How Secular Is Art

How Secular Is Art?
As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book

unsettles both the categories of ‘art’ and ‘secular’ in their theoretical and historical
implications. It questions the temporal, spatial, and cultural binaries between the
‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic
practice. All the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region, whether we call it
South Asia or the Indian subcontinent—one fissured by histories of partition, state
formations, and religious nationalisms but still offering a collective site from which to
speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded.
The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and
architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and
monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery
contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the
proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales, and festivals? How do we
understand South Asian art’s deep entanglements with the politics of the present?
Tapati Guha-Thakurta is honorary professor of history and the former director of the
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Her work is located within the
disciplinary fields of cultural history, art history, and visual studies. Three of her most
prominent works are The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and
Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Monuments, Objects,
Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University
Press and Permanent Black, 2004), and In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas
of Contemporary Kolkata (Primus Books, 2015). Vazira Zamindar is associate professor
in history at Brown University, Rhode Island. She is a historian of modern South Asia,
with an interest in twentiethcentury histories of decolonization, nation-state formation,
displacement, war, resistance, and the visual archive. She is the author of The Long
Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories
(Columbia University Press, 2007).
How Secular Is Art? On the Politics of Art, History, and Religion in South Asia
Edited by
Tapati Guha-Thakurta Vazira Zamindar
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Contents
List of Images
vii
1 Introduction Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar
Part 1 Secularity and Its Art 2 Indian Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis Akeel
Bilgrami
33
3 Art and the Secular in Contemporary India: A Question of Method Karin Zitzewitz
63
4 In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History
Kajri Jain
91
Part 2 Boundaries of Secular Nationalism 5 Displacements of Secularity: Decapitations

and Their Histories Vazira Zamindar
125
Contents
vi
6 Modern Art and East Pakistan: Drawing from the Limits Sanjukta Sunderason 7
Making Place for People? Geeta Kapur, Secular Nationalism, and ‘Indian’ Art Zehra
Jumabhoy
157
189
Part 3 Art and Its Gods 8 Shivaji’s Portrait and the Practice of Art History Holly Shaffer
227
9 Can a Festival of a Goddess Be ‘Secular’? Tapati Guha-Thakurta
261
10 A Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India Sumathi Ramaswamy
297
Part 4 Architectures of Devotion 11 Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture: A Critique of

the Secular Disenchantment of India’s Past Santhi Kavuri-Bauer 12 Rebuilding Konarak
in the Twentieth Century: Legacies of Colonial Archaeology and Discourses of
Inclusivity in Gwalior’s Birla Temple Tamara Sears
333
353
13 For the Love of God: Conservation as Devotion in Tamil Nadu Kavita Singh
387
About the Contributors Index
409 415
Images
1.1
Shaheen Bagh women protesters, New Delhi, 15 January 2020
1.2
One of the wall murals at the Shaheen Bagh protests, New Delhi, 7 February 2020
1.3
‘Artists in Jamia Gather to Disturb the “Comfortable”, Paint the Streets with Colour’, New
Delhi, 3 January 2020
1.4
Installation of paper boats in the shape of a heart at the Shaheen Bagh protests, New
Delhi, 15 January 2020
2.1
M. F. Husain’s 95th birthday celebrations (at the gallery named after him) at Jamia Millia
Islamia University, New Delhi, 17 September 2010
33
3.1
Rummana Hussain, Fragments from Splitting, 1993, bricks, mirror, gheru, terracotta
63
3.2
Rummana Hussain, Conflux, 1993, wood, paint on acrylic, gheru, terracotta
67
3.3
Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins (standing), 1995, performance at National

Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai
72
Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins (crouching), 1995, performance at National

Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai
72
Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (detail), 1996, Perspex, metal key, and phototransfer,

14 × 9 inches (35.6 × 22.9 centimetres)
76
3.4
3.5
viii
Images
3.6
Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (frieze), 1996, installation
77
3.7
Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (wood panels), 1996, installation

78
3.8
Rummana Hussain, Is It What You Think? (detail), 1998, black and white photograph
80
3.9
Rummana Hussain, Conflux, Dissected Projection, Unearthed, 1993, installation at Our

Time for a Future Sharing, 58th Venice Biennale, India Pavilion, Italy (11 May–24
November 2019)
82
Calendar advertising Ayurvedic health products featuring Shiva and his family,
displayed in an electronics shop, Haldwani, Uttarakhand, 2016
91
Windshield of tourist jeep with stickers catering to a range of passengers, featuring (left
to right and top to bottom): the goddess Durga; the Tibetan Buddhist Kalachakra
symbol; a sacred scarf; then chief minister of Sikkim Pawan Chamling; a lamp whose
flame contains Lakshmi, Ganesh, and Saraswati; and Sai Baba of Shirdi, in Sikkim,
2009
93
4.3
Print of Jesus adorning prow of fishing boat, Kerala, 2017
93
4.4
A 75-foot statue of Hanuman with Ram and Lakshman on his shoulders built in 2005 by
the sculptor Kashinath at the entrance to Tumkur, Karnataka (photographed 2008)
94
The 103-foot Mount Royal Cross in Montreal installed in 1924 (photographed 2014); the
original cross at this site was erected in 1643
97
4.1
4.2
4.5
4.6
A 65-foot Shiva statue built in 1995 by the sculptor Kashinath on Bangalore’s Old
Airport Road (photographed in 2009 as it was being given a plywood and cement
Himalayan backdrop)
106
4.7
A 135-foot Guru Rinpoche or Padmasambhava completed in 2004, Namchi, Sikkim

(photographed 2013)
111
4.8
A 108-foot Shiva at the ‘Char Dham Pilgrimage-CumCultural-Centre’ inaugurated in

2011, Namchi, Sikkim (photographed 2013)
112
A 95-foot Sakyamuni statue built by Sanjay and Bijoy Sakya, at its inauguration in 2013,
Ravangla, South Sikkim
113
4.9
Images
4.10
ix
Statue of B. R. Ambedkar by sculptor Ram Sutar at the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik

Parivartan Prateek Sthal, Lucknow, unveiled in 1997 (photographed 2019); it is
modelled on the 1920 figure of Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French at the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC
116
5.1a
Sadequain, A Headless Figure Paints, from Drawings, August 1970, pen and ink on
paper
125
5.1b
Poster of Symposium, 2018
128
5.2a
Sadequain, The Artist and the Model, from Drawings, 1966, pen and ink on paper
129
5.2b Sadequain, The Artist and the Model, from Drawings, 1966, pen and ink on paper
129
5.3a
131
5.3b Sadequain, The Artist and the Model, from Drawings, 1966, pen and ink on paper
131
5.4a
5.4b Sadequain, Sar-ba-kaf, from Drawings, 1966, pen and ink on paper
139 140
5.5
Sadequain, Who Is Sadequain? Khayyam Asks Sarmad, from Drawings, August 1970,
pen and ink on paper
142
6.1
Postal stamp of Bangladesh with Zainul Abedin’s artwork
157
6.2
Zainul Abedin with his collection of folk art
171
6.3
Cover of the first annual catalogue of the Dacca Art Group
175
6.4
Zainul Abedin, details from the scroll-painting Nabanna, 1970, wax, black ink, and
watercolour
180
6.5
Zainul Abedin drawing the Monpura scroll, 1973
182
6.6
Zainul Abedin’s painting of Maulana Bhashani, circa 1970
183
7.1
Bhupen Khakhar, Bullet Shot in the Stomach, 2001, oil on canvas 189
7.2
Installation view of Bhupen Khakhar’s Bullet Shot in the Stomach, 2001, from the
exhibition Subject of Death, curated by Geeta Kapur, 2013
192
7.3
Images
Gulammohammed Sheikh, Mappamundi Suite Marichika II, 2003, gouache on digital

inkjet paper, 58.4 × 71.1 centimetres, Umesh and Sunanda Gaur Collection
195
Sheela Gowda, And …, 2007, thread, pigment, glue, needles; installation view at the
exhibition It ... Matters, curated by Dr Eva Huttenlauch at Lenbachhaus Munich, 2020
201
7.5
Bhupen Khakhar, Muslims Around the Mosque II, 2001
203
7.6
Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg, 2007–2011, four-channel video/shadow play,

Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2017, Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris
204
Kali Cigarettes advertisement, published by the Calcutta Art Studio, Calcutta (Kolkata),
Bengal, India, circa 1885–1895, lithograph
207
Attributed to Payag, The Goddess Bhairavi Devi with Shiva, India, Mughal dynasty,
circa 1630–1635, Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
207
7.9
Nalini Malani, Sita/Medea, 2006, reverse painting on acrylic sheet
209
7.10
A Woman Visiting Two Nath Yoginis, north India, Mughal, circa 1750
209
7.11
Nalini Malani, Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain, 2005, five-channel
video play, sound; installation view at the fifth Taipei Biennale, Taipei Fine Arts
Museum, 2006, Collection MoMA, New York
214
Nalini Malani, Sare Jahan Se Acha, 2005, single-channel video play, sound; installation
view of Nalini Malani: Splitting the Other, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne,
2010
215
8.1
Raja Ravi Varma, Shivaji Maharaj, 1896, Ravi Varma Press, Bombay, chromolithograph
on paper, 20 x 14 inches
227
8.2
Narayan Vinayak Virkar, Raigad Fort, 1 May 1919, Mumbai, contact print from a half-
plate glass negative, 14.6 x 20.6 centimetres
230
7.4
7.7
7.8
7.12
Images
8.3
xi
Shivaji and Afzal Khan, folio 40a in a manuscript of the Shivakavya by Purushottam,
Kolhapur, 1821, gouache and ink on paper, approx. 5 x 11.5 inches
234
Sewadji [Shivaji], engraving on paper, 8 x 5 inches, in Dubois de Jancigny and Xavier

Raymond, L’Univers: Histoire et description de tous les peoples: Inde
236
Sevaji [Shivaji], engraving on paper, in Robert Orme, Historical Fragments of the Mogul
Empire, of the Morattoes, and of the English Concerns in Indostan
237
Portrait of Shivaji, ink, opaque watercolour, and gold on paper, 14.7 x 7 centimetres,
from an album of Portraits of Indian Princes, Golconda, India, 1680–1687
238
Mir Muhammad, Sevaji [Shivaji], folio 39, opaque watercolour on paper, 38.5
centimetres, in Niccolo Manucci (1638–1717), Histoire de l’Inde depuis Tamerlank
jusquà Orangzeb
239
8.8
Khandoba and Malsara, Chitrashala Press, Poona, 1880s, chromolithograph on paper,

17.3 x 13.3 inches
241
8.9
Mahrattas, in J. Forbes Watson, The People of India: A Series of Photographic

Illustrations, With Descriptive Letterpress, Of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan, vol. 7,
no. 371, albumen print, 24.5 x 33.3 centimetres (full page); 15.4 x 11.7 centimetres
(photo)
243
Marathas and Maratha Women, in ‘Races and Tribes of India, Part II’, Suvarnamala 6,
nos. 56–57 (May–June 1915), no. 7
245
M. V. Dhurandhar, Shivaji’s Stone Sculpture from Malvan, February 1906, lithograph

after a drawing on paper, illustrating V. K. Rajwade, ‘Shivaji’s Image (Pratima) from
Malvan’, in Itihas sangraha aitihasik safur lekh
246
M. V. Dhurandhar, Shri Shivaji Maharaj, in ‘Shiv-Bharat’, Suvarnamala 5, no. 42 (March

1914), cover, edited and published by Purshotam Vishram Mawjee
248
8.4
8.5
8.6
8.7
8.10
8.11
8.12
xii
8.13
Images
Portrait of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (1674–1680), Deccani, Bijapur, circa 1675 CE,
opaque watercolour and gold on paper, folio 37.8 x 23.5 centimetres; painting 22.3 x
14.5 centimetres
249
The goddess and her entourage designed by an artists’ group, Environmental Art
Collective, Barisha Club Durga Puja, Behala, Kolkata, 2010
261
9.2
Kaustuv Saikia, ‘Dainandin Durga/The Daily Durga on Behance’, photograph dated 5

October 2019
267
9.3
Sushanta Pal, Durga Puja installation with the artist appearing on the video screen,
Jodhpur Park, 95 Pally Club Puja, Kolkata, 2016
269
9.4
Rabin Roy, Durga Puja installation titled Barricade, Khidirpur Pally Sharadiya Puja,
Kolkata, 2019
270
9.5
Rabin Roy, Barricade and its iconography of the goddess, Khidirpur Pally Sharadiya
Puja, Kolkata, 2019
270
9.6
Subrata Banerjee, Durga Puja installation titled Thikana [Address], Rajdanga Naba
Uday Sangha Puja, Kolkata, 2019
272
9.7
Subrata Banerjee, Durga Puja installation titled Thikana [Address], Rajdanga Naba
Uday Sangha Puja, Kolkata, 2019
272
9.8
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee painting the third eye and awakening the
goddess to life, Chetla Agrani Sangha Puja, Kolkata, 2017
274
9.9
Puja pandal architecture in the form of a Mughal mosque, Ruby Hospital roundabout,
Kolkata, 2011
276
9.10
Pallab Bhowmick, sculpted tableaux of Durga and her children as a displaced migrant
worker family, Barisha Club Puja, Kolkata, 2019
279
Photographs of children from villages devastated by Cyclone Amphan in Bengal

surrounding the goddess at Kumartuli Sarbojanin Puja, Kolkata, 2019
281
A goddess group and pavilion designed by artist Subodh Ray, with participating tribal
artists from Chattisgarh, headed by the aged award-winning Sonabai, at Behala
Agradoot Club Puja, Kolkata, 2006
285
9.1
9.11
9.12
Images
xiii
9.13
Pradip Das, Durga Puja installation titled Kurnish [A salute to dying urban trades],
Samaj Sebi Sangha Puja, Kolkata, 2019
287
9.14
Pradip Das, Durga Puja installation titled Kurnish [A salute to dying urban trades],
Samaj Sebi Sangha Puja, Kolkata, 2019
287
9.15
A stand-alone street installation, outside the main exhibition site, Arsenal, at the Venice
Biennale, 2015, ‘All the World’s Futures’, curated by Okwui Enwezor
289
9.16
Pradip Das, street installation at the entrance to Samaj Sebi Sangha Puja, Kolkata,
2019
290
10.1
Tamilttay, poster published on the occasion of the fifth International Tamil Conference in
Madurai under the guidance of Professor Aru. Alagappan, Tamil Curankam, Madurai,
1981
297
10.2
S. K. Ayya, Tamilttay, chromolithograph published by Kamban Kazhagam, Karaikkudi,

circa 1941
303
10.3
Appu, Untitled [Bharat Mata], published by Brijbasi, Delhi, circa 2005
305
10.4
Bharat Mata, chromolithograph of Abanindranath Tagore’s tempera on paper, circa

1905, published by the Indian Press, Allahabad, circa 1910
307
10.5
Varaha rescuing Prithvi, sandstone sculpture, Eran, Madhya Pradesh, late fifth or sixth
century CE
310
10.6
Varaha, published by Ravi Varma Press, Karla-Lonavla, chromolithograph, late

nineteenth century
311
10.7
Shanti Swaroop Baudh and Chandrabhan Prasad, English the Dalit Goddess, print,
2009
315
10.8
Monal Kohad, Bharat Mata, watercolour wash technique, tempera, 2020
322
10.9
Sandhya Kumari, Maa Bharati, acrylic on canvas, 2020
323
10.10 Amitava Chandra, Untitled, acrylic on paper, 2020
325
11.1
Interior of the main mausoleum of the Taj Mahal, Agra
333
11.2
Samira Yamin, January 11, 2010, TIME Magazine, 7.875 × 10.375 inches; 20 × 26.4
centimetres, 2016–ongoing
344
xiv
12.1
Images
Sun Temple, from northeast, Gwalior, 1984–1988
353
12.2 Sun Temple, Konarak, circa 1250

355
12.3 Sun Temple, from east, Gwalior, 1984–1988
360
12.4 Informational placard, Sun Temple, from east, Gwalior, 1984–1988
361
12.5 Conjectural reconstruction of the Sun Temple at Konarak
364
12.6 Diagram of images on the Sun Temple sanctum wall, Gwalior, 1984–1988
366
12.7
367
West wall of the sanctum, Sun Temple, Gwalior, 1984–1988
12.8 Detail of erotic scenes on the platform, Sun Temple, Konarak, circa 1250
370
12.9
375
Lakshmi-Narayan Temple, Delhi, 1933–1939
12.10 New Vishvanatha Temple, Varanasi, 1931–1966
379
13.1
387
Ayyur Temple awaiting restoration, Tamil Nadu
Image 1.1 Shaheen Bagh women protesters, New Delhi, 15 January 2020 Source:
WikiCommons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wide_angle_of_Shaheen_
Bagh_women_protesters_15_Jan_2020.jpg (accessed 21 November 2021).
1 Introduction Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar
Luminescence: In Situ with Dissent It was an extraordinary winter of protest in India, as

the year 2019 rolled to its end. The background was set by a series of undemocratic
bills that became acts in parliament without debate and consensus, culminating in the
most explosive and divisive Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December that year,
leading to a surge of civil demonstrations, rallies, and protests across the country on a
scale that had not been seen before. Directly triggered by the state crackdown on a
student protest within the Jamia Millia Islamia University in the heart of New Delhi,
made worse by arrests and vandalization of the campus, a group of Muslim women of
all ages—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and grand-daughters—came out to
occupy the streets of Shaheen Bagh, a neighbourhood flanking the university. With that
began a historic day and night, peaceful, immovable sit-in by the Muslim women of this
locality against a conglomeration of laws that they feared threatened their citizenship,
and the guarantees of secularism enshrined in the Indian Constitution (Image 1.1).1
During the ensuing weeks of the defiant sit-in, artists, along with activists and students,
transformed the by-lanes of the neighbourhood with murals, pavement paintings, and
installations that guided visitors to the scene of protest. A month into the event,
scaffoldings, ephemera, and improvisations became part of ‘the art of resistance’,
transforming Shaheen Bagh into ‘an open-air art gallery’. As one student visiting the
venue wrote, ‘Even before reaching Shaheen Bagh, where the women sat with their
daughters and grand-daughters in silent, powerful defiance … one is introduced to
Shaheen Bagh through the numerous murals. The street art guides you….’2 Opening
up a space for daily congregations of activists and citizens, for singing and poetry
reading, for speeches and book discussions, for the setting up of a library, as well as for
a profusion of murals, drawings, posters, and installations, Shaheen Bagh was both a
site of contestation and experiments in democratic practice (Images 1.2 and 1.3).
Particularly significant was the way art and artists became constitutive of the site of
protest, alongside community elders and student activists, to together conjure visions
that had to be created to be fought for. In the luminescence of these protests, we open
our interrogations into the formations of art and the crisis of the secular in South Asia, in
situ with
Image 1.2 One of the wall murals at the Shaheen Bagh protests, New Delhi, 7 February
2020 Source: WikiCommons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Closeup_of_wall-
art_ graffiti_at_Shaheen_Bagh_Protests_7_Feb_2020.jpg (accessed 21 November
2021).
Image 1.3 ‘Artists in Jamia Gather to Disturb the “Comfortable”, Paint the Streets with
Colour’, New Delhi, 3 January 2020 Source: LiveWire, 3 January 2020,
https://livewire.thewire.in/campus/artists-jamia-protestdystopia/ (accessed 30 May
2022); courtesy of Abhik Bhattacharya.
Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar
dissent, in order to align with its temporality and with its sense of urgency and
possibility. Shaheen Bagh provides a special vantage point for this volume of essays in
examining the relationship between the modern categories of art and secularism. When
art enters this arena of protest, spearheaded by Muslim women, it buttresses their
claims for secular representation and protection of the constitution, and it also extends
their claim beyond the political boundaries to restitute a wider conception of belonging.
Importantly, it alerts us to the ways in which the practice of contemporary art has not
only given visual expression to a politics but has also shaped it. The art of Shaheen
Bagh was not merely a guide to the protest, but also its guardian, lending to the Muslim
women at its centre its very own secular credentials. Indeed, what are art’s secular
credentials? Are they universal and transcendental or does the location matter from
where we ask our questions? And if location grounds us, how have our questions been
constituted within the devotional worlds of South Asia, as well as within the religious
entanglements of nations and nationalisms, of which partitions are a part? In some
sense, the secular (unlike secularism and secularization) is a protean term, and in
Edward Said’s conception of ‘secular criticism’, it could be regarded as a form of critique
willing to hold all belief, as in certainty or conviction, in abeyance.3 But what does such
a concept of secular do for formations of art? How does it allow us to understand the
notion of the secular differently from its moorings in political thought? Akeel Bilgrami, in
this volume, suggests that what was remarkable about Shaheen Bagh was that, here,
the secular commitment of the Indian Constitution was being repeatedly invoked (as it
had been in wider protests),4 but now by ‘Muslims qua Muslims, not merely Muslims
qua abstract citizens’.5 In one of the murals at Shaheen Bagh (Image 1.2),6 this
demand was captured by a depiction of the Constitution as a tangible object in the form
of a large book that is held up to the viewer. In the hands of a hijab-wearing Muslim
woman, where she might be expected to carry the Quran, it becomes an article of
secular faith. If secularity and faith could be regarded as not as far apart as we
presume, then perhaps it is in this mutating domain of critique and conviction that our
inquiry can begin on the secular solidarities of art, in situ with the mural at Shaheen
Bagh and, more broadly, with South Asian image worlds. An installation on a street in
Shaheen Bagh consisted of over a hundred folded paper boats inscribed
Introduction
Image 1.4 Installation of paper boats in the shape of a heart at the Shaheen Bagh
protests, New Delhi, 15 January 2020 Source: WikiCommons,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paper_boats_in_the_shape_
of_a_heart_at_Shaheen_Bagh_protests_15_Jan_2020_closeup.jpg (accessed 21
November 2021).
with the lyrics of an Urdu poem by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, ‘Hum Dekhenge’ (We shall see),
which was being sung at protests all over India and beyond (Image 1.4). T. M. Krishna,
a Carnatic singer and activist, would sing it in four different languages at Shaheen
Bagh. But here the verses were written in Urdu and the ephemeral paper boats
appeared to come together in the shape of a heart when confronted by a toy tank
whose barrel was aimed at them. It is a poem whose modern revolutionary verses
—‘When these high mountains of tyranny and oppression evaporate/Beneath our feet
this earth will shiver, shake and beat’—are suffused with well-established images and
metaphors from Sufi and Quranic sources, as is characteristic of Faiz’s poetry. With this
Indo-Islamic–Persianate tradition now under acute threat of dispossession as ‘foreign’—
the very fear that undergirds the protests—the words on the fragile boats come together
as both a devotional offering and as a gesture of solidarity and love, to stand together
against a threat that has grown terrifying in scale. Many of the essays in this volume,
which are the result of an exciting symposium organized at the Cogut Institute for the
Humanities at Brown
University in autumn 2018, when Shaheen Bagh was yet unimaginable, are centreed on
the manifold crises of Indian secularism. All of them are anchored in a conception of a
region, whether we call it South Asia or the Indian subcontinent, -stan or -desh, carrying
with them this awareness of once-shared lived worlds that now require of us a careful
accounting of religion, nation, and religious nationalisms, but which—as region— allows
us to speak to the disciplines of art and, more broadly, to knowledge formations in which
they are embedded. Faiz, after all, was a communist Urdu poet from Pakistan who had
penned these lines in 1979 in relation to General Zia-ul-Huq’s brutal martial law regime
that would institutionalize Islamization—a past that still needs its own histories. The
poem was also likely to have been written in exile as it is signed ‘America, January
1979’. Exilic life would condition those years, and his incendiary poem, like him, would
have to make an escape in order to return to the region to continue to light fires. Sung
famously by Iqbal Bano at the Faiz mela in Lahore in 1986, to a rapturous encore, the
song was secretly recorded and smuggled out before the general’s soldiers could
destroy it. ‘Hum Dekhenge’ has ever since been a protest poem and song, that students
and activists in Pakistan stomped feet and sung with those in Shaheen Bagh, to
become part of its borderless audio-visual archive on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter,
finding ways to travel across divided nations and barriers, with different struggles to still
ignite. ‘Hum Dekhenge’ is usually translated as ‘we shall see’, as in to see and bear
witness. This volume in that sense is an invitation to interrogate the ways in which the
region’s visual archive stands witness to its tumultuous worlds of art, religion, and
politics, to see how this visual sphere is disciplined, and to re-envision what its unruly
turns might look like. But, as a scholar of Faiz’s poetry points out, the words hum
dekhenge actually carry another kind of force in Urdu (and Hindi), and that is of a
promise that indeed that day will arrive when justice will be delivered.7 We bring these
essays together to engage the histories and crisis of our times with that very defiant and
resolute hope.
Contours: Drawing from Indian Secularism The secular credentials of the Indian nation-
state suffered some of its worst blows in the 1990s, marking the turning point of the
slide into the present
Introduction
political dispensation. These are the years when a sixteenth-century Mughal mosque in
Ayodhya forfeited its right to exist as a protected historical monument, on the grounds
that it may have been built on the ruins of a pre-existing medieval Hindu temple. And an
iconic national artist, Muslim by name and faith, was stripped of his right to paint nude
goddesses, for the alleged offence it caused to Hindu religious sentiments, and denied
the protective shield of his world of art practice. The razing of the Babri Masjid on 6
December 1992, as a culmination of the mounting Ramjanmabhumi movement, and the
concerted attacks on Maqbool Fida Husain that began snowballing from 1996, forcing
the artist into a life of self-imposed exile in 2006, stand etched as watershed moments
in contemporary national and subcontinental history. Many would see these as cathartic
moments in the dismantling of an ‘idea of India’.8 What was under threat was not just
the principle of religious inclusiveness and cultural pluralism but the very integrity of
disciplines of history, art history, and archaeology that failed to save a monument and
an artist and secure their authority in the public domain. In these assaults, what took the
hardest beating was the notion of the secular across the multiple registers of state
policy, political ideology, and the fields of professional knowledge and expertise. The
public debates that followed threw wide open an irreconcilable rift between, on the one
hand, the fanaticism and uncontainable logic of Hindu nationalism, and, on the other
hand, the outrage of the voices of liberal, secular reason, with their corrective histories
of religious iconographies and architecture, and composite histories of faith and lived
practices. It would have been an easier battle for the champions of secularism (both
ethically and politically) had the monster to be vanquished been only the ruthless
cunning and claims of the forces of Hindutva. But there were other demons to be fought
their own falling ramparts and deepening fissures to be confronted within their own
ranks,9 equally within the shaky edifices of a secular national polity that had always
been propped up over a Hindu majoritarian base, with its thickened layers of caste and
communal prejudices.10 Understandably, what these years also saw was an explosion
of scholarship on the career, crisis, and challenges of secularism in India, generating
different camps of defenders and critics, fuelling a set of foundational debates on the
meaning of secularism in a multireligious country that was fast being consumed by the
blitz of Hindutva nationalism.
In these fiery debates, ‘Indian secularism’ emerged as an important ground for

questioning the presumed universality of secularism as well as for rearticulating its
historical particularity in the context of colonialism, anticolonialism, nationalism, and
partition.11 While some of this energy around debates on ‘Indian secularism’ may have
receded, the sense of urgency around it, with a virulent Hindu nationalist government in
its second term, has not. In the past decades, this has spurred a set of fresh
engagement with precolonial narratives of conquest and conflict, both Muslim and
Hindu, alongside the long-standing traditions of religious ‘syncretism’ across faiths, with
continuing legacies of living together, and with practices of cultural tolerance and
pluralism.12 There has also been a shift of emphasis as the debate has moved outside
the boundaries of India. Rather than considering ‘Indian secularism’ as unique or
exceptional in South Asia, on the basis of its constitutional arrangements, this has
opened up space for more comparative thinking across post-Partition nation-states of
the Indian subcontinent,13 and for rethinking the place of the secular for our times in
more expansive ways—as political doctrine, as cultural credo, or just as everyday
practice and common sense. The crisis of the secular also had a profound impact on
the scholarship on art and the study of South Asian visual and material culture. The
visual turn in South Asian studies may well, in some part, be indebted to this need to
rethink the secular grounds on which the art-historical discipline and modern art practice
have been constituted, and at the same time, to rally around these as they have
become the very battlegrounds on which different national visions have been played
out. For instance, in her book Monuments, Objects, Histories, Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s
interrogation of the colonial genealogies of archaeological and art-historical knowledges
allowed us to understand the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in relation to
the remaking of the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodhgaya, the celebration of nudity in the
Khajuraho sculptures in contrast to the outrage over M. F. Husain’s unclothed
goddesses—and confront the crisis within the disciplines of archaeology and art history
in their abject failures to save the secular entities of a historical monument and a
modern artist. Sumathi Ramaswamy’s Barefoot across the Nation brought together an
array of essays to critically re-engage with the figure of Husain and with all that was
entailed in the unrelenting attacks on him and his excision from a once-cherished
Introduction
inclusive ‘idea of India’. In a bold reaffirmation of faith in the secularity of art, Geeta
Kapur, in her canonical essay ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, charted an itinerary through
the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) formed in 1936, the Indian Peoples’ Theatre
Association (IPTA) formed in 1943, to the activism of SAHMAT, after the Ayodhya
debacle, and in support of Husain, to argue for a ‘vanguard role’ for ‘artist-as-citizen’ at
the confluence of ‘the state’s constitutional promise of democratic secularism and the
secularising logic of aesthetic modernism’.14 This book of essays consciously places
itself in the aftermath of these debates and has the advantage of having behind it this
vast body of scholarship that has been significant to both the academic and political
field, as it enters a battleground smouldering both with older debris of war and newer
fires of hate, distrust, and death. Tried and tested ad infinitum, ‘the secular’ may seem a
rather tired term today. Yet, in its very tiredness, it has left a lengthening shadow that
refuses to go away and keeps drawing us into its trail. From a different place of
conviction, Talal Asad once noted, it is precisely ‘because the secular is so much a part
of our modern life, [that] it is not easy to grasp it directly. I think it is best pursued
through its shadows, as it were.’15 The authors (some veterans, others newcomers)
who come together in this book are, in many ways, chasing the secular as a shadow as
it moves and lingers across the modern worlds of art and architecture, monuments and
icons, in the Indian subcontinent. The shadows here are dense. Their movements are
elusive. In pursuing these shadows, what the critical lens of these essays places under
scrutiny is as much the epistemology of art as the criterion and conception of the
secular with which it is equated. The question of ‘how secular is art’ stands inevitably
sutured with the question of how secular are the modern nation-states of the
subcontinent that emerged as core and breakaway entities across a changing political
map, and how secular are their modern professional and institutional structures. The
rhetorical question of ‘how’ in the book’s title can be extended, as the essays suggest,
to the questions of ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘to what extent’ can art be a safe habitus of the
secular, and the secular ‘function as a guard and guardian of a domain called art’?16
The ‘how’ can also be seen as opening up issues of contexts and contingencies,
gesturing towards a space of continuous negotiation instead of resolution.
10
Co-habitations: Reconfiguring the Secular Habitus of Art A decentring of the West—

what Dipesh Chakrabarty famously calls ‘provincialising Europe’17—is a key stake here
in thinking about what makes or unmakes the secularity of the practices of modern art
and modern art history in this region of the Global South. If the fractious histories of
state and nation-building across the Indian subcontinent became fertile grounds for re-
theorizing the secular, the many worlds of art that inhabit these histories can be seen as
primal sites of this dialogue. Along with the notion of the secular, can the very objects of
art and art history also be reimagined from the locus of South Asia, from its colonial and
postcolonial vantage points? This question, placed by Kajri Jain as the starting point of
her essay,18 is one that has implications for this volume as a whole. One of its main
intentions is to bring into conversation the large body of critical reflections on the
ideology and politics of secularism in the subcontinent with the dilemmas that have
globally riddled the institutions of art, the discipline of art history, and contemporary art
practices.19 Theorists of secularism have time and again alerted us to the categorical
distinctions to be maintained between the ‘secular’ as an epistemic category and
‘secularism’ as a political doctrine—between ‘secularization’ as a process of a socio-
cultural transformation of thought, belief, and lifestyles and the adoption of ‘secularism’
as a mandate of state and polity. Together, both processes ground the secular firmly
within the global time-scape of modernity, the forming of nation-states, and the making
of modern institutions and governments, with the former processes normally seen as
laying the path for the latter. This temporal tracking of the secular neatly folds into what
the art historian Hans Belting distinguishes as the ‘era of art’, in a magisterial work that
engages with the long prior histories of the devotional, sacral, and embodied functions
of visual images in the European world and the birth of new notions of ‘art’ in a post-
Renaissance and post-Reformation era.20 This conceptual cleaving apart of the image
as icon and the image as a work of art reinforces a historical teleology in which, as
Karin Ziztewitz notes, ‘art is used as a kind of benchmark for secularization’ and for the
coming of age of modern nations, disciplines, and professions.21 Such a teleology
revolves around the central assumption about a religious past that can be set aside by
the modern institutions of art in the ‘West’ to a
Introduction
11
degree that is never possible in the cultures and countries of the ‘nonWest’. Like the
idea of the nation and the modern state, notions of art in the subcontinent have also had
to wrestle with the histories of religious entanglements and incomplete secularization.
But what if we were to make the artistic dilemmas of the subcontinent a test case for
looking afresh at ‘the unfinished business between “art” and “religion”’ in our
contemporary transnational histories?22 What if we were to argue that the imperfect
secularization of art may be a generic problem rather than a blight of some incurably
religious nations like those of South Asia, pushing us to rethink the temporal and spatial
coordinates of what defines ‘the era of art’ and what undergirds its secularity. This
volume takes its position at the cusp of two familiar discourses that hold sway over the
field of South Asian art history. The first of these is a lingering trend of Orientalist and
nationalist projections that emphasize the quintessentially religious nature of South
Asian artistic traditions as against the secularization of art in the West, and holds aloft
this religiosity as the hallmark of its cultural difference. The second consists of a counter
assertion of the powerful place of art within the modern secular life of the nation—where
the secular is seen to enfold not just the practices of modern art but also the objects
from the pre-modern past by their assimilation within the institutional ambit of museums
and art histories. The evolving discipline of art history enabled an elaborate distilling of a
secular field in which both the art of the ancient and medieval past as well as of the
modern nation came to be positioned. The modern epistemology of art could
accommodate as effectively the religious productions and iconographies of the nation’s
past as the repertoire of divine, mystical, and mythological imagery in the art of the
present. If South Asia’s art traditions came to be invested with a uniquely ‘spiritual’
character, the ‘spiritual’ could be seen as a markedly secular designation: one that had
a distinct modernist lineage and could effectively invest in the religious objects of the
past, the sacral aura of ‘art’.23 From the end of the twentieth century, this once-taken-
for-granted secular habitus of art has come under the repeated siege of religious
fundamentalism and its politics of ‘offence-making’ and ‘offence-taking’.24 This has
called for a radical reformulation of the terms and conditions under which the art of the
region may or may not qualify as secular. On the one hand, the boundaries between the
religious and the secular, arbitrary
12
though they may be, stand in need of constant refurbishing to show how these mark out
the past from the present of South Asian art history and make for separate areas of
protection and immunity for the sacred objects of art and religion. On the other hand, a
look back at the longer histories of colonial and nationalist modernity and nation-building
in this region shows how invariably muddied were the grounds of the secular on which
the institutions and professions of art evolved. The mud took its natural course of drying
and hardening to form new kinds of foundations. It needs underlining here that the
process of secularization of the worlds of art never emptied out its life-worlds of
devotion and enchantment. In contrast to the disciplinary protocols and ‘methodological
atheism’ of other secular professional fields, such as history or politics, the discipline of
art could set up its own modes of enchantment, its own trysts with the divine and the
mystical, with myth and legend, and even with belief and faith.25 While scholars
(including some in this volume) have bemoaned the ‘disenchanting’ effects of the
discipline and its taxonomies on the wondrous objects of art and architecture, it could be
counter-argued that the very efficacies of this field of writing lay in its cultivation of forms
of awe and affect, and in its invitation to the senses of sight and touch. The demands of
disinterest and objectivity in other academic disciplines (which are also under question)
give way in the creative disciplines to alternative modes of aesthetic and sensorial
engagement, and often to direct partisan and political positions. In the essays that
follow, as the attention shifts from the more cognately secular spheres of contemporary
art to the more diverse circuits of popular imagery, iconographies, festival art,
resacralized historical monuments, and replanted temples, the epistemology of art and
its secular coordinates loosen up. Frequently endangered and compromised, the
secular identity of this world of artworks, icons, and monuments is however never fully
surrendered to the religious. Rather, such a world can be seen to offer the secular a
more capacious and flexible place of inhabitation—one where the normative positions of
religious inclusivity and tolerance coexist with sensorial flows of desire and devotion,
and where dogma and belief have to negotiate multiple sites of sacrality. As an
invitation to interrogate the secular temporality of art in South Asia, the essays here
collectively raise a number of questions. If secularism as a political doctrine consists
first and foremost of ‘a stance to be taken about religion’,26 how have the secularized
disciplines of art and architectural
Introduction
13
history strategically produced and managed the many claims of the religious that reside
within it? In what ways does the shifting field of objects and practices push open the
disciplinary boundaries between art history, visual studies, and cultural politics? How
must we redraw the existing temporal and spatial binaries between the religious and the
secular to understand their intertwined histories in both the past and present of South
Asian art history and art practices? What are the residues, returns, and reinventions of
the religious in the contemporary that call out for engagement? How do we
reconceptualize the public and the political amidst these new practices of art curation
and exhibitions, image circulation and reception, street installations and protests,
monument recoveries and remakes? How do we understand the South Asian
discipline’s deep entanglements with the politics of the present?
On the Secular State of Art Engaged in substantive deliberations on secularism, Akeel

Bilgrami in his essay here offers a philosopher’s opening—not only by ‘ground-clearing’
concepts as he sees them but also in paying special attention to the concept of the
secular in relation to art. While in his Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment there is a
strong sense of repair attached to secularism, here he emphasizes secularism as a
political doctrine with a robust constitutional framework in which ‘specific institutions and
laws that form a polity’ are kept distant from the direct influence of religion. This is
accompanied by guarantees for freedom of religion and provisions of constitutional
rights that neither mention religion nor opposition to religion. As such, in this conception
of secularism, the state cannot passively hold a position of neutrality towards religion
but must undertake a more active set of commitments. However, when Bilgrami comes
to the far more capacious notion of the secular, with its wide-ranging common-sense
usages, he proposes three senses for it (and we see contributors of this volume use the
term in all three senses). First, he suggests that the secular could entail ‘anything that
falls outside of the domain of the religious’. Sanjukta Sunderason uses it in this sense to
refer to socio-economic developmental concerns as opposed to the religious, in the art
of East Pakistan. Second, it could be understood as ‘what has … come out from under
the shadow of
14
religion’, as ‘an outcome of secularization’ (italics added). Tamara Sears uses it in this
sense, as she examines the afterlife of a medieval temple at Konarak which has been
secularized by archaeology and heritage regimes. The third is perhaps the most
significant as an expectation of what secular means for art, and that is of ‘a safe and
protected space’, a space immune from religious sanction so as to secure the freedom
of expression integral to art. However, as Bilgrami valuably points out, on the one hand,
such a protected space risks producing a ‘guild outlook’ where entry is based on
expertise and is not open to all, and on the other hand, in light of the kinds of threats M.
F. Husain and Salman Rushdie faced, such protections of the secular can dismally fail
without the active constitutional backing of the state. As such, he ties the possibilities of
‘a self-consciously formulated political doctrine of secularism’ with a strong, active
constitutional framework. We can see the significance of his argument in light of the
protests at Shaheen Bagh, with which he is also thinking. However, if Bilgrami’s
constitutional secularism is integral to the efficacy of the secular, his formulation raises
questions about the status of East and West Pakistan, created from the same political
history as India, albeit on a self-avowedly non-secular premise.27 More generally then,
how should we give an account of secular art-making in nationstates, without the
constitutional arrangements of secularism but with dogged imaginaries of and
contestations around the secular? Karin Zitzewitz, coming into the debate on Indian
secularism from art history and following up on arguments she had made in The Art of
Secularism, offers a different reading of ‘the thickness of the epistemic category of the
secular’.28 With an insistence on ‘practice as the most productive method for
understanding art’s secularity’, she rigorously takes us from the artist’s studio where
work is conceived and made (where artists freely engage with the religious and the
sacred in their work without forfeiting their secular moorings), through the interpretive
work of art history and criticism, to the exhibitions where the work is shown—and she
suggests that the accumulation of these intrinsically secular practices across these
domains produces a secular artistic field. In other words, unlike Bilgrami, for Zitzewitz,
the practice of art-making and writing can arguably generate a secular field (in all three
of Bilgrami’s senses), independent of the constitutional arrangements of the state and
its social backing. It is this auto-generative capacity of art, ‘of self-fashioning or of
Introduction
15
meaning-making … independent of religion’ that leads her to carefully ‘isolate and

differentiate the practices of secularity that make art, and make art possible’. This line of
sight makes artists and art a hugely significant archive for historical investigations
outside the domain of the state and allows for interrogations of both the secular and
non-secular state’s relationship to religion as crafted and contested rather than
predetermined. Vazira Zamindar and Sanjukta Sunderason’s essays on East and West
Pakistan, through the respective work of artists Sadequain and Zainul Abedin, elucidate
this significance of the visual archive of modern art for histories of the secular. Taking
Sadequain’s image of a beheaded artist painting his own head as the point of departure
—the image used for the symposium’s poster and the book cover—Zamindar traces
different ways of reading the image which invokes the medieval mystic Sarmad, buried
by the side of Delhi’s Jama Masjid. She explores how Sadequain draws on the Islamic
cephalophoric tradition (of which Sarmad is a part) to represent, what Julia Kristeva
calls a ‘capital moment’ in art history,29 by which the artist becomes visionary to give
‘sacred thought its secular form’. However, she also reads the theme of decapitation as
a spiritual crisis for both Indian and Muslim nationalisms, set in motion by the
dismemberments of 1947 and 1971, which explode in the hullabaloo of 1976 when
Sadequain’s ‘naked’ paintings are charged with ‘obscenity’ by the newly street-
mobilized Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaiba (IJT). It brings into focus a secular field of
contestation produced by art, a non-secular state’s attempts to separate the domains of
religion and art, and the unsettled questions of belonging and historical inheritance that
continue to haunt the region. While Zamindar interrogates the significance of art
history’s engagement with the spiritual for a political history of ‘decapitations’,
Sunderason focuses on ‘location’ as a spatial and temporal concept for viewing
historical self-understanding of the secularity of art, ‘looking from East Pakistan’, where,
as in its western counterpart, secularism was not a state doctrine. Tracing Zainul
Abedin’s ‘national-bureaucratic-pedagogic’ career across the national territories of East
and West Pakistan, as he built state cultural institutions in both ‘wings’ and curated an
exhibition to produce a ‘Muslim national’ history for Pakistan, Sunderason shows how
his rural-folk-modernism acquired a secular specificity that was distinctive to East
Pakistan. This in turn would shape the ‘vernacular’ distinction
16
of the modern art of the new nation of Bangladesh that emerged in the aftermath of
1971. Zitzewitz’s own argument about the artistic secular is built around the Mumbai-
based artist Rummana Husain’s work, who began to turn to installation and
performance art after Ayodhya, when artists led by Vivan Sundaram and the critic Geeta
Kapur upheld these as ‘a richer and more immediate form of art … to critique communal
violence and religious nationalism’. Geeta Kapur’s influential role in galvanizing and
producing a vocabulary for the role of contemporary art in a progressive politics that
must confront Hindu nationalism, ‘to inscribe the artwork within the public sphere’,
cannot be underestimated.30 It is in this context that Zehra Jumabhoy, as a young
Muslim art historian and curator confronting the field shaped by Geeta Kapur’s writings,
takes on Kapur’s ‘sacred-secular’ formulations for art as an ineffectual counter-point to
the present overpowering forces of dominant Hindu nationalism. Writing as an ‘insider’
to the Indian art world, dealing with the wounds of a crisis where Muslim pasts and
belonging have become intensely fraught, she argues that accommodations of the
sacred–spiritual in some contemporary Indian art practices end up constituting a ‘soft
Hinduism’ that often blurs with Hindu nationalism. With an emphasis on ‘heterogenous’
and ‘hybrid’ Sufi–Bhakti pasts, secular nationalism, she contends, does not look very
different from Hindutva’s devotional tropes, and reproduces the exclusions of more
devout, ‘orthodox’ forms of Islam. In some sense, both Zitzewitz and Jumabhoy have to
reckon with the strained secularity of art when it moves from its protective guild of the
worlds of practice into the ‘exhibitionary complex’ of the art world, in which Hindu
nationalist governments, and viewing publics that have elected them, have to be
accounted for. For Zitzewitz, exhibitions come only at the end of the secular practices
that make art possible, becoming the site of her disconcert as the late Rummana
Husain’s work finds its way into a Gandhi-centred India pavilion sponsored by the
Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) government at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and stand open
to the possibilities of ‘misrecognition’ by a viewing public. By contrast, for Jumabhoy as
a curator, the exhibition as the site of public address and politics cannot be considered
as simply an aftermath of making and interpretation. Rather, given the transformations
of viewing publics, of nationalisms-in-the-remaking and the cultural common sense they
Introduction
17
are producing, she argues that the ‘sacred-secular’ ceases to be secular enough and
demands a serious rethinking of the meaning of secularity for citizenship in the world of
art.
Porous Boundaries of the Sacred and the Secular Given Orientalist descriptions of the
quintessentially religious nature of South Asian artistic traditions, South Asia as a region
has been particularly important for thinking with what Kajri Jain calls the ‘epistemic
frictions’ at the boundaries of ‘religion’ and ‘art’. In this volume, Jain takes on ‘the
ongoing postcolonial and decolonizing task’ to re-ground art history as a discipline
through a set of important serial interventions that challenge the parsing apart of image
worlds into art and visual culture. This essay grows out of her prior scholarship in which
she had to forge arguments to gain admission for her ‘bazaar gods’ into the cloistered
halls of the art-historical discipline, even as she probed the overlapping economies of
vernacular capitalism, devotion, and desire in which they resided, and her new work on
gigantic public statuary that freshly tests the boundaries between aesthetics, religion,
and politics.31 Here, she traces the ghouls of religion across multiple displacements
through which art history’s subjects have been constituted across different geographies.
Traversing through theoretical debates, she argues that we must understand
postcolonial modernity, wrought of colonial legacies, as a universal (albeit
nonhomogenous) condition and not simply a problematic of some parts of the world.
One of her key challenges to the presumed secularity of the arthistorical discipline is her
contention that religion cannot be resolved as a temporal problem by consigning
religious objects to the past of art history. Instead, she argues that the persistence of
and dialogue with religion in modernism require a more flexible and nuanced
understanding of religion as a changing multi-faceted phenomenon, and that art and
religion are not opposed to but rather have been constituted in relation to each other.
Kajri Jain’s essay lays a complex platform on which many of the essays in the volume
find their foothold. Each of these track different transactions between the artwork and
the icon, and move between different public arenas of affect, devotion, and political
fervour. Holly Shaffer’s essay traces the journey of a seventeenth-century portrait of
Shivaji from its origins as a royal portrait in a Deccan court to its metamorphosis
18
into a 200-foot bronze sculpture, as a potent political icon of Marathi Hindu nationalism
in the twenty-first century, and she does so by deftly employing the secular practice of
art-historical analysis, with all its attendant tensions and complexities. As she navigates
the multiple sources for the Shivaji portrait, through imageries of Mughal kingship, Hindu
gods, and Maratha warriors, she arrives at a late nineteenth-century Ravi Varma portrait
as the key source for the circulating copies and prints that followed and that became the
poster image of militant religious nationalism of the region. In concluding that the ‘one
certainty in the history of Shivaji’s portrait, though, is that it is not secular’, Shaffer’s
main point is to underline that what is at stake in her detailed art-historical excavation of
the prior life of the image is not to return it to a place of the secular in art and history.
Rather, she wishes to show how, in both the past and present lives of the portrait, the
non-religious cannot be neatly disaggregated from the religious, the hero from the icon,
or history from nationalist mythography. From its location within a religious-cum-cultural
festival of Bengal, centring around the annual homecoming of goddess Durga, Tapati
Guha-Thakurta’s essay charts, in some ways, a counter-trajectory of the transformation
of the icon into a work of art. Emerging out of a longer history of the ‘secularization’ of
the Durga Pujas in Bengal, and its more recent transformation into one of Kolkata’s
biggest public art events, Guha-Thakurta presents her study of Durga Puja art as a
constitutive case for dismantling the boundaries between artistic, religious, and secular
practices, and the disciplinary formations that maintain them.32 How, she asks, might
we interrogate this open licence of art and politics to freely ‘trespass’ into the arena of a
religious festival, and for the festival to ‘trespass’ into the sphere of contemporary art
practice? Placing the contemporary festival directly in the midst of local, provincial, and
national politics, she looks at the ways in which many of the pandals engage with the
raging citizenship debates that led to the protests of Shaheen Bagh and the migrant
labour crisis during the pandemic and lockdown. Introducing a distinction between a
secular political mandate and an artistic claim on the secular, her essay works around
the concept of trespass as ‘unentitled intrusions’ and shows how the collapsing
boundaries between the political, the artistic, and the devotional in the festival create the
conditions for a new kind of ‘sacred and secular worlding of art’.
Introduction
19
A similar melange of the sacred and the secular enables the proliferation of a whole
array of contemporary gods and goddesses in the public political arena, who form the
main theme of the essay by Sumathi Ramaswamy. A veteran scholar in this field of
popular iconography and their visual histories,33 her concerns here are as much with
these divine beings as with her own disciplinary tools and trajectories. Her essay in the
first person takes us into not just ‘the secular practice of history’ but rather her ‘secular
practice of history’ and its continuing encounters with the affective powers of different
mother goddesses—whether as an embodied figure of Tamil language devotion or as
an embodied cartographic figure of Mother India. She makes us reflect on how the
concept of the secular in the ‘secular practice of history’ needs to be conceived as not
oppositional to the religious (drawing on Rajeev Bhargava),34 but rather as one that is
attentive to the sensorial entanglements of belief and devotion in matters of science and
vice versa. To be enchanted and to provide an account of enchantment, she argues, is
not merely to include the vitality of image-worlds, but to push at the limits of official
records and scientific claims that tame, censure, or exclude all that is ‘volatile,
unpredictable, … [disruptive, even risky,] … but also playful, mischievous, and
compassionate’. It is precisely the activation of the ‘scandalous’, say of the figure of the
unmarried, single-mother goddess, which allows us to respond to ‘the call of the
disenfranchised, the marginal, the subaltern’ in the practice of history. Here
Ramaswamy draws on Jane Bennett’s thinking on enchantment, not just as ‘a
comportment’ that ‘enables us to develop an affective attachment to this world’ but also
as ‘an ethical aspiration’ and a ‘critical obligation’. What happens when enchantment as
comportment has not only subtle political effects, but is self-consciously cultivated for
political projects of exclusion? Is an ethical conception of enchantment a way to
navigate the ever-present political field in which we write?
Secularization and Its Discontents This idea of enchantment, as a way of navigating

religious devotion on the one hand and secular disciplinary dispositions on the other,
returns as a key theme in Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s essay on Mughal monuments.
Focusing on particularly the Taj Mahal, she argues that the secularization
20

of the monument through heritage-protection regimes is precisely what has opened it up
to the brunt of religious and secular nationalisms and their contestations over it. While it
may seem that there are the ‘bad guys’ of ‘bigoted fundamentalism’ versus the ‘good
guys’ of ‘tolerant secularism’, her essay claims that both positions are equally
problematic as they are both ‘disenchanted’ and therefore take away from the
monument the rapture of wonder, the mystical experience, and the sensorial and
affective attachment that has sustained it over the centuries. Art history’s alignment with
the ‘good guys’ of ‘tolerant secularism’, in her view, does not salvage it from the political
battles that are waged over these monuments, or redeem it by bringing a better
understanding of its knowledge and expertise to the public. Instead, it prevents us from
grounding and probing the source of the affective experience of the monument, where
art history and artistic practice could conjoin to draw us back to enchantment. But does
the ‘secularization’ of a monument like the Taj Mahal inevitably amount to forms of
‘disenchantment and cynicism’, as KavuriBauer alleges? As the last two essays show, it
could equally lead to new forms of devotional interpolations and rebirths of living
temples, as they show how older archaeological monuments have come to inspire new
religious remakes. Tamara Sears’ essay takes on this process of the re-engagement of
new temples with older iconic architectural models by focusing on a new Birla Temple at
Gwalior, which is built to reflect the thirteenth-century Konarak Sun Temple. She shows
the tangible connections between the secular transformation of an ancient temple
through archaeology and heritage regimes and new devotional temple projects to argue
that the boundary between these secular and religious architectural formations is ever
porous. Thus, the new Gwalior Temple can bring back to life the dead ruins of Konarak
by adding a sanctum and deity to the replica that have been long absent in the semi-
collapsed original structure. Turning to the way the Birla Temples produced a national
architectural form for the temples of modern India, she locates these temple building
projects within a long twentieth-century history of Indian nationalism, which led to the
emergence of forms of sarvajanik mandirs, which do not embrace the unity of all
religions, but rather project a universalist vision of Hinduism, with its attendant
exclusions. Drawing from secularized antiquity on the one hand and a reinvention of
Hinduism on the other, to project an inclusive Gandhian nationalist project that can
embrace all but Muslims,
Introduction
21
the Gwalior Temple exposes once more the limits of Hinduism’s capacious possibilities
vis-à-vis Islam. It stands as a reminder of the exclusions that were deeply built into
inclusive architectural visions of the nation. The project of turning dead temple sites into
living ones takes on a more provocative secular front in the last essay by Kavita Singh,
where she examines the tensions between secular conservation and care of temples
and the new religious imaginaries that are appropriating its agenda. She studies ‘a
growing trend in south India in which the boundary between devotional care and
professional conservation is getting blurred through the work of several civil-society
initiatives, which combine professional conservation standards’ with overt religious faith.
‘The result is that one can no longer so easily distinguish between Indian artefacts and
monuments that have remained sacred and those that have been secularized. At the
heart of this essay is the work of the REACH Foundation, a Tamil Nadu– based
organization that conserves ancient temples that have fallen to ruin’, ‘adheres
scrupulously to conservation norms, and produces restored temples that look like
artefacts’ of the originals they replace. What is tantalizing is the manner in which
‘REACH’s conservation efforts follow the norms and protocols of the museal regime but
convert these to a form of devotional care, for REACH’s goal is not merely to conserve
the buildings, but to make these neglected temples fit for worship once again’.35 The
revival of ruined temples ‘is intended to catalyse the revival and consolidation’ of local
Hindu communities of worship. Grounded in Venkadu, there is an ethnographic feel to
Singh’s essay that alerts us to the seemingly innocuous, seemingly secular, modalities
of conservation by which a Hindu nationalist landscape is being vitalized. In that sense,
both Jumabhoy and Singh’s essays could be read alongside each other as sounding
alarm at the blurring of boundaries, at the seemingly innocuous and ordinary ways that
art and architecture can be drawn into, and become complicit in, nationalist projects of
extraordinary violence and exclusion. This collapse of boundaries between the secular
objects of art and architecture and the reinvented objects of religion is today carried to
new extremes under a triumphant BJP regime in India, returned to power for its second
term in the sweeping Lok Sabha electoral victory of May 2019. A revitalized Hindu
nationalist landscape of remade temples moves from the activities of organizations like
REACH to unabashed forms of usurpation of historical mosques by temple and
government authorities
22
alike. It is a repeating script that turns more menacing with each replay. The
precedence of the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya is now armed with full
judicial validation and a brand new Ramjanmabhoomi Temple in the making,
inaugurated in person by the prime minister and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in
August 2020 at the height of the first wave of COVID-19. And it is today powerfully
arming the moves of discovering so-called hidden Shiva lingas and Hindu idols inside
Islamic tomb and mosque structures, ranging from the Taj Mahal to the Gyanvapi
Mosque at Varanasi or the Shahi Igdah Mosque at Mathura—frequently with the overt
support of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), the local administration and the
judiciary. While the iconic global heritage status of the Taj Mahal has won it its
temporary reprieve through a court ruling, these moves spell a clear death wish for the
far-less protected and vulnerable mosques at Varanasi and Mathura.36
Itineraries through a Pandemic If this Introduction began on a note of hope and

resilience, in situ with the indomitable protestors at Shaheen Bagh, it ends with a fresh
sense of foreboding and fear. The coming together of this book of essays stands for us
as an ominous marker of present times. In many ways, the book began to finally fall into
place with a firm commitment from publishers and authors during February–March 2020
—as South Asia stood unsuspectingly on the brink of the onset of the pandemic and the
devastations that lay ahead of the loss of lives and livelihoods. In New Delhi, then still
seething under the fires of an anti-Muslim pogrom in its working-class northeastern
fringe, it was only to be anticipated that the powers-that-be would use the occasion of a
COVID-19 emergency and the announcement of a total lockdown to swoop down on the
three-month-long anti-CAA (Citizenship [Amendment] Act, 2019) vigil of the Muslim
women of Shaheen Bagh. It was a mark of the threatening potential of public art which
the site had generated that the forced clearing-out did not stop with the protestors but
continued into the obliteration of all the wall and pavement paintings and street
installations. In its beginning and in its ending, the sit-in protest at Shaheen Bagh, as an
ebullient symbol of the raging country-wide demonstrations against the CAA that now
sharply stand out as ‘that time before Covid’, remains a central framing theme of this
volume.
Introduction
23
The essays gathered here emerged, by and large, from an extremely lively symposium,
held at the Cogut Institute for Humanities at Brown University in the fall of 2018, that led
us to believe that transforming the conversations and arguments of the heady two days
into a book would be a worthy endeavour. The discussions at the symposium were so
vibrant and productive because the stakes felt so high—then as they do now. It was a
reckoning of the visual turn in South Asian studies alongside a reckoning of the
transformations in South Asia’s political landscape, in which the questions of how and
from where we write about art, history, and religion seemed to matter beyond just
academic purview. As co-editors, belonging respectively to India and Pakistan, our
coming together professionally was itself fortuitous, for we inhabit not just different
institutional locations of the Global North and South but also sharply divided national
locations within the entity that is South Asia. The occasion of a Visiting Fellowship at the
Cogut Institute that brought one of us from Kolkata to Providence in the fall of 2018
enabled a set of collaborative endeavours that allowed us to both think with and think
across the divides that furrow through the disciplines and locations within which we
work. The symposium itself grew out of a jointly taught graduate seminar and a series of
enquiries entitled ‘Art History from the South’, which focused on the implications of
worlding in art and history from a geographic and epistemic ‘south’. With the ‘How
Secular Is Art?’ symposium, as with the book, the epistemic ‘south’ became the more
specific ‘south’ of South Asia, pushing us to ground disciplinary arguments in fine-
grained, contested histories of nations and partitions, to raise questions that were hard
fought for, and to rally around the ongoing struggles around identity and belonging. Our
grappling with the fraught but indispensable notion of the secular has been all about
reclaiming a place of collectivity and solidarity in the worlds of art and academia we
uphold in the face of mounting onslaughts. If, back in October 2018, the symposium
bristled with energy and purpose, nothing prepared us for how significant the idea of
gathering would become in the years that followed. At the time, people travelled from far
and wide to be part of it, as presenters, discussants, and audience, and we are
extremely grateful to all of them for their participation and passionate engagement.
Transforming that kind of gathering and its conversations into the shape of a book
seemed compelling, to say the
24
least. Indeed, such a gathering would not have been possible without the unstinting
support and enthusiasm of the Cogut Institute’s director Amanda Anderson and the
institution’s entire staff. In addition, Leela Gandhi as the interim director of the Centre for
Contemporary South Asia, and its staff, also supported the project. In the long
interregnum between the symposium, the planning of the book and its falling into place,
the world transformed irreversibly. By the early months of 2020, the pandemic was upon
us, and with it, the imposition of a world-wide lockdown. While most of the contributors
to this volume were present at the symposium and have been steadfast in their
commitment to the book through the seemingly never-ending waves of the pandemic,
three others (Holly Shaffer, Sanjukta Sunderason, and Zehra Jumabhoy) joined in along
the way, adding important provocations and thought for the volume. Two Brown
University doctoral students came to our assistance during the summer of 2021, with
Faraz Haider undertaking extensive background research and thinking to support the
writing of this introduction, and Arnav Adhikari handling the compilation of image and
permissions, and copyediting of the text with flair and commitment. While Faraz Haider
and Arnav Adhikari contributed to the intellectual and material completion of this project,
Sohini Ghosh and Anwesha Rana, along with the editorial team at Cambridge University
Press, New Delhi, steered the book through all the hiccups and delays with unfailing
care, patience, and consistency. The book would never have seen the light of day
without these amazing sources of support and sustenance, for which we remain ever
thankful. It may not be entirely possible to give an account of the long, tough journey
that has been the last two years of the pandemic and the lockdown, marked by a scale
of loss, grief, uncertainty, and anxieties in our personal and collective lives that we
cannot yet fully fathom. But this volume is finally here, and that it could survive all odds
and be pulled through in these impossibly difficult times is an academic feat to feel
grateful for. The tenacity it has taken for the editors and for each of the contributors, for
the publishers and for those who assisted this long process, to give a book form to this
gathering, stands as a lesson to us all. A lesson of persistence, perseverance, and of a
collective will to stand together against the systemic and episodic violence of religious
nationalisms in South Asia, made immeasurably worse by the brutalities of the
pandemic and the lockdown. For many of us, our lives can never be the same again—
but the
Introduction
25
book stands a testimony of our passage from that time before to the times we are living
through and the times ahead we must brace ourselves for.
Notes 1. On 15 December 2019, a group of Muslim women occupied a public space,

