New Cultural Histories of India

Materiality and Practices

FM.indd 1 11/14/2013 4:38:52 PM

FM.indd 2 11/14/2013 4:38:52 PM
 New Cultural Histories of India
Materiality and Practices

Edited by
Partha Chatterjee
Tapati Guha-Thakurta
Bodhisattva Kar

FM.indd 3 11/14/2013 4:38:52 PM

 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in India by
Oxford University Press
YMCA Library Building, 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India

© Oxford University Press 2014

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

First published in 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

ISBN-13: 978-0-19-809037-3
ISBN-10: 0-19-809037-4

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 11/13.6

At MAP Systems, Bengaluru 560 082, India
Printed in India at...

FM.indd 4 11/14/2013 4:38:52 PM

 Dedication

FM.indd 5 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

FM.indd 6 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM
 Contents

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgementsxvii

Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, and Bodhisattva Kar

New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices 1

i.  the textual

1.  Francesca Orsini
For a Multilingual Literary History: North India in the Long
Fifteenth Century 41
2.  Prachi Deshpande
Scripting the Cultural History of Language: Modī in the Colonial
Archive62
3.  Rosinka Chaudhuri
Poet of the Present: The Material Object in the World of
Iswar Gupta 87

ii. the visual

4.  Christopher Pinney
The Look of History: The Power of the Aesthetic 115
5.  Kajri Jain
The Handbag that Exploded: Mayawati’s Monuments and the
Aesthetics of Democracy in Post-Reform India 139
6.  Tapati Guha-Thakurta
Conceits of the Copy: Travelling Replicas of the Past and the
Present180

FM.indd 7 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

 viii  contents

iii. the aural

 7. Rajan Kurai Krishnan
When Kathavarayan Spoke His Mind: The Intricate Dynamics of
the Formations of the Political through Film Making Practices in
Tamil Nadu 223
 8. Lakshmi Subramanian
Music Revivals—Major and Minor: Studying the Politics of
Performance in Modern South India 246

iv. the ritual

 9. Gautam Bhadra
Pictures in Celestial and Worldly Time: Illustrations in
Nineteenth-Century Bengali Almanacs 275
10.  Partha Chatterjee
Football and Collective Identity in Colonial Calcutta 317
11.  Bodhisattva Kar
Heads in the Naga Hills 335

v. the spatial
12.  Swati Chattopadhyay
‘Metro Pattern’: Art Deco Residences and Modern Visuality
in Calcutta 373
13.  Sanjay Srivastava
Urban spaces, Post-nationalism and the Making of the Consumer-
Citizen in India 409
14.  Srirupa Roy
When the Revolution is Televised: Reflections on Media,
Civil Society and Power in Contemporary India 437

Notes on Contributors00
Acknowledgements

FM.indd 8 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

 List of Illustrations

4.1  The materiality of script. ‘The Elements of the Devanagari

Character’ lithographed plate from John Shakespear, A
Grammar of the Hindustani Language (London: Cox and
Bayliss, 1826). The distinction between the linguistic and
non-linguistic is often invoked and seems straightforward.
However, all language, spoken and written must of necessity
be materially incarnated. 116
4.2  Frontispiece to Edward Moor’s The Hindu Pantheon published
by William Blake’s friend Joseph Johnson. 119
4.3  ‘Cutting Indigo into Cakes and Stamping’. Photogravure plate
from Indigo (Boston: Howe, Balch and Co, 1891). Original
photograph by Oscar Mallite. 121
4.4  Offset chromolithograph depicting Ambedkar as a ‘citizen of the
world’.124
4.5  Offset chromolithograph depicting Bhagat Singh wearing a trilby,
symbolizing his ability to ‘pass’ between different identities. 125
4.6  India Shining. Image produced under the aegis of the NDA
Government immediately prior to the 2004 election. 128
4.7  ‘Shining, Shining, Burning Bright’: the Blakean Times of India
headline following the Lucknow tragedy. 15th April 2004. 128
4.8  Politique Noire: the Congress critique of India Shining,
couched in a radically different aesthetic. 129
4.9  Ganga Mata emerging to receive Ravidas’ betel-nut offering at
Varanasi. Detail from offset chromolithograph. 131
4.10 Mangilal a village ghorla thrashing with the presence of
Kali.133
4.11 Ahmad Ali Khan’s image of L.E. Ruutz Rees. © The British
Library Board.135
5.1  Front approach to main Ambedkar memorial (Dr Bhimrao
Ambedkar Smarak), Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal

FM.indd 9 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

 x  list of illustrations

(Dr B.R. Ambedkar Site for Social Change), Lucknow,

May 2009. 143
5.2  Statues of B.R. Ambedkar and Ramabai Ambedkar, Sāmājik
Parivartan Pratik Sthal (Site Symbolizing Social Change) at the
approach to the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal,
Lucknow, July 2008. Sandstone canopies have subsequently been built
over the statues. 144
5.3  Statue of Sant Ravidas, one of a series of Dalit icons along an
avenue between the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan
Sthal and the Gomti River known as Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar
Gomti Buddha Vihar, Lucknow, August 2011. 144
5.4  Women security guards at the entrance to Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar
Gomti Buddha Vihar, Lucknow, August 2011. 145
5.5  Visitors with stone elephant (with raised trunk) during the
construction of the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal,
Lucknow, May 2009.  146
5.6  ‘Statue of Mayawati with her handbag at Manyawar Kanshiram
Memorial; this statue stands next to one of Kanshiram under a
125-foot diameter dome. Lucknow, August 2011.  149
5.7  The surface treatment of the main memorial and other elements
at the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal borrows motifs
from early (1st–2nd century BCE) Buddhist cave carvings such as
those at Ajanta, Karle, Bedsa, Pitalkhora, and Bhaja. May 2009.
Photograph by courtesy of Sarah Richardson. 153
5.8  The ‘monumental elephant gallery’: an avenue of sixty
elephants leading up to a relief depicting a map of the Ambedkar
memorial complex. Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal,
Lucknow, August 2011. 154
5.9  Colonnades of freestanding Chunar stone columns, each capped by
four bronze elephant heads. Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan
Sthal, Lucknow, May 2009. Photograph by courtesy of Sarah
Richardson.154
5.10 View from the Bhimrao Ambedkar Smarak structure towards the
elephant gallery. Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal,
Lucknow, May 2009. 155
5.11 Stūpa-like forms capping the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Smarak and
statue canopies at the Dr BR Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal,
Lucknow, May 2009. The early Indic stūpas on which these forms are
based usually had no internal space that was open to be seen
or entered, and probably featured a wooden superstructure. 157

FM.indd 10 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

 list of illustrations  xi

5.12 Man.gal Mahādev’, an eighty-foot Shiva statue, and monumental

statues of Radha and Krishna in the Birla Kanan park along National
Highway 8, near Delhi’s international airport, December 2008.
The Shiva statue was inaugurated in 1994, while the others (Radha-
Krishna and, opposite them, Ram-Sita) were built in 2008–9.166
5.13 Seated bronze Ambedkar statue by Ram Sutar, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar
Smarak, Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal, Lucknow,
May 2009. The statue is clearly based on the white marble statue of
Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French at the Lincoln Memorial
in Washington DC. 167
5.14 Bronze relief mural in an ante-room adjoining the main Ambedkar
memorial statue, thematizing the foundation, inauguration, and
completion of the Ambedkar memorial complex. Dr Bhimrao
Ambedkar Smarak, Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal,
Lucknow, May 2009. 169
5.15 Twelve-foot bronze statues of Mayawati and Kanshi Ram presenting
the mural in Figure 5.14. Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Smarak, Dr B.R.
Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal, Lucknow, May 2009. 170
6.1  Remake of the Sanchi Stupa at Luoyang, China—photograph,
courtesy, Ashish Chakrabarty, 2008. 182
6.2  Copy of a Sarnath Buddha sculpture inside the Sanchi Stupa at
Luoyang, China—photograph, courtesy, Ashis Chakrabarty, 2008.182
6.3  Copy of the Taj Mahal under construction at the proposed
amusement park at Sonargaon, Dhaka, 2008—photograph
courtesy of, NDTV. 184
6.4  Full size cast of the eastern gateway of the Sanchi Stupa in the
Architectural Courts of the South Kensington Museum, London,
1872—photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, London,
Museum No. 72:507. 188
6.5  Replicated casts of the eastern gateway of the Sanchi Stupa at the
London International Exhibition, 1871—from Graphic,
6 May 1871—photograph, courtesy of Timothy Barringer,
Yale Center for British Art, USA. 191
6.6  The India Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley,
London, 1924—reproduced from India: British Empire Exhibition
1924 Catalogue (London: Baynard Press, 1924), courtesy of Yale
University Library. 193
6.7  Yet, it was the Taj Mahal which was featured on the cover of India:
British Empire Exhibition 1924 Catalogue (London: Baynard Press,
1924), photograph courtesy of Yale University Library. 195

FM.indd 11 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

 xii  list of illustrations

6.8  Replica of the Amarnath cave temple at Amrapur, Mahdudi,

Gujarat—photograph reproduced with permission from India
Today Images (www.indiatodayimages.com). 199
6.9  An Akshardham temple look-alike as a Durga Puja pavilion,
Ekdalia Evergreen Puja, Calcutta, 2007. 201
6.10 Asian Paints awards banners (celebrating 25 years of this Durga
Puja award) and other trophies of a Puja on display—Lalabagan
Nabankur Sangha Puja, Maniktala, Calcutta, 2009. 202
6.11 An Art-Deco style installation filling the narrow alley of the
Nalin Sarkar Street Puja, Hatibagan, Calcutta, 2006. 203
6.12 Remake of the Vithhala temple of Hampi, Vijaynagar at the
Bakulbagan Puja, Bhowanipur, Calcutta, 2008. 204
6.13 Façade of the Opera House of Paris constructed as a Puja
Pavilion, GD Block Puja, Salt Lake, Calcutta, 2009. 205
6.14 Replica of the wooden palace of Padmanabhapuram, Kerala,
recreated by designer Dipak Ghosh, Tridhara Sammilani Pujja,
Monoharpukur Road, Calcutta, 2008.206
6.15 A Gond folk art village at the, Behala Club Puja, Hatibagan,
Calcutta, 2006. 207
6.16 The synchronized Durga image of the Gond folk art village,
Behala Club Puja, Calcutta, 2006. 208
6.17 Painted hutments of a Ghana village on display at the
Behala Sahajatri Puja, Calcutta, 2004. 209
6.18 An African art installation in copper, wood, and bamboo,
desgined by Subodh Ray at the Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja,
Calcutta, 2004. 210
6.19 Art of the ancient Inca civilization on display at the
41 Pally Puja, Haridebpur, Calcutta, 2007. 210
6.20 The Hogwarts castle from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories,
at the FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, Calcutta, 2007. 212
9.1  A page from the early printed almanac, title page missing,
1825–6, Serampore. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 277
9.2  Conversation between Siva and Parvati, woodcut, 15.5 x 10.7,
by Krishnachandra Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1842–3,
Chandroday Press at Serampore. Courtesy of National Library,
Calcutta.280
9.3  Cover page of Lord Ripon’s Pañjikā,, 1884–5, compiled and
published by Benimadhab De, Chitpur, 1884. Courtesy of
Bodleian Library, Oxford. 281

FM.indd 12 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

 list of illustrations  xiii

9.4  Solar eclipse, metal plate, 17 x 11.5, artist unknown, 1818–19,

almanac by Durgaprasad Vidyabhushan, Jorasanko, 1818.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 284
9.5  Durga Puja, woodcut, 15.5 x 10.7, by Krishnachandra
Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, Chandroday Press at Serampore,
1842–3. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 287
9.6  Durga Puja, woodcut, electro block, 16.8 x 11, Nūtan pañjikā,
1894–5, Benimadhab De. Courtesy of National Library,
Calcutta.288
9.7  Durga Puja, 15 x 10.3, Naba bibhākar pañjikā, 1920–1,
Shambhuchandra Chatushpathi, 1920. Courtesy of National
Library, Calcutta. 289
9.8  Woodcut, 22 x 22, Nūtan pañjikā, 1869–70, Nrityalal Sil,
Calcutta, 1869. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 291
9.9  Cover/Title page, Nūtan pañjikā, 1842–3, Chandroday Press at
Serampore. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 293
9.10 Cover, 21 x 11, by Heeralal Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā,
1869–70, Nrityalal Sil. Courtesy of National Library,
Calcutta294
9.11 Cover, coloured process block, 16.5 x 9, P.M. Bagchi’s Nūtan
directory pañjikā, preserved in the design book of Priyagopal
Das, 1905. Courtesy of Arup Sengupta. 295
9.12 Sam.krānti-purus.a, woodcut, 11.6 x 10.6, Nūtan pañjikā, 1840–1,
Chandroday Press at Serampore, Courtesy: National Library,
Calcutta.296
9.13 Image of Ketu, woodcut, Nūtan pañjikā, 1840–1, Chandroday
Press at Serampore, Courtesy: National Library, Calcutta. 297
9.14 Lakshmi, woodcut, 7.5 x 11, by Ramdhan Swarnakar, Nūtan
pañjikā, 1835–6, Dinasindhu Press, Courtesy: National Library,
Calcutta.298
9.15 Chad.ak, woodcut, 20 x 12, by Krishnachandra Karmakar, Nūtan
panjikā, 1840–1, Chandroday Press at Serampore, Courtesy:
National Library, Calcutta. 299
9.16 Chad.ak, woodcut, 16 x 11, by Krishnachandra Karmakar, Nūtan
pañjikā, 1842–3, Chandroday Press at Serampore. Courtesy of
National Library, Calcutta. 300
9.17 Chad.akpūjā, woodcut, 14 x 12, by Nrityalal Datta, Nūtan
pañjikā, title page missing, 1877–8. Personal collection of the
author.302

FM.indd 13 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

 xiv  list of illustrations

9.18 Jagannatha’s Snānayātrā, woodcut, 16 x 11, by Krishnachandra

Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1842–3, Chandroday Press at
Serampore. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 303
9.19 Jagannatha’s Snānayātrā, woodcut, 20 x 12, by Ramchandra
Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1858–9, Chandroday Press at
Serampore. Courtesy of Uttarpara Joykrishna Public Library. 304
9.20 Jagannatha’s Snānayātrā, electro block, 20 x 12, by Heeralal
Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1869–70, Nrityalal Sil. Courtesy of
National Library, Calcutta. 305
9.21 Rathayātra, woodcut, 15.5 x 10.7, by Krishnachandra Karmakar,
Nūtan pañjikā, 1842–3, Chandroday Press at Serampore.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 307
9.22 Rathayātra, electro block, 17.5 x 11, by Panchanan Karmakar,
Nūtan pañjikā, 1900–01, Benimadhab De & Co., Courtesy of
National Library, Calcutta. 308
9.23 Śivarātri, woodcut, 21 x 12, by Panchanan Karmakar, Nūtan
pañjikā, 1870–1, Harihar Press. Courtesy of National Library,
Calcutta.309
9.24 Śivarātri, woodcut, 17 x 11, by Panchanan Karmakar, Nūtan
pañjikā, 1894–5, Benimadhab De & Co. Courtesy of National
Library, Calcutta. 310
.
9.25 Daśaharā gan gā o manasā pujā, woocut, 17.5 x 11, by Panchanan
Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1894–5, Benimadhab De & Co.,
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 311
9.26  ‘Śiva giving salsā’, woodcut, 8 x 7, advertisement of N.C.
Mukherjee & Co, Nūtan pañjikā, 1898–9, Benimadhab De &
Co., Vidyaratna Press. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 313
9.27  Advertisement of Mahāmeda Rasāyana, Vr.hat Āyurvedīya Aus.
adhālaya, Upper Chitpore Road, woodcut, 5.5 x 6, Nūtan
pañjikā, 1898–9, Benimadhab De & Co., Vidyaratna Press.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta. 314
12.1  Residence on 25 Camac Street, by Ballardie Thomson, and
Mathews. © Swati Chattopadhyay. 374
12.2  Residence in Lake Terrace. © Swati Chattopadhyay. 376
12.3  Illustration from Śrīmatī, section on ‘Travel Letters: Home
and the World’. Courtesy of Keya Dasgupta. 388
12.4  Illustration from Śrīmatī, section on ‘Books, Film, Radio,
Record: Criticism’. Courtesy of Keya Dasgupta. 389
12.5  Detail plan of kitchen/dining room, Śrīmatī. Courtesy of
Keya Dasgupta.391

FM.indd 14 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

 list of illustrations  xv

12.6  Sketch of two-bedroom house, Śrīmatī. Courtesy of

Keya Dasgupta. 392
12.7  Plan of two-bedroom house, Srimati. Courtesy of
Keya Dasgupta. 393
12.8  Plan of house on 25 Camac Street. Ballardie Thomson and
Mathews. © Swati Chattopadhyay. 395
12.9  Plan of house on 6 Alipore Park. Mackintosh Burn Pvt. Ltd.
© Swati Chattopadhyay. 396
12.10 House on Basanta Roy Road, c. 1920s.
© Swati Chattopadhyay. 397
12.11 Site Plan of 156/2 and 157 Block G, New Alipore; based on
drawing in the archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation.
© Swati Chattopadhyay. 398
12.12 Plan of 156/2 Block G, New Alipore; based on drawing in
the archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. © Swati
Chattopadhyay.399
12.13 View of 156/2 Block G, New Alipore. 156/2 is to the left of
the image. © Swati Chattopadhyay. 400
12.14 Plan of 157 Block G, New Alipore; based on drawing in the
archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. © Swati
Chattopadhyay.401
12.15 Site Plan of 372, Block G, New Alipore; based on drawing
in the archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. © Swati
Chattopadhyay.402
12.16 Plan of 372 Block G, New Alipore; based on drawing in the
archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. © Swati
Chattopadhyay.403
13.1  DLF advertisement, 1955. 413
13.2  Gates installed by an RWA. 420
13.3  Inside a Gated Community. 421

FM.indd 15 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

FM.indd 16 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM
 Acknowledgements

FM.indd 17 11/14/2013 4:38:53 PM

 New Cultural Histories of India
Materiality and Practices

Partha Chatterjee
Tapati Guha-Thakurta
Bodhisattva Kar

What routes has the writing of Indian cultural histories traversed in the
recent past? How has the coming together of history with disciplines like
sociology social anthropology, literature, art history, film, and performance
studies enlivened research into cultural pasts and presents? How may we
position our interdisciplinary collection of essays within this changing lie
of the land? It is a challenge to present as a collective this body of cultural
histories that swings from the pre-colonial and early modern period into
the dense thicket of the postcolonial and contemporary era, delving into
fields as diverse as eighteenth-century scribal cultures of Western India or
mid-twentieth century Art Deco architecture in Calcutta, early illustrated
Bengali almanacs or circulating heads in the Naga hills, the affective powers
of football in Calcutta’s nationalist politics, or of monumental statuary in
Mayawati’s Lucknow. The themes covered here are varied and disparate,
as may seem the methods and analytical approaches. How can we string
together a set of overarching connections between them? More importantly,
how can we notate their ‘newness’ in ways that are not reducible merely to
the novelty of their subject matter? There is an intended tendentiousness in
the use of the tag ‘new’ in naming this volume. However, rather than labour
under the burden of marking a sharp break from any supposedly ‘old’ strong-
hold in the field, our brief will be to see how the concerns of these essays
crisscross some of the recent journeys undertaken by cultural history and
push them in uncharted directions.

Introduction.indd 1 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 2  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The Historiographical Context

In introducing her edited volume The New Cultural History in 1989, Lynn
Hunt had marked the transition from the preponderance of social history in
the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, spearheaded by the twin forces of Marxist and
Annales historiography, toward a new configuration of the ‘cultural’ as the
defining trend of the 1980s. The volume located itself at a historiographical
conjuncture in which the solid edifice of social and economic history, built
through the twentieth century as the product of the historians’ adoption of
social-scientific methods of research and analysis, was crumbling.1 The shift
from the ‘social’ to the ‘cultural’ was signposted in the historian’s engagement
with the literary and the representational, especially with modes of linguistic
analysis that came to be extended from printed texts to images and objects as
well as to collective social actions, rituals, and performances. Beginning with
E.H. Carr’s oft-quoted invocation of 1961 that ‘the more sociological history
becomes, and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both’,
Hunt concludes by paraphrasing Carr: ‘the more cultural historical studies
become and the more historical cultural studies become, the better for both’.2
When ten years later, Lynn Hunt, in association with Victoria Bonnell, took
stock once more of new directions in the historical studies of society and
culture, the editors took seriously the analysis of cultural representation, but
stressed that the ‘social’ ought not to be dismissed as a purely discursive for-
mation or a mere figment of the fictional imagination.3 Rather, even in the
new histories appearing after the ‘cultural turn’, there was still a striving for
and a fresh foregrounding of social explanation—in particular, to account for
the effects of power on social relations, and to relate the material and practical
aspects of cultural representation to social processes.4
It is in view of this strategic realignment of the ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ in new
historical research, as well in its clearly analogous title, that our volume needs
to be both positioned in relation to and set apart from these other antholo-
gies. While the specification of early modern and nineteenth-century Europe
could be easily dropped from the title of the Hunt volumes, the phrase ‘of
India’ has been firmly affixed to this anthology. This is so despite the way
‘India’ as a cohesive national entity dissolves in the face of several regional and
vernacular formations in these essays, and the divergent locational histories
they narrate seldom add up to the unity of the nation. Yet India as the select
topos for these investigations by scholars based in academic institutions in
the country and abroad, strongly marks out the distinctiveness of these new
histories from the Western master prototype. This is also why these cultural
histories are resolutely plural as against the proposed singularity and authority

Introduction.indd 2 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 new cultural histories of india  3

of The New Cultural History of the West. Proliferations, repetitions and mul-
tiplicities dominate the worlds of production and practices charted here. We
encounter this in the multilingual histories of literary texts and scripts that are
shown to flourish in northern and western India in the era before print; in the
prodigious spread of replicas and remakes of Indian monuments across differ-
ent parts of India and the globe; in the vicarious anthropological and political
careers of the prohibited object of ‘hunted’ Naga heads; in the mushrooming
of gated middle-class residential enclaves in post-­Independence New Delhi;
or in the boom in the vocation of small-town ‘stringer’ journalists following
the contemporary liberalization of the country’s news media.
In attempting our present appraisal of new cultural histories of India, we
also do not wish to present the same developments charted in the Euro-
American context with a decadal lag. In fact, as we will outline below, the
recent trajectory of cultural histories of India has followed a path distinctly
different from that in European or American history writing. Although there
was a cultural turn in historiography, there was never the same influence
of Hayden White or Clifford Geertz on historians of India.5 And while the
move from positivist facts to cultural representation was perceptible, social
history nevertheless continued to enjoy a rich following.6 Consequently, if
the study of materiality and practices marked a note of aspiration for leading
cultural historians in the United States a decade ago, the moment had arrived
for Indian history, albeit by a different route—a route that will be traced
in this introductory essay. The essays that follow will then describe certain
major fields of cultural practice—the textual, the visual, the aural, the ritual,
and the spatial—in which the twin tasks of dealing with the material and the
representational, or of explanation and interpretation, have been tackled in
the recent historiography of India.
This volume is the third in a series of collections of essays put together at
the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. The first of these, History
and the Present, had engaged with the question of the extent to which press-
ing political and social issues of the present were influencing the topics and
perspectives of historical scholarship.7 The second collection, History in the
Vernacular, looked at the distinct forms of historical writing that had devel-
oped in the Indian languages since the nineteenth century—in the shadow
of, but always somewhat different from, academic historical writings that
were predominantly in English.8 Both of these volumes had to grapple with
the difficult, and often controversial, question of the relation between the
academic/professional and the public/popular domains of historical memory.
The present volume brings the project to a close with an overview of the key

Introduction.indd 3 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 4  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

transitions in both subject matter and method that have characterized the
so-called ‘cultural turn’ in history writing on India.
In the next sections, we will traverse some of the grounds that were laid
out for cultural histories and cultural studies in India over the 1980s, 1990s
and 2000s, as against the field mapped by the Lynn Hunt volumes, in order
to think about what may be entailed in our projections of the ‘new’. If the
contours of the period’s socially and culturally-oriented histories took shape
under the celebrated sign of ‘difference’ of India’s colonial and nationalist
modernities vis-à-vis Western models, what emerged in the name of cultural
studies in India in the 1990s also shared few of the characteristics of the
eponymous discipline spawned by the Birmingham school in Britain or that
in the United States, and has never easily fallen into the net of an institu-
tional department. Our intention here is not to offer a detailed state of the
disciplines survey, as is often the form taken by many introductory chapters
of such anthologies. Instead, we would like to conceive of a broad genealogy
for the essays gathered here in terms of two main schematic outlines of the
recently changing directions of cultural history in India. The first of these
will foreground the study of popular cultures as a prime ground of shifting
approaches, and look at the coming of age of new categories of the ‘popular’
and the ‘public’ as a burgeoning interdisciplinary field of study. The second
rubric will take up in separate and complementary registers the older ‘linguis-
tic’ and ‘discursive’ turn and the newer ‘visual’ turn in the field to see how
they feed into each other and together chart an academic flow that brings us
into the present.

Genealogies of the Popular

One of the most contentious categories of cultural analysis, the ‘popular’ as
an object of study, has a long lineage. Over the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century, the traditions of Orientalist and nationalist scholarship had
bestowed on the domain of the ‘popular’ a peculiar double character. The
‘popular’ was either stamped as something utterly negative—vulgar, cor-
rupt, debased, and low in comparison with the canonical, the sanctified, the
­authorized—or it was valorized as the authentic repository of continuing
national tradition, uncontaminated by industrial modernity. The studies of
popular culture of the 1980s rejected both of these a priori evaluations that
flowed from either negative or idealized definitions of the ‘people’ and the
cultures they embodied. Instead, they focused on specific groups or commu-
nities that happened to be collective producers and/or consumers of various

Introduction.indd 4 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 new cultural histories of india  5

popular cultural products—groups or communities that could be local, but

also dispersed across regions and even countries. No longer easily contained
by Orientalist or nationalist disciplinary formations, the study of the popular
struggled to evolve alternative frames of social and aesthetic evaluation, even
as it needed to negotiate its position against the worlds of elite or high cul-
ture. Here, the efflorescence of popular history in Europe in the 1970s and
1980s became instructive for historians of India.9
But new questions had to be confronted to deal with the Indian material.
Was the relationship between elite and popular to be cast in terms of oppo-
sition and segregation, or of mutual borrowing and co-constitution? Once
the idealized definitions of the classical or canonical cultures of nationalist
construction had been set aside, it became clear that the boundary between
the high and the low, the elite and the popular, was not only frequently
blurred but also subject to active negotiation and periodic redefinition.
The contradistinction between elite and popular cultures came to be seen
as discursively constructed in a political field of cultural strategies, which in
themselves needed to be mapped, analysed, and interpreted. Popular culture
could no longer be seen as occupying its own distinct domain, practising its
own distinct forms, genres or styles. Rather, it was shown to exist in an active
field of mimicry as well as opposition in relation to high culture, frequently
intruding into or subverting the cultural enclaves of the elite. Placed under
a disaggregating scanner, the domain of the popular itself was found to be
differentiated into layers of products, practices and audiences, whereby new
categories such as the ‘high popular’ or the ‘middle-class popular’ had to be
coined in order to distinguish between these layers of popular culture.
Critical in these negotiations was a growing call for inter-disciplinarity,
since it became clear that the new study of popular culture could not be car-
ried out within the existing boundaries of traditional humanities or social
science disciplines. To enter this expanding domain of the popular and to
engage with its many complexities, the historian had to resort to theories
of anthropology, the archival scholar had to become a field ethnographer
and collector, the art historian needed to turn to folklore and the political
theorist to the sociology of mass consumption. For scholars trained in the
old disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, the study of popular
culture posed huge methodological challenges. A significant response to this
challenge was the move away from textual and written sources to the investi-
gation of oral, visual, ritual, and performative practices. It is largely through
its involvement with the different genres and forms of the popular that we
can trace the early formation of the new orientation (rather than discipline)

Introduction.indd 5 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 6  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

of cultural studies in India during the late 1980s and early 1990s—a forma-
tion that saw the creative aligning of history with the disciplines of sociology
and social anthropology, on one hand, and with the culturally oriented disci-
plines of art history and literary, film, and performance studies, on the other.
Indian experiments with cultural studies during those years were
distinguished by an engagement with the domain of the modern, urban, tech-
nologically mediated forms of print and visual production, as distinct from
what was once valorized as the pure sphere of rural, peasant, pre-­industrial
popular cultures. Three fields emerged as critical areas of new scholarship—
the literary history of the modern vernaculars and the foundational role of
print in the production of both high and popular reading cultures; the parallel
rise of the popular picture industry, especially in its use of modern photo-
graphic techniques, reproductive colour printing and realist representational
conventions in the re-imaging of mythological and national iconographies;
and, as the last in that serial chronology, the birth and spread of the popular
film industry of Hindi and regional language cinemas, as the most powerful
carrier of the modern Indian mass imaginary. These have remained among
the most energetic and creative areas of what we are calling the new cultural
histories of India—a point to which we will return in the next section.
It is instructive to look back on the 1980s as a time when an earlier set
of preoccupation with the primordial, non-urban forms of popular peas-
ant cultures still held sway among different circles of scholarship. One face
of this was manifest in the continuing consecration of the many regional
folk traditions of painting, sculpting, storytelling, song, dance, and theatre,
as uncorrupted living traditions and an endangered cultural resource of
the nation. Coming out of a long nationalist history of anthropological
research, collection and conservation of the folk, this trend moved in these
years into new forms of national and international promotion. The ‘folk’
took its place side by side with the ‘classical’ within new circuits of global
corporate capital in the age of the Festivals of India held in several Western
capitals. A scholar and museum professional like Jyotindra Jain emerged
as one of the most committed representatives of the period’s new creed of
folk aficionados—one who wished to bring India’s folk arts into a modern
global domain and believed that tribal artists working in their specific tra-
ditions must be given a place equal to that of the country’s urban modern
artists.10
On a radically different ideological front, the popular came into the spot-
light in the same decade as a site of subaltern dissent and militancy—of an
autonomous politics of peasant and working-class insurgency against elite

Introduction.indd 6 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 new cultural histories of india  7

and middle-class nationalist leadership. It produced the powerful historio-

graphical intervention of the Subaltern Studies initiative, which drew its first
leads from the period’s great tradition of European Marxist social histories of
popular rebellions and protests. There is a significant trajectory to be charted
in the passage of the Subaltern Studies project from its inaugural years in the
early 1980s to its ‘culturalist’ and ‘discursive’ turn in the 1990s.11 The evolu-
tion of the Subaltern Studies project over the coming decade brought, among
other strands, this new cultural focus on mentalités, opening out to the rich
resources of structural anthropology and the French historical literature on
the subject. Providing his theoretical typology of peasant protests in colo-
nial India, Ranajit Guha was among the foremost to flag off a succession
of structural and sociological analyses of lower-caste religious beliefs, cults,
and mythologies, breaking with orthodox Marxist historiography in uphold-
ing the ‘religious’ as a constituent element of subaltern consciousness.12 It is
within the loose frame of myth and ritual that the study of popular mentalities
also turned to a celebration of the irreverent and the ungodly, the rude and
the subversive, the bawdy and the obscene, highlighting the very attributes
that brought on these cultural expressions the sharp moral censure of the elite.
In a parallel line of scholarship, a writer such as Sumanta Banerjee began to
delve into these lowly cultural worlds of the ‘urban folk’—into the carry-over
of rural, pictorial, and performative genres to the streets of colonial Calcutta
and their steady effacement under the unfolding regimes of a refined and san-
itized elite cultural aesthetic.13 The feminine subaltern—like the ‘dangerous
outcast’ figure of the prostitute—also came to the forefront in this new strand
of investigations of popular culture, as did the politics of gender and sexual-
ity in these domains of social and cultural representation. An ambivalence
towards the domain of popular culture would, however, remain embedded in
the parallel trajectories of feminist history writing that rose to prominence in
India in the 1980s, and carved out its particularly rich and distinguished con-
temporary career. The concerns of feminist historians focused on the deeply
patriarchal norms and practices not only of traditional society but also of
colonial and nationalist reformers. While it added significant new dimen-
sions to the critique of colonial and nationalist modernity, and challenged the
field of dominant representations, feminist scholarship found no easy way of
celebrating or reifying the worlds of local popular culture, which it saw to be
as deeply marked by gender hierarchies and inequities.14
Until the late 1980s, the popular had remained resolutely positioned
against the currents of urban, industrial modernity. Pushed into the eth-
nographic temporality of the mythic, the primitive and the pre-modern, it

Introduction.indd 7 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 8  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

seldom inhabited the time of history, even less the time of the present. The
late 1980s and 1990s witnessed a new surge of academic interest in the tech-
nologically produced, mass-marketed cultural productions of the urban India
of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Put in the new ideological mould
of mass culture, the popular now urgently called out for a revised set of social
and evaluative criteria that would divest it of the taint of the inauthentic,
the corrupt or the debased: pejoratives that have long haunted the phenom-
enon of mass culture in Euro-American theories. The new scholars of Indian
mass culture—whether of the popular novel or chapbook, the mythological
print-picture, the bazaar studio photograph, the blockbuster Hindi film or
television serial—needed especially to turn their backs on the lingering legacy
of the mid-twentieth-century Frankfurt school critiques of what had been
termed the pernicious ‘culture industry’.15 Through the subsequent decades,
critics of mass culture continued to look askance at the way standardization
and mechanical reproduction involved an inevitable debasement in aesthetic
tastes and standards. The revaluation of the 1990s premised itself on a series
of reversals of this critique—arguing, for instance, that the general characteri-
zation of modern society as a massified, industrialized space was inapplicable
to a largely agrarian country such as colonial and postcolonial India; that
the consumers of mass cultural products in such a country were far from
homogenized or passive; or that these worlds of tastes and consumption were
governed by their own artistic preferences and choices.
The end of the 1980s brought into currency the new terminology of
‘public culture’—one that would be vital in inscribing attributes of inven-
tiveness, sophistication, agency and aesthetics into this long vilified sphere
of mass cultural life. The term had its principal proponents in the team of
Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge.16 It was used in careful distinction
from ‘public sphere’ or ‘popular culture’ to break free from the European
master-narratives of the emergence of civil society and bourgeois modernity,
to complicate the received notions of elite/popular, high/low divides, and to
find a way of naming that ‘space between domestic life and the projects of
the nation-state—where different social groups… constitute their identities
by their experience of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of eve-
ryday life’. Public, in this usage, came to indicate arenas of cultural practices
and contestations in varied local and national settings, in which modernity
could become ‘a diversely appropriated experience’.17 It was the time of the
first flush of globalization, and the charge of the new cultural theory was to
present a country like India as a key player, on its own inviolably local and
national terms, in this global modern arena. The emphases were on the local

Introduction.indd 8 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 new cultural histories of india  9

sites of the performances and production of the modern, on the new forms
of popular media, on the transnational cultural flows that energized them,
and on the spaces of reception and consumption. A series of anthologies
would ensue, where the essays were all about ‘interrogating’ or ‘consuming’
modernity in India, with the main aim of giving the many public cultures
of the nation their due place in the prismic structures of global modernities.

From the ‘Linguistic’ to the ‘Visual’ Turn

It is in the recasting of the popular as ‘public’ cultures that we are also able
to best track what is now commonly referred to as the ‘visual turn’ in con-
temporary cultural studies on India. It would leave in its wake a new crop of
archives, collections, exhibitions, renamed art history and film studies depart-
ments, and not least of all, a burgeoning academic book industry. At the heart
of this trend was a growing scholarly obsession with the many picture worlds
and print complexes of contemporary India, with the conviction that it is this
image-field (running across popular prints, posters, calendar art, photography,
stage performance, television and cinema) that provides a unique key to the
nature of the national modern. Riding on a plethora of citations from cultural
theorists who have argued for the hegemony of vision in modernity—ranging
from Heidegger’s widely-bandied statement that ‘the fundamental event of
the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture’,18 to Susan Sontag’s
observation that ‘a society becomes modern when one of its chief activities is
producing and consuming images’,19 to W.J.T. Mitchell’s proclamation that
‘the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the image’20—this
visual turn in modern Indian studies had a special stake in establishing its
credentials vis-à-vis the prevailing primacy of the textual and the literary in
historical analysis and cultural research. It wished, at one level, to shift the
weight from the study of popular print literatures in the many regional ver-
naculars in India to the sphere of visual production and performance to show
these as occupying an equal if not greater space in the popular public cultures
of the nation. It pushed, at another more polemical level, to prioritize the
visual over written sources and records to make a case for visual practices as
forming not a supplementary but a constitutively d ­ ifferent site of knowledge,
yielding its own different histories of Indian modernity and nationalism.21
The aim was to carve out a discrete field of study of mass-mediated popular
visual culture that could stand on its own, separate from the older disciplines
of literature, art history, musicology, or film and theatre studies, even as it
drew liberally on their analytical apparatus.

Introduction.indd 9 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 10  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

In this breaking away, the academic tools of linguistic theory and discourse
analysis remained the key supportive props of the new sphere of study, in
which a widening corpus of pictorial, photographic, architectural, cinematic
or televisual representations would be subject to close ‘textual’ readings. At
the same time, all the normative aesthetic and social categories that attended
the production, consumption, and signification of these representations were
shown to be discursively constructed and calibrated by the historical specifici-
ties of time and space. This would hold true in varying ways for the two visual
genres that emerged as central objects of study in the first flush of enthusi-
asm in the field. In the one case, we have mainstream (non-‘art’) Hindi and
regional cinema—its narratological styles and forms of emplotment, its star
systems and fan clubs, its modes of emanation and reception—becoming
the staple of the new disciplines and departments of film studies in India
during the 1990s. Even as cinema came to be seen as the ideal receptacle of
a mass national imaginary, and the cultural apparatus of the Bombay film
industry was held up as a refracting mirror to the ideological apparatus of the
Indian nation,22 what evolved as the defining face of the new discipline was a
detailed structural analysis of the cinematic ‘text’.23 In the other case, inhabit-
ing a ground prior and parallel to popular cinema, we see a vast repertoire of
mass-produced print pictures—once grouped under the generic label of ‘god’
pictures or ‘calendar art’—becoming the most ubiquitous face of the popular
art of modern India. This category of pictures now came to acquire a richly
inflected and regionally variegated history, laying open the varieties of reli-
gious, mythic and secular nationalist imagery that thrived within the genre.
The draw here for scholars was more on the disciplines of anthropology and
art history. If the one inspired a detailed ethnography of the social worlds of
the producers, traders and consumers of these pictures, the other attempted
a close dissection of the artistic styles, conventions and iconographies, lavish-
ing on these images the same depth of scrutiny that was otherwise reserved
for canonical works of art.24
One could seek a certain lineage for our present collection in a series of
anthologies of the 1990s and 2000s. Mostly coming out of conferences organ-
ized in Britain and the United States, these dipped heavily into the resources
of cultural and visual theory and laid out some of the main contours of
what emerged as the period’s trademark stock of post-colonial, post-modern
scholarship on India. One of the first of these ‘public culture’ volumes, titled
Consuming Modernity, with an introduction by Appadurai and Breckenridge
on ‘Public Modernity in India’, opened up for historical and ethnographic
scrutiny a diverse range of cultural a­ctivities—from the decolonization of

Introduction.indd 10 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 new cultural histories of india  11

Indian cricket, the administration of music programmes on All India Radio,

the development of the heritage tourism industry of princely India, the work-
ings of the Crafts Museum in New Delhi, popular film viewing in Tamil
Nadu, local martial art practices in Kerala, all the way to the cultures of
dining out in cosmopolitan Bombay.25 This eclectic range of themes would
give way, over time, to a more concentrated focus on cinema, television or
mass-produced print imagery as the privileged objects of study. The shift is
clearly marked, for instance, in the volume, Pleasure and the Nation edited
by Chistopher Pinney and Rachel Dwyer,26 which honed in specifically on
the complex zones of reception and spectatorship to unravel the kinds of
visual/sensual pleasures that attended the consumption of popular printed
texts and images, or the viewing of theatre and cinema. At a time when film
studies had emerged in India as a critical new discipline, pointedly turning
its attention away from ‘art’ to mainstream commercial cinema, this edited
volume also upheld the predominance of popular cinema of Bollywood
as the most riveting object of cultural studies and the most representative
sample of Indian mass culture. With the conference volume, Beyond Visual
Appearances, put together by Sumathi Ramaswamy,27 we have one of the earli-
est programmatic statements on the centrality of visual practices in defining
the Indian modern and on the possibilities of an alternative visual history of
the nation that was waiting to be retrieved from the popular image archive—
an archive that constituted itself around the key genre of the ‘calendar art’ of
twentieth-century India.28 The image and performative politics of Hindutva
nationalism emerged centre-stage in another companion volume, edited by
Richard Davis,29 which took the notion of ‘iconography’ out of the tradi-
tional conventions of religious and art historical studies to deploy it across a
collage of pictorial, cinematic and performance sites.
The ‘contemporary’ India that was the subject of all these ‘public culture’
and ‘visual culture’ volumes of the 1990s and 2000s was one that stood most
powerfully connoted by the hegemonic sway of Hindu nationalism. If the
first of these ‘public culture’ volumes set out, in the early 1990s, to grapple
with a distinctly post-Nehruvian, post-secular incarnation of Hindu nation-
hood, by the end of the 2000s, we had arrived at a juncture where we needed
to conceive of a post-Hindutva moment (well past its Ratha-Yatras, videos
or posters of the proposed Ram temple) and confront a new vocabulary of
competing imagery in the electronic and cyber media—in whose refracting
mirror, we would see an increasingly dissolving iconography of the nation.
By this time, the field of visual culture studies was itself being overcome by a
sense of both saturation and predictability. Admittedly, the object-domains

Introduction.indd 11 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 12  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

did not remain static, nor did the pool of technologies, processes, material,
and media they involved. From the pageants of the nation’s Republic Day
Parade to marriage videos and satellite television, from billboards advertising
globalized lifestyles to digital image networks—all began to feature under the
elastic folds of the field. But in this dispersal, notions of the national or the
public, or that of the Indian local or global, were thrown so widely asunder
that the logic of assembling such themes under single visual culture antholo-
gies seemed to become less and less persuasive.
The same charges of the disparate and disconnected can also spill into
the premises of this volume. What would be the new threads with which
we could weave together this heterogeneous body of cultural histories? Ideas
of the inter-textual and inter-visual have allowed for one kind of dialogue
between different representational genres—for instance, between literature
and film, ritual and theatre, or painting and photography. Likewise, ideas of
image complexes and mobilities have shown styles and motifs to travel across
such genres and promiscuously mix and merge. And theories of reception
and spectatorship have worked with many implicit assumptions of cross-
regional, cross-class, multi-gendered communities of tastes and identities. In
what follows, we will attempt to string through the essays of this volume the
twin concepts of ‘materiality’ and ‘practice’ to see how these propel a move
away from the ideational and representational, the linguistic and discursive in
the cultural realm, and push the analytical flow of the category of the ‘social’
and the ‘cultural’ along new currents.

Materiality and Cultural Practices

At stake in this bringing together of materiality and practice is a discursive
tension different from the age-old subject-object dialectic or the simple-
minded opposition between structure and agency. One of the most strikingly
ironic recognitions in the field of intellectual history over the past few dec-
ades has been that of an almost metaphysical indifference to matter in the
self-­professedly materialist accounts. In spite of their emphasis on praxis
and material production, Marxist cultural histories have as a rule turned
away from the specific densities of objects. It seems particularly paradoxical
that, within the analytic structure of a tradition so critical of the regime of
exchange value, all objects become reducible to commodities and each com-
modity is rendered convertible into another through the seamless conduits of
human labour.30 This is neither to deny the existence of recalcitrant moments
in the Marxist tradition nor to advocate a return to the supposedly pure

Introduction.indd 12 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 new cultural histories of india  13

thing-in-itself. But, on the whole, much of the recent academic attention to

materiality arises from a profound dissatisfaction with the over-generalized
scheme of commodity fetishism.31 Not too many Marxist historians in India
responded to Walter Benjamin’s call to explore ‘the soul of the commod-
ity’,32 and almost none to Jean Baudrillard’s heretic semiotics of ‘system of
objects’.33 For most of them, objects qua commodities were inconsequen-
tial stand-ins for the more substantial, more authentic and deeper, hidden
processes of labour, exchange, and accumulation.34 In the final instance, the
object was intelligible only as the alienated part of the subject, a conjured
reverie of human desires and actions. Matter threatened to become the high-
est form of the Idea.
Understandably, the inattention to matter sat well with the notion of
practice privileged in the standard histories. Despite their diverse method-
ologies, dissimilar archives and conflicting agendas, the older social histories
of ‘regions’ and the ‘nation’ and the new historiographical formations around
the category of ‘people’ frequently tended to share an idea of subjective
autonomy, intention, and agency that could at best be called humanist and
at worst unprocessed. An emphatic challenge to such homespun varieties of
humanism arrived in the work of Ranajit Guha. In a manner reminiscent of
the way Pierre Bourdieu had attempted to modify the agenda of structuralist
anthropology by advocating a shift ‘from rules to strategies’,35 Guha sought
to simultaneously emphasize the limiting and the generative functions of a
structure of popular practices which may not be self-evident to the people
using and inhabiting it.36 Indeed, critical and creative negotiations with the
classical themes of structuralism, of which the rule-bounded play of human
practices was one, marked most of the influential histories in the 1980s that
drew inspiration from Guha.37
However, the strong predilection in the critical industry for placing the
early Subaltern Studies works squarely within the Thompsonian tradition of
‘history from below’ eventuated a dominant association of the project with
that of ‘recovering the subject’.38 No doubt, this association was contested
and modified at several levels both inside and outside the collective.39 But in
a sense this was the other side of the much-needed emphasis on the popular.
Many feared that a renewed form of subjectivism, frequently sidestepping
the challenges once represented by structuralism, began to be rehabilitated
through the backdoor, as the term ‘subaltern’ began to gain acceptance among
professional historians and graduate students across the country and abroad
to represent any and every cause of social and political injustice. Thinking
the unthought of the popular, through a critical revisiting of ‘practice’, has

Introduction.indd 13 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 14  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

emerged as a major challenge at this point, particularly as populism of both

left and right-wing varieties have started to sway the South Asian political
scene with reinforced intensity. It is no coincidence that the need for a new
analytic of practice has made itself felt at the moment of exhaustion of social
constructionist historiography.
None of this is to claim that the essays in this volume completely break
free from these approaches and inaugurate a radically different moment in the
South Asian historiography. More exactly, this anthology bears out the ways
in which a number of historians in India have begun to articulate different
degrees of discomfort with the available repertoire of disembodied practices,
dematerialized objects, sovereign subjects, and constative statements. There is
yet no consensual formula of the new—there may never be one. The inspira-
tions are eclectic. The concerns are varied. The provisional conclusions often
stand far removed from each other. What is being wagered here is, in a sense,
the historians’ coming to terms with the irreducible and the unthought. Be it
the tactility of physical contact in the game of football that cannot be uncou-
pled from the techniques of mobilizing large-scale identitarian violence, or the
substantiality of pigments that refuse to split from figuration, or the cinematic
terrain of the hero-actor’s face that resists extrication from the abstract mod-
ernist grammar of producing signification and subjectification: some things
somehow prove obstinate. Obstinate in the face of the historians’ time-tested
mechanism of isolating ‘a design of some practices from a seamless web, in
order to constitute these practices as a distinct and separate corpus, a coherent
whole’.40 How does an onomatopoeic word claim a greater proximity to the
depth of things than the other signs? Where does the fierce independence of
replicas come from? As the commonsensical boundaries of social history are
brought into crisis, statues of stone and bronze leak into the fractured tempo-
rality of a postcolonial democracy, hunted human heads into the allegorical
apparatus of a colonial empire, art deco buildings into the conventions of inti-
macy in popular melodramas. And, constantly, mercilessly, at each point of
these leakages, matter strikes back, muddling the question of agency, blurring
the abuttal of ‘culture’, refusing to stay calm within the confines of received
categories. Perhaps this is the reason why, as Jacques Derrida put it, ‘material-
ity becomes a very useful generic name for all that resists appropriation’.41
How did we arrive at where we are? Although any quick genealogy is sure
to fail, we can identify at least some of the major intellectual trends that
have contributed to the new attention to materiality and cultural practices.
Michel Foucault, while elucidating the technologies of the modern regime of
power, had emphasized the formation of disciplines as the framework within

Introduction.indd 14 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 new cultural histories of india  15

which new practices in specific institutional sites were invented, discovered,

transmitted, authorized, taught, and debated. This led to studies in different
countries, in the West as well as in the formerly colonial parts of the world,
on the evolution of disciplinary practices in locations such as the school,
the hospital, the family, the prison, the factory, the scientific laboratory, the
army, the judicial system, the publishing industry, and numerous other insti-
tutional sites in modern societies. While the emphasis sometimes was on
the paradoxical fact that more humane and reformed practices produced a
plethora of surveillance techniques, leading to profound doubts about the
emancipatory claims of modernity, close attention was also paid to specific
details in the technical elaboration and transmission of practices. A series of
questions emerged around why some innovations succeeded whereas others
failed, why the same practices could not take root in all related institutions
in the same place, how some older practices could be adapted to new condi-
tions while others became defunct, and so on. These studies in social history
carried out in the wake of the so-called discursive turn were the immediate
precursors of the new cultural history. We must remember here that Foucault
particularly insisted on the impersonality of these practices—he was fond of
the phrase ‘strategies without a subject’42—and refused to read their func-
tioning in terms of a primary origin of thought, speech, desire, and action.
Although readjusted from time to time to suit the entrenched style of agent-
ism in South Asian histories, his example was also an invitation to many to
rethink practices beyond the confines of an intending social subject.
This was followed by the influence of new anthropological methods, such
as those proposed by Talal Asad. Following the lead provided by Foucault
and building on older, and somewhat neglected, anthropological ideas such
as those of Marcel Mauss and William Cantwell Smith, Asad proposed a
new approach to the study of modern and pre-modern cultures that placed
primary emphasis on embodied practices. Practices were not mere represen-
tations of latent cultural concepts; they were meaningful and efficacious in
themselves. Thus, bodily disciplines associated with religious practices could
not be fully understood as expressions of theological concepts; even their
soteriological or spiritual significance was located in the specific embodied
practices themselves. Such practices were disciplinary in that there were
­recognized canons that laid down, and authorities that pronounced on, the
right way to do bodily rituals such as prayers, fasts, penances, etc.; there were
regimes of training, recognized experts and standards of excellence; there
were debates over innovative or deviant practices, and sometimes disciplinary
schisms. It was misleading, it was argued, to reduce changes at the level of

Introduction.indd 15 9/26/2013 5:08:48 PM

 16  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

embodied practices to disputes over doctrine,43 with the argument extending

from the field of the anthropology of religion to disciplinary practices in the
fields of art, music, performance or crafts. This marked a considerable shift,
not only from older methods of studying folk arts and ritual, but also from
the cultural anthropology theorized, for instance, by Clifford Geertz.
Another approach that has recently influenced the field of cultural history
comes from science studies. Bruno Latour and his associates have proposed what
is known as actor-network theory that seeks to break down the traditional divide
between a material world of objects regulated by the laws of nature and investi-
gated by the hard sciences and a social world of human agents studied by the social
and humanistic disciplines. In this approach, both humans and non-humans are
agents in specific networks that vary in size and duration and are constructed by
practices that simultaneously connect humans and non-humans. From scientific
laboratories to industrial plants, science studies has shown how actual practices
of scientists and engineers, as opposed to the doctrines of philosophers, do not
take material objects as mere passive receptacles of the laws of nature. Instead,
these practices lay down, observe, debate, and frequently modify the interactions
between human and non-human agents in which both are seen to act unpredict-
ably. This approach recommends that studies begin with the material and bodily
enactment of practices themselves rather than with doctrinal or philosophical
accounts of practices. It also insists that the actors’ own account of their practices
be taken seriously instead of distrusting them as partial, interest-driven or ideo-
logical. Actor-network theory favours ethnographic studies of practices, even
in advanced physics laboratories or high-technology manufacturing, bringing
it close to the anthropological methods mentioned above. Specifically, it sets
aside discussions of fetishism or false consciousness and instead prefers to study
the specific terms in which actual controversies occur in a specific social and
disciplinary field of practices. Without dismissing the achievements of the lin-
guistic turn, it acknowledges that all historical knowledge of practices is derived
from textual records of one kind or another, but it does not insist that because
such knowledge is textually constructed, it cannot be regarded as true. True
knowledge, as well as good or bad accounts of the phenomena being studied,
depends on how well they accord with established standards of practice within
the ­networks in which knowledge claims are made.44
This brief account may help explain the shared emphasis on embodiment
and circulation in the present volume. The following chapters do not neces-
sarily adopt the methods of the anthropology of embodied practice or indeed
of actor-network theory. However, by focusing on the materiality and, in some
cases, more directly on the corporeality of cultural practices, they actively

Introduction.indd 16 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  17

engage with many of the questions raised by those theoretical approaches.

Indeed, the questions of corporeality and circulation become joined precisely
at the limit of the recognition that the flows, sequences, and programmes of
action may actually precede and exceed what Mauss called the ‘biological and
physiological apparatus’.45 Rather than taking the body as the natural home
of the subject, many of the essays in this volume focus on the various ways in
which bodily boundaries are violated and readjusted by circuits of skill and
technology. Thus, one essay in this volume shows how the new procedures of
printing images incited new techniques of the body. Another examines how
networks of patronage and criticism intervened in the techniques of breath
control and practices of rhythmic improvisations in musical performances. A
third explores how bodies of records took shape through activating and deac-
tivating specific bodily skills of the writers and record-keepers. As historians
look closely at specific events of enactment, practices reveal themselves neces-
sarily at the conjunctions of humans and things, as the signs of flow through
and alongside bodies, never completely exhausted by semiotics and social
construction. We will now turn to a discussion of the essays themselves, look-
ing particularly into the thematic categories under which they are grouped.

Texts as Objects
There was a virtual explosion of research from the 1990s on the modern
cultural history of the Indian language communities, based primarily on
the printed material of books, magazines, pamphlets, textbooks, almanacs,
advertisements, and ephemera hitherto ignored by scholars who had focused
exclusively on the ‘intellectual’ history of the high canonical literature. This
research produced a rich and complex account of the network of institutions
(such as publishing houses, literary societies, textbook boards, newspapers,
theatres, libraries, colleges, and universities) that emerged in each language
region of India to create, sustain and police the new standardized vernaculars,
to establish the cultural leadership of a new middle class, to order internal
cultural hierarchies based on gender, caste, class, region or dialect, and in
the process produce a new sense of ‘the people’. In every region, it was this
newly construed notion of a people that contributed imaginatively to the
sense of a nation, with complex cultural negotiations between the language
community and the imagined entity called India.46 While they build on these
older foundations, the essays in this group move beyond many of the existing
equations of language, script and region, as well as the boundaries between
genres of high and low literatures. In their concerns with the pre- and early

Introduction.indd 17 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 18  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

modern multilingual worlds and scribal cultures of northern and western

India, and with the object and sensory worlds of nineteenth-century Bengali
poetry, these essays come together in the ways in which they foreground the
materiality of the textual product.
The studies of print literature in the modern Indian languages appeared
to suggest the emergence in the twentieth century of predominantly mono-
lingual vernacular literary cultures. However, a series of influential studies
focusing on the period preceding the spread of printing technology argued
the opposite. Important studies by Sheldon Pollock, on the one hand, and
Shulman, Subrahmanyam and Narayana Rao, on the other, turned our atten-
tion to the multilingual vernacular cultures of production and consumption
of literature in most regions of early modern India.47 Extending this per-
spective and reporting on a recently concluded research project, Francesca
Orsini’s essay delves into the multilingual vernacular literary cultures of
early modern northern India. Multilingual literary history, it is shown, is
necessarily at odds with the conventional single-language histories which,
in both their sectarian and syncretist varieties, exclude a large domain of
literary production, arbitrarily set and eternalize language boundaries, con-
struct tendentious chronologies, and presuppose a deeply modernist isotope
of script, language and religious identity at the beginning of every history.
While a typical reaction against this model has been to celebrate the sup-
posedly spontaneous and natural heterogeneity of human speech, Orsini has
little faith in the innocence of such a linguistic state of nature. Instead, she
wants to approach multilingualism as a set of historically located practices
tied to specific material conditions of speech and writing. This perspective
gives Orsini a way of exploring the details of language, script and format in
which the texts were written and copied, and of tracking the material arte-
facts of writing even into the non-literary domains of language use, such as
administration, trade, and the army.
In continually reminding the reader of the wider oral-performative context
of textual circulation, she is also able to point to the embodied engagement
of cultural actors through which textual objects were translated into the
materiality of uttered words and spoken languages returned to the realm of
the written. Orsini’s emphasis on circulation and practice, on slippage and
reconfiguration of the languages and texts at different levels and limits of the
journey, entails a decidedly multi-locational approach to the question of ver-
nacularization. This is pitted against Sheldon Pollock’s model of court-centred
vernacularization, with the argument that literary culture be regarded more
as a palimpsest where different actors rewrote different parts from ­different

Introduction.indd 18 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  19

perspectives. While the bound book, frequently written on paper, is shown

to emerge as an object of sophisticated taste among Jain, Hindu, and Muslim
elites in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the consumption of literature in
this era was not limited by the possession of books. One important finding of
Orsini is that institutions rather than individuals—panths, sampradayas, Sufi
lineages and Jain monasteries—were the principal patrons and collectors of
manuscripts. Another is that most authors of poems and narratives in north-
ern India in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Muslims, Kayasths,
Jains, and poets of low-caste or unknown background who did not follow
canonical Sanskrit models and, even when composing in one or the other
vernacular, appeared to be mindful of the general prevalence of Persian in
the secular lives of the literati. By focusing on the materiality of literary texts,
Orsini suggests several propositions of great interest for rethinking the social
history of pre-colonial northern India.
Prachi Deshpande’s essay also brings into critical focus the theme of the
materiality of the Modi textual archives she studies, in the light of specific
colonial histories of their production and remaking. The government archives
in the city of Pune contain a class of documents described as English Ferists
(from the Persian fehrist = list, catalogue), consisting of bundles of papers
wrapped in cloth, which are officially called Rumals (from the Persian rumal =
handkerchief, napkin). Historians today would typically refer to a document
from one of these bundles as ‘Pune Archive English Ferists, Rumal No. 7, File
No. 40’. These files discuss a vast archive of records, also in Rumals but mostly
in Marathi written in the Modi script, of various titles to land and revenue
accounts dating back to the time when the Peshwas ruled the Maratha terri-
tories before being ousted by the British in the early nineteenth century. How
the documents came to be brought together, classified, and constituted in its
present form as an official archive of the British colonial government is a his-
tory in itself. It is this ‘afterlife’ of Modi under colonial rule that Deshpande’s
essay sets out to excavate through two key nineteenth-century events that
led to the critical reconstitution of this scribal archive—first, the setting up
of the Inam Commission of Bombay which in the 1850s and 1860s needed
to galvanize the entire repository of Peshwai Modi records from numerous
landowners and village officials to settle the revenue alienation enquiries;
and secondly, the activities of the Central Indian Agency half a century later
(in the 1900s) in organizing and categorizing its ‘vernacular records’ that
included a large corpus of Modi documents.
History writing after the discursive turn had questioned the presumed
transparency of documents in the official archives and devised new methods

Introduction.indd 19 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 20  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

of reading, interpreting, and situating texts within specific, historically pro-

duced protocols and conventions.48 The archival document that has offered
itself for decoding at the level of language or discourse is also recuperated
in Deshpande’s essay as a vital ‘material object’—one produced by human
hands working with ink, pen and paper, lodged along with other such pieces
of paper inside bundles wrapped in cloth, stored, doctored, hidden, seized,
scattered, regrouped, copied, and finally archived for future scholars. Not
just the texts, but also the objects on which they are inscribed thus become a
key actor in this new history. In tracing the historical change in the relation
between scribes and the records they wrote and copied, Deshpande looks par-
ticularly at the changing role of the karkun—a figure once embedded within
a network of relations between Maratha state authorities, village officials, and
landed families, whose earlier mediating presence as writer and interpreter
of the record would be entirely recast by the colonial state. Suspicious as
the colonial state was of the illicit mediation of records by ‘untrustworthy’
karkuns, there was also no way in which the state could reorganize these
objects in the archive without the active intervention of the ‘walking index’—
an ancient karkun who had crammed a lifetime’s knowledge of documents
inside his wizened head. Deshpande is able to show us the challenges faced
by a new regime of power that sought to fix material objects within a passive
order of nature that was meant to be known and actively manipulated only
by authorized humans. At the same time, she can also demonstrate that tradi-
tional practitioners who should have become obsolete could also be reflexive
in their practices, adapting their skills to continue to mediate, albeit in new
ways, within the new networks in which they found themselves. This story is
not one that could have been uncovered without making the material object
the central focus of historical inquiry.
Rosinka Chaudhuri’s discussion of the poetry of Iswar Gupta brings up
another dimension of the relation between texts and material objects in
the urban reading and literary cultures of nineteenth-century Bengal. Iswar
Gupta’s poems used to be printed in mid-nineteenth century Calcutta on the
back pages of his newspaper, in narrow columns, mostly untitled and always
unsigned. If the poems themselves are shown here to be an important part of
the circulating cultures of popular print in the new social worlds of reader-
ship and consumption in the colonial city, even more important, the essay
argues, was the all pervasive presence of everyday material objects as critical
signs of the ‘urban’ and the ‘modern’ in the words and images of this poetry.
Iswar Gupta’s poetry takes us deep into the textures, sounds, smell, and touch
of a wide spectrum of objects of daily use in the city lives of an emergent and

Introduction.indd 20 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  21

varyingly anglicized middle class. From vivid invocations of fruit, fish, meat,
clothing, kitchenware or furniture, these poems make us vicariously travel
in carriages with English sahebs and memsahebs or intrude into their festive
banquet dinners, just to partake of the sensuous presence of the things the
elite wore, cherished and consumed. We can see Iswar Gupta invoking a cor-
nucopia of ‘found objects’, as avant-garde modernists would describe them
in twentieth-century Europe, their materiality lying in their sheer tangible
presence in the everyday life of the city.
Chaudhuri’s essay shows how these material artefacts become objects of
poetry, not because they constitute a representation belonging to an endlessly
interiorized subjectivity, but because they belong to a pre-colonial conven-
tion of performance presented within certain habitual measures of meter and
rhyme. Tangibility and corporeal presence became the special hallmarks of
the ‘sound-image’ that Iswar Gupta was so adept at creating, using onomato-
poeic words to describe bodily activities such as eating, drinking, dancing,
and smoking. Chaudhuri argues that it is this very quality of poetic attention
to the everyday, the material and the bodily in the social worlds of his time,
that placed Iswar Gupta’s works on the contentious borderline between ‘high’
and ‘popular’ literature of nineteenth-century Bengal, and made his poetry
the target of widespread and continuing disapproval in the elite circles of
writers and critics who followed. If the aesthetics of Iswar Gupta’s poetry
long failed to meet the canonical criteria of ‘good’ literature, the recent revival
and revaluations of this poet is part of a new academic interest in the urban
popular. Rosinka Chaudhuri’s essay grounds her reappraisal of Iswar Gupta
as a ‘poet of the present’ in a pointed argument about the centrality of mate-
rial objects in his poetry as the marker of its contemporary urban aesthetic.

The Materiality of the Visual

The essay by Christopher Pinney provides an important lead into the next
section, opening up the volume’s foundational concerns with issues of mate-
riality, embodiment and affect and their specific configuration in the domain
of the ‘visual’. In an earlier essay in a book on Materiality, he had argued for
the visual as ‘metonymic of a much larger domain of materiality’, and for
materiality to be ‘defined as that (figural) excess, or supplementarity, which
can never be encompassed by linguistic-philosophical closure’. Invoking
Lyotard’s notion of the ‘figure’ as an object standing in radical exteriority
to discourse—as a zone less of decidable meanings, more of felt intensi-
ties—Pinney wished to reverse social anthropology’s valuation of the cultural

Introduction.indd 21 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 22  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

over the material, the discursive over the figural, in its engagement with the
world of objects. The anthropological preoccupation with the ‘social lives’
and ‘cultural biographies’ of objects, he believed, was waiting to be countered
by alternative visual and material histories of the same beings.49 In a direct
build-up of this argument, his essay in this volume proposes a ‘new cultural
history of India’ that would be premised on the primacy of vision (‘The Look
of History’) and on an acknowledgement of the elements of visuality and
materiality as vital transformative agents in the imagining of national and
global histories.
It is hardly surprising that such a project should seek out a vast histori-
cal canvas stretched across colonial and contemporary India. In keeping, we
might suggest, with the overall eclectic spread of periods and themes in this
anthology, Pinney’s essay moves with dizzying speed from the production
of colouring pigments in colonial India to the sartorial embodiments of the
figures of Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, and Ambedkar in nationalist print imagery;
proceeding then to the image propaganda of the BJP-led government’s India
Shining campaign of 2004, to finally meditate on the use of video technol-
ogy in the staging of Dalit shamanistic rituals in a Malwa village in the early
2000s. In each of these four brief examples through which Pinney explores
the potentials of new visual histories, he focuses on the political charge of the
material object/image. In his purported move from the iconographic content
and form to the aesthetics and look of these images, Pinney’s main purpose is
to probe their embodied and affective presence in a public field of image con-
sumption. The interactions between image and presence, and between the
material and the spectral dimensions of images, are orchestrated in his final
ethnographic encounter, armed with video camera, with the shaman rituals
of his Malwa Chamar subjects, where the recorded image comes to serve as
clinching proof to the Chamar that the ghorla devotee is physically possessed
by the gods. The interesting question about this ‘revolutionary empiricism’,
as Pinney calls it, concerns the materiality of the evidence. What is it that
authenticates the pro-filmic? Is it just the video recording that can be played
over and over before new audiences? Or is it the accredited anthropologist
who certifies that what one is seeing on the screen is indeed a real event (and
not one staged on a film set, for instance)? Either way, embodied practices
and material objects are at the centre of debate.
The power and volatility of the image in the Dalit Chamar politics of self-
assertion and public recognition is also the central theme of the essay by Kajri
Jain—where the contemporary, monumental, sculptural, and architectural
programmes of Mayawati’s Lucknow, the subject of strong censure in the

Introduction.indd 22 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  23

national media, are brought into sharp scrutiny. In this case too, the author
propels an analytic shift that combines a reading of visual and iconographic
symbolisms (the importance of Mayawati’s short hair, salwar-kameez, and
especially the clutched handbag in every one of her made and remade stat-
utes) with a new attention to the hard materiality and scale of sculpted form
(with the significations of plaster, stone or bronze in the continuous building,
destruction, and rebuilding of these monuments). The thrust of this contem-
porary monumental politics is situated, on the one hand, within the author’s
larger study of giant Hindu religious statuary across the highways and theme
parks of today’s north India, and, on the other hand, within the particu-
larities of Dalit socio-political claims in the urban landscape of Lucknow.
The invitation here is to ‘think about the deeply interwoven and mutually
mimetic trajectories of caste Hinduism and Dalit resistance as an engine,
if you will, of transformations in both religious and democratic images and
image practices on the subcontinent’. Jain turns to Jacques Rancière’s for-
mulations on the ‘redistribution of the sensible’50 to reflect on the affective
work that this statuary performs in new democratic domains of mass tour-
ing and spectatorship, and the way their making and unmaking intervenes
within the inbuilt spectres of violence and desecration of statues that haunts
these domains. The notion of ‘redistribution’ is expanded here to both take
into account, as she says, the fundamentally material nature of cultural and
symbolic processes and the indelible marks of the social and political in the
multiplying stone bodies of Mayawati.
In the third essay of this section, Tapati Guha-Thakurta deploys the
semantics of materiality to conceive of the many forms and fabrications
of architectural replicas, in their prodigious travels across the globe. A key
intention of this essay is to subvert (as these copies of monuments do) the
uniqueness and authority of the ‘original’ as the privileged subject of art and
architectural history. Following the lead of Walter Benjamin’s canonical art-
work essay,51 the duplicating, circulating, and democratizing powers of the
image as copy has become a favourite subject of cultural studies. Indeed, the
very field of visual studies has marked its distinction from the mother dis-
cipline of art history by turning to the proliferating careers of the ‘image’ as
against the singular location of the ‘art object’—to show how the reproducible
image constitutively escapes the binds of provenance, ownership or custody
that the original exudes.52 This essay shifts gear from the recent discourse on
the intangibilities of virtual worlds of the image to the intense labours of pro-
duction and the concreteness of materials and processes that have attended
the past and present histories of architectural remakes. What Guha-Thakurta

Introduction.indd 23 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 24  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

calls the ‘conceits’ of these replicas lie precisely in these autonomous material
forms they assume and the independent lives they can lead in their trans-
ferred locations, often in radical separation from the original sources from
which they have ensued.
This theme is played out in this essay across different historical and con-
temporary, global and local chronotopes of replica production and display.
Contrasting the contemporary histories of a nationally authorized copy of
the Sanchi Stupa in Lyoyang, China, with the unofficial travesty and excesses
of a Bangladeshi Taj Mahal, the essay moves back in time to the travels of
elaborate plaster casts and architectural ensembles from the colony to the
imperial venues of ‘world exhibitions’, before moving forward again to the
free, wide-ranging replication of national and global architectural sites in
the exhibitionary space of the Durga Puja festivals in present-day Calcutta.
Across these dispersed temporal and spatial contexts, Guha-Thakurta pur-
sues her key concern with the rights and prerogatives, liberties and licenses
of these remakes, to show how they remain tied to their referents or become
signs only unto themselves. Questions of embodiment of these material
structures are equally of importance here—as are to be seen in the elaborate
practices of simulation, substitution and emplacement of originals that each
of these replicas, permanent or ephemeral, enact in the particular sites of their
production and reception.

More on Sound
In this section, we move from the materiality of textual and visual objects to
the embodied practices that mark the aural worlds of cinema and music, and
constitute the political and social spheres of their performance. Cinema, as
has been widely analysed, brought about a revolutionary transformation in
the public circulation of the moving image, with a transformative impact on
the popular culture of twentieth-century India that has been unparalleled in
its reach and intensity. As we have noted before, some of the richest and most
innovative exercises in cultural studies have been made by scholars working
on Bollywood as well as the regional language cinema. Apart from the study
of cinema as the moving image, in which aspect film studies has overlapped
with the study of visual culture, a new attention has also been paid to cinema
as performance, where the emphasis has been on narrative, dialogue, acting,
make-up, costume, musical score, and other technical aspects that cinema
shares with, for instance, the theatre.53 More generally, a specialized field of
performance studies has emerged, characterized by most of the theoretical

Introduction.indd 24 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  25

concerns we have discussed above, to examine the various fields of public

performance such as theatre, music, dance, and oratory.54 The two essays in
this section deal specifically with the aural aspects of public performance as
cultural practice, leading us from an imaginative reinterpretation of the space
of Tamil cinema as embodied performance to a social and discursive engage-
ment with the worlds of the production and reception of Carnatic music.
Rajan Krishnan’s essay in this volume raises an important question about
the place of dialogue in the transformative role of cinema in Tamil poli-
tics. Krishnan here is not merely repeating a well-known truism about the
careers of Tamil political leaders such as C. Annadurai and M. Kanunanidhi
as hugely successful writers of cinema scripts. Rather, he is positing a more
complex argument about a semiotic triad consisting of Karunanidhi, Sivaji
Ganesan, and M.G. Ramachandran that created and sustained the cinematic
representation of the Tamil people as the new democratic locus of political
sovereignty. This is achieved, first, by shifting the emphasis from songs (which
has long commanded priority in the cinematic text, and was also the centre-
piece in an earlier period of Tamil cinema) to highly rhetoricized dialogue;
and second, by the emergence of Sivaji Ganesan and M.G. Ramachandran
(MGR) as complementary aspects of the screen representation of the politi-
cal leader. No one remembers, Krishnan points out, the various characters
that MGR portrayed; what remained imprinted in public cinematic memory
was only the image of the hero as leader, physically encoded and indelibly
imprinted in the screen presence of the actor’s body. Sivaji Ganesan’s actor-
body, on the other hand, was always empty—evacuated in order to be filled
by the particular character he was playing. While Sivaji was the representation
of particular subjectivities, MGR the actor became, as it were, the transcend-
ent signifier of Tamil sovereignty, the embodied leader of the Tamil people.
Both actors spoke lines written by Karunanidhi, even though Sivaji Ganesan
happened to be politically aligned with the Congress. Because MGR embod-
ied the hero-actor-leader, the fiery lines he spoke on the screen strengthened
his claims to politically represent the Tamil people. On the other hand, when
Sivaji played the Dalit hero, his screen rhetoric only strengthened the politics
of the DMK. In terms of method, Krishnan’s innovation lies in the use of
Peircean semeiotics that introduces an interpretant between the sign and its
object, and the subsequent bifurcation of object into immediate and dynamic
object: this allows him to clear out the space for the Tamil subaltern film-
viewing public within the formal semiotic analysis of the film text.
From the embodied dynamics of dialogue in cinema, we move in Lakshmi
Subramanian’s essay to the very different semantics and aural resonance of

Introduction.indd 25 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 26  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

‘language’ as it may be conceived in the milieu of Carnatic musical perfor-

mance. The historical context of this essay is the disciplining in the early
twentieth century of classical music in south India by middle-class Brahmin
critics, scholars, and institutional leaders—a context that is elaborated in
detail in the author’s earlier writings on the transitions in the social and
institutional worlds of Carnatic music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Madras. These transformations in forms of patronage and modes of perfor-
mance of Carnatic music, Subramanian shows, carved out a new public arena
of classical vocal recitals, based on traditional compositions but significantly
erased of all association with temple ritual or theatrical performance. This
led to a reaction in the middle decades of the century, led principally by
non-Brahmin Tamil patrons, who complained that the authorized classical
compositions had no Tamil songs, and that the proud tradition of Tamil sing-
ing was becoming restricted to the dubious confines of the cinema screen.
To underscore the particular charge of ‘revivals, major and minor’ and the
premium they brought to issues of tradition and authenticity in this trans-
formed social and institutional setting of classical music performances in the
city of Madras, Subramanian’s essay looks, for instance, into the campaign
launched by the Tamil Isai Sangam of including Tamil compositions in clas-
sical music performances. That such a movement could not claim a clear-cut
or unalloyed success becomes a pertinent issue for reflection. The debates
that such a revivalist campaign sparked off highlights, once more, the varied
and unpredictable possibilities of disciplinary contestation over performance
as cultural practice.

Ritual as Cultural Practice

Taking a broadly anthropological definition of ritual as rule-bound cultural
practice, the next group of essays invites us to think about how we may extract
this notion of ‘ritual’ out of its received contexts of religious or folk perfor-
mance and pitch it into an alternative field of objects and practices. The
notion here is made to inhabit worlds that range from the life of almanacs as
the most prolific product of the nineteenth-century popular book industry of
Bengal, to the politics of anti-colonial nationalism that animated the game of
football in early twentieth-century Calcutta, to the hunting, circulation and
collecting of heads of Nagas in the region’s colonial and postcolonial history.
We begin this section with Gautam Bhadra’s essay which describes the
emergence in nineteenth-century Bengal of the pañjikā or almanac as a
new printed and marketed commodity that was meant to act as a guide to

Introduction.indd 26 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  27

e­veryday ritual observances but ultimately itself became part of the ritual
process of household life. The traditional handwritten almanac was commis-
sioned and composed for a particular family, designed to fit the specific caste,
lineage or sectarian rules followed in family rituals. When printed almanacs
emerged, the product, while it had to cater to an extended conglomerate of
caste and sectarian groups, also had to operate within the competitive market
for printed commodities, and needed to innovate in order to enhance its util-
ity as well as its aesthetic appeal. This confluence of different logics–ritual,
sectarian, utilitarian, aesthetic, technological, and commercial–created the
specific material product called the Bengali pañjikā.
In Bhadra’s essay, we see, first, a multiplicity of authorities deciding on the
contents of the different components of the almanac, each authority confined
to its own sphere. Thus, the details of the ritual calendar and the timings
and procedures of observance are left to Brahmin specialists, usually belong-
ing to one or the other school of astrology. However, since the almanac also
needed to be marketed to a heterogeneity of social groups, many festivals
and observances that were not quite Brahminical and were mostly performed
by lower caste groups or women found a place in this new public compen-
dium of rituals. Second, with its rapid popularity as an essential item of the
household, reading the pañjikā aloud and listening to it became a sacred
ritual on its own, serving not only the pedagogical function of informing all
family members of their ritual obligations but becoming a meritorious act
in itself. Third, in order to become more useful to buyers, the pañjikā began
to provide information on government offices, courts of law, the revenue
calendar or places of commercial importance, becoming as it were a directory
in addition to a ritual almanac. Fourth, with its rapidly growing circulation,
the almanac also became a favoured place for advertisements and threw up
its own requirements as an aesthetic and commercially marketed product.
Through each of these expanding functions, the almanac as a product kept
engaging the new technological resources of printing and the individual artis-
tic skills of engravers who supplied it with its specific genre of wood-engraved
illustrations. Bhadra describes the stylistic transitions in almanac images
through the nineteenth century—reflecting on the hybrid popular styles of
the ­traditional scroll pat.acitra and the so-called bazaar woodcut, as well as the
unapologetic mimicking of European pictorial conventions—building up to
conscious ‘nationalization’ of divine imagery, especially of the goddess Durga
who would emerge as the most publicly celebrated deity in Bengal. What is
also important is the standardization of certain images as belonging to the
ritually sanctified pages of the pañjikā, whereby the wood-engraved image,

Introduction.indd 27 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 28  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

it seems, assumed a formal fixity that could not be disturbed, not even today
when printing technology has otherwise moved into the phototypesetting
age.
In looking at football as a ‘ritual’ site of popular nationalism, Partha
Chatterjee’s essay looks closely at the sanctity of rules in this sporting ritual
and the effects they had on the innovation of practices. Football, like all
organized sports, is a thoroughly constructivist activity, whose meaning
depends entirely on the mutually accepted rules within which the game
must be played. Competitive football in early twentieth-century Calcutta
was characterized by the clash of two distinct styles—the European style of
the European and Eurasian players wearing boots and the Indian style of
local footballers playing barefoot, in fifty-minute games held in the summer
and monsoon months. It was not merely a difference in stylistic practices,
involving different techniques, skills and strategies, but a difference that
mapped on to racial and political divisions in a colonial city. This essay shows
how the local history of football in Calcutta became linked to larger politi-
cal contestations over colonial rule and nationalism. It also notes the rise of
Mohammedan Sporting, a club with Muslim players and supporters, which
decided to abandon the traditional barefoot style and gained enormous
success by adopting European-style techniques. While this raised divisive
cultural issues of masculinity and disrupted the norms of indigenous prac-
tice, the interesting historical fact is that, with the global standardization of
rules under the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) in
the second half of the twentieth century, local football in Calcutta, as eve-
rywhere else, had to adopt the universal rules that required regulation boots
and ninety-minute matches. With this disappeared the so-called authenti-
cally Indian style of football.
In his attempt to write about headhunting in the Naga Hills ‘without having
to account for it’, Bodhisattva Kar reflects on the status of the head as object,
allegory, and principle. The standard anthropological accounts of headhunt-
ing as a ‘primitive’ ritual referred to human heads as objects—trophies to
be captured, displayed, confiscated or destroyed. But colonial configurations
of Naga headhunting, Kar shows, were equally and as ­thoroughly entwined
with ideas of the head as allegory and principle. The head was the highest
seat of human reason and judgement; it deserved to be the ruling element in
the human body. By allegory, as Hobbes’s famous depiction of the Leviathan
emphasized, the head was the absolute sovereign in the post-contractual civi-
lized state. Naga headhunting then easily became the metaphor used by British
colonial administrators for the unruly ­barbarism of acephalous tribes that did

Introduction.indd 28 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  29

not acknowledge any rulers and resisted all attempts at being governed per
capita—whether it was a census count or a tax register or a photographic
record or a settled and administered village. With the arrival of administra-
tor-anthropologists such as J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills in the early twentieth
century, this politics of alleogorization was given a new twist as they tried
to work out a logic of substitution for, rather than complete prohibition of,
decapitation. At one level, this allowed them to produce an immense archive
of material culture of the Nagas (the administrator-anthropologists insisted
that the severed heads, when found, should not be destroyed but confiscated
and preserved in the interests of science, preferably at the Pitt Rivers Museum
in Oxford). At another level, using this archive, the colonial government was
able to selectively appropriate and redeploy the ritual of headhunting in the
service of the state.
The denouement to Kar’s history of the materiality of metaphor comes in
the postcolonial phase of Naga nationalism, in which we find a new genera-
tion of Naga men and women schooled in Baptist evangelicalism increasingly
embarrassed by their own history of headhunting. Nagas now wanted rec-
ognition as a people that deserved to govern themselves like other modern
nations. Protesting against the campaigns of the Indian army trying to sup-
press the Naga revolt in the 1950s, Naga nationalists spoke of the horror of
dozens of headless bodies left behind after a massacre by Indian troops in a
Naga village. Kar’s essay ends with this poignant moment of political irony
where the signature ritual of statelessness was folded back into the practical
matrix of the modernized institution of the nation-state.

Matters of Space
We move in this final section to the critical register of the spatial, in line
with the growing interest in the production, representation, and theoriza-
tion of space in the new literature on urban public cultures. Particularly
important here is the way the study of the spatial geographies of contem-
porary Indian cities has taken a perceptible culturalist turn in recent years.
Patterns of settlement, migration, urban planning, spatial distribution
of livelihoods, transportation, spaces of public gathering, and entertain-
ment—all conventional topics of urban geography—have been subjected
to new questions arising out of the materiality of cultural practices in the
postcolonial city.55 A persistent theme in these recent studies has been the
finding that attempts by both colonial and postcolonial urban planners
to implant spatial models developed in the cities of Europe and America,

Introduction.indd 29 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 30  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

assumed to be the nurseries of modern urbanism, have led to utterly

unpredictable and unintended consequences in India. Indigenous cultural
practices, it appears, have reshaped the material forms of planning models
and the kinds of architectural and spatial topographies that have marked
out Indian cities. This last section brings together its three essays under a
common concern with the social and symbolic logistics of urban space,
where the element of the ‘spatial’ can be seen to play as crucial a role in
the fashioning of middle-class life-styles and identities in metropolises like
Calcutta and New Delhi as in the generation of new small-town ambitions
in the age of the media revolution.
We will use the ‘spatial’ metaphor here to also see how the idea of mate-
riality itself is one that is shifting and slipping, as if continuously in transit.
Several chapters in this volume treat materiality less as a benign foundation
of meaning and permanence, more as a performed and contingent order in
circulation. If Bodhisattva Kar argues that the powers of objects migrate into
allegories and tenets of rule, then Swati Chattopadhyay demonstrates the
way the solidity of a particular architectural design (in this case, the mid-
twentieth century flourish in ‘Art Deco’ residences in middle-class Calcutta)
partakes in the emergent culture of cinematic visuality and, through a series
of semantic dislocations, also becomes constitutive of the changing codes of
urban conjugality. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, the Bengali middle-
class familial structure underwent a remarkable transformation as a result,
among many other factors, of changing land relations in rural Bengal, migra-
tions across the different Bengal districts, emergence of nuclear families,
deteriorating economic conditions, and an acute housing crisis in the city.
Chattopadhyay argues that the suddenness of this structural transformation
brought about a particular crisis in bhadralok spatial imagination, which
the architectural designs and filmic depictions of middle-class residences of
the period struggled to resolve and restate. In Chattopadhyay’s account, the
absence of a real spatial coordinate of the new intimacy of a heterosexual
couple was overcompensated by the ‘notational’ spatial conventions of the
popular Bengali melodrama. Through a series of provocative but careful jux-
tapositions of cinematic stylizations, women’s magazines’ advice on house
designs, and formal architectural analyses, the author brings out the conflicts
and complexities condensed into the term ‘Art Deco’. Even as it partly shared
an aesthetic repertoire with its counterpart in Europe and the United States,
the architectural idiom of Calcutta Art Deco, she argues, remained in the
final instance symptomatic and constituent of the city’s middle-class social
life and its material culture.

Introduction.indd 30 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  31

From a very different set of materials, Sanjay Srivastava’s essay reconsiders

some of the same concerns that Chattopadhyay raises. But rather than the
limits of the autonomy of the aesthetic form, Srivastava focuses on the struc-
tural dynamic at the heart of the postcolonial urbanization process, involving
a ceaseless play between organized real estate capital, governmental agencies
and the mediatized cultures of consumption. Patiently constructing a his-
tory of the vast suburban conquests of the Delhi Land and Finance (DLF)
corporation across the southern border of Delhi, the author tries to identify
the elements, both material and ideological, that facilitated the transforma-
tion of a quiet rural hinterland into a bouncy geography of jazzy super-malls,
gated residential communities and plush corporate offices. As he continues
to untangle the strange mishmash of corporatist ambition and state patron-
age, filiational capital and capitalist affiliations, developmentalist invocations
and illegal practices, he claims that what holds together these remarkably
varied forms and figures is a kind of utopian and commodified urbanism
conjured up by DLF. This infectious, unending trade-off between the sym-
bolic and the material finds a provisional resolution in the emergent figure
of the ­consumer-citizen. Srivastava argues that real estate developments in
India, such as the privatized production of spaces of residence, leisure, and
shopping, have been a major site for the making of this normative figure.
Analysing the style and vocabulary of activism by the members of the gated
residential communities, Srivastava draws attention to the ways in which
the middle-class discourse of consumption has begun to displace the older
nationalist thematic of common good and political rights. As he plots his
story in the broader context of the decline of the Nehruvian state and the rise
of the neo-liberal one, he also chooses to connect this figure of the consumer-
citizen with a certain moment of post-nationalism.
While Srivastava’s account of the exclusionary activism of the new middle
class alerts us to the dangers of valorising practice as an unconstrained arena
of collective action, Srirupa Roy’s ‘practice-based approach to the study of
media’ opens up very different possibilities. Perhaps Michel de Certeau’s dis-
tinction between strategies and tactics is of relevance here. De Certeau argues
that while regularized, rule-governed operational strategies come from insti-
tutionalized ‘proper’ locations and try to generate relations with an outside,
tactics have no ‘proper’ locales. They often dodge the time of history and are
squandered on the plane of the everyday, involving temporary combinations
of disparate elements for the sake of a momentary advantage.56 In this essay
on the politics and performance of media liberalization in India, Srirupa Roy
seems to consider strategies and tactics both separately and in relation to

Introduction.indd 31 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 32  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

each other. She begins by reviewing the specific historical trajectory of media
liberalization in the country. Here she concentrates on the infamous triangle
of state, media and capital, and particularly points out the interplay of mixed
or diverse interests in the news industry, the continuing importance of state
actors and ideologies in terms of structuring the liberalized media landscape,
and the blurring boundaries between these three entities. In short, even
without disregarding the immensity of these forces, Roy finds these media
liberalization strategies punctured by tactics. She takes up the theme of tactics
in the next section as she looks at the quotidian manoeuvres, aspirations and
practices of the television ‘stringers’ or small-town freelance journalists. In
her attempt to clarify how the television news industry has enabled provincial
and vernacular subjects to seek, and in several cases gain, class, and status
mobility, Roy also explains why the rise of these non-metropolitan subaltern
elites is a simultaneous index of empowerment and marginalization. We end
this volume with Srirupa Roy’s passionate paean to these ‘spatial elsewheres’
(outside major urban/metropolitan locations) and their rising social actors
as the subjects of a new cultural history of contemporary neo-liberal India.

Notes
  1 Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989).
  2 Ibid., ‘Introduction’, pp. 1, 22.
 3 Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New
Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999).
  4 Increasingly, however, this proved to be a very different understanding of the
social than what had been deployed in the older varieties of social history. The
new social, as Joyce said, was hardly the ‘old, solid, ontological social’—a given,
almost prediscursive foundation setting the stage for discourses and practices.
Two most renowned examples would be: Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body:
British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995) and Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Social in Question: New Bearings in History
and the Social Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
  5 The two seminal works by these authors that were hugely influential in changing
the course of history writing, in the American academia in particular, during the
1970s and 1980s, were Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination
in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1973) and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New
York: Basic Books, 1973).
  6 See, for example, Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1998).

Introduction.indd 32 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  33

 7 Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh (eds), History and the Present (Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2002).
  8 Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee (eds), History in the Vernacular (Ranikhet:
Permanent Black, 2008).
 9 Histories of European popular culture produced in the 1970s and 1980s
were widely read by historians of South Asia. To cite a few at random: Peter
Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Vintage, 1979);
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, trans.
Barbara Bray (New York: Vintage, 1979) and Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary
Feeney (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the
Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982). The journal History Workshop was also
very influential in this respect.
10 Some of his writings are: Jyotindra Jain, Painted Myths of Creation: Art and
Ritual of an Indian Tribe (New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi, 1984); Ganga Devi:
Tradition and Expression in Mithila Painting (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1997); and
Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1999).
11 There is a large literature on the Subaltern Studies project, including thirteen
volumes of essays under that title and numerous monographs authored by
scholars associated with the project. Some useful selections are: Ranajit Guha
and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (New  York:
Oxford University Press, 1988); Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies Reader
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and David Ludden
(ed.), Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning, and the
Globalisation of South Asia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001).
12 See, for example Ranajit Guha, ‘The Career of an Anti-God in Heaven and on
Earth’, in Ashok Mitra (ed.), The Truth Unites: Essays in Tribute to Samar Sen
(Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1985), pp. 1–25.
13 These concerns have spread across several of Sumanta Banerjee’s books—from
The Parlour and the Street: Elite and Popular Cultures in Nineteenth Century
Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull, 1989) to Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in
Colonial Calcutta (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009).
14 The field of feminist historiography of India has been recently surveyed by
Mary E. John, Women’s Studies in India: A Reader (New Delhi: Penguin India,
2008).
15 A succinct discussion of the Frankfurt School critique of mass culture is pro-
vided in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt
School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann,
1973), pp. 173–218.
16 The journal Public Culture (Durham: Duke University Press) that began publi-
cation under their joint editorship from 1988 served as the main forum of this
trend.
17 Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, ‘Public Modernity in India’,
in Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in

Introduction.indd 33 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 34  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

­Contem­porary India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 4–5.
18 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row,
1977).
19 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell, 1977).
20 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
21 Repeatedly asserted in the writings of Christopher Pinney (see, for example,
Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle
in India [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004], p.8), this point will be under-
lined again in his and Kajri Jain’s essays in this volume.
22 M.Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
23 Once again, the recent literature on Indian film studies is large. For an important
survey of the new themes and methodologies in Indian film studies, see Ravi
Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2002).
24 See, for instance, Pinney, Photos of the Gods and Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar:
The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
25 Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity.
26 Christopher Pinney and Rachel Dwyer (ed.), Pleasure and the Nation: The
History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
27 Sumathi Ramaswamy, Beyond Visual Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies
in Modern India (New Delhi: Sage, 2002). The book had also appeared as a
special issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology (Vol. 36, Nos 1–2, 2002).
28 This archive of popular print pictures and calendar art, in turn, marked out
its growing circle of specialist scholar-collectors—among them, Partha Mitter,
Christopher Pinney, Kajri Jain, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Philip Lutgendorf, and
Patricia Uberoi—and their particular lines of enquiry.
29 Richard Davis (ed.), Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of Modern India (New
Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007). The book originated in a conference panel on
‘The Iconography of the Indian Nation State’ at the annual South Asian Studies
conference at the University of Wisconsin in 1997.
30 Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 28, highlights, once again, how Marx
himself insists on the simultaneously sensory and supra-sensory nature of
objects, on an object’s ‘unwillingness to abandon its physicality’.
31 An early and productive articulation of this dissatisfaction was offered in
1982 by Bernard Cohn in an influential essay on the imperial politics of col-
lecting and displaying of Indian piece-goods and collectibles. Bernard S.
Cohn, ‘The Transformation of Objects into Artifacts, Antiquities, and Art in

Introduction.indd 34 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 new cultural histories of india  35

­ ineteenth-Century India’ (1982), in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge:

N
The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 76–105.
32 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard UP,
1999), J 80a, 1.
33 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London and
New York: Verso, 1996).
34 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Colonial Times: Clocks and Kali-Yuga’, in Beyond Nationalist
Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History (Delhi: Permanent Black,
2002), pp. 10–37 is one of the best examples where he self-consciously stays
away from engaging with the physicality of clocks in order to address the colo-
nial politics of abstract and disciplinary time.
35 Pierre Lamaison and Pierre Bourdieu, ‘From Rules to Strategies: An Interview
with Pierre Bourdieu’, Cultural Anthropology, I: 1 (1986), pp. 110–20. See also
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977) and Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990).
36 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1983).
37 Partha Chatterjee, Bengal, 1920–1947: The Land Question (Calcutta: K.P.
Bagchi, 1984) and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).
38 The term is taken from Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern
Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia., Modern Asian
Studies, 22:1 (1988), pp. 189–224.
39 Cf. Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, ‘Discussion: Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing
Historiography’, Subaltern Studies IV (New Delhi: Oxford University Press
India, 1985), pp. 330–63.
40 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), p. 190.
41 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) (“within such limits”)’,
in Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (eds),
Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2001).
42 Michel Foucault, ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, Colin Gordon (ed.), trans. Colin
Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1980), p. 202. Cf. Louis Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu,
Rousseau, Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1972), pp.
182–4.
43 See, for instance, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of
Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993) and
Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Introduction.indd 35 9/26/2013 5:08:49 PM

 36  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

44 See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-

Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Jane Bennett, Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
45 Marcel Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’, Economy and Society, 2:1 (1973),
p. 85.
46 To mention only a few among dozens of scholars who have made this one
of the most productive fields of modern South Asian history, one could list
Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India,
1891–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Vasudha Dalmia,
Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-
Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Veena Naregal,
Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism
(Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Francesca Orsini, Hindi Public Sphere 1920–
1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002); Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory
and Identity in Western India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007); and Lisa Mitchell,
Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
47 Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from
South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Shulman, Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, and V. Narayana Rao (eds), Textures of Time: Writing History,
1600–1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001).
48 A classic example is Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’, in
Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983),
pp. 1–42.
49 Christopher Pinney, ‘Things Happen: or, From Which Moment does that
Object Come?’, in Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005), pp. 258–9, 265–6.
50 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and
New York: Continuum, 2004).
51 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in
Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 217–52.
52 A good example of this approach is to be found in Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Visual
Studies and Global Imagination’, Papers on Surrealism, Issue 2 (Summer 2004),
pp. 1–29.
53 To cite an example, Ranjani Mazumdar, in Bombay Cinema: An Archive of
the City (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), especially in the chapter, ‘The
Panoramic Interior’, pp. 110–48, marks the shift from a textual reading of cin-
ematic plots and narratives to a close study of the visual design and production
histories of cinema and its invocations of the material ‘sensorium of urban life’.
54 To give a sampling of this rich and growing literature—Anuradha Kapur, Actors,
Pilgrims, Kings and Gods: The Ramlila of Ramnagar (Calcutta: Seagull, 1990);
Kathryn Hansen, The Nautanki Theater of North India (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992); Avanti Meduri, Rukmini Devi Arundale, 1904–1986:

Introduction.indd 36 9/26/2013 5:08:50 PM

 new cultural histories of india  37

A Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts (Delhi: Motilal
Banarasidass, 2005); Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the
Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005); Lakshmi Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music
Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2006) and New Mansions for Music: Performance, Pedagogy, and Criticism
(New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2008); Amanda Weidman, Singing the
Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and
the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009).
55 This new trend in urban studies can be tracked through the following books–
Jyoti Hosagrahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism
(New York: Routledge, 2005); Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta:
Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (New York: Routledge,
2005); Janaki Nair, Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity:
Delhi’s Media Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2009).
56 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).

Introduction.indd 37 9/26/2013 5:08:50 PM

Introduction.indd 38 9/26/2013 5:08:50 PM
 I
The Textual

Chapter 01.indd 39 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

Chapter 01.indd 40 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM
 1
For a Multilingual Literary History
North India in the Long Fifteenth Century*

Francesca Orsini

The Problem
The first histories of north Indian literatures, written in the colonial and
nationalist periods, were involved in crystallizing communities around lan-
guage and cultural identity. While each in its own way had to negotiate the
origin and growth of its particular object, Urdu or Hindi, within the mul-
tilingual environment, they also quickly established boundaries, a canon,
selective affiliations and, of course, significant exclusions.
In Āb-e h.ayāt (1880), for example, Muhammad Husain Azad argued that
Urdu had its origins in Braj Bhasha—perhaps a gesture to early specimens of
bilingual rekhta—but then quickly established Urdu as a north Indian vernac-
ular whose literary affiliations were exclusively with Persian genres and tropes.
In doing this, he downplayed the significant history of Dakkani, of Gujri, of
non-Persianate vernacular poetry in the North (even that written and trans-
mitted in the Persian script), as well as of Hindu poets of Urdu.1 George
Grierson’s Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan (1889) embraced the
catholic view that Hindi literary history included all its m ­ edieval dialects,

* This essay is the result of a three-year AHRC-funded research project on ‘North

Indian Literary History from a Multilingual Perspective: 1450–1650’. I am grateful
to the AHRC and to the many participants of the project, whose work I refer to
in the essay. A slightly modified version has appeared as ‘How to Do Multilingual
Literary History? Lessons from Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century North India’,
Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 49: no. 2 (2012).

Chapter 01.indd 41 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 42  New Cultural Histories of India

a view shared by Hindi literary institutions of the time and subsequent his-
toriography.2 But while Avadhi Sufi poets, whose earliest manuscripts were
in Persian script, were included within Hindi literature, though their reli-
gious identity remained a ‘problem’ that required justification, rekhta (that is,
Urdu) poets in Khari Boli were left out. The Hindi literary tradition appeared
as a consequence to be formed exclusively by devotional and courtly poetry,
and even the oral epics, tales and songs that Grierson, the folklorist-linguist,3
eagerly collected were not included in this early canon of Hindi literature.
As Imre Bangha has noted, the criteria for inclusion were inconsistent,
based on script, genre, topic or poetic language, and they seem to follow a
pre-ordained cultural logic: thus ghazals and masnavis were automatically
classified as Urdu, while devotional or Braj Bhasha courtly (rīti) poetry, even
by Muslim poets, came under Hindi.4
Such literary histories encapsulated, and further promoted, a historical
view in which Muslims, Urdu, and Persian were ‘foreign’ to Indian culture.
According to this view, Urdu and Indian Muslims had little or no affiliation to
local cultural forms but belonged to the Arabo-Persian oekumene. And while
certain types of diglossic relations—Persian-Urdu, Sanskrit-Braj Bhasha—
were valued and foregrounded, others that had been equally important to the
literary culture, like those between Persian and Hindavi and Persian and Braj
Bhasha, were sidelined.5 To what extent these nineteenth-century taxonomies
followed early modern ones is an intriguing question. As we shall see, earlier
archives had their own strategies of exclusion, though undoubtedly new ideas
of language and literature as the expression and property of the ‘people’ ( jāti
or qaum) deeply influenced the way in which nineteenth-century scholars
related to the literary past.6
The myth-making and exclusions involved in the competitive and tele-
ological Hindi and Urdu literary histories have been critiqued by several
scholars in the past decade or so (Faruqi, King, Dalmia, Bangha, Busch).
Recent Urdu literary histories by S.R. Faruqi, S. Jafar and G.C. Jain, and
J. Jalibi have contested existing generic boundaries and widened the scope
of Urdu literature to a great extent, yet these histories still assume a single-
language object/tradition, Urdu.7 Given the institutional and ideological
investment in ‘Hindi’ and ‘Urdu’, and the historical baggage of suspicion, it
is of course unlikely that this state of affairs is going to end. Hindi and Urdu
departments will obviously continue to exist in universities.
What this essay suggests is that in order to develop an alternative historical
vision to the distorted one of exclusive, single-language histories it is neces-
sary to take the multilingual reality of north Indian literary culture seriously.
This requires a comparative perspective that takes in both cosmopolitan and

Chapter 01.indd 42 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  43

vernacular languages, both written archives and oral performances, and texts
and genres that circulated in the same place and at the same time although
they were transmitted in separate traditions and preserved in different archives.
This allows us to pull together the different parts of the same cultural and
social world in order to draw out areas of convergence, silences, and exclu-
sions within its constituent parts. Thus it is necessary to both critically take
on board and question early modern taxonomies, since they often ignore and
exclude aspects of the multilingual linguistic and literary world that were
undeniably present in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
A focus on the materiality of the archive—paying attention to the lan-
guage, script, and format in which texts were written down and copied, and
to combinations of texts and genres that were copied together—on the spaces/
locations in which literature was produced and performed, and on the oral-
performative practices and agents that ensured that texts circulated to audiences
that were not bound by the script in which the texts appear to us, can help
us greatly in trying to imagine the multilingual world of early modern north
Indian literary culture. In other words, it is important to approach multi-
linguality as a set of historically located practices tied to material conditions
of speech and writing, rather than as a kind of natural heterogeneity. This is
what this essay tries to do, with particular reference to the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries, from the time when the north Indian Sultanates flourished
to the establishment of the Mughal Empire. Rather than seeing the fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries as the ‘twilight of the Delhi Sultanate’ (Lal),8
this essay contends that the ‘long fifteenth century’ was a period of considera-
ble regional political, cultural and religious dynamism that saw the beginning
of widespread vernacular literary production in north India.9 This was after
all the time when the powerful voices of Kabir, Nanak, Surdas, and other
early saint-poets emerged, when Qutban, Manjhan, and Jayasi wrote their
sophisticated Hindavi Sufi romances, when Vishnudas retold the epics in the
context of Tomar Gwalior, and when singers and songs circulated intensely
across north India and across religious and courtly milieux.

Categories and Definitions

Before we consider the three elements mentioned above—the material-
ity of the archive, the spaces/locations of production and circulation, and
oral-­performative practices and agents—a few words about definitions and
categories.
When trying to reconstruct the cultural world of fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century north India, local taxonomies and ‘emic’ nomenclature are clearly

Chapter 01.indd 43 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 44  New Cultural Histories of India

important. Was what to us appears as a single linguistic region, the ‘Hindi belt’
stretching from western Rajasthan to Bihar and from the tarai to Malwa and
encompassing the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Uttaranchal, and Madhya
Pradesh, perceived as a ‘region’ then? What were emic understandings of lit-
erature and literary genres, were they identical in the different languages and
socio-literary communities, and did they coincide with our understandings
today? How were languages called and differentiated?
Political regions were, as ever, crucial, and in the period under review
north India was divided into the Sultanates of Delhi, Jaunpur, and Malwa,
with significant ‘Rajput’ presence in the countryside and in a few forts and
fortified towns (for instance, the Tomars in Gwalior). Geographical nomen-
clature referred to these entities or to individual towns and villages. Thus
in fifteenth-century sources Awadh designates the city of Awadh/Ayodhya
rather than the region, though it became an administrative unit (suba) under
the Mughals. Nonetheless, going by Sufi sources, circulation and trade across
north India between Bengal, Jaunpur, Awadh, and Delhi and between this
region and that of Gwalior and Malwa was easy and intense, despite the occa-
sional destruction brought by the battles and raids between Sharqi Jaunpur,
Lodhi Delhi, and Khilji Malwa, by Timur’s invasion of 1399, and by occa-
sional rebellions of local elites.10
In terms of language, the modern regional linguistic definitions of Braj
Bhasha, Avadhi, Bhojpuri, and Khari Boli are not reflected in the sources,
which instead speak of a generic Bhakha (Bhasha) or Hindavi/Hindui/
Hindi11 (in Persian texts) as the vernacular of north India. The perception
one gets from the great circulation of tales and songs is of a general intel-
ligibility of Bhakha/Hindavi across the region—for example, Daud’s ‘Avadhi’
romance Candāyan was recited from the pulpit of a mosque in Delhi without
any comment on the ‘eastern’ flavour of the language.12 Thus at least until
the late sixteenth century the general terms Bhakha and Hindavi denoted not
just a lack of grammatical and taxonomic interest toward the vernacular, but
also a continuum, with locally produced songs and tales that could travel and
be understood over the whole of north India.13
Oral performers and performance contexts, as we shall see, were crucial in
this respect, with performers able to modify inflections and replace words that
were too local while keeping to the metrical scheme: these changes would then
be written down by scribes and resurface as the great linguistic variation visible
between, for example, the ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ recensions of Kabir’s songs.14
Not surprisingly, the elevation of Braj Bhasha to the status of courtly
poetry with an alan.kāras´āstra pedigree in the late sixteenth century led to

Chapter 01.indd 44 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  45

its recognition as a named vernacular, a ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’15 with

a standard poetic language that needed to be learnt properly through rīti-
granthas and with teachers if not grammars per se (until the Persian Tuh. fat
al-Hind, 1675).16 As is well known, the growing status and popularity of Braj
Bhasha poetry induced poets like Tulsi Das to use it for his songs and verses.17
Thus, while north India was not a homogenous region in political terms,
it seems to have been a fairly well-connected cultural and linguistic region.
Its linguistic economy can be described as one of ‘multiple diglossias’,18 with
several written/High languages—Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit (Prakrit had a very
limited but symbolically important status for Jains, who also continued to
write in Apabhramsha until the sixteenth century19)—and a general spoken
vernacular (what I call here Hindavi) written in either Persian, Kaithi or
Devanagari scripts. A simplified form of Persian seems to also have been a
spoken lingua franca, while individuals and groups also maintained their own
spoken languages (for example, ‘Turki’ or Pashtun) for generations.
Material traces of this multilingualism are scant yet unmistakeable: Persian
dictionaries compiled in India in this period are particularly multilingual and
include Turki and Hindavi synonyms, and in the case of Turki also many
lemmas.20 The poor command over Persian of some Pashtu-speaking Afghan
amirs is occasionally commented upon.21 And a few compositions of the Sikh
gurus show that a simplified form of Persian was current as a spoken language
in Punjab in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.22 Persian words had of
course entered everyday language use, particularly in the domains of admin-
istration, power and warfare, and can be found inflected by local phonology
in a number of texts.23
Yet, precisely because there are comparatively few traces of this multi-
lingualism in the texts and in the internal organization of the archives, we
cannot rely only on local taxonomies but need to envisage a more inclu-
sive oral multi-lingual context for them. For example, Persian biographical
dictionaries may mention that certain individuals composed or listened to
poetry and songs in Hindavi as well as Persian, but they never quote the
poems or songs.24
Diglossia is the term most often used to describe the relationship between
vernacular and classical languages. Yet the hierarchical connotations of
the term and the dynamics it describes (High versus low language), while
undoubtedly fitting in some cases, as for example in the case of Braj Bhasha
rīti granth in relation to Sanskrit texts of poetics, make it a little too restric-
tive for the range of phenomena and relationships that we are trying to grasp.
Did the Sufi and courtly poets whose Persian literary habitus consisted of

Chapter 01.indd 45 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 46  New Cultural Histories of India

genres like the qasida, masnavi, ghazal, ruba’i, and qita’ consider the Hindavi
padas, dohas, and kathas they listened to or composed equally literary or
literary at all? The fifteenth-century Avadhi Sufi Abd al-Quddus Gangohi,
who composed Hindavi verses under the pen-name ‘Alakh Das’ (the literal
translation of Abd al-Quddus), posited a definite parallelism between Persian
and Hindavi poetry.25 Poets like Manjhan, Jayasi, and Qutban recognizably
borrowed elements from Persian masnavis for their Hindavi romances, but
expressed clear pride at the beauty and depth of meaning of their works.26
As writers on diglossia themselves are eager to point out, a low language, a
vernacular, is not always used for ‘minor’ functions and texts, or always in
an inferior relationship to a High language.27 For this reason, I have used
‘diglossia’ only when the relationship between two languages was clearly a
hierarchical one (that is, it was perceived to be so), and bilingualism and
multilingualism (or heteroglossia) in the other cases.
Finally, while there is enough evidence of vernacularization, this does not
mean that a mono-lingual vernacular literary culture replaced the multiple
diglossias. On the contrary, given the continuing and in fact expanding role
and status of Persian as a necessary requirement for administrative jobs and
elite culture, the symbolic role of Sanskrit and the persistent heteroglossia
that rendered ‘rough and ready bilingualism’28 a must for anyone engaged in
trade, the army, religion, and performance, it is not surprising that literary
culture in north India over this period (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, but
perhaps even more in the eighteenth century) witnessed a parallel growth in
Persian and the vernacular, and a continuous and enriching process of in-,
out- and cross-translation between classical languages (usually through the
vernacular), or between classical languages and the vernacular and vice versa.

