Map of Procrustean Bed

This work develops its central image form the Greek mythological story of Procrustes to critique the ideological violence in the making of homeland. The work uses the anthropomorphic approach in visualizing the homeland and juxtaposed it with cartographic flavor. Cotton cloth used in this work is a pictorial surface for the image of the victimized female body as well as a cloth for covering the bed on which the body is portrayed lying. Fabric is a human artifact which involves human labor and intelligence. Bringing together threads in to fabric could be seen as a metaphor for human bonding and fraternity. In Indian context homeland and then nation is imagined through such historical processes which involves huge labor, struggles, intellect, sacrifice and fraternity. The female body which is the central image in this work is surrounded by the images of wars from various periods and cultures suggests the nature of wars that control different lands based on ideologies. Anthropomorphic image of homeland effectively fits with in the contours of the map of homeland but the anthropomorphizing process also exclude certain ethnicity, religious groups and ideologies resulting in unresolved conflicts. Bharatmatha’s image is evidently drawn from the Hindu pantheon (Ramaswamy, 2001), which is due to the dominant religion’s imagination about the newly formed nation state has the divine form from its pantheon. The Image of the tortured body implies the conflicts involved in anthropomorphically imagining a homeland for people of diverse ethnicity, religious beliefs, and political ideologies.