Indian images

under theshadow ofcolonialism

The images described in this book begin to emerge inthe 1870s and exist in a relationship of both continuityand disjunction with earlier image practices in India.Many of those discussed and reproduced here arechromolithographs, that is colour images printed frommultiple stone blocks developing the original litho-graphic process invented by Alois Senefeldcr inMunich in 1798. The design was applied to the finelimestone stone block used in the process with anygreasy substance (such as a coloured wax) and fixed inthe stone through a variety of different techniques.The stone was then damped with water and greasy inkwas applied. This was repelled by the water andadhered only to the design, leaving a reverse image onany paper pressed on the stone for printing.

Lithography's chief advantage was that designscould be applied fluidly to the surface of the stone:there was no need for engraving, etching or cutting inrelief. Later chromolithographs using multiple colourblocks, and occasionally the application of varnish,produced images of an extreme tactility. Colours wererich and heavy with an astonishing depth and sensual-ity. Disparaged by the aesthetic elite, in both Europeand India ('complete with complicated German-giltframes, these things were horrible', opined the Englishlithographer Barnett Freedman in the 1930s),1 theywere powerful vehicles for the mediation of faith andsentiment.

Not all the images discussed in this book are chro-molithographs. Some, such as the earliest Calcutta ArtStudio prints, are single-colour lithographs and manyof the 1930s political images discussed in chapter 6 arealso black and white. Various non-lithographic imagesare discussed immediately below. Some picture pub-lishers, including S. S. Brijbasi, continued to producebeautiful and archaic multiple stone chromolitho-graphs until the 1950s but other companies werequicker to adopt photographic offset processes. Whilenoting these technological transformations where his-torically relevant, I have chosen to continue to refer tothem as 'chromolithographs'. I have done this becausetheir colour range and tactility continues to perpetuate

3 Plate from a Iate-i9th-century German publicationdemonstrating the effects of successive colours in a nine-blockchromolithograph image.

a repertoire established through conventional multipleblock colour lithography: technological refinementhas been used to reinforce pre-existing conventions.

Lithography was first used in India in the 1820s andGraham Shaw has argued that its impact was moresignificant than the introduction of typography in the1550s. Lithography was immediately appreciated for itscheapness, portability and relative ease of production,and the widespread ownership of presses by Indians inthe following decade played an important role in'democratizing print in South Asia'.2

Despite this, many kinds of Indian mass-producedimages continued to circulate independently of this

14 PHOTOS OF THE GODS

technological breakthrough. What may be the earliestvisual record of the domestic use of pictures of deitiesin India appeared in 1832 with the publication of Mrs S.C. Belnos's Hindoo and European Manners in Bengal (itself a

prime exemplar of the potentiality of lithography). Inplate 14, 'Interior of a Native Hut' (illus. 4), prepared byher French lithographer husband, a devotional painting('ill-executed ... on paper') is shown stuck to the wallbehind the cooking hearth. Next to this image is whathas been described as a terracotta female cult-figurine.3

Images like this emerged as a particular concern inmissionary accounts that stigmatized what they saw asHindu fetishism. A late nineteenth-century LondonMissionary Society tract, in a chapter titled 'Idols, IdolsEverywhere', enunciated the threat posed to an austereiconoclasm by the proliferating fecundity of Hinduimages:

Benares is the great centre of the idol-makingbusiness, though in all parts of India the tradeflourishes. Potters the day through may be seenin the sacred city moulding images of clay fortemporary use. Sculptors also may be foundproducing representations of the gods in stoneor marble. Carpenters, moreover, make greatwooden idols for the temples; and workers inmetal - goldsmiths, coppersmiths, and brass-workers - turn out more or less highly-finishedspecimens in their respective metals.4

Mechanical rnass-reproduction facilitated dissemi-nation through potentially infinite pathways, but itis clear that pre-lithographic images also 'travelled'.Itinerant bards and storytellers played an importantrole in disseminating visual traces of the divine. Amemorable example of this occurs in MahatmaGandhi's Autobiography, in which he recalls an incidentfrom his childhood in Gujarat in the 1870s that has'clung to [his] memory':

somehow my eyes fell on a book purchased by myfather. It was Shravana Pitribhakti Nataka [a play

4 Mrs S. C. Belnos, 'Interior of a Native Hut', a lithographpublished in Hindoo and European Manners in Bengal (London,

1823), A mass-produced, hand-painted image can be seen on thewall at the back.

about Shravana's devotion to his parents]. I readit with intense interest. There came to our placeabout the same time itinerant showmen. One of thepictures I was shown was of Shravana carrying, bymeans of slings fitted for his shoulders, his blindparents on a pilgrimage. The book and the pictureleft an indelible impression on my mind. 'Here isan example for you to copy', I said to myself. Theagonized lament of the parents over Shravana'sdeath is still fresh in my memory.'