Scripts, Writing, and Copying

From the perspective of modern scholars looking for the earliest specimens of
Hindi and Urdu, it was an easy step to either take script as proof of language
identity, or else to brush aside the evidence of script when it went against
one’s conception. Thus Hafiz Mahmud Sherani, whose pioneering work on
vernacular traces in Persian texts in the 1930s is still unsurpassed, consid-
ered those words and phrases as evidence of Urdu just because they were
written by Muslims in the Persian script (see n. 6). By contrast, Mataprasad
Gupta disregarded the evidence of script and insisted on positing a putative
Devanagari/Kaithi ‘original’ for Jayasi’s Padmāvat because this was a Hindi
text.29

Chapter 01.indd 46 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  47

While the ravages of war and climate mean that there are unfortunately
hardly any actual fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts extant, and
even fewer documents that trace non-literary language and script use, there
are still a few examples that can be discussed. Moreover, even a few general
pointers can help us avoid misapprehensions regarding a putative identity of
script, language, and community such as those just mentioned.
The first point to be made is precisely one regarding the relationship
between script and language. Script was first and foremost a skill linked to
education and professional use—only for religious texts, and even then not
in all cases, can we posit an association between language and script at this
time (e.g. Islamic and Sikh scriptures). Though little material evidence has
survived, historical sources tell us that the chancellery of the Lodi Sultans and
of Sher Shah Suri was bilingual and biscriptual and included both Persian
and Hindavi scribes.30 Some local functionaries may have known Persian,31
and local scribes literate in their own specialized script (Kaithi rather than
Nagari in north India) who did not read Persian heard the stereotyped Persian
expressions of official documents frequently and incorporated them in their
own vernacular documents, Sumit Guha suggests.32 As is well known, Todar
Mall’s decision ad 1582 to make Persian the language of administration even
at the lower levels of district administration gave a tremendous impetus to
Persian literacy and education (including literary education) among Hindu
scribal groups, and Persian-knowing Hindu scribes came to dominate the
scribal profession at all levels. But there is evidence of continued biscriptual-
ism in local documents such as the ‘Vrindaban documents’ (early seventeenth
century)—and of course in the chancellery of sub-imperial states such as
Amber/Jaipur.33
The two languages and two scripts in these documents speak of different
audiences and socio-cultural communities, but in the case of literary texts we
do well to consider the agency of the copyist and the literacy of the person
commissioning the copy in order to understand the relationship between text
and script, rather than immediately assume an identity between text, script,
and socio-textual community. For example, we find the same narrative and
song genres and texts (dhrupad, bishnupad, katha as well as doha) written in
both Persian and Kaithi script, depending upon the literacy of the patron or
copyist. Thus script is an important evidence of their circulation across dif-
ferent and/or mixed audiences rather than of any perceived identity of the
text.34 Jayasi’s Padmāvat for example, notes Thomas de Bruijn, was copied in
Nasta‘liq, Devanagari, and Kaithi scripts from the earliest stage of its textual
tradition, and the difference in size and appearance among the manuscripts

Chapter 01.indd 47 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 48  New Cultural Histories of India

in the same script also suggests significant differences in the nature and pur-
pose of the transmission of the text.35 The only copy of Malik Muhammad
Jayasi’s tale of Krishna, Kanhāvat, that has a date (1067H/1657) and a colo-
phon tells us that it was copied by a certain Sayyid Abdulrahim Husain, the
son of a drugseller and resident of Masauli near Kannauj, for a local kayastha,
Rajaram Saksena of Qasimpur, also in Kannauj district.36 This suggests both
that Rajaram Saksena was literate in Persian and that this ‘Sufi’ text circulated
beyond Jais and beyond Sufi circles.
Further clues are provided by the actual material form of the book, its size
and quality and whether it was illustrated or not. As far as I know, books
copied in Sufi circles were not illustrated, so the presence of several illus-
trated codices of Hindavi Sufi romances, though lacking colophons and thus
precise information about patronage, suggests that these tales were copied
for elite patrons, possibly local amirs. But what to say of a Mirigāvatī codex
copied in Kaithi (ca AD 1525)?37 Sheikh Qutban had written the Mirigāvatī
in AD 1503 and dedicated it to the Sultan of Jaunpur. Was this particular
copy produced and illustrated for a local Hindu chieftain? Or, less likely, for
an amir who preferred Kaithi?
The corpus of illuminated and illustrated manuscripts from the fifteenth
century is too limited to venture precise hypotheses about literary tastes or
literary patronage for books as expensive objects.38 Yet illustrated books do
offer some evidence of the trend toward vernacularization of Sultanate liter-
ary culture from Gujarat to Malwa. The same codex format with text in the
Perso-Arabic script and often full-page illustrations in a similar range of styles
were used for the Persian Shahnāmas, Hamzanāmas, and other Persian texts
and for the Hindavi Candāyan and Mirigāvatī.39 This is not the case with
Mughal patronage of illustrated books, which seems to have been limited
exclusively to Persian books—even when they were translations of Sanskrit
or Hindavi texts. At the same time, the proliferation of illustrated books on
paper (both in palm leaf manuscript and codex format) in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries suggests the emergence of a common elite taste for the
book as a precious object among Jain, Muslim, and Hindu elites.
And yet, in a context where so many texts (poems, songs, tales) were rou-
tinely read out and recited, the script in which a text or genre was transcribed
or copied cannot be taken as an indicator of the limits of its audience, espe-
cially in the case of vernacular texts. Allison Busch has carefully examined the
issue of the Mughal emperors’ taste for Braj Bhasha songs and verses, which
was not dependent on their ability to read the Devanagari or Kaithi script:
their experience was an auditory one.40 Persian poets who wrote complete

Chapter 01.indd 48 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  49

texts in and on Braj Bhasha poetry always did so in Persian script, and with
Persian commentaries, while other Muslim poets—especially in Rajasthan—
composed only in Braj Bhasha and in the Nagari script.41 Should we think of
bilingual literary elites in the first case, and of a more monolingual context
in the second?
Finally, and this leads us to the following section, although several of the
manuscripts mentioned in this section were copied for individual patrons,
writing and copying was an activity most intensely connected with institu-
tional locations and agents, or with an impetus towards institutionalization
and codification.Thus among the most active copyists and collectors of songs
and verses in this period we find religious groups—panths and sampradays
like the Nanak and Dadu panths and the Vallabha sampraday, as well as Sufi
lineages and khanqahs, and of course the Jains. These panths were also the
first to write down and codify life-histories of vernacular poets in collec-
tions such as bha-ktamals and vartas–thus harnessing their popularity and the
power of their poetry to their own name.
Though this kind of research has yet to be undertaken systematically for
north Indian vernacular texts, in the context of Marathi Christian Novetzke
has made a very useful distinction between two kinds of books, the more
canonical pothis and the badas.42 While the former are ‘codifying’ collections
usually written and copied by institutional agents and centres, the latter are
notebooks copied by individual performers of the kirtan genre. In the context
of north India, we may note a similar distinction between the fairly stable
pothi tradition of Kabir in the Ādi Granth and the Dadu-panthi Pañc-vān.ī
collections as against the more ‘unstable’ Kabir (and Surdas, and Mira, and
other popular poets) of singers’ ‘notebooks’ such as the AD 1582 Fatehpur
manuscript Pada Sūradāsajī kā.43

Location and Circulation

The most influential and compelling argument about the relationship between
language, literature and politics, and between a High Language (Sanskrit)
and the vernaculars has been put forward by Sheldon Pollock. Marshalling
an impressive range of genres and examples, he has argued that (1) vernacular
languages were first literized (that is, written down, usually for documentary
purposes) and then, often after a considerable gap, literarized, that is, used
for literary, imaginative, performative, and expressive purposes (what he calls
‘workly’). (2) Any vernacular innovation is linked to a reconfiguration of the
culture-power order, when in place of cosmopolitan imperial polities more

Chapter 01.indd 49 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 50  New Cultural Histories of India

regional, vernacular polities emerge. (3) Vernaculars then themselves became

cosmopolitan and were used simultaneously, as had been already the case
of Sanskrit, both for political and literary discourse, ‘with the court func-
tioning as engine for the stimulation of literary production of a textualized
sort’.44 (4) In order to become literarized, the vernacular [had to] emulate the
superimposed models of literature of the cosmopolitan language, for ‘there
is no parthenogenesis in culture’.45 As he puts it, ‘vernacular poets achieved
expressivity by appropriating and domesticating models of literary-language
use from superposed cultural formations’.46
Pollock is very clear that what he means by literature is what his authors
meant by literature, that is, kavya and sahitya,47 a set of genres and discourses
highly regulated by the ‘science of literature’, sahityashastra. ‘By contrast, the
world of the “uncultured”, that is, of the uncourtly and noncosmopolitan
languages of Place (deśabhās�ā), was sub-literary: a domain of the sung, the
unwritten, the oral’.48 And since his Sanskrit theorists disdained orality and
literature in non-cosmopolitan languages and consigned songs to a different
order of discourse ( gita), for Pollock, too, literature that does not follow the
      

courtly practice of kavya is simply not literature at all.49

This model of the emergence of vernacular literary culture—with the
making of vernacular polities and the literarization of the vernacular through
emulation of the superimposed model of Sanskrit by (mostly Brahmin) poets
at royal courts who knew Sanskrit very well and shared the conceptual frame-
work of Sanskrit poetics but wanted to innovate—does not work well for
north India for a number of reasons. First and more obvious is the substantial
presence of the dominant High Language of literary and political discourse,
Persian, which continued to spread over north India through the Sultanate
administration, madrasa education, and the culture of the Sufis—and as we
have seen had significant spoken currency as well in a simplified form. Second,
while Sanskrit-educated Brahmin poets did produce the kind of superim-
posed vernacular literary culture described by Pollock later on—notably with
Keshavdas at the Bundela principality of Orchha—they were by no means
the only or principal agents of literature at this time.50 Most of the authors of
poems and narratives in fifteenth-century north India were either Muslims,
kayasthas, Jain panditas, low-caste or of unknown or mixed background—
even if later tradition may have strived to ascribe hidden Brahmin pedigrees
to them. It is then unsurprising that the literary genres they preferred and the
literary models they followed were less Sanskritic than in Kannada and other
similar regional literary cultures.
As we have seen, fifteenth-century Hindavi literature consists mainly of
songs, doha couplets and kathas, narratives. Some were indeed produced at

Chapter 01.indd 50 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  51

regional or even smaller courts, but others in the open ‘bhakti public sphere’
(Agrawal) of towns and villages. Songs (and singer-composers, vaggeyakaras)
were highly prized and at the centre of courtly performances, as well as of
devotional practices and temples. Both kathas, songs, and dohas were genres
practiced by a range of different poets—Naths, Sants, Sufis, Jains, Bhakha
and also sometimes Persian court poets—and the high degree of intertextu-
ality in terms of titles/names, tropes, and images shows that they circulated
among all these domains, evidence of a general intelligibility of genres and
aesthetics.51
A useful term to grapple with this dynamic is palimpsest. While the dic-
tionary definition of palimpsest is ‘a manuscript (usually written on papyrus
or parchment) on which more than one text has been written with the earlier
writing incompletely erased’,52 the term has also been used as a metaphor for
an amalgam of different forms that rework shared matrixes and are loosely
connected with each other, though they may or may not acknowledge this
connection. And while palimpsest usually implies a diachronic dimension,
it can arguably also be used counter-intuitively to suggest a continuous and
simultaneous reworking of the shared matrix. We can then say that literary
genres worked as a kind of palimpsest, on which every poet rewrote from his
particular perspective.
Thus, instead of Pollock’s model of court-centred vernacularization sketched
above, it seems better to understand literary culture in fifteenth-­century
north India as a multilingual and multilocational literary culture—with a
trend towards Persian-Hindavi bilinguality in the domains of politics and
literature of the various regional Sultans and in Sufi religious and literary
practice, of Apabhramsha-Hindavi/Bhakha bilinguality in Jain circles, of
vernacular literary production with significant gestures towards Sanskrit in
(some) Rajput polities, and with the emergence of strong vernacular voices in
the ‘public sphere of bhakti’. This more diverse picture mirrors the balance of
social forces that were active and vocal in the polities of the regional Sultans
and local Rajput chiefdoms and in the ‘religious marketplace’ (Sheikh) of
the time: rulers and chieftains, merchants and artisans, religious leaders, and
groups of various kinds.
One of the challenges in linking these different locations is that literary
histories have come down to us with their own geographies, which if mapped
on the north Indian terrain look like a series of overlapping maps based on
language and content that bear little or no relation to each other. Thus there
is the Hindi map of early Rajasthani (rasau) and Avadhi poems, followed
by the Krishna bhakti poetry of the Braj area and the Ram bhakti poetry of
Ayodhya and Banaras, and the riti poetry of Rajput courts. The Urdu map

Chapter 01.indd 51 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 52  New Cultural Histories of India

bears early, phantom traces in Lahore and Delhi with Mas‘ud Sa‘d Salman
and Amir Khusrau in Delhi followed by two centuries of silence, the flourish-
ing of Dakkani Sufi and courtly poetry, and Vali’s journey north in AD 1700,
after which the map of Urdu poetry centres in Delhi and Lucknow with a
host of ‘satellite’ cities and qasbas. The Persian map is further divided between
darbar and khanqah, courtly and Sufi, with Persian courtly poetry making
a mark with Amir Khusrau and Mir Hasan Sijzi, then ‘disappearing’ in the
long fifteenth century, and bursting again on the scene with the large immi-
gration of Iranian poets at the courts of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shahjahan and
the local talents of Faizi, Chandrabhan Brahman, etc.—all taking place at
the Mughal court. The Persian Sufi map is more dispersed and ‘regional’, but
how exactly it relates to the Persian courtly one is only intuitively understood.
While such maps may be useful within the context of a silsilah or sam-
praday, or to understand the circulation and transmission of a specific taste
(e.g. Persian poetry), or the affiliation of a poet to a particular tradition,
they seem inadequate when it comes to understanding the workings of poets
within this multilingual literary culture. Even if tazkiras and bhaktamals and
poetic vamshavalis are themselves selective, and even if authors in a particular
language ignored those in another language in their own town or area, surely
this ignorance or lack of interest is to be studied as a function of the genre
or of the field rather than reproduced. Moreover, these maps leave too many
gaps, too many areas and periods where nothing seems to be happening. A
geographical sensibility within a comparative approach can go a long way in
highlighting and then filling these gaps.
Often works that signal the oral communication and circulation of a
narrative or a song genre from one language or one tradition or one perfor-
mance style into another are the most suggestive in this respect. Thus Nalini
Delvoye’s work tracing the trajectory of dhrupad from the Tomar court at
Gwalior to the courts of Gujarat, Rewa, and the imperial court at Agra and
the sub-imperial one of Jodhpur, and the links and affiliations between
Tansen, Swami Haridas, and the Shattari Sufi Muhammad Ghaus Gwaliyari,
has done much to show precisely how these different locations—both courtly
and religious—were connected, and how singers, songs, and musical aesthet-
ics circulated between Sufi sama‘ sessions, courtly mahfils and sabhas, temple
functions, and devotional gatherings.53
At other times it is works that are not central to the self-definition of a tra-
dition, works that appear off-site, that force us to look around for a possible
context until we can place them into a new literary geography. I have argued
elsewhere that a work like Jayasi’s version of the Krishna tale (Harikatha), the

Chapter 01.indd 52 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  53

already-mentioned Kanhāvat (AD 1540), at first surprises us, since Awadh

is usually left out altogether of Krishna bhakti maps, centred as they are on
Braj, Puri, Bengal, and later Rajasthan, and Gujarat.54 But when we begin to
look around for other traces of Krishna bhakti and performance in Awadh,
we actually start finding them. It may be a reference to a renowned bhakti
poet-singer who is usually associated with Braj (Paramanand svami).55 Or
what turns out to be the first Bhakha version of the tenth book (Dasam
Skandha) of the Bhāgavata Purān.a, albeit of scant literary merit, incomplete,
and unconnected to any sampraday, but quite popular in its own time, and
composed only ten years before Jayasi heard the story (and ‘read it’) and
only 40 miles away from Jais.56 We also find a significant trace of the popu-
larity of Krishna songs in a sixteenth-century Persian text from the region,
the already-­mentioned Haqā’iq-i Hindī.57 We can thus imagine songs and
tales about Krishna (bishnupad, kirtan, and Harikatha) circulating in Awadh
through groups of singers and storytellers who performed in urban centres, at
fairs, at Sufi sama‘ gatherings, as well as for private seva and worship.
A geographical sensibility allows us to see these texts in Persian, Avadhi
and Braj Bhasha as somehow connected. While in the sectarian Krishna-
bhakti accounts Awadh is just a stop-over for Vallabhacharya, a site where he
initiated a few more devotees and singer-poets into the sampraday, we may
read the accounts against the grain and note evidence of independent activity
and circulation of Krishna songs and the Harikatha. Lalac Kavi’s Haricarit
deserves only the briefest mention in Hindi literary history because it is not a
sophisticated literary achievement: yet both in its location (Kannauj, urban),
the background of the author (kayastha, halwai? in any case not a patronised
court-poet), and the wide geographical diffusion of its manuscript copies it
signals its significance as a vehicle of circulation of the Harikatha. Jayasi’s
elaborate and sophisticated Sufi tale tells us of yet another agency, that of
the Ahirs as seasonal performers of some kind of raslila, and of a reworking
that seeks to place itself in the open arena. Finally, the almost contempora-
neous Haqā’iq-i Hindī signals the popularity of bishnupad (Krishna bhakti
songs) in the region, certainly not among Sufis alone. As a result, thanks to
this multiligual map, Awadh is traversed with Krishna bhakti performers and
performances, a veritable synchronic palimpsest of religious entertainment.
If we take Jayasi’s Kanhāvat again as an example, the basic outline and
features of the Krishna story remained the same but there was ample space
for rearrangement, selection, and addition. The synchronic palimpsest of
north Indian literary (and religious) culture in this period meant that songs
or tales (Vaishnava, Sant, and other) circulated among different i­nterpretive

Chapter 01.indd 53 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 54  New Cultural Histories of India

c­ ommunities, and the same images and symbols became by necessity mul-
tivocal, i.e. there was no simple interpretation that was valid for all, and
participants knew this and accepted it as such.

The Need for a Multilingual Approach

The alternative to selective and exclusive single language literary histories
is not a narrative of ‘composite culture’, where equally selective syncretic
traditions are taken as definitive evidence that culture (music, Sufism, Sant
bhakti) acted as a great cohesive force in the Indo-Muslim polity. Both the
single language and the ‘composite culture’ narratives exclude large swathes
of literary production, set arbitrary language boundaries, construct chronolo-
gies that do not match, and address questions of language and literary choice
spuriously along an unproblematic continuum of script-language-religious
identity and community.
What this essay has suggested, instead, is that we need a multilingual
approach to the multilingual literary culture. Such an approach requires
specific tools in addition to the usual literary-historical narratives based on
genre, patronage, and the rise of new trends and fashions. This essay has
taken fifteenth-century north India as its case study, but the tools it pro-
poses could be fruitfully applied to other regions and periods of literary
history.
First, we need an awareness of the material and historically located prac-
tices of writing, where literature is but one domain of language use, to be
relativized and compared to, for example, the domains of administration,
trade, and the army. This helps us reflect on the important phenomenon of
biscriptualism and its consequences for the circulation of literary texts and,
in the final analysis, for literary history.
Second, local taxonomies and written archives are precious in the affilia-
tions and faultlines they set up, but they need to be set against wider categories
of language, literature, and socio-textual communities, where oral perfor-
mance and the circulation of genres and performers and a kind of regular
multilingualism gave shape to a multilingual and multilocal literary culture.
Thus, we noted that even scant bilingual traces within texts help question
and relativise otherwise strict protocols such as those of Persian texts. Or, as
Imre Bangha and Allison Busch have done, we can read register as a subtle
form of bilingualism, a tool through which poets modulated their responses
to other (poetic) repertoires in the multilingual world they lived in.

Chapter 01.indd 54 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  55

These traces lead us to the all-important aspects of orality: oral perfor-

mance, oral circulation, and oral enjoyment. In turn, these aspects help
us explain the ubiquity, intelligibility, and flexibility of songs, the striking
­intertextuality of certain texts (like Sufi Hindavi romances), the circulation
of tales, titles and motifs, and the development of a broad-based aesthetic
sensibility that can be summed up in terms like bhava and that continued in
the person of what Katherine Schofield has called the ‘Mughal rasika’.58
Finally, within this multi-lingual and comparative outlook, attentive to
the multiple locations of literary cultural and the oral aspects of performance,
circulation, and enjoyment, a geographical sensibility and historical acute-
ness can bring to light unexpected links. Thus, rather than a model of literary
culture centred around either religious sites or royal courts, we can see north
Indian literary culture as constituted precisely by the interrelated efforts of
singers, poets, patrons, and audiences at courtly darbars and sabhas, in the
open spaces of chaupals in towns and villages, in temples and khanqahs.
To study these voices and texts, and to study them in connection with
each other and within a wider comparative framework, means attempting to
write a different, at the same time thicker and more comprehensive, history
than that usually available in textbooks. Textbooks generally start from ‘hard
evidence’ and documents such as coins, inscriptions, and historical chronicles
typically compiled in centres of political power, whereas literature and the
arts are added as supplementary ornaments to the hard core of power, usually
under the rubrics of ‘patronage’ and, in the case of vernacular devotional lit-
erature, of an undefined ‘popular culture’. This is an exaggeration, of course,
but not too far off the mark.
Instead, especially for a richly fluid century like the fifteenth century in
north India, literary texts are often the only way we have to write social his-
tory, to write individuals and groups, their self-representation and worldview
into the picture, which is otherwise a hopelessly empty and schematic one of
court and people, rulers and dynasties, Muslims and Hindus, of course men
and hardly any women at all. Multilingual literary history, as we have seen,
requires a perspective open to elements and agents not immediately present
in the texts, an awareness that each text and author exists in a context that is
more complex and varied that the one he gives us to believe. Most of all, in
a region where vernacularization seems to have been, in general terms, much
slower and more partial than, say in Karnataka or the Deccan, we need to
remember that even texts in High languages were written by people who were
still part of the vernacular world.

Chapter 01.indd 55 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 56  New Cultural Histories of India

Notes
  1 M.H. Azad, Āb-e h. ayāt, (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy, 1993), p. 6.
  2 G.A. Grierson, The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan (Calcutta: The
Asiatic Society, 1889) and C.A. King, ‘The Nagari Pracharini Sabha of Benares,
1893–1914: A Study in the Social and Political History of the Hindi Language’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1974.
 3 See George A. Grierson, The Song of Mánik Chandra (Calcutta: Printed by
G.H. Rouse, 1878); idem, ‘Some Bihârî Folk-Songs’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. XVI (1884), pp. 196–246 and idem,
The Modern Vernacular Literature (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1889).
  4 Imre Bangha, ‘Rekhta: Poetry in Mixed Language’, in Francesca Orsini (ed.),
Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture (New Delhi: Orient
BlackSwan, 2010), pp. 21–83.
 5 For an important re-evaluation of the Persian-Hindavi relationship, see
Shantanu Phukan, ‘“Through Throats Where Many Rivers Meet”: The Ecology
of Hindi in the Persian Imagination’, Indian Economic Social History Review,
vol. 38, no. 1, 2001, pp. 33–58.
 6 Thus Hafiz Mahmud Sherani viewed the early instances of Hindavi in the
­fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (8/9c H) as evidence of the creation of Urdu
as a Muslim language: ‘These words and expressions, in my opinion, are enough
evidence for the antiquity of the Urdu language, and in truth it can be said that
this language was commonly spoken among Muslims in this period…we see
that Muslim peoples (aqwām) created a special language for themselves in India
and as they spread thanks to their conquests and victories, this language spread
eastward, westward, to the North and to the South as well, together with them’;
‘Urdu fiqre aur dohre āthvīn aur navīn sadī hijrī kī fārsī tasnifāt se’ (Oriental
College Magazine, August 1930), in Maqālāt-e H�āfiz Mah. mūd Sherānī (Lahore:
Shafiq Press, 1966), p. 132 (emphasis added).
  7 Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary Culture and History (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2001); Syeda Jafar and Gyanchand Jain, Tārīkh-e-
adab-e-Urdū 1700 tak, 3 vols (New Delhi: Qaumi Kaunsil baraye Furugh-e
Urdu Zaban, 1998); and Jamil  Jalibi, Tārīkh-e-adab-e-Urdū, 3 vols (Lahore:
Majlis-e-Taraqqi-e-Adab, 1975).
  8 Kisori Saran Lal, Twilight of the Sultanate: A Political, Social and Cultural History
of the Sultanate of Delhi from the Invasion of Timur to the Conquest of Babur
1398–1526 (rev. edn, New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1980).
  9 See the forthcoming volume edited by Samira Sheikh and myself, provisionally
titled After Timur Left: Cultural Production and Circulation in the Long Fifteenth
Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press. [under consideration])
10 For seasonal circulation of peasant armies in this period, see Dirk H. A. Kolff,
Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in
Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For
rebellions by local ‘Rajput’ elites in Awadh, see Surendra Nath Sinha, Subah

Chapter 01.indd 56 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  57

of Allahabad under the Great Mughals (1580–1707 ) (New Delhi: Jamia Millia
Islamia, 1974).
11 To avoid confusing this early definition of the north Indian vernacular with
modern Hindi (Khari Boli), I will use Hindavi in this essay.
12 Cf. instead Anandram Mukhlis’s comment on the ‘sweetness of the purabi
tongue’ when he heard it recited by his servant; Phukan, ‘Through Throats’,
p. 35.
13 For instance, the famous example of the Candāyan recited from pulpit in a
mosque in Delhi, though composed in ‘Avadhi’ in Dalmau, now in district Rae
Bareli; Shantanu Phukan, ‘Through a Persian Prism: Hindi and Padmavat in the
Mughal Imagination’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago,
2000.
14 See Charlotte Vaudeville, Kabir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). For word sub-
stitution by singers, see Winand Callewaert and Mukund Lath, ‘Musicians and
Scribes’ in The Hindi Songs of Namdev (Leuven: Departement Orientalistiek,
1978), pp. 55–117.
15 Sheldon Pollock, ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular’, The Journal of Asian Studies,
vol. 57, no. 1 (1998), pp. 6–37.
16 See A. Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
17 The songs collected in his Kr�s�n.a Gītāvalī (ca. 1590), Gītāvalī and the poems
in the Vinaya Patrikā, Kavitāvalī, and many of the verses in the Dohāvalī; see
Ronald Stuart McGregor, Hindi Literature: From the Beginnings to the Nineteenth
Century (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), pp. 114–57.
18 See María Angeles Gallego, ‘The Languages of Medieval Iberia and their
Religious Dimension’, Medieval Encounters, vol. 9, no. 1 (2003), pp. 107–39.
19 One of the major Apabhramsa poet, Raydhu, lived and wrote in Gwalior in the
Fifteenth Century; see Eva de Clerq’s article ‘Apabhramśa as a Literary Medium
in Fifteenth-Century North India’, in the forthcoming After Timur Left volume;
and Phyllis Granoff, ‘Mountains of Eternity: Raidhū and the Colossal Jinas of
Gwalior’, Rivista di Studi Sudasiatici, vol. 1 (2006), pp. 31–50.
20 For Indo-Persian dictionaries, see Solomon Baevskii, Early Persian Lexicography:
Farhangs of the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Centuries, translated, revised and updated
by John R. Perry (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2007 [1989]).
21 See Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, Waqi’at-e Mushtaqi of Shaikh Rizq Ullah Mushtaqui,
(New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research and Northern Book Centre,
1993), p. 9.
22 See Christopher Shackle, ‘Approaches to the Persian Loans in the Ādi Granth’,
Bulletin of SOAS, vol. 41, no. 1, 1978, pp. 73–96.
23 Even a text famously known for its low percentage of Perso-Arabic lexicon such
as Jayasi’s romance Padmāvat (1540) employs a number of such words when
describing Alauddin Khalji’s army, suggesting at the same time a highly het-
eroglot body of soldiers; V.S. Agraval, Padmāvat: Malik muhammad jāyasī krt
mahākāvya (Chirgaon: Sahitya Sadan, 1988), p. 527.

Chapter 01.indd 57 9/26/2013 5:32:12 PM

 58  New Cultural Histories of India

24 For example, the tazkira of poets in A.Q. Badauni, Muntakhabu-t-tawarikh,

translated from the original Persian and edited by W.H. Lowe (Calcutta: Asiatic
Society of Bengal, 1898–1925), vol. 2.
25 Abdul Quddus Gangohi, Rushdnāma, Jhajjhar, 1897 [BL 14724.c.1 (8)]; S.A.A.
Rizvi translated and published it in Hindi as Alakh Bānī, Aligarh, 1971; see also
Simon Digby, ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi (1456–1537 A.D.): The Personality
and Attitudes of a Medieval Indian Sufi , Medieval India: A Miscellany, vol. 3
(1975), pp. 1–66.
26 They often followed Persian poets in using precious stones as metaphors for their
precious words, i.e. ‘threading pearls’ (D.F. Plukker, The Mirigāvatī of Kutubana
[Amsterdam: Academisch proefschrift, University of Amsterdam, 1981], p. 5)
or ‘a ruby hidden in the dust’ (Agraval, Padmāvat, p. 22), also the title of Th.
de Bruijn’s monograph The Ruby in the Dust: The Poetics of Muhammad Jāyasī’s
Padmāvat (Leiden: University of Leiden Press, 2011).
27 Claudio Giovanardi, ‘Il bilinguismo italiano-latino del medioevo e del
Rinascimento’, in Storia della lingua italiana, vol. 2 ‘Lo Scritto e il Parlato’
(Torino: Einaudi, 1994), pp. 435–67.
28 Sumit Guha, ‘Mārgī, Deśī and Yāvanī: High Language and Ethnic Speech
in Maharashtra’, in M. Naito, I. Shima, and H. Kotani (eds), Mārga: Ways
of Liberation, Empowerment, and Social Change in Maharashtra (New Delhi:
Manohar, 2008), pp. 129–46.
29 M.P. Gupta, Jāyasī-granthāvalī (Allahabad: Hindustani Academi, 1952).
30 A land-grant from a village near the qasba of Sandila (now dist. Hardoi) to a local
Sheikh from Sultan Ibrahim II son of Sikandar Lodi (dated 927H [1520]) records
the deed in Persian taliq and in Hindi Kaithi script below, and there is a similar
(though illegible in print) grant from Sher Shah’s time.; M. Mohammad Shafi,
‘Three Old Documents’, in Proceedings of the Idara-i Maarif-i Islamia (Lahore,
1936), pp. 281–5. This shows that ‘Abbas Sherwani’s statement that Sher Shah
had appointed two karkuns in every pargana, one to write Hindi and the other to
write Persian, had its roots in Lodi’s times’; Momin Mohiuddin, The Chancellery
and Persian Epistolography under the Mughals (Calcutta: Iran Society, 1971), p. 28.
31 Although there are references to the fact that already in the time of Sikandar
Lodi Hindus ‘learned to read and write the Persian script, which had not been
common among whom until then’ (‘kāfirān bakhwāndan o–neveshtan-i khat-i
fārsī ki tā ān zamān dar miyān-i īshān ma‘mūl nabud, pardākhtand ’); Tabaqat-i
Akhbarshahi, quoted in ‘Sikandar Lodhi aur uske ‘ahad ke ba‘z farsi musannifin’,
Oriental College Magazine, vol. 32 (1932), p. 29.
32 For examples in Marathi and general arguments about biscriptualism, see
S. Guha, ‘Mārgī, Deśī and Yāvanī: High Language and Ethnic Speech in
Maharashtra’, in Naito, Shima, and Kotani (eds), Mārga, pp. 129–46. At the
same time, vernacular words and expressions crept into Persian letter-writing,
especially in the ‘functional’ parts of grants and correspondence; ibid., p. 134.
The Lodi grant mentioned above speaks of ‘zamīn-i banjar’ (uncultivated land,
p. 283), while a private letter (dated 955H/1548) written by a courtier of Islam
Shah warns the addressee against using force (‘dhakka nakunand ’) against a

Chapter 01.indd 58 9/26/2013 5:32:13 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  59

local Sheikh with good contacts at court. Perhaps because written in a clearly
agitated state of mind, the letter is written in very simple Persian and lets the
odd Hindi word in; Shafi, ‘Three Documents’, p. 287. The writer also uses an
odd causative ‘farmān…sādar mīkunānīdand ’ (they had an irrevocable order
issued) that looks like a calque of the Hindi causative karvānā.
33 The letter known as Krishnadasa’s document (1637) from Vrindaban is some-
what different from the Lodi example, with Braj Bhasha and Persian side by
side, left and right respectively: here the Braj Bhasha side is surprisingly free
of Persian expressions and the Persian side is instead full of untranslated Hindi
words (anucar, asthal, kuñj)—perhaps because written by a Hindu scribe? See
Tarapada Mukherjee and Irfan Habib, ‘Land Rights in the Reign of Akbar:
The Evidence of the Sale-deeds of Vrindaban and Aritha’, Proceedings: Indian
History Congress (1989–90), vol. 50 (1990), pp. 236–55. For examples from the
Jaipur chancellery, see Monika Horstmann, In Favour of Govinddevji: Historical
Documents Relating to a Deity of Vrindaban and Eastern Rajasthan, in collabora-
tion with Heike Bill (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts
in association with Manohar, 1999). I am grateful to Monika Horstmann and
Najaf Haider for their training sessions held at SOAS in 2007 and 2008 on how
to read these documents.
34 For evidence of bishnupad and dhrupad in Persian script see Mir ‘Abd al-Wahid
Bilgrami, Haqā’iq-i Hindī, Ahsanullah Collection MS 297.7/II (Aligarh:
Maulana Azad Library), translated into Hindi by S.A.A. Rizvi as Hakāyake Hindī
(Banaras: Nagari Pracharini Sabha, 1957); see also P. Sharma (ed.), Sahasraras:
Nāyaka Bakhśū ke dhrupadom kā saṅgraha (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Academy)
and Françoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, ‘Collections of lyrics in Hindustani music: The
Case of Dhrupad ’, in Joep Bor, Françoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, Jane Harvey, and
Emmie te Nijenhuis (eds), Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries
(New Delhi: Manohar, 2010)—in both cases only the song texts are in Hindavi/
Braj Bhasha, while the commentary and introduction are in Persian.
35 De Bruijn, The Ruby in the Dust, ch. 1.
36 Kanhāvat, Ms.Or. 29, Sprenger’s collection, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, f. 132a.
37 Held in the Bharat Kala Bhavan, Banaras (250 out of 253 folios); see
Karl  Khandalavala and Moti Chandra, New Documents of Indian Painting: A
Reappraisal (Bombay: Board of Trustees of the Prince of Wales Museum of
Western India, 1969), p. 107 (and Pl. 26 on p. 106). I am grateful to Preeti
Khosla for this information and the reference.
38 Eloïse Brac de la Perrière, L’Art du livre dans l’Inde des sultanats (Paris: Presses de
l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008).
39 See Khandalawala and Chandra, New Documents; E. Brac de la Perrière, L’Art
du livre, pp. 66–7. See also B.N. Goswamy, A Jainesque Sultanate Shahnama and
the Context of Pre-Mughal Painting in India (Zürich: Museum Rietberg, 1988).
40 Busch, Poetry for Kings; also ‘Hidden in Plain View: Brajbhasha Poets at the
Mughal Court’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (2010), pp. 267–309.
41 For Persian poets who also wrote in Braj Bhasha see G.A. Bilgrami, Ma'āthiral-
Kirām (Lahore: Maktaba Ihya al-Ulum al-Sharqiya, 1971); for Muslim poets

Chapter 01.indd 59 9/26/2013 5:32:13 PM

 60  New Cultural Histories of India

like Raskhan, Raslin, or Vajid, whose work is extant in the Nagari script, see
McGregor, Hindi Literature.
42 Christian Lee Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint
Namdev in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), ch. 3.
43 See Gopal Narayan Bahura, Pada sūradāsajī kā, facsimile edition, with an essay
by Ken  Bryant (Jaipur: Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, 1984); also
Callewaert and Lath, ‘Musicians and Scribes’.
44 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture,
and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006),
p. 337.
45 Ibid., p. 318.
46 Ibid., p. 291.
47 And prashasti, that is, workly political discourse in inscriptions.
48 Ibid., p. 299.
49 At the end of a very articulate and convincing plea for the importance and
radical innovation of writing for literature, Pollock comes to some rather star-
tling conclusions: ‘Only authors of written work are included in the canons
included in ethnohistorical accounts of literature; the oral poets stands entirely
outside of history’ [Kabir, Surdas, Mira Bai?]; ‘…such oral culture is not only
unknowable in its historicity, it is excluded from the literary history made by
committing texts to writing… It is no redundancy to say that a literary work
does not exist until it becomes literate’ (ibid., pp. 317, 318). Elsewhere he
acknowledges that ‘the ongoing interaction between the oral and the literate
constitutes one of the most remarkable and unique features of Indian literary
culture. If oral compositions could be literized, literized compositions could
also return to oral circulation, and the interplay between oral and literate
composition and transcription could become dizzyingly complex’ (ibid., p.
316).
50 This is the kind of literary culture analysed by Allison Busch in Poetry of Kings;
but to say that it was ‘singularly influential form of culture that occupied the
entire conceptual domain of aestheticized language use’ (Pollock, Language of
the Gods, p. 322) seems unwarranted.
51 The late Aditya Behl argued convincingly the redeployment of key concepts
of Sanskrit aesthetics such as rasa, bhāva, and rūpa by Avadhi Sufis; see his
series of lectures ‘Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition,
1379–1545’, delivered at SOAS, London, November 2008.
52 http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webw?s=palimpsest (accessed 26 October
2009).
53 See, for example, Françoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, ‘Indo-Persian Accounts on Music
Patronage in the Sultanate of Gujarat’, in Muzafar Alam, Françoise ‘Nalini’
Delvoye, and Marc Gaborieau (eds), The Making of Indo-Persian Culture: Indian
and French Studies (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), pp. 253–80, but more gener-
ally all her research; see also Allyn Miner’s ‘Ragas and Raginis, Sufis and Sants:
Music in North India in the Early Sixteenth Century’, forthcoming in Francesca

Chapter 01.indd 60 9/26/2013 5:32:13 PM

 for a multilingual literary history  61

Orsini and Katherine Schofield (eds), Tellings and Texts: Singing, Story-Telling
and Performance in South Asia.
54 For a fuller treatment of this issue and this text, see my ‘Krishna Bhakti and
Sufis in Awadh’, forthcoming in Vasudha Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui (eds),
Religious Interactions in Mughal India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
55 Richard Barz, ‘The Vārtā of Paramānandadāsa’, The Bhakti Sect of  Vallabhācārya
(Faridabad: Thomson Press [India], 1976), p. 144.
56 Lalac Das or Lalac Kavi was a kayastha or possibly a halwai from ‘Hastigram’
(present-day Hathgaon) near Raebareilly; his Haricarit was partly edited by Nalin
Vilochan Sharma (Patna: Bihar Rashtrabhasha Parishad, 1963). According to
R.S. McGregor (Hindi Literature, p. 96n), the text was well known in the 18c,
while Hindi scholar and manuscript collector Udaya Shankar Dubey maintains
that there are scores of manuscript copies of the Haricarit can be found in east-
ern UP and Bihar (all in Kaithi script) and as far afield as Malwa and Gujarat;
personal communication, Allahabad, August 2009.
57 Abd al-Wahid Bilgrami (1510–1608), from the nearby qasba of Bilgram, spent
part of his life in Kannauj. He must have heard a lot of Krishna songs (bishnu-
pad), for he expounded on the Sufi mystical interpretation of the terms found
in dhrupad and bishnupad songs, which he called The Truths of India (Haqā’iq-i
Hindī, 1566, see n. 31). This included a systematic treatment of terms related
to the story of Krishna, and from the tenor/tone of his explanation it is clear
that while the songs appealed to him aesthetically (and emotionally), he was
not interested in the theology of Krishna bhakti; for a lucid assessment of the
work, see Muzaffar Alam, ‘Assimilation from a Distance: Confrontation and
Sufi Accommodation in Awadh Society’, in R. Champakalakshmi and S. Gopal
(eds), Tradition, Dissent and Ideology: Essays in Honour of Romila Thapar (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 164–191.
58 Katherine Schofield, ‘The Mughal Rasika’, forthcoming in Francesca Orsini
and Katherine Schofield (eds), Tellings and Texts.

Chapter 01.indd 61 9/26/2013 5:32:13 PM

 2
Scripting the Cultural History of Language
Mod.-ı in the Colonial Archive*

Prachi Deshpande

A critical feature of the early modern history of Maratha power and expansion
are the voluminous written materials produced by the Maratha bureaucracy.
Sizeable collections of these administrative records, usually designated not by
the language they were in—Marathi—but by the medieval cursive script they
were written in—Mod.ī—are to be found across Maharashtra, and in different
state archives across the country. This overall Mod.ī corpus itself has been criti-
cal in shaping, symbolically as well as materially, the modern Marathi historical
and historiographical imagination from the nineteenth century onwards.1
The Mod.ī script itself, however, is no longer taught in Marathi schools in
Maharashtra as a matter of course; its usage waned over the twentieth century.
It is now a handy visual symbol of the bygone Maratha era, and a specialist
researchers’ skill—a technological key that is necessary primarily to access the
empirical history of the Maratha state through these archival materials.
In this essay, I am interested in placing this body of writing in the Mod.ī
script at the intersection of two related and growing fields of inquiry in the
social-cultural history of early modern and colonial South Asia: one, the
investigation of linguistic modernity and the shifts in linguistic practice under

* I could not have written this essay without the active help and encouragement
of Bhavani Raman, whose path-breaking work on scribal cultures, cited below, has
inspired and clarified my own thinking about the world of Mod.ī. I also thank all the
participants of the New Cultural Histories conference at the Centre for Studies in
Social Sciences, Calcutta, for their comments and feedback.

Chapter 02.indd 62 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   63

colonial knowledge practices; and two, the illumination of pre-­colonial, poly-

glot, scribal cultures and their transformation under new regimes of print,
education, and bureaucracy. The scholarship on linguistic modernity has
emphasized the enmeshing of three critical strands—the historicizing and
fixing of individual languages by Orientalist scholarship and Christian mis-
sionaries, the pedagogical transmission of these new, foundational ideas about
languages through printed textbooks and school primers, and the ascendancy
of new literary and prose genres in new, contested publics—in transform-
ing myriad speech forms and written registers across the subcontinent into
today’s dominant ‘regional languages’.2 The growing interest in scribal history
over the medieval and early modern periods in the subcontinent has, for its
part, located the shaping of bureaucratic worlds within a framework of mon-
etization, paper and the expansion of the global economy. It has emphasized
the social impact of these shifts in different regional and temporal contexts,
outlining their implications mainly for ritual status and Hindu social hier-
archy, to the political position of scribal groups within early modern state
formations, and to the making of a peculiarly South Asian modernity itself.3
One of the most interesting, yet under-explored lines of inquiry this
diverse body of scholarship has opened up are the deep intersection of rev-
enue administrations, scribal practices, archiving, and language in what were
complex polyglot worlds.4 It is here that a focus on scripts may be in order.
Thus far, the scholarly approach to scripts in the subcontinent has focused
on their origins and development from ancient to modern variants, or overall
rise and fall in usage. Another has emphasized their symbolic importance as
overdetermined markers of identity.5 To be sure, this evolutionary approach
can be applied to Mod.ī, tracing and the modifications of its curlicues over
time, its graphical proximity to, and departures from, variants of Nagari as
well as similar chancery-scripts such as Mudiya or Kaithi, or even its reso-
nance with another ‘broken’ script, Shikastah. However, conceived as sites
of socio-cultural and everyday linguistic practice, such scripts can enable us
to ask fresh questions about multilingual life, about changing cultures of
reading and writing and the cultivation of particular skills and attitudes to
them. In other words, exploring choices and shifts surrounding particular
scripts—a cultural history of scripts, as it were—can enable a fresh, produc-
tive approach to linguistic modernity, excavating both shifts in the scribal
worlds they enabled and inhabited, as well as changing attitudes to grammar,
orthography, and regimes of correct expression.
Mod.ī emerged as a cursive script for business documents and quick writ-
ing in Marathi, and was opaque enough that it required specialized skill to

Chapter 02.indd 63 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 64  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

read—a skill usually acquired through hereditary access. Legend ascribes its
invention to Hemadpant, the minister of the last Yadava king of Deogiri of
the thirteenth century, but we have evidence of its use from the sixteenth cen-
tury in the Adilshahi sultanate of Bijapur, and thence in the Maratha state.6 It
existed for centuries alongside Bālbodh (as Devanagari is known in Marathi),
and literacy in Marathi from the early modern period into the twentieth
century implied literacy in both scripts. Mod.ī and Bālbodh have different
orthographic rules: unlike Bālbodh, Mod.ī does not differentiate between
short and long vowels, frequently uses letters interchangeably, and dispenses
with some joint letters while allowing others. The specialist skill referred to
above, was precisely in correctly recognizing these conventions. The two
scripts have been historically employed for different writing tasks—religious
literature in Marathi always used Bālbodh, whereas ‘secular’ materials were
inscribed in Mod.ī. Over the colonial period, however, scholars have generally
tracked Mod.ī’s decline in the face of Bālbodh’s ascendancy as an inevitable
technological casualty of modernization, since print favoured non-cursive
scripts for its typefaces. Clerks in British colonial offices continued to use
Mod.ī for handwritten Marathi in the nineteenth century, but it eventually
declined in overall usage over the twentieth century.
This initial, exploratory essay takes a close look at two moments from this
‘afterlife’ of Mod.ī under the colonial state. The first moment is the Inam
Commission of Bombay, which galvanized the world of Mod.ī records from
the Peshwai in the 1850s and 1860s as part of its revenue alienations inquir-
ies. With this I briefly contrast the efforts of the Central India Agency to
reorganize its ‘vernacular records’, which included a sizeable number of Mod.ī
documents, in the early 1900s, before returning in the final section to a con-
sideration of some issues regarding scribal and linguistic practice that such a
focus on a script and its cultures might offer.

The Inam Commission

The East India Company first floated the Inam Commission in 1844 to
inquire into the profusion of claims to inam lands (grants of revenue-free
lands) it encountered in southern Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. It
was extended in 1852 to the entire Bombay Presidency, and acquired the
status of a court of civil jurisdiction by law. It conducted a massive inquiry
over eighteen years overall, and ended with a series of ‘summary settlements’
in 1863.7 Contemporary critics heaped scorn on the Inam Commission.
Very early Company policy after the conquest of western India had been one

Chapter 02.indd 64 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   65

of cautious conciliation of the local landed gentry, which included broadly

endorsing existing land grants. The Inam Commission’s decisions to revisit
this policy—not to do away with inams in general, but to separate ‘fraudu-
lent’ claims from ‘genuine’ ones so as to ‘correctly’ apply the demand for land
revenue—enraged those Inamdars whose hereditary claims were quashed.
Leading historians of the 1857 Rebellion took it to task for exciting disaf-
fection, and it was generally agreed that its heavy-handed and cumbersome
operations made it a heavy burden on the revenue itself, and a diplomatic
disaster in the Presidency.8 At least one contemporary Marathi critic, almost
certainly an Inamdar whose hereditary claims had been denied, likened it to
an invasion,9 and one of the long-time servants of the Commission itself bit-
terly criticized its methods at the end.10

The Disciplining of Mod.-ı Scribes

Usually treated as a story about the growing disaffection of landholders
with the colonial regime, the Inam Commission was in effect the story of
the disciplining of Mod.ī documents and their scribes. Focusing on opera-
tions within the Commission’s bureaucracy, rather than on its interactions
with inam claimants, allows us a glimpse into the everyday workings of the
colonial office and the refashioning of Mod.ī record-keeping and scribal
practice in western India. At the very top of the Commission’s hierarchy
was the Inam Commissioner, followed by Commissioners in two divisions
of the Presidency, Northern and Southern. To each division were assigned
two Assistant Inam Commissioners (AIC), under each of whom served a
Sub-Assistant Commissioner (SAC). This latter was the highest post that
Indians were appointed to, and below it served an elaborate hierarchical
­establishment of kārkūns (clerks). A typical establishment under each SAC
included two English writers at a salary of Rs 40–60 per month, a Marathi
Head Huzur Karkun (head clerk) at Rs 80–100 per month, supervising ten-
odd Huzur Karkuns (Marathi writers) in the main division office, five to
seven more travelling in the districts paid between Rs 12 and Rs 25 per
month, and a floating number of hān.gāmī (temporary) kārkūns who were
paid between Rs 7–10 per month. The pay scale also matched the specific
duties—some (usually, it appears, the hān.gāmīs) made lists of villages, claim-
ants and sorted records, some exclusively copied down the kaifiyats (narrative
testimonies) of claimants, while others generated t.ippan.s (abstracts or sum-
maries of accounts).11 The entire Marathi correspondence of the Commission
was ­conducted in the Mod.ī script.

Chapter 02.indd 65 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 66  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The Commission initially sent out a call to British Collectors for a com-
plete list of administrative units in their domains along with a complete ferist
(list) of the Mamlatdars in charge of each taluka and Mahalkari for each
mahal. These officers, in turn, were asked for a complete list of each village
in their domain and the different rights claimed within it, with the names of
their holders. A detailed set of guidelines specified the type, dimensions, and
margins of the paper the kārkūns were to use for various forms and letters.
Once the village ferists were prepared, Inamdars were summoned to the com-
mission’s offices to provide their testimonies. The kārkūn posed a specified
set of questions about when and how they acquired their grants, but had to
record their answers in narrative format without the intervening questions.
The kārkūn and the Mamlatdar built the narrative together by filling in sepa-
rate pieces of information at points specified in the guidelines, and the latter
signed every kaifiyat and was responsible for it.12 The SACs then ‘extract[ed]
information from the kyfeuts into the usual skeleton English forms, taking
care to be as concise as possible’ and presented it, along with translations of
any supporting documents (duly authenticated by him) for a final decision
on the claim by the AIC.13

Authenticating Documents
The entire operation turned on the verification of the kaifiyat through
the corroboration of existing revenue records, and by authentication of the
grant’s sanad (title) and other supporting documents. As Colonel Etheridge
summarized the procedure in the Commission’s final report in 1873, if a
sanad verified as genuine declared an inam grant to be hereditary, that claim
was continued. In the absence of a sanad, the Commission had to verify the
claim by searching district level revenue accounts and ensuring that no taxes
had been levied or collected from the said land in the past, and by finding
evidence of the original grant in the central records office, the Peshwa Daftar
in Pune. The onus of disproving an inam claim in the absence of authentic
titles, then, rested on the Commission, which could set it aside and reassess
the land for revenue only in the case of proven fraud.14
Access to as complete a record of the existing revenue accounts as pos-
sible, therefore, became critical to the exercise, because any gap implied the
possibility of a previous levy; it was in this context that the Commission
directed its Mamlatdars to confiscate cloth-wrapped rumāls (bundles) of
paper rolls from all the hereditary district and village accountants of the
erstwhile Peshwai—the Deshpandes, Desais and Kulkarnis—within their

Chapter 02.indd 66 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   67

talukas. Earlier scholarship has tended to conflate these hereditary officers

and their establishments with the Inamdars in identifying the ‘local privilege’
that resisted the state authority expressed through the Commission,15 but as
we shall see below, this sphere of ‘local privilege’ itself was differentiated and
fraught with contradictions: between the Inamdar and the Desai; between
their scribal employees; and between the Desais and the Mamlatdar’s office,
all of which the Commission sought to clarify and control. I would venture
to suggest that in an attempt to avoid excessively alienating the Inamdars,
the Commission’s disciplinary energies came, instead, to be focused on this
recordkeeping edifice.
Laziness or oversight on the Mamlatdar’s part in hunting down records,
or laxity in ensuring that once collected they were secure, became one of the
principal anxieties of the AICs; the files are replete with complaints, reports,
warnings and recommendations for demotion or dismissal of Mamlatdars
all over the region.16 The case of Vinayak Bhagwant of Rahuri taluka in
Ahmednagar district, painstakingly detailed by the AIC W. M. Hearn, is
typical. Bhagwant dragged his feet over collecting records despite repeated
enquiries from his superiors. He also returned some bundles to a Kulkarni
who wanted some religious manuscripts in them, and failed to identify
important papers in the same pile before giving them back.17 He flouted
rules about registering such transactions. He delegated much of the scouting
to his kārkūns. A few Brahman Kulkarnis later testified to Hearn that he had
sent around a Muslim peon Syed to investigate if the Brahman accountants
had any records hidden in their houses, knowing fully well that he would not
be able to enter and search the Brahman houses. The peon had desultorily
looked over the exterior of the houses and returned only with whatever the
Kulkarnis voluntarily gave up. Still more galling to Hearn was the case in the
Newasa taluka’s Mamlatdar office, where the kārkūns had thrown tons of
‘useless’ old papers from the Peshwai into the nearby Pravara river and sold
others to the shopkeepers, mainly to make room for fresh, recent records in
the office. Rather than follow the directive to specifically preserve Peshwa-era
records, they had done exactly the opposite.18

Fraud and Forgery

More than incompetence, however, the Commission worried about active
fraud and conspiracy on the part of its employees to hide and doctor records
either in cahoots with the Inamdar to validate his grant, or to extort money
from desperate and anxious claimants. Reports of hidden or destroyed records

Chapter 02.indd 67 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 68  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

in any of these offices immediately raised the spectre of evidence of taxation

in them, and thereby an inquiry into the circumstances of their secretion or
destruction. Indeed, the Commission’s very existence was predicated on the
idea of ‘fraudulent claims’ on the public revenue and dubious documentation;
therefore the activities of its own staff and keeping its paperwork error-free
and above suspicion became key to the legitimacy of the entire Inam inquiry.
It also made regulating this scribal establishment a central aspect of the inves-
tigation itself.
The most critical clause of Act XI of 1852, which established the Commission’s
position as a civil court of jurisdiction, was Clause VI:
Bribery, extortion and generally all acts of abuse, or misapplication of authority, or
other misconduct, committed by any officer belonging to the establishment of the
IC, or temporarily employed therein under the provisions of this enactment, shall
be punishable as criminal offences, with fine and ordinary imprisonment without
labour for a period not exceeding five years; and the receipt of a present directly or
indirectly, by any such officer, from any person against whom and in whose behalf he
may be officially employed, shall be considered extortion.19

The Commission regulated its subordinate establishment through the

framework of this clause, and several kārkūns were tried in the civil courts
and dismissed on charges of taking bribes from Inamdars and extorting
money from them.20 Establishing fraud or misconduct, however, both within
the Commission and in court, was easier said than done.
Let us look in some detail at one particular case. In 1856, during the exami-
nation of the records of Shinappayya, the Desai of Sortoor in the Dambal
taluka of Dharwar district, the AIC Hearn and his SAC Balwantrao Parshuram
strongly suspected a conspiracy between the Mamlatdar Shamrao Ramajee,
one of the Commission’s own kārkūns Nurso Shreeniwas who was close to the
Desai’s family, and the head kārkūn of his office Balaji Appaji. Shinappayya
Desai had played an elaborate game of cat and mouse with the Commission,
and it was only after his own disaffected record keeper Rangappayya alerted the
Commission as to the records’ whereabouts that Balwantrao was able to con-
fiscate them. Soon after this operation, which appears to have been conducted
with all the elements of a guerilla attack—surprise raids, extreme secrecy about
plans, quick movements from village to village—the head karkun Balaji Appaji
came forward and accused Balwantrao himself in a petition, of hatching a plot
to insert fake papers into the Commission. Appaji’s accusation had its own ele-
ments of dark intrigue involving stealthily ­overheard conversations in the dead
of night near the Maruti temple, and solemn oaths and pacts hinting at larger,
nefarious alliances among unnamed, faceless kārkūns of the Commission.21

Chapter 02.indd 68 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   69

Although Hearn, Etheridge and Gordon were convinced that Appaji’s

accusation was ‘a most gross, clumsy and palpable fabrication from begin-
ning to end’, they nevertheless mounted a year-long, elaborate inquiry into
the entire Dambal affair, with repeated cross-examinations of witnesses, and
re-examinations of records. Efforts to establish who in the local kārkūn world
might be involved hinted at a complex network. The Mamlatdar Shamrao
Ramajee was not only an old retainer of Shinappayya Desai, but also his
relative by marriage, and a regular creditor who facilitated business for the
Desai through his kārkūns. He also negotiated with the Desai to end the
dispute with his record keeper. Examining the Desai’s private correspond-
ence, the Commission came upon some ‘suspicious letters’ of dubious vintage
that linked the Mamlatdar, the government kārkūn Nurso Shreeniwas and
the Desai which suggested an alliance of some kind, but the exact nature
of these interactions, or the reasons behind Balaji’s petition, remained in
shadow. Well over a year later, after Balwantrao Parshuram had passed away
in the interim, a frustrated Hearn complained to his superior Gordon that
any serious examination of the records for evidence of foul play was thwarted
by the fact that he had to depend on very few hands, as there was no telling
how many other kārkūns in the Commission’s office ‘were partisans and even
distantly connected with the accused’.22

An Impartial Ka-rku-n
From this thick web of local social, familial and credit ties between hereditary
officials, their scribal establishments and new recruits in the colonial admin-
istrative hierarchy, the Inam Commission tried to disentangle an impartial
kārkūn, a man who knew his way about accounting rolls and records, could
read Mod.ī documents and identify at a quick glance the different kinds of
accounting documents, but with an eye for information about grants in par-
ticular,23 continue to adhere to strict ‘Maratha conventions’ of correspondence
but also craft regular ‘reports’ (rendered rapot in all the Mod.ī correspondence
of the Commission) according to new guidelines, and who would above all
emerge unmarked and unattached to this rural network comprising heredi-
tary officials and landed gentry and work in the interests of public records.
Interrogations of Mamlatdars for dereliction of duty routinely revealed that
the ‘zamindari’ kārkūns, those working for hereditary officials, had far greater
access to the Mamlatdar’s office than the Commission was comfortable with.
Being more familiar with their own records that had been confiscated, these
zamindari kārkūns were regularly roped in to help sort them out, instead of

Chapter 02.indd 69 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 70  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

the Commission’s own appointees dispatched from the district offices. An

informal economy of temporary work operated here, where local, zamindari
kārkūns stepped in to work on sorting the records for the Mamlatdar for some
extra pay, when the Commission’s kārkūns were called away to other villages
or talukas.24 The regularity with which this was done underscores the local-
ized nature of Mod.ī reading and writing skills, with localized conventions of
particular abbreviations and curlicues for confidentiality and speed, making
those trained within these daftars or scribal families more adept at interpret-
ing them than other scribes otherwise literate in Mod.ī. The Commission
legally invested its own scribes with greater authority by declaring such docu-
ments public, government property, but investing them with the required
skill to navigate local document collections was not as easily done by fiat.

The Usefulness and Publicity of Documents

The main navigational key here was determining ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ doc-
uments, with references to alienated revenue within them the most useful
for retention and cataloguing. In this process of sorting and weeding, the
Commission reframed the cataloguing method that the Amanatdars, the
Peshwa’s officers retained by Elphinstone in the first few decades of Company
control over the Peshwa Daftar, had undertaken; it now recommended that
individual accounting documents for individual villages not be treated as a
whole, as the Amanatdars had done, but be broken down into ‘useful’ and
‘useless’ parts, retaining the former, and getting rid of the latter.25 The Inam
inquiries attempted to reorganize these documents to yield very specific
kinds of information. Within its own offices, it gave very clear instructions
about the need to abandon this vertical arrangement of consecutive sheets
and multiple-sized paper, in favour of fixed size papers, front and back writ-
ing, and the collation of separate, consecutive sheets.26 In this process, it not
only altered methods of ‘summarizing’ tax-related information spatially and
visually by prescribing tables, columns and rows on individual and identical
pieces of paper, but also the content of what went into a summary of the
state’s fiscal relationship with its lands.
The large temporary workforce at various taluka and Commission offices,
required for initial sorting of papers when fresh bundles arrived after sweeps
across villages, made the disciplining of these kārkūns into ‘zamindari’ and
‘government’ officials with these requisite skills of correctly identifying ‘useful’
records even more fraught. Indeed, several testimonies of kārkūns indicate
the mobility of these temporary scribes, who did the rounds of various taluka

Chapter 02.indd 70 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   71

offices as umedwars (hopeful recruits), seeking to convert temporary experi-

ence into a more regular position. The Commission’s preoccupation with
preventing destruction of useful documents occasionally led eager applicants
to adopt unorthodox ways to demonstrate their knowledge of the new desired
skills and priorities of the job. In February 1857, during an informal inter-
view on the recommendation of the local headmaster, Chinto Krishna Barve
gave AIC Hearn extensive details about how, during his temporary employ-
ment as a cataloguer of records in the Mahal of Guttal in Dharwar district,
the mahalkari and other officers had willfully destroyed all the Peshwa-era
records as useless.27 After an extraordinarily lengthy investigation, however,
Hearn found that Barve’s story was entirely made up, since Guttal had come
into existence as a mahalkari station only in 1839, well after the end of the
Peshwai. It had never housed any Peshwai records in the first place, and
what’s more, Barve had never been employed there! Hearn concluded that
Barve had concocted the elaborate story of destroyed papers merely to show
off his knowledge of the workings of the new colonial office. When Hearn
finally recommended his disbarment from government service, Barve was
an umedwar elsewhere, this time in the Pacchapur taluka’s office under the
Mamlatdar.28
This search for the old accounts of the Peshwa government in order to
verify genuine inam grants, therefore, emerged as part of a wider process of
determining ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ records, the ‘public’ nature of all existing
Mod.ī records, including the family correspondence and any other kind of
material preserved in the same bundles of paper, and the right of the colonial
government to have exclusive access and control over it. The Commission’s
officers initially allowed the private correspondence of Desai families to be
duly returned to them, but the inability to effectively regulate this sorting on
part of kārkūns gradually led to the conviction that only a comprehensive
confiscation of all possible records would guarantee an honest and effective
inam inquiry. This declaration of the documents’ ‘publicity’, interestingly
enough, brought it into conflict with judicial institutions, as the Sadr Diwani
courts increasingly began to demand access to the confiscated records in
order to settle disputes of different kinds between parties who traced their
arguments to them.
The Commission’s relationship with the existing Revenue establishment in
the Bombay Presidency, which resented its presence and increasing demands
on its routine work, was already uneasy. It had an even more fraught rela-
tionship with the lower courts, where its cases against kārkūns accused of
fraud and bribery were regularly tried, often unsuccessfully.29 The Courts

Chapter 02.indd 71 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 72  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

tended to apply a rather more narrow interpretation of Clause VI of Act

XI of 1852, quoted above, and insist on stricter norms in the documen-
tary evidence the Commission supplied for cases of conspiracy.30 Focusing
on the ease with which cases for perjury could be made relative to conspiracy,
all those hereditary officers whose houses were searched had to depose and
confirm on oath before the Chief Revenue Officer of the district that no
more records remained with them. The fear remained that in the absence of a
stronger law, any concealed records would be used by people ‘at some distant
period’ and be made the means of ‘reagitating claims now being decided’.31
Dissatisfaction with the poor traction the Act itself provided, therefore,
only furthered the Commission’s efforts to acquire exclusive control over all
manner of old records in the Presidency.32
Why was the Commission so reluctant to allow the regular consultation of
old revenue records by other institutions of its own government? As we have
seen, while the existence of an inam grant could be confirmed in the Peshwa’s
diaries, proof of assessments in revenue accounts could disprove inam claims.
A clear catalogue of all that did exist in these records, therefore, was key to
the Commission’s authority. But here is where the contradictions arose. We
have already seen the problems that confronted this cataloguing effort with
regard to local record collections. The problem was magnified with respect
to the central Peshwa Daftar, which, despite repeated efforts at cataloguing,
remained labyrinthine. Even as Commission officials sought to discipline this
archive in order to catch fraudulent claims on the public revenue, however,
the Daftar’s documentary authority (and the Commission’s by extension)
rested to a very large extent on its mystery and secrecy. As Cowper candidly
admitted soon after the Commission began its inquiries, ‘To make known
to claimants the contents of the state records, must be to relinquish the only
means by which the revenue is at present collected’.33 In other words, for
this extension of state authority that staked its legitimacy on documentary
evidence, it was not a question of actually reading or interpreting an exist-
ing document, but sheer physical possession over any piece of paper that
could possibly have anything to say about grants, and therefore over an entire
archive. The process of extracting ‘useful’ information from the Peshwa’s
Diaries described above also reshaped, through a very particular idea of ‘use-
fulness’, a complex body of the Peshwa state’s transactions and accounting
documents into privileging a particular kind of information linked to rev-
enue-free grants. Thus it was not just the Commission’s actual control over
the Daftar that gave it the name ‘Alienation Office’ all through the colonial
period; it was literally constituted as an archive primarily for land alienation.

Chapter 02.indd 72 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   73

The Vernacular Records of the Central India Agency

Let us turn briefly to consider another cataloguing effort that encountered
Mod.ī documents in the colonial period, this time in Central India. In 1909,
the Central India Agency (CIA) decided to undertake the ‘weeding’ of ver-
nacular records preserved across its many residency and agency offices across
the northern part of Madhya Pradesh. Formed in 1854 as one administra-
tive unit, the CIA oversaw several smaller agencies such as Baghelkhand,
Bundelkhand, Malwa, Gwalior, Indore, and Bhopal under its supervision,
with each of these agencies dealing with several princely states within its juris-
diction. Some of these states were large, like Gwalior and Indore, while others
were tiny Thakurates and Jagirs that had been subdued by the East India
Company over the course of the early nineteenth century. The headquarters
of the CIA were at Indore. Each of these agencies maintained English and ver-
nacular offices, and some salary tables from the later ­nineteenth century show
that the latter usually had a hierarchy of Urdu munshis, Persian mohurrirs, a
Marathi sheristadar and a Hindi-Marathi mohurrir.34 In the 1870s and 1880s,
when cost-cutting measures brought the axe on lower-grade Persian scribes
and newswriters in the Gwalior Residency offices, the ‘Mahratta navees’ more
or less remained constant in the establishment at a pay of Rs 30 per month.35

Weeding in a Multilingual Garden

It was with these scribal establishments that the Agency offices attempted
a sorting and ‘weeding’ of the vernacular records in their possession in the
1880s and 1890s. Within this grab-bag category of ‘vernacular records’,
however, lay the repository of a complex, multilingual, scribal history of cen-
tral India. These records were from the eras of Mughal, Maratha, and early
Company administration: some were in Persian script, others in Nagari, and
still others in Mod.ī. These were all arranged in cloth bundles (called bastās
in this part of the country), with anywhere between twenty-five to a hundred
‘files’ in each. Practically every agency and district-level offices across central
India had several such bastās. They were papers relating to the incorporation
of the myriad Rajput zamindaris, thakurates and jagirs into the Company
over the early nineteenth century, periodic disputes that arose between these
small states, pensioners and grantees of previous regimes, and register-books
of various kinds. Following the 1857 revolt, the central office in Indore sent
to all its agencies several ‘pre-Mutiny records’ collected or confiscated from
previous regimes that were under each agency’s jurisdiction.

Chapter 02.indd 73 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 74  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

In the early twentieth century, however, many vernacular records previ-

ously marked for destruction were yet to be destroyed, and it was found
that many marked useless were actually often useful for reference. The CIA
therefore determined to undertake the weeding process all over again.36 Most
of the files, although haphazardly organized in some offices into registers and
lists, were found to be in a state of much confusion. After much delibera-
tion, the Agency hired temporary establishments of clerks with knowledge of
Hindi and Urdu in all the agency offices, with a senior clerk knowing English
in addition to these languages, Munshi Abdul Aziz, to supervise the entire
effort. The entire process went on till 1925.
The Marathi scribal positions in these Agency offices suggest that there
continued to be Marathi transactions in colonial offices, and nearly all of
them were in Mod.ī. Presently, at the National Archives in New Delhi, the
records of the CIA are divided into English and Vernacular file catalogues. Yet
the English files, too, for all kinds of subjects from the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries—corruption in native state administrations; leave
applications and succession disputes; petitions for hereditary rights, etc.,—are
full of Marathi correspondence, memoranda, and petitions in Mod.ī script
attached as supporting documentation to the English materials, some from
the colonial period, others ‘pre-Mutiny’. One of the most striking features of
this large corpus of documents from this region is the profusion of languages
and scripts in file after file.37

Marathi-Modi Skills in Central India

Although several colonial officials themselves were convinced that the only
vernacular skills needed for the weeding exercise were Hindi and Urdu, the
temporary establishments actually doing the work naturally found them-
selves confronted with a considerable number of Persian materials, and
Marathi documents in the Mod.ī script as well. The expectation certainly was
that joint knowledge of Hindi and Urdu would cover Marathi and Persian
materials as well and keep employee costs down, and the larger the number
of languages a clerk could claim, the greater were his chances for retention.38
These linguistic skills, however, appear to have been variously distributed
across the scribal employees in different offices. Not all the designated Urdu
clerks in Gwalior, like Shyamji Sahai or Mr. Thakur, could read the ‘peculiar
Urdu hand which only those versed in it can read out’. Some junior clerks
could work only with Hindi, but hardly any Urdu, no matter what their
applications stated. Others, like one Abdul Rashid, on the other hand, moved

Chapter 02.indd 74 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   75

easily between Persian, Urdu and Hindi, and could ‘casually’ work with some
Marathi too. It appears this ‘casual’ facility with Mod.ī documents was not
entirely uncommon among other Muslim employees as well. The discovery
of nearly twenty bundles of ‘purely Mori-Marhatti papers’ in 1916 in the
Gwalior office, however, called for ‘one who knows Marhatti as his mother
tongue and is expert in reading the Marhatti writing’. Accordingly, one
G.V. Joshi was hired in early 1917 as a ‘good Marhatti and Hindi knowing
man’. Within a couple of weeks, however, Joshi had quit, declaring himself
‘unable to read the characters’. He was replaced by one N.H.  Gadwaikar,
who worked for the next three months on the bastās of Mod.ī documents.
Following the completion of the Gwalior and Malwa records, his position
was terminated, as not ‘a single purely Marathi file’ existed in the Bhopal
records, and not knowing any Urdu or Persian, Gadwaikar was of no further
use to the weeding establishment.39
This desire, however, ran up against another, more urgent one to reduce
as far as possible the costs of the vernacular scribal establishments across the
Agency offices in Central India. Indeed, I would venture to suggest that
it was this initiative that led to the weeding exercise in the first place, the
amount of existent vernacular records and their usefulness evaluated along-
side the number of ‘inefficient Vernacular clerks’ who ‘could be conveniently
retired’. At first glance, the weeding of records and scribes, therefore, appears
to have proceeded together, as part of the Agency’s wider effort in the early
twentieth century to substitute a smaller English scribal staff for the diverse
and large vernacular one.40 The temporary establishments hired to do the
weeding work, therefore, were mostly junior clerks hired at no more than
Rs. 25 per month, many of whom had little experience with the intricacies of
the older documents produced in native courts.
In this set of colonial records about these establishments, there is very
little concrete information about the education and the social or linguistic
background from which these temporary clerks came into service. An ear-
lier file from 1890, examining candidates for a ‘Naib Hindi and Marathi
Sheristadar’ position in the Persian establishment of the Gwalior Agency,
however, provides a glimpse into the kind of skills and networks that came
to be desired in these colonial establishments in central India, and those that
were foregrounded by hopeful candidates in applications. Like the Inam
Commission, in a different context, the Agencies too attempted to create
an unmarked scribe who was unconnected through previous employment or
family ties to the native states and their courts, and was thereby considered
more ­trustworthy than one embedded in a particular court network.

Chapter 02.indd 75 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 76  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The applications received for this post, however, suggest that this kind of
unconnected yet skilled clerk was not so easy to find. Many applicants had
relations in either the Indore or Gwalior durbars. One applicant, Mukund
Rao, disclaimed any such connections, and emphasized his prior experience
with the colonial establishment in Bhopawar, but an anonymous petition
received soon after his application suggested that he was lying, and that in
fact he had several links to the Indore darbar. The formal education of these
applicants is not known, but almost all of their fathers had some scribal expe-
rience, either with the Maratha courts or with Rajput thakurates. Although
the position was for ‘Naib Hindi and Marathi Sharistadar’, all these appli-
cants applied in triplicate, with the same application in Urdu (Persian script),
Hindi/Rangdi (Devanagari script) and Marathi (Mod.ī script), but all three
very similar in their use of identical, standard Persianate administrative
vocabulary and generic frame of an arzi (petition).41 Each application drew
attention to proficiency in the other scripts as well.
It was this cataloguing effort that produced the English/vernacular divi-
sion in the CIA records referred to above, and after Independence, they were
all transferred to the National Archives in New Delhi. Land disputes and land
grants, not unlike the archiving concerns in the Bombay Presidency, formed
the overarching framework for determining which records would be retained,
and which destroyed. A vast majority of the ‘CIA Vernacular’ records retained
today are classed as ‘boundary disputes’, a catch-all category for a wide vari-
ety of land-related documents that were deemed of prime importance for
permanent retention throughout the weeding effort. For all the multilingual
skills that went into sorting and cataloguing them, they also appear in their
English descriptions marked for the most part as ‘vernacular’. Persian title
deeds, Urdu, Mod.ī, and Hindi/Nagari correspondence on different kinds
of paper jostle for space in these ‘boundary dispute’ files, the scripts and
languages speaking to different claimants to land and its revenue at various
points in the region’s history.

Materiality, Somatics, and Writing

In a 1950s treatise on traditional Turkish script arts, the literary critic Ismail
Hakki Baltacioglu argued that the Arabic script was essentially a ‘somatic
and gestural practice’, an anatomic, sensuous representation of different
parts of the human body itself, a sharp contrast to the geometric shapes of
the new Latin script that had replaced it to write the Turkish language. By
terming this Arabic calligraphy a surrealist representation of the human form

Chapter 02.indd 76 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   77

and emotions, Nergis Erturk has insightfully argued, Baltacioglu sought to

critique the separation of writer from writing that the rationalizing, simplify-
ing and modernizing language reforms in Turkey produced.42 The abstract
relationship between meaning and sign not only removed the anatomical
metaphors that the older script had enabled, but also transformed the bodily,
human presence in the very materiality of writing, through the tables and
chairs that replaced the low seating styles, and the angles of paper and quill
when writing.
The sheer depth and radicalism of Turkish script and language reform
do not at first sight appear relevant to thinking about the fortunes of Mod.ī,
which continued to exist alongside Devanagari for over a century of mod-
ernization. Also, far from sensuous or aesthetic engagements with calligraphy,
Mod.ī’s association with bureaucratic and worldly registers of Marathi rather
than sacred or creative ones made it firmly utilitarian. And yet, I invoke
Baltacioglu’s focus on the somatics of scribal practice and his elegy for the
vanished intimacy between the text and the writer’s body, because it invites
us to explore afresh the world of scribal labour, the embodied nature of read-
ing and writing skills, and the everyday impact of bureaucratic and linguistic
modernization for this range of early modern cultural practices. In other
words, it urges us to historicize and contextualize the deep imbrication of
scribe and document, and the importance of the materiality of writing and
records in the making and transformation of particular writing and graphic
systems, linguistic practices, and meaning.
Indeed, it is this linked materiality of the kārkūn and the record that the
Inam Commission transformed in its quest for Peshwa-era records and accu-
rate revenue-related information in the Bombay Presidency, and it did so
in many different ways. On an everyday basis in the colonial offices, as we
have seen, it visually and spatially altered the organization of information—it
abandoned the older vertical arrangement of consecutive sheets and multiple-
sized paper, in favour of fixed size papers, columns and rows, front and back
writing, and the collation of separate, consecutive sheets.43 It also attempted
to literally break down Peshwa accounting records into what it viewed as
‘useful’ information from ‘useless’ material. Most importantly, however, in
identifying all manner of paper records themselves as ‘public’ or ‘Government
property’, and the district officers as mere custodians, it also sought to physi-
cally stabilize their meanings and render them less malleable and flexible to
multiple interpretations, even within the ambit of other colonial institutions
such as the lower courts. Officers like Cowper worried about the lack of
expertise among young and inexperienced judicial officers who would not

Chapter 02.indd 77 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 78  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

know their way around these specialist revenue documents, but this worry
also masked anxieties about another kind of expertise: that of native litigants
to bend the Mod.ī archive, viewed as inherently unstable, to their own ends.
The Commission, therefore, continued to frame its inquiries in the formal
Perso-Marathi vocabulary of Maratha record-keeping. All the terms and cat-
egories for classes of inams, the Arabic names for years, the genres such as
kaifiyats through which information was to be collated were retained, and
ostensibly continued these ‘Maratha conventions’, but as Bhavani Raman
has powerfully argued in the context of early colonial Madras, the colonial
state’s approach to both the content, as well as the material importance of
these documents, had significantly altered.44 Rather than see the kaifiyat as
a creatively crafted narrative representation of the claimant’s stake to the
hereditary right, drawing on literary skills and historical allusions to back up
the claim, it was viewed as a neutral, narrative arrangement of facts about
the origin of the inam grant. The kārkūn had to, as we have seen, had strict
guidelines to write the kaifiyat as a narrative, but the form’s malleability
was now sought to be disciplined by a very specific question-answer format,
with careful instructions as to how and when contradictions in it were to be
addressed.

‘The Walking Index’

The kārkūn himself, in addition, became merely a sorter, comparer or
copyist in this process, or at best a quick identifier of very specific kinds
of information rather than the creative expert behind the narrative claim
itself, and integral to the decipherment of a complex written record.45 As
we have seen, for both the Inam Commission and the CIA offices, the
ideal clerk was a skilled reader and interpreter of all kinds of documents,
but more importantly, one whose skills were transferable, replaceable, and
not localized and embedded within particular networks of information
or scribal practice. This unmarked scribal skill now went hand in hand
with the independently decipherable record, both regulated by govern-
ment, and desirably reproducible and expressible in colonial reports,
summaries, and catalogues. This desire, however, remained unfulfilled for
decades after the Commission had folded up: at the central Peshwa Daftar
in Pune, repeated efforts to catalogue the thousands upon thousands of
bundles of paper were nevertheless haunted by the persistent depend-
ence on the ‘walking index’, native kārkūns whose ­navigational skills and
undocumented memory about the sheer mass of bundles were impossible

Chapter 02.indd 78 9/26/2013 5:12:08 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   79

to reproduce into usable and reliable paper catalogues.46 This figure of

the ‘walking index’ was also invoked repeatedly in the CIA weeding cor-
respondence, an older scribe who simply knew what was what, and where,
being the necessary evil in actually figuring out with some speed what was
useful and what was not.47
A new kind of embodied skill, however, came to predominate with regard
to language by the early twentieth century, over this older one. Even as the
CIA sought scribes expert at reading and interpreting courtly and bureau-
cratic documents in more than one language to save costs, this expertise itself
also increasingly came to be located in new formulations of identity, such as
the mother tongue. Recalling the Mr. Joshi who was hired on precisely this
(mistaken) assumption of expertise to read ‘purely Mori-Mahratti papers’ in
Gwalior, as well as the Mr. Gadwaikar, who was terminated once his Marathi
work was completed, underscores the need to consider afresh the emergence
of modern regional ‘vernaculars’ alongside these shifts in scribal practice and
skill-sets of reading, writing, and composition.

From the Somatics of Writing to Linguistic Identity

The Mod.ī script, as we have seen, continued to be in use in colonial offices,
albeit with changed ideas about its decipherability. Simultaneously, however,
it also emerged as a site of intersection for new, wide-ranging linguistic, and
cultural discourses in late nineteenth century Maharashtra. Pre-colonial prose
genres inscribed in Mod.ī, such as historical narratives (bakhars) now entered
the world of print transcribed into Bālbodh, and prompted debate about the
correct orthography of words—a question that also animated the making of
primers, textbooks, and educational guidelines about correct spelling or writ-
ing in Marathi. Indeed, the very flexibility of Mod.ī spelling now became an
indicator of its essential impurity, and its undesirability to visually represent
Marathi. The Mod.ī script, in a way, came to influence debates over the very
essence of Marathi, its orthographic and etymological integrity, and its iden-
tity as a modern Indo-Aryan vernacular.48
Considering the fortunes of these Mod.ī documents and their creators
from the Inam Commission to the CIA—within Maharashtra and beyond,
and from the eighteenth century into the early twentieth—rightfully locates
the emergence of this modern vernacular not just within a preconceived
‘regional homeland’ for it, but within the multilingual, multiscriptual world it
emerged from. One of the striking absences in the Inam Commission papers
is the question of other languages and scripts that it surely e­ ncountered in

Chapter 02.indd 79 9/26/2013 5:12:09 PM

 80  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

its regulation of records and scribes—for example, Kannada, and Persian.

Indeed, the ‘afterlife’ of Persian in the erstwhile Maratha territories is a ques-
tion that has to be intertwined with that of Mod.ī, both before and after the
Inam inquiries. The Commission’s inquiry began in the districts that today
comprise northern Karnataka: Dharwad and Belgaum. There are stray refer-
ences to ‘Kanarese’ materials in the correspondence and many of the scribes,
at least through their applications, state their expertise in both languages.
This expertise, or the lack of it, also appears to have been a matter of some
anxiety for the Commission, who often suspected scribes of lying when they
claimed ignorance of Kannada.49 We know that the daftars of Desais all across
the Southern Mahratta country maintained multilingual daftars in the early
modern period—Persian, Mod.ī, and Kannada—but we know little, as yet,
about how different languages were distributed and archived within them:
by genre, by scribe, by value of document, or by ideas of public and private
correspondence. The Commission’s own vernacular correspondence pro-
duced virtually no Kannada materials at all; all of it was in Marathi/Mod.ī,
with practically no references to Persian materials or scribes. I would argue
that Kannada reading skills were an asset in sifting through records in the
Commission offices, even though writing and composition was no longer
required in the exclusively Marathi/Mod.ī office work. When combined with
the emergent policies of separate vernacular schools, and educational quali-
fications for employment in colonial offices, this gradual separation of skills
formed an integral part of the gradual re-evaluation of what it meant to know
Kannada in this bilingual region, and, eventually, to be Kannadiga or Marathi
as well.50
By contrast, in central India (and, arguably, other regions with erstwhile
Maratha states) this re-evaluation of literate skills no doubt took place
for Marathi/Mod.ī instead, as Hindi and other regional languages grew
­ascendant in the vernacular offices and public spheres. To understand why
Mr. Joshi had to leave the Gwalior Agency’s temporary service in disappoint-
ment despite being a prized, literate native speaker of Marathi, it is necessary
to examine how the Mod.ī script continued to be taught as part of Marathi
education in central India over the colonial period under the ascendancy of
Hindi and the decline of Persian and Urdu, and how Marathi scribes fared
and responded to these changes. A large number of young men from the
Bombay Presidency found employment in the administrations of the erst-
while Maratha states; it is not clear at this stage whether these new circuits
of migration sustained Mod.ī in these regions or whether continued, albeit
modified, and informal local language and scribal training in these states

Chapter 02.indd 80 9/26/2013 5:12:09 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   81

did. The gradual irrelevance of Mod.ī scribal expertise from the 1930s due to
administrative reforms within states like Gwalior also generated passionate
laments and protests, which invite deeper exploration about the impact of
these shifts in the scribal world on wider imaginations of nation, region and
religious community.51
In the decades after Colonel Etheridge submitted his final report on the
Inam Commission in 1873, the Peshwa Daftar in Pune became the focus of
a new historical imagination for the western-educated Marathi middle class.
The Inam inquiries complete, Etheridge himself thought any further cata-
loguing and indexing of the records was unnecessary. The anxieties about
access shifted, henceforth, from litigants and claimants to the public revenue
to critics of the colonial regime itself, and their use of the Peshwa-era records
to craft subversive historical narratives. The colonial government authorized
a piecemeal, gradual cataloguing and supervised publication over the next
few decades. I have written elsewhere about how the denial of access to
the Peshwa Daftar galvanized Marathi nationalists to create an alternative
archive by collecting and printing the records from chieftains and private
collections across the erstwhile Maratha territories.52 In the early twenti-
eth century, some of these researchers of the Bharat Itihasa Samshodhak
Mandal collected several such daftars from Desais in this region, but only
transcribed the Mod.ī papers into Bālbodh and published them, leaving the
Kannada papers unread in their archives. This is but one instance of how
multilingual and multiscriptual pre-colonial archives were compartmental-
ized into separate linguistic ‘sources’ for equally compartmentalized regional
histories, as they entered print and served new historiographic imperatives
under colonial modernity. Scholarly research over the twentieth century
itself has been heavily marked by this parallelism, exclusive foci on indi-
vidual languages and regions in archives consulted reproducing those very
exclusivities. Scripting the cultural history of language in South Asia, then,
offers a way of bringing together once again these polyglot scribal worlds,
their complex modern legacies, and their material histories of records and
linguistic practice.

Abbreviations
AIC Assistant Inam Commissioners
CIA Central India Agency
NAI National Archives of India, Delhi
SAC Sub-Assistant Commissioner

Chapter 02.indd 81 9/26/2013 5:12:09 PM

 82  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Notes
 1 Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western
India, 1700–1960 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007)
 2 Bernard Cohn, ‘Command of Language and Language of Command’, in
Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985),
pp.  276–329; Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the
Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2006); Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001);
Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India,
1891–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Lisa Mitchell,
Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009); Thomas Trautmann,
Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (New Delhi:
Yoda Press, 2006); and Michael Dodson, ‘Translating Science: Translating
Empire: The Power of Language in Colonial North India’, Comparative Studies
in Society and History, vol. 47, no. 4 (2005), pp. 809–35.
  3 Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook (eds) ‘Munshis, Pandits and Record-
Keepers: Scribal Communities and Historical Change in India’, Indian Economic
and Social History Review, vol. 47, no. 4 (2010).
  4 Bhavani Raman’s study of the Ryotwari administration in the Madras presidency
persuasively shows how the new ‘document raj’ under colonialism not only appro-
priated and transformed the skills of Tamil village scribes, but it also reshaped rural
caste and linguistic relations by displacing the erstwhile bilingual arrangement
of Marathi/Mod.ī and Tamil at different levels of the Maratha administration in
Tanjore. Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial
South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). See also Bodhisattva
Kar, ‘“The Tongue Has No Bone”: Fixing the Assamese Language, c. 1800–1930’,
Studies in History, vol. 24, no. 1 (2008), pp. 24–76.
  5 Scholarship within sociolinguistics has also considered the profusion of sub-
continental languages and scripts to examine concepts such as digraphia or
multiscriptality, but apart from broad historical surveys or the overtly politi-
cized importance of scripts as markers of identity, this literature has tended to
examine scripts within linguistic models, rather than wider social, or cultural
historical contexts. See, for instance, Udaya Narayana Singh, ‘Multiscriptality in
South Asia and Language Development’, International Journal of the Sociology of
Language, vol. 150, no. 1 (2001), pp. 61–74. Christopher King, One Language,
Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1994) remains the standard historical analysis of the
Hindi-Urdu conflict.
  6 Elisabeth Strandberg, The Mod.ī Documents from Tanjore in Danish Collections
(Weisbaden: Steiner, 1983).
 7 A.T. Etheridge, ‘Narrative of the Inam Commission and Supplementary
Settlements’, Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, New Series

Chapter 02.indd 82 9/26/2013 5:12:09 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   83

No. 132 (Bombay: Government Press, 1873). One scholar argues that the
Commission’s inquiries netted an increase in revenue of Rs 50 lakhs by the 1880s.
Neil Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule: Agriculture and Agrarian Society in
the Bombay Presidency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
  8 John Kaye and G.B. Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, Vol. 1
(London: Allen, 1888), pp. 127–9. Robert Knight, The Inam Commission
Unmasked (London: Effingham Wilson, 1859).
 9 Anonymous, Mum.baī ilākyātīl inām kamiśan khātyātīl gair insāph, chāpūn
prasiddha kēlēlyā sarkārī daptar va dusryā cām.glyā ādhārāvarūn ināmdār
jahāgirdār vagairē lōkām.cyā māhitī karitā prakat. kēlē asat [The Injustices of the
Bombay Presidency Inam Commission, published for the benefit of Inamdars,
Jahagirdars, etc. based on the published records of the Government and other
good sources] (1859; Pune: Mumbai Marathi Granthasangrahalaya, 1976).
10 Gopal Hari Deshmukh, [a.k.a. Lokahitavadi], ‘Kam.panī sarkārcyā kārkīrdīcī
akhēr’ [The Last Days of the Company Administration], in A.K. Priyolkar
(ed.), Lōkahitavādīkrta nibam.dhasam.graha [Collected Essays of Lokahitavadi]
°
(Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1967), pp. 301–4.
11 Pune Archives (henceforth PA), English Ferists, List no. 1, Rumal No. 40, File
No. 22: ‘Belgaum office, establishment working under AIC Griffith’ 1853.
12 PA, English Ferists, List No. 2, Rumal No. 2, File No. 69. ‘Correspondence and
Rules relating to preliminary arrangements made in the Sholapoor Collectorate
before commencing the work of taking Kyfeuts’.
13 PA, English Ferists, List No. 1, Rumal No. 40, File no. 35. ‘Reconstitution of
the Inam Commission’. Memo from Lt. Etheridge, 13 February 1856.
14 Etheridge, ‘Narrative of the Inam Commission’, Para 42, p. 31.
15 Charlesworth, ‘Peasants and Imperial Rule’.
16 PA English Ferists, List No. 1, Rumal No. 42, File no. 62. ‘Mamlutdars’. This
file has several such cases.
17 PA English Ferists, List no. 2, Rumal No. 7, File no. 140. W.M. Hearn to Capt.
J.A. Cowper, 30 May1855 and the subsequent correspondence.
18 Ibid., Hearn to Cowper, 11 June 1855, and subsequent correspondence.
19 Etheridge, ‘Narrative of the Inam Commission’, pp. 21–2.
20 PA, English Ferists, List No. 1, Rumal No. 40, File no. 38. ‘Returns of Dismissed
Servants’. This file contains a lengthy list of such cases, specifying the name of
the dismissed kārkūn and the specific charge for which he was dismissed.
21 PA English Ferists, List No. 2, Rumal No. 3, File No. 64. This entire case is
summarized here from various reports and letters in this file.
22 Ibid., W. M. Hearn to Maj. M.F. Gordon, No. 347, 6 May 1857.
23 PA, English Ferists, List No. 2, Rumal No. 7, File no. 140, ‘Records’. No. 10 of
1857, Rungrao Bheemajee to W.M. Hearn, 9 October 1857.
24 PA English Ferists, List no. 2, Rumal No. 7, File no. 140. W. M. Hearn to Capt.
J.A. Cowper, 30 May 1855.
25 H.E. Goldsmid to John Warden, the Agent for Sardars, 11 February 1845,
in ‘Correspondence exhibiting the nature and use of the Poona Duftur, and

Chapter 02.indd 83 9/26/2013 5:12:09 PM

 84  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

the measures adopted for its preservation and arrangement since the intro-
duction of British rule: A selection of papers explanatory of the origin of the
Inam Commission and of its progress’, Selections from the Records of the Bombay
Government, New Series, Vol. 30 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1856),
pp. 46–7.
26 PA, English Ferists, List No. 1, Rumal No. 39, File No. 2.
27 PA English Ferists, List no. 2, Rumal No. 7, File no. 140. W.M. Hearn to Maj.
Gordon, 27 February 1857.
28 Ibid., Hearn to Gordon, 15 October 1857.
29 PA English Ferists, List No. 2. Rumal No. 3, File no. 59. ‘Dismissal of
Government Servants’. See the correspondence related to the Ghorpuri–
Wanowrie forgery case, where the courts did not convict on the argument that
it was unclear where the conspiracy lay between the comparer and copyist of the
Mod.ī document.
30 PA English Ferists, List No. 2, Rumal No. 4, File No. 68. The Commission
failed to successfully prosecute an Inam claimant for impersonating his dead
brother, the Courts determining that under the current Bombay Code, imper-
sonation in a deposition did not constitute ‘forgery’ of a document. The Courts
recommended that the Commission take written statements from deponents
that they were who they said they were, and if they did not turn out to be so, to
prosecute them for perjury.
31 PA English Ferists, List No. 2, Rumal No. 7, File No. 140. Rungrao Bhimajee
to Hearn, No. 12, 24 November 1857.
32 Ibid. Section XXI of the Indian Evidence Act of 1855 had prescribed that
witnesses were not bound to produce state documents in court if they were
‘contrary to good policy’. Faced with increasing demands for documents from
the Commission’s collections and the Peshwa Daftar for legal proccedings,
Cowper sought a legal opinion in December 1856 from the Government Law
Officer: ‘With whom does it rest to determine whether a document is or is not
one of those relating to affairs of state, the production of which would be con-
trary to good “policy”?’ The Law Officer replied that it was the Courts which
got to decide whether the documents were privileged or not, not by inspecting
the document itself but by general interrogation. He went on to list high-level
military and political correspondence between British officials as confidential
and privileged, but Cowper’s revenue accounts and Peshwa-era documents were
not among them. Cowper persisted in trying to get the ‘Revenue Records of
the former Government’ protected from general requisition by the civil courts
by the requirement of government consent, but was unsuccessful’. No 1607,
5/12/1856, Capt. Cowper’s memo, and subsequent correspondence.
33 Ibid., Capt. Cowper to C.J. Manson, No. 519, 16 Nov 1853, paragraphs 3–4.
34 National Archives of India (NAI), Central India Agency Establishment 18/1869:
‘Proposal to increase the Establishment in the CIA, English & Vernacular office’;
CIA Establishment 23/1871–78: ‘Redistribution of the pay of the English and
Persian office establishments at Indore’.

Chapter 02.indd 84 9/26/2013 5:12:09 PM

 scripting the cultural history of language   85

35 NAI, CIA Office, Gwalior Residency. Establishments. 65/1859–75; 70/1878–87.

36 NAI, CIA Bundelkhand Agency 1909/532 ‘Weeding of vernacular records of
the office of the Political Agent, Bundelkhand’, p. 2.
37 This brief section surveys just the fragmentary materials I was able to look at
in the National Archives where the colonial Residency records are maintained;
a fuller understanding of this linguistic and scribal landscape requires a much
more careful look at the shifting patterns of administration and scribal arrange-
ment within the Central Indian native states, especially Gwalior and Indore, and
smaller Maratha states like Dewas over the colonial period. The c­ orrespondence
generated over the weeding of older records across the CIA offices gives us
but a mere glimpse of this scribal world, and whets our appetite for a deeper
exploration. For example, NAI, CIA Dewas (JB), 161/1904A; 610/1892–93;
989/1894–1903, Parts I & II.
38 NAI, CIA General Records, 174D/14, 1914 Part II, Note, 10 July 1917.
39 Ibid., pp. 32–33.
40 NAI, CIA General Records, 174D/14, 1914, Notes dated 2 September 1916;
14 November 1916; 25 July 1917; 22 August 1917; 6 December 1917.
41 NAI, CIA Vernacular Files, Gwalior Agency, 320/1890, n.p.
42 Nergis Erturk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 103–4.
43 PA, English Ferists, List No. 1, Rumal No. 39, File No. 2.
44 Raman, Document Raj. One of the critical insights of Raman’s work on Tamil
scribal cultures in early colonial Madras is that colonial efforts to discipline
record-keeping gave written documents a new, coercive power in determining
land and social relations. More importantly, she shows, these documents were
fundamentally severed from the scribes and accountants who produced them.
Even as these scribes were appropriated into the ryotwari administration, the
urge to view a written document as a complete and self-evident distillation of
truth that spoke for itself generated suspicion and a ‘crisis of credibility’ about
the accountants’ skill-sets based on mnemonic storage, mental mathematical
computation, and performance in transmitting accounting information.
45 Sumit Guha has written about the importance of narrative testimonies in
adjudicating legal disputes over rights in the Maratha state, where the creative pre-
sentation and embellishment of historical facts was a crucial asset. Sumit Guha,
‘Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western
India’, American Historical Review, vol. 109, no. 4 (2004), pp. 1084–103. In
general, for a survey of inam grants under the Marathas see Andre Wink, Land
and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-century
Maratha Svarājya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 214–250.
Wink also discusses how ‘to establish the correctness of a claim there were many
other documents which could be adduced, for instance the village jamābandī or
district estimate (prānt ajmās) of the government or the tainat jabta of military
assignments from which the inam was regularly deducted at a certain amount. If
necessary, local assemblies were convoked to decide about a claim’ (pp. 224–5).

Chapter 02.indd 85 9/26/2013 5:12:09 PM

 86  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

46 PA, Ferist No. 5, A.C. Logan, Acting Commissioner, ‘Note on the Alienation
Office, Poona, compiled for the Committee appointed by Govt. Resolution
No.  6099 dated 27 July 1905’, pp. 1–5. It would be hasty, in advance of
more detailed exploration, to sketch a dramatic rupture from this pre-colonial
‘embodiment’ of the archive to documentary independence; we need more care-
ful analysis of pre-colonial clarifications of the relationship between individual
scribes and documents in various contexts spanning notions of authorship to
evidentiary practices. My intention here is as much to emphasize the colonial
state’s effort to separate scribe from document and its incompleteness, as to
identify the shifts in the kinds of embodied skill.
47 NAI, CIA General Records, 174D/14, 1914, Part I, p. 1 & p. 23; Part II, Note,
10 July 1917.
48 I explore these ideas and debates, clustered around the concept of shuddhale-
khan, or correct writing, in Marathi, in greater detail in a related essay, ‘A Plea
for Purity: Discourses of Writing and History in Marathi Modernity’, ms.
49 PA English Ferists, List No. 2, Rumal No. 3, File No. 64. This, for example, is
what the Mamlatdar of Dambal Shamrao Ramajee tells W.M. Hearn when he
is being interrogated about his participation in a conspiracy with the Desai of
Sortoor, but Hearn does not believe him.
50 At this stage it is not clear to me whether this monolingual bureaucracy was
merely that the colonial state was replacing the ‘central’ Peshwa government
that was also Mod.ī-based, or if it represented a shift from earlier, more flexible,
multiscriptual scribal practice in the area.
51 R.V. Date, Gvālhēr rājyātīl marhāt.ī sam.skrtīcā hrās [The Decline of Marathi
° Date walks a tightrope between
Culture in Gwalior] (Gwalior: n.p., 1936).
insisting that Marathi-speakers are native inhabitants of central India, and
invoking the glory of the Maratha past in order to highlight Marathi-speakers’
contributions to the region.
52 Deshpande, Creative Pasts.

Chapter 02.indd 86 9/26/2013 5:12:09 PM

 3
Poet of the Present
The Material Object in the World of Iswar Gupta

Rosinka Chaudhuri

By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the

half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.
—Charles Baudelaire, 18631

At the very moment when the withdrawal of functions obscures the rela-
tions existing in the world, the object in discourse assumes an exalted
place: modern poetry is a poetry of the object.
—Roland Barthes, 19532

Historical Memory and Its Politics

An appreciation of the achievements of Iswar Gupta is something that has
receded with time—the further Bengal travelled the road of nationalist
modernity, the further away it went from any understanding of, or sympathy
for, the works of Iswarchandra. This is glaringly evident in most of the com-
mentaries that accompanied the various editions of Iswarchandra’s works as
well as in the meagre attention spent upon him in standard literary histories;
a small detail should suffice here to illustrate this descent into condescen-
sion. Iswar Gupta had an informal education, in that he is said to have had
no formal knowledge of English and very little of formal Bengali. In 1904
Sibnath Sastri wrote, ‘Iswarchandra, so to speak, had not received anything
that can be called an education. English education he never had, and whatever
he learnt of Bengali from his own reading became his only resource’.3 In the

Chapter 03.indd 87 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 88  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

very next sentence, however, he added: ‘Nevertheless, even with these meagre
resources, in a very short time he came to be known as a good poet (sukabi )
and good writer (sulekhak) of Bengal’. This comment by Sibnath Sastri, of
Iswarchandra being more or less uneducated, was repeated in 1958 by Sushil
Kumar De in his foreword to Bhabatosh Datta’s edition of the Kabijībanī
verbatim; De’s intention seemed to be to highlight the ‘naturalness’ of Iswar
Gupta’s attainments in order to praise the extent of his ‘astonishing unedu-
cated skill’ (apūrba aśiks.ita-pat.utva). De then goes on to declare (although
Iswarchandra was the first to publish an edition of Bharatchandra) that,
it is to be doubted whether he actually understood the real meaning of Bharatchandra’s
poetry. He and his contemporary song-writers did not have the education, under-
standing, or imagination to have taken in Bharatchandra’s refined and dense
language, educated sensibility, easily-learned wit, and condensed presentation style.
That is why Bharatchandra’s flawless classical language did not endure in the follow-
ing era. All we see in the half a century following the start of the nineteenth century
are incompetent and disgusting imitations of Bidyāsundar.
Iswar Gupta’s own poetry too did not reach a very high standard.4
How could it? De is convinced that this rustic, uneducated, and unre-
fined natural poet was out of place in the educated world of new Bengali
poetry, and he approvingly (and selectively) quotes from Bankimchandra,
prophet of the new age, who had said, in his introduction to Iswar Gupta,
that there is no room for such a poet as this in the modern world. How far
we have come, in De, from the time of Sibnath Sastri may be measured by
the fact that Sastri’s concluding sentence in praise of Iswar Gupta as a good
poet and a good writer (sukabi, sulekhak) is not similarly endorsed in De’s
text, for De has already concluded that the new age had no time for the old
poets, and in this he is partly following the high priest of the Bengali modern,
Bankimchandra, who had held up Iswar Gupta’s case as a dire warning to the
youth of his time. ‘If there is one great truth that we imbibe from an analysis
of Iswarchandra’s life’, Bankim had said, ‘then it is this—talent cannot reach
its fullest apotheosis without good education’. He had also said, ‘It is a very
sad thing that he [Iswar Gupta] was not well-educated…If he had been, then
with the talent he had, if he had used it well, he would have had a much
greater command over his poetry, work and society…Bengal’s progress would
have moved further ahead by almost thirty years’.5 Bankim, however, was
nothing if not conflicted in his opinions, and a classic instance of this conflict
of opinion is present in the 1885 introduction, which veers from high praise
to open censure, from delight to condescension, from respect to rejection
to appreciation in a regular pendulum-like motion in the space of the few

Chapter 03.indd 88 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 poet of the present  89

pages of the essay. In his earlier English essay of 1871, ‘Bengali Literature’, by
contrast, he is more categorical in his opinion, saying, in the space of three
sentences in mid-paragraph in the middle of the essay on Iswar Gupta, ‘He
was a very remarkable man. He was ignorant and uneducated. He knew no
language but his own, and was singularly narrow and un-enlightened in his
views; yet for more than twenty years he was the most popular author among
the Bengalis’.6
Remarkably, this opinion, repeated ever after Bankimchandra right up to
the time of Sushil Kumar De, has persisted even among critics writing in the
twenty-first century, who have been unable to step outside of the humanist,
universalistic, and fundamentally bourgeois preoccupations of the preceding
eras. Typically, therefore, Sudipta Kaviraj, perhaps both unwilling as well as
unable to dispel with the enormous shadow of the revolutionary accomplish-
ments of Bankimchandra upon the modern Bengali man, has no hesitation
in marking the difference between Iswar Gupta and Bankimchandra as essen-
tially the difference between the high and the low, the pre-modern and the
modern:
From a vehicle of frivolous enjoyment of insignificant objects in the world, exploitation
of the infinite resources of punning and śles.a on things like the topse fish or babus
who for altogether contingent reasons incurred the hostility of Iswar Gupta, irony
came in Bankim to have a serious object, indeed an object beyond which nothing
could be more serious to the modern consciousness. Instead of trivial things in a
world which is not fixed in a historically serious gaze, it now reflected on three objects
entirely distinct from each other, all implicated in the historical world. These are the
self, the collective of which the self was a part, and the civilization of colonial India
which formed the theatre in which this darkly comic spectacle of the search for the
self unfolds.7 (emphases added)

From Bankimchandra onward, irony achieves ‘a new dignity’ it had never

had before, Kaviraj states; thus, with Bankim, a new tradition of Bengali
self-irony is born. Iswar Gupta’s poetry is about the ‘frivolous enjoyment of
insignificant objects in the world’; he writes about ‘trivial things’ such as the
topse fish or the babu, and if Bankim too made the babu the special object
of his satire, then Bankim is different because he did so as a babu himself,
which presumably Iswar Gupta was not. Here, Kaviraj finds that ‘irony came
in Bankim to have a serious object’, unlike in Iswar Gupta’s poems, which
exist ‘in a world which is not fixed in a historically serious gaze’. The argu-
ment assumes that selfhood came to the Bengali only with the advent of
Bankimchandra, for the ‘frivolous’ was not ‘serious’, the ‘contingent’ reason
was somehow not an adequate one. Kaviraj sees Iswar Gupta through the

Chapter 03.indd 89 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 90  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

lens of Bankimchandra, as someone who is, in Bankim’s words, ‘singularly

narrow and un-enlightened in his views’, for essentially the concern here is
with progress and evolution (Bengal would have moved forward thirty years,
Bankim had claimed, if Iswar Gupta had an education). For Kaviraj, Bengali
subjectivity appears to have been absent until a certain date, which is why
he reads Kaliprasanna Sinha too as inadequate, for Kaliprasanna ‘did not
realise yet the gravity, and the tragic taste of turning banter towards the self
(emphasis added)’.8 The use of the ‘yet’ in this sentence gestures towards a
notion of arrival, of deferral—modern subjectivity is yet to be realized in
the gravity of selfhood by the writer of Hutom. Bankim, then, is shown to
have attained a self-ironical mode denied to Iswar Gupta and Kaliprasanna,
both of whose choice of subject matter lacked dignity, and who personify
the unreconstructed self of the Indian that we have (hopefully) left behind
in our serious and progressive march on the road to the attainment, and the
critiquing, of self-hood.
A simple juxtaposition of two passages from either writer, however, con-
founds the basic assumptions of Kaviraj’s enquiry, for when we read the
passage Kaviraj quotes from Bankim’s Kamalākānta on the babu:
I shall do whatever you consider proper. I shall wear boots and trousers; put spec-
tacles on my nose, eat with knife and fork, dine at a table…9

what comes immediately to mind are Iswar Gupta’s already extant lines on
the spectacle of the bibi who shall eat with knife and fork [sab kñāt.ā-cāmce
dharbe śes.e] or the uncaring babu, ‘bujhi “hoot” bale, “boot” pāye diye,/“cheroot”
phñuke svarge jābe’ [I suppose they will say ‘hoot’, wear ‘boots’, smoke
‘cheroots’ and go to heaven] in the vastly dire scenario of scarcity of food
among the common people in the country, in a poem/song named ‘Famine’
[durbhiks.a].10 The long shadow of Iswar Gupta’s trenchant lines falls upon
Bankimchandra’s depiction unmistakably; only the satire is less pungent
in the later writer, de-politicized of its horrible context of starvation in the
countryside, made altogether more harmless and containable as a vehicle for
laughter.
Kaviraj is not alone in having been unable to find any new insight into the
textured world of Iswar Gupta’s poetry. A long line of distinguished Bengali
literary critics have been left bewildered by the chaotic confusion of Iswar
Gupta’s poems, their apparent formal conventionality hiding from sight
the modern urban language of material pleasure they encapsulate with so
much energy and verve. The commonest metaphor that has been used in the
­context of his poetry, then, has been that of the conjunction—in him and

Chapter 03.indd 90 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 poet of the present  91

his poetry—of the old and the new. It was Bankimchandra, once again, who
put these terms in place in his essay on Dinabandhu Mitra when he said, of
the years 1859–60, that they were ‘the meeting point [sandhisthal ] between
the old and the new’, because ‘The last of the old party, Iswar Chandra’s sun
had set, and the first poet of the new, Madhusudan’s, had just risen’.11 But
Bankimchandra had used these terms of those years, not of the poet; unfor-
tunately, the metaphor came to be displaced subsequently to the poet and
his poetry rather than to the era in question. Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay,
in his introduction to the poet in the Sāhitya Sādhak Caritmālā written in
1941 could only emphasize: ‘In the conflict between the old and the new,
just at the spot where there is an upheaval on the road, exactly at that spot,
he presides like a milestone planted in the bowels of the earth…’, using the
English word milestone in this description.12 Sukumar Sen falls back upon
the same metaphor: ‘I do not say that Iswar Gupta bade farewell to the old
poetry and welcomed the new, and I do not claim that his works proclaim the
conjunction of two worlds. But he had wanted to grasp the old and the new
world together at the same time—in this lay his uniqueness. Yet he was not
a prophet of an age’.13 Mired firmly as they were in the progressive, modern,
and nationalist prejudices of their time, every commentator, from Sushil
Kumar De to Bishnu De, had much the same to say in his evaluation of the
significance of the poetry of Iswar Gupta. The crucial point, however, is that
neither the old nor the new are configured here in terms of calendar time—
instead, both the temporal markers refer to the same moment of modernity.14

Readers, Publics
Almost every established zamindar in Bengal and all the wealthy families of
.
Calcutta were subscribers to Iswar Gupta’s Sambād Prabhākar. Further, Iswar
Gupta gave a free copy of the paper to many persons who were unable to
pay the subscription—at least three or four hundred in number. Prabāsī or
out-of-station Bengalis living in the Western and Northern provinces were
also grouped together as subscribers, sending local news of importance to the
paper—these contributions became especially valuable to the paper at the
time of the rebellion in 1857, when it became established as the preeminent
Bengali newspaper of its time.15 Since Iswar Gupta’s poetry appeared regularly
in the columns of his newspaper, his poetry reached a wide audience of recep-
tive readers, unparalleled in his time or the following ages for the manner in
which a newspaper and a poet each benefitted from proximity to the other.
This bond between paper and poet was reflected in a popular refrain, which,

Chapter 03.indd 91 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 92  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

typically, punned upon several words (‘iswar’ referred to both the poet and
god himself, and ‘gupta’ means hidden, but is also the poet’s surname, while
‘prabhakar’, of course, indicated both the sun and the newspaper):
ke bale īśvar gupta byāpta carācar
jāhār prabhāy prabhā pāy prabhākar.
[Who says Iswar Gupta is absent, he is present all over the world
In whose radiating influence glows the Prabhakar.]
.
The Sambād Prabhākar was the first daily newspaper in Bengali, starting as
a weekly in 1831, developing into a thrice-weekly publication from August
1836, and finally morphing into a daily from 14 June 1839. A notice at the
end of the last column in the newspaper of 5 April 1849, proclaimed: ‘This
Prabhākar newspaper is published everyday excepting Sundays from house
No. 44/3 situated in the lane on the southern end of the open road appear-
ing on the south side of Calcutta’s Simuliya Hendua pond. Yearly advance is
valued at Rs 10.’ After Iswar Gupta’s death in 1859, it continued to be edited
by his brother, Ramchandra Gupta, circulating till the 1880’s, after which it
became irregular, and finally ceased operations.
In Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s poetry of the same era in
Paris, he shows how art throws up new strategies of survival to adapt to the
changed conditions imposed by industrial society in an era of high capi-
talism. One of the great motifs of this age, for Iswar Gupta no less than
for Baudelaire, was the newspaper, and Benjamin remarks upon the manner
in which at this time the newspaper signified ‘the replacement of the older
narration by information, and of information by sensation, reflect[ing] the
increasing atrophy of experience’.16 Keeping in mind the essentially urban
character of Iswar Gupta’s poetry, it should be possible to see, in Benjamin’s
foregrounding in Baudelaire of the metropolitan masses that inhabit ‘giant
cities’, the public as it was taking shape in mid-nineteenth century Calcutta.
The verse of Iswar Gupta, so different in form from his French contemporary,
was similarly inhabited by the pressure of a public made up of ‘the people in
the street’—this crowd, he feels, is unique in this period in the nineteenth
century, when ‘it was getting ready to take shape as a public in broad strata
who had acquired facility in reading’.17 For Iswar Gupta, these are the read-
ers of a poetry which, both in its physical incarnation and in its content,
was essentially poetry that was designed to be sold in the streets. Sibnath
Sastri describes the scene upon which the theatre of Iswar Gupta’s poetry was
enacted before the public readership in the city in an unforgettable vignette:
When the Prabhākar was published, newspaper-sellers would stand at the cross-roads
and read aloud from the poetry in it and in no time at all a huge number of papers

Chapter 03.indd 92 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 poet of the present  93

would be sold. Slowly, a group of Iswarchandra-type poets began to grow and a new
age was inaugurated in Bengali literature. Just as nowadays every person—young or
old, male or female—who composes poetry does so in the mould of Rabindranath,
in those days whenever anybody desired to compose poetry he did so, consciously
or unconsciously, in the mould of Iswarchandra. As time went on, Iswarchandra’s
imitators and followers, his students and student’s students all branched out in
many directions and gave birth to a school of poetry. Among these followers, the
composer of Sudhīrañjan, Dwarakanath Adhikari, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay,
Dinabandhu Mitra, Harimohan Sen, Rangalal Bandyopadhyay and Manmohan
Basu achieved fame and status in later life.18
This list makes its way into almost every biography and notice of the
poet Iswar Gupta, almost as if the names that it boasts as his followers were
of more importance historically than the poems that he wrote. Whereas a
Bengali reader would be inclined to remember Madhusudan because of the
Meghnādbadh kābya and Rabindranath perhaps for Sonār tarī or Mānasī,
Iswar Gupta, it seems, is liable to be remembered not for his works, but for
his men—the stalwarts of Bengali modernity that he forged, like Prometheus,
in the workshop of the Prabhākar.
The poetry in the Prabhākar had appeared in narrow newspaper columns,
filling up the back sheets with its effervescent content, sometimes with a
small heading on top that proclaimed, simply, ‘padya’ [Poetry]. When it was
not printing his own poetry, on occasion the poems were contributions sent
in to the editor, who presumably published them at his discretion, and here a
short prefatory line would include the address to the editor. One such inser-
tion in the last page of the paper on the 26th of Caitra [April–May] 1849
proclaimed, at the head of the verse, with each word following the other in
separate lines: ‘Rūpak/Pran.ay/Padya’ (Rupak/Love/Poetry), and at the bottom,
it carried the poet’s nom de plume: ‘premānurakta janasya’ [love-smitten
one]. In another, the poem, ‘Śikh Parājay’ [Sikh Defeat], was preceded by the
line ‘Submitted with respect to the esteemed editor of the Prabhākar’, and
the poet’s identity given as ‘kasyachidran.aran.ga bilāsina’, which might tenta-
tively be translated as ‘one whose heart delights in pleasure’.19 In this it was
following quite closely upon the conventions followed, for instance, in the
pages of the India Gazette when Derozio was contributing regularly to that
.
paper between 1825 and 1831. The Sambād Prabhākar was perhaps the first
Indian regional language newspaper to carry a literary supplement—from the
Bengali New Year of 1853 it published a monthly supplement that provided
a much more substantial space than the daily newspaper for the publication
of a variety of occasional verse, as well as an eclectic range of prose and imagi-
native writing, providing Iswar Gupta with more space in which to indulge

Chapter 03.indd 93 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 94  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

his creative output than was available in the news-oriented daily newspaper.20
Through the newspaper and then the literary supplement, a poet such as
Iswar Gupta first enters the marketplace in the ‘style of the flaneur who goes
botanizing on the asphalt’, and poetry becomes a commodity that helps fash-
ion the phantasmagoria of city life in its own way.21
Although critics have been unwilling to identify Iswar Gupta as a member
of civil society in the sense of the Bengali bhadralok or babu as these cat-
egories evolved over the course of the century, the society he belonged to
was undeniably one in which the markers of a modern urban culture of the
city such as literary societies and clubs, debating societies and philosophical
associations were already very much in place, as indeed they had been since
the time of Derozio. The first literary society in Calcutta that I have found
evidence of participation in by Indians was the Oriental Literary Society of
1825, which had members from both the East Indian and Indian commu-
nities of the professional class.22 From 1851 onward, Iswar Gupta began to
organize a literary festival in Calcutta on the day of the Bengali New Year on
the 15th of April at his printing press. Almost every person with any preten-
sion to an education was to be found there, from the wealthy zamindar to the
impoverished pundit, as they travelled to attend this gathering from the city
and its outskirts, as well as from the mofussils. Bankimchandra writes of the
presence of Calcutta’s most respected and established families—the Mallicks,
the Dattas, and Shobhabazar’s Debs—as well as of some of Calcutta’s most
important men, such as Debendranath Tagore, at the festival. Iswar Gupta
would read and recite from his prose and poetry, followed by his best stu-
dents, who were then awarded prizes in order of merit for their compositions
by the wealthy men of the city and districts. At the end of the proceedings,
Iswarchandra would organise a feast for about four to five hundred people.23
Crucially, Iswar Gupta’s ambit was not confined to the precincts of the city
.
of Calcutta alone. Publishing profusely in the Sambād Prabhākar, he reached
a wide and eager audience in the towns and villages of Bengal; in the annals
of Bengali literary history, no less revealing than Rabindranath’s description
of the eagerness with which every issue of Bankimchandra’s Ban.gadarśan was
awaited is Nabinchandra’s account of the reception of Iswar Gupta’s poems
by his father’s circle in his childhood and youth in Chittagong in the 1850s:
In those days, Bengal’s Saraswatī Devī’s pale and poor image was to be found installed
at the bat. talā. There, whatever was birthed by the Mother on the poorest paper in
illegible print—I read it all. Gradually, Iswarchandra Gupta and the god-like (deb-
pratim) Iswarchandra Vidyasagar began to dawn upon the sky of Bengali literature.
That both of them are the gods (iswar) of Bengali verse and prose is a universally

Chapter 03.indd 94 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 poet of the present  95

acknowledged fact today. In those days Bengal was blinded by the light of Gupta-jā’s
‘Prabhakār’.
ke bale īśvar gupta byāpta carācar
jāhār prabhāy prabhā pāy prabhākar.
[Who says god/iswar is absent/gupta, he is present all over the world
In whose lustre glows the radiant Prabhākar.]
This proud and cutting remark was known to everybody and accepted as if it were
the word of the Vedas (bedbākyabat)…
My father was a great follower of Gupta-jā. Gupta-jā had once come to Chattagram
on his travels and had charmed everybody with his talents. My father used to read
the Prabhākar with his friends all the time–he used to love to read poetry. So much
so, that there were days spent reading poetry when he would forget to sleep or eat.24

This description of the birth of Bengali literature in poor circumstances

achieves one memorable connection—it perspicaciously links the Bat-tala to
Saraswati Devi, a historically wholly accurate conjunction. From those mean
surroundings, Nabinchandra seems to imply, rose the powerful Bengali
literature that was in its adolescence in his own heyday in the 1870s and
achieved manhood in Bankim; but of the two gods he mentions who take
that infant literature forward towards glory, it is Vidyasagar who is described
as god-like, ‘debpratim’. For undeniably Iswar Gupta, whose paper, like the
sun’s light, ‘had blinded them all’, remained very much a man of this world,
not a god, or even one who was made in his image, but a material man who,
his poems made abundantly clear, liked his meat and drink, his alliances
firmly rooted in the newspaper he edited and published his poems in, as
well as in the bat.talā that existed in close proximity to the half-ākhd.āi he
composed songs for.
The self-division of Bengali modernity, at odds between the bat.talā and
Saraswatī Devī, found a fusion of form and figure in the personality of Iswar
Gupta in mid nineteenth-century Bengal. In that battle, it seemed to be the
newly incarnate form of the goddess of learning that won the field in the
coming years, as a new generation of men was created far exceeding the pat-
tern of Iswar Gupta’s performance, of whose initial overwhelming influence
nothing seems to have survived except a few perfunctory pages mandatory
in the telling of literary histories. Yet the fuzzy intermediate space of fusion
between the two that Iswar Gupta carved out as his own domain was not
to be wiped out by all the zeal of reforming Young Bengal, persisting in the
interstices with tenacity to outlive many other trends and schools that devel-
oped at this time in the battlefield of Bengali literature, whether Sanskritic or
Anglicist, orthodox or reformist, country or Western.

Chapter 03.indd 95 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 96  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Popular Poems
It might be instructive, at this point, to pause for a moment and consider the
total corpus of Iswar Gupta’s poetic production. Iswar Gupta published more
poems than any other Bengali poet up to the time of Bankimchandra; Bankim
remarks that Gopalchandra Mukhopadhyay, the man who did the actual
work in compiling the material for the anthology edited by Bankimchandra,
estimated that Iswar Gupta ‘wrote almost fifty thousand lines of verse’, of
which only a fraction was presented in their edition of 1885.25 All of this
poetry, it is worth emphasizing, was published in the pages of the newspaper
.
he edited, the Sambād Prabhākar, as none of it was collected and published
in book form in his life time. Yet, the editions of Iswar Gupta’s poetry, that
first began to appear from the year 1862, have continued to appear unabated
in some form or the other through the course of the century and a half that
has followed.26 The newest edition, titled Īśvarcandra gupter śres.t.ha kabitā
[Best Poems of Iswarchandra Gupta], edited by Alok Ray, was published in
2002 and reprinted in 2009, while the Bankimchandra edition, reprinted as
recently as in 1995, and the Kamalkumar Majumdar, selection reprinted in
2007, testify to the fact that this poet, who was not deemed to be a proper
poet at all, is still read up to the current day.
It is very important to note that in keeping with the priorities of an age
when religion and worship were the primary priorities of all men of intel-
lect, from Rammohun Roy and Debendranath Tagore to Akshay Datta and
Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, the first section in the 1901 edition, of about a
hundred poems, is called ‘Moral and Spiritual’ [Naitik eban.g paramārthik].
This section contains poems with titles like ‘God’s Mercy’ [Īśvarer karun.ā],
‘Prayer’ [Prārthanā] and ‘Who is a Man’ [Mānus. ke]. This was followed by
sections called ‘Society and Satire’ [Sāmājik o byān.ga], ‘Of War’ [Yuddha
bis.ayak], ‘Description of the Seasons’ [R.tu barn.an], ‘Love’ [Prem], and finally,
‘Various’ [Bibidha].27 In the third section on war, apart from a few general
poems called simply ‘War’ [ Yuddha] or ‘Victory in War’ [ Yuddher jay], all the
poems are about contemporary wars in India, both civil and political, and
so we have ‘Sikh Conflict’, ‘Nana Saheb’, ‘Victory in Kanpur’, and epony-
mous poems on the Delhi, Kanpur, Allahabad, Kabul and Agra battles. Iswar
Gupta’s loyalties were firmly with the British every time, as can be seen from
just a title such as ‘Victory at Kanpur’ [Kānpurer yuddhe jay], and in this he
was no different from Rangalal, Hemchandra, Nabinchandra, or the poets
of the Dutt Family Album (1870) who wrote in English and were looked at
askance for writing eulogies to Lord Canning after 1857.28 The difference
lay, in fact, in the treatment, for Iswar Gupta is contemptuous of leaders

Chapter 03.indd 96 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 poet of the present  97

such as Nana Saheb (‘even though he is Hindu, he is an ocean of evil’) and

the Rani of Jhansi (using debased slang to call her ‘cut lip aunt’ [thñot.kāt.ā
kāki] and ‘she-fox’ [māgī khñeki]), sneering at them for, as he saw it, their
impudence and idiocy in language far more vitriolic than the ‘well-educated’
Dutts would have used. It is the language he uses against the Muslims that is
the most offensive, however, and they are described as ‘worse than the most
fallen’ (narādham nīc nāi, ned.eder mato), ‘filled with badness like the chilly
that is burnt whole’ ( jena jhāl lan.kā pod.ā, āgāgod.ā, nas.t.āmite bharā), whose
throne the British should seize and whose blood they should suck. Such sen-
timents, expressed with an appalling coarseness of language in the context
of Muslims, are repeatedly present in poems such as ‘Delhi’s War’, where he
asks the Hindu community, who are Bharat’s favourite children, to freely say
Victory to the British (bhārater priyaputra hindu samuday/ muktamukhe bala
sabe brit.iśer jay), or ‘Kabul’s War’, which has an image of the British shaking
the Muslim by his beard, or ‘Peace after War’, which celebrates the British
destruction of Delhi, ending with the lines ‘Say Victory to the British, say
Victory, brothers all/Come let us sing and dance and praise the Lord’.29
Iswar Gupta’s hostility towards women, reformed babus and Anglicized
Indians in his poetry (rather than his prose, which was altogether more
tempered, liberal, and generous) marks it out as representative of the most
common prejudices of his time, aligning it in spirit with the bazaar painters
.
of the Kalighat pat. or the performers of san g, who mercilessly satirized the
pretension and hollowness of a society rapidly on the make. Thus, whereas
in a poem he might denounce educated women, saying ‘āge meyegulo chila
bhālo, bratadharma karta sabe/ ekā bethun ese śes�? kareche, ār ki tāder teman
pābe? [The girls were better before, they performed all the religious rites/
Bethune alone has put an end to all that, will you ever find them like before
anymore?], in an opinion piece in his paper, he could express exactly the
opposite view:
Alas, it is impossible to describe the worry caused to us by the fact that women are
unable to access routes towards an education. If we ever look into the reasons for the
falling apart of families, of brothers, or of other unpleasant incidents, we will have
to admit that at its root lies the ignorance of women. Therefore, if they are educated
then all these illnesses may easily be overcome and society will be happier and pleas-
anter than before.30

This dichotomy between poetry and prose might well have been premised
upon an understanding of poetry as a performative genre, prone to the hyperbolic
gesture or the rhetorical flourish, and to always keeping its ­sensation-seeking
audience in mind.