Road 13A, which links Mathura Road in Delhi with Noida. The arterial road is used by
commuters from Noida, Delhi, and Faridabad. Protests had been ongoing at Delhi’s
major universities, Jama Masjid, Jantar Mantar, and India Gate, but the sit-in shifted
attention and lasted for more than eight weeks, as it filled the by-lanes of the Shaheen
Bagh neighbourhood. The protests were against the CAA that was legislated on 11
December 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The Citizenship
Amendment Bill which became an act (CAA) in December 2019 singled out Muslims as
‘illegal migrants’ and refugees, in the move of selectively extending citizenship status to
the ‘Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Bangladesh, who entered India on or before 31st December 2014’, and who have been
exempted from the Foreigners’ Act of 1946. Two important compilations of essays on
this crisis of citizenship are Harsh Mander and Navsharan Singh (eds.), This Land Is
Mine, I Am Not of This Land (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2021); and Romila Thapar, N.
Ram, Gautam Bhatia, and Gautam Patel, On Citizenship (New Delhi: Aleph, 2021). 2.
Adrija Ghosh, ‘Art as Resistance in Shaheen Bagh’, Forum, no. 30 (Spring 2020): 3,
DOI:10.2218/forum.30.4485. See also Sonia Agrawal, ‘Shaheen Bagh and the New
Wave of Protest Art That’s Sweeping across India’, The Print, 16 February 2020,
https://theprint.in/features/shaheen-bagh-and-the-new-wave-of-protestart-thats-
sweeping-across-india/364944/ (accessed 21 November 2021); Scroll Staff, ‘The Art of
Resistance: Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh Has Turned into an Open Air Gallery’, The Scroll, 23
January 2020, https://scroll.in/article/950720/theart-of-resistance-delhis-shaheen-bagh-
has-turned-into-an-open-air-art-gallery (accessed 21 November 2021); Seema Mustafa
(ed.), Shaheen Bagh and the Idea of India: Writings on a Movement for Justice, Liberty
and Equality (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2020). 3. Edward W. Said, The World, the
Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 230–234. See also Aamir Mufti,
‘Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times’, boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004):
1–9. 4. On the significance of the constitution in the protests, see Mustafa Akyol and
Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, ‘Why India’s Muslims Reach for Liberalism’, New
York Times, 30 October 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/ opinion/india-
muslims-liberalism.html?searchResultPosition=1 (accessed 21 November 2021); Rohit
De and Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘We Are Witnessing a Rediscovery of India’s Republic’,
New York Times, 27 December 2019, https://www.
26
5. 6. 7.
8.
9.
10. 11.
Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/india-

constitution-protests.html (accessed 21 November 2021). Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Indian
Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis’, ch. 2 in this volume. Sarover Zaidi, ‘If on a
Winter’s Night, Azadi’, Chiragh Dilli, 15 February 2020,
https://chiraghdilli.com/2020/02/15/if-on-a-winters-night-azadi/ (accessed 21 November
2021). Jennifer Dubrow, ‘Faiz, India and Protest’, Dawn, 5 July 2020, https://www.dawn.
com/news/1566933 (accessed 20 March 2021). See also her book on
nineteenthcentury Urdu publics: Jennifer Dubrow, Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of
Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia (Hawaii: University of Hawaii,
2018). Published a year before the destruction of the Babri Masjid, S. Gopal (ed.), The
Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid–Ramjanmabhumi Issue (New Delhi:
Viking, 1991), stands as one of the most comprehensive anthologies on the conflict and
the ways it violated the principles of modernity and secularism. On the Husain affair, the
essays brought together in Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.), Barefoot across the Nation:
Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (London: Routledge, 2011), strongly bring
out this sense of threat in its very title. This academic rift between different groups of
Left intellectuals on the force and failings of the secular reached its peak in the
aftermath of Ayodhya—with Ashis Nandy’s piece ‘An Anti-secularist Manifesto’, India
International Centre Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1995): 35–64 (amongst his many other writings
in this vein), and Aijaz Ahmad’s ‘Culture, Community and Nation: On the Ruins of
Ayodhya’, Social Scientist 21, nos. 7–8 (1993): 17–48 (amongst his several writings)
representing most sharply the two poles of opinion. See on this theme Shabnam Tejani,
Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2007). This is of course a vast field of scholarship, from which we would like to mark out
two edited volumes: Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1998); and A. D. Needham and R. S. Rajan (eds.), The Crisis
of Secularism in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), which include significant
essays following events in Ayodhya in 1992 and in Gujarat in 2002, along with Akeel
Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2014); and Akeel Bilgrami (ed.), Beyond the Secular West (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2016). The South Asia specific work can be regarded in conversation
with Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2007); Michael Warner, Jonathan Vanantwerpen, and Craig Calhoun
(eds.), Varieties of Secularism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), and
most significantly with Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Talal Asad (ed.),
Introduction
12.
13.
14.
15. 16. 17.
27
Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: Townsend Center
for the Humanities, University of California, 2009). On the re-examination of precolonial
histories of ‘Muslim invasion’ and ‘Hindu resistance’, some of the best books are Romila
Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004);
Shahid Amin, Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of the Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Manan Ahmad, A Book of Conquest:
The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2016). Among the many counter-narratives of religious plurality and cohabitation,
past and present, see, for example, Bruce Lawrence and David Gilmartin (eds.),
Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia
(Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2000), and in the specific context of Ayodhya,
Ashis Nandy, Shail Mayaram, Shikha Trivedi, and Achyut Yagnik, Creating a
Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of the Self (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1995). Some of the main books here are Humeira Iqtidar,
Secularizing Islamists? Jama’at e Islami and Jama’at ud Da’wa in Pakistan (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011); C. S. Adcock, The Limits of Tolerance: Indian
Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press,
2014); S. Saeed, Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Joseph T. O’Connell, ‘Dilemmas of
Secularism in Bangladesh’, in Understanding the Bengal Muslims: Interpretive Essays,
ed. Rafiuddin Ahmed (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); Amena Mohsin,
‘Secularism as Religious Tolerance’, in The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture,
Politics, ed. Meghna Guha-Thakurta and William van Schendel (Durham: Duke
University Press 2013); and the two edited volumes – Tanika Sarkar and Humeira
Iqtidar, Tolerance, Secularization and Democratic Politics in South Asia (New Delhi:
Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Karen Barkey, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Vatsal
Naresh, Negotiating Democracy and Pluralism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2021). Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in
Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004);
Ramaswamy, Barefoot across the Nation; Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays
on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000); and Geeta
Kapur, ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, ed.
Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), 390. Asad,
Formations of the Secular, 5. See Vazira Zamindar’s essay in this volume
‘Displacements of Secularity: Decapitations and Their Histories’, ch. 5. Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).
28
18. Kajri Jain, ‘In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows
of Art History’, ch. 4 in this volume. 19. The ground here has been critically shaped by
books such as Rustom Bharucha, In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural
Activism in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Karin Zitzewitz, The
Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Edward Said’s notion of ‘secular criticism’ in The
World, The Text, and the Critic; and in Aamir R. Mufti, ‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward
Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture’, Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1
(Autumn 1998): 95–125, has also been foundational to the correlations of art and
secularity that are being queried here. 20. First elaborately articulated by Hans Belting
in his book Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, 1st
English ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), his epistemic and institutional
formulations about the era of art in modernity are taken forward in his collected essays
The Invisible Masterpiece, 1st English ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
21. See Karin Zitzewitz, ‘Art and the Secular in Contemporary India: A Question of
Method’, ch. 3 in this volume. 22. See Jain, ‘In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis’.
23. A central theme of her book Monuments, Objects, Histories, these discourses of the
sacred, the spiritual, and the secular in Indian art history are further explored by Tapati
Guha-Thakurta in her articles ‘Our Gods Their Museums: The Contrary Careers of
India’s Art Objects’, Art History 30, no. 4 (September 2007); and ‘Fault-lines in a
National Edifice: On the Rights and Offences of Contemporary Indian Art’, in Barefoot
across the Nation, ed. Ramaswamy. Drawing on Talal Asad’s Formations of the
Secular, Karin Zitzewitz (The Art of Secularism, 6) writes more broadly about ‘the
emergence of the category of the “spiritual” as the name for that quality of art—whether
religious or secular—that moves people and is therefore the site of artistic value’.
Iftikhar Dadi’s book Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2010) provides a somewhat different perspective on the
spiritual as an artistic dispensation. Examining the ways in which modernism in East
and West Pakistan draws on Persianate or Islamic elements, he shows how artists
embraced the spiritual and sacred as a cultural legacy to decentre the religious basis of
the nation-state. 24. On these issues, see Salil Tripathi, Offence: The Hindu Case
(Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009); Kajri Jain, ‘Taking and Making Offence: Husain and
the Politics of Desecration’, in Barefoot across the Nation, ed. Ramaswamy; and
Malvika Maheshwari, Art Attacks: Violence and Offence-Taking in India (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2019). 25. On theories of enchantment in the disciplines, see
Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in
Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, ed. J. Coote and A. Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1992); and
Introduction
26. 27.
28. 29. 30.
31. 32. 33.

34. 35.
29
Jane Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and
Enchantment, see especially ch. 1, ‘Secularism: Its Content and Context’, 3–57.
Pakistan’s constitutional history is chequered by a lack of consensus on the role of
religion in the first constitution writing assembly. It was the 1956 version that made it an
Islamic state but, because of the military coup in 1958, this constitution was not brought
into effect till 1973. Bangladesh initially included secularism in its constitution in 1972,
but it was deleted in 1979, challenged in 1988, and has been under contestation ever
since. Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism, 155. Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital
Visions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). See Saloni Mathur’s close study
of Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur in A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in
Contemporary Indian Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 120. She places the
seminal contribution of Geeta Kapur in her crafting of a distinctive Indian genealogy and
vocabulary for the avantgarde in India, that moves contemporary Indian art out of a
civilizational art history of the kind propagated by scholars such as Ananda
Coomaraswamy and Stella Kramrisch, which long held sway over the field. Kajri Jain,
Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2007); and Kajri Jain, Gods in the Age of Democracy (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2021). It is a festival that Tapati Guha-Thakurta has studied very closely in In the
Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (New Delhi: Primus
Books, 2015). Some of her landmark books in this field are Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.),
Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (New Delhi:
Sage, 2003); Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother
India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Sumathi Ramaswamy, Terrestrial
Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2017); and most recently, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of
Disobedience (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2020). Rajeev Bhargava, ‘Secular’, in Keywords
for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century, ed. Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter
Ronald de Souza (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). This parallel museal regime,
where the sacrosanct secular institution of the museum (not just in South Asia but
across the world) is being reimagined through new kinds of sacred and devotional
appropriation of its objects, is now emerging as a critical concern in the discipline of
museum studies. Kavita Singh, herself, has led the way here in the important anthology
she has co-edited with Saloni Mathur, No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The
Museum in South Asia (London; New York: Routledge, 2015); and in their co-authored
essay in this book,
30
‘Reincarnations of the Museum: The Museum in the Age of Religious Revivalism’, 203–
218. 36. This fresh spurt of provocations is in gross violation of the Places of Worship
Act, which decreed that the status quo be strictly maintained of a religious site as it
stood in 1947, whatever may have been its prior or disputed religious dispensations.
This act which came into place in 1991, just before the destruction of the Babri Masjid in
1992, categorically left the long-disputed site of Ayodhya outside its jurisdiction. In doing
so, it not only sealed the fate of the Babri Masjid but also laid open the doors to the
kinds of claims that now continuously threaten the mosques of Mathura and Varanasi,
on the same grounds that these were allegedly built over demolished temples. See, on
this theme, Soutik Biswas, ‘What Secrets Do Taj Mahal’s Locked Rooms Hold?’, BBC
News, 13 May 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61429270 (accessed
12 July 2022); ‘Gyanvapi Masjid Row: How It Has Played Out since 1991’, Deccan
Herald, 21 May 2022, https://www.deccanherald.com/national/gyanvapi-masjid-row-
howit-has-played-out-since-1991-1111256.html (accessed 12 July 2022); and Abhinay
Lakshman, ‘Fresh Suit Admitted in Mathura Temple–Mosque Row’, The Hindu, 26 May
2022, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/mathura-templemosque-row-fresh-suit-
admitted/article65464683.ece (accessed 12 July 2022).
PART 1 Secularity and Its Art
Image 2.1 M. F. Husain’s 95th birthday celebrations (at the gallery named after him) at
Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, 17 September 2010 Source: Photograph by
Tapati Guha-Thakurta.
2 Indian Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis Akeel Bilgrami
A Distinction and a Definition I will begin very briefly with a ground-clearing distinction
and an attempt at definition before taking up the larger theme of this volume—the
bearing of the crisis of Indian secularism in recent decades on modern Indian art. The
distinction is elementary and should be familiar, but it bears repeating—between
‘secularism’ and ‘secularization’. Secularization, a topic first fully explored by Max
Weber, unlike secularism, is not a doctrine so much as a name for a process of
transformation in society. It has, in the sociological and historical literature, been
described by two quite different rhetorics: ‘the death of God’ and the ‘decline of magic’
and ritual, thus addressing religion as both belief and cultural practice. Loss of belief in
God or in the myths of creation, on the one hand, and the decrease in church-going
(liturgical rituals) or habits of pious dress and dietary restrictions, on the other, were two
distinct symptoms of the process of secularization in the European modern, speaking
respectively to secularization of religious doctrine and practice. The concept of
secularism, by contrast, is concerned less with general historical processes of ideational
and cultural transformation and more concerned instead, with describing specific
institutions and laws that form a polity, and that must be kept distant from the direct
influence of religion. This is a manifestly distinct thing, a distinctness that has its proof in
the fact that the same person can be highly non-secularized (because she is a devout
believer and practitioner of a religion) while being perfectly secularist, and also in the
fact that the same place can be secularist and yet not much secularized (such as, for
instance, the United States, especially in its heartland). It is, of course, often possible to
try and undermine this distinction by dragging cultural matters, say, for instance, habits
of dress, into the realm of policy and polity. Thus, France erected some of its cultural
prejudices about the hijab in the realm of the polity by actually passing policies and laws
about dress in public places. But that does not mean we should give up the distinction.
Matters of dress, unlike, for instance, matters of free speech, are not standardly within
the domain of law and polity; they are in the wider domain of culture and society. It is far
more sensible to keep different ideas distinct and point out that, in particular contexts
such as
Indian Secularism and Art in a Time of Crisis
35
Kemalist Turkey or in the example of France I just gave, the distinction can sometimes
be muddied. Even so, it is not so muddied that we have to give up the distinction. We
can in fact retain it by saying, for instance, that Kemalist Turkey is quite plausibly to be
understood as state-enforced secularization rather than secularism. Unlike the term
‘secularization’, of which everyone has an instinctive understanding, the term
‘secularism’, partly because it is so caught up with the law and the state, needs more
carefully precise characterization, if not a definition. In the rhetoric that surrounds the
term in the West, there is a metaphor that has become a mantra and tends to stand in
as a definition: the wall of separation between church and state. But since, in India, the
term ‘secularism’ came to be widely used after Independence in the context of the
reform of existing religions, this metaphor turns out to be extremely misleading; in fact, it
amounts to a paradox: How could a state, in the name of secularism, propose reforms
in the laws of a religion, without perforating the very wall of separation that defines
secularism? This sort of difficulty has led philosophers like Amartya Sen (and Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan before him) to argue that secularism in India has never really taken a
Western form, has never really appealed to the metaphor of separation, and is in fact to
be defined quite differently as a kind of neutrality between different religions.1 I have
argued elsewhere at length that this is neither theoretically sound nor accurate as a
characterization of Indian secularism.2 It is quite true that many spoke of the importance
of maintaining such a neutrality between religions both in the colonial administration and
in the Congress party through the long freedom movement,3 but it was never offered as
a definition of secularism. What was it intended as, then, if not a definition or analysis of
secularism? I will answer this question after saying something brief by way of defining
(or analysing) secularism. There is no doubt that the metaphor of a wall of separation is
a confusing and misleading characterization of secularism, but the thought that
underlies that confused metaphorical formulation can be perfectly soundly articulated as
a theoretical analysis or definition of Indian secularism that fits its practice as well,
without any mention of the offending metaphor.
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Akeel Bilgrami
The secularism implicit in India’s pronouncements as well as practice consists of three

commitments with relatively clear relations between them. There are, to begin with, two
ground-floor commitments: first, a commitment to freedom of religion (freedom of both
religious belief and practice); and second, a commitment to certain fundamental
constitutional rights that neither mention religion nor opposition to religion. These latter
are the basic ideals that a society, in its polity, seeks to live up to, and will bring the
resources of the state to do so. Free speech, gender equality, and so on are familiar
examples of such ideals that do not make any mention of religion. With these two initial
commitments (to freedom of religion and to general constitutional principles, often in the
form of rights that make no mention of religion or opposition to religion) in place, the
articulation of secularism proceeds to a third, higher-order commitment, a meta-
commitment, that is to say a commitment about these first two commitments. This third
commitment declares a lexicographical ordering which has it that, were there to be a
clash between the deliverances of the first commitment, that is, the commitment to
freedom of religion, and the second commitment, that is, the basic ideals enshrined in
rights that neither mention religion nor opposition to religion, then the latter must be
placed first. That is it. That is a definition of secularism with no muddled rhetoric of
‘separation’, yet capturing the underlying thought that that metaphor was confusedly
intending to convey. And so now, the remaining question is: If this is the right definition
or characterization of the secularism that India adopted rather than the idea of a state’s
neutrality between religions, how does the idea of neutrality between religions fit in with
this definition? What relation does it bear to this definition? And the answer is that the
idea of such neutrality is not a competing definition but rather a constraint (a side-
constraint) on how we must apply the only definition of secularism there is—the
lexicographical ordering one I gave above. When applying such a lexicographical
ordering, we must do so evenhandedly and equally with all religions, without favouring
one religion over another.4 Having distinguished between secularization and
secularism, and then having said something more or less precise to define or analyse
what secularism is, let me turn to the broader theme of their relevance to art.
37
Modern Indian Art and the ‘Secular’ Two things are immediately obvious and were
repeatedly said to be so by the editors of this volume, when they gathered its authors to
discuss its main theme at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University.
First, the theme is of great present urgency mainly because there is a general crisis of
secularism in India ever since the 1980s; and second, a quite specifically constructed
casus belli has steered this crisis into the realm of art, forcing us to reflect on the more
general term ‘secular’ (more general, that is, than either ‘secularism’ or even
‘secularization’) as it frequently surfaces now as an adjectival qualifier attaching to
modern Indian art (as well as to the modern discipline of art history).5 By a constructed
‘casus belli’, I am referring, of course, to M. F. Husain’s drawing of a nude Saraswati
and his painting Bharat Mata, which prompted intense vilification, lawsuits, threats of
violence to his person, and the destruction of some of his work. As is well known, these
were orchestrated mobilizations of the lethal emotional energies generated by the
Hindutva forces in the country that had not only gained both increasing parliamentary
success and executive power over recent years, but gained an increasingly wide
grassroots support in the population, forcing the artist to remove himself to a split
domicile in Dubai and London, where he died some years later, without ever returning to
his homeland—a tragic figure and, as some have said, a martyr to the secular cause.
The facts of this entire controversy, including the legal rulings in his favour, yet his
continued vilification, and the harassment of individuals and institutions who supported
him (such as the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao (MS) University in
Baroda, SAHMAT, and a number of museums and galleries which courageously
continued to exhibit Husain’s work) are by now well known. There is also a sizable
amount of writing on the controversy and the ‘issues at stake’, some of the best of which
may be found in the volume Barefoot across the Nation.6 I am not sure that anything
I have to say will add usefully to that excellent discussion, but I will try to relate one or
two of the issues at stake to the distinction and the definition I have proposed at the
outset of this essay. Though I have said something about the relation between
secularism and secularization in this essay, I have not said anything about the more
38
Akeel Bilgrami
general term ‘secular’ which, as I said, citing the editors of this volume, is an adjective
frequently used to describe modern Indian art and the art world within which it is
pursued (as well as studied). How shall we understand this more general cognate term
‘secular’? One obvious answer is that a term of such generality innocuously refers to
anything that falls outside the domain of the religious. So, in European society of times
past, one might have said that the merchant’s overcoat, unlike the friar’s tunic, falls
outside the religious domain. When the term, so defined, is applied to art and the art
world (the creative acts of artistic practice, their effects and productions, the
interpretative and critical discourse they generate, and so on), one assumes that the
idea of all this falling ‘outside’ of the religious domain is just the idea that religion does
not control and determine these practices and their productions, nor are they in the
service of religion and its purposes (as was said, for instance, about performances of
much early music and of Bach’s sacred cantatas, ‘singing for the greater glory of God’).
Such a definition still allows art to be secular, even if its creative acts and productions
are influenced by religion since not all influence is determining and controlling; and it still
allows art to be secular even if it engages with religion since a great deal of
engagement with religion can occur without it serving religion’s purposes, engagement
which is not from within religion and its practices but from a position ‘outside’ it. Another
layer of emphasis is added to this general notion of the ‘secular’ if one were to apply it
not merely to what falls ‘outside’ the religious in this innocuous way but more particularly
to what has, in some sense, come out from under the shadow of religion. In this more
particular emphasis, we may see the ‘secular’ as what has emerged as an outcome of
secularization. Of course, the domain of the secular, even so characterized, can be
trivially and flabbily comprehensive—after all, if we had, before secularization, taken the
world to be God’s creation, nothing less than ‘the world’ is now secular. It is not for
nothing that Weber, then, spoke of the disenchantment of ‘the world’. Still, one can
assume that the real interest lies in looking at more specific aspects of the world that
were once particularly under the determining control of religion and served its purposes
but are not (do not) any longer (do) so. Thus, we might say for instance that mediaeval
universities, such as Oxford, and the education they provided became uncloistered and
migrated out into the mundiality of the world at large, and thus are now ‘secular’, in the
modern period. So also, Georg Lukács had
39
said that the novel was a ‘secular’ literary form,7 famously declaring that it was a literary
form for a world that ‘had been abandoned by God’ (though an abidingly religious
person might be excused for thinking that those last five words seem to be blaming the
victim). Lukács’s argument turns on a range of substantive considerations, but it is
obvious that it is greatly facilitated by the more simply chronological consideration that
the novel is standardly said to have flowered as a literary form only in the last 300
years. That obviously cannot be said of painting or sculpture or architecture or
decorative practices as art forms, which might more properly be said—just as I did say
—‘to have come out from under the shadow of religion’. The novel, by contrast, was
never under the shadow of religion. I have given all these European examples since
the terms we are discussing first emerged in Europe, but if this is right and the term
‘secular’ gets to have this more particular emphasis when it describes aspects of the
world and its practices that have, in this way, emerged as outcomes of the process of
secularization, we begin to get a sense of what might be meant when it is said, as it
frequently is, that modern art in India is ‘secular’. The definitions or, at any rate, the
analytical characterizations, that I have just tried to provide for the term ‘secular’ were
carefully worded, as I said, to allow for both the influence of religion on art and the
engagement by art with religion. Such influences and such engagements were perhaps
always in play through the entire period designated as ‘modern’ in Indian art. But neither
that fact nor any carefully worded definitions and analyses can stop dichotomies and
binaries from developing in the natural course of the cultural and political
transformations that a society undergoes— most generally binaries such as ‘religious
and secular’ art, ‘traditional and modern’ art, but also more specifically between ‘elite
and popular’, ‘metropolitan and vernacular’, ‘cosmopolitan and provincial’. Thus, as was
widely noticed, the newly formed nation with a prime minister avowedly seeking to bring
its society forward into a modern, scientific, secularized, cosmopolitan ethos, was the
ground that nurtured in its artists an openness to the influences of international centres
of art such as Paris and New York and a turn away from the more homegrown
romanticist moorings of the art in Bengal that had dominated till then, bringing in its
wake a range of select institutions both for the teaching and the display of art, and an
informed and sophisticated audience, which one essay in the volume on Husain I
mentioned actually describes as consisting of
40
Akeel Bilgrami
‘self-possessed and self-cultivated individuals to exemplify [modern] civilizational values

to a broader population’.8 All in all, an aspiration to a Republic of Art that overcame
India’s sectarian divisions in echo of the Voltairean Republic of Letters that aspired to
transcend the long history of internecine national conflicts in Europe; and, like the latter,
distinguishing between the ‘lettered’ classes circulating in academies, galleries,
museums, cafes, and salons in the metropoles (Voltaire’s Paris/Geneva … extending to
St Petersburg; Husain’s Bombay/Delhi … extending to Baroda) who are equipped to
aspire in this way and the ‘broader population’ who saw nothing beyond what was
allowed by their parochialism, a parochialism which was quite literally identified as
contrasting with the secular by Voltaire, in such expressions as l’espirit de clocher (only
seeing as far as can be seen from one’s church tower). All this fed into the generating of
the binaries I mentioned above. Indeed, so much so, that it took only a few decades
before prominent artists as well as critics began to react against the binaries.
Gulammohammed Sheikh, to give just one influential example, spoke of how the
secularized, metropolitan, elitist ethos of the surround of art in Nehruvian India had
cramped creative possibilities by ‘quarantining the sacred’ and wrote explicitly of his
resolve to seek out references and sites of the sacred to complicate the secular and
non-sectarian outlooks he was committed to.9 Similarly, strands of the avant-garde
sought new directions to shed the impression of the ‘high’ that had come to be
associated with the ‘modern’, turning to the popular—on the street, in the regional and
vernacular festivals, in both the agitprop and the commercial poster, even on the
catwalk—to the point that Geeta Kapur began to speak of how folk, tribal, and popular
art might come to be seen as a heritage that ‘can stand in for, even usurp, the vanguard
formations of the contemporary modern’. Kapur pushed this argument even further to a
more political and philosophical plane, speaking of the ‘possibilities for the avant-garde
to turn to Gandhian ideas of resistance that might be renewed today in notions of [here
she cited some of my own work] “enchantment” that stand opposed to the alienating
cultural fall-out of modernity’.10 This is only to be expected. It is part of the natural
trajectory of the rise and fall of all conceptual classifications (at least outside the natural
sciences)—we make distinctions that then congeal and threaten to encrust in binaries,
and so we react by seeking to dissolve or complicate
41
the distinctions, reminding ourselves of the need for more ecumenical definitions and
more carefully worded analytical characterizations of the terms involved. Why should we
expect concepts deployed in the sphere of art and art history to be an exception to
these general tendencies? But in the decade or two following the destruction of the
Ayodhya Masjid, as Hindutva forces emerged with increasing influence and force, these
efforts to undermine the growing binary of religion versus secular (as, for instance, in
the cited remark as well as in the interesting work by Gulammohammed Sheikh) may
also have acquired a much more specific character and significance. It was not merely,
as Sheikh’s remarks suggest, a sort of return of the repressed (or suppressed), shaking
off, from a non-sectarian point of view, what seems like a state-encouraged11
secularization in the cultural sphere during the Nehruvian period; it also amounted to
calling the Hindu nationalist’s bluff. After all, from the outset, the Hindutva ideologues
had also voiced, in a much more shrill and insistent bleating complaint, the very same
reservation that Sheikh had voiced—that the Nehruvian establishment had treated
religion and tradition with hostility. Calling their bluff had its decisively effective moment
only some years later, when Sheikh himself, along with his departmental students and
colleagues at MS University in Baroda, were attacked by the Hindu nationalists, thereby
revealing their underlying sectarianism, which was now completely exposed as
something they hid behind a fraudulent façade of a seemingly non-sectarian general
complaint about the Nehruvian hostility to religion and tradition. So far I have analysed
the term ‘secular’ as having two connotations: first in terms of an ‘outside’ of religion;
and second, more particularly, as ‘an outside that is an outcome of secularization’ or, as
I put it, ‘a coming out from under the shadow of religion’. However, both these
connotations that I have been discussing about the deployment of the term ‘secular’ in
describing modern Indian art, gain a further and much more anxious third layer of
connotation in the aftermath of the attacks on Husain that forced his exile. These were
attacks on the art world of the Indian modern and now the term ‘secular’ to describe that
art world came to connote not merely a space ‘outside’ the religious domain, nor merely
an outside space that has ‘come out from under the shadow of religion’, but also in
addition a ‘safe and protected space’ for art that was rudely intruded upon by a
sectarian religious assertion. This third emphasis raises a whole set of fundamental
issues that I will now very briefly explore.
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Akeel Bilgrami
One theoretical instinct of mine regarding this third form of use of the term ‘secular’ to
describe the art world is that the idea of such a protection for art as a kind of special
zone to be safeguarded from Hindutva attacks coming from outside will inevitably slide
and degenerate into something akin to a ‘guild’ mentality around art, with all the pitfalls
of that mentality—a privileged coterie ideal, working within its own assumptions and
practices that are opaque to those not suitably reared in them, a claim to ‘expertise’
rather than merely knowledges (unlike knowledge, expertise ceases to be what it is if
the mass of people come to possess it), setting its own standards for self-assessment
that cannot be scrutinized and discarded without illicit impertinence by the public at
large, and thereby depriving itself of just the sort of fundamental dissent from the
outside that genuine creativity thrives on. At bottom, the main pitfall of this deployment
of the term ‘secular’ is just the tendency to, in effect, make an essential tie between the
intolerance of the Hindu nationalist campaign against Husain and its vulgarity; and once
this tie is made, there is no scope (or more cautiously, I should say, not much scope) for
the aspiration to dissolve some of the binaries of high and low, metropolitan and
vernacular, elite and popular, which, I had mentioned earlier, many artists and critics
themselves sought to do. In brief, then, this first instinct of mine, by contrast, restricts
one to opposing the intolerance but refuses any conceptual move (such as the one
marking a specially protected space for art via the adjectival qualifier ‘secular’) that
would, in effect, tie the intolerance one opposes to the idea of an unlettered and
untrained vulgarity. A second instinct is to observe that, unless one says something
more to justify one’s selectivity, there is a real question that arises about why the
intrusions of bigoted religious campaigns of this sort are being singled out in these
protective demands for art. The art world is part of a world that threatens the creative
aspirations of art from many different directions. It needs protection from all sorts of
things—religious intolerance as we have been discussing, but also, to pick just one
among the many things that artists and art critics frequently lament, protection from the
latecapitalist economic deformations of ceaseless commodification, of planned
obsolescence, of deep-seated careerism, of celebrity aspiration … (anyone wanting to
fill in this ellipsis can construct a very long list from Fredric Jameson’s book
Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism).12 By now, modern Indian art
is almost as vulnerable to these tendencies as
43
the art of ‘advanced’ societies of the West. And so my second instinct here is that, in the
face of these multiple sources of threat to the art world, ‘the something more’ that needs
to be said to justify the singling out of art’s secularity as a protected space cannot be
stated in non-arbitrary terms without appealing to the nation’s fundamental rights in the
Constitution, which have provisions that would protect it against bigoted sectarian
attacks but no provisions really to protect it against the corruptions of an increasing
influence of corporate capital. But then, once that constitutional appeal is made, there is
no way to single out art as a special space to be protected as opposed to all the other
things that are to be protected under general constitutional provisions of ‘free
expression’ and ‘free speech’. The Constitution and the law speak in completely general
terms about the targets of these attacks by religious zealotry, not about art in particular.
Art merely falls under the general protections given in principled commitments in the
Constitution to free ‘expression’. In fact, given my first instinct and its recoil from a guild
mentality, I am inclined to applaud the framers of the Constitution for not singling art out
as having a special status in the matter of such protection. But now, if I am right about
this, the entire topic of the general category of the ‘secular’ that we have been
discussing in these last many pages collapses into the more specific topic, the topic of
‘secularism’ because the principle regarding free expression and speech is just the sort
of principle that is listed among the second of the three commitments that make up the
lexicographical ordering ideal of secularism. Just to be completely clear, the dialectic of
what I have been saying has been roughly as follows. We are trying to understand the
adjective ‘secular’ as applied to art and the art world as a marker of its being a safe and
protected space against bigoted religious attacks. I first reacted to this with an
instinctive worry that this might land us with all the pitfalls of a guild outlook around art.
I then went on to elaborate a second instinctive worry in the form of a simple pincer
argument. One arm of the pincer asks the question: Why is the secular being selectively
stressed as a provider of a safe and protected space when art is vulnerable to attack
from so many directions, other than religion as well? And, I have claimed that there is
no way to answer that question and show why this selectivity is non-arbitrary without
appeal to the fact that, unlike with the other sorts of directions of attack on art that
I mentioned, it is the Constitution, which has laid down provisions for protection against
attacks of this kind in its principled
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Akeel Bilgrami
commitments to free expression. But then, the second arm of the pincer comes into play
because now the question arises: Given the fact that ‘expression’ adumbrates all sorts
of things including the plainest of speech, why is art being selected as specially
protected? If there is no answer to this question, and I do not see how there can be
given the formulations of the Constitution, then the entire matter of the ‘secular’ as
marking a protected space is nothing other than the matter that ‘secularism’ has sought
to address by the lexicographical ordering that appeals, among other things, to the
principle of free expression. The one matter collapses into the second. This, I believe, is
just as it should be. It is best to address the problems raised by the attack on Husain,
not by appeal to the ‘secular’ as a general category qualifying the world and space of
art, but rather to fall back on secularism, and thereby avoid all of the pitfalls that would
erect a guild outlook around modern art. Now, it must be admitted that, on the face of it,
Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul’s Delhi High Court decision in favour of Husain on the
grounds that Bharat Mata is a ‘work of art’ does seem to imply a claim for art in
particular as a protected domain against the kinds of charges that were brought against
the artist, a claim to art being the sort of domain that we have been discussing thus far
as deserving the more general qualifier ‘secular’. But the judgment does go on to say
that art is ‘a tool of expression’. So it is also just possible that he did not have in mind
that art, qua ‘secular’, by its nature, is something that singularly needed protection—with
all the guild implications which, I have argued, this eventually leads to— but instead
what he had in mind was to assimilate art to expression in general, and so he was
ultimately only invoking Husain’s general right to free expression, quite generally
provided for in the Constitution. It is just not obvious which of these two is the decisively
right way to interpret his judgment. The text of his legal ruling underdetermines this
matter and so we should be careful not to overinterpret it. Nor does his mention of the
Khajuraho sculptures and other nude artwork antecedents to Husain do anything to
resolve the question in favour of the former interpretation since the same ambiguity in
interpretation applies to the antecedents as well. There is no doubt that Kaul’s judgment
speaks at some length on art in particular but that is unavoidable because the casus
belli was an artwork. A great deal of the substance and the rhetoric of what he does say
about art
45
is, in fact, just rehearsing standard considerations from Mill’s arguments in his patchy
masterpiece On Liberty13 for free expression in general. In any case, particular legal
judgments apart, if I am right about this collapse of issues, I will now leave discussion of
the more general category of the ‘secular’ as attaching to art (an attachment that I have
argued is not well motivated nor well grounded) and conclude with some brief
reflections on the relevance of ‘secularism’ to art and the crisis that was generated first
by the attacks on Husain.
Art and ‘Secularism’ The obvious and simple relevance of secularism to the matter of
free expression (whether in art or in plain speech and writing), I have argued, is that the
law of the land in India’s adoption of a secular state enshrines two things: first, the
freedom of religious belief and practice; and second, free expression, but then further
insists that if the former, that is, the free exercise of beliefs, practices, and sentiments of
a religious people, demands censorship and censure of some particular case of artistic
expression or speech, then a third meta-commitment also enshrined in the law asserts
that the latter, that is, the right to free expression, gets lexicographical priority over the
right to freedom of religion. But important further issues remain because in every
constitution, including our own, the second, that is, the constitutional right to freedom of
expression, that according to secularism should get this lexicographical priority, comes
with built-in exceptions. As do all laws (such as, for instance, self-defence
considerations in homicide laws). Indeed, in the preamble to the Constitution’s First
Amendment in 1951, the need for such exceptions were openly announced as
desirable: During the last fifteen months of the working of the Constitution, certain
difficulties have been brought to light by judicial decisions and pronouncements
specially in regard to the chapter on fundamental rights. The citizen’s right to freedom of
speech and expression guaranteed by article 19(1)(a) has been held by some courts to
be so comprehensive as not to render a person culpable even if he advocates murder
and other crimes of violence. In other countries with written
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Akeel Bilgrami
constitutions, freedom of speech and of the press is not regarded as debarring the State
from punishing or preventing abuse of this freedom.
And, then, through some evolving steps over the years, this matter came to be settled in
the current formulation of Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution which states those
exceptions as expression or speech that threaten the ‘interests of the sovereignty and
integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public
order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement
to an offence’. We can summarize the laying down of these exceptions as an
application to the freedom of ‘expression’ of the pervasively invoked idea of John Stuart
Mill’s ‘harm principle’, which gives freedom all the scope it needs up to the point that it
causes harm to others. What constitutes harm is, of course, a contestable matter.
Those who are suspicious of the abuse of state power in India may resist a trigger-
happy understanding of what counts as the harm of threatening ‘the security of the
state’. Feminists may want to reformulate the harm of ‘decency or morality’ as the harm
of ‘degradation of women’. And so on. But these are all details. However, these details
are settled ultimately, the point is that all constitutions that make free expression a right
allow for exceptions that can be said to fall under Mill’s harm principle and this has
come to have central importance even in societies where libel laws are very relaxed
because of growing alarm about considerations of ‘hate speech’ on social media. When
religion comes to centre stage in considerations of ‘harm’ that provide exceptions to the
freedom of expression, one most recurrent kind of harm that is invoked is that of
causing hurt and offence. This is bound to be so in societies that are not much
secularized, but it is also constantly invoked in secularized societies such as those of
Western Europe in which there are large migrant populations from erstwhile colonies—
and not merely in their first generations because, as poor Salman Rushdie discovered
in Britain, younger generations too have resisted the pervasive secularization of the
societies in which they have grown up and claimed their religion as a zone of comfort
and a source of dignity and autonomy against the racial hostility they encounter. Their
religious sensitivities and passions can run high and with considerably more energy
than the older generations.
47
However, the laws and rights that secularism invokes in its second commitment will
naturally also insist that it is not sufficient to talk of feelings of hurt and offence as an
exception constituting ‘harm’. Feelings of hurt can be irrational. Or worse, they can be a
pretence of hurt, for gaining political ends and advantages (not unlike the familiar
spectacle of the pretence of physical hurt on the football field for gaining advantages
with the referee). So, secularist appeal to the lexicographical priority of the right to free
expression will insist that the harm principle requires that it be established that there are
justified feelings of hurt and of being offended. To put it in a word, it is not enough that
someone has hurt feelings, the action being assessed for harm must be deemed to
have been hurtful. When feelings of hurt are irrational (or pretended), we must deny that
there was any hurtful action to warrant the hurt. As T. S. Eliot might have put it, the
emotion has no ‘objective correlative’.14 The harms of hurt and offence were, of course,
central to the charges brought against Husain. But both the Delhi High Court and the
Supreme Court judgments, as we know, despite noting the claim to being hurt and
offended, did not see Husain’s painting as hurtful or offensive, and did not see it,
therefore, as falling under these ‘harm’-inducing exceptions to the free expression
constitutional commitment; and so, they rejected the Hindu nationalist legal allegations
regarding both obscenity and offence or disrespect towards religious sentiments. Thus,
as far as the issue of secularism is concerned, the judiciary then (unlike in some of its
more recent judgments) took the Constitution’s secularist commitments (in just the
sense of secularism that I have defined) entirely seriously, made an assessment by the
lights those commitments require (including the exceptions clause that I have for the
sake of convenience abbreviated as the harm principle), and made a verdict in favour of
Husain. A further issue arises, however, if in the matter of harm, we turn from the
perspective of the alleged victim, who claims to be hurt and offended, to the perspective
of the alleged perpetrator. This issue is clearly stated in Section 298 of the Indian Penal
Code which familiarly demands that the prosecution establish intention on the
perpetrator’s part to cause harm (hurt or offence of religious sentiments, in this case). In
the judiciary’s opinion, the prosecution failed to establish this in the case of Husain.15
However, what are vital and cannot be left out of a discussion of secularism and art are
the judgments made, not just by the judiciary but by the wider public
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sphere, the sphere of extra-legal public opinion. When one considers this wider public
sphere (the continuing vilification of and threats to Husain by his seedy Hindutva
tormentors despite the court rulings, making it impossible for him to return to India
without fear for his life and safety, vilification that still goes on all these years after his
death), something interesting is revealed about how the politics of identity understands
the law. To explain this, we need some stage-setting. Walter Benjamin had once
remarked in passing in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama,16 as had Eric
Auerbach more elaborately in his magisterial work Mimesis,17 that in Greek tragedy
and epic the heroes were by and large not depicted with the detail of an inner life. It is
interesting that, to the extent that this is true, it is entirely of a piece with the general
characterization of criminal law in the ancient period as working with a notion of ‘strict
liability’, whereby the occurrence of a criminal act was viewed only in terms of its effects
—the effect, in particular, of polluting society—and punishment (often in the form of
exile) was viewed as getting rid of the contamination. At its simplest, this point about the
absence of inner life might be put thus: Oedipus’s sexual relation with Jocasta is not
exculpable because there is no scope for distinguishing it from his sexual relation with
his mother, a distinction only available if his inner life is introduced as making the
difference. (He did not intend to have sexual relations with his mother.) It is not till some
of the sermons of St Augustine, with such expressions as reum non facit nisi mens rea
(an act does not make someone guilty without a guilty mind), that glimmers of an inner
life entered the sphere of the public’s blame practices in the matter of wrongdoing,
evolving gradually through the treatise describing Henry I’s laws in the early twelfth
century, all the way down to Edward Coke’s ‘Third Institute’, and then finally once tort
law and criminal law came to be seen as radically distinct, strict liability was restricted to
the former, and mens rea (or provably deliberate intent) became central to the latter.18
What counted as relevant inner life for the conviction of wrongdoing was then gradually
further enriched to include more than mere deliberate intent. Someone could be found
guilty for doing something that caused harm, knowing that it would cause harm, even if
he did not intend to cause harm. Moreover, even if this knowledge of the harm that
would be caused is shown to be lacking, if the harmful consequences of the act are
relatively
49
obvious, the law can indict the defendant’s obtuseness by bringing in its standard
considerations of criminal negligence to find culpable this lack of knowledge. Those
standard considerations, applied to the cognitive realm, yield the notion that someone
ought to have known better. And the graver the harm in question, the more strongly will
the law apply this imperative of ‘ought’. It is this sort of introduction of a wide field of
cognitive considerations, over and above intention, that I think really underlies a
differential that struck me as intriguing when the agitations targeting Husain began.
I noticed, in conversations and in what I read by the large class of metropolitan and
academic artists and intellectuals (what I, earlier, facetiously called India’s lettered
‘Republic of Art’), all of whom had impeccable commitments to the constitutionally
enshrined principle of the freedom of speech and expression, that though, invoking that
principle, they had stood up for Salman Rushdie as well, they never showed the same
warm sympathy for his plight after the publication of The Satanic Verses19 as they did
some years later for Husain’s plight. I have always been intrigued by this differential,
especially because I had written more than once in defence of Rushdie. It is worth
reflecting on and trying to diagnose, because what accounts for this differential says
something rather revealing about the relations between how secularism is conceived
and applied by the law and how it is conceived and applied by different segments of the
general public (‘the public court of law’, as it is sometimes called, rather than the judicial
court of law). The differential could, of course, be accounted for by relatively superficial
reasons. Rushdie came off as brash and prickly while Husain had gained elder
statesman status. Less superficially, it was often thought Rushdie resided in and had
produced the work that prompted the hostility from a distant metropolitan site, while
Husain lived and worked in the heart of the region that had been overtaken by his
Hindutva opponents (more sentiment and sympathy might have been forthcoming for
Rushdie if he lived and wrote in Riyadh or Isfahan or Peshawar). Going deeper yet, one
might also say Rushdie was explicitly attacking a religion which was under attack by the
whole Western establishment from within whose location he was writing, and which, in
India, was the religion of a minority under attack by a majoritarian Hindu nationalism,
while Husain was not only not attacking a religion (as the judicial judgments make
clear), the
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religion that perceived itself being attacked by him was fast gaining the seat(s) of
established power. To put it very crudely, Rushdie seemed to be joining in a general
attack on the underdog, which was, in turn, only fighting back by attacking Rushdie and
his book, whereas Husain and the Muslim minority he belonged to were being attacked
by the top dog. Strictly speaking, the judiciary cannot perhaps be moved by any of the
foregoing considerations in their assessments of harm, but public sympathies and
hostilities certainly are moved by them and they are reflective of a nation’s informal
understanding of its own secularism. Secularism may be defined in terms that invoke
constitutional principles, but you cannot stop the public from having opinions about its
effects on the world and the people to whom the law is applied. But, over and above
these reasons for the differential sympathies that these two prominent attacks on
freedom of expression prompted, there is, I think, a somewhat less sentimental and
more strict explanation that has to do with the wider cognitive considerations of the
inner life of the wrongdoer that had entered into the criteria of both the legal and the
general public response to the alleged wrongdoing. Rushdie certainly could and did
deny that he had written with deliberate intent to hurt or offend people with deep Islamic
commitments. So, by the mens rea criterion, he can claim the same innocence that was
granted to Husain. But, unlike with Husain, it is much harder to establish that he did not
know that what he wrote would hurt and offend Muslims. Since Rushdie was never
subjected to a court hearing, there is no telling whether a court of law would have found
Rushdie to be acting with knowledge of the harm of hurt his novel would cause, or
proposed that he ought to have known of it. But my subject here is not the legal sphere
but how to diagnose a differential in extralegal public sympathies, and my strong hunch
is that the public I am speaking of would be quite sceptical of any claim Rushdie might
make that he did not know that his book would cause hurt or offence. No such
counterpart scepticism or criticism of Husain seems to have arisen in the minds of the
very same public. And even if the members of this public were prepared to charitably
allow that Rushdie did not actually know he would be hurting and offending Muslims,
they would be very likely, on the basis of their awareness of the fraught sensitivities
among Muslims prompted by widespread Islamophobia both in India and abroad, at
least to say that he ought to have known that it would cause hurt and offence. They
might
51
have said it on the basis of elements in The Satanic Verses as well. As many have
observed, Rushdie’s use of terms like ‘Mahound’ as a name for the prophet
Muhammad, even though it occurs in the dreams of a character, must surely have been
written with an awareness of its long history of deployment in the centuries-long
vilification of Islam through the entire period of the crusades. By contrast, Husain could
not have been expected to know that his paintings would cause hurt or offence because
the history of Indian art, especially sculpture, is replete with nudes that did not cause
offence. I want to stress here that this is a quite different appeal to the Khajuraho
sculptures in defending Husain than the one offered by Justice Kaul. It does not suggest
that Husain’s painting, like the Khajuraho sculptures, belongs to a sequestered realm of
art that is protected as a secular space. It does not even cite them as precedents to
Husain’s paintings, which if they did not cause offence, his paintings should not do so
either. Rather it suggests that, unlike the rhetoric of ‘Mahound’ and several other such
devices in Rushdie, because the history of previous occurrences of nudity in Indian art
was never taken to be hurtful or offensive, it cannot be demanded of Husain’s cognitive
inner life that he ‘ought to have known better’. So, it would seem that the cognitivist
enrichments to the minimal mens rea element of the inner life of subjects being
assessed for falling afoul of the harm principle apply quite differentially to Rushdie and
Husain and it is in this that we can find an explanation for our differential response to
them. Of course, as I said, for all our differential sympathies here, we may still defend
Rushdie’s right to free expression just as much as Husain’s. Whether the harm principle
applies or not depends on how we weigh the harms that are caused by some
expressive act against the bad effects of denying the author or painter his or her right to
free expression. I have myself defended Rushdie on the ground that such harms as
were caused by The Satanic Verses are not comparable to the ill effects of censoring
the book and, furthermore I had argued, that this is a judgment that Muslims can arrive
at with a kind of internal rationality from within their Islamic commitments.20 Honest
disagreement can occur here. John le Carré, Benedict Anderson, and Talal Asad are
just some of the members of this ‘lettered’ wider public I am discussing who have taken
a somewhat different view. The only point I want to stress is that there is and should be
interest in the
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fact that even those who do defend Rushdie along these lines, as I do, may show
measurably more sympathy for Husain than they do for Rushdie. Such differential
sympathy reveals that secularism, though it is strictly a political doctrine, may find that
its application via the principle of free expression in the realm of art raises quite different
moral sentiments in different segments of a secular polity’s citizenry.
Art and the Sectarian Politics of Identity If we now shift our gaze from the public in the
sense I have been discussing to a different segment of the public, the public court of law
that the politics of identity informally constructs and mobilizes in all its conflicts, a quite
different set of issues arises. I should take care to sound a terminological caution here.
By ‘the politics of identity’ I mean something rather narrow. I mean the sort of identity
politics that is to be found in identitarian sectarian conflicts between groups, for
example, of the kind that emerged since the 1980s as a result of Hindu nationalism
gaining influence in Indian social and political life.21 I am not using the term ‘identity
politics’ here in the highly generalized sense which includes the political activism of a
group that may mobilize itself on the basis of its identity to gain rights of various kinds—
say, civil rights, or women’s rights, or gay rights. It is a conspicuous fact about such a
politics in the context of identitarian conflicts that neither the mens rea nor the wider
cognitive aspects of the inner life seem to be considered relevant in the responses to
claimed wrongdoing. All of the inner life becomes a nicety, which is deliberately
arranged to be missing. This is evidently so in the vilification of Husain. The justices
may say what they will about intent to ‘harm’ (to offend, hurt, disrespect) remaining
unproven; for the Hindutva vilifier of Husain, his intent (indeed his inner life generally) is
as irrelevant as it was for Oedipus in Ancient Greece. Since it was a Muslim who has
painted Bharat Mata, he is strictly liable of an offence to Hindus.22 The judges were
looking in the wrong place for his culpability in causing the harm of hurt and offence to
Hindus when they looked to his inner life. They should have looked at his religious
identity. This attitude is everywhere present in the rhetoric of the vilifications one heard
and read, including even in some of the legal arguments for his prosecution. The
concept of identity is radically ambiguous between its subjective aspect (an individual
herself or himself identifying with a group, endorsing
53
its values and commitments to the extent that there are a relatively coherent set of
commitments and practices and agendas that it has) and its objective aspect (an
individual being identified with a group, whether or not she herself identifies with it or
subscribes to its commitments and agendas). And in an identitarian conflict, invariably,
there is a great tendency for each side to view members of the other side as possessing
only an objective identity. There is, of course, a real difference between what we have
been saying about Oedipus and the treatment of Husain. Benjamin’s and Auerbach’s
point about Greek ‘heroes’ and the link I drew between that point and ancient
conceptions of wrongdoing in terms of strict liability was a comment on a society before
the emergence of notions of mens rea, knowledges and self-knowledges, and so on, as
the inner life’s contribution to criminal law. But viewing Husain in objective identitarian
terms in a social conflict of identities is not like that. He can only be so viewed via a
deliberate subtraction of his inner life from his identity. The viewing is not (as it is with
Oedipus23) just a routine element of a culture in which agency itself is from the outset
understood in spare terms; it is rather to reduce his agency in a modern culture where
the notion of agency has enriched and developed over centuries, familiarly described
with the rhetoric of terms like ‘self-fashioning’, an enrichment and development itself
owing considerably to a richer and more developed conception of the practices of
response to wrongdoing. If it is not like Oedipus, if instead it is based on a subtraction of
this sort, the question arises: By means of what conceptual apparatus did this sort of
subtraction in general come to be achieved? The most common mechanism, one on
which there has been much intelligent commentary, especially in the study of conflicts of
racial identity, is that of the ‘stereotype’. With the rise of statistical methods in the study
of societies, whole tendencies in the behaviour of social groups could be mapped, they
could be assigned numbers and percentages, and probabilities could be projected; but
what remained outside the net of such study were the motivational states that populated
the inner life of individuals, the firstperson point of view of a Husain or a Rushdie that
prompted their paintings and writings. The drive to generalizations regarding these first
personally conceived motivational states of mind of individuals seemed impossible to
achieve. (The reason for this is that there are just too many exceptions
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to any proposed generalization and the exceptions are too diverse and are impossible
to classify, to bring under social ‘kinds’24 that could be held steady in ceteris paribus
clauses.25) As a result, the preponderances that emerged in the statistical study of the
tendencies of a social group were grafted on to the individuals in it, projecting an inner
motivational life independently of a first personal, interpretative inquiry into that inner
life. This is what came to be called ‘stereotypes’. Thus, to take just one utterly familiar
example, social scientists discussing the poor rate of career success (in terms of
salaries, promotions, and so on) among women often attribute it to a model of thinking
in which a stereotype is first constructed on the basis of the study of past patterns in a
gendered population—‘the homemaker, the mother …’—and then, on its basis,
assumptions are made and motivations about the unwillingness to work the hours
required are attributed to individual women in decisions about promotions and raises.26
I have been giving the pedigree of the general idea of the stereotype, its emergence out
of a grafting of enumerated social tendencies of groups that are arrived at in the
detached, third personal study of society onto individuals, when no tractable
generalizations seem possible in the more engaged, interpretative efforts at studying
the inner life and motivations (the first-person point of view) of individual human
subjects. But in the much more informal public sphere where the conflicts of identity
politics are enacted, there is not even a gesture at appealing to probabilities drawn from
calculated percentages assigned to past social tendencies. The stereotypes are
constructed on anecdotal transmissions, often fictional and mythical, grossly
generalizing from random particular acts that are ideologically selected. Repeatedly in
the allegations against him, Husain was depicted as a stand-in for the ‘lustful Muslim
predator’, Rushdie as a stand-in for ‘the elite Western, Islamophobic cosmopolitan’.
How could that painting and that novel produced by a person, so identified, fail to cause
hurt or offence? Though I have said that this kind of subtraction of the inner life and
agency in identitarian conflicts via the conceptual constructions of stereotypes is done
by each side of the conflict in normatively assessing the actions of members of the other
side, the real damage of this process is much more likely to be done by the more
dominant group in such conflicts. Of course, if identitarian conflicts are not
overwhelmingly dominated by one group, then one often finds that each side can
damage the other by
55
these forms of stereotyping vilification. Something like that surely did happen in the
centuries-long period of conflict between Christendom and Islam during the crusades,
when both sides were robustly equal foes. But the relationship between the alliance of
nations we have for some time designated the ‘West’ and nations with large Muslim
populations today is simply not like that. The domination of the one side by the other is
undeniable. The same has to be said about the identitarian conflict within India today.
The stereotyping is far more damaging to the side that is suffering under domination.
What happened to Husain is evidence of this. This point is so utterly obvious that I will
not labour it with a long theoretical elaboration, but instead just convey the point by
citing a delightful occasion at which I was present, and leave it there. When I was a
graduate student at the University of Chicago, I invited Muhammad Ali, the iconic boxer
and conscientious objector, who was my neighbour in Hyde Park, to come and speak at
my department’s monthly colloquium. Ali readily agreed. In the discussion after, Donald
Davidson, one of the most eminent analytic philosophers of the last half century, had
the nerve to stand up and ask this question: ‘Mr Ali,’ he said, ‘you have quite correctly
criticized whites for stereotyping blacks and called that racist, but throughout your
lecture you stereotyped whites, would you not say there is racism in that too?’ Ali was
completely unfazed. He looked at Davidson as if he was talking to a rather stupid
person and said: ‘Man, if you are in a snake pit, are you gonna say “This one doesn’t
bite, that one doesn’t bite!?”’ The Hindutva attack on Husain raises all these points
about the relevance of inquiry into the details of the inner life of subjects in our
responses to and assessments of their alleged wrongdoings. Let me conclude this
essay with one final observation about how these points about the inner life relate to a
very important distinction to be made between the idea of secularism and the idea of
pluralism. What a conflictual politics of religious identity prompted by religious
majoritarian nationalism undermines is the unself-conscious pluralism of a social life,
and it generates the urgent need for a self-consciously formulated political doctrine of
secularism to correct the damage. What is significant here is that it is only in the unself-
conscious pluralism of social life that the relations between religious groups are defined
by a (relatively) effortless grasp of the inner lives of individuals across groups, just what
gets subtracted in social relations when objective identities dominate
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the conflicts between religious groups. I have been looking at how this subtraction
affected the public’s assessment of alleged wrongdoing or ‘harm’ by an artist, an
assessment outside of the legal sphere where he was absolved of wrongdoing. What
the judgment in the legal sphere of a secularist state showed is that the law is self-
consciously correcting for the subtraction of the inner life of human subjects in the public
sphere of identitarian conflicts in which unself-consciously pluralist social relations have
been undermined. A large question remains: Why, if conflictual identity politics of the
sort we are discussing has begun to be dominated overwhelmingly by one side, as in
India, does the law and the state not opt for a self-conscious multiculturalist response to
the problem rather than a self-conscious secularist response? Would not legal and
constitutional arrangements that adopt multiculturalism be better suited to address the
problem than secularism? This is a proposal that has often been made. The doctrine of
multiculturalism is a self-conscious effort at retrieving what was once an unself-
conscious pluralism; a self-conscious version of it would have to ensure the pluralism
through the legal and constitutional codes of a polity, just the sort of thing whose
absence marks the unselfconscious version of it. These constitutional and legal
structures would be substantially different from those of secularism in the
lexicographical sense that I have claimed was adopted by India after Independence.
Multiculturalist constitutional and legal structures would have to define themselves by
contrast with this secularism, insisting that all religions and communities (even the
numerically more populous ones) in a polity are in a substantive, if not enumerated
sense, minorities, whose cultures and religious beliefs and practices be permitted an
autonomy that is far greater than what is permitted in the first of the trio of commitments
that define the lexicographical ideal of secularism that was adopted. In the secularist
ideal, by contrast, the second and third of the trio of commitments substantially
constrain the autonomy granted by the first commitment to religious and cultural
practices of various groups. Thus, multiculturalism, as it distinguishes itself from
secularism, seeks a far wider autonomy and latitude for the practices and internal
cultural governance (by their own norms) of religious groups. Nothing short of that wider
autonomy will revive in a self-consciously formalized (constitutional and legal) political
framework, the informal pluralism of the past.
57
Something like this proposal could have been entertained seriously and debated
earnestly in the period when the crisis of secularism first developed in the 1980s. But
not today, not only because the crisis has reached the hideous and alarming
proportions it has of an authoritarian Hindu nationalist regime seeking to undermine the
citizenship status of well over one-tenth of its population by every means conceivable,
but also because it seems to have a very sizable number of the Hindu population of the
country sold on the idea that the Muslims must be given no quarter. Now, the demand
for such an ideal of multiculturalism seems a fantastically remote and unrealistic
possibility to present as an immediate goal. The tools are simply not in hand to pursue
it. The tools in hand at the present are the principles that are already there in the
secularist formulations of citizenship and the freedoms and equalities that citizens were
intended to enjoy by those formulations. The students in the squares and the maidans
two winters ago in December 2019 understood this very well. They were, shrewdly and
sensibly, simply demanding the implementation of the Constitution, nothing more. They
were not seeking to pursue a fantasy of a multicultural India with wider cultural
autonomy for Muslims and all religious groups. If they had any such fantasy, their
demands and their strategy were not invoking it, but seeking out what is immediately
possible, the recovery of what was actually in hand—the Constitution that guaranteed
secularist citizenship. Having said that, a very noticeable thing in their remarkable
campaigns, however, is that their rhetoric, their slogans, their posters, and their habits
of public address quite generally were deeply and quite unselfconsciously pluralist,
richly appealing to the poetry, the art, and popular religion of the past in all its diversity.
And the jouissance of this pluralist mayhem was all in the service of demands for the
abstractions, rights, and laws enshrined in the Constitution. This was a fascinating mix
of two seemingly discrepant things. On the one hand, elements of everyday, popular,
often religious, pluralist culture invested in the means. But, on the other hand, these
were means for an end that was a highly abstract liberal code of modern citizenship.
This is an innovation which is unprecedented in the mobilizations of the past. No
prominent Indian leader had achieved such an integrated mix. Gandhi, who almost
single-handedly tapped the appeal of popular religion to generate the most prodigious of
political mobilizations for some thirty years, as is well known, showed a studied
indifference to the codes and rights that defined citizenship. He openly said
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at times that he did not think that the heterogeneity of the people of India should be
undermined by making ordinary people over into some abstract, homogenous, codified
form of being called ‘citizens’. Nehru too had no inkling of how this integration might be
made. The Nehru who wrote with deep affection in The Discovery of India of the unself-
conscious religious pluralism in Indian history entirely shifted gears when he articulated
a very self-conscious set of secularist principles which characterized the constitutional
provisions that would, for instance, go into the formulation of the Hindu Code Bill. Nehru
recognized the honour and worth in each, but in his thought these moved in different
gears. Ambedkar too had no integrating vision that joined the long egalitarian, anti-caste
pluralist traditions of popular religion going back to the early Varkaris and such figures
as Kabir with his own remarkable innovations in constitutional affirmative action to
empower the deprived castes. In fact, I suspect that is why he was partly suspicious of
the eventual efficacy of the anti-caste Bhakti ideals. The integration of the young
activists in the winter of 2019–20, of which I am speaking is, thus, simply without
precedent. It was devised spontaneously, without the eminence of great leaders to
shape it. It might fairly be said that these young women and men and the urban
intelligentsia of large and small towns in India, though they were brilliantly effective
activists, were much more than activists. They were, without any theoretical vanguard,
fashioning through their struggles a theoretical framework that brings together practices
and abstractions; and thereby instructing us into the habits and dispositions of
democracy, which the Constitution’s abstractly formulated laws and principles always
had as their deeper underlying historical and philosophical source and which were
always formulated with a view to producing a cultivation and enactment of these habits
and dispositions in the citizens of the future to whom they applied. In this mobilization of
December 2019, it is well known that Muslims were a driving force in the activism and,
given their particular integrated mix of elements that I am emphasizing, any Muslim
voice that spoke with a fundamentalist strain sounded shrill and jarring and immediately
invited an internal correction. That is no small achievement. In this Muslim agency,
Hindu fundamentalism was being opposed by Muslims qua Muslims (just as in their
agency during earlier mobilizations opposing British rule, such as the Khilafat movement
and the Muslim Mass Contact Programme), not
59
merely Muslims qua abstract citizens. That is to say, they were opposing Hindu
nationalism by an insistent signing onto an abstract constitutional commitment to a
secularist ideal of citizenship dictated to them from the point of view of reasons that flow
from their own understanding of themselves as Muslims. That is no small achievement
either—it exposes how confused we were to think, as we have for so long, that
secularism must be something we must sign onto on wholly and only secular grounds.
Notes 1. In an address to the Indian History Congress in December 2014, I mentioned