There is evidence here of overlaps between differentmedia technologies and scopic regimes: the image ofShravana carrying his blind parents in slings is stillavailable from the Bombay-based Sharma PicturePublication in the form of a chromolithograph. But

INDIAN IMAGES UNDtR THE SHADOW OF COLONIALISM 15

5 Advertising placard forBradford Dyers' Associationdepicting Ganesh (:. 1900),chromoiithograph on card.Such pictorial trade-markswere widely used by foreignretailers in 19th-centuryIndia.

6 Matchbox label (c. 1900). The design would have facilitated thecustomer's request for a 'box of Kali'.

alongside such continuities, chromolithographs andother industrially produced images clearly facilitatedprofound transformations in patterns of worship andof political practice.

Nineteenth-century India was increasingly pervad-ed by images. These were hand-made and mass-produced, local and exotic, religious and commercial.A systematic overview of their terrain is difficult toacquire, but several compressed descriptions andother fragments provide great insight into the complexflux that increasingly characterized late colonialscopic regimes. Writing between 1885 and 1895, theReverend J. E. Padficld of the Church MissionarySociety described the extraordinary mixture of imagestyles and media to be found in some wealthy Hindu

homes in the vicinity of Madras. In the front room ofa house might be found images narrating the life ofKrishna: These pictures are gorgeous and grotesquenative productions, being paintings on glass that canbe bought in almost every fairly large bazaar'. Theoccasional print might also be spotted and 'perhapsa cutting from some English illustrated paper'. Butthese, Padfield noted, 'appear very much out ofkeeping with the surroundings; far more suitable andat home are the glaring labels from the Manchestercotton goods that one sometimes sees adorning thewalls or doors or shutters.'0

This 'suitability' reflected foreign entrepreneurs'wily recognition of their customers' cultural expec-tations. The manufacturers of cotton piece goodsbranded their products with pictorial trademarksand it was understood that consumers relied onthese when making their selections in local bazaars(illus. 5). A good sense of their importance is givenin the United States Government Department ofCommerce Special Consular Report on British India,published in 1915 and designed to enable Americanentrepreneurs to 'enter foreign trade preparedly'.7

The report highlighted the importance of'pictorialadvertising' in a country like India where consumerswere likely to be illiterate: 'Goods intended for popu-lar sale ought to be marked with some distinctivepictures which could be easily remembered. Forinstance, cotton piece goods are distinguished bylabels in which Indian deities, tigers or other ani-mals, dancing girls, etc., are displayed in attractivecolours.'8 The report also lists 'Hindu mythology,Hindu romantic drama, temples ... occasionally ...the King-Emperor of India and European actresses'as among other popular trademarks (illus. 6). Inmany cases, the report concluded, 'the particularattractiveness of these pictures may have quite asmuch to do with the sale of such goods as thequality of the cloth itself'.9

INDIAN IMAGES UNDER THE SHADOW Ot- COLONIALISM 17

PHOTOS OF THE GODS

The allure of colour and the powerful effects of imagesare a strong theme in the final chapter of this bookwhere an account is given of rural consumers' devo-tional engagement with images over the last twodecades. In the central Indian village described in thatchapter, these images are known as 'photos of thegods' (bhaguan ke photo). They are not seen as therarefied manifestation of a painterly tradition, but are,rather, centrally situated in the vibrant everyday visualculture of modern India. The judgements that aremade about images focus on questions of efficacy andtheir ability to intervene in the world, rather thanformal aesthetic criteria. Chromolithography finds itsmain market in early twenty-first century India amongrural consumers who need direct access to tangibleand powerful gods.