Chapter 03.indd 97 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 98  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The sectioning of the poems by Manindrakrishna in 1901 is interesting

for the fact that the poems on nation, for which Iswar Gupta was praised
by critics such as Akshaychandra Sarkar, are lumped together into the last
section, which therefore contains ‘Mātr�bhās�ā’, ‘Svadeś’, ‘Bhārater abasthā’
and ‘Bhārater bhāgya bilāp’, as well as ‘D� uel yuddha’ and ‘Bābājān bud�o śiber
stotra’. The sections on love and the seasons may automatically remind one
of Rabindranath’s famous sections of the Gītabitān, but the love poems here
belong to an entirely different sensibility. Poems such as ‘The Proud Woman
.
Appeased’ [Māninīr mānbhan ga] were very far from the Tagorean definition
of ‘Prem’ and did not find a place in Bankim’s anthology, while neither did
those such as ‘Meeting after Separation’ [Biccheder par milan] or ‘Unrequited
Love’ [Prem nairāśya] that harked back to an earlier pre-colonial idiom of
separation and longing with roots in either the Hindustani khayal or Bengali
Baishnab poetic traditions.
If Bankim left out the poems that according to him contained obscenity,
then later generations simply ignored or forgot about the poems on the wars,
on ethics and morality, and on the seasons. As a result, the modern reader
has little idea of what an astonishing range of poems are to be found in the
complete volumes of his works. Some of these were retrieved and reprinted
by Kamalkumar Majumdar for his famous selection of 1954, where the
poems were accompanied by his own woodcuts to accompany the text.31
The only poems to have merited sustained discussion over the years, apart
from the odd occasion when a poem such as ‘Nirgun� īśvar’ [God Without
Attributes] was praised by the modern critic, were those satirical poems that
commented scathingly on contemporary manners, and those that contained
aphorisms that have survived as one or two liners in colloquial speech. Both
the satiric poems and the poems about ‘things’ were immensely popular, and
survived the passage of time; their accent on the ordinary and on lived life
led later critics to emphasize these above his other works, for the acerbic
humour they contained continued to be celebrated by one and all. Here
.
we have reflections on ‘The English New Year’ [Ingrājī nababars�a], ‘Widow
Remarriage Law’ [Bidhabā bibāha āin], ‘Babu Chandicharan Singha’s Love
.
for the Christian Religion’ [Bābu cand�icaran� sin ghar khrīs�.tadharmānurakti],
‘Status’ [Kaulīnya], ‘The Topse Fish with Eggs’ [End�āwālā topsyāmāch] and
‘Pineapple’ [Ānāras]. Many of these made it into Kamalkumar Majumdar’s
selection, which also included the famous eulogy to the goat, ‘Pñāt. a’, on the
disguised missionary, ‘Chadma miśanari ’, and on Christmas Day, ‘Bad�adin’.
While the satirical pointedness of many of these poems mocked the colonial
dilemma with a topicality that lingers on in the neo-colonial world order, and

Chapter 03.indd 98 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 poet of the present  99

while ‘laughter and subjectivity’ might remain one of the commoner tropes
towards a reading of Iswar Gupta’s poems, it might be profitable to explore
further the conflicted reasons behind the enduring validity of this body of
work.32

-
Objects in the World: Ja-ha Ache (Whatever is There)
The reason why poets such as Madhusudan were considered great, and Iswar
Gupta low class (nimnaśren�ī), Bankimchandra had said in his evaluation of
the poet, was because poets such as Madhusudan had articulated the highest
ideals of man. However, Bankim went on to say, that was not the last word
to be said on the subject. Iswar Gupta had ‘an ability that was unmatched by
others—what he had, none other had, he was king in his own domain’. This
domain Bankim named as the domain of the present, of the real—‘Whatever
is there, Iswar Gupta is its poet’ ( jāhā āche, īśvar gupta tāhār kabi).33 Among
the reasons Eliot enumerated when he spoke of the peculiar problem in
the evaluation of Rudyard Kipling’s poetry, was a ‘further obstacle’—‘their
topicality, their occasional character, and their political associations’. Yet
Bankimchandra, in his appreciation of Iswar Gupta, had pointed exactly to
this lack of transcendence of the particular as the very reason for the survival
of the poems. Iswar Gupta brought something into the Bengal language, he
said, that was not there before him, which had given the Bengali language
strength. Iswar Gupta’s poems in the Prabhākar showed for the first time how
‘everyday business, political events, and social events—all this can become
the subject matter of poetry’. Thus the fact that ‘today the Sikh war, tomor-
row the f­estival of paus�, today the missionary, tomorrow soliciting for a job,
that all this is under literature, is the stuff of literature, was shown by the
Prabhākar’.34
In a short afterword to the most recent edition of Iswar Gupta’s poems
available to a Bengali reading public—Īśvar gupta: chabi o chad�ā [Iswar Gupta:
Pictures and Rhymes]—republished in January 2007 after its initial appear-
ance in 1954 as the Kamalkumar edition, the current editor, Aniruddha
Lahiri, tries to put his finger on the pulse of the matter: what constitutes
Iswar Gupta’s enduring appeal to modern Bengal? The question is asked in
the context of the illustrations around which the book is constituted—the
chabi of the title—which are a series of woodcuts by the writer Kamalkumar
Majumdar, who created these in conjunction with his own selection of Iswar
Gupta’s poems here. Chad�ā, the word used for ‘poem’, is a word that in
Bengali primarily indicates ‘nursery rhymes’, although here it seems to have

Chapter 03.indd 99 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 100  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

been used in the context of alliterative word-use and prosody, for these are
hardly children’s poems, ranging as they do in subject matter from war and
ethics to the seasons and satire.
The historical force of these poems, Aniruddha Lahiri suggests in intro-
ducing Kamalkumar’s selection, lies in the fact that
… as time went on, the pressure behind the spread of Gupta-kabi’s poetry shifted
from the circle of tradition to that which is accidental, suddenly put together and
therefore topical, and thereby historical. In the Historical Novel Lukács had noticed
at one point that the inclination towards historicality became strong in all of Europe
after the French revolution. Even if not expressed as forcefully, could not a similar
inclination have accelerated in British India’s centre of power, at the nerve centre of
the flow of events, Calcutta? Even if unknown to himself, Iswar Gupta gave a shape
to that historicality—in that sense probably is he not India’s first modern poet?…
From the point of view of this spurt in the awareness of history, his claim will not be
either easy or wise to destroy.35

Taking the argument further, one might suggest that the shape that Iswar
Gupta gave to the historicality of events in Calcutta resided in his empha-
sis, in the poems, on the materiality of things-as-they-are. Here, in poems
on contemporary urban life, on manners and the lack of them, on politics
and the hypocrisy of status, in short addresses on food, dress, and speech,
Iswar Gupta was sui generis, writing in a genre peculiar to himself in that
age, managing to baffle the later historian of literature and the literary critic,
who remained at a loss about whether to read these as ‘literature’ or not.
More often than not, these poems were cutting edge in their subject matter,
but informed more by a sensibility that was rooted in ‘tradition’ or the older
styles of Bengali literary composition. Falling uneasily between two stools,
this corpus of poetry confounded the subsequent literary historian, who
could only manage, therefore, to reiterate old clichés rather than find a new
language with which to read these poems.
The materialism, almost commercialism, in the subject matter of the
poems points toward a modern sensibility that captures an element of his-
toricity in the evocation of concrete presence—jāhā āche. Bankimchandra
identifies the elements of the poetic in Iswar Gupta as ‘that which is real, that
which is experienced, that which is found’ (jāhā prakr�ta, jāhā pratyaks�a, jāhā
prāpta). In identifying the rasa that soaks the poetry of Iswar Gupta with such
plenitude, Bankim lists the spaces that are Iswar Gupta’s poetry:
Iswar Gupta’s poetry is in the thorn in the rice, in the smoke in the kitchen, in the
push of the boatman’s oar in Natore, in the indigo loan, in hotel food, in the corpo-
real being of goat-mutton. In the pineapple, he finds not only the juice of sweetness

Chapter 03.indd 100 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 poet of the present  101

but that of poetry, in the topse fish he finds not just the fishiness of the fish, but its
ascetic look, in goat meat he finds not only the smell of meat but that of the body of
the sage Dadhichi.36

In this sense, then, Iswar Gupta’s poetry is that of the found object, ‘ready-
mades’ like Duchamp’s that are neither attractive nor beautiful but exist by
virtue of their selection by the poet or artist. André Breton and Paul Éluard’s
Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme defined a readymade as ‘an ordinary object
elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist’, a
definition applicable to the best of Iswar Gupta’s poems on things of ordi-
nary everyday materiality, particularly in their slightly surreal quality that
Bankimchandra has tried to capture in his passage without recourse to the
vocabulary of the surrealist manifesto. With the self-consciousness of the sur-
realist artist, where the displaced bottle rack or the inverted porcelain urinal
were the exhibited objects, Iswar Gupta’s pineapple or goat inhabits a similar
surrealism; as in Duchamp’s famous addition of the moustache and goatee
on the Mona Lisa print titled L.H.O.O.Q., he writes a poetry of irreverence,
satire, and mockery in an unmistakable statement of intent.
The element of materiality in Iswar Gupta’s poetry is factored in two ways:
it is tangible and it exists in the image. The subject matter of the Kalighat pat
is almost exactly the subject matter of Iswar Gupta’s poems—the cat with the
fish in its mouth in one instance, and the topse fish with eggs in the other,
the babu being beaten by a woman with a jhād�u in one, and the babu in the
boot and hat, scooting off with some urgency (‘“hoot” bale ut.hi “boot” pāye
chut.i/keman āmār bhāb’ 37) in the other. Sometimes, the image in the poetry
springs up with such immediacy that one can almost picture the painting the
Kalighat artist should have arrived at—so, when the disguised missionary is
described as ‘the corpulent tiger in the Hendo woods, the one with the red
.
face’ (‘Hñedo bane kñedo bāgh rāngāmukh jār’), ‘the missionary child-eater
who eats up kids’ (‘Miśanari cheledharā chele dhare khāy’), one can just see the
big traditional striped tiger painted in black and yellow with a small figure of
a boy babu in its mouth.38
This pictorial element to poetry and its resemblance to the traditional
pat.uā or artist (citrakar—literally one who paints pictures) were picked up
by Iswar Gupta himself; crucially however, he felt that the poet was dealing
in an immateriality that had no equivalent in the world of the painter. Thus
about the citrakar he said, ‘citrakare citra kare kare tuli tuli/ kabisaha tāhār
.
tulanā kise tuli?/ citrakar dekhe yata bājhya abayab/tulite tulite rānga lekhe sei
sab/ phale se bicitra citra citra aparūp/ kintu tāhe nāhi dekhi prakr�tir rūp’ [The
painter paints by picking up his brush/How do I hold up a comparison with

Chapter 03.indd 101 9/27/2013 4:18:32 PM

 102  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

the poet?/The painter looks at the material body/With his brush, he writes
of it all/Thus making a variety of pictures, beautiful depictions/But in them
you do not see the beauty of nature].39 Without a doubt, he is talking here of
the pat.uā—whom he names as such in the poem itself—the traditional rural
artist of mythological themes, whose bold lines and stylized forms had by this
time entered the Calcutta bazaar in the incarnation of the Kalighat pat., who
had no truck with naturalism or perspective, and therefore could not show
you ‘the beauty of nature’ as it was. On the other hand, the poet or kabi was
one who made both the unreal and the real visible, (‘kibā dr�śya ki adr�śya,
sakali prakat.’), who expressed feeling and love (‘bhāb-cintā, prem-ras, ādi
bahutar’), and in whose descriptions we see the play of God (‘kabir barn�ane
dekhi, īśvarer līlā’ ). The painter, he says, ‘writes a plenitude of hands, faces,
feet’ (pat.uā lekhe kata, hāt mukh pad ), deliberately using the word ‘writes’
rather than ‘draws’, while the poet-painter writes only in lines (kabi citrakar
lekhe śudhu mātra pad ), punning incessantly on words such as pad which
can mean both feet and the line of verse, or tuli, which can mean both brush
and to hold up or pick up, repeating words in an excess of alliterative zeal,
designing a decorative verse to exhibit his showmanship in language and his
expertise in its traditional poetic usage.
Alok Ray, who notices these lines in his introduction to the latest edi-
tion of Iswar Gupta’s poetry, feels that although Iswar Gupta had wanted
to speak, as a poet, of the ineffable, he had managed only to achieve in his
works a display of the skills of a pat.uā—there lay the contradiction of the
poet’s vision of himself and all he had managed to achieve.40 The assumption
here continues from Bankimchandra’s criticism, which is then quoted to cor-
roborate the judgement; Bankim had said, ‘He did not know how to express
the unsaid. He was not skilled in the creation of beauty. In fact, he did not
create very much’.41 The fundamental premise here on the function of poetry
is expressed in the verb ‘create’—the modern poet from the Romantic period
onward ‘creates’, he expresses the unsaid, his individual vision transforms the
felt experience into essence. This Iswar Gupta failed to do, and therefore,
Bankim says, he was not a ‘poet’ in the sense that Kalidasa was a ‘poet’, in
the sense that we understand poetry (and he used the English word) today.
The English word is used because there is no equivalent of the word poetry in
the Indian languages, because kāvya and kavi in Sanskrit poetic convention
had different connotations from that of English poetry and poet.
The modern poet, Barthes shows us in ‘Is There Any Poetic Writing?’, uses
words with ‘a violent and unexpected abruptness’, reproducing ‘the depth
and singularity of individual experience’ in the ‘power or beauty’ of poetry.

Chapter 03.indd 102 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 poet of the present  103

‘In modern poetics’, he says, ‘words produce a kind of formal continuum

from which there gradually emanates an intellectual or emotional density…
speech is then the solidified time of a more spiritual gestation, during with the
“thought” is prepared, installed little by little by the contingency of words’.
In contrast, classical poetry depends entirely on ‘technique’; it is ‘merely an
ornamental variation of prose, the fruit of an art (that is, a technique), never
a different language, or the product of a particular sensibility’. An older tra-
ditional poet like Iswar Gupta was in some senses analogous to the European
classical poet Barthes invokes, in that he embodies no particular depth of
feeling, he does not project an inner thought outward, he uses ornamental
variation in accordance with ‘a whole ritual of expression’ laid down already
for him by social convention. This is poetry, then, that is rooted in the social,
recognized by the ‘conspicuousness of its conventions’, by its display of verbal
skill, its relational ties with language. Its aim is ‘to bring a thought exactly
within the compass of a metre’, and here language is not in-depth but on the
surface, spread out according to ‘the exigencies of an elegant or decorative
purpose’. Here ‘poetic vocabulary itself is one of usage, not of invention’,
‘they are due to long custom, not to individual creation’. That is why the
poetic practice of Iswar Gupta fails to meet Bankim’s or Alok Ray’s standard,
because individual creation is not the criterion that governs its existence at all.
Yet the division Barthes makes between the classical poet and the modern
poet in Europe establishes a dichotomy that does not stand up to scrutiny
in the conflicted present of the poetry of Iswar Gupta. For Barthes holds up
modern poetry as being, on the contrary, about reducing ‘discourse to words
as static things’, where the primacy of the word is absolute. ‘Modern poetry is
a poetry of the object’, he says, but the unexpected object here is ‘each poetic
word’; this ‘Hunger of the Word, common to the whole of modern poetry,
makes poetic speech terrible and inhuman’, ‘full of gaps and full of lights’,
‘filled with absences’ and ‘without stability of intention’. ‘The bursting upon
us of the poetic word then institutes an absolute object’ and here, the object
cannot have any ‘resort to the content of the discourse’, it is not about the
subject matter, because it ‘turns its back’ on both ‘History’ and ‘social life’. But
in Iswar Gupta’s poetry, the object remains an object, it is material, it has a
body and attributes, it is physical and tangible in the image. In this it does not
aspire to the interiority of the modern individual poet, it has not turned its
back on History and social life. Nevertheless, its unmistakable modernity of
the urban and the spatial finds a manifestation in all that is anonymous (all of
his poetry appeared unsigned in his lifetime), that is of the crowd, the city, the
newspaper, and of the lived materiality of things. In this it also has ‘something

Chapter 03.indd 103 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 104  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

good, solid and delightful to offer’, as Baudelaire noticed in the minor poets,
for it is permeated by a ‘particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance and the
sketch of manners’. As such, then, like Constantin Guys, the obscure painter
Baudelaire is concerned with in his essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Iswar
Gupta too is ‘the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of
eternity that it contains’. ‘Every country, to its pleasure and glory’, Baudelaire
continues, ‘has possessed a few men of this stamp’, and here in Calcutta in the
1850s it is unmistakably Iswar Gupta who occupies that space.42
Such an artist is a flaneur, a traveller, a cosmopolitan, but he has a loftier
aim. Baudelaire says, ‘he is looking for that quality which you must allow
me to call “modernity”; for I know of no better word to express the idea I
have in mind. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever ele-
ment it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the
transitory’.43 The task of such a poet is to separate out, from the garb of an
age, the ‘mysterious element of beauty that it may contain’, and if, for Iswar
Gupta, that transitory beauty was to be found in the celebration of English
New Year’s Day or succulent goat meat, then that was the deportment of
the age, the special nature of beauty in his day. While the modern painter
in Baudelaire’s time captures the gesture and bearing of the woman of his
day in the cut of skirt and bodice, the crinoline and the starched muslin pet-
ticoats, for ‘every age has its own gait, glance and gesture’, in Iswar Gupta’s
descriptions, something like that glance and gesture is present, for instance,
in the depiction of the ‘fresh’ Englishwoman in her polka-dotted dress in
.
ingrājī nababars�a.44 Like the groups of singer-songwriters (kabiyāl ) who per-
formed in the houses of the Calcutta nouveau riche at this time, Iswar Gupta
is urban in his location and contemporary in his subject matter, writing a
­performative poetry for his audience in traditional metre and style. The city
and its society—with its hypocrisy and sham, its love of pomp and ceremony,
in its manners and customs, dress and deportment—is pitilessly reflected
in both their poetic productions, albeit in different forms. This immersion
in the city and its ways was something the nationalist modern in the late
­nineteenth century would decisively turn its back upon, and the material
world of urban life as subject matter for poetry would only return to Bengal
in the avant-garde 1930s.

Between Sound and Image: The Sound-Image

If the visual element of the language used allows a graphic pictorial imagery to
spring up in the reader’s mind, then the other dimension that is indispensable

Chapter 03.indd 104 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 poet of the present  105

to the success of the best of Iswar Gupta’s poetry is that of sound. Alliteration,
punning and a clever jugglery with words was taken to such an extreme in
Bengali poetry in the wake of Bharatchandra in the nineteenth century that
it was specifically identified as a fault by later literary critics. However, what
is remarkable in such usage in Iswar Gupta is the astonishing onomatopoeia
of correspondence created between sound and image in the poem, resulting
in something that can only be called, uniquely, a ‘sound image’. Take, for
.
instance, the celebrated satirical poem Ingrājī nababars�a [English New Year].
This extraordinary poem is written to commemorate the arrival of the English
year 1852 and records, in astonishing everyday detail, the sights and sounds
of the celebrations in the city. Beginning with a reference to the Bengali lunar
year that has lost all relevance with the coming of the English, Christian year,
the poem initially describes the white man on this occasion, well-dressed,
joyous, and indulgent, in his carriage on the way to church and then in his
well-decorated home. At his side, his wife looks ‘fresh’ in a ‘polka-dotted dress’
(mānmade bibi sab hailen fresh/ feather-er pholoris phut.ikāt.ā dress’). A detailed
description of her appearance follows. However, typically in Iswar Gupta, there
is a sting in the tail, for after describing the slippers (śilipar) on her white feet
and the scarf around her neck, the decorative comb in her hair and the spray of
flowers that descend to her cheek, he concludes in a notorious line, ‘bid�ālāks�i
bidhumukhī mukhe gandha chut. e’ (cat-eyed, moon-faced, she has bad breath).
Another famous line, ‘bibijān cale jān labejān kare’, follows two lines that use
the sound effect of fluttering and flowing in the service of an image:
ribin� ud�iche kata phar phar kari
d�hal d�hal .tal .tal bñākā bhāb dhore
bibijān cale jān labejān kore
[So many ribbons fly fluttering away
Leaning, reclining, poised at an angle
The beloved bibi goes her way, and one feels like dying].

This repeated use of words such as ‘phar phar’ for the sound of the ribbon
flying in the wind or ‘d�hal d�hal ’, which is actually repeated four times, to
indicate the delicious ease of attitude in the posturing bibi, is impossible
to translate effectively. This repetition, as well as the use of such sounding
words for description is, in a subsequent section of the poem, taken to its
logical extreme. After a hugely subversive and mischievous section where the
poet imagines himself to be a fly accompanying these two on their carriage
to church, sometimes sipping from their glass of sherry, sometimes sitting on
her gown or her face and happily rubbing its wings, there follows a section

Chapter 03.indd 105 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 106  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

on the scene at the table, full of ‘aparūp khānā’ [amazing food] in the sahib’s
house. Here, the scene is evoked entirely and only through sound, framed by
the preceding and following couplet:
Very best sherry taste merry rest jāte
āge bhāge den giyā śrīmatīr hāte

ka.t ka.t ka.tāka.t .tak .tak .tak

.thun .thun .thun .thun d�hak d�hak d�hak
cupu cupu cup cup cap cap cap
supu supu sup sup sap sap sap

.thakās .thakās .thak phas phas phas

kas kas .tas .tas ghas ghas ghas

hip hip hurray d�āke whole class

dear madam you take this glass.

This does not need translating, except for the framing couplets, of which
the preceding one say that the very best sherry that makes the rest merry is
given to the missus before anybody else, while the one following is almost
entirely in English except for the word ‘d�āke’ which means ‘calls’. Compare
the dissociation and alienation in the description of the scene to a letter writ-
ten in 1893, where the inherent feeling of repulsion toward the sound of
English culture in India is brought out into the open by the letter-writer:
When I went and sat in one corner of that drawing room, it all appeared like a
shadow to my eyes… Yet in front of me were memsahibs in evening dress and in my ear
was the murmur of English conversation and laughter—all in all such discordance!
How true was my eternal Bharatvarsha to me, and this dinner table, with its sugary
English smiles and polite English conversation, how empty, how false, how deeply
untrue! When the mems were talking in their low sweet cultivated voices then I was
thinking of you, oh wealth of my country. After all, you are of this Bharatvarsha.45

Rabindranath’s letter to Indiradebi is sensitive where Iswar Gupta is acer-

bic, but the impulse to portray the foreignness of the English dinner table
remains. Iswar Gupta is fascinated by the sounds the English make and
records their difference in objective detail, following up the lines ending ‘…
take this glass’ with a rendition of the sounds of the music and dance that
follows, all so completely foreign to the Indian ear:
sukher sakher khānā hole samādhān
tārā rārā rārā rārā sumadhur gān
[When the pleasurable and fine food was finished

Chapter 03.indd 106 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 poet of the present  107

Tara rara rara rara (went the) tuneful songs]

gud�u gud�u gum gum lāphe lāphe tāl

tārā rārā rārā rārā lālā lālā lāl
[Guru guru gum gum goes the leaping rhythm
Tara rara rara rara lala lalal lal]

This emphasis on sound had its roots in a conception of poetry that was
closely allied to the performative aspect of the lyrics he also wrote as a song-
writer for the kabiwalas of Bagbazar; fundamentally, his conception of poetry
was that of lines that were meant to be recited rather than read on the page,
as indeed they were, from the street-seller newspaper vendor in Calcutta
to the assembled friends of Nabin Sen’s father at Chittagong, as we have
seen. He himself described his idea of poetry in a poem called ‘Kabitā as that
which ‘expresses one’s feeling or opinion as it is spoken by the people, bring-
ing cheer to the public’ (manobhāb byākta hay, lokete kabitā kay, ānanda bitare
janagan�e).46 ‘Lokete kabitā kay’[people speak poetry], he says here, and in the
lines of the poem above we see exactly the function then of the onomatopoeia
of sound and image as it is recited rather than read in front of a public or
janagan� to bring them good cheer.
The poem goes on to describe the shops and hotels, cakes and ‘chops’ of
Anglo India and ends, eventually, with a scathing indictment of the anglicized
Indian woman, or as he calls her, the ‘black native lady’ (which appellation
is followed by the words ‘shame shame shame’), and the half-acculturated
Indian toady who is neither here nor there, determined to eat at a table, but
scared of getting cut by the fork and knife and therefore using both his hands
as paws to lift up heaps of rice. This is a poem often quoted for its sarcasm
at the expense of the half-anglicized upstarts who dominate Calcutta society,
for it is at the fountainhead of an honourable literary tradition that contin-
ued right into the Bengali high modern through Bankim and Tagore to D.L.
Roy and Sukumar Ray. The physicality of the sound images it so uniquely
contains, however, has never been held up to scrutiny, nor has the effect of
these onomatopoeic sounds upon the page. What they bring to life with
some vitality is the materiality of cultural difference, the obdurate strength
of certain sounds to convey a tonality, mood or atmosphere as nothing else
may do. In their sheer presence of being, they are a live playback record of
the changing shape of the everyday on New Year’s Day, 1852, bringing to
the contemporary reader a sense of lived experience as no other imagery may
do. This is history in the process of being made, history happening without
notice all around the colonial city, history as noise.

Chapter 03.indd 107 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 108  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

In Iswar Gupta’s poems, then, literature approaches historicality along

a path of everydayness, an everydayness that is necessarily informed by a
sense of the past. Heidegger’s notion that—‘Everydayness is a way to be—
to which, of course, that which is publicly manifest belongs’—if applied to
Iswar Gupta’s poems on the topical, the everyday, and the historical, reveal
that all of these poems manifestly belong to the realm of the public.47 There
is, here, no interiority in the sense of the endlessly interiorized self of bour-
geois subjectivity; rather, time and literature work together in the poems to
recuperate the living history of the banal. The focus, in these poems on the
pineapple or the English New Year, is on the detail, detail which is configured
in terms of description (sound or image) and the everyday which is rooted
in the domestic sphere of local social life. This focus belongs, conversely, to a
politicized account of the traditional, the ordinary, and the domestic as sites
of knowledge which are outside of the normative expectations of subjectivity
and interiority on the one hand and the drama of nation and history on the
other. Iswar Gupta’s poems belong, thus, to a culture of irony that is located
in the local and the ordinary—not in the grand mission of a nationalist high
modern or in the sombre tones of a fraught modernity as they are perceived
in his inheritors from Michael and Bankim onward. He is not preoccupied
with the polar conflicts of the colonizer versus the colonized, or the state
versus the people, but with textures of life that circumvent those epic battles
to concentrate insouciantly in the cracks of the edifices that will proceed to
build Bengali modernity.
The historicist imperative is conspicuous in its absence in Iswar Gupta’s
poems, which are based on a total involvement with the overwhelming rush
of the present contained in a miscellany of items. In a sense, then, Iswar
Gupta’s oeuvre is like the gossip in Hutom’s Calcutta, which is consti-
tuted, as Ranajit Guha describes it, of an ‘immediacy of presence’ that, ‘as a
­phenomenon’, ‘lives only for the day, literally as an ephemoros or adyatana,
in a state of utter transience’.48 Like the gossip of Hutom’s city, the poems of
Iswar Gupta too ‘create a sense of shared time out of the sum of short-lived
sensations’, helping thereby ‘together with other factors, to form the world-
hood of a colonial public’. Further, as Guha notes, ‘this incessantly unsettled
contemporaneity’ contains ‘fragments of the past’ that ‘show up in it from
time to time as tradition, genealogy or plain nostalgia, but are burnt up at
once’. Guha is right to contrast this ‘perpetual restlessness’ of being in the city
with the Wordsworthian mode in ‘Westminster Bridge’, or the Dickensian in
Sketches of Boz, both of which subscribe to a historicizing tendency, ‘adding
depth to the ongoing historicisation of the great metropolitan city in English

Chapter 03.indd 108 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 poet of the present  109

literature’.49 Their particular schematic lies within the Western aesthetic and
epistemological traditions, where the masculine suspicion of the quotidian,
of the ordinary, of minute detail has been inherited in part from the organi-
cist aesthetics of G.W.F. Hegel, and the ‘contempt he flaunts for “the little
stories of everyday domestic existence” and “the multiform particularities of
everyday life”—in short, for all he lumps under the dismissive heading “the
prose of the world”’.50
Irony, the local and the ordinary inhabit Iswar Gupta’s poems, outside of
the grand narrative of a developmental history inaugurated in his wake in the
epic poetry of Madhusudan or the historical novels of Bankimchandra. The
subjectivity in these poems cannot, however, be denied critical awareness—
if the colonial everyday was ‘irreparably split in the middle, with one part
assimilated to official time and (the other) alienated from the civil society’,
and the question Guha asked is ‘How, then could everyday life and everyday
people be inscribed in the discourse of the colonial city?’, then the answer
must lie not only in parody, as he finds with Kaliprasanna’s Nakśā, but in a
divided self-reflexivity that was both despairing and hopeful in turn.51 Once
we acknowledge Iswar Gupta’s treatment of the ordinary and trivial detail of
life as a site of critical knowledge production, it might be possible to read in
the details an indication of a self-conscious worldview that refuses to take
part in the valorized and self-important anti-colonial modernity that was
beginning to take shape in Bengal, providing in its place an overlooked alter-
native of self inscription in the unacclaimed, the unnoticed, the comic—in
whatever was there.

Notes
  1 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life
and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon
Press, 2008), p. 12.
  2 Roland Barthes, ‘Is There Any Poetic Writing?’, in Writing Degree Zero, trans.
Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967; first pub.
1953), p. 50.
.
  3 Sivanath Sastri, Rāmtanu lāhid�ī o tatkālīn bangasamāj (1904; Calcutta: New
Age Publishers, 2003), p. 223. Sastri’s comment, that Iswar Gupta never had
an English education and was self-taught in Bengali might have been the
perceived truth, but it still remains that this ‘uneducated’ man had, in 1832,
translated a part of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason into Bengali and published it
.
in the Sambād Prabhākar, challenging the missionaries, chiefly Alexander
Duff, to reply to its charges. See Bhabatosh Datta (ed.), Īśvarcandra gupta

Chapter 03.indd 109 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 110  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

racita kabijībanī (1958; Calcutta: Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 1998),

p. 46.
  4 Sushil Kumar De, Foreword to Datta (ed.), kabijībanī, p. ii.
.
 5 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (ed.), Īśvar guptar kabitā san graha (1885;
Calcutta: Dey’s, 1995), p. 8.
  6 Bankimchandra Chatterjee, ‘Bengali Literature’ (1871) in Bankim racanābalī,
Vol. III (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1969), p. 106.
 7 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self-Ironical Tradition in
Bengali Literature’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 34, no. 2 (2000), p. 388.
  8 Ibid., p. 384.
  9 Ibid., p. 389.
.
10  Chattopadhyay (ed.), Īśvar guptar kabitā san graha, p. 111.
11 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Kabitva’ [1886] in Bankim racanābalī, (ed.)
Jogeshchandra Bagal, Vol. II (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1998), p. 758.
12 Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay, ‘Īśvarcandra gupta’, in idem. (ed.), Sāhitya
sādhak caritmālā, Vol. 1 (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, 1986), p. 6.
.
13 Sukumar Sen, Bānglā sāhityer itihās, Vol. 2 (Calcutta: Eastern Publishers, 1970),
pp. 122–3.
14 I am grateful to Sibaji Bandyopadhyay for pointing this out in his comments on
the paper.
.
15 Chattopadhyay (ed.), Īśvar guptar kabitā sangraha, p. 15.
16 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), p. 113.
17 Ibid., p.120.
18 Sastri, Rāmtanu lāhidī, p. 231.
.
19 Sambād Prabhākar, 11 April 1849. ‘Rūpak’ is a particular tāl or rhythmic pat-
tern on the tablā to the accompaniment of which a song may be sung. Many of
the poems of this time were prefaced with an indication of the tāl in which it
should be sung.
.
20 Chattopadhyay (ed.), Īśvar guptar kabitā sangraha, p. 15.
21 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 36.
22 See Rosinka Chaudhuri, ‘The Politics of Naming: Derozio in Two Formative
Moments of Literary and Political Discourse, Calcutta, 1825–31’, Modern
Asian Studies, vol. 44, no. 4 (2010), pp. 857–85.
.
23 Chattopadhyay (ed.), Īśvar guptar kabitā sangraha, pp. 17–18.
24 In Bengali, the word used is ‘bedbākyabat’, meaning as sacred as the word of
the Vedas. Nabinchandra Sen, ‘Āmār jīban’, in Nabincandra racanābalī, Vol. 1
(Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, 1959), pp. 91–92.
.
25 Chattopadhyay (ed.), Īśvar guptar kabitā sangraha. This was followed by
Kaliprasanna Vidyaratna (ed.), Īśvarcandra gupter granthābalī (Calcutta:
Basumati, 1900) and Manindra Krishna Gupta (ed.), Granthābalī, īśvarcandra
gupta pran�īta (Calcutta: Gurudas Chatterjee, 1901).
26 Eight slim editions of his poetry were published after Iswarchandra’s death by
his brother Ramchandra Gupta, the first three appearing in 1861, the fourth

Chapter 03.indd 110 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 poet of the present  111

in 1869, the fifth, sixth, and seventh in 1873 and the eighth in 1874. After
Bankim’s famous 1885 edition, two subsequent editions, one from the Basumati
Press in 1900 edited by Kaliprasanna Vidyaratna and the other by his grand
nephew, Manindrakrishna Gupta, in 1901, followed in quick succession. Both
these editions presented a more complete selection than had been available so
far to readers, in so far as they include poems left out by Bankim in 1885 for
immoral content. The Manindrakrishna edition and Basumati edition are essen-
tially similar with only a slight difference in section headings.
27 Significantly, the Basumati edition calls the section called ‘Love’ ‘Poems of
Pleasure’ [Rasātmabodhak kabitā].
28 See Rosinka Chaudhuri, Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent
Nationalism and the Orientalist Project (Calcutta: Seagull, 2002).
29 ‘Yuddha-Śānti’, in Vidyaratna (ed.), Īśvarcandra gupter granthābalī, p. 186.
‘brit.iśer jay jay balo sabe bhāi re/ eso sabe nece kñude bibhugun� gāi re’.
.
30 Quoted in Asitkumar Bandyopadhyay, Bānglā sāhityer itibr�tta, Vol. 7 (Calcutta:
Modern Book Agency, 2009), p. 133.
31 Kamalkumar Majumdar (ed.), Īśvar gupta: chad�ā o chabi (Calcutta: Seemantanarayan
Chattopadhyay, 1954/1361 BS).
32 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Laughter and Subjectivity’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 34,
no.  2 (2000), pp. 379–406 and Milinda Banerjee, A History of Laughter:
Iswar Gupta and Early Modern Bengal (Calcutta: Dasgupta and Company,
2009).
.
33 Chattopadhyay (ed.), Īśvar guptar kabitā san graha, p. 23.
34 Ibid., p. 13.
35 Aniruddha Lahiri, Afterword to Kamalkumar Majumdar (ed.), Īśvar gupta:
chad�ā o chabi (1954; Calcutta: Talpata, 2007), p. ‘gha’.
.
36 Chattopadhyay (ed.), Īśvar guptar kabitā san graha, p.24.
37 ‘Īśvarer karun�ā’, Chabi o chad�ā, p. 8.
38 ‘Chadmabeśī miśanari’, ibid., p. 15. The ‘Hñedo’ woods might well mean
the water tank and area called Hendua in north Calcutta where Duff set up
what became Scottish Church College and Bethune established the Bethune
Collegiate School.
39 Every line here contains a variety of puns (for instance, the word ‘tuli’ means
both paintbrush and to pick up or hold up) which would be too laborious to
translate word for word; the original Bengali is therefore given alongside.
40 Alok Ray, Īśvarcandra gupter śres�.tha kabitā (Calcutta: Bharavi, 2009), p. 11.
41 Ibid.
42 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, pp. 1, 5.
43 Ibid., p. 12.
44 Ibid., p. 12–13.
45 Rabindranath Tagore, letter to Indira Devi, Cuttack, 10 February 1893.
Chhinnapatrabali (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 2004), p. 122.
46 Ray, Īśvarcandra gupter śres�.tha kabitā,, p. 9.

Chapter 03.indd 111 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 112  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

47 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 422.
48 Ranajit Guha, ‘A Colonial City and Its Time(s)’, Indian Economic and Social
History Review, vol. 45, no. 3 (2008), pp. 341–2.
49 Ibid., pp. 340, 342.
50 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York:
Routledge, 1989), p. 7.
51 Guha, ‘A Colonial City’, p. 344.

Chapter 03.indd 112 9/27/2013 4:18:33 PM

 II
The Visual

Chapter 04.indd 113 9/27/2013 4:18:51 PM

Chapter 04.indd 114 9/27/2013 4:18:51 PM
 4
The Look of History
The Power of the Aesthetic

Christopher Pinney

Consider two very different moments which point to the common theme I
wish to develop. The first occurs near the end of the eighteenth century, when
the English poet and visionary William Blake—who was much influenced by
Indian aesthetics—wrote angrily in his personal copy of Sir Joshua Reynolds’
Discourses on Art ‘The Foundation of Empire is Art & Science. Remove them
or Degrade them, & Empire is No More. Empire follows Art & Not Vice
versa as Englishmen suppose.’1 The second moment occurs in February 2003
when the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica hanging in the ante room to
the UN Security Council Chamber was curtained off at the insistence of the
United States. This was because it was deemed inappropriate as the visual
backdrop for pronouncements on the virtue of the aerial bombardment of
civilian populations in Iraq. This reflected, it has been suggested, the state’s
fear ‘that every last detail of the derealized décor it had built for its citizens
had the potential, at a time of crisis, to turn utterly against it’.2
William Blake’s writing and the fate of Picasso’s image direct our attention
to the proposition I want to develop in this chapter, namely that aesthetics
matter: they have the power to constitute and to change history. History is
intimately related to the visual and to the performative. This is a proposition
that has general validity but I will focus here on four examples relating to
India. In this sense the ‘new cultural history of India’ proposed here is part of
a global re-imagination of the role of the visual and material as t­ ransformative
agents. No claim is made for the particularity of India, rather India is the
specific ground on which a much broader argument is explored.

Chapter 04.indd 115 9/27/2013 4:18:51 PM

 116  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Nevertheless, Indian historiography, we must acknowledge, has been at

the forefront of attempts to theorize the visual and performative dimensions
of cultural life. Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in
Colonial India (1983) might be considered a foundational text in this regard
for the attention it gave to the formerly neglected domain of non-­linguistic
signification, and specifically in the context of insurgency, non-verbal visual,
and acoustic communication.3 Insurgency manifests itself in figurally potent
but semantically opaque ways (for example, followers of Birsa Munda ‘danc-
ing, jumping and brandishing their swords’) which were clarified by parallel
linguistic registers (such as insurgent leaders’ aphorisms). Insurgent drums
could mobilize illiterate peasants, Kols were summoned by arrows passed
from village to village,4 foliage from mango trees served as ‘messenger boughs’,
Saul twigs with three leaves signified the days remaining before communal
action, and most famously chapattis circulated as ‘symptom[s] of collective

Figure 4.1  The materiality of script. ‘The Elements of the Devanagari

Character’, lithographed plate from John Shakespear, A Grammar of the
Hindustani Language (London: Cox and Bayliss, 1826). The distinction
between the linguistic and non-linguistic is often invoked and seems
straightforward. However, all language, spoken and written, must of
necessity be materially incarnated.

Chapter 04.indd 116 9/27/2013 4:18:52 PM

 the look of history  117

anxiety and uneasiness in an agrarian society poised on the brink of violent

upheaval’.5
If Elementary Aspects can be seen to have inaugurated what by now almost
looks like a new paradigm, Miles Ogborn’s recent Indian Ink: Script and Print
in the Making of the East Indian Company (2007) demonstrates that the lin-
guistic itself is also, always, ineluctably material. Focusing on material forms of
writing which oscillated between London, Fort St. George and Bengal within
a ‘single interpretative frame’.6 Ogborn argues that ‘writing was not simply a
commentary upon what happened, it was very much part of the action’.7
But Ogborn perhaps should be viewed as an enormously detailed footnote
to Homi Bhabha’s inspired commentary on the materiality of iteration in the
transmission of the ‘English book’ in ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’. Diagnosing
colonial power’s own claims as rhetorical anxiety, Bhabha focuses, almost ‘eth-
nographically’ on a precise moment of encounter, transaction and translation.
It is here that Bhabha’s subtitle—Questions of ambivalence and authority under
a tree outside Delhi, May 1817—assumes such importance for he intends us
to understand that all relations are subject to empirical articulation, specific
material zones in which ideology is forced to manifest its own instability.
It is in the enunciation of power—its iteration—that we see slippage as the
condition of manifestation: ‘the presence of the book’ triggers a ‘process of
displacement’ in which it is ‘repeated, translated, misread…’8
Bhabha’s text describes the perplexity of a native catechist who had
encountered a small crowd of Indians under the eponymous tree. The cat-
echist is initially delighted by what appears to be a group of Bible-clutching
Christians, Indians who have assimilated themselves in a utopian conversion
to ‘the religion of the European sahibs’. But all is not as it seems. The Indians’
books cannot be the same as the Europeans’ because Europeans eat flesh, and
besides the Indians were given it directly by God. Here ‘through an act of
repetition … the colonial text emerges uncertainly’.9 The catechist attempts
to merge this ‘re-iterated’ book in the possession of the group of Indians with
the ür-text of the Bible as the codification of the ‘religion of the European
sahibs’ but fails. Iteration here signals a world of material displacements.
This incident exemplifies a more general proposition for Bhabha, that
‘colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as origi-
nal and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference’.10 It
also conjures a tangible and material space of transaction, encounter, and
­iteration. It is material both in terms of its specificity and in the appearance of
the ‘English book’ not as a disembodied text or ideology, but as incarnations
that have complex histories, surfaces, and appearances: ‘it is its appearance that

Chapter 04.indd 117 9/27/2013 4:18:52 PM

 118  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

regulates the ambivalence between origin and displacement, discipline and

desire, mimesis and repetition’.11
However, Guha’s and Bhabha’s enormous contributions notwithstanding,
a key related question of causality still awaits proper investigation. Are mate-
rial and visual forms ‘reflections’ of what has already been achieved socially,
or should they be understood as zones of experimentation in which future
socialities are determined? Does Art follow Empire, or vice versa? Blake,
scribbling in mad rage in his copy of Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses alerts us
to the possibility that art (or more properly, the visual and material) may
constitute a primary form of ‘knowledge’.12 For Blake, Reynolds’ neo-classical
aestheticism sustained the evil of empire and in formulating his own Art
opposed to Empire, Blake drew heavily on Indian sources—Charles Wilkins’
1785 translation of the Bhagavad-gita affected him greatly and an Indian
inspiration seems to be work in a number of his images: Almeida and Gilpin
have provocatively suggested that Blake’s celebrated Nebuchadnezzar ‘resem-
bles not so much King Lear as a sadhu or Hindu ascetic…’13 and that his
Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth from c. 1805–1809, derives much of
its structure and iconographic detail from the Daniell’s depictions of monu-
mental carvings of Buddha and Siva. Blake’s Jerusalem from c. 1804–20 is
clearly iconographically indebted to Edward Moor’s Hindu Pantheon (which
was published by his friend Joseph Johnson)14 and more generally it seems
plausible that Blake’s repeated creation of complex ‘friezes’—surfaces cov-
ered with elaborate mythological forms—owes much to his engagement with
depictions of Indian cave-temples.
One of my key concerns is the need to engage material and visual practices
not as ‘superstructure’ (as an after effect of what has already been achieved
socially or politically) but as a formative zone of debate. It might be claimed
that a parallel idea lies at the heart of Edward Said’s work, for the phantas-
matic entities of the Orient and the Occident are essentially works of the
imagination. It is clearly fundamental to Bernard Cohn’s work which prefig-
ures so much of what Said later argued in a more general and accessible frame:
the Census and the Durbar, for instance, illuminated how spatial structures
of hierarchy and precedence constituted key nodes of engagement through
which both Indians and Britons re-defined themselves. Nicolas Dirks—a
student of Cohn’s—subsequently explicitly theorized this, in his study of
Puddokatai, through Clifford Geertz’s suggestion that (within what he called
the ‘theatre state’), power might serve pomp.15 This inverted the conventional
assumption that pomp would serve power, that is, that cultural practice and
representation should be seen only as a mere appendage, a supplement to a
pre-existing and already consolidated structure of power.

Chapter 04.indd 118 9/27/2013 4:18:52 PM

 the look of history  119

Figure 4.2  Frontispiece to Edward Moor’s The Hindu Pantheon

published by William Blake’s friend Joseph Johnson.

Until relatively recently critical inquiry has imagined subjects with minds
which appeared not to engage with paintings, prints, theatrical performances,
photography or film. If one assumes that this domain of ‘representation’ was
simply a secondary elaboration of what had already been determined in a
more important sphere of ‘politics’, ‘society’ or ‘culture’, the omission would
be minor, and of little consequence. However, if one views ‘material history’
as more than simply a ‘supplement’ to—or a set of illustrative embodiments
of—a history with which we are already familiar, we face not an omission
so much as the deletion of an alternative mode of historiography. We can
approach this question through the following formulation: does the visual
serve simply as an illustration of what we already know, or can a history be
written through the visual and material? Can we escape from the process
Carlo Ginzburg describes in which ‘the historian reads into images what he
has already learned by other means’?16
In what follows I explore four brief examples of a possible visual his-
tory, exploring (1) pigments as the spectral constituent of representation;
(2) the sartorial embodiments through which Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, and
Ambedkar’s political projects were and continue to be mobilized; (3) the

Chapter 04.indd 119 9/27/2013 4:18:53 PM

 120  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

a­esthetic ­disruption evident during the 2004 India Shining election cam-
paign, and finally; (4) the role of visual presence in advancing the political
claims of Dalit mediums in central India in the early twenty-first century.
These are all fragments from a larger attempt to use the protocols of a visual
history in understanding of modern India’s diverse modernities, an attempt
as Arjun Appadurai might put it to grasp the political potentiality of the
imagination.17

‘Spitting Blue’: Image and Pigment

If we were to take seriously the Latourian critique of representation as reflec-
tion, and to conceptualise images as actants, we might fruitfully start with
Natasha Eaton’s discussion of the image flows which were a central element
of the complex politics and aesthetics of late eighteenth century Indian
courts. She describes the East India Company’s attempt to replace Mughal
gifts of rulers’ robes (khil’at) and tribute money (nazar) with ‘symbolically
potent portraits’.18 Both khil’at and painted portraits ‘aimed to transmit the
‘presence’ of the donor to the recipient’19 but they were aspects of aesthetic
regimes which misunderstood and mis-recognized each other.
But we might also consider the Look of History by approaching India as
a source of the very possibility of representation through its manufacture of
pigments. The dyes used to produce chintz, and the role of Indian Yellow
in the imperial palette, and the nature of indigo are productive examples.
Chintz (a corruption from chint, the Hindi-Urdu word for a spotted cloth)
had first entered Britain in 1631 when permission to import it was granted
to the East India Company. So intense was European enthusiasm for chintz
(especially for the brilliance and fastness of its colours, a spectral vibrancy
facilitated by indigo and madder red) that various governments were threat-
ened by the economic crises that the trade precipitated. In 1686 the French
banned its importation of all decorated stuffs from the East Indies, Persia,
and China to Britain. However, a loophole which permitted importation for
re-export meant that the ban was ineffective.
There already exists an extensive literature on chintz. Most of it is not,
however, concerned with it as embodied practice, or figure—as part of an eve-
ryday corporeal aesthetics (what elsewhere I’ve neologized as ‘­corpothetics’).
Rather, most accounts approach these genres in their purely ‘readerly’ aspect
(as something which like Lyotard’s discourse ‘can be read, identified, and
given meaning within a closed linguistic system’.20 However, two recent
accounts have served to place colour in a realm of figural affect and place the
‘skins’ of these spectralities and objects in the flesh of the world.

Chapter 04.indd 120 9/27/2013 4:18:53 PM

 the look of history  121

Jordana Bailkan argues, in a brilliantly original account of Indian yellow

that ‘imperial experiences of race and governance could be deeply and liter-
ally material’.21 Indian Yellow, a.k.a purree was a pigment made from the
urine of cows fed exclusively on mango leaves and when mixed with ver-
milion was widely accepted as the ideal material for the rendering of Indian
bodies. English ochre (dug near Oxford) was deemed to lack the necessary
radiance of purree. In 1883, a report by Trailokya Nath Mukharji, commis-
sioned by Joseph Dalton Hooker described the nature of purree production
and noted that most of the cattle used in its production die within two
years because of the highly restricted nature of their diet. Twenty-fives years
later, purree production ended, Bailkin observes, a consequence of the Cow
Protection Movement and British anxieties. In my own earlier work I have
tried to document the central role that printed images played in the 1890s
and later Cow Protection Movements. Bailkin’s research allows us to weave a
more profoundly material and ­spectral dimension in and out of this history.
Michael Taussig writes a parallel history through colour, in his case indigo.22
Viewing the colonial world as ‘an emporium of colour’,23 Tausig traces the
labour and exploitation that made the spectral fastness of chintz possible.

Figure 4.3  ‘Cutting Indigo into Cakes and Stamping’. Photogravure

plate from Indigo (Boston: Howe, Balch and Co, 1891). Original
photograph by Oscar Mallite.

Chapter 04.indd 121 9/27/2013 4:18:53 PM

 122  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Drawing on Tavernier, Taussig notes how workers would spit blue long
after their labours and that an egg ‘placed near a person working an indigo
vat would, at the end of the day, be found to be altogether blue inside’. ‘What
medley of history and horror, science and poetry, is hereby made manifest?’
Taussig asks and suggests that to write a history of indigo the historian needs
to ‘spit blue’ in the occult spirit of this astonishing substance. The history of
early Indian nationalism could be easily re-written as the history of indigo
(from Tirhut to Champaran): Taussig provides a framework for a material
understanding of indigo’s peculiar agency.

Dhoti, Suit, and Trilby

One aspect of modern Indian politics has been materially and visually incar-
nated in M.K. Gandhi’s highly efficacious political ‘somatics’ and political
theorization. A complex network connects John Ruskin, William Morris,
John Lockwood Kipling, and the aesthetician Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
to Gandhi. Lockwood Kipling (inspired in part by George Birdwood) and
Coomaraswamy both articulated within the sphere of art pedagogy and aes-
thetic theory, positions that prefigured Gandhi’s own essentialization of the
village, of artisanal—as opposed to industrial—production, and of a political
ethic rooted in a civilizational ‘craft’. But this flow of ideas—triangulating
India, Britain, and Gandhi in South Africa—would form the basis of a much
more significant aesthetic ‘intervention’ in the form of Gandhi’s somaticiza-
tion of a political theology. His increasingly naked body, as I hardly need to
detail here, became an aesthetic surface incarnating an ethics of anti-colonial
practice, and this body incarnated in turn next to the spinning wheel made
visible a political performativity that lay at the heart of his endeavour.
A similar aesthetic excess can be seen in a genre of mass-produced images—
motors of ‘national feeling’—whose popularity mirrored Gandhi’s ascendancy
in the 1920s and 1930s. Produced by Brahman artists from the Pushtimarg
pilgrimage centre of Nathdvara in Rajasthan, these images foregrounded
deities in fecund landscapes. Pictorially animating the lush topography of
Krishna’s Braj, these images depicted landscape as an emanation of the gods.
Waterfalls cascaded, parrots and peacocks festooned every tree, and a melan-
cholic moon shone an unearthly light.24 Reproduced in their millions these
ubiquitous images manifested a utopian ‘elsewhere’—making itself present
in a flash of recognition—which paralleled Gandhi’s pastoral utopia. Much
more than mere illustrations of a yearning that had already been resolved
in ‘society’ these images constituted their own immensely powerful affective
force-field. Empire, and anti-Empire, did indeed follow art.

Chapter 04.indd 122 9/27/2013 4:18:53 PM

 the look of history  123

In a recent series of artworks, the Mumbai-based artist Atul Dodiya, has

increasingly engaged the omniscience of a recursive archive of popular imagery.
From mixing Joseph Beuys with Caspar David Friedrich and popular Indian
images of the Ideal Boy, he has increasingly foregrounded the continually
reinscribed images which—to borrow a phrase from Kajri Jain—dominate
India’s public spaces with their ‘banal luminosity’. The painted roll-up metal
shutters of a merchant’s shop form an installational infrastructure in which
Dodiya juxtaposes hopeful Nehruvian toddlers—exemplifications of an opti-
mistic new generation in the making with a host of media and mediated
figures: film stars present and past (Hrithik Roshan, Ashok Kumar) and Dr
Ambedkar shown in his habitual (blue) suit while Gandhi chats incongru-
ously on the telephone.
Ambedkar’s blue suit forms the second part of a trimurti (of which Bhagat
Singh’s trilby is the third) of efficacious performatives which continue to
dominate India’s political imaginary. Ambedkar’s suit gestures to a very dif-
ferent cosmopolitanism and very different politics:25 Gail Omvedt, an astute
commentator on Ambedkar’s significance writes that ‘The meaning of the
western suit in all the statues and pictures of Ambedkar is simply this identifi-
cation with the heritage of the world.’ Gandhi’s renunciatory stance in which
liberation was a noblesse oblige imported from Ruskin and Thoreau into
rural India, was frequently confounded by Ambedkar’s demands for legally
guaranteed rights which drew upon a civic humanism learned, in part while
researching PhDs with John Dewey at Columbia University in New York and
subsequently the economist Vera Anstey at the London School of Economics.
The invisibilization of certain centrally important political projects is—
as Jyotindra Jain has recently sagely observed—one of the frames through
which we need to position contemporary contests over Ambedkar staues
and Ambedkar parks which Dalit communities and state governments are
actively promoting in their vision of the theatre state. Small suited figures
of Ambedkar are commonly to be seen in Dalit slums, often associated with
legal claims to residence on squatted land. In Lucknow, Mayawati has spear-
headed the creation of a vast twenty-seven-acre Ambedkar Udyan which
fuses early Buddhist architectural styles with the landscape ambition of
Mughal cities. Her state government was locked in a legal dispute about the
construction of a similar park costing fifty-five crore rupees in Noida. Its
opponents decry the destruction of forest land and the misuse of funds: for
its proponents the monumentalization of Ambedkar, clad in his blue inter-
pellatory armature, is a key element, not of the representation of a historical
past, but in the creation of a political future appealing to the ‘heritage of
the world’.

Chapter 04.indd 123 9/27/2013 4:18:53 PM

 124  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 4.4  Offset chromolithograph depicting Ambedkar

as a ‘citizen of the world’.

Sometimes the visual appears to us with a message that we have not already
learned. Consider for instance the striking pictorial celebration of violent
revolutionary opposition to British rule, which supplies the third element of
this trimurti of performatives: a trilby. Focusing especially on Bhagat Singh
who was executed in 1931, these images still figure visibly in India’s ­popular
imagery, both chromolithographic and filmic,26 and constitute a ‘visual
archive’ which narrates a history quite unlike that to be found deposited in
the textual archive. Bhagat makes only a fleeting appearance in Nehru’s auto-
biography, and most textbooks of Indian history have room for little more
than a footnote. Yet they have endured in the visual imaginary of India since

Chapter 04.indd 124 9/27/2013 4:18:53 PM

 the look of history  125

Figure 4.5  Offset chromolithograph depicting Bhagat Singh wearing

a trilby, symbolizing his ability to ‘pass’ between different identities.

the 1930s, embodying an enduring pre-occupation with the nature of action,

identity, and freedom that is far more ‘visible’ in the everyday than Gandhi’s
quite different resolutions of this triad.
Why is it that a Marxist revolutionary who is almost invisible in textual
histories of modern India should be so hyper-visible in popular imagery?
Bhagat Singh’s popularity is due, in part, I would suggest, to a celebrated
instance of vernacular modernism, an act of audacious mimicry. Since the
first popular images of him appeared in 1931, Bhagat Singh has nearly always
been depicted wearing a trilby. Though born into a Jat Sikh family and
returning to the turban just prior to his execution under the influence of Bhai

Chapter 04.indd 125 9/27/2013 4:18:54 PM

 126  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Sahib Randhir Singh his popular visual incarnation insists on his mimicry
of the English sahib. The trilby has a historical explanation: pursued by the
police, Bhagat Singh escaped from Lahore disguised as a wealthy mimic man.
In Rajkumar Santoshi’s film The Legend of Bhagat Singh, Bhagat (played by
Ajay Devgan) arrives at Lahore Station and publicly abuses Rajguru (playing
the role of his servant). Bhagat expresses his regrets about having to return to
India from London and he is then ushered through the station by a police-
man who urges ‘gentleman ko rasta do’ (make way for the gentleman). Popular
booklets produced to promote the film also emphasize this incident directing
our attention to this particular look of history, a look which asserts freedom
and fluidity.
If Gandhi’s essentializing of locality (signified by the dhoti) finds its sarto-
rial and ethical opponent in Ambedkar’s networked universalism (embodied
in his suit), it is the transformative fluidity embodied in Bhagat Singh which
seemed to offer a third alternative. This striking practice of anti-colonial
modernism is inseparable from violence and the volatility and fluidity of a
visual identity.

The Political Economy of Gloss

Volatility—at the level of the image—was also apparent during the 2004
election campaign. Prior to the election the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
had been forecasting 300-plus seats in the 545 Lok Sabha a prognosis which
commanded near universal consensus. But something happened during the
campaign. In the event the BJP seats fell from 182 to 136, and the National
Democratic Alliance (NDA) tally fell dramatically from 320 to 189. Congress
took 27 per cent of the vote and the BJP 22 per cent. The left gained their
highest ever representation.
Politics in India during 2004, I would suggest, dramatized in a particu-
larly compelling manner the continuing relevance of Guy Debord’s theory
of spectacularization. What is stake here is not iconography and content but
the aesthetics—the ‘look’—of the image. As Greil Marcus phrases it ‘society
organized as appearance can be disrupted on the field of appearance’.27 India
under the NDA (the BJP-led coalition) involved a quality of luminescence
under the sign of ‘shininess’ and ‘radiance’.
The campaign kicked off early (mid-2003) but surreptitiously, with the
use of public funds to finance ostensibly non-political glossy, colourful
images: a middle class woman plays cricket while her happy son skips on ver-
dant grass, school children eagerly wait with their hands in the air desperate

Chapter 04.indd 126 9/27/2013 4:18:54 PM

 the look of history  127

to unburden themselves of all the useful information they have acquired; an

elderly Muslim man holds a bunch of lotus buds in an ecumenical image of
communal harmony alongside the caption:
Tourism is booming.
Business is thriving
Flowers are blooming
You’ve never had
A better time to shine brighter

These pictures, Shiv Visvanathan observed, attempted to sidestep the elec-

toral liabilities of caste, religion and tradition in favour of a ‘supermarket of
dreams and values…in virtual reality’.28 And these dreams involved the strug-
gle between surface and interiority; reflectivity and textures which absorb;
sheen and stickiness. India Shining proved to be a highly vulnerable aesthetic
since, as the late Sunil Dutt, standing in Mumbai North-West constituency
proclaimed, ‘We are polishing the exterior, but the interior is starving’.29
Perhaps Giles Deleuze can also help us understand this aesthetic quality.
Writing about G.B. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, he notes that ‘There is the lamp,
the bread knife, Jack the Ripper… But there is also the brightness of the light
on the knife, the blade of the knife under the light, Jack’s terror and resigna-
tion, Lulu’s compassionate look’. Deleuze’s point is that we should attend not
simply to content, but also to texture, grain, presence—what J.L. Austin in
his account of performatives terms ‘perlocutionary’.30
The extreme vulnerability of the campaign was dramatized in mid-April
when twenty-one women died in a stampede at a BJP rally in Lucknow, the
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s constituency. Initially this seemed like
a small tragedy of the kind that appears every few weeks in the India press.
But the symbolic potency of the event quickly became apparent.
The deaths occurred when organizers of a birthday celebration for Vajpayee’s
election agent Lalji Tandon started to throw saris into a crowd of impover-
ished women bussed in from nearby slums and pandemonium broke out. On
15 April, three days after the tragedy, The Times of India ran a photograph of
the mass cremations of the twenty-one under the Blakean headline ‘Shining,
shining…burning bright’ recalling Debord’s claim that ‘society organized as
appearance can be disrupted on the field of appearance’.31 On the following
day, when the death toll had risen further the Indore Free Press ran a lead story
under the headline ‘“Shining India” has dark patches: Vajpayee’. Vajpayee
was quoted as conceding that ‘this incident has come as a shock’ and that
‘India has many aspects, some that shine and others that are still in the dark’.

Chapter 04.indd 127 9/27/2013 4:18:54 PM

 Figure 4.6  India Shining. Image produced under the aegis of the NDA
Government immediately prior to the 2004 election.

Figure 4.7  ‘Shining, Shining, Burning Bright’: the Blakean Times of India
headline following the Lucknow tragedy. 15th April 2004.

Chapter 04.indd 128 9/27/2013 4:18:54 PM

 the look of history  129

The Indian National Congress (INC) response to the India Shining cam-
paign that eventually emerged was a form of politique noire which pointed
to these dark patches—a poster and advertising campaign that invoked an
aesthetics of gritty black and white realism whose aesthetics were directly
opposed to the colourful glossiness of the BJP campaign. It targeted the rural
and urban poor and unemployed youth. ‘Special development for farmers was
promised’ ran one slogan above a poster image of a suffering peasant family
sitting on a string charpai. Beneath this ran the slogan repeated through-
out all Congress images Aam aadmi ko kya mila? (what has the common
man gained?). Another black and white poster showed disconsolate youth
queuing outside an Employment Exchange beneath the slogan ‘Five Crore
[50 ­million] Jobs Were Promised’ (5 karor rozgar dene ka dava) and above
aam aadmi ko kya mila.
India Shining, I suggest, is not simply a slogan that backfired but a politi-
cal aesthetics, a historical ‘look’ which was volatile and vulnerable. Organized

Figure 4.8  Politique Noire: the Congress critique of India Shining,

couched in a radically different aesthetic.

Chapter 04.indd 129 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 130  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

as appearance, the politics of India Shining was vulnerable at the level of

appearance. I mentioned at the beginning the US insistence that the tap-
estry copy of Picasso’s Guernica be removed from the UN Security Council
Chamber in the lead up to the war in Iraq. It was the explicit iconographic
nature of Guernica that allowed the US state to recognize in advance the
threat that it posed and hence to order its concealment. States have a well-
developed sensitivity to the destabilizing potentiality of iconography. But as
the 2004 Indian elections demonstrate their ability to immunize themselves
against catastrophic implosions at the level of aesthetic modality remains
extremely limited.

‘…Always Positively in a Certain Shape’

I concluded a recent book concerned with the impact of photography in
India, with a provocation. Having noted the radical individuation which
photographic portraiture precipitates, together with the camera’s radical egal-
itarianism, I suggested that ‘standing in front of the camera, or the polling
booth and voting machine, India’s citizens are able to ask the same funda-
mental question: “who do I want to be?” There was, I proposed, a resonance
between the self-making proffered by the camera and the epistemology of
(what for want of a better term we might call) ‘democracy’.
But this question of the image and politics, or more precisely the image as
politics might be approached through a more falsifiable formulation in rela-
tion to the dynamics of contemporary Malwa Chamar shamanism on which
I am currently working. I should make clear at this point that I only came
to be fully aware of the extent of Dalit shamanistic practices in 2004 when I
first used a video camera for field research. This was in a village in which I’ve
worked intermittently since 1982 and the point I wish to emphasize is that
for twenty-two years—in the absence of a video camera—I remained largely
ignorant of this important dimension of local politico-cosmological practice.
As has been observed in many other regional contexts ‘new media’ facilitated
the claims of ‘trance media’. In this instance my video camera was recognized
as a tool by Dalit shamans who insisted that I start filming them.
Part of the context which is required to grasp these shamans’ predicament
and the role that the camera can play in resolving it, includes the following:
Dalit mediums make essentially political claims that it is Dalits who are cus-
todians of the Gods; in making this claim they invoke a radical empiricism;
and, finally, they face opposition from higher castes who suggest that the
gods that appear in Dalit bodies are deceptive impersonations.

Chapter 04.indd 130 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 the look of history  131

Within Dalit, and especially Chamar32 visual-ethics images provide com-

plex texts for the mediation of the nature of the surface and a politics of
equality and citizenship. Some images of Ravidas, for instance, depict him
cutting his chest open to reveal a sacred thread, proof of his Brahman status
in an earlier life, an event associated with a conservative text, the Bhaktamala.
This is a key image in articulating the somatic as a fulcrum between differ-
ent ethical-political worlds. In the Bhaktamala version the outside signifies
Ravidas’ impossible putatively Chamar powers. The inside reveals his ‘true’

Figure 4.9  Ganga Mata emerging to receive Ravidas’ betel-nut offering at

Varanasi. Detail from offset chromolithograph.

Chapter 04.indd 131 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 132  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

high caste identity. The image plays out this materialization of a previ-
ously hidden truth. The most popular images of Ravidas among Chamars,
however, depict him as a cobbler hard at work and visually narrate an anti-
Bhaktamala politics. A key episode in these images concerns a Brahman who,
while in Banaras to make offerings for a Rajput friend and, needing shoes,
visited Ravidas who said he’d make the Brahman a pair of shoes if in return
he would offer a betel-nut to the Ganges. The Brahman made his offering
for the Rajput and almost forgot to offer Ravidas’s betel-nut. When he did
so and tossed it casually into the river, Ganga Mata appeared to personally
receive the offering.
For Chamars, the moral of the story is that the corrupted hierarchy of
the everyday world has an extra-mundane shadow in which the superiority
of Chamars is recognized. The Brahman may have mistakenly thought that
his own status and that of his Rajput friend was higher, but Ganga Mata
was under no such illusion. Dalit society as a locus in which Gods choose to
manifest themselves is a powerful theme in Dalit ideology.
We can see a parallel mutual becoming in the intense and visceral divine
manifestation by Goddesses. A (largely calendrically determined) nexus of
processions conjoin and disjoin villagers in various ways and this is one
stage on which the intense enfleshed aesthetics of Chamar shamanism are
mobilized in claims that it is they who make the presence of the Gods more
manifest and that consequently they who have a more legitimate claim to
speak for Hindu practice in this local setting. It is Dalit ‘counter-priests’ who
serve as the main conduits for the extramundane. Their power stems from
performance and affect, the outward signs of manifestation, which serves as
an index of divine presence. A parallel space for these claims is the dwell-
ings of individual ghorlas, where several Chamars, make their living from
­possession.
These dramatic performative interventions are central to the becoming
of Dalit political subjectivity. The ghorla thrashes—teeth chattering and
body swaying, holding a bowl of burning coals and a sword—and enfleshes
the printed chromolithographic images in front of which this performance
occurs. The more articulate shamans point to the image of the goddess that
they have made, and the political lesson of this abundance of manifestation.
‘In every direction, as you know’ Ambaram points out ‘Kalkaji comes, there’s
Mangubhai; Shitala comes—there’s Dhanna. They are in our samaj. And here
[gesturing to his own house] Chamunda comes. That’s also in our samaj’.33
Here Ambaram conjures the aesthetics of manifestation and superabundance
and invokes an empiricist method of adjudicating these contesting claims.

Chapter 04.indd 132 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 the look of history  133

Ambaram’s point here is that higher castes may claim to be conduits to the
divine, but they manifest this insufficiently. Dalit shamans’ performance of
the image of the goddess sustains a political claim to superiority: higher castes
have political dominance but are unable to visually manifest their proximity
to the gods.
The outside and inside—and the powers and truths they deliver—are
hotly contested. This contestation also applies to evaluations of the very
manifestation of Chamar possession to which Ambaram’s revolutionary
empiricism draws attention. Higher castes for instance strongly disparage
Chamar patterns of hereditary mediumship, imputing that this is a form
of traditional castework and refer to ghorlas as the halis of specific deities.
A hali is a ploughman, a bonded labourer tied to a higher status employing

Figure 4.10  Mangilal a village ghorla thrashing with the presence of Kali.

Chapter 04.indd 133 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 134  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

­ ousehold on whom the hali is economically dependent. The imputation

h
here is that ghorlas have entered self-interested economic relationships with
those above them, unlike higher caste mediums (more commonly female)
who are liable to thrash unpredictably. Just as one can order a hali to plough
a field for you, so ghorlas—if they are remunerated—will thrash to order.
Higher castes extend their scepticism to very public displays of possession
during the twice yearly processions during the Nine Nights of the Goddess
during the months of Kuar and Chait. Being fanned by the Dalit incarnated
goddesses is widely understood to provide preventative protection for all
castes but one also hears disparaging comments such as ‘us mem mataji kuut
rehte hai’  —in this there is Mataji mimicry. This cynicism dramatizes the
contest over authenticity and abundance that lies at the heart of local politics.
The video camera which was, recall, the conduit which first led me to
encounter Ambaram and others in their shamanistic incarnations, takes us
back to the question of the event—to what film scholars refer to as the pro-
filmic. There is a precise photographic dimension to this but also, perhaps,
a general visual dimension. Consider what Rudolf Wittkower described as
the visual’s tendency to solidify presences and claims which in their linguis-
tic form are always more uncertain. He notes a tactic in illustrated texts in
which the appearance of an illustration can ‘favour belief in what is left open
to doubt in the text’.34 Bernadette Bucher in her study of early European rep-
resentations of the Americas raises intriguing questions about the specificity
of visual representation, suggesting that, in the visual ‘negation as a means of
expression is lost’. Bucher proposes that in the visual arts negation is impossi-
ble: ‘it is impossible to portray a thing by what it is not: it is present or absent,
and if it appears, it is always positively, in a certain shape’.35 Bucher helps us
understand the manner in which visual manifestation produces a heightened
assertion and presence. This in turn points to the positivity of presence—the
art of the concrete—mobilized by visual mimesis.
Photography and film ratchet-up this positivity for every photograph is
indisputably a document of an event. In photography, as Roland Barthes
observed, ‘I can never deny that the thing has been there’. The event—what
Barthes also refers to as photography’s ‘sovereign Contingency’—is marked
by the particularity and specificity of what Barthes called the ‘body’ (corps)
whose singularity he contrasted with the generality of the ‘corpus’.36 The
camera records what is placed in front of it and on its own is incapable of
making distinctions about the relationship of its visual trace to psychic, social
or historical normativity. It never knows and can never judge whether what it
records is ‘typical’, ‘normal’ or ‘true’.

Chapter 04.indd 134 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 the look of history  135

A photograph made in the mid 1850s by Ahmad Ali Khan reveals with
a peculiar clarity how the photograph was unable to differentiate: it merely
recorded whatever was placed in front of the camera. An image of the mer-
chant L.E. Ruutz-Rees (subsequently celebrated for his Personal Narrative of
the Siege of Lucknow, 1858) is captioned ‘Mr. Rees in a native Costume’, but
what the photograph actually does, non-judgmentally, is record a body in
clothes: it has nothing to say about the normativity or identity of that body
or its adornment. Bucher’s point was that language is capable of discrimi-
nating, of asserting difference, in a way that the visual cannot. The image
of Ruutz Rees bears this out and reveals the way in which the syntagmatic
quality of language can assert identity and difference (‘Mr Rees’ versus ‘native
costume’) in ways that the paradigmatic photographic image—fated simply
to record whatever is placed in front of it—cannot.
It is the camera’s ‘sovereign contingency’ that appeals to Dalit shamans:
they can make a claim to an ineluctable presence and refute higher-caste

Figure 4.11  Ahmad Ali Khan’s image of L.E. Ruutz Rees.

© The British Library Board.

Chapter 04.indd 135 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 136  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

critiques. They understand very well the difference between photography’s

‘micro-event’ and that ‘something else’ (the ‘corpus’) which it can never
become except through a category error or other parallel confusion.
For Dalit shamans, the prophetic allure of my camera lies in its ability
to capture (indeed its inability to avoid capturing) what Barthes termed the
‘necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens’,37 the thing that
has been there that can never be denied, the thing which in this local political
context so may people do attempt to deny. They understand that the profimic
is wholly different from what Barthes called the ‘optionally real thing to which
an image or sign refers’.38 This is the distinction between the ‘body’ and a
‘corpus’. Dalit shamans clearly share this concern with the ‘body’, with what
we might think of as the autonomy of everything that is placed in front of the
camera. Freed from the demands of being ‘realistic’ in the sense of conform-
ing aesthetically, politically or in some other normative manner to a wider
world, their thrashing bodies remain, necessarily, real.
The examples I have discussed in this chapter are all drawn from India but
it is not intended that they might in anyway contribute to the possibility that
there might be a mode of historiography which is peculiarly suited to India.
India is here not an end point, but a ground, a starting point for the grasp-
ing of the precise ways in which (all) Empires follow art. All four case studies
provide examples of visual and material practices which are something other
than ‘illustrations’ of what we have already learned by other means (as in the
Ginzburgian formulation), and which cannot be adequately characterized as
‘reflections’ of an already socially achieved knowledge (as in the Latourian
critique). Visuality and materiality, media and technics, emerge instead as
dimensions of worlds continually in the making, and offer a window onto the
‘look of history’, an alternative mode of historiography.

Abbreviations
BJP Bharatiya Janata Party
INC Indian National Congress
NDA National Democratic Alliance

Notes
 1 William Blake, Poetry and Prose of  William Blake, (ed.) Geoffrey Keynes
(London: Nonesuch Press, 1927), p. 970.
  2 Retort, ‘Afflicted Powers: The State, the Spectacle and September 11’, New Left
Review, vol. 27 (May–June 2004), p. 5.

Chapter 04.indd 136 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 the look of history  137

  3 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 227.
  4 Ibid., p. 233.
  5 Ibid., p. 239.
  6 Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the East Indian
Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. xxiii.
  7 Ibid., p. 26.
  8 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 102.
  9 Ibid., p. 107.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 110.
12 He earlier complains in the same set of marginalia that he had spent ‘the Vigour
of my Youth & Genius under the Oppression of Sr Joshua & his Gang of
Cunning Hired Knaves Without Employment and as much as possible Without
Bread’. Blake, Poetry and Prose, p. 970.
13 Almedia and Gilpin, p. 274.
14 Almedia and Gilpin, pp. 281–86.
15 Dirks, The Hollow Crown.
16 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘From Aby Warburg to E.H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method’,
in his Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 1989),
p. 35.
17 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
18 Natasha Eaton, ‘Between Mimesis and Alterity: Art, Gift and Diplomacy in
Colonial India, 1770–1800’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 46,
no. 4 (2004), p. 818.
19 Ibid.
20 David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (New York: Methuen,
1987), p. 30.
21 Jordana Bailkin, ‘Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette’,
Journal of Material Culture, vol. 10, no. 2 (2005), p. 198. She suggests that
15,000 pounds of the pigment were produced each year in Bengal.
22 Michael Taussig, ‘Redeeming Indigo’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 25, no. 3
(2008), pp. 1–15. See also What Color is the Sacred ? (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009).
23 Ibid., p. 3.
24 See Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political
Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004), pp. 92–103.
25 Gail Omvedt, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India (New Delhi: Viking/
Penguin, 2004), p. 17.
26 The most recent being Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang de Basanti (2006).
27 Greil Marcus, ‘The Long Walk of the Situationist International’, in Tom
McDonough (ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and
Documents (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), p. 8.

Chapter 04.indd 137 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 138  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

28 Shiv Visvanathan, ‘Shining Kitsch’, Himal SouthAsian, vol. 17, nos 3–4 (March–
April 2004), pp. 6–8 (www.himalmag.com/2004/march_april/opinion.htm,
accessed 28 January 2005).
29 India Today, 19 April 2004, p. 28.
30 Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp.
49–50. J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1962), pp. 101–32.
31 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (Detroit: Black and Red,
1983).
32 The caste formerly known as Chamar now calls itself Ravidasi, after its guru,
Ravidas. However, since I also discuss Ravidas the individual I will, to avoid
confusion, retain use of the archaic term Chamar to describe the Ravidasi jati. I
request their forgiveness.
33 Ambaram to author.
34 Rudolf Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1987), p. 20.
35 Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of
de Bry’s Great Voyages, trans. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 35.
36 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 4.
37 Ibid., p. 76.
38 Ibid.

Chapter 04.indd 138 9/27/2013 4:18:55 PM

 5
The Handbag that Exploded
Mayawati’s Monuments and the Aesthetics of Democracy in
Post-Reform India

Kajri Jain

Handbag: verb [with object] informal, humorous (of a woman) verbally

attack or crush (a person or idea) ruthlessly and forcefully.
—Oxford English Dictionary1

Trying Harder
All around us, unnoticed by many, a mute but monumental battle is being
waged: a war, in fact, of monuments and statues, proliferating virally and
at an ever-increasing scale, silently competing to assert their presence in an
image-saturated visual landscape. ‘There is nothing in this world as invis-
ible as a monument’, Musil famously wrote, exhorting monuments to ‘try a
little harder, as we must all do nowadays!’ in order to compete with colourful
cars and advertising billboards to be noticed in ‘our age of noise and move-
ment’.2 All over the world, from the last decades of the twentieth century
onwards, monuments and statues have indeed been trying harder. In India,
the emergence of gigantic shopping malls, billboards, highways and high-rise
housing in the era of economic liberalization has been blessed by the con-
temporaneous emergence of equally massive Hindu and Buddhist statues,
often over 80 feet tall. These are mostly located along transport arteries and/
or in religious theme park complexes such as the well known Akshardhams
in Delhi and Gandhinagar or the less-discussed Birla Kanan and Chhatarpur
Mandir in Delhi, Kemp Fort in Bangalore, Murudeshwara in Karnataka,
Ganga Talao/Grand Bassin in Mauritius, the Char Dham ‘pilgrimage cum

Chapter 05.indd 139 10/25/2013 4:45:06 PM

 140  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

cultural c­ omplex’ featuring a 108-foot Shiva at Solophok in Sikkim, and a

similar complex at Rabong, also in Sikkim, featuring a 95-foot fibreglass and
beaten copper Sakyamuni (to name just a few of the most spectacular sites).3
Musil’s observation about the invisibility of monuments has become
something of a cliché by now, but I want to use it as a point of departure
to ask whether these more recent monuments are indeed senselessly locked
into the self-defeating claim to permanence that he identified as the source
of their invisibility, or whether there might be something else going on here.
These monuments can certainly trace their genealogy both to the late nine-
teenth/early twentieth century expressions of a European republicanism
that provoked Musil’s reflections, and to the later explosion of spectacular
visual forms that accompanied the rise of the automobile with its acceler-
ated ‘drive-by’ regime of perception and cannibalization of space in the US
and elsewhere (think billboards, Las Vegas, giant roadside attractions; recall
Maruti Suzuki’s prominent role as a harbinger of economic reforms in India
in the 1980s).4 But they also have a specifically postcolonial genealogy, in
the adoption of new technologies and media forms in India for the com-
mensurative requirements of democratic representation in a plural colonial
and then independent polity. So what is distinctive about the contemporary
conjuncture is that the new monuments in their techno-spatial assemblage
with cars and roads speak not only to the political valence of public space in
a democracy and to regimes of publicity driven by consumerism, but also
more specifically to the politics of recognition in an avowedly plural and
religiously-inflected postcolonial polity. Here competing identities wrought
in the colonial era now assert themselves in the visual landscapes of a global
order of neoliberal consensus, where space becomes another ground for cor-
ralling difference within the realm of the ‘cultural’, which in turn ties in
to new forms of value derived from speculative place-oriented boosterism.
These identities are not necessarily state-bound: even as they unfold in the
context of the nation-state they often enact an articulation between the sub-
(or para-) national and the trans-national. Further, they are characterized by
a paradoxical mimicry, such that the assertion of ‘cultural’ or ‘religious’ differ-
ence is undercut by the imperative of mutual intelligibility and translatability
in the public arena, an imperative of equivalence that results in a sharing
of genres and formal techniques: intimate yet agonistic exchanges between
others that push the idea of ‘discrepant’ cosmopolitanism to its limits.5
This essay examines one particular instance on the basis of these proposi-
tions: a site that does not itself house gigantic religious statues but is arguably
a key intertext for understanding their emergence at this moment in the

Chapter 05.indd 140 10/25/2013 4:45:06 PM

 the handbag that exploded  141

­ eoliberal reconfiguration of the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘econ-

n
omy’, illuminating both its logic (where culture is posited as separate from
economy, and then in this separated, reified form becomes a basis for value
production) and the limits of this logic. If the obvious context for the recent
emergence of religious statues and theme parks in India is the articulation
of Hindu nationalism and economic reforms from the late 1980s onwards,
this articulation also has to be understood in relation to the aesthetics of
democracy: specifically, to the simultaneous, and equally momentous, politi-
cal assertion of Dalits (once referred to as ‘Untouchables’) on the national
political stage, and its genealogy, located within a longer history of postcolo-
nial state-formation. This is particularly relevant because statue-building has
been so central to this assertion—not initially through monumental scale
but through numerical proliferation (although in terms of scale we might
identify a precedent in the huge DMK cut-out billboards in Tamil Nadu, that
speak to the importance of the cinema in creating a citizen-spectator through
the institution of spectatorial rights as much as through the representational
content of the films and the space of the theatre).6 This essay considers Dalit
statues and the controversies around Kumari Mayawati’s monument-build-
ing programme in Uttar Pradesh as part of a moment in the unfolding and
re-enfolding of a massive symbolic upheaval: an upheaval that has not only
enabled but in fact necessitates the kind of reconfiguration of Hindu iconogra-
phy and iconopraxis that we see in the monumental statues. Here Mayawati’s
monuments are a site through which to think about the deeply interwoven
and mutually mimetic trajectories of caste Hinduism and Dalit resistance as
an engine, if you will, of transformations in both religious and democratic
images and image-practices on the subcontinent, or in other words of what
Jacques Rancière calls a ‘redistribution of the sensible’ (a formulation I elabo-
rate further below).7
I am working here with two basic claims or presuppositions. One is that it
is impossible to think about Hindu nationalism, including its image-­cultures,
without thinking about the caste question (and this was evident even in the
case of calendar art with its reterritorialization of radical impulses from the
bhakti traditions).8 As I have argued elsewhere (in relation to the cultural
politics around the modernist painter M.F. Husain), there is no need to
take Hindu nationalist rhetoric at face value when it posits the Muslim as
its primary ‘other’ and scapegoat.9 And further, the context of caste pushes
us to examine the politics of Hindu nationalist inclusion just as the focus on
religious minorities in a Hindu hegemonic polity has largely addressed the
politics of exclusion. The second claim is that image-practices, and aesthetic

Chapter 05.indd 141 10/25/2013 4:45:06 PM

 142  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

or cultural practices in general, are not an epiphenomenon of social or politi-

cal change, but the very ground of this change. This is particularly clear in the
case of caste practices, where material or economic and symbolic or cultural
modalities of oppression are indistinguishable, for what must be reconfigured
is a hugely recalcitrant habitus and a highly institutionalized sensorium.

Background: ‘Mayawati’s’ Monuments

Let me begin by quickly sketching in some minimal background. Kumari
Mayawati, also known as Behenji (sister), a Dalit woman, was the Chief
Minister of India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh (UP), on and off between
1995 and 2012; at the time of writing she had just joined the upper house of
the Indian Parliament, the Rajya Sabha, as a move into national-level politics.
Mayawati rose under the mentorship of Kanshi Ram, a Raedasi Sikh from
Punjab; note that Punjab has a higher proportion of Dalits in the popula-
tion than any other state. Kanshi Ram started out as an activist, founding
the government employee organization BAMCEF (Backward and Minority
Community Employees Federation) in 1978. Then, with Mayawati, he
entered electoral politics by founding the BSP or Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984.
Mayawati first became Chief Minister for a while in 1995 in coalition with
Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP), again briefly in 1997, and then
from 2002–2003 in alliance with the BJP, before the BSP came into power
in its own right in 2007 and then 2009; the BSP lost to the SP in 2012. The
incompatible alliances with the Backward-Caste SP, with whom Mayawati had
a bitter falling out, and then, even more unlikely, the Hindu nationalist BJP,
indexed a primary principle of Kanshi Ram’s political strategy: power must be
seized at any cost in order to bring about political change. This was also the
rationale behind Mayawati’s push, once in power, towards a multi-caste alli-
ance under the moniker of the ‘Sarvajan’ (‘all the people’, as a supplement to
the ‘Bahujan’ or majority), again entailing the risk of alienating the BSP’s core
constituency; this was considered a major factor in its electoral defeat in 2012.
Now we can plunge straight into the controversies around the BSP
monuments that dogged Mayawati’s regime as Chief Minister, focusing in
particular on the Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal (the Ambedkar Site for
Social Change) in the UP state capital Lucknow: a memorial to the Dalit ide-
ologue, activist, lawyer and architect of India’s constitution, B.R. Ambedkar
(Figure 5.1).
The Ambedkar memorial was started when Mayawati first came into
power as Chief Minister in 1995 on a relatively modest thirty-acre site
with a grass-covered stūpa-like mound designed by the modernist architect

Chapter 05.indd 142 10/25/2013 4:45:06 PM

 the handbag that exploded  143

Figure 5.1  Front approach to main Ambedkar memorial (Dr Bhimrao

Ambedkar Smarak), Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal
(Dr B.R. Ambedkar Site for Social Change), Lucknow, May 2009.

Satish Gujral in the flood plain of the Gomti River. In 2007 the site was
expanded to 150 acres, with an estimated budget of five billion rupees (about
US$106.7  ­million);10 its neighbours are the five-star Taj Residency Hotel
and the opulent headquarters of the Lucknow-based Sahara India Pariwar,
an Indian finance, media and infrastructure/housing conglomerate, both of
which pale in comparison to the Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal, even
as it is evidently in conversation with them. This was just one of several BSP
monument building projects in Lucknow and in the urban centre of Noida
where UP borders Delhi—Noida is seen as part of the National Capital
Region, but is technically in UP, and of course it is significant that the Noida
projects were being built right under the central government’s nose. These
are also implicated in the discussion about using flood plains for large state
and non-state projects that emerged in relation to Delhi’s controversial 2010
Commonwealth Games village, and the way the value of such prime urban
real estate trumps environmental and safety considerations; the BSP’s Rās.t.rīya
Dalit Prern.a Sthal (literally the National Dalit Inspiration Site) in Noida,
inaugurated in October 2011, is also on the flood plain of the Yamuna, as is
Akshardham, the huge Hindu complex a few kilometres upstream.

Chapter 05.indd 143 10/25/2013 4:45:07 PM

 Figure 5.2  Statues of B.R. Ambedkar and Ramabai Ambedkar, Sāmājik
Parivartan Pratik Sthal (Site Symbolizing Social Change) at the approach to the
Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal, Lucknow, July 2008.
Sandstone canopies have subsequently been built over the statues.

Figure 5.3  Statue of Sant Ravidas, one of a series of Dalit icons along an
avenue between the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal and the
Gomti River known as Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Gomti Buddha Vihar,
Lucknow, August 2011.

Chapter 05.indd 144 10/25/2013 4:45:08 PM

 the handbag that exploded  145

Figure 5.4  Women security guards at the entrance to Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar

Gomti Buddha Vihar, Lucknow, August 2011.

The BSP’s projects included monuments, memorials, parks and rally

grounds dedicated to Ambedkar, his wife Ramabai, and Kanshi Ram,
often including prominent statues of Mayawati herself, as well as other his-
torical figures of Dalit resistance such as Jotiba Phule, Periyar and Shahu
Maharaj, and devotional saint-poets such as Ravidas, Kabir and Chokhamela
(Figures 5.2 and 5.3). All these monuments were characterized by an exten-
sive use of stone and bronze (the Lucknow Ambedkar memorial uses at least
nine different types of stone quarried from all over the country, including the
Chunar sandstone once used for Ashoka’s pillars). According to a Congress
party spokesperson, between 2007 and 2010 the BSP had spent Rs 140 bil-
lion (nearly three billion USD) in state funds on these projects; the BBC’s
estimate was one billion US. According to Mayawati, speaking at the Noida
park inauguration in October 2011, the state’s budget to build and maintain
memorials, parks and statues around the state was about US$10.2 billion, but
only one per cent of this amount had been spent until then.11 The BSP also
instituted a State Special Zone Security Force to protect the statues, without
official sanction from the Governor; the force had thirty per cent reservation
for women (Figure 5.4).

Chapter 05.indd 145 10/25/2013 4:45:08 PM

 146  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The media frenzy around Mayawati’s monuments was ignited in June

2009 by a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed in the Supreme Court by the
advocate Ravi Kant, claiming that ‘the expenditure of several crores of public
money to fulfil the whims and fancies of an individual is against the princi-
ples of natural justice and fails the test of reasonableness’, and hence violates
Article 14 of the Constitution, which ensures equality before the law. Ravi
Kant appealed to the Supreme Court to restrain Mayawati from installing her
statues and party symbol in public places at state expense and demanded a
Central Bureau of Intelligence investigation. In particular, he singled out the
installation of statues of sixty elephants as contravening Election Commission
guidelines, as the elephant is the BSP’s party symbol. The BSP countered this
by pointing out that while the elephant on their symbol has a lowered trunk,
those at the monument have raised trunks, a traditional symbol of welcome,
indeed an ‘inalienable part’ of Indian culture (Figure 5.5). On September 11,
2009, the Supreme Court put a stay order on any further building, which the
BSP regime violated but then was made to apologize to the Supreme Court
two months later. Nevertheless, the memorial was used to commemorate
Ambedkar’s death anniversary on December 6, 2009. While the original PIL
filed by Ravi Kant was still in limbo between the Election Commission and

Figure 5.5  Visitors with stone elephant (with raised trunk) during the
construction of the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal,
Lucknow, May 2009.

Chapter 05.indd 146 10/25/2013 4:45:08 PM

 the handbag that exploded  147

the Supreme Court, in the run-up to the 2012 UP state elections the Election
Commission issued an order for ‘suitably covering the statues of elephants and
statues of Ms. Mayawati constructed in public places at government expenses
[sic] for the duration of the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh’.12,13 In a tacit
vindication of Ravi Kant’s PIL, this Election Commission order included the
elephants with raised trunks featured at the BSP-built parks.
The BSP’s building projects were criticized not only for their alleged misuse
of government funds for party propaganda but also for their adverse environ-
mental impacts. In October 2009 residents of Noida filed a PIL against the
Noida monument on environmental grounds; the Supreme Court, which
halted construction there, gave it the go-ahead a year later on condition that
the built area should not exceed 25 per cent of the park area. The BSP sub-
sequently ensured that its monuments had parks attached to them, such as
the Manyavar Shri Kanshi Ram Ji Green (Eco) Garden (the UP Tourism
website abbreviated this as MSKRJGEG) and the Dr Ambedkar Gomti Park
in Lucknow, although their ‘greenness’ unfolds in a different register from
the Romantic imaginary of nature: the MSKRJGEG, for instance, features
one and a half times life size bronze animals and trees (in addition to some
organic, living grass and trees).14 Or again, in the lead up to the 2012 UP
state elections, Mayawati was under fire from the media for selling wetlands
in the Greater Noida area, that are a habitat for migratory birds, to the private
building company Ansal’s for a housing development.
The predominant affects in the mainstream media in response to the
BSP’s monument building projects were disgusted opposition, outrage and
ridicule, although towards the end of Mayawati’s regime in UP there was a
dawning recognition of the stakes involved (perhaps enhanced by a greater
willingness to take her seriously after the resounding success of another BSP
building project in UP, the Buddh International Circuit in Greater Noida,
where the first Formula One Indian Grand Prix was held in October 2011).
By and large, the mainstream media coverage repeatedly staged the contro-
versies around these monuments in terms of a rudimentary version of the
‘recognition versus redistribution’ debate, representing majority public opin-
ion as ‘infuriated and sickened’ (in the words of NDTV’s Prannoy Roy)
at Mayawati’s ‘profligate’ waste of public money on party propaganda and
­self-aggrandizement rather than the material betterment of her constitu-
ency.15 In this view, the only possible explanation for these irresponsible
acts was an individual ­psychopathology: her egomania, insecurity and cor-
ruption.16 This materialist argument for redistribution of resources rather
than ‘merely symbolic’ acts was propounded by right and left alike, though

Chapter 05.indd 147 10/25/2013 4:45:08 PM

 148  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

g­ rowingly tempered by the acknowledgment that Dalits have a legitimate

claim to being represented in the same way as others (think of the real estate
value alone of the memorials to Gandhi and the Nehrus across the Yamuna
in Delhi, to which Mayawati pointed in her Dalit Prern.a Sthal inauguration
speech).
There was also a non-Dalit defence of Mayawati, largely informed by
Ajoy Bose’s biography of her, though this also tended to personalize the
issue by giving her credit for succeeding despite the odds of caste, class and
gender.17 An instance of this more sympathetic treatment was a piece in
the Telegraph by Mukul Kesavan, who usefully pointed out—as, in a very
different rhetorical register, did a blog entry by the rather racier Shobhaa
De—that Mayawati was being unfairly singled out for opprobrium for
things that other politicians of a different caste, class and gender manage
to get away with.18 Otherwise unlikely bedfellows, Kesavan and De both
challenged the consensus implicit in pronouncements about how ‘we all’ feel
about Mayawati, though they didn’t say in so many words that the ‘we’ or
the ‘us’ signals a secular and cosmopolitan—but also implicitly caste Hindu
and elite—constitution of the public, from which Dalits are cast out as the
‘they’. Hence, for instance, the NDTV polls that showed separate approval
ratings for Mayawati’s monuments from the ‘general public’ and from Dalits
(ironically echoing—and vindicating—Ambedkar’s pre-independence plea
for separate Dalit electorates).19
Indeed, as Dalit activists have been quick to point out, it’s hard to think
of any Dalit journalists in the mainstream media. And certainly, lurking
not far below the surface of the often self-righteous and patronizing mate-
rialist critique (for ‘we’ know what is good for ‘them’ better than they do)
are the much uglier but all too familiar idioms of caste dominance that
seek to police the Dalit body, particularly that of the Dalit woman. In the
mainstream media, this policing of the body has centred on snide remarks,
jokes and rumours about Mayawati’s appearance and sartorial sense, in par-
ticular her taste for diamonds, the colour pink, and the handbag that has
become integral to her iconography: hence the title of De’s blog entry, ‘A
Ferragamo Handbag for Mayawati’, in which De perspicaciously remarked
that the ‘chattering classes’ had better beware, because once Mayawati comes
to power in Delhi she ‘will whack their butts with that handbag of hers’
(Figure 5.6). Particularly ­noteworthy here were the rumours (unsubstanti-
ated by my own research) that Mayawati had statues of herself destroyed
and rebuilt because they didn’t ­feature her handbag; these rumours paral-
leled others about her alleged wanton destruction and reconstruction of the

Chapter 05.indd 148 10/25/2013 4:45:08 PM

 the handbag that exploded  149

Figure 5.6  Statue of Mayawati with her handbag at Manyawar Kanshiram

Memorial; this statue stands next to one of Kanshiram under a
125-foot diameter dome. Lucknow, August 2011.

stone elephants and other ­elements in the Lucknow monuments. Even the
Wikileaks cables included an allegation that Mayawati had sent a private jet
to Mumbai to fetch a pair of her favourite sandals; here too, the US Embassy
in its wisdom was feeding from a rumour mill whose grist was the caste-
coded material of (leather) footwear. Meanwhile, in more informal venues
like blogs or YouTube comments on news stories about Mayawati, the idioms
of caste oppression and patriarchalism revealed themselves far more crudely,
in obscenities and ­violent threats.
However these kinds of discourse aren’t simply residues of some earlier
mode of casteism, but contemporary forms that are both maintained and
reconfigured in the post-reform scenario. What interests me is the role of
images and the media in this assemblage of politics and iconopraxis, both as
sites for reconfiguring caste hegemony in the post-liberalization order, and,
as I will argue, as sites for staging antagonism that keep monuments—and
politics—in a state of activation. The staging of antagonism in the media
paradoxically re-inscribes the deeply enmeshed circuitry between the sym-
bolic and the material, characteristic of the performance of social distinction,

Chapter 05.indd 149 10/25/2013 4:45:09 PM

 150  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

which the reconfigured form of caste hegemony seeks to disavow. For while
the materialism being proffered in mainstream media forums in this and
other contexts might often come out of Marxist conviction, in effect it does
the ideological work of driving an epistemological wedge between culture
and economy, instituting as separate two domains that in this context cannot
be thought apart.20 This transnational media commonsense hypostatizes
‘economy’ as a transparent universal and makes ‘culture’ a free-floating, de-
institutionalized signifier of identitarian difference, in keeping with the logic
of neoliberal capitalism; its preferred mode of managing difference, multicul-
turalism; and its preferred mode of politics: an identity politics that remains
insulated from the institutional enmeshments (economic and/or social,
formal and/or informal) of culture.21
So a crucial feature of the terms of the discourse on Mayawati has been the
way that the ‘merely symbolic’ activity of statue and monument building was
pitted against the ‘real’, material benefits of schools, universities, hospitals,
roads: a discursive distinction that obviates the ways in which caste injustice
works so inextricably in both symbolic and material registers, at the embod-
ied level of the habitus.22 What the media pundits and their ‘public’ were
saying was: ‘why doesn’t she play by the rules, and stick to the kind of devel-
opment states are supposed to do?’. The unsaid obverse of this is: ‘why doesn’t
she leave culture alone?’, that is: ‘why can’t she leave it to us?’. In other words,
caste Hindus of all stripes want to continue to police the domain of culture
(and Rancierians will recognize the category of the ‘police’ as the institutional
regime that protects the consensual status quo)—whether as secular culture
or as an increasingly culturalized religion. And Mayawati was ‘whacking their
butts’ with her handbag, or rather, keeping her handbag in their faces (that
is, in their newspapers and on their screens), perhaps because she knows only
too well that the manufacture of handbags, footwear and other leather goods
has given Chamars (like herself and Kanshi Ram) economic means—leather
has been one of India’s major exports since the mid-nineteenth century, and
has often meant substantial economic gains for the community—but that
even after a century and a half that has not been enough to give them social
equality.

Redistribution: Of the Sensible

What I want to argue for, then—what I want to perform—is a view of
Mayawati’s projects that takes her cultural interventions seriously, treating
them not so much as an index of her individual pathologies but placing them

Chapter 05.indd 150 10/25/2013 4:45:09 PM

 the handbag that exploded  151

in the broader context of both Dalit and Hindu cultural and political strug-
gles, over a longer duration than that of her biography or her regime in UP.
In all the discussion of these monuments and statues, very little attention
has been paid to their aesthetics and formal vocabularies, or to the genealo-
gies of practice within which they are embedded and/or that they sought to
reconfigure: uses of space, forms of iconopraxis, the politics of visibility and
presence, social violence—in short, the habitus of bodies structured by caste.
This is not to say that they should be treated analytically as ‘high art’, for
they aren’t primarily positioned within that frame of value and would imme-
diately be open to accusations of kitsch, pastiche, and so on, as has been the
fate of so many public art projects everywhere.23 Instead, I propose that they
need to be read in terms of Jacques Rancière’s more expansive notion of the
aesthetic as sense-experience (aistheton), which is not restricted to the insti-
tutional domain of ‘art’ but instead speaks to specific modes of ‘distribution
of the sensible’.24
For Rancière, the distribution of the sensible is intimately tied to the
political, through the institution within specific structures of power of divi-
sions between the sayable and the unsayable, the visible and the invisible, the
audible and inaudible, and so on. In other words, the very field of perception
is shot through with relations of power. This conception radically expands
the notion of redistribution in a way that takes into account the fundamen-
tally material nature of cultural and symbolic processes. Thus if philosophers
like Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor challenge the dualism of culture and
economy (posited most forcefully by Nancy Fraser) through an expanded
notion of recognition, Rancière does so through an expanded notion of redis-
tribution. This redistribution of the sensible is not itself politics—it is not,
as with identity politics, a substitute for politics operating in a cultural realm
divorced from economy. However it is intimately linked to the political, for
it is a disturbance in the perceptual field, or (more to the point) in the habi-
tus, that accompanies the political subjectivation of those hitherto excluded,
unheard, unseen, unable to speak. It is this kind of redistribution that I want
to suggest ultimately plays itself out (in both senses: as both manifesting and
exhausting itself ) in Mayawati’s monuments, and this is what I shall attempt
to demonstrate through a genealogical reading that attends to matters of
form, or rather to the forms of matter, as art historians do, but also to what
people have done with formed matter in order to activate its significations,
and the violence this entails.
This genealogy is necessary for understanding how politics and religion
have come together in the modalities of Dalit oppression and resistance to it

Chapter 05.indd 151 10/25/2013 4:45:09 PM

 152  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

(and here I’m using the contentious term ‘religion’ as a placeholder for a set of
phenomena whose consistency derives from a colonial knowledge-formation
but that has nonetheless taken on a certain valency). The interplays between
meanings and practices—the performative aspects of signification—do not
unfold here in an arena where the primary locus of social efficacy of images
is a realm of distinction and value based on a bourgeois notion of art, and
its fairly well understood institutional aspects, but the rather less explored
realm of contemporary iconopraxis. We are dealing here with the logics of the
image in a situation where the aesthetic is not located in art, and democracy
cannot be located in a polity assumed to be secular. This situation is certainly
not specific to India, but in India it takes on specific historical forms with
changes in the material forms of iconic images, their modes of address and
the practices they call forth.
So, how might we approach the logics of Mayawati’s monuments? Let’s
start, as art historians do, by looking.

Construction, Reconstruction, Destruction: The Temporality

of Stone

Here I would urge readers to view a short clip on the website of Design
Associates, the Delhi (or rather Noida) based architects of the Ambedkar
Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal and several other BSP projects (http://designassoci-
ates.in/), as no still image can provide an adequate sense of the immense scale
and grandeur of this project (though unfortunately the clip window itself is
ironically very small). Here panoramic views of the site are presented by a
smoothly gliding camera that mimics the words of a catchy song on the accom-
panying soundtrack, about a wind that blows along new roads towards new
goals; the visual treatment here echoes advertisements both for tourism and
for ‘prestige’ urban housing developments, though with the notable absence
of the (hetero-nuclear) model family that often features in the latter.25 As you
watch, you notice the vocabulary of elements taken from the Buddhist archi-
tecture of ancient India (Figure 5.7), but also from other monumental sites
like Lutyens’s Delhi, particularly the Rashtrapati Bhawan area with its grand
vistas, axes, and use of pink sandstone, in its turn inspired by Akbar’s intended
capital city of Fatehpur Sikri; there are resonances with the temples of Luxor
and Karnak in Egypt, with their avenues of sphinxes reinterpreted here as
elephants that in turn echo the elephant plinth from the second century BCE
Buddhist ruins at Pitalkhora (Figure 5.8); an amphitheatre-like space; colon-
nades of columns from the ancient Ionian cities of Anatolia, also reminiscent

Chapter 05.indd 152 10/25/2013 4:45:09 PM

 the handbag that exploded  153

Figure 5.7  The surface treatment of the main memorial and other elements at
the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal borrows motifs from
early (1st–2nd century BCE) Buddhist cave carvings such as those at Ajanta,
Karle, Bedsa, Pitalkhora, and Bhaja. May 2009. Photograph by courtesy of
Sarah Richardson.

of the ruins of imperial cities such as Persepolis (Figure 5.9); and great domes
inspired by the Pantheon [again, see Figure 5.9]. This is a global vocabu-
lary of historic monumentalism, but with the underlying theme of ancient
Indian Buddhism; that is, these monuments develop an idiom that abjures
the recognizably Hindu aspects of the ‘classical’ canon of Indian architecture.
The sensibility here is necessarily cosmopolitan because it refuses to be Hindu,
conjoining the BSP’s anti-Hindu cultural imperative with the transnationally-
informed vocabulary of the architect, Jay Kaktikar, who trained at Delhi’s
School of Planning and Architecture and holds a graduate degree from the
UK (where he worked on heritage and conservation projects at sites including
Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace; he also worked with Delhi-based
architect K.T. Ravindran on the Rajiv Gandhi memorial at Sriperumbudur).26
The first and most overwhelming impression of these monuments is one of
sheer, inescapable presence, and of scale. But even though some of the struc-
tures here are very high indeed, this sense of scale is not manifested primarily
via verticality, in the manner of the tall phallic towers and gigantic iconic
statues competing at various sites across the world. It is more a matter of the
extent or spread of the complex, and the immense vistas that unfold from kilo-
metres away, as you glide towards them on a wide, smooth, freshly flattened

Chapter 05.indd 153 10/25/2013 4:45:10 PM

 154  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 5.8  The ‘monumental elephant gallery’: an avenue of sixty

elephants leading up to a relief depicting a map of the Ambedkar
memorial complex. Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal,
Lucknow, August 2011.

Figure 5.9  Colonnades of freestanding Chunar stone columns, each capped

by four bronze elephant heads. Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal,
Lucknow, May 2009. Photograph by courtesy of Sarah Richardson.

Chapter 05.indd 154 10/25/2013 4:45:11 PM

 the handbag that exploded  155

Figure 5.8  View from the Bhimrao Ambedkar Smarak structure towards the
elephant gallery. Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal, Lucknow, May 2009.

road (Figure 5.10). The effect of this sense of lateral spread rather than height
is again to invoke the historical sites that I mentioned above, and the raw
territoriality of state power—indeed, imperial power—as yet unconstrained
by the logic of capital, rather than the more modern type of vertical spectacle
inaugurated by the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty in cities with intense
demands on real estate. The seeming archaism of this form of the claim to
territory speaks back, in part, to the archaism of the spatialized modes of caste
exclusion that have continued into the present: the corralling of Dalits into
‘Harijan bastis’ and denial of access not only to wells and temples but also to
schools, jobs, rental housing and even sections of cinemas.27 At the same time,
though, the initial experience of approaching the site lays claim to a mobile,
cinematic and, crucially, automotive modernity, for as the architects’ clip makes
clear to us with its sequence showing visitors inside a bus, the Lucknow monu-
ments are designed to be viewed from the windows of a bus (the sightlines of
the monuments’ walls and fences also appear to be geared towards buses rather
than cars), the journey orchestrated by signage and roundabouts with statues
and fountains. Note that this is a departure from the privatized consumerist
experience featured in the real estate advertisements that feature (private, indi-
vidual or family) cars rather than (public, community) buses.

Chapter 05.indd 155 10/25/2013 4:45:11 PM

 156  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

There is no contradiction between the archaism of the site and the con-
temporaneity of the modes of viewing to which it addresses itself. A claim
to history is an integral part of modern identity-formation, instituting the
origin of the vector of progress along which subjects and communities move
towards modernity: it is precisely the mobile, modern subject who has ‘his-
tory’. In this case, the use of Buddhist elements from sites like Sanchi, Ajanta,
and Pitalkhora speaks to the way Ambedkar made Buddhism key to Dalits’
historical narrative within that of the nation, thereby instituting them not
only as a political community vis-à-vis the state but also as a religious one sep-
arate from Hindus. As numerous Dalit informants in Lucknow and nearby
villages in Rae Bareli district repeatedly said when discussing Mayawati’s
monuments, even while criticizing other aspects of her regime, ‘She has
given us our history’. The activist Ram Kumar of the Lucknow-based DAG
(Dynamic Action Group) put it even more forcefully: ‘We [Dalits] have been
hungry for centuries; fine, we’ll be hungry for another century—but no-one
has done this for us’. Ram Kumar later went on to write:
The construction of these parks should be seen in their historical context. After the
Maurya dynasty, there was the reign of the upper class elites, which completely destroyed
the remnants of ‘Shudra Shashan’, and wiped out the history of the underclass. […]
The construction of these parks and massive memorials is activated by a desire on
Behenji’s part to restore the destroyed historical markers of the Dalits—something
that the elite cannot stomach. This is thus part of the battle to re-establish Dalit his-
tory. The parks and memorials serve to inspire those who have been depressed for
centuries. They give birth to self-respect and remind people of their glorious history
which has all but been wiped out over the ages. Mayawati will be remembered for
this work, and the statues and memorials will serve to inspire Dalits.28

While this is a position articulated specifically for a wide audience includ-

ing non-Dalits, as a modality of self-representation these narratives have a
remarkable consistency that speaks to the nature of the political project here.
They point to a reading of the memorials as invoking not only Buddhism or
the ancient sites themselves but the idea of history: not just the sensation of a
durée, but also its value as a good for subjects in and of modernity.
So while pastiche abounds here, its mélange of elements undoubtedly
informed by the cosmopolitanism of the project’s architects and the global out-
look pervading India’s post-reform mediascape, it does not address an ironic,
playful, postmodern sensibility but a deadly earnest, modern, historicising
one. Take, for instance, the freestanding columns that at first glance seem rem-
iniscent of Ashokan pillars, but with four bronze elephants rather than stone
lions on the finials (see Figure 5.9). However, unlike Ashokan pillars, these are
arrayed in rows, and they are not monolithic but made up of eight segments;

Chapter 05.indd 156 10/25/2013 4:45:11 PM

 the handbag that exploded  157

in fact, they much more closely resemble the columns that form part of the
ruins of the Athena temple at Priene, with the elephants’ curling trunks mim-
icking the scrolls that characterize Ionic finials. After all, a row of freestanding
columns is usually part of a ruin whose roof has fallen: this pastiche recreates
not a living temple but its remains. Similarly, the stūpa form used here is that
of the blunt ruins of domes whose upper portions have fallen off (Figure 5.5),
for the ancient stūpa were topped with superstructures representing the higher
heavens, most likely made from wood, as depicted on a second century fence
railing from Barhut.29 What’s more, the monument’s protracted state of con-
struction has paradoxically lent its long moment of becoming (five years at the
time of writing) the evocative air of incompletion and fragmentariness that
also characterizes a ruin or an archaeological site. And of course, more than
six decades of exposure to post-independence public heritage institutions such
as national and state museums and the Archaeological Survey of India have
meant that everyone knows that this is what ‘history’ looks like.30
Perhaps this peculiar temporality is why Amy Kazmin of the Financial
Times, in one of the early scathing reports on the Ambedkar memorial, was

Figure 5.11  Stūpa-like forms capping the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Smarak and
statue canopies at the Dr BR Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal, Lucknow,
May 2009. The early Indic stūpas on which these forms are based usually had
no internal space that was open to be seen or entered, and probably featured a
wooden superstructure.

Chapter 05.indd 157 10/25/2013 4:45:18 PM

 158  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

moved to write, ‘the memorial seems strangely lifeless, as if it was, from

­conception, only ever intended to be an abandoned ruin’.31 Kazmin rightly
relates this to its striking barrenness: the vast expanses of stone unrelieved
by trees or grass. This insight could only stem from the fact that she actually
bothered to address the formal aspects of the monument (even though she falls
into the ‘high art’ trap: for instance, she writes ‘it has all the authenticity and
originality of a Bollywood set’). But she, too, reads this always-already ruined
temporality as a reflection of Mayawati’s ‘aggressive assertion of her own raw
power’, rather than in more politically informed terms as an anticipation of
active destruction. I want to suggest, instead, that the monument’s temporal
relay between the invocation of history and a future that holds both promise
and dread indexes a specific feature of modern Dalit politics, which in turn
maps onto a tension at the heart of liberal democracies everywhere: how does
a political minority presume equality, which is the basis for democracy, while
also pressing for the recognition and redressal of historical inequalities insti-
tuted through practices of social, cultural and economic domination?

Violence, Subjectivation, and the Sensible

In The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Anupama Rao
outlines how the formation of Dalits as political subjects has meant an insist-
ence on equality before the law, with the concomitant use of law to ensure
that equality; but this use of law can in turn only flow from recognition of
the history of Dalit oppression. As a result, measures by the state to ‘define
and protect exceptional subjects [i]ronically… reproduce vulnerability as the
condition of possibility for continued protection and legal recognition’.32 In
other words, paradoxically, and perhaps self-defeatingly, both Dalit equal-
ity and Dalit vulnerability must be kept on the political agenda until the
conditions that create Dalit vulnerability disappear—but attempts to redress
vulnerability cause new forms of oppression to appear. According to Rao,
Indian democracy has been ‘distinguished not by the elimination of caste
discrimination, but by its implication in new forms of violence and the
emergence of new means of regulating the caste order’.33 In part these new
forms of regulation are produced by the state itself, through the creation
and maintenance of categories such as ‘untouchability’ or the ‘caste atrocity’,
that become hypostatized as social facts, even as they serve to make iniq-
uitous social relations visible as antagonisms.34 This heightened visibility of
antagonism engenders new forms of violent retribution. But Rao suggests
that these new modalities of violence should be read not simply as reflections

Chapter 05.indd 158 10/25/2013 4:45:18 PM

 the handbag that exploded  159

of ­existing caste antagonisms but as a performative ground for ­reconstituting

social ­relations, such that anti-Dalit violence becomes ‘a locus for further
politicizing Dalit identity’. This politics reoccupies corporeal grounds, such
that new forms of embodied violence continue to define Dalit personhood.35
Building on this analysis, then, we can posit violence as the key locus not
only of a reconstitution of the social, but also of an accompanying redistri-
bution of the sensible in response to the equality claims of those who were
hitherto excluded from the social order. In other words this violence has spe-
cific historical modalities of expression, predicated on a shared community
of reception—genres, if you will—which shift with transformations in the
political terrain. I want to suggest that while visibility and the element of
spectacle have always been integral to the idioms of caste violence, two key
generic shifts characterize the forms of violence accompanying modern Dalit
political subjectivation. One is a shift from the routine visibility of enforced
bodily difference (the everyday policing of clothing, posture, sexuality, access
to spaces, food, water, and so on) that is accompanied by the spectacular
punishment of transgression—both means of preventing claims to equality,
controlled by the dominant castes—to the visibility of the antagonism between
caste groups: a visibility that both parties can use to their own ends. Second,
in addition to the direct perpetration of violence on Dalit bodies and homes
is the mediation of violence via representative iconic bodies, particularly stat-
ues of Ambedkar: again, this is made possible by the ability of Dalits to create
their own icons, and the recognition of these icons as embodiments of the
community (itself a process enabled by the violence of desecration). These
shifts, I want to argue, are informed not only by the representational logics of
democracy in a plural polity, but also by the logics of religious image-efficacy
that are intermeshed with them: specifically those of modern Hinduism in the
age of mechanical reproduction—and, as we will see, in the age of construc-
tion in cement. Mayawati’s monuments need to be read against the backdrop
of these reconfigurations of the articulations of embodiment and visibility.

