“Popular” cartography and post-colonial afterlives: Analyzing imagery of the Cow Protection Movement
Arpita Biswas
Introduction
In this piece, I explore questions of nation-building and “popular” cartography in India. Focusing on the history of the Cow Protection Movement (from the late 19th century to the present), I trace the post-colonial legacy of popular artwork. I am particularly interested in mapping the intersections of nation building and visualizations enabled by scientific cartography. How does the advent of “barefoot cartography” (Ramaswamy, 2009) or “popular” cartography expand our ability to visualize and imagine the nation? “Barefoot cartography” here refers to local and bazaar art that was produced starting from the late-19th century in India. In the context of Sumathi Ramaswamy’s scholarship, this refers to visualizations of Bharat Mata (“Mother India”) (Fig. 3) as occupying or becoming the body of the nation. In this piece, I analyze visual representations of the Cow Protection Movement and their role in constituting India as a nation.
The history of the Cow Protection Movement (from the late-19th century to the present)
The Cow Protection Movement gained momentum in the late 19th century in India. This movement, often considered to be an important anti-colonial movement, laid bare communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims in Northern India (Freitag, 1980). Historian Sandria Freitag states that the Cow Protection Movement marked a significant moment in India’s anti-colonial history since it helped define the Hindu community in a more homogenous fashion and bridged an ever-present gap between urban and rural processes of community-building (p. 599, Freitag, 1980).The symbol of the cow was a very contentious figure in this context, as the cow is a sacred animal for Hindus. The sacrality of the cow informed an insidious, communal “panic” around cow slaughter and the threat posed by Muslims. This “panic” continues to exist in present-day India and shapes communal politics in multiple ways. Several instances of anti-Muslim violence are carried out by Hindu mobs for the protection of cows (Apoorvanand, 2017; Rashid, 2024; Salam, 2024). In this piece, I am interested in exploring the implications of the figurative “body of the cow” and how anthropomorphized representations/non-representations aid in nation-building. In this regard, I examine the imagery associated with the Cow Protection Movement. The symbols and images relating to the Cow Protection Movement are a part of the rich tradition of bazaar art and could be classified as kitsch (Jain, 2007).
Figure 1 – P.C. Biswas, The cow as mother of the world, Calcutta. Wellcome Collection, London (open source).
My purpose, in this piece, is to briefly explore the post-colonial afterlife of the lithograph in Figure 1. I argue that this lithograph, in a distinct zoomorphic form, aligns itself with the Hindu nationalist desire to establish Akhand Bharat (roughly translates to “United India” or “Undivided India”). Several proponents of Hindu nationalism do not merely seek to establish India as a Hindu state, they also believe that the larger Indian sub-continent is definitively Hindu (Jaffrelot, 2016). The continued use of this lithograph, therefore, makes room for the nation to be visualized outside the confines of “command cartography” or scientific cartography. By “Hindu nationalism”, I refer here to a set of religious and political principles that can be traced back to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and similar organizations. Hindu nationalists primarily believe that India is a Hindu country, which goes against the formation of India as a secular state, as mentioned in the preamble of the Constitution (Jaffrelot, 2007).
This chromolithograph (Fig. 1), traced back to the 19th century, was a significant symbol for the Cow Protection Movement. Freitag (1980), while analyzing a meeting of the Cow Protection Movement in the late-19th century in a town called Azmatgarh (in modern-day Uttar Pradesh), states that a picture similar to Figure 1 was placed within a meeting and that attendees were strongly urged to tend to the body of the cow and to worship the cow as a “universal mother”. Art historian Christopher Pinney also states that this illustration seemed to mimic the manner in which the Cow Protection Movement “colonized quotidian space” (p. 841) in the countryside; the lithograph, therefore, could be understood to fulfill a schematic function as well.
Figure 1 displays the body of a cow, with smaller images of regional Hindu gods and goddesses arranged within the body. This image was used in various ways by the Cow Protection Movement and seemed to materialize its anti-Muslim sentiment well (Pinney, 1997; Freitag, 1980). Lithography emerged as a process of mass production from mid to late-19th century in India and is credited with the creation of certain “popular” media, including the image in Figure 1 (Amanda Lanzillo, 2023; Kapil Raj, 2000: Christopher Pinney, 1997). Scholar Amanda Lanzillo states that during this time period, lithographic presses in big cities like Lucknow and Kanpur published “dizzying arrays of daily and weekly periodicals, pamphlets, poetry collections, religious literature, political treatises, histories, technical manuals, textbooks, and popular fiction” (pp. 31-32).
