[Reader-list] New Essay: Artful Mapping in Bazaar India

[Tasveer Ghar]

Dear friends of Tasveer Ghar

As part of our series of visual essays exploring the Priya Paul
collection of popular Indian art, we present a new exciting essay on
maps of India:

Artful Mapping in Bazaar India: Cartographic Reflections on the Priya
Paul Collection
By Sumathi Ramaswamy

http://tasveerghar.net/cmsdesk/essay/116/

"The mapped form of the nation is one of the more intriguing of
presences among the ubiquitous mass-produced prints that grace public
and private spaces in India. Intriguing, because as historians of
cartography assure us, the national map is a highly specialized
product and possession of the modern state and modern science. Its
knowledge, they tell us, is “hard-won,” generated by experts in the
science of cartography and related disciplines, learned through formal
schooling in classrooms, and disseminated through the work of modern
bureaucracies and agents of the state. As such, one would not expect
it to proliferate as it does in everyday, demotic, and mundane
contexts, especially since access to the knowledge that undergirds it
is often highly guarded and policed by the state, and even more so in
contexts where borders and boundaries are in question and hence not to
be trifled with."

Please visit the website of Tasveer Ghar for more exciting essays,
images and features on India's popular visual culture

The Tasveer Ghar team

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