Redistributing Iconicity, Democratizing the Icon

At the heart of the shifts outlined above is a process of resistance to
Brahminical authority unfolding over a much longer durée, at least from the
medieval bhakti movements onwards, if not from the very institution of icon-
worship in temples around the eighth century CE. If Brahminical authority
depended on the policing of access to icons and to sacred texts, the bhakti
saints—many of them either outcastes or from the lowest rungs of the caste

Chapter 05.indd 159 10/25/2013 4:45:18 PM

 160  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

hierarchy—claimed a direct, personal access to the divine through love, service,

and, importantly, through oral worship in the vernaculars. In other words, this
was a redistribution of the sensible that bypassed temple icons and Sanskrit
texts. These redistributions were repeatedly reincorporated or reterritorial-
ized back into the institutional spaces and structures of organized movements
and of caste Hindu practices, but their radical impulses remained available to
articulate with new forms of struggle and new modes of expression. This was
particularly evident in the late colonial period, as new image-making technol-
ogies were introduced into India and were simultaneously taken up by various
identitarian projects, including a Hindu-hegemonic anticolonial nationalism.
Among the many transformations of iconography and iconopraxis occur-
ring in this context, two in particular are worth noting. First, European
painting techniques, printing, photography, and the cinema expanded the
arena of image-based devotion, with mass reproduction both providing lesser
alternatives to, and increasing, the power of consecrated temple icons. The
reformulation of iconography during this period took up the deeply per-
sonalized affects of bhakti poetry to naturalize and humanize the gods, also
bringing newly sanctified figures like nationalist heroes and martyrs into the
ambit of devotionalism. Second, devotionalism took on increasingly public,
community-based forms that similarly supplemented temple worship medi-
ated by priests, for instance through the revival of processional forms like the
Ramlila or the Ganapati and Durga festivals. This indexed the enhanced power
and valency of public spectacle in a political arena where the enumerative
imaginary of representative democracy was taking hold, as well as its peculiar
modality of commensuration, such that communities, to the extent that they
were to be part of a democracy, had to adopt common, mutually recognizable
idioms of representation. Hence, for instance, the mimicry of Muharram pro-
cessions by Tilak’s Ganapati revival, that brought Hindus and Muslims onto
a plane of democratic commensuration; Dalits, too, adopted this form, for
instance with Chamars in Kanpur organizing Ravidas processions from 1936
after building a Ravidas temple.36 A similar process characterized the way that
bazaar prints, particularly after independence with the introduction of inex-
pensive offset printing in the 1960s, literally democratized the icon through
the kinds of commensuration that occur in publishers’ catalogues and retail-
ers’ stacks on the pavement, featuring x number of Hindu designs, y Muslim
designs, z Sikh designs, one Ravidas design and so on, but all within the same
recognizable format, for the same price. Crucially, then, although bazaar and
community icons were worshipped, this process of commensuration meant
that by now icons were objects that embodied not just the deities they rep-

Chapter 05.indd 160 10/25/2013 4:45:18 PM

 the handbag that exploded  161

resented, but also particular communities, such that, for instance, an attack
on an iconic symbol could be construed as an attack on the community qua
community. As I suggested earlier, this violence constituted a supplement to
the routine, everyday violence of policing caste boundaries.
Crucially for our purposes, this commensurative operation of democracy
was also the context in which Gandhi responded to the many non-Brahmin
and Untouchable claims to equality surfacing in the late colonial period,
including struggles over access to water tanks and temples, by insisting that
‘Harijans’ (as he termed them) were part of the Hindu fold, and that it was
the ethical responsibility of caste Hindus to make them feel welcome within
it. This, of course, was the source of Gandhi’s repudiation by Ambedkar, for
whom it was unacceptable that responding to Dalit equality-claims should be
left to caste Hindu noblesse oblige. One material manifestation of the defen-
sive mobilization of caste Hindu paternalism in the domain of the sensible
is the Lakshminarayan Temple (also known as the Birla Mandir) in Delhi,
largely funded by Gandhi’s cement-producing industrialist friends the Birlas
and inaugurated by him in 1938 on condition that it would accommodate
all castes, particularly Untouchables.37 This institution of the public in terms
of an inclusivist caste Hindu hegemony was also the animating spirit of the
Birlas’ monumental Shiva statue built 60 years later (also in cement), in a
park called the Birla Kanan on the Delhi-Jaipur highway, across from Delhi’s
international airport (Figure 5.6). It was built under the non-state aegis of a
private family trust, but, according to its patron B.K. Birla, with the public-
spirited intent to ‘let the people come’; even as he also said he wanted it to be
‘imposing’: a term revealingly signalling a will to hegemony.38
But by 1998, when B.K. Birla built his Big Shiva, the terrain of iconopraxis
had already shifted in deeply significant ways—and here I mean terrain quite
literally. What became possible in the intervening half century was the building
of a spectacular public icon that was not just erected temporarily for community
worship and then taken out in a procession for immersion, as with the Ganapatis
and Durgas, but that remained permanently on view for the general public,
without the intercession of a priest; there is no pūjārī at the Birla Kanan. This
indexes a bypassing of Brahminical authority in the name of a certain version of
democracy and a certain kind of public. But if the original impetus behind this
came from the pre-independence need to make Dalits literally count as Hindus
in the struggles around minority political representation, the more proximate
catalyst for this later public emergence of cultic icons was a reconfigured post-
independence image-economy in which Dalits had taken control of producing
their own iconic statues and were ­placing them in public spaces.

Chapter 05.indd 161 10/25/2013 4:45:19 PM

 162  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

This was no easy task: indeed, the violence of this struggle is still in evi-
dence today, for Dalit assertions of visibility and of the claim to territory
have consistently been construed as acts of provocation. The nature of the
provocation here hinges on claiming the right to use iconic symbols, and
then to bring them out into public spaces, which challenges the cultic basis of
Brahminical authority—that is, Brahmins’ right to police icons sequestered
in the garbhagr. has of temples. And the success of this challenge is evident in
the attempt by Hindu icons to reclaim the public sphere by resorting to a
politics of scale as a retort to the politics of number—that is, to the politics
of the Bahujan, the many. So the claim to equal rights to democratic repre-
sentation and the commensurability of citizen-subjects maps onto the claim
to equal rights of iconic representation and the commensurability of icons as
symbols of subject-communities. The productive resonances and dissonances
between the two frames constitute the violent ground of what Rancière calls
dissensus and its attendant redistribution of the sensible.
Taken together, the accounts of Dalit image-culture in northern and west-
ern India by Nicolas Jaoul (for UP) and Gary Tartakov (for Maharashtra),
along with Anupama Rao’s broader history of Dalit struggle, demonstrate
how icons of Ambedkar (and to some extent of Phule) achieved commensu-
ration with Hindu idols—despite Ambedkar’s explicit appeal not to idolize
him—and hence also became subject to violent desecration.39 Through such
desecrations, caste Hindu violence mimics the desecration putatively perpe-
trated by untouchables on Hindu idols by the mere fact of their presence—so
in fact, we can see the violence of desecration as a form of equalization or
recognition, as with the Hindu mimicking of Muslim processions decades
earlier. Of course, in this inversion Hindu presence alone is not enough to
perpetrate violence: it involves active stone-throwing at processions parading
Dalit icons such as the ones at Ambedkar’s funeral in 1956; smashing framed
pictures, as in the 1974 Bombay riots caused by clashes between the Shiv
Sena and the Dalit Panthers;40 and the destruction of statues, often through
beheadings, or their vandalization by garlanding with shoes, or smearing
with mud or tar, as in the over one thousand incidents of statue desecration,
nearly 30 per cent involving statues of Ambedkar, recorded in Maharashtra
from 1992 to 1997. These Ambedkar icons, particularly from the 1980s
onwards, were not always state-sponsored civic statues of stone or bronze,
but much smaller and more modest cement, plaster and fiberglass statues
and busts installed in order to assert Dalit presence, often to stake claims to
plots granted to the landless as part of Indira Gandhi’s 20-Point Programme
promulgated during the infamous Emergency of 1975–7. The confidence

Chapter 05.indd 162 10/25/2013 4:45:19 PM

 the handbag that exploded  163

to stake such claims came out of a number of Dalit mobilizations: the street
politics of the Dalit Panthers, the struggles around the name change to the
erstwhile Marathwada University in Aurangabad from 1977–9, and the rise
of the BAMCEF in UP.
But the impetus to build statues was also engendered by the violence of
caste Hindu responses to the installation of Dalit statues: in other words, this
can be seen as a deliberate strategy of provocation.41 If the building of a statue
provokes desecration, its desecration in turn provokes protests and riots, often
with deadly consequences. The overall effect is to render visible caste antago-
nism: in Michael Taussig’s terms, desecration or defacement becomes a highly
productive and powerful ‘labour of the negative’ that exposes a public secret,
in this case the secret of the violence at the heart of the caste order.42 Further, as
Taussig tells us, desecration ironically only serves to re-enchant, and certainly
caste Hindu desecrations of Ambedkar statues have only strengthened their
power as iconic embodiments of the community, and the resolve of Dalits to
organize in resistance. This, then, is how violence becomes the ground for the
formation of Dalit political subjectivity and for the reorganization of social
relations. As Rao says ‘The violence did not stand for other contradictions.
Rather, it was a form of public communication and a material practice that
staged political antagonisms’.43 The violence of desecration is the locus of dis-
sensus: the assertion of equality by those hitherto unheard and unseen, that
is necessarily agonistic because it disturbs the naturalized existing symbolic
order, but that elicits a recognition nonetheless. It is, as Eric Méchoulan puts
it, ‘the affirmation of something in common [that] is at the same time the
repartition of authorized positions’.44

Dalit Universality: Bahujan to Sarvajan

We are now in a position to return to Mayawati’s Ambedkar monument, and
to understand its peculiar temporality and its unrelenting use of stone and
bronze to create an indestructible monument so determined by the prospect
of its turning into a ruin—a prospect that is both unwelcome, as a confir-
mation of vulnerability, yet also welcome, as an index of history and as an
ongoing political incitement—that it starts to look like one. We can also
understand the performative politics in which the monument was impli-
cated: that is, Mayawati’s tactic of keeping the controversy around it on the
boil, using the media to keep caste-Hindu antagonism visible in the public
eye, and thereby to ensure the monument’s inevitably violent and conflict-
ual recognition as a memorial commensurate, for instance, with the Gandhi

Chapter 05.indd 163 10/25/2013 4:45:19 PM

 164  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Samadhi at Rajghat in Delhi. As Annie Coombes puts it, ‘… monuments

are animated and reanimated only through performance … The visibility of
a monument is in fact entirely contingent upon the debates concerning the
reinterpretation of history that take place at moments of social and politi-
cal transition’.45 Mayawati’s monuments index just such a moment in the
reinterpretation of history, through the imaginative figuring of a history
that was hitherto invisible. So we are also in a position to return to Musil’s
demand for monuments to try harder: Mayawati did indeed introduce the
attention-getting elements of sound and dynamism that Musil prescribed
for monuments to compete with ‘contemporary developments in advertis-
ing’, not through the literal introduction of noise, slogans or movement, or
through massive scale alone, but through the orchestration and perpetuation
of mass-mediated antagonism. That is what prevented her monuments, and
their claim to permanence, from fading into invisibility during her regime;
each scandal, each delay in their inauguration only enabled further strategies
to garner attention. This was also what made them quite different, despite
their obvious visual resemblance, to the monumental spaces of fascism and
totalitarianism that staged mass spectacles of the self-presencing of a unitary
people: they were hardly used as rally grounds, but already became efficacious
in their capacity as controversial construction sites.46 So the use of scale here
can be seen as a reflection not simply of an aspiration to absolute power but
of the extent of reparation required for centuries of invisibility.
Similarly, while the Ambedkar memorial’s use of stone and bronze is a
symbol of pride, it is an index not of aggression but of vulnerability. Mayawati
has explicitly said that she knows that subsequent governments will not
look after these sites, and indeed will attempt to destroy them, which is why
she wanted to make them as indestructible as possible within the available
time (which in politics, as she knows only too well, can be very uncertain).
Her chief antagonist here has been Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi
Party (SP), who was reportedly responsible for the neglect of the Ambedkar
memorial when he replaced Mayawati as Chief Minister (the struggles around
recognition have driven a wedge between Dalits, who want to carve out their
own non-Hindu space, and communities designated as Other Backward
Classes or OBCs, who see avenues for mobility within the Hindu fold and
are now considered to be the main perpetrators of anti-Dalit desecrations in
UP). In his campaign for the 2012 UP state election Mulayam Singh Yadav
promised to raze Mayawati’s monuments if the SP came to power (though
his son and SP heir Akhilesh Yadav performed an immediate volte-face on this
in his very first press conference once he took office as UP’s Chief Minister

Chapter 05.indd 164 10/25/2013 4:45:19 PM

 the handbag that exploded  165

in 2012). In other words, then, the most palpable threat of destruction was
rendered visible by the most immediately palpable means: that is, through
the use of stone, and through the massive scale and extent of the monuments.
But at the same time, the less immediately visible and palpable antagonisms
from the upper castes that masquerade under the guise of mass-mediated
secular-liberal reason were also rendered visible by Mayawati’s performances
of provocation and excess vis-à-vis the media, including her periodic requests
to the Central Government for large amounts of funding for monument-
related expenses.47
There is a resignification of matter at work here: public statuary is shaped
by considerations of historical vulnerability, strength and speed (that is, the
need to seize the moment) rather than the ritual imperatives informing temple
icons.48 One instance of the clear connection between the vulnerability of stat-
ues and the use of stone or bronze is that of the first public Ambedkar statue
in Kanpur. Nicolas Jaoul describes how an initially unauthorized Ambedkar
statue, made of cement, was damaged when its arm fell off in a clash with
police en route to its installation in 1969.49 That attempt at installation failed,
but four years later, when the Congress government was attempting to garner
Dalit votes, the state took the initiative in installing a civic statue of Ambedkar;
this time, it was made of stone. By contrast, almost all the recent monumen-
tal Hindu icons, whether built by private entrepreneurs or the state (like the
Sandruptse Shiva in Sikkim), are made of cement: a testament not just to their
greater ambition in terms of scale, but also to the absence of anxiety about their
destruction, at least by humans (a monumental Shiva at Murudeshwara in
Karnataka was struck by lightning and lost an arm).50
If stone is not concrete, it is also not grass and trees—and here again, note
the contrast between the Ambedkar monument and the green, well-watered
Birla Mandir and Birla Kanan in Delhi: ‘kānan’ literally means ‘garden’ or
‘forest’ (see Figure 5.12). As Amy Kazmin remarked, one of the things that
makes the Ambedkar memorial seem sterile and uninhabited is the remark-
able absence of greenery. This is not just a matter of unfinished landscaping,
for the site is almost totally paved in stone: the only provision for greenery is
in the form of planters for palm trees and a few patches of grass. The reluc-
tance to use grass could be explained in terms of the danger of waterlogging,
as this is a flood plain, or again the danger of neglect and abandonment that
might give rise to a ‘jungle’—this was the explanation proffered by one of
the security guards at the site. But there is something else going on as well.
Experientially, the most difficult and confronting things about the site for me
were the absence of shade and the reflective glare: I was there in the heat of

Chapter 05.indd 165 10/25/2013 4:45:19 PM

 166  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 5.12  Man.gal Mahādev’, an eighty-foot Shiva statue, and monumental

statues of Radha and Krishna in the Birla Kanan park along National Highway
8, near Delhi’s international airport, December 2008. The Shiva statue was
inaugurated in 1994, while the others (Radha-Krishna and, opposite them,
Ram-Sita) were built in 2008–9.

June with an Anglo-Canadian graduate student, and by 8.30 a.m. we found

it almost impossible to function; of course the construction workers had only
just started their day. This is a public monument, and unlike the Bahujan
Samaj Prern.a Kendra, it has no sense of Dalit exclusivity about it.51 And yet
it powerfully enacts a reversal of caste’s hierarchies of access without explicitly
reinstituting boundaries: for its modality of universality and publicness is also
one that provides everyone with the embodied sensation of what it has histori-
cally meant to be Dalit, through the vulnerability and discomfort of exposure
to the sun (and the attendant darkening of the skin, to which another layer of
stigma is attached). This, then, is a Dalit publicness, a Dalit universality that
short-circuits the distribution of the universal and the particular to ­proclaim:
‘We the nothing will count as the All’, or, as Mayawati might put it, the
bahujan will count as the sarvajan.52
This alternative universality continues throughout the monument in its
steadfast refusal of caste Hindu models in every aspect except the elephants’

Chapter 05.indd 166 10/25/2013 4:45:19 PM

 the handbag that exploded  167

gesture of greeting, which is secure in its alternative coding as the BSP

symbol. Architectural tropes are taken from ancient Buddhist sites and other
monuments from around the world, while the iconography of the statues
looks to Western models rather than Hindu ones. As various commentators
have noted, Ambedkar wears a suit and tie and carries a copy of the Indian
Constitution (symbolizing universal access to texts and more specifically to
the law), while one of his typical poses, with his arm raised, is reminiscent
of Soviet statues of Lenin (although it also recalls the Buddha’s teaching
mudra).53 The main memorial statue at the site, by the sculptor Ram Sutar, is
unusual in that it shows Ambedkar in a rare seated posture: rare, that is, for
Ambedkar—for anyone familiar with the Lincoln Memorial in Washington
will see that this is a scaled-down bronze replica of that marble statue of
Lincoln [Figure 5.13].54 The parallel here is plain: the social transformation
that the Ambedkar memorial both commemorates and enacts is a liberation
from slavery; what is more, the iconographic message here is that this libera-
tion has no precedent in caste Hindu society.
Dalits’ unashamed reference to the West as a source of egalitarian models
is a continued source of antagonism towards both Hindu and secular nation-
alism, and again this provides an opportunity for continued provocation that
has been effectively capitalized by Chandrabhan Prasad, a Dalit journalist
and activist based in Delhi, who on April 30, 2010 laid the foundations of a
temple to ‘Goddess English’ in a UP village.55 The iconography of this god-

Figure 5.13  Seated bronze Ambedkar statue by Ram Sutar, Dr Bhimrao

Ambedkar Smarak, Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal, Lucknow,
May 2009. The statue is clearly based on the white marble statue of Abraham
Lincoln by Daniel Chester French at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.

Chapter 05.indd 167 10/25/2013 4:45:20 PM

 168  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

dess is based on another figure from the world’s second largest democracy:
the Statue of Liberty. But with the iconography of Mayawati herself we are
on rather trickier ground. Here the enormous weight of the morally loaded
representation of woman as nation or tradition cannot be shaken off that
easily; she does not wear Western-style clothing, however her short hair and
handbag gesture in that direction, while her adoption of the Punjabi salwar-
kameez with a dupatta worn in the style of a scarf repudiates the Brahminical
saris worn by other women politicians such as Indira and Sonia Gandhi or
Jayalalitha. This also forges a link back to Kanshi Ram’s Punjabi origins (that
is, to the state with the greatest proportion of Dalits relative to the rest of the
population). But if the handbag reminds us of the material but not social
gains made by Chamars, or is read by others as foregrounding an inadequate
cosmopolitanism or a Thatcher-like ruthlessness, it initially appeared in her
iconography simply as a tool of her trade, the sign of a working woman,
much like the small towel that Kanshi Ram carried in his hand to wipe the
sweat off his face on his travels (though here again, note the evocation of the
sensation of heat and a hard-working body).56
These iconographic repudiations of the caste Hindu schema, however, are
accompanied by another kind of repudiation at the level of the mode of
engagement with the image. We might, at first glance, want to frame this
in terms of an explicit valorization of ‘exhibition value’ over ‘cult value’: a
preference for rendering visible rather than maintaining as occult, and fram-
ing images as the work of humans rather than as miraculous manifestations
of the gods.57 While a sense of accessibility and public spectacle characterizes
both the monument as a whole and the seated Ambedkar memorial statue at
its centre, it also repeatedly thematizes and draws to our attention the process
of its installation. Near the entrance to the complex are large marble tablets
with written inscriptions in Hindi and English as to why the monument was
made, by whom, and what it stands for; at the end of the colonnade of ele-
phants is a shining golden relief model of the complex (see Figure 5.14), while
another relief model appears on one of the bronze murals in an ante-room
next to the seated Ambedkar statue. Most intriguing, however, is the mural
opposite the latter one featuring the model of the site: another bronze relief,
this time based on a narrative photo collage put together under Mayawati’s
active direction, showing her laying the foundation stone of the memorial
in 1995 and then dedicating it to the people (lokārpan. , literally ‘giving to
the people’) in 2007—and here too we see a figure holding a model of the
complex (Figure 5.14). In this mural three discrete scenes, two of them cen-
trally featuring Mayawati, crowd into the frame, but with the overall effect of

Chapter 05.indd 168 10/25/2013 4:45:20 PM

 the handbag that exploded  169

Figure 5.14  Bronze relief mural in an ante-room adjoining the main

Ambedkar memorial statue, thematizing the foundation, inauguration, and
completion of the Ambedkar memorial complex. Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar
Smarak, Dr B.R. Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal, Lucknow, May 2009.

centring her as the largest element in the overall composition as well, while
a somewhat smaller Ambedkar on his Lincoln-like throne is pushed off to
the right. This doubling of Mayawati’s centrality is echoed in an even more
astonishing doubling of the theme of Mayawati as the bearer of the gift of
representation, the donor of the image to the people. If the very theme of the
mural is Mayawati’s role in installing the Ambedkar memorial and dedicating
it to the people, the mural in turn is flanked by two twelve-foot statues of
Mayawati and Kanshi Ram standing on the ground in front of it, each with
one arm outstretched, as if to present the mural itself (Figure 5.15).
What do we make of this remarkable semiotic excess, this frenzy of mul-
tiple prestation that belies an anxiety around the centrality of the leader, and
around the assertion of control over the source and process of r­ epresentation–
indeed, over representativity itself? Again, rather than seeing this solely in
terms of Mayawati’s insecurity and desire for importance, or in terms of an
anxiety about the empty place of democratic power, compelling as both these
readings may be, I would also like to relate it to the material reconfiguration
of the image-schema of caste Hindu iconicity (and hence of ‘cult value’) in
the face of democratic claims, and in accordance with a logic of the image
that plays out the problematic imperatives of democratic representation. For
a start, the composition of the photo-collage mural effectively features two
iconic figures, Mayawati and Ambedkar, in slightly different registers: not in

Chapter 05.indd 169 10/25/2013 4:45:20 PM

 170  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 5.15  Twelve-foot bronze statues of Mayawati and Kanshi Ram

presenting the mural in Figure 5.14. Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Smarak, Dr B.R.
Ambedkar Sāmājik Parivartan Sthal, Lucknow, May 2009.

the manner of a hypostatized divine couple, but with Mayawati as the his-
torical agent (her historicity signaled by the strong perspectivalism of the left
hand side of the composition) who mobilizes the relatively flat, frontal, static
Ambedkar icon through her garland of flowers (though garlanding is, of
course, a Hindu ritual gesture). Power here is both sacral and secular, ­resident
both in an individual agent and in an embodiment of the community; the
mural both mimics and refutes Hindu iconicity in a manner consistent with
Dalit mobilizations of desecration for democratic recognition.58
Secondly, what is both excessively thematized and enacted by the visual
prestations of this mural and its donors is the sheer accessibility and pub-
licness of the icon. Unlike the manoratha-type images of painting and
photographic traditions where patrons are depicted in profile flanking the
sacred icon with bowed heads, closed eyes and folded hands, the patrons
of these images meet their viewers’ gazes with heads held high and palms
outstretched (for these icons are not religious but secular, not indices of
the Absolute but representatives of the people). But even in its refutation
of the Brahminical sequestration and policing of icons, the message here is
double-edged: even as these images are given to the people within the frame-
work of a reconfigured Dalit universality, the source of this gift is made very
clear. And in this moment of open-handed presentation a new police order
makes its presence felt: the order in which Mayawati came to discourage

Chapter 05.indd 170 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 the handbag that exploded  171

the ­building of Ambedkar statues in village communities, and increasingly

failed to respond to complaints about desecration.59 On this reading, then,
the trouble with Mayawati’s ‘symbolic’ agenda was not that she set too much
store by the symbolic, or that she included herself among the subjects of
her iconic programme, but that she succumbed to the neoliberal democratic
logic whereby the symbolic power of minorities—particularly their right to
control representation—becomes the monopoly of the state, thereby turning
the active claiming of equality into the passive receipt of state bounty.60
Again, note that this moment of transfer of iconic authority to the para-
doxical subject of democratic leadership—the ‘first among equals’—bypasses
the bourgeois institution of fine art (or Art with a capital A), and with it the
creative genius onto whom Kant and the Romantics sublimated the divine
energies of the artwork. In other words, we see and hear nothing of the artist
who created this sculpture—there is no discernible signature, no inscription
crediting Ram Sutar for his contribution: instead, what counts are the figures
within the picture frame, which also coincide with the figures of the patrons
occupying a liminal space both inside and outside the frame. So, unlike
in the Benjaminian account, exhibition value here does not unfold within
the frame of the bourgeois artwork, but as a reconfiguration of the cultic
frame.61 Instead of the larger than life creative ‘genius’ we have an oscillation
between two iconic figures within the frame: Ambedkar, the sacralized, cultic
embodiment of community, and Mayawati, more a creature of c­ ontemporary
mediation and public exhibition like the cinematic star: she who is just like us
but bigger (in this case twice our size), she who represents us by fulfilling our
aspirations for us.62 And this oscillation is repeated in the movement between
the figures in relief within the mural and the sculptural figures presenting
the mural to us, the latter no longer just perspectival but three-dimensional.
Here the value and efficacy of these iconic figures stems not from their
remaining hidden but from their democratic publicness; but ultimately what
renders them auratic, and their efficacy of a sacral order (following Taussig),
is the violence that is enacted and provoked by their emergence into the
public arena, in Ambedkar’s case through desecration and in Mayawati’s case
through media antagonism.
What we are seeing here, then, is the self-description of a newly configured
police order, and the (still chimerical, to the extent that it continues to be
blocked and contested) reimagining of state authority on the basis of a recon-
stituted polity. This reimagining figures forth a certain revisualization of
history, on the archaic scale of a monumental site that invites us all to inhabit
it and hence to reconfigure our habitus; and at the same time it reappropri-

Chapter 05.indd 171 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 172  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

ates and reconfigures the sacral efficacy of the icon in a way that works with
contemporary forms of publicness, mass mediation and democratic commen-
suration. The imperative of commensuration makes it necessarily mimetic,
borrowing generic elements from an otherwise repudiated (caste Hindu)
iconic economy on the one hand and on the other from a historicist idiom
that is simultaneously predicated on, pre-empts and embraces the prospect of
ruin. But the very possibility of the material appearance—the incarnation—
of this new order of consensus, with its reconfigured policing of the sensible,
is enabled by a moment of politics: a performative, embodied, material redis-
tribution of the sensible in which the logic of democracy reconfigures the
logic of the sacred icon to reveal the public secret of caste antagonism, and to
render visible and audible those who were hitherto unheard and unseen, to
render palpable a heat that ‘we’ had not felt. Whatever Mayawati’s fate, her
monuments will have done their job: no-one will ever again be able to ignore
UP’s Dalits (think here, for instance, of the intense efforts of the Congress
Party’s Rahul Gandhi to woo Dalits in the 2012 UP election campaign).
From now on, they will always count. This is why the SP’s Akhilesh Yadav
had to recant his father’s promise to raze the monuments: he apprehends the
power they encapsulate, and the immense explosion that would follow any
attempt at their desecration. And this is why the story of the Lucknow and
Noida memorials is not just the story of Mayawati, her psychopathology, or
her biography, but a much larger story about the redistribution of matter:
about bodies, blood, sweat, rivers, cement, stone, grass—and not least, about
the fires of antagonism that catalyze the alchemical transformation of leather
into bronze.

Abbreviations
BAMSEF Backward and Minority Community Employees Federation
BJP Bharatiya Janata Party
BSP Bahujan Samaj Party
EC Election Commission
ICCR Indian Council for Cultural Relations
MSKRJGEG Manyavar Shri Kanshi Ram Ji Green (Eco) Garden
PIL Public Interest Litigation
SC Supreme Court
SP Samajwadi Party
SPA School of Planning and Architecture
UP Uttar Pradesh

Chapter 05.indd 172 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 the handbag that exploded  173

Notes
 1 The Oxford English Dictionary also provides the etymology of the verb ‘to hand-
bag’: ‘1980s: coined by Julian Critchley, Conservative MP, with reference to
Margaret Thatcher’s ministerial style in cabinet meetings’.
  2 Robert Musil, ‘Monuments’, in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, trans.
Peter Wortsman (New York: Archipelago Books, 2006). Sources variously date
this essay to 1927, 1932, and 1936.
 3 This phenomenon of the emergence of monumental statues in post-reform
India and the Indian diaspora is the subject of a research project I am cur-
rently engaged in, entitled ‘Highways to Heaven: Religious Spectacles and
their Publics in Post-Reform India’; I am grateful to the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this project. I would also
like to thank the marvellously engaged audiences at the University of New South
Wales, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1 Shanthi road, and Stanford University for
their questions and comments, which (I hope) inform this version of the paper.
  4 The larger project of which this is an offshoot attends (among other things)
to the relationship between monumental statues and the automotive industry:
the visual, technological, and spatial regimes that it inaugurated via increased
automobility, the intensified building of roads and travel infrastructure, the
attendant growth of peri-, inter- and intra-urban real estate, and the rise in
domestic tourism.
  5 See James Clifford, ‘Travelling Cultures’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson,
and Paula A. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992),
pp. 96–116.
  6 On spectatorial rights and citizenship, see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema
in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 2009), particularly Chapter 3: ‘The Cinema-Effect
1’. Addressing the comparison that is sometimes made between Mayawati and
Jayalalitha is beyond the scope of this paper: this would entail an analysis of the
misogynistic basis of these comparisons, the differing political programmes, his-
tories, and contexts of the DMK and the BSP, the different caste backgrounds of
the two women (Jayalalitha is a Brahmin), their respective track records in terms
of corruption and repression of dissent, and the rhetorics of their characteriza-
tion in media and other discourse.
  7 I am no expert on Dalit politics and history (an intrinsic shortcoming of the
kind of multi-site work I am doing in this project), and am relying heavily here
on secondary accounts: particularly Nicolas Jaoul’s work on recent developments
in UP (Nicolas Jaoul, ‘Learning the Use of Symbolic Means: Dalits, Ambedkar
Statues and the State in Uttar Pradesh’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol.
40 [2006], pp. 175–207), including on the use of statues, and Anupama
Rao’s rich discussion of the caste question as constitutive of Indian moder-
nity (Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern
India [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009]), which

Chapter 05.indd 173 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 174  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

includes a very useful theorization of Dalit political subjectivity that I draw on

extensively here (other sources include Nigam 2006 and Gary Michael Tartakov,
‘Art and Identity: The Rise of a New Buddhist Imagery’, Art Journal, vol. 49,
no. 4 [1990], pp.  409–16). I also draw on conversations with Vivek Kumar
at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Ram Kumar of Dynamic Action Group,
Lucknow—to both of whom my heartfelt thanks—as well as my own fieldwork
in June 2009 in Lucknow and Noida, where Mayawati’s monuments are being
built, in villages near Lucknow in Rae Bareli district where statues of Ambedkar
and other Dalit icons have been desecrated, and again in Noida in August 2010.
However, given the volatile political environment and the possible repercussions
for my informants, I am ethically bound to limit my use of this information;
hence the largely formal analysis in this paper. It could be argued that the perfor-
mative gesture of adopting a formalist rather than ethnographic method in this
instance is more appropriate to the aspirations embodied in these monuments;
in this sense, it not only acquiesces to but also lends a certain performative force
to their will to power. As this essay attempts to demonstrate, there are both
deterritorializing and reterritorializing political forces at work in that will to
power, that cannot be disentangled.
 8 See Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), also ‘Mass-Reproduction and the Art of
the Bazaar’, in Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana (eds), Cambridge Companion
to Modern Indian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
  9 Kajri Jain, ‘Taking and Making Offence: Husain and the Politics of Desecration’
in Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.), Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain
and the Idea of India (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 198–212.
10 http://www.techtipspro.com/2009/09/monumental-spendings-by-mayawati.
html, 12 September 2009, accessed 21 July 2010.
11 ‘Mayawati Spent Over Rs 14000 Crores on Memorials: Congress’, Thai
Indian News, 23 March 2010, http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/politics/
mayawati-spent-over-rs14000-cr-on-memorials-congress_100338571.html,
accessed 21 July 2010; Soutik Biswas, ‘Ms Mayawati’s Statue Protection Force’,
Soutik Biswas’s India (BBC News blog), 29 January 2010, http://www.bbc.
co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/01/ms_mayawatis_statue_protec-
tion_force.html, accessed 22 July 2010; Preetika Rana, ‘Dalit Park: Boon or Bane
for Mayawati?’ India Real Time (Wall Street Journal blog), 18 October 2011,
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/10/18/dalit-park-boon-or-bane-for-
mayawati/, accessed 20 October 2011.
12 On 22 February 2010 the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (SC) asked the
Election Commission (EC) to investigate and decide whether installation of
statues of elephants at public cost added up to misuse of BSP’s election symbol
in violation of poll laws and therefore whether a petition seeking derecognition
of BSP’s election symbol can be maintained. The EC then went back to the
SC and said that the UP government was making their investigation impos-
sible. On 9 July 2010, the Supreme Court directed the EC panel to ‘rein in its

Chapter 05.indd 174 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 the handbag that exploded  175

probe till the allegations are found “maintainable” under law’. ‘BSP Symbol: SC
Asks EC to Check Maintainability of Complaint’, Indian Express, 10 July 2010,
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/bsp-symbol-sc-asks-ec-to-check-main­
tainabil/644654/, accessed 22 July 2010.
13 Election Commission of India Press Note No.ECI/PN/9/2012, 18 January,
2012, Sub: ‘Covering of Statues in Uttar Pradesh—Comments Reported in
Media Regarding’.
14 The ways in which the ‘green’ imaginary is processed at various monuments
aimed at tourists, pilgrims, and vote banks is addressed in the larger project of
which this is a part.
15 Prannoy Roy, NDTV 24x7 report on ‘Mayawati’s Statue Building Spree’, 14 July
2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-hv0WyCvS0, accessed 20 February
2011.
16 Thus, for instance, even the otherwise sympathetic S. Anand writes: ‘Statues
for herself—“very trivial and unbecoming”—only feed her obscene delusions
of grandeur and betray a fear of mortality’. The Hindu, Sunday, 5 July 2009,
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2009/07/05/stories/2009070550120400.htm,
accessed 22 July 2010.
17 Ajoy Bose, Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati (New Delhi: Penguin
Books, 2009).
18 http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090416/jsp/opinion/story_10825507.
jsp, 16 April 2009 and http://shobhaade.blogspot.com/2009/03/ferragamo-
handbag-for-mayawati.html, 3 March 2009; accessed 22 July 2010. Kesavan’s
intervention, however, remains at the level of psychology/biography: ‘these
privileged young people were so insulated from life’s slings and arrows that they
didn’t have to develop Mayavati’s defensive angularities’.
19 NDTV 24x7 report on ‘Mayawati’s Statue Building Spree’, as above.
20 This parallels the neoliberal separation of the state and the economy; as Brenner
and Theodore point out, ‘neoliberal doctrine represents states and markets as if
they were diametrically opposed principles of social organization, rather than
recognizing the politically constructed character of all economic relations’. Neil
Brenner and Nik Theodore, ‘Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing
Neoliberalism”’, Antipode, vol. 34, no. 3 (July 2002), pp. 349–379, 353.
21 See Nancy Fraser on the pitfalls of the identity politics model of recognition.
Fraser is careful to point out that while there are pernicious aspects of the politics
of recognition in neoliberal regimes, this is not always the case; her argument
is that status is an important category in tempering debates around identity.
Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking Recognition’, New Left Review 3, May–June 2000,
pp. 107–120, and ‘Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response
to Judith Butler’, Social Text, nos 52–3 (Fall/Winter 1997), pp. 279–89.
22 This is not the place to venture into the intricacies of the way the ‘recognition vs
redistribution’ debate has unfolded in political philosophy, but suffice it to say
that even dualists like Nancy Fraser who would like to hold onto an analytical
distinction between economic and cultural injustice concede that in cases like

Chapter 05.indd 175 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 176  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

that of caste, gender, and race, injustice must be seen as bivalent—that is, both
cultural and economic.
23 There is another discussion to be had here about why public art is so often
subject to this kind of accusation, which ties into the genealogy of the modern
(that is, post-Romantic) conception of art or the aesthetic, with its address to
individual subjects and its delinking from the sacred.
24 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London:
Verso, 2004), and Dissensus, trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York:
Continuum, 2010).
25 I thank Christiane Brosius for pointing out this similarity with real estate adver-
tisements.
26 Kaktikar is one of the principals at Design Associates, founded by himself
and two other graduates of Delhi’s premier architectural school, the School
of Planning and Architecture (SPA); http://www.designassociates.in/p3.html,
accessed 21 February 2011. It is important to keep in mind the architects’ and
sculptors’ contributions to the aesthetics of Mayawati’s monuments—something
that is seldom acknowledged in the public debates that tend to see them as a
transparent expression of her intentions rather than as the outcome of a process
of negotiation and translation between Mayawati and her advisors as the chief
clients and the designers, contractors, and various state and civic ­authorities.
27 For an instance of the latter, see Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema, pp. 84–5.
28 Ram Kumar, ‘Sarvajan Fabric Showing the Strain’, Fountain Ink, 3 February
2012, http://fountainink.in/?p=1107, accessed 14 February 2012.
29 See Freer Gallery online, ‘The Art of Buddhism’, http://www.asia.si.edu/exhi-
bitions/online/buddhism/india2b.htm. I am grateful to Sarah Richardson for
her invaluable help in identifying the site’s references to Buddhist architecture,
and for pointing out these differences from the Ashokan columns and from the
ancient stūpa form.
30 Thanks to Kavita Singh, with her keen attunement to the work of museums, for
making this important point.
31 Amy Kazmin in the Financial Times, 23 May 2009: ‘You might call this the
new Rome, except it has all the authenticity and originality of a Bollywood set:
Mogul-style [sic] pavilions here, Buddhist-style domes there, white marble stat-
ues everywhere. What is most striking, beyond the site’s scale, is how barren it
is: with hardly any grass or trees yet, it is just a vast unbroken expanse of stone.
And, although new—with labourers still swarming around—the m ­ emorial
seems strangely lifeless, as if it was, from conception, only ever intended to be
an abandoned ruin’. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e01f13f0-44d7-11de-82d6-
00144feabdc0.html, accessed 24 July 2010.
32 Rao, Caste Question, p. 26.
33 Ibid., p. 26.
34 Ibid., Chapter 4.
35 Ibid., p. 167.
36 Jaoul, ‘Learning the Use’, p. 184.

Chapter 05.indd 176 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 the handbag that exploded  177

37 I address the Birla Mandir’s role in the politics of inclusion (and in the geneal-
ogy of the religious theme park) in more detail in my larger project. Something
of the difference between the paternalistic, hegemonic, inclusive Gandhian mes-
sage and Ambedkar’s antagonistic call to political struggle comes across in the
very similar yet crucially different captions of the sculptures of the two figures
by Ram Sutar, the sculptor patronized both by Mayawati for her statues and
reliefs and by organs of the Central Government such as the Indian Council for
Cultural Relations (ICCR) for supplying statues and busts of Gandhi to foreign
governments and Indian diplomatic missions overseas. Sutar’s statues of Gandhi
often bear the Devanagari legend ‘Mera jeevan hi mera sandesh hai’ (My life is
my message), while his statues of Ambedkar—such as the main memorial statue
at the Parivartan Sthal in Lucknow—say ‘Mera jeevan sangharsh hi mera sandesh
hai’ (My life’s struggle is my message). Gandhi’s message is simply to be (like
him), while Ambedkar’s is that being is itself a struggle.
38 B.K. Birla, interviewed 24 December 2007.
39 Gary Michael Tartakov, ‘Art and Identity: The Rise of a New Buddhist Imagery’,
Art Journal, vol. 49, no.4 (1990), pp. 409–16, and Jaoul, ‘Learning the Use’.
40 Rao, Caste Question, p. 201: ‘Policemen “entered… screaming ‘Break the idols
of these Mahardes’”.
41 There is an intriguing mention (that I have been unable to confirm in my field-
work) of this being an explicitly articulated strategy of the Dalit Panthers: see
Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘The Bahujan Samaj Party in North India: No Longer Just
a Dalit Party?’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
(formerly South Asia Bulletin), vol. 18, no. 1 (1998), pp. 35–52, especially p. 44.
42 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 1. As Jaoul says of an attempted
unauthorized installation of an Ambedkar statue in 1969 which was broken in
a clash with police, ‘Although the attempt to install the statue failed, it was suc-
cessful in opening a breach in Congress rhetoric by highlighting the authorities’
ambivalence towards Ambedkar and the Scheduled Castes and exposing the
casteism that lay behind official secularism.’ Jaoul, ‘Learning the Use’, p. 187.
43 Rao, Caste Question, p. 216.
44 Eric Méchoulan, ‘On the Edges of Jacques Rancière’, Substance 103, vol. 33, no. 1
(2004), pp. 3–9.
45 Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in
a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 12.
46 For this reason, too, it is not particularly useful to entirely reduce the meaning
and efficacy of these monuments to Mayawati’s intentions, even if we (or she,
for that matter!) had complete access to what those are.
47 For instance, in August 2010 the BSP approached the Central Government for
40.9 million rupees for a Kanshi Ram Eco-Park. The request came a few days
after the Supreme Court sent a high-level committee to investigate allegations
by local residents and environmentalists that the Ambedkar Park in Noida was
in violation of environmental laws.

Chapter 05.indd 177 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 178  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

48 Mayawati’s need for speed in erecting these monuments—again, driven by the

political vulnerability delineated above—meant not just a massive commit-
ment of labour (work at the Lucknow sites continued late into the night, with
a veritable tent city of workers from all over the country camped on site), but
also technological innovation. For example, the sixty massive elephants at the
Ambedkar memorial were not carved from single stone monoliths but were
assembled from a set of smaller blocks that keyed into each other like a three-
dimensional jigsaw; these keys were designed with the help of thermoplastic
moulding machines used in the automotive industry.
49 Jaoul, ‘Learning the Use’, pp. 186–7.
50 However, this willingness to use cement may be gradually being mitigated by
ritual considerations, as patrons of monumental Hindu statues, particularly in
South Indian temple complexes, are subject to a different kind of anxiety about
claims to tradition and authenticity (the canonical temple sculptures and icons
were built in specific types of stone in accordance with the Shilpashastras).
51 See Maxine Loynd, ‘Understanding the Bahujan Samaj Prerna Kendra: Space,
Place and Political Mobilisation’, Asian Studies Review, vol. 33, no. 4 (2009),
pp. 469–82.
52 Sarvajan (meaning ‘all the people’) has been the term used by Mayawati for an
expanded political constituency that includes caste Hindus alongside Dalits.
Žižek glosses the demos, as the subject of ‘politics proper’ in Rancière, as a sin-
gular that paradoxically stands in for the universal: ‘we—the “nothing”, not
counted in the order—are the people, we are All against others who stand only
for their particular privileged interests’, Slavoj Zizek, ‘Afterword’ in Jacques
Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, p. 70.
53 See Jaoul, ‘Learning the Use’, and Tartakov, ‘Art and Identity’.
54 Bronze has been used for the most privileged figures at the monument: those
of Ambedkar, Ramabai Ambedkar, Mayawati, and Kanshi Ram; the others are
made of stone, such as an unusual large four-directional Buddha in its own
pavilion or the series of Dalit icons in marble ranged along one of the peripheral
walls of the site. This may have to do with the relative naturalism and detail
achievable in bronze, combined with the speed of execution. Here, interest-
ingly, the imperative of indestructibility does not apply in quite the same way
as it does to the extensive use of stone for the architectural elements, for while
durable and resistant to the elements in one sense, bronze is also notoriously
re-usable (as in the case of over a hundred statues from the Third Republic’s
phase of ‘statuomania’ in Paris that were melted down by the Vichy regime in
1940–4; see Sergiusz Michalski, ‘Democratic “Statuomania” in Paris’, Public
Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870–1997 [London: Reaktion Books,
1998, pp. 13–55]). But the fact that these particular iconic figures were simul-
taneously the most vulnerable and the most highly invested, closely guarded,
and well-protected statues at the site is consistent with the precarious economy
of provocation and desecration in which they are situated. (Thanks to Shukla
Sawant for her reminder about the vulnerability of bronze.)

Chapter 05.indd 178 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 the handbag that exploded  179

55 See Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘The Work of Goddesses in the Age of Mass

Reproduction’, in Christiane Brosius and Roland Wenzlhuemer (eds),
Transcultural Turbulences: Flows of Images and Media (Wien, Heidelberg,
New York: Springer Verlag, 2011).
56 The initial appearance of the handbag was a matter of sheer contingency: when
Mayawati was being photographed for a proposed statue the sculptor asked
her to hold something so that her hands were not simply hanging by her sides,
and she went and grabbed her handbag, as that is what she normally carries to
­meetings.
57 Here I am using the terms ‘exhibition value’ and ‘cult value’ as delineated in Walter
Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility:
Second Version’, in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin
(eds), The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other
Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., Cambridge (MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 19–55.
58 To this extent it is not unlike the ‘Janus-faced’ images described by Hans Belting
in relation to the negotiation between religious icons as embodiments of the
divine and artworks as embodiments of a more abstract artistic idea. See Hans
Belting, ‘Religion and Art: The Crisis of the Image at the Beginning of the
Modern Age’, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 458–603.
59 This is what I was hearing from villagers dealing with statue desecrations in Rae
Bareli district in June 2009; a far cry from the situation when the BSP first came
into power and Mayawati put rural statue-building high on her agenda, with
designated Ambedkar villages receiving funding for Ambedkar statues and parks
among other development measures such as providing roads, water, electricity,
and schools.
60 On the de-democratizing ceding of power to the state that characterizes
the ‘neo-’ in both neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the US context see
Wendy Brown, ‘American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism
and De-democratization’, Political Theory, vol. 34, no. 6 (December 2006),
pp. 690–714.
61 I make this argument for the Indian culture industries in general in ‘Mass-
Reproduction and the Art of the Bazaar’. But this is not to say that the frame of
the fine art ‘genius’ does not apply in other contexts, even to the same sculptor:
Ram Sutar was featured in a large solo show called ‘Monumental Sculptures’ at
the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi (India’s state-sponsored national art academy),
13–22 February 2010. It is interesting to note, however, that perhaps due to the
show’s location statues of Mayawati were not in evidence, even though it was
primarily comprised of sculptures of political figures.
62 In this context it is worth mentioning that the Lucknow-based Dalit sculp-
tor Amar Pal defended Mayawati’s much-criticized erection of statues of herself
on the grounds that there were no other modern female role models for Dalit
women. Interview, Lucknow, 8 June 2009.

Chapter 05.indd 179 10/25/2013 4:45:21 PM

 6
Conceits of the Copy
Travelling Replicas of the Past and the Present*

Tapati Guha-Thakurta

It is a common refrain of our times that we are living in the age of the copy.1
The notion of this age stretches backwards in time to different nodal points
in modernity when new technologies of reproduction invested the duplicate
with the full powers of substituting the original, and allowed it a mobility
and circulation that gave it a life far in excess of its authorizing source. But it
also keeps hurtling towards a present that is connoted by the unruliness and
ungovernability of the copy, in the way it tends to completely extricate itself
from its referent, subvert its authority and become a sign only of itself. My
paper focuses on architectural replicas and recreations, and on the kinds of
travels they embark on in India’s colonial and contemporary histories. I will
treat the monumental replica as a central entity that has sustained, over time,
the popular imaginaries of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology,
and has served as the grounds on which professional knowledges came to be
configured within new public domains of display and spectatorship. I will
also use the divergent forms, claims, and aspirations of these fabrications as
a way of marking out their post-colonial careers from their colonial pasts—­

*  Apart from the conference on ‘New Cultural Histories of India’ at the Centre
for Studies in Social Sciences in January 2010, earlier and present versions of this
paper have been presented as the Raymond Firth lecture at the annual conference
of the Association of Social Anthropologists at Bristol (2009), at the conference
on ‘Circuits of the Popular’ at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi (2009), and as a public lecture at Smith College, USA (2011).

Chapter 06.indd 180 10/28/2013 12:30:31 PM

 conceits of the copy  181

distinguishing the popular from the official, the regional from the national,
the local from the global trends of replications.

A Tale of Two Replicas

Let me begin with two cameos from the present—with the making of repli-
cas of two of India’s most celebrated archaeological monuments in different
parts of the globe, that have elicited sharply contrasting responses from the
national media and government. The years 2008–2009 saw the opening, in
the one case, of a model of the Sanchi Stupa in the Henan province of central
China, 16 km from the ancient Buddhist monastic site of Luoyang; in the
other case, of a remake of the Taj Mahal in a projected amusement park com-
plex at Sonargaon, 30 km outside Dhaka in Bangladesh (Figures 6.1, 6.3).
While the one replica was held up as the gift and pride of the Indian nation,
as a symbol of official cultural exchange and diplomatic goodwill,2 the other
left the Indian Embassy in Bangladesh fuming at both the audacity of the
copy and the crassness of the remake.3 The distinction, it has been pointed
out, is between a markedly ‘official’ and a flagrantly ‘unofficial’ construction,
between one sanctioned by India’s ancient civilizational history and modern
scholarly expertise, and one propelled mainly by the needs of popular tour-
ism and mass spectatorship. But let us consider more closely what authorizes
and enables these different orders of replicas, in their conceptions and inten-
tions, and in their positioning vis-à-vis the Indian originals.
The building of a full-scale model of the Sanchi Stupa on site, at Luoyang,
has been a joint project of the Indian and Chinese governments, first con-
ceived of during a China visit of Indian Prime Minister, Vajpayee, in June
2003, and implemented since 2006 under the close supervision of a com-
mittee at New Delhi headed by the scholar-bureaucrat, Dr. Kapila Vatsyana.4
This new shrine, the official documents emphasize, is not intended to be an
exact replica of the Sanchi Stupa. It is the product of a design of a modern
architectural firm of New Delhi,5 which had to meet the approval of the
committee and was modified by Dr. Vatsayana from a historical and aes-
thetic perspective (Figure 6.1). Likewise, the image of the Buddha placed
inside the stupa (a copy of a sculpture of a Dhyani Buddha from Sarnath) is
a similar modern fabrication, produced by another Delhi-based professional
firm, called Icons India (Figure 6.2). There are many improvisations that
have gone into reproducing a slice of India’s ancient Buddhist art and religion
in distant China. The material that has been used for the building is pink
Dholpur stone transported from Rajasthan—a loose approximation of the

Chapter 06.indd 181 10/28/2013 12:30:32 PM

 182  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 6.1  Remake of the Sanchi Stupa at Luoyang, China—photograph

courtesy of Ashish Chakrabarty, 2008.

Figure 6.2  Copy of a Sarnath Buddha sculpture inside the Sanchi Stupa at
Luoyang, China—photograph courtesy of Ashish Chakrabarty, 2008.

buff ­sandstone of the original structure at Sanchi—a stone now widely used
for all contemporary look-alikes of north Indian temples that have come up in
various parts of India. The workmen assigned to the task were drawn from a
pool of skilled personnel from Rajasthan and Orissa who are able to faithfully
replicate the architectural designs and carvings of stupa ­gateways and temple

Chapter 06.indd 182 10/28/2013 12:30:37 PM

 conceits of the copy  183

walls in k­ eeping with the steady demands for such current refabrications.6
The stupa dome, a funerary monument, built in the past as a solid brick
and stone encasement of the corporeal relics of Buddha and his disciples, is
made to accommodate here an interior hall in the style of the latter-day form
of Buddhist vihāras (monastic residences) and chaityas (congregation halls).
And gracing this hall is an example of a Buddha image of the classical ‘Gupta
school’ from the fifth century Buddhist site of Sarnath, post-dating by several
centuries the original stupa and gateway structures at Sanchi that go back to
the second century BCE (where Buddhism exists in its early aniconic phase,
devoid of any anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha).7 All of these
changes may be read as creative licenses, which do not deviate from the broad
ambit of India’s ancient Buddhist history and do not detract from the overall
religious sanctity of this transported monument.
As against the original stupa structures at Sanchi, that had to be salvaged
from years of pilferage and spoliation to undergo a laborious reassemblage
and conservation, a century ago, under the Director-General of Indian
archaeology, John Marshall,8 the Luoyang remake stands unabashedly whole
and new. Strategically erected at the site of the now-extinct Baima Si (White
Horse) temple, the oldest Buddhist monastery on Chinese soil dating back to
the first century CE (where the legend goes that two Indian Buddhist monks
arrived on white horses carrying the sacred texts), it is intended to com-
memorate the coming of Buddhism from India to China. And its wholeness
is also offset by the neighbouring ruins of Buddhist grottoes and decapitated
rock-hewn Buddhas of Luoyang, and made to contrast this ‘other sad history’
of the past ravage and neglect of China’s own archaeological treasures.9 In an
internationally showcased China, India’s Sanchi Stupa was to take its place
amidst a cluster of replica monasteries—among them, an already built Thai
monastery—in its mission of developing Luoyang into a new centre of world
Buddhist pilgrimage.
Were there similar compulsions at work in claiming for Bangladesh, in
the name of Islam, India’s most iconic Mughal monument? On the contrary,
the prime concerns here were those of popular tourism and entertainment. A
film producer and director, Moni Ahsanullah, had as his model the Ramoji
Rao film city that he had seen in Hyderabad, when he acquired 15 bighas
(5 acres) of land to build a mega amusement part at Sonargaon outside
Dhaka—and decided to transplant at the heart of this park India’s world-
famous ‘Monument to Love’, one that he had visited several times at Agra
since 198010 (Figure 6.3). In a world where the Taj Mahal is available for all
to own as image and copy, Ahsanullah’s daring lay in building a near life-size

Chapter 06.indd 183 10/28/2013 12:30:37 PM

 184  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 6.3  Copy of the Taj Mahal under construction at the proposed
amusement park at Sonargaon, Dhaka, 2008—photograph courtesy of NDTV.

permanent structure to rival the original, to provide all ordinary Bangladeshis

who cannot afford a trip to India with their own Taj Mahal. It is instruc-
tive to see how the making of this monumental replica narrates its case on a
double register of earnestness and excesses. Ahsanullah claims to have spent
28 years closely ‘studying’ the Taj before he began constructing a faithful
replica in 2004.11 Most crucial to the credentials of his Taj Mahal is the sheer
extravagance of funds and materials invested in it. Involving a staggering sum
of 200 crore Bangladeshi takas (the equivalent of US$58 million), it has been
built with marble tiles and granite imported from Italy, with 350 pounds of
bronze used for its dome, and 172 diamonds brought in from Belgium to

Chapter 06.indd 184 10/28/2013 12:30:39 PM

 conceits of the copy  185

stud the dome and minarets and make them glitter in the light. Coloured
mosaic decoration were also fabricated on imported Chinese tiles to orna-
ment the white structure.12 While one group of Chinese workers assisted in
the on-site stone cladding work for the Luoyang Stupa, another group sup-
plied the decorated tiles for Bangladesh’s Taj Mahal. Materials and skills from
all over the globe have been freely assimilated to make this a true product
of its time—a copy that can boast of replicating the original, even as every
physical aspect of its production pushes it further and further away from the
master structure.
For Ahsanullah, as for the one million and more people who thronged to
see this replica on the first day of the opening of the s­ till-to-be-finished com-
plex on 9 December 2008,13 there are no incongruities between the claims
and licenses of the copy. Ahsanullah can, therefore, take as much pride in
the avowed exactitude of his Taj replica as in his plans transporting a few
dolphins all the way from Florida to feature among the other attraction of
this Sonargaon amusement park. And, the laying out of a landscaped Mughal
garden around the monument can be seen as having full concordance with
the sparkling fountain that visitors encounter inside this Taj Mahal. The mau-
soleum stands hollowed out and converted into an object of pure spectacle
and display. A fountain inside the Bangladeshi Taj Mahal, it could be argued,
appears no more of an aberration to the streams of local visitors coming to
view this new ‘Wonder of the World’ in their country than a model of the
meditating Buddha of Sarnath inside the Chinese Sanchi Stupa does to the
tourists and Buddhist devotees who congregate at this reconsecrated Buddhist
site at Luoyang.
Yet, from the point of view of the Indian state, the official sanction of
one replica pointedly sets it apart from the purported illegitimacy of the
other. What is it about the Taj Mahal copy that has caused such Indian
national displeasure and indignation? The answer can be found in the way
this replica audaciously bypasses the authority of the nation and unapologeti-
cally exceeds the norms and boundaries of duplication. But such an answer
itself leaves wide open the question of who decides the permissibility of the
copy, who adjudicates on its authenticity, and what governs its rights and
limits. The irony of the situation lies in the initial outrage of the Indian
High Commission of Bangladesh about the alleged breach of copyright in
the production of a Taj replica, and its subsequent dismissal of the produc-
tion as such a poor copy that it failed to pose any threat to the original.14
Inauthenticity became, in this case, the best guarantee for the survival and
autonomous life of the copy.

Chapter 06.indd 185 10/28/2013 12:30:39 PM

 186  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Taking the cue from these contemporary cases, this paper gestures towards
a diverse history of travelling monuments and simulated sites that takes
us from India’s colonial past into her post-colonial present. The idea is lay
out different ‘chronotopes’15 of replica productions, to look at the shifting
production processes that go into their making, and the kinds of liberties
and licenses that they enjoy in changing temporal and spatial settings. The
coming of age of the travelling replica coincided in the middle years of
the nineteenth century with the age of the ‘world exhibitions’ in England,
France, and the USA, where the exhibitions served as a key visual apparatus
for the staging of Western imperial hegemony and its representational powers
over the monuments, cultures and peoples of the non-Western world. The
‘world exhibitions’ are now a well-known and widely studied field, where
the scholarship ranges from a theorization of the new technologies of vision,
reproduction and display that exemplified the triumphant force of Western
modernity to close analyses of the imperial political economies and cultural
discourses that supported these exhibitionary complexes.16 Against this con-
text, the next section of the paper briefly charts some of the simulated travels
in time and space that were experienced around transported ensembles of
Indian architecture across temporary and permanent display sites in nine-
teenth and early twentieth century London.

Colonial Travels
Of Dioramas and Plaster Casts
We will find copies and look-alikes of the same two archaeological monu-
ments with which we began featuring prominently in this history of colonial
travels. Let me begin with the case of an early diorama, one titled the ‘Diorama
of the Ganges’ that was staged at an amphitheatre at the Portland Gallery,
London, in 1850, where the first part opened with a panorama of the city of
Calcutta, and a trip southwards to Orissa, to the ‘Town of Juggernaut’ (Puri)
and the Black Pagoda (Konarak), and the second part presented a journey
from the ‘Sacred City of Benaras’ upstream though north India to end with a
grand view of the Taj Mahal at Agra.17 In the decade that preceded the pho-
tograph, the ‘sublime’ and ‘picturesque’ effects of the scenic image would be
carried over into this new technology of the moving diorama, where life-size
painted scenes on cloth would be subjected to filtered regulations of light in
a darkened room to create the three-dimensional illusion of physically inhab-
itable settings. Such dioramas mediated the passage from the pictorial to

Chapter 06.indd 186 10/28/2013 12:30:39 PM

 conceits of the copy  187

the photographic image, advancing the techniques of illusionist oil p ­ ainting

and print-making, while anticipating the fundamental lighting devices of
the first years of photography.18 There was also another kind of mediation
involved—one more crucial for my case. The 1850 London production had
grown out of the detailed sketches of India’s ancient monuments made by
James Fergusson, the pioneering surveyor and scholar of Indian architecture,
during his first and only travels across India at the end of the 1830s. Even as
the first-hand knowledge and images gleaned from this foundational journey
would lead to the many scholarly compendiums on Indian architecture that
Fergusson began to write in England during the 1860s and 1870s, the lithog-
rapher, T.C. Dibdin, who converted Fergusson’s sketches into coloured plates
for his book, Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in Hindosthan
(London: Hogarth, 1848), used the same visuals to create a simulation of
travel through India in the ‘Diorama of the Ganges’.19 This marks out an
early moment in colonial history when the monument in its status as circu-
lating copy is not only transported from the distant exotic East to a London
theatre. It is propelled from the narrow domain of professional expertise into
the ambit of a popular spectacle, with the demands of the latter dramatically
preceding the incubation of the disciplinary field.20
In the years that followed, the professional worlds of museums, exhibi-
tions, and scholarship would closely come together in bringing into being
a different order of architectural replicas. This shift is interestingly presaged
by a change in the very meaning of the term ‘diorama’. As the older style
of lighted illusionist images came to be superseded by the technologies of
stereoscopy and photography, the term ‘diorama’ came to connote three-
dimensional tableaux of casts and models set up against painted backdrops.
Featuring both life-size and miniaturized models of monuments and human
figures—of India’s historic sites, industrial arts, village life, trades, castes, and
communities—this new genre of dioramas became crucial in the reproduc-
tion of the empire’s archaeological past and ethnographic present in the spaces
of museums and exhibitions. Of particular importance were the architectural
plaster casts. Laboriously wrought from original structures, replicating all
the details of their decorations and sculptures, these casts became a critical
ingredient of museum collection and scholarly documentation, selectively
supplementing the accumulation of a comprehensive photographic archive
on India’s monumental heritage.21
It was as a full-size plaster cast that the eastern gateway of the Sanchi
Stupa made its spectacular entry into London in the summer of 1870, when
it went on display in the newly designed Architectural Courts of the South

Chapter 06.indd 187 10/28/2013 12:30:39 PM

 188  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Kensington Museum.22 In a photograph of 1872, we see the gateway installed

amidst other architectural facades from India, 33 feet high, looming towards
the sky-light of the arched ceiling, dwarfing the other cast of a corbelled pillar
from the Diwani-i-Khas building of Fatehpur Sikri (Figure 6.4), rivalling in
its antiquity and artistry the casts of famous Western objects like the Trajan
column from Imperial Rome or Michelangelo’s David from Renaissance
Florence in the adjoining courts. The formation of these grand Architectural

Figure 6.4  Full size cast of the eastern gateway of the Sanchi Stupa in the
Architectural Courts of the South Kensington Museum, London, 1872—
photograph © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Museum No. 72:507.

Chapter 06.indd 188 10/28/2013 12:30:44 PM

 conceits of the copy  189

Courts at South Kensington had been facilitated by a pan-European imperial

monarchical convention, signed during the Paris International Exhibition of
1867, in which fifteen reigning princes agreed to promote the reproduction
(through casts, electrotypes, and photographs) of art and architectural works
from all over the world for museums in Europe. The knowledge of such
monuments, it was believed, was ‘essential to the progress of art’, and with
the advance in reproductive technologies, that cause could now be fulfilled in
Europe ‘without the slightest damage to the originals’.23 The colony in India
offered a wealth of ancient artistic traditions for the elucidation of the West,
with the Sanchi gateway now proclaiming as much the antiquity of that tra-
dition as the magnitude of the empire that had taken charge of its discovery
and dissemination.
This replica however had to wade its way out of a more scandalous history
of imperial aggrandizement. It was a matter of immense fortune for Sanchi
that what came to eventually travel was only this marvel of a physical rep-
lica and not the original gateways. Through the 1850s and 60s, the Begums
of Bhopal (the rulers of the princely state in whose custody the monument
stood) had been under constant pressure, first from British archaeologists and
political agents, and then from the French Consul General in India, to make a
‘gift’ of the Stupa’s gateways to Queen Victoria or to Emperor Napoleon III.24
The Western museum, it was believed, was where they would stand best con-
served and displayed. While Alexander Cunningham, writing his monograph
on the site in 1854, wanted two of the gateways transported to the British
Museum to be part of a ‘Hall of Indian Antiquities’, the French authorities
wished to have them installed at the Paris International Exhibition of 1867.
A growing imperial drive toward in situ conservation luckily intervened to
keep the two standing gateways where they were, and reconstruct the two
that had fallen on site, pushing the labour and expenses from the work of
dismantling and shipment of the original structures to the production of a
mammoth cast.25
In one of the most elaborate cast-making operations of the period, a
cargo containing 28 tonnes of plaster of paris and gelatine was shipped from
London to Calcutta and moved across land by bullock cart to the site, where
over four months Indian artisans worked under British guidance to produce
a perfect facsimile of the eastern gateway in around fifty parts. Packed in
the tins in which they were moulded, the many parts of the Sanchi gateway
were then shipped back to England, where the pieces were reassembled to
make up the whole edifice. And it was from this master replica that fur-
ther copies of the Sanchi gateway were moulded at the South Kensington

Chapter 06.indd 189 10/28/2013 12:30:44 PM

 190  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Museum for exhibitions in Paris and Berlin.26 Supervising the entire project
on site was Lt. Henry Hardy Cole of the Royal Engineers, son of Sir Henry
Cole, Superintendent of the South Kensington Museum. Trained in London
in different techniques of plaster-cast modelling, Cole was then functioning
in India as a key agent in the procuring of drawings, photographs, and casts
of Indian architecture for his father’s museum, preceding his own appoint-
ment in 1880 to a new office of the Curator of Ancient monuments in India.

Of Artware Courts and Exhibition Pavilions

Such phenomenal movements of materials, objects, and skills to and fro
from the outposts of India to the metropolis would evolve in the following
years into a vast, organizational regime around the institution of the ­colonial
exhibitions. The replicating cast of the great gateway of Sanchi becomes
the period’s best example of the travelling monument, as it moves between
museum and exhibition sites in London, and between London and other
continental venues (Figure 6.5). The exhibitions would also generate another
kind of architectural models, a new variety of remakes and mixed ­ensembles
that issued forth from Indian rulers and the traditional craftspersons of their
states, needless to say, through the intermediary coordinating authority of
the colonial administrators and exhibition commissioners. Transported to the
display venues at great labour and cost, these fabricated structures, like the
Sanchi cast, would circulate between different exhibition sites and move from
these temporary pavilions to the permanent spaces of museum c­ ollections—
even as the new genre of experimental exhibition architecture left their lasting
mark on the redesigned cityscapes of late nineteenth century London, Paris or
Calcutta. With the Indian empire offering itself as an invaluable repository,
not just of historic architecture but also of living traditions of ornamental
design and artisanal skills (especially expertise in masonry and stone, wood
and metal carvings), what becomes important to note is the sheer volume of
traditional architectural ensembles that came out of India into the milieu of
these exhibitions, inflecting at every stage the modernist architecture of the
exhibition pavilions with a thick Oriental, decorative aesthetic. The point I
would also like to emphasize is the way these exhibition productions extricate
themselves from the burden of exact replication of archaeological monu-
ments (as with the plaster cast taken off the physical body of the original) to
generate a new corpus of loose remakes and remixes, while never foregoing
the aura of authenticity of the regions and cultures they were made to rep-
resent. Made out of durable and non-durable material (ranging from wood

Chapter 06.indd 190 10/28/2013 12:30:45 PM

 conceits of the copy  191

Figure 6.5  Replicated casts of the eastern gateway of the Sanchi Stupa at the
London International Exhibition, 1871—from Graphic, 6 May
1871—photograph courtesy of Timothy Barringer,
Yale Center for British Art, USA.

and stone to plaster of Paris and papier-mache), these architectural fabrica-

tions now impart to the portable replica with its own independent status and
career.
To illustrate this point, let me cite the instance of the well-known ‘Gwalior
Gateway’ that came up under the patronage of the Maharaja Scindia, not,
as was clearly stated, as a copy of any single structure or ‘a conventionalized
entrance’ but as ‘an eclectic piece’ of work, designed by Major J.B.  Keith,
Curator of Monuments of Central India, where he put to work ‘2000
starving artisans skilled in the old Gwalior art of stone-carving’, blending
various architectural designs from the porticoes and pillared balconies of the
Gwalior Fort.27 First travelling to Calcutta for the International Exhibition of

Chapter 06.indd 191 10/28/2013 12:30:49 PM

 192  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

1883–4, the dismantled gateway next left for London as 200 packages of
carved stone, to be reassembled for the pavilions of the Colonial and Indian
exhibition, at the end of which it came into the galleries of the South
Kensington Museum. A similar spectacular ensemble was the wooden g­ ateway
­presented by the Maharaja of Jaipur which was set up at the entrance to the
entire cluster of Indian Artware Courts at the 1886 exhibition. Carved by
the Shekhavati carpenters of Rajasthan, and built to the scale, elevation and
designs laid out by the two main colonial art administrators in the state of
Jaipur, of the region, Major Hendley and Colonel Jacob, this entrance gate-
way would feature a ‘Nahbat Khana (a music pavilion, complete with models
of musicians playing different instruments), alongside all the royal emblems
and imperial honours of the Jaipur ruling clan, even as it was made to stand
in for the best ‘Saracenic architectural design of upper India and Rajputana’.28
If gateways from India were most readily in demand with the Commi­
ssioners of these imperial exhibitions, so was another variety of exhibition
productions: a series of richly carved, ornamental screens that would enclose
the Artware Courts of different regions. Each of these was produced from the
region itself as the authentic work of its local stone and wood carvers under
the munificence of native patrons and the defining grid of European design
and construction guidance. And each could again take the liberty of many
free blends and amalgamations. To represent the main architectural styles,
decorative designs and craftsmanship of a region was the order of the day. For
particular importance for this paper is the instance of the Artware court of the
North-Western provinces and Oudh at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition
in London in 1886—where the ornamental screen reproduced, in separate
parts, samples of nineteenth Lucknow Nawabi architecture and copies of the
trellised stone and marble screens of the Mughal buildings of Fatehpur Sikri
and Agra, and inserted within these, as its main attraction, a pair of original
marble arches, inlaid with precious stones, that were transported here from
the Agra Fort. Discovered as buried objects in the course of an excavation at
the Agra Fort, these restored arches stood here as ‘archaeological treasures’ of
the highest worth, their value enhanced even further for the viewers by their
projected similarity in period and style to ‘the world famed Taj’. Presenting
these as ‘a unique and faithful illustration of the architectural character of the
celebrated Taj Mahal’, the exhibition catalogue wrote that their connection
with this monument was ‘so intimate that they may be accepted as a fragment
of the mausoleum itself ’.29
Such strategic impersonations were at the heart of modernity’s new worlds
of illusions and spectacles. What was at stake was less the task of exact

Chapter 06.indd 192 10/28/2013 12:30:49 PM

 conceits of the copy  193

­ uplication, more that of illustration and representation—less the mirage of

d
the real, than the ability of the traveling object to stand in for the original.
In rounding off this section on colonial travels, let me use the never-fading
appeal of the legendary Taj Mahal to jump forward from the Artware Courts
of the 1886 exhibition to the India Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition
that was held at the newly-constructed Wembley stadium in London in
1924. The Wembley event comes to us suffused with all the arrogance and
excesses of the late empire. Supposedly a Taj Mahal look-alike, the extrava-
gance of the India Pavilion was in keeping with India’s long-acclaimed status
as the greatest of imperial dependencies. It was only to be expected that,
of all the pavilions that laid out Britain’s ‘empire overseas’, the most stately
and resplendent was this palatial white building with rows of minarets and
a central dome30 (Figure 6.6). The Indian pavilions at these exhibitions had
always thrived as part bazaars and part displays of India’s arts and manufac-
tures, architecture and ethnography. At Wembley, the interior of the pavilion
housed the biggest of these bazaars on the model of Chandni Chowk of old
Delhi, selling the best of goods and merchandise from all over India, with
the bazaar street leading to a sit-down restaurant and a theatre of performing
jugglers, acrobats, and snake-charmers. And fully in keeping with this spirit

Figure 6.6  The India Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley,
London, 1924—reproduced from India: British Empire Exhibition 1924
Catalogue (London: Baynard Press, 1924), courtesy of Yale University Library.

Chapter 06.indd 193 10/28/2013 12:30:50 PM

 194  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

of Orientalist fantasy, the exterior structure, set off against a lake, would be
transformed at night through flood-lighting into ‘a veritable fairy palace’ of
Mughal India.31
What I wish to underline is the way a reference to the Taj Mahal came to
thickly engulf this fantasy-land at Wembley, refusing to be dislodged from
the popular imagination despite the disclaimers of those who knew better.
While in the press and in popular parlance the India Pavilion was constantly
invoked as a replica of the Taj, writers of the e­ xhibition catalogues and guide
tried hard to dispel ‘the ghost of the Wembley Taj Mahal’ (Figure 6.7). The
style of architecture chosen for this pavilion, it was explained, was broadly
and loosely ‘Moghul’: if the dome and minarets carried a whiff of resem-
blance with the Taj Mahal, there were a mix of features and designs here
that were drawn from various other Mughal buildings like Akbar’s tomb
at Sikandra, the Pearl Mosque at Agra, the Jama Masjid at Delhi, and the
Golden Mosque at Lahore.32 What was also emphasized was that this com-
posite Mughal ensemble was a product, not of the hereditary masons and
carvers of India, but of the architectural firm of Messrs. White, Allom & Co.
of London. It was sign of the times that such an effective blend of Mughal
styles no longer required the authenticating touch of Indian master build-
ers and Indian architectural authorities—that such expertise could now be
locally generated by a modern building firm in London, without deviating
from the history and tradition it sought to represent. A final clinching point
was made by this English writer about the non-permissibility of fabricating
a full replica of the Taj Mahal. ‘The Taj Mahal’, he reminded his readers, ‘is
a tomb and a religious building, and to reproduce in its entirety would give
offence to Indian sentiment, though it is quite permissible to select certain
parts of such buildings to make up a composite whole’.33
The case of the Wembley pavilion—its misrecognition as the image of the
Taj as much as its corrective positioning as representatively Mughal w ­ ithout
in any way being the Taj—propels us in many ways into the muddled h ­ istories
of the present. It raises at this sensitive moment of British-Indian history the
vexed question of the rights of reproduction of an entire monument and
legitimacy of the transportable copy—questions that resonate across the
­contemporary history of the making of a Bangladeshi Taj Mahal. It touches
on the even more fraught issue of the replica involving a violation of the
religious sanctity of the original monument, and an offence to the sentiments
of the community of believers who have a different claim on the site. For the
Taj Mahal, there would never be any easy co-existence between its historic
life as a mausoleum and its modern status as a secular tourist monument.34

Chapter 06.indd 194 10/28/2013 12:30:50 PM

 Figure 6.7  Yet, it was the Taj Mahal which was featured on the cover of India:
British Empire Exhibition 1924 Catalogue (London: Baynard Press, 1924),
photograph courtesy of Yale University Library.

Chapter 06.indd 195 10/28/2013 12:30:54 PM

 196  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Reservations voiced in the imperial capital in the 1920s about the propriety
of simulating an exact model of the mausoleum in the hedonistic space of
an exhibition and of converting its interior into bazaars, theatres, and res-
taurants, gets transferred into the present-day outrage of the Indian nation
about Bangladesh’s so-called breach of copyright in copying a monument
that belongs uniquely to India. In each instance, what comes to the aid of the
copy are paradoxically that many differences and departures that separate it
from its referent. The assertions of the Wembley exhibition authorities about
not duplicating the Taj Mahal clashes outright with the Bangladeshi impre-
sario’s insistence of collapsing the identity of his remake with the historic Taj,
even as he pitches it into a new time zone of mass entertainment. But what
we can pull out as common to both the cases is a concession (grudging or
otherwise) that one nation’s monuments can be reassembled and rehashed in
other distant locales, that these fabrications can be assembled at will through
local and international mobilizations of materials and skills, and these trans-
plants can take on a life in radical substitution of the original.

Simulations and Replications in the ‘Post-colony’

I will take as my central thread these issues of the licenses of the copy and
its powers of emplacement or substitution, as I shift my focus, in this sec-
tion, from the colonial pasts to some select scenarios of contemporary Indian
­history—contrasting a spate of temple remakes in Western India with a range
of architectural fabrications that energize the space of a popular religious
festival (the Durga Pujas) in the city of Calcutta, transforming the whole city
into an ephemeral exhibitionary site. I take this huge leap in time and con-
text with the full awareness that there are no direct or obvious connections
between these divergent histories. Rather, following Achille Mbembe, I will
be arguing that it is a series of displaced and disjointedness temporalities that
mark out the identity of the ‘post-colony’ and allow it its many holds over
‘time on the move’.35
‘To be sure, the postcolony’, Mbembe writes, ‘is chaotically pluralistic;
it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a
particular way of fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes … The
postcolony is characterized by a distinct style of … improvisation, by a ten-
dency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by distinct ways identities
are multiplied, transformed and put into circulation.’36
My case studies will test some of these distinct styles of improvisa-
tions, fabrications, and circulations of simulacra that will help position the

Chapter 06.indd 196 10/28/2013 12:30:54 PM

 conceits of the copy  197

­ articularities of the regional histories that I narrate A key concern here will
p
be to see how new notions of the ‘religious’ and ‘sacred’ have come to coexist
with the logic of exhibition, museum and spectacle in these different regimes
of worship and sightseeing, taking the examples of two distinctly contrasting
scenarios of what may be called ‘religious’ and ‘festival’ tourism. In taking
this large sweep across India’s imperial and contemporary histories, my main
argument will be to chart how the post-colony wrests from its pasts its own
prides and prerogatives of staging the copy—how it enacts its own processes
of assimilation and ­appropriation of national and world monuments, and
thrives on a contemporary global sense of the portability of cultures across
time and space.

Transplanting Temples
To make my point about the distinctiveness of the Durga Puja spectacles in
their particular locations, it becomes imperative to separate out what can be
seen as the ‘secular’ contours of these transient festival productions against
another contemporary spreading trend of the reproduction of country’s
sacred temples in various Indian urban sites, that transcribes spaces and struc-
tures with specific markings of the ‘religious’. To juxtapose the ­temporary
vis-à-vis the permanent implantations of travelling monuments, to set off
the purely exhibitionary logic of the one against the purportedly religious
and nationalist self-projections of the other becomes an instructive exercise.
It throws open the question of what enables the sanctity of the ‘religious’ to
be transmitted from the original to the replica and relayed into new spaces of
consumption and display, also into a new politics of cultural nationalism and
identity formations. It also pushes us to see how the sovereign space of the
nation allows for one kind of free right and uncontested prerogative about
transporting and reproducing its temples across regions, to make them avail-
able for a new self-brandishing consumerist Hinduism.37
Grandiose remakes of Hindu temples, mostly as a standardized model of
the medieval Nagara architectural style of north India, occasionally as exact
replicas of distant holy shrines, have become a thickly sprouting feature of
the urban topographies of contemporary India. The state of Gujarat, with its
concentrated powers of private, diasporic capital and state-sponsored politics
of Hindu cultural nationalism, has emerged as one of the most powerful
theatres of this trend, and of the socio-economic-political apparatus that bol-
sters it. The trend was set rolling here in the immediately post-Independence
years by the state government’s project of rebuilding the Somanātha temple.

Chapter 06.indd 197 10/28/2013 12:30:54 PM

 198  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

In a highly controversial move, flagrantly over-riding the objections of

archaeologists, an earlier twelfth century disused and dilapidated temple was
demolished to make way for this brand new construction. Commissioned
by the traditional Somapura architect and stone carvers of the region, it was
ceremoniously consecrated with a new Siva linga and holy waters from all
over the nation. For a shrine that had suffered the most notorious desecration
by Islamic invaders in the eleventh century and had become over the nine-
teenth and early twentieth century a growing symbol of a Hindu national
resurgence, the compulsions of the remake, we find, could easily set aside the
requirement of any rigorous archaeological authentication of a historical style
or the incorporation of sections of the older temple remains within the new
structure. Leaving the sculptures of the demolished temple to be installed
in a new Prabhasa-Pattan museum a few metres away, the remade temple of
1951, in all its newness, could, by the sheer fact of its location in the original
site, stand in, in the public imagination, for the historic Somanath temple
itself: one that miraculously survived and resisted the ‘sword of the infidel’.38
As a thriving pilgrimage centre, the remade Somanātha temple offers a classic
instance of a complete substitution of a historic original, absorbing within
itself all references to the anterior structure that it embodies.
In retrospect, we can see the intricately carved architectural form of this
Somanātha temple setting the broad stylistic rubric for the spate of temple
building in contemporary north India, where in marked contrast to the
dark, deep, dank interiors of old temples, the new interiors sport brightly lit,
sparkling clean marble halls, corridors, and elaborately sculpted panels on
display. Conceived of as a larger revivalist cultural unit that would include,
for instance, an-all India Sanskrit University to promote traditional Sanskrit
scholarship, the Somanatha project anticipates on a small scale another kind
of production of the present. It is again Gujarat that pioneered the new kind
of mega temple-museum-theme park extravaganza that is exemplified by the
Akshardham temple complexes of the Swaminarayan sect, the first of which
again came up in Gandhinagar in 1992, and its newest extension on the banks
of the Jamuna on the outskirts of New Delhi in 2005.39 As for instance with
the Bangladeshi Taj Mahal, the pride and power of these Akshardham com-
plexes lie in the sheer scale of land, resources, and the latest exhibition and
display technologies at their command. The central monumental temple and
its surrounding colonnade, while not claiming to replicate any single temple,
boasts of a rich blend of Indian temple architecture and sculpture of the
eighth to the twelfth century, that was constructed out of six ­thousand tonnes
of pink sandstone and marble, housing inside a giant gold-leafed statue of the

Chapter 06.indd 198 10/28/2013 12:30:54 PM

 conceits of the copy  199

founder of the sect, Lord Swaminarayan. The greater novelties present them-
selves in the lush gardens around the temple, which offer lakes and waterfalls,
games and Disney-land like boat-rides through dioramas on Indian mythol-
ogy and history, alongside exhibition halls with audio-animatronics show on
the Upanisads, Rāmayana, and Mahābhārata, and a 14 screen presentation
on ‘Mystic India’ in an IMAX theatre.40
There is yet another trend that Gujarat can be seen to have spawned
within this growing package culture of worship, spectacle and ­entertainment
of the country’s capital-flushed neo-Hinduism. During the 2000s, it has
transplanted avowedly exact replicas of two of India’s most inaccessible hill
cave shrines from distant Kashmir—the Amarnath and Vaishno Devi tem-
ples—on to the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar highway, and on the road from
Gandhinagar to Mahdudi (Figure 6.8). If the new Somanatha temple had
secured its legitimacy by growing out of the original sacred site, the Amarnath
and Vaishno Devi temple remakes authenticate themselves in their trans-
ferred locations through an elaborate procedure of artificial fabrication of

Figure 6.8  Replica of the Amarnath cave temple at Amrapur, Mahdudi,

Gujarat—photograph reproduced with permission from India Today Images
(www.indiatodayimages.com).

Chapter 06.indd 199 10/28/2013 12:30:57 PM

 200  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

hills, rocks ­boulders, and caves, making both the elite group of drive-in visi-
tors and the more plebian mass of pilgrims undertake the steep mountainous
climb to the cave sanctums. The idea is to reproduce as closely as possible
the experience of pilgrimage at the distant sites, while making the climb
that much easier and offering up the experience for all those who cannot
undertake that dangerous and arduous journey to Kashmir. To ­complete the
process of simulation, a great investment of the authorities has also been on
bringing to these remakes physical traces of the original shrines. So, we are
told, the sacred flame was brought all the way from the Vaishno Devi shrine
to consecrate the recreated interior of the ancient cave with its natural source
of the holy Ganga (banganga) at Gandhinagar, just as some holy white ash
was brought from the caves of Amarnath to be strewn around the ice linga
of the replica shrine, the miraculous natural formation of the Kashmir caves
maintained in the heat of Gujarat by the installation within the sanctum of
a round-the-year cooling plant.41 Standing in tandem with all the new cen-
tres of Hindu worship in the state, the replica here take on a function of a
full transplant of the original, in all its indivisible spiritual aura. Unlike the
Somanatha temple, the copy never displaces but empowers itself through
its continuous reference to a distant master site. The replica, in these cases,
thrives on a wholly autochthonous principle of simultaneous multiplicities.42

Bringing All of India and the World to a City

I wish to juxtapose this thickening scenario of what has been called ‘reli-
gious tourism’ in one part of India—one that carries it with strong doses
of the ideology of the Hindu Right and its agenda of a national cultural
mobilization of publics—with an alternative trajectory of what I will term
‘festival tourism’ as it is played out each year in the city of Calcutta around
the autumnal event of the Durga Puja—one which is marked by a different
spirit of transience, heterotopic emplacements, and frenzies of mass specta-
torship.43 The spectacular regime of Calcutta’s Durga Pujas presents itself in
a series of contrasting and divergent frames.44 (Figure 6.9). A key difference
can be mapped in the fluid and indeterminate ambience of the ‘religious’ in
a festival which unfolds around the annual homecoming of goddess Durga,
but where the worship of the goddess has long been synonymous with the
biggest secular cultural celebration in Bengal. There is a long history to the
affective transformation of the image of the goddess from a martial slayer of
the buffalo demon to a benevolent mother surrounded by her four divine
children, and an adored daughter who returns each year for five days from

Chapter 06.indd 200 10/28/2013 12:30:57 PM

 conceits of the copy  201

Figure 6.9  An Akshardham temple look-alike as a Durga Puja pavilion,

Ekdalia Evergreen Puja, Calcutta, 2007.

her ­husband’s abode in the Himalayas to her parental home on earth. There
is also a complex, concomitant history of the changing life of this urban
festival over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from exclusive revelry
and entertainment in wealthy homes to close-knit community celebra-
tions in middle-class neighbourhoods, to new exhibitionary practices of the
­production of tableaux and spectatorial practices of touring and viewing.45 In
a current pan-Indian context, what most significantly connotes the ‘secular’

Chapter 06.indd 201 10/28/2013 12:30:59 PM

 202  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

in the identity of the Durga Puja in Bengal is the marked absence from the
scene of any large-scale Hindu religious organization or of an programmatic
agenda of Hindu cultural nationalism—and in the preponderance instead of
a discourse of art and craft production, of popular pedagogy and tourism,
and of the creation of a new public visual aesthetic.
Also important are many other contrasts and differences. Local community
clubs, with a growing line-up of commercial sponsors to prop their initiatives,
remain the organizing force of this festival. Even as Calcutta Durga Puja has
taken on a new corporate profile of awards and promotional campaigns (Figure
6.10), the smallness of its production budgets stands out in sharp contrast to
the hegemonic grip of large state and private capital in the making of temple
sites in other parts of the county, most specifically in a state like Gujarat. The
command over vast expanses of land, and over equally vast amounts of con-
struction material, labour and imaging technologies, that are central to the
latter projects are radically reversed in Calcutta’s festival—where replicas and
remakes take shape through a circulating pool of local skills and simulacra, and
magically sprout out of a maze of narrow lanes and small community grounds

Figure 6.10  Asian Paints awards banners (celebrating 25 years of this Durga
Puja award) and other trophies of a Puja on display—Lalabagan Nabankur
Sangha Puja, Maniktala, Calcutta, 2009.

Chapter 06.indd 202 10/28/2013 12:31:01 PM

 conceits of the copy  203

in the congested heart of the city (Figure  6.11). The logic of massive, per-
manent temple ensembles are set off here by the constitutively different logic
of these temporary tableaux, in the ways in which these convert lived urban
spaces into liminal zones of worship and spectacle. This, in turn, creates its own
intense frenzy of mass tourism and spectatorship—a phenomenal movement of
crowds across the circuit of the festival city through the days and nights of the
event—sustained by the knowledge that these spectacles will disappear in no
time, and that these illusionary spaces will revert all too soon to their everyday
uses. The fortified enclosures of an Akshardham complex, with its screening
and close regulation of visitors within its museumized spaces, stands power-
fully overturned in the open, unbounded movements of crowds through the
imaginary worlds and cultures that Calcutta’s Durga Puja places on display.
Overall, then, there is a powerfully populist dimension, an inverted economy
of scale and resources, equally of an alternative aesthetics of production and
­consumption, that make for the distinctiveness of Calcutta’s Durga Pujas.
For the purpose of his paper, the critical question to ask would be—how
have these distinctions also made for a different history of replica p
­ roductions

Figure 6.11  An Art-Deco style installation filling the narrow alley of the Nalin
Sarkar Street Puja, Hatibagan, Calcutta, 2006.

Chapter 06.indd 203 10/28/2013 12:31:03 PM

 204  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

within the festival? What are the kinds of monuments and sites that are chosen
for reproduction in the Puja sites? What governs the rights and claims of the
copy in such spaces? For several decades now, a passionate investment in the
fabrication of architectural structures, local or distant, ancient or modern,
national or global, has marked out the art of pavilion ( pandal ) making for
the city’s Durga Pujas. The pride of the festival has revolved around the way
it could transform the entire city into a fantasy land of make-believe tem-
ples, mosques, palaces, or fortresses, inside each of which would be featured
the image of the demon-slaying goddess and her familial entourage. There
have been no holds barred on what could be fabricated by local decorator
firms, using a simple fare of bamboo, ply, cloth, and plaster, now with newer
material like thermocol or fibre glass. Along with the nations’ own historical
monuments, an ever widening range of world buildings entered the repertoire
of these pavilion makers—the Vitthala temple of Hampi of the Vijaynagar
kingdom alongside the Opera House of Paris (Figures 6.12, 6.13) the Red
Fort of Delhi alongside the Fontane de Trevi of Rome, a Tibetan Buddhist
pagoda side by side with a giant Egyptian Sphinx. Typical of this festival

Figure 6.12  Remake of the Vithhala temple of Hampi, Vijaynagar

at the Bakulbagan Puja, Bhowanipur, Calcutta, 2008.

Chapter 06.indd 204 10/28/2013 12:31:06 PM

 conceits of the copy  205

Figure 6.13  Façade of the Opera House of Paris constructed as a

Puja Pavilion, GD Block Puja, Salt Lake, Calcutta, 2009.

fare have been the looseness of these remakes, and the heterogeneity of the
mix of structures that can vie for attention in these overgrown urban sites.
And a defining feature of such spectacles has been an unfettered local license
to copy, re-assemble, and re-invent whatever monument or site that catches
the fancy of organizing clubs, producers and publics.46 The utter eclecticism
of these choices of structures in which to house a Hindu goddess has never
failed to bewilder religious purists, at one level, critics and connoisseurs, at
another. Such an unapologetic catholicity of this representational field has
laid the festival open to a constant charge of desacralization and trivialization,
even as it held strong as the hallmark of its secular mass identity.
It is in this context that we must also consider the way the festival has
sought, in recent times, to upgrade and refine its cultural image—not by
inventing a more orthodox frame of religiosity and ritual tradition, nor by
letting go of its wide representational licenses, but by laying a new premium
on the authenticity, artistry, and creativity of its productions. What has come
to distinguish the present festival field is a new genre of specialist ‘theme’
tableaux, that take on their nomenclature from the idea of ‘theme parks’ but
also stake their identity as a form of public installation art. Bringing into the

Chapter 06.indd 205 10/28/2013 12:31:09 PM

 206  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

fray a new group of art school trained artists and set designers, these identifi-
ably new-wave productions also aim at reaching out to a more informed and
discerning viewership. There are three broad, often overlapping, forms that
have emerged for these contemporary ‘theme’ productions, each of which
continue to revolve around the illusions of other sites and space, each seeking
a new aesthetic of faithful similitude.
In one case, as against the free-wheeling mix of monumental architectural
styles of the standardized Durga Puja pavilions (a concoction of temple and
palace look-alikes), the new designers place on offer a new order of exact scale-
to-scale replicas of India’s historical architecture—the Mukteswar temple of
Bhubaneswar in Orissa, a Jain temple of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, or a wooden
palace of Padmanabhapuram in Kerala (Figure 6.14)—reproducing in
­throw-away material like ply and thermocol the full intricacies of carvings on
the exterior and interior of these structures. Months in advance of the event,
such panels are fabricated off-site in the designers’ studios before their careful
assemblage in the middle of a busy street, which gets temporarily inscribed

Figure 6.14  Replica of the wooden palace of Padmanabhapuram, Kerala,

recreated by designer Dipak Ghosh, Tridhara Sammilani Pujja, Monoharpukur
Road, Calcutta, 2008.

Chapter 06.indd 206 10/28/2013 12:31:13 PM

 conceits of the copy  207

as a heterotopic Puja site. In the second form, not just a single monument
but an entire archaeological site (such as the caves of Bhimbetka in Madhya
Pradesh with its oldest samples of cave paintings) comes to be fabricated
within neighbourhood parks, playfully using the subterfuge even of the blue
Archaeological Survey of India signboards to authorize itself. There are also
Puja clubs that work with a tighter sense of seriality in turning its grounds
each year into theme parks of different Indian states, presenting an integrated
spectacle of the architecture, arts, and crafts and performances of states like
Kerala, Rajasthan, Gujarat, or Assam. In the third, most thickly proliferating
form, artists and designers bring on to the production platform teams of vil-
lage and tribal craftsmen from all parts of India to fabricate a series of craft
and folk-art villages, with an elaborate lay-out of thatched h ­ utments, ethnic
designs and a folk-art goddess (Figures 6.15, 6.16). Upholding the cause of
preservation and salvage of these endangered rural art forms of India, and
cashing on the new tastes for ethnic-chic, these village pavilions of the Durga
Puja provide the most resonant example of the ‘folklorization’ of urban India.
This is also where the Pujas become the occasion for the production and
circulation of a vast body of durable craft objects that pour into the market

Figure 6.15  A Gond folk art village at the, Behala Club Puja, Calcutta, 2006.

Chapter 06.indd 207 10/28/2013 12:31:14 PM

 208  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 6.16  The synchronized Durga image of the

Gond folk art village, Behala Club Puja, Calcutta, 2006.

and trickle into other public and interior decorations, even after the tableaux
are dismantled.
What holds together this entire pool of productions is a common premium
on preparatory site visits, field research and scholarship, and faithfulness
to the original sites, cultures or craft traditions that are being reproduced.
Equally crucial to this whole conglomerate is a bid for public pedagogy: a
mission of educating the masses and reorienting their tastes for history, art,
and anthropology. As the festival in Calcutta lays out these more specialized
routes of art, craft, and archaeological tours, there is, each year, a ‘mini-India’
to be toured free in the span of a week, in space of a single city, alongside
other, more exotic journeys into far-flung parts of the globe. Let me offer a
few examples of such world tours to show how a deepening claim not just
on the national space, but also on transnational sites and cultures contin-
ues to animate this circuit of local festivity, boosting its new-found artistic

Chapter 06.indd 208 10/28/2013 12:31:16 PM

 conceits of the copy  209

self-image. In the age of the internet, it is a globally accessible pool of cyber-

information and downloadable images of world art and monuments that
comes to the aid of both the new groups of Puja artists and designers and of
the older variety of decorator firms, in enabling and authenticating their pro-
ductions. An important point to underline, here, is the undiminished local
élan and confidence that spill over from the fabrication of Indian temples and
craft villages, into tableaux that recreate African villages, its primitive masks
and totem poles or the art of the ancient Inca civilization (Examples, Figures 
6.17, 6.18, 6.19). In these transitory sites of make-believe, the exotic global
can secure for itself the same niche and authority as the nation’s own art and
architectural heritage.
In recent times, these trans-national imaginaries have come to revolve
around a new primitivist aesthetic, with a concentrated taste for African
tribal art suddenly becoming the rage of a Puja season. In one case, we
saw an amazing remake of a Ghana village with decorated mud huts, laid
out on an empty neighbourhood plot by a young designer of the locality
(Figure 6.17). As explained in this concept-note, the designer drew on the
model of one particular village of Sirigu in Ghana and its tradition of wall
decorations executed by poor peasant women of the region, highlighting

Figure 6.17  Painted hutments of a Ghana village on display at the Behala

Sahajatri Puja, Calcutta, 2004.

Chapter 06.indd 209 10/28/2013 12:31:22 PM

 210  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 6.18  An African art installation in copper, wood, and bamboo,

desgined by Subodh Ray at the Khidirpur 25 Pally Puja, Calcutta, 2004.

Figure 6.19  Art of the ancient Inca civilization on display at the

41 Pally Puja, Haridebpur, Calcutta, 2007.

Chapter 06.indd 210 10/28/2013 12:31:30 PM

 conceits of the copy  211

the aesthetics that alleviated the acute poverty of village life. In another
instance, in another Puja site the same year, a more veteran designer in
the field created his own amalgam of the many traditions of African art—
wooden masks, bamboo panels, totem poles, and painted cloth canopies
(Figure 6.18)—and blended these with a tribal art Durga group that he
personally designed, giving the clay image the appearance of an old bronze
with a greenish patina. Like an art work, the production was given a title
that loosely translates as ‘The Wonder of Primitivism’, to emphasize the
family genealogies between the art of the different primitive races of the
world, and the indebtedness of modern man to this legacy of their primitive
ancestors. While the look of the tableaux was distinctly African, it drew on a
local pool of craftsmen from Assam and West Dinajpur in North Bengal to
work on bamboo panels and wooden carvings with designs that harmonized
with those of African art.
In their repeated mobilization of traditional artisanal practices under the
guidance of new professional expertise, these Durga Puja productions in
Calcutta can be seen to be curiously playing out the history of the colonial
exhibitions and the forms of their assemblages of Indian architectural design
and industrial arts. They can also be seen as pushing this history into a
new ‘post-ethnic’ phase of cosmopolitan encounters and cultural flows.47
If the display of the architectural and design wealth of India at the colo-
nial exhibitions had required the laborious import of expertise and labour,
materials, and objects all the way from the colony, the staging of world cul-
tures in the Durga Puja festival can nonchalantly dispense with the need for
such authenticating inputs of persons and products from the original sites.
Vernacular talent can be made to simulate the ethnicities and skills of the
makers of African totem poles or of the relief sculptures of the ancient Incas,
without in any way diminishing the effectiveness of the copy in the setting
in which it is created. Thus, for instance, in keeping with the primitivist
aesthetic sweeping through the festival, a group of young artists in a small,
non-elite Calcutta locality decided in 2007 to profile the art of the ancient
Inca civilization in their Pujas. Using the internet as their main resource
on Inca art, these artists produced their own relief carvings of Inca motifs
on soft stone slabs and grafted on Peruvian textile designs in fresco panels
they painted around the carvings (Figure 6.19). And, as with all these tab-
leaux, they ensured that the design and costume of the goddess Durga was
in concordance with her Inca art surroundings. That this production won
the most coveted Puja awards of the season and made it to the top of that
year’s popularity charts confirmed its appeal both for art connoisseurs and
the touring crowds.

Chapter 06.indd 211 10/28/2013 12:31:30 PM

 212  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Insolence and Affront

As all these examples amply bear our, here is a local exhibitionary setting
where there are few who question the appropriateness of African painted
hutments or Inca stone reliefs as the setting for the worship of Durga, and
even fewer who question the proprieties of such simulations. This field of
production has always thrived on an unbounded, unregulated local pre-
rogative of copying and fabrication. So, it came as a kind of bolt out of
the blue when, perhaps for the first time in the present history of the fes-
tival, the charges of copyright violation suddenly descended on another
star Puja production of the season of 2007—on a towering remake of the
Hogwarts castle of the Harry Potter stories, that was put up in a large park
by the Puja club of the locality and the decorator firm they commission for
their pavilions48 (Figure 6.20). I will round off this story of the Durga Puja
displays with case of this fabricated fictional castle, because it most power-
fully encapsulates the spirit of post-colonial appropriations of the cultural
property of the West, and the kinds of defences that could be garnered to
its cause.

Figure 6.20  The Hogwarts castle from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories, at
the FD Block Puja, Salt Lake, Calcutta, 2007.

Chapter 06.indd 212 10/28/2013 12:31:36 PM

 conceits of the copy  213

For the local decorator firm which has come over the years to specialize
in giant tableaux of international blockbusters on this same Puja site—a
model of the capsized Titanic on the year of the film (1998), and of the
Columbia space shuttle on the year of its crash (2003)—the choice of the
Harry Potter castle in 2007 came as a natural extension of the style of
work it is best known for. The achievement of this semi-professional work
team lies in its self-initiation into the elite cultures of a globalized Indian
middle class (fed on a diet of the Titanic and Harry Potter adventures),
and its skills in converting images gleaned from the internet into a mas-
sive three-dimensional architectural structure. While the vast castle, with a
mock Hogwarts Express chugging in, took shape in plaster and ply-wood
over three months in the open park, figures of Harry and his cast of char-
acters were fabricated in a image-making workshop alongside the clay idols
of Durga. What angered the distant Western authorities—the agents of
the author, J.K. Rowling and the film company, Warner Brothers—was
less the grossness of these fairground remakes, but their alleged breach of
the intellectual copyright of the material. That such a local production
in far away Calcutta could even attract the attention of the international
­powers-that-be was a sign of the kinds of publicity and global circulation of
news of present times.49
A few weeks into the completion of the tableaux, Penguin India, the
national representatives of Rowling and Warner Brothers, filed a case
against this Puja production in the Delhi High Court, bringing on the
court order that either the structure be removed or that its organizers pay
a fine of two million rupees for the violation of copyright (an amount that
far exceeded the cost of its making). The critical twist to this story comes in
the way that the local copy proudly survived this onslaught of national and
international legal regimes of copyright—in the way this legal suit brought
it even greater publicity in the festival and a wave of sympathy across groups
who were convinced about the utter unfairness of these charges. An even-
tual last-minute reprieve came for this Puja remake on the grounds of it
being a purely non-profit and temporary construction, that was not within
the purview of the authorized theme and publicity events for Harry Potter
fans sponsored worldwide by the agents of Rowling and Warner Brothers.
An added point was also made, in a support campaign, that such a local
production could take the appeal of Harry Potter into wider, unexplored,
and probably more exciting avenues than ever imagined by the corporate
managers of Warner Brothers and their likes. The note ended with a salute
to piracy.50

Chapter 06.indd 213 10/28/2013 12:31:36 PM

 214  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

It became all about the ‘victory’ of the copy and a celebration of its ability
to overturn the powers of international corporations. This Pyrrhic triumph
of the Harry Potter castle in a Calcutta Durga Puja bears out for us the full
force of the conceits that attend the contemporary lives of replicas across
different local, pan-Indian and transnational sites. The many histories that
this paper has schematically charted underline, not just the radical shifts in
production processes and authenticating agencies in the making of replicas,
but also the changing registers on which these wrest their autonomies from
the originals they simulate and validate their presence as copies. We have
come a long way from the time of the giant plaster cast that had to be labo-
riously wrought from the body of the monument on site to be reassembled
at new sites of display to times when modern architectural firms in London
or New Delhi, a film producer in Dhaka or pavilion makers in Calcutta can
produce their remakes of historic architecture as fully autochthonous struc-
tures. We have also seen how the notion of the replica has come to thrive
on an epistemic elasticity and amorphousness of the term, which can both
produce its own discourses of authenticity and exactitude and allow for a
wide scope of improvisations and departures. This is what enables this notion
to inhabit this diverse and chequered history of productions, purposes, and
uses—­ranging from the official to the popular, from the transnational to the
local. This is also what has given the contemporary copy, as I have shown,
its variant credibility across the realms of ‘religion’, ‘art’, and pure ‘spectacle’,
in each of which it is granted its particular rights and liberties of replication.
It is the domain of the popular—its spaces of worship and tourism,
exhibition and entertainment—that can be seen to continuously push at
the boundaries of the possible and the permissible. The replica, here, can
occupy a position that can be ambivalently swing between a double and a
fake, between the thing-itself and a thing-apart. Let me end by returning
once more to the ever proliferating image of the Taj Mahal—to show how
one of its fabrications as a Durga Puja pavilion in north Calcutta connects up
with its controversial remake in the amusement park outside Dhaka. While
he had visited the Taj at Agra several times and drawn inspiration from the
original monument, what had particularly motivated Ahsanullah was the
copy of the Taj that he encountered at a Calcutta Durga Puja—a cloth, ply,
and plaster illusion of the marble mausoleum, where in a departure from the
standard practice, in deference to the religious sentiments of Hindus and
Muslims, the goddess was housed in a small separate unit outside the main
tableaux. If the Taj could be made available for display and tourism within
the ambit of Hindu religious festival, it could (in Ahsanullah’s thinking) be as

Chapter 06.indd 214 10/28/2013 12:31:36 PM

 conceits of the copy  215

e­ ffectively and as legitimately put up for show in an entertainment complex

in Bangladesh,51 the ­ephemeral Puja remake replaced here by a p­ henomenally
expensive permanent replica, with no perceived violence to the original.
That it leaves the original ­monument at Agra untouched in its singularity,
that it can in no way diminish its unparalleled grandeur, remains the safest
ground of legitimacy of this remake. At the same time, that it lays claim to
be Bangladesh’s own Taj Mahal makes its very existence an affront to the
sanctity of India’s national monument.52 It exemplifies, once again, the local
conceit and global insubordination of the copy—pushing the contemporary
notion of the replica to its most disquieting extremes, smudging the bounda-
ries between mimicry and mockery.

Abbreviations
NDTV New Delhi Television
AFP Agence France-Presse

Notes
  1 For a wide-ranging account of the copy in Western culture, as duplicate, imita-
tion, reproduction, and facsimile, where the notions of the double range from
twins, mirror images, death masks, plaster casts, or shop window mannequins
to processes of printing, colour photography, stenography, or photocopying—
see Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable
Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996).
  2 Ashis Chakrabarti, ‘India’s Gift: Sanchi Stupa in China’, The Telegraph, Calcutta,
31 December 2008.
 3 ‘India Fumes at Duplicate Bangladeshi Taj Mahal’, Hindusthan Times,
New Delhi, 10 December 2008.
  4 The implementation of the project was entrusted to the Ministry of External
Affairs, Government of India, on the Indian side, and to the Luoyang Municipal
People’s Government, on the Chinese side. Working under an Advisory
Committee, headed by Dr Kapila Vatsayana, the Indian contributions have
been (i) the provision of structural architectural drawings, with details of
decoration, provided by a professional firm of architects; (ii) a fully fabricated
Buddha image; (iii) Indian stone material (finished, semi-finished, and crude)
for exterior cladding of the structure; and (iv) the full cost of construction. The
main responsibilities of the Chinese was to provide the land, handle tenders,
oversee the financial and technical monitoring of the project, and bear the costs
of local transportation of material and additional on-site expenses. All informa-
tion and photographs on the making of the Sanchi Stupa in China have been
procured through the generous assistance of Mr Ashis Chakrabarti, a senior

Chapter 06.indd 215 10/28/2013 12:31:36 PM

 216  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

journalist with The Telegraph, Calcutta, who spent the period from March 2008
to January 2009 on a journalistic assignment in China.
 5 The firm of the New Delhi-based architects, M/s Akshaya Jain and Raka
Chakravorty.
  6 An Indian stone supplier, M/s Mangla Exports, provided all the stone for the
construction, and also secured stone craftsmen from Rajasthan and Orissa who
have experience in doing temple architectural work.
  7 A concise introduction to the history of the Sanchi stupa and its sculptural
iconography can be found in the booklet, Sanchi (New Delhi: Archaeological
Survey of India, World Heritage Series, 2003).
  8 It was in the course of Marshall’s archaeological operations, from 1912 to 18,
that Sanchi was transformed from a site of ruin and spoliation to one of the
best-­preserved standing stupa complexes of antiquity. The publication that
immediately followed was Sir J.H. Marshall, A Guide to Sanchi (Calcutta,
Superintendent, Government Printing, 1918).
  9 The words were quoted to be those of Chinese monk at Baima Si, who referred
to the damage of these rock sculptures at Luoyang, Datong and Dunhuang
in the hands of Western ‘cave raiders’ and Cultural Revolution ideologues—
Chakrabarti, ‘India’s Gift: Sanchi Stupa in China’.
10 I am indebted to the television feature of Ms Monideepa Banerjee of NDTV
(New Delhi Television), aired on 2 January 2009, for the interview with Moni
Ahsanullah, and much of the information and photographs on the Bangladeshi
Taj Mahal.
11 ‘Bangladesh Gets Its Own Taj’, Headline News, The Straits Times, 7 December
2008. Ahsanuallah talked of hiring specialist architects to measure the dimen-
sions of the real Taj Mahal, and of bringing over six Indian technicians to the
building site across the border to ensure the fidelity of the copy to the structure
of the original.
12 Ibid. Moni Ahsanuallah even claimed to have used ‘the same marble and stone as
in the original Taj’ and to have invested the same magnitude of material and labour
in his production. ‘We used machinery, which is why it took less time. Otherwise,
it would have taken us 20 years, too, and 22,000 workers to complete it.’
13 ‘Replica of Taj Mahal Opens to the Public in Bangladesh’, Beijing Time, Xinhua,
English, 9 December 2008.
14 The Indian High Commission in Dhaka, cited in the NDTV television feature
on Bangladesh’s Taj Mahal, 2 January 2009.
15 I use this famous term of Mikhail Bakhtin—The Dialogic Imagination, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981)—to suggest the specificities of a configuration of time and space in lend-
ing context to a particular trend or occurrence in history.
16 A landmark and widely-cited writing on this theme is Timothy Mitchell’s
essay, ‘The World as Exhibition’, which appeared as the first chapter of his
book, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and
in Comparative Studies in History and Society, vol. 31, no. 9 (1989). Among

Chapter 06.indd 216 10/28/2013 12:31:36 PM

 conceits of the copy  217

other significant studies of imperial exhibitions are Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral

Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World Fairs, 1851–
1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Peter N. Hoffenberg,
An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal
Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and
Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007).
17 An Illustrated Description of the Diorama of the Ganges (London: Portland
Gallery, 1850).
18 For a discussion of the techniques of these early dioramas, see The Dictionary of
Art (London: Grove, 1996), Vol. 8, pp. 910–11.
19 We do not have references to any separate publications by the lithographer,
T.C. Dibdin. He was clearly the main person working with James Fergusson,
converting his sketches of monuments into lithographed plates in many of the
early publications of Fergusson. Even before the publication of James Fergusson’s
Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in Hindosthan (London:
J.  Hogarth, 1848), Dibdin’s name as lithographer appears in Fergusson’s
Illustration of the Rock Cut Temples of India (London: Weale, 1845).
20 Fergusson’s travels in India and writings on Indian architecture have been dis-
cussed in the first chapter of my book, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions
of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004). On the deployment of Fergusson’s images for this diorama, see
pp. 18–19.
21 J. Forbes Watson, Report on the Illustration of the Archaic Architecture of India
being conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India (London: India Museum,
1868). Discussed at length in Monuments, Objects, Histories, pp. 22–6, 58–60.
22 On the setting up of these Architectural Courts at the South Kensington
Museum, see Tim Barringer, ‘The South Kensington Museum and the
Colonial Project’, in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds.), Colonialism and the
Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 17–21.
23 National Archives of India, New Delhi. ‘Convention for Promoting Universally
Reproductions of Works of Art for the Benefit of Museums of All Countries’,
Government of India, Home Department Proceedings, Archaeology Branch, 1869–
70, pp. 7–8.
24 Nayanjot Lahiri, ‘From Ruin to Restoration: The Modern History of Sanchi’,
in Timothy Insoll (ed.), Belief in the Past: Proceedings of the 2002 Manchester
Conference on Archaeology and Religion (British Archaeological Reports,
International Series, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2004), pp. 102–3.
25 National Archives of India, New Delhi. Report by H.H. Cole, Superintendent,
Archaeological Survey, N.W. Provinces, India, to the Under-Secretary of State
for India, India Office, London, 24 August 1869—Government of India, Home
Department Proceedings, Archaeology Branch, 1869–70, pp. 2–4.
26 Art Journal (London, 1870), pp. 65–6, 1871, pp. 65–8.

Chapter 06.indd 217 10/28/2013 12:31:36 PM

 218  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

27 Deborah Swallow, ‘Colonial Architecture, International Exhibitions, and

Official Patronage of the Indian Artisan: The Case of the Gateway from Gwalior
at the Victoria & Albert Museum’, in Barringer and Flynn (eds), Colonialism
and the Object, pp. 59–60.
28 Catalogue of the Indian Section of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London,
1886 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1886). Preface, p. 9,
Chapter VII, pp. 1–2.
29 Ibid., pp. 11–12. Italics are mine.
30 Official Guide, British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, 1925, (ed.) by G.C. Lawrence
(London: Fleetway, Press, 1925), pp. 74–5.
31 Ibid.
32 Donald Maxwell, Wembley in Colour, Being Both an Impression and a Memento
of the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (with over 100 sketches in colour and
monochrome) (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1925), pp. 56, 68.
33 Ibid., p. 68. Italics are mine.
34 See, on this theme, Tim Edensor, Tourists at the Taj: Performance and Meaning
at a Symbolic Site (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
35 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), pp. 14–15.
36 Ibid., p. 102.
37 This new consumerist Hinduism is an offshoot of the politics of the Hindu Right
in India, which has been a vibrant current within twentieth century ideologies
of nationhood and has gained steady ascendancy in India’s electoral democracy
since the 1980s. Orchestrating a campaign for the ‘rebuilding’ of a Ram temple
in the holy city of Ayodhya, on the site of a sixteenth mosque that has suppos-
edly been built over a destroyed temple, this politics reached its crescendo in
the demolition of the mosque in December 1992 and its aftermath. There are
a number of studies on the rise, political fortunes, and cultural ideology of the
Hindu Right in contemporary India—see, e.g., Tapan Bose, Pradip Datta, and
Sumit Sarkar, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags, Tracts for the Times (Delhi: Orient
Longman, 1991); Gyanendra Pandey (ed.), Hindus and Others: The Question of
Identity in India Today (New Delhi: Viking, 1993); or David Ludden, Making
India Hindu: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999). The connection between the political careers of Hindu
nationalism and the new spate of temple building, as replicas and look-alikes of
older medieval temples, is only recently becoming a subject of scholarly interest.
38 The contending medieval narratives of the desecration and reconsecration of
this temple and the story of its rebuilding in the years after India’s Independence
are analysed at length in Richard Davis, ‘Reconstructions of Somanatha’, in Lives
of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 213–21.
39 The Akshardham temple complexes in both Gandhinagar and New Delhi now
maintain elaborate websites, providing detailed information on the history of
the Swaminarayan sect, the construction of the temples, the ­statuary and the
larger display tableaux, and all the sights and exhibits to be toured within

Chapter 06.indd 218 10/28/2013 12:31:36 PM

 conceits of the copy  219

their vast enclosures. See, e.g., http://e.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akshardham_

(Gandhinagar).
40 My discussion of the Akshardham temple complexes and of the two replicas
of the Amarnath and Vaishno-Devi temples in Gujarat, that follows, is drawn
from the work of Jyotindra Jain, ‘Curating Culture, Curating Territory: Religio-
Political Mobility in India’, in Gayatri Sinha, Art and Visual Culture in India,
1857–2007 (Mumbai: Marg and Bodhi Art, 2008). My thanks to Dr Jyotindra
Jain for his generosity in sharing his research, writing, and photographs of this
material.
41 Jyotindra Jain, ‘Curating Culture, Curating Territory’, pp. 219–20.
42 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, ‘The Thing and Its Doubles’, pp. 143–8.
43 This last section on Durga Puja in contemporary Calcutta is based on my ongo-
ing research on the subject, begun in 2002 in collaboration with my c­ olleague,
Dr Anjan Ghosh, which is now nearing completion as a monograph. All the
research material from this project—interview tapes and transcripts, newspaper
and journal articles, publicity material, and a large body of transparencies and
digital photographs on this theme—is housed in the archives of the Centre for
Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
44 Some of my arguments and material on the contemporary festival phenomenon
in Calcutta is laid out in my article, ‘From Spectacle to Art’, Art India, The Art
News Magazine of India, vol. ix, no. iii quarter iii (2004).
45 For a brief history of the changing social and civic character of Durga Puja
celebrations in nineteenth and early twentieth century Calcutta, see Tithi
Bhattacharya, ‘Tracking the Goddess: Religion, Community and Identity in
the Durga Puja Ceremonies in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta’, Journal of Asian
Studies, vol. 66, no. 4 (November 2007).
46 Pradip Bose, ‘The Heterotopias of Calcutta’s Durga Puja’, translated from the
Bengali article, ‘Pujor Kolkatar Bikolpolok’ of 1997 by Manas Ray, in Amit
Chaudhuri (ed.), Memory’s Gold: Writings on Calcutta (New Delhi: Penguin,
2008).
47 The term, ‘post-ethnic’ has been used by Hans Belting to talk about the
way the ‘primitive’ and the ‘indigenous’ arts of the non-Western world have
transcended their ethnicity and reinvented their identity as contemporary art—
Hans Belting, ‘Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age’, in Peter
Weibel and Andreas Buddensieg (eds), Contemporary Art and the Museum: A
Global Perspective (Hatje Canz, 2007).
48 ‘Summons for Potter Pandal ’, ‘Pandal Wins Reprieve’, The Telegraph, Calcutta,
11 and 13 October 2007.
49 ‘Harry Potter and the Hindu Gods’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/
7040191.stm.
50 The term used was ‘Jai Piracy’—e-mail correspondence from Solomon
Benjamin, ‘Copyright Claim over Harry Potter Pandal’, 12 October 2007.
51 Interview with Ahsanullah by Monideepa Banerjee in the NDTV television
feature on Bangladesh’s Taj Mahal, 2 January 2009.

Chapter 06.indd 219 10/28/2013 12:31:36 PM

 220  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

52 Answering newspaper critics and many who felt cheated at the poorness of
the copy, Ahsanullah defended his creation, ‘It’s the Taj of Bangladesh …’ In a
boldly populist stance, he continued, ‘If you want to see the real Taj, you have
to travel to the Indian city of Agra and spend at least 20,000 takas. It costs only
50 takas to see my Taj’—‘Bangladesh Taj Mahal Owner Slams Critics’, Agence
France-Presse (AFP), 15 December 2008.

