{"AuthorName":"Arvind Rajagopal","Description":"

Although calendar art may, at first glance, appear to be relatively changeless, it is of course transformed alongside mechanical innovation and the spread of capitalist markets, and reflects historical and political changes over the years. What might seem constant is the profusion of mythological imagery.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 01: A widely circulated Ravi Varma image, depicting the goddesses Lakshmi, Durga and Saraswati, shown with their respective vahanas, the elephant, the lion and the peacock. The print is courtesy of a “high class snuff manufacturer” from Madras, with the consumer product, a tin of snuff, shown in the bottom left-hand corner to avoid detracting from the main focus of the picture. The scale of the vahanas vis-à-vis the goddesses confirms their relative importance.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 01<\/a><\/span>In fact, there are subtle but interesting shifts in how mythological imagery is treated in calendar art over time. For example, motifs and representational styles migrate from the mythological to other domains (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 01: A widely circulated Ravi Varma image, depicting the goddesses Lakshmi, Durga and Saraswati, shown with their respective vahanas, the elephant, the lion and the peacock. The print is courtesy of a “high class snuff manufacturer” from Madras, with the consumer product, a tin of snuff, shown in the bottom left-hand corner to avoid detracting from the main focus of the picture. The scale of the vahanas vis-à-vis the goddesses confirms their relative importance.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 01<\/a>). Meanwhile as the language of the market becomes more familiar, commodity images acquire an authority of their own, and no longer require the presence of gods and goddesses to win an audience.
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\r\nThe concept of the ‘commodity image’ was formulated by Wolfgang Haug to point to the importance of aesthetic mediation in the conversion of use value to exchange value. As with all mediation, what might be assumed to be instrumental is in fact constitutive.1<\/sup>  As a result, the commodity does not remain merely economic, nor the image only aesthetic. Since the process of exchange is a worldly event, the commodity’s representation through the image is also an historically located activity, explicable with reference to a given context.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Indian calendar art presents many of the shock effects of modernity including new technologies, space-time compression, political regime change, and new commodities and consumption practices, alongside mythological and religious elements. Commodity images emerge to help realize exchange value across unevenly developed contexts, and hence have effects beyond being economically functional to the growth of capitalism. Whether by registering a guard-rail of continuity alongside change, or a moral vantage point to consider such change, commodity-images in Indian calendar art negotiate epistemologically plural milieux, and hence provide an archive for understanding historical change.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The deities shown in Indian calendar art (as in The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 01: A widely circulated Ravi Varma image, depicting the goddesses Lakshmi, Durga and Saraswati, shown with their respective vahanas, the elephant, the lion and the peacock. The print is courtesy of a “high class snuff manufacturer” from Madras, with the consumer product, a tin of snuff, shown in the bottom left-hand corner to avoid detracting from the main focus of the picture. The scale of the vahanas vis-à-vis the goddesses confirms their relative importance.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 01<\/a>) are not continuous with temple art despite the similarity of their subject matter, because of the medium of their depiction.2<\/sup>   Print renders these images hybrid in character: they are both profane and sacral, iconographically conventional and yet new in the means of their reproduction and circulation. For example, they reached (and reach) not only twice-born castes, for example, but also untouchables who might have been barred from approaching the deities portrayed, if they were situated in Hindu temples.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Such images were not merely artistic creations intended to convey a message so much as they combined artistic motifs and social conventions so as to increase their own circulation.3<\/sup>  Designed to evoke a minimum of friction as objects of passage, they did not reflect public opinion so much as they presented signs of the uses they were put to, as calendars advertising products and services for example. They presented combinations of objects and viewing styles that connoted social efficacy, thereby indicating also what kind of strength was envisioned for a picture, which constituencies were appealed to, as well as at times, which ones were omitted, or considered too weak to be more than passive mediators of the message. To circulate extensively, images had to be strong, and include pictorial and textual elements that gave them force. As such, images can be graded as ‘strong’ or ‘weak,’ based on the extent to which their terms of intelligibility remain stable across a larger or a smaller radius.4<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

But the use of religious imagery, however instrumental for its sponsors, existed for much of society not only as something strong and efficacious, but also as auspicious or good: these qualities were, and are, closely related in a context where the Western form of separation between “religion” and “culture” has not occurred. “Religion,” as we know, in one form or other provided the medium for much of the political conscientization and national mobilization that occurred during the colonial period, and thus acquired an emphatically public presence during a significant phase of Indian modernization. Colonial missionary activity only strengthened indigenous attempts to identify native religious life with national culture as a whole. Conventional accounts of the separation of church and state that occurred in Western Europe, and the supposed relegation of religion to the private sphere, are therefore misleading when invoked without qualification.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The systematic and fairly large-scale use of religious imagery for commercial purposes nevertheless instrumentalized such imagery “as if the image of the deity gave cachet through association,” in Jim Masselos’s words.5<\/sup>  By virtue of introducing them into new contexts for purposes unrelated to their sacral origins, implied strength or efficacy as a distinct criterion, but without necessarily effacing ritually derived criteria.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Thus, rather than truth versus falsehood, which are the representational criteria for conventional realism, two other sets of oppositions were more relevant for Indian calendar art: strength versus weakness, and good versus bad (i.e., auspicious versus inauspicious). Although these are clearly related criteria, the former set of oppositions, strength versus weakness, became more important over time with the spread of commercial calendar art, reflecting the secularism of a commodity economy that could draw on and even reinforce the sacral, but was ultimately indifferent to it. But the latter remained important, and what is interesting is how these two sets of criteria could sometimes interact. In the remainder of this essay, I will try to show this interaction and discuss its implications.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 02: Coolies draw a box on a cart, in a textile label of Ramparsad Mahadeo, Calcutta. Advertisements that featured laborers as prop and background to the product advertised were not uncommon. They reflect the conventions of a world in which manual laborers were assumed not to inhabit the same communicative world as the consumers addressed by such messages. Chromolithograph, paper. 15 cm x 12 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 02<\/a><\/span>Consider for example, the advertisement on left (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 02: Coolies draw a box on a cart, in a textile label of Ramparsad Mahadeo, Calcutta. Advertisements that featured laborers as prop and background to the product advertised were not uncommon. They reflect the conventions of a world in which manual laborers were assumed not to inhabit the same communicative world as the consumers addressed by such messages. Chromolithograph, paper. 15 cm x 12 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 02<\/a>). A heavy strongbox is presented to connote the dye’s “safety” – it cannot run, and will only go where it is led, or open when meant to.
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\r\nThree barefoot coolies in white loincloth mutely demonstrate the product’s quality. The buyers of this product exist in a culture where such servitude can be taken for granted, and where laborers like goods, exist for what is demanded of them. They are conveyed as abstractions, with their faces obscured. Their incapacity to consume does not compromise the message. The object for sale here does not arise from a generalized system of equivalences where the labor-power of different classes readily computes vis-à-vis each other.6<\/sup>  On the contrary the consumption advertised is shown to be exclusive. Members of the working class, whose desires can be imagined and yet ignored, are pictured to convey the desirability of a given product.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In contemporary advertising, status differences are usually bridged by depicting consumer desire. Even if it is never likely to be fulfilled, the portrayal of desire brings human differences onto a terrain of potential negotiation. By contrast, in this ad, the workers lack of visible desire for a product claimed to be desirable represents an inaccessible difference. More precisely, the assumed viewer may replicate the workers indifference to the good with an attitude of indifference towards the workers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The capitalist economy is typically seen as a modernizing agency that creates a level playing field, as it were, as it absorbs traditional societies in its wake.7<\/sup>  But here we have an image produced and circulated alongside the goods it advertises, portraying a non-fungible form of inequality between the persons shown in the image and its intended viewers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