Figure 1 is one iteration of the body of the cow, but there are other iterations from around the same time period. Scholars Sandria B. Freitag (1980) and Christopher Pinney (1997), in their studies of the Cow Protection Movement and related imagery, state that one of its iterations displays a figure about to attack the cow with a sword. Freitag states that this figure was commonly understood to represent a Muslim man. There are other common motifs across these images, which Pinney highlights in his work. One of these motifs is the presence of a group of figures kneeling beneath the udders. Amongst the figures kneeling, we notice representatives of different religious communities, specifically Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Parsis, who are all seemingly being nourished by the body of the cow. Figure 2 is another lithograph, published by the Ravi Verma Press, wherein the priestly figure is seemingly protecting the body of the cow from an attacker. While it is not pictured here, in similar iterations of this lithograph, a putatively “evil” figure is attacking the body of the cow. Pinney states that this figure represents a demonic figure from the kaliyug (p. 846, 1997).
Figure 2 – Raja Ravi Verma Press, The holy Cow personified as World Mother with many Sanskrit verses. Chromolithograph., Mumbai, Wellcome Collection, London (open source).
For my broader project, I am interested in studying the lifecycle of this image, by tracing its post-colonial afterlife. I will briefly discuss the implications of this image’s lifecycle in this piece. While this image was produced and circulated in the late 19th century, there are contemporary iterations of this image that are equally intriguing.
Figure 3 –July 2023. Calcutta, India (own photo).
Figure 3 displays a poster used by the Calcutta Pinjrapole Society (“Pinjrapole” roughly translates to animal shelter; the phrase roughly translates to “Calcutta Animal Welfare Society”), using a modern iteration of the original chromolithograph. The newer iteration leaves behind several elements of the older lithographs (symbolic figures drinking milk, women tending to the cow), perhaps as a way for this image to seamlessly blend-in with other modern bazaar art. The continued use of this image could also suggest that popular artwork is an important site for nation-building. Further, I would speculate that the Hindu nationalist “imaginary” cannot be fulfilled by cartographic rationales and that the site of the “popular” allows such discourses to thrive. Most significantly, I speculate that the continued use of this image takes us back to an imagined Hindu past. In this narrative, Hindus are considered to be indigenous to India and the arrival of Mughals and the British marks the end of Hindu civilization (Shahane, 2019). However, scientific research specifically upholds the “Aryan Migration theory” and debunks this myth of a Hindu past, stating that Hinduism has a more recent history in India than was previously imagined, and is implicated with histories of Aryan migration. Images of this nature, I believe, continue to signal a unified Hindu imaginary, much like they did in the late-19th century. Benedict Anderson theorized that the advent of the “nation” signaled a distinct relationship to time and space. Anderson’s invocation of a shift from “Messianic” time to “homogenous, empty” time in Imagined Communities is significant here (Anderson, 2016). While “command cartography” or scientific cartography marks “homogenous, empty” time, “barefoot cartography” (explained below) is evidence of “Messianic time”. Modern maps were one of many tools through which this peculiar relation between time and space in a nation state was embodied. I speculate that alternative or “popular” cartography troubles the modern idea of the “nation” and creates a temporal chasm. I will further explore the implications of this connection in the next section.
“Popular” cartography and alternative ways of visualizing the nation
Sumathi Ramaswamy’s (2009) scholarship on Bharat Mata and her study of gendered representations of the Indian geobody proves significant here to understand alternate ways in which a nation can be visualized. Ramaswamy, in The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, studies anthropomorphized, artistic representations of India as “Bharat Mata.” These works of art can best be described as paintings and lithographs where the corporeal form of a female goddess is overlaid on the geobody of the nation, such that the borders of both these bodies are merging, complementary, and putatively organic. Ramaswamy refers to these forms of art as “barefoot cartography”, which are a “set of demotic practices and techniques whose primary creative influence and aesthetic milieu is the art of the bazaar” (p. 34, 2009). Bazaar art is also a popular form of art, as evidenced from Ramaswamy’s analysis. “Barefoot cartography” is meant to represent the “body of the nation” by only making a fleeting reference to scientific depictions of a nation’s geobody. Significantly, Ramaswamy draws a distinction between “barefoot cartography” and “command cartography” (also referred to as scientific cartography in other parts of this piece), stating that
“at least for some Indians the map of India—that symptomatic scientific artifact used to delimit a measured territory called India—is not an adequate representation in and of itself for mobilizing patriots to the point of bodily sacrifice, indispensable though it might be for bestowing a credible form upon the emergent nation … after the fashion of so much else in colonial India where the artifacts of empire and science were simultaneously disavowed and desired, patriotic popular mapmaking takes on the cartographed form of the nation but also pushes it in directions not intended for it by either science or state.” (p. 35, 2009).