Yet, as will soon become clear in the followinghistory, in the nineteenth century some British colonial-ists saw new representational techniques as a meansof dismantling the Hindu world-view. Perceiving thegreat mass of Indians as inhabiting 'an era before art',10

and to be interested in images only as 'idols', colonialart-educators sought to transform the intimate andinterested engagement of the devotee into thedisinterested and rationalized response of colonialpolitical subjects to the image as 'art'. The historythat follows is, in part, set against colonial attempts toturn devotional images into 'art' and popular chromo-lithography's rejection of this denial of religious efficacy.

Edward Moor's Hindu Pantheon, which had beenpublished in 1810, can be seen as an early charter forsome of the representational transformations thecolonial state sought to effect. The frontispiece11

depicts a brass cast of Ganesh (illus. 7), the elephant-headed son of Shiv who is commonly invoked at thebeginning of orthodox Hindu texts. There are obvioustransformations of media - the brass cast of Ganeshastride his mount (a rat) is rendered by line, and thismedium allows the syllable 'awri (transliteratedidiosyncratically) to appear in a sunburst above the

HINDI/ I'ANTN CON

7 Frontispiece to Edward Moor, The Hindu Pantheon (London,1810). Depiction is transformed from the reproduction ofpowerful deities into a technical problem of representaiion.

statue. But more significant is the cultural trans-position of Ganesh from the space of Hindu devotioninto the space of representation. The diagonal linerunning from right to left along which Ganesh lookscan be thought of as a realist tangent, a deliberate(mis)alignment that transforms what might otherwisebe a flat hieratic signifier of divinity into a represen-tational conundrum to which the rules of single-pointperspective can be applied. This slight rotation servesto displace the sculpture into a different Europeanspace of representation. This displacement ismetonymic of a much broader representationaltransformation in which the world, as AnuradhaKapur suggests in Heideggcrean vein, 'is seen . . . as amathematically regular ordering of time, space, andhuman action'12 informed by a 'disinterested' aesthetic.

However, this colonial 'aesthetic' might be betterconceptualized as an 'anaesthetic'. This is the argu-ment advanced by Susan Buck-Morss. Using WalterBenjamin's 1930s 'Work of Art in the Age ofMechanical Reproduction' essay as her starting point,she constructs a history of the 'alienation of the corpo-real sensorium'. Kantian aesthetics - predicated on thedistance or absence of the body - marks an inversionand denial of earlier aesthetics born, as Terry Eagletonhas noted, as 'a discourse of the body'.13 In its original

l 8 PHOTOS OF THE GODS

ancient Greek formulation, aisthitikos denoted 'percep-tive by feeling' and revealed the original field ofaesthetics as 'corporeal, material nature'.

This earlier, different, practice of aesthetics - whichI propose we call 'corpothetics' - was also, import-antly, synaesthetic, mobilizing all the senses simulta-neously. 'Anaesthetics' is the result of the 'numbing'and deadening of the sensorium. Following Benjamin,Buck-Morss emphasizes the role of the shocks ofindustrialization and modernity in this process ofattenuation. In colonial India, the 'anaesthetization'of what was formerly 'perceptive by feeling' was anintrinsic element in transformations of idols into 'art'.

THE POWERS OF EUROPEAN ART

The realignment of Ganesh into this new space ofrepresentation alerts us to some colonizers' conver-sional desires, but we should not confuse desires withoutcomes. In India attempts to undermine the sacral-ity of images only served to make the Gods appearmore 'real'.

Advocates of art schools, such as Richard Temple,positioned perspective as part of a larger scientisticproject that they imagined would make Indians'modern' and 'rational'. There are various candidatesfor India's first 'western' art school. Several individu-als and organizations established institutions from1798 onwards that sought to disseminate what wereperceived as imported visual techniques in India.14

In the :850s, however, pre-existing art schools inMadras, Calcutta and Bombay came under the directcontrol of the department of public instruction.Mitter pointedly notes that for the East IndiaCompany 'the scientific scrutiny of nature was asacred act'.15 Programmatic statements by those seek-ing to encourage the foundation and growth of colo-nial art schools stressed their role in inculcating a'scientific' progress alongside the contribution theymight make to the development of public 'taste'. Atechnical convention - single-point perspective -

emerged as the key that would unravel an Indianresistance to the 'powers of observation'. Writing in1880, Temple noted that 'the instruction' in artschools 'embodied the principles applicable to art inall climes and the practice most approved in Europeanart'.16 The ability to '[draw] objects correctly'17 wouldin turn, it was hoped, foster an analytic re-orientationthat would have profound consequences. Hence thestress on 'science'; perspective as a rigorous analytictool would help fracture what Hegel referred to as theHindu 'dreamworld':

