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Book Review
Popular visual representations
NALINI RAJAN
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Exploration of visual culture through modern forms like photographs, posters, prints and hoardings
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INDIA’S POPULAR CULTURE — Iconic Spaces and Fluid Images: Jyotindra Jain — Editor; Marg Publications (National Centre for the Performing Arts), Army & Navy Building, 3rd Floor, 148, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Mumbai-400001. Rs. 2500.
In the contemporary publishing age of mechanical book production, we occasionally come across an artefact that evokes childhood memories of the sensuality we experienced while seeing, smelling, and touching our lushly-illustrated fairytale collections. This volume, edited by Jyotindra Jain, is a beautifully-produced coffee-table book, and will provoke similar feelings in the hearts of its adult readers. Nevertheless, it is much more — content-wise — than a mere
instrument of nostalgia or a living-room adornment.
In his introduction, Jain points out the complexities embedded in the interface of visual culture and art history. Indeed, the rationale of putting together this volume is to provide some answers to the question: can popular visual culture be subsumed under the rubric of art history? Without resorting to simplistic binaries like high and low culture, or classical and popular culture, the contributors to this book survey the construction of cultural identities and strategies of representation, using “popular” media like photographs, posters, prints, advertisement hoardings, and theatre props, within the larger context of nation-building.
Hindu culture
The first two essays in the volume examine specific aspects of Hindu culture. Sumati Ramaswamy traces the trajectory of the Varaha or boar image in Hindu mythology from its insular religious origins to its pan-Indian manifestation, with the aid of scientific cartography. Over time, the science of cartography has helped us graphically represent the map of India, ensconced among an array of outlines of the other nations of the world. Varaha, then, is no longer merely a Hindu god or the third avatar of Vishnu; he has developed an Indian nationalist aura as he balances the globular model of the planet Earth on one of his tusks. Varaha, then, rescues today not only the Earth goddess but also Mother India! Christopher Pinney, for his part, demonstrates the difference between the dominant, upper caste Vaishnavite darshanic frontality of chromolithographic images of iconic folk heroes like Nathdvara Shrinath, which demands a worshipful gaze from onlookers, and the katha or narrative aesthetic of Ramdevji images, which, for Ramdev’s Dalit and lower caste followers, merely focuses on life histories and folk tales.
While Anuradha Kapur analyses the different kinds of spaces opened up in the curtains, borders, and backdrops of the popular Surabhi Theatre of Andhra Pradesh, Ranjani Majumdar investigates the historical development, location variations, and aesthetic transformation of Bombay film posters. Savia Viegas’s description of colonial Goan photographs informs us of the new visibility given to conjugal and extended family values. Here we see a peculiar blend of Portuguese, Victorian and indigenous cultural norms.
Hybrid form
In a parallel move, Yousuf Saeed throws light on the construction of popular Indian Muslim religious art. Some would call the juxtaposition of “Islam” with “art” an “oxymoron” or contradiction in terms. Be that as it may, Saeed presents a fascinating discussion of the intermingling of Islamic, Hindu and Western European motifs in the subcontinent’s Muslim religious art. Christiane Brosius’s article looks at another hybrid form of popular art — this time in the context of residential complexes and lifestyle advertisements. Often, for the new urban elite, these herald a new cosmopolitan cocktail of exoticism and desire, in the form of ancient grandeur (evoking the antiquity of ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome!) along with the ultra-modern conveniences of modern living.
Unity in diversity
Perhaps the most significant contribution to this volume is Jyotindra Jain’s paper on the visual representation of folk and tribal groups during the 55-odd years of the country’s Republic Day parade. Oddly enough, the visual archives of the parade provide the frozen standard for tribal or folk cultural behaviour in the so-called real world and thus constitute the “truth” of nation-building in India. Thus every 26th of January, the nation is provided with “proof” of its unity in diversity.
Jain’s essay nicely fulfils the win objective of this stunningly-illustrated book, namely, trailing the complex course of visual production over time, and through a variety of layered spaces.
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