Figure 4 – Abanindranath Tagore, Bharat Mata, 1905 (Public domain).
Barefoot cartography, therefore, is a “popular” form of cartographic representation. As mentioned above, “barefoot cartography” appropriates a style of art that is reminiscent of “bazaar art.” It imbues the body of the nation with affect, as a way of conjuring up an alternative vision of the nation. In the instance of Bharat Mata, Ramaswamy (2009) argues that the “affect-laden body” of the goddess compels patriotism. It is, therefore, “adequately” performing a function of nationalism in such a way that “command cartography” may not be able to. The sense of “adequacy” here marks the different functions performed by command cartography and barefoot cartography. I would go further and state that even though the body of the cow does not appropriate the cartographic form of the nation in the way that Bharat Mata does, it constitutes a form of barefoot cartography.
Remarking on the nation-building potential of the lithograph of the cow, Christopher Pinney states that “…in numerous lithographs the cow becomes a proto-nation, a space which embodies a Hindu cosmology” (p. 841, 1997) (emphasis mine). This implies that the “body of the cow” performs the pre-cartographic function of visualizing a national community or of experiencing nationhood. In Siam Mapped: A History of the Geobody of the Nation, Thongchai Winichakul (1994) states that scientific cartography marked a distinct relationship between humans and space, with maps performing the role of “active mediators”. However, cosmographs, which preceded scientific maps, did not always seek to represent or capture space. Cosmographs were often used to convey deeper religious or sacred meanings. This implies that an ocular invocation of the nation-state does not have to be limited to the geobody of the nation.
Pinney (1997) also draws upon Benedict Anderson’s (2016) work in Imagined Communities, stating that the ability to “think the nation” only arose when “Messianic time” gave way to “homogenous, empty time”. As discussed above, this is to say that the “body of the cow” represents a “Messianic time” and a pre-colonial Hindu cosmology. We could, therefore, state that “barefoot cartography” is an alternative form of representation that seeks to represent the ideals of a community. It also implies that the advent of “homogenous, empty” time coincides with the advent of scientific cartography. It is also interesting to note here that if the body of the cow is indeed a “proto-nation”, then this nation excludes all religious minorities (Pinney, 1997). Once again, this vision serves the Hindutva agenda to establish a Hindu nation.
While the popular, in this regard, is not a “site to recount marginalized stories” (since a lot of these images may serve purposes of Hindu nationalism), the popular does privilege an alternative relationship to space, time, and the nation. “Barefoot cartography” therefore provides a means to envision and affectively experience a post-colonial Indian state, which “command cartography” may not allow for.
Conclusion
Returning briefly to Figures 1, 2, and 3, what possibilities does the “popular” open up? Does the “popular” allow us to view nation-building projects in a different light? While wholly acknowledging the harms of cow vigilantism and the endless violence that Muslims in India are subject to, I would also like to explore the possibilities opened up by barefoot cartography and specifically, the body of the cow. At the outset, I had mentioned that I aim to explore the post-colonial afterlife of fig. 1. While fig. 3 is a “modern” iteration of fig. 1, some interesting questions arise about the body of the cow functioning as a passage of futurity. Discourses on coloniality and post-coloniality often hinge on questions of temporality. For instance, how is time experienced in a settler-colony (Rifkin, 2017)? How is the Global South temporally constructed as lacking or “behind” in relation to the West (Chow, 2006)? In this regard, I believe that the “body of the cow” and other popular forms of cartography collapse colonial and post-colonial time. This “collapse” occurs through the seemingly linear logic of Hindu nationalism and of the ideal vision of an Akhand Bharat. I would argue that the difference between fact and fiction also collapses in this space, since, as mentioned earlier, it allows us to hark back to a fictitious Hindu past.
Further, there are several modes of representation that are opened up by popular cartography or barefoot cartography. By deprivileging command cartography and its scientific rationale, cartographic imperatives can be gathered from seemingly disparate objects and time periods. This is to say that, if the “body of the cow” can fulfill a cartographic function, what else can fulfill a cartographic function? Further, what are the functions of cartography? And why do we assume that cartography fulfills a “representational” function? Cartographic instruments like portolan charts certainly do not fulfill a navigational purpose and many types of maps do not fulfill political functions. If this is true, then what function is a cartographic instrument supposed to fulfill? Sumathi Ramaswamy (2009) states that barefoot cartography garners affective feelings toward the motherland, which can also be understand as garnering feelings of “nationalism”; can we argue that this is also a cartographic function?
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