If commodification is at the heart of the forces colonizing the world, images have been understood as being part of that process. The logic of capital favors exchange value over use value, and accumulation for its own sake. Images, it has been argued, seduce us into the society of the spectacle, extending commodity fetishism to habits of perception.8<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

But images also bear impressions of the world, and thus disclose more than the functions of exchange for which they are employed. They can therefore disclose the heterogeneity elsewhere unacknowledged or covered over.9<\/sup> The advertisement for Safe Dyes, I suggest, draws on images of caste and class inequality for a clientele who would have been largely savarna, or twice-born. Even without an explicitly religious signifier, therefore, it derives from and signals a world where ‘goodness’ is a value confirming rather than challenging the caste hierarchy.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 03: A consumer goods advertisements (Lily Biscuits) in the 1937 Times of India Yearbook’s magazine page. 25 cm x 17 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 03<\/a><\/span>There are of course markedly competing conceptions of good and bad in the colonial context; colonial rule is assumed to be a secular good, for example, by the two advertisements in Figures 3 and 4, in contrast to the ritual forms of goodness assumed in the ads shown in Figures 1 and 2. In the ad for the Lily Biscuit Co. (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 03: A consumer goods advertisements (Lily Biscuits) in the 1937 Times of India Yearbook’s magazine page. 25 cm x 17 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 03<\/a>), an aeroplane has skywritten the words “The Pride of India” – referring to Quality Biscuits from Lily. “India,” here, unlike the use of the name today, refers to the English, who both ruled and represented the country.10<\/sup>
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\r\nIndia is symbolized in the white child frolicking in a shower of biscuits dropping from above. The casual pleasures of everyday life are visually linked here to technological might, to say nothing of culinary excellence, and perhaps implicitly to the power that commanded such skills and resources. With an airplane, a white infant girl and the word Lily, which in English is a flower symbolizing innocence and purity, “The Pride of India” involves nothing from the period that we would necessarily think of as Indian. The ad was published in 1937 (the picture of the aircraft shows a 1930s long-distance commercial sea-boat), when the Indian National Congress had formed provincial governments, and begun planning for political independence. Arguably, at this time, Indian pride pertained to swadeshi rather than to English tea biscuits dropping from the sky.11<\/sup>  What the ad omits for the purposes of circulating amidst a specific clientele, offers its own illumination of the character of this constituency, which is assumed not to be significant.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 04: An advertisement for the Buckingham & Carnatic Mills, which in the early years of the 20th Century, had the largest khaki dyeing plant in the world. The theme of ‘defense’ using a temple in the backdrop suggests that not only lives but places and symbols of faith too are being defended.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 04<\/a><\/span>In the ad reproduced here as The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 04: An advertisement for the Buckingham & Carnatic Mills, which in the early years of the 20th Century, had the largest khaki dyeing plant in the world. The theme of ‘defense’ using a temple in the backdrop suggests that not only lives but places and symbols of faith too are being defended.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 04<\/a>, only Indians are visible, by contrast. Promoting “all kinds of cloth for defenders and defended,” from the Buckingham & Carnatic Mills, the image shows a bearded and turbaned cavalryman leading a group of lancers as they ride past a crowd in native costume, standing in front of a temple.
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\r\nThe picture is undated, but the text mentions khaki, for which B&C Mills had the largest dyeing plant in the world at the turn of the 20th C., and which it supplied to the military.12<\/sup>  The ad may have been designed to evoke and justify the foreign wars for which Indian recruits were sought. Just as the production of cloth was a universal good, similarly the defense of empire too was in the natives’ interest. European violence against Indians between 1918-21 was widely publicized when the Madras Labour Union went on strike at the B&C Mills. It is possible that the ad’s claim about the legitimate use of force is made against more disquieting accounts circulating about the company after this time.13<\/sup>  Indians dominate the picture, but the claim that the army is used for their defense would presumably need to be made only against doubts about just such a fact. Nationalist images of the army tend to invoke pride, not arguments about its utility. The ad therefore appears to defend British rule explicitly, whereas the previous image was more implicit in this regard.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Religion and Popular Visuality: From the Colonial to the National <\/strong>
\r\nThe onset of nationalism could not leave the strength of these images undisturbed. The shift from colonialism to nationalism is a change from an exclusive to a more inclusive form of power, from the status of subjecthood to that of the aspiration towards some sense of citizenship, and to a moral universe in which indigenous conceptions of the good could no longer be ruled out or dismissed in the same way.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Alongside this shift, the copious use of mythological imagery by multinationals in product advertising disappears over time. In other words, while initially global capitalism demonstrates its facility in the vernacular through the forms of advertising it sponsors, after independence, multinationals begin to observe the secular pieties of official nationalism<\/em>. Now, this began to change in the late 1980s and onward, as the onset of national television and the growth of Hindu nationalism combined to make mythological imagery available for securing nation-wide constituencies and consumers.14<\/sup>  But it is interesting to note that multinationals appear on both side of the divide between elite and vernacular domains, and that their presence was mediated by commodity images, which were frequently religious, and Hindu. If the uses of these images, attached to everyday objects sold in bazaars, or hung in Indians’ homes as calendars, were seen to be sacrilegious, such opposition was relatively minor and did not restrict their circulation.15<\/sup>  Religious non-interference on the part of the government was therefore differently reflected in the colonial and in the postcolonial economy, if we trace the story through the commodity-image.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 05: Lord Ram striding like a colossus amidst a storm, ready to do battle. His devotee Hanuman is at the lower right hand corner, his strength and valor implicitly at Ram's command. The image is noteworthy for departing from earlier conventions of calendar art, in showing Ram in profile, and by himself rather than with Sita and Lakshman, and on a mission. Most chromolithographs present a frontal view of Ram crowned as king, posing ceremonially with his consort and his brother.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 05<\/a><\/span>The power of commodity images is thus clearly sensitive to issues of governing ideology, as much as to questions of domain and medium. The circulation of images in new domains and through new technological modalities alters their efficacy, and influences the resistance (or lack thereof) that they arouse. Thus the advent of independence and of an official policy of secularism accompanied the withdrawal of mythological imagery from advertisements for national and multinational companies, and signaled a loss of status for such imagery, although just how rapidly this occurred remains to be examined. The onset of broadcasting systematically oriented to the devotional sentiments of the Hindu community in the 1980s altered this situation however, and opened the way for a change in aesthetic standards and for returning Hindu themes and symbols to an up-market status, although class distinctions in the way Hinduness was communicated could not suddenly become irrelevant, of course (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 05: Lord Ram striding like a colossus amidst a storm, ready to do battle. His devotee Hanuman is at the lower right hand corner, his strength and valor implicitly at Ram's command. The image is noteworthy for departing from earlier conventions of calendar art, in showing Ram in profile, and by himself rather than with Sita and Lakshman, and on a mission. Most chromolithographs present a frontal view of Ram crowned as king, posing ceremonially with his consort and his brother.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 05<\/a>).16<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

