Picturing The Nation: Iconographies of Modern India

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Picturing the Nation explores visual representations of India from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. The eight illustrated essays in this volume consider a multitude of visual items including chromolithographs, films and television shows, official icons, architecture, and cultural displays.

With a comprehensive introduction by Richard H. Davis, this volume analyses how the Indian "National Symbolic" has been imagined and how visual representations of the Indian nation have been figured in terms of family relationships community and divinity. Through this analysis, the book attempts to answer the question-how is it that so many persons have been persuaded to die willingly for something as recently imagined as the nation?

Consciously differing from writings where imagining the nation is a predominantly verbal and discursive activity, Picturing the nation presents a visual history of modern India.

About the Author

Richard H. Davis is Professor in the programs of Religion and Asian Studies at Bard College, Annandale, NY. His publications include Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: worshiping Siva in Medieval India (1991) and Lives of Indian Images (1997).