Chapter 06.indd 220 10/28/2013 12:31:36 PM

 III
The Aural

Chapter 07.indd 221 10/25/2013 6:34:01 PM

Chapter 07.indd 222 10/25/2013 6:34:01 PM
 7
When Kathavarayan Spoke His Mind
The Intricate Dynamics of the Formations of the Political
through Film Making Practices in Tamil Nadu

Rajan Kurai Krishnan

Maruthur Gopalan Ramachandran (1914–1987), better known as MGR,

has attracted some, though possibly inadequate, academic attention, and
theoretical reflection, while his lasting posthumous sway over Tamil masses
is seen as enigmatic and inexplicable by many observers.1 Thousands of his
statues can be found all over Tamil Nadu, and in many places ritual offerings
like lighting camphor are made in front of the busts and statues. In fact, the
political life of the icon is far from over. The actor politician was initially
part of the rise of the Dravidian-Tamil nationalist movement turned regional
political party in support of autonomy of Indian states, Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam (DMK), which came to power in Tamil Nadu under the leader-
ship of C.N.  Annadurai (Anna) in 1967. After the demise of the founder
leader, MGR fell out with M. Karunanidhi, the successor to Anna as the
leader of the DMK, and founded his own party All Indian Anna Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in 1972 claiming to be the true legatee
of Anna. He became the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu in 1977 and ruled
the state until his death in 1987 winning elections consecutively in 1977,
1980, and 1984. J. Jayalalitha, the actor who paired with MGR on screen
and became his political successor, has ruled the state alternatively with M.
Karunanidhi of DMK since then.
The case of MGR provides an opportunity to think how film-making
practices, given the right historical moment, can make it possible for an actor
to become a sovereign figure—a leader commanding the loyalty of huge

Chapter 07.indd 223 10/25/2013 6:34:02 PM

 224  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

swath of people. He is not the only actor to become a political leader or to

govern a state. However, each instance of such a transformation of an actor
playing hero in films into a head of a state through democratic political exer-
cise is distinct and can help us to understand the constitution of the popular
in the mass-mediated society. In some instances the film career may not have
much to do with the political career except for the initial advantage of being
a known face whereas in another instance both film and political career may
perfectly converge. There can be no single analytical framework to under-
stand MGR of Tamil Nadu, Ronald Reagan, the former President of the
USA, Joseph Estrada of Philippines, N.T. Rama Rao of Andhra Pradesh, and
Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, USA to name some of the most suc-
cessful cases. In the case of MGR, I believe that the role played by cinema in
the transition of Tamil society into a modern democratic polity has provided
the ground for his transformation into a political leader. Among the various
components that may have contributed to the making of MGR in such a
historical context, the present paper will just delineate three. The first is that
cinema was part of the process of how Tamil became a sign of sovereignty of a
people, in the very process of forging a conception of the historical becoming
of a people. It is in the process of welding cinema and the political aspirations
of the people through sign Tamil that M. Karunanidhi played a role in the
making of MGR. The second is how cinema in such a situation was capable
of converting the hero into a sovereign figure. MGR himself is to be credited
for capitalizing on the potential of the medium once he became popular with
the help of Karunanidhi’s dialogues. The third is how Sivaji Ganesan, the
other popular actor of the time, complemented MGR in the formation of the
modular modern political subject inadvertently helping MGR to become the
sovereign figure. In other words, if MGR is the visible apex of an isosceles tri-
angle, Karunanidhi and Sivaji are the other two vertices unseen at the bottom
in so far as their role in the making of MGR is concerned. After elaborat-
ing how this triangulation worked, in a brief conclusion, I will present the
instance of Kathavarayan films to support my thesis.

Cinema and the DMK: Understanding the Shift from Song to

Speech
The early Tamil cinema, from 1931 to 1948, relied heavily on songs for
expressing all emotional high points. In that initial phase, for various rea-
sons, Tamil cinema closely followed on the footsteps of the musical drama
tradition, which emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century and

Chapter 07.indd 224 10/25/2013 6:34:02 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  225

became very popular in the early decades of twentieth century. Apart from
that, as Stephen Hughes as suggested, the booming gramophone industry of
the early decades also made songs the very mark of popular culture.2 While
these are perhaps the immediate reasons, there was one more historical condi-
tion that ­contributed to the reliance on songs. It was the problem of dialects
in speech. The everyday speech in Tamil would index the characters through
the dialect to a specific region and/or caste. It was also hard for characters
to express themselves powerfully through everyday speech, since neither the
audience nor the actors were ready for a creative depiction on screen the
actual ways in which people acted and spoke. Mostly the situations enacted
were far removed from everyday life since the stories were mythological or
folk narratives. Hence to match the stylized performances songs came in
handy. However, several attempts were being made to make socials and to
write dialogues appealing to all the people. The real success in those attempts
came with the DMK writers. But before we see how the political party got
involved in this we need to get a brief snapshot of the political history of the
Tamil land.
As Theodore Baskaran has documented the initial popular political sen-
timent to be spread through popular theatre and print media in the early
twentieth century was in the cause of national liberation.3 However, Indian
National Congress as a political party lacked leaders in Tamil Nadu who were
capable of effecting grass root mobilization. In addition to that, in a develop-
ment unique to Tamil Nadu (then part of Madras presidency), alarmed by
the domination of the Brahmins in colonial bureaucracy, in the emergent
professions like legal practice as well as in the Indian National Congress,
the non-Brahmin elite and landlords came together to form a platform of
their own which came to be known as Justice Party. When diarchy was intro-
duced in 1920, the Justice Party formed the ministry in Tamil Nadu since
Congress stayed away from the elections. In order to counter the claim of
the Justice Party that they represented non-Brahmin interests, Congress
strengthened its own non-Brahmin wing. As a part of it, E.V. Ramasamy4
was also invited to join the Congress by C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji). It was
the induction of E.V. Ramasamy, later to be known as Periyar, in 1919 that
gave a new popular thrust to the activities of the Congress. However, Periyar
left the Congress after a short shrift in 1925 when he launched the Self-
Respect movement. Periyar’s emphasis on communal reservations, that is,
provision of equal opportunity to the members of all castes, as a means to
the subsequent annihilation of caste itself, made him closer to the Justice
Party founded on non-Brahmin plank. Though the Congress lead by Rajaji

Chapter 07.indd 225 10/25/2013 6:34:02 PM

 226  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

won the elections in 1937, defeating the Justice Party, Periyar’s movement
was getting entrenched at the grass root level. Rajaji provided an historical
opportunity to the non-Brahmin sentiments of several sections of the society
and the egalitarian sentiments of Self-Respect movement to assume a new
direction, when he tried to make learning Hindi compulsory in schools in
1938. Suddenly, language became the unifying point of various sections of
dissent. The anti-Hindi agitations made Periyar the common leader of oppo-
sition to the Congress and those demanding separate Dravidian nation. In a
perceptive account of the developments, Pandian has suggested that Aryan
Brahmin-North India-Hindi became transitive categories in the political
common sense of the Tamil people.5 In such a commonsense, in order to
seek emancipation from the discriminatory caste order the ‘Aryan’ Brahmin
was allegedly presiding over, it was found necessary to oppose Hindi. It was in
that context Tamil became the sign of the political aspirations of the people
of Tamil Nadu.
The anti-Hindi agitations of 1938 drew young people of the generation
of C.N. Annadurai into the movement. Anna could thus perceive that Tamil,
as a Sign, will have the power to bring many sections of the society into a
political fold. In the mid-forties, Anna fashioned an ornate Tamil prose from
various literary traditions and deployed the same in both speech and writing.
Alliteration, rhyme and repetitive sound patters were the means of producing
rhetorical flourish in his articulations. He introduced this language not only
in his public addresses, but in his journal Dravida Nadu and then in the plays
he wrote, to a tremendous public response. Most of the young activists of the
Dravidian movement started emulating him, leading to a massive innova-
tion in language use. In 1949, Annadurai left Periyar’s Dravidar Kazhagam
and formed his own political party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).
Many of the creative artists and writers in popular theatre followed him
resulting in his party being derisively branded as the party of ‘Koothadigal’,
literally performers of Koothu, traditional folk theatre. The DMK leaders in
their speeches, writing and performances brought into circulation terms and
idioms from ancient Tamil literary corpus, many works of which were found
and printed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The result-
ant language, however, was not beyond the comprehension of the ordinary
people, unlike the language of the learned men, the pundits. At the same
time, it was completely different from the everyday speech of the people,
thus freeing itself of all the divisive markers of caste and regional belonging.
The new ornate language realized Tamil as something other than itself, mark-
ing the birth of a new collective significance to Tamil. It is important that

Chapter 07.indd 226 10/25/2013 6:34:02 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  227

themes of emancipation and freedom were articulated in the new rhetoric,

which accomplished several tasks in the following decades. Primarily, it made
Tamil a sign of sovereignty and any expression in the newly fashioned ornate
style an invocation of the historical becoming of a people, the Tamils coded
as Dravidian by the Dravidar Kazhagam, the parent body of the DMK, in
order to keep out Tamil speaking Aryan Brahmins, the alleged proponents
of divisive caste system which has for long blocked history in the ideological
perspective of the movement.
Following the success of the DMK plays with dialogues in the new rhetori-
cal mode, the film industry wanted to incorporate the same in films inviting
Annadurai to script films. Whatever is distinct about the histories of cinema
and politics in Tamil Nadu owes much to this moment. With the great suc-
cess of Annadurai’s film, Velaikkari (1949), Tamil cinema found a way to
use dialogue in the place of songs to highlight emotions. As a consequence
it became possible to make films depicting contemporary life without losing
dramatic import. Advertisements for the film Velaikkari, for example, quoted
a line from the hero’s argument in court: Vēs�aman�iyāta vētānti, mōt�i ceyyāta
mātu, jōt�i illāta māt�appurā, cēt�i illāta rājakumāri irukka mut�iyātām! (The god
man without deceit, the woman without the ability to entice, the pigeon
without a pair, the princess without maids cannot be seen!). We have two sets
of alliterative sounds: Vē and vē in the first phrase, m and m in the second
phrase. The presence of the suffix āta in all the phrases creates a rhyming
pattern. More importantly, the t�i ending in the second, third and fourth
phrases, mōt�i, jōt�i, and cēt�i, give the sentence the power of a chant. Such
powers of articulation endowed the hero with the singularity required to
overcome his enemies and transform the society. Following closely the success
of Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi became the most cherished dialogue writer of
all times with a string of extremely successful films.
When lengthy ornamental dialogues displaced songs in the sound track,
the accompanying images had to change as well. It was not necessary to show
the face of the singer all the time during the song sequence. Even if the face
was shown the singer-actor was not required to display much emotion on the
face since the song was carrying the emotion. Further, the song, though an
expression of personal emotion, did not necessarily originate with the singer.
He could make use of the song to express his emotion. I believe this under-
standing is derived or strengthened from real life situations in which village
communities used well-known songs to lament the death of a person or when
a young man used a widely known love song to convey his feelings to his love
when his beloved occasioned to walk past him. Hence though the emotions

Chapter 07.indd 227 10/25/2013 6:34:02 PM

 228  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

are personal the song itself was seen as impersonal allowing the camera to
show anything in the vicinity apart from the face of the singer during a song
sequence. However, when a long piece of dialogue is delivered the particular
combination of words apparently originated in the interiority of the speaker.
Hence the singer-actors of the previous era, who were known for their lack of
histrionic potential, were replaced by new actors. One can say that the new
actors were constrained by the very images to show emotions. Let me explain
this proposition.
In his books on cinema, Gilles Deleuze has proposed a primary classifica-
tion of film images as movement images and time images.6 Briefly stated,
the movement images are subsumed by the narration but time images are
relatively autonomous. The images determined by the sound track, as during
a song, do not keep the action flowing but rather dwell on the particular
moment in the narration yielding images relatively autonomous from the
narrative. Hence, song sequences are largely time images in that they are just
there so that the sound track can do its business. When the ornamental dia-
logues of the DMK leaders replaced the songs, they also performed as sound
images, that is, images determined by the sound track. The rhetoric implic-
itly trained the actors in becoming articulate and expressive as the camera
stayed on their face as they spoke. Unlike everyday language that demanded
expressive power from the actors, the alliterations and figurative usages helped
them to forge expressions. They had to authenticate the ornamental speech
delivered by them. In other words the DMK speech images combined two
different requirements. On the one hand, since the speeches were ornamen-
tal they also retained the quality of sound images which being a time image
will allow the visual on the screen to be autonomous while on the other
hand, even though autonomous, the face of the actor had to accompany the
speech. It was the mandatory—autonomous face that could forge emotions.
The audience read the face of the character and related to the interiority. As
for politics, the movement from being merely subjected to power to that of
becoming subject of enunciation-action, a reversal in the direction of flow
of power, involves the production of the sign of interiority and the articulate
agentive self. It is in fashioning such a modern subjectivity and historical
agency that DMK cinema and politics came together. Let me provide an
instance from a review published in Dravida Nadu, a DMK journal edited by
Anna himself.7 The film reviewed was Devaki (1951). ‘Sufficient importance
has not been given to the charming dialogue of Thozhar Mu. Karunanidhi.
For example, when Devaki, weary of life, is about to jump into the water in
the Kannambadi Dam, what she speaks has not been filmed in a way that

Chapter 07.indd 228 10/25/2013 6:34:02 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  229

excites our thoughts. We are unable to find the following words ... Because,
instead of showing Devaki, who speaks the words, the director shows the
water below’ (translation and emphasis added). Here the curious expression
‘to find’ which implies that the words are visualized on the face, makes clear
what I suggested above about the interiority of the enunciatory subject.
Sivaji Ganesan, who debuted with the landmark DMK film Parasakthi
(1952), delivering the by now legendary court-room declamation penned
by M. Karunanidhi, was the answer to the historical need of an actor whose
face could be the well spring of emotions to match the dialogue. Likewise,
it was the string of M. Karunanidhi scripted films between 1949 and 1954
that made MGR a famous actor. It should be born in mind what charmed
the people in those dialogues were not just rhetorical embellishments but the
message of political emancipation. Further, as we already noted, the ornate
style signified Tamil as the sign of sovereignty.
Since 1954, MGR became closely associated with the DMK leadership,
invariably performing in plays staged in District level party conferences apart
from delivering political speeches in them. He carefully crafted certain con-
tinuity between the dialogues he spoke on screen with the political speeches
he delivered, slowly making his film narratives synchronize with the politi-
cal narrative of the party. In due course MGR became the very icon of the
party and the political emancipation it promised to the subaltern classes.
Sivaji Ganesan, on the other hand got estranged from the DMK in 1956 and
slowly started veering towards the Congress, led by Kamaraj who also had the
support of Periyar. The Congress tried to showcase Sivaji to counteract the
appeal of MGR. But they were in for a surprise. While Sivaji’s films competed
well in the box office with MGR’s films, Sivaji’s political appeal to the elec-
torate never fetched any results.8 Kamaraj, to whom Sivaji had sworn loyalty,
died in 1975 soon after the proclamation of national emergency. During
the course of the next ten years, Sivaji desperately tried to gain a foothold in
politics, even founding his own party. He lost a lot of his hard-earned money
in those futile attempts. With the demise of MGR in 1987, Sivaji made
one last attempt, after the complete failure of which he gave up his political
ambitions once and for all, and contented with donning guest roles in films.
Regardless of their contrasting political careers, MGR and Sivaji dominated
the cultural landscape of Tamil Nadu as a combination. Before I expand on
this theme further, I want to reflect on the transformation of the actor body,
which I name as Hero-Actor-Leader (HAL) phenomenon, by which MGR
could aspire to be a sovereign figure through the inherent qualities of the film
medium.

Chapter 07.indd 229 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 230  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Hero-Actor-Leader: The Sovereign Body of the Film Actor

My attempt in this section is to explore what semeiotic characteristics of
cinema make it possible for the film actor to become a candidate for the
role of a political leader. By leader I mean a person who will have the abil-
ity to inspire the formation of a political group or party which can act in
the real world in such a fashion as to acquire political power. I call such
political capacity an expression or manifestation of sovereignty. All the actors
performing the role of heroes, fighting manifestations of evil or bad guys
based on principles of moral order, will have this possibility of acquiring the
political capacity, generated by film narratives. However, it will need certain
socio-historical context for converting the possibility into an actuality, which
only a few actors get to find. I will begin with an anecdote from the life of
MGR.
K.P. Ramakrishnan was a stunt artist, who often substituted MGR or his
main villains in stunt scenes in which considerable risk taking was involved.
He became part of MGR’s permanent group of minor artists in 1957 and
one of the body guards when MGR became a full-time politician and Chief
Minister. His memoir, fascinating in its ethnographic details, has recently
been published.9 A freelance journalist called Rajath wrote the memoir orally
narrated by Ramakrishnan. Perhaps it is this double inscription that has given
the book a strange texture in which two registers seem to play out. One is an
account of the hardships faced by the stuntmen which if extended should go
on to decry the raw deal they get in the industry. But this extension is denied
by Ramakrishnan’s adulation and devotion to MGR which make the book a
celebration of MGR’s great qualities. I will summarize briefly his narration
of an incident during the filming of an MGR blockbuster Ayirathil Oruvan
(1965). The shooting was taking place in the rocky coasts of northern
Karnataka. MGR, Jayalalitha, the heroine and Nambiar, his regular villain
were all staying in a bungalow and the stunt men were staying in a local inn
without electricity. They were working from dawn to dusk filming a sword
fight sequence in the craggy rocks in a distant shore. One day, late evening,
MGR sent a car to pick up Ramakrishnan. The latter was apprehensive since
it was unusual, took two of his colleagues and went to the bungalow. They
were first treated with excellent dinner and then Ramakrishnan was sum-
moned to the presence of MGR. Ramakrishnan was surprised to find MGR
being surrounded by other major co-stars, the Director, Assistant Directors,
and so on. In the presence of everyone MGR initiated the inquiry. The prob-
lem was this. Ramakrishnan, who was substituting Nambiar in the fight,

Chapter 07.indd 230 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  231

was repeatedly erring causing several retakes and wastage of the precious
raw film stock. Ramakrishnan discomfited by MGR’s displeasure found it
­impossible to defend himself. Nambiar, the villain actor came to his rescue.
He prompted Ramakrishnan to talk about the shoes. Then the truth was
slowly revealed. The rocks had very sharp edges. If one was to balance him-
self the footwear needed to offer a firm grip. The shoe must have been made
with flexible, quality rubber. But the stunt men were supplied in this instance
with cheap inflexible boots which Ramakrishnan describes as police boots.
While it was hard for Ramakrishnan to balance himself and strike a fight-
ing posture during the film shooting, for some reason he could not bring
himself to complain about the footwear either. Once the issue came to light,
Ramakrishnan was delighted to see his master MGR taking on the director
and the production crew about their failure to provide quality footwear. It is
his sense of pride about the master’s recognition that appears to have made
him remember the incident and narrate it. I have narrated the story so that
the role of stuntmen in the context of the MGR film becomes clear.
Now let us turn to the nature of the film image. The image stands for two
different things. At the immediate level the image shows MGR fighting the
actor Nambiar. Both are well known to the contemporary audience as persons
alive and living in the city of Madras. At another level the image shows the
warrior Manimaran fighting a corrupt ruler of Selva Theevu in some distant
past. Both these significations are simultaneous. One may think the represen-
tation involved as similar to a play. On further thought the difference would
become obvious. In a play, the actor is very much present in the immediate
vicinity of the audience. He only enacts the character. In the case of cinema,
both the actor and the character he plays are absent. This double absence is
the very reason why the actor can slide into the hero by his affective use of
the actor-body. Further, another consequence of such absence occurs when
a stuntman in the costume of MGR may be doing the fight in a long shot.
In such a shot the film sign both says ‘You see MGR (or someone like him)
fighting Nambiar (or someone like him)’ and ‘You see Manimaran fighting
the leader of Selva Theevu’ when both known actors and the characters are
actually absent in the image. Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of semeiotic
(as he spelled the word) would have called the first proposition the immedi-
ate object of the sign the determination of which is indexical (contiguous)
and the second proposition the dynamic object of the sign the determination
of which is iconic (through resemblance).10 The consequences of this dual
signification is enormous as it sets up an implicit dialectic between the actor
and the character or in semeiotic terms between the icon and the index or

Chapter 07.indd 231 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 232  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

in yet another register between the sensible and the intelligible. In semeiotic
terms, I propose that the hero belongs to iconicity and narration, but the
actor belongs to indexicality and the physical world. The actor is the equally
absent embodiment of the hero but is a person known to be alive or to have
lived in contemporary times. We should explore this a little more closely to
understand how this takes him closer to sovereignty.
Let us consider a typical sequence. A character, Samy, a vigilante, has taken
possession of a vital evidence to prove the guilt of a powerful politician. He is
pursued by the private army of the bad guy and runs to the top of a building.
He comes to the edge of the terrace and the pursuers are closing in. Samy
looks below and sees a speeding truck in the street with sand piled in its
trailer. He jumps from the rooftop. We see him landing on the sand, victori-
ously waving to his pursuers who stand helplessly on the building as the truck
speeds away. You can imagine the delight of the fans of actor V who played
character Samy.
Now actor V is a big star, who charges a huge sum for a film and has
considerable fan following. Naturally no producer can risk having him jump
from a roof top even if it is on to a net, since so much has been invested on
his body. So stunt man K is enlisted to perform the jump. The sequence can
be filmed in the following manner.
While Sign A and Sign B independently related to real things in the world,
together they narrated a story. The most important point: In the process,

Table 7.1  Film Sign: Two Layers of Signification

Images-on-Screen What is in front of the Story (iconic—

(Sign) camera (indexical— dynamic object)
immediate object)
SIGN A Long shot – A Substitute K resembling Samy leapt out of
person jumps from actor V wearing red the roof to escape
the top of a building shirt and black trousers the bad guys
wearing a red shirt jumps from the top of chasing him…
and black trousers a building (he lands in
a net )
SIGN B Mid shot. Actor V Actor V jumps (from a (…AND) luckily
wearing a red shirt wooden plank held by landed on
and black trousers a crane few feet above) sand piled in a
lands on sand piled on to the sand in the speeding truck
in a speeding truck speeding truck

Chapter 07.indd 232 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  233

the body of the stuntman K, rendered faceless, is mobilized by the face of

the actor V, who stands for the hero. The particular actor may be well built,
can personally be very brave and can even be capable of doing the jump by
himself. But his body is more precious as it carries the face that makes him
the hero. His face does not allow the body to take risks. Hence, within the
process of film making we see that like the sovereign’s body protected by
several expendable soldier bodies, the hero-actor’s body is protected by sev-
eral expendable stuntman bodies. I am only suggesting that the hero-actor’s
body is implicitly coded as privileged which can entail re-signification as a
sovereign body if the situation arises. In the case of MGR his active partici-
pation in the mobilizational efforts of the DMK which promised political
emancipation provided the necessary context for re-signification. In the early
films of MGR the dialogue written by M. Karunanidhi sealed the bond. All
this helped the privileged body of MGR, in itself coded as sovereign in the
context of cinema to transport itself to politics. As we shall see later, Deleuze
and Guattari would call it a fully facialized body.
In the case of MGR, the agility of his body was the cause of much
admiration. For example, an assistant cameraman who worked in the film
Malaikkallan (1954), meaning ‘The Thief of the Mountain’, narrated an inci-
dent to me. The film was made in six different languages altogether; Tamil,
Telegu, Kannada, Hindi, Malayalam, and Sinhalese. While each language
version had its own actor to play the hero, the sets and locations remained
the same. The Robinhood like hero character, played by MGR in Tamil, was
played by N.T. Rama Rao in Telugu, Rajkumar in Kannada and Dilip Kumar
in Hindi–Azaad (1955). In the beginning of the film, Malaikkallan in the
disguise of an old man saves the heroine from her abductors and takes her to
his secret dwelling place. Leaving her in a room in the company of another
woman, Malaikkallan goes to another chamber, removes his disguise and re-
appears in the room presenting his youthful self. When the director asked
MGR to do something stylish while performing his re-entry, MGR walked up
fast in long strides up to the entrance of the room and entered the room with
a leap, a light springing movement. The Director, Sriraramulu Naidu was so
impressed that he proceeded to ask the actors in other language versions to
imitate MGR’s leap. When the Hindi version was being filmed Dilip Kumar
had difficulty in performing the leap and became annoyed with the imitative
exercise. In the end he refused to do it, demanding that he be allowed to per-
form in his own style. The director had to relent considering the popularity
Dilip Kumar enjoyed at that time. My narrator concluded what Dilipji did
in the end appealed to the audiences in the north because of their culture.

Chapter 07.indd 233 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 234  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

While it is a matter of speculation what the leap had to do with Tamil

culture, it clearly demonstrated the physical dynamism of MGR as his
major source of attraction. Apparently all through his life MGR ascended
the dais in political rallies only with a leap skipping the last one or two steps
of the stair leading to the dais, to the thunderous applause of the people
assembled. When I personally witnessed it the crowd was waiting in antici-
pation of the performance. Hence the body of the actor brought together
his real life political work and the valour and might of the hero who fought
for justice in the film narrative. The icon-index dialectic that allows the
actor’s body to be fully facialized as hero may enable several actors to aspire
to become political leaders. However, MGR was helped by the historical
context of the emergence of the DMK as the party of the masses in Tamil
Nadu. Realizing this he took care to devote much of his energy and time to
party activities.
There is a general tendency to think that the audiences were gullible in
mistaking the actor for the hero he played. It is my surmise that there is no
naiveté or gullibility involved in the situation. In fact the audiences know
even about the substitutes or stuntmen, ‘dupes’ as they are called. What they
appreciate in the actor is only his capacity to represent the hero convincingly.
The actor after all had the potential or capacity to represent the hero on
screen even as he was not the actual hero. It recommended him to the role of
political representation where he could secure justice for all.
Further, since the actor has only insufficiently assimilated the hero his
leadership rests on a vulnerable foundation. The person has to connect, con-
stantly, his actual self to the qualities of the hero to sustain the leadership.
Pandian has detailed some of the ways in which MGR made the connec-
tions.11 In the extensive vernacular literature that has proliferated in the last
two decades, MGR’s extraordinary acts of charity and generosity have been
extensively documented. It should be born in mind that in comparison to
the situations where individual leaders come to embody the ideology all by
themselves, like in the case of Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin, the Hero-Actor-
Leader has no capacity to produce fascism or dictatorship.12 Even at the
height of his glory MGR conceded around 30 per cent of the popular votes
to M. Karunanidhi, whose dialogues helped him to become a star and who
became his political rival after 1972. In cinema, he had to work hard to stay
ahead of Sivaji Ganesan, his bête-noir. That is the reason why MGR cannot
be understood without the other two vertices of the triangle, M. Karunanidhi
and Sivaji. As I have already explained the role of M. Karunanidhi in making
MGR possible, let me now turn to discuss Sivaji.

Chapter 07.indd 234 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  235

The Faciality Machine and the Many Plateaus of Tamil

Popular Culture
In terms of history of Tamil cinema or the cultural history of Tamil Nadu,
there is no MGR era but only that of MGR and Sivaji. They may not have
made sense or have succeeded so much without complementing each other.
Like in the construction of gender, male and female making sense primarily
in juxtaposition to the other, MGR and Sivaji were defined largely in opposi-
tion to each other. Like in the case of gender there is much to undo in the
MGR-Sivaji opposition as well. We will begin the exercise in the present essay
by locating them together in the faciality machine.
I suggest that MGR-Sivaji era lasted for twenty five years from 1952 to
1977. Though MGR had started acting in 1936 and Sivaji continued to act
for two decades after 1977, it was in the intervening period that their duop-
oly marked what Tamil cinema was. One can easily see that the era of MGR
and Sivaji was one of massive social transformation. The years mark the first
exercise of universal adult franchise (1952) and the end of national emer-
gency imposed by Indira Gandhi and the restoration of democracy (1977).
It will not be an exaggeration to say that the period slowly brought in the
whole populace, the vast majority being illiterate at the beginning, into a new
political understanding of their transformation as citizens of the democratic
republic. Even though initiated in the colonial era, the extension of modern
institutional networks gained impetus only after independence. The spread
of elementary education, rural electrification, founding of several govern-
mental institutions and organizations, the spread of media network in the
rural areas like the vernacular newspapers and radio (the transistor revolu-
tion), the growth of political parties marked the sweeping changes across the
land. In short, the formation of the new political subject was the significant
summary effect.
The figures of MGR and Sivaji were central to the transitional period.
The narratives in which they acted helped people to come to terms with the
ongoing changes. Every year in the period saw the release of several films of
each of them, with MGR acting in lesser number of films (about 115) than
Sivaji (about 175) in those years. The film industry got organized around the
two poles with each of them competing for and signing up other talented
artistes and technicians. The network of fan clubs became rival formations
often resulting in minor scuffles in the cinema halls and other public places.
Defacing the posters of the other hero was a favourite activity of a devoted fan.
They zealously watched the commercial performance of the films, celebrating

Chapter 07.indd 235 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 236  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

when the film of their hero performed better than the opponent’s film. Now
in their old age, MGR and Sivaji fans speak with zest about each of their
hero’s films, the date of release, which film of the other hero was released on
the same date or around that time, how they comparatively fared, the details
of the supporting cast or even minor and major events related to the making
and exhibition of the film. Both the actors were loved by all sections of the
people from Dalit landless agricultural labourers to rich upper caste landown-
ers, professionals, and bureaucrats. Fan networks fostered friendship among
Muslims, Christians, and Hindus. In short my extensive fieldwork during
2005–07 gave me an impression that for an entire generation of Tamilians,
watching MGR and Sivaji films was a way of growing up in the world.
It is observable that the partisanship towards MGR or Sivaji was part of
the affective dynamics of close relationships as if the complementarity made
the bonding strong. If the husband liked Sivaji, the wife liked MGR and vice
versa. Among brothers if the elder liked MGR the younger one liked Sivaji.
There have been instances that arguing in favour of their choice hero brought
an MGR fan and a Sivaji fan closer in friendship.13 From kids in elementary
school to old men and women compared and contrasted the two heroes, and
there are several accounts of the phenomenon in vernacular writing. To give
an instance, one of the most innovative contemporary Tamil poets, Kalapriya,
has extensively written about the fervour with which people were attached to
either Sivaji or MGR in his memoir.14 He was an ardent MGR fan.
It is necessary to see how the complementarity of the actors came about,
before attempting to theorize the same. As we already noted the agility of the
body in action and stunt sequences, style, and mannerisms came to mark
MGR, and allowed the indexical quality of the film sign to graft the iconic
hero onto the actor-body. Some of his most successful films belong to the
Raja-Rani genre (King-Queen genre) which can be rephrased as costume
dramas set in some vague past. MGR would play the honest warrior who
fights the corrupt minister who had usurped the kingdom to become the
dictator and restores the rule of the good king who would then announce the
formation of a republic. Whatever be the variant of the story it would always
be about ending dictatorship restoring the good king as a precursor to her-
alding people’s self rule. In socials, that is, films set in contemporary society,
he would fight the cruel landlords, usurious moneylenders, arrogant rich,
corrupt bureaucrats, and criminals to make them mend their ways to help
the poor and the downtrodden. With the relentless repetition of stereotypical
roles, MGR’s actual body became the very sign of the hero, the saviour of the
suffering lot. His association with the party that promised to bring about the

Chapter 07.indd 236 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  237

rule of the common person did well to work the index-icon dialectic in his
favour. Within his lifetime, the name MGR became a character. He started
playing himself in different roles.
In the case of Sivaji, his articulation of the long monologues with great
emotive power made him a huge success. In contradistinction to MGR,
Sivaji came to be recognized as a kun�acittira nat�ikar (character-actor; lit-
erally, an actor of character portraiture.) While MGR was an action hero,
Sivaji’s prowess for character portrayal resulted in his being cast in negative
roles immediately following his debut, in films like Thirumbi Paar (1953)
and an odd Rashomon spin-off, Andha Naal (1954). Sivaji’s location in the
moral universe was very different from that of MGR. If MGR vanquished
villainous people who troubled the society Sivaji was to face the challenges
of the inner self. Sivaji excelled in family dramas where he encountered emo-
tional conflicts, fought human foibles, and character defects to underscore
the moral fibre that is the basis of human society. The indexical sign of his
body was used to reinforce the iconicity of the character played. Within the
logic of the Tamil film narration, the audiences saw Sivaji distinctly but only
for his capacity to erase his personal self to portray the fine shades of a char-
acter. Hence, he started overemphasizing the character he played to such an
extent that he came to be widely criticized for ‘over-acting’ by the elite. In
the words of the documentary/avant-garde filmmaker–intellectual Amshan
Kumar, ‘He raised the character high above himself and kept increasing the
distance between him and the character’.15 Hence he had to forge a power-
ful and imaginative over-interpretation to reach the heights of the character
fast. The actor body of Sivaji became a vacant site where endless interiorities
manifested. Though they residually constituted in him a moral subject—­
selfless, honest, and altruistic, there were so many ways the qualities exhibited
themselves with no cumulative effect that would allow the actual body of
the actor to mobilize. The actor body became the wellspring of emotions
that gave everything to the iconic characters and could graft little onto itself
owing to the lack of iteration or repetition.
I should mention a casual exercise I undertook with several interlocu-
tors during my fieldwork. I would ask my interlocutor to tell me the names
of five characters that Sivaji had played. No one would have any difficulty
in coming up with them in quick succession. Some of the early favourites
would be Veerapandiya Kattabomman, V.O. Chidambaram Pilli, Sikkal
Shanmugasundaram, Rajaraja Cholan, Lord Siva, Saivite Savant Appar,
Bharathan of Ramayana, Prestige Padmanabha Iyer, Barrister Rajinikanth
and so on. When I followed it up by asking for the names of five characters

Chapter 07.indd 237 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 238  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

MGR played there would be some difficulty even in beginning the list. He
was a fisherman in Padakotti, a peasant in Vivasayee and so on, but what was
the name of the character? His erstwhile fans did come up with some names,
but the exercise looked absurd since whatever singularity the character might
have was already subsumed in the singularity of the name and the persona
of MGR.
All through his career, owing to the secular and atheist moorings of his
party, MGR never played the Hindu Gods except for the folk deity Madhurai
Veeran who got treated as a historical figure in the movie. Two decades after
his death ritual offerings are made to his iconic representations in many places.
Sivaji Ganesan played both Siva and Vishnu with panache but is hardly con-
sidered divine. MGR made Man, Sovereign, and Divine. Sivaji humanized
the Gods and Kings. They needed each other as complementary forces in the
modern subject formation. Further, MGR being part of the DMK meant
that he symbolized the Sovereign aspirations of the Tamil nation; Sivaji being
part of the Congress meant that he interiorized the Indian nation as Tamil.
This helped to complement the historical actualization of the Tamil identity
as personal and essential to the realization of the Indian state, the locus of
sovereignty, as public and formal.16 Viewed thus, MGR’s triumph in politics
and Sivaji Ganesan’s abject failure should make abundant sense.
In his seminal essay titled Subject and Power, Foucault has suggested that
all his work has been about how human beings are made subjects rather than
about power. They are about the making of the subject as the very operation
of power. He has argued that the power of the modern state has a tricky dual
function. ‘But I’d like to underline the fact that the state’s power (and that’s
one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing
form of power. Never, I think, in the history of human societies—even in the
old Chinese society—has there been such a tricky combination in the same
political structures of individualization techniques and of totalization proce-
dures’.17 In passing one can say two things happen in the process of making
the modern subject and the state. One is that the human being is thoroughly
individualized with emotions and interiority sketched, enunciatory, agentive,
and separated from others and so on. The other process is the totalization of
the society. In conventional liberal political thought the state is seen to be
the agent of totalization with individuals fighting to save their distinction.
Foucault in contrast suggests that the state, as transformed pastoral power, is
both individuating and totalizing.
The pre-modern person in Tamil Nadu could have multiple belongings:
caste, ritual orientation, region, village or city, and so on. The process of

Chapter 07.indd 238 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  239

inculcating modern political rationality involves severing a person’s older

ties to individualize him as a distinct identity and totalize him under a new
sign of a collective that authorizes the state. In the one of a kind text, The
Thousand Plateaus (hereafter TP) Deleuze and Guattari offer a beautiful
metaphor inspired by cinema for this dual process: the faciality machine.
The faciality machine consists of white wall of signifiance and black holes of
subjectification. Primarily faciality refers to the originary redundancy of the
signifier which is the sign without the signified—God face or the Despot face.
When new forms of power assemblages come about the faciality machine is
produced by keeping the empty transcendental signifier as the white wall
and the transcendentalized individuated subject as black hole. I understand
this as corresponding to Foucault’s analysis of state power derived from pas-
toral power: the totalizing procedures of the state power, the whitewall or
signifiance and individuating techniques of the state power which is subjec-
tification or black holes. In the historical situation of Tamil Nadu anything
standing for sign Tamil provided the whitewall and the new individuation of
the politicized, enunciatory, agentive subject formed the black hole.
From all our discussions above, it should not be hard to see that MGR and
Sivaji together constituted the faciality machine. MGR was the white wall
signifiance and Sivaji was the black hole of subjectification. MGR was the
transcendental signifier of Tamil sovereignty and Sivaji was the interiorized
enunciatory subject. In order to constitute the modern political subject they
had to operate together as complementary forces.

Kathavarayan Story and the Semeiotic Juncture

We need to ask the question when the faciality machine gets formed. One
answer TP gives is: ‘At very different dates, there occurred a generalized col-
lapse of all of the heterogeneous, polyvocal, primitive semiotics in favour of a
semiotic of signifiance and subjectification. Whatever the differences between
signifiance and subjectification, whichever prevails over the other in this case
or that, whatever the varying figures assumed by their de facto mixtures—
they have it in common to crush all polyvocality, set up language as a form
of exclusive expression, and operate by signifying biunivocalization and sub-
jective binarization’.18 The other answer is that the faciality machine occurs
when a signifier centred semiotic order is in a concrete mixture with the sub-
jectification originated semiotic. We can interpret that the signifier centred
semiotic as any moral, social order centred on God and the Sovereign, the
earthly representative of the divine. The subjectification originating semiotic

Chapter 07.indd 239 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 240  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

is where humanist immanence and self-rule of the people constitute the order
like in secular modern democracies. Signifier centred semiotic is ‘Signifying
sign regime’ and subjectification originated semiotic is called ‘Post-Signifying
sign regime’.
In the case of Tamil Nadu both these answers are true. The mid-twentieth
century Tamil Nadu was a wildly stratified society. There were abundant rural
pockets that belonged to the heterogeneous, polyvocal, primitive semiotics.
The post independent modernization collapsed them all in favour of a semi-
otic of signifiance and subjectification. MGR and Sivaji became the faciality
machine that absorbed and transformed all the primitive semiotics of hetero-
geneous rural and tribal communities. The cities and small towns were the
concrete mixtures of signifying and post-signifying sign regimes. For example,
in what is known as public-private divide, the Brahmin lawyers were legis-
lator-subjects par excellence in their profession belonging to post-­signifying
sign regime and devotee ritual practitioners in private life belonging to signi-
fying sign regime. They too needed the faciality machine even if they could
find sources other than MGR and Sivaji to provide the same. With the level
of abstraction in which TP discusses the faciality machine it should be obvi-
ous that MGR and Sivaji could not have been the only sources for making the
faciality machine though they were certainly the most popular of the sources:
‘Very specific assemblages of power impose signifiance and subjectification as
their determinate form of expression, in reciprocal presupposition with new
contents: there is no signifiance without despotic assemblage, no subjectifica-
tion without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two
without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls
and subjects’.19 The despotic assemblage belongs to God/Despot-centred
signifying sign regime; the authoritarian assemblage belongs to the legislator-
subject post-signifying sign regime. What hangs in balance in the mixture is
the extent to which the agentive human is apparently freed from the clutches
of divine ordination and despotic control.
I suggest that the many renditions and transformations of the story of
Kathavarayan provide an instance of how the semiotic transition hap-
pened. Kathavarayan is a folk deity worshipped primarily in central Tamil
Nadu mostly annexed to the all-powerful goddess Mariamman. There are
many chapbook versions of his story printed in the early twentieth century
apart from the myriad oral narratives surrounding the rituals enacted in
­contemporary times. The story and the rituals involving the deity have been
extensively studied by scholars of folklore and religion like David Shulman

Chapter 07.indd 240 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  241

and Evelyn Masilamani Meyer.20 Abstracting from the countless variations,

the basic outline of the story can be presented in the following manner.
Kathavarayan, originally, is the son of Siva and Parvati. Due to certain
misdeeds, Siva curses him to be born as a human child. Parvati makes an
unwise intervention inviting Siva’s wrath on herself, who curses her as well
to live as a human being in the world. When Parvati pleads to be forgiven,
Siva promises to redeem both of them when Kathavarayan as a human being
is impaled on a stake. Kathavarayan becomes a human child to be brought
up by an untouched hunter’s community. He falls in love with a Brahmin
girl Aryamala, living under the care of the local king. In spite of the repeated
warnings from Parvati, now living in penance in the world, Kathavarayan
defies all obstacles to abduct and marry Aryamala. Eventually apprehended
by the king he is ordered to be impaled on the stake. On his impalement,
Siva appears on the scene to redeem both Parvati and Kathavarayan to heaven
along with Aryamala.
As can be readily imagined the chapbook versions and ritual enactments
of the story betray deep tensions about the divine status of the untouched
tragic hero. Typically, the left secular folklore analyses in Tamil seek to his-
toricize the love and the punishment calling all mythological frills upper caste
attempts to deflect the import of the human tragedy. The left-secular analysts
are so entrenched in the post-signifying sign regime of authoritarian assem-
blage that they would want to free completely the human element from the
divine and make it a fully fledged tragedy of a Dalit hero.21 Since the ritual
enactments of Kathavarayan story is still popular in Mariamman festivals, it
appears that the people are not yet ready for such semiotic transition the left
would insist on. Hence we can only have several mixtures of the sign regimes.
Let me present two film versions of the story as examples so that my argu-
ments in the paper can be substantiated.
The first film version of the story was produced in 1941 with the title
Aryamala. One of the singing stars of the early Tamil cinema, P.U. Chinnappa
acted as Kathavarayan. The story stayed close to one of the chapbook versions
to the extent possible. Though the hero appeared more dignified than the
ambiguous moral stature the chapbooks give him, the first film version is
too enmeshed in the supernatural for the release of the human element in
the story. Further, as I pointed out in the beginning of the paper, since songs
were the high points of emotional expression, it left P.U. Chinnappa’s rather
­non-expressive face incapable of producing the i­nteriority of the a­gentive
hero.

Chapter 07.indd 241 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 242  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The second film version of the story was produced in 1958 with the
title Kaathavarayan. This time Sivaji Ganesan acted as Kathavarayan. The
mythological preamble to the story was cut short. The first time grown up
Kathavarayan appeared on the screen, he was sitting majestically on an ele-
phant, singing against caste discrimination. Later in the film he of course
delivers fiery monologues denouncing caste hierarchy. In such sequences,
the dialogues of Thuraiyur K. Murthy unmistakably bear the stamp of
Karunanidhi. Both Kathavarayan and Aryamala are far more agentive and
self-conscious in their love for each other.
There is a sequence in both the films when finally the king con-
fronts Kathavarayan, arrested and brought before him. The king accuses
Kathavarayan of violating the norms in various ways in seeking to abduct
and marry Aryamala. In the 1941 version, we see P.U. Chinnappa standing
before the king showing little anger at the unjust charges levelled against
him. He appears to have expected as much, since the punishment was pre-
destined. The episode quickly passes on to the final sequence in which we
find P.U. Chinnappa taken to the stake, where he sings lamenting his tragic
fate. The camera slowly pans the crowd as he sings proceeding to linger on
the stake. In the 1958 film, however, we see Kathavarayan retort with power-
ful alliterative lines. Further, thinking that Aryamala has died out of grief,
Kathavarayan causes huge destruction in the city. We see Sivaji Ganesan’s face
in close up, laughing hysterically, superimposed on the scenes of destruction,
expressing anguish and fury. This is no longer the fatalistic, mythologized
Kathavarayan who takes his low-caste birth as a curse but one whose human-
ity is demonstrated in his impassioned protest against caste discrimination.
The two film versions of the Kathavarayan story explicate the semiotic
transition that has taken place in the intervening seventeen years. What is
more pertinent to my argument is, while Sivaji was no longer identified with
the DMK in 1958, the DMK-inspired dialogue he spoke only alluded to
Tamil as the sign of the sovereignty of the Tamil people. While he succeeded
in producing the interiorized subjectivity of Kathavarayan, the black hole,
it only strengthened the faciality machine, the other component of which is
the white wall of signifiance, the sign of sovereignty MGR was consolidating.
While the primitive semiotics of the chapbook stories has been brought under
the ordering of semiotics of signifiance and subjectivity, it is significance that
gained more under the historical circumstances, since sign Tamil took prec-
edence over all other elements. While Sivaji’s acting prowess could ensure
the success of his films, the Tamil in which he enunciated the ­interiority

Chapter 07.indd 242 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  243

of the characters strengthened the politics of the DMK through the other
­component of the faciality machine, MGR. It is the process in which the
three vertices of the cultural triangle of Tamil Nadu—Karunanidhi, MGR
and Sivaji—produced the faciality machine as a source and expression of the
semiotic transition and the genesis of new assemblages of power.

Abbreviations
AIADMK All Indian Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
DMK Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
MGR Maruthur Gopalan Ramachandran

Notes
  1 See for example Sara Dickey, ‘The Nurturing Hero: Changing Images of MGR’,
and Robert L. Hardgrave, ‘Politics and the Film in Tamil Nadu: The Stars and the
DMK’, in S. Velayutham (ed.), Tamil Cinema: The Cutural Politics of India’s Other
Film Industry (London: Routledge, 2008) as well as M.S.S. Pandian, The Image
Trap: M. G. Ramachandran in Film and Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1992). Dickey’s
essay about the changing valances of MGR icon is a fresh update in MGR schol-
arship and can be productively connected to textual analyses of his films which
are yet to take place. My indebtedness to Pandian’s monograph, a pioneering
work in understanding MGR, should be obvious from the essay. However, I am
convinced there is a lot more to be gained by political theory, film studies, anthro-
pology, and cultural history through further study of this rare phenomenon.
  2 See Stephen Hughes, ‘Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama,
Gramaphone and Beginnings of Tamil Cinema’, The Journal of Asian Studies,
vol. 66, no. 1 (2007), pp. 3–34.
  3 S. Theodore Baskaran, The Message Bearers: The Nationalist Politics and the
Entertainment Media in South India, 1880–1945 (Madras: Cre-A, 1981).
  4 In academic writing in English, the habit of using his caste surname ‘Naicker’
widely persists. I find it insensitive to continue with that for two reasons.
Scholars writing in Tamil language abide by his publicly expressed wish not to
be referred by his caste surname. Moreover, his movement effectively brought to
an end the very use of caste surnames within Tamil Nadu.
  5 M.S.S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political
Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).
 6 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1986)
and Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1989).

Chapter 07.indd 243 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 244  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

 7 See Dravida Nadu dated 8 July 1951, p. 10. The magazine is available, among
other places, at Periyar Rationalist Library and Research Centre, Periyar Thidal,
Chennai.
  8 Hardgrave provides in his essay cited above some interesting survey data about
the voting patterns of the fans to argue that MGR and Sivaji fans voted for their
respective parties. It appears that the survey was conducted among the members
of the fan club and the parties. However, the point is that the electoral appeal of
MGR far exceeded the tiny sections of official members of the fan club or the
DMK. Congress leaders expected similar mass appeal from Sivaji, whose films
competed well with MGR films, but were badly disappointed.
  9 See K.P. Ramakrishnan, M.G.R. oru sagaptham (Chennai: Vikatan Pirasuram,
2007), pp. 99–100.
10 For a preliminary introduction to the sign classifications of Peirce I mention
here, please see James Jakób Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of
Charles Sanders Peirce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
11 Pandian, Image Trap.
12 I suggest that the dialectic of icon (hero) and index (the actor-body) in the film
image is non-sublative. I have adopted the concept of non-sublative dialectic
from Roy Bhaskar. They do not bring forth the leader as an act of synthesis. The
leadership tenuously rests on the actor’s capacity to connect his actual self to the
qualities of the hero or his capacity to become a leader through regular political
practice using the initial “charisma” gained from playing the hero as an invest-
ment. For a detailed exposition of the concept of non-sublative dialectic please
see Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993).
13 The fact is drawn from my own personal experience apart from fieldwork data. I
was a Sivaji fan and my close friend was an avid MGR fan. We used to endlessly
argue about our choices in the years between 1973 and 1975. I switched over to
Kamal Hasan after watching Apoorva Ragangal (1975).
14 Many interesting vignettes and anecdotes about MGR and Sivaji fans and films
can be read in his blog http://kalapria.blogspot.com/.
15 See Amshankumar, Migai nadiya kalaignan, in Ravikumar (ed.), Migai nadiya
kalai (Nagercoil: Kalachuvadu Padhippakam, 2003), pp. 19–23.
16 As a quizzical pointer to this complementarity, one can find that in the Tamil
version of Manirathnam’s patriotic parable Roja (1991) the film ends with a
song that begins addressing the Tamils as ‘Thamizha, Thamizha’ and a few lines
later suggests that your home is Tamil Nadu but your name is Indian. It ends by
consoling Tamils, again calling them so, that the united country would protect
them and the blood in their veins is Indian. The paradox is the difficulty in call-
ing Tamils Indian in the vocative in Tamil language.
17 Michel Foucault, ‘Subject and Power’, Critical Enquiry, vol. 8, no. 4 (1982),
p. 782.
18 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis
Press, 1987), p. 180.

Chapter 07.indd 244 10/25/2013 6:34:03 PM

 WHEN KATHAVARAYAN SPOKE HIS MIND  245

19 Ibid.
20 See their essays in Alf Hiltebeital (ed.), Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees:
Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1989).
21 See, for example, Arunan, Kolaikkalangkalin vaakkumoolam: Nanthan, kaaththa-
varaayan, mathuraiveeran, muththuppattan (Madurai: Vasantham Veliyeettakam,
2006). He frequently draws from a senior folklorist Vanamamalai, who was also
a leftist.

Chapter 07.indd 245 10/25/2013 6:34:04 PM

 8
Music Revivals—Major and Minor
Studying the Politics of Performance in Modern South India

Lakshmi Subramanian

Music has almost without interruption flourished there from very

remote ages. The higher branches of the musical profession were con-
fined to either Brahmins or to men of very high caste. Music being of
Divine origin was regarded as sacred, and it was considered impious for
any but me of the sacred caste to wish to acquire any knowledge of its
principles.
—C.R. Day, 1892

Besides the musicians whose names occur in the above list, there are
legions of musicians who have been distinguished for their Sangeet
Sahityam and for their efficiency in the three important elements of
music, viz. Bhava, Raga and Talam who are found among the class of
Ochars, Annavis, Players of Nagaswaram, Davul, Mridangam, Veena
and Mukhaveena, Gandharvas, Devadasis and Dancing girls. We know
that these who had attained special efficiency in the three chief ele-
ments of music, Bhava, Raga and Talam had learnt the art from the very
beginning and had made it their means of livelihood. Among these, the
Gandharvis were and are excellent singers. That they were the original
storehouse from which all music was disseminated later on is a well
established fact. It is a world-known truth that Brahmins and others
learnt the art of playing the Mridangam about thirty years later on and
appeared before the public.
—Abraham Pandithar, 1917

chapter 08.indd 246 11/11/2013 11:58:54 am

 music revivals—major and minor  247

These two sets of observations mirror two distinct skeins in the discursive
tapestry produced around music and performance in twentieth century
southern India. Each of these reflections speaks directly to the ideas of revival
and authenticity of music practice that recurred as enduring features in the
representation of cultural politics of the region. In both cases, the preoccupa-
tion with authenticity was important and its locus was squarely to be located
in caste and its social practices and subsequently in language. The idea of
authenticity surfaced again and again during the revival movements associ-
ated with music practice in southern India during the late nineteenth and
twentieth century, whether it was to do with the creation and consolidation
of a properly classical tradition or with the more spontaneous manifestation
of autochthonous musical experience embodied not so much in music as in
song. Studying these moments of revival and their claims of authenticity has
constituted the staple of some of the recent histories on music and perfor-
mance. This chapter is in part, an attempt to locate these writings within a
larger historiographical context as well as to revisit the Tamil music revival
movement, in order to be able to demonstrate what an investigation of cul-
tural practices holds for understanding power structures and their semiotics.
In attempting this, the chapter acknowledges the potential that the writing
of new social and cultural history has had for studying aural practices that
have been at least in the South Asian context understudied as well as for
understanding social relations in general that develop around the production
and consumption of cultural practices like music. Studying the aural field in
southern India through the lens of revival movements, I will suggest, enables
us to understand the overtly political nature of the cultural agenda of the
revivalists. It also enables us to access regimes of listening and pleasure and
thereby, to unpack the construction and transmission of meaning attached
to cultural practices like music even while recognizing that music has its own
distinct register and language. I will thus argue that music revivals and the
construction of a discourse around them came to have a very special affective
signification in southern India largely through networks of print and perfor-
mance that helped produce different communities of listeners some of whom
were more effective in deploying retrospective fantasies to structure their sub-
jectivities. The emphasis is not on or at least exclusively on the voice of the
subaltern here, it is more directly engaged with looking at practices and the
embedded politics in the articulation of cultural practices fashioned around
material structures. That music revivals have generally tended to be middle-
class phenomena playing an important role in the formation of a class based
identity of subgroups, and in the construction of modern categories such as

chapter 08.indd 247 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 248  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

classical and popular is well known1 but what makes the regional experience
of south India especially interesting is the way parallel revival moments com-
peted for multiple readings of tradition and modernity, one celebrating music
more abstractly albeit through certain genres of compositions and the other
invoking the spontaneous song in the mother tongue.
The passages between social and cultural history have largely skirted
around the complexities of theorizing culture and understanding its rela-
tionship with politics. For social historians who reacted to the excessive
reductionism of class analysis, cultural practices were the most convenient
conduit to accessing the everyday world of the subaltern. Yet they were not
entirely comfortable with jettisoning quantitative methods or concepts of
class and power relations. On the other hand, cultural historians while dis-
tancing themselves from older cognitive understandings of culture stepped in
to study cultural practices as an autonomous field and to look at collective
structures of emotion and belief. The methodology they deployed drew its
inspiration from both anthropology and semiotic theories of culture combin-
ing it with innovative interpretation of texts, emphasizing their perfomative
aspects but balancing these with a more intuitive approach to the archive and
to the contexts in which archives themselves were produced. The impact of
Orientalism and Foucauldian concerns with power, knowledge production,
and history was especially marked even as newer subjects of research came
under consideration. Predictably, the very nature of the object of study drew
attention to more complicated issues of archives and sources and their decon-
struction and which combined to produce innovative theorizing. Besides the
immense advances these new insights produced in the domain of women’s
studies or ethnic studies, it was the history of music and performance prac-
tices in South Asia that has emerged as one of the most exciting fields of
research and enquiry.
Thus taking the cue from recent debates over the complicated passages
between social and cultural history,2 and on the complexities of culture’s
relationship to politics, and from newly emerging concerns in ethnomusicol-
ogy, this essay will attempt to make sense of the concerns that have begun
to inform histories of performance and listening practices in modern south
India. It will suggest that there has been a deeper conversation across disci-
plines and that far from uncritically studying and celebrating the contingent
and episodic, there has been a sustained effort at understanding the processes
of social and artistic transformation and more importantly of the processes
involved in listening and reflecting on the aural, thereby producing new com-
munities of listeners and commentators. What happens to our bodies, our

chapter 08.indd 248 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 music revivals—major and minor  249

sense of identity, individual, and collective while we listen to music remains

a moot question and one that does not yield an easy answer even more so
in the historical past as we do not have access to events that structure our
subjectivities or historical contexts as immanent experiences of reality. The
challenge therefore, is to make sense of the way meanings were produced
by music-making and listening to it by understanding the context in which
these were rendered and the expressions these assumed. This involves recourse
to a method that accords sufficient respect to language and the analysis of
our subjects’ representations of their worlds, especially that of performance.3
Performance in modern south India involved not merely a large range of
social and artistic practices but also one which was closely and deeply impli-
cated in the politics of individual self-fashioning as well as of the changing
public sphere constituted by emerging registers of language, meaning and
affect. Historians and anthropologists have tended to look at performance in
the region as an important site for studying social behaviour and strategies;
the new histories of music and performance take this even further by looking
more open mindedly at text, image, and actions to speak to a more inclusive
narrative. As Hunt puts it in her introduction, ‘Historians working in the
cultural mode should not be discouraged by theoretical diversity; for we are
just entering a remarkable new phase when the other human sciences are
discovering us anew’.4
This chapter has three sections. The first section will briefly identify
the ways in which historical research on modern south India has looked
at the issue of public space and patronage, urban culture, and political dis-
play, the second section will identify the more recent works on music, and
performance in southern India and that pertain more precisely to issues
of nationalism, modernity, and transformation as embedded in the classi-
cal music revival project of the Madras Academy, and the third will look
more critically at the Tamil music movement in order to reflect on some
of the specificities of Tamil cultural politics in south India to tease out the
ambiguities and ambivalence of its brand of modernism and authenticity.
I will suggest in fact that in the case of both the revival movements, the
mutual overlaps and their interactions with an earlier sound-scape made their
respective strident celebration of authenticity somewhat ridiculous and that
neither resisted location within a set of conventions and aesthetics that distin-
guished modernity. Where the analogy broke down was over the positioning
of relative importance of lyrics over music’s universal language of melody and
rhythm and in doing so, ­speaking more directly to an expressive mode that
was ­universalist in its sweep.

chapter 08.indd 249 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 250  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Performance and Publics in Southern India

More than any region, southern India has commanded the attention of
anthropologists whose work has been very significant in mapping the con-
tours of southern India’s social ecology and the place of performance within
it. This is not to blindly endorse southern exceptionalism as an inevitable
fall-out of anthropological concerns but to merely make the point that issues
and categories of individuality, caste hierarchy, and political power as display
and performative enactment have been critical inputs in presaging a cultural
history for the region. More specifically, there has been a sustained interest
in conceptualizing and contextualizing issues such as maryādai (honours),
devotion (parru) and individuality and leadership especially in relation to
the politics of language devotion, caste deployment, and of contestation over
temple spaces. What anthropological work on southern India has done is
to suggest how social relations based on notions like honour were in fact
cultural practices and that economic and social relations were not prior to
determining cultural ones. As a broad ordering principle of cultural history,
this has in fact been central to the ways in which forms of cultural produc-
tion, especially music—ritual, courtly, classical, and popular/devotional—its
production, patronage, circulation and its representation, have been under-
stood in more recent writings. The notion of honours producing a particular
mode of self-reflexivity has been especially important and as far as the case of
performance history is concerned, has been a critically significant and influ-
ential factor in determining research questions on culture and performance.
As Mines and Gourishankar put it in explaining the central role of maryādai
in south Indian society.
This, we feel, explains a great deal about the relationship between politics and reli-
gion: the intensity of conflict over honours exists not simply because they square with
public relations, in effect being symbolic markers investing persons with the author-
ity to represent and command, but precisely because they distinguish individuals,
acknowledging them as social agents. It is this aspect of honours – their symbolic
role connecting individual identity with agency, reflecting the dynamic and often
independent role a big man plays in organizing society into institutions and constitu-
encies—that we wish to stress. Contrary to interpretations that deny or downplay
individuality in Indian society, our theory finds individuality acknowledged and
valued in the practice of ritual honours, in the creation of galactic policies, and in the
formation of big-man centered groups.5
For the history of music as a modern cultural production in southern India
in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, the notion of maryādai and
its connections with individual agency, of what one may call an expressive

chapter 08.indd 250 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 music revivals—major and minor  251

economy model has been central in teasing out the more complex nuances
of social engagement with musical production and its patronage and its fore-
grounding in the nationalist cultural project.
The transformation of the public space in southern India in the second
half of the nineteenth century, the articulation of a new publics constituted
by networks of migration, colonial education and publishing and religious
institutions—mat.has in particular where the big-man centred groups and
galactic politics manifested—has been well documented. The writings of
Pamela Price and Mattison Mines, not to speak of the extensive literature
on Non-Brahmin politics and Tamil separatism have been exceedingly useful
in providing insights on the changing social landscape of the region and its
impact on the configuration of caste and ethnic identities revealed primarily
through social and cultural practice. While Mattison Mines worked on per-
formance practices around temples and mat.has or monastic endowments to
make a case for individuality and agency, Pamela Price spoke of the way ‘rule
confusion’ induced new social and cultural practices that actually produced
alternative and complementary definitions and perceptions of ethnicity.6
Music and sponsorship of musical activity was a central feature of public
display and consumption—mat.has and temples from the eighteenth century
to the 1980s organized concerts and academies to attract thousands of devo-
tees and that reflected both a preoccupation with music as honours and with
individual agency in developing big-man institutional politics. For high-caste
non-Brahmin leaders, mat.has and temples provided the space for demon-
strating innovative and ingenious practice that fed into a mythology of a doer
of good—of the idea of the big benefactor with vallānmai or largesse who
was able to create, manage and transform the institutions that give Indian
society its corporate frame. Temples and their management, procession
rights, festivals with music formed an integral part of the politics of status
recognition.7 To this was added the workings of print and publishing net-
works that helped community leaders to lend their weight to new formations
of religious and reading communities. Take the case of Ponnuswami Tevar,
manager in the Ramnad Palace administration and dominant in palace affairs
from 1858 to 1868 for instance. Here was an individual who circumvented
the constraints on him and chose to act as the generous patron outside the
domain of formal ritual and extended full support to Tamil scholarship. He
patronized the production of literary and scholarly material that later became
central to the politics of non-Brahmin advocates in the Madras Presidency.8
Among the recipients of his largesse were Arumuga Navalar and Minakshi
Sundaram Pillai, the exemplary scholar and teacher who ­maintained close

chapter 08.indd 251 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 252  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

connections with the Thiruvavaduthurai mat.ha in Tanjore as well. The case

of Vedanayakam Pillai is also a good instance in point for his writings shaped
by his unique appreciation of Tamil bhakti poetry and musical conventions
were printed and published to help give a greater cohesion to the Protestant
community in Tanjore and the rest of Tamil Nadu.9 Similar instances are
provided by the enthusiasm with which Brahmin publicists framed a par-
ticular mode of writing as part of what M.S.S. Pandian refers to as practising
Brahminism.10 Here of course the emphasis was not on the great man but
on recuperating the authentic Brahmin, and thereafter on making the
Brahminical Hindu as the authentic Indian. In this narrative, music and its
consumption and representation enjoyed a central place, especially the music
of the Tanjore trinity of Tyagaraja, Diksitar and Syama Sastri. Among the
distinguishing features of this narrative were the exalted status of Brahmin
practitioners, of their spiritual orientation that amounted to much more than
just devotion and encapsulated the very quintessence of musical excellence
that incorporated the most subtle and profound aspects of breath control,
melodic immersion, and rhythmic control. To appreciate this music required
a particular location, a particular inheritance that had to be safeguarded even
as the idea of its democratic dissemination was being mooted.
The gentrification of neighbourhoods in Madras like Mylapore where the
middle class predominated,11 all serving in lucrative professions like law and
education provided the actual material context for the public life of musical
and theatre performance and the construction of what one may call a ‘musi-
cal publics’. Building on older performance connections and circuits, the new
elite responded to two developments. One was the growing popularity of
dramatic entertainment, in the form of harikathā and theatre that democ-
ratized a taste for music among an increasing constituency. The other was
an equally strong compulsion to unite the dispersed performance practices,
hitherto confined to specific temples as part of ritual or to specific perfor-
mance spaces sponsored by individual patronage and present it in a format
that could embody both the cultural inheritance and orientation of the com-
munity as well as its intrinsic merit as a cultural resource for the emerging
nation. As such this was part of a concerted attempt to stake a claim for a
very definite public space and role just as more contemporary initiatives in
gentrifying religious worship in present-day Chennai gesture to the need for
bourgeois respectability.12 What this involved was a self-conscious effort to
build a public platform through associations or sabhās as they were called
for the showcasing of those musical genres that were considered appropri-
ately classical and authentic. In defining the classical, complex considerations

chapter 08.indd 252 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 music revivals—major and minor  253

of taste and orientation, of materiality and anxiety about maintaining the

protocols of tradition and modernity came to the surface. Musicians and
performers were not extraneous to this process either and became part of the
new publics; migrating from Tanjore (the ex-musical capital of Tamilnadu)
and Trichinopoly and Madurai, musicians attached themselves to individ-
ual patrons and thereafter, to the patronage of the sabhās and used their
venues to evolve a distinct singing style. Membership in a sabhā thus became
emblematic of a new status and taste not to speak of providing a basis for
more systematic sociability. The reforming dimensions of sabhās became
progressively significant; the early sabhās like the Krishna Gana Sabha, the
Jagannatha Bhaktha Sabha and the Mylapore Sangeetha Sabha gave way to
the Madras Music Academy in the late 1920s and that assumed the mantle
for setting the concert standard. Some of these sabhās became associated with
stand alone music concerts that provided the opportunity for musicians to
evolve a distinct repertoire and style and experiment with compositions and
their interpretation. Recall for instance how K.S. Mahadevan as he listened
enthralled before a concert of Naina Pillai in 1926 at the Mylapore Sangeetha
Sabha observed the extraordinary virtuosity of the performer and his accom-
panists in the department of rhythm thereby reflecting how aesthetics around
that time still were configured around virtuosity and percussion ensembles.13
Successive decades saw a downplaying of the rhythm factor and by the
time the Madras Music Academy assumed the status of the foremost arbi-
ter and patron, there was a very definite shift in the very style of musical
performance. This new style was mediated largely through a repertoire of
compositions, notably of the Tanjore trinity that had among other things
the benefit of sustained and systematic transmission through networks of
disciples, many of whom were to be found among the Brahmin elite of
Madras city. Yoshitaka Terada also points out to the systematic deification
of the composer Tyagaraja, the senior member of the trinity as well as to the
mode of music history writing undertaken by the Madras Academy. As he
observes, not only were the Trinity all Brahmins, ‘but were also described as
having inherited music that had been passed down by a string of Brahman
composers. Within this dominant narrative, one is easily led to conclude
that Brahmin musicians have inherited a musical tradition of their own that
saw its highest manifestation in Tyagaraja’.14 Not surprisingly, Brahmin elite
connoisseurs saw it as their moral responsibility to mark out a very distinct
classical style of music that would encompass a repertoire and a conception
that was in its scope both social and aesthetic. This classical style was to
be propagated and popularized through the sabhā sponsored concert, entry

chapter 08.indd 253 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 254  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

to which also became a badge of respectability and status. Being a sabhā

member was a mark of pride and honour—contemporary satirical notices
brought this out in no uncertain terms. From the 1930s, sabhā culture
became an object of reflection in literature and popular writings, where it
was lampooned and caricatured as a manifestation of misguided elite snob-
bery and at times reinforced as a marker of good taste and sensibility.15 If
sabhās represented the urban face of music’s public life from the late nine-
teenth century, then mat.has and religious endowments as well as princely
establishments like Ramnad were important. Here complex considerations
of political legitimacy and social competition came into play. As Price has
argued in the case of Ramnad, the dynamics of princely or zamindari poli-
tics in the context of their participation in the Anglo-Indian legal system
altered the ways in which older relationships with other elite groups were
perceived and also the ways in which older symbols of kingship were recast
in a new public sphere. Thus even as older complementary relationships
between the royal house and ritual practitioners were undermined there was
a renewed emphasis on the patronage of cultural practices.16 Mat.has were not
impervious to these compulsions either; the district of Tanjore particularly
renowned for its Saiva Siddhanta mat.has and their Vel..lāl.a leadership that
supported Tamil scholarship and peria melam or ritual music saw a resur-
gence of interest in recitative music. This interest was very clearly framed by
the enormous popular appeal of the compositions of the trinity that with
or without court patronage had entered into a wider field of circulation. If
Christians, as Zoe Sherinan’s work demonstrates,17 responded to the form
of the new kr.ti in their distinctive way, so did Tamil composers experiment
with the format to produce Tamil kīrtanai—the songs of Ghanam Krishna
Iyer and Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer being instances in point. These musicians,
Brahmins by caste, enjoyed a particular and special relationship with the
Thiruvavaduthurai mat.ha18 that under the leadership of Subramania Desikar
patronized Tamil songs including those of the Oduvar community which
specialized in the singing of thevāram or devotional hymns in praise of Siva.
The Oduvar community was generally trained at the Saiva monasteries to
recite this poetry very much in the way Vedic hymns were memorized and
recited but with the important difference that they were not bound to ritual
functions or specialists. They were freely accessible to all Tamil saiva devo-
tees, remained close to the speaking and literary idiom of the Tamils, and in
terms of their musical medium said to draw from an older melodic tradition.
The peria melam, on the other hand, was essentially a nādasvaram-based
orchestra that accompanied ritual worship and drew on a specific repertoire

chapter 08.indd 254 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 music revivals—major and minor  255

that shared common acoustic features with the art music associated with
the older Tanjore court of the Marathas and the trinity. What distinguished
the peria melam was of course the social composition of its practitioners
who were mainly members of the Iśai Vel..lāl.a community. We get an excel-
lent account of the Thiruvavaduthurai mat.ha’s activities in U.V. Swaminatha
Iyer’s autobiography where he describes the annual celebrations of the
mat.ha on specific festive occasions.19 He speaks of celebrated musicians
taking part in the celebrations that afforded space for ritual music as well
as for music practiced by Brahmin teachers more at home with the com-
positions of the trinity as well as of older Telugu composers and which had
come to be regarded as the lodestone of a particular version of art music.
Swaminatha’s memoirs reflect a particular moment in the evolving imagining
of Tamil language and culture that did not see the division between Brahmin
and non-Brahmin peria melam music in stark terms; in fact the reverse seems
to hold true as musicians seem to have interacted in multiple sites and partic-
ipated in what may be called a polyglot musical culture. What was becoming
increasingly clear, however, was the cohering of particular cultural identities
around language and music and a heightened urgency to the affective con-
cern with Tamil as well as with music, each beginning to signify two distinct
publics, one speaking for a modern art form that rested on an authentic tra-
dition and the other for a more traditional practice that invoked the classical
and antique and threw its weight on the side of a distinct language for music.
Thus while classical art music of the Brahmin variety was defined as elite that
looked for a growing but limited and educated audience, Tamil music spoke
for the people but could not circulate within the same performance circuit
and failed to find a distinct audience for itself. In the end, it had to cross over
to the domain of the properly popular constituted by film and theatre.
With the growing articulation of caste politics and of a heightened appre-
ciation for the antiquity and affective register of the Tamil language that
became the vehicle for a new kind of political and religious consciousness,
the precious singularity of the art music tradition, showcased as classical
.
music or sampradāya karn.at.aka sangītam by middle-class sabhā organizers
with their performers came under scrutiny. In this context, Pamela Price’s
arguments about rule confusion are revealing as she demonstrates how major
landholding kin groups experienced ambiguity in the wake of litigious action
that eroded older relationships and structures on the one hand making
Brahmin lawyers the prime targets for an ideology based on ethnic distinc-
tion. Brahmin lawyers, on their part seemed apparently comfortable with
balancing their material success in the public domain and subscribing to a

chapter 08.indd 255 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 256  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

language of c­ onservative caste regulation in their private lives. Without going

into the details of this apparent dichotomy whether this was driven by the
anxiety of colonial subjugation or not, what was more important was their
access to a conceptual language of order and discipline that was thereafter
imposed on performance practices and their representation. This disciplinary
move included in a very central way not just the foregrounding of certain
genres and compositional styles but the production of an aesthetics that self-
consciously distanced itself from theatre and its musical apparatus and ritual
singing and that projected a very particular and specialized mode of vocaliza-
tion and presentation. This did not find resonance either with the practice
of singing Tamil ritual compositions or secular theatre-centred songs, both of
which acquired new semantic, political, and symbolic meaning from about
the closing decades of the nineteenth century in response to an emerging
and influential circuit of language devotion. This was in part sponsored by
regional courts like that of Ramnad and mat.has like those in Tanjore dis-
trict and reinforced by the growing popularity of theatre entertainment that
drew on a mixed and richly hybrid repertoire of melodies and lyrics. The
resulting tensions between the competing modes of music appreciation and
representation manifested in interesting ways and converged only occasion-
ally with the politics of caste and more consistently with that of language
projected as the ultimate instrument of safeguarding the well being of its
speakers and of communicating a purity of musical expression that embodied
an older authenticity. This came into relief during the Tamil music move-
ment where support for and advocacy of a particular style, singing voice, and
language became strongly and centrally identified with language and the idea
of authenticity, even if in the end as both Yoshikata Terada and I have argued,
dominant Brahmanical discourse on south Indian music pushed other genres,
notably peria melam music to the margins and to a past without relevance.20
What is apparent from the scholarship on south India’s publics is how dif-
ferent elites responded to the colonial experience and invested simultaneously
various projects of language reform and civil liberties and simultaneously in
redefining configurations of domestic practices that included understand-
ings of religion and caste rules. The latter in fact became indexical of social
aspiration and cultural orientation. As we shall have occasion to see, the new
works on music deepen our understanding of the politics of representation
of cultural production and practices in the period following formal colonial
rule and the articulation of nationalist and sub-nationalist consciousness.
The business of listening to music, and thereafter providing it with patron-
age that was spatially and substantively different from the earlier context of

chapter 08.indd 256 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 music revivals—major and minor  257

court and salon as well as of actually doing music in one way or the other—
composing, performing, and reflecting on it—assumed an altogether new
urgency. The extraordinary and even apparently disproportionate interest
that elites demonstrated in defining and retrieving a classical music tradi-
tion in southern India and thereafter of a parallel Tamil one, was clearly
not of marginal importance to be relegated to the domain of an episodic or
contingent activity—it was very centrally tied up with notions of honour,
moral virtue, and taste that made up the personality of a good subject if not
a great man and certainly of a larger ethnic community that found its voice
in language and music.

Constituting a Classical Tradition

Much of the scholarship on the performing arts in the context of south India
has attempted to combine disciplinary approaches, especially of anthropol-
ogy and history and less of ethnomusicology. What has characterized this
approach in terms of methodology and of interpretation is one, the engage-
ment with a wider archive constituted by interviews, literary texts, and
material generated by the public domain not to speak of historical mate-
rial and two, by the changes that the arts underwent in the interface with
modernity. This transformation has largely been understood in terms of the
formation of ‘classical arts’ evidently as an elite project but also in relation to
the agency and voices of those who were excluded or marginalized through
the discourses of the classical-modern. Work on this aspect of the performing
arts has also engaged with the complex negotiations of caste, gender, and class
affiliations making it very much part of a cultural history that adopts a variety
of textual, historical, and anthropological perspectives.21
The starting point for most of the new works on music has been the for-
mation of the modern classical tradition that was completed around the
middle of the twentieth century, when mainly at the initiative of middle class
Brahmin enthusiasts, music and dance had been shifted out of the traditional
venues and placed in modern concert halls and a clearly defined repertoire
had been put together to mark the canon and a performing style that pro-
duced conceptions of new singing voices as well. Underlying this project was
a heightened sense of a connoisseur—a rasika—whose responsibility it was
to not merely listen self-consciously but to capture that ineffable sense of
affect and translate it into modern expressions of criticism and aesthetics.
The process of the staging of the classical as a canon and as a performance
style was intimately connected with the existential anxieties of new Brahmin

chapter 08.indd 257 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 258  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

connoisseurs most of whom had definite recall of hearing music as part of

ritual and marriages in the districts they came from and who were trying at
the same time to integrate the practice into a new milieu that threw up its
own set of problems. What has been foregrounded in the studies has been
the self-conscious projection of the listening subject who articulated the aes-
thetic and also spearheaded reform. This came into sharper focus from about
the late 1930s and 1940s when the challenge from Tamil stage and cinema
aroused anxieties about authenticity, dilution of standards and by which time
the Academy and its members and following had consolidated their influence
over the field of cultural politics especially as it related to music and dance.
Through its annual lecture demonstrations, the Academy was able to partici-
pate publicly in the formation of an identifiable aesthetics as well as that of a
performance standard that was demonstrated through actual lecture demon-
strations by those practitioners who were seen to be the authentic inheritors
of the tradition. Of course, it was not as though the Academy deliberately
kept out those artists who did not enjoy the same credentials; in fact there
were regular performances arranged by the Academy to persuade artists from
other genres, notably from hereditary and specialized performing families.
However, what was accorded priority was the continuous refinement of a
repertoire and performing style that could be best exemplified by resorting
to a corpus of compositions mostly in Telugu (used by the Trinity) and that
were seen to embody an incremental assemblage of older musical practice.
These compositions were often held out as exemplary models to demonstrate
the correct melodic usage and thereby help in arriving at a consensus about
melodic structures and features. At the same times, these were exemplary
vehicles of expressive devotion, which was the hallmark of the music whether
or not it was sung and rendered in a secular space. Here lay the apparent
contradiction in the modern public life of Karnatik music but also one that
enabled it to emerge as a public cultural practice. At the level of composi-
tions, Indian music was almost entirely devotional as it deployed the songs
and compositions of saint composers whose engagement with the practice
was of a deeply experiential mode of immersed devotion. But at the level
of public performance, these compositions were part of a performing space
that was not ritualistic or even personally devotional. For the new audience,
these compositions were seen as hallowed conduits for accessing a domain
of affect and emotion that were critical inputs in the refining of a moral
personage with exquisite taste. For practitioners, whose lives and apprentice-
ship had been spent in imbibing these songs as part of their training and
engagement with music, their artistic value was immeasurable as it gave them

chapter 08.indd 258 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 music revivals—major and minor  259

access to r­egisters that transcended both the ritual-devotional element and

the linguistic component. As a senior practitioner pointed out in his address
to the Madras Academy in 1942, both theory and practice were best learnt
by the study of the compositions of the well-known composers and of the
trinity who were pure devotees and whose complete absorption in music as
the chosen vehicle of personal meditation was the principal ingredient in
bringing out the true essence of melody or rāga.22 The collaboration of prac-
titioners was the key to the success of the Madras Academy project as they
responded to its overall mandate of singularizing a clear-cut style, repertoire,
and performing format and foregrounded it as the lodestone of a properly
classical style that art music deserved. Not only did they participate in lec-
ture demonstrations, they experimented with the concert format that was so
organized as to demonstrate range, virtuosity and depth that could then mark
it off from the domain of more popular theatre music and entertainment.
They were able to carry this off before an audience that was similarly trained
and disciplined to acquire a particular identification with the style and with
the value of the form, appreciation of which assumed the markers of elite
taste, respectability, and superior cultural orientation. This was manifested in
many different ways from being an ardent and informed listener who could
not only identify the melodies that were sung or keep beat with the percus-
sion, to that of being a severe and self appointed critic. The audience thus
became both a magic space where the performer and his listeners enjoyed a
rare field of exchange and a space of elite sociality as well. This is especially
clear in the litterateur Kalki Krishnamurthy’s (1899–1954) writings as he
himself participated in the emerging field of criticism.23
The emergence of the music critic and the articulation of music criti-
cism as a genre was an important auxiliary instrument in consolidating the
classical aesthetic. Most of the early criticism that was articulated through
newspapers and journals emphasized the need to mark off classical music
from other forms of entertainment that used music and to emphasize the
importance of cultivating a simple and subtle emotionalism (bhāva) in music,
of jettisoning unnecessary rhythmic improvisations that detracted from the
more intimate aspect of vocalization and of demonstrating a familiarity with
a certain corpus of compositions that encoded a whole tradition. Subsequent
criticism in the form of writings by Kalki and later on Subbudu (1917–2006)
remained caught up in very personalized reflections on performance practices
and did not really produce a conceptual language of appreciation. They were
however, influential in consolidating a particular mode of semiotics deployed
in the understanding and consumption of classical music that authenticated

chapter 08.indd 259 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 260  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

what Terada sees as hegemonic Brahmanical music culture. To quote him,

‘Brahmin domination of public discourse is partly a result of their domina-
tion music scholarship and journalism, through which their view has been
amplified and authenticated, and of what may be termed the dynamic mech-
anism of domination in which the perspectives of subordinate groups are
excluded or left unarticulated in public domains of communication’.24 This
was done according to Terada through a variety of media from more formal
networks of print and journalism, schools and public festivals to more infor-
mal circuits of gossip and rumours and anecdotes where among other things
the uniqueness of the Brahmin contribution was stressed.
There is admittedly some basis to this characterization. But it does not
entirely capture the complexities of the musical landscape in Tamil Nadu, the
intersecting worlds of language and music appreciation in which Brahmins
and non-Brahmins participated. In fact, it irons out the complex connections
and artistic movements between various genres and performing domains, the
more layered and polyglot musical landscape that influenced both high art
music as well as that of the later Tamil Isai which, was a constructed category
to include recitative music performed by Oduvars, and contemporary as well
as older Tamil compositions some styled on the lines of the Tanjore trinity. It
ignores the linkages between Brahmin musicians with both fellow Iśai Vel..lāl.a
musicians or with the stage and cinema. What seems to have been decisive in
facilitating the staging of the classical Karnatik tradition was the creation of
a coherent listening habit in the public domain thanks to the katha tradition
and to the development of drama—a factor that did not play out in the same
way in the case of either the peria melam or the later assemblage and projec-
tion of Tamil music as a parallel classical tradition. The Iśai Vel..lāl.a and the
advocates of Tamil music as we shall have occasion to see, were handicapped
by the lack of a cohesive audience whose support could have triggered off a
very different process of standardization, classification, and retrieval. The fact
that older spaces of ritual and recitative music that were popular in Tamil
speaking spaces like the Saiva Siddhanta mat.has did not enter a more public
domain of entertainment meant that its repertoire of ritual and recitative
music could not form the basis of a practice intended for a wider reach.
This was apparent almost immediately after the Tamil Isai was launched,
its genesis really lying not so much in an outright artistic reaction to the
classical version of Karnatik music that had been put together, as much it
was an expression of language politics that was taken up by Brahmins and
non-Brahmins alike. Iśai Vel..lāl.a musicians were caught up in by Terada’s own
admission in Brahmanizing narratives while some of the leading musicians

chapter 08.indd 260 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 music revivals—major and minor  261

on the other side were important artistic collaborators in setting Tamil com-
positions (contemporary as well as older ones) to tune. The material context
for this engagement that went through distinct stages was provided by what
Stephen Hughes calls the music boom in southern India and which became
an important element in the reconfiguring of what one may call a popular
classical turn in vocal music that gestured to a newly emerging set of mean-
ings for a wider Tamil speaking audience.25 In both cases, the importance of
an emerging aural community was evident but whether this can be under-
stood in terms of exclusive and polarized experience of caste and ethnicity
is doubtful. The materiality of practice, the modalities of transmission and
the politics of patronage in the public sphere especially in the urban space of
colonial modern Madras and the fissures in the provincial circuits as far as the
circulation of temple orchestral music and recitative singing was concerned
constituted a major determinant in the way different elites responded to their
immediate concerns. Contrary to what Terada suggests, peria was very mar-
ginally concerned with music or musicians just as he had very little patience
with the politics of language devotion.
The investment in music and the project of musical reform by Brahmin
elites was then part of a complex cultural orientation that valued music and
its appreciation as a resource and as an object of display as it was to do with
confronting the onslaught of changes coming in the wake of new urban thea-
tre entertainment and of expanding networks of sociability. It was as though
friendships had to be forged through music and its appreciation, and also
as though the larger moral responsibility of being a proper subject required
an intimate identification with music. Music, more than anything else was
comfortably poised to take the place of ritual in public and furthermore,
it enhanced the credentials of a civilized bourgeois subject. It gestured to
universal ideals of sound appreciation, sublime identification with the most
profound of the muses and anchored them at a time when they were grappling
with a new space and new conceptions of public and private responsibility.
This was also true in the case of high caste non-Brahmin leaders who in the
early stages of musical reform were at its forefront. It was only later around
the end of the 1930s that there was a decided shift in their cultural politics
as they preferred to side with the growing appeal of the Tamil movement. By
this time, the exponential development of the Tamil language sphere—the
growth of vernacular journalism as well as that of a heightened appreciation
of Tamil classics, in the collection and compilation of which high caste Vel..lāl.a
publicists and intellectuals played a pre-eminent role—helped constitute a
new publics around language that also assumed important signification of

chapter 08.indd 261 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 262  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

anti-caste protest and that fired the imagination of some enthusiasts who
campaigned for a Tamil musical culture and performance practice. Many of
them especially its leading light Sir Annamalai Chettiar brought to the cam-
paign the more familiar concerns of gifting and donation to the cause of
music as befitted the politics of big men. The campaign threw up an interest-
ing range of discourses around music and language, between sound and song
before falling back on the more standard strategies of revival and representa-
tion. Here too, there were some instances of practitioners coming forward to
participate in the project but this did not in the long run create a space for
a parallel classical music domain; instead it enabled the modern kacc-heri to
integrate additional features and compositions on the one hand and fostered
what one may identify as the modern Tamil popular musical culture on the
other.

Contestation and Revival: The Tamil Music Movement

The Tamil Isai Iyakkam developed largely as the personal initiative of Sir Raja
Annamalai Chettiar, who like so many of his associates responded to the new
energy that marked the Tamil public sphere by about the first quarter of the
twentieth century. Coming in the wake of the changing political equations
in the Madras Presidency, where high caste non-Brahmins deployed language
as a major vehicle for self-definition and self-empowerment, there was an
unprecedented interest in the use and development of the Tamil language
that produced, as Sumathy Ramaswami has argued a community of passion-
ate devotees.26 This community was by no means homogenous in terms of
caste—in fact the language lent itself to multiple imaginings by various castes
that produced very different narratives around their specific affective invest-
ment in it. As far as Chettiars and Mudaliars, Vel..lāl.as, and other land holding
elites were concerned, Tamil was intimately connected with a particular mode
of indigenous devotion around Saiva Siddhanta philosophy, bringing them
into proximity with mat.has that propagated such classical and religious schol-
arship.27 Brahmins had a different engagement—­litterateurs like Subramania
Bharati and Kalki among others used the language to imagine their concep-
tion of a homeland while more antiquarian scholars like U.V. Subramania
Iyer (who in any case was more of a transition figure) laboured for the
language and its antique and classical literary treasures. Discovering the trans-
formative potential of language was an intense subjective experience that was
augmented by the popular spread and appeal of Tamil drama and recording
of its songs that created among other things a field for Tamil music. This

chapter 08.indd 262 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 music revivals—major and minor  263

largely consisted of Tamil songs written for theatre as well as those that had a
nationalist flavour and which drew on a richly textured and hybrid melodic
repertoire ranging from Hindustani melodies, those of the Parsi theatre and
Marathi musical theatre as well as melodies used in well known compositions
of the trinity as well as of other contemporary composers. If one recalls that a
composer like Gopalakrishnan Bharati who studied at the Thiruvavaduthurai
math celebrated Tamil teacher Meenakshi Sundaram Pillai and composed his
dramas and used a variety of melodic forms, then it is clear that the sound-
scape of pre-Academy southern India was intensely polyphonic. Interestingly
it was the circulation of these drama songs that produced a mass appeal for
Tamil songs and that persuaded Tamil enthusiasts to experiment with the
possibility of fostering a parallel classical Tamil music tradition. For this, it
became necessary to script a history of Tamil music framed in antiquity and
textual depth and to assemble a repertoire of older Tamil songs and more
recent ones. The Raja and his associates were happy to come forward with
rich and generous donations (nankodai) satisfying thereby their sense of
self-worth and continue to transact their older roles of community leaders
and public figures. Commenting on the occasion of establishing the Tamil
Isai Sangam in Madras in 1943, the official report stated how the raja and
his close associate the celebrated Dr Shanmuga Chettiar never hesitated in
donating handsomely to the cause that was so dear to them.28
Official histories of the Tamil Isai date the beginnings of the move-
ment to the setting up of a music college in Chidamabaram in 1929 by
Raja Annamalai Chettiar and the integration of its graduate programme
with Annamalai University (1932) that had been set up primarily to foster
indigenous scholarship on Saiva Siddhanta religion and medicine. A keen con-
noisseur who had patronized music related initiatives like the Madras Music
Academy, the Raja was meant to have been dismayed at the apparent lack of
interest in or encouragement to Tamil songs in standard performances and
responded to this lack by publicly urging performers and associations to sing
Tamil compositions and suggesting to the Radio authorities to assign more
air space for Tamil compositions. By 1941 the decision to launch a move-
ment for propagation of Tamil music was taken and a series of Tamil Music
conferences29 were convened in various towns like Devakottai, Trichinopoly,
Kanchipuram, Kumbakonam, Dindigul, and Tirunelveli. These confer-
ences were more in the nature of festivals (vizhā) where the patrons spoke
strongly for the need to re-connect with the mother tongue, which alone had
the power to move the listening subject. In the first Tamil Isai Conference
at Annamalai University, Raja Annamalai Chettiar stated in his inaugural

chapter 08.indd 263 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 264  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

address that music ­performance should begin with and end with Tamil songs.
This insistence became even more pronounced in subsequent conferences
when resolutions about the proportion of Tamil compositions in any given
concert and regarding the share of air space were discussed.
What kind of music did the ideologues of Tamil Isai wish to validate and
how was this to be set apart from Karnatik music as it had emerged by this
time as an identifiable form and style? Clearly rhetorically at least, it was
not the ‘popular’ tag they were after. Nor was it only a revival of Tamil reli-
gious devotional music, of the religious songs of saints that they wished to
identify with. It was a mélange of all these elements including the consoli-
dation of a classical repertoire that could draw from an indigenous Tamil
kīrtana tradition, something that had circulated during and before the nine-
teenth century. It was precisely here that all sorts of contradictions and inner
inconsistencies within the movement surfaced. These had to do with the
circularity of a rhetoric that insisted on scripting a mimetic history of clas-
sicism for Tamil music, located in the antique pann (melodic prototype of
the rāga) and in a rich but interrupted tradition of recitative singing of devo-
tional hymns by the community of oduvars attached to specific temples and
mat.has but went against the actual making of a Tamil Isai repertoire that was
a deeply collaborative enterprise in which musicians of all hues and castes
participated. To suggest therefore, and to endorse the representation that
the Tamil Isai actually split the community of performers into those who
sang thevāram and Tamil songs and those who sang the compositions of the
trinity seems to be a caricature of the complex negotiations that performers
undertook as artists responding to various sites of patronage. The decisive
and determining factor was the dissemination of taste and its multiple loci;
some musicians like Musiri Subramania Iyer or G.N. Balasubramanian
worked across domains of classical and popular music while all of them par-
ticipated in setting Tamil songs to tune which was entirely abstracted from
considerations of language. Retrospective histories have tended to ignore the
artistic interchanges between performers and performing groups and in the
process flattened out the dynamics of social interaction that was not always
and entirely captured by narratives of caste, ethnicity or language.
To make sense of the outpourings of the Tamil Isai advocates, we need to
distinguish the various strains that surfaced. There were those who demanded
the validation of an older pre-eminently Tamil classicism anchored in proto
melody types or panns, there were those who wished to see new composi-
tions (primarily nationalist and theatre songs) included in public concerts
that upheld classical music and finally those for whom the question was not

chapter 08.indd 264 11/11/2013 11:58:55 am

 music revivals—major and minor  265

one of music at all but one that referred to language and identity. I think it
is important to keep these distinctions in mind for each of these concerns
gestured to very different modes of subjectivity. Only in very general terms
did the debates actually address the complex issue of language in music or
musical language and where indeed the meaning of music lay and how acces-
sible it was.
The case for Tamil songs was put forward most emphatically by the Raja
himself and by connoisseurs like Kalki Krishnamurthi. The Raja insisted that
his intention was not to belittle other language compositions but merely to
promote musical compositions in the mother tongue that would appeal to
a wider audience and that befitted an ancient and rich cultural inheritance
as that of the Tamil country. Kalki too a keen enthusiast of classical music
insisted that it was not his intention to question the greatness of composers
such as the trinity of the eighteenth century but that it was his wish to see
older compositions back in circulation and also to popularize new ones. In
putting this forward he acknowledged that music and language had to be
perfectly intelligible and without the aid of the mother tongue and lyrics
in it that would facilitate the processing of implicative patterns of musical
form, real appreciation would not be possible. Here Kalki was definitely
donning the role of a public teacher whose intention was to ensure an edu-
cated audience who would identify with the music and its lyrics.30 He urged
senior musicians to come forward and help in this public project. The argu-
ments of people like T.K. Chidambaranatha Mudalier and R.K. Shanmuga
Chettiar spoke even more sharply of the need for the mother tongue that
could alone give them ātmatr.pti and would make sense to the audience. They
too asked of practitioners to come forward and sing Tamil songs, retrieve old
compositions and stake their space in the public domain; as Murugappa in
one of the conferences of 1944 remarked passionately, ‘What do we ask of
.
Sangīta Vidvāns? That you and I are Tamils. Please sing for god’s sake Tamil
songs—we ask of this like alms. They must do this as their duty. We may ask
this quietly, or with passion or slyly but the matter remains the same. Only
Tamil songs will make sense to the Tamil people. We have no enmity with
Telugu, or Gujarati or Hindi or Bengali. And we are not looking for Tamil
songs to be sung in Gujarat or Bengal only in Tamil Nadu. There are some
good kīrtanams in Tamil, retrieve them and present them in a k­ acc-heri’.31 The
issue at stake was emotional identification and comprehension and this could
be accessed only through the mother tongue. They too held out opportuni-
ties for professional musicians to participate in the concerts they organized
but on the whole their enthusiasm would appear to have been framed largely

chapter 08.indd 265 11/11/2013 11:58:56 am

 266  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

within the immediate need of effecting a proper musical public culture that
gave them a sense of their own dignity and confidence in their inheritance
that they identified even more keenly with Tamil. R.K. Shanmugam Chettiar
gave expression to a deep sense of personal angst when he wrote wondering
why it was that only in Tamil Nadu, music was sung in other languages.
Strange he observed that ‘we had to study in English, marry in Sanskrit and
speak in manipravalam (hybrid) of which he gave a charming example.32
Of course such sentiments also expressed a growing antagonism with the
ritual caste status of Brahmins and a critic like Kalki not unaware of these
tensions. Commenting in his usual wry style about the proceedings of the
Chidambaram conference in the 1940s he said that the Kalasalai (arts scene)
had become a Kalata shalai (site for mischief ) and that the question of con-
flating the politics of Tamil Isai with the larger politics of separatism was
perverse.33 A third strain was that of the formal Tamil Isai Sangam (estab-
lished in 1943) that resolutely endeavored to give the movement a classical
status and which was possible only by providing it with a traditional lineage
and preferably a textual one. This found expression in the establishment of
research committees to enquire into the historic origins of Tamil music and
melodies or panna and to establish how this predated Karnatic music.
The discrete nature of the multiple narratives that flowed into the move-
ment for Tamil Isai meant that as a counter revival movement, it was not
able to sustain its mandate clearly and that at the level of actual practice,
neither could the Karnatik music concert be dislodged nor could practition-
ers be compressed into polarized performing spaces. For performers, what
mattered was one, patronage and an audience space (either live or as listeners
to recordings) and two, a musical stimulus that persuaded them to improvise
with compositions and set them to tunes and in a format that conformed
to their aesthetics which in itself had been formed out of various, miscel-
laneous acoustic inputs. What the Tamil Isai was able to achieve therefore,
was a supplementary locus of support for musicians whose collaboration
facilitated the formalization of Tamil musical compositions that significantly
augmented the Karnatik music concert repertoire. Thus after the initial
indignation expressed by musicians like Ramanuja Iyengar, who publicly
said he would not be bullied into singing Tamil songs and that music had a
language of its own34 and that transcended words, there was long standing
and systematic collaboration between musicians and the Tamil Isai Sangam.
This continued right through the 1950s and 1960s and helped produce
anthologies of Tamil compositions and the popularization of more recent
ones by Papanasam Sivan and Periyasami Thuran that f­ eature so prominently

chapter 08.indd 266 11/11/2013 11:58:56 am

 music revivals—major and minor  267

in today’s ­repertoire. This is not to discount tensions and fissures within the
performing fraternity where politics of patronage, individual misgivings,
and conflicts were played out or to ignore the hegemonic hold of a particu-
lar classicist discourse that had been set in motion by the Academy but to
make a case for the agency of the performing subject. What may be inter-
esting to see is how the performer devised an aesthetic conception for the
rendering of Tamil songs and whether this was what the Tamil Isai advocates
were after. The question then is whether we can actually track through the
discourse of Tamil Isai the history of a new conception of voice as a medium
of conveying a distinctly Tamil conception of devotional that could double
up for classical music or whether we need to look for answers in its actual
performance? In terms of the discourse, there is but little in terms of musical
conception. If we look at someone like T.K. Chidambaranatha Mudaliar, a
man of letters and author of Sangeetamum Sahityamum (Music and Lyrics),
we come across two interesting observations. One concerns the centrality of
lyrics in music and the other about the constitutive elements in an effective
singing voice. Music for him was all about emotionalism or bhāvam and
that could only emerge if the singer identified with what he was singing and
understood the lyrics that he was using. It was only then that he could let
his natural and spontaneous singing voice take over. For Mudaliar, pandits,
and vidvāns had made spontaneous singing appear crude while they sang so
called high class music in closed up artificial voices. Evidently Mudaliar was
not seeking to replicate the vidvān’s music and preferred a direct singing style
that would be facilitated by those lyrics the singer could fully comprehend.35
Again for champions like Shanmugam Chettiar, the issue was all about senti-
ment embedded in Tamil songs and it hardly mattered if there were adequate
numbers to go around. As he said candidly, ‘I do not care whether there is
sufficient music and song in Tamil Nadu. Whatever Isai there is in Tamil is
enough for me’.36 Given this preoccupation, the notion of a classical Tamil
voice or music was not really at the heart of the project; the competition was
for gaining a similar space for Tamil songs in the way that Karnatik music
had consolidated in the city’s public cultural life. For performers, the issue
was more complex as they put in their creative energies to melodically cast
and recast Tamil songs and play with conventions of melody to make these
consistent with what they considered to be of high musical value. It was
their investment and energy that produced an unprecedented popularity for
Tamil songs especially outside the realm of popular film music even if they
did not necessarily espouse the cause of Tamil Isai in the same way as its
ideologues did.

chapter 08.indd 267 11/11/2013 11:58:56 am

 268  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The challenges of classicism and authenticity were harder to achieve. As

mentioned before, some of the spokesmen wished to give Tamil Isai the ben-
efits of an old and uninterrupted tradition of songs and melodies that were
projected as prototypes for rāgas. Oduvars and the recuperation of thevāram
devotional songs and research into older Tamil historical material were central
to this project.37 The committees that were formed were mixed in composi-
tion, and included Oduvars whose deliberations were painstakingly recorded.
What came through in these deliberations were the ruptures that oduvar sing-
ing had suffered for more than a century and that many of these compositions
could not be accurately reproduced. Professional musicologists and musi-
cians urged Oduvars especially in the 1960 Pann conference of the Sangam
to share their understanding through practical demonstrations. The debates
that followed centered around issues of classification and taxonomy and of
standardization of panns and their structure. The discussions were heated as
Oduvars confessed that they were not sure of even the number of established
pans and also that the question of authentic interpretation was very difficult.
Velayudha Oduvar, the most articulate of the oduvars present in this confer-
ence confessed that the method of singing pans had changed but that this was
admissible especially in an oral tradition of recitation.38 While members like
S. Rasan were scathing in their indictment of Oduvars who seemed to ‘escape
the responsibility when they say that my father snag in this manner, my
grandfather in that manner and my guru in yet another manner’,39 musicians
like Ramanuja Iyengar suggested that more research and recording was neces-
sary to come to any clear consensus about pans and their musical usage and
interpretation. The Sangam kept up its efforts at research and Tamil music
conferences the result of which was not the cohering of a parallel and counter
revival movement but the accumulation of a creative investment in collect-
ing and retrieving Tamil compositions including thevāram, setting them to
tune and singing them as part of the mainstream concert. What was started
as a movement to emphasize difference eventually ended in being integrated
almost seamlessly within the concert circuit and certainly within an expand-
ing circle of listeners thanks to the audio cassette revolution.
Did this silent assimilation of Tamil Isai provoke a reaction? Not in the
1950s and 1960s. It was in the 1990s that a new radicalism against the mod-
erate stance of the Tamil Isai Sangam was articulated by the Makkal Kalai
Ilakkiya Kalaham and Tandai Periyar Tamil Isai Manram40 but this is outside
the scope of my study. What I have attempted in this essay is to identify the
complexities of musico-social interaction that surfaced in a period of social
and material transformation that fostered parallel circuits of listeners some

chapter 08.indd 268 11/11/2013 11:58:56 am

 music revivals—major and minor  269

of who tried to translate their affective experiences into collective projects

gesturing to wider publics. What distinguished the cultural politics around
music in south India in the first five decades of the twentieth century was the
intense competition for consuming and performing spaces and how these
were represented in the self definitions of communities that aspired to speak
for the authentic region and the nation. This produced among other things
categories such as classical and light classical if not popular, but which in actual
usage and in their afterlives, remained somewhat slippery. Understanding the
way categories have been continually expanded and modified would require a
closer study of actual performance practices and their material context, some-
thing that the new histories have not adequately grappled with.
That brings me to my concluding observations on the centrality of the
connoisseur and the focus on the mechanics of representation in the new cul-
tural histories that have been written. To that extent, the recent histories on
music and performance in South Asia have foregrounded the staging of clas-
sical music by self-appointed connoisseurs and custodians and have hinted at
the consequences it had for a range of practitioners. The self-appointed pub-
licist and connoisseur has remained the subject of enquiry and by analyzing
the representations of their worlds, the new histories have tended to give them
even more substantial form. Evidently this has political implications that may
as Lynn Hunt apprehends, end up with historians doubling back over territory
that is already covered. A useful counter to this could be by looking at practice
and practitioners more closely and how they expressed their stakes in endors-
ing or rejecting musical ideas undertook innovations and experiments. For
even as they too participated in the production of a symbolic discourse around
music, their lives and experience in actual musical networks, their micro-
politics of dependence and competition, affective linkages through aesthetic
choices would be of immense value in writing a fuller social history of music.

Notes
 1 Tamara Livingston, ‘Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory’, Ethnomu­
sicology, vol. 43, no. 1 (1999).
 2 The American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 3 (June 2007).
  3 Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989). See Introduction.
  4 Ibid., p. 22.
  5 Mattison Mines and Vijayalakshmi Gourishankar, ‘Leadership and Individuality
in South Asia: The Case of the South Indian Big-Man’, Journal of Asian Studies,
vol. 49, no. 4 (1990), p. 766.

chapter 08.indd 269 11/11/2013 11:58:56 am

 270  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

 6 Pamela G. Price, ‘Ideology and Ethnicity under British Imperial Rule:

“Brahmans”, Lawyers and Kin-Caste Rules in Madras Presidency’, Modern
Asian Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (1989), pp. 151–77.
 7 Pamela Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 153–4, 163–72.
  8 Ibid., p. 134.
 9 Indira Viswanathan Peterson, ‘Between Print and Performance: The Tamil
Christian Poems of Vedanayaka Sastri and the Literary Cultures of Nineteenth
Century South India’, in Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (eds), India’s
Literary History Essays on the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2004).
10 M.S.S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political
Present (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).
11 Referring to the late nineteenth century preponderance of Brahmins in the
Madras administration, Suntharalingam noted, ‘A feature of administrative
recruitment in the Madras Presidency was the preponderance of the Brahmins
in 1886, the Brahmins held 42 per cent of all posts in the Madras Government
carrying a monthly salary of over Rs 10. Brahmin domination was even more
marked at the higher level of the Uncovenanted Service; of the 349 elite posts in
the executive and judicial lines in 1886, no less than 202 (or 58 per cent) were in
Brahmin hands. In certain special departments, Brahmin representation was just
as preponderant. In the Registration Department for example, 217 out of 365
officers were Brahmins’. Quoted in Pandian, Brahmin and Non Brahmin, p. 67.
12 Joanne Waghorne, ‘The Gentrification of the Goddess’, International Journal of
Hindu Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (2001), p. 233.
13 ‘Down Memory Lane’, an interview with the critic, K.S. Mahadevan, http:/
www.carnatica.net/special/ksmI.html. (accessed on 7 February 2008).
14 Yoshitaka Terada, ‘Tamil. Isai as a Challenge to Brahmanical Music Culture
in South India’, in idem (ed.), Music and Society in South Asia: Perspectives
from Japan, Senri Ethnological Studies, vol. 71 (Osaka: National Museum of
Ethnology, 2008), p. 203–26.
15 Lakshmi Subramanian, New Mansions for Music: Performance, Pedagogy and
Criticism (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2008), pp. 143–4.
16 Price, Kingship and Political Practice, p. 190. Price argues that the antagonism
between zamindari rulers and the administration of temples and mat.has laid
the groundwork for royal support of ethnic antagonism on the part of non-
Brahmins towards the Brahmins.
17 Zoe Sherinian, ‘One Kirttanai, Three Songs’, in Indira Viswanathan Peterson
and Davesh Soneji (eds), Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South
India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008).
18 Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘A Language for Music: Revisiting the Tamil Isai
Iyakkam’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 44, no. 1 (2007),
pp. 19–40. See especially pp. 24–8.

chapter 08.indd 270 11/11/2013 11:58:56 am

 music revivals—major and minor  271

19 U.V. Swaminatha Iyer (1855–1942) often referred to affectionately as the grand-

father of Tamil was an exemplary Tamil scholar and compiler of classical literary
texts. His autobiography (partially translated by K. Zvelebil offers a fascinating
insight into the transition of a segment of Indian society under colonial rule.
See, The Story of My life: An Autobiography (Madras: Institute of Asian Studies,
1994). The Tamil edition is called En charitram (Madras, 1950).
20 Yoshitaka Terada, ‘Effects of Nostalgia: The Discourse of Decline in Periya
Melam Music in South India’, Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology,
vol. 21, no. 4 (1996), pp. 921–39.
21 Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical
Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Lakshmi Subramanian,
From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music
in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Amanda Weidman,
Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in
South India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). See also Yoshitaka Terada,
‘Effects of Nostalgia’. For a fuller bibliography of the more recent works, look at
Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court and New Mansions for Music.
22 Journal of the Music Academy, Madras, vol. 14 (1943), see, pp. 7–8 for the
presidential address by Vidvān Subbarama Bhagavatar in the sixteenth annual
conference of the Academy.
23 Subramanian, New Mansions for Music, pp. 75–86.
24 Yoshitaka Terada, ‘T.N. Rajarattinam Pillai and Caste Rivalry in South Indian
Classical Music’, Ethnomusicology, vol. 44, no. 3 (2000), pp. 468–9.
25 Stephen Putnam Hughes, ‘Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:
Drama, Gramophone and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema’, The Journal of
Asian Studies, vol. 66, no. 1 (2007), pp. 3–34.
26 Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India
1891–1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
27 Ginette Ishimatsu, ‘The Making of Tamil Shaiva Siddhānta’, Contributions to
Indian Sociology, vol. 33, no. 3 (1999), pp. 571–9.
28 Ponn Vizhakollum, Cennai tamil. iśai sangat.t.in varalāru [History of the Chennai
Tamil Isai Sangam on the Occasion of Its Golden Jubilee] (Chennai: Tamil Isai
Sangam, 1993), pp. 12–13.
29 Ibid., pp. 8–10.
30 Kalki, Taram koraiyumā? [Will Standards Fall?] (Chennai: Bharathi Press,
T Nagaram, 1957).
31 Tamil. iśai makānādu (Madras, 1944). Speech of Kumaran Asiriyar Murugappa, 15.
32 R.K. Shanmugam Chettiar, ‘Tamil. iśai iyakkam én’ [Why a Movement for Tamil
Music], in Tamil. iśai mutikkam (Madras: M. B. L. Muthiah, 1996).
33 Kalki, Taram koraiyumā?
34 See Journal of the Music Academy, Madras, vol. 12 (1941), pp. 18–19 for
Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar’s address on the language issue (29 December
1941).

chapter 08.indd 271 11/11/2013 11:58:56 am

 272  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

35 Amanda Weidman, ‘Can the Subaltern Sing? Music, Language and the Politics
of Voice in Early Twentieth Century South India’, The Indian Economic and
Social History Review, vol. 42, no. 4 (2006), pp. 496–7.
36 Shanmugam Chettiar, ‘Tamil. iśai iyakkam én’, p. 21.
37 Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘A Language for Music: Revisiting the Tamil Isai
Iyakkam’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 44, no. 1 (2007),
p. 37.
38 Tamil Isai Sangam, Tamil. iśai āraychi kuzhu (Chennai: Tamil Isai Sangam,
1960), pp. 24–5, 26.
39 Ibid., p. 28.
40 Terada, ‘Tamil. isai as Challenge’, pp. 211–12.

chapter 08.indd 272 11/11/2013 11:58:56 am

 IV
The Ritual

Chapter 09.indd 273 11/11/2013 5:18:03 pm

Chapter 09.indd 274 11/11/2013 5:18:03 pm
 9
Pictures in Celestial and Worldly Time
Illustrations in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Almanacs

Gautam Bhadra

An Immense Archive
From the nineteenth-century cataloguer James Long to the twentieth-century
cultural historian Sripantha (pseudonym of Nikhil Sarkar), everyone agrees
that almanacs or pañjikās had the largest circulation in the Bengali book
market of the nineteenth century. Printed Bengali almanacs carried pictorial
images from the very beginning, the number of images growing significantly
from the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. Sripantha declares that
no discussion of illustrated Bengali books can be complete unless it includes
the topic of printed images from almanacs.1 I agree. However, his discussion
hardly extends beyond this declaration. Although a few images from alma-
nacs are reproduced in Sripantha’s book, he does not engage in any discussion
of their visual significance. Pranabranjan Ray’s piece in the volume edited by
Ashit Paul examines very briefly the engravings of Krishnachandra Karmakar,
the ingenious craftsman of the Chandroday Press at Serampore, but the
volume does not contain any instance of his artwork.2 Sukumar Sen, again,
completely avoids the question and simply reproduces a couple of samples in
his book.3 In fact, the texts contained in almanacs, let alone their images, go
almost unaddressed in the standard histories of Bengali books. For example,
the chapter on the history of book images in Partha Mitter’s sizeable mono-
graph has an impressive title—‘The Power of the Printed Image’ but does not
even mention almanacs.4 As far as I know, Chittaranjan Bandyopadhyay’s
brief essay remains until now the only reliable and systematic discussion of

Chapter 09.indd 275 11/11/2013 5:18:03 pm

 276  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

nineteenth-century Bengali almanacs. However, even in that essay, the ques-

tion of images is restricted to one paragraph.5
Yet there is hardly a richer archive for printed images in Bengal. Of course,
like all other archives, this one too is marked by play between eloquence and
silence. In correcting the inattention in the existing historiography, I will
indulge in a commentary on this archive. After all, as Sanskrit grammarians
tell us, the primary meaning of the word pañjikā is commentary—relentless,
meticulous commentary.
In popular memory, the origin stories of Bengali almanacs are organized
around the name of Krishna Chandra, the famous eighteenth-century Raja
of Nadia. In the printed almanacs of western Bengal, we mostly hear of the
patronage of the Rajas of Nadia and the discursive predominance of the pun-
dits of Navadvip. According to popular understanding, the almanac prepared
by the local astrologer (grahabipra) was the chief instrument in deciding on
the dates and sequence of different social and ritual occasions. In his auto-
biography, Jogeshchandra Roy Vidyanidhi described the period before the
coming of the printed almanac in this manner:
In an adjacent village there was an astrologer (grahācārya). In the beginning of the
year and after every fortnight, he would visit and read out the almanac for the price
of a sidhā (a gift of uncooked rice and other food ingredients). He read aloud briskly
the palm-leaf text and the housewives listened carefully. They had to memorize the
almanac for the fortnight: the auspicious dates of the lunar calendar, the day of the
new moon, the day of the full moon, the seventh day of the fortnight, the fifth, the
sixth, the eighth; they had to remember the different dates of the pujas and ritual
observances. The priest (purut) too had to learn the dates by heart. In those days
there was no printed almanac.

Then Jogeshchandra went on to describe how different festivals were

observed in affluent households in accordance with the ritual requirements
of their sectarian affiliations and lineages. He mentioned that in the case of
absence of particular communities or sects in the village, their ritual occa-
sions were not observed. Indeed, there was little means of knowing of such
occasions. ‘The village was the world’.6
In the course of their evolution, Bengali almanacs showed remarkable
dynamism. The process of transforming handwritten manuscripts into
printed texts had an impact on the very structure of almanacs. A distinctive
shape gradually came into being. Novelties, both in terms of contents and
arrangement, were noticed. Elements were added to and taken away from the
old forms. Of the old handwritten almanacs, very few survive and I cannot
claim to have seen all of them. However, there are fragmentary references

Chapter 09.indd 276 11/11/2013 5:18:03 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  277

and occasional comparisons between old and new almanacs in contemporary

newspapers. In the handwritten manuscripts, stellar calculations used to be
recorded in shorthand, in cryptic forms, in the style of symbolic diagrams.
In the printed versions, these cryptic forms came to be expressed in words,
explained in commonly understandable Bengali sentences. As a result, the
almanacs became much more accessible to common people. The Samācār
Darpan. of 11 March 1820 mentioned that in the almanac printed at the press
of Bishwanath Deb of Sovabazar, one could both ‘know the days and dates of
auspicious occasions and so on from numerals [as in the customary almanacs,
cf. Figure 9.1] as well as from sections which have been separately written in
words. Any literate person can know the dates and the occasions, the aus-
picious and inauspicious hours, without difficulty’. In 1818, following the
directives of the pundits of Navadvip, Durgaprasad of Jorasanko published
a Bengali almanac after consulting the original Siddhānta text. This was an
explicitly commercial venture: ‘Desiring wealth, I publish this ­almanac’.

Figure 9.1  A page from the early printed almanac, title page missing,
1825–6, Serampore. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 277 11/11/2013 5:18:03 pm

 278  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The writer suggested that the printed almanac would be of great help to all
­householders who required knowledge of the positions of planets on par-
ticular days. ‘There will be no difficulty. This almanac contains everything.
Consult it when you want to’.7
Again, in 1835, the almanac of the Dinasindhu Press published a Bengali
edition of the Śubhāśubha Dinaks.an.a Vicāra of Gangagovinda Vidyalankara
of Mahanada. These vernacular versions of Sanskrit texts and their common
strategy of complementing arithmetical figures and diagrams with plain
words certainly rendered the form of the almanac more intelligible to a large
section of the population than ever before. Drawing attention to the superior
efficacy of printed almanacs over older locality-specific forms, a news item in
Jnānānves.an. reported in 1838 that ‘the almanac printed in the Vidvanmod
Press is truly excellent as it contains much more necessary information
than is usually considered essential for an almanac’. It was suggested that
these printed almanacs with extra information would prove useful not only
to ordinary people but also to the expert grahabipras. The value of the old
locality-specific almanacs prepared by the pundits appeared to decline as new
printed almanacs became available.
Consultation of this almanac will greatly facilitate the work of the daibajña.
Previously, first-rate almanacs used to be published under the authority of Maharaja
Krishna Chandra of Nadia and following the directives of the pundits of Bali. The
pundits had high regard for them. The almanacs which have come into circulation
since the extinction of those almanacs stand nowhere in comparison to this excellent
almanac [printed at the Vidvanmod Press].8
From the second quarter of the nineteenth century, certain neighbour-
hoods such as Bali came to specialize in composing almanacs. In fact, the
grahabipras from these localities became involved with the publication of
almanacs on account of their training, their family status and the eminence
of their lineages. Handwritten almanacs did not completely disappear, but
their circulation was certainly reduced.9 What we need to note, however, are
the ways in which the structure of the pañjikās were gradually stabilized and a
balance emerged over time between the traditional subjects and the necessary
extra information. In the initial phase, at least, this formal balance was tied
to a new, pragmatic sense of the proper use of time. Some of the images too
seem to relay this concern.
A number of almanacs from the third quarter of the nineteenth century
were characterized by long opening poems. They often contained Sanskrit
verses with corresponding Bengali translations. In line with the popular
mythological tradition, these were styled as conversations between Siva and

Chapter 09.indd 278 11/11/2013 5:18:04 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  279

Gauri. Siva, after all, is the Lord of Time. Gauri’s question is certainly gran-
diloquent: ‘Fascinated, Parvati asks the Lord/“O Kind Lord, please speak of
the origin of the world./ Who is born first/As the world comes to be created?”’
Very soon, however, the question becomes somewhat different: ‘Why are
there new almanacs every year?/Why are they called “new almanacs?”/Why
should one listen to new almanacs?/ Please explain, O King and Nobles’. The
response is the justification and validation of almanacs, the description and
commendation of their usefulness—in short, a preface, in the modern sense
of the term. These long rhymed lines could be used equally in the custom-
ary Eulogy to the Nine Planets (nabagrahabandanā) and for explaining the
procedures of reading almanacs. However, by the 1840s, they were regular-
ized into brief formulaic expressions. The popular almanac printed in the
Chandroday Press at Serampore, for instance, carried these standard opening
lines: ‘The goddess tenderly asks Siva/“Please tell me how this year will go./
Which planet will come to occupy the position of the king and which will
be a minister, so to speak?”/Siva tells Parvati, “Here it is./Listen how it will
go”’.10 Usually, the first image of a printed almanac would be a pictorial rep-
resentation of this introductory conversation (Figure 9.2). In Krishnachandra
Karmakar’s stylized grid, for example, one can see Siva making infallible pre-
dictions from the upper panel, with Parvati sitting on a throne next to him.
Evidently, the heaven of Kailaśa now has European-style facades. The spatial
symmetry is defined by the juxtaposition of a trident-decorated temple and
a colonial mansion.
The form, texture, and claims of this pictorial syntax were embedded in
the political and social realities of the nineteenth century. The Eulogy to
the Nine Planets could almost function as a textualization of the sense of
being oppressed by a turbulent, disorderly time. Everyday lives were at the
mercy of unseen and powerful planets. The authority of Siva and Parvati was
indisputable in Kailaśa. But the temporal kingdom of Bengal belonged to
the East India Company. Whether a zamindar, or a pundit, or an ordinary
householder—all Bengalis were subjects of a colonial empire. Seemingly,
the intensity of this recognition never escaped the publishers and compilers
of printed Bengali almanacs. Much before the almanacs named after Lord
Ripon or Empress Victoria would appear, Pitambar Sen of Sealdah made
an interesting effort to synchronize the authority of Siva and the power of
the Company by having an ‘Account of Kings’ (‘Rajbibaran.’ or ‘Rājābalī’)
inserted in his Bengalee Annual Almanac of 1835–6. Written in the standard
style of Rājābalīs, the text recounted a brief history of the empire with its
landmark events for the reader.