More broadly, these images are not monovalent, since they index different forms of power at the same time. Rather than understanding religious and secular power as successive or mutually exclusive, and as somehow external to their modes of mediation, I suggest we can think of the images as both indexing and helping to constitute one or more forms of political theology. These involve extra-rational modes of legitimation that are enabled by extant religious symbolism.<\/em>17<\/sup>  Inquiring into the political theology of these images points to the reliance of a modern economy on religious imagery. Communicating in a demotic idiom and with popular audiences, it indicates as well, the heterogeneous character of modern power.18<\/sup>  Indeed different political theologies, colonial, national, mythological, and technological, can be glimpsed across these images, providing commentaries on the times they were made for. Thus, some of the images here suggest a reliance on devotional forms of authority in the sale of snuff, textiles, tobacco and other goods and services. The expansion of commodity consumption is often assumed to have a secularizing influence. But these communiqués from the domestic market, vernacular in their imagery if not in their script, suggest a more complex story.19<\/sup>  (e.g., see Figures 08-13).<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 06: Riding a chariot drawn by four roaring lions, with sparks streaming from her, this goddess, who clearly stands for India, is carrying the national flag, and is suffused with a halo layered in orange, white and green colors just like the flag. Her garment also bears the colors of the flag, while the presence of lions indicates the goddess is Durga, who represents the feminine principle Shakti, invincible and independent.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 06<\/a><\/span>Colonial canons objectified or erased natives, rendering them into the passive or invisible mediators of colonial-era assumptions, but Indian culture itself was no coherent entity. Caste, creed and sect stratified most domains of life. As printed images began to circulate, issues of what could be shown publicly had to be worked through. With the growth of the market economy, images served manufacturers in distinguishing their wares, and tradesmen in advertising their services. The proliferation of mythological characters that we notice in these pictures was as much a solution to the problem of how<\/em> to communicate, as it is a statement of what<\/em> to communicate. On more than one occasion, objections were raised to the profane uses of religious imagery.20<\/sup>  However these objections were dismissed on the grounds that such images were already in common use, that people did not on the whole object to it, and moreover, the authorities ruled, trade would be adversely affected if religious imagery were withdrawn from the market.21<\/sup>  As a means of enabling trade, Hindu imagery seemed indispensable (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 06: Riding a chariot drawn by four roaring lions, with sparks streaming from her, this goddess, who clearly stands for India, is carrying the national flag, and is suffused with a halo layered in orange, white and green colors just like the flag. Her garment also bears the colors of the flag, while the presence of lions indicates the goddess is Durga, who represents the feminine principle Shakti, invincible and independent.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 06<\/a>).22<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Among the first examples of bazaar art are the pictures accompanying bales of textiles to be sold, a practice that may have begun sometime in the 1860s or ‘70s. These pictures served as means of quickly distinguishing one manufacturer from another, with images presumably helping to overcome challenges of literacy and linguistic difference as the goods traveled from producer to wholesaler, retailer and consumer. These pictures often bore no connection to the products sold; for example mythological imagery was often used to identify one brand of textiles as against another.23<\/sup>   The British companies selling these goods presumably treated the images simply as ways of promoting their products, rather than as either expressions of their own beliefs, or as endorsements of the beliefs of their customers<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The practice spread to other products; mythological imagery could be found attached to bidi<\/em>s, biscuits, cloth, matches, oil, snuff or soap, and the images could be meditative portraits of the supreme deity Brahma, devotional pictures with Krishna posing on the cosmic serpent Seshanag and affirming himself as Vishnu (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 07: Lord Krishna on the cosmic serpent Anantha-Shayi, in an advertisement for Kaloojee Valajee tobacco, Rangoon. Chromolithograph, paper, 38 cm x 25 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 07<\/a>), or of Parvati worshipping an icon of Lord Shiva (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 08: Parvati worships a Shivling. The background shows the visage of Lord Shiva looming like the mountain Kailash Parvat, where he lives. The Hindi caption, Imandari Hamara Dhyey Hai,” “Honesty is Our Aim,” implies a link between the devotion shown by Parvati in her worship, and the steadfastness of Dhannaram Sitaram Cloth Merchants, the sponsors of this image. The location of the business is identified as the Grain Market in Revadi, Haryana. Artist: P. Sardar.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 08<\/a>), violent battlefield images of Rama’s army fighting Ravana and his demons (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 09: Battle between Rama and Ravana – a textile label of Alexander Drew & Sons. Chromolithograph, paper. 12 cm x 10 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 09<\/a>), or of the fierce Narasimha avatar of Vishnu (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 10: Durgacharan ka Shri Narsingha Avtar ka Ticket. In the upper panel, the half-man, half-lion avatar of Vishnu, Narasimha, disembowels the rakshasa Hiranyakashyapa, who disbelieves in him. The son of Hiranyakashyapa, a devotee of Vishnu named Prahalada, and his mother, piously observe the scene. Textile label of F. Steiner and Co, Manchester and Kerr, Turrock & Co., Calcutta. Chromo. Paper. 20 cm x 15 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 10<\/a>), and so on.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 07: Lord Krishna on the cosmic serpent Anantha-Shayi, in an advertisement for Kaloojee Valajee tobacco, Rangoon. Chromolithograph, paper, 38 cm x 25 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 07<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 08: Parvati worships a Shivling. The background shows the visage of Lord Shiva looming like the mountain Kailash Parvat, where he lives. The Hindi caption, Imandari Hamara Dhyey Hai,” “Honesty is Our Aim,” implies a link between the devotion shown by Parvati in her worship, and the steadfastness of Dhannaram Sitaram Cloth Merchants, the sponsors of this image. The location of the business is identified as the Grain Market in Revadi, Haryana. Artist: P. Sardar.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 08<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 09: Battle between Rama and Ravana – a textile label of Alexander Drew & Sons. Chromolithograph, paper. 12 cm x 10 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 09<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 10: Durgacharan ka Shri Narsingha Avtar ka Ticket. In the upper panel, the half-man, half-lion avatar of Vishnu, Narasimha, disembowels the rakshasa Hiranyakashyapa, who disbelieves in him. The son of Hiranyakashyapa, a devotee of Vishnu named Prahalada, and his mother, piously observe the scene. Textile label of F. Steiner and Co, Manchester and Kerr, Turrock & Co., Calcutta. Chromo. Paper. 20 cm x 15 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 10<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Clearly, the distinctions between sacred and secular, or even those between sacred and profane, used in other contexts, do not explain the ready use of mythic imagery for profit, to sell goods as varied as soap, snacks and nicotine. The range of pictorial themes and styles connect folklore and religious myth with every sphere of existence, from love and worship to war. Secular culture as understood in post-Reformation Europe hardly existed in this context.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Received accounts of modern society assume that “religion” characterizes society as a whole, and that “culture” gradually separates out of religion. But the development here is in the opposite direction.  Images of mythic characters offered ready means of linking across religious and ethnic divides as capitalist markets and print media interacted and grew. Religion appears to have provided the medium for the growth of modern culture, at least in the domain of calendar art. In the process, these images appeared in new situations where existing forms of religious authority were altered, and could be used to redefine, and occasionally subvert existing ritual hierarchies.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

