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Photo: V. Ganesan

Unique material Posters convey a lot about our culture

But increasingly, these posters and their ‘popular art’ cousins — hoardings, graffiti, calendar art, etc. — are being taken so seriously by scholars that they try to preserve them for posterity in archives.

“This is unique material that has a lot to say about our social, political and religious culture,” says G. Sunder, director, Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL), where about 900 images of street posters have been entered in a digital archive since 2002. “But they’re ephemeral — the life of these posters is between a few hours and a few days — and they need to be captured for future research.”

Their ephemerality is a stumbling block social historian and writer V. Geetha has run up against repeatedly in her attempts to study popular art forms — first when she got interested in the artwork of the Sivakasi calendar that was popular in the 1970s and 80s, and later when she set out to work with Sirish Rao on “The Nine Emotions of Indian Cinema Hoardings,” a book on Kollywood’s distinctive culture of hoardings and posters.

“Printing presses don’t maintain catalogues of these artworks,” she comments. “So to find old prints, we had to depend on private collections.”

Naturally, private collections aren’t as meticulously maintained as an institution’s archive, and can be quite ephemeral themselves: “I lost count of the number of times I was told, ‘oh, I had them until just last month! They were collecting dust so I threw them away,’” says Geetha wryly. “We often had to settle for ‘what could have been’ rather than ‘what was’ because original prints were so hard to come by.”

The thing is these materials tell stories that are hard to find elsewhere. “Posters are the only material on, for example, Chennai’s distinctive fan club culture,” comments Sundar. “They encapsulate an entire tradition of communication — on the occasion of death or marriage or coming of age and other rituals — in certain urban communities.”

Why then do such few archives of popular art exist? “There’s always been this idea that ‘high art’— art that matters to the educated upper classes — needs to be archived and saved, while the art of the working classes has been largely ignored,” says S. Theodore Baskaran, cinema historian and former director of RMRL. “It’s as though they have no history because there’s no material to work with.”

Look back through South Indian history and you learn how our rajas and ranis lived, he says — what about the common man? “But that attitude has been slowly changing over the last few decades with an increased emphasis on subaltern studies — history from below, so to speak.”

As a reflection of this growing concern, a group of scholars from across the globe have come together to create an online digital archive of popular art from the Indian sub-continent called Tasveer Ghar. “As scholars interested in South Asian visual culture, we met at conferences and seminars frequently,” says Yousuf Saeed, a film-maker based in Delhi who is currently working on a documentary on religious pluralism in popular art. “And about a year ago, the idea of having a single virtual location where popular art could be collected and studied by students and scholars all over the world was born.”

The going has been slow, says Yousuf, but they are hoping to digitise several large private collections in the near future. Meanwhile, they’re providing fellowships to young scholars in India to research everything from hoardings and posters to publicity labels and advertisements.

Unfortunately, the one thing these archiving efforts have in common is trouble with funding. “It takes time and man power to create and document an archive of this sort,” says Sundar. The building of the RMRL archive of posters has tended to be an intermittent affair, and their planned database of Chennai graffiti is struggling to get off the ground. It can also be rather tricky to document the very culture you live in, says Geetha. “We’re in the semi-ironic position of constantly being in the midst of popular culture yet having to step back and look at it from the outside.” But they all agree that the memory of these ephemera is needed. “In a sense, we’re documenting a history of the present for the future,” says Yousuf.

Indeed. To these scholars, the peeling posters, the over-the-top cinema hoardings, the loud advertisements and the messy graffiti you roll your eyes at are all part of a story that needs to be preserved and told in the decades to come.

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