Chapter 09.indd 279 11/11/2013 5:18:04 pm

 280  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 9.2  Conversation between Siva and Parvati, woodcut, 15.5 x 10.7,
by Krishnachandra Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1842–3, Chandroday Press at
Serampore. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

The traffic between the cosmic order and the imperial chronology also reg-
istered itself in the way the checklist of ritual obligations during the Ratanti
and Vasanti Pujas was followed in quick succession by a list of the courts of
law, a compilation of information on the police, registration offices and the
post office, and an inventory of official holidays.11 Similarly, the Chandroday
Press almanac of 1840–1 apprised its readers of the details of holidays in
courts, the dates and timings of their sessions, and the schedule of judi-
cial vacations. These were typically the new ‘necessary information’ which
could not have been present in the handwritten almanacs. In the discursive

Chapter 09.indd 280 11/11/2013 5:18:04 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  281

world of new almanacs, however, religious duties and imperial obligations

emerged as intertwined, and a look at Lord Ripon’s Almanac published in
the last years of the nineteenth century will suggest how the logic of reticu-
lation was reiterated through the juxtaposition of images: the serious but
compassionate face of a bearded Viceroy on the first cover (Figure 9.3) and an
image of the elephant-headed god Ganesha on the fourth. Did viewers really
care to make a distinction? Consider, again, the new almanac published in
1875–6 by B.R. Day and Brothers, designed by Madhabchandra Siddhanta
of Serampore and printed by Siddheshwar Ghosh at Jorasanko. This well-
edited and comprehensive volume gave the important dates according to
both solar and lunar (Hijri) calendars, listed the occasions associated with
Vaisnava, Śākta, Muslim, and Christian persuasions, and did not skip even
the popular unorthodox rites. But it also firmly clung to the particulars of
different government regulations, revenue rates, stamp duties at courts of law,
and even the fee payable to the government for bringing out ­processions on

Figure 9.3  Cover page of Lord Ripon’s Pañjikā, 1884–5, compiled and
published by Benimadhab De, Chitpur, 1884. Courtesy of
Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Chapter 09.indd 281 11/11/2013 5:18:04 pm

 282  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

the city streets. Printed almanacs of the nineteenth century not only armed
their readers with the knowledge of auspicious hours and the zodiac divisions
of the celestial pathway, but also tabularized the laws and regulations of gov-
ernment as well as the duties and obligations of subjects. Without the latter,
no calculation of everyday time was possible for householders in a colonial
society.
Indeed, it was an extension of this principle that allowed Nrityalal Sil
and Balaram De an edge in the competitive market of vernacular almanacs
during the mid-1870s. Between 1874 and 1877, they introduced the style of
adding to their almanacs a certain number of blank pages for each month (as
in a diary). The middle-class householder could now keep his temporal and
spiritual balance sheets together. Adding a separate section of ‘Directory’ to
the Bengali almanac, Balaram De said in 1874:
An almanac is a most essential book. In fact, one has to consult this book every day
for conducting daily domestic affairs. I have worked hard to add to it a variety of
necessary details with great care. I present this almanac and directory to the general
public at a very cheap price so that everyone can use it without difficulty.12

Adopting the style of English directories, Nrityalal Sil’s almanac included a

Bengali version of the two volumes of the Victoria Empress Directory which
contained information on several government offices, markets, shops and
professionals. Not surprisingly, native Ayurvedic practitioners (kavirāj), mid-
wives, and traders dominated this list. At times, inventories of affordable
lodgings (dharmashalas) near different Indian pilgrim centres also made their
appearance. After all, the target audience was the native Bengali subjects of
the Empress.
The power of almanacs in disseminating knowledge was recognized early.
During 1856–7, the Vernacular Literature Society of Calcutta, a distin-
guished forum of the local intelligentsia, published a multi-volume almanac
‘inclusive of several practical matters’. Needless to say, the utilitarian thrust
of these practical matters, such as a district-wise list of the dates of and
merchandises sold at local fairs, set these volumes more in tune with offi-
cial gazetteers than pre-colonial handwritten grahabipras. In the very first
volume of this almanac, there was a list of the dates of revenue collection,
monthly agricultural routines, and a table of exchange rates and commis-
sions in currency.13 Such intermingling of different representational forms
spoke to the yoking of the diurnal rites of colonial discipline to the quotidian
performance of social customs. In a series of sliding knots, the sacred ritual
occasions of a colonial society remained delicately bound up with the profane

Chapter 09.indd 282 11/11/2013 5:18:04 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  283

revenue calendar. Evidences of this tangled time lie scattered on the pages of
­nineteenth-century almanacs.14
The language of printed almanacs also reflected this tension. Typically, an
almanac opened with rhyming lines, continued in the caupadī metre, and
culminated in a language that belonged to the bureaucratic domain of colo-
nial administration. The Bengali almanac never ceased to shuttle between
the poles of everyday ritual and official regulation. In fact, there is reason to
argue that both the province-wide standardization of domestic rituals and the
popularization of legal-administrative knowledge became possible through
the circulation of almanacs. The mobility and dynamism of the form also
ensured that certain topics and subjects could emerge or disappear in the
compilation according to the changing imperatives of life or the rules of a
competitive market.

Almanacs and Ritual Performance

Almanac images were located precisely in this assemblage of information and
power, within the space of actions prescribed in both astrological and secular
time. Our archive begins to fade at this point. Instances of precolonial alma-
nacs are rare, and even memoirs do not clarify if those handwritten scrolls
carried any image at all (apart from, of course, the figure of the zodiac con-
stellation which was a regular feature).15 In Durgaprasad’s almanac (1818),
we find a picture of the solar eclipse superimposed on the zodiac image
(Figure 9.4). The sun and the planet Rahu occupy the upper segment of the
picture, but the grahabipra-like figures who raise their fingers from the sides
of the zodiac circle maintain the balance of the frame. The maze of engraved
lines conjures up a dusky backdrop evoking the inky sky of a solar eclipse. In
such a rendition of the zodiac constellation, a pictorial depiction of folklores
surrounding the eclipse becomes possible. The zodiac images of almanacs
definitely acted as a prototype for illustration of Bengali books. It is to be
noted that the dress and gesture of the grahabipras are hardly Brahminical.
Rather, they point to a distinctly European source. Perhaps an imported pic-
ture acted as a model of reference. Imitations such as this indicate a history
of exchange between the acts of reading and translating images, a history
defined by an irreducible hybridity. However, it must also be pointed out that
this picture of a solar eclipse is rather unique. I did not find a similar image
(or even an image of the same subject) in Bengali almanacs of the next hun-
dred years. In point of fact, it is difficult to speak of a tradition continuing
uninterrupted from the early years of the history of almanac images.

Chapter 09.indd 283 11/11/2013 5:18:04 pm

 Figure 9.4  Solar eclipse, metal plate, 17 x 11.5, artist unknown,
1818–19, almanac by Durgaprasad Vidyabhushan, Jorasanko, 1818.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 284 11/11/2013 5:18:05 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  285

The fashion of decorating almanacs with images of festivals arranged in

their chronological sequence became established only from the 1840s. As
the organizational arrangement of printed almanacs began to stabilize, the
pictorial sections of different almanacs produced by different publishers col-
lectively repeating an order of subjects, an ‘overdetermined’ structure was in
place. Under the sign of this structure, the festival images were either placed
at the beginning of the book or distributed in separate pages across it.
We must remember that there was considerable difference between print-
ing images in almanacs and illustrating narratives such as Vidyāsundara,
Rāmāyan.a or Mahābhārata. In the latter, interspersing continuous narratives
with illustrative images sought to emphasize the pivotal or climactic moments
in the story or highlight the characters therein. Frozen frames catered to the
reader’s desire for seeing pictorial expressions of verbal descriptions. The
structure of almanacs functioned quite differently. Printed almanacs had a
number of distinct sections (and all sections were not invariably present in
every almanac). Of these, the forecasting accounts, the local proverbs, the
fragments from purān.as or accounts of kings, the stories of emergence of
domestic rituals, or the description and mantras of rituals were meant to be
read. But sections such as the Directory were for quick reference, for spotting
relevant information and addresses—not for continuous reading. The texts
of nineteenth-century almanacs did not always lend themselves to the form
of an uninterrupted narrative. They were episodic organizations of ritual and
ceremonial occasions that householders were supposed to perform during the
year. The images of these ceremonies represented them in actually perform-
able forms.
Buying, unpacking, and reading a new almanac constituted one such cer-
emony in itself. The Bengalee Annual Almanac of 1835, to which we have
already referred, had these instructions for the occasion: ‘Hear [this alma-
nac] with a pure heart and in a pure mind,/In company with friends and
in front of ritually purified leaves/With fruits and flowers in hand to offer/
… Listening to an almanac is a virtuous act’. The act of arranging a recita-
tion session was clearly rewarding: ‘Hearing the names of the years ensures a
long life,/Hearing the names of the kings cures the kingly [major] diseases’.16
Looking at the images in such an exalted text also had its share of virtue.
These images after all were displayed as idealized depictions of ceremonies
and divine beings. I am yet to find a detailed nineteenth-century narra-
tive recounting the users’ reactions to images in almanacs. Perhaps, printed
images in almanacs were not considered autonomously of the text. Titles and
captions seemingly functioned as the key to these images. In some of the

Chapter 09.indd 285 11/11/2013 5:18:05 pm

 286  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

almanacs—such as the one published by Day, Law and Co. in 1867, or the
ones published by Benimadhab De between 1894 and 1900—attractive and
appropriate catchphrases ( jigir) were printed below the images of particular
festivals, expressing the perceived mood or the desired outcome of the occa-
sions.17 More general and consistent than putting up such slogans was the
convention of mentioning the specific dates and hours of worship or rites
against the images. Pictures in an almanac were not simply illustrative; they
participated in the world of householders by marking everyday acts. In their
participatory and performative capacities, the images continually reworlded
the purān.ic, brought into focus the complex play of desire and performance
in which festivals took shape in society, and served the taste that would be
marked as popular.
In this context, Chittaranjan Bandyopadhyay’s comment concerning the
immutability of the image of Durga in Bengali almanacs attracts attention. In
almanacs, according to Bandyopadhyay, ‘images of gods and goddesses have
continued in the same style. The idol of Durga in the sārbajanīn (commu-
nity) Pujas has distinctly changed over the last one hundred and fifty years,
but the image of Durga in almanacs has remained the same’.18 It cannot be
denied that in spite of some variations, the structure that Krishnachandra
Karmakar composed for the 1842 Chandroday Press almanac (Figure 9.5)
has in the main continued. What the emphasis on the ostensible repetitive-
ness of this image obscures, however, is the fact that important, even radical,
transformations took place over the long nineteenth century in the prac-
tices of seeing and showing images. A comparison between the mid-century
descriptions of Hutom Pñyācār Nakśā, which found the figure of Durga at
the centre of nouveau-riche extravaganza, composed ‘in the truly Jewish
and Armenian manner’ and adorned with banners, crests, and images of
unicorns,19 and the late-century account in Ānandamath which famously
identified the goddess as the mother of the nation,20 indicates the nature of
this shift. Displacements happened, meanings changed, even if the familiar
frame of the goddess persisted. The baboo model of illustration and decora-
tion available to nineteenth-century engravers such as Heeralal Karmakar or
Panchanan Karmakar (Figure 9.6) had no place in the stylistic repertoire of
early ­twentieth-century illustrators of Bengali almanacs. The figure of Durga
that emerged in twentieth-century almanacs was systematically divested of
her European adornments, while new pictorial conventions of using folded
curtains and pillars were added to the image (Figure 9.7). The project of
turning a carnival of decadent baboos into the respectable national festival
of all Bengalis was a conflicted, ­protracted, and uneven process. Over many

Chapter 09.indd 286 11/11/2013 5:18:05 pm

 Figure 9.5  Durga Puja, woodcut, 15.5 x 10.7, by Krishnachandra
Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, Chandroday Press at Serampore, 1842–3.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 287 11/11/2013 5:18:06 pm

 Figure 9.6  Durga Puja, woodcut, electro block, 16.8 x 11, Nūtan pañjikā,
1894–5, Benimadhab De. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 288 11/11/2013 5:18:06 pm

 Figure 9.7  Durga Puja, 15 x 10.3, Naba bibhākar pañjikā, 1920–1,
Shambhuchandra Chatushpathi, 1920. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 289 11/11/2013 5:18:06 pm

 290  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

years, through regular reproductions, almanacs assisted this process by popu-

larizing an idealized structure of representing Durga. In its effort to bridge
the tastes of the elite with the demands of the popular, the visual politics of
nationalism cashed in on this continuity.
In an interesting anecdote told to Rani Chanda, Abanindranath Tagore once
revealed how political necessities could open a space in almanacs for accommo-
dating new figures and forms of sacredness. In the early days of the Swadeshi
movement, at the behest of Rabindranath Tagore, an elaborate ritual with man-
tras was prepared for the newly conceived nationalist f­ estival of Rākhībandhan.
Kshetramohan, the performer-storyteller in charge of devising the ritual, used
his personal contacts to have the ceremony included in the almanacs.21 The
inclusion was not only a guarantee of respectability for the newfangled rite
but also an assurance of its continuity in the social life of Bengal. In order to
appear traditional, a rite had to appear on the pages of almanacs. Performance
was shot through with power, consecration with politics.
A history of display must consider the role of printed images in almanacs
in relation to the wider market of books and the craftsmanship of engravers.
The market for almanacs turned competitive from the middle of the nine-
teenth century. Several publishers entered the fray. Advertisements published
in the almanacs themselves refer to differently priced ‘Full Almanacs’, ‘Half
Almanacs’, and ‘Quarter Almanacs’.22 The printing of images had to corre-
spond to this reality of a stratified market. Nrityalal Sil published two types
of almanacs in the same year. In the more expensive edition, a whole page
was devoted to each picture, while in the low-priced edition an entire bunch
of images was fitted into two sides of a page, distributed into small boxes
(Figure 9.8).23 Benimadhab De used to publish different almanacs under dif-
ferent titles, and the pictorial contents of these books usually did not match.
In De’s Lord Ripon’s Almanac, the images of popular rites such as paus.-pārvan.
or bhrātr.dvitīyā were drawn in a style that cannot be called anything but
academic. (I could not find the name of the artist in the copy I used.)24 But
the style of the full-page images in Benimadhab De’s Pañjikā was very differ-
ent, and these images usually carried the names of the engravers. The varying
modes of displaying images gave the publishers some scope for claiming dis-
tinctness in a competitive market.
In the nineteenth century, the artist would usually engrave his name
and address in the bottom most panel of the image. In a certain sense, the
engravers advertised their work through these images. While this practice
leaves us with a considerable list of nineteenth-century engravers—Ramdhan
Swarnakar, Krishnachandra Karmakar, Heeralal Karmakar, Panchanan

Chapter 09.indd 290 11/11/2013 5:18:06 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  291

Figure 9.8  Woodcut, 22 x 22, Nūtan pañjikā, 1869–70, Nrityalal Sil,

Calcutta, 1869. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Karmakar of Hogalkur, Bishwambhar Karmakar, to name only a few—we

know almost nothing about their social backgrounds, financial situations
or the hierarchical arrangement of their craft. In the academic histories of
European prints, we are told that the woodcut and the wood-engraving
were two different processes, that the designer or the artist was often dis-
tinct from the cutter or the engraver, that the former usually employed the
latter keeping in mind their respective styles.25 It is difficult to obtain simi-
lar facts about artists and engravers of nineteenth-century Bengal. We know
that Krishnachandra Karmakar of Serampore both designed and engraved
the images in the Chandroday Press almanacs.26 In the 1867–8 almanac pub-
lished by Day, Law and Co., there is an image of the chad.ak festival which is
clearly flagged as ‘Artist and Engraver: Mr. Nafarchandra Bandyopadhyay of
Chinsurah’.27 It needs to be pointed out that none of the other images printed
in the same volume puts the word ‘Artist’ before the names of the engravers.
The difference between the artist and the engraver, therefore, was not entirely
absent in the world of nineteenth-century almanacs. On the other hand, an
engraver like Nrityalal Datta of Jorabagan ran his own press. The works of
Heeralal Karmakar of Battala, again, were not confined to almanacs; there
was substantial demand for his woodcuts and illustrations of popular epic-
purān.ic texts sold as s­tand-alone prints. Most probably, these better known
artists supervised a number of artisans, on whose work they put finishing

Chapter 09.indd 291 11/11/2013 5:18:07 pm

 292  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

touches. In an almanac from the 1870s, we see that Panchanan Karmakar

had the image of Śivarātri engraved ‘by Radhaballabh Sil’.28 Again, in the
1890s, perhaps as a mechanism of asserting proprietorship, the name of the
publisher, Benimadhab De, came to be added to the images engraved by the
same Panchanan Karmakar. But apart from these suggestive fragments, we do
not have much data on the business of printing images in nineteenth-century
almanacs.

Reading the Printed Images

In spite of such crucial gaps in our knowledge, it is possible to suggest a
roughly tripartite division of almanac images for further analysis: the cover
and/or the title page, images of festivals and deities, and images used in adver-
tisements. During the 1830s, the cover of the Chandroday Press almanac was
not distinguished from its title page. The title was printed in both Bengali
and Roman scripts, a feature that sharply distinguished the new almanac
from its precolonial versions. The cover page functioned like a handbill: it
gave information on the places from which the almanac could be obtained.
Incidentally, this handbill-like cover page would return in the declining years
of the press. In the 1858–9 almanacs, for instance, the cover not only gave
the details of the publisher, engraver and distributors, but also evoked, some-
what desperately, the name of the deceased founder-engraver Krishnachandra
Karmakar. The name in itself had become a trademark.
But in the 1840s, during the high noon of Krishnachandra’s engraving
career, the cover pages of Chandroday Press almanacs used to be differ-
ent. They followed the copybook style of what was then called mirror titles
(Figure 9.9). The page was framed as a huge, palatial entrance, with two sym-
metrical lion figures guarding European-style columns on both sides. The
title of the almanac was embossed on a classical-looking tablet in the middle,
framed by a Sanskrit verse. The intended effect, undoubtedly, was grandeur
and elegance. The covers of Nrityalal Sil’s almanacs were evidently different
from Krishnachandra’s (Figure 9.10). Here, the engraver (and perhaps also
the designer) Heeralal Karmakar filled the backcloth with a series of doll-like
figures of the different zodiac signs, much in the manner in which a panel in a
terracotta temple was filled with multiple divine figurines. The rather incon-
spicuous features of the figures had the effect, by their proliferation, of a wild
growth that filled the empty space on the margins. The same filled-out space
at the bottom was then used to insert the name of the publisher engraved in
reverse. Apart from pictures of the Viceroy and Ganeśa, to which we have

Chapter 09.indd 292 11/11/2013 5:18:07 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  293

already referred, Lord Ripon’s Almanac published by Benimadhab De had the

image of a large butterfly engraved on its title page.
A skilful combination within a single frame of these different traditions
of cover design can be seen in the works of Priyagopal Das, who decorated
the P.M. Bagchi almanacs in the early twentieth century. Among various
European illustrative stereotypes, the zodiac signs form a circle around the
conversing figures of Siva and Parvati. The setting is defined by the heavenly
hills of Kailaśa with a winding river, drawn in the typical style of a theatri-
cal backdrop (Figure 9.11). In his time, Das was unparalleled in his skill
of ­creating commercial labels drawing on both local and European styles.
Creating trademark emblems for a mass product like the almanac was his
forte. The cover itself was the emblem. Particular designs referenced particu-
lar publishing houses. This convention was already in place by the end of the
nineteenth century.
To come to the second set of images, I want to point to the curious
woodcut figure of a Brahmin printed in an 1825 almanac, currently pre-
served in the National Library, Calcutta (Figure 9.12). Comparable are the

Figure 9.9  Cover/Title page, Nūtan pañjikā, 1842–3, Chandroday

Press at Serampore. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 293 11/11/2013 5:18:07 pm

 Figure 9.10  Cover, 21 x 11, by Heeralal Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā,
1869–70, Nrityalal Sil. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 294 11/11/2013 5:18:07 pm

 Figure 9.11  Cover, coloured process block, 16.5 x 9, P.M. Bagchi’s Nūtan
directory pañjikā, preserved in the design book of Priyagopal Das,
1905. Courtesy of Arup Sengupta.

Chapter 09.indd 295 11/11/2013 5:18:08 pm

 Figure 9.12  Sam.krānti-purus.a, woodcut, 11.6 x 10.6, Nūtan pañjikā, 1840–1,
Chandroday Press at Serampore. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 296 11/11/2013 5:18:08 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  297

Brahmin-like figures of Sankrānti-purusa, and the planets Rāhu and Ketu

which appeared not only in the 1835 almanac printed at the Dinasindhu
Press by Pitambar Sen, but also, and more frequently, in the Serampore
almanacs. From time to time, these images were placed inside the boxes
of the zodiac diagram, almost as miniature illustrations in a manuscript
(Figure 9.13). These ­practices ­trouble the claims of self-adequacy of printed

Figure 9.13  Image of Ketu, woodcut, Nūtan pañjikā, 1840–1, Chandroday

Press at Serampore. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 297 11/11/2013 5:18:09 pm

 298  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 9.14  Lakshmi, woodcut, 7.5 x 11, by Ramdhan Swarnakar, Nūtan

pañjikā, 1835–6, Dinasindhu Press. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

texts. Moreover, the habit of seeing was also variously negotiated. Consider
the image of Lakshmi by Ramdhan Swarnakar, for example (Figure 9.14). In
the rectangular surface of the page, both the Sanskrit verse and its Bengali
translation were ­perpendicularly printed while the image faced the reader
straight on. In order to read the verses, one would have to rotate the book.
The image would always capture the reader’s attention first, reducing the
vertical lines of printed words to the status of its frame. This tension between
the organization of words and images is remarkable.
Like every other committed artist, Krishnachandra Karmakar tended to
rework and improve upon his older compositions. In the 1840 almanac of the
Chandroday Press, he published a full-page rectangular image of the chad.ak
festival with his name engraved inside it (Figure 9.15). The performances were
framed against a Siva temple in full view and the arrangement of figures was
cluttered. In the almanac published from the same press in 1842, we come
across another chad.ak image by him (Figure 9.16). The performances were

Chapter 09.indd 298 11/11/2013 5:18:09 pm

Chapter 09.indd 299
Figure 9.15  Chad.ak, woodcut, 20 x 12, by Krishnachandra Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1840–1,
Chandroday Press at Serampore. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

11/11/2013 5:18:10 pm
 Figure 9.16  Chad.ak, woodcut, 16 x 11, by Krishnachandra Karmakar, Nūtan
pañjikā, 1842–3, Chandroday Press at Serampore. Courtesy of National
Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 300 11/11/2013 5:18:10 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  301

more carefully organized in this one, the temple dome was only partly visible,
and a few casual strokes denoted clouds in the sky. In the manner of display-
ing parts of the temple, there was a clear projection of angular vision. The
scene of gājan was now foregrounded and two conversing men stood out from
a surging crowd. European-style floral-patterned illustrations filled the lower
panel. This was a typical picture much in demand. Its success was its conden-
sation of all the predictable gestures, likely figures and anticipated styles of a
familiar annual ceremony into one frame. It brought the expected within the
scope of perception. But to speak of Krishnachandra’s achievements, we need
to look elsewhere. The texture of the different activities of chad.ak in his work
did not follow the traditional conventions of pat.acitra, or the bazaar art of
Kalighat, or even the European style. The forms and figures in his image were
not adjusted as objects in a convergent perspective, and hence his style was
clearly different from the contemporary instances of European or Company
Art. But he still used cross-hatched lines in his illustrations: it was the linear
representation of gesture and movement that gave his figures their density and
substance. In terms of dimensions, on the other hand, his depiction of the cer-
emony adopted the style of pat.acitra. The object of Krishnachandra’s design
was distinct: an economical but recognizable ­representation of the scene with
all its characteristic attributes and actions in the two-dimensional space of the
printed page. The ceremony as a spectacle had to be made directly accessible
to the optical organ. When we compare the controlled composition of the
second image and its use of angular vision to the cluttered order of the first, it
becomes clear how Krishnachandra continually strove to better his style and
why he came to be regarded as the master engraver by his colleagues.
We need to remember here that depictions of the scenes of chad.ak and
gājan were extremely rare in the terracotta temple panels of West Bengal.29
However, these popular festivals were portrayed in almanacs with almost
a vengeance. Although Krishnachandra’s visual account of these scenes
remained modular, other engravers sometimes modified the representation a
little, in keeping with the broad conventions. Let us look at Nrityalal Datta’s
chad.ak image in an almanac of 1877–8 as an example (Figure 9.17). The
composition is almost identical to Krishnachandra’s, but the details of the fig-
ures vary. The shape of the temple at the corner is different. The figures below
are cheerful. A vendor is selling snacks in the fair. A boy is standing with his
mother. In the context of terracotta temple decorations, Hitesranjan Sanyal
points out a generic feature of such variations. These figures are characterized
by their almost expressionless faces. The particularity of mood is conveyed
principally through the bodily gestures or stylized contours of the figures.

Chapter 09.indd 301 11/11/2013 5:18:10 pm

 302  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 9.17  Chad.akpūjā, woodcut, 14 x 12, by Nrityalal Datta, Nūtan

pañjikā, title page missing, 1877–8. Personal collection of the author.

Individually, the images may have their origins in indigenous traditions or

foreign conventions or the artist’s observation of reality. But collectively they
function to strengthen the overall design.30
We need to recognize the slippage between the successive mythological
images in the almanacs: the framework was the same, but there were changes
in the presentation of subjects. This applies to almost all images. I would
­particularly refer to those of Snānayātra, Rathayātra, and Śivarātri. We see two
kinds of representation of the Snānayātra festival in the almanacs published
from the Chandroday Press. The image created by Krishnachandra Karmakar
in 1842 (Figure 9.18) was divided into two panels, the upper section contain-
ing the icons of Balarāma, Subhadrā, and Jagannātha, and the lower section
distributed into columns and gateways. In Ramchandra Karmakar’s image in
another Chandroday almanac from the next decade (Figure 9.19), the estab-
lished structure continued, but the subject of the lower panel became different.
It showed the ritual act of bathing the god and introduced different female
and royal figures. In a similar manner, Heeralal Karmakar’s modifications in
the 1869–70 almanac (published by Nrityalal Sil) were also confined to the
lower panel. The figures continued to change. Kings on elephants and sahibs
in hats came together in the same image, almost suggesting a social expansion
of the spectacle of the festival (Figure 9.20). The ceremony of Jagannātha’s

Chapter 09.indd 302 11/11/2013 5:18:11 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  303

Figure 9.18  Jagannatha’s Snānayātrā, woodcut, 16 x 11, by Krishnachandra

Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1842–3, Chandroday Press at Serampore. Courtesy
of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 303 11/11/2013 5:18:11 pm

 Figure 9.19  Jagannatha’s Snānayātrā, woodcut, 20 x 12, by Ramchandra
Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1858–9, Chandroday Press at Serampore. Courtesy
of Uttarpara Jaykrishna Public Library.

Chapter 09.indd 304 11/11/2013 5:18:12 pm

 Figure 9.20  Jagannatha’s Snānayātrā, electro block, 20 x 12,
by Heeralal Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1869–70, Nrityalal Sil.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 305 11/11/2013 5:18:13 pm

 306  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Snānayātra, at any rate, was an assortment of diverse Brahminical, Śabar,, and

Sahajiyā rituals, a palimpsest of different cultural registers, and hence could
allow greater representational freedom.31 While the stability of the upper
panel ensured continuity of visual consumption, the minor variations in the
lower panel opened new points of departure in terms of the subject matter.
This was true for the Rathayātra pictures too. What dominated
Krishnachandra Karmakar’s image was a single figure of the chariot (ratha),
itself organized into a number of panels full of different figures (Figure 9.21).
On the other hand, the lower panel of the work of Panchanan Karmakar
(published in Benimadhab De’s almanac) in the 1890s privileged the danc-
ing procession and the ecstatic crowd that gathered around and followed the
chariot (Figure 9.22). Icons realized themselves in performances.
The central figure of the Śivarātri images was certainly the most ubiqui-
tously reproduced icon in the popular culture of nineteenth-century Bengal.
In the almanacs (of which he was the chief promulgator) Siva appeared in
a number of distinctive pictorial conventions: sitting majestically with his
.
semi-divine companions Nandī and Bhr.ngī on the side, or wearing his
unique necklace of human skulls and accompanied by his wife (Figure 9.23).
.
The manner in which Nandī and Bhr.ngī stood in these images, the criss-
crossed lines which were used to illustrate the pictures, the stylized use of
the bel tree, and the sitting posture of the Lord clearly set apart the almanac
images of Siva from those in the Kalighat pats. More remarkable perhaps was
the image engraved by Panchanan Karmakar and published in the 1894–5
almanac of Benimadhab De (Figure 9.24). In placing a bow-carrying figure
on a tree (purported to represent the legendary Wicked Hunter) alongside
Siva, Karmakar inserted a solitary almanac image into a longer series of folk
narratives. If the act of adding this figure had evoked a well-known story,
then the social memory of that story now made possible a particular way of
reading the image, even without an accompanying written commentary.32
Then again, there were also those images (notably of Janmās.t.amī and of
.
‘The Descent of Gangā’) which clearly employed the narrative conventions
of pat.acitra: the successive scenes of a particular story ran in a row within
horizontal panels, vividly resembling the act of writing and without demand-
ing any other adjustment from the literate eye (Figure 9.25). A similar style
is found in book illustrations. In this set of conventions, there would not
be much difference between reading the almanac images and viewing the
mythological pat.acitra narratives.
One can say that there is a lowest common denominator in every age
of viewing popular images. This is the standard taste, brought into being

Chapter 09.indd 306 11/11/2013 5:18:13 pm

 Figure 9.21  Rathayātra, woodcut, 15.5 x 10.7, by Krishnachandra
Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1842–3, Chandroday Press at Serampore.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 307 11/11/2013 5:18:13 pm

 Figure 9.22  Rathayātra, electro block, 17.5 x 11, by Panchanan
Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1900–1, Benimadhab De & Co.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 308 11/11/2013 5:18:14 pm

 Figure 9.23  Śivarātri, woodcut, 21 x 12, by Panchanan Karmakar, Nūtan
pañjikā, 1870–1, Harihar Press. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 309 11/11/2013 5:18:15 pm

 Figure 9.24  Śivarātri, woodcut, 17 x 11, by Panchanan Karmakar, Nūtan
pañjikā, 1894–5, Benimadhab De & Co. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 310 11/11/2013 5:18:15 pm

 .
Figure 9.25  Daśaharā gan gā o manasā pūjā, woodcut, 17.5 x 11, by
Panchanan Karmakar, Nūtan pañjikā, 1894–5, Benimadhab De & Co.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 311 11/11/2013 5:18:16 pm

 312  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

through various common viewing practices. In the last decade of the

­nineteenth ­century, reflecting on his encounter with the mythological paint-
ings of Ravi Varma, Rabindranath Tagore spoke of the commonly accepted
norm of reading images. The poet was not as enthusiastic about Varma as
was his nephew Balendranath. Nor was he much concerned with the stylistic
details of the paintings or the artistic ideals of ancient India. Instead, he was
thinking about the popularity of mythological paintings in the context of the
tradition of viewing. He knew that it was ‘easy to find fault’ with these pic-
tures. But the real question, he thought, was something else: namely, what the
viewers expected from these images. The acceptability of the images sprang
from the familiarity of their themes: these were ‘native themes’, and so ‘our
mind begins to cooperate with the painter. We anticipate what he is trying to
say and get it before he says so. If we can recognize his effort, we complete the
rest’.33 What is expected from an image flows from this foreknowledge, this
very style of collective presentiment. This is the lowest common denominator
of viewing. Both in their attempt to portray what the people expected and
in their capacity to embody an accepted visual norm in a certain historical
period, almanac images of festivals become a part of social performance itself.
In this context, it is meaningful to remember Ernst Gombrich’s observation
of the tension between repetition of conventionality at the structural level and
minor modifications at the level of subject matter or illustration. Almanacs and
their images were required to negotiate both the suturing of different, hetero-
geneous times and the performance of rituals in regular e­ veryday cycles. This
was the sense of order at work. The routinized actions of the everyday informed
the clichés with which the textual and visual designs were suffused. European
almanacs suffered equally from this. Bernard Capp notices ‘a steadfast rejec-
tion of originality’ in English almanacs.34 Repetition of habits renders every
scheme static. In the repetitiveness of frames, too, the slight displacements in
subject matter actually incite the power of the original scheme. The recurrence
of the structure creates a familiar space, and the viewing eye remains trapped
in this space. Varying figural combinations within this space create the aura of
its distinctiveness. It is the tension between the recurrence of the structure and
the variations of subject matter that guides the viewer’s attention to the viewed
object. Through habit, his expectation translates into a visual norm. The pro-
cess neither allows a burst of visual surprise to overpower the viewing habits nor
induces the monotony of repetition to completely overtake the viewing agent.35
Finally, advertisements. Advertisements began to appear in almanacs from
the 1880s and their number substantially increased from the next decade.
Books, various medications, and many other items were advertised here.
Indeed, circulation-wise, there was hardly a more effective vehicle. The

Chapter 09.indd 312 11/11/2013 5:18:16 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  313

c­ ontest over taste was primarily focused on the style of these advertisements.
We need to remember that in spite of their prominence, the mythological
pictures did not serve as the sole model for commercial visuals in alma-
nacs. Mythological characters were, of course, present. But contemporary
European fashion also made its way into the Bengali almanac (Figure 9.26).

Figure 9.26  ‘Śiva giving salsā’, woodcut, 8 x 7, advertisement of

N.C. Mukherjee & Co, Nūtan pañjikā, 1898–9, Benimadhab De & Co.,
Vidyaratna Press. Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 313 11/11/2013 5:18:17 pm

 314  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

In any case, the standard of judging these images had to be different. Since
the overriding imperative was that of popularity and saleability, the ques-
tion of stylistic agreement took a back seat. The artists created such hybrid
images in the hope of drawing attention and stirring up desire. The accom-
panying texts also followed this rule. Take, for example, the advertisement of
Kaviraj Haralal Gupta Kaviratna’s medicinal product ‘Mahāmeda Rasāyana’
in the 1890 almanac of Benimadhab De (Figure 9.27). The engraved image
placed right in the middle of the vertically arranged text was presented as evi-
dence of the truth of the text. And a supposedly scientific explication of male
­reproductive powers was also provided through the symbol of the sperm.
The commercial logic of the visual design was prepared to use every available
resource. The ethical implications of such advertisements were, of course,
hotly debated at the time. The following excerpt may be cited:
Captivated by the gorgeous splendour of the advertisements put up by these traders,
ordinary village people buy and consume these medicines in the hope of saving their
lives, only to find themselves cheated at every step. … In the first page of [such] an
advertisement are printed the images of gods and goddesses, bordered with peculiar
designs of flowers, leaves and figures of angels; amidst all this, the names of “This

Figure 9.27  Advertisement of Mahāmeda Rasāyana, Vr.hat Āyurvedīya

Aus.adhālaya, Upper Chitpore Road, woodcut, 5.5 x 6, Nūtan pañjikā,
1898–9, Benimadhab De & Co., Vidyaratna Press.
Courtesy of National Library, Calcutta.

Chapter 09.indd 314 11/11/2013 5:18:17 pm

 pictures in celestial and worldly time  315

Company” and “That Company” are written in strange cursive styles. Even pictures
of Dhanvantari [the celestial physician] descending from heaven with a bottle of
medicine in his hand are not uncommon. The names of the medicines, printed with
various special [engraved] blocks, are then placed in these advertisements and they
are further decorated, glamourized and beautified by all means.36

The history of almanac images shows how visual representations of com-

modities gradually became indispensable in the world of consumption, even
in those spaces where religious ritual was deeply embedded in everyday life.
These images were a site of the intertwining of desire, taste, and piety. In the
history of social practices, the pleasing display of commodities, along with
the resonant voice of vendors and the seductive incitement of advertisements,
inserts the acts of consumption in the sensory, corporeal regime of everyday
practice.

Notes
 1 Sripantha, Jakhan chāpākhānā elo (Calcutta: Banga Samskriti Sammelan, 1977),
pp. 88–9.
  2 Pranabranjan Ray, ‘Printing by Woodblock upto 1901: A Social and Techno­
logical History’, in Asit Paul (ed.), Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth Century Calcutta
(Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1983).
  3 Sukumar Sen, Bat.talār chāpā o chabi (Calcutta: Ananda, 1989).
  4 Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental
Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
. . .
 5 Chittaranjan Bandyopadhyay, ‘Bānglā pañjikā’, Banga-prasan ga (Calcutta:
Pustak Bipani, 1987), pp. 38–58.
  6 Jogeshchandra Roy Vidyanidhi, Ātmacarit (Bankura: Swastik, 2002), p. 2 and
pp. 42–3.
  7 Durgaprasad Vidyabhushan, Pañjikā (Title page missing, 1225 b./ 1818–19);
copy in National Library, Calcutta.
.
 8 Brajendranath Bandyopadhyay (ed.), Sangbādpatre sekāler kathā, Vol. I
(Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, c. 1932), pp. 60–2; Vol. II, p. 164.
 9 Anjan Mukhopadhyay, ‘Bālir pan. d. it samāj’, Sānnidhya, September 2008,
pp. 54–8. I am indebted to Professor Brajadulal Chattopadhyay for referring
me to this source.
10 Nūtan pañjikā (Serampore: Chandroday Press, 1842).
11 The Bengalee Annual Almanac, Nutan pañjikā (Calcutta: Dinasindhu Press,
1242 b./ 1835–36).
12 Introduction, Bengalee Almanac and Directory, 1874–5, B.R. Day and Brothers,
Jorasanko, Advaita Jantralaya. Pañjikā-directory, 1878–79, compiled and pub-
lished by Nrityalal Sil, Ahiritola.
.
13 ‘Bānglār melā pañjikār pāñjite’, Kaushikī, Special Issue, 1997, p. 65.

Chapter 09.indd 315 11/11/2013 5:18:17 pm

 316  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

14 See Ranajit Guha, ‘The Advent of Punctuality’ and ‘A Colonial City and Its
Time(s)’ in Guha, The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays, (ed.) Partha
Chatterjee (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), pp. 391–434 for a wonderful
discussion of the issue.
15 Jatindra Mohan Bhattacharjee, Catalogus Catalogorum of Bengali Manuscripts,
Vol. 1 (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1978), p. 117. See also, the statement of
.
Kailashchandra Smrititirtha, cited in Sankar Sengupta, Bāngāli jīvane vivāha
(Calcutta, 1974), pp. 217–8.
16 The Bengalee Annual Almanac, Nutan pañjikā (Calcutta: Dinasindhu Press,
1242 b./ 1835–6).
17 Cf. Nūtan pañjikā 1898–99 (Calcutta: Benimadhab De and Co., 1898).
.
18 Bandyopadhyay, ‘Bānglā pañjikā’, p. 54.
19 Arun Nag (ed), Satīk hutom pñyācār nakśā (Calcutta: Ananda, 2008), p. 72, 85,
88, 245.
. .
20 Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, ‘Ānandamat.h’, in Bankim racanābalī, vol. 1
(Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 2000), 666–7.
21 Abanindranath Tagore and Rani Chanda, Gharoyā (Calcutta: Visva-Bharati,
1941).
22 Indranarayan Ghosh, Nūtan pañjikā, 1873–74 (Calcutta: Sudhanidhi, 1873).
23 Nūtan pañjikā, 1869–70 (Calcutta: Nrityalal Sil, 1869).
24 Lord Ripon’s Panjikā, 1884–85 (Calcutta: Arunoday Ghosh, 1883).
25 Anthony Griffiths, Prints and Print Making: An Introduction to the History and
Techniques (London: The British Museum, 2004), pp. 13–27.
26 Shripantha, Jakhan chāpākhānā elo, p. 17.
27 Nūtan pañjikā 1867–68 (Calcutta: Day, Law and Co., 1867).
28 Paul (ed.), Woodcut Prints, p. 18, 28.
29 Amiyakumar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Mandir bhāskarye pratiphalita samājcitra’, in
.
Ashok Upadhyay and Indrajit Chaudhuri (eds), Paścimban ger mandir terracotta
(Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, 2009), p. 94.
.
30 Hitesranjan Sanyal, ‘Mandir sthāpatyālankār’, in ibid., p. 65.
31 See K.C. Misra, The Cult of Jagannātha (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1984), pp.
123–30 for details of the Snānayātra rituals.
32 Chintaharan Chakravarti, Hindur ācār anus.t.han (Calcutta, 1970), p. 32.
33 Rabindranath Tagore, Chinna patrābalī, 1893, Letter no. 94, quoted in
.
Satyendranath Ray (ed.), Śilpacintā: Rabindra racanā sankalan (Calcutta 1996),
p. 257.
34 Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500–1800
(London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 66.
35 Ernst Hans Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative
Art (London: Phaidon, 1979), pp. 151–2, 191–3.
36 Kalikumar Datta, Keśabbābur guptakathā bā pūrbbabanger jaladasyur itibrtta
(Calcutta 1908), pp. 206–7.

Chapter 09.indd 316 11/11/2013 5:18:17 pm

 10
Football and Collective Identity in Colonial
Calcutta

Partha Chatterjee

Football as a Manly Sport

Like many other things British and urban, soccer, or ‘association football’, to
use its proper name, began in Calcutta soon after its emergence in British
cities. Being a largely working-class sport in Britain, it was played in the late
nineteenth century by British soldiers stationed in India and by Europeans and
Eurasians in the railways, the police, and other services. It was also adopted
enthusiastically by rapidly growing numbers of Indians who started neighbour-
hood football clubs in cities like Calcutta. The best white teams played against
one another on the sprawling grounds of Fort William in the centre of the city.
The Indian teams played barefoot in sundry open spaces in the native quarters.
An argument has been made that the ‘games ethic’ of Victorian public
schools became a useful pedagogical tool for disciplining a colonized middle-
class into civilized citizens of the empire.1 From the late nineteenth century,
European school teachers and missionaries tried to introduce the game
among Indian students in schools and colleges as part of a general attempt
to inculcate physical training and the moral lessons of hard work, team spirit
and obedience to authority. In the case of Bengal, there was the additional
consideration of instilling ‘manliness’ among a people long regarded by the
British as cowardly, effeminate, and physically weak. In the context of the
new socio-biological theories of race, the physical deficiency of the Bengalis
was, not surprisingly, linked to the backward practices of their culture, such
as their sedentary habits, poor diet, and child marriage.

Chapter 10.indd 317 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 318  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The new Bengali middle-class smarted under these accusations. In the

political arena, it bitterly contested the charge that the English-educated
Bengali was physically or culturally incapable of carrying out with equal
distinction the public responsibilities then vested exclusively in Europeans.
From the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883–4 to the agitations over the Age
of Consent Bill in 1891, organizations of educated Bengalis publicly dis-
puted the charge of cultural backwardness. On the flip side, however, these
accusations triggered within the bhadra (respectable) upper-caste Hindu
community of Bengal an internal movement of social reform that included
a scathing self-criticism of the effete culture of the Calcutta babu, the pro-
motion of new norms of conjugal family life and the inculcation of new
habits of bourgeois self-discipline. It is in this context that educated Bengali
men in the late nineteenth century took to physical training in gymnasiums,
wrestling arenas, and football clubs. The ‘games ethic’, in other words, was
appropriated by the Bengali middle-class and turned into an instrument for
matching up to the power of the British. Historians of colonial sports have
pointed out that competition with British teams in the sporting arena was a
form of opposition that did not incur the wrath of the colonial state. ‘Belief
instilled on the sporting field that the Indians could defeat the British con-
tributed in no small measure to challenging British superiority in the political
realm’.2 From the point of view of imperial pedagogy, therefore, the introduc-
tion of football into Bengali society had unintended effects. But more needs
to be said on the subject.
Historians have noticed that several arenas of colonial civil society in
Bengal were split along racial lines in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Business houses, schools and colleges, clubs and literary societies, and
spaces of entertainment were, as if by mutual consent, segregated into sepa-
rate arenas where Europeans and Indians often pursued the same activities
of modern economic and cultural life without coming together in the same
institutions. This split was also an important condition that enabled the
nationalist formulation of an independent cultural project of Indian moder-
nity that would not be a mere imitation of the West.
The arena of sports was something of an exception to this colonial history.
Here too, the sporting clubs were quite strictly segregated on racial lines. But
from quite early on, perhaps rather serendipitously, a competitive domain
was created where European and Indian teams met as rivals. It opened up a
sphere of public life in the colonial city that was mixed but deeply racialized.
In 1889, a Trades Cup was launched, presented by ‘the trading Community
of Calcutta’—meaning the European business houses—and organized by the

Chapter 10.indd 318 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 football and collective identity in colonial calcutta  319

Dalhousie Football Club, to be played for ‘by bonafide Football Clubs only’.3
The Sovabazar Club, patronized by the influential Deb family of Sobhabazar,
was the only Indian team that was allowed to compete. It lost in the first
round. However, in 1892, Sovabazar defeated East Surrey Regiment by two
goals to one in an early round of the Trades Cup, this being the first time an
Indian team beat a British military team on the Calcutta Maidan. In 1893,
the Indian Football Association was started to run an IFA Shield tournament
along the lines of the English FA Cup. Each year, two or three Indian teams
were allowed to play, even though Indians had no place in the association
itself.
It is important to appreciate the strategic location of this new arena of
competitive sport in the public space of the colonial city. The IFA shield was
played on the gad.er māt.h or the fort grounds, supervised by an association of
white clubs and by white referees. The competitors were mostly British regi-
mental teams from different cantonments all over India. But because it was
an open tournament, Indian clubs also had the right to compete. The rule of
freedom, in other words, had to apply. But, as always, it was subject to the
rule of colonial difference. In this case, the criterion invoked was a limit on
the number of local teams that could be allowed to play without curtailing
the number of visiting teams and thereby jeopardizing the ‘all-India’ charac-
ter of the tournament. For several years, only two or three Indian teams from
Calcutta were allowed to play for the IFA shield.
The Maidan at the turn of the twentieth century was generally not a place
where Indian residents of Calcutta would venture; it was for all practical pur-
poses reserved for the recreation only of Europeans. So when Indians began
to flock to the football grounds to watch the progress of one or the other
team from the northern quarters, they must have felt the thrill of having
transgressed a protected zone of power.
There was something else about the domestication of the game of football
on the soil of Bengal that involved its basic techniques and that had a great
impact on its cultural significance well into the early decades of the twentieth
century. Most Indian footballers, even those appearing at the highest com-
petitive levels of the time, played barefoot, without the aid of boots. This
had partly to do with the way most of them were introduced to the game as
young boys—football, after all, demanded no equipment other than a ball
and some open space. It also had to do with the fact that unlike Europe where
shoes or boots were the usual everyday footwear, most people in Bengal wore
sandals that did not cover the whole foot. One can easily imagine Bengali
schoolboys discarding their slippers (if they were wearing them at all) before

Chapter 10.indd 319 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 320  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

running excitedly into a football field. What is interesting is that the play-
ers developed technical skills of dribbling, passing, shooting, and the sliding
tackle that fully utilized the flexible movements of the bare foot, including
the toes. But it also entailed a grievous technical flaw. Players with bare feet
had little chance against booted ones on a slippery surface. This was a par-
ticularly critical drawback for players in Calcutta where competitive football
was played during the monsoon months of June, July, and August. Football
lore in the city is replete with stories of how the prospects of an Indian club
pitted against a British side were dashed by a heavy afternoon downpour,
just as there are stories of fervent prayers at the Kali temple at Kalighat or
Thanthania being answered by the goddess providentially delaying the show-
ers until after the final whistle was blown.
Football actually is particularly well suited to the competitive exercise of
controlled collective violence. It is a contact sport in which physical stature
and strength play a significant part, even though speed and skill are just as
important. But it is above all a team sport that lives on the continuously coor-
dinated movements of all twenty-two players and the ball, and thus requires
the mental powers of strategic thinking and execution. The deployment and
movement of forces belonging to the two sides across the territorial space of
the football field, with each side defending a citadel that the other is trying
to penetrate, easily lends the game to the analogy of field warfare. It is hardly
surprising, therefore, that not only when national teams are playing against
one another, but also in club football, the support for rival teams so often
tends to break along ethnic lines. Without resorting to functionalist theories
of ritual violence as a social safety valve or a means of letting off steam, it is
nonetheless important to appreciate the cultural significance of what is going
on in a game of football watched by thousands of rival supporters.
It is with all of this allegorical baggage then that football came to be seen
as a ‘manly’ sport. In the context of Bengal, where Indian players generally
played barefoot against British players wearing boots, the question of manli-
ness acquired a somewhat special significance. There was added manliness, as
it were, in a barefoot player coming out the winner against a crunching tackle
from a booted player, or in stealing the ball with a deft flick of the toes, or
in slicing through a defence with a series of magical dribbles and feints. This
‘manliness’, in other words, was the ability to prevail over a technologically
superior opponent by sheer courage, skill, and cleverness.4 The sentiment was
well summed up by the legendary Samad who played mostly for the Eastern
Bengal Railways and Mohammedan Sporting in the 1920s and 1930s. His
loping runs down the left flank and mesmerizing dribbling skills have turned

Chapter 10.indd 320 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 football and collective identity in colonial calcutta  321

him into a mythical hero of the Maidan. Migrating to East Pakistan after the
partition of the country, he came back to the Maidan once in 1962 to watch
a game. All the players were now wearing the regulation football boots. On
being asked for his comments, Samad said, ‘It wasn’t a bad game, but it could
just as easily have been played by women’.5

Football and Nationalism

The turning point in the history of Calcutta football, and some say in the
history of nationalism itself in Bengal, was the astonishing victory in the IFA
Shield final of 1911 of Mohun Bagan, a club located in the northern part
of the city, over the East Yorkshire Regiment. The club had been patronized
by some eminent Bengali professional families, such as that of the lawyer
Bhupendra Nath Basu, a moderate politician who held important govern-
ment offices and later became president of the Indian National Congress.
His nephew, Sailen Basu, who was a junior officer in the British Indian army,
became secretary of the club in 1900 and tried to drill its middle-class Bengali
players, many of them college students, into the rigours of physical train-
ing, gymnastics, and tactical lessons to which army footballers were used.6
The team began to see success in several local tournaments, winning the
Trades Cup three times in a row between 1906 and 1908 after defeating local
European and Eurasian sides. In 1909, Mohun Bagan was allowed entry into
the IFA Shield but lost in the first round, doing only slightly better the next
year by moving as far as the second round.
Nothing spectacular could have been expected from Mohun Bagan, there-
fore, when it won the first round of the 1911 tournament. Fortunately, the
weather was mostly dry and sunny in July that year, except when Mohun
Bagan met Rangers for a place in the quarter-finals. Notwithstanding the
soggy field, Mohun Bagan managed to cling on to a 2–1 lead, thanks to a
superlative effort by goalkeeper Hiralal Mukherjee who saved as many as
three penalties. When they beat Rifle Brigade by a solitary goal from Bijaydas
Bhaduri and went into the semi-finals of India’s premier football champion-
ship, the city suddenly woke up to the fact that history was about to be made.
Thousands crowded to watch Mohun Bagan play the Middlesex Regiment to
a 1–1 draw, and bitterly complained afterwards that the army team’s equalizer
was gained by their forwards rushing on goalkeeper Hiralal, knocking him
down and pushing the ball into the goal with their hands. In the replay, how-
ever, Mohun Bagan scored a resounding victory by three goals to nil, helped
by an unfortunate injury to the Middlesex goalkeeper Pigot.

Chapter 10.indd 321 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 322  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Twenty-ninth July 1911. The match was to start at 5.30 p.m. but the
crowds began to assemble from the morning. Special trains were run between
Burdwan and Howrah and extra boats ferried passengers across the river to
Calcutta. The western side of the Calcutta Football Club ground had white
stands for its members—all Europeans—while temporary green stands were
put up on the northern side for spectators with tickets priced at two rupees
(they were selling for fifteen rupees on the day before the match).7 The total
capacity inside the ground could not have been more than four or five thou-
sand. Outside the fencing on the eastern side, opportunist entrepreneurs had
set up rows of packing boxes arranged like galleries going up to ten or twelve
feet. On the southern side were people standing on top of parked bicycles and
behind them rows of people on the sloping glacis of Fort William, known to
generations of football watchers on the Maidan as ‘the ramparts’. There were,
it was reported, perhaps eighty to a hundred thousand people that day in and
around the football ground, most of whom had no chance of seeing anything
of the game.8 They were, however, informed of its progress by kites in the sky
bearing the latest score. Several city newspapers had temporary telephone lines
installed in the ground so that the result could be immediately reported to
their offices—the first time this had been done for a sports event in Calcutta.
After a goalless first half (of twenty-five minutes which was considered
sufficiently punishing in a tropical summer afternoon), a hush descended on
the assembled multitude when Jackson put East Yorks in the lead. But five
minutes before the final whistle, the crowd exploded when skipper Shibdas
Bhaduri, after frequently switching positions with his lookalike brother
Bijaydas to confuse the opponents, made a run down the left to equalize.
Then, with barely a minute left, ‘Slippery’ Shibdas, as he came to be known
among white players and journalists, dribbled through the defence once more
and, facing a solitary Cressey in goal, kept his head and passed the ball to the
unmarked Abhilash Ghosh who drove home the winner.9
The scenes that followed had been never seen before on the Calcutta
Maidan. People went delirious, not knowing how to react to something
so unprecedented. ‘Hats, handkerchiefs, umbrellas and sticks were waved’,
reported Amrita Bazar Patrika, while Reuters added in a despatch for British
newspapers that the Bengalis in the crowd tore off their shirts and waved
them.10 The Mohun Bagan players were taken on an open carriage in a
procession to the north of the city. A group of Muslim young men joined
the procession at Harrison Road with a large brass band. All the way up
Cornwallis Street, women blew conch shells and showered flowers on the
players from the balconies.

Chapter 10.indd 322 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 football and collective identity in colonial calcutta  323

The Reuters report on the game published in The Times of London

remarked: ‘The absence of all racial feeling was noticeable. The European
spectators were good humoured, and the Bengalis cheered the losing team’.
But The Times correspondent added: ‘the Bengal papers claim that the success
is a proof of the physical potentialities of their race’.11 Indeed, in an editorial
entitled ‘The Immortal Eleven’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, the leading nationalist
daily, first emphasized the need for racial amity:
May God bless the Immortal Eleven of Mohan Bagan for raising their nation in the
estimation of the Western people by their brilliant feat on Saturday last. … The vic-
tory is no doubt ours and that in the line of physical culture wherein the Bengalees
at any rate were so long held to be lamentably deficient. … But if we are to be
true to Hindu instinct and culture such triumphs should not at all be exploited for
other ends than establishing the best of relations between the two races. These are
divine events meant for facilitating the harmonious working of two great peoples by
curbing to a certain extent the pride of the one and contributing to the growing self-
consciousness of the other.

But it then pointed to an implication that was directly political:

We must also ask the attention of the Government to the moral of this incident.
Is it not high time that they did some thing to give full play to the developing
physical powers of our countrymen? Should those materials be allowed to rust
unused? … We hope that the incident … will lead the Government to review their
estimate of Indian capacity even in the matter of defending the Empire when the
need arises.12

The demand, if indeed it was one, was put mildly, well within the recog-
nized boundaries of the discourse of loyalty to the empire. As a matter of fact,
when the need did arise barely three years later with the outbreak of World
War I, Indians were indeed heavily recruited in the defence of the British
Empire and sent out in their thousands to war in the Middle East and Europe.
But in 1911, still the heyday of high imperialism, the cultural discourse of
racial stereotypes was alive and kicking. The Statesman, a daily identified with
the British community of Bengal, retorted to the Amrita Bazar suggestion
that Bengalis had demonstrated their capacity to be good soldiers:
It is much more desirable that the Bengalis themselves should perceive that, when
physical energy has been developed by healthy sports, the effect ought to be to divert
the attention of the most promising young men of the country from sedentary pur-
suits to out-door occupations which are at present not agreeable to them … it will be
strange if young men who have undergone the stimulating discipline of football and
cricket do not feel the attraction of the career offered by farming and other industries
which demand physical strength and endurance.13

Chapter 10.indd 323 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 324  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Amrita Bazar Patrika was incensed:

Why does our contemporary evade the point and raise a side-issue? What we con-
tended was that when the Indians can display such excellence in English manly
games, which require not only physical endurance but such qualities as strong will,
intrepid courage and powers of organisation, they might as well be utilised in the
battle-field.
The editorial pointed out that Bengalis were physically strong a hundred
years ago, and the first Lord Minto had described them in 1807 as ‘tall, mus-
cular, athletic figures, perfectly shaped…’
Where is now this race…? And how did they manage to make themselves such fine
specimens of humanity? The reasons are not far to seek. In those days the people had
their national games … Every village at that time had its gymnasium and it was a
religious duty with its male inhabitants, young and old, to spend their evenings … in
physical culture. They had not to attend courts as litigants and lawyers … or to drive
quills in Government or mercantile offices … They had enough of food; the prices of
all necessary articles were cheap; fish, milk and vegetables more than abundant; they
had good drinking water and malaria and cholera were unknown.
There are those who attribute the physical deterioration of the race mainly to
early marriage. But be it noted that the fine race of whom Lord Minto spoke in such
rapturous terms, were the fruits of that system of marriage. The eleven of the Mohan
Bagan Foot Ball Team are we believe also the products of such marriage.
… We cannot help repressing a smile at the proposal of the “Statesman” that,
Indians, including, we believe, the Mohan Bagan Team, … should take to agricul-
ture. Do English youths who distinguish themselves on the play ground ultimately
turn into agriculturists? … No, Mr. “Statesman”, they deserve a better career than
that of hewers of wood and drawers of water.14
Amrita Bazar Patrika’s glorification of the health and well being of Bengal’s
rural people before the advent of British colonialism ravaged the villages was,
of course, a familiar theme in the discourse of the Swadeshi movement of the
time. The defence of child marriage too was part of the conservative Hindu
revivalism that had emerged in the late nineteenth century against liberal
attempts to persuade the colonial government to reform Hindu marriage
laws. But in the aftermath of Mohun Bagan’s victory, the initial anxious plea
for racial harmony followed by this exchange of barely disguised racial slurs
betrayed the presence of a suppressed discourse that the civic space of public
debate was not allowed to articulate but which had free rein on the public
field of competitive sport. It is difficult to elaborate on this with the help
of the usual sources that historians use, precisely because the public archive
in print does not document any evidence of this submerged discourse. But
there is enough experiential evidence familiar to many to suggest that things

Chapter 10.indd 324 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 football and collective identity in colonial calcutta  325

might be said or gestured by fans, almost entirely male, at a football match

that would never be allowed in a civic forum. The sporting arena, in other
words, even though a public space sometimes inhabited by masses of people,
is a rather special public domain that is not entirely subject to the rules that
govern public political discourse, even when sporting loyalties may be deeply
implicated in political affiliations.
This is why the question of manliness and race became such a touchy
issue in relation to football in the years following Mohun Bagan’s victory
in the IFA Shield tournament. For the next two decades, while the club
maintained its position as the leading Indian football team in the city, it
failed to win another trophy, whether the IFA Shield or the Calcutta League
Championship. Football legend is replete with stories of how Mohun Bagan
was the victim of unfair scheduling of matches by an association dominated
by white clubs and, above all, of biased supervision of matches by white refer-
ees. The club itself, patronized by leading zamindars and loyalist politicians,
was always ready to play by the rules and rarely complained against any of
these decisions. But the submerged discourse among Mohun Bagan support-
ers left no room for doubt that the club’s misfortunes were entirely due to the
arrogance and envy of the British ruling race. As if to compensate, they made
special heroes of players such as Gostho Paul (dubbed ‘The Chinese Wall’ for
his sturdy defensive skills) and Balai Chatterjee who had the physical strength
and courage to challenge British regimental players and not give an inch even
when unfairly tackled.
These subterranean currents of racial feeling were well brought out by
Rakhal Bhattacharya, a sports journalist who first published his history of
Calcutta football in 1955:

When someone from my own kin [ jāt-bhāi] makes your life hell on the football field,
then whether you are an armed soldier or the big boss in my office, you must be infe-
rior to me, or at least in no way superior. You can no longer get away with your tricks
here. Even if your kin-brother the referee overlooks your villainy, you cannot but
be wary of Gostho Paul or Balai Chatterjee. If you try any of your smart tricks with
them, with one lightning kick as lethal as a striking viper, they’ll send you to hospi-
tal or, who knows, perhaps even to hell. And needless to say, you know our Samad.
When he twirls his moustache, blows his nose at you and starts his mesmerizing run,
all you will do is dance to his tune like a bunch of monkeys. … And that’s not the
end of it. Don’t forget us. When I am sitting in the galleries, there is no rein on my
voice and tongue. The torrent of abuse will scare away the ghosts of your forefathers.
You are the big boss only when you are in the office; your soldiers can beat and kick
me only after I step out of this ground. But when I occupy these stands assigned to
my race [svajāti], I am free, oblivious of all restrictions.15

Chapter 10.indd 325 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 326  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

In 1929, there was a crisis of sorts over a match between Mohun Bagan
and Dalhousie in the Calcutta League. A goal was awarded against Mohun
Bagan when goalkeeper Santosh Dutt, in the view of the referee Cameron,
leaned over the goal line with the ball while making a save. This caused much
resentment among the Mohun Bagan supporters. A few minutes later, when
Williams and Dutt both went up for an aerial ball in front of the goal, there
was contact between the two players. Williams fell down and had to be car-
ried off the field with, it was later confirmed, a fractured jawbone. Cameron
was seen speaking to Dutt, at which point the crowds rushed on to the
ground and attacked the officials. A group of army men watching the match
used their sticks to beat back the crowds and rescue the referee and linesmen.
There was much pelting of stones and, it was alleged, the Dalhousie Club
tent on the Maidan was vandalized. At a meeting of the IFA council the next
day, Thomas Lamb, the president, ‘deplored the conduct of the Indian sec-
tion of the spectators as still lacking in true sporting spirit. … He depicted
a gruesome picture of a Calcutta racial riot had the Europeans chosen to
retaliate’. Lamb warned that if such unpleasant incidents occurred again,
the Calcutta Football Club, the premier European team of the city, would
refuse to play against Indian teams. The meeting then suspended Santosh
Dutt for two years on the evidence of MacLaren, the linesman belonging to
Dalhousie, even though the referee Cameron was not sure if Dutt had indeed
deliberately hit Williams.16
The cat had been set among the pigeons. The Indian clubs decided enough
was enough and refused to turn up for their remaining matches in the league.
An Indian member of the IFA council was reported as saying, ‘a feeling of
racial hatred was prominent in what Mr Lamb said’.17 A meeting of 600 rep-
resentatives of 71 Indian football clubs decided ‘to completely dissociate from
the IFA and to take immediate steps to form an Indian association’.18 The
IFA council at this time had eight representatives for fourteen European clubs
and four for 140 Indian clubs. Amidst rumours of closed-door negotiations,
it was reported ‘that Indian clubs will submit to no settlement which will not
offer them an equality of status with their Anglo-Indian fellow sportsmen’.19
Finally, at the mediation of N.N. Sircar, advocate-general to the government,
a solution was found to the crisis. Lamb expressed regret for his remarks and
two additional seats were provided in the IFA council for Indian clubs.20
The suspension on Santosh Dutt was also lifted. Soon thereafter, European
supremacy in the IFA ended altogether with the council being reconstituted
with seven members each representing the European and Indian clubs.

Chapter 10.indd 326 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 football and collective identity in colonial calcutta  327

There is little doubt that the 1911 football victory was widely read as
more than just a sporting event. Coming at the same time that the partition
of Bengal was undone and the province reunited after mass agitations, and
following the unprecedented rise of the armed revolutionary movement, it
certainly provided a spurt to the public airing of political grievances focused
on the racial divide between the rulers and the ruled. A curious glimpse is
afforded into this submerged strain in the everyday public life of the time by
the following, somewhat trivial, incident. A week after the IFA Shield final of
1911, F.A. Roberts, a European passenger on a suburban train, was charged
with assaulting Albert Bose, a Bengali passenger. It appeared that Bose was
conversing with another Bengali when Roberts barged in and punched Bose.
The judge of the Serampore Police Court asked if the conversation was about
the recent football match. On being told that it was not, he found Roberts
guilty of assault and fined him five rupees.21
Was there a more direct political message, concerning the issue of sov-
ereignty, that was also drawn from the result of this remarkable game of
football? It is impossible to tell, because every answer is liable to be framed
by the anachronistic perspective of hindsight. But Sudhir Chatterjee, the left
full-back of the victorious Mohun Bagan team and its only player to play
in boots, and who later became a Doctor of Divinity and Right Reverend
of the Anglican Church, was fond of recounting the story of an elderly
Brahmin who approached him that memorable evening in the middle of the
celebrations as the players were being led away from the ground. After con-
gratulating him, the old man said, ‘Well, this job is done’. And then, pointing
to the Union Jack flying above Fort William, he asked, ‘But when will you
take care of that?’.22

We Are Kings of the Country, the Rest Are Slaves

The mid-1930s saw the rise of yet another football public in the city of
Calcutta. Though established as far back as 1891 in the poor neighbourhood
of Kaiser Lane near Sealdah railway station, the Mohammedan Sporting Club
was a relatively unknown entity until it won the second division league cham-
pionship in 1933, thus gaining a promotion to Calcutta’s premier league.
What ensued was nothing less than a fairy tale.
But, as is the case with most fairy tales, the miracle required much prepara-
tion. A.K. Aziz, the secretary of the club from 1931 to 1934, was a dynamic
leader with bold ideas. He decided to look beyond the immediate environs
of Calcutta to seek new players for his team. Compared to the other Indian

Chapter 10.indd 327 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 328  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

clubs such as Mohun Bagan and the recently promoted East Bengal, the
club had only meagre funds. Aziz decided he would project Mohammedan
Sporting as the leading football team of Indian Muslims and draw talented
Muslim players from other parts of the country. He was hugely successful
in his effort. He recruited Mohiuddin, Masoom and the brothers Rahamat
and Habib from Bangalore, Rashid from Vishakhapatnam and Jumma Khan
from Quetta.23 He also acquired Samad, the wily old fox, from E.B. Railways.
The following year, he got the goalkeeper Osman from Delhi.
Aziz also decided that the quaint practice of Indian footballers playing
without boots was the principal reason why no Indian team had managed to
win a single major trophy anywhere in India, save the singular occasion of
Mohun Bagan’s victory in 1911. He decided to persuade all of his players to
wear boots. It was not easy to change so settled a practice. When his players
complained that they felt uncomfortable with their feet wrapped in heavy
leather, he ordered special light boots to be made for them. The result was
magical. When Mohammedan Sporting beat Kalighat 4–0 to take an unbeat-
able three-point lead over its nearest rivals Dalhousie and Mohun Bagan and
emerge as the first Indian team to win the Calcutta league, and that too in its
first year in the championship. Amrita Bazar Patrika reported in its inimita-
ble prose:
The Mahomedans appeared in boots and Samad who made no exception had at
once thousands of eyes set on him on being quite a novel sight. It is near about two
decades he has been playing football and many were the occasions when he was dis-
carded as a hopeless derelict on a wet day.
And the old juggler spread a regular revelation by the admirable way he reconciled
his footwear. He ran with the easy grace of a stag, showed admirable precision in his
shots and proved quite a wonder-man in his new equipage.24

The report also pointed out what was so spectacularly new about the arrival
of Mohammedan Sporting on the Maidan of Calcutta:
Clean, neat and delightfully scientific, the games of the victorious Mahomedan
Sporting left an impress on the tournament and created new crowds for them. The
popularity of the team increased with every match and eventually it became quite
a feature with their games that the gates would be closed long before the appointed
time to start.…
The enclosure proved once again a mockery to the bulk of the throng who set
their hearts on the match and presented themselves there. … The fort glacis easily
scored a record of mammoth gathering that stood in tiers along the gradual slopes.25

This was when the song was coined somewhere along the streets of central
Calcutta: ‘Mohammedan Sporting tumko lakhon lakhon salam/ham ab deshka

Chapter 10.indd 328 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 football and collective identity in colonial calcutta  329

badshah bane, aur sab hai ghulam [Mohammedan Sporting, a million salutes
to you/We have now become kings of the country, all the rest are slaves]’.
But the dream run had only just begun. From 1934 to 1938, Mohammedan
Sporting won the first division league an incredible five times in a row. Along
the way, it also won the IFA Shield in 1937. It was without doubt the most
popular football team among Muslims all over India. In Calcutta, it acquired a
loyal following not only among the Muslim middle-class and the many Muslim
students from eastern Bengal and Assam but also among the poor Muslims of
the city. They would throng around the ground every day their team played,
braving the monsoon sludge under their feet, perching themselves on top of
nearby electric poles and devising periscopes with reflecting mirrors in order to
get a glimpse of the action from behind a wall of humanity. There were now
three permanently fenced grounds on the Maidan, each with galleries on three
sides and one side enclosed in barbed wire, allowing the crowds outside a view.
The white stands on the west were for club members, while the green stands
to the north and east, maintained by J.J. Headwards & Co., were open to the
public at eight annas per seat in the enclosure with chairs and four annas in the
wooden galleries, which was roughly equivalent to the price of a cinema ticket.26
Among the thousands of loyal supporters of Mohammedan Sporting who
would pack the stands was a certain Jan Muhammad who would, from time to
time, raise the cry ‘Allah-u-akbar’ bringing the entire crowd to its feet.27 Almost
every memoir of Muslim politicians and intellectuals who lived in Calcutta in
the 1930s mentions the electrifying effect on the Muslim public of the victories
of Mohammedan Sporting on the football field.28 Managers of the jute facto-
ries in the northern suburbs and in Howrah set up works committees among
the predominantly Muslim workers to discuss the prospects of their favourite
football club and thus steer away from the more contentious topics of pay and
working conditions.29 In the districts of east Bengal, people would eagerly wait
for Calcutta newspapers like Azad to arrive with news and photographs of the
team that had made Muslims proud.30 The names of their footballers became
legendary: Osman in goal, Jumma Khan and Taj Mohammed in defence,
Nasim, Noor Mohammed (Senior), Sabu, Mohiuddin or Masoom in the half
line, Rahamat, Rahim, Rashid, Abbas, Noor Mohammed (Junior) or Bachi
Khan as forwards. They became idols: fruit sellers, tea shops, and restaurants
in and around New Market would serve them for free and department stores
such as Wachel Molla on Dharmatala Street would give them huge discounts.
Kazi Nazrul Islam composed a paean to the victorious team:
You have put the crown on the sunken head of India.
You have shown that given a chance we can be invincible.…

Chapter 10.indd 329 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 330  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Those feet that have so incredibly woven wonders with the football–
May the power of all of India rise from those very feet.
May those feet break our chains. And our fear, and our dread—
May those feet kick them away! Allah-u-akbar!31

Within a year or two of its winning the league, Mohammedan Sporting

was also transformed into a favourite of the elite Muslims of the city. Several
members of the Dacca Nawab family became its patrons and Khwaja
Nazimuddin was elected the club’s president. Prominent Muslim business
families began to support the club. Subid Ali, a wealthy merchant, threw
open the rooms of a building off Dharmatala Street for the accommodation
of the team’s players. After the formation in 1937 of the coalition ministry
led by A.K. Fazlul Huq, several members of the cabinet would regularly sit in
the galleries to watch important matches of the club. There is little doubt that
the presence within the same enclosed space of supporters cutting across class
lines, simultaneously experiencing the same visceral sensation of the rise and
fall in the fortunes of their favourite team, lent an unprecedented collective
identity to this new urban public.
When Mohammedan Sporting won their final fixture against Customs to
win the league for the fifth time in 1938, ‘the match was watched by at least
50,000 persons including the sea of human heads that occupied the glacis of
the fort’. There were spontaneous celebrations at the club ground and also
at Subid Ali Mansions. ‘Thousands of Mahomedan supporters marched in
procession with band and rent the skies with tremendous shouts of jubila-
tion…. A spontaneous Kabuli dancing recital was held under the skies on
their ground, led by buglers’.32
The dream run was broken in 1939, but for reasons that lay outside
the football field. There was a buzz around the Maidan, circulating mostly
among supporters of Mohammedan Sporting and the East Bengal Club, that
a conspiracy was afoot within the Indian Football Association to smoothen
the way for Mohun Bagan to win the league that year, and this was revealed in
particular by a series of shocking decisions by referees. Midway through the
league, Mohammedan Sporting dropped a point against Border Regiment
when the latter equalized in the last minute from a doubtful penalty. Referee
Gilson was stoned by an angry crowd and K. Nooruddin, the secretary of the
club, was hard put to restrain the fans.33 Mohammed Sporting slipped to the
fourth position in the league. A few days later, it lost to Customs 0–1, once
again from a disputed penalty. When the referee Handyside was surrounded
by an irate crowd, Nooruddin again stepped in to tackle the situation.34 On
5 July, with only a few matches left, Mohammedan Sporting, Kalighat, East

Chapter 10.indd 330 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 football and collective identity in colonial calcutta  331

Bengal and Aryans announced that they would not participate any more in
the league unless the IFA took steps to redress their grievances, especially over
the issue of bad refereeing.35 In response, H.N. Nicholls, the IFA president
from Calcutta Football Club, took the unprecedented step of suspending the
four clubs until the end of the calendar year for going to the press before the
matter had been discussed in the governing body.36
But football and politics had, by this time, become deeply entangled in
Calcutta. Khwaja Nazimuddin, president of Mohammedan Sporting, was a
prominent leader of the Muslim League and the home minister in the coali-
tion government led by Fazlul Huq. Nalini Ranjan Sarker, president of East
Bengal Club, was a former Congress leader and finance minister in the same
government. At a meeting of the three rebel clubs (Aryans refused to join), it
was agreed that they had no wish to leave the IFA unless forced, but if that
were to happen, they would form a new association. The IFA president was
criticized for suggesting that the rebel clubs had tried to ‘belittle the achieve-
ment of Mohun Bagan’. Nazimuddin said, ‘Any club especially an Indian
club ought to feel proud of another Indian club achieving the coveted hon-
ours’.37 A few days later, it was reported that ‘the attitude taken by the IFA …
indicated that the door … had been bolted against them [the rebel clubs]’.38
Mohun Bagan won the league title for the first time in its history in July
1939. In August, the three rebel clubs—Mohammedan Sporting, East Bengal
and Kalighat—announced the formation of the Bengal Football Association.
The meeting was convened by J.C. Gupta, a Congress leader, and was
attended by the Nawab of Dacca, the chief minister A.K. Fazlul Huq, and as
many as four members of his cabinet, namely, K. Nazimuddin, N.R. Sarker,
B.P. Singh Roy and H.S. Suhrawardy. Abdul Momin, a prominent member
of the Muslim League, said that the IFA was a ‘closed oligarchy’ of twenty-
two clubs, ostensibly with equal representation of seven members each from
the European and Indian clubs. But there were only four European clubs who
nevertheless elected seven members to the governing body. There could be
‘no justification for such a heavy European representation’.39
For the rest of the year, the new association could do little but organize
friendly matches and go on tour to the districts. By the start of the season in
1940, things were patched up. Mohammedan Sporting won the league again
that year. In addition, it won the Rovers Cup in Bombay and the Durand Cup,
played that year in Delhi instead of Simla. The following year, Mohammedan
Sporting not only won the Calcutta league but also the IFA Shield.
When meetings were organized by Muslim students in Calcutta in May
1940 demanding the removal of the Holwell monument at Dalhousie Square

Chapter 10.indd 331 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 332  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

symbolizing the so-called Black Hole tragedy, they regularly had to be delayed
to allow students to watch Mohammedan Sporting play their league matches.
A cabled report from the Bengal governor J.H. Herbert to the viceroy Lord
Linlithgow, for instance, mentions one such public meeting:
It began quietly with thin attendance but swelled after close of football play on maidan.
… General impression was that saner Muslims were inclined to be quiet, but Hindu
followers of Subhas and some extreme Muslims were anxious to foment trouble. …
Well known ex-terrorists and Forward Bloc Hindu agitators were p ­ rominent.40

The Holwell monument agitation was one where a call by Subhas

Chandra Bose, expelled from the Congress, was enthusiastically supported
by youth leaders of the Muslim League. This fragile spirit of Hindu–Muslim
fraternity was, of course, cruelly shattered in August 1946 by the Great
Calcutta Killing in which in the space of four or five days several thousand
men and women of both communities were killed in the city in a frenzy
of violence never seen in its relatively peaceful history since the time when
Siraj-ud-daulah laid siege to the old Fort William.41 It is quite certain that
there was considerable overlap between the public that celebrated the victo-
ries of Mohun Bagan or Mohammedan Sporting on the Maidan, the public
that agitated for the removal of the Holwell monument and the murderous
public that went on a rampage on the streets and in the slums of Calcutta.
We would do well to remember, therefore, that collective identities sustained
by the seemingly innocuous passion for football could also be mobilized for
the violence that often underlies the founding of modern nation-states. The
history of sports is, whether we like it or not, deeply entangled in the history
of politics.

Notes
 1 J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in Victorian and Edwardian Public Schools: The
Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981); Mangan, ‘Soccer as Moral Training: Missionary
Intentions and Imperial Legacies’, in Paul Dimeo and James Mills (eds), Soccer
in South Asia: Empire, Nation and Diaspora (London: Frank Cass, 2001), pp.
41–56; Paul Dimeo, ‘Football and Politics in Bengal: Colonialism, Nationalism
and Communalism’, in Dimeo and Mills (eds), Soccer in South Asia, pp. 61–6.
  2 Boria Majumdar and Kausik Bandyopadhyay, Goalless: The Story of a Unique
Footballing Nation (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006), p. 18.
 3 Advertisement in The Indian Daily News, 8 June 1889, reproduced in Arbi
[Rakhal Bhattacharya], Kalkātār phut.bal, (ed.) Sibram Kumar (1955; Calcutta:
Prabhabati, 2002), p. 38.

Chapter 10.indd 332 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 football and collective identity in colonial calcutta  333

  4 There was also an aura of Oriental magic surrounding the Indian preference
for barefoot football. Karuna Bhattacharya, a legendary player of the 1930s,
wrote of the wondrous reception that greeted a visiting Indian team in Australia
in 1938. The players’ feet were closely inspected and photographed, and the
pictures published in newspapers. Bhattacharya was convinced that playing
barefoot was the distinctly Indian style of football which ought not to be given
up. K. Bhattacharya, ‘Ast.reliyāy bhāratīya phut.bal dal’, Ram.maśāl, Kārtik 1349
BS (1942), pp. 390–5.
  5 Ajay Basu, Phut.bale dikpāl (Calcutta: Mandal Book House, 1980), p. 39.
  6 Jaydeep Basu has argued that Mohun Bagan’s superiority over other contemporary
Indian teams was because ‘it could field a professional side in the garb of amateur-
ism’. Stories from Indian Football (New Delhi: USB Publishers, 2003), p. 14.
  7 ‘Football at Calcutta’, The Bengalee, 30 July 1911, reproduced in Arbi, Kalkātār
phut.bal, p. 125.
  8 As a ten year old, Ahindra Chaudhuri went to the football ground that day but
was unable to see most of the game except the last few minutes when a kind
gentleman pulled him up on top of a packing box. For a graphic description
of the proceedings outside the ground, see Ahindra Chaudhuri, Nijere hārāye
khñuji (Calcutta: Indian Associated, 1962), pp. 42–3.
  9 A recent retelling of the story of Mohun Bagan’s 1911 victory is in Jaydeep Basu,
Stories from Indian Football, pp. 1–16. There is a curious anomaly in this story
that indicates the predicament created by the event for many newspapers of the
time that normally did not carry any sports news. The Calcutta dailies Amrita
Bazar Patrika and The Statesman published detailed reports of the match that
described the first half as ending without a goal being scored. The Bengalee, on
the other hand, reported that East Yorks was leading at half time from Jackson’s
goal. This version has been carried into several later histories, including the one
by Rakhal Bhattacharya.
10 Ganen Mallik, ‘I.F.A. Shield Tournament Final’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1 August
1911; The Times (London), 31 July 1911.
11 The Times, 31 July 1911.
12 ‘The Immortal Eleven’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1 August 1911.
13 Quoted in ‘Manliness of the Bengalis’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8 August 1911.
14 ‘Manliness of the Bengalis’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 8 August 1911.
15 Arbi, Kalkātār phut.bal, p. 23. The race angle appears even in the more didactic
commentaries on football at this time. A 1928 article on the history of football
in Britain, after declaring rather ruefully that football had become ‘the national
game’ of Bengalis and could not be eradicated as a foreign cultural import,
nonetheless advised that Bengali spectators give up their habit of hurling filthy
abuse at European teams. Satyendrakumar Basu, ‘Phut.bal’, Māsik Basumatī, vol.
7, no. 2(6), Chaitra 1335 (1929), pp. 993–1006. I am grateful to Kamalika
Mukherjee for this reference.
16 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 15 May 1929.
17 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 May 1929.

Chapter 10.indd 333 11/11/2013 5:19:46 PM

 334  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

18 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 19 May 1929.

19 ‘The Foot Ball Dead-Lock’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 25 May 1929.
20 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 31 May 1929.
21 ‘Scene in a Railway Train: European Fined for Assault’, Amrita Bazar Patrika,
8 August 1911.
22 The story is repeated by many who claim to have heard it from Sudhir
Chatterjee: for example, Santipriya Bandyopadhyay, Klāber nām mohanbāgān
(Calcutta: Aparna Book Distributors, 1998), pp. 34–5.
23 Mohammedan Sporting Club, Calcutta: Football League Champions (1st Div.)
1934–1935: A Souvenir (Calcutta, 1935). Maharaja of Santosh Papers. Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library.
24 ‘First Indian Win of the League’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 6 July 1934.
25 Ibid.
26 This private company held a monopoly contract over the stands on the Maidan
football grounds, maintaining the galleries and selling tickets. An unsuccessful
attempt was made in 1935 by the Indian Football Association to take over the
management of the stands. Petition from the IFA Council to Sir John Anderson,
Governor. Maharaja of Santosh Papers. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
The Headward monopoly lasted until the 1960s.
27 Muhammad Waliullah, Yugabicitrā (Dhaka: Maola Brothers, 1967), p. 345.
28 For instance, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, Atīt diner smr.ti (Dhaka: Naoroz
Kitabistan, 1968), pp. 165–8.
29 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 161.
30 Abdul Gafur, Āmār kāler kathā (Dhaka: Bangladesh Co-operative Book Society,
2000), p. 43.
31 Quoted by Abdul Gafur, Āmār kāler kathā, pp. 42–3.
32 ‘Hats Off to Mahomedan Sporting’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 July 1938.
33 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1 June 1939.
34 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 22 June 1939.
35 ‘Football Crisis in Calcutta’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 6 July 1939.
36 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 7 July 1939.
37 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 10 July 1939.
38 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 17 July 1939.
39 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 12 August 1939.
40 Telegram from Governor to Viceroy, 4 July 1940. File R/3/2/25. Bengal
Governor’s Secretariat Files. India Office Records.
41 Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905–1947 (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1991), pp. 161–206.

Chapter 10.indd 334 11/11/2013 5:19:47 PM

 11
Heads in the Naga Hills*

Bodhisattva Kar

This essay tries to imagine a leakage between the object of head, the allegory
of head and what Georges Bataille of La Revue Acéphale called the princi-
ple of head.1 That its empirical scope is limited to the partly administered
British Indian district of the Naga Hills will not be a surprise to anyone who
is even vaguely aware of the name of that area. Among the practices that were
understood as symptomatic of the essential character of the savage Naga, ‘head-
hunting’ has proven particularly compelling for a wide metropolitan audience
and triggered different administrative, academic and emotional responses
over the last two centuries.2 It is not my purpose here to offer an explanatory
account or even a comprehensive historical overview of the practices brack-
eted as headhunting in the Naga Hills. Indeed, to some extent, my reading
militates against some of the common assumptions of such accounts which
routinely reduce ‘headhunting’ to a signal of inviolate cultural difference.
Instead of approaching ‘headhunting’ as a self-sustained site of ‘Naga culture’,
I want to focus on heads that in their radically uneven but mutually implicated
capacities of object, allegory, and principle circulated in and out of bodily and
non-bodily orders, across modernist capitation programmes and savage prac-
tices of d
­ ecapitation, between cultures of heading and spectacles of beheading.

* Thanks to Daud Ali, Guy Attewell, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Dipesh Chakrabarty,

Indrani Chatterjee, Partha Chatterjee, Rajarshi Dasgupta, Sean Dowdy, Kaushik
Ghosh, Rahul Govind, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Carolyn Hamilton, Lisa Mitchell,
Projit Bihari Mukharji, Aditya Nigam, Christopher Pinney, Akshi Singh, and Ashley
Tellis for stuffing my head with challenging questions, for shaking their heads in
disagreement, and for proving over and over again that two heads are better than one.

Chapter 11.indd 335 11/11/2013 5:20:09 PM

 336  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The twinning of heading and beheading reveals more than my low allit-
erative skills. In the archival vortex of rumours about the nineteenth-century
Naga Hills, the acts of physical decapitation were often causally linked to
political acrania. Barbarism and anarchy were logically sequenced. Lieutenant
Bigge who produced the first detailed report on the Angamis in 1841, Captain
Brodie who toured through the western Naga Hills in the early 1840s to make
individual agreements with different villages, Brigadier-General Tombs who
was called in to inspect the security arrangements in the frontier in 1865: all
agreed in principle that unless some form of political headship was in place
it would be impossible to stop ‘the Naga tribes who number almost as many
independent communities as there are villages, who are constantly at feud
with each other and who acknowledge no common head’ from taking human
heads.3 Otherwise, argued Jenkins, in such a ‘disorganized state of society …
we shall [not] be able to command complete obedience throughout all these
various and unconnected tribes without which little general improvement
will be effected in the habits of the people’.4 In 1850, writing from a bat-
tlefield in the Angami country, an exasperated British lieutenant cursed ‘this
hydra-headed rebellion’ for the same reason.5
Indeed, the old Hobbesian theme that people need a political head in
order to save their physical heads was invoked time and again with varying
emphases for all the ‘head-hunting tribes’ of the frontier—the Garos, the
Kukis, the Lushais, the Chins. ‘All agree in being inveterate head-hunters’,
said Tombs, as ‘all villages are absolutely independent, acknowledging no trial
chiefs, and intensely democratic’.6 But what gave ‘the Naga case’ its specific
intensity was the fact that in spite of the repeated attempts by the British ‘to
create headmen as part of a structure of local management’—through arbi-
trary declarations, signing of various ‘engagements’, calculated endorsements
of certain claims against certain others, and creation of legal chieftainships—
the project of condensing political authority into the figure of a singular
‘head’ did not begin to show any sign of success in the Naga Hills till the very
end of the nineteenth century.7 Even afterwards, as late as 1926, the district
officers regularly complained of the pervasive presence of a ‘vague democ-
racy in its extreme form’: ‘No one ever seems to obey anyone else, and it is a
marvel that the villages ever come to any decisions at all’.8
It has now become a commonplace that through the prism of Hobbesian
sovereignty the prevailing culture of power in the area looked chaotic, cruel,
irrational and state-of-nature-like. Historians have started to write on the ways
in which the colonial misrecognition of the different political orders scattered
across the north-eastern frontier energized a series of violent administrative

Chapter 11.indd 336 11/11/2013 5:20:09 PM

 heads in the naga hills  337

responses.9 While the importance of developing a different vocabulary for

describing the local protocols of power cannot be overemphasized, it remains
equally necessary to craft an analytic that will allow us to reach beyond the
formulaic invocations of orientalism and trite accusations of distortion in
racist stereotypes. It is indeed a contention of the present essay that more is
at stake here than a mere pointing at the ‘errors’ and ‘falsifications’ in ‘colo-
nial representations’ of the Nagas, and the consequent attempt to restore a
truer and fuller reality of the ‘local practices’ and ‘indigenous discourses’. In
exploring the historical horizons where blunders mesh into truths, the fan-
tastic into the everyday, the allegorical into the literal, and the indisciplinable
into the disciplinary, it is possible to write histories of ‘headhunting’ without
having to account for it. The sources suggest that one way of doing this may
be arranged through reading the bodies in borderlands in relation to body’s
own borderlands.10
As a matter of fact, in its solitary privilege of being the anatomical pin-
nacle, human head in many discursive traditions has come to refer to ‘the
extremity of the extreme, the aim and the end, the ultimate, the last, the final
moment or last legs, the eschaton in general’. In alerting us to the unstoppable
tradeoffs between capitation, capital, and captaincy, Jacques Derrida actually
echoes an older line of scholarship when he claims that heading ‘assigns to
navigation the pole, the end, the telos of an oriented, calculated, deliberate,
voluntary, ordered movement: ordered most often by the man in charge’.11
A considerable range of critical literature on the politics of allegorization in
post-medieval Western Europe draws attention to the doxological invest-
ment in the rhetorical site of head. If Bakhtin makes the point through an
analysis of Rabelais’s subversive obsession with the ‘lower bodily stratum’,
then Fletcher confirms the metaphorical equivalence of god, king and head
to have been a standard and central concern of the scholastic rhetoricians.
Sekula discusses how a privileging of head over other organs of the human
body functioned to ‘legitimate on organic grounds the dominion of intel-
lectual over manual labor’. Bertelli describes how ‘even the cut of meat was
subjected to rules that reflected the hierarchy of the body’.12 To summarize
a common finding of this strikingly wide range of works: as the late medi-
eval affinity between the organizational hierarchy of organs in the human
body and the positional hierarchy of functions in the human society came
to be energetically reinforced since the seventeenth century, the head as the
uppermost element in the anatomical body was consistently paired with, shot
through, collapsed into and made to represent the figure and force of the
sovereign. ‘For the head always is that part not only where the care resides

Chapter 11.indd 337 11/11/2013 5:20:09 PM

 338  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

but also against which the stroke of an enemy most commonly is directed’,
Hobbes wrote in a book published within a year of the public beheading of
Charles Stuart.13 As the various commentaries on the carefully commissioned
frontispiece of Leviathan indicate, in the most influential iconic imaginations
of early modern England head was the locus of condensation of power and
accumulation of knowledge, the sole site of reflection and judgement, the
singular summit of culmination of what Hobbes called ‘a multitude of little
faces’.14
One can mobilize a host of comparable examples from various South Asian,
Tibetan and Southeast Asian discursive traditions where the anatomical head
and the logics of command, accumulation and concentration functioned in a
relationship of semantic mutuality and support.15 Therefore, starting from an
assumption of radical irreconcilability between the ‘western’ and the ‘eastern’
approaches to head would seem at least as facile as that of pervasive universal-
ity. Many histories of headhunting operate with the implicit hypothesis that
human heads are allegorically invested only in the head-taking cultures, while
most accounts of European heads systematically ignore the crucial overseas
careers of the allegories they point at.16 Against such racial enclosures of the
allegorical, this essay intends to speak. For a quick recall, as the grammar of
Hobbesian sovereignty continued to have imperial valence in the Victorian
world, the phrenological obsession with human heads kept drawing energy
from this allegorical stability.17 In fact, Shapin and Barnes conclude after a
thorough examination of ‘the steeply graded hierarchy of head and hand’
in the nineteenth-century British pedagogical writings, the allegory of head
and the principle of control became discursively inextricable in the bourgeois
empire.18 Just as head, the seat of reason, must govern the appetitive, carnal
and excremental drives of the lower body, so an enlightened government
must rule over the hunger, sexuality and hygiene of the lower classes. It was
against this entrenched tradition of ‘the purified head, whose unshakeable
commands lead men’ that Bataille, in the age of the Führer, sought to invent a
recalcitrant sign of dispersion, expenditure, and limit-experience in the figure
of headlessness.19 I wish to argue in this essay that to respond to Bataille’s call
for escape from the principle of head is neither to partake in his avant-garde
primitivism, nor to invert the colonial fear of the acephalous into any easy
form of postcolonial hope. Rather, in choosing to constantly leak into the dif-
ferent registers of allegory, object and principle, this essay wishes to perform
a dispersive function that is necessarily at odds with both the administrative-
anthropological and the cultural-nationalist approaches to ‘hunted’ heads.
In other words, this essay asserts the impossibility of writing a history of the

Chapter 11.indd 338 11/11/2013 5:20:09 PM

 heads in the naga hills  339

Naga Hills heads as pure objects.20 In the first piece he published on ‘Head-
Hunting among the Hill Tribes of Assam’ in 1909, T.C. Hodson could not
desist from mentioning the irony of a situation when he was brought into
contact with a Naga headhunting ritual in Manipur: ‘I myself was busy with
the census, an operation which in the Meithei language is described as head-
seeking, (mī kōk thī-ba, to seek the heads of men)’.21 The quick reference to
this linguistic slippage between census and headhunting was immediately
followed by a half-comical story of substitution:
The headman of a large and powerful village over the border and outside my jurisdic-
tion was engaged in building himself a new house, and, to strengthen it, had seized [a
Naga living in the British territory] and forcibly cut off a lock of his hair, which had
been buried underneath the main post of the house. In olden days the head would
have been put there, but by a refinement of some native theologian a lock of hair was
held as good as the whole head…22
I shall come back to the subject of Hodson’s location in the British anthro-
pological discourse later in the essay. Let me start with the two issues of
slippage and metonymy, because in each other’s company they sharpen our
question. Together, they scatter and double the boundary that Hodson and
his craniographic state take to be foundational and unrepeatable. It is the
boundary between life and death, or so we are told. It is the watershed of
modern common sense that differentiates seeking heads for conduct of good
government—census—from seeking heads for conduct of passions and/or
customs—headhunting. One is a harmless act of calculation. The other is
a violent undertaking of physical force. The local linguistic quirk, however,
opens up an accidental, contingent space over which a shadow of equivalence
quickly passes only to be reclaimed into cynical irony at the next instant.
But perhaps not too accidental. Perhaps not too contingent. The pro-
tracted resistance of the frontier communities against census operations,
the much-repeated and much-mocked claim of ‘the Naga tribesmen’ that ‘it
would be unlucky to number the men’23 begins to suggest a theatre of war that
is already an allegorical field. And no user of colonial archive can rightfully
confine this field to a simple duality of headhunting and census. The bound-
ary continues to multiply: the overlapping histories of resistance in the Naga
Hills to being indexed, taxed, photographed, dressed, and settled bring into
focus a drawn-out struggle over ‘the tribal body’ that resonates strongly with
what Foucault once cryptically called anatomopolitics. A number of recent
works have begun to illustrate the different disciplinary dimensions of this
project—how the attempts of formatting the Naga body were directed at its
projected ‘integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’, at ‘the

Chapter 11.indd 339 11/11/2013 5:20:09 PM

 340  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

optimization of its capabilities’, and at ‘the parallel increase of its usefulness

and its docility’.24 What lent the discrete practices of this anatomopolitics a
degree of coherence was, in the final instance, its indestructibly allegorical
quality through which the project of subjecting the ‘bloodthirsty Nagas’ to
distinct political heads remained bound up with the attempts at distributing
the ‘gregarious Nagas’ into definite figures of culpable and taxable individu-
als. An administration pursuing such anatomopolitical ends has to govern per
capita; otherwise—to borrow Foucault’s words—‘it always risks governing
too much’.25 In a frontier where the British Indian administration consist-
ently chose to advertise itself as severely resource-strapped, ‘the self-limitation
of governmental practice’ necessarily acquired an unusual degree of intensity
and urgency. As late as 1947, having returned from a punitive expedition
against ‘the bold bad head hunters who live between the Choklalu River and
the Patkoi range’, Charles Pawsey, a veteran in the job, admitted that ‘[i]t is
always difficult to know how much punishment to inflict’.26
Already by the early 1850s, the British officers in the Angami country had
begun to realize that ‘[b]esides the “grand clans” in each village, there were
in each portion many sub-divisions adhering to one side or the other; hence
indiscriminate burnings of villages should be avoided as injuring friends as
well as foes’.27 This is certainly not to say that blanket punishments (such as
communal blockade or destruction of entire settlements) went out of prac-
tice. But the sentiment that such measures were on the whole wasteful came
to weigh more and more heavily with the local officers,28 and by the 1870s
co-ordinated efforts were directed at locating the Naga who would be indi-
vidually responsible for crime and payment of revenue. It became a standard
government demand to ask for the individual decapitators before sending
in costly punitive columns or destroying communal jhum fields. This was
paralleled by the similarly stumbling measure of replacing house-tax with
capitation-tax.29 The extrication of assessable individuals from a gamut
of intersecting claims proved as difficult as the identification of specific
head-takers. As the cost-conscious, institutive violence of the per capita gov-
ernment sought to define, delimit, and validate itself in complete opposition
to the reckless, dismembering violence of the savage headhunter, the head
became the meridian of the allegorical struggle. It was a most useful heuristic
device to decide whether or not a particular act of killing by the Nagas was
­‘political’. On 16 January 1873, for example, the Political Agent of the Naga
Hills found out that one of his Kuki scouts was murdered close to the village
of Keruphemah. However, since the trunk was not headless—‘as it certainly
would have been had the act any political meaning’—the Agent concluded

Chapter 11.indd 340 11/11/2013 5:20:09 PM

 heads in the naga hills  341

that the murder was perpetrated merely to obtain the scout’s musket.30 Thus,
the human head, which revealed itself as an object only when severed, had to
be constantly converted within the administrative discourse into a symbol—
of individual identity, of organic body, of ordered society. At the same time,
opening an unending exit though absurd multiplication, metonymy particu-
larly invited the threat of extravagance. Was Hodson supposed to punish the
trans-frontier chief for having cut off a British Naga’s hair-lock? Could the
administrators prohibit the sculpting of pillars that seemed to reference head-
hunts? Must the heads of non-British subjects count as much as the heads
of the ryots? These were typically the questions that kept the British officers
occupied in the frontier.
‘[T]he Nagas have remained isolated on their hill tops, only deigning to visit
their immediate neighbours when a longing for the possession of their heads
has become too strong to be resisted’.31 This observation by R.B. McCabe,
the Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills throughout the 1880s, is
quite typical of the dominant official representations in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Frequently profiled as one of the most ‘isolated’ groups—outside the
pale not only of British jurisdiction but also of civilization, commerce and
exchange—the Nagas were seen as having their only point of contact with
humanity in their appalling obsession with human heads.32 Mackenzie attrib-
uted their ‘raids’ into the British territory to their ‘craving for skulls’.33 As
early as 1841, having returned from ‘the Angamee Country’, Biggs pointed
out that one of the biggest challenges awaiting the British government in its
new North-Eastern frontier was ‘[t]he cessation of the iniquitous traffic in
skulls’.34 Until the distinction between the ‘head-hunting’ Nagas of the south
and the ‘human sacrifice-practising’ Nagas of the north was made during the
course of the Hukawng Valley Expedition in 1925,35 this traffic was quite
consistently represented as the wicked motor of the savage ‘slave trade’ in
the frontier. The widely held notion that the Nagas bought and kidnapped
‘slaves’ in order to take their heads implied that in order to stop ‘headhunting’
the Government would first have to intercept the supply of ‘slaves’.36 During
the investigations following a much-discussed case in the 1870s of a Mishmi
killing his crippled slave near Sadiya, the frontier administrators became con-
vinced that the ‘captives taken by one tribe of Nagas from another are sold to
the Mishmis, and by them to the Abors or Tibetans’.37
The long and entangled careers of the official narratives of slavery and
head-hunting are fascinatingly complex. For want of space, I cannot enter into
that discussion at any length here.38 On a quick note, this discursive conjuga-
tion lent a distinctly evangelical overtone to the standard nineteenth-century

Chapter 11.indd 341 11/11/2013 5:20:09 PM

 342  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

government discourse. Negative Biblical motifs and references—particularly

that of the Golgotha for the Naga morungs (‘Bachelors’ Halls’) and minge-
tungs (‘Head Trees’) where the taken heads were usually displayed after the
performance of required ceremonies—were unsparingly used. The missionar-
ies, of course, had a significant role to play here, but the circulatory reach of
this trope was much wider.39 This construal of pagan cruelty was curiously
complemented, particularly from the 1880s, by pungent dictions of a harsh
evolutionism. The Nagas, often half-seriously referred to as ‘Darwin’s missing
link’ and as ‘hardly different from the wild and violent primates’, were not
considered fully human to the extent they were understood as lacking in a
minimum awareness of what constituted fellow-feeling.40
Like a beast and like a child, the Naga of the nineteenth-century British
archive was by and large incapable of abstraction and sociality: the human
head, the primary insignia of the sovereign individual, was just another ‘game’
to him. As Butler put it, ‘long use has made it second nature to the Naga to
seek for human heads, which he simply looks upon as the noblest trophies
of the chase, with which either to decorate his ancestral halls or to adorn
the walls of his assembly rooms’.41 Similarly, Moffatt Mills said with utter
disgust and profound surprise that ‘without any provocation or pre-existent
enmity, merely to stick up in their fields to ensure a good crop of grain’, the
Nagas would cut off the heads, hands, and feet of anyone they could meet
with.42 What seemed even more dreadful was the perverse love of the primi-
tive woman: ‘the “chaff ” of the village girls may send a body of young men off
on the warpath for heads’.43 The 1891 Census of Assam clearly said that ‘the
desire for head-hunting was more the fault of the women than of the men,
who were laughed at if they turned out at the village festivals without the
decorations assigned to the successful warrior’.44 The British understanding
of surprise attacks as clear proofs of the headhunters’ ‘treachery’ was related to
such stylization of taking heads as a less-than-masculine act.45
A characteristic summary of the nineteenth-century perceptions can be
found in a 1907 report by the Intelligence Branch of the army.
The chief object and ambition of the Angamis and other backward clans used to
be the collection of human heads, and no man was of any account till he had taken
at least one. Any head was good, so long as it was that of a hostile clan; the skulls
of women and children were prized equally with those of any male foe. The death
of any individual had to be avenged by that of one of the murderer’s section; and
although years might elapse before an opportunity for satisfaction occurred, the debt
was never forgotten, but handed down from father to son, murder being followed by
murder, and vengeance by retaliation, through many successive generations.46

Chapter 11.indd 342 11/11/2013 5:20:09 PM

 heads in the naga hills  343

No wonder that the usual epithets for the Naga in this rhetorical battery were
‘bloodthirsty’, ‘treacherous’, ‘murderous’ etc. The goriness of ‘headhunting’
added colour to the otherwise insipid descriptions of what this tradition of
narration understood as ‘slavery’. John Butler, a prominent member of several
anti-Naga expeditions in the nineteenth century, gave (what he must have
thought) a chilling account of the fate of a poor Kachari boy whom the Lhota
Nagas had purchased from the Angamis and eventually ‘flayed … alive, cut-
ting his flesh bit by bit until he died. These cruel and superstitious savages
then divided the body, giving a piece of the flesh to each man in the village to
put into his dolu, a large corn basket’.47 Williamson’s comparable description
of ‘the sacrificial murder of slaves’ by Rangpang Nagas had large influence
on the decision-makers in the frontier.48 In the vertiginous cascade of blood-
curdling savagery, the signs of headhunting, cannibalism, slavery, abduction,
torture, and mutilation could only refer to each other unendingly.49
While it would be wrong to say that this narrative tradition became com-
pletely displaced at the start of the twentieth century,50 it is important to
recognize the significant break in the official discourse around this period.
Three members of the British Indian bureaucracy—Thomas Callan Hodson,
John Henry Hutton, and James Philip Mills—were particularly interested
in ‘understanding’ the practices and customs of the Nagas and asserted ‘that
head-hunting is part of a definite cult, and has a meaning and purpose of its
own entirely independent of mere blood-thirstiness or of any idea of provid-
ing post-mortem servitors for the dead’.51 Hodson, who was to be recruited as
Alfred Haddon’s successor in the Readership in Ethnology at the University
of Cambridge in 1926 over the claims of Bronislaw Malinowski and even-
tually become the first William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in
1932,52 had laid out the contours of this new discursive topography in an
influential essay in 1909. ‘I do not think it possible to reduce head-hunting
to a single formula’, said Hodson.
I have found it connected with simple blood feud, with agrarian rites, and with
funerary rites and eschatological belief. It may again be in some cases no more than
a social duty,—obligatory upon those who seek to prove their fitness for i­nitiation
into tribal rites. It is compatible and co-existent with a strong sense of social soli-
darity, and it may be argued to be a survival,—stripped of much of its original
significance, since it is observed among people who from the aspect of material
culture are not primitive in that sense of that much-abused term, who are skilled in
the arts of agriculture, weaving, and metal-work. But a society may be, in respect of
its material culture, comparatively advanced, and yet exhibit a relatively low level
of mentality.53

Chapter 11.indd 343 11/11/2013 5:20:09 PM

 344  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The emphasis on the complexities of head-taking, and the disentanglement

of ‘material culture’ and ‘level of mentality’, proved critical. That which had
been considered as the ultimate cancellation of the social in the nineteenth-
century descriptions became in Hodson’s rendition the main fabric of the
primitive society. Hutton, who joined the Indian Civil Service in the same
year when Hodson published this article, took it upon himself to systemati-
cally develop parts of Hodson’s arguments. The first step was to uncouple
headhunting and cruelty. ‘I am inclined to think that these stories of tor-
ture [popularized by Butler and others] are always open to grave suspicion’,
wrote Hutton in 1921. A decade in the region had convinced him that ‘[t]
he torture of human beings is quite contrary to Naga sentiment generally’.54
His friend and colleague Mills also openly challenged the veracity of Butler’s
accounts.55 To the claims of immediacy of savage violence was opposed the
mediatory functions of primitive culture. Severed from the anatomical body,
heads were affixed to a new archival series: material culture.
Hutton was made the Honorary Director of the Department of Ethnology
in 1920. Even a casual glance at the volumes that he and his colleagues pub-
lished from the Department makes anybody understand the enormity of the
archive that they helped to create. The reader comes to know how to read
from the hornbill feathers or cowrie strings or tattoos worn by a warrior of
a particular community the number and types of heads taken by him, or
what the different rituals of head-taking gennas in different villages are, or
what kind of distinctions between the taken heads the village wood carvings
may represent, and so on. Through these patient acts of rigorous detailing,
‘headhunting’ emerged for the first time in the British Indian archival order
as a human activity that was intentionally invested, semantically accessible
and linguistically communicable. It became possible, logical, and eventually
imperative to ask the why question.56 The headhunter was no more a beast
oppressed by his mute, meaningless, passion but an intending agent of his
eloquent culture. The repulsive surface of mindless savagery was now the
attractive depth of primitive symbolism. A vertical path opened from the
heart to the head. From having been a target of prohibitive measures, then,
the practice was now a site of semiotic productivity. What Mackenzie had
understood as ‘an insane pride in the possession of human heads taken in
massacre’57 became for Hutton a particular form of ‘some deep-rooted and
innate characteristic of human nature’.58 ‘Most Britishers are headhunters at
heart’, said Hutton.59
Translated into the idiom of everyday government, this however did not
mean that Hutton or Mills or the significant number of frontier ­officers

Chapter 11.indd 344 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 heads in the naga hills  345

inspired and trained by them were any less severe on the ‘headhunters’ than
their predecessors. In fact, considered together, they might have led more
anti-Naga expeditions in the wake of ‘headhunts’ than were undertaken
during the entire nineteenth century. But the narratives of these expeditions
do reveal, at least, three interesting and interconnected shifts in the official
approach which are linked to the theoretical reconfiguration. First, a dis-
tinctively new affective economy of objects came into operation. Burning
settlements, fining villages, jailing individuals, blockading communities: all
the standard punitive measures continued. But one can say (even at the risk
of a slight exaggeration) that in the long history of capturing heads in the
Naga Hills a new era started with Hutton’s explicit instruction in 1913 that
‘in the interests of scientific pursuits’ skulls found in the offending villages
should be ‘confiscated’ and, by implication, not destroyed.60 The practice
of collecting skulls from the defeated Naga villages was not entirely unprec-
edented. Through the surgeon-entrepreneur John Berry White, three Naga
skulls had made their way to the renowned collection of Joseph Barnard
Davis which was purchased by the Royal College of Surgeons of England in
1880. One of these samples was said to be a ‘[f ]ine skull of a Freebooter shot
on a plundering expedition’, and another one belonged to ‘a servant-lad of
Col. Hannay’s’.61 When in 1882 the Chair of Anatomy of University College,
London published the first academic paper on the cranial measurements of
the Nagas, he was able to consult five specimens in altogether, the last two
having been ‘brought’ from Ninu by F. d’O Partridge and Robert Woodthorpe
respectively.62 However, the culture of collecting changed dramatically on the
eve of the First World War when the curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in
Oxford, Henry Balfour, established contact with Hutton. The promise of a
secure institutional destiny almost became the source of a systematic capture
of heads in the Naga Hills.
During the anti-Pangsha Expedition of 1936, which the Austria-born
anthropologist Baron Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was allowed to
join in order to carry out his ethnographic fieldwork, Mills reported: ‘The
Baron and I went into the village and had a look around. Not very interest-
ing; they told me that [Charles] Pawsey [the officer who had led the previous
expedition] made them burn all their old heads when they were taken over’. A
disturbed Mills complained, ‘I wouldn’t have believed him guilty of such an
act of vandalism’.63 Compare this sentiment to the official report of the most
elaborate anti-headhunting military expedition to the Naga Hills in the nine-
teenth century. In February 1875, the warriors of Sanua and Ninu attacked
the topographical survey party and along with guns and ­ ammunitions

Chapter 11.indd 345 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 346  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

took away 79 heads, including that of Lieutenant Holcombe, the Assistant

Commissioner of Jeypore.64 The British punitive expedition ransacked Ninu
later in the year, found most of the heads ‘carefully arranged in a long basket’
placed under an old tree, and rather self-consciously destroyed the evidences
of defeat. ‘These heads and all the bones and other remains of the massacre
were now very carefully collected and burnt, and the ashes buried, so that
no trace whatever of the sad event was left behind’.65 This was exactly what
Porteous did at the Ao village of Nunkum in 1887,66 or Cole at the Sema
village of Kiyekhu in 1897.67 Even when not out on an anti-headhunting
expedition, Butler had ordered to remove and bury ‘the ghastly spectacle
of a human head, evidently but lately cut off, transfixed on the point of a
bamboo about 8 feet high and placed on the edge of [a] road’ in the Naga
Hills in 1870.68
And this was precisely the practice that Hutton and his adherents would
struggle against. In so far as the Golgotha could be turned into a ticketed
exhibit, they did not want it demolished. Indeed, utmost care was taken in
protecting and curating the heads captured from a village which was pun-
ished for having captured those very heads in the first instance. Consider, for
example, another letter by Mills in which he described the tact required for
collecting the ‘trophies’ from the village of Yimpang:
Hanging from the Head Tree were five heads of the wretched Saochin people they
killed in the spring. As the raid was for slaves and was a gross act of treachery I
was determined to confiscate them, but I bided my time till we were safely outside
the very strong fortifications. A double fence with a ditch in the middle simply
bristling with poisoned bamboo spikes. Then I demanded those heads, and waited
outside with my 50 rifles till they were produced. We got them and the Yimpang
Head Tree is bare: and the Pitt Rivers Museum will get some fine specimens if I can
ever manage to send them.69

Those particular heads, as a matter of fact, could not be sent to Oxford, but by
1939 Mills, Hutton and Balfour would manage to dispatch 99 skulls in total
from the area to Pitt-Rivers.70 As a grateful Mills remembered in 1947, the
English customs officials ‘used to be very reasonable and never opened cases
of bona fide specimens’.71 To come back to the evening of 21st November
1936, when Mills reached his camp with the prized trophies from Yimpang, it
started to rain heavily. ‘My poor ‘heads’ will get wet’, he worried, ‘but it won’t
be the first storm they have ever know[n]’. ‘They are hanging just outside my
tent’, he wrote to his young wife jokingly, ‘I hope they won’t send ghosts to
give me dreams’.72 The care, fondness and excitement with which the new
head-takers handled their captured heads may look a­ mazing today, but the

Chapter 11.indd 346 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 heads in the naga hills  347

irony of this intimacy was not missed even at that time. Woodthorpe had
already noted with amusement during the anti-Lushai Expedition of 1872,

In fact all the medicos with us were quite as eager for Lushai skulls as any Lushai
could have been for theirs; though, in the interests of civilization, the Lushais’ heads
would have reposed in glass cases on velvet cushions probably, while those of our
friends would have been elevated on poles exposed to the wind and the rain.73

From bodies to trees and poles, from open hazoās to enclosed museums,
from disgusted military men to excited osteologists, from ensuring good
crops in Samaguting to getting a professorship at Cambridge: the iniquitous
traffic did not end. Heads continued to travel, to have multiple functions, to
occupy different exhibitionary orders, to cause disputes, to initiate collabo-
rations, to invite rituals, to incite dislocations, involving new participants,
bringing newer anxieties into focus and inaugurating novel rules for the hunt.
The irony was manifold: the more their cultural particularity was affirmed
in the competing and complementary languages of phrenology and social
anthropology, the less exclusive their participation became in the ‘culture’
bracketed as Naga.
This observation resonates with an emergent and powerful theme in the
new historiography of circulation of skulls in colonial empires.74 However,
tracking the imperial traffic in the Naga Hills heads is not exactly the purpose
of this essay. Instead, it wishes to think through the strange resemblance that
such gestures inevitably set up between the historians and the expeditionists.
In a social history of circulations, where the fate of objects is ‘always to live
out the social life of men’,75 the inaccessible materiality of the severed heads is
reduced to the manageable alterity of their cultural functions. The very tactic
which allows us to contest the claim of natural intimacy between a particular
‘culture’ and its peculiar ‘objects’ also places the principle of corporeal integ-
rity—the natural intimacy between head and trunk—beyond and prior to all
variable claims of the cultural. The act of severance thus becomes the inau-
gural act of culture. It is for this reason that Claude Lévi-Strauss, an ardent
reader of Hutton, would speak of decapitation (anatomical division) only in
terms of its ‘parallelisms’ with incest (sociological division) and alternation of
seasons (astronomical division).76 And, it is precisely by placing the material-
allegorical as a conceptual posterior to the natural-anatomical that Hutton
would be able to combine his anthropological appreciation with ruthless
administrative violence without a sense of contradiction. But what if the act
of severing does not produce a pure object which can be completely pos-
sessed without being possessed by it? What if the head offers, rather, a strange

Chapter 11.indd 347 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 348  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

assemblage in which its objectal status has no meaning without r­eference

to the other constituents, intensities, allegories and principles to which it is
always already conjoined?
After the final battle in the anti-Pangsha Expedition of 1936, Fürer-
Haimendorf plucked four heads from the Pangsha Head Tree. As he packed
them into a basket, he distinctly felt ‘the amusement of the Nagas and
the slightly shocked surprise of the sepoys’,77 but moved on. In a few days
the anthropologist brought his share back at the administered Konyak ­village
where he had been doing his fieldwork. When the Konyaks heard that he
had returned with human heads from his tour they wanted him to hand
them the heads, so that they once more might hold the related ceremonies
which had been declared illegal since their recent integration into the legal
jurisdiction of the empire. ‘It is irrelevant who brings a head to a village’,
wrote Haimendorf, ‘the magical force emanating from it in any case benefits
the village and increases the fertility of the crops’.78 Returning from the same
expedition, Mills stopped at a fishing camp on the Dikhu before the day he
would cross into British territory. ‘The show has gone off very well’, he evalu-
ated the expedition in a private letter,
… and though we took no heads, it will count as a headhunting raid for all the Nagas
who came on the expedition, and everyone will get their ornaments [which strictly
belonged to a headtaker]. I like to think that when I die there will be Nagas wearing
ornaments I have helped them to win. Even the Christians I have with me are going
to put them on—after all they are no more heathen than medals gained in war!79

The two expeditionists encountered two different registers of ‘irrelevance’,

as it were: the irrelevance of the identity of the decapitator and the irrelevance
of the actual deed of decapitation. Just when the administrators and the
anthropologists claimed that they had captured (‘confiscated’) the ‘objects’,
heads leaked into allegories and alibis though metaphorical performances and
metonymic rituals of appropriation.80 To write the history of secularization of
the heathen fetish is to recognize this constant switch between insubstantial-
ity of objects and materiality of metaphors, between labour of appropriation
and appropriation of labour.
The second point is connected to this. The trend of systematic impress-
ments of Naga labour into the service of the government that started in the
1880s was almost on a steady rise for the rest of the Raj.81 With the coming of
the First World War, a Labour Corps was raised in the Naga Hills in 1917 for
road-repairing in the war-zone of eastern France. Two thousand Nagas were
enrolled ‘from inside or across the frontier’, mainly under Hutton’s personal
supervision.82 In a way of explaining his unanticipated ­success in persuading a

Chapter 11.indd 348 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 heads in the naga hills  349

savage community to labour which had been found ‘too well off to enlist vol-
untarily in a coolie corps’ during the anti-Abor Expedition of 1894,83 Hutton
clarified that it was only by drumming up an indistinct hope of ‘touching
meat’—the local idiom for taking heads—in a faraway theatre of war that he
managed to get his Nagas enlisted in the labour corps.