With Ravi Varma’s influential breakaway from the depthless, two-dimensional convention of god-portraiture, where space was structured according to cosmic hierarchy, the rules of classical perspective came to be applied equally to deities and laity.  Instead of always presenting deities looking frontally at the viewer with an all-seeing gaze, according to custom, mythological characters began to appear in meditative poses, turned away from the viewer, absorbed in themselves like mere mortals, as aesthetic rather than devotional figures.24<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

For example, in the picture below, Krishna is shown with arms akimbo in a flower garden, with a fountain playing behind him (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 11: An advertisement for Photo Marc Gold Thread, Surat (1936) chromolithograph on paper. Size 50 cm x 38 cm.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 11<\/a>).<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 11: An advertisement for Photo Marc Gold Thread, Surat (1936) chromolithograph on paper. Size 50 cm x 38 cm.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 11<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 12: Another similar portrait of Lord Krishna, in a poster calendar of N.V. Shunmugam & Co., makers of high class Madras snuff. This and many other images depict deities in contexts lacking identifiable mythological markers or narrative signifiers, suggesting the creation of a new space in the commodity image where deity and product are aligned with each other.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 12<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The same picture appears in mirrored form in an ad for N.V. Shanmugam & Co., makers of High Class Madras Snuff with “sub-agents in all parts of India” The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 12: Another similar portrait of Lord Krishna, in a poster calendar of N.V. Shunmugam & Co., makers of high class Madras snuff. This and many other images depict deities in contexts lacking identifiable mythological markers or narrative signifiers, suggesting the creation of a new space in the commodity image where deity and product are aligned with each other.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 12<\/a>). In both pictures, Krishna is shown wearing his crown with a peacock feather, but otherwise, things identified with Krishna and invariably depicted with him, such as the flute, the chariot, cows, and maids, are absent. Nor is Krishna performing any actions to which are recognizable from Hindu mythology. Standing at ease amidst flower bushes in a country estate, his posture is more like that of a squire overseeing his property than that of the romantic cowherd god-king he is supposed to be.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 13: Ralli Brothers. Textile label, Manchester. Ram and Lakshman. Chromolithograph, paper. 15 cm x 112 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 13<\/a><\/span>To take another example, a chromolithograph produced for Ralli Brothers, a trading company, shows the god-king Ram next to his brother Lakshman, much as if they were secular figures of equal rank out of a pack of playing cards, parlaying with each other (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 13: Ralli Brothers. Textile label, Manchester. Ram and Lakshman. Chromolithograph, paper. 15 cm x 112 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 13<\/a>).
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\r\nThis ignores the convention of establishing the superiority of Ram as the elder brother and major avatar of Vishnu, by placing Ram at the center, and sometimes portraying Lakshman diminutively vis-à-vis Ram. The Mughal miniature style of portraiture draws attention to their interaction, but once again, without flagging any recognizable mythic encounter. Their foreshortened arrows clearly inadequate to their full-sized bows, they are looking at each other intently, hinting at a story we cannot immediately place within the known lore of Ramayans.25<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Alongside these we also have images such as for Sunlight soap (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 14: Shankar with Parvati and Ganesha on the Kailash Parvat, in a Sunlight Soap calender poster of 1936. Nandi the bull, Shiva’s mount, is seated at their feet. Chromolithograph, paper, 50 cm x 35 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 14<\/a>), for Imperial Chemicals, (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 15: Sita training her sons in archery. The name of Imperial Chemicals Industries frames the picture, headquartered in Ballard Estate, the European business district in Bombay. Presumably, a prestigious corporation could afford to publicly identify itself with mythological imagery in 1954. Up-market business’s public sponsorship of such imagery is scarce today, by comparison. Chromolithograph, Paper\/ 50 cm x 38 cm.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 15<\/a>) or for Burmah Shell (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 16: A 1939 calendar and advertisement for an English company, Burmah Shell, “oil storage and distribution company,” and its agents in Jodhpur, Moolchand Bahetti and Co. (In 1976 Burmah Shell was nationalized and became a public sector undertaking, now called Bharat Petroleum.) The picture shows Lord Krishna with the black snake Kaliya, in a scene usually described as Kaliya-mardan, Krishna punishing the snake Kaliya, also the subject of a 1919 film by Dadasaheb Phalke.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 16<\/a>).<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 14: Shankar with Parvati and Ganesha on the Kailash Parvat, in a Sunlight Soap calender poster of 1936. Nandi the bull, Shiva’s mount, is seated at their feet. Chromolithograph, paper, 50 cm x 35 cm, portrait.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 14<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 15: Sita training her sons in archery. The name of Imperial Chemicals Industries frames the picture, headquartered in Ballard Estate, the European business district in Bombay. Presumably, a prestigious corporation could afford to publicly identify itself with mythological imagery in 1954. Up-market business’s public sponsorship of such imagery is scarce today, by comparison. Chromolithograph, Paper\/ 50 cm x 38 cm.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 15<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 16: A 1939 calendar and advertisement for an English company, Burmah Shell, “oil storage and distribution company,” and its agents in Jodhpur, Moolchand Bahetti and Co. (In 1976 Burmah Shell was nationalized and became a public sector undertaking, now called Bharat Petroleum.) The picture shows Lord Krishna with the black snake Kaliya, in a scene usually described as Kaliya-mardan, Krishna punishing the snake Kaliya, also the subject of a 1919 film by Dadasaheb Phalke.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 16<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

