Visual representations of India
NALINI RAJAN
PICTURING THE NATION — Iconographies of Modern India: Richard H. Davis — Editor; Orient Longman, 1/24, Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 795.
How does one imagine the nation? According to Benedict Anderson's well-known thesis, it is the emergence of print-capitalism in the form of the newspaper and the novel that allows a people to make the transition from the face-to-face village community life to the process of collectively imagining an anonymous group of people spread across a geographical space with a common `national' identity. By the same token, Jurgen Habermas famously acknowledged the emergence of the public sphere of the media as heralding secular modernity in any polity. Going against the grain of these theses, this collection of eight essays examines the Indian context of a largely illiterate, visually alert, public that often imagines the nation (see the contributions of Sumathi Ramaswamy, Sandria Freitag, Kajri Jain, Catherine Asher, Christiane Brosius, and Raminder Kaur), and occasionally refrains from doing so (see the articles by Ajay Sinha and Christopher Pinney).
Brosius and Kaur concentrate on the Hindu Right's imaginings of an exclusively Hindu state in wall graffiti, posters, greeting cards, and festival pageantry. Of special interest is Ramaswamy's discussion of a `somatic' cartography in India, pertaining to the easily recognised Bharat-Mata figure perched on or spread across a map of India. Figuring the nation as an embodied deity fulfils the twin jingoistic objectives of imperialist desire (since such a geo-body form usually extends beyond the geographical frontiers of a nation) and heroic sacrifice (since the configured female inspires male viewers to regard the nation as a vulnerable woman in need of protection from `foreigners'). The `Tamiltay' figure in Tamil Nadu is a sub-set of the Bharat-Mata configuration and subject to similar aspirations.
Body and bomb
Pinney's article looks at the body in combination with the bomb. One famous instance in the nationalist period is the martyr/terrorist, Bhagat Singh, whose popularity among Indians was said to rival Gandhiji's. Bhagat Singh provoked a peculiar anxiety in the British colonial administration, owing to his uncanny and menacing mimicry of the English sahib's attire. If Pinney's essay dwells on the struggle against the colonial state, Sinha's analysis is aimed at the post-colonial state. Looking at Binode Bihari Mukherjee's large mural titled `Medieval Saints' in the Hindi Bhavan of Rabindranath Tagore's Vishva Bharati University at Shantiniketan, Sinha favours an elasticity of meaning to the (earlier nationalistic) reading of the mural in order to debunk the Euro-American fantasy of nationhood.
In a seminal, though somewhat longwinded, article on the subject of visually imagining the Indian nation, Freitag posits the mobile processionist (following the mobile tableau or idol) against the European subversive figure of the flaneur or stroller, who aims to resist the Panoptican gaze of the state. A related aspect of visually imagining the nation is the dominant poster culture in most Indian States. Freitag discusses the Indian Islamic posters that tell complex and composite stories. An example is that of the reformist and literate Indian Muslim woman, with uncovered head, reading the holy Koran, by a window opening out to the larger ummah of Mecca and Medina. The downward reach of visual imagination — against the elitism of print-capitalism — is also sensitively portrayed in Asher's depiction of the socio-political complications surrounding mosque-building in Jaipur city and in Jain's discussion of the auspicious image (following the teachings of the ancient Sanskrit treatise, Chitrasutra) in calendar art. On the whole, this collection will arouse interest in readers precisely because all the contributors attempt to situate the nation-building exercise in India at a distance from the theory and practice of nation-building in the West. If there is a flaw in these essays, it is that they are often self-consciously the product of a university-based discourse. This could, at times, alienate the general reader.
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