Sen as a prominent early proponent of this view, and Irfan Habib alerted me during the
discussion to the fact that Radhakrishnan was the first to assert it as a characterization
of secularism. See Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, The Recovery of Faith (New York: Harper
Brothers, 1955). The most explicit version of Sen’s articulation of it may be found in his
essay ‘Secularism and Its Discontents’ in the anthology Secularism and Its Critics, ed.
Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). In the West, Charles
Taylor too has long been seeking to ‘re-define’ secularism along these neutralist lines.
For an extensive criticism of Taylor on this topic, see Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Secularism: Its
Content and Context’, ch. 1 in Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2014). 2. See Akeel Bilgrami, ‘Gandhi, Nehru, and the
Contexts of Indian Secularism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy, ed.
Jonardon Ganeri (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 3. To give one example, it
is explicitly articulated in the Karachi Resolution of the Congress Party, 1931, but, as
I said, it was not there, or anywhere else, declared to be a characterization or definition
of ‘secularism’, merely a general bit of political wisdom. 4. It is precisely this side-
constraint on the application of the lexicographical ordering that was violated in Britain
when Christianity was favoured over Islam in the differential responses to Nikos
Kazantzakis’s novel, The Last Temptation of Christ (which was banned as a result of
Mary Whitehouse’s campaign) and to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (which
was never banned). This sideconstraint of even-handed application of the
lexicographical ordering notion of Indian secularism was also put into abeyance (I have
taken care to use the term ‘abeyance’ because it was explicitly intended as being
temporary) when Muslim personal law remained concessively unreformed, despite its
counterpart in Hindu law having been subjected to reform. This concession, as is well
known, remains a matter of continuing contention and has been the subject of much
commentary.
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5. It surfaced repeatedly in that adjectival place on the lips of both editors, Tapati
GuhaThakurta and Vazira Zamindar, in their introductory remarks at this meeting. 6. I
have put the expression ‘issues at stake’ in quotation marks because that is the
expression that Tapati Guha-Thakurta uses as a subheading in a careful and instructive
survey in that volume of the range of questions that need to be addressed in the
aftermath of the attack on Husain. See Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.), Barefoot across the
Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (London: Routledge, 2010). 7. This
is a part of the extended argument of his work The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge:
MIT Press, [1916] 1974). 8. Barbara Metcalf and David Gilmartin, ‘Art on Trial:
Civilization and Religion in the Persona and Painting of M. F. Husain’, in Barefoot
across the Nation, ed. Ramaswamy. 9. See Gulammohammed Sheikh, ‘Paintings
1998–2001’, Palimpsest (a catalogue published in 2001 to accompany the exhibition of
his paintings), 11. 10. From the notes I took while chairing a session at a conference at
New York University in October 2012, organized in part by the Queens Museum of Art,
at which Geeta Kapur gave a keynote address entitled ‘Proposition Avantgarde: A View
from the South’. 11. I use that expression to mark something weaker than ‘state-
enforced’ that seems more true of Kemalism in Turkey and French ‘laïcité’. 12. Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1992). 13. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Dover Publications,
[1859] 2002). 14. T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays
on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Methuen, 1980). 15. Section 298 of the Indian Penal
Code, 1860, reads: ‘Whoever, with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious
feelings of any person, utters any word or makes any sound in the hearing of that
person or makes any gesture in the sight of that person or places, any object in the
sight of that person, shall be punished….’ 16. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German
Tragic Drama (New York: Verso, 2009), originally published in 1928 under the title
Ursprung Des Deutschen Trauerspiels. 17. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, [1946] 2014). 18. The Leges Henrici Primi of 1115 cites the
phrase from Augustine during its discussion of perjury as a crime. And Edward Coke’s
Institutes of the Lawes of England, which was published over almost two decades
starting in 1628, makes mens rea an explicit demand in its ‘Third Part’. 19. The Satanic
Verses was first published by Viking Press in London in 1988. 20. See Akeel Bilgrami,
‘After the Fatwah: Twenty Years of Controversy’, ch. 9 in Secularism, Identity, and
Enchantment (Cambridge; New Delhi: Harvard University Press; Permanent Black,
2014). 21. Immediately after the rise of Hindutva politics, the relations between Hindus
and Muslims may rightly be described as a ‘conflict’. Initially Muslims resisted the
majoritarian domination and after the destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque some
22.
23.
24. 25.
26.
61
of the resistance was even violent. But with the rise of Narendra Modi and a far more
ruthless form of domination by Hindutva forces in power in the regions and then
eventually at the centre as well, Muslims have gone into their shells out of sheer
desperation and fear in the face of the quasi-fascist menace they face. So ‘conflict’ is
hardly the right description for the current wholly one-sided nature of Hindu–Muslim
relations. This point is not overturned by the fact that a young Hindu student artist,
Chandramohan, at MS University in Baroda was also the target of Hindutva attack for
his depiction of Durga and Christ in the long follow up to the controversy around Husain.
The art department at MS University had been a strong progressive voice in support of
Husain, so this has to be seen as just a widening of the extended campaign against
Husain himself rather than a newfound even-handedness on the part of the Hindutva
campaign. There is no doubt that Husain was the chief target of attack and the fact of
his being a Muslim was the central plank of its mobilization. It is rather odd yet
fascinating, therefore, that Freud chose the Oedipus myth to speak of the inner life in
the very special sense that he made so central to his doctrines. By choosing to highlight
that myth he was leapfrogging backwards to a time when the conscious inner life was
said to be playing no role in finding someone guilty, so as to construct a case for
arguing that the psychology of a subsequent time was too restrictive in its
understanding of an inner life, that is, focusing too much on the conscious inner life and
excluding unconscious states of mind (crucial among them being unconscious guilt).
This is especially interesting to explore further, since a great deal of the point of
introducing an aspect of an inner life that is unknown to the subject himself or herself
has so often been taken, even by the law, to absolve wrongdoing. We are left then with
an unfolding dialectic in which strict liability of the ancient period is removed from
criminal law in a subsequent time (except in torts) and the accused are thereby often
absolved of crime by the introduction of the demand that an inner life of intention and
cognition be present for finding guilt. This is further complicated and even reversed if
the inner life, through its Freudian enrichment, shows that intention and cognition—
which normally would lead to a guilty verdict—are only unconsciously present. By
‘social’ kinds, I just mean the constructed counterparts in the study of society of the
‘natural’ kinds that are elaborated in the classifications of nature. All generalizations or
laws have these escape clauses, what are called ceteris paribus clauses that take the
formulation ‘all things being equal’. In informative empirical generalizations, one can say
ex ante what things are being held equal because we are able to gather the exceptions
to the generalization sortally and say what sorts of things are being held equal. If the
exceptions are too diverse to gather sortally, the ceteris paribus clause gets to be too
vaguely hospitable and takes on a ‘whatever it takes’ character, that renders the
generalization uninformative. One can find this sort of analysis, stressing stereotypes, in
the excellent book by Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).
Image 3.1 Rummana Hussain, Fragments from Splitting, 1993, bricks, mirror, gheru,

terracotta Source: © Estate of Rummana Hussain, Courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New
York; New Delhi.
3 Art and the Secular in Contemporary India A Question of Method Karin Zitzewitz
ecular behaviours, secular habits of mind, secular institutions, and so on, once
described with that adjective, are understood to illustrate of a conceptual domain that is,
at the very least, divorced from the realm of the sacred. When compared with its
supposed opposite, the secular is a relatively imprecise conceptual domain, with a loose
set of phenomena forming its boundaries. It is best understood as realm of practice,
made up of forms of self-fashioning or of meaning-making that are common or shared
across religious communities and/or relatively independent of religion. Secular practices
not only have precise and detailed genealogies but also robust lives in the present.
They are intelligible and significant: when one acts in a secular way, that action is
understood as such. Historically, art—both in and outside of India—was transformed
into a secular practice, when and as ideas of creation became anthropocentric.1 A
feature of colonial modernity, art emerged as a secular site that is thick (like culture)
rather than thin, active (like discourse) rather than passive. The secularity of art’s
practices is grounded in its peculiar understanding of subjectivity: an idea of artistic
expression in which the interiority of the self is both reflected and produced within an art
object that is then interpreted by viewers long after the moment it is made. At the same
time, art’s meanings are never just individual, and they often strike allegiances with
more general cultural forms, including religion and myth. In his anthropology of
secularism, Talal Asad explores how Adonis, the Arabic poet, at once claims secular
habits of mind as crucial to his practice and contemplates within his poetry a category of
myth that emerges as the ‘plural, even anarchic’, mark of ‘unconscious truth’.2 This
balance of secular and sacred is common among modern visual artists as well, whose
habits of mind and bodily art practices are determinedly worldly, valuing the act of
making as the most important part of being an artist. With very few exceptions, when
forms of the sacred enter into art, they do so as source material, free for the artist’s
taking.3 Even as artists engage with structures of religious authority or sacrality, their
own freedom of expression is understood—by them, by their viewers, and by the
common law tradition—as paramount.4 Certainly a historical rather than a universal
phenomenon, art’s secular formation has been dominant in India—both in the sense of
being freighted with cultural capital and of operating as a normative injunction—since at
least the 1930s. 5 The secular practices associated
Art and the Secular in Contemporary India
65
with Indian art have a direct impact on the art object, with artists adopting particular
strategies, such as grounding of image-making in research into India’s art history, or
pursuing practices of abstraction, or of the juxtaposition of signs. A parallel set of
secular practices is closely associated with the social life of art, such as the degree to
which artists place value on participation in public life and discourse, or on the pursuit of
non-normative forms of friendship and romantic love.6 In each of these cases, artists
make a series of everyday choices that enact the secular. The ongoing nature of these
practices is crucial, because the particular habits of secularity associated with either the
social conduct of artists or the form that art takes are not stable but rather mutable and
highly reactive. The record of practice makes up the art-historical archive, and works of
art and their histories of production can be read as a set of experiments regarding what
secularity might produce, both in the material form of art and in its social life. I set out
this idea of art as secular practice in my 2014 book The Art of Secularism: The Cultural
Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India, which examines how art’s secularity
was placed under stress during the 1980s–1990s rise of Hindu nationalism. Each of the
four painters and one gallerist discussed in the book practiced a somewhat different
secularity, working to articulate and to perform different relationships between art and
life. My book grounds itself in close readings of the artists’ works, choosing paintings
that demonstrate the status of art as secular critique. As with Adonis, each artist’s
practice, though grounded in a secular disposition, rejected any sense of India as a
social realm devoid of religiosity. Their works of art articulate a secular critique of
secularism, often anticipating discursive positions later articulated through academic or
public debate. The book emphasizes how nimble artists tend to be in reacting to
change, as well as the ways that artists participate in political activism with explicitly
secularist aims. Through both gestures, the book establishes artists as important public
intellectuals. But my emphasis on artistic interventions in public discourse may have
obscured the book’s methodological contribution, on behalf of art history, to
interdisciplinary debates on Indian secularism. That is brought into sharper relief in this
essay, which uses the practice of Rummana Husain to focus on the capacity of art-
historical methods, with their combined
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Karin Zitzewitz
historicization of the circumstances of production and theorization of the ongoing

experience of works of art, to isolate and differentiate the practices of secularity that
make art, and make art possible. Art-historical methods allow for the articulation of art’s
subjective practices, as well as the (re)staging of art objects through writing and
exhibition. In so doing, the discipline can show how the category of the secular is
continually (re) defined and (re-)enacted. It can help us to understand secularity, readily
and richly, as a loose set of interlocking practices that add up to a field of subjective
positions, rather than a principle from which practices are derived.
Art after Ayodhya The 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid and the extensive civil
violence that followed prompted an influential group of artists to reconsider the way that
secularity was expressed in art. Before this moment, the artists involved had been
broadly associated with a tradition of painting that privileged the human subject while
constructing spaces in which the mythic sat easily next to the real.7 Reeling from these
watershed events, a group of artists led by Vivan Sundaram (b. 1943) and the critic
Geeta Kapur argued that painting was not sufficient to the task of confronting the
contemporary crisis in secularism.8 Installation was designated as a richer and more
immediate form of art, one that would offer a more suitable way to critique communal
violence and religious nationalism. The post-Ayodhya rejection of painting was
anticipated in feminist art, which had gained a foothold through the exhibitions that
Nalini Malani (b. 1946) organized with three other women painters, Madhvi Parekh (b.
1942), Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945), and Arpita Singh (b. 1937), in 1989.9 Malani began to
explore alternatives to painting before Ayodhya, in work that evinced a combination of
secular and feminist critique as well as a desire to move across mediums. Similar
feminist positions were articulated by Nilima Sheikh, Rummana Hussain (1952–1999),
Navjot Altaf (b. 1949), and others. A series of mid-1990s exhibitions provided additional
space for a clustered critique of painting, and articulation of the limits of secularism, and
of existing models of feminism.10 In practice, then, the move away from painting and
adoption of other media was associated both with secular critique and feminist critique,
offering itself as a site of convergence between the two.
67
Among the first artists to explore this convergence was Rummana Hussain, a secular
Muslim woman whose work was galvanized by her experiences in the wake of the
Ayodhya crisis; she and her family were forced to remove their nameplate and flee their
flat during the rioting that convulsed Mumbai in January 1993.11 A painter, she began
to work across sculpture/installation and performance in an experimental manner in
1993. With its combination of formal innovation and intense personal exploration,
Rummana’s series of performances and installations have emerged as canonical,
credited with the expansion of possibilities for contemporary art in India. As critic Jyoti
Dhar writes, ‘Hussain had been discussing with her peers the need for a more potent
visual language and object-oriented art—one that would use the intrinsic value of
everyday materials to evoke deconstructed concepts.’12 When describing this work,
critics name the crisis in secularism as the instigating factor in her break with form.13
Among her first attempts to construct an alternative artistic language were Fragment
from Splitting (Image 3.1), Dissected Projection (Image 3.9), and Conflux (Image 3.2),
all 1993 works that involved the placement of sliced or broken terracotta pots on top of
mirror or black acrylic sheet, sometimes
Image 3.2 Rummana Hussain, Conflux, 1993, wood, paint on acrylic, gheru, terracotta
Source: © Estate of Rummana Hussain, Courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New York; New
Delhi.
68
Karin Zitzewitz
with clay as well. These assemblages encourage a symbolic reading of their often
ready-made or altered materials. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha discusses in his catalogue
essay,14 the pot serves as a stand-in for the feminine body, while its shape reads as a
dome, an archetype of Islamic sacred architecture. Clay or dirt is cast as earth or soil,
associated with land or home. The mirror, he writes, (re)produces a distorted
representation of reality. This mode of reading is similar to what was encouraged by
Rummana’s painting, in which figures were freighted with symbolic, often allegorical,
meaning. The series of assemblages is particularly in line with a series of paintings that
were exhibited alongside in Fragments, Multiples, in which oval shapes refer to female
genitalia and/or seeds. Among the works shown, the terracotta/mirror/earth
assemblages most squarely link the feminine with the Islamic, acknowledging the
artist’s identity as a Muslim woman at a time in which that position had become
untenable. The slicing or breaking of the vessel-dome makes explicit reference to the
demolition of the Babri Masjid. But it also points to the misogynist rhetoric of communal
violence, in which reports of women’s reproductive organs—breasts, wombs, or genitals
—cut open with knives recur throughout the archival record. Simple and direct, the
assemblages draw attention to the acts of destruction that are central to their creation.
Meaning, it is not the process of making the pot—presumably done elsewhere, by a
commercial potter—but rather the act of slicing or breaking it that is attributable to
Rummana. Everything else is gathered and arranged, making way for a focus on the
destructive/creative act.
How Can We Understand This Work as Secular Practice? The power of Rummana

Hussain’s 1993 assemblages comes in their acts of (metaphorical) iconoclasm: she
buys the pot, slices or smashes it, and presents the remains. Indeed, the meaning of
the terracotta pot as ‘icon’ is secured because of this act of destruction, which is
intelligible because of its association with a tradition of productive destruction.
Rummana’s works intervene in a twentieth-century genealogy in which artists either
emphasized their power to reclassify ready-made objects as art or used acts of
defacement in order to assert their power to destroy. Each of her works makes three
assertions of artistic authority: first, the appropriation of the ready-made pot; then, its
destruction; and, finally, the reclassification of
69
the fragments as artistically valuable. These are all properly understood as metaphorical
acts of iconoclasm, in which the authority in question—a purely secular authority
associated with the category of art—is at once threatened and then reaffirmed.
Rummana’s assemblages combine this invocation of the metaphorical iconoclasm
associated with art with references to the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid, which
was publicly represented in a series of images of young men scaling and then clawing
apart the dome of the mosque.15 The mosque destruction was an explicit act of
iconoclasm: an attempt to physically dismantle a site of religious authority in the name
of a contending religious community. That form of symbolic violence was repeated
across India in a series of riots that followed, the largest of which was in Mumbai, where
Rummana was living. It is worth noting the modes of violence at play in riots: the visual
identification of the religious identities of people and neighbourhoods, the smashing and
slicing of bodies, and destruction of neighbourhood shrines. The artist’s gesture is one
of re-enactment, repetition, and replacement of one form of iconoclasm for another.
Rummana’s act of replacement or exchange is a common secular tactic within works of
art. Her assemblage depends upon the isolation of an element or sign—the dome
shape, in this case—that is common among two contexts: mosque architecture and the
domestic sphere. It is then used to connect one meaning to another. In employing this
technique, the artist ignores the special status of the religious sign, its attachment to
sacral power or religious authority, and places it on par with its worldly connotations. In
some cases, the everyday or secular meanings of the sign take over to become
primary. But in this instance, the artist maintains connection to a religious connotation,
even as the sign is opened up to new meanings. But the subversive power of her
gesture—the source of the artist’s critique—is her appropriation of some measure of the
power or authority attached to the sacred sign. Rajadhyaksha’s text16 assists in
maintaining this relationship of these works to the demolition of the mosque, by
explicating this similarity for the viewer. The Fragments, Multiples exhibition in which
these works appeared included other significant materials, including robin blue pigment,
which appeared in painting-like works along with gheru, an ochre pigment. This may
have influenced the critical treatment of the assemblages, in which it appears that the
domestic connotations of the terracotta pot were
70
Karin Zitzewitz
primary, and the relationship to mosque architecture was largely excluded from
discussion. Indeed, the exhibition was widely discussed in the press, including one
Gujarati review of the Bombay exhibition and four Englishlanguage reviews of the Delhi
version. Each of the English pieces illustrated Fragment by Splitting, most likely at the
artist and gallery’s behest.17 But there was little sign of the relevance of Rummana’s
work to the postAyodhya political context. The only reference is a parting comment by
Pioneer critic Seema Bawa, who suggests that the use of the Sanskrit term yoni as the
title of a painting was intended to ‘protect the sensibilities of the viewer’. Bawa refers
here to the legal concept of religious sensibilities, which was designed to curb
incendiary speech and had begun to be used to police secularist discourse.18 Like the
other critics, Bawa largely excludes Rummana’s assemblages from consideration,
thereby ignoring her references to the attack on the Babri Masjid. The critical texts focus
instead on three aspects of the exhibition: one, the artist’s move away from oil painting
as a medium; two, the openness to interpretation of these works, which is attributed to
their construction of meaning through the use of materials with symbolic value; and
three, the relationship of each work to the experience of women, including and
especially the domestic sphere. Overall, the critics frame her work as purely personal.
There are two possible explanations for this difference of interpretation. One option is
that these critics were protectively drawing attention away from the artist’s religious
identity, anticipating that a Muslim artist using such signs might become the target of
protest. Given Rummana’s association with the secularist organization SAHMAT, which
had already been the target of harassment under the sign of ‘religious sentiments’ for
their post-Ayodhya actions, the press may have taken a quietistic or protective attitude
to the artist’s work.19 Another possibility is that the critics were operating under a
somewhat different notion of art’s normative secularity, one in which artistic subjectivity
is evacuated of considerations of religious community. In that case, considering
Rummana’s work as feminist expression was more acceptable, but the ultimate
interpretation would be the classification of her work as expressive of a purely individual
experience. These interpretations misrecognize the particular secularity of Rummana’s
practice, in which the artist’s act of (non-violent) iconoclasm
71
is an assertion of artistic authority as an alternative mode and site from which to speak.
The gesture highlights the threat that the mosque demolition posed to both religious and
secular modes of authority, for the mosque was both a sacred Islamic space and a so-
called ‘disputed structure’ under supervision by the Indian state. But the work also refers
more generally to the manner in which the demolition endangered both Muslim and
secular modes of understanding space, history, and culture. In hailing an affective
sphere of femininity and domesticity, the work of art does not indulge the personal as an
apolitical space, as these critics describe. It rather constructs an alternative to the
sensibilities—in legal terms, ‘religious sentiments’—that have been the focus of Hindu
nationalist activism.20 That alternative affective realm overlaps substantially with a
feminist understanding of the self, and a feminist political practice, but it is not
completely coextensive with it.
Performance as a Medium Initially misrecognized, the interpretation of Rummana’s

assemblages as a secular artistic response to the violence at Ayodhya was secured
retrospectively. She refined and recommunicated her position through a series of works
in 1995 and 1996. The first of those, a 1995 performance Living on the Margins (Images
3.3 and 3.4), is recognized as a central work in her oeuvre. A recording of that
performance was exhibited in the United Kingdom (UK) that year, together with an
installation of text and image works, which included news items associated with
Ayodhya. Portions of the installation were included in Rummana’s 1996 Home/Nation,
which has been re-presented a number of times since, often in exhibitions associated
with SAHMAT. All of these works share basic forms and a loose set of images, and
constitute the ground on which the artist articulated, through practice, her embattled
experience as a Muslim woman after Ayodhya. Living on the Margins was performed for
a small group of artist and art world friends on the grounds of the National Centre for
Performing Arts in Mumbai.21 The artist held a halved papaya in her hands and walked
silently around a square courtyard, with ghungroos (bells worn by dancers) tied around
her ankles. She periodically held her mouth open in a shape that echoed the shape of
the sliced-open fruit, at once a repeated form and an estranging gesture, a silent
scream. She punctuated her walk with deliberate
Image 3.3 Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins (standing), 1995, performance at

National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai Source: © Estate of Rummana
Hussain, Courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New York; New Delhi.
Image 3.4 Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins (crouching), 1995, performance at

National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai Source: © Estate of Rummana
73
gestures, lighting diyas (small oil lamps)—more open oval shapes—that had been
arranged in a larger oval around the papaya and a vacuum cleaner attachment. During
the performance, she scattered indigo powder and gheru in her path, reusing the
symbolically rich media from Fragments, Multiples as well as the earlier work’s focus on
open vessels. For all its redeployment of elements from the earlier exhibition, Living on
the Margins moves away from symbols of the body into a medium in which the body is
both (artistic) subject and (art) object. The title of the work flags Rummana’s
understanding of her doubly ‘marginal’ subject-position as a woman, excluded from the
position of transcendent subjectivity afforded the male subject. The performance
highlights the artist’s agency-in-thepresent, as she borrows from the grammar of dance
to focus attention on each step. As Kamala Kapoor describes, ‘Solo, austere, almost
ritualistic, her performance is anchored to the image of a woman’s life through colour,
motif, material, object and touch. This inner world, with its feminine energy, has its
parallel in the outer world, with its more masculine components, which remain
implicit.’22 In this particular performance, the vocabulary is not tied to the artist’s Muslim
identity but instead enacts a more generalized female subjectivity through symbols of
proper womanhood tied, at some point, to Hindu ritual. Rummana made Living on the
Margins in a period in which feminist theories of performance and subjectivity had
already gained a central role in cultural studies, largely through the reception of the
work of Judith Butler. Butler focused on the performative function of speech, of doingby-
saying, in order to identify how gendered subjectivity was constituted through and with
language. In her 1998 book Body Art/Performing the Subject, art historian Amelia Jones
very skillfully articulates the broadly emergent understanding of performativity within the
contemporary art discourse in which Rummana’s work participated. Jones argues that
performance art fundamentally troubles the distinction between subject and object.
Focusing particularly on the work of Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke, she
builds a model in which feminist performance has the most to gain, analytically, from
exploiting the medium’s possibilities. For, as Jones argues, ‘feminist body art crosses
over subjects and objects of cultural production in a chiasmic interweaving of self and
other that highlights the circuits of desire at play among them (and refuses the notion of
an “objective” aesthetic judgment).’23 The feminist–artist–subject is also
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Karin Zitzewitz
the woman–art–object, at once actor and acted upon. As Jones observes, in feminist
body art, the artist’s subject-position is both made manifest and subverted—rendered
false—through the act of articulation.24 Through the small set of props or actions used
in the performance, Rummana’s Living on the Margins dwells upon the things women
do that are valued. That includes the very mundane vacuum cleaner brush. But most of
what is referred to by the performance are everyday ritual practices, and therefore point
to the role women have in maintaining the ritual status of domestic space. Dance, made
present in her performance through her ghungroos, once a sign of immorality, has
become associated with the proper, middle-class Hindu feminine subjectivity that stands
in for a national womanhood.25 Lighting the diya and marking space with pigment are
similarly common tools used by Hindu women to mark the borders of the domestic
space and maintain its auspiciousness. By invoking these religiously coded practices of
proper femininity, Rummana’s performance draws attention to the agency afforded to
women through ritual, and then recontextualizes those acts through their performance
in/ as art. In that sense, Living on the Margins repeats the secularizing gestures of the
assemblages, including their reliance upon acts of replacement and exchange. The
performance gains power by juxtaposing these immediately legible, quasi-ritualistic acts
with the more ambiguous signs of the cut papaya and open mouth. Both—fruit and lips
—are volatile references to the objectification of women, to the fragmentation of their
bodies through acts of sexual violence. Living on the Margins embraces the grounding
assumptions of the artistic medium, in which the artist’s body simultaneously makes and
makes up the work of art. Returning to Amelia Jones’s description of the capacities of
performance as a medium cited earlier in this section, it is possible to see how
Rummana’s careful combination of acts and objects exploits the manner in which
feminist body art fluidly interweaves subjectivity and objecthood. The materials and acts
that make up this performance are separable into those associated with acting and
being acted upon, but the artist, herself, participates in each role. In the cases explored
by Jones, art’s secularity is assumed but remains unexplored. 26 Rummana’s work, by
contrast, consciously engages art’s status as secular practice, prompted by the
particular role that
75
religious identity and difference have played in India’s modern history. Indeed,
Rummana’s performance was only fully legible in the context of contemporary feminist
discourse in India. In this period, through the research of historian Tanika Sarkar and
many others,27 feminist histories had come to identify key transformations of women’s
lives, as well as ideas of the proper, in the legal debates that characterized British
colonial rule and the nationalist movement. Rummana’s performance is most closely
associated with the portion of historical debate that had come to recognize how tightly
associated discussions regarding female behaviour—from everyday practices to key
elements of family or personal law, to public participation—were with the articulation of
and opposition to secularism.28 By performing the rituals associated with a specifically
Hindu, feminine virtue as an Indian woman without a claim to a Hindu identity,
Rummana enacts, through her body, a secular critique of national-cultural discourse. As
in her acts of iconoclasm, she appropriates a religiously coded practice and transforms
it by placing it into an alternative context. What is crucial here, of course, is the manner
in which her performance mimics the bodily gestures of everyday life, estranges them
from their conventional context, and submits them to critical apprehension. The habits
and dispositions associated with being a good (Hindu) woman are brought into close
context with the behaviours associated with performance as an artistic discipline. This is
the same sort of analogical thinking at play in the assemblages, but with a much more
intimate, personalized, and pointed focus on the body of the artist.
Traces of Secular Practice A video recording of Rummana’s 1995 performance was

shown alongside text-based works under the common title Living on the Margins in
Inside Out, an important show of feminist Indian painting in the UK.29 As is common for
performance art, the work has gained significance, even as it loses the presence of the
artist upon which the work was predicated.30 Although particularly central to
performance, the logic of the trace operates in Rummana’s 1993 assemblage series,
which also records momentary gestures. The artist’s play with the trace was extended in
the 1995 exhibition into the mixed-media works with which the video was grouped. In
those works (Image 3.5), a set of texts associated with women’s
Image 3.5 Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (detail), 1996, Perspex, metal key, and

phototransfer, 14 × 9 inches (35.6 × 22.9 centimetres) Source: © Estate of Rummana
77
political action were printed on Perspex acrylic sheeting and suspended in clear sleeves
along with photographs and small objects. In each case the image, text, and object are
loosely connected, with links ranging from the metaphorical to the easily classifiable.
After these works returned from the UK tour, the video and text assemblages were
shown alongside other elements in an installation Home/Nation (1996). The work is
remembered as a crucial statement on the artist’s sense of belonging: a protest against
the steady diminution of the space available to women—or, more properly, to Muslim
women—or, even more specifically, to secular Muslim women—in Indian public life. A
single work of art in many parts, Home/Nation (1996) worked primarily through accretion
and juxtaposition, with meanings of particular elements adjusting to accommodate what
is placed beside. It included elements from other installations, like the text-on-Perspex
works and blue-dyed textiles, displayed in new contexts. Among the most significant
uses of this tactic is the frieze of photographs (Image 3.6) in which mouth and papaya
images are interspersed with those of doorways, including the pointed arches that are
immediately recognizable as an Islamicate architectural form. Photographs of arches
recur throughout the installation, including in a set of photographs of the Ayodhya
cityscape mounted on wood (Image 3.7). Their presence draws the set of references
made in the work into a tighter frame, focusing on everyday signs of Muslim
Image 3.6 Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (frieze), 1996, installation Source: © Estate

of Rummana Hussain, Courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New York; New Delhi.
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Karin Zitzewitz
Image 3.7 Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (wood panels), 1996, installation Source: ©

Estate of Rummana Hussain, Courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New York; New Delhi.
presence. That which had been recorded as trace in the architectural record was
vulnerable to destruction in the present. The principal secular practices at play in the
1993 assemblages were, first, the act of iconoclasm as an assertion of artistic authority,
and then, the placement of the record of that act in an alternative affective space. Even
as the artist continued to forefront the vessel as a form and to place value on the trace,
Home/Nation combines those with citation. In the category of trace, we can place
Rummana’s references to her past actions as an artist, or to everyday domestic tasks or
architectures, familiar from use. But there are also multiple citations of the acts or
writings of others, extending the gesture seen in the Perspex text works into the
monumental architecture of Ayodhya. This range of references is itself made possible
by the understanding of art as secular practice, reconstituted through feminist
understandings of the social and historical constitution of the most intimate aspects of
women’s lives. If Home/Nation is, as a whole, now quite explicitly tied to Rummana’s
articulation and practice of secularity, then
79
each part of the installation acts as individual trace of that performance or set of acts.
Art-historical method typically treats works of art as traces of artistic actions, even as art
historians like Amelia Jones insist upon the paradoxical nature of that attachment to lost
presence. Rummana’s work fully engaged the implications of the trace, allowing her to
adjust the meanings of works as she went. By 1996, it was difficult to see the 1993
assemblages as limited to the artist’s experience as a woman alone. Because the 1995
and 1996 works repeated forms or media from earlier works, they were able to gather
and solidify associations with particular signs. This practice of breaking a work down,
repeating and recombining its elements elsewhere was central to the works that the
artist made in the last few years of her life. She had already been diagnosed with breast
cancer when she made Home/Nation, and she continued to make installation and
performance works during her treatment and up until her death in 1999.
What Does the Art-Historical Method Give Us, So Far? I began this essay by promising
that art-historical methods would help us to identify the practices of secularity that make
art, and make art possible. So far, art-historical methods have allowed us to identify the
artist’s reliance upon her own authority, on productive analogies among forms of
iconoclasm, on the appropriation and translation of sacred signs into secular contexts,
and on attentiveness to the meaning of the artist’s gesture, her body, her presence, and
its traces. We have been able to trace the artist’s conscious references to feminist
discourse, art and architectural histories, present politics, and the historical accretion of
ideas associated with artistic media. Art-historical methods have also allowed us to
suture these gestures to the intentions of the artist, and particularly her questioning of
the manner in which her social position was (re)defined across the period after the
demolition of the Babri Masjid. These methods have demonstrated, through reference to
critical and curatorial texts, the understanding of artistic subjectivity as performed
through the production of works of art. Rummana’s last performance work, Is It What
You Think? (1998, Image 3.8), was squarely focused on questions of subjectivity and
secular practice. Half-dressed in a salwar and loosely draped chador, her mastectomy
scars and prosthetic breast revealed, and
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Karin Zitzewitz
Image 3.8 Rummana Hussain, Is It What You Think? (detail), 1998, black and white
photograph Source: © Estate of Rummana Hussain, Courtesy of Talwar Gallery, New
York; New Delhi.
holding a book wrapped in the manner of the Qu’ran, Rummana delivered what Geeta
Kapur describes in a brilliant lecture as an ‘ironical rendering of a questionnaire to the
Muslim woman who is the object of religious injunctions and (since the rise of Muslim
fundamentalism and the fear it breeds in the rest of the world) of urban ethnography’.31
Dozens of questions ping across categories and scales, addressing everything from
peeling vegetables to political subjectivity. But, as Kapur writes, they always reveal the
asker’s ‘pity, curiosity, and scorn’. Every so often, Rummana asks and is asked the
same, fundamental question: ‘Have you defined her?’
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Presented through its traces, including Kapur’s memory, this performance underscores
Rummana’s combined investment in connecting artistic and subjective practices and in
submitting those connections to trenchant critique. In her daily life, dress, and
comportment, Rummana did not conform to most expectations of a Muslim woman, and
so her performance constituted a brief solidarity with women whose forms of
selffashioning she had always rejected. Kapur’s reading emphasizes the artist’s choice
to voice the paradoxes of her religious identity, as well as her bodily display, scarred
and naked, which marked her allegiance to a secular artistic performance tradition.
Rummana’s Is It What You Think?, in all its messy, intuitive power, holds these opposed
meanings in suspension, even as they point to the dissolution of any stable subjectivity
that might give support. This precise combination of contradictory elements is not just
intelligible but particularly prized within the artistic discipline of performance. Artistic
discourse and practice encourage within performance a deliberate exploration of the
instability of subjectivity, as well as its precarious (re) instantiation through gestures that
mimic everyday practices. Rummana’s performance work is squarely within this
tradition, which she uses to examine crucial questions of religious identity and secular
subjectivity. This focus of her work is reinforced through art-historical methods of
reading, documentation, and retelling. As is often true of performance studies, the
attachment of meaning to the body of the artist has been dominant, with little autonomy
given to the work of art as a site of meaning, in itself. Rummana’s non-performance
work, including her assemblages and installations, asks similar questions through
different means and in dialogue with different medium histories. It provide an
opportunity to explore the implications of different art-historical methods for
understanding the capacity of works of art to retain their connections to secular practice,
in the absence of the artist.
When Are Exhibitions the Site of Secular Practice? This last section of this essay will
therefore shift away from the initial histories of production and reception, and towards
exhibition history, which disturbs the close relationship between artist and work of art by
considering the other actors, such as collectors, curators, and cultural producers, who
make the (re)presentation of works possible.32 It provides
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Karin Zitzewitz
a means for understanding the changing meaning of works of art, as they survive one
context and enter another, losing and gaining significance. In this case, a focus on
exhibitions intersects with the similar effects of artist estates—another instance in which
the process of securing meaning to a body of work becomes the work of curators,
critics, and executors.33 Efforts to manage and shape Rummana Hussain’s legacy
have implications for understanding art as secular practice, which has relied primarily on
ideas of artistic creation and/or critical intervention. Because of her self-staging and
development within feminist and performance art discourses, Rummana’s 1990s work
has been considered almost exclusively through the lens of artistic subjectivity.
Understanding her work as secular practice depends upon the overlap between artistic
practice and practices of the self. If we consider her work through the lens of exhibition
histories, then that close connection is displaced by other
Image 3.9 Rummana Hussain, Conflux, Dissected Projection, Unearthed, 1993,

installation at Our Time for a Future Sharing, 58th Venice Biennale, India Pavilion, Italy
(11 May–24 November 2019) Source: © Estate of Rummana Hussain, Courtesy of
Talwar Gallery, New York; New Delhi.
83
considerations, as Rummana’s works become supporting evidence for the intervention

made by the exhibition’s curator. In that case, do we then consider works of art as
material artefacts of an artist’s secular practice? Or must they be understood as part of
the practices of others, such as the curators and patrons who restage works of art?
These questions—genuine, not rhetorical—were prompted by the inclusion of
Rummana’s 1993 assemblages in the India pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Entitled Our Time for a Future Caring, the exhibition celebrated the 150th birth
anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and featured works that engage artistically with his life
or beliefs. The exhibition was curated by Roobina Karode, who directs the Kiran Nadar
Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, the most significant collection of Indian
contemporary art in the world. As an official national pavilion, the show required official
endorsement by the Ministry of Culture, and the public–private tie was cemented by
loans of art from the National Gallery of Modern Art, which supplemented KNMA
holdings. The event was inaugurated by officials from all of these institutions. After
acquiring the 1993 assemblages for the KNMA collection, Roobina Karode has helped
to cement Rummana’s contributions both to feminist art and to post-Ayodhya artistic
interventions through a series of key exhibitions. Along with gallerist Deepak Talwar,
who manages the artist’s estate, Karode is among the very few crucial actors who
maintain Rummana’s art-historical significance. Her curatorial work is connected to
KNMA’s overall commitment to raising the profile of Indian contemporary art in India and
in key art institutions around the world. In so doing, the institution is neither activist in its
support nor has it departed from the normative secularity of the Indian art world. The
collection’s major actors would likely consider themselves to be committed to India’s
secularism and their work to be secular practice. And yet, in the India pavilion at Venice,
viewers were greeted by the spectacle of works like Rummana’s, which were made in
response to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, being celebrated by a political regime
that owes its electoral success, in no small part, to that act. Indeed, Narendra Modi’s
government has facilitated the movement to place a temple on the site of the mosque,
alongside a series of other acts that have further diminished the rights of India’s Muslim
citizens. The exhibition could be seen as exemplary of the Modi regime’s effort to
sunder the symbolic ties
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Karin Zitzewitz
between Gandhi and the Congress Party, their chief political opposition. While this
attempt at symbolic capture continues, it is worth noting that the regime’s effort has
been challenged by persistent celebration of Gandhi’s assassin by Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) loyalists. Tucked in the back of the cavernous and dark exhibition space,
dramatically lit but largely decontextualized (Image 3.9), Rummana’s works sat uneasily
within the Gandhian theme: they neither celebrate his life nor advocate for his thought. It
is plausible to suggest that Rummana’s work takes part in something like Gandhi’s
innovative body politics, which offered a crucial critique of modern politics—including
secularist principles—through embodied self-fashioning. But the practices of secularity
that made the assemblages possible were quite outside of the Gandhian frame. They
were based in Rummana’s leveraging an artistic sphere of authority and her confidence
in her audience’s grasp of the differing meanings of artistic and religious iconoclasm.
These aspects of the artist’s secular critique were difficult to maintain in the context of
the larger exhibition. Their effects were, at the very least, muddled, if not overwhelmed
by the celebratory curatorial argument they were meant to support. My perception of the
exhibition is certainly affected by distrust of the BJP-led regime’s patronage, particularly
in the context of its other cynical appropriations of Gandhi’s name and legacy. Far from
a supporter of the artistic sphere, the regime’s targeting of modernist artists, demolition
of modernist architecture, and refutation of modernist aesthetics has significantly shrunk
the space of artistic authority that Rummana depended upon and enacted through her
works. In any case, appearance of the assemblages in the Venice pavilion caused me
to doubt the works’ status as artefacts of secularity. At least in this pavilion the artist’s
secular critique of secularism was muffled and replaced by something less active and
less critical. Exhibition histories, as a method, encourage this kind of doubt. To focus on
the exhibition as a whole is to interrupt the self-affirming circuit between artist and work
with the voices and intentions of a variety of other actors. As Saloni Mathur describes,
exhibitions are typically the product of ‘multiple and divergent aesthetic assumptions,
fraught historical investments, the inconsistencies of national ideologies, and self-
conscious efforts of intervention staged as visual and curatorial arguments’.34 Among
those divergent assumptions and inconsistent ideologies sits the question of whether

85
and how art constitutes a secular practice. Exhibition histories invite the sorts of
concerns that have not yet entered into this essay, but which are constitutive of debates
on secularism, such as whether or not the assumptions that guide behaviour in
particular public spaces or institutions can be understood as secular. Suffice to say that
the broader view taken by exhibition histories, as method, leads directly to an expansion
in the basis for evaluating the secularity of art, and the wide array of practices it relies
upon and supports. In sum, art-historical methods offer much to the interdisciplinary
study of the secular. The history of art typically tacks back and forth across scales of
inquiry, paying attention to the relatively minute decisions of artists, the presentation of
works to groups of people and their reception among a variety of actors, and artistic
interventions in broader discourse. This movement across analytical scales, as well as
the insistent integration of human interactions with material histories, is common to
nearly all arthistorical methods. It makes it possible to connect Rummana’s
assemblages and performances to everything from her own biography to transnational
feminist debates, to the compromises of present exhibitionary practices. Equally crucial
for our purposes is the much more recent advocacy within the discipline for the
contingency and instability of meaning, reversing the discipline’s former focus on the
enduring and/or universal. Rummana’s works, which were produced under enormous
personal and political stress, articulate in form and content the dissolution of subjective
wholeness in terms that were both poignantly personal and absolutely historical. They
do so by championing the fragment, linking her series of 1990s works by repeating and
recontextualizing particular elements and images. Her work also turned out to anticipate
broader cultural changes. Is It What You Think?, Rummana’s final performance,
articulates the shrinking plausibility of a secular, feminist Muslim subjectivity even
before the signal events that followed 9/11, which saw an even more insistent
application of narrow identarian structures from within and without of India. Finally, this
essay has demonstrated the most enduring method of arthistorical inquiry, which is to
begin with the work of art and work outward, describing layers of significance. It is
written in line with the discipline’s tendency to tolerate—and sometimes revel in—the
limits of its inquiry, marking how difficult it is to reconstruct meaning and to find
consistent principles within artistic practice. These disciplinary assumptions have the
greatest implications for the study of the secular, which has been dominated
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Karin Zitzewitz
by approaches that emphasize the development of theoretical principles as their

necessary end. Acknowledging art history’s preference for messiness and the emphasis
on the case in itself is crucial in grasping what can (and cannot) be understood about
the secular from its disciplinary perspective. Art history is particularly good at plotting
points within a field of art that is also a domain of the secular, using its methodological
toolbox to explore its layered, complex, and protean forms. It allows readers to explore
the contingency of secular practices, as well as their significance, first to the artist and
then to the viewers of the work of art. It imagines secularity as vulnerable, unstable, but
also the result of efforts of individual subjects to materialize their commitments in their
work.
Notes 1. The genealogy of a secular idea of art has become intertwined with narratives
of secularization and historical teleology, in which art is used as a kind of benchmark for
secularization. A crucial voice here is Hans Belting, who engaged with the art-historical
discipline’s inheritance of a Hegelian philosophy of history. See Hans Belting, Likeness
and Presence: A History of the Image in the Era before Art (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994); and Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art?, trans.
Christopher Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 2. Talal Asad,
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 2003), 54–56. 3. An important line of thought regarding spirituality, religious
practice, and modernism hurtled back into view in the United States (US) recently with
the blockbuster Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. Working before
Kandinsky, an important theorist/practitioner of spirituality and abstraction, the exhibition
split the difference between presenting af Klint as a feminist pioneer and as a
representative of a peculiar early twentieth-century spiritual practice. See Tracey
Bashkoff (ed.), Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (New York: Guggenheim Museum
Publications, 2018). 4. After the decision legalizing the circulation of D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, common law has preserved that ordering, valuing artistic
freedom over obscenity. Indian law continues to make use of that case, and those that
followed, as was made clear in the obscenity case associated with M. F. Husain. The
matter is discussed in several essays in Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.), Barefoot across
the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011),
including my own. A valuable counterexample to this norm is found in Kenneth George’s
work on Indonesian artist A. D. Pirous’s deliberate subversion of his own
5.
6.
7.
8.
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artistic authority in the face of the authority of the calligraphic Qur’anic text. See
Kenneth George, ‘Ethics, Iconoclasm, and Qur’anic Art in Indonesia’, Cultural
Anthropology 24, no. 4 (2009): 589–621; and Kenneth George, ‘Ethical Pleasure, Visual
Dzikir, and Artistic Subjectivity in Contemporary Indonesia’, Material Religion 4, no. 2
(2008): 172–193. This dominance was hard fought and delicate, as the
secular/national/modern became a mark of social and aesthetic distinction that was
institutionalized in the 1950s through the Lalit Kala Akademi, National Institute for
Design, and art schools, including the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao
(MS) University in Baroda. The manner in which forms of public religiosity have
threatened or violated this principle has been the subject of numerous academic
studies, most notably in the ongoing work of Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Sumathi
Ramaswamy, and Kajri Jain, particularly in Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New
‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992); Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories:
Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-colonial India (New York: Columbia University
Press; Permanent Black, 2004); Tapati Guha-Thakurta, In the Name of the Goddess:
The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Kolkata: Primus Books, 2015); Sumathi
Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010); Sumathi Ramaswamy, Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of
Disobedience (Delhi: Roli Books, 2020); Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies
of Indian Calendar Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Kajri Jain, Gods in
the Time of Democracy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). The former is
articulated by Geeta Kapur, ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, in Art and Social Change: A
Critical Reader, ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche (London: Afterall Books, 2007),
422–439. A crucial statement on the latter is Nilima Sheikh, ‘A Post-Independence
Initiative in Art’, in Contemporary Art in Baroda, ed. Gulammohammed Sheikh (New
Delhi: Tulika Press, 1997), 96–108, which strongly influenced my writing on her
husband, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Bhupen Khakhar in The Art of Secularism:
The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (London: Hurst, 2014).
Associated with the Faculty of Fine Arts at MS University, Baroda, that approach is best
articulated in the essays by Nilima Sheikh and Ajay Sinha in Gulammohammed Sheikh
(ed.), Contemporary Art in Baroda (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 1997); and by Chaitanya
Sambrani (ed.), At Home in the World: The Art and Life of Gulammohammed Sheikh
(New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2019). The Art of Secularism details these approaches,
highlighting the secular critiques of secularism that manifest in the paintings of K. G.
Subramanyan (1924–2016), Gulammohammed Sheikh (b. 1937), and Bhupen Khakhar
(1934–2003). Though developed in several places, a representative and mature
expression of this position is found in Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Bombay/
88
9.
10.
11.
12. 13.
14. 15. 16. 17.
Karin Zitzewitz Mumbai, 1992–2001’, in Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern
Metropolis, ed. Iwona Blazwick (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001), 17–39. Nalini
Malani, Madhvi Parekh, Nilima Sheikh, and Arpita Singh, Through the Looking Glass,
Centre for Contemporary Art, New Delhi, 10 November–1 December 1989, Asia Art
Archive, https://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/ archive/nilima-sheikh-archive-
documents-on-four-women-artists-from-nilimasheikh/sort/title-asc/object/centre-for-
contemporary-art-19891990 (accessed 26 January 2020). Including Dispossession,
curated by Shireen Gandhy and Geeta Kapur, India Pavilion, at the 2nd Johannesburg
Biennale, 1995; Inside Out: Contemporary Women Artists of India, curated by Alison
Lloyd with texts by Geeta Kapur, Kamala Kapoor, and Sutapa Biswas, Middlesbrough
Art Gallery Touring Exhibition, 1995–1996; and Telling Tales: Of Self, of Nation, of Art,
curated by Rasna Bhushan and Jane Connarty, Bath Festivals Trust touring exhibition,
1997. Although it included some installation and media-based works, Inside Out was
explicitly an exhibition of painting; Kapur’s catalogue essay mentioned this debate and
exhibited some tension around the medium-based focus of the show. Ram Rahman,
‘Rummana Hussain’, in The SAHMAT Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989,
ed. Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman, exhibition catalogue (Chicago: Smart Art
Museum/University of Chicago Press, 14 February–9 June 2013), 165. Jyoti Dhar,
‘Rummana Hussain: Prescient Provocateur’, ArtAsiaPacific 90 (September/October
2014): 94–103, 98. See, in chronological order, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, essay in
Rummana Hussain: Fragments/Multiples, exhibition catalogue (Jehangir Art Gallery, 31
March– 6 April 1994, and Gallery Chemould, 31 March–29 April 1994, Bombay, n.p.);
Geeta Kapur, ‘The Courage of Being Rummana’, Art India 6, no. 1 (2000): 64–67; and
Dhar, ‘Rummana Hussain’. Ashish Rajadhyaksha discusses in his catalogue essay for
Rummana Husain’s 1994 exhibition, subtitled Fragments, Multiples. See Rajadhyaksha,
essay in Rummana Hussain: Fragments/Multiples. As critic Meera Menezes points out,
an image of mosque demolition was included in Behind a Thin Film (1993). See Meera
Menezes, ‘Rummana Hussain: Talwar Gallery’, ArtForum 54, no. 5 (January 2016): 264.
See catalogue text. Mukesh Vaigh, ‘Angat rupakobhari Rummana Hussain ni sarjakata’
[Rummana Hussain’s creation of personal metaphor], Janamabhoomi (Gujarati), 6 April
1994; Seema Bawa, ‘Forms in Gay Abandon’, Pioneer, 9 August 1994; Bharati
Chaturvedi, ‘Domesticity Soaked in the Mood Indigo’, Indian Express, 1 September
1994; Vasantha Iyer, ‘Rommano’s [sic] Stunning Works’, Hindustan Times, 9
September 1994; Amit Mukhopadhyay, ‘Aladdin’s Cave of Language’, Economic Times,
10 September 1994.
89
18. See essay by Ram Rahman, ‘Defending Husain in the Public Sphere: The Sahmat
Experience’, in Barefoot across the Nation, ed. Ramaswamy. 19. Jessica Moss and
Ram Rahman (eds.), The SAHMAT Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989,
exhibition catalogue (Chicago: Smart Art Museum/University of Chicago Press, 14
February–9 June 2013). 20. Rajadhyaksha’s text implies this in a different way, citing
Tanika Sarkar’s discussion of Hindu womanhood and its reconfiguration during the
nationalist movement, ‘Rhetoric against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and
Death of a Child-Wife’, Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 36 (1993): 1869– 1878.
Sarkar argues that women’s endurance of pain became a mark of feminine virtue, which
was mapped onto the Indian nation in (Hindu) nationalist discourse. Rajadhyaksha
asserts that Rummana’s work refers to this Hindu nationalist focus on female pain, while
also noting her anguish at the 1985 Shah Bano verdict and 1992 Babri Masjid
demolition. 21. Dhar, ‘Rummana Hussain’, includes eyewitness accounts of the work.
22. Kamala Kapoor, ‘Home/Nation: Photography in the Installations of Rummana
Hussain’, ArtAsiaPacific 13 (1997): 88–91, 91. 23. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing
the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 152 (emphasis
original). Rummana moved among artist communities in London and New York, in
which this broader discourse was fundamental; those same communities continued
largely to exclude women artists of colour from serious consideration. 24. Jones frames
Hannah Wilke’s work as a ‘narcissistic self-relation’, in which her whiteness, beauty, and
health—attested to in photographs—are all undermined by her work. See, especially,
Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, 185–195. This is the aspect of Jones’s
argument that has the most potential for thinking through Rummana’s work, especially
after her diagnosis with cancer. See Kamala Kapoor, ‘Rummana Hussain: A Space for
Healing’, Beyond the Future: The Third AsiaPacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, ed.
Jennifer Webb, Julie Walsh, and Robyn Ziebel, catalogue (Queensland Art Gallery,
Brisbane, Australia), 52–53; and Geeta Kapur, ‘Public Address: Citing Installation and
Performance Art’ (unpublished lecture delivered at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi, 31 March 2014), https://www.jnu.ac.in/sss/archive-lectures (accessed 28 May
2020). 25. Pallabi Chakravorty, Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity
in India (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2008); Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures:
Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2012). 26. The lack of attention to the secularity of contemporary art in the US is
curious, given the association of religious fundamentalism with opposition to state
funding for the arts, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. It is significant that initial
conservative opposition to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) focused on
performance art. For an immediate account of those actions, see the series of essays
by Carol
90
27.
28. 29.
30.
Karin Zitzewitz Vance published in George Marcus and Fred Myers (eds.), The Traffic in
Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (New York: New York University Press, 1995).
Rajadhyaksha cites Tanika Sarkar, ‘Rhetoric against Age of Consent’, Economic and
Political Weekly 28, no. 36 (September 1993): 1869–1878. Other important aspects of
the debate were considered in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting
Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989). Kumkum
Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds.), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History
(Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989). Lloyd (curated), Inside Out. As mentioned earlier, this
exhibition focused on painting; Rummana’s contribution stretched that frame without
causing practical issues for the curatorial team. Living on the Margins was re-performed
in Amsterdam in 1997, in a more formally staged version with a larger audience.
Photographs and videos of both versions have been the basis of most accounts. Amelia
Jones summarizes this effect in the following way: ‘Presence’ as commonly understood
is a state that entails the unmediated co-extensivity in time and place of what I perceive
and myself; it promises a transparency to an observer of what ‘is’ at the very moment at
which it takes place. But the event, the performance, by combining materiality and
durationality (its enacting of the body as always already escaping into the past) points to
the fact that there is no ‘presence’.
31.
32. 33. 34.
See Amelia Jones, ‘“The Artist Is Present”: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility
of Presence’, TDR: The Drama Review 55, no. 1 (2011): 16–45, 18. Geeta Kapur,
‘Rummana’s Question: Is It What You Think?’ (unpublished lecture delivered at
SAHMAT, New Delhi, November 2009, Geeta Kapur Archive, Asia Art Archive),
https://cdn.aaa.org.hk/_source/digital_collection/fedora_ extracted/20832.pdf (accessed
22 July 2021). See the conversation led by Saloni Mathur, ‘Why Exhibition Histories?’,
British Art Studies, no. 13,
https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-13/conversation. For an examination of
this, primarily in the US context, see the project edited by Rachel Middleman and Anne
Monahan, ‘Forum: The Politics of Legacy’, Art Journal 76, no. 1 (2017): 70–205. Mathur,
‘Why Exhibition Histories’.
Image 4.1 Calendar advertising Ayurvedic health products featuring Shiva and his
family, displayed in an electronics shop, Haldwani, Uttarakhand, 2016 Source:
Photograph by author.
4 In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours Some Sacred Cows of Art History
Kajri Jain
f this volume poses the question ‘How secular is art?’ in relation to South Asia, I want to
insist that its stakes go well beyond art history in or for South Asia. For this question is
an invitation to examine how art and art history are being reimagined from South Asia:
how art history is becoming otherwise, albeit in ways that perhaps are not that other
after all but were actually there all along. The unfinished business between ‘art’ and
‘religion’ is at the heart of this necessary reformulation. It pervades modern and
contemporary art’s engagements with religious ‘living tradition(s)’ as it does secular
institutions like museums.1 But it also surfaces in the peculiar habitations and
uninhabitations of modern and contemporary art history by an ever-expanding domain
of images varyingly contaminated by religiosity, spilling out from temples and shrines
into homes and shops and onto streets and screens, embedded in the fabric of
everyday life. These include the spectacular but temporary public deities of annual
festivals such as Ganapati Utsav and Durga Puja; painted bazaar icons like those of
Kalighat in Kolkata; the printed ones known as calendar art (Image 4.1); mythological
television serials; the propitious adornment of vehicles of transportation (Images 4.2 and
4.3); monumental concrete icons delivering unsolicited darshan along highways (Image
4.4); and animated gifs showering blessings from WhatsApp. I am coming at art’s
secularity and art history’s art via the affects and efficacies of these modern religious
images, which may or may not, or sometimes do and sometimes don’t, also count as
art. In South Asia, innovative religious or mythological forms have been proliferating in
response to new image technologies from the nineteenth century onwards, as described
by a number of scholars including myself.2 Our accounts range across media from
woodblocks, reverse glass painting, and history painting in oils to photography;
chromolithography; offset printing; proscenium theatre; sculpture in clay, plaster, and
other materials; cinema; television; various types of vehicle decoration (paint,
hammered metal, carved wood, reflective tape); and reinforced cement concrete. The
images described here either appear as central to the emergence of modernist art and
cinema in South Asia, or as key to understanding religion, politics, public culture, or
aesthetics in the region, or some combination of these. Within this body of scholarship,
then, such images elicit border-crossings between art history and criticism; film, theatre,
and media/communication studies; history; religious studies; and anthropology. This
multivalence
Image 4.2 Windshield of tourist jeep with stickers catering to a range of passengers,
featuring (left to right and top to bottom): the goddess Durga; the Tibetan Buddhist
Kalachakra symbol; a sacred scarf; then chief minister of Sikkim Pawan Chamling; a
lamp whose flame contains Lakshmi, Ganesh, and Saraswati; and Sai Baba of Shirdi, in
Sikkim, 2009 Source: Photograph by author.
Image 4.3 Print of Jesus adorning prow of fishing boat, Kerala, 2017 Source:
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Image 4.4 A 75-foot statue of Hanuman with Ram and Lakshman on his shoulders built
in 2005 by the sculptor Kashinath at the entrance to Tumkur, Karnataka (photographed
2008) Source: Photograph by author.
says something about the deep performative imbrications of art, religion, and social,
political, and commercial life despite—and alongside—the modernist separation of
these domains. Much of this scholarship, emerging from the early 1990s onwards, has
been interested in the role of images in nationalism. Guha-Thakurta and Mitter, for
instance, describe how artists in the late colonial period drew on folk and bazaar forms,
among other traditions, to forge distinctive national idioms; Pinney and Ramaswamy pit
the religious ‘enchantment’ and ‘messianism’ of anticolonial print capitalist art and visual
culture against Benedict Anderson’s narrative of a secularizing nationalism based
primarily on textual forms.3 For many of us, the focus on nationalism and public culture
was a response to the resurgence of Hindu nationalist politics in the late 1980s, an
investigation of this movement’s deeper (anti)
Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis
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colonial genealogies. It was also part of a postcolonial resistance to the provincial-yet-