These present more familiar devotional scenes with calendars advertising the company’s products. Aestheticization does not necessarily displace devotionalism, but co-exists with it, as English multinational corporations qualify their commitment to realism by a demotic religious idiom convenient for the market.26<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

We might be tempted to call this a process of partial secularization accomplished through market-based religious imagery. But “religion” here does not correlate with a unified authority such as with the church. There is no single religious authority, on the contrary, whether within Hinduism or Islam (these examples are from the former, clearly). Nor is there a domain that is demarcated from the religious, whether as profane or as secular. Similarly if the outcome is partial secularization, it is achieved not through the privatization of religion, but by its enlarged public presence.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Mechanical Marvels<\/strong>
\r\nIf the gods adorned much of consumer advertising, images with more overtly secular themes also evinced elements of an older cosmology, albeit with a cinematic use of montage. In The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 17: This chromolithograph from the Empire Calendar Company, Calcutta, juxtapose portraits of national leaders around scenes of rural development.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 17<\/a> and The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 18: This chromolithograph from the Empire Calendar Company, Calcutta, juxtapose portraits of the Buddha and Jesus Christ as well as the national leaders, around scenes of rural development.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 18<\/a>, we have scenes of agricultural development, with mechanical farming presumably meant to signal modernization. Whether they are meant to domesticate technologies that are considered strange and threatening, or to extend the spiritual or political charisma of national leaders and religious figures to technology and agricultural development, they reflect an interesting compositional strategy.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 17: This chromolithograph from the Empire Calendar Company, Calcutta, juxtapose portraits of national leaders around scenes of rural development.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 17<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 18: This chromolithograph from the Empire Calendar Company, Calcutta, juxtapose portraits of the Buddha and Jesus Christ as well as the national leaders, around scenes of rural development.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 18<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The collages indicate the artifice of bringing different and formally unrelated images together and thereby suggesting their association across space and time. The absence of women on the fields perhaps helps to locate the picture in terms of date and region, but it may appeal to prevailing patriarchal assumptions to render the image better able to circulate, presenting as it does male peasant labor alongside national leadership. Depiction of agricultural scenes alone would be uncertain in their meaning, presumably – even the sight of a prosperous field would not necessarily signal prosperity for all the viewers of these pictures. Images of technological development too do not necessarily provide the grounds of their own authority. But the figures of Christ and the Buddha above (in the picture on the right), and of Gandhi, Nehru and Rajendra Prasad in both, imply an assurance that these scenes benefits from the moral authority of gods and political leaders both, with the halo around Gandhi suggesting he is both. The picture of a man driving bullocks on a field, encountering a boy on a tractor, with thatched roofs in the background, proposes, perhaps, the possibility of a reconciliation between the Gandhian republic and Nehruvian industrialism. The bubble in which this picture is contained, between sea and sky, and above the heads of political leaders, could indicate an idea as much as a real event. At any rate, political, technical and theological conventions intersect here, in a complex attempt at developmental propaganda, albeit one from below.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 19: A Hindu deity atop a caparisoned elephant, and amidst factories. The deity is holding a hammer, scales, an ax and a bow and arrow. At the feet of the elephant are all the signs of an ongoing puja: a lighted oil lamp, flowers, incense, a bell, a coconut surrounded by mango leaves placed in a bowl, and other sacrificial food offerings. Various mechanical tools, a hand pump, a bulb, and a set of weights are placed around the deity.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 19<\/a><\/span>In The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 19: A Hindu deity atop a caparisoned elephant, and amidst factories. The deity is holding a hammer, scales, an ax and a bow and arrow. At the feet of the elephant are all the signs of an ongoing puja: a lighted oil lamp, flowers, incense, a bell, a coconut surrounded by mango leaves placed in a bowl, and other sacrificial food offerings. Various mechanical tools, a hand pump, a bulb, and a set of weights are placed around the deity.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 19<\/a>, mechanical tools placed before a mustachioed god astride an elephant, against an industrial landscape, echoes the Durga Puja during Navaratri (or Saraswati Puja in the south), when books and musical instruments are placed near the gods to be blessed by them.
\r\n
\r\nThe figure here seems to be the artist’s contrivance, however, since it combines features associated with no known deity. The quiver, bow and arrow suggest Rama, but the elephant is the vehicle of Indra, and that elephant, Ayravata, is white. This Hindu god holds scales, which are an import, and a hammer, also not seen with other deities.27<\/sup>  The profusion of tools suggests this may be Vishwakarma, Lord of the Architects, but Vishwakarma’s vehicle is the swan, and he is often portrayed as an old and bearded rather than as young and mustachioed. Spewing chimneys stand in the background - are these akin to Blake’s dark Satanic mills or are they a neutral record of productive machinery? Is this picture unambiguously endorsing a site of development, or is the explicit fabrication of an unidentifiable deity a wry commentary on factories as the temples of modern India?<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 20: A 1953 calendar for Jay Engineering Works, Calcutta, advertising an Usha sewing machine.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 20<\/a><\/span>The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 20: A 1953 calendar for Jay Engineering Works, Calcutta, advertising an Usha sewing machine.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 20<\/a> shows women examining different parts of a giant sewing machine in a calendar from Jay Engineering Works.
\r\n
\r\nThe ad depicts other mechanical goods, including fans and a hurricane lamp. Women of different hues and wearing different costumes are animatedly talking to each other, perhaps expressing their wonderment about the machine, and seeking to understand it. Mythological pictures sometimes present a deity next to a devotee, and many times the latters size, to underline their relative importance. Something similar may be intended in this picture, but if the machine is being deified, it is also presented as an object of knowledge, albeit a powerful and even dominating one. The absence of men suggests that the object pertains mainly to women’s work, although in fact, professional tailors are invariably men. Seen in this light the womens curiosity may be amusing, and an expression not only of technological power, but of men and machines vis-à-vis women. Here again, conventions of devotional portraiture are being used to make a comment on the relationships between gender, technology and development. Technology here appears not as an instrument under human control so much as a site and symbol of national unification and perhaps even a goal, albeit perceived in patriarchal terms. If this is an inversion of means and ends, it is presented humorously, although whether the joke is on women or is being shared with them is uncertain.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Calendar Art Then and Now<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 21: A 1939 calendar and advertisement for an English company, Burmah Shell, “oil storage and distribution company,” and its agents in Jodhpur, Moolchand Bahetti and Co. (In 1976 Burmah Shell was nationalized and became a public sector undertaking, now called Bharat Petroleum.) The picture shows Lord Krishna with the black snake Kaliya, in a scene usually described as Kaliya-mardan, Krishna punishing the snake Kaliya, also the subject of a 1919 film by Dadasaheb Phalke.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 21<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 22: Sita training her sons in archery. The name of Imperial Chemicals Industries frames the picture, headquartered in Ballard Estate, the European business district in Bombay. Presumably, a prestigious corporation could afford to publicly identify itself with mythological imagery in 1954. Up-market business’s public sponsorship of such imagery is scarce today, by comparison. Chromolithograph, Paper\/ 50 cm x 38 cm.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 22<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Several decades separate The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 21: A 1939 calendar and advertisement for an English company, Burmah Shell, “oil storage and distribution company,” and its agents in Jodhpur, Moolchand Bahetti and Co. (In 1976 Burmah Shell was nationalized and became a public sector undertaking, now called Bharat Petroleum.) The picture shows Lord Krishna with the black snake Kaliya, in a scene usually described as Kaliya-mardan, Krishna punishing the snake Kaliya, also the subject of a 1919 film by Dadasaheb Phalke.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 21<\/a> and The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 22: Sita training her sons in archery. The name of Imperial Chemicals Industries frames the picture, headquartered in Ballard Estate, the European business district in Bombay. Presumably, a prestigious corporation could afford to publicly identify itself with mythological imagery in 1954. Up-market business’s public sponsorship of such imagery is scarce today, by comparison. Chromolithograph, Paper\/ 50 cm x 38 cm.