[Art Schools] will teach them one thing, whichthrough all the preceding ages they have neverlearnt, namely drawing objects correctly, whetherfigures, landscape or architecture. Such drawingtends to rectify some of their mental faults, tointensify their powers of observation, and to makethem understand analytically those glories ofnature which they love so well.18

Alongside those who argued for a dis-enchantmerneffected by 'Cartesian perspectivalism'19 were advo-cates of a re-enchantment - at the level of allegory -through the medium of history painting. Lord Napier,Governor of Madras, urged in a celebrated lecture in1871 the development of an Indian style 'that deals withthe ideal and allegorical' in which 'the virtues, thegraces . . . and other abstract conceptions and agenciesare clothed in human forms which owe their majestyor their terrors to the Artist'.20 The epic Mahabharataand Ramayana contained, he declared, 'the most inex-haustible and diversified stores of pictorial representa-tion which any country possesses':

All that is needed to promulgate their beauty andcomplete their fame is that, in their purer andnobler passages and with the powers of EuropeanArt, they should engage the service of the nationalpencil as they have fastened on the nationalmemory and animated the national voice.21

INDIAN IMAGES UNDER THE SHADOW OF COLONIALISM 19

European art worlds endowed history painting witha moral gravity denied to other genres and it was theattempt to export this genre to India that laid thegroundwork for the emergence of what we mightthink of as Indian 'magical realism'. This might alsobe seen in part as an inadvertence on the part of thedominant colonial culture, which while expoundingits superior technology failed to recognize thepotency of its 'other side', that is its own infatuationwith myth and the extramundane. It is also in partthe consequence of the inevitable slippage thatoccurred during the translational passage of the con-cept into a colonized society jn which 'religion' wasincreasingly being called upon to do the work ofpolitics. Images that might remain largely 'allegori-cal' in the salons of Europe, inhabited a politicallymore challenging terrain in India.

INDIAN MAGICAL REALISM

A clear sense of the impact of the 'powers of EuropeanArt' is conveyed by O. Chandu Menon's observation inhis 1888 novel Jndulekha:

Before the European style of oil painting beganto be known and appreciated in this country,we had - painted in defiance of all possibleexistence - pictures of Vishnu as half man andhalf lion . . . pictures of the god Krishna with hislegs twisted and turned into postures in which nobiped could stand . . . Such productions used tobe highly thought of, and those who producedthem were highly remunerated, but now they arelooked upon by many with aversion. A taste hasset in for pictures, whether in oil or water colours,in which shall be delineated men, beasts, andthings according to their true appearance, andthe closer that a picture is to nature, the greateris the honour paid to the artist.22

Menon's invocation of the realist transformationthat engulfed oil painting in India in the late nine-teenth century was intended to persuade those ofhis critics who wondered how he could assemble asuccessful novel that described 'only the ordinaryaffairs of the modern life without introducing anyelement of the supernatural'.25 Just as, he claimed,new representational idioms were collapsing thedistance between 'pictures' and 'nature' and creatingan aversion for older schemata, so a new literaturethat was 'true to natural life' would dissolve theground on which stood older narratives, 'filled withthe impossible and the supernatural'.

Menon articulated what might be termed the'modular' version of realism,24 The modular versionas it operates within the novel, according to FredricJameson, took as its 'historical function' the 'systematicundermining and demystincation, the secular "decod-ing", of... preexisting inherited traditional or sacrednarrative paradigms'.25

In Indulekha, however, as Meenakshi Mukherjee hasargued, the intention had been forgotten as early as theend of the novel, the last lines of which echo a quitedifferent genre, the purana or mythological narative:'All the characters mentioned . . . have reached thesummit of human happiness, and now may God blessus and all who read this tale'.2'1 This process offorgetting and the non-fulfilment of realism's'historic function' can be seen inscribed even morevividly in Chandu Menon's exemplar, popular visualrepresentation.