universalist Eurocentrism embedded in categories such as nationalism, modernism,
modernity, history, religion, art, and the aesthetic, as well as in the epistemic primacy of
the visual. In revisiting some of these categories, this essay resumes that ongoing
postcolonial and decolonizing task, but now shifts the focus from specifically South
Asian art, religion, or cultural politics to reflect on the practice of art history as we know
it, its presuppositions and methods. This is a reflection on processes that are already
underway and may well be familiar; the aim here is to identify them and sharpen some
of their implications for a discipline seeking to decolonize. To that end, I will proceed via
seven points in the manner of polemical theses, flagging en route some of the epistemic
frictions that modern religious images in South Asia and elsewhere elicit and illuminate:
frictions that make art history exceed itself.
Thesis 1: South Asia Is Neither Here nor There (and Both) Before wading into the
quagmire of art and religion, a necessary reminder, in the first two theses, of the
quagmire of ‘context’. Particularly, given South Asia’s strong associations with
religiosity, whether as putatively benign spirituality or malign fundamentalism, let me
reiterate that the object here is not to delineate a given, ‘context-specific’, arena of
difference from the Eurocentric ideas under scrutiny, for that would only serve to further
reify these categories (and risk perpetuating essentialisms and stereotypes). If South or
East Asia, Africa, Latin America, the ‘Islamic world’, and so on, are seen as arenas of
difference, it is because these arenas were constituted along with the imperium (in its
various avatars, colonial and neocolonial), as its others. Difference is colonialism’s
constitutive outside: a part of the structure of colonialism as well as apart from it, a site
where the binary logic of either/or gives way to—or rather, coexists with—that of
both/and. This means that we are all postcolonial, but experience this differently
depending on who and where we are. (Subthesis: postcoloniality is a universal
condition, but that does not mean it is a homogeneous one.) Context is crucial, but it is
not everything. This fundamental relationship of co-constitution with colonialism, which
enabled modernity to name itself as such, is disavowed in modernity’s
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own narratives about itself and its others. In other words, colonialism is modernity’s
obscene underbelly, its blind spot, the unspeakable and unfathomable Real without
which the self would not exist but whose eruption into the Symbolic—perception,
language, representation—would destabilize the functioning of that self. The
secularization narrative is no exception to this ongoing colonialist disavowal. A
particularly revealing example of the murkiness lurking in the secularization narrative’s
blind spot is the crucifix in Quebec’s National Assembly. After years of debate, this
symbol was finally removed in July 2019, a few months after the controversial passage
of Bill 21 ‘respecting the laicity of the State’—that is, banning religious symbols for
public workers when serving in positions of authority. The removal of the cross hanging
above the Speaker’s head signalled that it had become legible as a religious symbol
akin to the hijabs, turbans, and kirpans whose hypervisibility so distressed right-wing
Québécois. But notwithstanding this grudging admission of religious or (multi)cultural
equivalence, what still remains unparsed, unassimilated, and unerased about the cross
as a more general signifier of ‘heritage’ is its use by the settler-colonial state as a
foundational claim to territory. A large, visible cross—indeed, usually illuminated in white
light—still looms above, or some might say blesses, the city of Montreal (Image 4.5). In
this capacity it is the site and the occasion for the constitutive, yet unrecognized and
unaddressed, gaze of the Indigenous other, and of the slaves, indentured labourers,
and women on whose backs the empires of modernity were built.4 In short, the
metropoles must ignore and repress their own abundant, illiberal, amodernities, for to
confront them would dissolve the consistency of their identities as modern societies by
admitting what and who made them modern in the first place. Attending to the ongoing
legacies of colonialism, settler colonial or otherwise, serves to clarify how the
metropoles may not have been describing themselves that well after all, including in the
discipline of art history. So to approach the postcolonies merely as sealedoff sites of
difference is to be blind to the structural elisions and disavowals embedded in modernist
categories and narratives, and the ways in which the postcolonies and the metropoles
have more in common than they think—for instance, their messy circuits between
religion and politics. As Susan Buck-Morss pithily puts it in relation to post-
Enlightenment philosophers’ elision of actually existing slavery as the enabling context
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Image 4.5 The 103-foot Mount Royal Cross in Montreal installed in 1924 (photographed
2014); the original cross at this site was erected in 1643 Source: Photograph by author.
for scholarship in which metaphors of slavery and unfreedom abound, such historical
and national boundaries ‘allow counterevidence to belong to someone else’s story’.5
And yet, of course, these self-misrecognizing modernist narratives are embedded in
institutions and practices that have force in the world, even as they fail to do justice to,
or in, that world. One such force is the disciplinary logic that continues to specify faculty
positions and course offerings in art history in terms of periods and regions. But it also
appears in less obvious places, such as the turn to circulation, border crossing, and
intercultural or transcultural exchanges that has characterized this and other disciplines
for the past few decades, ever since the idea of globalization gained traction in the
humanities. While the processual thrust of this turn—its attention to objects’ ongoing
material and social lives—is salutary, as is its attempt to look beyond Euro-America to
non-Western spaces, a thoroughgoing
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decentring must also entail a critical suspicion of the term ‘culture’ in the ‘intercultural’
and ‘transcultural’ (see Theses 3 and 6). Our task as art historians is to reckon
simultaneously with both the force and the failures of Eurocentric ideas, not least those
of area, region, nation, and the putatively post-national idea of ‘culture’.
Thesis 2: Visual Culture Is a Red Herring That Turns Art into a Sacred Cow But why
drag modern religious images, especially those entangled in commerce like bazaar art
or corporate-sponsored festival deities, into an art-historical discussion of art and the
aesthetic—surely they belong squarely within that other arena of difference we have
come to call ‘visual culture’ or ‘visual studies’? Here too, as with the demarcation of
regional or cultural context, it could be useful to reflect on how religious images point up
the force and the failures of this seemingly neat, but much debated—and by no means
resolved—distinction. What is amplified by this boundary, what is diminished, what is
disavowed? Visual culture has undoubtedly been an enabling space for scholars
interested in images beyond those designated as what I will call Art with a capital A, and
efficacies and affects beyond Art’s associated versions of the aesthetic. To recap: Art,
as distinguished from visual culture, broadly pertains to images that have been set apart
from everyday life by being exhibited for aesthetic and pedagogical experience or
contemplation in (or by) museums, galleries, and art institutions. Art displays originality,
mastery, complexity, and experiential richness; its affective intensities are akin to those
of the sacred. Perceiving these qualities, however, is seen as requiring a certain
sensibility, if not full-blown connoisseurship. So while Art is primarily associated with an
aesthetics whose value is nonpurposive, where even pleasure and devotion count as
purposes, the very ability to apprehend that value plays into a historical form of class-
based distinction that emerged in bourgeois societies in Europe after the French
Revolution, along with this theorization of the aesthetic.6 In other words, our ideas
about Art are just over two centuries old.7 Visual culture supposedly pertains to
everything else, particularly explicitly or implicitly purposive images. Given the
emergence of visual culture as a domain of study after the Russian Revolution, as leftist
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intellectuals in the West began examining the role of capitalist images in perpetuating a
range of oppressive structures, this has effectively meant that it is primarily concerned
with modern societies; with the political, commercial, mass-produced, and/or popular;
and questions of ideology and resistance.8 So it should come as no surprise that, in a
2005 entry on visual culture and religion in the online Encyclopaedia of Religion, the
scholar of modern and contemporary North American religious images David Morgan
notes that ‘religion plays no role whatsoever in the great majority of visual culture
studies’.9 As he points out, visual culture approaches could be used to study religious
images, but ‘because many art historians assume that post-Enlightenment modernity is
characterized by secularization, religion is considered vestigial and reactionary and
therefore uninteresting’. Here Morgan identifies two limitations, not in the idea but in the
default practice of visual culture: its presentism and its secularism. I would suggest that
a third limitation, also germane to religious images, is in fact embedded in the very term:
its ocularcentric emphasis on vision, based on the much-critiqued epistemological
nexus between vision and knowledge, rather than on the multisensorial, embodied,
affective, material experience characterizing most forms of devotion.10 Indeed, even as
Morgan was making a case for the inclusion of religion in visual culture, he was aligning
himself with ‘material religion’ (in the eponymous journal he co-founded, also in 2005,
Material Religion). The Art/visual culture relationship is actually far messier than this
potted account suggests: museums display visual culture; Art functions as a culture
industry; the secular humanist values attached to bourgeois Art are applied
retrospectively or universalizingly to everyday and religious objects from earlier periods
and other places; the critical lenses of visual culture are often trained on Art; few in the
global art world today subscribe to purist notions of aesthetic autonomy; and so on. Yet
many of us (myself included) nonetheless carry an overriding sense of Art as something
special, precious, uplifting, and set apart from or exceeding the everyday, again, akin to
—or standing in for?—a certain idea of the sacred. Distinguishing art from visual culture
only serves to shore up this sense. Given the variegated force of this distinction and of
the terms involved, my concern is not with the validity of these terms as such but with
the limitations entailed by our uses of them as art historians. Specifically, it is to
highlight the provincial historical sources, and the attendant implications,
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of our ongoing habitual, unwitting commitments to that largely discredited ideology of

modernity called the secularization thesis. I will have more to say about this narrative, in
particular its linear temporality, in the theses that follow. Here, however, my point is that
buying into the Art/ visual culture distinction risks eliding from the discipline’s purview
the extensive, complex life worlds of images that do not fully conform to the secularizing
presuppositions and binary oppositions inherent to both terms, even as such images
may be subject to these terms. For these are life worlds where artists, patrons, and
audiences/users move in and out of the domain of Art, while sometimes (but not always)
also maintaining a sense of its distinctness, and where the aesthetic as deep sensory-
intellectual enjoyment and stimulus is not always or necessarily set apart from religious
and other efficacies. Again, this is not just a matter of South Asian specificity. On the
one hand, religious images and performances have efficacy, including in domains such
as politics and commerce, across much of the world, not least Europe and North
America (as with the instance of Quebec referred to in Thesis 1).11 On the other hand,
there are plenty of South Asians, whether resident, non-resident, or diasporic, who
subscribe to modernist ideas of the aesthetic, including its ‘normative secularity’, and for
whom knowing about and/or owning Art functions as a mode of social distinction.12 But
approaching the question from South Asia helps to clarify that any differences in context
are matters of degree: the extent to which people selfidentify and conduct themselves in
post-Enlightenment secular terms; the traction of secular, post-Romantic
understandings of the aesthetic; and the relative social efficacy of artistic as against
religious patronage of images. Thinking with South Asian image worlds shows us that
modernist artists everywhere have been in formal and thematic dialogue with religious
and commercial images from the very inception of modernism in the nineteenth century.
If Euro-American artists focused primarily on the mass-produced objects and images of
their societies and the religious icons or fetishes of others, for South Asian artists this
dialogue was not solely a one-way street of Orientalist or Primitivist fascination and
inspiration (though it has certainly been that too). In South Asia, given the practices of
religious patronage as markers of status flourishing at all levels of society, further
boosted by the (anti)colonial uptake of religion as a basis of national and subnational
identities, the careers of artists trained at art
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schools could entail making religious paintings for mass reproduction, often alongside
portraits, genre and mythological/history paintings, or, more recently, modernist works.
Similarly, the same patron might frequent art galleries and museums, donate to temples
for the upkeep of icons, and collect artworks featuring, say, the god Ganesh in a range
of styles, from Tanjore-style reverse glass painting through ‘folk art’ to versions
variously inflected by modernism. As is evident from the scholarship on bazaar art and
public festivals and statues, this continuum of art patronage continues into the present,
as does a flourishing vernacular aesthetic world that is both conversant with and
exceeds the gallery circuit and the domain of ‘fine’ art.13 This ongoing relationship
between sites and frames of engagement with images complements what Walter
Benjamin described as the ‘oscillation’ between ‘cult value’ and ‘exhibition value’;
Richard Davis also uses the term ‘oscillation’ to describe the relationship between what
he calls the ‘temple effect’ and the ‘museum effect’.14 However, between the
secularism of both art history and visual culture, and the presentism of the latter, these
frames tend not to be seen as oscillating; instead they are implicitly situated along a
linear timeline where religion belongs in the past. In the process, instead of being
treated as alive and (too often literally) kicking, religion becomes an unquiet ghost that
haunts art history.
Thesis 3: Art History Is a Zombie Discipline, or, Beware the Spirits of Religion and Art!
The hauntings of art history—and its attempted exorcisms, such as the presentism and
secularism of visual culture—surface in various ways. Georges Didi-Huberman, for
instance, compares ‘our beautiful discipline’ to the figure of Leah in a Central European
Jewish fable, who is possessed by a restlessly clinging spirit called a dybbuk.15 For
Didi-Huberman, Aby Warburg is the dybbuk that possesses Leah and Panofsky the
exorcist who fails to fully depossess her. Here the Panofskian knowledge of images is
pitted against Warburgian understanding. Against Panofsky’s scientific, humanist,
schematistic reduction of the image to an intelligible symbol or representation, Didi-
Huberman argues for Warburg’s unquiet unreason: his sense of the spectral
inexhaustibility of the image, its overdetermination as a symptom, a trace of intensities,
an incarnation.
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Didi-Huberman’s account unfolds as a drama of mutual possession between Leah and

the dybbuk. The dybbuk-as-art-historian is madly in love with Leah—that is, possessed
by the image—while she in turn, Leahas-art-history, is haunted by the one possessed.
Here Leah is effectively both art history and the image itself, for images alter the
historical knowledge built on images:16 a knowledge that attempts to bind them tightly
to their time and place—their context—of production. For Didi-Huberman this alteration,
the making-other of historicist knowledge by what Warburg called the Nachleben, or
recursive afterlife of images, cannot be exorcised from art history. Art history is a ghost
story, for it speaks with the voice of the (un)dead. Interestingly, however, Didi-
Huberman observes that this art-historical possession has the same structure as the
mystical union with the divine that enables prophecy, that is, speaking with the voice of
God. So, this story is also a fable of prophecy gone awry, its ‘fall or demonic
reversal’.17 Perhaps, then, we might also see the haunting of art history as what
happens when the image-based relationship with the divine takes a secular turn. It
matters little whether the divine presents itself through icons or is absent from them;
both scenarios, and the tension between them, have exerted tremendous power across
Judeo-Christian traditions (as with Hindu, Islamic, and others as well). For when the
human enters the picture, the picture enters the human, such that the relation with the
image becomes a question either of depossessing the image in order to repossess it in
humanist terms (Panofsky’s exorcism) or of being possessed (Warburg’s mutual
haunting). The image, reincarnated as Art, takes on an uncanny existence in relation to
the human, different from its existence as the abode or speech of the gods, or as the
risky object of sacred or demonic animation (which amounts to the same thing). But this
is not just Panofsky versus Warburg; art history was born as a ghost story. That is to
say, the Panofskian historicist ‘exorcism’ of the image can also be recounted as a
chapter in a longer story of the attempted counter-possession of images by human(ist)
Spirit, which turns them into zombies—or slaves, indentured labourers, wives—that do
their human Masters’ narrative bidding.18 This is the ghost story as the (etymologically
related) Geist story told in his lectures on aesthetics by Hegel, who knew a thing or two
about masters and slaves.19 Here divine Spirit or Geist, with properly self-knowing,
freedom-seeking human subjects as its sole authorized ‘agents’, progresses towards
more and more adequate vehicles
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of artistic self-expression. Its forms rise from brute matter into monstrous heathen idols,
then temple architecture, sculpture in the image of Man, and painting on Christian or
otherwise reflection-inducing themes, through to music and poetry, culminating, as the
‘end’ of art, in thought itself: that is, philosophy. These stages of Spirit’s self-unfolding
through art are associated not just with specific media and themes but also with
civilizations, progressing westwards from Asia to Egypt, Greece, and western Europe.
So, the story of Spirit is not only an individual one but is also writ large in peoples,
races, and nations, in ages and periods— categories that were being consolidated in
Hegel’s era and remain at the heart of our discipline today, supplemented by the more
spatially elastic and putatively more progressive term ‘culture’. This hierarchical
progression is prefigured in Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime,
which occasions a taxonomy of peoples according to their aesthetic capacities in his
1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.20 Here, too, peoples
are ranged along a scale of humanness. At the most noble, free, agentive human pole
are those who can experience the sublime and are therefore closest to God; at the other
are those whose putatively primitive nature, akin to animality or objecthood, keeps them
enslaved to their fetishes—and, though he does not mention this, to the more noble and
free humans. For these ideas about art and the aesthetic are being forged around the
mid-eighteenth century as voyaging Europeans are busy processing their encounters
with others, others’ objects, and these objects’ forms of value and efficacy—all while
simultaneously instituting others as objects via slavery. So art and the aesthetic, as well
as the modern notion of religion, are conceived along with their evil twin, the fetish, also
known as the idol or the icon: Hegel’s monstrous, unnatural distortions that cannot
reconcile form and spirit.21 Fetishism emerges here as the delusion that is the other of
self-realization: the ‘primary process of unenlightenment’.22 William Pietz brilliantly
traces how the agency of human subjects was formulated in the context of colonizing
encounters via Enlightenment vilifications of the fetish and its putative agency.23 This,
of course, unfolded even as land was being claimed with crosses (in a settler-colonial
disavowal of its own fetishes) and turned into property in exchange for beads. Art
history became a ghost story of uncanny objects that possess or are dispossessed
because it was founded on turning other people’s bodies and lands into objects of
possession.
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This story denounced those people’s objects as fetishes, dangerously lively things,
while forswearing the nonhuman life in its own by recasting them as vehicles of (a
conditional) humanness—whether they be crosses or the images known as Art. The
Enlightenment’s Masters summoned various spells to transform the powers of images,
religious and otherwise, into a zombie life of Art possessed by human Spirit (the artistic
idea; the philosophical Idea; the spirit of a people or nation; the spirit of an age or
period; civilization; culture). For Kant, the purposiveness of religion disqualified it as
aesthetic experience; for Hegel, religion remained inadequate to the full, self-conscious
freedom of Spirit. With Romanticism and the Sublime (and the thoroughgoing
resignification of land as property by the Enclosure Acts), for bourgeois subjects,
religion was literally and metaphorically sublimated into Nature as landscape, real and
painted.24 About a century on, thoroughly ‘spiritualized’, as David Morgan describes, it
resurfaced in modernist abstraction with Malevich and Rothko (later we might add the
installations of James Turrell or Olafur Eliasson whose very stuff is light).25 The
sublimation of religion into publicly viewed zombie Art and outdoor Nature was of a
piece with the institution of artistic exhibition value as distinct from religious cult value,
and the sequestration of ‘religion’ into a private, domestic, individual, family- or
community-based rather than public or state affair. The religious efficacies of images
appearing in public spaces were either scotomized or tamed by consigning them to the
past as subjects of secular art history—or, more recently, by making over their potency
in the present as identity-based ‘cultural heritage’ (the term used in one of the
arguments for retaining the cross in the Quebec National Assembly). Thus, it was that
anthropocentric human Spirit turned Art into zombie art history’s sacred cow: what was
left for worship once the golden calf—the sacred object—was depossessed,
repossessed, sanitized, and taxidermized in the museum. All this stemmed from art
history’s origins in Europe’s encounters with non-European others, including trade,
slavery, and colonial land grabbing, and from Enlightenment humanism’s role in the
politics of religion and state within Europe. Little wonder, then, that if religion qua
religion features in modern and contemporary art, it is only, as James Elkins argues, as
spirituality, kitsch, or camp—or, I would add, as history, however nostalgic or ironic. But
just as art’s haunting by the fetish resurfaces in the drive of the collector or in the culture
industry’s
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corporate-sponsored blockbuster shows, the disavowed efficacies of religion, now

retooled in the time of democracy, resurface in the frictions of ‘iconoclash’ via what
Michael Taussig calls the ‘labour of the negative’.26 Here images, oscillating between
art and religion in its identitarian avatar, are harnessed to the taking and making of
religious offence, as with M. F. Husain’s Saraswati, the Bamiyan Buddhas, the Danish
and French cartoons of the Prophet, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, or Chris Ofili’s The
Holy Virgin Mary. Note the flattening equivalence at work in this reduction of images
from heterogeneous traditions to symbols of identity. But is that all they are? Didi-
Huberman refuses the enslaved zombie version of art history with his story of the
unquiet dybbuk who ‘wanders less and less silently through the (social) body’ of our
discipline, embracing another arthistorical tradition that acknowledges the ongoing
Nachleben of images.27 Similarly, we can also choose to acknowledge the ongoing
poltergeist activity of religious images, particularly public ones, that now make their
noisy presence felt everywhere. If, eager to welcome its non-Western others, art history
seeks to be not only a ghost story or a Geist story but also a host story, it needs to
reckon with the unrecognized othernesses at its core, encapsulated in the etymological
kinship of host, guest, and hostility in the proto-Indo-European ghost-i-, also meaning
stranger—but nothing to do with ghosts.28 In short, this means thinking sacrality
alongside spectrality.
Thesis 4: Religion Is Not a Thing—or at Any Rate Not One Thing I have just written a
book about the monumental iconic statues proliferating in post-liberalization India since
around the early 1990s (see Images 4.4, 4.6–4.9).29 Most of these are Hindu and
Buddhist deities, built in concrete along highways or in religious theme parks, often for
social, political, or commercial leverage. A question I sometimes get about these
statues, like 108-foot icons of Hanuman or Shiva, is whether they represent some kind
of secularization. Similarly, after describing these icons as engendering new religious
practices, I might be told, occasionally with some exasperation, that these are obviously
just built for their patrons’ personal gain—as land grabs and/or to woo an electoral vote
bank (even though I always discuss these aspects; there is no doubt an element of
‘mansplaining’ here).30 It is as
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Image 4.6 A 65-foot Shiva statue built in 1995 by the sculptor Kashinath on Bangalore’s
Old Airport Road (photographed in 2009 as it was being given a plywood and cement
Himalayan backdrop) Source: Photograph by author.
though any modern innovation, anything to do with politics or business, or anything that
might be construed as entailing private gain as opposed to the public good, is not
properly religious and cannot be contemplated within that frame.31 And yet such
images are clearly not properly secular either, just as they are neither quite Art nor quite
visual culture (see Thesis 2). Modern and contemporary religious images like these sit
right in the blind spot of the temporally linear, humanist, spiritualizing, and secularizing
narrative described earlier. One impediment to bringing them into the field of vision (and
other kinds of engagement) is a certain essentialism and universalism in the category of
religion: a category that was itself co-constituted with its secular other. To take a
previously mentioned instance from South Asian public imagery, the pioneering work of
Christopher Pinney and Sumathi Ramaswamy analyses popular religious prints as
vehicles of anticolonial nationalism.32 Both use these
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prints as image-based contestations of Benedict Anderson’s secular account of

nationalism, stressing instead the mythic or deified nature of the nation-space and
themes of sacrifice and martyrdom in nationalist affect.33 So far so good, but in the
process Pinney adopts Anderson’s opposition, drawing on Benjamin, between
‘homogeneous, empty time’ as the modern nation’s putatively secular temporality and a
‘messianic’ time that comes to monolithically stand in for all kinds of religious time.34
Indian bazaar prints, including icons, thus counterintuitively partake of messianic
temporality. There may well be a case to be made for this, on the grounds that
Benjamin’s dialectical notion of the messianic is deployed within, but in excess of, a
secular horizon, but this is not the move being made here—at least it is not argued that
way.35 Pinney’s messianic time, like Anderson’s, appears as a catch-all ‘religious’
category that does not engage Benjamin’s subtle and singular reformulation of this
Judaic concept. My point here is not so much to plead for justice to Benjamin or
Judaism (or indeed to any other religion): it is more to illustrate how our clunky, much
contested, but nonetheless habitual notion of religion lends itself to such universalizing
and essentializing moves. For Anderson, religion and secularism are mutually exclusive
and ranged in linear succession. Pinney demonstrates that religion never went away but
does not ask whether this thing that seems to persist is the same as what existed
before: religion is treated as ahistorical. Thus, for instance, his emphasis on
‘corpothetic’ or embodied devotional engagements implies a continuum between
ancient temple icons and mass reproduced ones in domestic or public settings. This is
certainly valid for the purposes of his argument against an aesthetics of distanced
contemplation (or, rather, an ‘anaesthetics,’ as Susan BuckMorss calls it), which
usefully undoes the material–spiritual binary that enabled ‘religion’ to be formulated as a
dematerialized vehicle of divineas-human Spirit.36 However, it stops short of analysing
what is new or otherwise here in religious terms. What else does religion become in
these new forms of publicness or its articulation with nationalism through new genres
and media? How does it become a site, for instance, not just of native subalternity and
resistance to colonialism but also of Hindu hegemony and the form-shaping forces of
representative democracy: its biopolitical taxonomies, its reterritorializations, its
electorally driven temporalities? To address such questions, we need to attend to
religion’s ‘post-secular’ forms as additions to those shaped before the emergence of a
secular horizon,
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even as we are in the habit of lumping all of these together under the monolithic term
‘religion’—or, conversely, seeing all modern forms, even religious ones, as somehow by
default surreptitiously secular.37 To be fair, this homogenizing habit is hard to shake
because of the stickiness of many elements of ‘pre-’ secular practices and material
forms, including the modalities of value and authority they reinforce, which persist in our
‘post-secular’ world (hence the scare quotes around these temporalizing terms). Think
here of the canonical traditions followed for centuries by the powerful temples of Hindu
monastic orders, or mathas, and the continued social importance of patronage of such
institutions as well as new temples and mosques. That ‘persistence’ does indeed have
much to do with religious temporality: not the messianic temporality of redemptive
rupture (or even of a general orientation towards the future), but one where cyclical
rituals keep traditions alive. However, the same cyclical temporality has also been an
engine of emergence: of new, topical, formally protean religious practices and images,
particularly various types of public devotion in mundane spaces. Here ‘new’ and ‘old’
religious forms come into circuits with each other and with secular forms like Art, as well
as being seen as distinct (see Thesis 5). Further, in another spatiotemporal knot, even
as religious forms are both perpetuated and constantly remade by material practices in
the present, they are also subject to modern forms of authority and value that valorise
primordial, authentic, canonical forms seen as continuous with the past, or as an
expression of ‘spirit’ (that is, a repossessed zombie life). It should come as no surprise
that it is an art historian of the ‘pre-’ secular (or at any rate precolonial) age in South
Asia who has provided us with a term that eludes, encompasses, and helps us address
these complexities. I am thinking of Michael Meister’s addition of iconopraxis, the
‘fluidity and multiplicity of practice’, to iconography (and iconology) as part of the art-
historical toolkit.38 Writing on ancient and medieval temple sculpture in South Asia,
forms remote from the secularizing movement at art history’s core, Meister seeks to
eschew the ‘canonical linearity’ characterizing the scholarship on South Asian ritual
images, embracing instead their ‘layered traditions’ and ‘anti-canons’.39 If, in engaging
embodied practices, this approach shades into anthropology, its central concern is more
the image than the human (though to jettison the human altogether would be literally
inconceivable). For iconopraxis at once responds to and generates
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‘iconoplasty’: ‘the semantic fluidity of forms at times of ritual definition and the
transformational characteristics of meanings attached to forms in the same period by
different users synchronically and over longer durations (diachronically)’.40 This
characterization is robust enough, I would suggest, to encompass transformations of
meaning and practice whose ‘longer durations’ extend to include the modern notion of
the aesthetic—along with the spectres of purposiveness, fetishism, and Nachleben, and
their attempted exorcism and zombie counter-possession by divine-as-human spirit. In
this notion of iconopraxis, broadened to the modern and contemporary, the ‘icon’ is
simply an image (although, of course, the image is far from simple!). Its force in the
world is not necessarily or exclusively religious but moves between frames of value,
efficacy, and meaning that are both distinct and overlap, including various versions of
religion and the aesthetic, not least those attendant on Art. To describe iconopraxis is to
analyse the terms on which artists, patrons, and others affecting and affected by
images, as well as images themselves, inhabit and move across religious, aesthetic,
and other frames, at once reinscribing the differences between these frames and
forming material circuits across them.
Thesis 5: Religion and the Secular in Art Are Both Mutually Opposed and Form Circuits
with Each Other Public iconopraxis and the discourses around it provide a good entry
point into these complexities of the icon as simply an image. Ongoing temple renovation
and construction, bazaar prints, and the new public megadeities demonstrate that in
India religious patronage remains a powerful way to maintain or achieve social status
and mobility—far more so than artistic taste as a bourgeois modality of distinction as
Bourdieu described for France in the 1970s.41 As I have argued, the ethos of
vernacular capitalism or the ‘bazaar’ does not oppose religion and commerce, the
material and the spiritual, or the other-worldly and the mundane, in quite the same
manner as the self-description of the Protestant ethic does with its focus on the Word
(even as the bazaar is co-constituted with institutions and discourses that do).42 Thus a
common way for vernacular capitalist Hindus and Jains to mark economic success is to
build temples, as with the extensive, innovative temple-building programme starting in
the 1930s of the major Indian industrialists the Birlas; they also created religious theme
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parks with giant statues of deities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the pre-
liberalization economy, bazaar prints in the form of calendars gifted to customers and
business associates were a common means of annually renewing the commercial-cum-
social networks that maintained the moral reputation of the donor. Now monumental
icons also consolidate the moral and social status as well as the technological or
infrastructural prowess of post-liberalization players, old and new. If the Birlas are an
example of the ‘old,’ a controversial post-liberalization player was the audio baron
Gulshan Kumar, who famously started out as a roadside fruit juice vendor and then
consolidated an audio cassette, CD, video, and film production empire only to be
assassinated while exiting a temple, likely by the Bombay underworld. Media scholars
have focused on Gulshan Kumar’s use of piracy to gain economic mobility, but, in
keeping with the habitual assumption that religion belongs to the past and media to the
present, completely ignore the key role of religion in his social mobility: the CDs and
videos of devotional bhajans and pilgrimages where Kumar’s own image features
prominently; the giant Shiva statue at his studio in Noida (pirated, of course, from the
Birlas); and his patronage of a temple and a 65-foot Shiva near Dwarka, one of the Char
Dham—four important Hindu pilgrimage sites centred on powerful ancient mathas.43
Note the circuit here between canonical authority and spectacular new forms: it is hardly
surprising that Kumar sought an association with the institutional power of Dwarka
Dham. But this is a circuit because it works both ways: the authority of powerful ancient
temples is reinforced, not diminished, by featuring in devotional CDs and pilgrimage
videos. A similar circuit is at work in the political adoption of the monumental statue form
in the attempt to garner favour with local vote banks. Here, however, politicians tend to
maintain an arm’s length from religion per se, so these projects often unfold under the
secular rubrics of tourism development, cultural heritage, philanthropy, even
environmentalism. For monumental statue impresario, Pawan Chamling, chief minister
of the Himalayan state of Sikkim from 1994 to 2019, this secular reframing enabled him
to cater to two major religious blocs, Hindus and Buddhists, via two colossal statues on
hilltops flanking his constituency, Namchi, even as he himself belongs to the Indigenous
Kirant community. These gestures of recognition did double duty as economic initiatives
to develop tourism in South Sikkim, which is drier and not as naturally attractive as other
parts of the state.
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The statues in question are a 135-foot Guru Rinpoche or Padmasambhava (Image 4.7),
completed in 2004, with a garden inaugurated on World Environment Day—that is,
trading on secular value—and a 108foot Shiva (Image 4.8) at the 2011 ‘Char Dham
Pilgrimage-Cum-Cultural Centre’. Note this formulation that conjoins religious
‘pilgrimage’ to secular ‘culture’ while also maintaining them as distinct. This complex
also features scaled-down replicas of the four temples at the Char Dham, each manned
by priests and large enough to enter and worship in. These replicated temples were
established as ritually authentic, with no sense of this being an oxymoron, via another
circuit: the site’s inauguration by the Shankaracharya or head guru of the Dwarka
matha, one of the Char Dham. Similarly, the Dalai Lama laid the Guru Rinpoche
statue’s foundation
Image 4.7 A 135-foot Guru Rinpoche or Padmasambhava completed in 2004, Namchi,

Sikkim (photographed 2013) Source: Photograph by author.
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Image 4.8 A 108-foot Shiva at the ‘Char Dham Pilgrimage-Cum-Cultural-Centre’
inaugurated in 2011, Namchi, Sikkim (photographed 2013) Source: Photograph by
author.
stone, as well as inaugurating a 95-foot seated Sakyamuni at Ravangla (Image 4.9),

also in South Sikkim, in 2013 (the initiative of a local ‘big man’ in Chamling’s cabinet).
But the sights of the Sakyamuni project team were set not so much on domestic tourist–
pilgrims as on the international ‘Buddhist circuit’, and on ‘both the pilgrim and the
aesthete’: another both/ and formulation that maintains a distinction between religious
icon and secular art, yet projects them both onto a single object or image.44 Once again
we encounter a drama of possession and repossession, this time centred not on the
aesthetic but on the capacious iconoplasty of religious images as (secular, humanist)
‘culture’. In this scenario, as has been extensively analysed in the Indian context,
religion and secular culture are not opposed in relation to the state and its institutions,
but
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Image 4.9 A 95-foot Sakyamuni statue built by Sanjay and Bijoy Sakya, at its
inauguration in 2013, Ravangla, South Sikkim Source: Photograph by author.
explicitly subject to interconvertibility and translation. A case in point is the idea of

Hinduism as dharma: a term that effects a temporal knot in which the modern category
of religion mediates an ancient meaning to render it translatable to modern laws. This
translation is codified in several rulings of India’s Supreme Court, which has described
Hinduism not as a religion but as ‘a way of life and nothing more’. This was later
conflated with the political notion of Hindutva, which a notorious 1995 ruling described
as a ‘way of life or state of mind’.45 Not coincidentally, several of these rulings pertain
to cases contesting the right of temple entry, often lodged by mathas, leading to a
demarcation of temples as public (and hence open to all) or private (and therefore able
to restrict entry).46 The point here is that religion as a category and the forms it takes
have been, and continue to be, up for resignification. These negotiations are germane
to an art-historical understanding of what is and is not new about emergent religious
forms. In other words, Meister’s notion of iconoplasty as ‘semantic
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fluidity of forms at times of ritual definition’ pertains not only to the forms that religion
takes, but also to the very idea of religion itself as it fluidly inhabits and vacates iconic
images created precisely as a result of, and to accommodate, such fluidity. In sum,
then, following Talal Asad’s anthropological approach to secularism, or Stanley Cavell’s
ordinary language approach to religion, rather than working with essential categories of
religious and secular, sacred and profane, other-worldly and mundane, to do art history
would be to attend to the ongoing assemblages—including both circuits and boundary
work—between these categories, in discourse and in practice.47
Thesis 6: Heterochrony Includes Linear Temporality (‘Culture’ Is Spirit by Another

Name) Even as this history is one that attends to newness, it neither succumbs to the
force of linear temporality and the progress narrative of Spirit, nor does it simply wish
them away. Art historians trying to address the uneven co-presence of artistic practices
have had to contend with heterogeneities in the very apprehension of temporality, but
are not always able to assimilate their co-presence (again that colonialist blind spot).
Keith Moxey, for instance, argues for ‘an awareness of heterochrony, the sense that
different cultures have distinct notions of time and that these are not easily related to
one another’.48 This formulation fails to register that (to restate Thesis 1) ‘cultural’
difference was in fact produced in relation: cooked up by European imperialism, kept on
the boil by subsequent relations of asymmetry, and served up as needed to legitimize
the exceptionalities of colonial and then other forms of rule, including Hindu absolutism.
Eliding this relational production of ‘cultural difference’ essentializes culture, enabling
culturalist explanations to substitute for, among other things, a narration of capital’s
movements in search of its ‘spatial fix’.49 Such invocations of cultural difference ignore
the force of Western ideas, bodies (including images), and technologies in the world,
propagated and institutionalized via colonialism, and simultaneously remade by
colonialism’s contradictions. These forces elicit material incarnations, even if not always
in forms that are anticipated or recognizable in their origins: forms like festival shrines,
printed deities, and television epics as theatres of politics or of corporate advertising, or
giant concrete icons as
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performances of technological puissance and lures for investment. Public religious

forms demonstrate how ‘distinct notions of time’, in this case that of ritual cycles as
distinct from the linear vectoral progress of capital and the nation, are inhabited—and,
as I have argued here—remixed by the same subjects and in the same objects. So
even if we can speak of ‘different cultures’, these are not easily mapped onto distinct
subjects, objects, or locations. Again, then, the lesson in describing forms and their
journeys across boundaries and networks is not to peg their qualities to cultures, but to
develop complex accounts of the multiple spatialities and temporalities— and politics—
at work as new configurations are layered onto, make links with, reactivate, and
remediate existing ones.50 This is to bring to images, religious and otherwise, media
archaeology’s insight that images and their technologies do not necessarily replace one
another in evolutionary succession, while still acknowledging the pervasiveness, force,
and efficacy of modernity’s progress narrative.51 Post-liberalization gigantic statues, for
instance, do not replace existing, smaller icons, whether sequestered in temples or
appearing by the roadside, even as the emergence of such new forms might affect
existing ones by bringing them into novel assemblages like temple-cum-theme parks.
The same applies to plug-in Tanjore-style glass paintings of Krishna with flashing LED
lights in living rooms; calendar images of Hanuman in shopkeepers’ shrines inspired by
Boris Vallejo’s fantasy airbrush illustrations; or an Ambedkar statue modelled on the
Lincoln Memorial in a commemorative complex whose anti-Hindu formal programme
enlists a global vocabulary of ancient imperial architecture (Image 4.10).52 Or take the
mysterious sixth–tenth century CE ‘Gandhara– Nagara’ sculpture from Kafirkot that
Michael Meister conjectures did not just mediate with but also perhaps produced the
divine, in a protohumanism whose anachronism is no failure but proper to the
temporality of the image.53 This temporality is not just nostalgic (though if it is that too,
what of it?). Political urgency in images can be ignited at any moment: for instance, in
settler-colonial crucifixes and public icons, including the massive deities bellowing caste
Hindu dominance in the face of thousands of small Ambedkar statues asserting Dalit
presence, or the reanimationby-destruction of imperialist and Confederate monuments
sparked by phone videos witnessing institutionalized racism and white supremacy.
Images demand attention to processes unfolding in multiple registers at a
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Image 4.10 Statue of B. R. Ambedkar by sculptor Ram Sutar at the Dr Bhimrao

Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Prateek Sthal, Lucknow, unveiled in 1997 (photographed
2019); it is modelled on the 1920 figure of Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French at
the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC Source: Photograph by author.
variety of scales and times, as well as the very production of those scales and times: to
the dybbuk-like stickiness of forms and their contingent (re-) emergences through
encounters with materials, techniques, and other images; to stochastic appearances
and disappearances, intensifications and diminishments, resonances and departures.
None of these are reducible to the movement of Spirit as genius, period, or culture. If
these sound like shibboleths of the ‘material turn’, let us not forget that this is in fact a
material return, from zombie art history to the spectral and the sacred that neither went
away nor stayed the same. Art historians, whose methods have always entailed close
attention to objects, spaces, and sense-experience, have no need to join the bleating
herd following political philosophers and historians or sociologists of science whose
zombie disciplines were wedded to Cartesian, liberal bourgeois subjects but then
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suddenly woke up to the liveliness of things. For we, like anthropologists, have long
known from images of their nonhuman being: like Warburg, for whom the image drew
on and exercised efficacies and affects beyond its proper time and place; like Foçillon
and Kubler, for whom form itself was an engine of form, unfolding over time; like
Meister, attuned to plasticity, ‘cultic transformation’, and ‘image-play’; like Didi-
Huberman, confronting the image in a present that is just a moment in the layers of
matter and meaning contained in the encounters between the object and the senses,
memories, and other embodied psychic processes of those ‘before’ it.54 Art historians,
anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, and others—not least South
Asianists compelled by images to overflow their disciplines—have been alive to the
work of objects, artists, and iconopraxis both in and beyond Enlightenment subjectivity,
and to medialities not limited to secular communication between humans but also
between mortals, gods, and the ceaseless reincarnations of matter. Art history is and
has always been otherwise, because our ‘objects’ will never be reducible to what we
have to say about them. In other words:
Thesis 7: Art and Art History May Be Secular, but Art History’s ‘Objects’ Need Not Be
Notes 1. For South Asian modernism’s engagements with religious traditions, see K. G.
Subramanyan, The Living Tradition: Perspectives on Modern Indian Art (Calcutta:
Seagull Books, 1987); Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Karin Zitzewitz, The Art of
Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (London:
Hurst, 2014); Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and
Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015). On
religion and museums, see Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, ‘Reincarnations of the
Museum: The Museum in an Age of Religious Revivalism’, in No Touching, No Spitting,
No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, ed. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (New
Delhi: Routledge, 2015), 203–218. My thanks to the participants at the symposium at
Brown University’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities from which this volume emerged
for their lively discussion of the paper on which this essay is based, and in particular to
Sonal Khullar and Vazira Zamindar for their insightful engagement with an earlier draft.
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2. Among them are Richard Davis, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Geeta
Kapur, Anuradha Kapur, Philip Lutgendorf, Jyotindra Jain, Partha Mitter, Arvind
Rajagopal, Ravinder Kaur, Rachel Dwyer, Jamal Elias, Christopher Pinney, Sumathi
Ramaswamy, and Christiane Brosius. 3. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New
‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992); Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India,
1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in
India (London: Reaktion, 2004); Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation:
Mapping Mother India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1991). 4. A story in the Montreal Gazette makes this connection between the
Quebec Assembly crucifix and the first settler cross planted by Jacques Cartier and
remarked upon by First Nations Chief Donnacona, without framing it in the same way.
Andy Riga, ‘The Crucifix in Quebec’s National Assembly and Why Its Symbolism
Matters’, Montreal Gazette, 2 February 2019, https://montrealgazette.com/news/ local-
news/the-crucifix-in-quebecs-national-assembly-why-its-symbolism-matters (accessed
10 June 2020). Implicit in my own framing is a parallel between the cross and the
illegible anamorphic skull that appears as a massive blot or stain right in the foreground
of Holbein’s Ambassadors, which Lacan variously theorized as an eruption of the Real
and of the constitutive gaze of the other. The stain threatens the order of signification
that keeps subjectivity intact and therefore cannot be assimilated by the subject; this is
what makes it a figure of disavowal. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Vintage,
1994). 5. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 821–
865, 822. 6. Art is theorized as non-purposive in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment,
trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). On the class aspects of this
theorization see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the
Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 7. Jacques Rancière, ‘Contemporary Art and
the Politics of Aesthetics’, in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics,
ed. Beth Hinderliter, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009), 31–50. 8. Notably, however, Frankfurt School thinkers
like Benjamin and Adorno were concerned with the circuits between Art and mass
culture. 9. David Morgan, ‘Visual Culture and Religion: An Overview’, in Encyclopedia of
Religion (2005), https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopediasalmanacs-
transcripts-and-maps/visual-culture-and-religion-overview (accessed
10. 11.
12.
13.
14.
15. 16. 17. 18.
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9 June 2020). For a thoughtful United States–specific discussion, see Sally Promey,
‘The “Return” of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art’, Art Bulletin 85, no. 3
(2003): 581–603. On critiques of the nexus between vision and knowledge in Western
epistemologies, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-
Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). I wrote this
alongside reportage of then US President Donald Trump’s insistence on a photo-op with
a Bible outside St John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC, after having police clear
the area of anti-racism protestors with tear gas and rubber bullets. This violent act of
religious image-making polarized the US public sphere into those decrying it as
conclusive proof of Trump’s autocracy and those hailing him as wearing ‘the full armor
of God’, welcoming the kingdom of God on earth, or moved to speak in tongues.
Matthew Teague, ‘“He Wears the Armor of God”: Evangelicals Hail Trump’s Church
Photo Op’, The Guardian, 3 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.
com/us-news/2020/jun/03/donald-trump-church-photo-op-evangelicals (accessed 3
June 2020). On ‘iconoclash’ in Europe, see Bruno Latour, ‘What Is Iconoclash? Or Is
There a World Beyond the Image Wars?’, in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in
Science, Religion and Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 14–37; on contemporary
religiosity in North America, see David Morgan, ‘Art and Religion in the Modern Age’, in
Re-Enchantment, ed. James Elkins and David Morgan (New York: Routledge, 2002),
25–45. Karin Zitzewitz adopts the phrase ‘normative secularity’ from Saba Mahmood,
‘Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of the Islamic Reformation’, Public
Culture 18, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 342–343. Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism. See, for
instance, Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art; and Tapati Guha-Thakurta,
In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Delhi: Primus,
2015); Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007); and Kajri Jain, Gods in the Time of Democracy (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2021). Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana,
1992), 211–244; Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999); see also Richard Davis, Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshipping
Shiva in Medieval India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Georges Didi-
Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans.
John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), xxi. Ibid.
Ibid., xxii. It is no coincidence that Leah’s possession happens at her wedding (to
someone other than the young rabbi-gone-awry she is in love with) and thwarts it. She
is nobody’s wife: the image/art history serves nobody, labours for nobody.
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19. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:

Clarendon Press. 1975), Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’. 20. Immanuel Kant,
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait
(Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); see also Morgan, ‘Art and
Religion in the Modern Age’. 21. See Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of
European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 22. William Pietz,
‘Fetish’, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, 2nd
ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), 306–317, 308. 23. William Pietz,
‘Problem of the Fetish, Part I’, Res 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17; and William Pietz, ‘Problem
of the Fetish, Part II’, Res 9 (Spring 1987): 23–45. 24. Denis Cosgrove, Social
Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
25. Morgan, ‘Art and Religion in the Modern Age’. 26. James Elkins, On the Strange
Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 1999); Latour, ‘What Is
Iconoclash?’; Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the
Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 27. Didi-Huberman, Confronting
Images, xxi. 28. Online Etymology Dictionary entry for *ghos-ti-,
https://www.etymonline.com/ word/*ghos-ti- (accessed 6 June 2020). 29. Jain, Gods in
the Time of Democracy. 30. Let me note in passing that the recognition of
‘mansplaining’ stemmed from the experience of a female art historian: see Rebecca
Solnit, ‘Men Explain Things’, Los Angeles Times, 13 April 2008. A longer version of this
essay appears in Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2014). 31. This echoes the terms of the colonial debates on religious donations
described by the historian Ritu Birla, where it was similarly ambiguous as to where to
draw the line between public good and personal profit, due to the colonial governance of
domestic capitalist firms under Hindu and Muslim personal law rather than corporate
law. Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial
India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 32. Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’;
Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation. 33. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 34.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt (London: Fontana, 1992), 245–55. 35. Sami Khatib, ‘The Messianic Without
Messianism’, Anthropology and Materialism 1 (2013),
http://journals.openedition.org/am/159 (accessed 10 June 2020). 36. Here Pinney cites
Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay
Reconsidered’, October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3–41. 37. The term ‘post-secular’ does not
refer to the demise of secularism, but to religion in the time of secularism.
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38. Michael Meister, ‘Image Iconopraxis and Iconoplasty in South Asia’, Res 51 (March
2007): 13–32, 15. 39. Ibid., 15. 40. Ibid. 41. Bourdieu, Distinction. 42. Jain, Gods in the
Bazaar. 43. See Ravi Sundaram, ‘Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban and New
Globalisation’, Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 1 (2004): 64–71; and Lawrence
Liang, ‘Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation’, in Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts
(New Delhi: Sarai/CSDS, 2005), 6–17. 44. Interviews with Thobchen Thakapa, project
manager of the Sakyamuni project, and Navin Pradhan, its architect (Sikkim, May
2009). 45. Brenda Cossman and Ratna Kapur, ‘Secularism’s Last Sigh? The Hindu
Right, the Courts, and India’s Struggle for Democracy’, Harvard International Law
Journal 38, no. 1 (1997): 113–170; Ronojoy Sen, ‘The Indian Supreme Court and the
Quest for a “Rational” Hinduism’, South Asian History and Culture 1, no. 1 (2010): 86–
104. 46. While this is not the occasion to do so, there is a great deal more to be said
about how such conflicts around the control of access to space and the publicness or
otherwise of icons reveal the political stakes of iconopraxis for the caste struggle in
India, via the aesthetics of touch and untouchability. See Jain, Gods in the Time of
Democracy. 47. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power
in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Talal
Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003). On Cavell’s approach, see Hent de Vries, ‘Introduction: Why
Still “Religion”?’, in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), 1–98. On ‘religion’ as a category in relation to South Asia, see
J. Barton Scott and Brannon D. Ingram, ‘What Is a Public? Notes from South Asia’,
South Asia 38, no. 3 (2015): 357–370. 48. Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in
History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 173. 49. David Harvey, ‘Globalization
and the “Spatial Fix”’, Geographische Revue 2 (January 2001): 23–30. 50. Jay David
Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2000). 51. See, for instance, Charles Acland (ed.), Residual Media (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 52. On the Ambedkar memorial complex in
Lucknow, see Kajri Jain, ‘The Handbag That Exploded: Mayawati’s Monuments and the
Aesthetics of Democracy in Post-reform India’, in New Cultural Histories of India, ed.
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Partha Chatterjee, and Bodhisattva Kar (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 139–179.
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Kajri Jain
53. Meister, ‘Image Iconopraxis and Iconoplasty’. On anachronism, see Georges

DidiHuberman, ‘Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism’,
trans. Peter Masson, in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and Out of History, ed.
Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003), 31–44; also Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance
(New York: Zone Books, 2010). 54. Henri Foçillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans.
Charles Hogan and George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1989); George Kubler, The
Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1962); Meister, ‘Image Iconopraxis and Iconoplasty’; Didi-Huberman, ‘Before the Image,
Before Time’; and Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images. On Warburg, see Georges
DidiHuberman, ‘The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology’, Oxford
Art Journal 25, no. 1 (2002): 61–69.
PART 2 Boundaries of Secular Nationalism
Image 5.1a Sadequain, A Headless Figure Paints, from Drawings, August 1970, pen
and ink on paper Source: Courtesy of Sadequain Foundation.
5 Displacements of Secularity Decapitations and Their Histories* Vazira Zamindar
Does decapitation become the emblem of social and historical division? Or rather the
brutal admission of our internal fractures, of that intimate instability that prompts
movements, but also crises? —Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head1
Displacements They say Sarmad was an Armenian Jew who travelled to India in the
seventeenth century and became a mystic. That he came as an ordinary trader and by
the banks of the Indus he fell in love with Abhay Chand, that he abandoned himself to
nature and roamed the streets naked, that the great prince and philosopher Dara
Shikoh invited him to the Mughal court at Delhi, and that Aurangzeb—in rivalry with his
brother, or in abhorrence of the abandonment—had him beheaded for heresy. He was
ordered to recite the Kalima—‘there is no god but one God’— and yet only the words
there is no god, there is no god came forth. And yet such were his mystical powers that
when he was beheaded, he seized his own decapitated head and ascended the steps
of the Jama Masjid, his head in his hands, and as he did so, behind him the river Jamna
rose in wrath.2 For the ecstatic and prolific painter-calligrapher-poet Sadequain,
displaced from a small town in north India to West Pakistan in 1947, an intense
identification with mystic-martyrs like Sarmad in this image of the beheaded artist
painting himself (Image 5.1a)—an image that appears in various guises over and over
again in his work—raises some of the aporias of modernity and writing about ‘art’ from
the south: Has he been beheaded or has he beheaded himself? Do we grieve the
violence of the beheading or is this violence the very condition of possibility, of his
playfulness, of his sight? Are these passions or inventions of inheritance by which Sufi
abandonment and transgression can enable an articulation of a ‘modern artist’? How
does ‘secular’ function as guard and guardian of a domain called art, and as such
organize the very terms by which we think of belief, dissent, and the sacred?
A Spiritual Crisis The ‘crisis’ of Indian secularism and the acuteness with which it has
been experienced in the domain of art have been put to considerable political
Displacements of Secularity
127
and historical deliberation. The symposium How Secular Is Art? was borne out of a
deeply felt concern with the now no longer ascendant, but rather dominant Hindu
nationalism, and its wider implications for religious pluralism and practices of art and
history across the nationstates of South Asia. Yet given that the core of the debates on
secularism and modernity, its universal versus ‘Indian’ lineaments, have tended to
examine the colonial history of Indian secularism in order to interrogate the postcolonial
Indian state’s commitment to secularism, they have left a palpable lacuna in thinking
with partitions and explicitly non-secular state formation (East and West Pakistan) that
was produced simultaneously, from the same dismemberment. To expand the signpost
of ‘crisis’ under which we write, I return to Sadequain’s drawing used for the
symposium’s poster and offer some readings of this image (Images 5.1a and 5.1b), for
this specific drawing is not of one, but two decapitated figures: as if one severed head
continues to rhythmically offer blood as pigment for drawing, while the other acephalous
figure wields the brush in a gesture of absence. In ‘Languages of Secularity’, Sudipta
Kaviraj uses the word ‘stealth’ to describe how secularity entered the colonial world, as
not mere European imposition, but rather surreptitiously, in slow degrees, transforming
religion itself to be ‘at home in modernity’ with a host of untended consequences.3 This
stealth of secularity is perhaps most profoundly embedded in transformations of the
subcontinent’s ritual and material past into an ‘Indian’ art history: not merely the parsing
apart of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim with a grotesque hand, but rather in the gentle
aesthetic formations of the category ‘spiritual’ for forging an inheritance for the new
demands of modernity. While ‘spiritual’ imbued transcendental meaning to material
formations, these meanings were shaped by history, and was not necessarily an
accommodative, inclusive, or a transcultural iteration of religious thought in modernity
(as is sometimes presumed). Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s extraordinary work has shown the
anticolonial and nationalist lineaments of this ‘spiritual’ basis for Indian art, one which
could become in Abanindranath Tagore’s spirituality ‘a reduction of the whole idea of
Indian art to an ancient Hindu core’, as well as provide the naked female form, the
iconic nude of Western art, a particularly Indian entry into a sanctified and
transcendental domain of Indian art history and aesthetics.4 What constituted this new
‘spiritual’ inheritance of India was of course a matter of considerable debate and
contention beyond artists,
Image 5.1b Poster of Symposium, 2018 Source: Courtesy of Sadequain Foundation.
and emergent fields of archaeology and art history. Even if forged in aesthetic domains,
the ‘spiritual’ was at work in political domains as well, where enumerated religious
communities began to acquire identitarian stakes in emerging forms of representative
government, making the state
129
Images 5.2a and 5.2b Sadequain, The Artist and the Model, from Drawings, 1966, pen
and its relation to religious communities a pre-eminent question. That the ‘spiritual’ was
integral to the ‘vibrant, uproarious and eventually deeply fractious’5 political debates
that would lead to the denouement of Partition is evident in Ambedkar’s landmark text,
Thoughts on Pakistan (1940). Written as an ‘impartial’ evaluation of the Lahore
Resolution as it transformed the mandate of the Muslim League from a minority rights
party to a nationalist one, Ambedkar fiercely argued that Muslims were ‘spiritually alien’
to India, and conjoined the ‘spiritual’ argument to extensive enumerative exercises of his
own to make one of the earliest cases to a ‘Hindu’ readership for not only conceding
‘Pakistan’ but also partitioning the provinces of Punjab and Bengal along religious
lines.6 For Kaviraj, these very fractious debates that led to Partition were significant in
the formation of the postcolonial Indian state’s commitment to secularism, and at the
same time also constituted the site of its foundational ‘crisis’. (This is a different reading
from those that draw a
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Vazira Zamindar
natural and unbroken line from the anticolonial pluralism of the Indian National
Congress to the secularism of the postcolonial Indian state, with a ‘crisis’ only emerging
in the 1990s.) With Partition making religious difference a fundamental cleavage and
condition of Independence from colonial rule, Kaviraj sees parallels between the need
for redress in the aftermath of ‘the bloody mobilizations of the partition’ and the
conditions in which secularism emerged after the religious wars in Europe.7 However,
the very same conditions also contributed to making ‘secular principles … contentious
from the start’. He notes, ‘A dominant strand of Muslim nationalism formed the state of
Pakistan rejecting that principle and a large section of nationalists in India remained
unreconciled to it’.8 It is here that Sarmad’s gesture of absence requires enunciation.
For the unreconciled nationalists in India, Kaviraj goes on to trace the historic shifts in
Hindu nationalism’s position over the post-Independence decades, from rejecting
secularism as a principle of the state to embracing it to demand equality for majoritarian
Hindus under its secular umbrella. For the well-rehearsed statement that Pakistan was
formed from a rejection of the secular principle on which the Indian state was founded,
we have very little historical scholarship to examine the presumption of ‘oppositional’
state structures emerging in Pakistan, or to explain the persistent hold of secular
imaginaries in political and cultural debates in the aftermath of not one but two
partitions. This persistent hold of secular imaginaries deserves deliberation. If
secularism can be understood as having a contentious rather than natural trajectory in
postcolonial India (something that had to be fought for, argued for, amidst contending
political and cultural imaginaries), the same historical scrutiny is required for
postcolonial East and West Pakistan. Some recent scholarship on West Pakistan has
made important arguments along these lines. Kamran Asdar Ali’s cultural history of the
Communist Party of Pakistan, for instance, recuperates a dogged communist (qua
secular) imagination that he considers vital as ‘other possible imaginations for
Pakistan’s future that were available during the formative years of its existence’.9 Sadia
Saeed goes further to propose a concept of ‘desecularization’ to understand the history
of the Pakistani state’s relationship to religion. Rather than presuming that the Pakistan
demand in 1940 was oppositional to Indian secularism (or in other words a religious
nationalism that could be deemed equivalent to Hindu
131
nationalism), she instead views it as ‘a secular-national demand to the extent that it is
articulated in terms of Muslims qua minority and not Muslims qua Muslims’.10 She then
goes on to historicize, focusing particularly on the Ahmediya question, the contestations
and compromises struck to that secular political demand (which she calls
desecularization) over the decades that ensued. Contemporary art is particularly
significant for historicizing the self-avowedly non-secular state’s relationship to religion
as crafted and contested, rather than predetermined, because it is here that we can see
the secular claim of ‘art’ and the political field it generates around it, in its own specificity
(rather than simply as oppositional to Indian secularism). In other words, the domain of
art provides a particularly important archive for what is in fact a ‘spiritual’ crisis for (both
secular and religious) nationalism, that is inseparable from the foundational violence of
partitions/ dismemberments.
Images 5.3a and 5.3b Sadequain, The Artist and the Model, from Drawings, 1966, pen
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Vazira Zamindar
Postcolonial Archive When the box arrived in the midst of the pandemic from Ithaca,
New York, I opened it with some trepidation. It had been nearly three decades since
Sadequain was my full-time research project at a non-governmental organization (NGO)
in Islamabad. This box contained materials I had collected in the early 1990s which
I had passed on to Iftikhar Dadi when he was working on his book Modernism and the
Art of Muslim South Asia (2010).11 What drove my Sadequain research in the early
1990s— conducted alongside colleagues who worked on what were perceived as
‘serious development projects’ like governance, waste management, and gender
equality—was the withering of political imagination that we had experienced under
General Zia’s dictatorship, such that stories of the preZia years appeared to belong to
entirely another country, one that was now unimaginable as a past of where we had
come from. Sadequain (1930–1988) allowed me entry into that other country. Displaced
from Amroha, UP, in 1947 and part of the middle-class Urdu-speaking north Indian
Muslim migration to Karachi, Sadequain emerged a towering, larger-than-life cultural
figure over the following four decades. Fabulously prolific and performative of other-
worldly feats, he cultivated a distinctive persona as the faqir-as-artist and moved
effortlessly between visual and literary expression: from off-the-cuff drawings and
canvas paintings to monumental socialist scaled murals, from nudes to Quranic
calligraphy, reciting and illustrating Urdu poetry as well as penning his own rubaiyaats.
His public life and his art are as significant for art history as it is for political history and
thought. Thirty years ago, my apprehension of Sadequain as postcolonial archive was
largely intuitive, and investigations were conditioned by aurality and improvisations.12
To understand the wider social and political formations that underpinned Sadequain’s
extraordinary career, I sought to reconcile the extensive state support he received
throughout his career (despite changes in political regimes),13 with his tremendous
popularity amongst an English- and Urdu-speaking intelligentsia that wrote copiously
about him to make him a household name in middle-class West Pakistan. With his
dramatic performance and feats, I explained this universal success under the sign of
nationalism, as a ‘bearer of nationalist aspirations of a state and society that was
enthusiastically trying to
133
search for a national identity’14 in the aftermath of partitions’ severings and