In the administered village[s] … war is gradually receding into the limbo of the for-
gotten past, except in so far as the desire to wear the warrior’s pigs’ tushes and cowrie
gauntlets keeps the young men desirous of going as carriers on expeditions on which
they hope for a chance of ‘touching meat’ and thus acquiring the right to put on the
coveted ornaments [which used to be reserved exclusively for the warriors who have
taken heads]. It is partly this desire, as well as loyalty, which … has just taken 1,000
Semas to work in France. In their own villages they have to confine themselves to the
more modest exploits of cutting off the tail of a neighbour’s cow, a deed of chastened
daring which is followed by the hanging up of the beast’s tail and the performance of
a genna as though for the taking of a head.84

Five years later, Hutton again mentioned that ‘[e]ven now the Naga coolies
on any [Government-led] transfrontier expedition usually manage to return
with a finger, ear, or other trophy secreted somewhere about their persons.
A Naga coolie returning from the Abor expedition, when asked what he had
brought back, lifted his arm and showed a little finger hanging in the armpit
by a string round his neck’.85
We shall return to this curious theme very soon. Let me just quickly say
here that the Huttonian style of working along the grain of the ethnographic
archive established a pattern of labour impressment in the Naga Hills in which
it became economical for the British Indian government to seize on and play
with (rather than collapsing) the local distinctions between headtakers and
non-headtakers. By the end of the nineteenth century, quite a few officials
came to find strength in Godden’s observation that the Nagas’ ‘national habit
of head-taking … [was] by no means a merely military matter’.86 Samuel Peal,
a tea planter by profession and an anthropologist by hobby, pointed out in
1874 that taking heads was a means of obtaining a ‘Certificate of Manhood’
within the community.87 Michell’s 1883 Report spoke of the prevalence
of ‘Judaic customs’ among the Nagas with much abhorrence: ‘To enable a
young warrior to sit in council, or to be tattooed as a warrior, he must bring
in the head of an enemy to his chief. It does not matter whether the head
belongs to a woman or child….’88 However, in the nineteenth-century dis-
cursive arrangement, the recognition that the taken heads were bound up
with the questions of everyday entitlements within head-taking communi-
ties did not rise above the status of a stray curiosity. With Hutton and his

Chapter 11.indd 349 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 350  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

colleagues, manipulation of this distinction between the warrior and the

­unanointed became an effective way of ensuring the maximum enlistment
of Naga porters in various anti-headhunting expeditions. For many young
Naga males, participating in these expeditions even in the non-combatant
capacity of ‘baggage porters’ widened the chance of getting heads (some-
times fresh, sometimes processed skulls from the head trees and morungs of
the destroyed villages), and consequently of moving up the social scale in
their own communities.89 By the middle of 1940s, William Archer noted that
‘[w]arriors’ dress is now awarded to all Aos of the village who have either
served as porters on expeditions in which heads were taken or who have
been on active service in a war’.90 However, more than mere opportunism is
to be found in the increasing official ‘tolerance’ of the ‘degraded’ and ‘bar-
baric’ practice. The Huttonian understanding of Naga headhunting as a local
expression of universal human nature not only made a discursive transaction
between modern governments and primitive subjects eminently possible, but
also effectively fuzzed the line between criminalized rituals and authorized
actions, opening up a space for selective appropriation of the barbaric at the
very core of its negation. Incorporation was Hutton’s answer to decapitation.
The third point follows directly from this. Instead of approaching the
‘Naga customs’ as a consistent and exterior object of reprobation and attack,
the Huttonian manoeuvre involved working in and through the massive
ethnographic archive that the officers were particularly encouraged to build.
Once the depth of primitive symbolism was discursively ratified—a trajectory
of rationality, however labyrinthine, was tracked across discrete practices, it
became possible within the bounded space of that archive to imagine alter-
native routes, to decide on competing interpretations, or, most crucially in
the case of headhunting, to prescribe ‘substitutes’ for human heads. The alle-
gorical became an apparatus of capture.91 In their own argument that the
Nagas do not make a ‘very radical … distinction between human heads and
heads of game’,92 both Hutton and Mills saw a possibility of bowdlerizing the
head-taking activity, by having human heads substituted with animal ones.
Metonyms were things of this world, in supply and in control.
The logic of substitution had many different histories written into it. At
least from the middle of the 1910s, firearms began to play a crucial role in
reshaping the modes and moods of taking heads. Although the Nagas were as
a rule permitted to carry only spears and hatchets, and only 752 licenses were
issued in the entire district for guns until 1913, smuggled muskets (‘mostly
single-barrelled ­muzzle-loaders’) from Manipur, China, Cachar, Sylhet,
the Lushai Hills, and the Chin Hills began to find their way to the Naga

Chapter 11.indd 350 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 heads in the naga hills  351

s­ettlements across the ­boundary of British control.93 Some were also locally
manufactured, and reportedly the sale of toy pistol caps in the Assam plains
was of considerable help in this respect.94 Often ‘more dangerous to owner
than to the mark aimed at’,95 these guns came to redefine the intensity and
methods of inter-settlement wars. Reporting on the rapid spread of war for
head-taking between various trans-frontier Konyak settlements in the 1920s,
the Sub-Divisional Officer (SDO) of Mokokchung concluded that ‘[g]uns are
also improving in quality. If a real massacre were to occur it might be neces-
sary to stop the use of guns in warfare near our frontier’.96 In 1932 the Deputy
Commissioner pleaded to ‘be allowed to issue definite orders on behalf of
the Government that the use of guns in warfare is prohibited in our control
area’.97 The Government quickly agreed.98 However, throughout the 1930s
and 1940s, guns continued to be extensively used in head-taking expeditions.
In a mere three-year span from 1936, a total of 279 heads were reported taken
only in the war between the settlements of Keyok, Saochirr and Aghching.
‘[T]he enormous increase in the number of guns has completely changed
the situation’, remarked the Deputy Commissioner in 1941. He was of the
opinion that the official ban on the use of guns had in effect encouraged the
head-takers in the villages outside the control area which were ‘more advan-
tageously placed than those who carry out our orders’.99 From the 1920s,
again, some of the Tangkhul communities of the Somra Tract, such as Pansat,
began to develop a new method of digging pits on the jungle paths ‘deliber-
ately intend[ing] to trap men, as the Somra Tangkhuls had no other source of
supply of heads to keep in their houses and feed with baked meats’. Hutton,
who banned the practice in 1935, noted that ‘[t]here were no pits like this in
1917, or later when I was here’, and surmised that ‘a total of 400 would not be
an exaggerated estimate of the number of Pansat pits in Assam’.100
‘There can be little doubt that continued head-taking in the control area
makes for general unrest in the administered tract’, wrote the SDO in 1947,
‘and it would make much easier for the administered Konyaks to evolve suit-
able tribal substitutes for their head-taking ritual (as the Aos and Lhotas have
done) if there was not this standing incitement from across the border’.101 No
doubt, getting heads were becoming difficult for many communities as the
boundary of British administered area slowly but surely moved up. At the
same time, innovations in technology and renovations of rituals opened up
new ways of coping with the ban. The new politics of substitution needs to be
located in this dynamic context. Take, for example, the story of Yampongo, as
narrated by Mills in 1922. Yampongo was from the Lhota settlement of Phiro
and earnestly wanted to marry a certain Phiro girl.

Chapter 11.indd 351 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 352  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The minx said she would only accept him if he would take the head of a Rengma girl
and show it to her as a proof of his valour. This put the ardent lover in a quandary,
for, with the British established at Kohima and Wokha, it appeared that he must
either lose his well-beloved or take a head and get into serious trouble. But a brilliant
idea struck him. He caught an unfortunate Rengma girl, cut off her ears without kill-
ing her, and after giving this proof of his valour and devotion, triumphantly married
the Phiro girl.102

It seems that the more the human head became practically unreachable,
the more energy was put into the allegorical apparatus. The process was too
entangled to be neatly halved between colonial constraint and indigenous
consent, more so because the codifications of ‘Naga customs’ took shape only
within the Huttonian archive. While it will be overly simplistic and even
factually incorrect to say that the practice of using animal skulls in place of
the human ones had its exclusive origin in the British intervention, it is quite
certain that this rite was given a modular and generalizable form with the
Huttonians’ emphasis on the allegorical. During his tour in the unadminis-
tered area of the Naga Hills in 1923, Hutton noticed ‘large numbers of skull
trophies’ in a Naga village ‘in which a cow’s skull took the place between the
buffalo horns usually occupied by a human skull’.
Apparently when a man wounds an enemy but fails to get his head, he hangs up a
cow’s skull in the place of the human skull which he ought to have got but didn’t. The
wounded enemy is probably regarded as dying in consequence of the ‘genna’ done
with the substitute for his head. But the question arises, Why a cow’s head? A monkey
or even a bear’s skull, as used by Yacham and Yungya, would seem a decidedly nearer
approach to the human than a cow’s’.103

The symmetry that Hutton found lacking in this particular case between
ritual equivalence and visual resonance was consciously enforced in his substi-
tutive prescriptions. All communities within the administered area were advised
to use surrogates for propitiating their Nats (‘spirits’). The preferred substitutes
were monkey skulls which, it was reasoned, looked almost similar to shrunken
human heads.104 By the early 1940s, when Hutton succeeded Hodson as the
William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge and Mills moved
to Shillong to become the Secretary of the Governor of Assam, their protégés
were manning the Naga Hills administration fully on the line set by them.
As far as the eradication of ‘headhunting’ was concerned in the (unadminis-
tered) trans-Dikhu region, it became the official common sense after Hutton to
work through, and not against, ‘the Naga customs’ to push the official agenda.
The SDO of Mokokchung suggested that, just as Hutton and Mills had done
for the communities inside the British control area, the c­ ommunities outside

Chapter 11.indd 352 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 heads in the naga hills  353

should also be ‘forced to evolve some kind of ritual substitute for human heads’.
‘If Angamis, Aos, Semas, Changs, Lothas and Sangtams can do so’, asked he,
‘why should Konyaks, Kalyo-Kenyus and Phoms not?’105
However, as the Additional Deputy Commissioner (ADC) of Mokokchung
soon realized, the Nats were not easy to fool. In November 1946, for exam-
ple, the community at Kongon, an administered Konyak village (in which
‘headhunting’ was punishable under law), offered a monkey’s head to its
Nats.106 In the next four months, ten men died and a further five expired
in April and early May 1947. The village applied the infallible leaf test to
divine the cause of so many deaths and in each case they got the same reply—
‘that the deaths were due to the drum not having received the customary
human head’. Anxious and desperate, the Kongon elders suddenly got the
news in the middle of May that the Ang (‘chief ’) of Chui, another admin-
istered Konyak village, had recently received a head from its friendly village
of Angpang. Angpang was in the unadministered area, and, as subsequent
enquiries revealed, in early May they had taken three heads from an attack on
the unadministered village of Chingkao. Now, having known that the Ang of
Chui’s son had not yet secured full warrior status for the want of a head, the
Angpangias sent a ‘complementary head’ to him so that the boy could now be
granted warrior’s honors. In the middle of May, therefore, Kongon decided
to send 5 ‘envoys’ to Chui and beseech the Ang ‘to spare a fragment’ so that
further ills might be averted.
Watching this strange economy of circulation at work, the ADC noted
with embarrassment, ‘As I understand the position, war is not forbidden
between Angpang and Chingkao, and so far as I know villages in the control
area are also not debarred from accepting presents of heads. None of these vil-
lages therefore seem to have acted incorrectly’.107 Indeed, as in Dutch Borneo,
‘borrowing’ and ‘sharing’ of human skulls were encouraged in British Naga
Hills.108 When the Kongon envoys reached Chui, they found a fresh head
hanging on the mentis outside the Ang’s house. They asked for a fragment,
but the Ang refused. They allegedly pleaded with him for a day and in the
end he allowed them a piece of skull about one inch long as well as half a
finger. On their way back home, the Kongonias became entangled in serious
brawls with other Naga settlements, giving rise to official worries about law
and order in the frontier.109
‘So far as Government is concerned, the matter seems to me much more dif-
ficult’, wrote the ADC. ‘[I]t is obviously only a short step from receiving of a
captured head to commissioning a new one’. There was something o­ minously
proleptic about this statement. If the Kongonias went ­unpunished, the ADC

Chapter 11.indd 353 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 354  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

argued, ‘other villages in the administered area [we]re likely to negotiate simi-
lar transactions’. Therefore, old files were brought up and it was found that
about ten years ago the Namsangias had been fined 320 rupees for accept-
ing a human finger from the village of Mom while a little later the village of
Honfoi had also been fined 60 rupees for similarly receiving a small fragment
of a human limb. In its ubiquitously perfidious play, however, the official
archive also revealed various contrary and ‘extenuating circumstances’. Let
me just quote the most interesting one here:
When a punitive column went to Yongya in 1942 some heads were taken and these
were distributed among a number of Konyak administered villages if not under
express orders of the SDO, at least with his full connivance (In certain other cases
distribution was even done by the SDO personally). Since Kongon is of the same
Sub-tribe as Yongya, they were debarred by Konyak law from receiving any of these
heads and their present need was therefore correspondingly acute. Again[st] this
background [it] could be argued that Kongon have only done at their own initiative
what many other Konyak villages have done with Government’s approval.110

While the scattered references to various instances of official encourage-

ment, and even deployment, of ‘Naga headhunts’ need not necessarily be
attributed to a hidden plan or a centralized policy on the part of the imperial
government, there is also no getting away from the fact that such references
became increasingly numerous from the second quarter of the twentieth cen-
tury. Particularly since the outbreak of the Second World War, when military
and logistical assistance from different Naga communities became extremely
crucial for the British in thwarting the advance of the Japanese troops,111 the
official attitude to ‘headhunting’ turned out to be ever more accommodating.
This could take the simple form of looking away. As an SDO notified briefly
in a memo in 1943, ‘It is reported that a combination of Chingmei, Nokluk,
Pangsha, Fonyu, Tsaplaw, and Tsawlaw with possibly some other small vil-
lages attacked and destroyed Law Nawkun, taking between 250 and 300
heads. This does not threaten the security of the American Posts so I propose
that no action be taken’.112 Alternatively, the skills of ‘Iron Age warfare’ could
be actively stoked and productively drawn on within the expanding theatre of
the first nuclear war.113 After the war was over, Archer was told in an Angami
village how military mobilization of the Nagas used to work.
I asked if any Japanese heads were taken in the fighting. Kosazu then explained that
when the war approached the hills [,] Pawsey issued an order urging the Nagas to kill
all the Japs they could, but forbidding them to take their heads. Instead of this he
authorised them to remove a finger and an ear (Pawsey tells me that this was done to
avoid reprisals). Following this announcement Whilie Angami, a Naga of Kigwema

Chapter 11.indd 354 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 heads in the naga hills  355

killed two Japs but he is the only member of the village who did so. When he brought
in the finger and the ear a two days’ genna was observed and he is now entitled to
wear a full warrior dress and a fourth line of cowries in his belt.114

Pawsey’s desperate attempt to uphold a distinction between civilized kill-

ings and barbaric headhunts rested upon the perceived assuaging power of
the metonymic: heads were a strict no-no, but fingers and ears could be con-
ceded. We will be mistaken in reading this gesture simply as a strategic, local
compromise during the pressing conditions of an international war. At stake
was the entire structure of allegory through which control was exercised and
calibrated. Without its material metonymies, the metaphorical exceptionality
of the human head could not function. In 1947, a couple of months before
the territory would pass into the Indian union, the Deputy Commissioner of
the Naga Hills had this to say about the Head Tree of Tseminyu, a Rengma
village:
The last time a head was exhibited in the tree was in 1944. For some weeks a small
Jap force had been camping at the inspection bungalow, when a British party accom-
panied by some Rengmas took them by surprise. One Jap was captured, three were
killed and the rest escaped. Nanyhuo of Tseminyu who had taken a head in the Abor
expedition cut off one of the Jap heads. The next day it was set up on the trees. A
week later however Major Housman ordered it to be returned and the head was taken
down and given back.115

‘It is now four years since any villages were burnt and thus the restraining
effects which former punitive expeditions may have had have long since worn
off ’, the SDO at Mokokchung wrote with a touch of sadness on 30 August
1947.
The presence of military outposts in the area during the war made neutrality by
Government [in respect of headhunting] advisable but this has in turn led the
Konyaks to conclude that Government approve of head taking and even desire to
maintain it. When Government had sufficient force in the area but did nothing for
four years, they argue that head taking has Government support. Moreover, the fact
that before the war various columns themselves took heads has given further cover to the
view that Government is not averse to head taking.116

The line between the punishable and the commendable became smudged.
The prohibition of headhunting turned into the very condition of its repro-
duction. It was indeed a very short step ‘from receiving of a captured head to
commissioning a new one’.
Irony only gets sharper in our perverse discipline. The Assam Tribune of
18 August 1966 carried a letter from none other than John Henry Hutton,

Chapter 11.indd 355 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 356  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

now the Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology in the University of

Cambridge, who—after having been simultaneously courted by Nehru and
Phizo for a number of years since the Naga nationalist insurgency had taken
off—finally threw his lot with the new Indian authorities and indeed, in
print, advised them to ‘offer a thumping reward to any one bringing in the
heads of any one of half-a-dozen or so specified underground leaders’.117
As a matter of fact, the Indian authorities did not need this advice from
him. Twelve years ago, on 15 November 1954, just when the Indian media
was in doubt if the Indian army was not going too soft on the independ-
entist headhunters, the village of Yengpang, a storm centre of the ongoing
insurgency, experienced one of the worst state-engineered massacres that
postcolonial north-east India has known so far. ‘The killing lasted for two
hours, from five till seven’, the rebel leader Phizo would later claim in a
‘factsheet’ published from London.
Political Officer A. had been boasting previously that he would show the Nagas that
the Indians were the better ‘head-hunters’ and he carried out his boast with punctili-
ous accuracy: all the victims were beheaded, some alive, some after being shot, and
their heads were taken back to Noklak to be photographed. He rewarded his soldiers
that night with a feast of looted pork from Yengpang.
Among the stories told by survivors is that concerning Sibonglemla, the cheerful
young woman who was the village schoolmistress. Dragged on the ground by her
long and beautiful hair, which was four feet long when loose, she begged for mercy
and wept, but the killers scalped her while she was still alive and then cut her head off.
Political Officer A. took the scalp. Afterwards he was heard to say that he would plait
her hair into a ‘holy thread’ and keep it for luck. Sibonglemla’s husband and their two
sons, one five years and the other seven months old, were all slaughtered too.

Phizo then appended a list of fifty-three headless bodies that were identified
by the Yengpang villagers, and added at the bottom of the list that ‘[s]ome
could not be identified, and some are missing’.118
To stop at this ghastly ‘postcolonial’ moment is, however, not to give the
final word to the self-idealization of Naga nationalism. Phizo’s textual act
reminds me more of what Danton supposedly told his executioner, ‘You must
show my head to the people, it’s worth the trouble’.119 The narrative has
come full circle, as it were. The Naga nationalists, educated almost entirely at
local evangelical schools, had already been showing signs of embarrassment
at the mention of that ‘bizarre fashion of trophy-gathering’. Echoing the new
sensibilities of the ‘jungle Baptists’, the Naga National Council now as a rule
insisted that ‘[i]n fact head-hunting began to die out [among the Nagas] as
the British gradually pacified the area at the end of the nineteenth century’.120
Temporally distanced, exteriorized in a vacated pagan past, ‘headhunting’

Chapter 11.indd 356 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 heads in the naga hills  357

made appearance in the mid-twentieth-century Naga nationalist discourse

as an exogenous assault, as an unlawful force that could come only from an
outside to the Naga society, namely the Indian colonial army.121 This strat-
egy of disassociation may not seem very unfamiliar to us. All the moving
motifs in Phizo’s narrative—indiscrimination between men and women, and
adults and children, feast of looted pork after taking heads, pathological cru-
elty of the head-takers, the helplessness of the vanquished—could have been
taken verbatim from a nineteenth-century British officer’s account. Phizo’s
Acephale mourns a body into being: the allegorical body of the Naga nation.
And what reduces the tangle of mutilated trunks into the intellective opera-
tions of Naga nationalism is the evidentiary imperative of naming. Headless,
the trunks cannot still escape the rule of Logos as the Head of the nation
decides to speak for them. Do skulls really grin?

Abbreviations
ASA Assam State Archive, Dispur
CSA Cambridge South Asian Archive, Cambridge
IOPP India Office Private Papers in the Asia, Pacific and Africa
Collections of the British Library, London
NAI National Archives of India, Delhi
PRMA Pitt Rivers Museum Archive, Oxford

Notes
  1 ‘[T]he very principle of the head is the reduction to unity, the reduction of
the world to God’. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–
1939, trans. Allan Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1985), p. 199.
 2 See David Vumlallian Zou, ‘Raiding the Dreaded Past: Representations of
Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North-East India’, Contributions to
Indian Sociology, vol. 39, no. 1 (2005), pp. 75–105 for the standard references.
  3 Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Secretary to the Government of
India, Home Department, No. 368, Dated on Board the Yacht Rotas, 13 May
1866, in ‘Report by Brigadier-General Tombs on the Affairs of Assam’. Home
Department, Public Branch, 30 November 1865, Nos. 37–45 [NAI].
  4 F. Jenkins, Agent to the Governor-General, North-East Frontier, to F. Currie,
Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, No. 73, dated
Gowhatty, 14 September 1844, in Selection of Papers regarding the Hill Tracts
between Assam and Burmah and on the Upper Brahmaputra (Calcutta: Bengal
Secretariat Press, 1873), p. 293.

Chapter 11.indd 357 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 358  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

 5 Lieutenant Vincent, quoted in John Butler, Travels and Adventures in the

Province of Assam, during a Residence of Fourteen Years (London: Smith, Elder &
Co., 1855), p. 194.
  6 Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Secretary to the Government of
India, Home Department, No. 368, Dated on Board the Yacht Rotas, 13 May
1866, in ‘Report by Brigadier-General Tombs on the Affairs of Assam’. Home
Department, Public Branch, 30 November 1865, Nos. 37–45 [NAI].
 7 Peter Robb, ‘The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An
Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 31,
no. 2 (1997), p. 261. See also Gertrude M. Godden, ‘Naga and Other Frontier
Tribes of North-East India’ [Part I], The Journal of the Anthropological Institute
of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 26 (1897), pp. 161–201.
 8 J.P. Mills, ‘Certain Aspects of Naga Culture’, The Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 56 (1926), pp. 27–35.
‘The Naga headman is simply primus inter pares, and often that only pro tem’,
remarked Butler. John Butler, ‘Rough Notes on the Āngāmī Nāgās and Their
Language’, The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 44 (1875), pp. 307–
46. Woodthorpe thought that among the Nagas, who ‘have no settled form of
government’, ‘every man … is a law unto himself ’. R.G. Woodthorpe, ‘Notes
on the Wild Tribes Inhabiting the So-Called Naga Hills, on Our North-East
Frontier of India’ (Part I), The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland, vol. 11 (1882), p. 68.
  9 Sanghamitra Misra, Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity
in Colonial Northeastern India (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2011), pp.
47–94; Bodhisattva Kar, ‘Welsh’s Fallacy: Rereading the Eighteenth-Century
Ahom Crisis’, in Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in
South Asia: New Terrains (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 2011), pp. 129–67.
David Sneath, The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and
Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007) may serve as a useful comparative reading.
10 I owe the phrase ‘body’s own borderlands’ to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail
Weiss, ‘Introduction: Bodies at the Limit’, in idem (eds), Thinking the Limits of
the Body (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 2.
11 Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale
Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992), p. 14.
12 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 316–44). Angus Fletcher, Allegory (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1964), pp. 109–10. Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the
Archive’, October, vol. 39 (1986), pp. 3–64. Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body:
Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, trans. R. Burr
Litchfield (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), p. 192.
See also Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of
Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 17–61 for

Chapter 11.indd 358 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 heads in the naga hills  359

an insightful discussion of the literary politics of decapitation and cannibaliza-

tion of the heads of the defeated in a twelfth-century English narrative.
13 Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Ferdinand Tönnies
ed. (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1889), 2.5.2
14 Horst Bredekamp, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies’, in Patricia Springborg
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), pp. 29–60; A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan:
Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), Appendix C: ‘The Frontispiece to Leviathan’, pp. 362–7.
15 Jospeh S. Alter, Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004), p. 60; Gavin Flood, The Tantric
Body: The Secret Tradition of Hindu Religion (London: I.B. Tauris & Co.,
2006), pp. 43, 110; Wiliaiwan Kanittanan and James Placzek, ‘Historical and
Contemporary Meanings of Thai Khwan: The Use of Lexical Meaning Change
as an Indicator of Cultural Change’, in Bruce Matthews and Judith Nagata
(eds), Religion, Values, and Development in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), p. 158; Richard A. O’Connor, ‘Siamese Tai in Tai
Context: The Impact of a Ruling Center’, Crossroads, vol. 5, no. 1 (1990), p. 7;
J.L. Taylor, ‘Embodiment, Nation, and Religio-Politics in Thailand’, South East
Asia Research, vol. 9, no. 2 (2001), pp. 129–47; Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Essence
of Vajrayana: The Highest Yoga Tantra Practice of Heruka Body Mandala (Delhi:
Motilal Banarasidass for Author and Manjushri Mahayana Buddhist Centre,
2000), pp. 97, 188. For an interesting inversion of the ‘vertical and hierarchical
progression’ of the cakras, see Shaman Hatley, ‘Mapping the Esoteric Body in the
Islamic Yoga of Bengal’, History of Religions, vol. 46, no. 4 (2007), pp. 356–7.
16 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, trans. Joddy Gladding (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2012); Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture
and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (London and New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993). Denis Y. Arnold and Christine A. Hastorf, Heads of
State: Icons, Power, and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes (Walnut Creek,
CA: Left Coast Press, 2008) is a delightful exception to this line of scholarship.
How I wish I came across this book before sending the present article to press.
17 David Bindman argues that for the early phrenologists the value of the skull—
‘over and above any other aspects of the body’—was its potential measurability,
which was thoroughly tied to considerations of aesthetics. David Bindman, Ape
to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2002), chapter 4. Robert J.C. Young, The Idea of English
Ethnicity (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 63–7, calls attention to the founda-
tional metonymic structure of the phrenological thought whereby the difference
in the sizes of skulls could stand in for civilizational gaps. For a standard history
of nineteenth-century phrenological discourse and practice, see Roger Cooter,
The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of
Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984).

Chapter 11.indd 359 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 360  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

18 Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, ‘Head and Hand: Rhetorical Resources in
British Pedagogical Writing, 1770–1850’, Oxford Review of Education, vol. 2,
no. 3 (1976), pp. 231–54. See also Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter
Dear (eds), The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance
to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van
Wetenschappen, 2007).
19 Bataille, Visions of Excess, p. 221.
20 Cf. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 224–34.
21 T.C. Hodson, ‘Head-Hunting among the Hill Tribes of Assam’, Folklore, vol. 20,
no. 2 (1909), p. 133.
22 Ibid. For a comparable account, see E.R. Grange, ‘Extracts from the Narrative
of an Expedition into the Naga Territory of Assam’, Journal of Asiatic Society of
Bengal, vol. VIII (1839), pp. 445–70.
23 Sir Denis Bray’s Speech in the VIth Committee of the Assembly, 21 September
1935, in ‘League of Nations: Slavery Convention. Modification of Reservation
made by India in respect of those areas in Burma and Assam in which Slavery
has already been abolished or in which active steps are contemplated for aboli-
tion’. Foreign and Political Department, External Branch, File No. 66-X (Secret)
[NAI].
24 These phrases are from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An
Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 139.
For different ramifications of this process in the context of the British Naga
Hills, see Lipokmar Dzuvichu, ‘‘‘Opening Up the Hills?”: Politics of Access
along the Northeastern Frontier of British India, 1866–1942’, unpublished
PhD dissertation, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
2010; Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in
South Asia (Oxford: Berg, 2004), Chapter 3; Dolly Kikon, ‘From Loincloth,
Suits, to Battle Greens: Politics of Clothing the “Naked” Nagas’, in Sanjib
Baruah (ed.), Beyond Counter-Insurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 81–100.
25 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–
79, trans. Graham Burchell and (ed.) Michel Senellart (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), p. 17.
26 C.R. Pawsey, Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, to the Adviser to the
Governor of Assam, Shillong, dated Kohima, 12 June 1947, Memo No. 2887
G, in ‘Miscellaneous Notes on Nagas, 1947’, Private Papers of William George
Archer, Mss Eur F236/88 [IOPP].
27 Alexander Mackenzie, History of the Relations of the Government with the
Hill Tribes of the North-East Frontier of Bengal (Calcutta: Superintendent of
Government Printing, 1884), p. 112.
28 For example, in 1877 the Deputy Commissioner evidently did not like the fact
that in spite of the eagerness of the unoffending Konoma settlement to trade with
British Naga Hills, he could not exempt it from the economic blockade imposed

Chapter 11.indd 360 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 heads in the naga hills  361

in the area originally intended for the hostile settlement of Mozema ‘as our
people could not distinguish friends from foes’. See the entry of 22 December
1877, in Tour Diaries of Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills: December 1876 to
October 1879, Volume 5 (Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1942), p. 15.
29 Cf. Tour Diary of the Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, Volume I: 1870 (Shillong:
Assam Government Press, 1942), p. 1.
30 ‘Copy of Diary of the Political Agent of the Naga Hills’, in Tour Diary of the
Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, Volume II: From the year 1870–72 (Shillong:
Assam Government Press, 1942), p. 27.
31 Quoted in J.H. Hutton, The Angami Nagas, With Some Notes on the Neighbouring
Tribes (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 9.
32 See, for example, Gertrude M. Godden, ‘Naga and Other Frontier Tribes of
North-East India’ [Part II], The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland, vol. 27 (1898), p. 16; S.E. Peal, ‘Notes on a Visit to the
Tribes Inhabiting the Hills South of Sīb Sāgar, Asām’, Journal of Asiatic Society
of Bengal, vol. 41(1872), p. 25.
33 Mackenzie, History of Relations, p. 98.
34 Quoted in ‘Lieutenant Vincent’s Diary of the Expedition to the Angami Naga in
1849’, File No. 639 (1850), Reprinted by Eastern Bengal and Assam Secretariat,
undated [ASA].
35 Spencer Harcourt Butler, ‘Report on my visit to the Hukawng Valley and the
arrangements made and proposed to abolish slavery and end human sacrifices’,
28 January 1925, in the Private Papers of Spencer Harcourt Butler, Mss Eur F
116/82 [IOPP].
36 A typical example would be: G.F.F. Vincent, Acting Junior Assistant
Commissioner, on special duty, Angamee Naga Hills, to John Butler, Principal
Assistant Commissioner, Nowgong, No. 45, dated Camp Mazumah, 10
September 1850, in ‘Lieutenant Vincent’s Diary of the Expedition to the
Angami Naga in 1849’, File No. 639 (1850), Reprinted by Eastern Bengal and
Assam Secretariat, undated [ASA].
37 A. Mackenzie, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary
to the Government of India, Foreign Department, No. 595T, 14 June 1873,
in ‘Massacre of Borlangee Nagas by Kamsinga Nagas’, Foreign Department,
Political-A, July 1873, Nos. 469–507 [NAI].
38 In this context, it is important to notice that Jonathan Friedman, who in 1979
famously declared the head-taking system of the Nagas as a ‘structural inversion
of the Kachin [slave-taking] system’, and a ‘devolutionary’ tendency as such,
built his theory largely on the ethnographic evidence of James Philip Mills, who,
as we shall shortly see, was deeply invested in challenging the nineteenth-century
straight causal connection between ‘slavery’ and ‘headhunting’. Cf. Jonathan
Friedman, System, Structure, and Contradiction in the Evolution of ‘Asiatic’ Social
Formations (Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 1979), pp. 266–8.
39 The most useful example of the evangelical rhetoric is M.M. Clark, A Corner
in India (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1907). Hutton

Chapter 11.indd 361 11/11/2013 5:20:10 PM

 362  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

himself used the expression ‘Golgotha’ in almost all his Tour Diaries. See,
for example, Tour Diary of J.H. Hutton, Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills
for the months of February and March 1935, in Private Papers of John
Henry Hutton [PRMA]. He also translated a local legend about behead-
ing under the title of ‘A Naga Judith’. Hutton, Angami Nagas, pp. 255–6.
See also Lanusangla Tzudir, ‘From Headhunting to Christianity: Questions
of Cultural Identity in Ao Land’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Centre
for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2003, Chapter 1; and
Tezenlo Thong, ‘‘‘Thy Kingdom Come”: The Impact of Colonization and
Proselytization on Religion among the Nagas’, Journal of Asian and African
Studies, vol. 45 (2010), p. 600.
40 Cf. Padmanath [Gohain] Barooah, ‘Nagā’, Bijuli, vol. 2 (c. 1892), p. 250.
Sanghamitra Misra, ‘The Nature of Colonial Intervention in the Naga Hills,
1840–80’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 33, no. 51 (1998), p. 3277 quotes
an 1866 Foreign Department letter which ‘portrayed the Nagas as “living in
circumstances not very dissimilar from the conditions under which wild animals
exist...drawing health and vigour from an atmosphere which is a swift, subtle
and deadly poison to all other human beings”’.
41 John Butler, Political Officer, to the Secretary to the Chief Commissioner,
Assam, dated Samaguting, 30 April 1875, in Military Expedition against Ninu,
Etc, 1875, Excluded Areas Records, No. 23 (Shillong: Assam Government Press,
1940), pp. 9–10.
42 A.J. Moffatt Mills, Report on the Province of Assam (1854; Gauhati: Publication
Board, Assam, 1984), p. cxlv.
43 Robert Reid, History of the Frontier Areas bordering on Assam, from 1883 to 1941
(Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1942), p. 2.
44 Assam Census Report, 1891, vol. I, p. 249.
45 ‘[A]s any head counts, it is usually the head of some helpless old woman or
child, treacherously waylaid and slain on the outskirts of the village when fetch-
ing firewood or water. Few of the heads are ever taken in fair fight. And strange
to say, although these heads are mostly obtained by the sacrifice of women, it
is the young women of the tribe who goad on by their jeers the young men
of the village to this cold-blooded murder, at the expense of the women and
children of other villages’. L.A. Waddel, The Tribes of the Brahmaputra Valley:
A Contribution on their Physical Types and Affinities (1901. Reprint, Delhi:
Sanskaran, 1975), p. 64.
46 Frontier and Overseas Expeditions from India, Vol. 4: Compiled in the Intelligence
Branch Division of the Chief of the Staff Army Headquarters India (Simla:
Government Monotype Press, 1907), p. 203.
47 Butler, Travels and Adventures, p. 189.
48 See, for example, the correspondences in ‘Examination of the Question of
Slavery as it now exists in the administrative districts of Assam and in the unad-
ministered tracts of the Assam Frontier’, Foreign Department, Political Branch,
September 1916, Nos 18–31 [ASA].

Chapter 11.indd 362 11/11/2013 5:20:11 PM

 heads in the naga hills  363

49 ‘Cannibalism … which at one time was probably universal, has died out in most
cases, or survives in the passion for “head-hunting” in several’. S.E. Peal, ‘The
Communal Barracks of Primitive Races’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,
vol. 61 (1892), p. 248.
50 Even during the Hukawng Valley Expedition of 1925 the newspaper reports
and photographs liberally reproduced these standard stereotypes of the Naga
‘headhunters’. See the undated news clip ‘England Stamping Out Her Head
Hunters’ from The American Weekly in Private Papers of Charles Pawsey [CSA].
51 J.H. Hutton, ‘The Significance of Head-Hunting in Assam’, The Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 58 (1928),
p. 399. Although written in explicit reference to Charles Hose’s recently pub-
lished Natural Man: A Record from Bornéo, in the specific context of the Naga
Hills Hutton’s last salvo was also meant for Laurence Waddell who in 1901 had
claimed that ‘[t]he origin of their head-hunting is probably to some extent their
belief that all those persons whose heads are thus taken become slaves of their
captors in his future life’. Waddel, Tribes of the Brahmaputra Valley, p. 63.
52 George W. Stocking, Jr, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 293, 360. Stocking’s hur-
ried description of Hodson as ‘an anthropological mediocrity’ is certainly open
to contestation.
53 Hodson, Head-Hunting, p. 143.
54 Hutton, Angami Nagas, p. 155n.
55 J.P. Mills, The Lhota Nagas (London: Macmillan, 1921), pp. 230–1.
56 Cf. Rodney Needham, ‘Skulls and Causality’, Man, ns, vol. 11, no. 1 (1976),
pp. 71–88. While Rodney Needham is interested in probing whether the anthro-
pological discipline as a whole misconstrued the notion of causality involved in
headhunting, I am more concerned with the emergence of this very problematic
of ‘skulls and causality’.
57 A. Mackenzie, Junior Secretary to the Government of Bengal, to the Secretary
to the Government of India, Foreign Department, No. 595T, 14 June 1873,
in ‘Massacre of Borlangee Nagas by Kamsinga Nagas’, Foreign Department,
Political-A, July 1873, Nos 469–507 [NAI].
58 Hutton, Angami Nagas, p. 157.
59 Ibid., p. 158.
60 Copy of Memo by J.H. Hutton, No. 375 E, dated Kohima, 7 December 1913,
in File No. XIII 5 (2) 1940–1941 [ASA].
61 Joseph Barnard Davis, Thesaurus Craniorum: Catalogue of the Skulls of the Various
Races of Man, in the Collection of Joseph Barnard Davis & c. (London: Printed
for the Subscribers, 1867), p. 173. See Helen Macdonald, Human Remains:
Dissection and Its Histories (London: Yale University Press, 2006), chapter 4 for
a brief history of the Barnard Davis collection.
62 George D. Thane, ‘On Some Naga Skulls’, The Journal of the Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 11 (1882), pp. 215–19. The implica-
tion of the location (Ninu) may become clearer in the next paragraph. It may

Chapter 11.indd 363 11/11/2013 5:20:11 PM

 364  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

also be noted here that Hutton offered to loan ‘2 Ao Naga skulls for phrenologi-
cal research to the Royal College of Surgeons’. John Henry Hutton to Miriam
Louise Tildesley, dated 21 May 1927, in Museum Letters Series 3, 1907–79,
the Archive of Museum Correspondence, The Royal College of Surgeons of
England, London.
63 Letter dated 13 November 1936, in ‘Letters from a Deputy Commissioner on
the North-Eastern Frontier of India to His Wife and Edited by Her’, in Private
Papers of James Philip Mills, CSA. (Emphasis added.)
64 One of Holcombe’s hands was also taken away along with his head. Appendix
F: Statement of Tolong of Banfera, 15 March 1875, in Military Expedition
against Ninu, Etc, 1875, Excluded Areas Records, No. 23 (Shillong: Assam
Government Press, 1940), p. 13. For related details, see ‘Report by Captain
W.F. Badgley, in charge No. 6, to the Surveyor General of India,—No. x/8 A,
dated Jaipur, 7th February 1875, on the treacherous attack made by the Nagas’,
in H.L. Thuillier, General Report on the Topographical Surveys of India, and of the
Surveyor General’s Department, Head Quarter Establishment, for season 1874–75
(Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Government Printing, 1876), pp. 51–3
and Captain W.F. Badgley, in charge No. 6 Survey, to Colonel Nuthali, C.B.,
Commanding 44th Regiment Native Infantry, No. X 3 B, Debroogurh, 10
February 1875, in ‘Measures for Punishment of Naga Villages concerned in
the attack on Lieut. Holcombe and his party’, Foreign Department, Political A,
March 1875, Nos. 480–98 [NAI].
65 Military Expedition against Ninu, Etc, 1875, Excluded Areas Records, No. 23
(Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1940), p. 6.
66 Reid, History of the Frontier Areas, p. 112.
67 Assam Secretariat, For., A, May 1898, Nos. 4–5 [ASA].
68 Entry of 17 February 1870, in Tour Diary of the Deputy Commissioner, Naga
Hills, Vol. 1: 1870 (Shillong: Assam Government Press, 1942), p. 9.
69 Letter dated 21 November 1936, in ‘Letters from a Deputy Commissioner on
the North-Eastern Frontier of India to His Wife and Edited by Her’, in Private
Papers of James Philip Mills, CSA.
70 http://history.prm.ox.ac.uk/page_71.html [accessed on 15 November 2009].
‘Hutton alone collected 2,783 artefacts from the Naga Hills for the Pitt Rivers
Museum in Oxford, while many others went to the Cambridge University
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’, writes Alan Macfarlane in his
Foreword to Peter van Ham and Jamie Saul, Expedition Naga: Diaries from
the Hills in Northeast India, 1921–1937, 2002–2006 (Bangkok: River Books,
2008), p. 7.
71 J.P. Mills to T.K. Penniman, Curator, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, dated
Shillong, 20 April 1947, in Papers of James Philip Mills [PRMA].
72 Letter dated 21 November 1936, in ‘Letters from a Deputy Commissioner on
the North-Eastern Frontier of India to His Wife and Edited by Her’, in Ibid.
73 R.G. Woodthorpe, The Lushai Expedition, 1871–72 (1873. Reprint. Aizawl:
Tribal Research Institute, 1978), pp. 268–9.

Chapter 11.indd 364 11/11/2013 5:20:11 PM

 heads in the naga hills  365

74 See, for example, Paul Turnbull, ‘Rare Work among the Professors: The Capture
of Indigenous Skulls within Phrenological Knowledge in Early Colonial
Australia’, in Jeannette Hoorn and Barbara Creed (eds), Body Trade: Captivity,
Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific (New York: Routledge, 2001),
pp.  5–23; Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and
Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley and London: University of California
Press, 2005), pp. 117–50; Steven Lee Rubenstein, ‘Circulation, Accumulation,
and the Power of Shuar Shrunken Heads’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 22,
no. 3 (2007), pp.  357–99; Ricardo Roque, Headhunting and Colonialism:
Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire,
1870–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
75 Christopher Pinney, ‘Things Happen: Or, From Which Moment Does that
Object Come?’, in Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2005), p. 239.
76 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners: Introduction to a Science of
Mythology, 3, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row,
1978), p. 105.
77 Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, The Naked Nagas (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink
& Co., 1939), p. 165. See also Letter dated Camp Chantung, 7 December 1936,
in ‘Letters from a Deputy Commissioner on the North-Eastern Frontier of India
to His Wife and Edited by Her’, in Private Papers of James Philip Mills [CSA].
78 Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, ‘The Head-Hunting Ceremonies of the
Konyak Nagas of Assam’, Man, vol. 38 (1938), p. 25. (Emphasis added.)
79 Letter dated Dikhu River, 12 December 1936, in ‘Letters from a Deputy
Commissioner on the North-Eastern Frontier of India to His Wife and Edited
by Her’, in Private Papers of James Philip Mills [CSA].
80 For different discussions of the rituals of appropriation see Hutton, Angami
Nagas, 239; J.H. Hutton, The Sema Nagas (London: Macmillan, 1921),
pp. 175–6; J.P. Mills, The Ao Nagas (London: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 204–5;
Thane, Naga Skulls, p. 216.
81 The government decided to build a large number of roads, bridle paths, water
supply arrangements, and telegraph lines, along with the Kohima Fort and
Magazine, within a very short period of time in the late 1880s. Massive labour
impressment—more or less unhindered by any custom, law or convention—took
place in the Naga Hills. In 1887, even the officials were embarrassed to admit
that in the last year at least 16,500 Nagas were forced to work for ‘public utility’
[Reid, History of the Frontier Areas, p. 110]. After a few years’ token abatement,
the official impressment figures for the Naga Hills shot up to 20,507 in 1891–2.
Within four years, the figure became even more frightening: 91,516 [See the
volumes of the Annual Report upon Native States and Frontier Tribes of Assam for
this period]. Explicit official statements are available to the effect that the ‘actual
number of coolies used in the district ‘was still much higher’. Annual Report upon
Native States and Frontier Tribes of Assam for the year 1893–94 (Shillong: Printed
at the Assam Secretariat Printing Office, 1894), p. 27.

Chapter 11.indd 365 11/11/2013 5:20:11 PM

 366  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

82 Hutton, Sema Nagas, p. viii. See also Annual Report on Frontier Tribes of Assam
for the year 1917–18 (Shillong: Printed at the Assam Secretariat Printing Office,
1918).
83 W.R. Little, Report on the Abor Expedition, 1894, compiled for the Intelligence
Branch of the Quarter Master General’s Department in India (Simla: Printed at
the Government Central Printing Office, 1895), p. 33
84 Hutton, Sema Nagas, p. 173.
85 Hutton, Angami Nagas, p. 32.
86 Godden, Naga and Other Frontier Tribes [Part II], p. 15.
87 S.E. Peale, ‘The Nagas and Neighbouring Tribes’, The Journal of the
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 3 (1874), p. 477.
88 F. Michell, Report (Topographical, Political and Military) on the North East
Frontier of India (Calcutta: Intelligence Branch, Quarter Master General’s
Department, 1883), pp. 205–6.
89 William Archer noted in the mid-1940s: ‘As I was drinking rice beer at the
house of the Nisonuma gaonbura I noticed that Duovizo Angami was wearing
a kilt with a fourth line of cowries. This is the coveted badge of a successful
headhunter; it appears that twenty years ago he accompanied J.P. Mills on a
transfrontier expedition as a baggage porter. During the operation a transfron-
tier Naga was shot by a Gurkha and Duovizo was the first to get in and cut off
his head. He was able to secrete it on his person and get it back to the village.
When he arrived the skull divided into four pieces. One was given to Khonoma,
one to Jotsoma, one to Kirfema and the rest was divided among Mezoma itself.
All the youngmen shared and as a result they became eligible for wearing war-
rior’s feathers. Duovizo however is the only Angami in the village who can wear
a fourth line of Cowries’. Untitled and undated note in the Private Papers of
William George Archer, Mss Eur F236/88 [IOPP]. It is important to remember
here that in the entire north-eastern frontier, serving as coolies in the British
army was very often linked to the complex question of martial self-images of
the ‘tribesmen’, and the politics of stereotyping involved more than a mere
one-sided perception. As an army officer from the 1894 expedition against the
Abors reported, ‘the Khasias made no objection to carrying the gun ammuni-
tion which was nearly 100 lbs, but objected strongly to kitbags often under 30
seers. The ammunition was their favorite load.’ W.R. Little, Report on the Abor
Expedition, 1894 (Simla, Government Central Printing Office, 1895), p. 18n.
90 Untitled and undated note in the Private Papers of William George Archer, Mss
Eur F236/88 [IOPP]. See also Letter of J.P. Mills to his wife, dated Dikhu River,
12 December 1936, in ‘Letters from a Deputy Commissioner on the North-
Eastern Frontier of India to His Wife and Edited by Her’, in Private Papers of
James Philip Mills [CSA].
91 Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987), pp. 441–2.
92 Hutton, Angami Nagas, p. 158.

Chapter 11.indd 366 11/11/2013 5:20:11 PM

 heads in the naga hills  367

  93 General Staff, India, Military Report on the Naga Hills (including Routes), 1913
(Simla: Government Monotype Press, 1914), pp. 53–4. For a useful glimpse
into the complex, opaque world of contraband traffic in firearms in the region,
see Dzuvichu, ‘Opening Up the Hills?’, chapter 2. See also C.R. Pawsey,
Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, to the Adviser to the Governor of Assam,
Shillong, dated Kohima, 12 June 1947, Memo No. 2887 G, in ‘Miscellaneous
Notes on Nagas, 1947’, Private Papers of William George Archer, Mss Eur
F236/88 [IOPP].
  94 Assam Government Letter No. Pol. 351/2495 AP, dated 21 March 1933, in
File XIII 5 (A) 1920–3, in Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills,
Memo No. 54/G, dated Kohima 25 April 1947 [ASA].
 95 The entry of 13 May 1934, in Tour Diary of J.H. Hutton, Deputy
Commissioner, Naga Hills for the month of May 1934, in Private Papers of
John Henry Hutton [PRMA].
 96 The Sub-Divisional Officer to the Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills,
No. 859G, dated 3 September 1928, in File XIII 5 (A) 1920–23, in Office of
the Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, Memo No. 54/G, dated Kohima 25
April 1947 [ASA].
  97 Deputy Commissioner’s Memo No. 3726 G, 10 December 1932, in File XIII
5 (A) 1920–3, in Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, Memo
No. 54/G, dated Kohima 25 April 1947 [ASA].
  98 Telegram No. 274 AP dated 6 January 1933, in Ibid.
  99 C.R. Pawsey, Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, dated Kohima, 11 November
1941, in Ibid. Pawsey contrasted the substantial reduction in number of taken
heads in the Sema-Sangtam control area with the trans-frontier Wakching
area.
100 Entry of 5 March 1935, in Tour Diary of J.H. Hutton, Deputy Commissioner,
Naga Hills, for the months of February and March 1935, Papers of John
Henry Hutton [PRMA].
101 Memo No. 3662-G, dated Mokokchung, 30 August 1947, Office of the Sub-
divisional Officer, Mokokchung, in the Private Papers of William George
Archer, Mss Eur F236/88 [IOPP]. (Emphasis added.)
102 Mills, Lhota Nagas, p. 106.
103 J.H. Hutton, ‘Diaries of Two Tours in the Unadministered Area East of the
Naga Hills’, Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1929), p. 12.
104 Mrs J.P. Mills, ‘Memoirs of a Memsahib in Assam, N.E. Frontier of India’,
undated typescript in Private Papers of James Philip Mills [CSA].
105 Unnumbered and undated [c. 1946] Memo, Office of the Sub-divisional
Officer, Mokokchung, in the Private Papers of William George Archer, Mss
Eur F236/88 [IOPP].
106 Memo No. 3662 by Additional Deputy Commissioner, Mokokchung, dated
30 March 1947, in Ibid.
107 Ibid. See also Memo No. 3662-G, dated Mokokchung, 30 August 1947,
Office of the Sub-divisional Officer, Mokokchung, in Ibid.

Chapter 11.indd 367 11/11/2013 5:20:11 PM

 368  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

108 Cf. Peter Metcalf, ‘Images of Headhunting’, in Janet Hoskins (ed.),

Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996), p. 255.
109 The envoys then left for home but in order to reach their village in time
they were forced to pass through the cultivated fields of the Shiong and the
Wakching communities. The millet was sprouting at the time and by taking a
piece of a human head through these villages they broke a well-known Konyak
genna [roughly, taboo]. This genna forbade the movement of a head through a
village ‘until plants have grown tall’. The breach of this genna could endanger
the whole harvest. At Wakching the party was intercepted for a while by the
angry villagers to whom Kongonias agreed to pay two hundred rupees towards
the loss of the necessary sacrifices. Elaborate arrangements for averting the ill
effect of the breach of genna had to be made in a number of villages.
110 Memo by Additional Deputy Commissioner, Mokokchung, dated Camp
Wakching, 15 June 1947, in the Private Papers of William George Archer,
Mss Eur F236/88 [IOPP].
111 Ursula Graham Bower, Drums Behind the Hills (New York: William Morrow
& Company, 1950); Vicky Thomas, The Naga Queen: Ursula Graham Bower
and Her Jungle Warriors, 1939–45 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History
Press, 2012); Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall
of British Asia, 1941–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2004), pp. 202–6; John
Thomas, ‘Missionaries, Church and the Formation of Naga Political Identity,
1918–1997’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Centre for Historical Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2010, chapter 4.
112 Copy of Memo No. 1446-G Dt. 26.11.43 from the SDO, Mokokchung, to
the Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills, Kohima, in Private Papers of William
George Archer, Mss Eur F236/88 [IOPP].
113 Cf. Simon Harrison, ‘Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects
of Remembrance’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, ns, vol. 12
(2006), pp. 817–36.
114 Untitled and undated note in the Private Papers of William George Archer,
Mss Eur F236/88 [IOPP].
115 Untitled notes by C.R. Pawsey, Deputy Commissioner, Naga Hills (c. June
1947) in the Private Papers of William George Archer, Mss Eur F236/88
[IOPP].
116 Memo No. 3662-G, dated Mokokchung, 30 August 1947, Office of the Sub-
divisional Officer, Mokokchung, in Ibid. (Emphasis added.)
117 Letter to the Editor, from J.H. Hutton, The Assam Tribune of 18 August
1966. See also Raymond Hutchinson to Charles Pawsey, dated London, 19
September 1968, in Private Papers of Charles Pawsey [CSA].
118 A.Z. Phizo, The Fate of the Naga People: An Appeal to the World (London:
Author, 1960), pp. 5–6.

Chapter 11.indd 368 11/11/2013 5:20:11 PM

 heads in the naga hills  369

119 Allan Stoekl, Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot,
Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985),
p. 43.
120 Cf. Gavin Young, The Nagas, An Unknown War: India’s Threat to Peace
(London: Naga National Council, 1962), p. 10. (Emphasis added.)
121 Cf. Dolly Kikon, ‘Cultural Construction of Nationalism: Myths, Legends
and Memories’, in Michael Oppitz, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen,
and Marion Wettstein (eds), Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the
Northeast of India (Gent: Snoeck, 2008), pp. 97–105.

Chapter 11.indd 369 11/11/2013 5:20:11 PM

Chapter 11.indd 370 11/11/2013 5:20:11 PM
 V
The Spatial

Chapter 12.indd 371 11/11/2013 5:20:35 PM

Chapter 12.indd 372 11/11/2013 5:20:35 PM
 12
‘Metro Pattern’
Art Deco Residences and Modern Visuality in Calcutta

Swati Chattopadhyay

In the 1930s, the architecture office of Ballardie Thomson, and Mathews of

Calcutta was busy churning out designs with flourishes of Art Deco and Western
Modernist aesthetics (Figure 12.1). Curved verandahs were emphasized with
horizontal bands, strip windows, ‘marquise roofs’, and set in contrast with the
verticality of stair towers, and stepped cornice lines. Residences, ­commercial
offices, banks, cinema, and recreational facilities designed after such a manner
were recognizable as ‘modern’ and came to ­constitute important landmarks
in the city. Aesthetically, they were distinct from the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century neo-classicism that was the sine qua non of respectable
establishments in cities such as Calcutta. I am using ‘Art Deco’ as a short hand
for these architectural characteristics that shared an aesthetic with their coun-
terparts in Europe and the United States. Yet, and perhaps not surprisingly,
the aesthetic took its own character when grafted onto local building practices.
The new aesthetic responded to an important set of social and cultural
practices among the city’s middle and upper classes. By the 1950s Art Deco
was the commonly accepted vocabulary of middle class residences, and as
a fashion, lasted well into the 1960s, long after Art Deco had exhausted its
aesthetic potential in Europe and the US. Bengali writer and humourist
Rajshekhar Basu invoked a popular parlance by referring to this building
fashion as the ‘Metro pattern’.1 The provenance of the term is uncertain.
While it is possible that the term was borrowed from one strand of Art
Nouveau known as Wellenstil, also called the ‘métro style’,2 there is little
evidence that the aesthetic aspirations evident in the Art Deco architecture

Chapter 12.indd 373 11/11/2013 5:20:35 PM

 374  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 12.1  Residence on 25 Camac Street,

by Ballardie Thomson, and Mathews. © Swati Chattopadhyay.

of Calcutta owed anything to the Wellenstil. For the city’s residents ‘Metro’
meant the Metro cinema in the city, itself designed in a manner that would
be recognizable as Art Deco.3 This essay takes its cue from this suggestive
cinematic reference to explore the desire for a modern aesthetic idiom among
the Indian, particularly Bengali, middle class, expressed in the formal and
cultural logic by which these residences were assembled.

Art Deco as Fashion

The term Art Deco, scholars seem to concur, refer to modern design (not
Modernist design) that came together in the early twentieth century between
the two World Wars.4 One could argue that what made Art Deco attractive
and popular are its thematic and formal contradictions. Much has been writ-
ten about the hedonistic characteristics of Art Deco, applied to objects and
spaces of conspicuous consumption, and unbridled pleasure and power. Art
Deco designers nonchalantly borrowed from a world repository of forms,
fastening upon the frivolous and the transitory. In contrast to Modernist
architects and designers, they rarely felt the need to rationalize their choices

Chapter 12.indd 374 11/11/2013 5:20:35 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  375

or theorize their design efforts, and were, in fact, often candid about the
purely capitalist drive that spurred the aesthetic choices.5
A global phenomenon, once Art Deco travelled from Europe to the
United States, we are told, it took up a different cultural role by opening
up artistic possibilities between decorative arts, industrial design, capitalist
profit and mass consumption. As the prevailing style of the inter-war years
in the United States, Art Deco is seen to have provided the American people
with the necessary fantasy for survival. ‘Part of the fascination of the style’,
Charlotte Benton and Tim Benton note, ‘lies precisely in its confrontation
of new values and old, and in the hint of fragility that often lurks behind its
­glitter—themes evocatively portrayed in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
(1925)’.6 But if we are to assume that the visual effects of Art Deco travelled
with tourists, popular magazines, cinema, product design, and the reach of
capital, surely the socio-economic conditions in which the artistic preoccupa-
tions took root were not all identical to Fitzgerald’s United States. Capital’s
reach was and remains notoriously uneven. For the same reason, it is only to
be expected that Art Deco in New York, Budapest, or Calcutta would yield
differences in excess of commonality. It is thus useful to ask: through what
process did the visual effects of Art Deco take root in a particular location?
In Calcutta, Art Deco was applied to commercial buildings, multistory
apartments, cinemas and places of entertainment, as well as single-family resi-
dences. The first projects with such design attributes demonstrate an attempt
to apply a set of external formal conventions to the program of the plan
already in place. The new façade aesthetics soon began to change the plan
configuration and the quality of interior spaces. More accurately, the changes
in plan that had already started taking place at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury were expedited by the new fashion. By the 1920s the strict rectangularity
of nineteenth-century colonial buildings, and their simple three-bay pattern
were obsolete.7 As if the symmetrical envelope of these earlier buildings was
being pushed from the inside to capture more of the ground, thus lending
these buildings a distinctively asymmetrical look.
By the 1950s, the image of public buildings had been absorbed, appro-
priated, and realigned with a new set of values to become part of a common
vocabulary of middle and upper class Indian residences. The recognizable
external components included rounded or curvilinear verandahs, horizon-
tal stucco bands along verandahs and cornices, a prominently located stair
hall, ribbon windows with horizontal projecting sunshades, and decorative
features including port-hole fenestration, and a tiered motif for anten-
nas and flagpoles (Figure 12.2). Entire neighbourhoods in the southern

Chapter 12.indd 375 11/11/2013 5:20:35 PM

 376  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 12.2  Residence in Lake Terrace. © Swati Chattopadhyay.

part of the city—in New Alipore, Ballygunge, and the Dhakuria Lakes
area—would develop a formal coherence that has only recently begun to
be undone. Importantly, as in many places across the globe, Art Deco and
Modernist design were not always differentiated in this milieu. Residential
architecture of the late 1950s seemed to blend the formal conventions of
Art Deco and Euro-American Modernism quite seamlessly. But much more
than looks were at stake. Art Deco as a form of modern visual pleasure
became engaged in the desire for a new space of domesticity. It is important
to note here that exactly during the period, 1940–60, when Art Deco was

Chapter 12.indd 376 11/11/2013 5:20:35 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  377

held in disdain in the United States,8 did it flourish as a residential vocabu-

lary in Calcutta.9
There are several interesting issues here. First, Art Deco in most parts of
the world was the preferred style for public buildings, commercial structures,
and multistory apartment blocks; for it to become the language of middle-
class residential architecture, a vast majority of which were one-or two-storied
single-family residences, suggests a very different interpretation and use of
the architectural convention. Second, if the longevity of the Metro pat-
tern in Calcutta may be attributed to its lasting importance to the Bengali
middle class, what indeed was the relation between the desire for a form
of domestic space and the availability of a new visual idiom? Does Bengali
cinematic visuality of that period help us understand Calcutta’s Art Deco?
Third, on the surface it may appear as if the Bengali nationalist patriarchy
was enthusiastically adopting a western vocabulary during the heyday of the
nationalist movement against British rule, and after it had gained independ-
ence. Suburban platting after independence from Britain (1947) presumed
and fostered a configuration of residential architecture such as this. What then
may we infer about the translation of vocabulary when architectural fashion
moves from one place to another, and in this case, across the colonial divide?
This essay is built on two assumptions. First, architectural drawings,
buildings, and cinematic space embody social relations. That is, analysis of
architectural and cinematic space may inform us about desirable social rela-
tions, and prohibit/delimit, even if parenthetically, undesirable ones. Art
Deco scholars have focused primarily on the decorative shell of buildings,
ignoring the organization of space evidenced from plans. It is an analysis of
plans and the social relations embodied in the spatial arrangement, I suggest,
that might enable us to understand the peculiarities of Art Deco in any one
location. Second, such focus on cultural specificity will help us understand
the significance of formal attributes to the patrons and inhabitants. While
the processes I discuss in this essay may hold for other metropolises in India
as well, my concern is with the specificity of spatial pattern, imagination,
nomenclature, and use of space.
The pattern of these residences and the organization of the residential
blocks, I argue, were constitutive of a structural transformation of the Bengali
middle class that took place in the first half of the twentieth century. By struc-
tural transformation I am referring to a large-scale fundamental realignment
of cultural values to address a new set of economic and social imperatives.
What we see in these houses and neighbourhoods is the gradual dismantling
of nineteenth-century Bengali society and notions of nineteenth-century
middle-class respectability. In studying the plans of these houses and their

Chapter 12.indd 377 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 378  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

aesthetic expression closely, I will be using the cinematic spatial conventions

of mid-century Bengali melodrama as a methodological template. Here I
will build upon some formal contradictions between the external volume of
these residences and the organization of their floor plans that seem to refer to
a different formal vocabulary. The awkwardness in the spatial arrangement
that ensued from these two not-quite reconciled vocabularies enables us to
unpack the peculiarity of Art Deco architecture in Calcutta.

Transformation of the Bengali Middle Class

In terms of residential architecture, nineteenth-century middle-class Bengali
culture gave rise to a new urban townhouse prototype: a courtyard house
that had two components—the inner spaces (andar) at the back meant for
private use of the extended family, and the public rooms (sadar) up front that
engaged and even encroached upon the public space of the street. The spa-
tial arrangement worked around a sequence of courtyard-ro’āk-dālān-room.
Much of the everyday work and leisure was accommodated in the open-air
courtyard and ro’āk and semi-open air spaces of the dālān.
The house itself was guided by a cherished but deeply troubled spatial and
gender logic. The very sign of middle-class respectability was house ownership
and extended family living. The inner spaces were meant as the domain of the
women of this extended family, housing the sleeping rooms, kitchen, store
and services, while the outer spaces anchored by the bait.hak-khānā (equiva-
lent, but not quite the same as a salon) and ro’āk were for the socialization of
the men of the family and their acquaintances. The porosity of the building
envelope and the desired proximity to the street became the cause of anxiety
among those who preferred a more pronounced separation between women’s
spaces and the city, and desired a clearer distinction between the lower and
middle classes.10 Much of this anxiety surfaced in relation to women’s access
to public education that necessitated their stepping out of the bounds of
seclusion. In the face of change, we find late nineteenth-century housekeep-
ing guides insisting on retaining the primary feature of these residences—a
clear difference between sadar and andar.
And yet, by the 1920s these terminologies and spatial distinctions were
becoming obsolete. The Swadeshi movement and the ongoing nationalist
agitation that it prompted would make it legitimate for women to participate
in the public sphere and public spaces of the city. Even as it created a new
topos of anxiety centred on the independent modern Bengali woman, the
phenomenon undid the spatial and gender logic of the nineteenth-century

Chapter 12.indd 378 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  379

middle-class dwelling. The nationalist project demanded a serious spatial

stake in the capital of British India. Reconfiguring one’s notion of dwell-
ing in modernity involved fashioning new models of conjugality, and new
conceptual and spatial boundaries between public and private, resulting in a
spatial crisis, a rift between the image and imagination of modernity, between
conceptual and physical structures.
By the 1930s, the shift from an old patriarchy to a new patriarchy was
beginning to take hold. The events of the 1940s and 1950s only hastened
the transformation and radically altered the city and its cultural milieu.
Apart from the nationalist movement and the spheres it opened up for both
men and women, we can discern at least four factors that contributed to the
transformation. It included the emergence of the nuclear family, changing
land relations in rural Bengal leading to the erosion of zamindari privileges
enjoyed by the Bengali Hindu elite in particular, migration across the Bengal
border immediately before and after in the partition of India in 1947, as well
as the economic conditions during World War II and after independence/
partition.
The loss of the extended family was a slow and painful process. This
was not simply a matter of the younger generation seeking a smaller, more
independent household; economic conditions necessitated it.11 In addition
the existing housing stock in the city was over-burdened, fragmented due
to inheritance, often mired in legal conflict, and could not accommodate
the needs of growing families. But the desire for smaller households cannot
be dismissed entirely. A significantly larger number of Bengalis admitted to
the colonial civil services in the first three decades of the twentieth century,
and a corresponding swelling in the professional ranks of doctors, engineers,
lawyers, and teachers, meant that Calcutta had a critical mass of upper middle
class residents familiar with western ideas, fashions and mores, and yet sensi-
tive to the nationalist cause. Used to setting up nuclear households in remote
locations in the provinces, these young men and their wives developed a taste
for independent living.12 In 1948, a Bengali-language women’s magazine,
Śrīmatī, published from Calcutta, could simply assume a family compris-
ing a couple and their two children as the norm in the context of furnishing
advice for house design.13 This assumption does not, however, imply that
the contours of conjugal space were already well established. As I show later,
Bengali melodrama and the Metro-pattern residences were set to the task of
defining the conjugal sphere.
The famine of 1943, followed by the forced migration across the Bengal
border deeply affected the sense of economic security that had been assumed

Chapter 12.indd 379 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 380  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

by the middle classes until then, and ensured a rethinking of housing norms
and a revaluation of middle class respectability. The catastrophe of the war
and partition made it necessary for women to join the salaried workforce;
their scope of salaried occupation expanded significantly.14
The move from the provinces to the city was vastly expedited in the 1940s.
The census data during the first five decades is telling: between 1931 and
1951 the population of the city itself more than doubled.15 In addition, a vast
number of people commuted to the city from the newly established suburbs.
The 1951 census reported: ‘[M]ore people than at any time before 1947
now come to Calcutta for a living from the suburbs which have overnight
as it were produced three new cities’. The majority of the new settlements
occurred in the Tollygunge and Garden Reach area to the south of Calcutta,
and Barrackpur and Dumdum to the north and east.16 The heavy demand
for decent housing created by the population surge was only exacerbated by
volatile economic conditions.
The speed with which houses in the southern suburbs were built between
1930 and 1960 partly testifies to the phenomenon of the Hindu middle
classes moving their landed assets to Calcutta. Though, a distinction needs
to be made here. Those who took the opportunity of deflated real estate
prices in the city or made good on war-profits were able to build some of
the most commodious residences in the southern part of the city by 1945.
The houses built after the war, were substantially different, and responded
to the social and economic turmoil of the post-independence decade. The
editor of Śrīmatī writing in 1948, for example, expected its readers to recog-
nize two issues that went hand-in-hand with the idea of the nuclear family:
the need for economy and the need to adjust to small spaces.17 The article’s
cautionary note was addressing the socio-economic crisis across the nation
and the housing crisis in the city.

Visions of Modernity
Literature, art, and film of that period registered and articulated these socio-
economic transformations. A new group of Bengali novelists and poets,
swept both by the fervour of radical nationalism and the communist move-
ment, announced their departure from the rearguard and the accepted norms
of Bengali literature set by the nineteenth-century stalwarts, Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore. They made Calcutta the explicit
site of literary exploration. Even the older generation of authors felt com-
pelled, from the mid 1920s onwards, to shift gears in order to accommodate

Chapter 12.indd 380 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  381

a growing modern sensibility that involved the new Bengali woman, endow-
ing their female characters a subjectivity and orientation towards public life
that was simply considered unnecessary even in the first decade of the twen-
tieth century.18 Writing in 1951 Rajshekhar Basu, noted this about Bengali
love stories:
Rabindranath’s and Bankimchandra’s heroines were children. In those middle ages
of Bengali literature, a serious love plot required the introduction of older sisters,
widows, and the like. The same went for the male characters…. Then gradually
the social conditions of Bengali society changed, and with it altered the plots of
novels. The bomb, swadeshi, and non-cooperation movement increased the sphere of
engagement for both men and women, the obstacles to free social intercourse were
removed. Then the communist struggle inaugurated a new field of work with peas-
ants and labourers, followed by the trauma of war and Partition … the great kaliyuga,
the loss of societal shame, unrestrained misdeeds.19

He added in a sarcastic note: ‘No matter how much human suffering

these changes have caused, they have surely made it easy for writers to hatch
plots’.20 The possibilities of both life opportunities and narratives seem to
have expanded quite suddenly. Now the hero doesn’t have to be a land-
lord dispensing homeopathic medicine among the poor, he noted with wry
humor. He may well be a poet, a shopkeeper, a soldier, a sailor, a pilot, a thief,
a robber, or a desh-sevak (social worker). The heroine may well be a typist,
a telephone clerk, a cinema star, a labour leader, an editor, a professor, or
whatever one may choose. ‘There is no shortage of spaces for tryst either’, he
remarked—‘restaurants, parks, the Lakes and the cinema. The golden age of
Bengali literature has arrived. Society and its environment have changed’.21
It is worth noting that Rajshekhar’s perceptive and sarcastic delineation of
societal and urban transformation during the first five decades is anchored
around the emergent notion of the modern woman. In the 1940s and 1950s
the theme of middle-class women having to seek a livelihood in a male-­
dominated public world became one of the most important in Bengali novels
and films.22 The figure of the modern Bengali woman signified the crisis of
Bengali modernity at mid-century. It was a recurrent theme in Rajshekhar’s
own short stories, for which he earned the credit of being the first truly
urbane Bengali author. But unlike the representations of the nineteenth-cen-
tury modern Bengali woman, the new woman was not primarily signifying a
loss. She represented the aspiration and conflict of youth, and was portrayed
as an agent of change. She was responsible for changes in conceptions of
­conjugality, residential space, and the public sphere. The one change in house
design that was commented on most frequently was the disappearance of the

Chapter 12.indd 381 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 382  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

male space of the bait.hak-khānā from the Bengali household. These changes
and an attendant ‘feminization’ of space were salient in Bengali films between
1950 and 1970. The melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s, in ­particular,
­provide the most poignant clues to the crisis in spatial imagination.
While post-independence films made the themes of national identity, forced
migration, and the conflict of tradition/development, village/city their foremost
preoccupation, a large number of Bengali melodramas revolved around the
idea of the modern Bengali woman, with a particular sensitivity towards spatial
delineation. The films did not just reflect contemporary practices; rather like
nineteenth-century Bengali literature, they gave expression to the idea of Bengali
modernity—made it imageable and imaginable.23 Bengali cinema had close ties
to contemporary Bengali literature, but cinematic visuality could make the image
of modernity more palpable than literature could. Arguably, the great majority
of the Bengali middle class derived their images of modern living from films—
both Indian and Hollywood, and the design of the theatres where they went to
watch these films. The plush lobby of the Metro cinema was often pointed out
as a site for the conspicuous consumption of modernity. Cinematic visuality that
provided the Bengali middle class with the image of modern habitation, and was
perhaps why Calcutta’s Art Deco architecture came to acquire the nickname,
Metro-pattern. It would be incorrect, however, to assume any simple causal rela-
tion between cinema and Art Deco residential design in Calcutta. Rather, the
nickname ‘Metro-pattern’ in Calcutta had much more to do with the idea the
Metro-pattern represented—new possibilities of imagining the self.
Between 1935 and 1965, Bengali cinema as well as the architecture of the
Bengali middle class displayed symptoms of a struggle to find the appropriate
spatial coordinates of this structural transformation. Until then the romantic
relationship between a heterosexual couple, a staple of such melodramas, was
‘in search’ of a modern spatial idiom that scarcely seemed available in the ‘real’
world. It is precisely this search for a visual idiom and the unique spirit of exper-
imentation with spatial conventions in Bengali cinema that help us understand
the formal logic of mid-century Art Deco residential architecture in Calcutta.

A New Figure of Space

One could argue that mid-century Bengali melodramas were in a direct or
indirect way about the loss and recovery of self. At the risk of reducing a
complex repertoire to its bare outlines, the ‘loss’ may be characterized as a
reaction to, or representation of, the shock of modernity in its alienating
form, and the ‘recovery’ as a tentative, and often, paradoxical ‘resolution’ of

Chapter 12.indd 382 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  383

the contradictions spawned and revealed by this alienation in the process of

negotiating new social and economic imperatives.
Discussing the recent resurgence of popular Bengali melodramas of the
1950s and 1960s, a large number of which featured the star-duo Uttam
Kumar and Suchitra Sen, film historian Moinak Biswas has reminded us
of some key functions of these melodramas.24 In common with melodra-
mas in the rest of the world, Bengali melodramas articulated larger societal/
political upheavals through the realm of the familial/conjugal, although the
familial did not necessarily find resolution in the conjugal in the tradition of
Hollywood melodrama. Film scholars have argued that Indian popular films
in general are marked by an absence of a ‘space for the couple’.25 Conjugal
space is otherwise implied, alluded to, but not represented. Biswas, however,
points out the manner in which Bengali melodramas of this period indeed
found a way of acknowledging the desire for a conjugal space and ‘articulat-
ing the absent space of the couple’.26
The crisis of individuation on which the Bengali melodramatic narrative
rests, has at its centre the woman. Her individuation and independence mark
her (yet-to-be-fulfilled) modernity. The articulate female presence in these
films, work both to provide the imagination of a ‘modern woman’ and to
reveal a crisis of masculinity often represented paradoxically as a crisis of
femininity. Biswas has perceptively noted that these films ‘produce a feminine
subjectivity independent of the female subject of the story’.27 And sometimes
the placement of the woman at the centre of the narrative opens up ‘a whole
field of experience and desire that cannot be entirely accommodated within
the patriarchal ideological framework of the film’.28 Such feminine figuration
of desire in the narrative irresolution of the conjugal in Bengali melodramas
therefore demanded formulation of novel spatial conventions. Biswas sug-
gests that the Bengali melodramatic mode both displaced realism, and at the
same time used elements of realist narration and realist spatial depictions to
allow for representational identification. Let me elaborate on this important
point.
Hollywood’s contribution to Art Deco has been understood to reside in its
emphasis on realism. In the words of Ghislain Wood: ‘The culture these films
explored and transmitted—upward mobility, sexual liberation and conspicu-
ous consumption—fuelled the desires of audiences and became intricately
linked with Art Deco’.29 However ‘the mise-en-scène for escape from a restrict-
ing morality to a fast, new, glamorous and sexually liberating modern age’
was not attempting to ‘create a real or viable vision of the style as it existed on
the street, but instead gave a sense of the heightened reality to the dream the

Chapter 12.indd 383 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 384  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

theme conveyed. As one contemporary historian observed, “Hollywood is in

the business of building illusion”’. Wood continues, ‘Enormous night-clubs
stretched away into the distance, vast metropolitan offices and apartments
sprawled across the screen, and stage sets expanded beyond the realms of
possibility’.30 In Bengali melodrama the relation between realist space and
theatrical (fantastic) space was quite different.
Bengali melodrama, in addition to using realist spaces such as street scenes,
used a form of artificial or imagined space that was sparse and ‘notational’.31
The latter drew its lineage from theater sets and popular visual arts, rather
than from an existing everyday architectural space. The density of realist
object-filled space is replaced in notational space by its figurative character-
istics, sustained by the weight of the signifying function of the few objects
present in the scene. Notational spaces are necessary for Bengali melodrama
because the narrative, with its thematic tension between the old patri-
archy and the new patriarchy/conjugality, is not spatially resolvable using
realism. Biswas cites some examples from Hārāno Sur (Lost Tune), a 1957
Uttam-Suchitra melodrama, to elucidate this point.
Hārāno Sur is a love story that revolves round Aloke’s (Uttam Kumar)
loss of memory and Roma (Suchitra Sen), a psychiatrist who finds Aloke
in a mental hospital and brings him home to help recover his memory.
The architectural references in the film are important in understanding
the narrative. Aloke’s house designed in the fashion of Calcutta Art Deco,
even though it has all the trappings of modernity, is aligned with the old
patriarchy. Roma’s house, a bungalow in the province, with its architec-
tonically unresolved setting represents the new patriarchy. The isolation of
the house enables it to be successfully wrenched free from existing social
constraints, allowing the emergence of an alternate space for the couple in
its proximity.
The film utilizes the male protagonist’s loss of memory (alienation) to
bring about creative departures in the narrative and spatial norms. Sparse,
artificial settings with recurring reference to objects such as a bunch of tuber-
oses gain extraordinary valence in the narrative context of memory loss and
recovery. A yard with a tree, located outside Roma’s house, that works as an
intermediate location between the mental hospital and home, and between
Aloke’s house (old patriarchy) and Roma’s house (new patriarchy), is the
most important meeting space for the couple in the film. Although an out-
door space, it gains conjugal ‘privacy’ by being isolated from the surrounding
patriarchal institutional spaces. Similarly the front yard of Roma’s house—
Biswas refers to it as a courtyard—is remarkably artificial and stage like, a

Chapter 12.indd 384 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  385

residue of studio conventions from an earlier era. Its artificiality renders it

apart in a film that is not short of realist exterior as well as interior settings.
This artificiality allows for the theatrical emotional excess of melodrama to
be elaborated, precisely because such scenes cannot be accommodated within
the imagination of everyday ordinary space or even within ordinary language.
Melodramatic mise-en-scène ‘translated character into action, and action into
spatial characteristics’ bypassing ordinary speech, and thus expressed ‘the
emotion that remains undischarged in the particular moral world of the
text’.32 This serves to explain the importance of the type of spatial improvi-
sation we find in mid-twentieth-century Bengali cinema. Here desire itself
exceeds narrative and spatial conventions and has to be launched upon a new
figure of space shaped around the woman ‘before the couple can claim their
chimerical space’ (emphasis added).33 Thus one could argue that Bengali mel-
odramas like Hārāno Sur were articulating the rationale for the ‘independent’
couple’s space that had come into existence but had yet to be accepted as a
norm. Aloke’s modernist/Art Deco residence is indeed shown as insufficient
in accommodating this spatial need.
Hārāno Sur ends in the front courtyard of Roma’s house. The artificiality of
the décor of the site is enhanced in this final scene. When Aloke ­remembers
Roma and their previous relationship he returns to Roma’s house. Aloke cries
out Roma’s name and a disembodied cry ‘Roma’ covers the distance between
their meeting site and Roma’s house before he arrives at its gate; she comes
out of her house and the film concludes with their embrace in the yard.
Biswas explains the significance of the artificiality of this scene:
Not only the décor but there are other positive factors then contributing to the unre-
ality of the location—it is a space arrived through the editing with the help of a
sound that tries to connect, without following the logic of spatial unfolding. One
cannot forget, moreover, the overlapping cuts on Roma when she comes out of the
house—she is made to cover the same area more than once in the process, prolonging
her journey and disturbing the rationality of the space.
… Space implodes in an embrace as the couple is finally formed in Harano Sur;
it collapses into a non-space between them and a nowhere for them. The courtyard
now ‘holds’ the absent term that is articulated amongst all the sites including itself,
namely, the space of the couple.34

There are three issues here that are of interest to the discussion of archi-
tecture. First, the two spaces that accommodate the desire for modern
conjugality are an open space marked by a tree and a front yard. It is inter-
esting that Biswas refers to the front yard as a courtyard, in line with older
Bengali nomenclature. The yard is depicted as a garden-like space with an

Chapter 12.indd 385 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 386  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

unpaved path connecting the gate to the front porch/dālān, and the very first
time we see this space with the duo’s arrival at the house, gardeners are seen
working in it. In older houses the open-to-sky space inside the house—the
enclosed courtyard or ut.hān—had two functions: that of gathering and work
space for the entire family, and second as a circulation/connective space. In
Hārāno Sur, the front yard really is an indecision between an older courtyard
and a modern bungalow-like front yard. Apart from serving as the meeting
space for the couple, it retains only the purpose of a transition space that
links/separates other spaces.
Second, the production of this front yard bears the mark of tentative-
ness, an artificiality that some might deem a ‘fault’ in its formal logic. It is,
however, this work of improvisation—the yard as an artificial, forced inter-
vention—that enables a rethinking of the content and organization of the
spaces that the courtyard connects/separates. This is to say that the artificial-
ity of the (court)yard space forces us to notice the changes in the existing
spatial relationships. In turn, it offers a template for envisioning the spaces
that are not yet possible within the extant social framework. The open yard
available to the spectator’s (social/familial) gaze emerges as a private conjugal
space, spilling over the function of the courtyard as conventionally under-
stood. By re-signifying the front (court)yard as the space for the couple, the
film invents a particular condition of privacy that is, theoretically speaking,
available to the gaze of an imagined spectator.
And finally, in the process of carving this new figure of space, in both
its physical and gendered dimensions, a new stylistic paradigm—figural,
spatial, and narrative—emerges, which sets the melodramatic conventions
of Hollywood to a different task. It is useful to mention here that Hārāno
Sur is based on a 1942 MGM melodrama, Random Harvest, starring Ronald
Colman and Greer Carson. The formal shift in Hārāno Sur signals a narrative
shift, or conversely the narrative shift in Hārāno Sur required a fundamental
recasting of the formal conventions of the Hollywood genre. Of special
significance here, in Hārāno Sur, is a reliance on a sparse notational space
to construct a stylistic repertoire, in contrast to the material abundance of
the Hollywood version. Material sparseness as a formal condition of the
modern becomes peculiarly amenable to the dense focused evocative poten-
tial of the few objects in the setting, all of which have extra-visual affect,
such as the perfume of the tuberoses, for their ability to express modern
alienation and intimacy. In addition it suggests a sense of moderation in
consumption. Material sparseness becomes both an effect and an ethic of
modernity.

Chapter 12.indd 386 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  387

An Ethic of Moderation
Typically one does not think of Art Deco design in any medium in terms of
austerity or even moderation; this is where, some might argue, lies Art Deco’s
genuine distinction from early twentieth-century Modernist architecture.
Much of Art Deco architecture in India, including Calcutta, between 1920
and 1950 was primarily concerned with flamboyance, and Aloke’s house in
Calcutta in Hārāno Sur is an example of that—the sweeping open staircase
inside the house stands as a visual trope of modern upper class sensibility.
However, an ethic of moderation growing out of economic necessities faced
by the middle classes in the post-independence period came together tenta-
tively with certain visual flourishes of Art Deco to render the middle-class
residential architecture in Calcutta its style.
In 1948–9 the woman’s magazine Śrīmatī published a series of brief articles
on house design. Addressed to its female middle-class reader, the magazine
promoted such an ethic of moderation. Frugality necessitated by the eco-
nomic devastation of the war and Partition was to be transformed into a
higher goal through aesthetics. The author of the articles, also the editor of
the magazine, Mira Chowdhury, came from the ranks of the nationalist elite.
She was an amateur photographer, an entrepreneur, a seasoned traveller, and
she designed her own house on Chowringhee Terrace in Calcutta. Her house-
hold prescriptions brim with enthusiasm for positive social transformation.
The ideal feminine figure projected in the magazine is that of a woman who
is knowledgeable about the outside world (or desires such knowledge), has
a keen interest in literature, music, film, and aesthetics (Figures 12.3, 12.4).
While these images and desires are intimately linked with certain kinds of
conspicuous consumption evident in the material artifacts presented in the
illustrations, Chowdhury’s articles insist on judicious consumption as a key
virtue.
Chowdhury prefaces the discussion on house design with a need for fru-
gality, and the absolute necessity of eliminating all extravagances in food
consumption, clothing, and the like. One must choose a few items judi-
ciously with an eye towards greatest benefit and comfort.35 Careful planning
would be necessary to minimize waste of both time and space. She makes a
clear distinction between the abundant space and time enjoyed by the earlier
generation and the tough choices to be made in the present:

Until recently, we (not talking about the wealthy, but those of us who are middle-
income) were used to the comfort of two bedrooms, a sitting room, a dining room,
a bathroom, and a kitchen, and perhaps a pantry and a servant’s room. In addition

Chapter 12.indd 387 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 388  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 12.3  Illustration from Śrīmatī, section on ‘Travel Letters:

Home and the World’. Courtesy of Keya Dasgupta.

we had a strip of verandah or a small terrace, for hanging out clothes to dry. But
now the problem of adequate finances has translated into the problem of adequate
space.
If middle-class Bengali’s have two rooms and a small bathroom and a small
kitchen it is considered quite a fortune. And yet we cannot rid ourselves of all happi-
ness and comfort. Never mind a separate servant’s room, most of the time we don’t
have a servant.
My hunch is that this state of affairs is not temporary, this will become the
norm.… So we have to think of how to turn our small accommodation into a space
of comfort.… These days anything is possible.36

Chapter 12.indd 388 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  389

Figure 12.4  Illustration from Śrīmatī, section on

‘Books, Film, Radio, Record: Criticism’. Courtesy of Keya Dasgupta.

A robust confidence in the possibility of working out a solution to small

spaces, and an idealization of the pleasant, well-orchestrated modest home
runs through the articles. The overall conception is resonant with the view
provided in the Journal of the Institute of Indian Architects in 1938: ‘Young
people fed on the international outlook day by day, by the newspaper, by the
cinemas and the radio … require a little home of their own and one that does
not require a great deal of time and an army of servants to keep tidy’.37
Chowdhury suggests her readers learn from Japanese house design rather
than western ones; however she notes, the smart thing to do is ‘not ­constrict
oneself to any one tradition; take that which you can make yours, to enjoy

Chapter 12.indd 389 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 390  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

its convenience’.38 She does not forget to mention that modern western
interiors have much spatial similarity with the valued austerity of Japanese
house design. Certain basic design themes recur in Chowdhury’s discussions:
multiple uses of space (for example, dining space turned into reading/work
space), use of few low-height locally made furniture, shelves, and tables fitted
into walls keeping as much floor space open as possible, preference for solid
colors, handcrafted indigenous, inexpensive fabrics such as khadi, and last
but not least, a sense of innovation—finding new uses for inexpensive local
artifacts to turn them into attractive furnishing.39 The visual emphasis is on
clean lines and surfaces, both for aesthetic reasons and for the ease of dusting
and polishing.40
The articles include examples of a small two-room house, a two-bedroom
house with separate dining and living rooms, and a larger house. The two-
room accommodation she assumes is an apartment, and therefore one must
work within the limitation of standard dimensions and construction prac-
tices.41 The two-bedroom house is intended to be custom made.42 While no
images are given for the two-room accommodation, Chowdhury provides
several sketches to explain the idea of the two-bedroom house. The plan of
the house demonstrates an attempt to link three groups of spaces—dining/
kitchen, living, and bedrooms—around a corridor that leads off from the
stairs, in a pinwheel formation. All rooms have provision for built-in shelves,
and the wall between the dining and kitchen is used as a service window. A
formal dining table with chairs is eschewed in favour of a space-saving solu-
tion. The curved perimeter of the dining room is used to set up a seating
arrangement for six with six small individual tables in front of the seat. Low
stools are stowed underneath the tables, so if need be, the dining arrangement
could accommodate twelve people (Figure 12.5).43
If we look closely at the plan we will notice the three-bay plan of a colonial
house has been has been stretched to incorporate a vision of an exterior with
curved verandahs. These verandahs, meant to be read as extensions of the
interior living space give the plan a sense of spaciousness when the rooms
are indeed fairly small. Chowdhury notes that the verandah between the
bedrooms may easily be converted into a work space.44 The corridor in the
centre lends equivalence to all rooms around it in terms of privacy/public-
ness as well as importance. This feature is similar to both nineteenth-century
colonial houses and urban courtyard houses. The corridor, rather than a
means of separation (note access between bedrooms), acts as a vestigial form
of a courtyard. In other words, the plan relies on the conceptual model of
the nineteenth-century house to articulate a new vision of space and social

Chapter 12.indd 390 11/11/2013 5:20:36 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  391

Figure 12.5  Detail plan of kitchen/dining room, Śrīmatī. Courtesy of

Keya Dasgupta.

r­ elations. A striking change in comparison to the nineteenth-century house is

that the sitting room (which always used to be on the ‘outside’) is incorporated
within the interior domain. The first sketch Chowdhury used to illustrate her
ideas contains an independent entry from the stair hall to the sitting room
(Figure 12.6).45 In the properly dimensioned plan published in the later issue
this entry is eliminated, thus integrating the sitting room more fully with the
interior spaces on the right (Figure 12.7).46 The homologous spatial relation
between interior/exterior, private/public has been transformed. It is no longer
a front-back issue. Household privacy is no longer to be understood as the
seclusion of women but as allowable physical access for both men and women.
By the time these articles were published the very standard dimen-
sional module of residences in the city (as well as in other metropolises in
India) had changed. In contrast to the spaciousness of colonial-era houses,
post-independence planning assumed a ten- or twelve-foot module as the
standard. Chowdhury was trying to demonstrate a small house on a 1.5 katha

Chapter 12.indd 391 11/11/2013 5:20:37 PM

 392  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 12.6  Sketch of two-bedroom house, Śrīmatī. Courtesy of

Keya Dasgupta.

(120 sq. yards) lot. If one has a larger lot, it still is unnecessary to build a
larger house, she argues: ‘I would use the remaining space for a garden’.47
Chowdhury’s plan contains some curious features. Entrance to the kitchen
from the house must be through the stair hall. In the event the house is two
storied (the alternative possibility is to interpret the plan as that of a single story
house with the staircase leading to the terrace) with the objective of renting out
one of the floors, it would mean stepping out on a common corridor to enter
the kitchen/dining, a highly unlikely proposition. The desire to retain a wall in
the sitting room without fenestration (between the dining and sitting rooms)
leads to this awkward compromise. In other words, the stair/corridor combi-
nation works somewhat forcedly as an armature around the living spaces.
In terms of site emplacement, the plan assumes the shorter dimension
along north-south, with all rooms in the house able to take advantage of the
southern summer breeze. Despite its ideal solution, this orientation was also

Chapter 12.indd 392 11/11/2013 5:20:37 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  393

Figure 12.7  Plan of two-bedroom house, Śrīmatī. Courtesy of Keya Dasgupta.

highly unlikely to be followed in the new suburbs where these kinds of houses
were being built, because the lot dimensions in these neighbourhoods would
rarely permit such east-west elaboration. Despite the intention of catering to
a small city lot, the plan has a whiff of a bungalow—modest house located
on a spacious premise surrounded by gardens. But that is only to be expected
once we recognize the pattern of plan development in Art Deco residences in
the city, discussed in the next section.
Finally, Chowdhury’s concern is clearly with the interior plan and décor.
While she specifies the color scheme of the interiors, there is no comment
on the exterior finish or form. External form is assumed to grow out of the
interior organization; the plan becomes a tool for ‘solving’ certain spatial
dilemmas. This aspect of Chowdhury’s design and the awkwardness of the
plan’s armature are also those that we find in several contemporary houses.

Chapter 12.indd 393 11/11/2013 5:20:37 PM

 394  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

The Metro Pattern

The overwhelming majority of the so-called Metro-pattern residences were
located in the southern part of the city. A rapid expansion of the south-
ern fringes of the city had begun in the early 1900s, when large chunks of
the southern suburbs, particularly land adjacent to the Ballygunge Circular
Road, Tollygunge Circular Road, and Alipore were platted by private devel-
opers for wealthy residents.48
From the 1930s onwards the platting done under the jurisdiction of the
Calcutta Improvement Trust, apportioned modest sized lots with the view
of catering to the middle class. The lot sizes were in the range of 110 feet
x 60 feet; the width could be somewhat more generous in some cases. In
such a lot size, the building by-laws presumed a driveway on one side, and a
minimum open space of 4 feet on the other. One had to leave an open space
in front, invariably presented in municipal drawings as the front lawn, and
a minimum space at the rear that could be used as an extension of service
spaces located in the back of the house. This increase in the availability of
platted land, together with the fall in real estate prices in the city during the
war enabled a section of the middle class to buy property in the localities of
Ballygunge, the Lake Area along Southern Avenue, Lake Terrace, and Lake
View Road, and in New Alipore (which was even during the 1951 census
outside the Calcutta ward area). During the 1940s and 1950s the Calcutta
Improvement Trust devoted considerable attention to making these southern
localities desirable residential neighbourhoods. One such effort led to the
design of the Dhakuria Lakes to make it a much-valued park and recreational
area. The rapid growth of the southern localities and suburbs in both planned
and unplanned ways between 1940 and 1960 is indeed remarkable.
Those who built a Metro pattern house in the 1930s and early 1940s were
wealthy professionals. These houses, such as the one on 25 Camac Street, are
distinguished by their large lots, generously dimensioned spaces, and curvi-
linear perimeter (Figures 12.1, 12.8).49 One can see in the design an extension
of the plan organization of bungalows designed in the city in the 1910s, as
for example in the plan of the house in 6 Alipore Park (Figure 12.9).50 The
entry portico in 25 Camac Street still has a central location, but is augmented
by a marquise roof. The relationship between the hall, staircase, and draw-
ing room, and between the dining room and pantry (no longer called the
bottlekhana), in terms of connectivity, remains the same, except that the con-
tours of the spaces have changed. As in colonial houses of the earlier century,
the kitchen is outside the main house among the service buildings. All the
bedrooms in 25 Camac Street are located on the upper floor, which was not

Chapter 12.indd 394 11/11/2013 5:20:37 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  395

Figure 12.8  Plan of house on 25 Camac Street.

Ballardie Thomson and Mathews. © Swati Chattopadhyay.

an unusual practice in the houses designed in the 1910s. The change in the
shape of the verandah, and the practice of having multiple verandahs and
terraces on the same floor, meant to induce a cascading effect, however, was a
new practice, and one that was not necessarily borrowed from contemporary
western models. Beginning in 1919 a number of buildings in Santiniketan,
built under the auspices of Rabindranath Tagore, were designed with multiple
verandahs, and overlapping, cascading volumes, inspired by formal elements
of ancient Indian architecture and Japanese residence and garden design.51
The preferred architectural language of the great majority of the nationalist
patriarchy between the 1910s and 1930s was a revamped nineteenth-century
townhouse. They are clearly recognizable by their symmetrical front facades,
car ports or a wide front entrance leading directly from the side walk, and
generous verandahs overlooking the street (Figure 12.10). Many still retained
a courtyard within the house, even when the use and meaning assigned to the
courtyard and inner spaces had changed. From the 1940s onwards the design
shift was noticeable, if only because they were being turned out in large num-
bers—both the elite and the middle classes adopting the Metro pattern for
their houses. The houses were either of brick-masonry construction or built
using a reinforced-concrete frame with brick in-fill, plastered over to generate

Chapter 12.indd 395 11/11/2013 5:20:38 PM

 396  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 12.9  Plan of house on 6 Alipore Park. Mackintosh Burn Pvt. Ltd.
© Swati Chattopadhyay.

smooth volumes. In some cases poured-concrete was used to fashion curvilin-

ear balconies and marquis roofs. The house designs and the skill with which
they were executed varied. But looking at the plans of some of the houses that
were not designed by well-known architects, and the great majority as may be
expected were designed and built by contractors and civil engineers, reveals
an interesting mode of assembling the plan and elevation. Let us consider
three such examples built during the 1950s in New Alipore, a new southern
suburb at that time, where large numbers of Bengali professionals settled.52
They are all from the same neighbourhood—Block G of New Alipore,
and suggest three slightly different ways of assembling a plan within the nor-
mative lot conditions. It is fair to say that the form of these houses takes its
first cue from the external constraints of the lot (Figures 12.11–12.16). In a
matter of two decades the Metro pattern had been moved squarely from its
suburban residential beginnings to be utilized for generating a more intimate

Chapter 12.indd 396 11/11/2013 5:20:39 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  397

Figure 12.10  House on Basanta Roy Road, c. 1920s.

© Swati Chattopadhyay.

engagement with the city. Unlike 25 Camac Street, the kitchen and service
spaces form an integral part of the house. All three have the expected side
driveway (although the location of the garage varies), and generous southern
verandahs connected to bed rooms. The public rooms are no longer up front.
The side entry splits the house in two parts: the coveted southern aspect given
to the bedrooms in front, and the back for services, connected by the dining
and drawing rooms. These drawing/dining spaces appear as replacement of
the courtyard of the old townhouse in its capacity as a social and circulation
space. In #372 the central space is labeled ‘lounge’, and the path of access

Chapter 12.indd 397 11/11/2013 5:20:39 PM

 398  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 12.11  Site Plan of 156/2 and 157 Block G, New Alipore; based on
drawing in the archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation.
© Swati Chattopadhyay.

ensures that the entire house obtains almost the same degree of privacy as
when organized around a courtyard (Figure 12.16). It was a common practice
to label the hall space next to the staircase ‘lounge’.
The plan of the house on 156/2 is somewhat different, and contains an
interesting suggestion that helps us understand the process of adapting to a
new form (Figures 12.11, 12.12). The central hallway of the house is labelled
‘dālān’. In the nineteenth-century house type the dālān is the ‘verandah’ space
that mediates between the enclosure of the rooms and the openness of the
courtyard. In terms of use, the dālān in this house could not possibly work
like the ones in the old type, but its vestigial presence reminds us that for the
designers and owners, the new template of the plan was not yet conceptually
adequate. They were attempting to sort out their everyday life practice within

Chapter 12.indd 398 11/11/2013 5:20:40 PM

 Figure 12.12  Plan of 156/2 Block G, New Alipore; based on drawing
in the archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. © Swati Chattopadhyay.

Chapter 12.indd 399 11/11/2013 5:20:41 PM

 400  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 12.13  View of 156/2 Block G, New Alipore.

156/2 is to the left of the image. © Swati Chattopadhyay.

the new house contour. We find here a dissonance between the conceptual
spatial model—the urban courtyard house with its formal ability to lend all
the rooms around the courtyard an equivalence in terms of importance and
privacy/publicness, and the necessity of fitting within normative lot condi-
tions as well as the desired contour of the modern house that demands a new
understanding of privacy. From that point of view the dālān came to occupy
the function of the courtyard, even if its role had been reduced to one of
circulation. The drawing room is absent here. Both bathrooms are accessed
through the dālān. This form of access and the labelling of all the front rooms
as ‘bedrooms’ also suggest the possibility that the property might have been
thought of as rental/boarding house, while retaining the opportunity to use
the ‘dining hall’ as a drawing/dining space in future. This formal capacity to
accommodate multiple uses would disappear from later plans.
The house on No.157 (demolished in 2004) represents the most typical
configuration (Figure 12.14). In comparison, No. 372, although contain-
ing generous verandahs and rooms, eschews curved contours and marquis
roofs. However, the plans reveal certain commonality. The location of the
bedrooms in No. 157 with large attached verandahs made these rooms
noticeably ‘public’, in the sense of their openness to the outsider’s view. As in
Chowdhury’s plan privacy is no longer understood as a front-back issue (that
is, one moves from the front public rooms to the back private rooms); it is

Chapter 12.indd 400 11/11/2013 5:20:41 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  401

Figure 12.14  Plan of 157 Block G, New Alipore; based on drawing

in the archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. © Swati Chattopadhyay.

being understood as a matter of allowable physical access. The ‘public’ draw-

ing room is located squarely in the middle of the house, its formality easily
overcome by its proximity to the dining room. Rajshekhar was quite correct,
in fact. The new house form had summarily done away with ‘men’s space’,
privileging a sense of female interiority oriented towards the public.
The drawing room in mid-century Bengali houses had emerged as a new
figure of space with the woman at its centre. While it might have appeared to
male writers that the male space of the bait.hak-khānā had been replaced by the

Chapter 12.indd 401 11/11/2013 5:20:43 PM

 402  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 12.15  Site Plan of 372, Block G, New Alipore; based on drawing in the
archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. © Swati Chattopadhyay.

drawing room, the formal conditions of the new drawing room suggest some-
thing different. The bait.hak-khānā has been eliminated no doubt, but the
drawing room really re-presents or re-places the erstwhile notion of the court-
yard of the nineteenth-century townhouse. The confusion in nomenclature,
the ‘fault’ in the formal logic of the public spaces within the house, convey the
morphing of the old courtyard-dālān into the drawing/dining room.
The model of cinematic space offered by Bengali melodrama is useful here
for understanding the significance of this spatial morphing and the residual
presence of an obsolete nineteenth-century domestic space: the desire for
modern conjugality and the nuclear family quite literally exceeds the estab-
lished spatial conception available to the owners and builders. What appears
as a fault in the formal logic suggests an attempt to accommodate emerg-
ing domestic ideals and visual sensibilities, often unevenly, generating a new
stylistic repertoire that found resonance with the Bengali middle class. The

Chapter 12.indd 402 11/11/2013 5:20:43 PM

 Figure 12.16  Plan of 372 Block G, New Alipore; based on drawing in the
archive of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. © Swati Chattopadhyay.

Chapter 12.indd 403 11/11/2013 5:20:44 PM

 404  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

specificity of the stylistic content of Metro pattern is lodged in these domestic

ideals, and generates its difference from Art Deco in other parts of the world.
This is analogous to the formal and narrative differences between Hārāno Sur
and Random Harvest that I discussed earlier.
The desire to accommodate conjugal privacy in the spatial arrangement of
the house would be signaled by a careful feminization of domestic space. As
a general rule, these houses were cordoned off from the street by a three-to
four-foot high wall that contributed to the privacy of the houses as an inde-
pendent unit. Within that gesture of control, one could accept opening up
inner rooms to the view of outsiders. The generous verandahs, located close
to the street, because of lot conditions, retained the desired connectivity to
the street as in older townhouse models. The houses were modest in size, and
notwithstanding individual differences in plan and façade, produced a strik-
ing formal homogeneity and tightly-knit sense of neighbourhood. This sense
of neighbourhood in turn gave rise to a number of modest but highly effec-
tive community facilities such as neighbourhood libraries and clubs.

***

The Metro-pattern houses attempted to articulate a new figure of space in an

effort to accommodate the modern nuclear family. Connections were impro-
vised, adjacency of rooms reconsidered, and the drawing room in the heart
of the house became a venue for enacting new gender relations. To say that
the architecture discussed above is ‘Art Deco’ is to recognize certain elements
of style it shared with Art Deco buildings in the west. But the overall stylis-
tic similarity only makes sense when we understand the peculiar conditions
of mid-century Bengali modernity, and the building mode—the selective
appropriation of Art Deco formal elements and the spatial logic by which
these elements were assembled. If the plan or the external envelope of the
building was an experiment with ideas, not always seamless in its coherence,
it suited the middle-class quite nicely; and it certainly expressed its conflicted
acceptance of societal changes in view of the ‘new’ woman. The nickname
Metro-pattern with its allusion to cinematic visuality, self-construction, and
image of modernity thus fits the bill.
The mid-century residential model that the Bengali middle class had
crafted with great deliberation remained viable, until recently. While the
current real-estate boom is rapidly doing away with this mid-century urban
fabric, the extent to which this transfiguration is related to the changing
matrix of the Bengali household remains to be explored. The earlier ­structural
transformation will have rich lessons to provide in such exploration.

Chapter 12.indd 404 11/11/2013 5:20:44 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  405

Notes
  1 In Rajshekhar Basu’s short story ‘Dhusturī māyā’, originally published in 1949, an
elderly gentleman makes a sarcastic remark about the young generation wanting
to build new houses in the ‘Metro pattern’. Dhusturī māyā (dui bud.or rūpkathā)’,
in Paraśurām granthābalī, vol. 1 (Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar & Sons, 1988), p. 131.
  2 Bevis Hillier, Art Deco of the 20s and 30s (London: Studio Vista, 1968), p. 10.
  3 This might have been a common reference point in the Indian metropolises:
Bombay, for example, had its own Metro cinema designed in the Art Deco style.
  4 It was the 1925 Exposition Internationale des arts decoritifs et industriels mod-
ernes in Paris where the visual effects became recognized as ‘a new spirit in
design’. See Charlotte Benton and Tim Benton, ‘The Style and the Age’, in
Charlotte Benton, Tim Benton, and Ghislaine Wood (eds), Art Deco 1910–
1939, (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 2003), p. 16. Bevis
Hillier, who used the term in his 1968 book, noted that the term Art Déco has
been used in the mid-1960s in both France and England, and he chose the term
because it was commonly understood.
  5 Martin Grief and Rosemarie Haag Bletter have commented on the plurality of
Art Deco. See Grief, ‘Defining Art Deco’, Art Deco Society of New York News,
vol. 2, no. 1 (January–February 1982), p. 2, cited in Benton and Benton, ‘The
Style and the Age’, p. 16. Bletter, ‘Introduction’, in Carla Breeze, New York Deco
(New York: Rizzoli, 1993).
  6 Benton and Benton, ‘The Style and the Age’, p. 13.
  7 The three-bay pattern of Calcutta’s nineteenth-century colonial houses is dis-
cussed in Swati Chattopadhyay, ‘Blurring Boundaries: the Limits of White
Town in Colonial Calcutta’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol.
59, no. 2 (June 2000), pp. 154–79.
  8 David Gebhard, Tulsa Art Deco: An Architectural Era 1925–1942 (Tulsa: Junior
League of Tulsa, 1980), p. 17.
  9 This holds for other metropolises in India as well, and perhaps in other loca-
tions beyond Euro-America, for example, Cairo, Istanbul, and Singapore.
10 See chapters 4 and 5 in Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity,
Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2005).
11 For a discussion of the ‘joint-family’ in the post-independence decade, see
T.N.  Madan, ‘Social Organization’, in V.B. Singh (ed.), Economic History of
India: 1857–1856 (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1965).
12 As early as the mid-nineteenth century, in her autobiography, Kailashbasini
Debi, who was married to Kishorichand Mitter, a member of the subordinate
civil service of the East India Company, wrote of the pleasure of having the
undivided attention of her husband and the freedom from social restrictions she
enjoyed in their remote residence in the provinces (Janaika gr.habadhūr d. āyeri,
Calcutta 1871). At the same time her autobiography notes the affection and
security offered by her husband’s extended family in Calcutta. Almost a century
later, in the reminiscences of Mira Chowdhury we get a narrative of her experi-
ence of being the first Indian couple to move into a railway colony of European

Chapter 12.indd 405 11/11/2013 5:20:44 PM

 406  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

officers, and of having to learn how to keep house according to European

notions of propriety. Mira Chowdhury, ‘Smr.tir chabi’, Aitihāsik, vol. 6 (1996, 2
Caitra 1403 BS), pp. 205–65.
13 The slogan used by the post-independence Indian Government’s campaign for
population control, ‘Hum do hamare do’ (We two, ours two) similarly promoted
the notion of the nuclear family of a couple and two children.
14 The Census of 1951 commented on the significance of the mere 3 per cent
self-supporting females (76,001): ‘employment for women except in teaching,
midwifery, nursing, and domestic services was thrown open in other directions
only after WWII’ (p. ix).
15 Census data for Calcutta during the first six decades of the twentieth century
reveals the following changes:

1901 933,754
1911 1,016,445
1921 1,053,334
1931 1,221,210
1941 2,167,485 (inflated figure)
1951 2,698,485
1961 2,927,289
(Census of Calcutta, 1981)

16 The Census of 1951, p. xi.

17 Śrīmatī, vol. 2 (1949, Paus. 1356 BS), 203–4. I thank Keya Dasgupta for lend-
ing me the cited volumes of Srimati, and for giving permission to reproduce the
images.
18 The frequently cited example of this is Rabindranath Tagore’s heroines in his
novels and short stories of the 1920s and 1930s as in Śes.er kabitā (Farewell Song,
1929), and Cār adhyāy (Four Episodes, 1934).
19 Rajshekhar Basu, ‘Rāmdhaner bairāgya’, in Paraśurām granthābalī, vol. 1, p. 140.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid. He notes sarcastically that Bengali writers have been lagging far behind
English and French novelists. They are stuck with nineteenth-century model of
the chaste Bengali woman—Rabindranath and Saratchandra have not been able
to think of the Bengali woman as anything but one who ultimately returns to the
moral fold of society. That Rajshekhar found himself dealing with the ‘modern’
Bengali woman in many of his short stories, often as extreme caricatures, sug-
gests the depth of the changes that middle-class Bengalis felt confronted with.
22 For an example, see Bimal Kar, Dewāl (1951; Calcutta: Ananda Publishers,
1993).
23 For the role played by Bengali literature in the nineteenth century, see Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Chapter 12.indd 406 11/11/2013 5:20:45 PM

 ‘metro pattern’  407

Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Partha Chatterjee,

The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta; and Sudipta Kaviraj, Unhappy
Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Indian
Nationalist Discourse (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
24 Moinak Biswas, ‘The Couple and Their Spaces: Hārāno Sur as Melodrama
Now’, in Ravi Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 123–44. I am grateful to Bhaskar Sarkar for
alerting me to this article.
25 M. Madhava Prasad, ‘Cinema and the Desire for Modernity’, Journal of Arts and
Ideas, nos 25–6 (1993), pp. 71–86.
26 Biswas, ‘The Couple and Their Spaces’, p. 133.
27 Ibid., p. 131.
28 Ibid.
29 Ghislaine Wood, ‘Art Deco and Hollywood Film’, in Benton et al. (eds), Art
Deco 1910–1939, p. 327.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., pp. 127–8.
32 Ibid., p. 128.
33 Ibid., p. 134.
34 Ibid., p. 141.
35 Śrīmatī, vol. 2 (1949, Kārtik 1356 BS), pp. 1–2.
36 Śrīmatī, vol. 2 (1949, Paus. 1356 BS), p. 203.
37 Journal of the Indian Institute of Architects, vol. 4, no. 3 (1938), cited in Amin
Jaffer, ‘Indo-Deco’, in Benton, Benton, and Wood (eds), Art Deco 1910–1939.
38 Śrīmatī, vol. 3 (1950, Baiśākh 1357 BS), p. 417.
39 Ibid., pp. 417–18; Śrīmatī, vol. 2 (1949, Jyais.t.ha 1356 BS), pp. 507–8; Śrīmatī,
vol. 2 (1949, Ās.ād.h-Śrāvan. 1356 BS), pp. 575–7; Śrīmatī, vol. 2 (1949, Āśvin
1356 BS), pp. 740–2.
40 It is well to remember here that Chowdhury’s recommendations are in accor-
dance with the interior designs of the practitioners of the Santiniketan school
of art: Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, Rathindranath Tagor, Purnima
Tagore, et al. Chowdhury was very familiar with this practice, being a frequent
visitor to Santiniketan during the heyday of the Santiniketan school between
1920 and 1950.
41 Śrīmatī, vol. 2 (1949, Paus. 1356 BS), pp. 203–4.
42 Śrīmatī, vol. 3 (1950, Baiśākh 1357 BS), pp. 417–18; Śrīmatī, vol. 3 (1950,
Jyais.t.ha 1356 BS), pp. 507–8; Śrīmatī, vol. 3 (1950, Ās.ād.h-Śrāvan. 1356 BS),
pp. 575–7.
43 Śrīmatī, vol. 3 (1950, Jyais.t.ha 1357 BS), pp. 507–8.
44 Ibid., p. 577.
45 Śrīmatī, vol. 3 (1950, Baiśākh 1357 BS), p. 420.
46 Śrīmatī, vol. 3 (1950, Ās.ād.h-Śrāvan. 1357 BS), p. 576.
47 Ibid., p. 575.

Chapter 12.indd 407 11/11/2013 5:20:45 PM

 408  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

48 Most of the owners of these developments were Bengalis. The lots were large:
220’ x 120’ or 220’ x 300’, and were meant to house bungalows in the middle
of the lot, with the usual service buildings located along the boundary walls, in
a continuation of the nineteenth-century norm.
49 Drawing of Ballardie, Thomson, and Mathews, architects and planners; author’s
collection.
50 Drawing from the archive of Mackintosh Burn Pvt. Ltd.
51 For images and plans of Udayan, see Swati Chattopadhyay, Santanu Roy, and
Arup Raha, ‘Udayan’, Inside-Outside (October–November, 1986), pp. 72–80.
52 Drawings of all three buildings are from the archives of the Kolkata Municipal
Corporation.

Chapter 12.indd 408 11/11/2013 5:20:45 PM

 13
Urban Spaces, Post-nationalism and the
­Making of the Consumer-Citizen in India

Sanjay Srivastava

Recent writings on new urban developments in the National Capital Region

that includes Delhi have pointed to the rise of new spatial imaginaries and their
associated cultures of sociality and aspirations.1 Building upon these studies,
this paper investigates the connections between urban spaces, the state, new
cultures of consumption, and the making of middle-class identities in India.
The discussion will proceed through an investigation of three contexts.
Firstly, it will explore the mise en scène of private real estate activities in Delhi
during the period immediately preceding independence in 1947 and that
which immediately followed it.2 Secondly, it will outline the context of pri-
vatization of urban spaces through focusing upon mechanisms of localized
capitalism and narratives of ‘gating’. And, finally, gathering various strands of
the discussion, it will track the case of a ‘protest’ movement spearheaded by
Residents Welfare Associations (RWAs) of Delhi that represent a variety of
middle-class localities.
The term ‘middle-class’ has a complex history in India, being part, as it is,
of prolix linguistic, regional, rural-urban, caste, occupational, and religious
histories.3 In this article, I am not concerned with trying to define what a
‘middle-class’ is. Rather, I suggest that it is more analytically productive to
explore what it means to claim such status. Hence, while the localities Delhi
RWAs represent vary widely—the super-expensive South Delhi suburbs do
not have much in common with the more modest locales in the East of the
city—what their residents share is the claim to middle-classness.4
RWAs seek to locate their actions in the realm of ‘civil society’, self-consciously
speaking for ‘middle-class’ interests in urban affairs. In addition, they also

Chapter 13.indd 409 11/11/2013 5:21:05 PM

 410  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

c­ ollaborate with newly established non-government o­ rganizations—NGOs—

(such as People’s Action) that also self-identify as the voice of ‘middle-India’. The
decline of the—‘socialist’—Nehruvian state and the rise of the neo-liberal one
is a significant context for negotiations of middle-class identities. However, as I
explain below, discourses of middle-class activism in an era of post-colonial and
transnational cultural-economic transactions articulate their politics through the
vocabulary of the anti-colonial movement. Circulation of terms such as ‘revolu-
tion’, ‘change’, and ‘freedom’ in the absence of the backdrop of anti-colonial
nationalism tells us something about the ways in which contemporary projects
of the self are sought to be linked to the ‘morality’ of an earlier era.
In particular, the paper will outline the processes and politics of imagin-
ing a ‘civil society’ where ideas of a ‘people’ and the ‘state’ traverse through
the registers of consumer culture, new urban spaces of leisure and residence,
the logic of economic privatization, a de-emphasis on production processes,
and, the making of the ‘global city’. These are also contexts of the imagined
transformations in the relationship between ‘civil society’ and the state at a
time—as I explain below—of post-nationalism.
I suggest that the privatized production of spaces of residence, leisure,
and shopping is a significant context of the making of middle-class activism,
and that it also gives rise to a broader set of ideas about bounded identities,
interests, and, rights of the consumer-citizen. The emergence of the latter
figure marks the discursive distancing from earlier ideas of the Nehruvian
‘citizen-worker’5 and the ‘Five-Year Plan Hero’,6 each charged with the task
of ‘nation-building’ through curbing consumerist desire and aligning his (sic)
ambitions with those of the nation-state. In the post-Nehruvian economic
and cultural phase, the middle-class woman-consumer has also become part
of the narratives of urban citizenship. Hence, the citizen-consumer differs
from earlier idealized formulations of nationalized identity both in terms of
gender, and his or her relationship with the market and the state.
Before we come to the immediate present, however, it is necessary to begin
with an earlier history of the making of middle-class spaces in Delhi through
a focus on private real estate companies.