Temple and others certainly desired the displace-ment of the mythic into the realist, but, after a briefperiod of strategic mimicry and 'sly civility', Indianartists would develop something quite different, some-thing akin to a visual 'magical realism'. This term wasfirst used by Franz Roh to label post-Expressionistpainting in Germany.27 It achieved its currency,however, in Latin America where, partly throughAlejo Carpentier's articulation of the 'marvellous real',it came to describe a genre of hybrid, anti-positivist,post-colonial literature. Carpentier essentialized

2O PHOTOS OF THli CODS

the marvellous real as a response to the peculiarlymarvellous reality of South America, but in his articu-lation of a hybridized baroque - a more generalizedcultural phenomena with which the ontologicallyvalorized marvellous real intersected -we can un-ravel a set of insights that will help in understandingpopular Indian visual culture.

Although the baroque was, for Carpentier, a'constant of the human spirit', it needs also to be under-stood as a reaction to a spatial rationality. The baroque'is characterized by a horror of the vacuum, the nakedsurface, the harmony of linear geometry';28 it 'fleesfrom geometrical arrangements'.29 Carpentier seesBernini's St Peter's basilica in Rome as exemplar ofbaroque; it is like a caged sun, 'a sun that expands andexplores the columns that circumscribe it, that pretendto demarcate its boundaries and literally disappearbefore its sumptuousness'.JO To Carpentier's stress onthe Creole and hybrid nature of magical realism wecan add Luis Leal's observation that magical realism isan 'attitude towards reality' and not just as a literarygenre,31 and Amaryll Chanady's claim that magicalrealism 'acquires a particular significance in thecontext of Latin America's status as a colonizedsociety'.32 In Chanady's perceptive reading of magicalrealism as a response to the '"rule, norm and tyranny"of the age of reason'35 one can hear echoes of ParthaChatterjee's claim that the nineteenth-century Bengalielite found in the rediscovery of popular aesthetics anescape from the 'prisonhouse of colonial reason'.34

At various points in the ensuing narrative we willencounter images and genres that might be usefullythought of as magical realist in Chanady's sense. Theseimages are responses to colonialism and refusals of acertain technology of representation. The late 1920sstyle associated with artists in the Rajasthani town ofNathdvara, for instance, might be seen as a post-perspectivalism that attempts to 'flee from geometry'.

'ABSORPTION' AND 'THEATRICALITY'

Buck-Morss's archaeology of aesthetics may alsoprove useful for our understanding of mass-pictureproduction in India over the last 120 years, for herewe will encounter images produced within andmediated by 'anaesthetizing' discourses, and thoseproduced within and mediated by sensory practices.If we envisage this as a continuum, rather than adichotomy, we can place images produced in Calcuttain the late nineteenth century nearer the 'anaes-thetized' end, and the popular twentieth-century'magical realist' images can be placed at the otherend. It is the numbing of the human sensorium thatmakes the colonial mimicry of earlier images socompatible with conventional art-historical exegesis:a literature on the products of these early pressesalready exists. It is the sensory immediacy of thelater images that makes them so intractable to con-ventional analysis and regard: the analysis of theseimages is in its infancy.

Images whose power is evaluated in terms of effi-cacy are difficult to understand from the viewpointof conventional aesthetics. Aesthetic discourse isstill, inappropriately, brought to bear upon popularrepresentational practices and, since it misses the pointof them, is inevitably forced to decry their variousdeficits. The questions asked by neo-Kantianaesthetics are - in this context - the wrong ones.

The central Indian villagers whose pictures arediscussed in the final chapter of the book do not sur-round them with reified discourses. Rather, they speakof a depicted deity's efficacy, and link the originationof the image to their own biographies. The significanceof images is expressed by rural consumers not throughthe efflorescence of words around an object, but abodily praxis, a poetry of the body, that helps giveimages what they want.

This corporeal relationship with images (whatAdorno called 'somatic solidarity') resists 'predatoryreason'35 in rather the same way that in Lyotard'sdichotomy 'figure' resists the 'linguistic-philosophical

INDIAN IMAGES UNDER THE SHADOW OF COLONIALISM 21

closure' of discourse. For Lyotard, the figural is'relatively free of the demands of meaning', indeed itis not the arena for the production of meaning but aspace where 'intensities are felt'.56