displacements. My primary inspiration at the time was John Berger’s The Success and
Failure of Picasso,15 which aligned Picasso’s most vital and original phase to his
association with communist politics, and read artistic failure as tied to the ‘failure of the
revolutionary nerve’, the failure of the Russian Revolution’s internationalist promise. On
heel with the significance of political imagination, my essay for the NGO, ‘The Making
and Unmaking of a National Artist’,16 argued that Sadequain’s artistic practice was
similarly divided between an earlier wildly experimental and ecumenical phase tied to
the nationalist promise of decolonization, and a second repetitive and depleted phase
that was tied to the failure of that nationalist promise. However, in doing so, I self-
consciously sought to move away from the widely held belief, my own included at the
time, that General Zia’s Islamization was solely responsible for the evisceration of our
dreaming mind; that it was under General Zia that Sadequain transformed from a
vibrant transgressive contemporary artist who captivated his publics to a subservient
one who came to be perceived as only painting Quranic calligraphies and serving the
‘anti-arts’.17 Instead, I argued that it was in 1971, when a brutal silenced history marked
the break, that a before and after could be traced in Sadequain’s exhausted lines, that
they became inseparable from the dismal failures of a nationalist project. The focus on
1971 seemed important then as it remains an unbearable silence in (West) Pakistan; as
if it has left no scars (gesture of absence), and remains only a Bangladeshi burden to
bear. By aligning Sadequain’s creative decline to 1971, I wanted to insist on the
psychic scars of the genocidal violence on West Pakistan, on the trauma of the ghost
limb. The term ‘secular’, however, evaded scrutiny entirely: nonetheless, it haunts the
national question in South Asia, and it is with secularity and art in mind that I return to
the box from Ithaca. While the Ayub Khan years have been widely characterized as a
‘secular’ dictatorship (for example, the Jamaat-i-Islami [JI] was banned under Ayub),
particularly in stark contrast to General Zia’s ‘Islamization’ programme, the brief
democratic interlude of the Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto years, in the aftermath of 1971, remains
both starkly understudied and deeply contested in popular imagination. My argument for
the significance of 1971 centered on a public hullaballoo in 1976, during those Bhutto
years,
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Vazira Zamindar
when Sadequain’s exhibition at the Lahore Arts Council came under attack as
‘obscene’, followed by a bomb blast which shut the exhibition down completely. Here,
I return to this scene of the exhibition and the debates that it stirred, including one on
the Punjab Assembly floor. What does it tell us about the secular negotiations of art and
of the relationship between state and religion when under contestation? What is
distinctive about these negotiations from the Indian national context, or in other words
what does it mean to think about persistent claims of secularism from a wider South
Asian context where we need to account for not one but rather two partitions (as two
decapitations)? The two partitions have different histories (arguably one was the
denouement of a ‘minority’ politics, while the other the struggle of an oppressed
‘majority’), so what does it mean to speak of partitions as decapitations? I use the term
dismemberment and decapitation interchangeably, although dismemberment (often
used for partition, as in a division of a body politic) shifts in meaning when understood
as severing of a limb or (fatal) severing of the head. I deliberate in the next section on
decapitation and the traditions of martyrdom that Sadequain is drawing upon for his
image, but what if we were to regard this figuration as not simply the division of a body
politic but rather the death or existential crisis of an idea? For instance, when Pakistan’s
citizenship laws were discussed by the Constituent Assembly in 1952 (both India and
Pakistan had been forced to enact citizenship laws even before the Constitution to
determine who belonged to which state in the face of massive movements of people),
these debates were rife with a sense of crisis as the law transformed Muslims who
remained in India into foreigners in Pakistan, and thus undermined the very premise of
a ‘Muslim homeland’.18 Two decades later, the journalist I. H. Burney registered this
crisis again when he declared that the ‘Fall of Dhaka’ (Liberation of Bangladesh)
marked the end of the ‘conceptual basis of the country … that Pakistan was carved out
as a haven of safety for Muslims’. The term he used is ‘two-nation theory’ (widely used
in Pakistan to denote the ideological basis of partition and formation of Pakistan) which
he wrenchingly pronounced as ‘dead like a dodo’.19 If these two partitions are
considered from this perspective together, ‘partition’ (a severing of the head) could be
regarded as not simply a territorial partition of the Indian subcontinent (or as per the
fictional ‘two-nation theory’, a parting of two already formed theo-political communities),
but rather a partitioning of
135
the idea of ‘Muslims’ of India, or the serial dismemberment of the Muslim nationalist
project. If seen from this perspective, then in postcolonial Pakistan the relationship
between state and religion had to be repeatedly crafted, not in seamless and natural
continuation with pre-1947 Muslim League’s nationalist demands (whether secular or
religious, as per Saeed), but rather in their repeatedly falling apart! As such one could
argue that the crisis of secularism in Pakistan in the face of serial dismemberment of the
Muslim nationalist project, internal fractures to the idea of Muslims-conceived-as-nation,
has therefore not only been about the state’s relationship (neutrality–equality) towards
religious differences to constitute the body of the nation (as in India), but also about the
state’s relationship (neutrality–equality) to Muslim differences: Who indeed is a Muslim?
If a Muslim, under what conditions can a Muslim be a Pakistani? Could this be a
displacement of the political labour of art’s secularity, mediating as it had to Muslim
differences in the aftermath of violent decapitations? Could this displacement be traced
in the hullaballoo over Sadequain’s exhibition at the Punjab Arts Council in 1976?
To Be Parted from Oneself While Sadequain’s drawings of the beheaded artist with
female nudes have been catalogued as a conversation with Picasso’s ‘artist and his
muse’ series (and Sadequain was very self-conscious about making references to
canonical European art20), the profuse recurrence of the Sarmad figure as a beheaded
artist holding his own head, or of the head or headless body, in other serial drawings
and paintings throughout the 1960s and 1970s,21 make it a leitmotif that requires its
own interrogation. Julia Kristeva’s heterogenous ruminations in The Severed Head
(2012), on an exhibition of European art that she curated for the Louvre, begin with the
act of drawing as a kind of ‘speed’. For Kristeva, this rapidity of motion connects the
contemplative mind, thought, interiority, the invisible, to the hand that renders it
suddenly exterior on a surface, and as such to the viewer who can now regard it as
‘proof’—the artist, the drawing, and the audience come together to constitute the visible.
It is here then, in images of decapitation in particular, that she locates a ‘capital
moment’ in art history when the artist is no longer content to draw a description of the
world, but instead insists on this ‘new, intimate vision of their own visionary capacity’.
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Vazira Zamindar
It is in representations of the severed head that the edge between life and death (what
is known/seen and what is not known/unseen) comes to be exposed and provides ‘the
preliminary condition for the representation of what allows us to stand up to the void that
is none other than the ability to represent the life of the mind’.22 With beheading as the
condition for visually representing contemplation, the apprehension of the divine, the
interiority of ‘spirituality’ as a modern apparition of religious experience, Kristeva’s Euro-
Christian conception is firmly anchored in the subjective individual as visionary (where
the profane self has intimations of but remains separate from the sacred), and she
therefore focuses her meditations on the head as a particular kind of portraiture.
However, in Sadequain’s drawing—and in almost all the drawings—the decapitated
head always bears Sadequain’s distinct likeness. If we think of Sadequain as drawing
from an Islamic tradition of the cephalophore which emerged from the Christian
tradition, and where sufi and martyr hagiographies are suffused with decapitated sar-ba-
kaf (head-inhand) imagery, he brings to this ‘capital moment’, as modern artist becomes
visionary, two inflections.23 The decapitated martyr as shahid (the Urdu/ Arabic word
for martyr with its double meaning) represents both sacrifice and witness to divine truth,
but as witness is not bound by a separation between self and other as in Levinas, to
‘know the otherness of the other’, in order to witness.24 Indeed, in a Sufi conception,
the aspiration is not to retain the subjective individual that apprehends the divine, but for
fana or annihilation of the self, to die before one dies, in order to achieve wahadatal-
wujud or unity of being with God (when all creation is God, the self and the sacred can
be fused). Thus, through self-portraiture, as we (the viewers) behold the image, he
becomes both the mystic-martyr who repeatedly draws his own decapitation and thus
enacts a form of self-decapitation, and the contemplative artist who has been
beheaded, but continues to draw, in the primal gesture that seeks to give sacred
thought its secular form. In these drawings, the hands of the acephalous body are very
important, especially where the figure is seated in north Indian fashion with the canvas
on the ground.25 This is unlike the many other headless figures that Kristeva
contemplates, such as Rodin’s Walking Man (1907), where the legs are very important
for the appearance of walking after the beheading. The hands with which he draws and
the speed with which he draws intensify the movement from mystical thought from the
void
137
to secular actions that create the vision we behold. Certainly, Sadequain repeatedly
spoke of ‘this compulsive urge to paint, to create now’ as if his hands took over and
moved without the direction and control of the head, and with the concentrated urgency
of the ‘now’: I cannot stop it. It is something beyond me. If someone says I will give you
a score of lashes on your back unless you stop painting I will suffer all that and still
paint.... That is the hold of uncontrollable compulsion that I feel now.26
Through repeated self-decapitation Sadequain becomes a ‘speak[er] of truth’,27 who,

overpowered by an otherworldly force, his hands ‘possessed’, could routinely perform
dramatic feats of speed, stamina, and scale,28 as well as submit to give form to
whatever possessed him. An ecumenical range of subjects proliferate, as if moved by
the same mystical force: from female nudes that seem to directly reference European
art (rather than Indian goddesses), to playful demons, deities, and mullahs that
converse with the faqir-artist, to gouged out (decapitated) heads and hand-like cacti
from the Sind desert, to celebrations of manual labour of workers, the Soviet role in the
Second World War and the 1965 war with India, to illustrations of poets like Ghalib29
and Faiz as well as writers like Camus, to calligraphies including those of Quranic
verses. The Quranic calligraphies are important to the hullaballoo of 1976, so it is worth
reiterating that when he began to exhibit them in the month of Ramadan, from around
1968 onwards, he claimed it as a particular kind of ‘spiritual duty’ associated with the
holy month in which ‘some hidden force makes me write the Quranic verses’—albeit the
same kind of invisible force that directed his other work into visibility.30 While one can
trace genealogies that he is forging through his work, through European art and
literature, sufi and martyr traditions, Urdu literary and Quranic texts, historical events,
and socialist imaginations of his time, there is a movement between (sacred) thought
and (secular) form which his audiences—‘people from all walks of life’ who thronged his
exhibitions ‘to see what new world Sadequain had explored’31—intuited when they
began to dub him not merely artist (or poet), but ‘philosopher’.32 Faiz Ahmad Faiz, in a
1965 note, bestowed on Sadequain the title Naqsh-e Faryadi (the image of one who
laments), from a Ghalib couplet
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Vazira Zamindar
that was also the title of one of his own collections of poems, and this became an oft-
quoted commentary on Sadequain in his own time. It captures some significant insights
about Sadequain (including his ‘calligraphic modernism’ as argued by Dadi), and one
passage arrests Kristeva’s evolution when Faiz notes retrospectively how ‘he began
quietly enough, painting living things as appearances, but even then, in selection and
treatment, he was more of a commentator than a mere naturalist’. As his early drawings
relinquished the descriptive to become martyred visionary, Faiz observed something
‘autobiographical’, ‘social’ (arguably from his own lyrical Marxism), and ‘conceptual’ in
the ‘toiling’ and ‘suffering’ figures in struggle. It was after all the ‘virtuosity’ of
Sadequain’s hand that manifested ‘soulful despair’ on surfaces and stirred his viewers,
and in doing so ‘Sadequain is not unaware of the hope that is borne by his huge
canvas’.33 Both despair and the self-aware hope of Sadequain’s secular canvases
became matters of heated debate when The Cobweb Series went on display in
February 1966. In the letters-to-the-editor section of the evening newspaper Leader,34
correspondents argued whether there were indeed intimations of a spiritual crisis facing
society as revealed in Sadequain’s canvases. What was this crisis, his interlocutors,
who included the artists Ahmed Pervez, Bashir Mirza, and Mansur Aye, asked? ‘Why do
so many of us seem to grope in the dark; uncertain and fearful?’35 While some of his
fellow artists argued for optimism rather than despair, their lines of questioning were
earnest with soul-searching. Was society facing a loss of self-confidence, inertia, or
decay? Was there indeed a ‘crisis of values’, and what was to be done? Was there a
struggle within the divided self, some severing yet unreconciled? This soul-searching
and diffuse sense of crisis in these letters, which found its way into many of the
contemporary writings on Sadequain, could be regarded as having both a spiritual and a
historical basis in deeply felt yet unspeakable severing. With self-decapitations as the
condition from which to draw ‘border’ lines (in Kristeva’s sense where all lines are
borders between the visible and the invisible), or to lose one’s head where the head has
represented reason, with madness as the most enduring figure of speech (universalized
in Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories) for how we recall the Partition of 1947—let me
propose that the historical condition produced by the two political partitions of the
subcontinent as decapitations, was not
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experienced as a division of differences, of self and other, but rather to be parted from
oneself. To be parted from oneself: As a ‘brutal admission of … intimate instability’,36 it
is both dark (a violence to be grieved) and at the same time latent with possibility
(forging a new kind of political community). But how do we grieve when we cannot give
an account of the loss, or invent when we do not yet know what belongs to us? In one
drawing (Image 5.4a) the acephalous figure sits on the ground, his form and gestures
framed by the large canvas. He holds up his own head, a wide-eyed profile, by his chest
and it appears to speak to him/himself with self-aware acuity, as if to guide his gestures
on the canvas. Yet the self-portrait he renders on the canvas is shrouded, as if only
through concentrated darkness can we perhaps ‘see’ again.
Image 5.4a Sadequain, The Artist and the Model, from Drawings, 1966, pen and ink on
paper Source: Courtesy of Sadequain Foundation.
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Image 5.4b Sadequain, Sar-ba-kaf, from Drawings, 1966, pen and ink on paper Source:
Courtesy of Sadequain Foundation.
The Hullaballoo of 1976 A Sadequain exhibition at the Punjab Arts Council in May 1976
in Lahore became suddenly controversial when Nawa-e-Waqt, the Urdu daily
newspaper, brought the old colonial charge of ‘obscenity and immorality’ against it. On
22 May the Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaiba (IJT), the student wing of the JI, led a large
demonstration against the exhibition with the apparent support of many of the major
student unions of Lahore’s universities and colleges,37 and it ended outside the Arts
Council with a lathi-charge by the police, and several injured students. While Sadequain
exhibitions were always crowd-pullers, people now flocked in droves to see the show,
and reportedly more than 800 soda bottles were opened daily.38 As a result of
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the demonstration, however, the Punjab Arts Council decided to remove the Bosa
series (the Kiss series) which had received the brunt of the denunciations against the
exhibition. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government took the mobilizations against the display as
a direct challenge to itself, and when on 4 June the exhibition was discussed on the
Punjab Assembly floor, the People’s Party ministers rose to its defence. Thirty-two
eminent writers, poets, and other artists published a joint statement in support of
Sadequain’s paintings.39 Finally, on 13 June, the exhibition was bombed during after-
hours and while several paintings were destroyed, no one was physically hurt, albeit
injury in other ways remains an open question. Let me begin with the notion of giving
offence.40 What was considered offensive about the Sadequain exhibition, or the Bosa
series in particular? The term that Nawa-e-Waqt used was uryaan tasaweer where
uryaan literally means naked: it claimed that Sadequain’s exhibition was full of ‘naked
images’. Sarmad is well known for not just his legendary beheading by Aurangzeb, but
also for his nakedness.41 While it is unclear in the taskaras associated with him when
and why he renounced all clothing, in some accounts at least it is said that when he fell
in love with Abhay Chand, he came and sat ‘naked as the day he was born’ before his
beloved’s door.42 It also appears that his nakedness was a source of discomfort for
even his powerful patrons, as it certainly was to those opposed to him. For instance, in
one story, after Sarmad was invited to the Mughal court, when Emperor Shah Jahan
encountered him, he praised Sarmad’s sanctity, but questioned him about his
nakedness. Sarmad is said to have replied with a quatrain: ‘Why do you object to my
nakedness at the same time as you acknowledge my miracles? The truth is not what is
visible, but the truth is what is concealed in my heart, and that is love.’ This response
secured his place at court and so impressed the crown prince Dara Shikoh that he
became a disciple of Sarmad.43 After Dara Shikoh’s defeat, when Sarmad was put on
trial by Aurangzeb’s Council of Ulema, he was asked to cover himself. Sarmad is said to
have replied, ‘He who gave thee an earthly throne, gave poverty to me; The costume
covers ugliness; The faultless are granted the gift of nakedness.’44 In many ways the
distinction that John Berger once famously made between ‘naked’ and ‘nude’ in relation
to art resonates with this mystical elucidation of nakedness. Berger writes, ‘To be naked
is to be oneself / To be naked is to be without disguise / To be nude is to be seen naked
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Image 5.5 Sadequain, Who Is Sadequain? Khayyam Asks Sarmad, from Drawings,
August 1970, pen and ink on paper Source: Courtesy of Sadequain Foundation.
by others and yet not recognized for oneself / The nude is condemned to never being
naked.’45 He reiterates this relationship of nakedness with the bare (mystical) truth and
as a form of consciousness, to be without worldly concealment, without intended or
unintended disguise. Sadequain’s drawings included male figures as naked as Sarmad,
albeit in most the decapitated faqir-artist is represented ‘naked’ with a loincloth. Indeed,
in the 1976 exhibition, it is unclear how ‘naked’ the figures were, but naked enough for
Nawa-e-Waqt and the JI to levy the charge of ‘obscenity’. In the charge of obscenity in
M. F. Husain’s case in India, the separation between the female nude of art and the
goddess of devotional worship was apparently transgressed by the artist. As Tapati
Guha-Thakurta has argued, the idea of offence rests in this apparent transgression of
what are porous boundaries between the artistic and religious, sacred and secular; here
there was a notion of transgression, but conceptions of nakedness at
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play here—the question when is nakedness mystical truth and when is it moral
transgression—have a long-standing history in Islamic thought before the time of ‘art’,
but come to be immediately activated anew from the moment of the first partition as a
question of ‘national’ culture. Given that the ire was particularly levied against the
‘nakedness’ in the Bosa series, this hullaballoo is worth comparing to the charges
brought between 1949 and 1952 against two of Manto’s Partition stories (‘Khol Du’,
published in Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi’s Naqoosh and ‘Thanda Ghosht’, published in the
journal Javed) where kissing scenes in ‘Thanda Ghosht’ in particular received juridical
deliberation. Although in Sadequain’s case, the accusations of obscenity against Bosa
were more of a public fracas and not a legal case as in Manto’s (under section 292c of
the colonial Indian Penal Code, which then became part of the Pakistan Penal Code,
and he was prosecuted under both),46 Manto’s vivid descriptions of penetrating kissing
with tongues and slurping kissing of breasts were decried by the prosecution for inciting
‘lewd and immoral’ thoughts in susceptible young readers. In support of Manto, literary
figures (as experts) were called up to defend the literary necessity of those passages to
the story, and Faiz Ahmad Faiz went on record declaring ‘nakedness is not obscene’.47
While found guilty and then not guilty and then guilty again by various levels of court, it
is striking, however, that despite the absence of constitutional arrangements in those
early years, or because of the absence of such arrangements, the court case became
the arena for contesting the state’s relationship to religion in the recently decapitated
political community. As is evident in the judgment of 10 July 1950 in Manto’s favour,
Ayesha Jalal reports that the ‘fundamentalist’, JI-leaning sessions judge Inayatullah
Khan noted that while he did not personally approve of ‘Thanda Ghosht’ and agreed
with the prosecution that the moral ‘ideal’ for Pakistan should be based on the Quran,
that ideal had not yet been attained. Was it the state’s role to impose that ideal? He
argued that since ‘kissing and hugging is something which is depicted in the cinema
daily’ and no objection was raised to these everyday representations, then Manto’s
writing could not be singled out.48 There was no recognition of a separate secular ambit
of ‘art’ by which to judge the work—expert evaluations by the literary community
(including famously Faiz who, while defending the story against obscenity, criticized it
on literary merits) did not matter.
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Vazira Zamindar
By the time of the hullaballoo over the Sadequain exhibition, the first constitutional
arrangements had just come to pass—Bhutto had officially ratified Pakistan as an
Islamic republic in 1973, and the following year he declared the Ahmediya as non-
Muslims, transforming heresy, or the negotiation of religious diversity within Islam, into a
state-sanctioned affair. The IJT in the meantime had acquired its street power (from the
Left student and labour mobilizations of 1968 which had brought down Ayub) by actively
supporting and participating in the genocidal violence in East Pakistan, the second
decapitation.49 How significant was the constitutional declaration of Islamic status for
the remaining (West) Pakistan in consolidating the state’s relationship to religion? Some
argued that the IJT attack had less to do with Sadequain’s ‘naked’ drawings and more
to do with his association with Bhutto’s People’s Party government that had inaugurated
these changes (as in Sarmad’s case, where arguably his beheading had less to do with
Sarmad’s own heresies and more to do with his association with the defeated Dara
Shikoh). What was the nature of Sadequain’s association with the Bhutto government?
Through the heady 1960s, Sadequain freely drew on socialist imaginaries, particularly
when painting public works, even if they were commissioned by a military dictatorship
closely aligned with the United States. Once Bhutto came to power at the end of 1971,
state patronage continued to flow to Sadequain, as it had under Ayub Khan’s regime—
including the Lahore Museum ceiling (The Evolution of Mankind, 1973), where at its
centre the word ‘Aaj’ was calligraphed with the alif as a hammer and the geem as a
sickle. Yet, Bhutto’s state support is less remarkable for (socialist) public works and
more so for the promotion of his Quranic calligraphies as part of his pan-Islamic foreign
policy, and in the weeks before the hullaballoo at Lahore, Sadequain had just returned
from touring Islamic countries with a collection of those calligraphies. In a particularly
remarkable interview, ‘Do You Know Sadequain: Poet, Philosopher, Artist’, which
appeared in April 1971 in the evening Star, at the time of the Pakistan army’s brutal
military campaign in East Pakistan, we can hear explicit iterations of Bhutto’s Islamic
socialist electoral campaign in Sadequain’s responses. When he declared ‘I am not a
drawing room artist, but the artist of the gutter: my art is for the people’,50 he was
making a direct reference to Bhutto’s line: ‘I am not a drawing room politician’. When
asked if he was a communist, Sadequain replied, ‘If communism
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means that people have the right to clothe themselves, if they are able to eat and get
shelter—well then I am a communist.’ This again was a direct reference to Bhutto’s
campaign slogan promising kapra, roti, aur makan (clothes, bread, and housing).51 Yet
we can see in the line of questioning of the fuller interview that the journalist is probing
questions of faith, of the kind long associated with the heresies of mysticism—including
the twentieth-century heresy of (atheist) communism. Here is an excerpt from that
interview: Q: Do you have any bad habits? Sadequain: I drink and I smoke a lot, but
apart from these I cannot think of others. Q: Does wine inspire you?52 S: To some
extent it provides a stimulus, but in the long run it isn’t good for painting. Q: People state
that you are an atheist. Is it true? S: I don’t think so. I am a great believer in God, as you
can see from the Quranic paintings. Q: Another common accusation against you is that
you are staunchly a communist. Comment? S: If communism means that people have
the right to clothe themselves, if they are able to eat and get shelter—well then I am a
communist.
Both Sarmad and Dara Shikoh (and Manto) were questioned for intoxication and
atheism—Sarmad was accused of drinking Aurangzeb’s physician Dr Niccolo Manucci’s
wine!53 Sadequain’s responses are pragmatic and straightforward—he drinks and
smokes but not if it affects his ability to work, he is a devout believer as is evident from
his Quranic calligraphies, and communism makes sense when associated with the right
to basic material needs. At the time of the interview, there is an interest in, but nothing
extraordinary, about his responses—these are precisely the kinds of ordinary heresies
through which diversity of faith coexists, and in the secularity of ‘art’ (figurative drawings
as well as Quranic calligraphy), mysticism and orthodoxy have no clear contours. Yet in
1976, as with moments of trial for Sarmad and Manto, the political field became
activated, and the same Quranic calligraphies now acquired a new burden of proof.
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On the Punjab Assembly floor, Dr Mubashir Hasan, the secretary general of the
People’s Party, and Aitzaz Ahsan, the Punjab minister for art and culture, both affirmed
that ‘the People’s government was determined to purge this country of nudity and
obscenity and had taken action against books and magazines which contained
pornographic material’. By making such statements, ‘art’ was to be separated from
‘pornography’, and ‘art’ became the basis by which Sadequain’s exhibition was
defended by the government: Sadequain was a ‘national artist’ and ‘an artist of
international repute who had earned a name for the country through his art’. His stature
as ‘national artist’, however, was secured by the fact that he had also ‘served Islam
through his calligraphic art’.54 At one time, the JI’s own newspaper, Jasarat, had given
extensive coverage to Sadequain’s Ramazan exhibitions as an example to other
Pakistani artists to ‘paint according to their national culture and tradition’.55 The Quranic
calligraphies could represent a more orthodox conception of faith, but could cohabit with
Sadequain’s other bodies of work that did not. Now, instead of regarding them as moral
and national credentials, the JI and IJT rejected them as purdah, or veil. The Punjab
Arts Council exhibition was full of ‘naked images’ they claimed because they exposed
Sadequain from under the veil of calligraphies. ‘Nakedness’ was a (mystical) revelation,
as it exposed him for who he truly was, his ‘true self’. One Nawa-e-Waqt column
explained: His true self has been revealed, which he had been hiding behind the
veil/curtain of calligraphy.... So what if Sadequain has been doing Quranic calligraphy.
His calligraphy cannot change his true self or the tenets of the Quran.56
The columnist claimed that Sadequain only started to paint calligraphies after seeing
Shakir Ali’s calligraphy being praised. Sadequain was reportedly so jealous that he went
off and painted his own calligraphies. The source of his inspiration, figurative or
calligraphic, was not to be regarded as divine in any way, but rather as profane as
jealousy. It is noteworthy that, in this hullaballoo, the Nawa-e-Waqt and its JI critics
recognized the secular institutional authority wielded by ‘art’— they repeatedly claimed
that while it was up to the ‘experts’ to artistically evaluate Sadequain’s art, including his
calligraphies, their authority was
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moral and religious, and national culture was to be determined on that basis. Attacking
the statement of the thirty-two writers and artists, which had predictably raised alarm at
the policing of critical thinking, diversity, and dissent, Nawa-e-Waqt again recognized
that while ‘experts’ can judge ‘art’, what was at stake was the ‘spiritual’ content of
(secular) art—the ‘spiritual’ that was a requirement of national culture and identity. A
clear cleavage emerged in the reporting on the hullaballoo between the vernacular
press and the English language press—a deeply divided public where the injunction to
‘look’ only resulted in each side ‘seeing’ very different images. ‘Look’, one Nawa-e-Waqt
editorial decried to the thirty-two defenders of Sadequain, look and ‘see’ the nakedness:
This country is Islamic. This society upholds Islamic traditions. Before Sadequain,
intoxicated with more alcohol, paints more Quranic calligraphy, may these people listen
to the call of God.57
Responding to the demand to ‘look’ with moral rectitude, the Lahore Notebook
columnist of the Pakistan Times58 retorted: ‘Look at his Bosa series if you are an adult
and if you want to know what it takes to make a kiss delicate.’ Another reporter of the
Lahore magazine Viewpoint professed that the opinion of the viewing public at large
was contrary to Nawa-e-Waqt’s claims: Questioned at random, none of the visitors
found anything obscene in the paintings ... it is difficult to understand whether the
objection is to the word or to the act, always suggested and never shown—in one case,
the figure is actually kissing the gallows. One visitor commented that the only obscene
thing he had seen was the sight of Sadequain’s ribs (in one of his self-portraits).59
Hameed Zaman concluded in his article that the supporters of Nawa-eWaqt’s charges
‘saw nakedness because they wanted to see it that way. Otherwise how could they
have made political capital out of a simple exhibition?’ Faiz Ahmed Faiz was quoted as
saying, ‘If this is pornography which is being talked about it is most disappointing.’60
However, while so-called ‘art critics’ and others rallied to defend the exhibition against
charges of obscenity, many did so despite their
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reservations about the aesthetic quality of Sadequain’s work (much like Faiz’s remark
on the literary merit of Manto’s short story). Many commented that there was little new
in Sadequain’s work: he no longer represented ‘the manifesto, faith, conviction and the
ideal of an artist’ as he once had. For many the charge of obscenity in fact obscured
another truth: as Viewpoint harshly noted, Sadequain had become an ‘officially
accepted artist’, and as ‘an artist and a showman’ he suffered from ‘a lack of self-
appraisal’. As a result of endless spectacles, ‘serious critics of his work have noted a
certain deterioration both in his craft and in the content of his paintings’. Hameed
Zaman suggested that Sadequain was ready to produce ‘third rate art only to be near
the people who were not so initiated’. Another reviewer commented that ‘on entering the
gallery, one is confronted by disappointingly familiar Sadequains of the last seven
years.... The familiar images of gnarled, tormented figures ... these have been around in
Sadequain’s paintings since the mid-60s.’61 Alas, while to some the seer-like velocity
and virtuosity of his earlier work seemed to have given way to repetition, the
contestation over Sadequain’s Arts Council show was clearly not about the quality of his
work, but neither can it be simply reduced to an opposition between religious–moral
versus secular–aesthetic viewpoints. After all, the significance of Sadequain as artist
and Sadequain’s artwork lay in its spiritual–mystical manifestations, the movement from
inner despair to hopeful surface, from the divine to the profane. And both sides, those
who attacked Sadequain’s work and those who defended it, can be regarded as seeking
to forge a spiritual inheritance as demanded by, considered imperative to formations of
nation, albeit in the aftermath of unreconcilable severings. In some sense, in a self-
avowedly non-secular state, the secular field generated by art allowed for a democracy
of seeing and guarded the cohabitation of (Muslim) differences, while at the same time
this is also where such cohabitation, what constituted a spiritual inheritance, could be
challenged, and put to the test.
Secular Lines of Sight A few years after the hullaballoo of 1976, the return of military
rule, and the execution of Bhutto, Sadequain was able to return to north India for a year-
long visit—a distance of 45 minutes, as he would say, that took him
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thirty-three years to traverse. There he met M. F. Husain, and through Husain’s tender
account of this meeting in 1981 we can conjure the two artists, one barefoot and the
other with his head in his hand, on two sides of an uncertain parting.62 When Husain
walked into Sadequain’s messy, suitcase-strewn hotel room in Delhi, Sadequain picked
up an old newspaper from the floor and with a pen scribbled the Urdu alphabet noon
twice, forming two semi-circles with a dot at the centre of each letter. He showed the
suggestive voluminous forms to Husain with a chuckle and explained, ‘Whenever so-
called Mullahs see this in my country, they proclaim the nudity of feminine boobs
immoral.’ Then with the same secular gesture, he joined the two alphabets to form the
word ainul yaqeen (Arabic for the vision of certainty). With this, he remarked, ‘The
Mullahs are terribly disappointed!’ It is a telling anecdote, of the kind that proliferate
about Sadequain, and which captures the wit with which he unsettled boundaries. By
the time of this visit to north India, Sadequain was under censure from his peers in
Pakistan for accepting state patronage under General Zia for his Quranic calligraphies,
as if it were an evacuation of his more provocative figurative art. Here Sadequain
attempts to disrupt the separation between the figurative and the calligraphic, mystical
and the orthodox, secular and the religious; he draws upon sufi and literary traditions of
irreverence towards mullahs, while his lines swerve and lilt to play the potential plurality
of meaning in their movement. Of the many ways to read the image of the artist
repeatedly drawing his severed head, one could regard it as an insistence on the
secularity of his line, and a refusal to let his imaginative or sacred itineraries be
contained by a fraught ‘national’ status that was being bestowed upon him, a refusal to
submit to the expectations of either his patrons or his critics. As an image of refusal, its
gestures reside not only in a wider cephalophoric tradition (of which Sarmad is a part)
but also in popular representations of anticolonial martyrdom (of figures like Bhagat
Singh), a more contemporary Indian imagery that Sadequain may not have been aware
of but which drew on some of the same sources as he did, and are specifically
grounded in South Asia.63 However, it is not the hand that holds the head, but rather
the hand that holds the brush that sets Sadequain’s image apart, and affirms his secular
domain as not outside
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of (or in opposition to) but at once constituted in relation to formations of religion,

spirituality and mystical experience. And yet as the brush must yield an imagery, can we
regard the secular field generated by art as a restitution of the dreaming mind, for
unlearning partitions, for repairing multi-religious cohabitations and a diversity in faith?
Or are these demands on the secular too heavy to bear? Based on Husain’s account,
we can imagine Sadequain standing beside Sarmad’s luminous red grave by the
bustling side of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, or the scruffy artist pulling out his sar-ba-kaf
drawings to ruminate on the plenitude of gods (‘a thousand idols’) that he wants to
capture on his surfaces. The hullaballoo of 1976 then is but one moment of
contestation, and by insisting on an accounting of it in our violent, divided political
history, let it be but a small gesture to the necesssary mobilizations of the secular as an
ordinary practice of dissent.
Notes * I am indebted to Tapati Guha-Thakurta for urging me to write this essay,

Iftikhar Dadi for the conversations that have shaped it, Shahzad Bashir, Saloni Mathur
and Asad Ali for the most thought-provoking and careful feedback, and Selima Hashmi
for help with tracking images. In addition, Dr Salman Ahmad, of the Sadequain
Foundation, was remarkably generous and insightful with the Sadequain archive he has
created. I dedicate this essay to the late artist Lala Rukh (1948–2017) who drove me
around Lahore in the early 1990s in search of Sadequain. 1. Julia Kristeva, The
Severed Head: Capital Visions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 105. 2.
For many versions of the legend, see S. Ram and M. Ali Khan, Encyclopaedia of
Sufism, vol. 8, Great Sufi Saints (New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 2003); Nathan Katz,
‘The Identity of a Mystic: The Case of Sa’id Sarmad, a Jewish-Yogi–Sufi Courtier of the
Mughals’, Numen 47, no. 2 (2000): 142–160. On Sarmad in Sadequain’s work, see S.
Amjad Ali, Artistic Pakistan, June 1969, 8; and Sibte Hasan, Pakistan mein tehzib ka
irtaqa (1979), 331–333. 3. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Languages of Secularity’, in Tolerance,
Secularization and Democratic Politics in South Asia, ed. Humera Iqtidar and Tanika
Sarkar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 22–49, 27. 4. Tapati Guha-
Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in
Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Tapati Guha-
Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art
5. 6.
7.
8. 9. 10.
11. 12.
13.
151
in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Karin
Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary
India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7. Kaviraj, ‘Languages of Secularity’,
39. While the original text was published in 1940 (B. R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on
Pakistan, 1st ed. [Bombay: Thacker, 1940]), just months after the Lahore Resolution,
this citation is from the third edition. B. R. Ambedkar, Pakistan, or, The Partition of India,
3rd ed. (Bombay: Thacker and Company Limited, 1946), 16. Kaviraj, ‘Languages of
Secularity’, 39. He notes that despite the similarity, there was one signal difference
between Europe and India in that secularism came before democracy in Europe, while
in India it came hand-in-hand with universal suffrage, with consequences. Kaviraj,
‘Languages of Secularity’, 31. Kamran Asdar Ali, Surkh Salaam: Communist Politics
and Class Activism in Pakistan, 1947–1972 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.
Sadia Saeed, ‘Secularization of Politics: Muslim Nationalism and Sectarian Conflict in
South Asia’, in Tolerance, Secularization and Democratic Politics in South Asia, ed.
Humera Iqtidar and Tanika Sarkar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 50–
74, 57. See also Sadia Saeed, Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority
Question in Pakistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Iftikhar Dadi,
‘Sadequain and Calligraphic Modernism’, in Modernism and the Art of Muslim South
Asia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 134–176. This was just
six years after Sadequain’s death, and in the absence of visual documentation, libraries,
or formal archives, my research was entirely dependent on word-of-mouth. In 1993–
1994, the late artist Lala Rukh in Lahore took me around the city to meet anyone and
everyone who had something to say about Sadequain, and I spent hours listening to
stories and opinions about the man! In February 1994, I was able to meet Sadequain’s
nephew Sultan Ahmad Naqvi at his home in Karachi and he let me photocopy his
personal collection of newspaper cuttings. For ‘improvisation’ as a condition of historical
research in Pakistan, see Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of
Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007), 16. His state commissions ranged from murals in the offices of Pakistan
International Airlines and the Pakistan Embassy in Paris during his years in the city, to
massive murals in the State Bank, in the Mangla Dam powerhouse, the ceilings of
Lahore Museum and Frere Hall in Karachi, to shows in the Arts Councils in Karachi and
Lahore, in the Banking Hall of the State Bank headquarters (for example, in July 1966,
an exhibition of 3,000 paintings) and the foyer of the Pakistan Institute of International
Affairs. By the end of his life, there were three government-run galleries dedicated to his
work—in Frere Hall in Karachi, in the Lahore Museum, and in the National Art Gallery in
Islamabad.
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Vazira Zamindar
14. The essay was later published in Abdul Hamid Akhund, Farida Munavarjahan Said,
and Zohra Yusuf (eds.), Sadequain: The Holy Sinner (Karachi: Mohatta Palace
Museum, 2003), 54–67. 15. John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso
(Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books Inc., 1966), first published in 1965. 16. In 2003, Husain
Haroon and Selima Hashmi organized a massive show of Sadequain’s work at the
Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi, and put together a book on an outrageous scale
(size and weight) comparable to Sadequain’s own obsession with feat. My essay for the
NGO appears in this book, Sadequain: The Holy Sinner (Karachi: Herald Publications,
2003). 17. In July 1985, I. A. Rehman, the director of the Human Rights Commission of
Pakistan (HRCP), wrote an open letter to the Herald, addressed to Sadequain. It was on
the occasion of Sadequain receiving the Quaid-e-Azam award from General Zia, and
Rehman asked why Sadequain had abandoned the ‘working man who was at the center
of your work’. Rehman claimed that Sadequain by painting only Quranic calligraphy had
given his support to the ‘anti-arts’ who were trying to deny the other parts of ‘our cultural
heritage’. I. A. Rehman, ‘An Open Letter to Sadequain’, The Herald, July 1985, 109. 18.
Zamindar, The Long Partition, 176–180. 19. Editorial of 8 April 1972, The Outlook
Editorials of I. H. Burney 1962–4, 1972–4: No Illusions, Some Hopes and No Fears
(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 203. 20. For example, the painting in kufic
calligraphy that won him the Under 35 Laureate prize at the Paris Biennale in 1961 was
entitled The Last Supper. And when he was painting the ceiling inside the Lahore
Museum in 1974, Lala Rukh recalled how the gesture was read as ‘Michelangeloesque’
by the crowds that thronged to see him paint. She was an art student then at Punjab
University, and amongst the awed spectators. 21. Sadequain published two collections
of drawings, in 1966 and 1970. These have been republished by Dr Salman Ahmad,
who runs the Sadequain Foundation, under Figurations Mystique: Sadequain 1966 and
Sadequain 1970; Collection of Drawings (CreateSpace Independent Publishing
Platform, 2016). Sadequain also made countless off-the-cuff drawings throughout his
life which are harder to give an account of. 22. Kristeva, The Severed Head, 4–5. 23.
While in hagiographies, imagery of decapitation, auto-decapitation, and martyrs as
cephalophores is literary (and my colleague Shahzad Bashir has pointed out that it
appears in Shahid Amin, Conquest and Community [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2016], 47), it is also present in popular visual culture, in depictions of the ultimate
mystic-martyr of Islam, Husain, and as Christopher Pinney, Sumathi Ramaswamy, and
Kama Maclean have noted, in popular chromolithographs of Bhagat Singh in particular.
As a mediator of religious pluralism, see Amila Buturovic, ‘Headless They March On:
Cephalophores
24. 25.
26. 27. 28.
29.
30. 31. 32.
33.
34.
153
and Coexistence in Ottoman Bosnia’, in Architectures of Coexistence: Building

Pluralism, ed. Azra Aksamija (n.p.: ArchiTangle, 2020), 101–109; Christopher Pinney,
‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 128; Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Maps, Mother/Goddesses, and
Martyrdom in Modern India’, Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 3 (2008): 819–853; Kama
Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). In Emmanuel Levinas’ conception, to
witness requires knowing the other and a responsibility to this otherness. Hanoch Ben-
Pazi, ‘Ethical Dwelling and the Glory of Bearing Witness’, Levinas Studies 10, no. 1
(2016): 221–248. In images accompanying this online article, you can see Sadequain
painting while sitting on the ground as well as a painting version of the drawing but
where the face on the canvas is not shrouded. Raza Naeem, ‘The Subtle Subversion of
Sadequain’, The Wire, 30 June 2020, https://thewire.in/books/pakistani-artistsadequain-
birth-anniversary (accessed 13 July 2022). Sultan Ahmed, ‘Sadequain Shuns Money’,
Leader, 22 May 1969. Anis Mirza, ‘Sadequain the Painter Prolific’, Dawn, 2 September
1980. Perhaps the most celebrated feat was the Mangla Dam powerhouse mural which
was 170 feet by 23 feet, completed in 70 days and 71 nights, but he routinely claimed to
work for 160 hours at a stretch, and the journalist and friend Khalid Hasan once asked,
‘When if at all did he eat and when if at all did he sleep?’ in ‘Memories of Sadequain’,
The Muslim, 16 March 1987. Sadequain explained the centrality of Ghalib to his work in
the Exposition catalogue (6 November–5 December 1968): ‘Wherever I go in mind,
I meet Plato coming back: That is a Greek epigram. Creative artists in our part of the
world who choose to remain rooted in local traditions, rather than break away from their
past, meet Ghalib instead.’ ‘Sadequain Shows Mastery in Calligraphy’, Leader, 16
November 1970; ‘Koi gaibi taqat mujh se qurani aayat likhwati hai’, Jang, Friday
Magazine (1970). Describes Sadequain’s exhibition ‘as a big event in the cultural life of
Pakistan’. ‘In the Memory of Heroes’, Viewpoint (1970). In a 1969 special issue of the
journal Fellowship that was dedicated to Sadequain, its editor, Abid Zuberi, introduced
Sadequain as ‘a minor philosopher, a poet, a social reformer and a rebel’. See also
special issue of Tulo-o-Afqar: Sadequain Number 2, no. 32 (February 1992). In
newspaper articles the term ‘philosopher’ made a regular appearance as well. Faiz
Ahmad Faiz, Naqsh-e-Faryadi, 16 August 1965, published in Lail-o-Nihar, 20 June
1970. Included in translation in The Holy Sinner, 90. In February 1970, Sadequain
exhibited paintings and drawings based on Faiz’s poetry, to commemorate Faiz’s 60th
birthday. Letter to Editor: ‘Ahmed Pervez Explains’, Leader, 12 February 1966;
‘I Support Sadequain’, Leader, 23 February 1966; ‘The World of Cobwebs’, Leader,
154
35.
36. 37.
38. 39. 40.
41. 42. 43. 44.
45.
Vazira Zamindar
25 February 1966; ‘Cobwebs, Not Flowers’, ‘The Cobwebs in Our Minds’, and
‘Sadequain Is Right’, Leader, 2 March 1966; ‘Artists Must Stay Dignified’, Leader, 11
March 1966; ‘The Web Is Very Much There’, Leader, 18 March 1966. Sultan Ahmed,
‘The Dying World’, Fellowship: Sadequain Number, ed. Abid Zuberi (1969): 44. See also
Sultan Ahmad, ‘The Shocking World’, Fellowship: Sadequain Number, ed. Abid Zuberi
(1969): 48; Fazal M. Kazi, ‘Aim at a More Significant Life’, Fellowship: Sadequain
Number, ed. Abid Zuberi (1969): 40; ‘Introduction’, Sadequain Exposition Catalogue
(July 1968). Kristeva, The Severed Head, 105. According to Nawa-e-Waqt news report,
‘Sadequain ki uryaan tasaweer ki numayish key khilaf ...’ (23 May 1976), the
demonstration was supported by the leaders of the Lahore Students Council, the
Islamia College Student Union leader, the Government College Student Union general
secretary, the Punjab University Council chairman, the leader of the Punjab University
Union, the Liaqat Baloch Government College Students’ Union, and the Engineering
University Union leader. Mohammed Idrees, ‘Lahore Notebook: Sadequain Is What
Sadequain Is’, Pakistan Times, 20 May 1976. It included several eminent figures like the
poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and the playwrights Nadeem Qasmi and Ashfaq Ahmad. This
notion of ‘offence’ has been explored by Tapati Guha-Thakurta in ‘FaultLines in a
National Edifice: On the Rights and Offences of Contemporary Indian Art’, in Barefoot
across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, ed. S. Ramaswamy
(London: Routledge, 2010); and Talal Asad notes in ‘Free Speech, Blasphemy, and
Secular Criticism’, in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
(Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, 2009), 20–63,
that of the many words in Arabic that could be used for ‘blasphemy’, the World Union of
Muslim Scholars deliberating on the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad
discussed isaa’ah which has a range of meanings including insult, harm, offence (38). In
Image 5.5, Sarmad is depicted naked next to the robed Khayyam, and this same
drawing of Khayyam and Sarmad also appears in Sadequain’s book of illuminated
poems Rubaiyyat-e-Sadequain Naqqash (Karachi, 1970). Introduction to Rubaiyat-i-
Sarmad (Lahore: Marghoob Agency, 1920), iv–v, quoted by Lakhpat Rai, Sarmad, His
Life and Rubais (Gorakhpur: Hanumanprasad Poddar Smarak Samita, 1978), 25, as
cited in Katz, ‘The Identity of a Mystic’, 144. Katz, ‘The Identity of a Mystic’, 149–150.
Ibid., 152; Rai, Sarmad, His Life and Rubais, 53. Apparently, Aurangzeb, while offended
by the nakedness, did not consider it heretical enough for punishment. In other
renditions of the Sarmad story, it is one of the heresies that gets Sarmad beheaded.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1979), https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ch3 (accessed
21 November 2021).
155
46. Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work Across the
IndiaPakistan Divide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 151–160. 47. In
Zehmat-e-Mehr-e-Darakhshan, Manto offers his version of the trial, which is available in
translation on https://azizakhmad.medium.com/pakistans-firstobscenity-trial-
244d7a029890 (accessed 17 May 2020). 48. The comparison with cinema is important
for its long-standing connections to state censorship and the anxiety around moral
regulation of the media. See Asad Ali, ‘Pissing Men, Dancing Women and Censuring
Oneself’, in Love, War and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan, ed. Vazira
Zamindar and Asad Ali (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2020), 206–235. 49. Seyyid
Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jamaat-iIslami of Pakistan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 9. The JI had been banned under Ayub,
and therefore its student wing IJT became extremely important. However, during the
1950s and the 1960s, Marxist organizations were particularly strong on student
campuses, and the main thrust of the IJT’s political activities ranged from egg-tossing to
more disruptive clashes with left-wing students. However, between 1969 and 1971
when the Ayub government collapsed, and Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and
the Awami League were locked in battle, the IJT became the main force of the Jamaat
against both parties. In May 1971 the IJT joined the army’s brutal counterinsurgency
campaign in East Pakistan, and with the help of the army organized two paramilitary
units to fight the Bengali guerrillas. Thus the JI failed electorally, and the IJT, having
returned fresh from the ‘patriotic struggle’ in East Pakistan, began to gain ground on
university campuses. In 1974 the IJT defeated the PPP student wing, the People’s
Student Federation, in a number of campus elections in Punjab and swept the elections
on campuses in Karachi. The IJT then emerged in the 1970s as a more militant
presence on the streets, and led the non-recognition of Bangladesh movement of 1972–
1974, the anti-Ahmedi movement, as well as later became the mainstay of anti-PPP
campaigns. 50. ‘Do You Know Sadequain: Poet, Philosopher, Artist’, The Star, 9 April
1971. 51. Anwar H. Syed, The Discourse and Politics of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (London:
Macmillan, 1992), 83. 52. Sarmad wrote at least five quatrains which not only praise
wine but demean prohibitions against it, such as quatrain 197: O men of piety, thou
sayeth that wine is forbidden by religion; I tell thee that it is most sacred, and not
unlawful. (Katz, ‘The Identity of a Mystic’, 155) 53. On Sarmad’s heresies, see Katz,
‘The Identity of a Mystic’, 140–145; On Dr Manucci, see Niccolo Manucci and William
Irvine, Storia Do Mogor, or, Mogul India, 1653–1708 (Calcutta: Editions Indian, 1965),
quoted by Maulavi Abdul Wali, ‘A Sketch of the Life of Sarmad’, Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal 20 (1924): 120.
156
Vazira Zamindar
54. ‘Serious Action to Curb Nudity’, Pakistan Times, 5 June 1976. Also, Dawn and
Mashriq carried the same headline. ‘Drive against Sadequain Condemnable’, Pakistan
Times, 26 May 1976. 55. ‘Pakistani artisto ko apna art qaumi riwayat aur mizaj key
mutabik bana na chahian’, Jasarat, 14 November 1970. 56. ‘Khuda, moat, aur dafa 144
sey daro’, Nawa-e-Waqt, 24 May 1976. Section 144 is the martial law section of the
Criminal Procedure Code which allows the police to disperse a public demonstration.
Here it obviously refers to the IJT student demonstration. 57. ‘Kya yeh humara tehzibi
aur saqafati wersa hey?’, Nawa-e-Waqt, 29 May 1976. See also ‘Pakistan—sirf Islami
saqafat ka gherawa’, Nawa-e-Waqt, 20 May 1976. 58. Idrees, ‘Lahore Notebook:
Sadequain’. 59. ‘Sadequain: What’s All the Furore About?’, Viewpoint, 28 May 1976. 60.
Hameed Zaman, ‘Ministorm over Sadequain’s Paintings in Lahore’, Morning News, 31
May 1976. 61. ‘Sadequain: What’s All the ...?’; Zaman, ‘Ministorm’. 62. During his year
in India he painted murals at the Institute of Islamic Studies in Delhi, Aligarh Muslim
University and Banaras Hindu University. M. F. Husain, ‘Hail Sadequain’, Illustrated
Weekly of India, 20 December 1981, reprinted in Holy Sinner, 88–89. 63. See note 23.
Image 6.1 Postal stamp of Bangladesh with Zainul Abedin’s artwork Source: Collection
of Mainul Abedin.
6 Modern Art and East Pakistan Drawing from the Limits Sanjukta Sunderason
Looking from East Pakistan Questions of art and secularism raised in this volume are
seeking a South Asian scale, possibly with resonant histories or historiographical
possibilities across the subcontinent’s unstable twentieth-century borders. Invited to
write on Bangladesh—a critical yet often-marginal perspective in such conversations—
my quandaries were two: Are such questions around art and the secular posed to or
drawn from the particular histories of the subcontinent’s (relatively young) nation-states?
And along that drift, what analytical, even unsettling work, can such particular histories
do, in the imagination of such questions aiming subcontinental scales? My concerns in
this essay are historiographical. Not in the sense of re/configuring multiple positions on
questions of art and the secular in Bangladesh, but looking from the region and its
particularity, as a methodology of perceiving the secular in its plural form(ation)s, as we
attempt to generate truly subcontinental art histories. Such looking from location, I am
hoping, can release Bangladesh—former East Pakistan, 1947–1971—from being
merely an indexical marker for representing South Asia (beyond the hegemonic centre
that Indian art/histories have held in the region), and become rather an analytical
vantage point to re/generate subcontinental questions. The locational, I will argue, is
neither a (simply) spatial nor a rhetorical marker; it is both temporal and
epistemological; and as such an agent of the historical itself. While the locational tends
to be subsumed within the nation (particularly so in conversations on postcolonial
modernities and artistic modernisms), it sustains a critical traffic with transnational and
transregional currents (or the often-used scale of the ‘global’), which needs more critical
attention in South Asian art/historiography. As a vantage point, Bangladesh is both a
young nation-state of fifty years and the vestige of the long decolonization in South
Asia. In this essay, I am positioning myself in East Pakistan: that brief political entity
between two climactic partitions in the subcontinent—India’s in 1947 with the creation of
Pakistan, and Pakistan’s in 1971 with the liberation of Bangladesh. East Pakistan was
formed from the partition of the Bengal province of British India in 1947, on grounds of
religion, as a new Muslim-majority Pakistan
Modern Art and East Pakistan
159
emerged alongside independent India with the eclipse of British Empire in the
subcontinent. As the eastern wing of Pakistan, and separated by the expanse of India,
East Pakistan was a direct product of the reckless mechanisms of decolonization that
hatched arbitrary political entities while dismantling empire, making the question of
(postcolonial) freedom itself conflicted. Imagined as part of a Muslim nation of Pakistan,
East Pakistan was both rooted in and remote from (the idea of) postcolonial Pakistan
with its federal centre in West Pakistan’s Karachi. This contradiction—of ideational
commitment and geographic remoteness— was amplified multiple times through the
1950s–1960s through conflicts around language, governance, and economic and
political rights. East Pakistan’s most climactic and persistent struggles hence were not
around religious identity but around extra-religious questions of language, political, and
economic rights. Postcolonial modernity in this eastern outpost of Pakistan was hence a
historical negotiation not only from the limits of the postcolonial Pakistani nation-state in
its far-flung eastern borders, but also around the limits of religion as the national
episteme. The question of the secular in the public culture (and art) of East Pakistan
must be gleaned from the generative spaces of the extra-religious, even the para-
religious forms that were conditioned by such particular histories of and from location.
Not only as a vantage point but also as an aperture, East Pakistan, I will propose here,
can frame and foreground new forms of un/becoming secular as postcolonial aesthetics.
Historical hindsight assigns a delimited-ness or in-between-ness to East Pakistan,
which within the 1950s–1960s would not have been apparent. Yet the enclosed
temporal being of East Pakistan, framed by two climactic ruptures of 1947 and 1971, is
still a generative site to think about decolonization in the subcontinent in longue-durée,
negotiational terms, rather than signposted by climactic events.1 The temporality of
East Pakistan was both negotiational and utopian; the arrival of nationhood in
Bangladesh via genocide made East Pakistan a transitory as well as an eclipsed
geography, a ‘phantom map’ that haunts the subcontinent, as Ananya Jahanara Kabir
has aptly noted.2 The ‘two-winged structure of pre-1971 Pakistan’, Kabir has argued,
‘transnationalised inherited transregional networks, while simultaneously structuring
intersubjective desire thorough a powerful interplay of sameness-within-difference’.3
East
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Pakistan is marked by this duality, both in its affiliations to nation and location and, as
Kabir notes, in its sensibilities of political urgency ‘be they grasped as apocalyptical or
utopian or, indeed, both’.4 Art practices in East Pakistan were shaped by this dialectic
of nation and location, and artists were conscious of it. Speaking to Kabir, Anisuzzaman
—writer, pedagogue, and literary historian—commented, for instance, ‘… this very idea
of Pakistan was a kind of utopian notion in 1947, and then the way it eroded, the whole
dream was eroding and how different intellectual strands were having their input in the
process of erosion….’5 This shared awareness generated a dialogical aesthetic in the
region, where artists, writers, and academics sought to imagine the self and community
both via deep subjectivity as well as a collective address. Questions of art and the
secular looked at from East Pakistan are thus hinged on two tensions that entangle in
the domain of cultural imagination: the first, between fragmentation and creation; the
second, between the subjective and the collective. Together they make the secular itself
an aesthetic impulse shaped by the dialectics of location—both in desire for and
disenchantment with postcolonial ‘national’ modernity in the mid-twentieth century. What
would disenchantment of the secular connote—for art—in postcolonial contexts in South
Asia? For new history-writing around art, decolonization, and postcoloniality, such a
question points towards larger historiographical and conceptual responsibilities, not just
a horizontal expansion to signpost South Asian nations in representational (often even
tokenistic) ways. Further, while it is important to study the consolidation of the national
legitimacies and signatures of postcolonial national-modern art as it gained ground
during decolonization, it is worth noting if we are also breaking down universalistic
frames of Eurocentric, metropolitan modernism only to slip into an equally universalistic
frame of the national. While a volume such as this provides rich insights into the
tensions around the public and the modern, or the dissonances around art and identity,
nation and location, we must also ask: In what ways can contemporary art/historywriting
as much as contemporary art practices return to the nation with new questions? In other
words, how can postcolonial artistic modernities delineate its epistemes for historical
understanding and history-writing? In what follows, I am drawing from my continued
work on the historiographical potentialities of location as a ‘partisan site’ in fracturing
161
national-modern narratives in art6 and new interest in developing transnational

