FRONT LINES/ BORDER POSTS

Critical Inquiry

Summer 1997
Volume 23, Number 4

Excerpt from
The Nation (Un)Pictured? Chromolithography and 'Popular' Politics in India, 1878-1995
by Christopher Pinney
Since the VHP [Vishva Hindu Parishad] claims to have appropriated all Hindus, signs of this occupation have to be made visible all over the Hindu world. The movement therefore works its way from the overtly political domain into everyone's everyday life, primarily through the innovative use of small icons, derived from calender art . . . . Slickly produced in a variety of garish colours, at one time they could be seen all over North Indian cities and towns and also in many villages. They could be pasted anywhere--on vehicles, offices, houses, or on school blackboards. Their reach extended much beyond that of posters or wall-writing. They swamped individuals in their ubiquity, contriving a sense of the irresistible tide of Hindutva.
--Tapin Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags
India has emerged in recent theoretical writing as the site of one of modernity's gravest implosions. A sinister Hindu chauvinism threatens to eclipse a Nehruvian and post-Nehruvian moment. Despite Hindutva's origin at the heart of the modern, there is an understandable fascination with this nostalgic politics' alliance with new visual technologies, ranging from the mobile video rath (chariot) to the superabundance of colour posters. This fascination is propelled on the one hand by journalistic clichés which claim a paradox through the juxtaposition of the 'medieval' and the 'modern', but also by simplistic secularist accounts gripped by a historicism which is only capable of constructing popular media as antagonistic to its own project. In these accounts these new visuals harbour the threat of unpicturing the nation, of unthreading a community which has been more carefully stitched together. Here I will advance the argument that for more than a century very similar images have pictured this very nation which is now threatened. The signs from an underinformed epidemiology which naively links formal content with ideological effect through 'physiognomic' readings.1

Here I will try to construct a different account which, while still trapped within an inescapable residue of the 'physiognomic', stresses a narrative of commercial image production whose ideological inflections have been caught in a complex process of inversion, archaism, and temporal disjuction. The creation of popular visual symbols is facilitated by archives of early images maintained by most commercial artists. These ensure the circulation of these images and prevent their sedimentation. Forming part of a relatively closed repertoire, they migrate endlessly, cutting back and forth across new times and contexts.

1. 'The mishaps that can result from such a "physiognomic" reading of artistic documents are clear enough. The historian reads into them what he has already learned by other means, or what he believes he knows, and wants to "demonstrate'" (Carlo Ginzburg, 'From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method', Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi [Baltimore, 1989], p.35).

Christopher Pinney is a lecturer in South Asian anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is currently completing a book-length study of popular Hinduism and the printed image. He co-curated the exhibition The Impossible Science of Being: Dialogues between Anthropology and Photography at the Photographer's Gallery, London, 1995-96.

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