This corporeality and resistance to 'reason' is thesource of an endless series of misunderstandings. Inan Indian context one of the starkest condemnationsof popular art's corporeality has come from WalterSpink, who in 1978 reviled it for its Voluptuous [ness]'which seems 'marvelously camp to the western eyebemused by such highly sentimentalised and"realistic" religious productions'.57 The invocation ofvoluptuousness (the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

definition of which is 'gratification of the senses[and] imparting a sense of delicious pleasure') and" itsassociation with kitsch is instructive, for theoreticalwriting on kitsch stresses a similar embodiedimmediacy, defining it as the inverse of disinterestedand disembodied aesthetics. Tomas Kulka, writingfrom the high ground of Kantian disdain, suggeststhat kitsch differs radically not only from 'good' artbut also from 'bad and mediocre' art, for it is asensory phenomenon set apart from ordinaryaesthetic discrimination. For Kulka, kitsch isdependent on motifs that are 'stock emotions thatspontaneously trigger an unreflective emotionalresponse'.38

The role of this corporeal immediacy in construct-ing popular contemporary North American religiousart as 'kitsch' - and hence disavowed as 'art' - hasrecently been powerfully analysed by the art historianDavid Morgan. In addition to a disavowal founded onthese images as 'interested', 'engaged' and 'extrinsicallypurposive',39 they are also seen to embody a 'senti-mentality'. This is associated with a female embodiedemotionality, which is contrasted with a virile Kantianausterity.40

The story of how a numbed sensorium wasbrought back to life is one of the central concernsof this book. If'anaesthetics' is about the discursiveinvestigation and assessment of meaning, sensoryaesthetics is about the relationship between the body

and the image. This dichotomy becomes particularlyclear in the contrast between colonial mimicry andmagical realist images. The European art whose colo-nial shadow was cast over India had passed throughengagements with vanishing points that incarnatedcorporeal viewers41 to a practice that implied a 'trans-cendent point of vision that has discarded the body...and exists only as a disembodied punctum'.42 NormanBryson's arguments parallel those of Michael Fried,who observes the rise of what he calls the 'supremefiction' of an absent beholder in late eighteenth-century French painting. This disembodied 'absorp-tion' was exported to India and can be seen as anattempt - in tandem with the art schools' stress on'naturalism' - to deny the magical origin of images.Later 'magical realist' paintings, by contrast, assumedan embodied 'corpothetics', by which I mean the sen-sory embrace of images, the bodily engagement thatmost people (except Kantians and modernists) havewith artworks.

In Michael Fried's work the driving forces of changein European art-from French eighteenth-centuryhistory painting through to modernism - arestrategies that deny the presence of the beholderthrough strategies of'absorption'. Drawing in detail onDiderot's critical commentaries, an increasingdisparagement of paintings that acknowledge thepresence of the beholder emerges. Such acknowledge-ments usually involved direct eye-contact betweenthe picture's subject and the beholder, a relationshipDiderot disdained. His hostility to this mutualawareness of picture and viewer can be seen as ameans of establishing a 'privileged' art as the antithesisof ritual art (that is, art whose sole raison d'itre is to actas a conduit between beholder and deity). Likewise, forFried, 'good' art is art that negates the presence of thebeholder. Making a link between his study ofeighteenth-century French art and 1960s modernism,he concludes that mediocre work has a 'theatrical'relation to the beholder, whereas the 'very best recentwork' is 'in essence anti-theatrical'.43 The emergence ofmodern art, Mitchell writes in his valuable gloss:

22 PHOTOS OF THH GODS

is precisely to be understood in terms of the nega-tion or renunciation of direct signs of desire. Theprocess of pictorial seduction Fried admires is suc-cessful precisely in proportion to its indirectness,its seeming indifference to the beholder, its antithe-atrical 'absorption' in its own internal drama.44

Absorption, indirectness and history painting werepart of the package exported by the colonial state intoits Government Art Schools in the nineteenth centuryand we will encounter some silhouettes of these earlyanaesthetics. The 'supreme fiction' of the absentbeholder becomes - in colonial India - a mark ofwestern 'distinction' and a marker of distance fromHindu 'idols', from the fetish that was the commonorigin of all art. However, whereas in Fried's account'absorption' marked an irreversible shift towards adesirable indirection, in popular Indian art its tenuoushold was quickly lost as consumers started to demandimages stripped of this 'supreme fiction', insistinginstead on images that fundamentally addressed theirpresence and invoked a new corpothetics.