conceptualizations (and historiographies) of the aesthetics of decolonization. My goals
in this brief essay, while in conversation with questions posed in this volume, are more
tentative opening perspectives than a definitive representation of a complete story from
East Pakistan/ Bangladesh. A part of such goals can indeed be a (slow) restructuring of
the perspective itself, of ‘South Asia’—the address/scholarship in which remains
saturated not only with Indian experiences and forms, but also epistemes and
assumptions. The question of the secular—as non/para/ alter-religious sensibility,
concept, and practice—and art as a modality and archive for grasping form(ation)s of
such sensibilities, can be a key dimension in that restructuring. In this essay, I am
presenting some very initial thoughts on this, as I work with the art of the iconic East
Pakistani/ Bangladeshi artist Zainul Abedin, in dialogue with a wider body of archival
sources on art and artists in (East) Pakistan that I am beginning to explore. I am
structuring this essay in four short segments. Each segment activates a way of looking
from East Pakistan to foreground the ‘postcolonial secular’ as a dialectical aesthetic:
first, via co-existence of fragmentation and creation; second, as dilemmas of publicness;
third, in contradictory affiliations; and fourth, as art/historiographies via/of rupture. I will
conclude by highlighting how this dialectical aesthetic is key to understanding
postcolonial (artistic) modernities: both within assumed national-modern whole/s in the
postcolonies and in more transnational, transregional, and global terms as we write
about the politics of modernisms at the ends and fault lines of empire.
Fragmentation and Creation The 1950s and the 1960s were foundational years for the
new postcolonial nation-states in India and Pakistan, and a period of becoming—of
institutions, publics, and aesthetic—that were to define a postcolonial modernity. This
ethic of becoming connects India and Pakistan, though their departure points and
structures as well as dynamics differed substantially. While India moved from the
colonial state to a paternalistic developmentalist state fashioning itself as a secular,
democratic, sociocultural agent committed to a national-popular aesthetic, Pakistan was
put on unstable political ground, with a short-lived democratic phase, a
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military coup in the late 1950s, an uneasy grip over its Eastern counterpart, and a
hostile India in between. Unlike India, which retained most of the established art
institutions and veteran artists after Independence, Pakistan inherited a depleted
cultural landscape. The Mayo School of Art, Lahore’s oldest colonial art institution, lost
some of its key artists or teachers who migrated to Delhi in 1947–1948; and Dhaka in
East Pakistan lacked any institutional apparatus whatsoever. For both wings of
Pakistan, cultural re/organization was active, with new art institutions, and new artist-
pedagogues leading the nascent yet promising artistic energy of raw and undefined
transition during the late 1940s and the early 1950s, what Iftikhar Dadi has described as
the unique dynamic of ‘mid-century modernism’ in Pakistan.7 Zainul Abedin—who was
to become one of these key artists of midcentury modernism in Pakistan—migrated to
Dhaka from Calcutta in 1947, along with his colleagues from the Calcutta School of Art
where they taught. Abedin was a reputed teacher, gaining prominence for his stark
expressionistic drawings of the Bengal famine of 1943 that had ravaged undivided rural
Bengal. From his position of relative prominence, Abedin along with his colleagues
Safiuddin Ahmad, Qamrul Hasan, and Anwarul Haque, among others, were forced to
move to the newly formed (East) Pakistan as Muslim artists, as Calcutta witnessed riots,
communal genocide, and a radical cleansing of its Muslim population, while also
absorbing a massive exodus of Hindu refugees from across the new border. In Dhaka,
Abedin and his colleagues were transplanted to a context with virtually no art school,
and many of them had to join schools to maintain themselves. Abedin became a
steering force in setting up a new art institute, and increasingly using his connections
from Calcutta and at the federal government at Karachi, he helped secure modest
provisions. The story of the formation of the Institute of Fine Arts in Dhaka is one of
political and personal negotiations with the Pakistan government, as well as
sociocultural negotiations with a general population whose Islamic affiliations generated
suspicions towards visual art.8 The institute kickstarted by the end of 1948 with a
couple of rooms at the National Medical College Hospital with seventeen–eighteen
students, and two running levels—a compulsory two-year elementary part and a
specialized three-year course.9 It would eventually shift to the Music College in
Segunbachia, and only in 1956 to its present building, designed by the modernist
architect Mazharul Islam.
163
Dhaka had to be re-imagined as an urban centre in the 1950s and 1960s; Islam notes:
‘The whole of the Shahbag area was considered very seriously for the development of a
“Zone” devoted to Bengali culture.’10 Negotiations for forming an art school in post-
Partition Dhaka carried the dialectical dynamics of fragmentation and creation: artists
displaced socially and professionally due to Partition were trying multiple strategies—
personal, pedagogical, discursive—to imagine new sites and visions of postcolonial
modernity. The complete absence of institutions in Dhaka made this dialectic of
creation-in-void unique in its dialogical capacities—both in terms of piecemeal and
abbreviated development of art institutions and in bringing together artists, academics,
writers, and planners to visualize as and via a collective. Familiarity and personal
networks were foundational, going back often to pre-1947 ties. For example, Abedin’s
previous association with Nurul Amin, the then education minister (both of them hailed
from Mymensingh) and Habibullah Bahar, the health minister, helped to secure an initial
grant allotment for an art school in the budget of mid-1948.11 This modest provision,
and future negotiations, however, had to be ensured by a series of appeasements of the
federal government. Before the budget of 1948, for instance, Abedin and his fellow
artists had to mount a special exhibition for the government, behind closed doors of the
Governor House, illustrating to a strictly invited audience of high government officials
and elite the propaganda potential of visual art. The exhibition, suggested to Abedin by
Habibullah Bahar, himself a patron of the arts, was meant to elaborate in 100 posters
the chronological history from the first Muslim conquest of India until the birth of
Pakistan.12 For the artists, this was a compulsion and a strategy, as they later recalled
in their memoirs, in a bargain with the government. It worked too, in two important ways:
first, it secured for Dhaka a modest but useful allocation of two rooms in the deserted
National Medical College hospital building to start an art school; and second, this
exhibition brought Abedin under official attention. At the instance of Shahid Suhrawardy
—chairman of the Pakistan Public Service after Partition—Abedin was invited to join the
Information and Publications Division of the government at Karachi as head artist.
Suhrawardy was a poet, writer, and diplomat, and former Bageswari professor of Fine
Arts at Calcutta University in the 1930s. As an art critic associated with the Statesman,
one of the premier newspapers of Calcutta, Suhrawardy
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Sanjukta Sunderason
was familiar with Abedin’s work before they migrated to Pakistan, and it is likely that he
would have known Abedin from his Calcutta days; this prior association can be said to
have facilitated Abedin’s integration into the cultural administration of the Pakistani
state. By 1949, not only was Abedin the key initiator in creating new art institutions in
Dhaka, but he also became an integral part of the cultural administration of the federal
government of Pakistan at Karachi, using his bureaucratic location at the centre to
facilitate cultural apparatus for East Pakistan. Abedin took up the position of head artist
in Karachi, on the condition that he would return to the new art institute in Dhaka in a
year’s time. Abedin’s intermittent presence in West Pakistan was sustained by his
involvement in developing the Fine Arts Department at the University of Peshawar,
developing collections of folk art, facilitating student trips, and documentation of
archaeological sites, which tied him to the entire pedagogical apparatus that the
government was trying to foster in West Pakistan. Abedin’s location as artist-bureaucrat
lay at this precise juncture of negotiation between East and West Pakistan that informed
the consolidation of the art institute and cultural sphere in Dhaka. Through the 1950s he
continued these repeated measures of appeasing the government for securing grants to
concretize the art institute, and in piecemeal allocations a bigger double-storeyed site
could be arranged in 1952, and finally in 1956, a full-fledged building, planned and
executed by Zainul Abedin and Mazharul Islam, one of the stalwart architects of
Bangladesh. The federal government too had interests in appeasing the East by raising
Abedin to the status of a national artist, to keep tabs on the pulse of the eastern wing.
By the mid-1950s, the Dhaka wing of the Pakistan Art Council was formed, with the first
national exhibition of Pakistan in Dhaka in 1954. In the early 1950s, Abedin facilitated
the formation of artists’ collectives, taking cues from his experience in Calcutta in the
early 1940s. The first exhibition catalogue of the Dacca Art Group, a modest collective
of Abedin’s students, laid out their key objectives as the formation of a national gallery
in East Pakistan, provision for international exhibitions, raising the intellectual and social
standards of art practice, arranging studios for artists, and publication of art journals.13
The first exhibition of the Dacca Art Group, organized to attract the attention of the
government in Karachi, was heavily attended by students, writers, poets, and
academics. It was covered extensively too in journals such as Dilruba and New Values.
165
While this suggests a conscious desire for artists in East Pakistan to have a space and
a public for their art, as well as a marked need for international assimilation, their
appeals were often directed towards Karachi and Lahore, which were seen to receive
active government support and the patronage generated by foreign consulates and
post-war cultural wings like the Asia Foundation, the Pakistan American Cultural Centre,
the British Council, or the German Cultural Centre. Karachi had already received
government support for setting up its own Art Society in 1949, and the Arts Council
supported by foreign diplomats, while in Lahore the Mayo School of Art (1875), a well-
established colonial institution, was being restructured and upgraded to the National
College of Arts (NCA) through the 1950s to become the seat of modern art. This
generated an internal layer of access and patronage within Pakistan, where artists from
Dhaka felt compelled to make themselves seen in Lahore, Karachi, or Rawalpindi—the
new art capitals of West Pakistan—to make their mark in the nation’s art scene. When
the staff correspondent of the Pakistan Times asked the East Pakistan artists in 1960,
‘Does this Province offer us enough opportunities to live and work here and make
decent living as artists,’ it was noted vehemently that more and more artists have
migrated to West Pakistan—to Lahore and Karachi—in search of work.14 Throughout
the 1950s–1960s, while relations between the two wings of Pakistan soured, this
internal mobility (albeit one-way, in most cases) was sustained, both for want of
participating in and accessing a ‘national’ art public that would be beyond either
religious or linguistic affiliations, as well as for staking a claim in the transnational traffic
in artistic exchange that marked the post-1945 global art world. Throughout the 1950s,
Abedin made conscious efforts to integrate art with the people—whether in projecting
the image of rural Bengal in art or promoting public access and public taste. This was
symptomatic of a larger pedagogical role that postcoloniality demanded of artists,
Abedin himself being an example. Decolonization generated sustained efforts from the
new nation-states to form new institutional apparatuses for nationalizing practice and
patronage of ‘fine art’, and to assimilate structurally ‘folk art’ and ‘living traditions’ within
the aesthetic canons of modern art. The state tried to formulate new cultural patrimonies
to reconfigure the national past and to envision its future. It projected and linked
together cultural modernity with political modernity, to visualize and institute a
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postcolonial imaginary. This gave art practice a national-administrative character,

creating and allowing for sites and roles for artist-pedagogues like Abedin who
consciously formulated stylistic and material frames for visualizing and framing the
nation. Yet this pedagogy had a tense relation with the demands of postcolonial
modernism itself, oscillating between art’s public and individualistic impulses. Abedin’s
trajectory in the 1950s–1960s was also symptomatic of the dilemmas of publicness.
Dilemmas of Postcolonial Pedagogies Zainul Abedin’s own works from the 1950s to
1960s were steeped in developing a visual language rooted in East Pakistan’s rural
everyday as well as committed to public address and popular legibility. As principal of
the art institute and an artist, bureaucrat, and pedagogue, he gained an aesthetic
authority that came to represent the cultural identity and aspirations of East Pakistan.
Such doubling of the artist’s public and private address were also tied to the ways in
which a dominant Euro-American ‘post-war’ art discourse staged itself globally. In
September 1952, Abedin was the official representative of Pakistan to the International
Conference of Artists, organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in cooperation with its National Commissions across
the globe, to coincide with the 26th Venice Biennale. Attended by over 200 delegates
and more than 150 artists representing forty-four countries and eleven artists’
associations across the world, the conference resonated with the cultural anxieties of
the Cold War, raising questions around the social and political commitment of artists,
relations between artists and nation-states, a publicized need for international mobility
of artists, funding for cross-cultural artistic exchange, and new values of ‘universal’
aesthetics, ‘democratic’ art, and artistic freedom. Underlining the discourse of ‘public
roles’ of artists lay anxiety over ‘political art’—the spectre of ideology and stylistic
strictures of official cultural policy, which (re)produced the polemic against Socialist
Realism, the Soviet aesthetic policy dominating art across the Eastern Bloc. Henry
Moore, the noted British sculptor and a key presenter at Venice, was careful to warn
that there existed a paradoxical relationship between the artist’s freedom and his social
function, between ‘his need for the sympathy of a people and his dependence on
internal springs of inspiration’.15 This
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dialectic between the public and the private, and the social and the formal within art
practice also frames Abedin’s location—both in East and West Pakistan. Abedin’s
example is particularly critical here because of his lifelong commitment to realism as an
artistic style, which not only formed his own artistic disposition, but also the collective
aesthetic he tried to shape for modern art in East Pakistan, where he combined realism
and social responsiveness of art with an earth pictorial language and folk-art idioms
from rural Bengal.16 Realism can be seen as a defining aesthetic for Abedin. It
connected his training in rigid academic naturalism in the 1930s to his social realistic
take on naturalist art in his famine drawings that invoked the grotesque in the closing
decade of colonial rule, and further on to a reoriented language of what can be seen as
folk realism that he developed in East Pakistan. A representative set of his works done
between 1948 and 1951, and featured in all his exhibitions thereafter, whether in
Lahore, Karachi, London, or Washington, show struggle and movement, as well as
composure and a contained rural everyday, far-from-the-urban realities and aspirations
of the postcolonial nation-state. This image of labour, or his image of a rebel bull, were
in fact recurring features in his work, and became his signature style by the 1970s. The
watercolours of the indigenous tribal and rural everyday, which he formalized after
migrating to Dhaka, were in fact a continuation of his art school training in the 1930s,
when he would often retire to the tribal belts around western Bengal to sketch tribals at
work. This has been seen as an Indian variant of primitivism that marked the interwar
period, and found adherents in Calcutta, though Abedin’s own works from the 1930s to
1940s combined a sensibility towards social realism more than a folk-modern idiom that
an artist like Jamini Roy had been developing around the same time.17 This sensibility
of the rural/folk/modern via realist art is carried into Dhaka in Abedin’s work, with a
marked difference, framed not only by his new pedagogical, institutional role, but also
the particular locationality of East Pakistan itself. What happens in Dhaka is a difference
in framing and a difference in signature. A new ‘social’ idiom emerges that is mediated
by questions of land, struggle, and marginality; it becomes a new marker for
locationality, with location itself as form, not merely content. As aesthetic form, location
—materialized via art objects/practice/pedagogy/ discourse—also becomes an
allegorical vista for a subnational cultural
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and political subjectivity. Under Abedin’s patronage, this also gains a kind of aesthetic
authority, the image of a rural everydayness framed in fluid linearity becoming an artistic
signature of East Pakistan itself, whether in contemporary exhibitions or in post-
liberation Bangladesh as transmuted sub/national memory (see Image 6.1 as example
of Abedin’s watercolours becoming national stamps in post-liberation Bangladesh). In
Abedin’s repertoire, this realistic, utterly representative language was to change, though
mildly and for a short span, after he returned from his first spell in the United Kingdom
(UK), Europe, and Turkey between 1952 and 1953, and after 1953, Abedin was seen to
experiment in linear simplifications—breaking up the image, trying out semi-Cubistic
figurations, and so on. What is critical to note in these images is that his subjects remain
the same—peasants, labour, domestic subjects (like mother and child)—though the
artist seems momentarily lured by a language of modernism while holding on to a
commitment to the rural. This is a curious instance of a national-popular modernity that
an artistpedagogue like Abedin can be seen to grapple with. It can almost be seen to
signify a transitional aesthetic in the post-colony where modernity is hinged between
context and the universal, in this case between the image of a peasant and that of
cubism. Yet Abedin’s commitment to realism was a point of contention in postcolonial
Dhaka. While Abedin’s famine sketches of 1943 were to mark his reputation
internationally, he was critiqued both in Dhaka and Lahore for not steering his students
at the Dhaka art institute towards the international idiom of modernist abstraction, and
for holding on to representational art in a fast-changing international ambit around him
and stagnating public taste. For critics like Syed Waliullah, Abedin was seen as ‘not
modern enough’—a ‘victim of conflicting ideas’—an artist succumbing to outdated
romanticization of the folk, slipping to ‘journalistic drawing rather than creative form-
making.…’18 His early-1950s watercolours of the Chittagong Hill Tracts were described
as more of ‘geographical rather than artistic interest’, or works more suited to ‘an
ethnologist equipped with camera and colour film’ than an artist of Abedin’s stature.19
The ‘constant public gaze and drum-beating’ around Abedin leaves him with little
privacy for creative work, Waliullah argued, revealing a peculiar postcolonial dilemma
around publicness and modernism: it is the absence
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of a ‘dissecting, progressive cultural section’ in (East) Pakistan that places the burden of
public pedagogy on a ‘few lone talented artists like Zainul Abedin’. This, he admitted,
was a lonely task: ‘Perhaps they are like the captain of a ship in moments of crisis with
no help and no equipment but entrusted with the task of taking a shipload of people to a
land better than the one they have left behind.’20 Waliullah’s critique titled ‘Zainul
Abedin: A Victim of Conflicting Ideas’ was retorted by S. Amjad Ali in ‘Zainul Abedin: A
Victim of Confused Criticism’. In Abedin’s ‘complete lack of formalism both in his linear
composition, design and colouring’, Amjad Ali wrote, ‘It is futile … to look for solid
substantial forms or complex and meticulously balanced designs—the virtues of
classical art.’ Abedin’s style lay instead in ‘a kind of personal handwriting, as has been
remarked by Raoul Dufy. It has some of the calligraphic qualities of the old Oriental
painting which ignores literal naturalism and aims at sheer harmonies.’21 Amjad Ali’s
focus was more on assimilating Abedin’s idiom with the stylistic contours of Islamic
aesthetic and the folk idiom he saw as typical to East Pakistan. This conflict of the
public diktat and his own creative directions revealed early articulations of the tensions
between the social responsiveness of artists and a defined individualism that
modernism demanded. Similar critiques were raised even in the mid-1960s, in particular
around the appeasing policy of West Pakistan in lifting a purely representational painter
like Abedin to a stature of national importance, allegedly as a sop to the sensitivities of
East Pakistani intellectuals.22 To critics in Lahore and Karachi, Abedin’s redrawing of
folk subjects and realistic storytelling in visuals was a language of the soil—an assertion
of a subnational aesthetic, a commitment to locality outside the universalistic discourse
of national-modern aesthetic. In Dhaka, too, Abedin’s public commitments were seen to
collide with the demands of modernist experimentations that his students desired.
Abedin’s friends, admirers, and critics equally lamented his reduced productivity since
the late 1950s, his absorption in developing institutions and cultural diplomacy eating
into his creative hours. Within the art institute in Dhaka, his former students and now
colleagues complained of a growing distance between him and fellow artists, with
Abedin’s increasing dissociation from modernist abstraction that began to dominate art
production in Dhaka. Abedin himself, while
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Sanjukta Sunderason
aware of these critiques, insisted on sticking to art’s public roles and social commitment:
More than success of my paintings, I feel gratified while creating an institution where
many others can paint. I feel it is from here that the craftsmen of ‘beauty’ can be born.…
‘Art for art’s sake’ is not my faith. I believe art is for human welfare, for making life
harmonious and beautiful…. I say time and again that our present famine—is one less
of food than of taste. This has to be eradicated. Or else, economic poverty and the
poverty of taste will march in parallels. Our struggle, thus, is against both these
poverties.23
Over the 1960s, Abedin had tied himself more to the collection and documentation of
folk art, a substantial part of which formed the core of the Sonargaon museum he
established after liberation. This was at the same time his self-fashioning as a patron
and preserver of folk art and also his retreat into the identity of a pedagogue rather than
that of a modernist artist. This also canonizes in a way how he is remembered and
celebrated in post-liberation Bangladesh, as an icon of cultural resistance to West
Pakistani domination (Image 6.2). For Abedin as well as for his fellow artist-pedagogue
Qamrul Hasan, the use of ‘folk’ was a pedagogical principle for generating a locational
aesthetic. Under their patronage and pedagogy, the folk in the East became a modality
of secularization—not in dissociation with but a heterogenous understanding of Islam,
one that had roots in the longer heterodox religious formations in undivided Bengal,
including the plural and lived iterations of Islam in the region. These included locational
traditions of Sufi thought, baul music, narrative scroll art traditionally made by Muslim
scroll painters, or pottery dating back to medieval religious eclecticism, and constituted
as such, not the absence or negation of religion but a non-hegemonic relationship to it.
Art in East Pakistan carried this materiality of the secular, and a celebration of the folk
that actively articulated the ‘livingness’ of this cultural past. Decolonization itself
generated new modalities of memorializing a locational culture, not just through living
traditions but lived experiences of struggle. The memorialization of the Language
Movement of 1952, for instance, and the death of students in the cause of language, as
Sufia Uddin has argued, turned the arena around Dhaka University into a ‘sacred site’,
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Image 6.2 Zainul Abedin with his collection of folk art Source: Collection of Mainul
Abedin.
one where since 1953 Bengalis continue to make ‘pilgrimages’ every 21 February,
famed as ‘Ekushey’ to mark the date of sacrifice. ‘The site and the date’, Uddin has
noted, ‘have been transformed into spatial and temporal loci of holiness on which
justification for the eventual birth of Bangladesh would be based,’ the sacrality of the
space itself identifying ‘two imagined communities, one a common oppressor and the
second the Bengali nation (encompassing many religious communities)’.24 Such
sacrality attached to secular sites is repeated via songs, flags, and cultural processions
that memorialize and mark 1952 within a larger genealogy of liberation, the culmination
of which was seen to be the war of 1971. This publicness of art in East Pakistan itself
was a modality of secularization of cultural discourse therein. Art became, in other
words, a spectrum of negotiating the sovereignty of locational imagination. This
negotiation of locational imagination aesthetically was also a complex question of
artistic style. In Abedin, the question of style was at once between consolidation and
critique—he became the articulator of a contained ‘folk’ culture as much as a social
disintegration and resistance.
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Sanjukta Sunderason
In 1967, Abedin retired from the position of principal at the art institute in Dhaka. He
went to Karachi on invitation to set up a new art gallery and got involved as art advisor
to the television and broadcasting division of the government and worked across Dhaka,
Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Peshawar. In 1967, he was declared the Shilpacharya
in East Pakistan—the master artist-pedagogue—his own artistic signature becoming a
marker also for the burgeoning nation as location, under the shadow of increasing
alienation from the federal centre in West Pakistan. In the late 1960s, Abedin would also
reinstate the politics of his art and return to a realism that he had iconicized in 1943
through his famine drawings. After returning from his visit to the refugee camps of the
Palestinian liberation fighters in 1970, Abedin gave a fiery speech at a student
congregation, attacking the notoriety of government suppression of the East Pakistani
student movement, and had to escape for his life. This co-existence of consolidation
and critique makes Abedin’s own artistic signature dialectical, and this is a tenson that
marked the work of his fellow artists too (Qamrul Hasan and S. M. Sultan being only a
few of the examples that I cannot explore here fully for shortage of space). As Abedin
noted himself, commitment to the search for beauty could only have been via the
presence and destiny of the ‘people’, the persistence of the image of pain and
displacement becoming an ironic affirmation of this commitment. ‘I paint to uphold the
beauty of nature’, he noted, ‘what is beautiful in life, and what is not, also to mark the
forces that resist the creation of beauty in life.’25 This duality marks Abedin’s art
pedagogy and aesthetic repertoire, and reveals a texture within the space of the secular
in art—one that can move beyond the question of affirmation or negation of religion and
reveal instead the ingredients that entered the alternative imagination of the nation in
Islamic Pakistan.
Dialectical Affiliations The politico-economic domination of West Pakistan over East was
met time and again with linguistic and cultural exclusivism by the East. This began with
contesting the imposition of Urdu as the official language over the predominantly
Bengali-speaking East Pakistan, in what became famous as the Language Movement of
1952, and continued in the struggle for political independence in the late 1960s. The
university was the locus of
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strikes, agitation, and a public political discourse. The decades-long tense dynamic
between the two wings of Pakistan is a multi-layered politicocultural praxis that
encompassed within it interpersonal associations, assimilations, and negotiations,
alongside persisting dissonances. The artistic and cultural field captured these
dialectical affiliations and helps us loosen the assumed ideological moorings of the
postcolonial nationalmodern aesthetic to contest claims and appropriations within
imagined or enforced singularity of territory and frontiers. ‘Nationalism is something we
debated quite a lot,’ Anisuzzaman recalls in his conversation with Ananya Jahanara
Kabir. ‘… Language Movement and other intellectual movements, cultural
movements.’26 Freedom itself, in other words, was a discursive field, modernity in this
eastern outpost of Pakistan being entangled with negotiations of identity—in inherited
pasts, contemporary struggles, and utopian visions. Debates over a secular culture
continued not only around language but the inheritance of that language, for instance, in
discussions centred on the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore. When the government
restricted celebration of Tagore’s birth centenary, for instance, the literary critic
Anisuzzaman is known to have approached Zainul Abedin to draw a portrait of Tagore
to be included in his anthology on the poet. When Abedin asked him whether he
considered Abedin to be a portrait painter, Anisuzzaman told him that ‘he had to draw
the portrait in the same spirit in which he had signed the statement protesting the
government’s opposition to Tagore’s songs’, to which Abedin is known to have ‘readily
agreed’.27 When Tagore’s ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’ (Oh my golden Bengal!) was adopted
as the rallying cry during the liberation war, it was once again an assertion of a secular
inheritance that is tied to language and cultural form. The Language Movement
animated a wider cultural discourse and public engagement with the question of the
secular—which while rooted in the idea of Pakistan disturbed its ‘national consensus’
via vernacularity: Bengali as a locational language (the subnational) countering in effect
the hegemonic language of Urdu (the national). This vernacular produced its own
aesthetic forms and values. In Abedin and his fellow artist Qamrul Hasan, this
vernacular took the form of a celebration of rurality, folk-art practices, and quotidian arts
that would generate an aesthetic of and from the region. In other artists in the new
generation of the 1950s–1960s, this vernacular took distinctly modernist energies of
re/framing public space—
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Sanjukta Sunderason
not via transferring and reworking inherited forms, but by producing entirely new
dialogues with material, space, and scale. A new negotiational dynamic of postcolonial
identity could be seen to develop through the 1950s and 1960s, which was embedded
in both growing sensibilities of abstract art—a disenchantment, hence, from the
folk/realist works that Abedin had foregrounded—and a parallel activation of art’s
political potentialities. Thus, while the founding generation of artists like Abedin became
the artist-pedagogue—the Shilpacharya— and Hasan steered the folk-modern impulse
via the cottage industries and handicrafts corporation of East Pakistan in 1962, a new
generation of artists like Murtaja Baseer, Novera Ahmad, Rashid Chowdhury, and
Aminul Islam reframed publicness in art via modernist abstract forms, at once rooted in
location and universality. Novera Ahmad made murals for the Language Movement in
the library of Dhaka University in 1956 and the 1958 mural in the basement of Kendriya
Shaheed Minar. In the works of Aminul Islam and Rashid Chowdhury, material itself
became the protagonist of an artwork, generating visual patterns of artistic modernity.
Safiuddin Ahmad—Abedin’s fellow artist from Calcutta—led a more private life,
experimenting with strong linear explorations of inhabited landscapes, and
multidimensional scales of self and space. S. M. Sultan— the artist celebrated for his
folk-modern work—worked outside Dhaka from Jessore and contributed wholeheartedly
to a new formal vocabulary of rural labour and vision itself. Folk art emerged as the site
for both the counter-modern and counter-classical in Sultan’s works. When the Dacca
Art Group held its first exhibition in 1951 (Image 6.3), Abedin as its president highlighted
‘a crisis in Art’ that Pakistan was facing, one that would find resolution through ‘truth’
and ‘beauty’: ‘We have a bright culture behind and it is our duty to create new for the
present and future.’28 The crisis for Abedin was both one of structures—art institutions,
infrastructure, publics; as well as of imagination—identity, affiliations, tradition,
modernity. The Dacca Art Group asserted that it was not following any particular school
or ideology of painting; rather, it was simply an association of artists, of all schools and
ideologies, with a ‘common cause’ to paint. Painterly values—and identity as a quest for
artistic form—were highlighted as a unifying drive. By the time of the First Annual
Exhibition of the Government Institute of Arts in 1953, artists asserted on the one hand
that ‘this is the only academy in this part of the
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Image 6.3 Cover of the first annual catalogue of the Dacca Art Group Source: Collection
of Mainul Abedin.
country and academic tradition of realism has been preserved by most of us’, and noted
on the other that ‘special attention has been given to the use of local motifs and
traditional designs for decorative purposes’.29 This entente between realism and the
local was a critical signpost of art practice in East Pakistan, steered in particular by
Abedin, but sustained pedagogically by his fellow artist Qamrul Hasan. This entente
was, however, challenged time and again, and increasingly by the new generation of
students emerging out of the art institute, revealing the crystalizing and challenging of
canons. By the first exhibition of the Painter’s Unit—set up by the new generation
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Sanjukta Sunderason
of artists like Syed Jahangir, Murtaja Baseer, and Qayyum Chowdhury—in 1956, there
was active shunning of this ‘traditionalism’.30 The tension of affiliations—with the
institutional commitment to realism/locational aesthetic on the one hand, and the new
criticality of the opponents of perceived traditionalism on the other—formed a
cornerstone of art discourse in postcolonial Pakistan, as critics on both sides of the
young nation sought to grapple with the wider, intangible question of modernity after the
rupture of Partition and Independence in 1947. A critic commenting on the Arts
Ensemble exhibition in Dhaka in 1962 argued, for instance: The painters in East
Pakistan today have two-fold alignments. On the one hand, they are searching for a
long-lost link with a traditional concept of visual expression, retained only in primal
forms in the indigenous crafts and folk-patterns. On the other hand, they are striking to
be up to date with the international trend of experimenting with abstract values of the
plastic media, as a means of human expression. Caught between these two pulls, some
of them are maturing into new paths of creativity very rapidly indeed.31
Writing in the Morning News in Dhaka in 1962, the reputed critic B. K. Jahangir
foregrounded the dialectics of ‘quest’ itself. While the ‘problem of modern art’, he noted,
‘is basically the problem of quest,’ the true nature of the quest is unspecific: Was it a
‘quest for tradition’, ‘for arrangement and space’? The individual artist, he concluded,
strives ‘to put forward an answer. And that is all.’32 For (East) Pakistan, Islam continued
to be an additional frame marking its artists, over and above that of ‘tradition’ and the
‘oriental’— vocabularies that so often lurked in any art appreciation abroad. In the
Commonwealth Art Today exhibition, for instance, held between November 1962 and
January 1963 at the newly opened Commonwealth Art Institute in London, the
catalogue introduction on the Pakistan segment written by G. M. Butcher noted: In
cultural terms, Pakistan is that part of Greater India where the contribution of Islam will
not only be tolerated as a part of history, but lived and encouraged as the principal path
to the future. So far as
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painting is concerned, this means an endeavour to exploit the visual and spiritual
principles of Islam within the context of world-wide artistic standards.33
Islam here was not only a religious framing of the national-modern aesthetic, but an
aesthetic framing for modernity itself. Butcher’s rhetoric made the bind between Islamic
imagination and national imagination in art stronger. While most artists represented in
the exhibition attempted ‘to build a bridge between the East and the West’, their true
success lay only in assimilating ‘values from Islam’s past with principles derived from
Western masters’.34 Outside this entente of Islamic values and Western principles, art
from Pakistan (those represented at the exhibition being primarily those who had
studied in the West), Butcher concluded, becomes ‘confused imitations of bits and
pieces from everywhere’.35 The question of identity was embattled within the nation,
with East Pakistan framed as an unreconciled other. To critics and ideologues in West
Pakistan, for instance, the tension between the new nation’s West and East was more
than political and bordered on the civilizational. The artificial assimilation of West and
East Pakistan was an incomplete and forced one. The resentment sounds clear in Aziz
Ahmad’s writing in 1965: Pakistan in 1947, he notes, had achieved ‘only a political
nationhood.… Culturally it was not yet a nation’; ‘Apart from the problems of interfusion
into a “unity-in-diversity” there was the cultural counterpart of the political problem of
cutting adrift from the Hindu cultural residue of India in order to isolate and establish the
new nation’s cultural identity….’ The ‘cultural parity’ between East and West Pakistan
was also artificial, he argued, not ‘genuine interpenetration’. Discontent and doubt of
political affiliations of the East is rife in this text: Yet, in terms of objective value-creation
or determination of standards this resulted in curious situations. Nazrul Islam, the great
revolutionary Bengali poet, though mentally ill and resident by choice in Indian West
Bengal had to be equated institutionally with the much greater poet philosopher Sir
Muhammad Iqbal, the theoretician of Pakistan’s creation. Zainul Abidin [sic], a
promising Bengali representational painter received parity of official attention and
patronage with the incomparable ‘Abd al-Rahman Chaghtai [sic].36
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While Ahmad admits in the text that ‘Pakistani painting is rather a mixed and a mediocre
medley, suffering from a poverty alike of tradition and spontaneous local inspiration’, his
reading of East Pakistani artists is marked by their ‘passionate closeness to the soil’ that
he saw in Abedin, a far cry from the ‘westernized elite of Pakistan’ who, he argued, took
‘its modern art seriously’.37 The pressure of ‘identity’ as national rhetoric was felt by
artists too. The East Pakistani artist Baseer is seen arguing in 1963, at a time when he
himself was based in West Pakistan: Some say that my paintings are too Westernised.
What would you say is purely Pakistani Art? Possibly they want something Islamic, or
calligraphic, something in Moghul style. It is strange that they do not make such
demands on the artists of other countries of Asia.… I am from East Pakistan. And I am
not very familiar with Arabic letters. Sadequain is. To expect Pakistani paintings alone
from our artists, is stupid.… May be the Pakistani painting will come after 40 or 50
years. What we have now is the regional cultures—the cultures of Punjab, Sind and
Bengal are different from each other. Submerging them into one culture and unifying
them is a long-term process.38
Baseer’s view points to the heart of the argument about the secular being not the
rejection of religion but the potential untenability of it, in configurations of postcolonial
modernity within the new arbitrary formation of what was post-1947 Pakistan. This
modernity could only grow organically from below, via ‘regional cultures’ as Baseer calls
them, and not via parameters of the nation-state. This locational rhetoric becomes
stronger in another interview from Baseer: Lots of people ask me, do my paintings
represent Pakistani culture? Let me answer by a counter-question. Does Pakistani
culture exist, with two wings of the country separated by more than 1000 miles, with
profound differences in language, customs, everything and with only religion being the
common bond? … Being a Muslim painter of Pakistan, I face all kinds of problems.
I can’t paint in the Ajanta or Kangra or Rajput style, because all these, I am told, have
the stamp of Hindu art on them. Shall I then paint in the Mughal tradition with
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which I am not familiar? Or shall I do Islamic calligraphy or Arabesque designs? I can’t
do so, because I am not familiar with Arabic script. People in Pakistan, or even
foreigners, want to see something Islamic from a painter here. Why don’t they seek
such things in a Muslim painter from Iran, India or Indonesia or Egypt?39
The tropes of participation and incomplete association between West and East Pakistan
during the 1950s–1960s raise a larger methodological question: How do we theorize the
postcolonial modern born out of rupture, where arrival and splintering are built into the
uneasy entity of postcolonial nationhood? East Pakistan as aperture reveals this
unstable becoming of form via rupture.
Arts of Rupture The liberation war in East Pakistan in 1970–1971 was the second wave
of decolonization in South Asia. The war marked the bloody culmination of two decades
of incomplete and persistent political tussle between post-1947 West and East Pakistan.
As the birth of current Bangladesh marked the second arrival into independence of
colonial eastern Bengal, unfinished struggles from the 1940s were rehashed; affective
ties to land, locality, and nation realigned; cities re-inscribed; and memories
reconfigured. In the 1970s, on the eve of the Liberation War, Zainul Abedin organized
an exhibition Nabanna, titled after the harvest festival in the region. For the occasion, he
painted an iconic watercolour scroll Nabanna (Image 6.4)—a 65-foot-long narrative that
celebrated the moment of culmination of reaping, a collective affirmation of labour, a
ritual invocation of rural plenitude and life cycles in rural Bengal. Produced under the
shadow of an impending freedom struggle, the monumentality of Nabanna is a
preamble to the turning point of the nation’s destiny. Looking closely into the rolling
image of the narrative scroll, we can identify segments: the painting opens with friezes
of displacement—a spectre of desolation with looming vultures over barren land,
villagers leaving in hordes; it moves over to images of return, cycles of labour, collective
participation, absorption in the rhythm and motion of cultivation; and in the third
segment, are figures of leisure, rest, and composure. Nabanna carried an epic scale,
animating pain and resilience, labour and leisure, as a meta-history of the being and
becoming
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Sanjukta Sunderason
Image 6.4 Zainul Abedin, details from the scroll-painting Nabanna, 1970, wax, black ink,
and watercolour Source: Collection of Mainul Abedin.
of a new nation. The monumentality of Nabanna in 1970 was matched by the iconicity of
Abedin’s authorial signature, as the national artist. Nabanna presents a metanarrative
that weaves together two tropes— first, of rural labour and leisure and second, of loss,
struggle, and resilience. Abedin stands here as the narrator of a metaphoric harvesting
of struggle, framing an impending arrival of nationhood. Yet, another grid of meanings
surrounds Nabanna, both containing and demarcating its location at the juncture of East
Pakistan’s second freedom struggle. In Nabanna, Abedin returned to a stark realism
that he had moved away
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from since the 1950s. Underlying the grand narrative of rural labour is the long story of
decolonization in the subcontinent. The opening scene of depletion and displacement
harks back to the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1943 that Abedin had given iconic
visual life to. In the hands of Abedin, the famine had received some of its most iconic
treatments as he walked the streets of Calcutta during the famine months—a young and
poor art teacher at Calcutta’s art school—capturing hunger in stark ink sketches on
cheap brown wrapping paper. In 1970, as an opening fragment in Nabanna, Abedin
brought back the famine—to tell, as it were, the story of the trials and trails of
decolonization in Bengal on both sides of 1947. Nabanna highlights this place of realism
and collective memory in postcolonial modern art, Abedin being one of its staunch
patrons. It carries, as I have argued elsewhere, ‘shadow lines’ of decolonial aesthetics
in the subcontinent.40 Nabanna was followed soon after by Monpura ’70, Abedin’s
visualization—in retrospect—of a calamity-torn landscape in brush, ink, and wax (960 x
105 centimetres) that recalled both his 1943 famine drawings and his recent drawings of
struggle and displacement as a part of his Palestinian Refugee series from the summer
of 1970. Drawn in 1973 from memory in a span of merely three hours, recalling the
horrors of tidal flood and cyclone that ravaged Monpura in November 1970, the epic
scroll is another testimony to the artist’s experimentation with epic form—this time the
epic form of tragedy at the moment of arrival into postcolonial nationhood (Image 6.5).
In late 1970, as the tidal wave decimated thousands, Abedin drew an iconic image of
Maulana Bhashani, the theological and peasant socialist leader of the National Awami
Party (NAP) (Image 6.6). Bhashani had been a keen collaborator of Abedin from the
1950s, when Abedin frequently joined him in decorating grounds of peasant
congresses. Such collaborations had made the aesthetic and political mobilizations of
the ‘folk’ a national-popular project, where the Islamic socialism of Bhashani and socio-
aesthetic pedagogy of Abedin would time and again make tangible the idea of a
locational identity and horizon. In 1970, Abedin’s striking drawing of Bhashani looming
over a struggling, ailing nation as a messianic figure revealed once more the co-
existence of religiosity and aesthetic imagination within the lived experience of rupture.
The secular form of the art of rupture—as in Abedin’s Nabanna or Monpura ’70 or
indeed in his Maulana Bhashani—reveals this heterogenous aesthetic of postcolonial
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Image 6.5 Zainul Abedin drawing the Monpura scroll, 1973 Source: Collection of Mainul
Abedin.
Islam as a ‘living’ aesthetic (in everydayness, in political struggles, historical

continuities) rather than in purely theological prescriptions. The ruptures of
decolonization peculiar to East Pakistan were constitutive of this heterogeneous
‘secular’ aesthetic of Islam. It demands conceptualizations from within the shared
interstices—rather than the oppositions—between secular and religious nationalism in
political thought. It demands, also, conceptualization of what a postcolonial secular can
look like in art: Is it an affirmation, inevitably, of (invented) traditions—whether of
religion, or religious eclecticism? Or is it (also) the site for visualizing ruptures and
displacement—a disenchantment, in other words? A fundamental difference exists,
David Scott argues, between the ways in which anticolonial and postcolonial modes of
writing and narrating imagine ‘futures’ and ‘futurity’. The anticolonial narrative is a
romantic one, one of hope and progress; history here, ‘rides a triumphant and
seamlessly progressive rhythm’. The postcolonial mode, in contrast, is one of ‘tragedy’,
183
Image 6.6 Zainul Abedin’s painting of Maulana Bhashani, circa 1970 Source: Collection
of Mainul Abedin.
one steeped in negotiating ‘a broken series of paradoxes and reversals in which human
action is ever open to unaccountable contingency’.41 In East Pakistan/Bangladesh, the
liberation war had erased a generation of intellectuals, students, and activists, and left a
scar in the national psyche that made a postcolonial future both rooted in the rawness of
genocide and a continuing negotiation of the question of the (recent) past itself. For a
young nation-state, this persistence of recent history opened up the question of
temporality itself, one that faced—like the Benjaminian angel of history—both the past
and the future. Art in independent Bangladesh thus carried persistence of the dialectics
of time itself. In the 1980s, as the new nation fell into military dictatorship, an artist
group Shomoy addressed this question of ‘time’. Foundational to the formations of
modern
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art in East Pakistan and eventually Bangladesh was hence a persisting sensibility of the
political. This political resided in continuing negotiations of the received inheritances of
displacements and the scopes of freedom itself. These negotiations make postcolonial
modernism in Bangladesh a foundationally secular aesthetic, one organically tied to
rupture itself— both in displacing religion as an organizing principle of post-Partition
postcolonial identity, and by turning inherited histories into negotiational terrains for new
dialectical aesthetics. This persists in contemporary art from the region, where
inheritance itself is a trope, not via religion or tradition, but the history of decolonization
itself. The constitution of the new nation-state of Bangladesh instituted secularism as
one of its cornerstones. Like the artist-pedagogue Nandalal Bose in India, Zainul Abedin
was the illustrator of the Constitution of Bangladesh. Unlike the epic citations of the
Indian Constitution, its Bangladeshi counterpart was lined with motifs and patterns from
the folk art of the new nation, all taken from the kantha stitches used most famously in
everyday textiles of rural Bengal. Under Abedin’s supervision, four artists illuminated
each page of the constitution for three months using motifs from folk art and
embroideries. In return he received land and provisions for Sonargaon, work for which
continued from 1972 until Abedin’s death in 1976. A figure of a ‘decolonial’ artist like
Abedin represents, indeed, the last of the mid-century modern painters in South Asia
who imagined and forged artistic modernity during decolonization via the folk, adhering
to a decolonial imaginary of modern art committed to non-urban, folk sensibilities. This
generation, consisting of Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy in India and Abedin in
Bangladesh, presents a distinct variation of modernism, committed to linear figurative
drawing resonating a ruralist aesthetic. In East Pakistan Abedin’s role as an institution-
builder (alongside that of his colleague, the artist Qamrul Hasan) saw a build-up of an
avid collection and documentation of folk art as a patron. As Hammad Nasar, one of the
curators of the exhibition Lines of Control organized transnationally between 2009 and
2014, argues, ‘Partition is how the nation-states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were
formed. It was thus, by definition, a productive act: generating new lines and maps,
creating borders and regimes of control; fashioning new identities, reconfiguring
memories and rewriting histories.’42 Attempts are being made—most recently, for
instance, by the Third Text special
185
volume on Partition To Draw the Line (edited by Natasha Eaton and Alice Correia)43—
to read partitions in South Asia across plural temporalities and geographies. While the
trope of partition continues to be dominated by 1947, 1971 gets overtaken by tropes of
civil war and genocide. Driven ever so often by epistemic structures drawn from India,
1971 is seldom read as a second partition of the subcontinent, and hence with organic
ties to 1947, and to the wider critique of the rationalities of mid-century decolonization.
Looked at from East Pakistan, however, both 1947 and 1971 appear to activate a
peculiarly dialectical mid-century vista of decolonization, and cultural imagination—
despite religious affiliations or inheritance—as the protagonist of that dialectical
modernity. It is indeed partitions—in the subcontinent—that can generate productive
sites to re/ think what connected, critical historiographies of art and postcoloniality
across South Asia’s modern and tenuous borders might look like. *** The understanding
of postcolonial modernity in the subcontinent, as I proposed at the start, needs not only
an expansion in geographies but open/ing epistemes for possible dialogues. Looking
from East Pakistan, I have argued, connects the question of the secular to that of
location. Location here is not only a site where an alternative nationalism (a ‘secular
nationalism’ in opposition to ‘religious nationalism’, as has been argued by scholars)
can be seen to play out but where the secular gains new radical reinterpretations of
religion itself. It is worth asking, if looking from East Pakistan/Bangladesh can be
somehow more than an argument on location? What are we ‘seeing’ now that we have
looked in the essay, from the aperture—an analytical vantage point, as it were—of this
particular location? What conceptual responsibility can this essay take if we were to
move beyond, as I had argued at the start, tokenistic representation of the marginal
nation-states of South Asia as we aim subcontinental questions? I am thinking in
particular here of the conceptual import of looking from the brief political entity of East
Pakistan—both for connected art/historical questions across subcontinental South Asia,
and for the wider conversations around visual art and decolonization across the Global
South. The question of the secular and the art of art history in South Asia—the themes
driving this volume—as I noted at the start, demand form(ation)s
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Sanjukta Sunderason
drawn from particular histories, with their particular tensions, dilemmas, and
contradictions. Looking from the vantage point—and aperture—of the short-lived entity
of East Pakistan, the secular appears not only as an imaginational negotiation of a
nation-ness harnessed to a (recent) religious origin, but also a rhetorical aid for the
question of the locational itself, for both belonging to and de-centring the nation in
postcolonial art/historiography. The secular as seen from East Pakistan is not a
negation of Islam, or separation of religion from modernity, but a quest— even utopian
—for parallel, alternative, or resistant forms of belonging to a postcolonial national
project. Location becomes, as I have argued elsewhere44, a partisan site, from where
the hegemonic narrative and aesthetics of the nation get questioned or ruptured. In
art/histories of East Pakistan, the secular can emerge as this field of questioning, a
dialectical possibility where postcolonial modernity both invokes and delineates what its
historical affiliations would be. The secular then is a question of a dialectical becoming
and not radical departures, and art becomes that imaginational field where this
dialectical aesthetics of the postcolony via/ after rupture can play out. More critically, the
question of the secular—seen from East Pakistan/ Bangladesh—I will propose by way
of concluding, destabilizes the geopolitical and ideological rationalities of decolonization
by capturing not arrival but the limits of (postcolonial) freedom. Art here can be seen to
capture both the exhilaration and alienation of an incomplete decolonization that while
being unique to East Pakistan in South Asia, carries plural echoes across the
decolonizing Global South where religious inheritance and socio-political displacement
were entangled (in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, for instance). Wider questions
of nation, narration, memory, and modernism intertwine in such loci, and demand a
contextualization as well as de-nationalization of artists from the region. My propositions
in this essay, are some of the initial thoughts-inprogress from a larger work on the arts
of partition in subcontinental Asia that I am beginning to develop. A driving concern here
is not artistic ‘representation’ of the two traumatic partitions that marked the
subcontinent in the wake of decolonization. Rather, I am interested in modalities that
(subcontinental) partitions produced in postcolonial modernisms. How did Partition
reconfigure artists’ practices? How did artists negotiate postPartition geographies and
cross-border affiliations? How did art discourse
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across the subcontinent negotiate the dialectics of freedom and rupture that marked
decolonizing South Asia? Looking from East Pakistan, as I have tried to argue here, is
one of the ways of exploring such questions.
Notes 1. A point made by Vazira Zamindar in the context of seeing Partition in its
longuedurée footprints. See Vazira Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of
Modern South Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 2. Ananya Jahanara
Kabir, Partition’s Post-amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia (New Delhi:
Women Unlimited, 2013), 45. 3. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Utopias Eroded and Recalled:
Intellectual Legacies of East Pakistan’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41,
no. 4 (2018): 892–910, 894. 4. Ibid., 895. 5. Quoted in Kabir, ‘Utopias Eroded’, 892. 6.
Sanjukta Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). 7. Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of
Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 8. A point
noted by the artist Aminul Islam, see Lala Rukh Selim, ‘50 Years of the Fine Art
Institute’, Art, A Quarterly Journal (October –December 1998): 8. 9. Ibid. 10. Interview of
Mazharul Islam, Art, A Quarterly Journal (October–December 1998): 5. 11. Selim, ‘50
Years of the Fine Art Institute’, 7. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 10. 14. ‘The Artists’ Dilemma in East
Pakistan’, Pakistan Times, 19 September 1960. 15. Henry Moore, ‘The Sculptor in
Modern Society’, in The Artist in Modern Society: International Conference of Artists,
Venice, 22–28 September 1952 (Paris: UNESCO, 1954), 104. 16. Dadi, Modernism and
the Art of Muslim South Asia, 101–102. 17. For a discussion of the Indian variant of
primitivism, see Partha Mitter, Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-
Garde 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion, 2007). 18. Syed Waliullah, ‘Zainul Abedin: A
Victim of Conflicting Ideas’, The Dawn, 23 October 1955, Karachi. I am thankful to the
late Murtaja Baseer for sharing this article with me. 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Ibid. 21. S. Amjad
Ali, ‘Zainul Abedin: A Victim of Confused Criticism’. I am thankful to the late Murtaja
Baseer for sharing the article with me.
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Sanjukta Sunderason
22. Aziz Ahmad, ‘Cultural and Intellectual Trends in Pakistan’, Middle East Journal 19,
no. 1 (Winter 1965): 35–44. 23. Quoted in Hashem Khan, Zainul Abedin-er Shara Jibon
(Dhaka: Samay Prakashan, 2003). 24. Sufia Uddin, Constructing Bangladesh: Religion,
Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006), 126. 25. Nazrul Islam, ‘Zainul Abedin-er Silpabhabana: Ekti Sakkhatkar’,
in Samakalin Silpa o Silpi (Dhaka: Bangladesh Silpakala Academy, 1996), 105. 26.
Kabir, ‘Utopias Eroded’, 900. 27. Anisuzzaman, ‘Claiming and Disclaiming a Cultural
Icon: Tagore in East Pakistan and Bangladesh’, University of Toronto Quarterly 77, no.
4 (Fall 2008): 1058–1069, 1063. 28. First Annual Exhibition of Dacca Art Group, 16–21
January 1951, held at Lytton Hall of Dacca University. I am thankful to the late Murtaja
Baseer for sharing these archives with me. 29. First Annual Exhibition of the
Government Institute of Arts, Dacca, in 1953. 30. First Exhibition of the Painter’s Unit,
Press Club, 14–19 February 1956. 31. The Arts Ensemble, Dacca, October Exhibition of
Paintings, at United States Information Service (USIS) Gallery, 5–31 October 1962. 32.
B. K. Jahangir, ‘Dacca School of Painting’, Morning News, Dacca, 9 September 1962.
33. G. M. Butcher, ‘Introduction to the Pakistan Segment’, in Commonwealth Art Today,
7 November 1962–13 January 1963, Commonwealth Institute, London. 34. Ibid. 35.
Ibid. 36. Ahmad, ‘Cultural and Intellectual Trends’, 36. 37. Ibid., 42. 38. Sultan Ahmed,
‘Protest of a Disillusioned Artist’, The Leader, Karachi, 28 May 1963. I am thankful to
the late Murtaja Baseer for sharing these archives with me. 39. ‘Murtaza Bashir Talks of
Murtaza Bashir’ to M. A. Quadiri, Vision 11 (Anniversary Number 1963): 34. 40.
Sanjukta Sunderason, ‘Shadow-Lines: Zainul Abedin and the Afterlives of the Bengal
Famine of 1943’, Third Text 31, nos. 2–3 (2017): 239–259. 41. David Scott, Conscripts
of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press,
2004), 13; See also David Scott, ‘Tragedy’s Time: Postemancipation Futures Past and
Present’, in Rethinking Tragedy, ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 2008). 42. Hammad Nasar, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space
(New York: Cornell University Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2012), 10. 43. Alice
Correia and Natasha Eaton (eds.), To Draw the Line, Partitions Special Issue, Third
Text 31 (2017): 2–3. 44. Sanjukta Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and
India’s Long Decolonization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020).
Image 7.1 Bhupen Khakhar, Bullet Shot in the Stomach, 2001, oil on canvas Source:
Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, India; and the Estate of Bhupen Khakhar, Surat,
India.
7 Making Place for People? Geeta Kapur, Secular Nationalism, and ‘Indian’ Art Zehra
Jumabhoy
Categorical Imperatives Bullet Shot in the Stomach, 2001 (Image 7.1): The diptych
depicts two ageing, white-haired men, one pointing a gun at the other. They are locked
in mortal combat. Both figures reveal their internal organs: the one on the left displays a
red heart; the one on the right exposes crimson intestines. And yet, does the pistol
resemble an oversized phallus? Does it denote tough love or violent aversion? As
viewers zoom in on the protagonists, we realize: they are both the same person, self-
portraits of their maker— Bhupen Khakhar. Bullet was painted by Khakhar towards the
end of his life, as he battled with cancer (to which he finally succumbed in 2003). Its
playful poignance, mingling homoeroticism with anguish, is typical of the dying
Khakhar’s last works, where doppelgangers struggle with their conflicted corporeality.
Significantly, it was included in Geeta Kapur’s Subject of Death exhibition, one of five
group shows she curated as part of Aesthetic Bind (2013) at Bombay’s Chemould—the
first Indian gallery to champion the art of the new nation, and the one which played the
largest role in Khakhar’s career. Kapur’s attention-grabbing pairing of Khakhar’s demise
with the fiftieth anniversary of Chemould’s birth was a deliberate provocation; a demand
for the Indian art world to take stock of itself. Today it seems vital to take up the
gauntlet. Such an investigation could not be more urgent: the nation—as much as its art
—is in dire need of soulsearching. The country has witnessed the steady rise of the
Hindu Right, which achieved political success with the election of its front-man Narendra
Modi as prime minister in 2014 and, again, in 2019. Since his second election, Modi has
cracked down on India-controlled Kashmir, initiated a series of anti-Muslim citizenship
laws (in the form of 2019’s Citizenship Amendment Act), and stirred up border disputes
with Pakistan and Bangladesh. If the borderlands face a crisis of identity, the ‘idea of
India’ itself is under re-vision, thanks to the governing party’s strategic re-writing of
history in which the Mughals are reconfigured as Islamic ‘invaders’. As an ideology,
Hindutva instigates sectarian strife; as a political entity it has sparked off Hindu– Muslim
rioting in Bombay (1992–1993), Gujarat (2002), and Delhi (2020). According to
Ramachandra Guha, communal tensions have generated indelible rifts within ‘Hindu–
Muslim relations’, ‘suspicion and hostility’
Making Place for People?
191
becoming its ‘governing idioms’.1 In this climate, violence against the Indian Muslim
minority has become par for the course. As this essay was being completed in October
2021, newspapers were reporting carnage in Hyderabad, while Muslims were being
attacked by Hindutva factions across Tripura. The groups responsible—swearing
allegiance to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS)—vandalized six mosques as well as private property belonging to the Muslim
community in Tripura. The anti-Muslim violence—according to certain news outlets—
was ‘instigated’ by communal friction in Bangladesh.2 The escalation of sectarian strife
within the region is reminiscent of that which led up to (and was followed by) the two
partitions of the subcontinent in 1947 and 1971, respectively. This makes probing the
nature of Indian secularism—the country’s foundational justification for its existence in
1947—a vital pursuit. Perhaps, it was unsurprising, then, that in 2016, London’s Tate
Modern repurposed Bullet to probe India’s fraught national identity in the retrospective
Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All. Curated by Nada Raza, with advice from Kapur,
the most intriguing section of the show gave a political gloss to the painting. Raza
placed it opposite Untitled (2001), showing a Muslim man drinking sharbat outside a
blue mosque. Khakhar’s pistol appeared to be aimed both at himself as well as at a
scull-capped Muslim (Image 7.2). The juxtaposition transformed the interpretation of
Khakhar’s loaded gun. Bullet’s self at war (whatever its maker’s original intention) stood
in for India’s bleeding body-politic. Split apart on religious lines, such fratricidal violence
undermines the secular harmony, the ‘unity in diversity’ espoused by India’s founding
father Jawaharlal Nehru.3 It is in this context that this essay revisits the theories of
Geeta Kapur, who more than anyone else has played a pioneering role in the
construction of Indian art history, one which is moreover deeply rooted in her belief in
secularism. In the essay ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’ (2006), Kapur maintains that
despite all the criticisms levelled against it, she advocates a ‘secular nationalism’.4
Meanwhile in the seminal volume When Was Modernism, she states: Taking a cue
from … Indian art in the twentieth century, we can claim a tradition of the modern that
inscribes within its very narrative the aspirations of the secular nation.5
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Zehra Jumabhoy
Image 7.2 Installation view of Bhupen Khakhar’s Bullet Shot in the Stomach, 2001, at
Aesthetic Bind: 50 Years of Chemould from the exhibition Subject of Death, curated by
Geeta Kapur at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, 2013 Source: Chemould Prescott
Road, Mumbai, India; and the Estate of Bhupen Khakhar, Surat, India.
A general trend emerges in these texts: Kapur conjoins the term secular to the nation,
and stands with them in the face of ‘national vexations’ such as ‘ethnic vulnerability’ and
‘neo-religious fundamentalisms’.6 At the core of Kapur’s writing is the belief that as an
‘organic’, ‘rooted’ intellectual, who operates within the ‘historical paradigm’ of the nation-
state, she is best placed to provide a ‘countering impulse’ to Hindutva by harnessing
India’s ‘secular cultures’ and ‘avant-garde art’.7 My study will explore the interrelation
between art, the secular, and nationalism in Kapur’s texts written over a really crucial
period— one which saw the emergence of Hindu nationalism to its cultural and political
dominance today. As Saloni Mathur styles it in her book A Fragile Inheritance: Radical
Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art, Kapur is the ‘theorist, critic and curator’ who is ‘the
most significant interlocutor of the post-1968 avant-garde generation’; a veteran ‘of
socially engaged art in the subcontinent’.8 And yet, few studies have been conducted
on ‘the particular convergence of politics and aesthetics in India’ as it was
193
‘shaped’ by Kapur’s ‘leftist praxis’.9 This essay goes some way to rectifying this
omission, paying critical attention to her theories about a ‘national secular art’. While
Mathur’s volume—dedicated to Kapur and her husband, the artist Vivan Sundaram—
fills many a gap in the narrative of Kapur’s linking of art and politics, it treads a different
path to the one I am pursuing. Mathur’s book provides a long view of Indian art history,
and the undisputedly special place that Kapur occupies within it. It explores how Kapur
is deeply concerned with using art as a means of contesting the narrative of Hindutva,
even as the art world itself is targeted by the Right. As such, Mathur’s text defines
Kapur’s ‘fragile inheritance’, generously highlighting the importance of her contribution.
If my perspective in the ensuing essay is more interrogative of Kapur’s legacy, this is
because Mathur and I start our investigations from different vantage points. Mathur’s is
motivated—in her own words— by distance: as a diasporic academic (and an
anthropologist by training), Kapur’s writing offers her a window into the Indian art world
‘in a way that transcends the parochial claims to “insider” or “outsider” status’.10 My
standpoint is from the inside: I started life as an art critic in Bombay in the nineties when
India’s rapid globalization conjoined with the rise of so-called ‘Hindu fundamentalist’
sentiment. I left to pursue a PhD in the United Kingdom because I wanted to probe my
own belief—influenced largely by Kapur’s formulations—that ‘secular art’ could save the
day.11 As an Indian art historian—who is culturally Muslim—I have a personal stake in
analysing the rise of Right and the problematics of the secular this ascendency
generates for the art world.12 It is in the light of Kapur’s immense presence within this
world that this essay operates: if Kapur’s legacy is one with which ‘insiders’ have to
grapple, it is about time that it is re-examined in the context of India’s altered political
landscape.13 Whilst Mathur is not concerned with testing the relevance of Kapur’s
formulations, her book identifies the pertinence of the issue that my study seeks to
unravel: the seemingly paradoxical importance of the sacred in Kapur’s commitment to
secularism. Mathur pinpoints Bhupen Khakhar’s centrality to the development of
Kapur’s ideas on the secular and the sacred. She argues that Khakhar’s ‘devotional
quality’ allows for Kapur’s ‘firmly secular consecration’ drawn ‘entirely from the
philosophical or “affiliative” field’.14 What are these ‘affiliations’? If the definition of
‘secular art’— which nods to devotion, without being devotional—is tricky to navigate
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Zehra Jumabhoy
in Indian art history, it is further complicated in Kapur’s oeuvre because of her frequent
coupling of a such art with the rubric of nationalism. Kapur’s complex stance on the
secular—and its relationship to art, nation, and religious sentiment—needs to be
unpacked before it can be evaluated. Kapur was instrumental in two watershed
moments in Indian art history. First, she was associated with the ‘narrative figurative
painters’ of ‘the Baroda School of Art’ in the 1980s (including Gulammohammed Sheikh,
Jogen Chowdhury, Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan, and, of course, Khakhar).15 The
success of this group was related to the Place for People exhibition (Delhi and Bombay,
1981), which Kapur is thought to have curated. Although Kapur is adamant that the term
‘curator’ made no sense at the time—and that this was not her exhibition but ‘a self-
generated project of six artists and a critic’—her writing on the show and its protagonists
came to redefine the ‘language of Indian Modernism’.16 Second, Kapur was integral to
the rise of Indian installation art in the 1990s. After the Hindu– Muslim riots in 1992,
Kapur advocated a shift in medium (from painting to installation) in order to forge a
response to Hindutva.17 She championed artists like Malani, Sundaram, Sheela
Gowda, and Atul Dodiya who made the switch; arguing they marked ‘the emergence of
a historically positioned avant-garde’ securing installations as ‘sites for political
battle’.18 While there will be some discussion of other artworks, this essay will mainly
focus on Bombay-based Malani’s video installations. Kapur has said that Malani
represents ‘a space for contestation within the national/ modern paradigm’; a secular
perspective from which to stage an ideological battle with Hindutva.19 Malani’s work is
foregrounded here because Kapur puts her ‘at the start of an argument’ about Indian
artists who ‘continue to address national issues head-on’.20 Malani was integral to both
the movements that Kapur sanctioned: she was part of the 1980s ‘Baroda School’ as
well as the turn, in the 1990s, towards political installation art. Consequently, Kapur
commends Malani for embodying a ‘politics of place’ that presents an alternative vision
to the ‘belligerent nationalism’ of Hindutva.21 Therefore, Malani’s installations can help
us understand how Kapur defines a secular, national art—and its relationship to India’s
sacred traditions.22 The complexity of the connection between sacred and secular is
thrown into relief today. Hindutva, described by Christophe Jaffrelot as an ‘ethnic
nationalism’ or ‘Hindu nationalism’, is, after all, a ‘discourse
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based on belief’: Hinduism.23 However, at the ‘heart of Hindutva lies the myth of a
continuous thousand-year struggle of Hindus against Muslims as the structuring
principle of Indian history’.24 To restore Hindu pride, India must become a ‘Hindu
Rashtra’ (Hindu Nation). India’s past is configured as a battle zone between competing
religious groups. As a cultural counter, Kapur sets great store by ‘heterogenous’
narratives, such as paintings by Gulammohammed Sheikh which juxtapose
multireligious motifs. Mappamundi Suite Marichika II merges elements of the medieval
Christian map with Mughal miniatures. We spy the minute forms of the doomed lovers
from Persian folklore, Layla and Majnun; the fifteenthcentury Kashmiri poet-saint and
weaver, Kabir (whose mystical writings influenced Hinduism’s Bhakti movement), and a
swirling dervish. All three reference the subcontinent’s Sufi–Bhakti past, its folk-derived
devotional aesthetics (Image 7.3). Kapur argues that such ‘hybridity’, rooted in India’s
Image 7.3 Gulammohammed Sheikh, Mappamundi Suite Marichika II, 2003, gouache
on digital inkjet paper, 58.4 × 71.1 centimetres, Umesh and Sunanda Gaur Collection
Source: The artist and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, India © Gulammohammed
Sheikh.
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Zehra Jumabhoy
‘living traditions’, counteracts the Hindutva definition of India as an exclusively Hindu