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 22<\/a>  (themselves two decades apart) from the third (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 23: A 2009 calendar for Kartik Fine Arts, in Alwarpet, Chennai, showing an illustration of Lord Murugan, surrounded by photographs of the deities in various Murugan temples such as Tirutanni.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 23<\/a>). In all three examples of calendar art, Hindu imagery accompanies the names of businesses, but in The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 21: A 1939 calendar and advertisement for an English company, Burmah Shell, “oil storage and distribution company,” and its agents in Jodhpur, Moolchand Bahetti and Co. (In 1976 Burmah Shell was nationalized and became a public sector undertaking, now called Bharat Petroleum.) The picture shows Lord Krishna with the black snake Kaliya, in a scene usually described as Kaliya-mardan, Krishna punishing the snake Kaliya, also the subject of a 1919 film by Dadasaheb Phalke.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 21<\/a> and The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 22: Sita training her sons in archery. The name of Imperial Chemicals Industries frames the picture, headquartered in Ballard Estate, the European business district in Bombay. Presumably, a prestigious corporation could afford to publicly identify itself with mythological imagery in 1954. Up-market business’s public sponsorship of such imagery is scarce today, by comparison. Chromolithograph, Paper\/ 50 cm x 38 cm.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 22<\/a>, text above and below frames and surrounds the images of the gods, whereas in the third (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 23: A 2009 calendar for Kartik Fine Arts, in Alwarpet, Chennai, showing an illustration of Lord Murugan, surrounded by photographs of the deities in various Murugan temples such as Tirutanni.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 23<\/a>), the image is above and the text below, separated spatially and by color.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 23: A 2009 calendar for Kartik Fine Arts, in Alwarpet, Chennai, showing an illustration of Lord Murugan, surrounded by photographs of the deities in various Murugan temples such as Tirutanni.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 23<\/a><\/span>The relationship suggested between the god images and commerce is closer in The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 21: A 1939 calendar and advertisement for an English company, Burmah Shell, “oil storage and distribution company,” and its agents in Jodhpur, Moolchand Bahetti and Co. (In 1976 Burmah Shell was nationalized and became a public sector undertaking, now called Bharat Petroleum.) The picture shows Lord Krishna with the black snake Kaliya, in a scene usually described as Kaliya-mardan, Krishna punishing the snake Kaliya, also the subject of a 1919 film by Dadasaheb Phalke.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 21<\/a> and The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 22: Sita training her sons in archery. The name of Imperial Chemicals Industries frames the picture, headquartered in Ballard Estate, the European business district in Bombay. Presumably, a prestigious corporation could afford to publicly identify itself with mythological imagery in 1954. Up-market business’s public sponsorship of such imagery is scarce today, by comparison. Chromolithograph, Paper\/ 50 cm x 38 cm.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 22<\/a> images than in The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 23: A 2009 calendar for Kartik Fine Arts, in Alwarpet, Chennai, showing an illustration of Lord Murugan, surrounded by photographs of the deities in various Murugan temples such as Tirutanni.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 23<\/a>. If in the past, multinationals routinely used images of gods to promote their services, today it is regional and local businesses that utilize them, in calendar art that does not typically circulate very widely, unlike before. The “daily tear” calendars used today are mostly from retail shops or service providers such as a grocer, a pharmacist, or a cable operator, or even a local temple. These are usually essential services that are shared by well-to-do as well as lower middle classes. Such calendar art has circulated for many decades, but god pictures do not nowadays accompany the names of prestigious upmarket companies, unlike before.28<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Mythological imagery in calendar art that is actually in use has moved down-market, while some of the calendar art of the past has acquired an up-market status, fetching high prices and attracting scholarly attention.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Here are some more samples of recent calendar art (The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 24: Abirami, also known as Shakti, is the Goddess of Thirukadayur near Mayiladuthurai in Tamil Nadu. The caption at the bottom of the picture, Sri Abirami Thunai, declares a claim for protection by this deity.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 24<\/a>- The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 28: This calendar is from a Muslim-owned business with a majority Hindu clientele. The absence of religious imagery makes this calendar noteworthy.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 28<\/a>)<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 24: Abirami, also known as Shakti, is the Goddess of Thirukadayur near Mayiladuthurai in Tamil Nadu. The caption at the bottom of the picture, Sri Abirami Thunai, declares a claim for protection by this deity.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 24<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 25: Lord Venkateswara of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, with his consort the goddess Lakshmi residing on his chest. The picture is composed using a photograph of Lakshmi superimposed on a photograph of the Venkateswara icon from the Tirupati temple. The calendar appears to be from a grain merchant. The two perforations beneath the picture, against the blue background, indicate where the daily calendar sheets were secured.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 25<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The contrasts with earlier calendar art shown in this essay permit a few tentative generalizations.29<\/sup>  Earlier artists frequently drew the spectator into an embodied rather than disinterested relationship to the picture, something Christopher Pinney has taught us to appreciate as a distinctive feature of this art.30<\/sup>  They did this through an emphasis on the gaze, as observers saw themselves being seen by deities in the picture itself, encapsulated in the idea of darshan. It could feature mythological scenes with multiple characters, and non-perspectival portraits of gods with their feathered or furred vehicles. Elephants and lions appeared no larger than dogs, underlining their relative importance vis-à-vis the deities. The positioning of the vendor’s name was sometimes in the same pictorial field, and sometimes appeared as a framing element, and the vendors were at times foreign multinationals not known for their Indic religiosity.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 26: The Saivite goddess Shakti. She is seated in front of a pot of rice, and pours gold coins from her hand, suggesting she is also to be understood as Lakshmi, consort of Vishnu and the goddess of prosperity.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 26<\/a><\/span>           The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 27: Sri Karpaka Vinayakar of Pillayarpatti, Tamil Nadu, an icon of Lord Ganesa considered auspicious by students seeking academic success. The use of the picture by a sports store also suggests that the audience includes students.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 27<\/a><\/span>          The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Fig. 28: This calendar is from a Muslim-owned business with a majority Hindu clientele. The absence of religious imagery makes this calendar noteworthy.<\/p><\/h2>\">Fig. 28<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Contemporary calendar art, at least in these urban South Indian examples, when focused on mythological themes, tends to identify gods associated with specific sites of pilgrimage and worship, and often relies on photographic portraits of those deities. The images tend to be close-ups of a single deity associated with one or more specific sites, or where more than one deity is depicted, of particular temple deities. Photographs are at least as frequent as illustrations, if not more common. If previously, an embodied relation of the spectator to the images was prominent, indicated by the frontal gaze of the god portrayed, increasingly the sense of being seen can itself be absorbed by photographic verisimilitude. Where they exist, artists illustrations of gods and goddesses tend to be natural and perspectival, and there are fewer supernatural elements. Beings with many heads and arms are gone, and except for the curious exception of the elephant-god Ganesha, gods that are both animal and human, or are reptilian, seem scarce. Textual and pictorial elements of the images, combined with ethnographic information, suggest a further contrast.31<\/sup> Themes of prosperity and protection are more pronounced in latter-day calendar art. This is no doubt connected to the rendition of the frontal gaze into a more abstract quality, to be imputed to the stone or metal figurine portrayed in the photograph, since the eyes of the deity are not always distinct. Since the embodied sense of incorporation by the image is no longer available, its equivalent requires to be conveyed by other means, such as through words or through mention of specific places of devotional potency. The sites of display of these images appear to have moved further into the private sphere, and are more identified with specific forms of regional and ritual observance.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

