mātā: so much so that it is often difficult to differentiate between the two.
For instance, in an advertisement from the early decades of the twentieth century, the female figure advertising the sale of S. S. Anandam’s Tamil “siddha” medicine could be taken to be either of these two goddesses (Figure 8): there is nothing in the visual appearance of the woman occupying the map of India and holding a banner in two of her four hands that states in English that “belief is relief,” that would help the viewer to decide whether it is Bhārat Mātā or Tamiḻttāy who is being pictorially invoked here.
We would expect that the advertiser might draw on Tamiḻttāy’s help to sell his “Tamil” medicine, but what is she doing here, occupying what is recognizable as a partial outline map of India? |
Figure 8
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Figure 9
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For, typically, in India’s burgeoning patriotic visual culture, it is the mother/goddess Bhārat Mātā who is associated with the outline map of India. Sometimes, as in Figure 9, she is shown proudly occupying it, her body filling up the map, her limbs and head blurring the fraught boundaries of state cartography: |
| Occasionally, she stands or sits on the map of India, itself inscribed on a terrestrial globe, as in this poster issued soon after Indian independence
(Figure 10): |
Figure 10
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She is also shown literally merging with the soil of India, her body partly disappearing into the map of India (Figure 11):
Figure 11
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