nation.25 Yet, Hindutva functions on different levels—and the boundaries between them
are not clear-cut. It comprises the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political party; the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary volunteer organization; and the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a priestly faction. Modi rose up through the ranks of the
RSS to become India’s first BJP prime minister with a vast majority. Is his 2019 re-
election an indication that Hindutva’s ideology of hate has triumphed? His political
ascendency throws Indian secularism and nationalism into definitional crisis. Is Hindutva
an ethnic nationalism or a fundamentalism? If the former, does nationalism inevitably
pivot towards an ethic of exclusion? Is any introduction of ‘belief’ into the language of
the national to be avoided? When Kapur speaks about a secular nationalism, rooted in
India’s sacred, syncretic traditions, how does she carve out a space for it as distinct
from Hindutva’s religious traditionalism? At first, Kapur’s positing of the secular against
Hindutva appears straightforward. Resistance to Hindutva conventionally used the
rubric of secularism; the conflict characterized in terms of ‘religious fundamentalism’
versus ‘liberal secularism’.26 In this formulation, the two are portrayed as
‘opposites’—‘the secular state’ with its ‘principles of neutrality and toleration’ serving as
an ‘antidote’ to Hindutva.27 Yet, of late, the lines between them have blurred. Upendra
Baxi argues that secularism ‘suddenly’ became a ‘problematic notion’ in the 1980s,
thanks to the efforts of the BJP which ‘endeavoured to demonstrate’ that the Congress
party (which had dominated Indian politics until this point) was only ‘pseudo-secular’.28
It is tempting to argue that the definition of Indian secularism has always been
ambiguous: if in the West the term is ‘distinct’ from notions of ‘community’, ‘caste’, and
‘communalism’, in post-Independence India it became ‘a nexus of all these’.29 A. D.
Needham and R. S. Rajan extend this point to discuss the Indian state’s interpretation
of secularism: if in the West secularism historically sought the ‘division of the spheres of
state and religious authority’, the ‘Indian state’ has an ‘investment in matters of religion’;
legislates on ‘administering religious trust’, declaring public holidays for religious
festivals, and intervenes in religious laws.30 This reinterpretation inevitably generates
the problem of ‘where the boundaries of state secularism are to be drawn’ when it
comes to religion. Thus, the
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Indian nation—and related concepts of nationalism, secularism, and the modern—are in

urgent need of analysis.31 This study will pay attention to ‘the tradition of the modern’
that Kapur frames as it borrows from the Subaltern Studies Collective: especially its
founding fathers, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty.32 These
theorists adapt the discourse surrounding the modern, secular nation for a postcolonial
context. Chatterjee argues that the failing in Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism
—as an imagined community, full of invented traditions—is (for all its attention to the
imagination) its blind spot when it comes to accounting for the spirituality of India’s
peasantry.33 Chakrabarty explores a ‘history from below’ where ‘the peasant,
“uncorrupted” by the self-tending individualism of the bourgeois’ ushered ‘in a modernity
different and more communitarian’ than in ‘the West’.34 He argues that India’s mass
gatherings—‘the factory, the bazaar, the fair and the street’—facilitated the Indian
peasant’s entry into ‘public life’.35 Kapur suggests that immersive installations have a
similar mobilizing capacity; her ‘secular art’ represents a communitarianism immersed in
syncretic mysticism.36 I will argue, therefore, that Kapur’s is a nuanced secularism, one
that neutralizes many of the criticisms levelled against the term’s ‘rational’, Western-
centric bias by Ashis Nandy.37 However, Kapur goes one step further: she claims that
her secular art provides a counter-narrative to Hindutva. I will interrogate this claim: Is
Kapur’s secular–sacred art clearly distinguishable from its Other? How persuasive is her
alternative vision in today’s BJP-dominated landscape? In order to get to the bottom of
this, it is necessary to compare the visuality associated with Kapur’s secularism to
Hindutva’s devotional tropes. The essay will end on the icon that both battle to define:
Mother India.
Secular Cycles; Sufi Circles First, it is necessary to tease out the version of secularism
Kapur proposes. Secularism is generally defined as a strict separation between religion
and politics. However, in India the term often connotes a particular relationship to
religious identity rather than a complete disavowal of it in political life.38 Kapur enters
the fray on this already muddied battlefield: How does she draw the line between the
state and religion?
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Shabnum Tejani divides the ‘secularism’ debate in India into three ‘distinct strands’.39
The first interpretation of secularism defines it in the ‘classic Enlightenment’, rationalist
terms of Kant and Hegel: that is, the secular state must stay separate from religious
affiliation. The second position advocates that the state should embody a ‘soft Hindu
position’ (for example, Gandhi); the third that the state must embody a ‘hard Hindu
position’ (that is, Hindutva).40 It is the first and second strands (the ‘Enlightenment’
versus the ‘soft’ religious position) that concern us here— as we know that Kapur is
against the ‘hard Hindu’ position of Hindutva. Tejani ascribes rationalist secularism to
the champions of ‘Nehruvian secularism’, notably Sunil Khilnani who argues that ‘faith’
for Nehru meant a belief in the power of reason.41 According to Khilnani, while Nehru
shared much in common with Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi, where he differed from
them was in his ‘sense of the place of religion’ and ‘of the need to keep it distinct from
the state’.42 If Tagore ‘had a sharp sense of the limits of science and scientific enquiry’,
for Nehru, ‘the moral life’ was pursued through ‘the exercise of reason’.43 Needham
and Rajan likewise point out that both Nehru and Jinnah—the founding fathers of India
and Pakistan— were secular implementers of the ideals of statecraft.44 They propose
the division between the nation (as secular) and the religious community life of the
ordinary citizen, where ‘the official and elite secular political ideal of the nation’ serves to
counter the ‘forces of cultural nationalism on the ground’.45 In contrast to such secular
‘rationalism’, Tejani sees Nandy as advocating a ‘soft Hindu position’.46 Pointing out the
pitfalls of Enlightenment secularism, Nandy promotes a tolerant, fluid version of ‘faith’
that is not based on primordial identities but on the ‘non-modern’, which enshrines the
values of ‘hospitality’ and ‘convivencia’ (a term from Moorish Spain).47 Inspired by
Gandhi and Tagore, Nandy’s ‘non-modern’ is inflected by Hinduism but Nandy provides
an alternative to Hindutva’s rigid, exclusivist Hinduism by championing a porous Hindu-
inflected sense of community. In which of these two senses does Kapur refer to herself
as a secularist? Perplexingly, Kapur speaks about a national art that draws from both
Nehru and Gandhi.48 While it can be argued that this division between ‘rational’ Nehru
and ‘religious’ Gandhi does not always hold, the question here is if Kapur thinks that it
does—and, consequently, which model of secularism is she championing? At first, it
seems straightforward to put
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her in the rationalist camp. After all, Nandy dislikes both the terms Kapur uses:
‘secularism’ and ‘nationalism’.49 For Nandy, secularism is a flawed concept that, allied
to nationalism, inevitably generates the problem of Hindutva. Hindutva’s founder Veer
Savarkar was a ‘secular’ ideologue— and his ‘scientific’, rational tendencies created the
conflation between the religious and the national in a fundamentalist vein. Nandy sees
the ‘love–hate’ relationship that India’s ‘urban middle class’ has with Savarkar as
evidence of the intrinsic connection between the state’s practice of secularism and
Hindutva’s nationalistic version of religion: His rationalist, amoral, anti-religious self had
paradoxically arrived at the conclusion that only religion could be an efficacious building
block for nation- and state-formation….50
According to Nandy, the problem with secularism is that it is does not allow for the
sacred to be a part of public life. Therefore, Savarkar’s Hindu Rashtra marked an
ideological insertion of religious rhetoric into politics in order to construct a ‘sovereign,
modern republic’.51 He sees it as an unfortunate transposition of colonial categories
where ‘religions, denominations and ethnicities were bludgeoned into nationalities’. 52
Nandy’s answer to Hindutva is not a denial of religious identity but an embrace of the
sacred in community life; an appeal to hospitality instead of secularism; to patriotism
(kinship and belonging). Nandy derides South Asian intellectuals who treat secular
nationalism ‘as a magical cure of all communal passions’.53 So, it seems
straightforward to assume Nandy’s diatribe is a critique of the position that Kapur
occupies: a heterogeneous nationalism that is a secular ‘magical cure’ for Hindutva.54
However, I suggest that Kapur’s version of ‘secular nationalism’ also gestures to the
sacred as a means of encouraging inter-religious kinship. Kapur’s advocacy of a
‘secular art’ as a means of unravelling the narrative of Hindutva is comparable to the
non-modern hospitality that Nandy promotes—and the clue lies in the reworkings of
nationalism that the Subalterns provide. They argue that Indian nationalism per se—
both Congress-style and Hindutva—cannot be adequately described in strictly rationalist
terms. Chakrabarty insists that modernity in India does not eschew the ‘everyday
relations of power that involve kinship, gods, and spirits’.55 He suggests—in the same
vein as
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other Subaltern historians, such as Partha Chatterjee and Ranajit Guha— that India’s
folk spirituality must be considered part of ‘modernity’, not as a ‘prepolitical’
primordialism, but as a complementary component of secularism and the state.56 In
fact, Kapur is aware that, in the 1970s Nehruvian secularism was criticized for its
rationalist exclusion of ‘multiple Indian identities’ and their various ‘democratic rights’.57
She contends that while postcolonial theorists come to the conclusion that these
omissions make the ‘nationalist framework’ ‘unviable’, she would like to both ‘critique’
and ‘use’ the ‘utopic model of development articulated by Nehru’.58 Kapur’s revamped
secularism encompasses ‘the living traditions’ of folk culture and the ‘sacred’ in the
Indian every-day, harnessing the potential of ‘intracommunity sites’.59 So, Kapur’s
secularism does not buttress the rational, Enlightenment subject who presumes the
‘universality’ of ‘constitutional values’ that Nandy critiques.60 In her version, artists play
the key role because they ‘assume the privileged, if ironical, status of a
sovereignsubject’ that allows them to be ‘inside the nation, while being outside the
state’.61 Kapur is inspired by this ‘community-based’ ethics of ‘hospitality’, immersed in
darshan. She draws from what Baxi terms a ‘Hindu secularism’.62 It is important to
clarify, that I am not arguing that Kapur’s secularism is a version of soft Hindutva but
rather that it is a version of soft Hinduism. The latter sees Hinduism as fluid,
heterogeneous, and porous, socially and economically inclusive. By the 1990s, Kapur
sees artists who ‘switched’ to ‘sculptural and video installation’ as being uniquely suited
to her ‘secular’ project, because of the paradoxical properties of the new medium. It is a
rooted, organic approach to the nation that nevertheless escapes the state’s rationalist
narratives.63 Kapur suggests that installation art is ‘a form of deconstructed object’
which evokes ‘the dynamics of presence in an unhomely, indeterminate setting’.64 So,
her adherence is based both on its ‘unhomeliness’ and its ability to fix, to be an art of
‘presence’. This echoes the Subalterns’ community-based secularism, which moves
outside official, rationalist narratives of the state, to propose a ‘history from below’. My
point here is not to corroborate Kapur’s interpretation of installation art, but to
underscore that she champions it because she thinks it has the potential to subvert
dominant dictums by generating public engagement.65 Kapur says:
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The installation form, presenting a phenomenological encounter based precisely on the

act of displacement … reflects on the equation between the citizen–subject … in the
imaginary, evolutionary public sphere.66
Thus, installation art’s ‘displacement’ also ‘opens the possibility of a direct, democratic
address’.67 Sheela Gowda’s And Tell Him of My Pain, 1996–1998 (Image 7.4), enacts
this double manoeuvre. Spools of red thread, over 700 feet long, wind their way around
a room—dangling from ceilings, curling over floors, they tower over viewers. The title
gestures to suffering: the threads resemble arteries, pulsing with blood. Their threaded
tips glitter with needles. The skeins are stained with kum kum—the substance that
marks the foreheads of married Hindu women, symbolizing fertility. Is Gowda’s offering
about violence, a reference to craft—often derogatively dubbed ‘women’s work’—or the
patriarchal prison of matrimony? According to Kapur, Gowda’s ‘dematerialised space’
refers to a ‘dominantly male aesthetic’.68 Kapur’s use of ‘dematerialised’ echoes her
idea that
Image 7.4 Sheela Gowda, And…, 2007, thread, pigment, glue, needles; installation view
of the exhibition It ... Matters, curated by Dr Eva Huttenlauch at the Lenbachhaus
Museum, Munich, 2020 Source: Lenbachhaus, Simone Gänsheimer © Sheela Gowda.
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installation’s immersive properties allow for a ‘dismantling’ of societal norms. Mesmeric

and menacing, Gowda’s work unsettles us, presenting a disjunctive signification:
impregnated with ideas of religious ritual and patriarchy, it also upends them. Such art
provides a means of tackling Hindutva because it can offer two things. First, it can
propose an alternative version of identity to the one that Hindutva enshrines (as macho,
exclusionary, and elitist). Second, its immersive properties allow it to stage this vision
persuasively.69 Malani’s installations—especially her video/shadow plays—take centre
stage in this essay because they appear to typify Kapur’s twofold agenda. They
enshrine India’s syncretic past even as their seductive painted forms (that dance around
the walls) propel viewers into their plural universe. But, why should art be made to carry
this heavy political burden? Is it not an unrealistic expectation? Kapur, however, is not
alone in the value she ascribes to aesthetics. According to Jyotirmaya Sharma, what is
required to battle Hindutva need not occur in the political arena: culture is the place to
start. It involves ‘a rethinking of the premises upon which Hinduism ought to confront
modernity’; remoulding it to encompass ‘a multicultural, multi-ethnic, plural India’.70
Since Hindutva frowns on ‘myths and legends’, ‘local colour and flavour’, these are the
aspects of Hinduism which must be enshrined.71 In other words: a soft Hinduism is
required to combat Hindutva’s hard Hinduism. Tellingly, Kapur advocates that her
secular artist reinterprets the past to focus on ‘alterity’ rather than purist Vedic myths of
origin.72 She explains that ‘artists working within a transforming ethos of traditional
societies’ must ‘weave their way’ to ‘political dissent’ through ‘philosophical mystical
radicalism’.73 This radicalism draws upon the ‘Sufi/Bhakti traditions of medieval
India’.74 By channelling a sacred and profane tradition, secular artists embody the dual
forces of these ‘medieval ancestors’.75 Since this tradition holds in tension ‘a new
heterodox spirituality’ with a ‘near atheist autonomy’, it enables artists to dismantle
religious institutions (or Orthodoxy) while fostering ‘intra-community exchanges’.76
Hence, Kapur’s ‘secular national art’ follows a similar folk, faith-based trajectory as
Nandy’s non-modern communitas.77 Kapur’s aesthetic was fashioned in the 1980s,
when she plumped for the ‘narrative figurative tradition’ of Baroda-based painters, which
featured in her 1981 Place for People exhibition.78At this point, Kapur’s hero
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was Khakhar—India’s first explicitly homosexual artist—who ‘more than any Indian
artist’ helped ‘dismantle the incumbent norms’.79 Khakhar’s paintings referred to
‘everyday life in a provincial city’ capturing ‘the labour of love in the performance of ritual
in secular and religious ceremonies’.80 Muslims around the Mosque II, 2001 (Image
7.5), is a patchwork quilt of small-town vignettes—in one section of the canvas a Muslim
man stands outside a blue mosque, looking dreamily into the distance; in another, three
men (wearing Muslim skull caps) converse, huddled intimately. At the centre of the
work, two tiny silhouettes of naked men are visible. Khakhar’s painting is deliberately
transgressive: homosexuals, like Muslims, were Hindutvavadi targets at the time.81 So,
not only does Khakhar offer a vision
Image 7.5 Bhupen Khakhar, Muslims Around the Mosque II, 2001 Source: Chemould
Prescott Road, Mumbai, India; and the Estate of Bhupen Khakhar, Surat, India.
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of Hindu–Muslim synchronicity, but he also overturns Hindutva’s sexual norms. Kapur

says that Khakhar’s ‘kitsch-sublime’ of ‘sexual fantasy’ exhibits ‘sublimity worthy of the
poet-saints’.82 Kapur’s recommendation evokes Bhakti as a form of erotic, poetic, folk-
based Hinduism. Malani’s installations also channel Khakhar’s subversive, syncretic
spirit—as they encompass the female voices, folk art, and Islamic iconography that
have been erased from Hindutva’s ‘monochromatic’ vision.83 Remembering Mad Meg,
2007 (Image 7.6), enacts the running together of cultural trajectories; exactly the kind of
‘heterogeneity’ that Kapur champions. The installation is one of Malani’s video/shadow
plays, and includes kinetic paintings, light, sound, and animation. Here, shadows,
painted forms, and coloured lights are projected onto the walls of the gallery, recalling
Balinese wayang kulit as well as old-fashioned magic lantern displays. The illusion is
created with the help of eight rotating
Image 7.6 Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg, 2007–2011, four-channel video/
shadow play with eight rotating reverse painted Lexan cylinders, eight spotlights, sound;
installation view of Nalini Malani: The Rebellion of the Dead, Centre Pompidou, Paris,
2017, Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris Source: Photograph by Payal Kapadia ©
Nalini Malani.
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plastic cylinders that have been painted on their reverse with a range of cross-cultural
images. It riffs on Renaissance art—like the 1563 oil painting by Flemish Pieter Bruegel
the Elder, Mad Meg—illustrations in medical manuals (for example, a red lung, animal
skeletons, a curling snake-like intestine), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and
borrows motifs from Hindu mythology, including those associated with powerful mother
goddesses such as Kali. Stylistically, Malani’s reverse side paintings gesture to Kalighat
temple art. For instance, the curly-tailed Hanuman in Remembering, imitates a
traditional Kalighat pat of the monkey god, with its bold strokes of paint and fluid lines.
The latter is an urban popular style that developed near Calcutta’s Kali temple in the
mid-nineteenth century, and the runny drips of paint on Malani’s rotating cylinders
simulate the watery splotches of such iconography too. Moreover, Malani’s technique of
painting on the back of a transparent sheet also owes a debt to the reverse painting on
glass that was highly popular in south Indian temples in Tanjore. Doris von Drathen
proposes that ‘in the face of Hindu fascism’, Malani ‘renewed the profane and political
tendencies of erotic depiction’.84 So, the politics of Bhakti are in play: if Hindutva
enshrines masculinity, is upper caste, and sees Muslims as ‘foreign invaders’, Malani
provides a contrast on all three counts, often riffing on medieval India’s subversive
tantric traditions. Curator Imma Ramos notes that the Kalighat Temple in Calcutta
turned into a site of rebellion in the nineteenth century. The watercolours sold around
the temple (Kalighat pats) converted the venue into a ‘central symbolic space’. Kali was
‘reimagined as a figurehead of resistance and a manifestation of an independent Mother
India’.85 Ramos’ comment mirrors both Christopher Pinney and Sumathi Ramaswamy’s
exploration of the way prints of Mother India (such as those produced as anti-colonial
propaganda in Bengal) served to invigorate early Indian nationalism. Pinney suggests
that cultural nationalism on the ground—especially when it is inflected with religion—
supplements the state-led variety of ‘official nationalism’. According to Ramaswamy, in
early independence movements, religious nationalism and the official, state-led
apparatus united to form a seductive notion of Mother India as a Hindu goddess—
without which the national project could never have got off the ground.86 Ramaswamy’s
analysis of cartographic representations of the body of the goddess emblazoned on the
map of the subcontinent connects two
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aspects of the Indian nation that are sometimes represented as separate— its official
aspect (with its supposedly ‘secular’, rationalist credentials) and its unofficial aspect
(steeped in the sacred). My argument is that Kapur praises Malani because it is this
sacred– secular, unorthodox history that is enshrined in her work. The recasting of Kali
as a symbol of street-level subversion—an everyday, peasant-led resistance—is the
kind of raw energy that Malani’s female protagonists channel. In Remembering, the
‘Mad Meg’ in question is ‘Dulle Griet’, the peasant shrew from Flemish folklore who
dons a knight’s armour and sword to attack the mouth of Hell. The avenging Meg,
embedded in the blood-red swirls of Malani’s reverse-side offering, recalls Kali on the
rampage, much like the rendition of the mother goddess on an advertisement for ‘Kali
Cigarettes’, in which a bloody-tongued Kali is garlanded with severed male heads
dripping gore (Image 7.7). It is important to note that if Kali became a mascot for male
anticolonial resistance, she is also an abiding figurehead for feminism—since she
strides across her consort, Lord Shiva, during her frenzied dance of destruction.
Likewise, Malani’s translucent female figures are often painted with runny fusions of
watercolour, acrylic, and enamel, which recall streaks of blood. Are they references to
childbirth, to menstruation—or bloodshed? Either way, their soiled ageing bodies are
rooted in an earthy physicality. They are not ethereal symbols of Mother India but
corporal deities: powerful in their ugliness. In other words, they share more in common
with the rebellious tantric devis, associated with female power and sexuality, than the
submissive femininity prized by the Right. The bloodied forms of Sita, Medea, Alice, and
Mad Meg bear a close resemblance to the Goddess Bhairavi Devi—whose name
means ‘terror’ or ‘awe-inspiring’. In a depiction attributed to the Mughal artist Payag
(Image 7.8), a horned, blood-red Bhairavi sits cross-legged, her lap full of skulls, as a
weedy, blue-skinned male devotee (he could be Shiva) humbly gazes up at her. One of
the Mahāvidyas (ten Hindu goddesses), Bhairavi represents the rise of the Bhakti
aspect of Shaktism. In contrast, Hindutva sports an elite macho-nationalism which turns
on the warrior god Ram. The ‘Ayodhya dispute’, in which the Babri Masjid (a sixteenth-
century Mughal mosque) was destroyed during a political rally in 1992 (leading to
Hindu–Muslim rioting) was a manifestation of this ideology. Hindutva’s increasingly
violent Ayodhya campaign in the
Image 7.7 Kali Cigarettes advertisement, published by the Calcutta Art Studio, Calcutta
(Kolkata), Bengal, India, circa 1885–1895, lithograph Source: © The Trustees of the
British Museum.
Image 7.8 Attributed to Payag, The Goddess Bhairavi Devi with Shiva, India, Mughal
dynasty, circa 1630–1635, Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Source: © The
Trustees of the British Museum.
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1980s and 1990s demanded that the mosque be replaced with a Ram temple. They
claimed that the mosque was standing on the birthplace of Ram, and a temple had been
decimated by Mughal ‘invaders’ to build it. Corbridge and Harriss suggest that in its
seductive use of ‘mass mediated imagery’, Hindutva broke ‘new ground’ via Lord Ram,
who marked a ‘return to origins’, a revitalization and ‘renewal of the national project’, a
cipher for their ‘protection’ of a ‘nation under threat … fatally weakened from within’.87
The threat envisioned by Hindutva is invariably that of the Muslim Other. Modi himself is
no stranger to communal aggression: he was chief minister of Gujarat during the 2002
riots (also attributed to the Ayodhya dispute) and, whilst he claimed that ‘no political
party provokes riots’, he did not stop the RSS targeting Muslims.88 More to the point,
his electoral campaign in the lead up to his 2014 premiership had him posing, sword in
hand: a self-styled fighter for Ram. If Hindutva sees Muslims as conquerors to be
conquered, Malani’s paintings borrow their palette and motifs from the most syncretic
aspects of Mughal miniatures with an accent on Shakti (divine female power). Instead of
a macho Ram who protects the weak female body of the nation, Malani focuses on his
consort in the Ramayana, the Goddess Sita. In the reverse-sided painting on mylar,
Sita/Medea (2006), Sita is paired with the Greek goddess Medea, their bleeding forms
sometimes indistinguishable, at others resembling storybook illustrations from The
Arabian Nights or the minute folk from Indo-Persian painting (Image 7.9). For instance,
the tiny forms on the extreme right evoke the wizened Sufi saints of Safavid painting,
while the small green-sari-wearing Sita in Malani’s image looks like the Mughal princess
visiting two Nath yoginis from a north Indian miniature (Image 7.10). A late Mughal
work, the latter is a fusion of multireligious elements, which unites the subcontinent’s
Hindu devotional strands (Bhakti) with Muslim mysticism (Sufism). After all, as Ramos
notes, Mughal Emperor Akbar ‘consulted Sufis as well as yogis and was known to host
religious debates at his court in which Muslims, Hindus, Jains, and Christians discussed
their theological differences’.89 Malani’s morphing Sita–Medea harnesses this plural
past. Thus, Malani appears to provide the kind of minoritarian perspective that Kapur
proposes is the ‘real’ way to fight Hindutva’s majoritarianism. Chaitanya Sambrani—
echoing Kapur—argues that if the ‘genius of Indian tradition’ is its ‘plurality’, Malani uses
its ‘diverse body of poetry, ritual and
Image 7.9 Nalini Malani, Sita/Medea, 2006, reverse painting on acrylic sheet Source:
Photograph by Anil Rane © Nalini Malani.
Image 7.10 A Woman Visiting Two Nath Yoginis, north India, Mughal, circa 1750
Source: © The Trustees of the British Museum.
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art’ to ‘resist their reification into univalent tropes’ by ‘the Hindu Right’.90 Malani argues
that: There are 300 ways of writing the Bhagavad Purana. The character of Hinduism is
its open nature…. That’s the worst thing about religious fanaticism, so I feel we have to
oppose it: the word Hindu does not even exist in Sanskrit.91
Sufism also plays a role in this open-ness. Significantly, Sufism’s history in the
subcontinent is tied to the emergence of Islam in the eighth century.92 Saiyid Jafri
maintains that Sufism’s teachings of divine spirituality, cosmic harmony, and love—
combined with the importance of saints and mythological stories—were responsible for
the spread of Islam to Hindu communities, especially among lower castes in rural
areas.93 Like Bhakti’s relationship to Hinduism, Sufism embodies a mystical strand of
Islam, emphasizing oral traditions, love poetry, and music, and treating the tombs of
saints as sites of holy pilgrimage. Scholars argue that the two movements did much to
foster relations between Hindus and Muslims because Bhakti devotees and Sufis share
a lexicon of common saints— such as the fourteenth-century Kabir.94 According to Ajay
Sinha, Kapur proposes that Malani’s installations enact this Hindu–Muslim exchange:
since they ‘exist in the viewer’s space’, their ‘cross-fire of signs’ can draw the viewer
vicariously into an area … giving the diverse, partially erased fragments of India’s
historical experience a contemporary semantic value.95
The ‘interactive’ quality of installation art—its ‘cluster of sculptural, pictorial, and sound
elements’—makes it formally in tune with the hybrid mixing that Kapur extols. For
example, as the images in Remembering mingle multicultural traditions on the walls,
they intrude into the viewers’ space—we are literally propelled into Hindu–Muslim
histories. Kapur says Malani’s installations ‘are directly political’ and ‘provide secular
culture with an image code’ as they pass through ‘scrims (screens, Mylar, walls)’. As
their ‘hybrid, high/low resources’ crowd ‘the threshold in surreal mutations’, they ‘re-
mythologise representation’ enacting a ‘process of healing, of bringing back a sense of
belonging’ to family, community, and
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the nation.96 Kapur’s point is that Bhakti–Sufism is not only evoked in Malani’s content,
but her medium also turns viewers into devotees. Kapur’s sacred–secular echoes
Nandy’s ‘non-modern’ spiritualism. Nandy observes that in India ‘the ideologues of
secularism routinely fall back on Sufi and Bhakti poetry’ as well as ‘medieval saints like
Kabir, Lalan and Shah Latif’, ‘Baul singers’, and ‘names from history’, such as ‘Ashoka,
Akbar and Gandhi’.97 While Nandy clarifies that as far as he is concerned these ‘idols’
are actually ‘non-secular heroes who have never heard of secularism’, and that the
secularists who ‘invoke’ them are therefore ‘intellectually lazy’, he admits to building
upon their efforts.98 So, both Kapur and Nandy make a comparable gesture towards
syncretic secularism. Kapur’s secularism—as already infused with sacrality—is the ‘lost’
utopia she expects installation artists to evoke.99 And, Malani’s installations appear to
fit the bill perfectly.100 Or do they?
Mother Issues and Difficult Births Corbridge and Harriss problematize the idea that the
British Raj was preceded by a ‘golden age of religious harmony’. They suggest that
Nandy’s rebuttal to Hindutva depends on a ‘romanticised account of religious faith’
which anthropological evidence does not justify.101 Given Nandy’s dependence on
such instances of inter-faith communitas, they argue he offers an insecure, somewhat
‘complacent’, challenge to Hindutva.102 If they are right, could the same be said for
Kapur? Certainly, one could propose that Bhakti’s syncretic conflation with Sufism is not
the only way it has resonance within Indian nationalism. In contrast to Kapur and
Nandy’s belief in its tolerant history, Jyotindra Jain argues that Bhakti (as a form of
Krishna-worship) also fashioned Hindutva’s visual symbols in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.103 As urban spaces were ‘legitimized as sacred’, Krishnalila
collages became simultaneously ‘susceptible’ and ‘contested’ as ‘vehicles for the
expression of a nationalist/Hindu nationalist iconography’.104 Jain’s point is that the two
kinds of nationalism—Congress-led and Hindutvadi—were often difficult to distinguish
as the two ‘streams’ of Krishna imagery ‘flowed simultaneously’ and ended up
‘intermingling’.105 In Kapur’s defence, one could argue that all images can be
subverted, but that the art she supports unravels Hindutva’s visual lexicon in obvious
ways. For instance, Malani’s
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sexually charged subversions depict an erotic, folk Sita over a macho, upper-caste
Ram.106 This difference is visually evident. Then again, we know that images of
Krishna’s sexual love-play, Krishnalila, have been put to Hindutvavadi use as well and
that decoding images that work across an intolerant/tolerant nationalism is dangerously
dependent on the ideological orientation of the viewer. This is an increasing issue in the
new India, as the controversy surrounding M. F. Husain demonstrates. From the 1950s
onwards, Husain was the quintessential symbol of a secular Indian artist—in Kapur’s
sense of the term—since his paintings were a plural fusion of multi-religious figurative
iconography.107 As Ramaswamy notes, Husain was ‘entangled with the career of
independent India as a democratic, secular and multiethnic nation’.108 Karin Zitzewitz
argues that Husain’s paintings disprove arguments about ‘the systematic exclusion of
Muslims’ from Indian nationalism because his oeuvre demonstrates the ‘affinities
between a secular/nationalist/modernist idiom’.109 It was in this ‘sacred–secular’ vein
that Husain imagined the nation as a Hindu goddess in his Untitled (Bharat Mata), 2005,
where the goddess’ body fused with the map of India. Nevertheless, Hindutvavadis
refused to believe that a Muslim could paint a Hindu icon with patriotic sentiment.110
Interpreting Husain’s painting as an insult—because the goddess is nude— they
launched a series of court cases against him, forcing him into exile. Zitzewitz maintains
that Husain presented himself ‘in secular–nationalist terms right until he passed
away’.111 Still, Husain’s dependence on Hindu motifs for his construction of Indian-
ness was unwittingly revealing about the dangers of a soft Hindu–secular iconography:
it is reliant on the agenda of who is interpreting the images. If Bharat Mata is used
across the board, there is nothing to prevent Hindutvavadis making use of it to argue
their point—and proposing the very antithesis of Kapur’s vision.112 Gyanendra Pandey
suggests that for Hindutva ‘the symbol of the community in its modern national form’ is
‘Mother Bharat’.113 Hindutva’s version of the Mother is different from Congress-style
depictions. Nonetheless, as a symbol claimed by both sides of the political spectrum,
Mother India is open to interpretation by both. Husain’s Bharat Mata drew on this shared
pool of images: his presentation of the Goddess Saraswati—traditionally used as
Mother India by Hindutva—was therefore read as a deliberate provocation to its sense
of propriety. In Husain’s defence, Zitzewitz argues
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(quoting Kapur) that while Husain’s visuals borrow from India’s religious traditions, they
represent a ‘secular’ darshan and should not be read as religious.114 Nevertheless,
policing the ‘right way’ to read Husain’s paintings proved impossible. Ziztewitz concedes
that when ‘reinterpretations of Hindu iconography’ are open to dispute, one can ‘no
longer rely on the goodwill of the secular modern elite’.115 Moreover, Husain’s Mother
India foregrounds the changes in Indian society since Independence: his nude goddess
would be unlikely to enthuse many Indian Muslims today either.116After all, with the rise
of Hindutva, Muslims in India have also retreated into their own communities, turning
towards a more straight-laced ‘Orthodoxy’. Kapur’s Bhakti–Sufi valorisation of the
sexualised poet-saints would be as offensive to India’s Sunnis as it would be to
Hindutvavadis.117 One could argue that Kapur’s move is a masterly method of
exposing the prudery of Hindutva and the more orthodox Muslims—both of whom draw
from the Victorian values of the one-time Raj. However, this misses the point: her
‘secular art’ is hardly a challenge to Hindutva if it alienates the constituency it seeks to
include.118 As the BJP re-writes history, demolishes Mughal monuments, and uses
‘schools and medical services’ to ‘reconnect the tribal populations with Mother India’,
the syncretic potential of Bhakti is being systematically erased from collective
memory..119 In such an environment, ‘soft Hinduism– secularism’ offers shaky ground
from which to combat Hindutva. For, in the absence of a public that can be moved by
such mystical mysteries of a heterodox spirituality, such conceptions of the ‘sacred–
secular’ cannot hope to offer salvation. As Perry Anderson has controversially
proposed: to argue that the ‘mythology of Mother India’ solves ‘deep legacies of
conquest and conflict’ could ‘only be self-deception on a heroic scale’.120 In fact,
Malani’s five-channel video installation Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of
Pain (2005) is ambiguous about the unifying potential of the Mother (Image 7.11). Here,
images of the goddess are interspersed with carnage: Hanuman rips open his chest to
reveal Sita and Ram on one vast screen, scenes of violence unfold on another. Malani’s
artworks are generally filled with allusions to thresholds; the borderline of identity that
makes birth and death simultaneously possible. Veena Das talks of the Radcliffe Line,
the 1947 border responsible for Partition as well as the birth of the independent nations
of India and Pakistan. She says that its ‘scenes of violence constituted, the (perhaps
metaphysical) threshold
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Zehra Jumabhoy
within which the scenes of ordinary life are lived’.121 The female subject’s role in
Mother India is mixed. As a cipher for national identity, the birth of the nation, on the one
hand, she is also the body on which masculine will—as macho-nationalist fantasy—is
inscribed, on the other. Malani’s title quotes directly from Das’ essay, ‘Language and
Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’ (1996), and her significance is reiterated
on Malani’s website with another quote: … the project of nationalism in India came to
include the appropriation of bodies of women as objects on which the desire for
nationalism would be brutally inscribed and a memory for the future made.122
Das puts a dark spin on the body of the nation when it is configured as a woman, and
Malani’s quotation suggests that such narratives are ineradicably haunted. In the words
of Mother India’s voiceover: ‘I die at the border of the new nations, a bloody rag as my
flag.’123
Image 7.11 Nalini Malani, Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of Pain, 2005,
five-channel video play, sound; installation view at the fifth Taipei Biennale, Taipei Fine
Arts Museum, 2006, Collection MoMA, New York Source: Photograph by Johan
Pijnappel © Nalini Malani.

215
Concluding Conundrums This project sought to flesh out Kapur’s notion (largely
unchallenged in the Indian art world) that a ‘national, secular art’ can save the day. It
concludes that Kapur’s formulation—based on an adjustment of a rationalist, state-led
secularism—often ends up sharing its visual vocabulary with Hindutva. While this does
not make it in any way complicit, it nonetheless undermines its ability to combat
Hindutva. For the point here is that both soft Hinduism and hard-hearted Hindutva often
counterclaim the same set of Hindu visuals (for instance, Mother India). This leaves too
much open to interpretation as it relies on the ideological agreement of citizens. In India
today, this can no longer be taken for granted. Despite her vital place in Kapur’s
aesthetics, a close reading of some of Malani’s installations suggests misgivings about
Indian nationalism—whatever its ‘secular’ aspirations. In the video installation Sare
Jahan Se Acha, 2005 (Image 7.12), a girl dressed
Image 7.12 Nalini Malani, Sare Jahan Se Acha, 2005, single-channel video play, sound;
installation view of Nalini Malani: Splitting the Other, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts,
Lausanne, 2010 Sources: MCBA, Lausanne; © Nalini Malani.
216
Zehra Jumabhoy
in a salwar qameez, with her head covered in a dupattā, sings an Indian patriotic song,
‘Sare Jahan Se Achha’ (The best place in the world). The girl’s clothes suggest she is
Muslim: the qameez is also the national dress of Pakistan. The ambiguity of her position
as an Indian Muslim singing a patriotic song is thrown into relief. We know that the
national song ‘Vande Mataram’ (I worship thee Mother) was banned by Indian Muslim
clerics because it associates Mother India with a Hindu goddess. ‘Sare Jahan Se
Accha’, written by the poet Iqbal, is an acceptable mode of patriotism for these
clerics.124 At Malani’s retrospective in Lausanne, the video was projected onto an
archway—a literal separation recalling the 1947 Partition. Hence, the video became a
symbol of the divide between competing versions of India, as well as an allusion to its
foundational split. Malani’s installation of the work may also have gestured to her
position on the subject of secular nationalism: she sits on the fence. So does this essay.
If my conclusion casts doubt on the ability of Kapur’s ‘secularism’ to save the day, this is
not to undermine either her efforts or their towering importance within art history. It is
merely a product of the times: the fact is that little remains of the hope which motivated
Kapur’s theories or the artists, curators, and theorists who followed in her footsteps
thereafter, clinging to a particular version of secular salvation. This essay argues that it
is time to re-evaluate India’s foundational dialogue; to burst apart the notion that the ills
of the subcontinent can be solved via an application of India’s ‘secular’ standard. The
Hindu Right has been in power since 2014: in today’s India, Kapur’s spiritual secularism
—seductive as it continues to be for those of us who were once caught in its spell—is
simply not enough. This was a painful truth that the late artist Rummana Hussain
stumbled upon before her death. As a well-to-do resident of South Bombay, Hussain
found herself in the 1990s in an unexpectedly vulnerable position: she was Muslim, she
was female, she was sick. As the Hindu Right instigated communal strife, Hussain
discovered she had breast cancer. In Is It What You Think? (1998) Hussain sits in her
chair in lacy underclothes—draped with a black dupatta (mimicking a hijab?), the fabric
sometimes falls away to expose her prosthesis; laying bare the wounds from a
mastectomy (Image 3.8). Chanting from a book (covered with a cloth, it makes us think
of a Quran—which is, perhaps, kept hidden for protection?), Hussain asks: ‘Where does
she belong? Have you defined her? Has she fought for her
217
rights? Has she been mutilated?’125 To whom are these questions addressed? Of
whom do they speak? The grainy documentation of an ephemeral performance recalls
Khakhar’s self-destructive painting with which we started our investigation. Hussain’s
cancerous body, much like India itself, has turned on itself. Was the canker that ails it
always there? Hussain’s performance offered no reassuring rebuttal. It foreshadowed
what was to come. Perhaps, this is the best we can hope for from Indian art—and art
history—in these troubled times: an acknowledgment of the limits of Indian secularism
and the precarious place the Muslim citizen increasingly inhabits even within its once-
comforting embrace.126
Notes 1. Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest
Democracy (Picador: London, 2007), 641, 645. 2. It is interesting to remember in this
context that Bangladesh has often been called the ‘first constitutionally’ secular country
in South Asia, having explicitly declared itself as a secular state in 1972. It was the first
and only Muslim-majority country in South Asia to enshrine secularism in its
constitution. 3. As the juxtaposition of Khakhar’s works recalls partition’s dark divides in
1947, perhaps, it is unsurprising that Tate’s show was the brainchild of Raza, a curator
of Pakistani ancestry. 4. Geeta Kapur, ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, lecture transcript,
Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2006, 4,
http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/ SpecialCollectionItem/2993
(accessed 20 June 2016). The lecture was modified and published (under the same
title) in Art and Social Change in 2007. 5. Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays
on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (Tulika Books: New Delhi, 2000), 344. 6.
Geeta Kapur, ‘Globalization: Navigating the Void’, in When Was Modernism, 346–347.
7. Kapur, When Was Modernism, 344, 347, 352–353. 8. Saloni Mathur, A Fragile
Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2019), 14. 9. Ibid., 15. Mathur’s book was published after my PhD was
concluded in 2017. Since this essay draws substantially from the thesis, I should
underscore that no one had interrogated Kapur’s practice at the time I conducted my
research. Yet, Kapur has been largely responsible for the belief within the Indian art
world that art and politics are two sides of the same coin. Unlike Mathur, my research
was motivated by an attempt to probe the validity of Kapur’s notion of secularism rather
than contextualize the development of her ideas.
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10. Saloni Mathur, ‘Preface’, in A Fragile Inheritance, viii. In the preface to her book,
Mathur locates herself as an outsider to the Indian art world, who nevertheless has a
vested emotional interest in it. She says: My interest is in the critical procedures that
open out a discourse about modernism or aesthetics emerging from a particular era and
locale and make it available to outsiders across distance and time—that is, make its
problems and questions available for others to inhabit in a way that transcends the
parochial claims to ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ status. 11. The PhD revolved around
contemporary Indian art’s relationship to national identity, pitting the ideas of Geeta
Kapur against those of Homi Bhabha. 12. This political tension has underwritten my
curatorial ventures too, such as The Progressive Revolution: A Modern Art for a New
India, which I guest curated at New York’s Asia Society Museum in 2018. The show
asked: How does one curate the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG)—often considered
India’s quintessential Moderns—to portray the narrative of the secular that they
represented? 13. Kapur’s own revamping of the secular in the 1980s and 1990s had
huge implications for the way in which the PAG has been interpreted as embodying a
less satisfying version of the modern and secular than that of the Baroda School of Art
she championed. 14. Mathur, A Fragile Inheritance, 33. 15. Gulammohammed Sheikh,
‘Geeta Kapur and the Baroda School’, https://www.
webofstories.com/play/gulammohammed.sheikh/34 (accessed 12 December 2014). 16.
Geeta Kapur as quoted in Natasha Ginwallah, ‘Geeta Kapur: On the Curatorial in India
(Part 2)’, Afterall, 3 October 2011, https://www.afterall.org/online/ geeta-kapur-on-the-
curatorial-in-india-part2#.WMAwhyOLTR0 (accessed 10 February 2016); Geeta Kapur,
‘When Was Modernism in Indian Art’, in When Was Modernism, 313–314. 17. Kapur,
‘Globalization: Navigating the Void’, 344. 18. Geeta Kapur, ‘Globalization and Culture’,
Third Text Asia 1, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 59, 61. 19. Geeta Kapur, ‘Dismantled Norms’, in
When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (Delhi:
Tulika, 2000), 385. 20. Geeta Kapur, ‘SubTerrain: Artists Dig the Contemporary’, in
Body.City: Siting Contemporary Culture in India, ed. Indira Chandrasekhar and Peter
Seel (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2003), 53. 21. Ibid. 22. Malani was also included in my
thesis, so the quotes from her in this essay were part of my fieldwork; based on
interviews conducted in February and March of 2012. 23. Christophe Jaffrelot,
‘Introduction’, in Hindu Nationalism: A Reader, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007), 19–20.
219
24. Ratna Kapur and Brenda Cossman, Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with
the Law in India (Delhi: Sage, 1996), 234–235. 25. Kapur, ‘Globalization: Navigating the
Void’, 349. 26. S. N. Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover, ‘Dark Hour of Secularism:
Hindu Fundamentalism and Colonial Liberalism in India’, in Making Sense of the
Secular: Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia, ed. Ranjan Ghosh (London:
Routledge, 2013), 111–130. 27. Ibid. 28. Upendra Baxi, ‘The Constitutional Discourse
on Secularism’, in Reconstructing the Republic, ed. Upendra Baxi, Alice Jacob, and
Tarlok Singh (Delhi: Haranand Publications, 1999), 211–213. 29. Shabnum Tejani,
‘Reflections on the Category of Secularism in India’, in The Crisis of Secularism in India,
ed. A. D. Needham and R. S. Rajan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 45–47. 30.
Needham and Rajan, The Crisis of Secularism in India, 20. 31. Space constraints
necessitate that the scholarship on Hindutva’s own relationship to nationalism can only
be alluded to briefly and its version of Hinduism—as a rigid definition—will feature here
solely in the context of its relevance to Kapur’s aesthetics. 32. The ‘Subaltern Studies
Collective’ (also ‘Subaltern Studies Group’ or the Subaltern historians) came into being
in the 1980s through the efforts of Ranajit Guha and Eric Stokes, and included Partha
Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty. According to Chakrabarty, it emerged ‘out of a
Marxist tradition of historywriting in South Asia’ markedly ‘indebted to Mao and
Gramsci’. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 73, 75, 89; Dipesh
Chakrabarty, ‘Subaltern History as Political Thought’, in Political Ideas in Modern India:
Thematic Explorations, ed. V. R. Mehta and Thomas Pantham (New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2006), 15. 33. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial
and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6. 34. Ibid., 14.
35. Chakrabarty, ‘Subaltern History as Political Thought’, 15. 36. Geeta Kapur, ‘Secular
Artist, Citizen Artist’, in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, ed. Will Bradley and
Charles Esche (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), 400. 37. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate
Enemy (Bombay; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); see also Ashish Nandy,
‘The Demonic and the Seductive in Religious Nationalism: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
and the Rites of Exorcism in Secularizing South Asia’ (working paper no. 44, Heidelberg
Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, Heidelberg University, February 2009).
38. Needham and Rajan, ‘Introduction’, in The Crisis of Secularism,14–15. 39. Tejani,
‘Reflections’, 64.
220 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.
51. 52. 53. 54. 55.
56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.
Zehra Jumabhoy Ibid. Sunil Khilnani, ‘Nehru’s Faith’, in The Crisis of Secularism, 89,
99. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 96. Needham and Rajan, The Crisis of Secularism, 6. Ibid., 7.
Tejani, ‘Reflections’, 64. Ashis Nandy, ‘Closing the Debate’, in The Crisis of Secularism,
117. Kapur, ‘Globalization: Navigating the Void’, 346. Nandy, ‘Closing the Debate’, 117.
Ashis Nandy, ‘The Demonic and the Seductive in Religious Nationalism: Vinayak
Damodar Savarkar and the Rites of Exorcism in Secularizing South Asia’ (Heidelberg
Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics, working paper no. 44, February 2009),
6. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid., 5. Ibid. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 13–16.
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age challenges the idea that the state and religious identity
were ever really separate in the West: he suggests that if the concept of the modern
secular state was kick-started by the Protestant Reformation, it must be seen as a
movement within Christianity, a rejigging of the structure of belief, rather than a
phenomenon outside it. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 13. Kapur, ‘SubTerrain’,
51. Ibid., 51–52. Kapur, ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, 4. Ibid., 6, 9; Nandy, The Intimate
Enemy, 26, 9. Kapur, ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, 7. Baxi, ‘The Constitutional
Discourse’, 213. Kapur, ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, 7. Kapur, ‘Globalization:
Navigating the Void’, 351. Kapur, ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, 8. Kapur, ‘Dismantled
Norms’, 383. Ibid., 385. Ibid., 402. Ibid., 340. Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva: Exploring
the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003), 2. Ibid., 8.
Making Place for People? 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.
87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.
221
Kapur, ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, in Art and Social Change, 400. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.
Kapur, ‘SubTerrain’, 53. Kapur, ‘Dismantled Norms’, 370. Ibid. Geeta Kapur, ‘Bhupen
Khakhar’ (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2002), 8. The Indian
state decriminalized homosexuality in 2019. Ironically, the law was passed under Modi’s
premiership. Kapur, ‘Dismantled Norms’, 370; Kapur, ‘Bhupen Khakhar’, 8. Sharma,
Hindutva, 8. Doris Von Drathen, ‘The Continuous Flow of Living Presence’, in Nalini
Malani: Splitting the Other (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 29. Imma Ramos, Tantra:
Enlightenment to Revolution, exhibition catalogue (London: British Museum, 2020),
196–197. Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political
Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004), 12; Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Maps, Mother
Goddesses and Martyrdom in Modern India’, in Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed. Martin
Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (London: Duke University Press, 2014), 425–426. Stuart
Corbridge and John Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and
Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 189–190. Narendra Modi as
quoted by Arvind Rajagopal, ‘The Gujarat Experiment’, in The Crisis of Secularism, 221.
Ramos, Tantra, 83. Chaitanya Sambrani, ‘Nalini Malani: Apocalypse Recalled’,
http://www. nalinimalani.com/texts/chaitanya.htm (accessed 20 July 2015). Interview
with Nalini Malani by the author, Mumbai, 1 March 2012. Anniemarie Schimmel, ‘Sufism
in Indo-Pakistan’, in Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1975), 345. S. V. Husain Jafri, The Islamic Path: Sufism, Politics, and
Society in India (Delhi: Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 2006), 4. Rajiv Singh, ‘Bhakti and
Sufi Movement in India’, Important India, 7 January 2014,
http://www.importantindia.com/9517/bhakti-and-sufi-movement-inindia/ (accessed 20
June 2016). Ajay Sinha, ‘Contemporary Indian Art: A Question of Method’, Art Journal
58, no. 3 (1999): 34–35. Geeta Kapur, ‘Gender Mobility: Through the Lens of Five
Women Artists in India’, lecture transcript, Faculty of Fine Arts, M. S. University, Baroda,
2005, http://www.aaa.org.hk/Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionItem/3012
(accessed 10 October 2015).
222 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.
110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.
Zehra Jumabhoy Nandy, ‘Closing the Debate’, 114–115. Ibid., 115. Kapur,
‘Globalization: Navigating the Void’, 352. Interview with Nalini Malani by the author,
Mumbai, 8 February 2014. Corbridge and Harriss, Reinventing India, 198–199. Ibid.,
198–199. Jyotindra Jain, ‘Morphing Identities: Reconfiguring the Divine and the
Political’, in Body.City, 33. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 14. Kapur, ‘SubTerrain’, 67. Kapur,
‘Dismantled Norms’, 370. Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Introduction: Barefoot across India’, in
Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, ed. Sumathi
Ramaswamy (Delhi: Routledge, 2011), 5. Karin Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism: The
Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 27. Sonal Khullar’s book, Worldly Affiliations, makes a similar point about
Husain’s intrinsic importance to the development of a secular, inclusive version of the
modern Indian nation. Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National
Identity and Modernism in India (California: University of California Press, 2015). V.
Sundaram, ‘Ravi Varma Award for M. F. Husain Is National Insult’, 24 June 2007,
http://www.ivarta.com/columns/070624-mf-hussain-paintings.htm (accessed 16 August
2016). Ziztewitz, The Art of Secularism, 27. Ibid., 61. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Which of Us
Are Hindus?’, in Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today, ed.
Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Viking, 1993), 242–243. Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism, 27.
Ibid., 61. David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia (London: I. B. Tauris,
2006), vii. Jessica Winegar, ‘Islam at the Art School’, in Islam and Popular Culture, ed.
Karin van Nieuwkerk, Mark LeVine, and Martin Stokes (Texas: University of Texas
Press, 2016), 190. Kalpana Sharma, ‘Chronicle of a Riot Foretold’, in Bombay:
Metaphor for Modern India, ed. Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 270. Marie Lall, ‘Indian Education Policy under the NDA Government’, in
Coalition Politics and Hindu Nationalism, ed. Adeney and Lawrence Saez (London:
Routledge, 2005), 162.
223
120. Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, 2012),
97. 121. Veena Das, ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’,
Daedalus 125, no. 1, ‘Social Suffering’ (Winter, 1996): 67–91, 68. 122. Nalini Malani,
Mother India, http://www.nalinimalani.com/video/motherindia. htm (accessed 1 January
2021). 123. Quote from Nalini Malani’s Mother India: Transactions in the Construction of
Pain (2005). 124. Muhammad Iqbal was a religious philosopher and political activist
who supported the autonomy of Muslim majority provinces in British India. He has been
called the ‘poet’ of Partition; and while his status as the ‘architect’ of Pakistan is
debated, he is officially recognized as its ‘national poet’. 125. Jyoti Dhar, ‘Prescient
Provocateur: Rummana Hussain’, ArtAsiaPacific (September/October 2014),
http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/90/Rummana Hussain (accessed 29 October 2021).
Dhar’s article speaks about how Hussain’s awareness of herself as ‘Muslim’—in a
cultural sense—was born in the context of the Bombay Riots of 1992 when Hussain
decided to change the name on the nameplate outside her flat in South Bombay as a
precautionary measure. Taking her daughter, she moved to the safety of a hotel during
the worst of the violence. 126. Dhar, ‘Prescient Provocateur’. Dhar writes touchingly of
this performance in ArtAsiaPacific, ending with a quote from Kapur’s profile of Hussain
for a 1999 issue of Art India magazine. Kapur says, ‘Perhaps, I hang too much on
Rummana Hussain’s frail body, but she risks herself in a way that makes me shudder
and review the more sanguine forms of survival that we seek for ourselves.’ Dhar’s own
article reads Kapur’s comment as one of hope. But my essay takes a different tack:
Hussain’s ‘frail body’ could serve a metaphor for the body-politic; for the fragility of the
Indian nation as a plural, inclusive entity. Perhaps, Kapur’s comment reveals her
awareness of the frailty of her own position as a believer in the secular state: she
admits, after all, that she may be hanging ‘too much’ on Hussain’s beleaguered body.
PART 3 Art and Its Gods
Image 8.1 Raja Ravi Varma, Shivaji Maharaj, 1895, Ravi Varma Press, Bombay,
chromolithograph on paper, 20 x 14 inches Source: Anil Relia Collection, Ahmedabad.
8 Shivaji’s Portrait and the Practice of Art History Holly Shaffer
portrait of Shivaji Bhonsle, crowned Chhatrapati Maharaj of the Maratha territories in

