Indian Visual Culture

Mark Elmore

Sample Syllabus

Logic

Despite having the largest film industry in the world, the visual culture of India is virtually invisible to most people in the West.  The goal of this course is to introduce students to its richness.  The class is guided by the premise that the visual culture of a region or a nation is not constituted solely in its art, nor most clearly in its painting.  In this course we will examine not simply pieces of Indian painting and sculpture, but also its calendars, its ritual images and its approaches to seeing more broadly.

Visual culture in India today is exceptionally complex, incorporating ancient patterns using the most modern of technologies.  Throughout this course, we will strive to see the manner in which pre-modern, modern and postmodern forms of visual coexist in the contemporary visual economy.  We will begin the course with a look at the early ritual economy and some of the logics that guided early visual interactions in India, moving through the colonial and post colonial periods.  Throughout the course we will be most attuned to the specific relation between religion and politics that are established in and through the visual as it is this relation—between religion and poltics—that has proved so powerful in contemporary India. 

Course Requirements

Let there be no mistake: this class is intense. For most of the people taking this course the images, the sentiments and the historical landscapes will be completely foreign. Fear not. If you do all the readings before lecture and come prepared to the film screenings, this class can be one of the most rewarding in your undergraduate education.

In addition to completing all the reading, you will be expected to write single page review essays (double spaced, 12 pt. Times, 1 inch margins) each week in response to one of the texts or films assigned for that week. The specific topics are given in the reading outline below. In each of these assignments, you will be expected to respond in depth to either a primary text or the film shown that week. You will be expected to clearly articulate what you understand as the main point of the text and to offer a critique or comment on this position. In this assignment, you must be concise. Responses should be between 280-350 words. You will be expected to turn in six of these over the quarter. They will account for 60% of your grade.

The final 40% of your grade will be a research paper (6-10 pages) in which you examine in detail one piece of Indian visual culture (a photograph, a film, a painting, a calendar, a postcard, etc.) and read it in relation to the social and historical forces within which it is embedded.  For example, reading late colonial photographs in relation to projects of control and information management, or eulogistic public sculptures of Indira Gandhi in relation to her legacy of authoritarian control and reshaping of Indian democracy.  

WEEKLY SCHEDULE

 

Week One:  Picturing India

Readings

  • Mitter, Partha. Indian Art, Oxford History of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 1-13.
  • Davis, Richard H. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton, N.J.; Chichester, U.K.: Princeton University Press, 1997. 15-51.
  • Kapur, Geeta. When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000. 297-325.

Film

  • Raja Harishchandra (1913)

Week Two Ritual Economies

Readings

  • Eck, Diana L. Darsan, Seeing the Divine Image in India. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Film

  • Puja (1996)
  • Father, Son and Holy War (1994)

Week Three: Colonialism: Logics of control

Readings

  • Mitter, Partha. Indian Art, Oxford History of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 169-201.
  • Pinney, Christopher. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.  1-72.

Films

  • Gunga Din (1939)
  • Earth (1998)

Week Four:  Photography: Penetrating Certainty and Magical Realism

Readings

  • Pinney, Christopher. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 108-210.
  • Pinney, Christopher. 'Photos of the Gods': The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion, 2004. 7-25.
  • Falconer, John. "Ethnographical Photography in India 1850-1900." Photographic Collector 5, no. 1 (1984): 16-46.

Films

  • Dalda 13(1997)
  • Photo Wallahs (1991)

 

Week Five: Chromolithographs and the Visual Economy of the Bazaar

Readings

  • Jain, Kajri. "More Than Meets the Eye: The Circulation of Images and the Embodiment of Values." Contributions to Indian Sociology 36, no. 1 (2002).
  • Jain, Kajri. "When the Gods Go to Market: The Ritual Management of Desire in Indian 'Bazaar Art." Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational and Crosscultural Studies 6, no. 2 (1998): 187-204.
  • Inglis, Stephen. "Suitable for Framing: The Work of a Modern Master." In Media and Transformation of Religion in South Asia, edited by Laurence Babb and Susan Wadley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
  • Smith, H Daniel. "Impact of 'God Posters' on Hindus and Their Devotional Traditions." In Media and Transformations of Religion in South Asia, edited by Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Film

  • Hello Photo (1995)

Week six: It’s all Eyes: Staging spectacles

Readings

  • Pinney, Christopher. 'Photos of the Gods': The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion, 2004.
  • Freitag, Sandy “Visions of Nation: Theorizing the nexus netween Creatio, Consumption, and Participation in the Public Sphere.”  in Pinney, Christopher and Rachael Dwyer, ed. Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India. Vol. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001.

Film

  • Holi (1990)
  • Devī (1960)

Assignment:

  • At least four response essays must be turned in by this point.

Week Seven: Early Hindi Film: Mythological and Realism

Readings:

  • Rajadhyaksa, Ashish. "Indian Cinema: Origins to Independence." In Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. London BFI, 1999.
  • Rajadhyaksa, Ashish. "The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology." In Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, edited by Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir and Vivek Dhareshwar, 47-82. Calcutta: Seagull, 1993.
  • Kapur, Geeta. “Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ray”

Film

  • The Home and the World (1982)

Week Eight: Contemporary Hindi Film:  Cinema of Attractions and the Star

Readings

  • Dwyer, Rachel, and Divia Patel. Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film, Envisioning Asia. New Dehli; London: Oxford University Press, 2002. 7-42.
  • Dwyer, Rachel. “Shooting Stars” in Pinney, Christopher and Rachael Dwyer, ed. Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001.
  • Mazumdar, Ranjani "From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: the ‘Angry Man’ and the ‘Psychotic Hero’ of Bombay Cinema’ in Vasudevan, Ravi, ed. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Film

  • Jai Santoshi Ma (1975)
  • Dil Se (1997)

Week Nine: Television

Readings

  • Mankekar, Purnima. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. 1-104, 259-289.
  •  Rajgopal, Arvind. Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 1-30, 72-120.

Film

  • Selection of Television shorts

Week Ten:  Going Global

Readings

  • Mankekar, Purnima. "Brides Who Travel: Gender, Transnationalism and Nationalism in Hindi Film." Postitions 7, no. 3 (1999): 731-61.
  • Kapur, Geeta. When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000. 325-367.

Film

  • Pardes (1997)
  • Monsoon wedding (2001)

Final Paper Due
 

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last updated: october 8, 2006
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