By contrast, older calendar art, when dwelling on mythological themes invoked a wider range of responses, and was less exclusively focused on prosperity and protection. Gods and goddesses, when pictured, were not identified with specific temples or icons, but rather, pointed to a fabulous, textured universe that could evoke nationwide recognition, or help to mediate between different regional folklores.  Religious and mythological imagery did not necessarily signal ideological conformity. On the contrary, it could embrace naturalistic as well as non-perspectival imagery, life-like as well as supernatural elements, and constitutional political authority alongside charismatic, magical or deistic powers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Earlier calendar art presented mythological themes as readily available currency in images, and by so doing, portrayed the magical and the supernatural dimensions of a world in which their integral relation to the everyday was taken for granted. It emerged in a period when businesses, foreign and Indian, found it convenient to assume or retain a vernacular habit, and native elites were willing to see national distinction in a range of popular cultural forms. Such a convergence of interests undoubtedly increased the volume and visibility of this art form, and thereby ensured that what are in many cases ephemeral creations that have vanished with the goods and services they advertised, have endured.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Since then, new mechanisms and arenas of cultural production have proliferated. The forces shaping calendar art today are not only those of popular taste, but also of more stratified and varied spaces of expression both within and across classes, in terms of private and public spheres, upper and lower reaches of the market, and materially diverse platforms of display. In this context, calendar art appears more coy in its references to the magical and supernatural, preferring representational styles that embed such meanings in more literal pictorial forms. While older forms of calendar art may persist, their mode of appropriation by urban, educated classes is more often as art or as historical artifact. Nevertheless, the visual archive glimpsed here and in the other papers on the Tasveerghar site present a history of visual perception that requires to be understood on its own terms.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Indian Visual<\/strong>
\r\nIt is relevant to recall here the work of Jonathan Crary, who has argued that the socialization of perception accompanying new techniques and instruments of vision in the 19th century in the West did not only undermine classical laws of perspective, including the assumption of an all-seeing observer, and of a unified field of vision. The revolution in technologies of perception involved, crucially, the displacement of the stable perceiving subject and his\/her incorporation into a larger socio-technical apparatus. Both optical stimulus and individual response are anticipated and incorporated in emerging systems of governance by the beginning of the 20th C., Crary argues. Viewing audiences are exposed to forms of entertainment that accustom them to the partial and fragmentary character of individual perception, and to the instability of perspective. These have been rendered ludic by incorporation into street side nickelodeons and peep-shows using new optical instruments. Crary does not assume a seamless transmission of popular cultural practices from the fairground to the factory and to postmodern society thereafter. Methods of attention management and for the regulation and minimization of distraction occupied engineers and industrialists, who prescribed ways of ensuring that workers could be focused and disciplined, he argues.33<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

By contrast, in the Indian context, the forms of governmentality are themselves fractured and liable to disruption, while power lacks legitimacy and is constantly being challenged, whatever combination of political and theological features it presents. Images maybe used as conduits of ideology, but due to the existence of multiple and discontinuous forms of authority, these are at best leaky conduits, that cannot reliably achieve their intended outcomes. Here we have artists who combine realist idioms with diversely imagined social and political scenarios, in which the authority of the image can never be taken for granted. Rather, such authority requires seeking and asserting each time, employing combinations of strong and weak symbols suitably arranged. On occasion using deistic imagery or deistic representational styles are used, that are so various in their rendition that they have clearly become artifices rather than a guarantee of acceptability. Here we have the suggestion of a very different route to the possibility of popular empowerment, where myth and religiosity can offer epistemic and symbolic leverage to re-assess an overweening modernity, albeit in largely Hindu-inflected terms.34<\/sup><\/p>\r\n\r\n

I suggest that such images therefore represent a potentially democratic medium, one whose limits are very far from being tested as yet.<\/p>","pageBackColor":"#993300","topLineTextColor":"#ffffff","title":"

The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/p>","subTitle":"","footNotes":"

