Gods in the Bazaar , livre ebook

449

pages

English

Ebooks

2007

Écrit par
Jain Kajri Jain

Publié par
Duke University Press

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449

pages

English

Ebooks

2007

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

06 avril 2007

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822389736

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

12 Mo

Gods in the Bazaar is a fascinating account of the printed images known in India as "calendar art" or "bazaar art," the color-saturated, mass-produced pictures often used on calendars and in advertisements, featuring deities and other religious themes as well as nationalist leaders, alluring women, movie stars, chubby babies, and landscapes. Calendar art appears in all manner of contexts in India: in chic elite living rooms, middle-class kitchens, urban slums, village huts; hung on walls, stuck on scooters and computers, propped up on machines, affixed to dashboards, tucked into wallets and lockets. In this beautifully illustrated book, Kajri Jain examines the power that calendar art wields in Indian mass culture, arguing that its meanings derive as much from the production and circulation of the images as from their visual features.Jain draws on interviews with artists, printers, publishers, and consumers as well as analyses of the prints themselves to trace the economies-of art, commerce, religion, and desire-within which calendar images and ideas about them are formulated. For Jain, an analysis of the bazaar, or vernacular commercial arena, is crucial to understanding not only the calendar art that circulates within the bazaar but also India's postcolonial modernity and the ways that its mass culture has developed in close connection with a religiously inflected nationalism. The bazaar is characterized by the coexistence of seemingly incompatible elements: bourgeois-liberal and neoliberal modernism on the one hand, and vernacular discourses and practices on the other. Jain argues that from the colonial era to the present, capitalist expansion has depended on the maintenance of these multiple coexisting realms: the sacred, the commercial, and the artistic; the official and the vernacular.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

06 avril 2007

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822389736

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

12 Mo

GODS IN THE BAZAAR Gods in the Bazaar

O B J E C T S / H I S T O R I E S : Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture, and Representation

A series edited by Nicholas Thomas Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation.

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

Typeset in Adobe Jenson Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Introduction: Calendar Art as an Object of Knowledge



Part 1. Genealogy

Acknowledgments





. The Sacred Icon in the Age of the Work of Art and Mechanical Reproduction 



Part 3. Efficacy











. Flexing the Canon





Part 2. Economy

. The Circulation of Images and the Embodiment of Value

vii

. Vernacularizing Capitalism: Sivakasi and Its Circuits

CONTENTS

. When the Gods Go to Market

Notes on Style

. Naturalizing the Popular

. The Eﬃcacious Image and the Sacralization of Modernity

Works Cited

Index

Conclusion

Notes

NOTES ON STYLE

Wherever Hindi words and terms speciﬁc to South Asia appear for the ﬁrst time, I either provide a brief translation immediately following the word, or, where a longer explanation is required, in a footnote. Transliterated spellings of Hindi words generally follow accepted conventions wherever they exist (as in the case ofbhava), while others have been kept as simple as possible in order to provide an accurate sense of the way they sound (as inshringarordarshan). In the captions accompanying the ﬁgures, titles of images assigned by publishers are in italics, while my own descriptors are in quotation marks. Artists, publishers, and dates are only speciﬁed when known. Every attempt has been made to locate and obtain permission from copyright holders of images where applicable. Unless speciﬁed other-wise, images are from the collection of the author.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First I want to thank my teachers at the University of Sydney. Laleen Jayamanne and I shared many sessions of what she calls ‘‘loose talk,’’ an epithet that belies her example of tight thinking and beautiful writing. Her interventions (or, more accurately, the contagion of her intensity, which is all the more powerful for its unobtrusive register) were impor-tant to me. John Clark has been unfailingly supportive and generous; Mick Carter always reinjected my thinking with delight; and Yao Sou-chou provided the critique and ongoing engagement only a good friend can. Without Julian Pefanis and Terry Smith I don’t think I would have embarked on this project at all. Gyorgy Markus would probably be hor-riﬁed, but I must also acknowledge my debt to his legendary course on German aesthetics. Another person without whom I would not have started any of this is Shalini Puri: she and Carlos Cañuelas have been constant, af-fectionate mentors andcompañeros. As with them, merely to thank Patricia Uberoi would be a travesty: she has been a godmother to this project, a long-distance guardianyakshiwatching over it from Delhi. I have also beneﬁted greatly from the comments of my thesis examin-ers, John Frow, Tapati Guha Thakurta, and Michael Taussig, as well as others who shared their work and ideas or took time to comment on mine: Can Bilsel, Christiane Brosius, Richard Davis, Whitney Davis, Laura Diamond, Sandria Freitag, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Philip Lut-

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