In India the reawakening of the human sensoriumwent hand in hand with the insertion of mass-producedimages into spaces of Hindu worship. This relocationhad a twofold characteristic, involving movementstowards, on the one hand, sacralized spaces and, onthe other, domestic spaces. Thus there was a move-ment from mundane spaces such as the art schoolsinto domestic spaces of worship and temples whereimages had a different work to perform. The need todemonstrate appreciation through explanation wasreplaced by bodily gestures and the look of thedevotee. This entailed new forms of physical intimacywith images and an increasing irrelevance of formal'anaesthetized' discourse.

The hold of absorption and history painting wastenuous and reached its apogee in the work of RaviVarma (1848-1906), the Indian painter most amenableto the western genre of art-historical evaluation. Partlythis is the result of his own self-mystification inVasarian mode but it is, more importantly, the result

of his adoption of a painterly style that strove for the'supreme fiction'. His most art-historically celebratedworks are those that look past the beholder. RaviVarma's characters behave as if they had heard andingested Diderot's command: 'think no more of thebeholder than if he did not exist. Imagine, at the edgeof the stage, a high wall that separates you from theorchestra. Act as if the curtain never rose'.45 We shallsee that it was this that his imperial patrons soadmired. Conversely it is this (dominant) element ofRavi Varma's work that is so utterly invisible in thesubsequent archive of Indian popular visual culture.The fragments of his work that do survive are those'theatrical' or corpothetic images which unequivocallyacknowledge the beholder's presence. In these imagesthe beholder is a worshipper, drinking the eyes of thedeity that gazes directly back at him.

'A SECRET OF THEIR OWN COUNTRY'

In Bombay, by the 1920s, Temple's conversionalfantasy was long dead. W. E. Gladstone Solomon,the Principal of the J. J. School of Art in Bombay,encouraged the process of'Indianization'. This waseulogized by Sir George Lloyd, the Governor ofBombay, who noted, when opening an exhibition ofstudents' work, that 'successful artistic work cannotbe achieved without inspiration, and inspiration cancome only when the artist is working on lines naturalto him, and endeared by inheritance and tradition'.46

Discussing the school's curriculum, Solomon deniedthe claim that the work of the school was 'not Indian'.Some head and figure studies, he conceded, 'mightalmost have been painted by French or Britishstudents', but this is simply a reflection of the 'gram-mar of the universal language of Art'.47 For Solomon,the language was part of a training that would placestudents in 'a stronger position for working out theirown salvation'.48

Western representational techniques were no longerthe vectors of a wholesale chronotopic transformation.

INDIAN IMAGES UNDER THE SHADOW OF COLONIALISM 23

Instead they had become one among many tools, ameans of revitalizing 'inheritance and tradition'rather than overturning it. With their own means ofsalvation to hand, students were choosing the 'Indianpoint of view', a conclusion shared by Bombay'sNationalist press. Surely, Solomon pleads, 'Indiansare the best judges of what is Indian'.49

Temple's chronotopic revolution also implied anecessary disenchantment, a failure of the Hindu gods,which Ruskin had referred to as 'an amalgamation ofmonstrous objects'.50 But Solomon revels in thedissemination of ever more potent gods into thepublic space of Bombay. In 1921 the School of Artwas commissioned by the Prince of Wales ReceptionCommittee to paint the 'pylons' with which the streetshad been decorated with '170 figures of Deities, eachseven feet in height':

Then indeed it was a portentous spectacle to see. the marshalling of multifarious emblems, tokens,

ornaments, 'vehicles', and other insignia of aninterminable line of Celestial Incarnations. Someof these were endowed with the usual complementof limbs, while others flourished arms like wind-mills. There were triple-faced, monkey-faced,vulture-faced Deities. There were some who rodeon tigers, on lions, on eagles, on snakes, and somewho used the lotus as a spring board for the stars.51

The art schools had been established with theintention that naturalism would vanquish Indian art,as suggested by Temple's hope that 'such drawing'would 'rectify some of their mental faults'.52 But a verydifferent vanquishing had occurred since, as Solomonwrote, invoking a remarkable set of metaphors:

the shell that encloses the fruit... is so trulyIndian that even the Western buildings in whichthe different departments of the School arehoused almost seem, to knowledgeable eyes,to have been draped by the hands of their Indianstudents with invisible 'saris'... In the depths

of their dark eyes are the fires of enlightenment,but it is a Secret of their own Country that theyare engaged in unravelling in the School ofArt.53

It is this unravelling - undertaken by the widercommercial picture production industry - that thefollowing chapters will trace.

24 PHOTOS OF THE GODS