1 In this context, see my essay “Advertising, Politics and the Sentimental Education of the Indian Consumer,” Visual Anthropology Review<\/em>, vol. 14 no. 2, 1998-99, pp. 14-31. On commodity aesthetics, see Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society<\/em>, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, e.g., p. 8. For a somewhat differently inflected but useful discussion of the commodity image in the context of Indian advertising, see William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India<\/em>, Duke University Press, 2003.
\r\n2 In this essay I consider Hindu mythological imagery alone. On Muslim imagery in calendar art, see Sandria B Freitag,  “South Asian ways of seeing, Muslim ways of knowing: The Indian Muslim niche market in posters,” The Indian economic and social history review<\/em>. 44, no. 3, (2007), pp. 297-331.
\r\n3 See Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art<\/em>. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
\r\n4 The distinction is made in Boris Groys, Art Power<\/em>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, pp. 90-91, and has been discussed in his lecture, “Everybody is an Artist,” at the School of Visual Arts, New York, January 21, 2010. Groys’ discussion of these terms however, both in the book and in the lecture, relates them chiefly to contemporary art practice vis-à-vis mass culture and new media. My thanks to Magdalena Sabat for drawing my attention to Groys’ discussion.  Clearly, ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ are relational properties of an image that vary with context, rather than inhering in their own characteristics.
\r\n5 Jim Masselos, “A goddess for everyone: the mass production of divine images,” in Jackie Menzies, ed. Goddess Divine Energy<\/em>. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales and Thames and Hudson, 2006, p. 148.
\r\n6 In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts<\/em>, Marx emphasizes that production and consumption are equivalent and interchangeable from the point of view of capital. A recent critical intervention in this connection is the work of Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle<\/em>. Dartmouth, NH: University Press of New England, 2006.
\r\n7 In this connection, see Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy<\/em>. Tr. Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 105. See the important discussion in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference<\/em>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 52-53.
\r\n8 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle<\/em>. Tr. Donaldson Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1995.
\r\n9 For a discussion of some of the methodological issues involved in such an approach, see Susan Buck-Morss, “Visual Studies and Global Imagination,” Papers of Surrealism<\/em>, Issue 2, Summer 2004. My thanks to Jamie Berthe for the reference.
\r\n10 As late as 1936, Nehru remarked about the English press in India, that Indians as such were absent in it; even the doings of the nationalist politics would be confined to a few lines in the back page. J.Nehru, An Autobiography<\/em>. New Delhi: Publications Division, 1980, p. 48.
\r\n11 My thanks to Nityanandan Ashwath for his aeronautical expertise in reading this image.
\r\n12 S. Muthiah, “A 200 year-old chapter ends,” The Hindu, Nov 12, 2001. http:\/\/www.hinduonnet.com\/thehindu\/mp\/2001\/11\/12\/stories\/2001111200120300.htm
\r\n13 David Arnold, “Industrial Violence in Colonial India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History<\/em>, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), p. 251.
\r\n14 For a more extensive discussion, see my Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India<\/em>, Cambridge, 2001, and also “Advertising in India: Genealogies of the Consumer-Subject,” in Modern Makeovers: A Handbook of Modernity in South Asia<\/em> ed. Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
\r\n15 See footnote 20 below.
\r\n16 I am thinking here of the decline of the genre of mythological films over the 1970s and 1980s, and the change in fortunes of this genre with the onset of television and the broadcast of epic serials from 1987 onwards. See Rajagopal, 2001, ibid.
\r\n17 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty<\/em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political,” in his Democracy and Political Theory<\/em>, tr. David Macey, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
\r\n18 See in this connection Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern<\/em>. Tr. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
\r\n19 See Kajri Jain, ibid<\/em>. for a discussion of ‘vernacular capitalism.’
\r\n20 See e.g., Resolution of the Marwari Chamber of Commerce, 20 June 1915, in No.132, August 1915, in Bengal Chamber of Commerce, Abstract Proceedings<\/em>, Vol.II, p. 46; and, B. Das, ‘Statement of objects and reasons…’ in Govt of India Legislative Assembly Dept. letter of 6 March 1930 to Govt of Bombay Legal Dept, in British Library: India Office and Records, Bombay Financial Proceedings 1930 P\/11835, p.683. Cited in Masselos, ibid<\/em>.,  pp 148-9.
\r\n21 Financial Dept, Govt of Bombay, reply of 9 June 1930 to Govt of India, ibid., p.684; Opinion of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce March 1930, no. 317, in Bengal Chamber of Commerce, Abstract Proceedings<\/em>, Vol. III, pp.241-2. Cited in Masselos, pp. 148-9.
\r\n22 Masselos, ibid<\/em>.
\r\n23 Masselos, ibid<\/em>.
\r\n24 See in this connection Sandria B. Freitag’s essay, “The realm of the visual: Agency and modern civil society,” Contributions to Indian Sociology<\/em> vol. 36, nos. 1 and 2, pp. 365-397, 2002; and see Chris Pinney, Photos of the Gods<\/em>.
\r\n25 Here there may be a sly reference to the Ralli Brothers rather than to the members of the Raghukula vamsa<\/em>, of course. The Ralli Brothers originated as a Greek family enterprise that, after the Napoleonic wars, moved from Marseilles to London, started in India in 1851 with centers in Bombay and Calcutta, trading in agricultural products. The Great Depression led to a closure of the company’s India operations in 1929, and another Greek family, Argenti, stepped in to serve as their agents.  Currently their India division is a subsidiary of Tata and Sons. See http:\/\/www.rallis.co.in\/aboutus\/history.asp
\r\n26 Clearly such images as these do not accommodate Christopher Pinney’s important arguments about colonial “xeno-realism.”  Pinney, ibid<\/em>.
\r\n27 My thanks to Bala Kailasam for his help in reading this image.
\r\n28 I am indebted to the Chennai-based film-maker Bala Kailasam for making me see that present-day calendar art would be an essential point of contrast with the other examples in this paper.  My thanks to him also for providing me with the photographs shown here, as well as for his valuable insights about calendar art today, which inform my discussion.
\r\n29 Scholarly research in calendar art has not sufficiently distinguished historical shifts in representational styles and themes over time, and has, it is fair to say, concentrated on identifying the culturally particular aspects of Indian calendar art. To this extent, despite the critical theoretical thrust of much of this research, the mystique of Indian calendar art and hence its status as objets d’art<\/em>, have unwittingly been reinforced in the process. Given the small sample on which my arguments in this paper are based, my own response must necessarily be read as provisional.
\r\n30 Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods. The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India<\/em>. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.
\r\n31 My generalization derives from the South Indian examples examined for this paper. A wider sample will no doubt complicate this hypothesis.
\r\n32 Imagining the gaze of the deity is not new of course. It is familiar from pre-chromolithographic forms of reproduction of the divine image, notably the clay figures that continue to be used on festival occasions.
\r\n33 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century<\/em>.  Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. See in this connection, Sumathi Ramaswamy ed. Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India<\/em>, New Delhi: Sage, 2003.
\r\n34 This archive, as far as I know, does not offer evidence to allow examining the interaction between different styles of calendar art here, e.g., Hindu and Muslim. But see Freitag, 2007, ibid<\/em>.<\/p>","authorUrl":"arvind-rajagopal","visitgallery":"The Commodity Image in the (Post) Colony<\/h4>Arvind Rajagopal<\/span>

Visit the Gallery: This calendar is from a Muslim-owned business with a majority Hindu clientele. The absence of religious imagery makes this calendar noteworthy.<\/p><\/h2>\">Visit the Gallery<\/a>","unsubscriber":1}