Click to enlargeL'Inde. Jac Mercier. Dessinateur
A French illustrated newspaper map of India by the commercial artist Jacques Mercier, drawn for a wartime magazine series. India as modern current-affairs geography — the subcontinent for the newspaper reader of 1942.
Authorship and object
"L'Inde," drawn by Jacques Mercier, a prominent French commercial artist, for the "7 Jours" map series that ran in a French illustrated magazine; printed in Paris by Desfossés-Néogravure, around 1942.
A map for the mass public
This is popular journalistic cartography — a pictorial, accessible map made not for navigation, government or scholarship but for the general reader following events in the press. It belongs to the twentieth-century world of mass media, where a map's task is to make a distant place legible to a newspaper audience at a glance.
The gaze
By 1942 India was in the news — a vast British possession at the centre of a world war and with an increasingly contested future. Mercier's map represents the modern, democratic version of the European gaze: no longer the merchant, the surveyor or the administrator, but the ordinary reader, handed a tidy graphic of India with the weekly paper. The subcontinent has become an item of current affairs, consumed by a mass public an ocean away.