The Making of the Consumer-Citizen: DLF and ‘Superb

Housing Schemes’ for People with ‘Modern Outlook’
The 3000-acre privately developed DLF City (DLF) is located immediately
across the southern border of Delhi, in the Gurgaon district of the state of
Haryana. Beginning in the early-1980s, DLF was planned and constructed

Chapter 13.indd 410 11/11/2013 5:21:05 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  411

by the Delhi Land and Finance (DLF) corporation and is regarded in both
scholarly as well as popular writings as a significant site for the making of
contemporary cultures of trans-national urbanism in India.7 Its ‘hyper’ malls,
gated residential communities, and corporate offices (occupied by call centres,
BPOs, and prominent multi-national corporations) speak of urban transfor-
mation that also relate to new ideas of the modern—‘middle-class’—Indian
self. And while this discussion concentrates on DLF City and its promoter,
the Delhi Land and Finance corporation, there are also other significant real
estate companies with their own projects in the vicinity. However, none can
match the DLF company in terms of the size, popularity, and prestige of its
projects.8
The DLF company was established in 1946 by Chaudhury Raghvendra
Singh, a civil servant and landowner belonging to the agricultural caste of
Jats. Till the mid-1950s, DLF had a significant presence in the private real
estate market in Delhi. The key aspect of its business strategy was its ability
to both surmount as well as manipulate the extraordinary layers and minu-
tiae of urban land and ‘planning’ regulations instituted by the colonial state.9
The background to this lay in the provenance of the state over the vast tracts
of Nazul lands, that is, ‘the Delhi Crown lands denoting property which
has descended to the Government either as successor of former Government
or by escheat, in absence of heirs to legal owners’.10 Within this context,
private real estate companies had two ways of acquiring land: through pur-
chasing from large land-holders (zamindars) whose properties escaped the
Nazul regulations, or, negotiating with the Delhi Improvement Trust (DIT)
for properties within the Nazul areas. The DIT was established in 1937 in
the wake ‘of a report by [senior civil servant] Mr A.P. Hume … on con-
gestion in Delhi City’.11 In addition to the imperatives of ‘colonial urban
development’,12 the founding of the Trust was also connected to other ideas
on urban development circulating in the Euro-American sphere during the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These included the ‘garden city’
movement,13 and strategies for slum-clearance based on ‘scientific’ methods.
Hence, in 1938, while proceeding on leave to England, the Trust’s inaugural
Chairman, A.P. Hume, applied for financial assistance in order that ‘he might
take the opportunity of studying the methods adopted for the removal of
congestion in cities in the United Kingdom and the Continent’.14
From its inception, the Trust was armed with extensive powers which
included those of compulsory acquisition of land (via the Land Acquisition
Act of 1894), and the implementation of a plethora of ‘improvement’ schemes.
Hence, the ‘general improvement scheme’ could address ‘the ­narrowness,

Chapter 13.indd 411 11/11/2013 5:21:05 PM

 412  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

closeness, or bad arrangement and condition of streets or buildings or groups

of buildings’, whereas a ‘town expansion scheme’ could apply to the provision
of residential accommodation ‘for any class of the inhabitants of any area’.15 It
assigned itself the task of ‘improving’ a colonial citizenry through acting upon
their spaces of dwelling, leisure, and commerce. The Trust focused its atten-
tion upon the minutest spatial blemish (‘remedying defective ventilation’),
and harboured the most magisterial territorial ambition (‘the acquisition of
any land’). However, it aimed not at spatial egalitarianism, but a hierarchy
of new—improved—spaces: the very poor, the poor, and the middle-classes
were to be located in their own spaces, each with its own characteristics.
So, the redevelopment of Basti Harphool Singh in North Delhi would not
require ‘public bathing places’ since it was to be occupied by ‘middle-class
populations’,16 whereas the nearby Ahata Kidara locality—meant for the
‘labouring classes’ and located in vicinity of lime kilns—would have them.17
During the 1940s and 1950s, then, private corporation such as DLF which
hoped to profit from rapidly expanding demand for real-estate18 encountered
an entrenched state monopoly in land-ownership and urban planning. DLF
and other companies could gain permission to build in one of the Town
Expansion Schemes of the Trust19 by agreeing to erect buildings as well as
develop public infrastructure to standards specified by the Trust, and trans-
ferring public infrastructure to the Trust free of cost (after paying an initial
fee). Notwithstanding these constraints, DLF became an active player in the
Delhi real estate market and by 1949 it had ‘developed some of the first resi-
dential colonies in Delhi such as Krishna Nagar in East Delhi’.20
During the early 1950s, the company also went on to develop some of
the most prominent of Delhi’s suburbs. The social imaginary that DLF
sought to conjure for its localities was one animated by a curious mixture
of American and British stylistic and hence, ‘behavioural’, references. Figure
13.1 shows a DLF advertisement from 1955 for some of its key projects
in Delhi. Here, in a city still pock-marked by the scars of the post-parti-
tion trauma and regulated by the dicta of the DIT Building Manual, is a
vision of joyful cartoonish intensity. A man-about-town preens near a foun-
tain in North-West Delhi, an insouciant young couple goes boating in North
Delhi, a Hollywood starlet-like figure prepares to descend into a swimming-
pool in West Delhi, an ‘Oxford’ Don welcomes a school-boy in South Delhi,
and a prosperous elderly couple survey manicured domains in Central-South
Delhi that might soon be their home. It’s a fantabulous vision of post-parti-
tion Utopia wrenched from the ascetic reaches of the Five-Year Plan state, and
from the messianic—‘slum-clearing’—gaze of the DIT. There is a ­striking

Chapter 13.indd 412 11/11/2013 5:21:05 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  413

continuity of aspirational themes between mid-twentieth advertisements

such as these and those of the current era, where ‘modern’ men and women
go about jogging on private tracks, swimming in private pools, and enjoying
privatized educational facilities. Real estate developments in India have been
a prime site for the making of the citizen-consumer, and the current phase
of RWA activism owes much to the urban spatial transformations that have
gained ground in the wake of economic liberalization policies put into train
by the Congress party through its New Industrial Policy in 1980.21
The Utopian—and commodified—urbanism conjured by DLF was
founded on a keen grasp of spatial-bureaucratic realpolitik and the company
was adept at finding its way around the maze of official rules and regulations
that stood in way of its commercial ambitions. This much is clear from archi-
val materials relating to complaints by individuals and corporations against
the ‘special’ relationship between DLF and DIT that frequently thwarted its
competitors’ plans.22 Negotiations with the state in order to further private
enterprise were a crucial aspect of the urbanism nurtured by DLF; its urban

Figure 13.1  DLF advertisement, 1955.

Chapter 13.indd 413 11/11/2013 5:21:06 PM

 414  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

spaces and citizenry were those created through treating the state as a facili-
tator of individual choice. This, simultaneously, crafted the ‘individual’ as a
trans-national consuming subject. The latter was both statists—in the sense
of subscribing to the legitimacy of the post-colonial nation-state—as well as
combative of the professed ‘socialist’ and anti-consumerist proclamations
of the state. This post-colonial citizen—along with that conjured through
the state’s own discourses on identity—was, however, implicitly, male. Early
expressions of consumerist intent were not—as they are now—part of a con-
current dialogue on women-in-the-city, and consumerist privilege was still
limited to the sons of the soil.
It is this spatial history of the consumer-citizen—nurtured in the crucible
of the processes of private urban development—that forms the background
to contemporary contexts of urban middle-class activism.23 This history sits
alongside that of the centralizing state with its emphasis on curbing con-
sumption in order to invest in productive industrial capacity. It is crucial to
an understanding of the relationship between the state and the market in the
making of ‘civil society’. The manner in which this relationship constructs
the idea of ‘public interest’ has been the focus of analysis in different spheres
including ‘educational reform’,24 ‘bourgeois environmentalism’,25 and middle
class ‘environmental activism’.26
In 1957, DLF’s soi-disant dreams of spatial modernity—swimming pools
and buxom beauties, lakes and carefree couples, ‘flower bedecked’ roads
and their patrician crowds–came to end. For, following a highly critical
report of an inquiry into the functioning of the DIT published in 1951,
the government promulgated The Delhi (Control of Building Operations)
Ordinance of 1955, leading to the establishment of the Delhi Development
Provisional Authority. The Provisional Authority was, in turn, succeeded
by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) in 1957. The so-called Birla
Report (produced under the chairmanship of the leading industrialist GD
Birla) concluded that the Trust had ‘failed’ in all the key areas of its function-
ing: that its record of slum-­clearance had been ‘meagre’, the Town Expansion
Schemes had merely resulted in the ‘freezing’ rather than ‘development’ of
considerable land areas, it had commissioned neither a ‘civic survey’ nor a
‘Master Plan’, and, its strategy of selling land to the highest bidder had only
exacerbated the ‘housing problem’.27
With the establishment of the DDA, the small window available to pri-
vate developers was firmly shut and even ‘while the DDA was in the process
of preparing a Master Plan for the city, the government announced a freeze
on all vacant undeveloped land within the urbanisable limits’.28 Further,

Chapter 13.indd 414 11/11/2013 5:21:06 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  415

‘Establishing itself as the sole agency legally authorized to develop and dis-
pose off land, the State left little, or no role for the private land developer’.29
By December 1977, DDA had acquired an area of 39,455 acres ‘for the
planned development of Delhi’.30
The spectre of ‘planning’—with its connotations of the centralizing
state and deterrents to private enterprise—seemed to portend the demise of
the nascent consumer-citizen. However, there is another spatial history to
consider. This concerns what we might call the workings of consanguineal
capitalism, a specific set of social, economic, and cultural strategies that form
the background to both contemporary urban developments as well as the
middle-class activism that this paper seeks to analyze.

Consanguineal Capitalism and ‘Millennium’ Geographies

Kushal Pal Singh (b. 1931), the present head of DLF, was born in the city
of Bulandshahar in the western part of the state of Uttar Pradesh.31 After
graduating with a science degree, Singh went on to study aeronautical engi-
neering in England, eventually serving for nine years as an officer in the
Indian army. Before joining DLF—the company founded by his father-in-
law Raghavendra Singh—in the early-1970s, Singh was associated with the
American Universal Electric Company, a joint venture enterprise, and Willard
India, a manufacturer of car and electric batteries. The latter company had
been formed by the elder Singh in the wake of the severe curtailment of DLF’s
real estate activities as a result of the establishment of the Delhi Development
Authority in 1957.
With DLF unable to ply its lucrative trade in Delhi—by the late 1950s
it had developed some twenty-two private ‘colonies’ in Delhi—the relatively
young K.P. Singh turned his attention beyond the city’s borders into the state
of Haryana. This appears to have been prompted by two factors: that the
elder Singh had landholding in Gurgaon (estimates range between 25 to 40
acres), and, his Delhi-strategy of ‘tapping into old family connections’ and
appeals to community ties to acquire land could be replicated in Haryana.
From the late 1970s, and under K.P. Singh’s initiative, DLF launched upon
an aggressive policy of land acquisition in Gurgaon district, approximately 30
kilometres south of Delhi, and then a largely agricultural area occupied by a
mixture of Jat, Ahir, and Gujar castes. Singh’s own Jat background appears
to have been instrumental in his practice of consanguineal capitalism as he
smoothed the way for his company’s subsequent rise to the status of real
estate behemoth. In a magazine interview, he outlined his strategy as follows:

Chapter 13.indd 415 11/11/2013 5:21:06 PM

 416  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

I set about identifying myself with each family whose land I wanted to buy. A team
of 70 to 80 people were deputed to find out everything about these people: the size
of their families, how many children, who was good in studies, any family disputes…
every little detail. I did everything it took to persuade these farmers to trust me. I
spent weeks and months with their families—I wore kurtas, sat on charpais, drank
fly-infested milk from dirty glasses, attended weddings, visited the sick.…32
Confronted with a context of small land holdings (typically four to five
acres each) and complicated ownership patterns, Singh relied heavily on local
knowledge to achieve his aims. Hagiographic accounts relate how obtain-
ing clear title involved securing agreements with dozens of owners, a task
achieved through invocations of bucolic trust and patrimonial obligation.
The grass-root corporatism was matched, on the other hand, by persistent
lobbying of the state to change laws that militated against residential devel-
opment on agricultural land. This was achieved—one account suggests that
the late Rajiv Gandhi’s intervention was crucial—through measures such as
the reclassification of agricultural into ‘nonagricultural’ land. The blending
of corporatist ambition with state patronage, communal bonds, and p ­ easant
cultural economy paid rich dividends, and by the mid-1980s, DLF had
acquired some 3,500 acres of land in Gurgaon—much of it on credit—and
was ready to transform the rural hinterland into, as its publicity later pro-
claimed, the ‘Millenium City’.
As of December 2006, DLF had development projects (including residen-
tial, commercial, and retail) in 29 cities across India, with ‘over 220 million
square feet of existing development and 574 million square feet of planned
projects’.33 Plans for mammoth shopping malls that putatively signpost
the national journey from ‘stagnant third-world country’ to ‘an emerging
economic super-power’34 are also in the pipeline, including a four-million
square-foot Mall of India in Gurgaon. Located within an extraordinary slew
of numbers denoting colossal spatial transformations, and the discourse of
‘transformation’ itself, the image of DLF City is one of a nationalist-­corporate
alternative to the slothful and unreliable spaces of the bureaucratic state; this
‘new’ India fires the engines of economic creativity through etching its sharply
defined motional intent upon previously inert landscapes. The DLF corpo-
ration’s public self-representation might best be described as one based on a
nationalist imaginary beyond the nation-state, or, a post-nationalist position.
Its role as the key sponsor of the Indian Premier League cricket tournament
is in keeping with this tramsformative imaginary.
There are two approaches to DLF City from Delhi: the Mehrauli–
Gurgaon (MG) Road and National Highway 8 (NH 8) that stretches from

Chapter 13.indd 416 11/11/2013 5:21:06 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  417

Delhi to Mumbai via Jaipur. Till recently (June 2010) MG Road was the
site of building activity for the Metro Rail network that was being extended
into Haryana from Delhi, in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The
Highway was also the site of significant road-works in order to convert it into
a privately operated toll-way. Towards the Delhi end of MG Road, there are
semi-­demolished but still-shiny remains of a row of buildings that not too
long ago housed high fashion boutiques owned by leading Indian designers.
The cavernous structures—apparently illegally built—that once announced
passage to the fashionable geography of DLF, now teeter precariously with
their innards of wires and pipes exposed to the traffic. On the Highway
side, on the other hand, vehicles of every shape and description hurtle along
smooth surfaces, largely unmindful of traffic regulations, flashes of speed-
ing metal occasionally captured upon the glass surfaces of the Ambience
shopping mall which has seven floors, each approximately a kilometre in
length. ‘Kilometers of Shopping!’, the Ambience advertising proclaims on
large banner.
MG Road enters Gurgaon via DLF Phase III, then crossing Phase I, which
sits in no particular geographical relation to Phase II nearby, and moving
on to Phases II, IV, and V, the latter being the latest to be developed by the
­company. The different ‘phases’ of DLF City are themselves located in ‘sectors’
carved out of the erstwhile farmlands by the Haryana Urban Development
Authority (HUDA). Phases I, II, and III mainly consists of independent
houses built on plots purchased from DLF, and semi-detached bungalows
built and sold by it. In Phase III, the DLF built ‘White Town Houses’ are
grouped around narrow streets with mock-Victorian street-lighting, whereas
in other areas the designs of the independent houses borrow from a variety of
inspirations. So, for example, near Silver Oaks Apartments in Phase I, there is
a large house built in a neo-Gothic style which, in turn, is hardly any distance
from another with a façade of a traditional Indian mansion, the Haveli.
Traffic in the locality flows along several main (‘sector’) roads and their
tributaries, part of the infrastructure that has been constructed through a
scheme of ‘private-public partnership’. Beyond DLF City, about ten kilome-
tres further south into Haryana are two areas that are the hub of current—and
feverish—real estate activity. The first of these centers on ‘Nirvana County’, a
three hundred acre apartment and villa complex being developed by Unitech
Builders. The main thoroughfare—entered through a gateway—is lined with
semi-detached bungalows, collectively named Aspen Greens. Other areas
include Birch Court, the Close, and Espace. Further south from Nirvana
County, past a patchwork of agricultural land overgrown with weeds and

Chapter 13.indd 417 11/11/2013 5:21:06 PM

 418  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

fenced-off with the markings of their new owners—a variety of construction

companies—we encounter a highway that is crowded on both sides with a
multitude of condominium and commercial projects still under construc-
tion. The traffic is joined by a seemingly endless parade of trucks carrying
building materials. Private security personnel are posted at the perimeters of
the building zones, and long stretches of the road-side have been taken over
by semi-permanent ‘offices’ of real estate agents. This is Sohna Road, which
leads to the village of Sohna. Some prominent projects include The Nile
apartments (based on an ‘Egyptian’ theme), the Mansionz (bungalows in a
‘French provincial’ style), and Vatika City, being designed by a firm head-
quartered in New York.
Phases IV and V are home to what DLF City is best known for: gated
condominiums and shopping malls. The former are guarded and serviced, in
the main, by migrant men from Bihar, and Bengali and Bangladeshi women
respectively, and the malls form a phalanx of aggressive consumerist intent
along one key stretch of road. Apartment complexes differ in terms of the
amenities offered.35 They usually contain one or more of the below: swim-
ming pools, club-houses, gymnasia, walking tracks, tennis and badminton
courts and shops selling basic provisions. The newer ones—some still under
construction—are more likely to have all of the above, while still others–
such as Ambience City and Ardee City—contain large shopping malls on the
premises.36
In addition to residential spaces, the area between DLF City and the
Sohna Road construction zone contains a variety of leisure, shopping and
commercial spaces. These includes a (‘18-hole Arnold Palmer’) golf course,
a number of members-only clubs, shopping malls, multiplex cinema halls,
multi-cuisine restaurants, and global fast-food outlets, and the offices of
some of the leading multinationals and call-centre companies in the world.
Fields of green have, within the space of some two decades, turned into spaces
of global commerce and local habitation fuelled by changes in the economy
since the mid-1980s.
It is a curious geography, built out of a vast inventory of imaginative and
concrete material. However, the most striking aspect of the locality is not, I
suggest, the toponymic re-inscription of the erstwhile farmlands of Haryana
with the hybrid transnationalism of condominiums with names such as
Regency Park, Windsor Court, Hamilton Court, and Malibu Towne. Rather,
it lies in the consolidation of a very specific social consciousness and self-
identity. The social production of the space at DLF is coeval with the making
of the identity of the citizen-consumer, one increasingly entangled in the

Chapter 13.indd 418 11/11/2013 5:21:06 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  419

processes of middle-class activism, and, in the process, further defining what

it is to be ‘middle-class’ in India today.

‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’: Biographies of Activism

We are living in joyful times indeed. There’s a lot to choose from, in lifestyle. Fashion,
design, travel, cuisines or entertainment. What happens on the ramp at Fall shows in
Milan is reflected back in Delhi or Mumbai.37

‘Gated communities’, Setha Low notes for the United States, ‘are predomi-
nantly new settlements built as part of large-scale housing developments or
‘master-planned’ communities’.38 The history of contemporary gated com-
munities in India is, in fact, slightly longer than might be imagined from
an exclusive focus on the housing complexes of Gurgaon. The ‘gating’ of
Delhi’s middle and upper middle-class residential localities began in the
early to mid-1970s, and was carried out under the aegis of Residents Welfare
Associations in different parts of the city. The gates were the earliest vis-
ible signs of the RWAs’ increasingly public presence as a formal entity in
urban affairs. The raison d’etre of RWA activity was the marking out of
privileged, delimited and ‘secure’ spaces where urban ‘civil’ life and con-
sanguinity could unfold. Ostensibly based around the notion of collective
action, RWAs became the key vehicles for articulating an exclusionary urban
politics of space. The result was the de facto privatization of public thorough-
fares in residential localities by the installation of large iron gates at points
where internal streets of the locality joined external main roads. The gates
carried sign-boards indicating hours of opening (normally dawn to sunset),
with some permanently locked, a small trap-door allowing individual access.
This served, in effect, to reduce the number of entry and exit points to the
‘colony’ through crossing notions of modern urban governance with those of
a cordon sanitaire (Figure 13.2).
Hence, the gated enclaves of Gurgaon have extended, rather than invented,
this logic of separation. In any case, current middle-class activism—both
RWA and NGO-related—is inextricably linked to the accumulating dis-
course of private and public spaces, the privatization of public spaces, and
the concurrent dialogue on the role of the state in securing ‘citizens’ within
private spaces, simultaneously as it provides safeguards against the threats
to such spaces and their life-ways. What is specific to the immediate pre-
sent is the suturing of the discourse of consumerism—with its emphasis on
privatized actions as reward for individualized effort—with that of urban
citizenship.

Chapter 13.indd 419 11/11/2013 5:21:06 PM

 420  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Figure 13.2  Gates installed by an RWA.

The Bhargavs: Consuming the Metropolis

The Bhargavs (name changed) are residents of a tenth floor flat in Victoria
Park (VP) gated enclave in DLF IV. VP adjoins two other—more expen-
sive—condominium enclaves of Hampstead Park and Beechwood Estate.
From the main balcony of the Bhargav flat there is a panoramic view of
the surroundings. The walls that surround Victoria Park, Hampstead Park,
Beechwood Estate, and other such mini-suburbs mark the dividing lines
of an extraordinary contrast between what lies within them and the world
outside; manicured gardens, fountains, well-equipped playgrounds, and
sign-posted streets in good repair stand in tight embrace against the pot-
holed roads, malfunctioning streetlights, and the careering, chaotic traffic
outside (Figure 13.3). There are guards at the boom-gates to regulate entry,
and keep the outside, out. There is also the ceaseless activity of garden-
ers, guards, cleaners, drivers, and maids at work or proceeding towards their
places of employment. Completed in 1994 and designed by the Mumbai
based architect Hafeez Contractor, VP was one of the earliest of the apart-
ment complexes in the area. Contractor has made a considerable name for
himself in both commercial and new residential architecture and his website

Chapter 13.indd 420 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  421

Figure 13.3  Inside a Gated Community.

describes the VP style as a ‘classical style to create a sense of place amongst the
clusters in the neighbourhood’.
Mrs Bharghav is in her late thirties and grew up in the thickly populated
Krishna Nagar locality in East Delhi, which was, coincidentally, one of the
earliest of DLF’s projects. When I rang to ask if we could meet, she readily
agreed. However, she said, her husband would be at work and would only
join us later in the evening. Mr Bhargav is originally from the Rajasthan
city of Jodhpur, which is where he and his wife lived for three years after their
marriage. The Bhargavs moved to Delhi about twelve years ago, renting in
Anand Vihar (East Delhi) in order to be near Mr Bhargav’s office, the newly
established low-cost airline, Indigo. However, when the Indigo office shifted
to Gurgaon, he found commuting very difficult and decided to move to the
locality, first renting in another apartment complex nearby. This was in 1998.
Soon after, they bought their present apartment in VP.
The aesthetics of the Bhargav apartment speaks of a strategy of adorn-
ment that is simultaneously attentive and indifferent. We enter through an
elaborately carved door—done in a ‘Rajasthani’ style—that takes us to the
sitting room which contains three over-stuffed sofas with brown velvet-like

Chapter 13.indd 421 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 422  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

c­overing. In one corner there is a half-opened stand-alone wooden screen

which partly obscures a framed testamur on the wall. Apart from the gold
border, the testamur’s exact contents are difficult to decipher. The room also
displays several other kinds of decorative intent scattered in an irregular array.
There are large landscape paintings and small Mughal miniatures, and flocks
of soaring wooden ducks, surrounded by seated divinities rendered in the
(south Indian) Tanjore style. Three small clear glass coffee-tables peep from
the sides of the sofas, and there is a tall brass lamp next one of the latter. On
a larger smoked-glass table—almost in the middle of the room—I am served
tea and biscuits.
A private school abuts the VP compound and it was one of the key reasons
why the Bhargavs chose to buy a flat here. Another was the 24 hour ‘power
back-up’ that is provided by condominiums such as VP, there are frequent
disruptions in the official power supply and dark smoke from mammoth
diesel powered generators serves as an ephemeral pennant of new lifestyles. As
Mrs Bhargav pointed out, ‘Living here you just don’t feel the ‘load-shedding’.
Sometimes, friends ring up and say we haven’t had electricity for eight hours
and I am amazed since the back-up ensures that the power is not off for
more than thirty seconds’. The physical environment converts easily into the
symbolic, and the proximity to the school and the diesel generator are the
grounds for other kinds of meaning about space and identity. In particular,
they symbolize perceived transformations in life-ways and the possibilities of
self-development.
The Bhargavs have two daughters, Veena who is fourteen and in class nine,
and twelve-year-old Meera in class six. The school next door is considered
one of the most prestigious in the Delhi–Gurgaon area and each year there
is intense competition for admission. While clearly pleased that her children
have gained admission to the school, Mrs Bhargav tells me that she is con-
cerned that that the school does not believe in ‘competition’, ‘so it can not
bring out the best in children’.
As part of their extra-curricular activities, Veena learns ‘modern dance’ and
electric organ at the school, whereas Meera is learning art and Kathak danc-
ing. Every Saturday, she is taken to the East Delhi locality of Mayur Vihar
to receive extra lessons at a school run by the niece of the famous Kathak
maestro, Birju Maharaj. Mayur Vihar is approximately 30 kilometres, or—
given Delhi traffic—an hour and half drive away. ‘After my marriage’, Mrs
Bhargav says, ‘I spent some time in Jodhpur, and the kinds of facilities my
children have here … would have been simply unimaginable there, or even

Chapter 13.indd 422 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  423

in Krishna Nagar. I am very happy living here’. For the Bhargavs, the space
of the condominium and the adjoining school is one of passage: here one
kind of cultural capital—of the small-town—is exchanged for that of a glo-
balized Indian modernity. More significantly, the condominium-space is also
one where female identity is refigured as both ‘independent’ and possessing
agency, attributed denied it by the space ‘outside’.
The gendering of public space as male, and the restrictions and harassments
to which the female body is subject are significant themes in India-related
scholarly literature.39 The condominium-space—scrupulously classed—is a
homogenous one where a variety of rituals (national days and religious days),
bodily acts (walking, running and other forms of exercise), and other forms
of social interactions involve almost equal participation by men and women
residents. The perceived dangers of the ‘open-street’ are absent, leading to a
specific sense of the possibilities of altered sociality. Indeed, as compared to
men, women residents I spoke to were far more unequivocal in their fond-
ness for life within the gates. So, for example, whereas elderly retired men
felt a loss of independence in being reliant on their children by living with
them, women of the same age group routinely talked of a new-found freedom
in their current situation. This was strongly linked to the range of ‘public’
events within the gates that—ironically—lead to a sense of the gated space
as an open one where a vast array of religious, social, cultural, and political
life unfolds in sequence; the gates ensure the elaborate unfolding of events on
the celebratory calendar with an intensity that such control makes possible,
and without the fear of ‘disruptions’ that the open-street holds. So, the VP
Residents Welfare Association organizes events relating to Republic Day (26
January), Independence Day (15 August), popular religious festivals such as
Diwali and Holi, dance competitions, sporting events, consumer-goods fairs,
and a variety of women-centred religious rituals (such as Karva-Chauth) that
have been popularized by Bollywood cinema. Apart from Christmas—which
takes on the shape of a secular festival of modernity—there is no practice of
celebrating non-Hindu festivals. The world—religious, national, and trans-
national—is here, and women are visibly a part of it.
Feminist scholarship has usefully suggested that the discourse of ‘safety’
that is companion to the issue of women’s access to public spaces is mired
both in patriarchal and masculinist notions of ‘protecting’ women (and
hence men’s honour), as well as classed notions of urban threats to ‘respect-
able’ women.40 The contract of ‘safety’ seeks to guard women’s ‘reputation’,
and hence brings with it, among other restrictions, a desexualized version of

Chapter 13.indd 423 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 424  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

public visibility.41 The choice is clear-cut: women should be safe in public

spaces, but this also entails ‘proper’ conduct on their part.
Within the gated community, the ersatz pell-mell of the street that is
produced through the directed circulation of the discourse of consumerist
choice and intent is uninterrupted by the ‘distractions’ of the street, such as
the need for constant vigilance against putative others. It is within this cru-
cible—where the ‘street’ is not the street, and, for precisely that reason, is a
site of intense middle-class activity—that ‘public’ women can be both the
guardian of tradition and take part in the sexualized presentations of the
self. So, the morning-after elaborately dressed women perform the rituals of
Karva-Chauth (to ensure their husbands’ well-being), they pace the condo-
minium grounds on their exercise rounds dressed in skin-hugging clothing.
And, unlike the constraints placed on women at public celebrations of the
spring festival of Holi (that can also involve a sexual economy of ‘fun’),42 at
the VP Bacardi-sponsored Holi mela (fair), men and women dance together
to Bollywood songs on an open-air stage.
The broader context of the above is, I suggest, a particular kind of gender
politics that relates to the perceived ability to move between the worlds of ‘tra-
dition’ and modernity by exercising choice.43 Through the notion of choice,
consumerist modernity and its spaces appear to offer women the possibility of
both maintaining their ‘reputation’, and taking part in ‘disreputable’ activities
denied by the open-street. It is in this sense that contemporary middle-class
notions of urban citizenship—with its specific configuration of a manage-
ably hybrid modernity—reformulates the ‘fraternal social contract’44 within
its own terms to include the consuming woman within its remit. Hence, the
female consumer-citizen takes on a significant role in the RWA discourses of
the making of the ‘global’ city and its inhabitants.
The Bhargavs are active members of the RWA of Victoria Park. The RWA,
Mrs Bhargav tells me, is important in that it both ‘protects our lifestyle’ and is
also a site of sociality. The Bhargavs closely follow news regarding the activi-
ties of RWAs in Delhi, and are pleased to learn that the interests of ‘people
like us’ are ‘finally’ being represented ‘in an activist manner’.

Suburban Activism: Urbanism and the Residents Welfare

Association
Middle-class activism in public affairs is not, of course, a new phenomenon
in India. Indeed, the nationalist movement and the variety of ‘social reform’
movements45 are significant example of such activism. Hence, the idea of

Chapter 13.indd 424 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  425

an activist middle-class has been a significant one both during the colonial
post-colonial eras. What is new is the perception that such activism ought
also ‘protect’ and represent middle-class interests, rather than only those of
the poor.
In the current period, the clearest examples of middle-class activism that
tell us something about the relationship between the categories of the middle-
class, the state and the market are related to the activities of Delhi’s Resident
Welfare Associations (RWAs) and that of the Delhi government sponsored
Bhagidari (‘sharing’) scheme for ‘citizen-state cooperation’ that was started in
2001.46 Residents’ Welfare Associations, as the name suggests, are intended to
promote the interests of a group of people, consisting of families and individ-
uals who share a specified space of residence. RWAs in Delhi are generally of
two types: those that are attached to bounded spaces, usually gated commu-
nities of apartments, and others that cover residential localities consisting of
independent and semi-independent houses. Whereas RWAs of the first kind
emerge out of physically bounded spaces, the latter create a bounded space
through defining the territory of their remit. Of course, as mentioned earlier,
even non-gated localities have increasingly become gated ones through the
practice of barricading major thoroughfares. In either case, such visual acts
upon space are designed to create communities of common interest.
Historically, RWAs have dealt with issues of common concern such as ‘secu-
rity’ (through appointing private guards at key entry points), maintenance
of local infrastructure (such as parks and gardens), resolution of localized
disputes, and the organization of social and cultural events where members
participate. For RWAs attached to gated communities (such as those in DLF
City), these functions are extended to the collection of a variety of govern-
mental fees to be deposited with the final authority. In almost all cases, RWA
office-holders are elected to their positions (of president, secretary, and so on).
Both in terms of key functionaries as well as lay membership, RWAs are male-
dominated. There are often ‘special cells’ for ‘women’s’ activities, but women
very rarely take a leading role. The exceptions are some older English-speaking
women who are able to interact with men on reasonably equal terms. I was
also told that women representatives of the RWA found it difficult to travel
with their male counterparts without attracting adverse comments. Hence,
‘urban governance’ within this context is a visibly gendered activity. Further,
there is a tendency to favour retired officers of the armed forces as RWA
functionaries, perhaps seeking to attach the aura of military discipline to that
of the modern housing locality. Till recent times, RWAs have been content
to operate below the level of the various state ­bureaucracies, ­operating as

Chapter 13.indd 425 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 426  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

mechanisms of localized conviviality, and often represented as crucial ele-

ments of ‘civil-society’. Given the nature of the residential ­localities where
such associations are formed, and the fact that the only RWAs ‘recognized’ by
the state are those that represent ‘authorized colonies’ and are registered with
the Registrar of Cooperatives, they have invariably articulated the concerns
of very specific segments of the urban population.47
In 1999, soon after being elected to office, Delhi’s Chief Minister, Sheila
Dixit, ‘called for an active participation of Residents Welfare Associations in
governance’. The rationale for this was the ‘failure’ of ‘civic agencies’ to carry
out their normal tasks. The Chief Minister’s Secretary noted that the call to
actively involve RWAs in urban governance heralded a new era, marking as
it did ‘the first step towards a responsive management of the city’.48 Positing
a distinction between the state and the ‘community’, the Secretary further
noted that the ‘failure’ of ‘civic agencies’ meant that ‘it’s really time for the
community to be given direct control of managing the affairs of the city’.49
Subsequently, the government decided to ‘empower’ RWAs to ‘take certain
decisions on their own’. So, it was proposed that RWAs be given control over
the management of resources such as parks, community halls, parking places,
sanitation facilities, and local roads. A more direct relationship between
the state and RWAs was also mooted through the idea of joint surveys of
‘encroached’ land—that is, land that had been ‘illegally’ occupied, usually by
slum-dwellers—with the possibility that all illegal structures would ‘then be
demolished in a non-discriminatory manner’. Finally, it was proposed that
RWAs be allowed to impose fines on government agencies which failed to
carry out their assigned tasks.
The Delhi Residents Welfare Association Joint Front (RWAJF) was
formed in 2005, following a decision by the Delhi state government to raise
electricity tariffs by 10 per cent. The Front consists of 195 separate member
RWAs from around the city. The increase in power rates for domestic con-
sumers was the second one since the state-owned electricity body (the Delhi
Vidyut Board or DVB) was ‘unbundled’ in June 2002 as part of power sector
‘reforms’. As a result, three privately owned companies secured contracts for
electricity distribution.50 There was vigorous protest over the price rise and,
in addition to the RWAJF, NGOs such as People’s Action, and another group
known as Campaign Against Power Tariff Hike (CAPTH) joined the cam-
paign. Individual RWAs asked their members to refuse payment of the extra
amount, while RWAJF lobbied the government, and organized city-wide
protests. The protests gained wide coverage in both the print and electronic
media, and, echoing Gandhian anti-colonial strategies, the organizers were

Chapter 13.indd 426 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  427

reported to have deployed ‘the ideas of “civil disobedience” and “people’s

power”’.51 Indeed, the parallels sought to be drawn between the Gandhian
anti-colonial moment and the present times were even more explicit with the
Convener of the RWAJF referring to the protests as ‘non-violent Satyagraha
[resistance]’.52
Eventually, the Delhi government backed down and the price rise was
shelved. According to Sanjay Kaul, Presidents of the People’s Action NGO,
the success of the protest heralded the making of a ‘middle-class revolution’.53

Post-nationalism
The circulation of the ideas of ‘civil disobedience’, ‘Satyagrah’ and ‘revolution’,
and the consolidation of the notion of a ‘people’ contesting the state occur in
a context that might be called post-national. This term is intended to index a
situation where the original moral frisson of these terms—provided by anti-
colonial sentiment—no longer holds. Indeed, in an era of post-Nehruvian
economic liberalization characterized by consumerist modernity,54 the moral
universe of the anti-colonial struggle is no longer part of popular public dis-
course. In fact, the ‘colonial ambience’ is now the stuff of popular marketing
strategies:55 just another time that is an ingredient in the making of the con-
suming present. Within this context, the ideologies of the Nehruvian state,
with their emphases on the ethics of ‘saving’ and delayed gratification for
the ‘national good’ do not find any resonance in contemporary popular dis-
courses on the role of the state. The term ‘post-national’ does not mean to
imply that the nation-state is insignificant as a context of analysis, or that we
now live in a ‘post-patriotic’ era where the most significant units of analysis
are certain ‘postnational social formations’—such as NGOs—that putatively
problematize nationalist and statist perspectives.56 Further, my use of the
term is also different from its deployment in another recent discussion. Here,
it is posited as ‘a distinct ethico-political horizon and a position of critique’
and a concept ‘that can be instantiated by suspending the idea of the nation
as a prior theoretical-political horizon, and thinking through its impossibil-
ity, even while located uncomfortably within its bounds’.57 Post-nationalism,
in my usage, is the articulation of the nationalist emotion with the robust
desires engendered through new practices of consumerism and their associ-
ated cultures of privatization and individuation.
The most significant manner in which the post-national moment reso-
nates within the politics of urban space concerns the repositioning of the
language of anti-colonial nationalism from the national sphere space—to

Chapter 13.indd 427 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 428  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

the suburban one, viz., the sphere of the neighbourhood. In turn, this also
indexes the move from the idea of the ‘national’ family to the nuclear (gated)
one, and, the translation of the notion of nationalist solidarity to (middle)
class solidarity. It is in this context that the figure of the consuming woman-
as-citizen takes on particular significance, for, post-nationalism and its own
masculinist ideology allows both men and women to have an active relation-
ship with commodity cultures. Further, the new woman-citizen is doubly
significant in that not only does she take part in the (consuming) business
of modernity, but is also able to withdraw from it when required in order
to take on the mantle of the ‘traditional’ Indian woman.58 Through exercis-
ing ‘choice’, not only does she embody the logic of consumerism, but also
agency. Post-nationalism does not, in my usage, constitute a rejection of
nationalist sentiments, rather, it represents, in different ways, the recasting
of this sentiment within the framework of consumerist modernity. Here, the
middle-class consumer-citizen, installed as representative of the ‘people’, is
imagined as the intermediary between the market and the state. So, as many
newspaper reports covering the anti-price increase protests pointed out, the
RWAs were not against the privatization itself (which was understood to be
the reason for the increase), rather, they wanted a ‘better’ and more ‘transpar-
ent’ privatization process.
The making of the ‘people’ in a time of consumerist modernity has spe-
cific consequences: it unfolds through differentiating ‘good’ consumers from
the ‘bad’ ones, in turn identifying the ‘good’ citizen from his or her antith-
esis. The most visible signs of this are, of course, inscriptions upon urban
space—the various acts of gating—that announce the presence and work of
an RWA. ‘Urban fear’59—the slum-dweller-turned-criminal is the most fre-
quently invoked threat—is a significant motivation for the proliferation of
gated communities in Delhi (as also for North America). However, RWA
discourse in Delhi also acts in other ways to produce the ‘uncivil’ other. The
‘power’ agitation is a case in point.
A recent study points out that electricity privatization in the states of Orissa,
Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh has had the effect of drastically reducing the
already low levels of access for poor sections of the urban population;60 ‘reform’
in the power sector has mostly benefited the well-off. Since the state’s power
network does not cover areas of the city that are designated as being under
‘unauthorized’ occupation, the urban poor secure access to electricity through
informal arrangements with municipal authorities, often aided by local poli-
ticians seeking to secure vote banks. With privatization, these arrangements
usually come to an end. In other cases, the private supplier simply does not deem

Chapter 13.indd 428 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  429

it profitable enough to continue to supply these areas.61 With the consolidation

of the idea of the consumer-citizen and the broader context of consumerist-
modernity, issues of social equity—such as those relating to access to energy
resources—come to be evaluated in terms of the logic of consumerism; they
become an issue of ‘good’ consumers versus ‘bad’ consumers. So, a frequent jus-
tification for the agitation against the increase in electricity charges was that the
hike could have been avoided had the government been more vigilant against
slum-dwellers who obtained power through illegal, and unpaid for, means. And
that, ‘power theft’ meant that ‘honest’ citizens were subsidizing dishonest ones.
There are three other aspects to the post-national moment of middle-class
activism in Delhi. The first concerns the accumulating discourse on ‘village
India’. ‘Nearly every book that tries to capture the fundamental character-
istics of India for its readers in whatever sphere of human activity, Ronald
Inden has noted, ‘includes a statement about the Indian village. It is one of
the pillars of these imperial constructs of India’.62 This ‘imperial construct’
has found a new life through contemporary consumer culture. Through a
number of contexts, the Indian village has become a significant site of the
urban middle-class imagination. So, discourses of leisure, aesthetics, spir-
ituality, health, and housing—among others—draw upon romanticized
images of ‘village India’; there are purpose-built ‘ethnic villages’ to experience
‘authentic’ rural food and entertainment, ‘living museums’ to watch ‘tribals’
producing handicrafts,63 clothing designed to reflect rural exuberance, and
gated enclaves that promise rural idyll.64
The earlier colonial and anthropological preoccupation with the ‘vil-
lage India’—though the two are not always the same65—has, more recently
transformed into newer enterprises of the middle-class imagination. So, ‘Star
hotels … organize special regional festivals…, where efforts are made to
re-do everything—from décor to food. Costumes to music—with elements
from that particular region. [Here] rural Rajasthan [is] reproduced within
the premises of Best Western…. The rural ambience is, of course, carefully
free of cow-dung (or cows), gutters or flies in this case thus rendering it
a safe bucolic experience’.66 A significant consequence of the middle-class
idealization of the ‘rural’ manifests in the hostility towards ‘debased’ villag-
ers: the urban working classes and slum-dwellers who do not fulfill their
vocation as material for the urban imagination. The slum-dwellers are, in
this sense, ‘improper’ and ‘inauthentic’ villagers, out of place, threats to civic
life, and hence, not deserving of sympathy. Hence, the slum is not so much
‘the reinvented “compassionate” village’,67 as the site of an urban anger at the
dismantling of its rural imaginary.

Chapter 13.indd 429 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 430  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Secondly, this context is part of a wider process of rethinking the state such
that it is increasingly imagined as a ‘friend’ of the middle-classes.68 The post-
colonial state in India has most significantly been imagined as a benefactor
of the poor, with ‘development’ as its most significant policy focus. Indeed,
the ‘development’ focus of the state has been a defining feature of perceptions
of post-coloniality itself.69 This, in turn, has led to an understanding of the
state as pro-industrialization and anti-consumption.70 RWA activities such as
those discussed above have become sites for the reformulation of these well
entrenched notions of the state and its relationships with different class frac-
tions. These neighbourhood and city-level activities unfolds in tandem with
the broad national thrust towards ‘de-regulating’ the economy71—including
a shrinking public sector and easy loans for consumer purchases—and pro-
duce a palpable sense of amity between the ‘people’ and the state.
Curiously, however, the increasing role of RWAs in urban life may be the
result of two seemingly contradictory processes. Political scientist Gurpreet
Mahajan points to a ‘deepening of democratic sentiment’ that is accompa-
nied by demands ‘for a more direct and active role in decision making’.72 The
‘public sphere’, she goes on to say, ‘is sought to be strengthened through a
decentralized system of administration and involvement of people in govern-
ing themselves, at least at the local level’.73 Hence, acts of exclusion—the urban
fortification trend—sit alongside inclusive ‘democratic sentiment’ tendencies.
Further, if we view RWAs as part of new movements of self-governance, we
might speculate that their activities also seek to delineate the characteristics of
urban citizenship and the kinds of spaces where it thrives. In these ways, RWAs
negotiate the relationship between the state and the middle-classes.
Finally in this context, RWA activism also partakes in redefining notions
of ‘civil society’. The term may no longer signify an independent realm
that interrogates the state.74 Rather, within the discourses of RWA activ-
ism, ‘civil society’ is imagined as an instrument to make the state stronger,
­simultaneously as it is called to account for its actions that affect middle-
class lives. In these ways, the consumer-citizens—including the ‘new’ woman
nurtured in the crucible of emerging urban spaces—seek a post-national
­dialogue with the state and the market.

Abbreviations
CAPTH Campaign Against Power Tariff Hike
DDA Delhi Development Authority
DIT Delhi Improvement Trust

Chapter 13.indd 430 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  431

DLF Delhi Land and Finance

DVB Delhi Vidyut Board
HUDA Haryana Urban Development Authority
MG Road Mehrauli–Gurgaon Road
NGO non-government organization
RWA Residents Welfare Associations
RWAJF Residents Welfare Association Joint Front (Delhi)
VP Victoria Park

Notes
  1 See, for example, Anthony King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism,
Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Véronique Dupont, ‘The
Idea of a New Chic Delhi through Publicity Hype’, in Romi Khosla (ed.), The
Idea of Delhi (Mumbai: Marg, 2005) and Christiane Brosius, India’s New Middle
Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity (New Delhi:
Routledge, 2010). I have been unable to incorporate the substantial arguments
of Brosius’s book as it has only recently come to hand.
  2 For scholarship that focuses specifically on the politics of space in the colonial
period, see Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power
and Environment (Boston: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1976); Narayani Gupta,
Delhi between Two Empires: Society, Government and Urban Growth, 1809–1931
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Awadhendra Sharan, ‘In the City,
Out of Place. Environment and Modernity, Delhi 1860 to 1960’, Economic
and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 47 (2006), pp. 4905–11; Jyoti Hoshagrahar,
‘Negotiated Modernity: Symbolic Terrains of Housing in New Delhi’, in Peter
Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (eds), Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling
and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London and New York: Routledge,
2007); and Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
 3 Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: an Ethnography of
Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997); Arvind Rajagopal, ‘Thinking about the New Indian
Middle Class: Gender, Advertising and Politics in an Age of Globalisation’,
in Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan (ed.), Signpost: Gender Issues in Post-Independence
India (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Satish Deshpande,
Contemporary India: A Sociological View (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003); and Leela
Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic
Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
 4 On RWAs and the different kinds of ‘middle-classness’ they represent, see
Lalitha Kamath and M. Vijayabaskar, ‘Limits and Possibilities of Middle Class
Associations as Urban Collective Actors’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 44,
no. 26 (2009), pp. 368–76.

Chapter 13.indd 431 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 432  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

 5 Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief : India and Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism

(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 149.
 6 Sanjay Srivastava, ‘The Voice of the Nation and the Five-Year Plan Hero:
Speculations on Gender, Space, and Popular Culture’, in Vinay Lal and Ashis
Nandy (eds), Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian
Cinema (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  7 For example, King, Spaces of Global Cultures; Dupont, ‘The Idea of a New Chic
Delhi’; Brosius, India’s New Middle Class; Madhu Jain, ‘Tyrannies at Work’,
Seminar, ‘First City? A Symposium on Remembering Delhi’, 515 (July 2002);
and Arvind Adiga, ‘India’s Mania for Malls’, (13 September 2004), [http://
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/, accessed 22 August 2009].
  8 Other prominent companies with substantial residential and commercial proj-
ects in Gurgaon include Ansals, Unitech, and the Ambience Group.
  9 Hoshagrahar, ‘Negotiated Modernity’; Legg, Spaces of Colonialism.
10 Gazetteer of Rural Delhi (Delhi: Delhi Administration, 1987).
11 Annual Administration Report of the Delhi Province for 1937–38 (Delhi:
Government of India Press, 1939), pp. 26–7. See also Hume Report:
A.P. Hume, Report on the Relief of Congestion in Delhi, Volume I (Simla:
Government of India Press, 1936).
12 King, Colonial Urban Development.
13 Stephen V. Ward (ed.), The Garden City: Past, Present and Future (London:
Routledge, 1992). For its application in China, see Duanfang Lu, Remaking
Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity, and Space 1949–2005 (London and
New York: Routledge, 2006).
14 ‘Settlement of Bills for Out of Pocket Expenses incurred by Mr. AP Hume,
Chairman, DIT, for Study of Slum Clearance Problem during Leave in England’
(902/1938/LSG 6-7/Delhi State Archives (DSA)). The ‘garden city’ idea came
to be applied slightly later with the proposal of a ‘green belt’ around Delhi that
would define the limits of urban development. In 1947, approximately 12,000
acres of village lands were earmarked for the green belt (‘Green Belt Scheme of
the DIT’, 1/67/1947/DIT/DSA).
15 Delhi Improvement Trust Report (New Delhi: Delhi Improvement Trust, 1941),
p. 30.
16 ‘Question of Grant-in-Aid to the Municipal Committee, Delhi, for the
Acquisition and Development of the Slum Area in Harphool Singh ki
Basti’(4/141/1935/LSG/DSA).
17 Ibid. See also Hoshagrahar, ‘Negotiated Modernity’.
18 While the term ‘overcrowding’, when used within a colonial context, is, a loaded
one [see, for example, Ratna Naidu, Old Cities, New Predicaments: A Study of
Hyderabad (New Delhi: Sage, 1990)], a number of factors led to a more active
real estate market during the first half of the twentieth century. These included
the decision to locate the imperial capital in Delhi (1911–1912) and the
subsequent construction of New Delhi, and, the massive dislocation and move-
ments of populations caused by the partition in 1947. Soon after 1947, Delhi’s

Chapter 13.indd 432 11/11/2013 5:21:08 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  433

­ opulation swelled by the addition of some 500,000 displaced persons, stimu-

p
lating a massive re-housing effort [see Suneetha Dasappa Kacker, ‘The DDA
and the Idea of Delhi’, in Khosla (ed.), Idea of Delhi, 71]. By 1956, approxi-
mately 30 per cent Delhi’s households had a (male) head who was born outside
the city. V.K.R.V. Rao and P.B. Desai, Greater Delhi: A Study in Urbanisation
1940–1957 (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1965).
19 By 1954, the Trust had earmarked 30,000 acres for various Town Expansion
Schemes (1/26/1954/LSG/DSA). However, the area under its actual field of
activity—that consisting of ‘sanctioned schemes’—was far less, being around
2700 acres.
20 http://www.dlf-group.com. Accessed 7 July 2008.
21 Dilip Dutta, ‘Effects of Globalisation on Employment and Poverty in Dualistic
Economies: The Case of India’, in Clem Tisdell and Raj Kumar Sen (eds),
Economic Globalisation: Social Conflicts, Labour and Environmental Issues
(Cambridge, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004) and Mitu Sengupta, ‘How the State
Changed Its Mind: Power, Politics and the Origins of India’s Market Reforms’,
Economic and Political Weekly, 43: 21 (2008), pp. 35–42.
22 Letter dated 23 March 1954, ‘Plot No. 181 “J” Rajouri Garden, Najafgarh,
From Jamnadass Wahi, 1411 Bazar Sitaram, Delhi, to the Chief Minister, Delhi
State’ (1/26/1954/LSG/DSA); Letter from Paramjit Nayar to the Chairman,
Delhi Improvement Trust, dated 25 July 1955 (1/27/ 1955/LSG/DSA).
23 The complicated historical relationship between the ‘people’, the state, and
the market should be taken into account when considering the significance
of the Anna Hazare led ‘anti-corruption’ agitation that, particularly, gripped
the media in late 2011. While it is not possible to discuss the full significance
of the agitation in this paper, it is worth noting that consumer-citizenship—
and the apparent disenchantment with the state by the middle-class that, till
recently, was its key benefactor—is an indispensible backdrop to it.
24 Sangeeta Kamat, ‘Deconstructing the Rhetoric of Decentralization: The State
in Education Reform’, Current Issues in Comparative Education, vol. 2, no. 2
(2002), pp. 110–19.
25 Amita Baviskar, The Politics of the City, Seminar: A Symposium of the Changing
Contours of Indian Environmentalism, no. 516 (2002), pp. 41–7 and Amita
Baviskar, Subir Sinha, and Kavita Philip, ‘Rethinking Indian Environmentalism:
Industrial Pollution in Delhi and Fisheries in Kerala’, in Joanne Bauer (ed.),
Forging Environmentalism: Justice, Livelihood, and Contested Environments
(New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2006).
26 Emma Mawdsley, ‘India’s Middle Classes and the Environment’, Development
and Change, vol. 35, no. 1 (2004), pp. 79–103.
27 DIT Enquiry Report. Report of the Delhi Improvement Trust Enquiry Committee,
Volume 1 [Birla Report] (New Delhi: Manager, Government of India Press, New
Delhi, 1951), pp. 3–4.
28 Dasappa Kacker, ‘DDA and the Idea of Delhi’, p. 72.
29 Ibid.

Chapter 13.indd 433 11/11/2013 5:21:09 PM

 434  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

30 Gazetteer of Rural Delhi (Delhi: Delhi Administration, 1987), p. 144.

31 The biographical account presented here is drawn from various journalistic
sources as well as private interviews. I am grateful to Radha Khan for providing
access to the latter.
32 Radhakrishnan Swami, ‘Building on a Dream’, Business Standard, 22 March
2005, p. 19.
33 DLF http://www.dlf.in/corporates/dlf_city/overview.asp. Accessed 20 July 2009.
34 Adiga, ‘India’s Mania for Malls’.
35 There are some walled complexes that have a mixture of free-standing bun-
galows, townhouses, and apartments, and some with only the last two. The
overwhelming majority consists of those with apartment blocks, and my discus-
sion concerns these.
36 At the time of writing, construction of the Ardee city mall appears to have stalled.
37 R. Bhattacharya, ‘Lifestyle Choices in Harmony’, Design and Interiors: The
Magazine for Exciting Living, March 2007, p. 3.
38 Setha M. Low, ‘Urban Fear: Building the Fortress City’, City and Society, vol. 9,
no. 1 (1997), pp. 53–71. For a discussion on Turkey and China, see Serife Genis,
‘Producing Elite Localities: The Rise of Gated Communities in Istanbul’, Urban
Studies, vol. 44, no. 4 (2007), pp. 771–98 and Choon-Piew Pow, ‘Securing
the ‘Civilised’ Enclaves: Gated Communities and the Moral Geographies of
Exclusion in (Post-) Socialist Shanghai’, Urban Studies, vol. 44, no. 8 (2007),
pp. 1539–58 respectively.
39 Shilpa Phadke, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men, Risk and Reputation in
Mumbai’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 17 (2007), pp. 1510–18;
Shilpa Ranade, ‘The Way She Moves: Mapping the Everyday Production of
Gender-Space’, Economic and Political Weekly, 42: 17 (2007), pp. 1519–26;
and Martyn Rogers, ‘Modernity, “Authenticity”, and Ambivalence: Subaltern
Masculinities on a South Indian College Campus’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute (N.S), vol. 4, no. 1 (2008), pp. 79–95.
40 Phadke, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’; Kalpana Vishwanath and Surabhi Tandon
Mehrotra,“‘Shall We Go Out?” Women’s Safety in Public Places in Delhi’,
Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42, no. 17 (2007), pp. 1542–48.
41 Phadke, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’.
42 Lawrence Cohen, ‘Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of Modernity’, GLQ 2
(1995), pp. 399–424.
43 See Sanjay Srivastava, Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class, and Consumption in
India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007), pp. 280–327.
44 Carole Pateman, ‘The Fraternal Social Contract’, in Rachel Adams and David
Savran (eds), The Masculinity Studies Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
45 Ghanshyam Shah, Social Movements in India: A Review of Literature (New Delhi:
Sage, 2004).
46 Bhagidari Report (Delhi: Government of Delhi, 2001).
47 John Harris, ‘Antinomies of Empowerment: Observations on Civil Society,
Politics and Urban Governance in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 42,
no. 26 (2007), pp. 2716–24.

Chapter 13.indd 434 11/11/2013 5:21:09 PM

 URBAN SPACES, POST-NATIONALISM  435

48 Abhilasha Ojha, ‘RWAs Will Soon Have Direct Control Over Sanitation and
Community Halls’, Indian Express, 12 January 1999 [www.indianexpress.com/
res/ple/ie/daily/19991201. Accessed 11 December 2007].
49 Ibid.
50 Aman Sethi, ‘The Price of Reforms’, Frontline, vol. 22, no. 19, 10 September
2005, pp. 5–6. For a more benign view of privatization, see Ravi Kanbur,
Development Disagreement and Water Privatization: Bridging the Divide, 2007
[http://www.arts.cornell.edu/poverty/kanbur/WaterPrivatization.pdf. Accessed
18 January 2009].
51 Sethi, ‘Price of Reforms’, p. 5.
52 Tanvi Sirari, Civil Uprisings in Contemporary India, Centre for Civil Society
Working Paper No. 161 (Delhi: Centre for Civil Society, 2006), p. 5.
53 Ibid.
54 William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in
Contemporary India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) and Fernandes,
India’s New Middle Class; Srivastava, Passionate Modernity.
55 ‘Colonial chic’ is reflected both in restaurant names such as ‘Days of the Raj’
as well as colonial era photos displayed at department stores that—proudly—
inform visitors about the store’s ‘history’.
56 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Patriotism and Its Futures’, Public Culture, vol. 11 (1993),
pp. 411–29.
57 Malathi de Alwis, Satish Deshpande, Pradeep Jeganathan, Mary John, Nivedita
Menon, Aditya Nigam, and Akbar S. Zaidi, ‘The Postnational Condition’,
Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 44, no. 10 (2009), p. 35.
58 Srivastava, Passionate Modernity.
59 Low, ‘Urban Fear’.
60 A.R. Sihag, N. Misra, and V. Sharma, Impact of Power Sector Reform on Poor:
A Case Study of South and South East Asia. Project Report No. 2002 RT 45
(New Delhi: Tata Energy Research Institute, 2002).
61 Sethi, ‘Price of Reforms’.
62 Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 132. See
also Vandana Madan (ed.), The Village in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2002).
63 Paul Greenough, ‘Nation, Economy, and Tradition Displayed: The Indian
Crafts Museum, New Delhi’, in Carol Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity:
Public Culture in a South Asian World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995).
64 Dupont, ‘The Idea of a New Chic Delhi’.
65 Madan (ed.), The Village in India.
66 Pramod K. Nayar, Reading Culture: Theory, Praxis, Politics (New Delhi: Sage,
2006), p. 189.
67 Ashis Nandy, An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins
of the Self in the Indian Imagination (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 20.
68 Sangeeta Kamat, Development Hegemony: NGOs and the State in India
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Chapter 13.indd 435 11/11/2013 5:21:09 PM

 436  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

69 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Akhil Gupta,
Postcolonial Development: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998); and Donald S. Moore, ‘Beyond Blackmail:
Multiple Modernities and the Cultural Politics of Development in India’,
in K.  Sivaramakrishnan and Arun Agarwal (eds), Regional Modernities: The
Cultural Politics of Development in India (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003).
70 On the cultures of the ‘Five-Year Plan’ state, see Srivastava, ‘The Voice of the
Nation’ and Roy, Beyond Belief, chapters One and Four.
71 Dipankar Gupta, Mistaken Modernity: India between Worlds (New Delhi: Harper
Collins, 2000) and Steve Derné, Globalization on the Ground: Media and the
Transformation of Culture, Class and Gender in India (New Delhi: Sage, 2008).
72 Gurpreet Mahajan, ‘Introduction: The Public and the Private: Two Modes of
Enhancing Democratization’, in Gurpreet Mahajan and Helmut Reifeld (eds),
The Public and the Private: Issues of Democratic Citizenship (New Delhi: Sage,
2003), p. 20.
73 Ibid.
74 See, for example, the contributions in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (eds),
Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2006).

Chapter 13.indd 436 11/11/2013 5:21:09 PM

 14
When the Revolution is Televised
Reflections on Media, Civil Society, and Power
in Contemporary India

Srirupa Roy

On 9 December 2007 several news channels in India broadcast video footage

from a ‘sting operation’ or a hidden camera investigation that had been car-
ried out by television journalists at a farm in Bihar, a state in eastern India.
The footage showed two young boys, barefoot and in torn clothes, straining
to pull a large tree trunk across a paddy field. A farmer explained in the video
that the children had been hired to plough his fields (the log was apparently
a makeshift plough) because the excessive rain in the area had prevented the
use of tractors or oxen that year.
The images were repeatedly broadcast over the next few days and the video
soon became a political scandal. It had come to light that the national min-
ister for Rural Development, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, owned the farm.
Opposition political parties called for Singh’s resignation on grounds of his
‘shocking’ participation in child labour practices, an act rendered even more
shocking by the fact that the children were from Dalit communities.1
National and international media and civic organizations highlighted
this story as an example of the atavistic and corrupt ways of India’s govern-
ing elite. ‘Indian shame: Union Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh’s child
slaves’ announced the dramatic banner headline at an anti-child labour web-
site (www.stolenchildhood.net). With parliamentary discussions and media
debates focusing on the problem of child labour, actors in the Indian politi-
cal and public sphere appeared to be engaging in a much-needed process of

Chapter 14.indd 437 11/11/2013 5:21:29 PM

 438  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

reflection on the uneven or highly unequal character of India’s economic

resurgence in recent years (albeit restricted to ‘egregious’ examples such as
child labour). This reflexive turn was enabled by India’s commercial news
media: it was after all the TV sting operation that had alerted public atten-
tion to this issue and created a focal point around which democratic concern
could coalesce.2 As in other celebrated cases of investigative print journalism
and new media ‘leaks’, Indian news television at least in this one instance
appeared to be bearing out the truth of liberal theories of ‘watchdog media’,
of how non-state media can contribute to the essential democratic goods
of accountability and transparency by keeping a watchful check on popular
representatives and publicizing wrongdoing.
Less than a week later the narrative of the intrepid fourth estate changed
quite dramatically. By mid-December a fresh set of revelations recast the
guilty minister as a victim of media entrapment. Investigations organized
by Singh and his party revealed that two local TV ‘stringers’—free-lance
journalists who work for television channels—had paid two children from
the government school 20 rupees each (approximately $4) to pose as child
labourers. The story was renamed as a ‘fake sting’.
By way of explanation Singh offered a familiar story of political intrigue,
and claimed that the sting had been authorized by rival politicians. However,
several media critics deepened the level of analysis, moving from the imme-
diacy of political machinations to a different and more structural narrative
about the workings of cultural capital and metropolitan, upper-caste preju-
dice. In this narrative the power differentials at work were not between the
rulers and the ruled as had originally been asserted, but between the tiny
minority of the Delhi-based media elite and plebian politicians like Singh, a
resident of Bihar, one of the least developed states in India.
By the end of December Singh’s stand was vindicated when a governmen-
tal inquiry by the Bihar Labour Commission supported his version of events.
The sting was found to be ‘stage-managed:’ the school children confessed to
investigators that four men on motorcycles had paid them money to drag a
papaya tree trunk across a field. He continued as minister and media atten-
tion soon shifted to other issues.
The story of the fake sting is the point of departure for this essay. As we
have seen already, this is an incident that produced two very different inter-
pretations of the relationship between non-state, commercial news media
and democracy. Thus while liberal commentators hailed the child labour
sting as an example of how the news media enables the emergence of limited,
accountable political power, others, particularly in the wake of the ‘fake sting’

Chapter 14.indd 438 11/11/2013 5:21:29 PM

 when the revolution is televised   439

revelation, saw it as an example of how the media consolidates the dominance

of a narrow elite and undermines rather than deepens the pursuit and prac-
tice of democracy in India.
In this particular instance the liberal imagination of the media-democracy
relationship was proved to be unfounded in empirical reality. However, in a
myriad other cases the normative impasse is unresolved, and opinions about the
relationship between media and democracy remain polarized between what we
might call ‘accountability-promotion’ and ‘power-consolidation’ perspectives.
Resolving this impasse requires a move beyond a­ccountability-promotion
theories of the media or the view that the ‘communicative abundance’ pro-
duced by new and old media institutions and technologies can enable the
reflexive, limited, and popularly responsive exercise of delegated political
power that characterizes representative democracies.3 At the same time the
optic of power or the view that commercial media are the means and site for
the elaboration and consolidation of elite dominance requires reworking as
well, and it is this task that I take up in this essay.
I argue that to understand the social and political implications of the child
labor sting we need to reject both liberal and critical theories of the news
media and their respective views of how ‘autonomous’ news media enhance
democratic accountability and how ‘elitist’ news media entrench hierarchies
of power. Moving away from the two opposed archetypes of the ‘public inter-
est journalist’ and the ‘journalist as corporate pawn’ that framed discussions
of the (fake) child labor sting, I draw attention instead to the four men on
motorcycles who paid the 20 rupees, and the role of stringers in the story of
news media liberalization. I ask what happens to existing theories of democ-
racy when we place the social and political aspirations, relations, and practices
of these ‘provincial’ and ‘vernacular’ subjects at centre stage: subjects who are
neither powerful nor powerless, neither ‘slumdogs’ nor ‘millionaires;’ subjects
whose political agency cannot be captured by the binary paradigm of domi-
nation and resistance that often governs our discussions of power.

***
The liberal imagination of civil society as the motor of good governance
depicts civil society as an autonomous, disinterested, and effectively weight-
less space that is unmoored from structures of power. In contrast, critical
perspectives on civil society have argued that hierarchies of power and struc-
tures and practices of inequality play a central and constitutive role and that
civil society theorists must replace the familiar optic of good governance with
that of power.4

Chapter 14.indd 439 11/11/2013 5:21:29 PM

 440  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

But while they are a welcome departure from the ideal-typical and ahis-
torical accounts of liberal theory, power theories of civil society have several
analytical flaws. First, they reproduce what we might call (pace Danny Boyle)
the ‘slumdog syndrome’ or the binary understanding of power and inequal-
ity as a dichotomous, zero-sum relationship between subalterns and elites.
Critical discussions about the non-state media, institutional presences that
are regarded as facilitators or promoters of civil society values and practices
or even as civil society entities themselves, commonly echo this view-
point. In scholarly as well as public discussions, liberal understandings of
the media-democracy relationship—how the free media facilitate account-
able government and informed deliberation by citizens—are rejected for
accounts of how the commercialized or corporate controlled media promote
free-­market ideologies and further the power of elite and middle-class con-
stituencies while ignoring the needs and interests of the mass poor.5
For example, in her study of the rise of the new Indian middle classes in
the era of economic reform, political scientist Leela Fernandes has argued that
commercial news media routinely provide a platform for the urban middle
classes to assert and exercise political and cultural hegemony.6 This selective
prioritization of urban middle class and elite interests over those of rural and
poor sections of the population in fact secures the stable passage of economic
liberalization policies, as elite winners of the reform process are given voice,
while mass losers are marginalized and silenced.
The problem with this elite versus mass dichotomy is that it fails to cap-
ture the complexities of graded and intersecting inequality in India (and in
most other countries in the world), or the fact that inequalities are consti-
tuted along multiple continuums of power. Interestingly while this insight is
central to Fernandes’ main argument about the fragmented and contradic-
tory character of the Indian middle classes, when it comes to the discussion of
the non-state news media in India, she sets aside her nuanced consideration
of internal contradictions to reproduce an undifferentiated understanding
of the media as a tool and mouthpiece of elite/middle-class interests. Yet
as we will shortly see the conflation of commercial news media with elite
and middle-class interests is empirically inaccurate. While urban middle class
consumers are an important constituency for some television news organ-
izations (particularly their marketing departments), they are by no means
the only, or even the primary, imagined audience. Moreover the bulk of the
labour of news production is performed by ‘vernacular’ or provincial, lower-
middle class subjects, and the aspirational practices of this important though

Chapter 14.indd 440 11/11/2013 5:21:29 PM

 when the revolution is televised   441

­ nacknowledged group are critical to an understanding of the non-state

u
media in the age of economic liberalization.
The second problem with power theories of civil society has to do with
their metropolitan bias or the assumption that the big city is the site where
civil society (particularly its contemporary neoliberal avatar) finds its fullest
expression. Reversing the village-centric focus of an earlier generation of social
science scholarship on India (and on other non-western polities), where rural
locations were hailed as the authentic research sites and peasant communi-
ties as the paradigmatic research subjects, cities such as Bombay, Bangalore,
Chennai, Delhi, or Calcutta have emerged as the favoured hunting grounds
of researchers on civil society in the age of economic liberalization.7 Indeed
it would appear that barring a few notable exceptions,8 inquiries into the
political, cultural, and social effects of economic liberalization are confined
to urban/metropolitan locations. Other kinds of spatial ‘elsewheres,’ particu-
larly those that resist the neatness of metropolitan and rural categorizations,
remain outside our scholarly purview.
Yet as we will see, life is elsewhere. The civil society politics charted by John
Harriss and Arjun Appadurai, and the practices of political society mapped
by Partha Chatterjee have their counterparts in the countless small towns of
India, a nomenclature that indexes not so much a demographic or territorial
evaluation of size, but rather the symbolic-cultural marginalization and even
non-relevance of these sites in the national imagination. Despite this symbolic
and academic marginalization, small town or provincial India has recently
emerged as a significant and even privileged site for the incursions of capital.
Market research reports prepared for major transnational corporations have
located the ‘growing marketplace’ of the country in urban centers other than
the six major ‘metros’ of Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, Hyderabad, and
Bangalore.9 According to the market researchers of Ernst and Young, these
are the venues in which the all-important ‘Dhoni Effect’—a reference to the
small town origins of the captain of the Indian cricket team, Mahendra Singh
Dhoni—is realized:

growing affluence levels, increased awareness due to media penetration, improved

physical connectivity and significant changes in consumption patterns with high
aspiration levels in smaller towns … are now compelling marketers to take notice of
the needs of this growing marketplace.10

While rejecting the teleological thrust of this narrative of steady progress

toward consumerist utopias, this essay issues a similar call to take notice of

Chapter 14.indd 441 11/11/2013 5:21:29 PM

 442  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

non-metropolitan India as a significant site where the politics and practices

of neoliberal civil society may be apprehended.
What follows is an ethnographically informed account of the political
and social worlds of non-state or liberalized news media.11 In contrast to
the content-centric focus of existing discussions of news television, where
­content-analysis and reception studies constitute the dominant method-
ologies, the emphasis in this essay is on the ‘economy of practices’12 that
surrounds non-state news media and the new social and political relations,
structures, and identities that are constituted in and through the activities of
liberalized news-making in contemporary India. Through this practice-based
discussion of media liberalization I offer an account of power in/and civil
society in the context of neo-liberalism that (1) moves beyond the binary
conception of inequality as a relation between haves and have-nots to focus
on the social, political, and economic power of subaltern elites—what we
might call the ‘have somes’—in liberalizing India; and (2) corrects the met-
ropolitan bias of power theories through a focus on small towns, where the
politics of the subaltern elite finds its fullest expression.
The argument proceeds in the following manner. The first section sets
the context by reviewing the specific historical trajectory of media liberaliza-
tion in the country, or the dynamics of ‘actually existing liberalization’.13 The
second section addresses the political implications of media liberalization.
The specific example discussed is that of stringer politics, or the social and
political practices and aspirations of small town stringers (free-lance journal-
ists): the unrecognized but indispensable foot-soldiers of the Indian media
revolution. The essay concludes by considering the broader implications of
the finding that media and civil society organizations in neo-liberal contexts
produce and sustain the power of subaltern elites, and graded rather than
binary configurations of power and inequality.

The Legacies of Patchwork Reform

The news media arena of post-independence India has been structured by
a combination of state control and market competition. In large part, the
balance between state and market has been sectorally specific, with privately
owned print media organizations flourishing since the early years of inde-
pendence, while television and radio news were monopolized by the central
state. The monopoly over television (content and distribution) ended in
the early 1990s. Until that time, news was broadcast on the single, state-
owned channel Doordarshan. Just two decades later, there are approximately

Chapter 14.indd 442 11/11/2013 5:21:29 PM

 when the revolution is televised   443

37 privately owned 24-hour news channels broadcasting in national, regional,

and local arenas, giving India the dubious distinction of having the largest
number of news channels in the world.
While the transformation is undoubtedly dramatic—from one to thirty-
odd news channels in just twenty years—the underlying process of news
media liberalization in India has in fact been a gradual, even an ad hoc pro-
cess, one that is most accurately described in terms of non-regulation rather
than de-regulation. Media liberalization has followed from the decision of the
state to not intervene in the social-political terrain charted by the availability
of new technologies such as satellite broadcasting, rather than from a singular
policy decision to end the state’s monopoly on broadcast news or to dis-
mantle existing regulatory frameworks.14 Even today the colonial era Indian
Telegraph Act (1885) continues to govern private media, and there is a for-
midable array of regulatory weapons available to the Ministry of Information
and Broadcasting (as also to a range of other ministries and state agencies)
that enable the central state to exert considerable regulatory authority on the
private news media organizations in the country. However this authority is
selectively exercised. What has resulted is a loophole filled, patchwork regime
of state control over media rather than the absence of such a regime as com-
monly asserted in public debates on the media. The Hindi term jugād. that
literally means getting by, making do, or improvising is an accurate descrip-
tion of the ad hoc quality of media liberalization dynamics in India.15
This account of media liberalization as jugād. or improvisation has two
specific implications, as elaborated below.

State–Media Relations
The first has to do with the relationship between state and commercial
media, or between state and capital in a broader sense. The mini-steps of
jugād. as opposed to the grand strides of decisive structural transformation,
and the phenomenon of non-regulation and the passive state as opposed to
an active state policy of deregulation have meant that state authority plays a
central role in the commercial media field. The relationship between state
and commercial media in India is an accommodative rather than an opposi-
tional one, with accommodations ranging from individual level transactions
(for example, owners of media houses sharing a very close relationship with
state officials) to state-centric journalistic practices (the fact that questions
of government and state authority continue to be a central theme of news
­coverage by journalists from private TV news channels).

Chapter 14.indd 443 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 444  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

In this regard it is worth remembering that despite the constitutional defi-

nition of India as a socialist republic,16 the economic system of India in the
pre-liberalization period was structured along state capitalist lines. As sociolo-
gists Pranab Bardhan and Vivek Chhibber have argued, the alliance between
state and capital has been a central and formative feature of Indian politi-
cal economy, with the ‘dominant proprietary classes’ of Nehruvian India
comprising bureaucrats or state officials as well as owners of agrarian and
industrial capital.17 This accommodative alliance between state agents and
capitalists has continued in the post-reform era as well,18 although the iden-
tity of the partners have changed, as has the different political levels (national,
as well as regional and local) at which these state-capital alliances are forged.
Commercial news media organizations exist in India today at each one
of these levels: there are numerous local, regional, and national news chan-
nels, broadcasting in a variety of different languages. And while each of these
media fields has a distinctive constitution—thus for instance there are signifi-
cant differences in the structure and composition of Bengali and Tamil news
industries—state actors and institutions play a central, structuring role in
all cases. The familiar practice of state supplication continues to be a central
element of the news media universe, whether this takes the form of daily chai
(tea and conversation) sessions between the owner of a local news channel
and the sub-inspector of the police station, or business association lobbying,19
campaign donations to political parties, and requests for nomination to gov-
ernmental committees and commissions and even to Parliament on the part
of national news organizations. Going against the grain of arguments that pit
state control against market control, the state-oriented structure of the liber-
alized media field in India calls into question the autonomy of commercial
media vis-à-vis the state (and by extension, what Pierre Bourdieu describes as
their ‘heterenomy’ vis-à-vis market forces).20
Elsewhere I have written about the state mythologies of post-independence
India, and the ways in which official and private media texts disseminated
idealized portrayals of a monumental or ‘transcendent’ state that would pro-
tect, guide, and develop an ‘infantile nation’.21 While contemporary television
news media coverage no longer portrays the state-nation relationship in terms
of tutelage and guardianship, the enduring fascination with transcendent
state mythologies is still very much in evidence, although now it is the global
rather than the national-developmental register that shapes the news coverage
of the state. Thus, it is no longer the building of the big dam and the associ-
ated promises of miraculous and rapid economic development, but the role
of the Indian state as a global player, able to negotiate a nuclear deal with

Chapter 14.indd 444 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 when the revolution is televised   445

the United States as an equal rather than a supplicant; or the apparently daz-
zling speeches delivered by the Indian Finance minister Chidambaram at the
World Economic Summit in Davos, that makes the evening news.
To summarize, state-media relations in India are generally characterized
by ‘conviviality’ and proximity rather than antagonism or opposition,22 each
viewing the other as a partner in a common, and dirigiste, enterprise. The
dirigiste nature of the partnership requires close attention, since it attests
to another distinctive feature of actually existing media liberalization in the
country, namely the self-positioning of commercial media at the helm of
national affairs alongside the state, as the guides and guardians of the nation
and its citizens.
With the patchwork and gradualist process of media liberalization result-
ing in a situation where state actors and ideologies continue to structure
the liberalized media landscape, we find media professionals synthesizing
public interest and social responsibility discourses with market-driven com-
pulsions of maximizing audience numbers and profitability. Considerations
about serving the public interest, or of news journalism as a significant social
vocation, inform the self-understanding of many television journalists, who
continue to truck in developmentalist vocabularies that bear more than a
passing resemblance to dominant state ideologies from the pre-reform era.
For instance, journalists working for English language channels will hasten
to distance themselves from the ‘sensationalist’ and ‘tabloid-style’ journal-
ism of their Hindi language counterparts by describing their journalism as a
reflection of ‘what people need’ rather than ‘what people want’. For several
senior journalists I interviewed, English media has a responsibility to provide
people with information that is useful or meaningful even if there is no popu-
lar realization or expression of the need, a statement that closely echoes the
pedagogical and developmentalist imperatives of state television.23
Perhaps the most interesting example of how the commercial media ‘acts
like a state’ is the phenomenon of media activism in India today. Since 2005,
national television news organizations have focused their attention on par-
ticular issues, and have devoted considerable screen-time (as well as financial
resources) to what they describe as ‘campaigns for justice’. Each of these
campaigns, although presented as a national, public interest service that is
being selflessly being undertaken by the media, has advanced the cause of
an individual who belongs to a particular social-economic group, namely,
the urban upper-middle classes. Media campaigns such as the Justice for
Jessica campaign of 2006–7,24 as well as other kinds of self-described advo-
cacy campaigns around various issues of ‘human interest’ and ‘social need’

Chapter 14.indd 445 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 446  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

(for instance, blood and organ donation drives; monetary appeals for natu-
ral disaster relief and rehabilitation efforts) variously constitute commercial
media as parastatal entities, or organizations that act like, and in fact take the
place of, the state in the crucial task of providing for the everyday and extra-
ordinary needs of citizens.
Similar to non-governmental entities in other parts of the world in the era
of economic reform, the commercial media in India have taken on the role
and attributes of a ‘shadow state’,25 and in this sense they do not so much
ignore or reject the role of the state in social life as mirror or emulate it.26 As
a result, we have the apparently paradoxical phenomenon of the proliferation
of statist ideologies and modular images of the ideal state in and by the non-
state media.

Media–Capital Relations
The second structural implication of the patchwork and gradualist reform
trajectory of media liberalization has to do with the relationship between
media and capital. As the preceding account of ‘cable enterprise’ indicates,
the field of commercial media has from the outset been suffused with a vari-
ety of different entrepreneurial energies and practices. The familiar specter of
powerful corporate or transnational media taking over the journalistic field
is inadequate as a description of the forces and dynamics that constitute this
field. Instead, media liberalization in India has given rise to, and in turn is
propelled by, formal as well as informal (corporate as well as non-­corporate
or entrepreneurial/petty-bourgeois) capitalist structures and relations.27
Moreover, other non-capitalist social relations and networks, such as those
constituted around political power, caste, and regional identity also play a
determinative role.
Although for the purposes of this essay I would like to focus on the commer-
cial media arena alone, the observation about the diversity of capitalist forms
and imperatives that structure media liberalization, and the co-existence of cor-
porate and ‘enterprise capitalism’ can be generalized to the broader economic
arena, as a description of the post-reform Indian political economy in a broader
sense.28 Thus, although the spectacular rise of Indian capitalist houses in the
global arena is taken to be the leitmotif of Indian economic growth, what is
equally important is the proliferation of entrepreneurial activities on a smaller,
local, and informal-unorganized scale. Simply put, it is not just the listing of
Indian corporate firms on global stock exchanges, but equally the mushroom-
ing of small-scale local enterprises in small towns that attests to the economic

Chapter 14.indd 446 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 when the revolution is televised   447

transformation underway in India in recent years: the billboards promoting

coaching institutes for careers as diverse as flight attendants, beauty queens,
and graphic designers; the advertisements for English medium schools in loca-
tions such as Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh that are the main revenue stream local
cable news networks; and the agrarian retail hubs set up both by industry giants
such as Reliance and local entrepreneurs in district towns throughout India.
This co-existence of organized and informal/entrepreneurial capital is a prom-
inent feature of the commercial news media field as well. Thus, the remarkable
growth of the television news industry is linked to investment decisions made
both by large industrial houses that are listed on the Indian stock exchange, as
well as by regional real estate firms, political parties, or (particularly in the local
markets) wealthy and socially-politically powerful individuals and families. The
mixed capitalist constitution of commercial media field immediately points
to the interplay of mixed or diverse interests that drive news-making practices
and the news industry in a broader sense: i.e. it is not simply the imperative
of creating surplus value for capital, but imperatives related to social and even
individual-level aspirations and status anxieties and to political/partisan con-
cerns that equally shape the worlds of commercial media in India.
Although scholarly and popular attention is mostly directed to the corpo-
ratized elements of this field, i.e. the practices and outputs of major national
news houses such as NDTV, Television Eighteen, Television Today, these
comprise only a part, (and that too, a minority part) of contemporary Indian
news media. Take for instance the case of television news organizations that
broadcast in the Hindi language, and have a national presence (i.e. they can be
received in metropolitan centres across the country). While most of the estab-
lished market leaders are owned by publicly listed corporations29 this field
also comprises media organizations such as India TV, News 24, LiveIndia TV,
and Janmat, each of which represents different forms of investment capital,
ranging from non-publicly listed but nevertheless corporate entities to indi-
vidual/family proprietorships with undeclared investment sources.30
The exact sources and nature of capital investment in the news media
industry remain obscure and the various allegations and rumours about
political interests that drive the news media are unsubstantiated. But India’s
news media boom does defy market logics, in that a television news channel
is more often than not a loss-making venture, as prohibitively high personnel
costs and various other forms of fixed expenditure do not recompense for
advertising revenue. The question then arises as to what exactly drives the
media business, and it is here that other, non-market based considerations
enter the picture.

Chapter 14.indd 447 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 448  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

An anecdote that was related to me by a senior news executive in a national

news channel hints at some of these considerations. A prominent editor of
a national newspaper was approached a few years ago by a builder or a real
estate entrepreneur from the city of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, who ran a
profitable business of selling apartments in complexes built and designed by
his firm. The builder asked the editor to help him in setting up a twenty-four
hour news channel in Lucknow, and offered a handsome payment for his
services.31 The editor expressed surprise that this individual would want to
spend his money on a news channel, and inquired into the rationale for this
decision. The builder’s reply had nothing to do with market logics, but was
instead a fascinating account about politics, power, and aspirations.
In the course of his ordinary business dealings, the builder recounted, he
had to frequently interact with state officials and politicians. Although he
was a man of considerable financial standing, that made no difference to
the local civil servants (the district magistrates, the police officers, and other
state agents) who he had to visit with his various business-related requests.
He would be made to wait in these state offices, whereas young men carrying
press cards were granted immediate access to the corridors of power. If they
were representatives of television news channels, their ease of entry was even
greater. The builder had concluded that the ownership of a television news
channel would elevate him into these distinguished ranks, and that his build-
ing business would prosper if he could reinvent himself as a TV-wala [‘TV
guy,’ a commonly used colloquial Hindi term].
‘So you see, it’s not about profit, it’s about power,’ my informant concluded,
offering this anecdote as a response to my query into the causes of India’s
news media revolution. While this distinction between power and profit or
between the separate logics of political and economic capital accumulation is
of course simplistically etched, it points to the multiple impulses that produce
and sustain media liberalization in contemporary India. By extension, the
impact or the social-cultural implications of media liberalization are equally
diverse and variegated. The broad brushstroke narrative of how commercial
media presence enhances urban middle class power and enshrines the domi-
nance of consumer culture32 thus requires considerable modification.

Stringer Politics
So far I have argued that the historical and institutional dynamics of media
liberalization in India has structured the relationship between media and
the state and between media and capital in ways that contradict dominant

Chapter 14.indd 448 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 when the revolution is televised   449

understandings of these relations. First, proximity or conviviality rather than

opposition or autonomy characterizes the state-media relationship. And
second, the media-capital relationship reflects the presence of diverse forms
of capital in the media industry, and the co-existence of profit-seeking and
power-seeking as the twin imperatives of media liberalization. Each of these
conclusions is consequential for our overarching discussion of the transform-
ative impact of media liberalization on Indian democracy. In this final section
of the essay, I turn to this question of impact, through an ethnographic con-
sideration of I would submit is the ultimate social foundation of the news
media industry, namely, the world and the work of stringers.33
The term stringer refers to free-lance journalists who are paid on a
­piece-rate basis, according to the number of articles/stories they submit to a
news organization.34 Stringers are a familiar presence in news media circles
all across the world, and the Indian media arena is no exception. As Sevanti
Ninan has recently documented in her careful study of the Hindi newspaper
industry in Northern India, the development of a substantial stringer net-
work is both the hallmark of twenty-first century Hindi news journalism,
and the motor for its growth, that is, the remarkable boom of the Hindi news
industry at a time when newspaper readership and circulation is declining
across the world is largely due to the availability of this pool of cheap labour.35
Like their newspaper counterparts, stringers have a substantial presence in
the television news industry as well. Although contemporary discussions of
the television news industry focus on the activities of top editors, marketing
executives, and media owners in the Delhi-based national headquarters of
news organizations, the demographic basis of the media boom is the group
of young men and women throughout the country who actually supply the
news that appears on our television screens. The stringer-driven nature of the
news industry is well known to industry insiders, who attribute the success
of different news channels36 to the breadth of their respective stringer net-
works. In other words, the availability of a cheap pool of labour rather than
cutting-edge technology or senior editorial expertise is widely considered to
be the differentiating factor in the competitive environment of television
news ­journalism.
In what follows I examine the implications of the ‘stringer phenomenon’
through a discussion of stringers in the Indian state of Bihar, a nodal state for
the Hindi television news industry. Every national news channel has a bureau
in the state that is headquartered in the capital city of Patna. Although the
senior journalists of the state are stationed here, the bulk of the reporting
originates from the stringers located in the different districts of the state,

Chapter 14.indd 449 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 450  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

and coordinating the stringer network is the main task of the Patna bureau.
Stringer recruitment and retention practices vary across channels, but there
are several similarities that justify the notion of a single stringer system for the
Hindi television news industry. Broadly speaking the contours of this system
are as follows:

News Flow
Bureau chiefs handle stringer networks for their channels, which could com-
prise between six and thirty-odd individuals, located in the different districts of
the state. In Bihar, as in most other northern and eastern Indian states, string-
ers double as reporters and camera-people. They are mostly male, and have
either youth (or the will and energy to work hard and drive long distances!) on
their side, or else are well connected with local state and social forces. Stringers
co-ordinate with the Patna bureau by phone calls, informing the Patna journal-
ist of any interesting stories in their area (or of stories being covered by a rival
channel), and in turn receiving directions from Patna (via Delhi) on stories that
require coverage. Some bureaus coordinate and plan monthly schedules for
their stringers, both to ensure that stringers receive a decent monthly income
(since they are paid per story broadcast on the channel), and to fulfil the ‘story
filing quotas’ that are imposed on them by the Delhi headquarters.
If the story is not an urgent one, then the tape is sent to Patna either by
courier, or through a variety of different means. These include the ingenious
use of an informal ‘bus delivery’ service, where the stringer hands the tape
to the driver or conductor of a night bus travelling to Patna, and a journalist
from the Patna office meets the bus and picks up the tape. If there is ‘break-
ing news’ pressure to deliver immediately, the stringer travels to the nearest
cybercafé offering broadband facilities, and uplinks the tape directly to the
Delhi newsroom.
The footage is edited either in Patna or in Delhi (the stringer provides
‘script inputs’ that may or may not be incorporated) prior to broadcast. In
many cases, stringers don’t actually watch the final broadcast of their story,
because the channel is not received in their home location.

Recruitment
Patna bureau chiefs recruit and select stringers through formal and infor-
mal means. Formal recruitment takes place when a new television channel
is being established and an open call for job applications is announced.

Chapter 14.indd 450 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 when the revolution is televised   451

Informal recruitment takes place in a variety of different ways, for example,

the familiar industry practice of ‘poaching’ or luring stringers from rival chan-
nels (through the offer of more competitive remuneration, or the promise
of more stories broadcast on television); connections to individuals who are
associated with private journalism training institutes in Patna and other parts
of the state and can provide a fresh batch of graduates every few months;
chance encounters with promising young people in the course of field report-
ing in districts and rural areas; and finally the practice of what we might call
instrumental recruitment or the offer of a stringership to someone who is in
a position to return the favour to the bureau chief at a later time.

Qualifications
The basic qualification for the position is the ownership of a camcorder, as
I soon realized when I reviewed a pool of 170 job applications submitted
to a Hindi language news channel that had recently set up a Patna bureau.
Multiple applicants for stringer positions at the channel submitted photo-
copies of receipts proving that they had purchased a camcorder in recent
months. In at least four cases the proof of purchase was submitted in lieu of
documentary proof of educational or professional qualifications for the job.
Since the grey market price of a basic camcorder is significant, at around
Rs  20,000–25,000 (approximately $500), the investment in this piece of
equipment can only be justified against the expectation of future rewards.
From this simple camcorder economy we can conclude that considerable
social-economic value accrues to the stringer occupation, at least in Bihar.
Apart from this basic infrastructural qualification, there didn’t appear to
be other, educational or skill-based qualifications that were upheld in any sys-
tematic manner. Several bureau heads explained to me that often ‘raw talent’
and ‘inexperience’ were more of an asset than education or training; and
this ‘raw talent’ was something that could be spotted instantly, but was hard
to describe. It involved a combination of enthusiasm, a willingness to work
hard, and what one senior journalist described as the ‘fire in the belly’ syn-
drome, of people who were eager, and even desperate to get work as a stringer.

Finances
For news channels, the financial cost of maintaining a stringer system is mini-
mal. Some channels provide tape stock while others reimburse a set number
of tapes, which cost around Rs 120 ($ 3) each.37 Transportation costs are

Chapter 14.indd 451 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 452  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

reimbursed occasionally, that is, the expenses incurred in the process of trav-
elling from the stringer’s home location to either the nearest data centre from
where s/he can transmit or uplink her/his video footage or the courier cost of
sending a tape to the Patna bureau. However, given the non-formal nature of
the stringer appointment and the fact that the stringership deals are usually
struck verbally (a formal letter acknowledging employment is usually pre-
sented as a certificate at the time the stringer leaves the organization), many
of these expenses are not reimbursed (most notably, the cost of petrol and/or
local transport to actually travel to a location to cover a story).
Remuneration for stringers varies across channels, with the most generous
pay-scale set at Rs 800–Rs 1200 ($20–$30) for a story that is broadcast on
the news channel.38 Since the broadcasting decision is usually made in the
Delhi newsroom, or through telephone and email negotiations between the
Patna bureau chief and the production and editorial team in Delhi, the indi-
vidual stringer has no control over the price of his labour.
Payment is also extremely episodic: stringers have to come into the Patna
office to receive their dues, often nine-ten months after their stories are com-
pleted. Here again an informal but trust-based relationship is in place, as
stringers have no formal proof of whether or not the story was actually aired.
In the case of one stringer I interviewed, the district that she lived in did not
receive the channel for which she worked, so she would have been unable
to verify the broadcast record even if she had wanted to monitor daily news
bulletins herself.
Several channels I encountered in Bihar had established an ingenious prac-
tice of doing away with remunerations for stringers altogether, by devising a
training/internship program for individuals who were desperate for a foot-
hold in the world of television journalism. The local channel PTN, started
by a former stringer for Zee News (a national Hindi news channel), and
took this to its ultimate level, where trainees were charged for the privilege of
working for the channel. Srikanth Pratyush the owner-editor explained that
this was a far better deal than the traditional route of enrolling in a diploma
course in journalism. While media institutes charged high fees for a diploma
course that lasted six months to a year, students who came to him could
make a single ‘lifetime fee’ payment of Rs 5000, and gain access to ‘on-the-
job training’ for long as they wanted! For those who could not afford this
payment, Pratyush offered a different scheme. He encouraged local unem-
ployed or underemployed youth to mill around outside his office building
in downtown Patna, waiting to be dispatched with office camcorders to the
site of a ‘breaking news’ event. All they needed to have was a ‘two-wheeler’

Chapter 14.indd 452 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 when the revolution is televised   453

or a motorcycle/moped of their own,39 and a willingness to be available all

day outside the PTN building, waiting for breaking news.40 That Pratyush’s
office was flooded by applications to undertake such free journalistic labour
attests to the enormous social, political, and cultural value of the television
news profession.

Political and Social Effects

As the above description of the stringer system suggests, the rapid growth
of the Indian television news industry has led to the proliferation of pre-
carious or uncertain employment practices at the local level. These have
specific political and social effects. The fluctuating and episodic remunera-
tion received by stringers, and the unregulated conditions under which they
labour shapes their political and social agency in specific ways, all of which
disrupt the vision of ‘clean politics’ or the promise of increased political trans-
parency and accountability and social empowerment made by advocates of
media and economic liberalization.
Most stringers rely upon other sources of livelihood. While in some cases
the alternative occupations have no connections with television journalism
(for example, farming or other agrarian occupations based on inherited access
to land), in a majority of cases the social and political value that accrues to
the position of a stringer is parlayed into economic gain. For instance, several
of my informants spoke of how stringers command large dowries in the local
marriage market. In fact, in recognition of the high social and political status
of stringers, the prevailing economy of dowry demands made by the prospec-
tive groom’s family now includes camcorders—the essential ‘qualification’ for
employment as a stringer—alongside consumer goods such as refrigerators,
televisions, or motorcycles.
Stringers also enhance their income by bargaining with their own and
with rival channels over the placement of a story. For instance, stringers
often approach a channel with an ‘exclusive’ story that has been promised
to a competitor in the effort to receive a higher payment for their work.
At times, the threat to undertake such an action (‘I will take this story to
Channel X unless…’) elicits a pay hike from the current employer, though
this depends upon the magnitude and urgency, and hence the news value, of
the story that is being used as a bargaining chip. Due to the particular time
constraints under which twenty-four hour news channels operate in India,
stringers also play a role in the assignment of news value. The industry-wide
emphasis on the importance of being the first to cover breaking news means

Chapter 14.indd 453 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 454  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

that channels have limited opportunity to cross-check details of a story or to

otherwise obtain independent verification of the stringers’ claims about news
value. As a result, the bargaining practices stringers engage in can effectively
create or produce news (that is, add news value to an otherwise unremark-
able incident). The story of the ‘fake sting’ with which this essay began is
a classic example of news creation by stringers in an effort to supplement
their incomes. In this particular case, stringers working for two Hindi news
channels came up with the idea, reasoning that it was politically scandalous
enough to guarantee broadcast and hence payment.
This finding contradicts both liberal and Marxist understandings of the
relationship between media liberalization and democracy. For the former, lib-
eralized media produces and disseminates more and better information than
its statist counterparts, while for the latter, liberalized media produces and
circulates corporate controlled information. The Indian example of stringer-
driven news production supports neither of these conclusions. As we have
noted, the ‘bargained news’ aired on private television channels reflects the
livelihood concerns of local stringers rather than journalistic commitments
to democratic citizenship (as liberal media theorists would have it) or the
interests of corporate capital (as Marxist media critics claim).
Apart from their influence on the news industry and news-making prac-
tices, stringers also exercise their bargaining power in a wider social and
political arena. In regional news bureaus, journalists routinely trade accounts
of the various deals struck by stringers in the effort to earn a sustainable
income. AMJ, a senior journalist in the national news channel NDTV’s
Patna office recounted one such story, of how a stringer with the regional
channel Sahara Samay leveraged his journalistic contacts to receive a road-
building contract worth 10 million rupees from a local legislator (MLA),41
and then sold this to a local contractor for a commission of 1 million rupees.
Economic uncertainty—and the various backchannel manoeuvres to
which it gives rise—affects stringers working for both newspaper and televi-
sion. For example, the Hindi daily Hindustan pays its stringers ten rupees per
story. Even if the stringer is very prolific and writes five stories each day, he
spends around Rs 100 on that same day on petrol for his motorcycle, and on
assorted expenses (such as tea and chewing tobacco). To make up the differ-
ence of Rs 50, he turns to inventive means of income supplementation, such
as leveraging his press status to act as an ‘intermediary to power’. Journalist
AMJ provided a concrete example in his account of a stringer’s role as a ‘go
between’ at the local police station. The scenario was explained to me by
other journalists as well, of how in district and village police stations or at

Chapter 14.indd 454 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 when the revolution is televised   455

the local administrative headquarters, stringers spend their day chatting with
the local officials over cups of tea. When ordinary citizens approach these
offices with particular problems and grievances, they are duly impressed by
the stringers’ apparent familiarity with power. The stringer then pays a visit
to the citizen, and offers to act as a broker or go-between: upon payment of
a suitable ‘commission’ he will ensure that the problem or grievance receives
a hearing. In nearly all cases, the offer is accepted, and the stringer is able to
supplement his income and enhance his social and political status as a local
‘big man’.
In all of these instances, we see how news media liberalization has led to
the emergence of new practices of crony politics that access political and eco-
nomic power through routes of questionable legality. Although the examples
cited here are from the lowest levels of the news pyramid, similar practices of
political hustling can also be noticed at the national level. Although this is
beyond the scope of this particular essay, the argument can also be extended
beyond the immediate context of the television news industry as well, to
characterize the practices and cultures of national politics in India in the era
of economic liberalization.
On the face of it crony politics does not merit wholesale condemnation.
After all in India’s unequal society, where positions of social and economic
privilege have been historically occupied by a narrow elite, economic lib-
eralization (and its specific subset, news media liberalization) has opened
up opportunities for individuals marginalized on grounds of class and caste
backgrounds, who lack access to the requisite economic and cultural capital.
The practices of backchannel politics described in this section have allowed
many ‘provincial Indians’—those from non-metropolitan backgrounds who
lack fluency in English, the long-standing language of power—to realize their
aspirations and achieve considerable social and economic mobility. The life
histories of stringers such as Pooja Misra, a young female stringer from the
town of Purnea in Bihar, or of Srikanth Pratyush, who started his career as a
stringer for Zee News and is today the owner-editor of his own cable news
channel in Patna attest to the social churning underway in different parts of
the country, as new career opportunities and new avenues for socio-economic
mobility are made available to individuals and groups hitherto shut out of
circles of privilege.42
For both Pratyush and Misra, as for the thousands of other stringers pres-
ently working in the television news industry, previously rigid hierarchies
constituted by linguistic and spatial capital are no longer as consequential.
As Pratyush put it, he always had a nasha (addiction) for journalism that he

Chapter 14.indd 455 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 456  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

was hesitant to pursue due to his lack of English-speaking skills. However,

he soon ‘realized’ that he could learn English ‘all by himself ’, and was able
to become a ‘successful and well-known journalist’. The point here is not
so much about the redundancy of English-language skills in contemporary
India. After all, the mushrooming of English-language coaching institutes
throughout the country attests to the opposite. Instead, Pratyush’s comments
highlight perceptions about the accessibility of an English-language educa-
tion, or the new idea that it is not family-background and inherited status
but rather, individual initiative and/or the financial resources to enrol in an
English-language course that turns someone into an ‘English speaker’.
As national newsrooms and corporate boardrooms are increasingly filled
with the sound of rustic-accented English, the long-standing normative
superiority that English speaking elites have enjoyed over their vernacular
counterparts is being called into question. The ‘English vs. Hindi’ social and
cultural distinction continues to operate within the newsroom, as English-
speakers from urban-metropolitan schools and colleges openly look down on
their small town counterparts. At the same time however, there is an uneasy
recognition that the language of power in contemporary India is not solely
English any more. Among the new breed of television news journalists in
India today, there is an increasing recognition that vernacular language skills
can open up avenues of opportunity and privilege: Hindi speakers can have
conversations with the personal assistants of ministers (who are the real source
of power and information); they can even dialogue with ministers and politi-
cal leaders who are increasingly vernacular subjects themselves. As a senior
journalist in an English language national news channel crudely summarized
it, ‘going native’ is an asset for journalists in India today: ‘it’s time for people
like us to take Hindi-speaking classes if we want to get ahead’.
Alongside this linguistic shift a spatial re-orientation of metropolitan
hierarchies is taking place as well. Most of the stringers I interviewed did
not entertain career ambitions of moving to the big city, for them the ‘small
town’ provided sufficient and ample terrain to realize their aspirations. And
even more significantly, for those who articulated national-level aspirations
(‘becoming known across the nation’) their small-town provenance was not
seen as an obstacle to the realization of this national dream.43
These spatial and linguistic shifts are among the most significant implica-
tions of media liberalization in contemporary India. Overlooked both by
the proponents and critics of media liberalization, these changes attest to
the key role of liberalized media in enabling what we might term strategies
and practices of ‘capital conversion’ in contemporary India. With economic

Chapter 14.indd 456 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 when the revolution is televised   457

liberalization enabling the entry of new actors into the middle and upper
classes, and political transformations such as the growing national salience of
regional and caste parties changing the demographic character of the political
elite, the long-standing coincidence of political, economic, and social capital
has been disrupted. To put this simply, your caste background no longer
determines or predicts your political clout; your fluency in English does not
say anything about your bank balance; your status as a national cultural icon
does not mean that you live in metropolitan India.
In such a situation, institutions, networks, and spaces that enable the con-
version of economic into political and/or social power (and vice versa)—what
we might call pace Weber the realignment of class, status, and party—acquire
considerable public significance. Liberalized news media play such a role in
contemporary India: it is through ‘media power’ that upstart local entrepre-
neurs like Srikanth Pratyush are able to convert their newfound economic
wealth into political influence. At the national level as well we see the lib-
eralized media playing a similar role. Television news organizations create
venues and avenues for interaction between political and economic elites
and institutions: television studios are sites where economic elites routinely
engage in dialogue with their political counterparts, and economic power
is parlayed into political clout. The quest to understand the transformative
impact of media liberalization must take these kinds of ‘media effects’ on
board, moving beyond and behind the spectacular effects of the media com-
modity to investigate the wider social and political worlds and practices of
media production, and the very literal acts of social and political mediation
that India’s news revolution makes possible.

The Possibilities and Limits of ‘Backchannel Politics’

Taking a practice based approach to the study of media, this essay has elab-
orated on two empirical findings about the social and political impact of
news media liberalization in India: how the rapid growth of non-state media
organizations has led to the proliferation of ‘backchannel’ or crony politics;
and how the television news industry has enabled provincial and vernacular
subjects to seek, and in several cases gain, class and status mobility. Both
these findings contradict prevailing views on the political and social role of
liberalized news media, and at a more general level, of neoliberal civil society.
Thus, the flourishing practices of backchannel politics contradict the claim
of enhanced political transparency in the era of media liberalization, a claim
made by ‘good governance’ theorists of media and civil society.

Chapter 14.indd 457 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 458  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

They also call into question the binary distinction between elite and mass
politics, between the rights-based discourse of an empowered civil soci-
ety and the contingent manoeuvres of a marginalized political society that
has governed discussions of society and politics in much of the developing
world.44 As this essay has suggested, liberalized media organizations at local,
regional, and national levels advance their agendas through the very kinds of
contingent political manoeuvres and backchannel bargains or deals that have
hitherto been associated with political society. Thus, while the discourse of
rights features prominently in contemporary media and civil society circles,
it is important not to conflate discourse with political praxis and action, and
to realize that ‘rights talk’ is not the only means by which political agency is
realized by media and civil society organizations.
Finally, the finding about the aspirational successes and social-economic
mobility enjoyed by marginalized actors from small towns contradicts claims
about the entrenchment of elite privilege by liberalized media. The discrete
and insular elite and middle class domains occupied by media and civil
society organizations are shown in fact to be arenas in which a variety of dif-
ferently positioned actors strive for and achieve empowerment and mobility.
However it is important to remember that this mobility is individually
exercised and experienced: The growth of the news media industry and the
availability of career and status enhancement opportunities for individual
stringers have not led to any kind of collective empowerment of marginalized
communities. On the contrary, practices of exclusion and inequality con-
tinue to persist within these newly mobile social worlds. Thus at one level the
entry of the Bhojpuri-speaking young man from a nondescript district town
into the elite urban confines of a New Delhi newsroom (with a hefty salary
to boot) is a spectacular enactment of individual class and status mobility.
However this does in any ways spell an end to practices and structures of dis-
empowerment and discrimination: discourses of caste prejudice, to take just
one example, are alive and well in the television news industry.
Caste discrimination also has a tangible, structural effect on employ-
ment patterns and work conditions in the industry. As a recent survey by
the political scientist Yogendra Yadav reveals, decision-making positions in
news organizations are held by upper-caste individuals in a proportion that
far exceeds their demographic weight. Hindu upper-caste men, who form
approximately eight percent of the national population, occupy 71 per
cent of the senior media positions in the country.45 And a closer look at the
intangible factors that influence decisions to hire stringers reveals that caste
considerations may well play a significant, though unacknowledged role: the

Chapter 14.indd 458 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 when the revolution is televised   459

lowest tier of the news pyramid, like its upper levels, is also dominated by
upper caste groups. Even as the liberalized media sector opens up new ave-
nues of economic and social mobility, it is the unequal distribution of power
and privilege that determines access to these avenues.
This coincidence of empowerment and exclusion in the television news
industry unsettles an implicit assumption of democratic theory, what we
might call the assumption of ‘contagious equality’ or ‘contagious freedom’.
This is the view that marginalized groups and individuals who gain in equal-
ity and freedom will diffuse such gains to others; that when ‘the poor,’ ‘the
discriminated,’ and the ‘oppressed’ are empowered, they necessarily enact a
politics of generosity and collective solidarity. The maintenance of caste hier-
archies by stringers suggests otherwise, and is but one of many examples that
draw our attention to the inherent ambiguities of democracy, and remind us
that the erasure of privileges constituted around one axis of power can very
well entrench exclusions around another, that the rise of subaltern elites is a
simultaneous index of empowerment and marginalization.

Notes
 1 In an ultimate irony Singh was the official in charge of administering the
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Bihar, a piece of progressive
socio-economic legislation introduced by the government in 2005 that guar-
anteed a minimum of 100 days of paid employment to Indians living in rural
areas.
  2 For an insightful discussion of the politics of contemporary ‘sting journalism’
in India, see William Mazzarella, ‘Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency,
and the Politics of Immediation in India’, Public Culture, vol. 18, no. 3 (2006),
pp. 473–505.
  3 Classic elaborations of ‘accountability theories’ of the media may be found in
the work of Amartya Sen, John Keane, and Pippa Norris among others. See
Amartya Sen, ‘Democracy as a Universal Value’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 10,
no. 3 (1999), pp. 3–17; John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009); and Pippa Norris (ed.), Public Sentinel:
News Media and Governance Reform (Washington, DC: The World Bank,
2010); and for a critical and comprehensive overview, see Michael Schudson,
Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
 4 For an overview see the collection of essays in Simone Chambers and Will
Kymlicka (eds), Alternative Conceptions of Civil Society (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001).
  5 The ascendancy of a ‘corporate media’ that conflates the concerns of a narrow
urban elite with the national, public interest is a common theme in recent schol-
arly as well as popular writings on Indian news television. See, for instance,

Chapter 14.indd 459 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 460  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

Somnath Batabyal, Making News in India: Star News and Star Ananda (Delhi
and London: Routledge, 2011).
 6 Leela Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of
Economic Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
  7 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon
of Politics’, Public Culture, vol. 14, no. 1 (2002), pp. 21–47; Amita Baviskar,
‘The Politics of the City’, Seminar, no. 516 (2002), pp. 41–7; Janaki Nair, The
Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2005); John Harriss, ‘Middle Class Activism and the Politics of
the Informal Working Class: A Perspective on Class Relations and Civil Society
in Indian Cities’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 38. no. 4 (2006), pp. 445–65; and
Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in
Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
 8 Sharad Chari, Fraternal Capital: Peasant Workers, Self-Made Men, and
Globalization in Provincial India (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004);
Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business, and Industry in a
Modern Nation (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2008); Craig Jeffrey, Patrica
Jeffery, and Roger Jeffrey, Degrees Without Freedom: Education, Masculinities and
Unemployment in Northern India (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007).
 9 Ashok Rajagopal, ‘Waking Up to the Dhoni Effect’, The Financial Express,
13 May 2008.
10 Ibid.
11 The empirical evidence for this essay is based on an eighteen-month ethnog-
raphy of the social and political worlds of Hindi, English, and, to a more
limited extent, Bengali commercial television news in India. Research locations
included the national capital of New Delhi where the main bureaus of national
news channels are located; regional capitals in eastern and central India such as
Calcutta, Patna, and Bhopal that house the regional bureaus of national news
channels and the main bureaus of regional and local (city-specific) news chan-
nels; and small towns such as Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh (central India) and
Darjeeling/Siliguri in West Bengal (eastern India) that serve as the district hubs
of national and regional news channels.
12 Fernandes and Heller derive the notion of an ‘economy of practices’ from Pierre
Bourdieu’s action/practice sociology. See Leela Fernandes and Patrick Heller,
‘Hegemonic Aspirations: New Middle Class Politics and India’s Democracy
in Comparative Perspective’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4 (2006),
pp. 495–522 and Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard
Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
13 Neil Brenner and Nik Theodor, ‘Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing
Neoliberalism’, Antipode, vol. 34, no. 3 (2002), pp. 356–86.
14 See Paula Chakravartty and Srirupa Roy, ‘Media Pluralism Redux: Towards
New Frameworks of Comparative Media Studies “Beyond the West”’, Political
Communication (forthcoming); P.C. Chatterji, Broadcasting in India (Delhi:
Sage Publications, 1991); and Nalin Mehta, India on Television: How Satellite

Chapter 14.indd 460 11/11/2013 5:21:30 PM

 when the revolution is televised   461

News Channels Have Changed the Way We Think and Act (New Delhi: Harper
Collins, 2008).
15 Craig Jeffrey uses this term to describe the nature of contemporary youth politics
in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Like Jeffrey, I use this term as a ‘category of prac-
tice’, that is, it emerged in conversations with informants when they were asked
to describe the liberalized media industry (and in Jeffrey’s case, when they were
asked to describe youth politics). See Craig Jeffrey, ‘Kicking Away the Ladder:
Student Politics and the Making of an Indian Middle Class’, Environment and
Planning D, vol. 26, no. 3 (2007), pp. 517–36.
16 The 42nd amendment of 1976 revised the preamble to the Indian constitution,
and declared India to be a ‘sovereign socialist secular democratic republic’. (The
words ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’ were added.)
17 Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press,1984) and Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building and
Late Industrialization in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
18 Atul Kohli, ‘Politics of Economic Growth in India, 1980–2005’, Part II,
Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 41, no. 4 (2006), pp. 1361–70 and Aseema
Sinha, ‘Understanding the Rise and Transformation of Business Collective
Action in India’, Business and Politics, vol. 7, no. 2 (2005), pp. 1–37.
19 These include general associations such as the Confederation of Indian Industry
(CII) and specialized media associations such as the Indian Broadcasting
Federation and the News Broadcasters Association.
20 See Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (New
York: New Press, 1999) and Rodney Benson and Eric Neveu, Bourdieu and the
Journalistic Field (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005).
21 Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
22 For a theoretical consideration of ‘conviviality’ or proximity to power as a con-
stitutive feature of postcolonial polities, see Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
23 For a discussion of the prevalence of similar developmentalist and pedagogical
discourses within the Hindi commercial film community, see Tejaswini Ganti,
Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2012).
24 Between 2005 and 2007, English language news channels took it upon them-
selves to run what they described as national campaigns for justice, centred
around murder trials involving defendants with kinship ties to powerful political
figures, who had been accused of murdering young urban middle-class women.
The airtime given to the ‘Justice for Jessica’ and ‘Justice for Priyadarshini’ cam-
paigns and the media demand for a fair and speedy judicial resolution to these
protracted trials met with a swift institutional response from the notoriously
slow judicial system. Within a few months of the media campaigns, the power-
ful guilty were brought to justice, amid widespread self-congratulation on the
part of the media for their role in championing the cause of justice.

Chapter 14.indd 461 11/11/2013 5:21:31 PM

 462  NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES OF INDIA

25 For a discussion of NGOs as ‘shadow states’, see Margaret Sutton and Robert
Arnove (eds), Civil Society or Shadow State? State/NGO Relations in Education
(Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2004).
26 Neerabh Labh, an NGO worker in Patna, describes the media as providing an
alternative sunwai or hearing for individuals who are not heard by the state.
AMJ, a senior journalist in the city who was present during this discussion,
concurred with this opinion. He provided a supporting anecdote about being
approached at a government hospital in Delhi by a woman who was ‘having a
problem’, and who turned to him for help as soon as she overheard him saying
that he was a journalist, even though AMJ was at the hospital on a private visit.
27 For a discussion of the distinction between corporate and non-corporate capi-
tal in India, see Partha Chatterjee, ‘Classes, Capital, and Indian Democracy’,
Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43, no. 46 (2008), pp. 89–93.
28 For a rich discussion of diverse forms of ‘vernacular capitalism’, see Damodaran,
India’s New Capitalists.
29 For example, Aaj Tak, owned by TV Today Network; Star News owned by
MCCS, a holding company of the transnational conglomerate STAR; IBN 7
owned by Television Eighteen; and NDTV India owned by NDTV. For details
on ownership structures in the television news industry, see Vanita Kohli-
Khandekar, The Indian Media Business (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006)
and Vibodh Parthasarathi, ‘Media Under Corporate Control,’ Combat Law,
27 March 2011, pp. 31–6. Available online at www.combatlaw.org
30 In some cases, as in the case of News 24, a recent news channel started by a
private production house called B.A.G. Films, several industry insiders claim
that funding was obtained through the owner-editor’s familial connections with
major national political parties.
31 Approximately ten million rupees available right on the spot, in a briefcase
stuffed with crisp bills.
32 Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class; William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke:
Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003); and Bourdieu, On Television.
33 These sections have been previously published in Srirupa Roy, ‘Television News
and Democratic Change in India’, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 33, no. 5
(2011), pp. 761–77.
34 The term references the newspaper practice of using column-inches to deter-
mine payment amounts, with column inches of published articles measured by
a piece of string, which would be sent in to the newspaper every week or month.
35 Sevanti Ninan, Headlines from the Heartland: Reinventing the Hindi Public
Sphere (Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007).
36 Within the television news industry, success is defined in terms of who is the
first to get the ‘breaking news’.
37 This automatically encourages the reuse of existing tape stock and the deletion
of material—both of which are actions that have definitive effects on news con-
tent. Significantly, here the ‘gatekeeping functions’ are exercised at the lowest

Chapter 14.indd 462 11/11/2013 5:21:31 PM

 when the revolution is televised   463

level of the news pyramid, that is, by the ‘foot soldiers’ of the news industry
rather than by corporate capitalist actors. For a discussion of gatekeeping and
the news flow, see the classic account in Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study
in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978).
38 To be distinguished from a story that is sent in to the Patna bureau, which may
or may not be aired.
39 This practice is unique to the local television channel PTN. However, the dis-
tinctive economies of collusion in local media arenas, or the fact that journalists
from rival organization work collectively and share information, story ideas, and
even footage with each other means that even major national news channels like
NDTV often air the footage shot by Pratyush’s unpaid stringer brigade.
40 The advantages of these ‘two-wheeler boys’ were reluctantly noted by senior
journalists in national news channels. Patna is a city of terrible traffic jams,
they explained, and the major national channels are invariably at a disadvantage
when it comes to intra-city transport: their state-of-the-art outdoor broadcast
vans are always beaten to the ‘news scene’ by Pratyush’s motorcycle men.
41 While in this case the stringer won the contract from the legislator by promising
him positive media coverage, in other instances, stringers strike deals based on
their journalistic silence. See Ninan, Headlines from the Heartland.
42 While the example of Pooja Misra points to the reworking of patriarchal struc-
tures that have hitherto confined women from her social class to domestic and
reproductive labour alone, it is admittedly only a partial reworking. Misra’s own
narrative of being a working woman turns on the ‘permission’ that has been
granted to her by her broad-minded in-laws and her husband. Moreover, as eco-
nomic compulsion (the need for a second income to supplement the precarious
finances of her joint family) emerges as the ultimate reason for the permissive-
ness of her family, Pooja Misra’s professional life bears out the familiar logics of
gendered inequalities being swapped for economic insecurities.
43 In fact, by the logic of the ‘Dhoni Effect’ that was cited to me by several infor-
mants, it was actually an asset to be from a place like Ranchi, Dhoni’s hometown.
The intimate neighbourly atmosphere in small towns allowed aspiring stars to
find local fans more easily than in the vast and anonymous environment of
Delhi or Bombay, and the relative absence of competition made it easier to
‘stand out’ as a local talent.
44 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed.
45 Anil Chamaria, Jitendra Kumar, and Yogendra Yadav, Survey of the Social Profile
of the Key Decision Makers in the National Media (Delhi: Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies, 2006).

Chapter 14.indd 463 11/11/2013 5:21:31 PM