western India in 1674, is currently being modelled by the sculptor Ram Sutar for a
statue over 200 metres (circa 695 feet) high, projected to rise off the shore of Mumbai.1
Though the work has stalled due to legal suits—including a plea on the part of local
fishermen to retain the use of the waters for their livelihood—the massive bronze cast of
Shivaji rearing a horse is emblematic of the symbolic power of this seventeenth-century
king today.2 Yet the likeness that Sutar sculpts has a history; it is rooted in a
chromolithograph made by the artist Raja Ravi Varma in the late nineteenth century to
centre a growing nationalist movement in western India. This essay traces Shivaji’s
portrait from a range of images made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to
those that Ravi Varma and other artists developed in the late nineteenth century. In this
period, western Indian nationalists sought a hero-icon for their movement, and the
absence of a definitive portrait of Shivaji from his own court became the subject of a
fraught debate. The multiple portraits collected at this time reveal their negotiation with a
range of deeply rooted traditions of representation in western India—including those of
men and of gods—and with those of colonial portraiture and the classification of people.
This aesthetic flexibility was a decisive factor in the transformation of Shivaji’s portrait
into a medium of anticolonial resistance. Yet, the multivalence of the image not only
stood as a beacon for independence but also as a potent icon for a Hindu polity, which
continues to this day. This is a charged image and I treat it with respect as I do Shivaji
Maharaj, though the essay is not engaged with him as a historical figure. My purpose
here is rather to trace a genealogy of Shivaji’s portrait to historicize and complicate a
picture that has become infused with communal politics, and to question the framework
of the secular for an image that refuses to be defined as either hero or icon.
Finding Shivaji’s Portrait On 12 January 1896 the Mahratta printed a short notice about
a portrait, a vibrant chromolithograph of Shivaji, which ‘the famous artist’ Raja Ravi
Varma had presented to the newspaper (Image 8.1). The writer reported:
Shivaji’s Portrait and the Practice of Art History
229
It is conceived in his happiest style and depicts Shivaji in a most interesting and
touching position. Followed by … trusty friends armed cap-a-pie, riding noble steeds
magnificently saddled, the great Shivaji is shown coming down the hillside of a
fortress … [which] with its castellated ramparts forms a beautiful background.3
The Mahratta’s editor, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, had been agitating for months to restore
Shivaji’s tomb on one of those fortresses, Raigad, through the newly inaugurated Shivaji
Memorial Fund. He could have been inspired by James Douglas’s charge in his
travelogue Book of Bombay (1880) that ‘not one man contributes a rupee to keep or
repair the tomb’,4 now covered simply with a ‘mass of … tender blue flowers’, as
Richard Temple, the governor of the Bombay Presidency from 1877 to 1880, described
it.5 ‘The hero,’ according to Temple, ‘was buried on the summit of this hill, commanding
a view of the scenery fraught with associations of his deeds.’ That ‘rugged and
mountainous country’ of the Deccan aided such ‘a bold man … [who] had peculiarly the
power of arousing enthusiasm in others’ in raising ‘an abject, subject race from
nothingness up to empire’.6 Though the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had been
surveying and restoring numerous monuments across the Deccan since the
midnineteenth century, when the British Crown took control of India as the Raj from the
East India Company after the Indian Rebellion of 1857–1858, Shivaji’s forts had
received little attention.7 The head of the ASI at the time, James Fergusson, primarily
assessed ancient sites, mapping the Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu rock-carved temples at
Ellora and Ajanta, as well as some medieval Muslim sites in the Deccan, such as at
Bijapur and Aurangabad. A spectrum of fortresses, which had overt political connections
with the Maratha regime that the British had only recently defeated in 1818 appear only
as landscape. In Fergusson’s edited volume of Major Gill’s 100 Stereoscopic
Illustrations of Western India (1864), only a ‘View in the Valley of the Taptee … which
the Tiger loves to frequent’ hints at the structures, creatures, or warriors, such as Shivaji
and his weapon of choice the ‘Tiger’ claw that lurked in these hills.8 It was only in 1885
that James Burgess, the archaeological surveyor to the government in western and
southern India, complied, allocating
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30–50 rupees for its restoration. ‘I think the tomb of the great Maratha hero ought to be
protected from further destruction,’ he wrote, even if ‘structures of this sort having no
architectural features of interest, should not be the objects of expensive repairs’.9 An
architectural feature of interest is of course in the eye of the beholder. To colonial
archaeologists like James Fergusson or James Burgess, the rise and fall of Indian art
could be charted from its height in antiquity, with Buddhist architecture, to its steady
decline into ornament, typified in the medieval Hindu temple, as Tapati Guha-Thakurta
has argued.10 In contrast to the British, the Marathas were most interested in features
of the recent past as sites of documentation alive with memory and possibility. A
photographer associated with Tilak, Narayan Vinayak Virkar, catalogued Shivaji’s forts
in colonial-style sepiatoned photographs, but with an anticolonial intent, such as at
Raigad, the site of the first nineteenth-century festival raised for the king (Image 8.2).11
Tilak had turned to gods and then men to ignite a nationalist cause that attempted to cut
across caste through heroism with an emphasis on
Image 8.2 Narayan Vinayak Virkar, Raigad Fort, 1 May 1919, Mumbai, contact print
from a half-plate glass negative, 14.6 x 20.6 centimetres Source: Collection of
Christopher Pinney, London.
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Hindu unity.12 To begin with, he reinvigorated the festival to the elephantheaded Hindu
god Ganesha, regionally known as Ganapati. The festival had been observed in the
Deccan for centuries, but during the eighteenthcentury reign of the ministers to the
Marathas, the Peshwas, who had come to rule in their stead, it received substantial
patronage as he was one of their family gods.13 However, as Richard Cashman has
demonstrated, Tilak took a largely domestic festival and reimagined it as a public one,
organizing neighbourhood singing groups or melas, which each presented their own
image of the deity. On 2 September 1895, the Times of India reported that the singers
were ‘dressed in lavish costume, sometimes in the garb of Shivaji’s soldiers, armed with
bamboo sticks decorated with coloured paper and emblems of Hinduism, practiced in
dancing, drilling and fencing, the mela was a colourful and ceremonious unit’.14 These
songs frequently ran to the political, exposing Tilak’s purpose to create a counterpart to
the annual Muslim Muharram festival, and connect Hindus across caste, while
promoting Brahmins as relevant to society contrary to perceived British opinion.15
Besides iconic representations of deities and costumed singers, these processions also
included portraits, such as of Tilak, Shivaji, and the revered poet–saints, or santas, of
Maharashtra who had instantiated a tradition of devotion towards a personal god, or
bhakti, in the Deccan from the thirteenth century.16 These customs are important for
the history of Shivaji’s portrait because they staged a relationship among ageless
deities, once-living poets, a seventeenth-century king, and contemporary social
reformers.17 Nineteenth-century writers promoted the association between a man’s
heroic deeds and the incarnation of a deity. The essayist, publisher, and mentor to
Tilak, Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, wrote that ‘just as those who take the form of Shiva’s
incarnation, time after time, present themselves … so also the biographies of people
progress’.18 To Chiplunkar, a historical figure like Shivaji could be recognized as an
incarnation of a god, particularly through the popular conduit of biography. Indeed,
writers merged the ballad genre (powada) with those of historical narrative, epic poetry
(mahakavya), and devotional Marathi song in which a hero could attain mythic
proportions; in the nineteenth century, these were adapted as nationalist ballads
(rashtriya kirtan).19 For instance, Agrindas wrote a ballad, or powada, in 1659 that
described Shivaji killing Afzal Khan, which was translated into English by H. A. Acworth
in 1894,
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right before the Shivaji festival. It begins with Shivaji as an incarnation of the Hindu god
Shiva: Hail in all faith to Shiwa, God over gods supreme / The iron age grows golden,
His eyes propitious beam, / When as the royal ensigns And stedfast faith afford /
Witness to Samb incarnate In Shiwaji our lord.20
Shivaji’s court poet Kavindra Paramananda’s paean to Shivaji, the Shivabharata (circa
1674), also considered Shivaji to be an incarnation, but of the Hindu god Vishnu.21 In
one of Paramananda’s word portraits, Shivaji gains powerful aspects of multiple gods:
he is extremely handsome, fully armoured, with a tall neck and broad chest, a tender
face and bright, shining demeanour, with traits that exceeded the gods. He is termed
more valiant than Shiva, more merciless than fire, stronger than the wind, wealthier than
Kuber, more able than Indra, and so on.22 As Karline McLain has argued, over the
nineteenth century, references to Shivaji’s divinity were acknowledged but disavowed
by colonial historians as politically rather than religiously motivated. James Grant Duff,
for instance, wrote that ‘Sivajee’s admirers among his own nation speak of him as an
incarnation of the Deity, setting an example of wisdom, fortitude, and piety. Mahrattas,
in general, consider that necessity authorizes a murder, and that political assassination
is often wise and proper.’23 An unpublished, slender manuscript of the Shivakavya,
written in 1821 by Purushottam in Kolhapur, visualizes the potent episode of Shivaji’s
meeting with the Bijapur general Afzal Khan and it does so by fusing history, myth, and
religion, as well as visually updating the scene to accord with the present. Shivaji is
dressed in the eighteenth-century style of the Peshwa, wearing a red turban, or pagadi,
sprouting a jewelled sarpeche and pearls, and long-flowing gown, or angarkha, and with
a sash wrapped at his waist. Just as the artist used line and colour, the poet infused
Shivaji with the traits of gods: ‘In his speech he superseded Bruhaspati [the god of
wisdom], and by his treasure he superseded Kubera [the god of wealth]. By his
handsomeness, he superseded Madhan [Cupid]. By his forgiveness, he superseded the
earth and by the strength of his body, this king superseded Hanuman.’ Progressing
slowly, page by page, the viewer witnesses Shivaji:
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‘… not very tall, nor very short’, with ‘eyes like lotus petals; he is strong and fair. He is
so handsome, like Kamadeva; he is fearless like a lion….’24 Meanwhile, Afzal Khan
also strides across the blank page to encounter Shivaji: ‘His hair is long, and moving,
and half of his head is covered with a red turban, and he has shaved himself; he is tall,
very fat, and his gown is long.’ Finally, they meet (Image 8.3). The poet asks: ‘How are
the two looking? One is a big elephant who is intoxicated [Afzal Khan], and Shivaji is
looking like a young one of an elephant. This scene was unprecedented. The people
wondered, what will happen?’ They didn’t know because it seemed to be an unequal
duel.25 Only on the last page, after Shivaji has defeated and killed Afzal Khan, are the
proportions revealed not to matter. Though Afzal Khan maintains his elephant-sized,
mythical proportions, Shivaji’s comrade, Sambhaji Kavji, has swiped off his head and
bounded off.26 Tilak drew on these popular traditions that embellished historical
narratives and familiarized their picturing to unify western Indians. He also did not shy
away from purposeful violence, as Grant Duff had ascertained that Shivaji’s killing of
Afzal Khan by ‘necessity authorizes a murder, and that political assassination is often
wise and proper’ could be a model for anticolonial resistance.27 Initially he rallied
western Indian nationalists around the deity Ganapati, but he determined that the
festival’s religious core distracted from the political. From April 1895, he turned to
Shivaji who represented political action, the militant warrior, Hindu morality, and a non-
Brahmin caste, which he discerned would have broad appeal.28 On 12 April 1896, an
editor wrote in the Mahratta: ‘Pride and admiration for our national heroes is a principal
element in the sentiment of nationality, and no nation can hope to rise that neglects its
past heroes.’29 Three days later, thousands of people climbed up the fortress at Raigad
to celebrate their chosen hero, Shivaji. Here, Raja Ravi Varma’s portrait was unveiled to
cries of ‘Victory to Shivaji Maharaj’ and processed by torchlight as music played (see
Image 8.1).30 Ballads extolling Shivaji’s deeds, including his defeat of Afzal Khan, were
robustly performed, artfully visualizing ‘how the dark world of mountains / with every
fortress grim / that lowers above their valleys / were seiz’d and ruled by him’.31 These
not only evoked the surrounding landscape, but also the multiplying images of it, seen
for example in Gill’s, and later Virkar’s, photographs of the Western Ghats (see Image
8.2). They further aurally conjured what Ravi Varma’s picture synthesized: Shivaji,
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Image 8.3 Shivaji and Afzal Khan, folio 40a in a manuscript of the Shivakavya by
Purushottam, Kolhapur, 1821, gouache and ink on paper, approx. 5 x 11.5 inches
Source: The Oriental Institute, Baroda, 8211.
clothed in a simple white cotton garment that flutters with the horse’s gallop, descends
from the mountainous fort on horseback followed by his men. His body turns to the
viewer, while his face sharply looks left, in profile, towards what is ahead, with a ‘quick
and piercing eye’ that English records described.32 But how did Raja Ravi Varma
formulate this image? Ravi Varma’s brother Raja Raja Varma does not mention any
details in his diary, but it is likely that Ravi Varma sought historical sources similar to the
technique he used for the portrait of Maharana Pratap Singh of Udaipur. During the
brothers’ assignment in the Maharana’s palace from 16 March to 1 July 1901, they
consulted published works, such as the British East India Company Colonel James
Tod’s History of Rajasthan (1829–1832). They also copied ‘from an old painting a life
size portrait of Raj Singh’, and viewed all of the Maharana’s ‘paintings in the old style’ of
‘almost all the brave ancestors he had’.33 Though they found that there was ‘little of
nature in the old painting [it] being painted in the old conventional style, face in profile
and feet turned in the same direction’, they nevertheless copied
235
it exactly, ‘as His Highness wants to preserve this style’.34 Further, they received
advice on Pratap Singh’s objects from a scholar (pandit) at court, viewed his armour,
and used a local model, ‘a true knight of old’.35 Likewise, for his portrait of Shivaji, Ravi
Varma seems to have consulted historical images and texts, many of which had been
reproduced in European publications. Equestrian portraits of Shivaji had been published
in Louis Mathieu Langlés’s Monuments anciens et modernes de l’Hindoustan (Ancient
and modern monuments of India), 1821, and in Adolphe Philibert Dubois de Jancigny
and Xavier Raymond’s Inde (India), 1845 (Image 8.4). Akin to these illustrations, Ravi
Varma drew Shivaji in an equestrian portrait; however, he dynamically turned Shivaji
and his horse towards the viewer, in a dexterous display of foreshortening, with the fort
shown in receding perspective via the zig-zagging path. Ravi Varma also painted the
face—the most important part of a portrait—in precisely the same manner as the
equestrian prints as well as other circulating portraits. By consulting works like Robert
Orme’s bustlength depiction of Shivaji in Historical Fragments in 1805 (Image 8.5) or its
predecessor by François Valentijn (1724–1726), Ravi Varma would have been following
an ‘old conventional style’ understood as close to Shivaji’s historical likeness.36 It is
possible that Ravi Varma would have been able to access the seventeenth-century
Mughal or Deccan portraits on which these prints were based. These portraits of Shivaji
had been produced in the Deccan for commercial trade and collated, alongside other
portraits of renowned kings and military leaders, into albums for sale; a few remain in
European collections (Image 8.6).37 In his Historical Fragments, Orme noted that he
had requested an original painting from the late eighteenth-century British resident at
the Maratha court in Pune, Charles Warre Malet. Yet Malet’s ‘endeavours’, he wrote,
‘have been hitherto unsuccessful to procure any picture of Shiwajee’, which suggests
that a Maratha portrait of Shivaji was not in circulation in the late eighteenth century,
even in such close proximity to where he had lived.38 The Langlés and Jancigny prints
(Image 8.4) were also based on a painting though it had been commissioned by the
Italian adventurer Niccolo Manucci. He hired an artist named Mir Muhammad who
worked in the Mughal emperor Shah Alam’s court; this album returned with Manucci to
Europe (Image 8.7). Mir Muhammad copied ‘all the kings and princes [of the Mughal
court], together with the portraits of the rulers
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Holly Shaffer
Image 8.4 Sewadji [Shivaji], engraving on paper, 8 x 5 inches, in Dubois de Jancigny

and Xavier Raymond, L’Univers: Histoire et description de tous les peoples: Inde [The
Universe: History and Description of All People: India] (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1845), no.
56 Source: Robert J. Del Bontà Collection, FSA A2014.06, Freer Gallery of Art and
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of
Robert J. Del Bontà, 2014 and 2015, Augustin Francois Lemaitre,
FSA_A2014.06_2.076.
over Bijapur and Gulkhandah, of some of the chief Hindu princes, and of other famous
generals’ from originals in the royal palace, which he claimed were ‘veritable’
portraits.39 In Manucci’s painting, Shivaji is shown astride a white horse, carrying a long
sword, the famous Bhavani, in his right hand. He wears a golden turban, and a gold
striped, pink and white floral jama with pointed and curled shoes. There are a number of
layered rocks at the top of the hill, which perhaps reference one of Shivaji’s forts.
237
Image 8.5 Sevaji [Shivaji], engraving on paper, in Robert Orme, Historical Fragments of
the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes, and of the English Concerns in Indostan (London:
F. Wingrave, 1805) Source: British Library, London © The British Library Board, General
Reference Collection G.4275.
While this painting is an equestrian portrait, the depiction of the face shares a common
prototype with other portraits of Shivaji, such as one made for a Dutchman in the
Deccan before 1707 (see Image 8.640 as well as other Deccan portraits that were
housed in private collections such as Image 8.13) or sold on the market and used as
designs for the European prints mentioned earlier in this section.41 Each of these
paintings conforms to the ‘old conventional style’ that Ravi Varma applied to the Mewar
painting of the Maharana of Udaipur but in relation to Mughal portraiture. Shivaji’s face
is static, in profile, and his body turned to a three-quarter view. The background, when
there is one, consists of a plane of colour, a turbulent sky, and spare ground. Yet, Ravi
Varma translated the ‘old conventional’ Mughal ‘style’ of these portraits into that of
contemporary European
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Image 8.6 Portrait of Shivaji, ink, opaque watercolour, and gold on paper, 14.7 x 7
centimetres, from an album of Portraits of Indian Princes, Golconda, India, 1680–1687
Source: British Museum, London, 1974,0617,0.11.12 © The Trustees of the British
Museum.
oil painting, including an attention to shading, perspective, picturesque greenery,

naturalism, and motion. Ravi Varma also simplified Shivaji’s dress, depicting him in
humble white muslin rather than the rich patterned garments represented in the
paintings and reproduced in the prints. The scene also recalls James Grant Duff’s 1826
account of Shivaji going to meet Afzal Khan, indicating the likelihood that Ravi Varma
consulted colonial histories and other literary and visual sources. Duff related that
Shivaji put on a steel chain cap and chain armour under his turban and cotton gown,
concealed a crooked dagger, or beechwa, in his right sleeve, and on the fingers of his
left hand he fixed a wagnakh, a treacherous weapon

239
Image 8.7 Mir Muhammad, Sevaji [Shivaji], folio 39, opaque watercolour on paper, 38.5
centimetres, in Niccolo Manucci (1638–1717), Histoire de l’Inde depuis Tamerlank
jusquà Orangzeb [History of India from Tamerlane to Aurangzeb] (1678–1686) Source:
Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie,
RESERVEPETFOL-OD-45.
well known among Mahrattas. Thus accoutered, he slowly descended from the fort.42
This is similar to the seventeenth-century court poet Paramananda writing in his

Shivabharata: ‘The enemy Afzal saw that hero / As he came down the mountain.’43
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Holly Shaffer
Ravi Varma combined historical Mughal and modern European methods of depiction
and reference in his portrait of Shivaji; yet he also subtly infused the image with a hero’s
divinity. This mixture included potent regional allusions that evoke a mythic Shivaji
similar to the Shivakavya manuscript (see Image 8.3). For instance, his portrait
corresponds with depictions of Khandoba, a form of Shiva who protects farming and
herding communities and whose temple is at Jejuri in Maharashtra. In small bronze
figures or plaques often purchased at a pilgrimage site and installed in a home shrine,
or devghar, Khandoba is worshipped as a fierce warrior astride a horse, often
accompanied by his wife Malsara.44 Khandoba was also the subject of late nineteenth-
century chromolithographs, such as a print published by the Chitrashala Press, Poona,
where he is shown as an equestrian warrior with his wife, actively defeating the demons
Malla and Mani, who cow underfoot (Image 8.8). They wear local costume and inhabit
the lush region of the Deccan plateau, its hills receding in stacked formation behind
palm trees and bushes. A later print published by the Bombay New Press (1890) also
depicts Khandoba, but as Mantri, an incarnation of the king’s minister, indicating a
fluidity between God and man in the popular imagination.45 Shivaji’s equestrian portrait
is also reminiscent of Vishnu’s tenth avatar, Kalki, who, on a horse or leading a horse,
will return as a saviour to the earth when necessary.46 Tilak recognized that Ravi
Varma’s painting was an interpretation of Shivaji that differed from other known,
historical portraits. ‘This painting [by Varma],’ he wrote, ‘takes the view of 18th-century
politics.… Looking at [it] one immediately thinks of the whole … of the great warrior. So
he must be congratulated.’47 In the portrait, Ravi Varma fused man and god, history
and myth, and Mughal, European, and Maratha aesthetics, which Tilak identified with
the different forces in ‘18th-century politics’ and the mixtures that composed ‘the
whole … of the great warrior’. Such mixtures also point to a fundamental tension in the
art of portraiture between the temporal identity of the person being depicted and the
qualities represented in his or her character. In an essay that considered the ‘traditional
conceptions of ideal portraiture’ and their relationship with modern, naturalistic ones, the
early twentieth-century art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy decided that ‘it is the
former Man, the God, that was to be represented in the ideal portrait envisaged by
tradition; the latter and animal-man that is represented in our art’.48 This classic division
draws attention to the ideal portrait,
241
Image 8.8 Khandoba and Malsara, Chitrashala Press, Poona, 1880s, chromolithograph
on paper, 17.3 x 13.3 inches Source: Anil Relia Collection, Ahmedabad.
representative of the soul or spirit, and the realistic or mimetic portrait, representative of
man’s likeness that Ravi Varma managed to contain in his portrait of Shivaji.49
A Tension between Typology and a ‘Realistic Effect’ Despite the popularity of Ravi

Varma’s depiction of Shivaji, a critic writing in the Mahratta in January 1896 was not
completely satisfied (see Image 8.1). He thought it lacking ‘in realistic effect’. Though
the picture ‘is conceived
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in his happiest style and depicts Shivaji in a most interesting and touching position’,
rather than a generic fortress in the background, ‘we wish the eminent painter had
selected for this portrait one of the noble fortresses actually in existence. A likeness of
Raigad or Pratapgad’, for instance, ‘would … have greatly enhanced the value of the
picture by its realistic effect’. Given the movement to restore such forts and the
imminent Shivaji festival at the fortress of Raigad, this critique had context. However,
the reviewer sought physiognomic traits alongside historical likeness in the portrait. He
continued: ‘The expression of the hero’s face … is rather mild and does not, we think,
represent a sturdy Maratha face such as Shivaji must have had. A little more of
sternness would have set the face beautiful indeed.’50 The critic sought a true
portrait.51 In imagining what that might be, he wished to bring together the specificity of
Shivaji’s life, look, and deeds, with what he understood as a generic Maratha ‘type’.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, such a type had been defined, and classified,
photographically and textually, in colonial publications. Such works garnered ‘scientific’
data about Indian people and culture, alongside geography, climate, and statistics, for
the purposes of colonial control, relying on quickly codified, and often negative,
summaries of groups of people.52 For instance, James Grant Duff’s 1826 description of
Shivaji is specific but veers into typology: ‘He was a man of small stature, and of an
active rather than strong make; his countenance was handsome and intelligent; he had
very long arms in proportion to his size, which is reckoned a beauty among
Mahrattas.’53 This type was repeated as a generalization in The People of India (1860–
1880), a multi-volume ethnologic colonial publication produced for a British India Office
that documented and classified the castes and cultures of India in the medium of
photography and letterpress.54 Two Marathas from Indore were depicted in a
photograph alongside their description as ‘usually short, stout, active figures, capable of
great exertion, particularly on horseback, and they are excellent riders’ (Image 8.9).
What the Mahratta critic took for a want of sternness, John Forbes Watson in The
People of India determined ‘a wily, uncertain disposition, with no abstract love of truth …
he is patient, hardy, and brave, devoted to his leader or to his friend, and with much
national spirit’.55 Over time, these types of descriptions became more detailed, racist,
and ‘scientifically’ quantified, such as through anthropometry.56
243
Yet, in the 1914 May–June issue of the monthly magazine Suvarnamala, published in
Bombay and dedicated to the ‘Races and Tribes of India’, the collector, editor, and
publisher P. V. Mawjee aligned the portrait with the type towards a positive outcome of
self-reliance (Image 8.10). The photograph is of a specific Maratha prince, Fatehsingh
Bhonsle, ‘the brother of the Raja of Akalkot with the Maratha attendants’, which appears
to merge well-known photographic portraits of the prince with the staged group setting
of a typological photograph set against
Image 8.9 Mahrattas, in J. Forbes Watson, The People of India: A Series of

Photographic Illustrations, With Descriptive Letterpress, Of the Races and Tribes of
Hindustan, vol. 7, no. 371 (London: C. Whiting Beaufort House, Strand, 1874), albumen
print, 24.5 x 33.3 centimetres (full page); 15.4 x 11.7 centimetres (photo) Source: The
People of India, FSA A1990.03, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Purchase, 1990, John Forbes
Watson and John William Kaye, FSA_A1990.03_7.371.
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Holly Shaffer
a painted picturesque backdrop. The description is also classificatory, repeating aspects

of the information detailed in The People of India noted earlier: The Maratha chiefs …
settled in their own country bear a much better character, being sober, industrious and
encouragers of agriculture. The soldiery so much resemble the chiefs that individuals of
the two classes might change places without any striking impropriety…. The Maratha
soldiery love war. In battle they are active, hardy, vigilant and they have the greatest
confidence in their horses. The Maratha peasantry have some pride in the triumphs of
their nation....57
Contrary to many of the colonial descriptions, this one is positive. When read alongside
the opening quotation to the magazine, the text takes on a nationalist tone: ‘The
redemption of the race is in the originality of individuals.’58 Here the entire ‘race’,
understood as castes that constituted the population of Bombay, was conscripted into
the nationalist movement. Any generic individual had the potential to become a named
leader. Did the Mahratta critic of Raja Ravi Varma’s portrait wish to see Shivaji as an
aggregate of all Marathas, or all Indians, as Mawjee’s text implies of the individual’s
potential in Suvarnamala? In 1908, the historian and collector V. K. Rajwade came to a
related conclusion: Shivaji could mirror the style and employment of multiple Indian
groups while maintaining a singular heroic persona. In a short yet insightful Marathi
essay that he published in D. B. Parasnis’s Itihas Sangraha (Collection of history), he
drew attention to a Hindu temple in Malvan, a fortified port on the west coast of India. In
1695, Rajaram Maharaj constructed this temple, which contained a stone sculpture of
his father, Shivaji Maharaj, marking out the first Maratha king as a deified hero (Image
8.11). A ‘port image’, it revealed Shivaji to be ‘a fisherman and sailor’s king’. ‘His body is
hardy, athletic and toned … the legs and feet are like the fisherman’s, the full chest and
broad wrists are like the sailor’s....’59 Shivaji was a man of the people, astutely
changing dress, for example, according to region and circumstance, such as to naval
dress at port. Rajwade credited Shivaji’s appearance to the sculptors: ‘If the artists did
not draw Shivaji’s boundlessness in the manner of skills from the fisherman’s short and
squat fashion in this place only, if not from there, then from whom?’60
245
Image 8.10 Marathas and Maratha Women, in ‘Races and Tribes of India, Part II’,
Suvarnamala 6, nos. 56–57 (May–June 1915), no. 7; edited and published by
Purshotam Vishram Mawjee Source: Gokhale Magazine Hall, Pune.
Rajwade considered this image from Malvan to be a portrait. He surmised that Shivaji’s
son Rajaram Maharaj would not have accepted it otherwise. Yet, he acknowledged that
‘at present’, in the early twentieth century, two different images were also known and
consistently reproduced. Originating in printed European books, they were copies of
Mughal paintings and portrayed Shivaji in ‘Muslim’ dress. These included two well-
known prints of Shivaji that I noted Raja Ravi Varma could have consulted for his
portrait. The first was from Orme’s Historical Fragments, 1805 (Image 8.5), and the
second from Jancigny and Raymond’s Inde, 1845, which also shows Shivaji in ‘Muslim’
dress in procession to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s court, though the image was
not printed in Rajwade’s article (Image 8.4). In Rajwade’s account, just as Shivaji took
on the costume of coastal fishermen and sailors, here he took on the garb of Mughals.
Rajwade’s comparison of original sources offers a wily and everchanging notion of the
portrait, echoing of Shivaji’s ingenuity. It shows a remarkable flexibility, especially when
the two prints accompanying his article are compared (see Images 8.4–8.5). Side by
side, they do not appear
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Image 8.11 M. V. Dhurandhar, Shivaji’s Stone Sculpture from Malvan, February 1906,
lithograph after a drawing on paper, illustrating V. K. Rajwade, ‘Shivaji’s Image
(Pratima) from Malvan’, in Itihas sangraha aitihasik safur lekh [Collection of history:
expanded historical writings; in Marathi], ed. D. B. Parasnis, vol. 1 (1908), 1–4. Source:
Deccan College Library, Pune.
like, or even as identifying images of a single person. Shivaji and the artists are given
the leeway to have strategically altered his appearance, even to conform to different
‘types’, and remain true. Rajwade’s methodology, based on that of the German historian
Leopold von Ranke’s systematic collection and comparison of original source material
to determine chronological histories, depended on locating and accruing documents. In
this instance, these sources amounted to three images—two European prints after
Mughal paintings and a Hindu temple sculpture—that led to his deduction about the
variability of Shivaji’s portrait.61
247
Other historians, such as D. B. Parasnis who edited the journal in which Rajwade
published his essay, also looked to historical sources to ascertain Shivaji’s portrait, but
rather than collating competing versions of Shivaji’s portrait, they modernized historical
ones.62 Indeed, Rajwade, Parasnis, and Mawjee were part of a widespread movement
in western India that sought to revive the texts and images of the past in order to
incentivize the present to resist British colonialism. Parasnis stated simply that ‘it is
important to publish great historical people’s old pictures’.63 While both Parasnis and
Mawjee republished older works, such as in Parasnis’s Marathi journal Itihas Sangraha,
they also commissioned new ones from contemporary artists who were steeped in
colonial artistry, such as the rising star of the J. J. School of Art in Mumbai, M. V.
Dhurandhar (1867–1944), and published them, such as in Mawjee’s Marathi magazine
Suvarnamala. Each issue of Suvarnamala was devoted to a single person, saint, or
literary narrative, and contained relevant illustrations. In 1914, Mawjee devoted an
entire issue to Shivaji (Image 8.12). In the introductory text, the author wrote that the
cover portrait was a ‘three coloured picture’ (chromolithograph) that ‘shows Shivaji-
Maharaj at the height of his glory with the proud walls of Rayagad his capital in the
back-ground’.64 This picture seemed to respond to the Mahratta critique of the generic
fort in Raja Ravi Varma’s portrait of Shivaji, replacing it with a specific one, at Raigad.
The writer further stressed the importance of the historical source for art. Dhurandhar’s
picture was ‘an exact representation of an old picture of Shivaji’, which was a Deccan
painting that happened to be located in Mawjee’s collection (Image 8.13).65 However,
Mawjee chose not to reproduce the original painting, ascribed to the Sultanate court in
Bijapur, but rather had Dhurandhar reinterpret it in a popular European academic style,
merging verified original materials with a naturalistic aesthetic being promoted at the
J. J. School of Art, where Dhurandhar had been a student, then painting teacher and
headmaster.66 From its inception in 1856, the school had promoted a reinvigoration of
training in Indian ‘craft’ and European ‘fine art’ to improve native ‘taste’, which
connected intuitive, scientific, and moral instruction in the school.67 As Partha Mitter
has examined, the art school struggled between its twin precepts of training in flat
ornament associated with Indian design and
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Holly Shaffer
Image 8.12 M. V. Dhurandhar, Shri Shivaji Maharaj, in ‘Shiv-Bharat’, Suvarnamala 5,

no. 42 (March 1914), cover, edited and published by Purshotam Vishram Mawjee
Source: Deccan College Library, Pune.
the applied arts, and the illusionism of western naturalism, associated with European
fine arts. Dhurandhar, particularly under Mawjee’s patronage, fused the Indian fine art of
painting with that of European art. In his portrait of Shivaji (Image 8.12), he updated the
opaque watercolour medium that his earlier source (Image 8.13) used to oil paint and
added depth and background replete with a landscape of trees and the rising
architectural fort. He also infused the formal pose in which Shivaji stands in the Bijapuri
painting with movement; the feet twist and the dress flutters to insinuate action without
depriving the figure of the critical identifying features of the source: the face and pose in
profile. This was a ‘realistic’ but Indianrooted ‘effect’, akin to Raja Ravi Varma’s
portrayal of Shivaji but even more firmly situated in a verified historical source. Mawjee’s
commitment to this type of historicist contemporary art is clear from his commission
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Image 8.13 Portrait of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (1674–1680), Deccani, Bijapur, circa
1675 CE, opaque watercolour and gold on paper, folio 37.8 x 23.5 centimetres; painting
22.3 x 14.5 centimetres Source: Courtesy of the Trustees of the Chhatrapati Shivaji
Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, formerly Prince of Wales Museum of Western India,
Mumbai (not to be reproduced without prior permission of the Trustees).
of a portrait of Shivaji from Ravi Varma.68 Ravi Varma’s brother Raja Raja Varma noted
their meetings in his diary including the resources he offered them, which included
original paintings on display in his museum in Bombay, as well as historical notes.69 In
November 1903, Raja Varma wrote that Mawjee was ‘writing a history of Shivaji the
great Mahratta hero’, that he had ‘visited all the scenes connected with his exploits’, and
had ‘good pictures and picture books’ connected to the king that he would lend them for
their painting.70
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Holly Shaffer
Mawjee’s attention to the past was linked to its continuation. Within Suvarnamala’s
covers, he emphasized both historical manuscript and contemporary magazine
production as ways to capture the ‘spirit’ of Indian art.71 It was precisely this spirit that
defined Dhurandhar’s ‘praiseworthy’ pictures according to a writer from the illustrated
periodical Navayug (New age) in 1913. He opined: ‘A great poet opens out the essence
of an object and makes it an ornament of the world…. The painter does the same.’72 If
Coomaraswamy considered the binary between the ‘ideal portrait’ of God, or the soul
‘envisaged by tradition’, and the realistic or mimetic ‘animal-man’ portrait that Ravi
Varma’s portrait of Shivaji emblematized,73 then this author played with the relationship
between the verified portrait of a man and his essence or character, his type, that he
believed Dhurandhar had perfected. Ravi Varma and Dhurandhar as well as the
collectors and publishers Parasnis, Mawjee, and Rajwade negotiated with historical
portraits and devotional icons, European aesthetics, and colonial typological practices to
develop a modern yet historical hero, a hero-icon. Parasnis wrote that it was their ‘duty
and … concern’ to promote a leader.74 Mawjee reiterated this notion in the motto of the
1914 issue of Suvarnamala: ‘The redemption of the race is in the originality of
individuals.’75
A Portrait to Incite Revolution The multivalence of Shivaji’s portrait—as a king cast in a

Mughal or Deccani mode; as an incarnation of an iconic Hindu god; as a leader of the
humble, like the fishermen, as well as the type of the hardy Maratha warrior; and as a
model of European naturalism and historicism—carried over from an image of emulation
to one of action. A Bombay police notice from Sholapur, 6 November 1906, reports: The
Pandharpur Industrial Exhibition was opened … on the 20th October. The Chief [of
Miraj] delivered a speech exhorting the people to shake off their lethargy and emulate
other countries in their efforts to foster home industries. The Honourable … B G Tilak
… [was] present, but did not speak. Financially the exhibition is a complete failure and
I look upon it as a pretext for assembling in Pandharpur a host of speakers to carry on a
propaganda in Tilak’s interest. Some
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of the exhibits are very good specimens of Native handicraft, but in the majority of cases
the material used is not of country manufacture. Nearly every stall displays pictures of
Shivaji and in the Fine Arts Gallery I counted seven paintings describing episodes of
his life including Afzul Khan’s death depicted, of course, to suit the Brahman version of
the incident.…76
Shivaji’s portrait moved in a wide sphere of anticolonial activity and became an

incentive for resistance. His portrait was not only exhibited in galleries, but also in
revolutionary shrines. In Nasik before 1906, the British reported that there was an
association called the Mitra Mela run by the Hindu nationalists Ganesh and Vinayak
Savarkar. The report notes a photograph as evidence that showed members grouped
around Savarkar ‘in which four or five pictures of Shivaji … are prominently displayed’.
Before these images, Savarkar spoke, according to the police, ‘to arouse the passion
for independence and hatred of the foreign rulers of the country and to suggest how by
means of mental training and physical exercises, preparation might be made for
successful revolt’.77 According to a testimony by one Chatterbhuj, Savarkar used
Shivaji’s image as an icon, taking an insurgent to a room and closed the door from the
inside. He then placed a lamp with ghee in it on the mantelpiece, and put a picture of
Shivaji on it. He poured water into the hollow of the deponent’s palm.… He told him his
duties were to be ready to wage war against the Government with such weapons as he
might have, sacrificing life, family and possession.78
By 1916, unsurprisingly, the British had declared that ‘no pictures of humans could be
carried and no names other than gods could be invoked in procession’.79 But what if
Shivaji’s portrait fit into both categories? In this it is similar, albeit in opposition, to the
Bengali artist Abanindranath Tagore’s nationalist symbol of Bharat Mata—Mother India
—an ethereal four-armed mother goddess of unity across region and religion towards
peace. She, like Shivaji, is a variegated figure, with many other iconographic
representations as Sumathi Ramaswamy has considered.80 Bharat Mata emerged out
of a complex Bengali nationalist aesthetic that found a voice
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in the arts in E. B. Havell at the Calcutta School of Art and the paintbrush of
Abanindranath Tagore. With the critic, collector, and curator Ananda Coomaraswamy,
they sought to form a new Indian aesthetic that turned to the poetic imagination,
interweaving a tradition of Indian art and craft with a pan-Asian sentiment.81 Parul
Dave-Mukherji has described this as an idealistic and transcendentalist Indian aesthetic
that sought to differentiate itself from ‘Western materialism’ in its nationalist intent.82
Though similarly steeped in nationalism, the aesthetic that emerged out of western
India, specifically related to Poona and Bombay, was charged with visual adaptations
and reuses, rather than rejections, of ‘Western materialism’, through the portrait and
biography of a masculine, warrior-hero that erupted in nationalist violence. This eclectic
Maratha aesthetic mined its accumulated mixture of regional as well as trans-regional
traditions and techniques as a source of strength and flexibility.83 The paintings at the
base of many of these prints were produced in Mughal, Deccan, and Maratha contexts
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the nineteenth century, artists modified
them in dialogue with the European art of portraiture, colonial typological practices, and
the technology of chromolithography. Western Indian nationalists recalibrated these
traditions of portraiture to enact ‘the redemption of the race’ through ‘the originality of
individuals’, in this case through the image of Shivaji Maharaj.
Conclusion: A Hero-Icon In this essay, I have detailed the history of Shivaji’s portrait to
understand its popularity and enduring iconicity as well as to push back against the
contemporary use of Shivaji’s portrait as a symbol—and historical precedent—for a
Hindu nation. For, seen from the present, the portrait holds within it a host of
contradictions that Rajwade’s short Marathi essay highlighted.84 The most popular
portrait of Shivaji is the one by Raja Ravi Varma, which succeeded, I have argued,
because it offered a multi-faceted view of the leader—Mughal king, Hindu god, and
Maratha warrior. But it is undoubtedly based on reproductions of a Mughal portrait of
Shivaji, rather than, say, the fishermen’s iconic sculpture. Is this significant? Should the
‘Muslim’ style of portrayal, as understood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, temper the image’s interpretation as a ‘Hindu’ hero-icon, in the present? Many
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
253
western Indian nationalists identified Shivaji’s portrait as one to specifically rally Hindus
across caste lines, but others also saw its potential to unify all of India. Ravi Varma’s
portrait is purposefully multivalent and strategic: Hindu and Muslim, high and low caste,
militant and diplomatic, colonial and anticolonial, hero and icon. The one certainty in the
history of Shivaji’s portrait, though, is that it is not secular. Shivaji’s portrait doesn’t
follow the art-historical trajectory that Coomaraswamy, for example, laid out in his early
twentieth-century essay on ideal portraiture.85 Coomaraswamy pointed to a moment in
which the secular split off from the religious, when the medieval, idealistic icon
transitioned into the modern, naturalistic portrait. Part of Coomaraswamy’s goal in that
essay was to unearth the differences between secular and religious portraiture by
comparing European and Indian examples, or ‘Christian and Oriental’ in his terms. He
tapped into a longstanding dilemma at the core of art history, which is the status of the
Christian icon in a secular European discipline.86 In that context, the iconic and the
profane are often situated in a binary relationship; indeed, the words—religious and
secular—themselves are dependent on each other for their contrasting definitions.
Shivaji’s portrait is in dialogue with a history of art that differentiated secular from
religious portraiture, yet even as the western Indian artists and collectors who
participated in making the image incorporated some of these European conventions,
they did not seem bound by the underpinning construct. That being said,
Coomaraswamy and the other scholars whom I have discussed approached the subject
of portraiture from a secular, academic position. Rajwade, for instance, following
Ranke’s method of gathering and comparing facts, laid out three images (two European
prints and one Hindu sculpture) in his essay on Shivaji’s portrait to come to an objective
conclusion. Nevertheless, there were critics of such purported objectivity. Sir Jadunath
Sarkar, one of the most prominent historians in the first half of the twentieth century in
India, was frustrated with historians at the institution Rajwade founded in Pune, the
Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal. He found that the Mandal historians’ partisanship
towards ‘Maratha national sentiments’ and ‘pride in a particular identity’ tainted their
historical writing. Sarkar contrasted their emotional attention to certain subjects with his
own positivist approach of ‘impartial objectivity’ that he believed centred his own
scholarship.87 Rajwade’s method was not
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enough for Sarkar—it was too sentimental—which of course points to any academic’s
blind spot. What are our partialities and our impartialities? What do they allow us to do
as scholars, and what becomes inaccessible? As an American art historian similarly
trained in German arthistorical methods to these early twentieth-century Indian
historians, I have also approached this subject from a secular standpoint. I have
gathered as many sources as I could find, have laid them out, and have tried to offer as
balanced and dispassionate an analysis as possible to see the many aspects of
Shivaji’s portrait in order to diffuse its potential as an instigator of religious unrest. But
there is a politics to such a position, one that can seem to disavow the emotional, which
Sarkar believed the Mandal historians had allowed to seep into their work. Shivaji’s
portrait is potent. People care about it: from those feelings of pride and devotion to
those unwieldy antagonisms that have proved intensely violent. As an art historian,
I have to admit that the fervour of art sits within the arthistorical discipline, akin to how
the artists and patrons aligned the god and the man in Shivaji’s portrait.
Notes 1. Somya Lakhani, ‘High Time: Likely Changes in Shivaji Statue Design’, Indian
Express, 19 August 2018, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/maharashtrashivaji-
statue-noida-studio-ram-v-sutar-5313669/ (accessed 10 February 2020). On
monumental sculptures of deities and people, see Kajri Jain, Gods in the Time of
Democracy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). 2. Namrata Kolachalam, ‘The
Statue That’s Splitting Mumbai’, Roads and Kingdoms, 13 July 2018,
https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2018/the-statue-thats-splittingmumbai/ (accessed 10
February 2020). 3. The Mahratta, 12 January 1896. The Mahratta newspaper was one
of Vishnushastri Chiplunkar’s ventures to stimulate a nationalist era through Marathi and
English prose. From 1874 to 1881, he opened the Arya Bhushan Press, which
published the English Mahratta and the Marathi Kesari newspapers; edited and wrote
the Marathi literary journal Nibandhamala; and opened the Chitrashala Press, which
focused on visual images. See N. C. Kelkar, ‘Vishnushastri Chiplunkar’, in Indian
Worthies (Bombay: Manoranjak Grantha Prasarak Mandali, 1906), 119–163; and Veena
Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India Under
Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2014), 209. 4. James Douglas, Book of Bombay
(Bombay: Bombay Gazette Steam Press, 1883), 433. 5. Richard Temple, Oriental
Experience (London: J. Murray, 1883), 378–379.
255
6. Ibid. 7. The English East India Company entered Indian markets in 1601; in 1757,
they gained control of Bengal and also held territories in Bombay and Madras. With the
defeat of the Marathas in 1818, the British controlled much of India; after the the Indian
Rebellion of 1857–1858, the British Crown took colonial control from the Company as
the Raj. 8. See James Fergusson and Major Gill, ‘View in the Valley of the Taptee’, in
100 Stereoscopic Illustrations of Western India (London: Cundall Downes, 1864). The
‘tiger claw’ weapon is known as a waghnakh; two of Shivaji’s were given to the British
and one to P. V. Mawjee by Shivaji’s descendants. See D. B. Parasnis, Satara, Brief
Notes (Bombay: Tukaram Javaji, 1909), 39–42. 9. V. G. Khobrekar (ed.), Shivaji
Memorials: The British Attitude (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1974), 8. 10.
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and
Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 3–42. 11. See
Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: The British Library,
2008), 83–85. 12. Bal Gangadhar Tilak was part of a diverse movement for
independence. Rosalind O’Hanlon has outlined three strands of nationalism that
flourished in nineteenthcentury Marathi-speaking territories in western India. First there
were anti-caste activists like Mahatma Jotirao Phule, who advocated for lower castes
and against Brahmin domination. There were also reformists, like Justice M. G. Ranade,
who identified a pluralist, confederate model in the Maratha past to unify diverse
religious and political groups in the present. Finally, there were conservative Hindu
nationalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak who promoted the local cultures of Maharashtra,
including its religious traditions and Brahmin histories, often by way of contrast to others
such as Muslim ones, and de-emphasized precolonial integration. See Rosalind
O’Hanlon, ‘Maratha History as Polemic: Low Caste Ideology and Political Debate in Late
Nineteenth-Century Western India’, Modern Asian Studies 17, no. 1 (1983): 1–33, 3–4.
13. Paul Courtright, Ganesha: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 202–226. 14. Reported in Times of India, 2 September 1895,
quoted in Richard I. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in
Maharashtra (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 77. 15. Cashman, The
Myth of the Lokamanya, 77–87. See also N. C. Kelkar, Life and Times of Lokamanya
Tilak (Delhi: Anupama Publications, 1987), 279–286; and Courtright, Ganesha, 226–
247. 16. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya, 3. Tilak also turned to eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century writers, such as Mahipati, who had sought to draw together Shivaji’s
political project with the devotional traditions of Maharashtra. See Prachi Deshpande,
Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007), 47. On this subject, also see Christian
256
17. 18.
19.
20. 21. 22. 23. 24.
25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
Holly Shaffer
Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and A. R. Kulkarni and N. K. Wagle
(eds.), Region, Nationality and Religion (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1999). Novetzke,
Religion and Public Memory, 49–50. Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, Nibhandamala [A
garland of essays], vol. 1 (Pune: Varada Books, 1993 [1874–1881]), 466–468. There is
a history to the deification of heroes in Maharashtra and across India. On Maharashtra,
see Günther Sontheimer, Pastoral Deities in Western India, trans. Anne Feldhaus (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and on Rajasthan, see Isabella Nardi, ‘Between
Rajasthani Painting and Oral Traditions: A Representation of the Epic of Devnarayan’ in
Ratnamala: Garland of Gems; Indian Art Between Mughal, Rajput, Europe and Far
East, ed. Joachim K. Bautze and Rosa Maria Cimino (Ravenna: Edizioni del Girasole,
2010), 137–158. Anna C. Schultz, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional
Performance and Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6; see also
James W. Laine and S. S. Bahulkar, The Epic of Shivaji (Hyderabad: Orient Longman,
2001), 8; and Karline Marie McLain, ‘Chapter 4’, in ‘Whose Immortal Picture Stories?
Amar Chitra Katha and the Construction of Indian Identities’ (PhD dissertation,
Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas, Austin, 2005). H. A. Acworth, ‘The
Death of Abdulkhan at the Hands of Shiwaji Maharaja’, in The Ballads of the Marathas
(London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), 16–17. Laine and Bahulkar, Epic of
Shivaji, 100–104. Shivaji commissioned this poem to commemorate his coronation.
Ibid.; Shivabharata, 29th Adhyaya, Shloka 15–25. James Grant Duff, A History of the
Mahrattas, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1826), 297,
quoted in McLain, ‘Whose Immortal Picture Stories?’, 168. Purushottam, Shivakavya
(unpublished manuscript in the Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1821). I thank Dr Supriya
Sahasrabuddhe for roughly translating the Sanskrit verse. For Shivaji’s meeting with
Afzal Khan, see J. N. Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times (London: Longmans, Green, and
Co., 1920), 73; and S. Sen, Shiva Chhatrapati, Being a Translation of the Sabhasad
Bakhar with Extracts from Chitnis and Sivadigvijaya, with Notes (Calcutta: University of
Calcutta, 1920), 8–22. On the animal metaphors in this text, see Gijs Kruijtzer, ‘The
Fighting on the Wall: Animal Symbolism of the Deccan in a Eurasian Perspective’, in
The Visual World of Muslim India, ed. Laura E. Parodi (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 148,
160–162. Purushottam, Shivakavya. I thank Dr Supriya Sahasrabuddhe who roughly
translated the Sanskrit verse. Duff, A History of the Mahrattas, 297, quoted in McLain,
‘Whose Immortal Picture Stories?’, 168. Reported in Kesari, 28 April 1896, quoted in
Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya, 98. Reported in The Mahratta, 12 April 1896,
quoted in Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya, 98.
257
30. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya, 108–109. 31. Acworth, The Ballads of the
Marathas, 16–17. 32. English Records on Shivaji (1659–1682) (Poona: Shiva Charitra
Karyalaya, 1931), 73, letter 79, L’Escaliot’s letter, 28 January 1664, quoted in D. V.
Kale, ‘A Discussion of Shivaji’s Pictures’ [in Marathi], Tremasik 24, no. 2 (1943): 35. 33.
Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger (eds.), The Diary of C. Raja Raja Varma
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 30 March 1901–1 April 1901, 89–90. 34.
Ibid. 35. Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental
Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 194–197. 36. See ‘Shivaji
and Murad Baksh’, in Francois Valentijn, Oud en Nieuw OostIndien, … (Dordrecht:
Joannes van Braam, 1724–1726). Ravi Varma painted a bust of Shivaji, which has an
affinity with Valentijn and Orme’s prints and to a chromolithograph attributed to a Dutch
artist, entitled Der Heer Sevagi. A reproduction of Varma’s painting appeared adjacent
to the title page of H. G. Rawlinson’s Shivaji the Maratha (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1915). 37. Pauline Lunsingh-Scheurleer, ‘Indian Miniatures for Europe: The Dutch
Market in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, in Miniatur Geschichten: Die Sammlung
Indischer Malerei im Dresdner Kupferstich-Kabinett, ed. Monica Juneja and Petra
Kuhlmann-Hodick (Dresden: Sandstein, 2017), 55–67; and Marta Becherini, ‘Effigies in
Transit: Deccan Portraits in Europe at the Turn of the 18th Century’, Journal18 6 (Fall
2018), http://www.journal18.org/2979, DOI: 10.30610/6.2018.5. 38. D. B. Parasnis,
Savai Madhavarava Peshwyancha Darbara ani tya Veleche Pahile Ingraja Resident Sir
Charles Malet [The court of Peshwa Savai Madhavrao and the then English Resident
Sir Charles Malet; in Marathi] (Mumbai: Tukaram Javaji Nirnaysagar Press, ca. 1867),
75. 39. Niccolo Manucci, Storia do Mogor, trans. William Irvine, vol. 1 (London: John
Murray, 1907), liv. For the original manuscript, see Manucci, Storia do Mogor [History of
India from Tamerlane to Orangzeb], 1678–1686, National Library of France, Department
of Prints and Photography, RESERVEPETFOL-OD-45,
http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40357932t (accessed 17 February 2020). 40. The
inscriptions within the album ‘Portraits of Indian Princes’ are in Dutch. See the British
Museum catalogue information: acc. no. 1974,0617,0,11, and specifically folio 12 for
Shivaji. 41. Two albums of prominent Mughal and Deccan figures, produced circa 1680,
include portraits of Shivaji. Nicolaas Witsen purchased one album in Amsterdam in the
early 1680s; he became the director of the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie
(VOC; the Dutch East India Company) in 1693. See Malini Roy, 50 x India (Amsterdam:
Rijksmuseum, 2008), 66–67. 42. Duff, History of the Mahrattas, 1:172. 43. Laine and
Bahulkar, The Epic of Shivaji, 262.
258
Holly Shaffer
44. Sontheimer, Pastoral Deities in Western India, 185–205; and Cornelia Mallebrein,
Die Anderen Götter: Volks-und Stammesbronzen aus Indien [The other gods: Folk and
tribal bronzes from India] (Köln: Edition Braus, 1993). 45. Partha Mitter, ‘Mechanical
Reproduction and the World of the Colonial Artist’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 36,
nos. 1–2 (2002): 23–25. 46. Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Popular Indian
Art: Raja Ravi Varma and the Printed Gods of India (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 130–131. Shivaji’s portrait might also allude to the history of hero-stones
in the Deccan. See S. Settar and Günther-Dietz Sontheimer (eds.), Memorial Stones:
A Study of Their Origin, Significance and Variety (Dharwad: Institute of Indian Art
History, Karnataka University, 1982). 47. Mitter, Art and Nationalism, 412n82. 48.
Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘Traditional Conceptions of Ideal Portraiture’ (1939), in
Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 126. 49.
See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art,
trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1–16. 50. The
Mahratta, 12 January 1896. 51. The search for a true portrait of Shivaji fits within a
broader nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interest in recovering heroes, and their
faces. In nineteenthcentury Britain, writers contemplated the historical portrait of Jesus,
as well as of Boadicea, an ancient British queen. See Jefferson J. A. Gatrall, The Real
and the Sacred: Picturing Jesus in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2014); and Jodi Mikalachki, The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and
Nation in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998). Similar trends are seen in
the nineteenth-century German interest in earlier kings like Frederick the Great. See
Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in NineteenthCentury Berlin
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 52. On the relationship between
photography, anthropology, and colonialism, see Christopher Pinney, Photography and
Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); and Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories:
Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001). 53. Duff, A History of
the Marathas, 1:298. 54. John Forbes Watson (ed.), The People of India: A Series of
Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive Letterpress, of the Races and Tribes of
Hindustan (London: India Museum, 1868–1875). Catalogue information from the
Smithsonian Institution project: https://transcription.si.edu/project/6587 (accessed June
30, 2022). On the theoretical framing and devastating consequences of The People of
India project, as well as colonial photography as a whole, see Zahid Chaudhary,
Afterimage of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1–36; 107–
152; and Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 16–71. 55. John Forbes Watson, The
People of India, vol. 7 (London: India Museum, 1874); Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M.
Sackler Gallery Archives, 371.
259
56. See a description of the Kunbis, for example, in the Gazetteer of the Bombay
Presidency, vol. 18, part I, Poona (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1885), 285; and
Irawati Karve, Anthropometric Measurements of the Marathas (Poona: Deccan College,
1948). 57. P. V. Mawjee, Suvarnamala (Bombay: Lakshmi Art Printing Works, May–
June 1914), 2–3. 58. Ibid., inside cover. 59. V. K Rajwade, ‘Shivaji-chi Malvan yaitheel
pratima’ [Shivaji’s image from Malvan; in Marathi], Itihas Sangraha Aitihasik Safur Lekh
[Collection of history: expanded historical writings; in Marathi] 1 (1908): 1–4. This
published image is a drawing after the original sculpture made by the artist M. V.
Dhurandhar, perhaps from a photograph, in 1906. The image has been simplified, and
likely Brahminized. The long garland that adorns the Shivaji sculpture in Malvan seems
to have been transformed into the holy string, or janwar, that Brahmins wear. 60.
Rajwade, ‘Shivaji-chi Malvan yaitheel pratima’, 1–4. This ascription of Shivaji’s
sympathy with the fishermen takes on added meaning when considering their
contemporary plight in relation to Shivaji’s sculpture in fishing waters. 61. Regarding
Rajwade, see M. R. Kantak (ed.), Rajwade and His Thoughts (Pune: Bharat Itihas
Samshodhak Mandal, 1990); regarding history-writing and collecting practices, see
Deshpande, Creative Pasts, ch. 3 and 4. 62. For a short biography of D. B. Parasnis
and P. V. Mawjee, see Jadunath Sarkar, House of Shivaji (Hyderabad: Orient
Blackswan, 1978; e-edition, 2012 [1940]), ch. 22. On Mawjee, see Jyotindra Jain,
‘Bombay and Print’, Imagenaama, Quarterly Journal of the Civic Archives 1, no. 3
(2013): 12; and Jaya Dadkar, Dadasaheb Phadke: Kala ani Kartitva [Dadasaheb
Phadke: Art and duty] (Mumbai: Mouj Prakashan, 2010), 36. 63. Parasnis, Itihas
Sangraha, 10. 64. P. V. Mawjee, ‘Shri Shivaji Charitra’ [Biography of Shri Shivaji],
Suvarnamala, 1914, 1. 65. Ibid. 66. Mitter, Art and Nationalism, 90. 67. Ibid., 30–32. 68.
A Catalogue of Purshotam Vishram Mawjee Museum (For private circulation), Address:
19, Walkeshwar, Malabar Hill, Bombay, 6. 69. Neumayer and Schelberger, The Diary of
C. Raja Raja Verma, 185. 70. Ibid., 183. 71. P. V. Mawjee. ‘Ourselves’, Suvarnamala,
October 1913, 2. 72. ‘R. Dhurandhar and His Art of Painting’, Navayug [New Age]
(December 1913): 119–120. 73. Coomaraswamy, ‘Traditional Conceptions of Ideal
Portraiture’, 126. 74. Parasnis, Itihas Sangraha, 10. 75. Mawjee, Suvarnamala (May–
June 1914), inside cover. 76. From the Bombay Presidency Police Abstract of
Intelligence, 1906, reprinted in M. R. Palande and N. R. Phatak (eds.), Source Material
for a History of the Freedom Movement in India, collected from Bombay Government
Records (BHFM), vol. 2 (Mumbai: Government of Maharashtra, 1958), 614.
260
Holly Shaffer
77. From the Extract from the Special Bench Judgment given on pages 153–182 of
Secret Abstract, 1911, CID, Bombay, reprinted in BHFM, 395–396. 78. From the Times
on 25 May 1910, reprinted in BHFM, 444–445. There are other accounts that describe
portraits being used for veneration in this manner. According to Sir James Mackintosh,
an oil painting of Mahadji Scindia by the British artist James Wales, painted around
1792, was in use as an icon with offerings in Scindia’s Chhattri in Pune when he visited
in 1805. See D. B. Parasnis, Poona in Bygone Days (Bombay: The Times Press, 1921),
66–67. 79. Reported in Kesari, 29 August 1916, as quoted in Cashman, The Myth of the
Lokamanya, 88. 80. See Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping
Mother India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 81. For the history of the
nationalist movement and its relationship to art in Bengal, see Mitter, Art and
Nationalism; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists,
Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992); and Natasha Eaton, Colour, Art and Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013),
228–288. 82. Parul Dave-Mukherji, ‘Art History and Its Discontents in Global Times’, in
Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, ed. Aruna D’Souza and Jill Casid
(Williamstown: Clark Art Institute, 2014), 93–95. 83. Rabindranath Tagore and
Jawaharlal Nehru similarly proposed cosmopolitanism as ‘a strategy of anti-colonial
nationalism’. See Antoinette Burton, The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 36, quoted in Sonal Khullar, Worldly Affiliations:
Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930–1990 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2015), 25. Khullar argues that such a ‘cosmopolitan
stance, an anti-colonial nationalist and postcolonial gesture, was shared by a majority of
the artists and critics’ she surveys in her book about Indian modernism. ‘Rather than
embracing a timeless or ideal notion of national culture, they crafted a worldly identity
through which the relation between East and West was remade.’ 84. Rajwade, ‘Shivaji-
chi Malvan yaitheel pratima’. 85. Coomaraswamy, ‘Traditional Conceptions of Ideal
Portraiture’. 86. See Belting, Likeness and Presence. 87. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The
Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2015), 162–163.
Image 9.1 The goddess and her entourage designed by an artists’ group, Environmental
Art Collective, Barisha Club Durga Puja, Behala, Kolkata, 2010 Source: Photograph by
the author.
9 Can a Festival of a Goddess Be ‘Secular’? Tapati Guha-Thakurta
hat defines the secular in a cultural festival in Bengal that centres on the annual
homecoming of Goddess Durga?1 How may we read the rhetoric of secularization of
this event that has a long historical background and has become crucial to its
contemporary identity? In keeping with the title of this volume, a question mark
necessarily hovers around the nomenclature of the ‘secular’ and the extent to which it
may lend itself to the profile of a festival that has well outstripped its religiosity and
willed its transformation into Kolkata’s biggest public art event.2 Defying any easy
placement within an institutionally secure realm of either religion or art, and never fully
measuring up to the criterion of the secular, the Durga Pujas provide a powerful site for
the interrogation of each of these conceptual categories. I will be arguing that the
contemporary festival of Durga in Kolkata (and the ideas and forms it exports to Durga
Puja celebrations across Bengal and other big cities of India) offers itself not just as a
case study but as a constitutive ground in the dismantling of boundaries between
artistic, religious, and secular practices, allowing each of these to freely trespass into
each other’s domains. This sense of trespass is not one that comes from within the field
of festival art and its creative protagonists. It erupts more within the fields of scholarship
and disciplines such as art history and religious studies. It is in the spaces of these
disciplines that the need to redefine the normative domains of art, religion, and
secularity has gone hand-in-hand with the urgency of maintaining their separate
jurisdictions and their different rights and prerogatives.3 It is important, in this context, to
mark the coming of age of the field of South Asian visual studies and its tendentious
criss-crossing of the disciplines of art history, visual anthropology, and the study of
ritual, religion, and material cultures; and to situate my turn to the changed artistic
contemporary proclivities of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas within this shifting disciplinary
confluence in the initial decades of the twenty-first century. As a mega urban spectacle
that has been engaging with a spectacular array of art and craft productions, new visual
technologies, and social media, the city festival holds out an invitation to the field of
visual studies that is hard to resist. Here is a phenomenon that continuously defies the
normative institutional registers of both religion and art. There is no other goddess
(among Bengal’s growing divine pantheon) who so openly tests the sanctity of worship
within her festival. The steady evacuation of
Can a Festival of a Goddess Be ‘Secular’?
263
the festival’s religiosity has been a long-standing lament: one that keeps returning as
cultural nostalgia, social critique, and recently as the main tool of political onslaught of
the Hindu right-wing, represented by the ruling cohort of the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP). There is also no other goddess who so tantalizingly courts the worlds of
contemporary art, craft, and design (Image 9.1). Taking on the standing of the festival
as the biggest public art event of the city, one of the main points of my book was to lay
open the designation of art and artist in this sphere both as a set of insistent projections
and a mesh of incomplete formations. The festival, I have argued, can be located in that
fluid zone where art history becomes visual studies, where the institutional enclaves on
the one sphere give way to the open-ended zones of production and consumption of the
other.4 Crucial in this sphere of festival art are the elements of over-production and
surfeit, of popular reception and mass spectatorship, of ephemerality and destruction,
and the new challenges of archiving and documentation that the field is grappling with.
In this essay, I hope to take a few steps in another direction. Rather than just slotting
the festival as a chosen field for visual studies, it is important to make it also speak to
the transforming interests of art history, to the cultural politics of secularism, and to the
political field of mass festivities. To go with the arguments of Kajri Jain’s essay in this
volume, this would mean renegotiating a place for affect and devotion within the
academic field of art history, and for art and aesthetics within the visual worlds of
modern religion. Such a move, she has contended, brings a set of cacophonies and
disturbances within the enclaves of art and its histories, and makes way for a pantheon
of popular gods and goddesses to displace the existing gods of art history.5 There are
inevitable hurdles that come in the way of the transference of the registers of devotion
or aesthetics from one field to another, from religious studies to art history or from the
worlds of art to those of popular iconographies. The problem, I will argue, is further
compounded when there is a goddess such as Durga who consciously stands apart
from her kith and kin of popular prints, calendar imagery, or gigantic statuary;6 seeks an
alternative artistic connoisseurship; and forges special affective bonds with her
community of patrons, makers, and viewers. Following Sumathi Ramaswamy’s trysts
with the many new goddesses of modern India, we encounter here another mother
goddess who has left
264
Tapati Guha-Thakurta
behind her ancient hoary pasts to live a fully contemporary life, ‘whose simultaneous
claim to transcendent divinity and familial maternality undercuts any easy classification
as either “sacral” or “secular”’,7 and whose provocations increase as she wilfully propels
herself into the realms of art and politics. My prime concern in this essay is to look at the
specific ways in which Durga’s sacrality intersects with the many forms of her artistic
and political entanglements and reconstitutes the registers of affect within the space of
her annual cultural festival. What is entailed here is a process that is neither fully one of
‘secularization’, where the secular represses the religious but replicates its orders by
simply moving objects and practices from one realm to another, nor fully one of
‘profanation’, where the powers of the sacred are deactivated and neutralized as the
consecrated object undergoes different forms of ‘profane contagion’. 8 The threats of
desacralization are countered by modes of reanimation and creative appropriation—
whereby the goddess’ affective powers as an icon are never neutralized but
continuously recharged in her promiscuous embrace of everyday worlds of human
consumption and celebration. Much has been written about how, over a long history
stretching from the eighteenth century to the present, Bengalis have had a different
familial relationship with this warrior goddess whom they have domesticated and
transformed into mother and daughter, and to whose festival they have given many
innovative, artistic, and consumerist spins.9 What remains in need of a closer analysis
is the expanding communitarian and nonsectarian nature of the Bengali Durga Puja as it
evolved as a sarbojanin utsab (‘a festival for all’) and a public street celebration over the
course of the mid- and late twentieth century, even as the many embedded inequities of
caste and class hierarchies in the festival never went away. The inner community of
worship and the conducting of the ritual event was always set apart, not just from the
many artisanal castes, Muslim workforce, and subaltern groups of performers (the most
crucial among them, the dhakis or drummers) who contributed their art and labour to the
festival, but also from the larger anonymous mass publics that came together around
this annual event as it turned into an occasion for touring, viewing, and cross-religious
congregations.10 How effectively can we put to test the much-flaunted image of the
social inclusiveness of the Durga Pujas and
265
its embrace of all classes and religious communities within the ambit of its celebrations?
How has this larger sense of inclusiveness recently morphed into a more pointed
rhetoric about the anti-majoritarian secular nature of the Durga Pujas? Leaving aside
the matching of truth and claim, the force of this rhetoric becomes something to engage
with in itself, as it spills out of the contemporary print and social media, with Bengal’s
ruling party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) out to capitalize on the Hindutva brigade’s
non-comprehension of the avowedly secular cultural essence of this festival. When I set
out to write my ‘non-religious’, ‘artistic’ history of the contemporary festival, I too cited
the long history over which the ritual and liturgical domain of the Durga Pujas spilled into
a broader cultural ambience of sociability and festivity.11 In this essay, I wish to take on
more directly the vexed question of the ‘secular’ in the specific context of the current
cultural politics of the festival in Bengal. The tensions as well as the interface between
this newer political stake and the older artistic stake on the ‘secular’ become a key
theme, leading us to think afresh about the connections ‘between the “secular” as an
epistemic category and “secularism” as a political doctrine’.12 The first section of the
essay turns to the new political present of the Durga Pujas, both to the way the festival
has grappled with the themes of endangered citizenship, dislocation and detention, or
the plight of migrant labour during the pandemic, and the way the festival has come to
serve as a main stronghold of the ruling regime of West Bengal. The second section
returns to the problem of the unresolved status of ‘art’ and its avowed claims of
secularity within the body of an ephemeral, mass festival. The main challenge here is to
think about how a specific conjuncture of the political, the artistic, and the devotional
creates the conditions for a new repertoire of festival productions and changing forms of
the sacred and secular worlding of art.
The Political Present of the Festival Humanized and domesticated over a long history,
Goddess Durga has shown remarkable adaptability in keeping up with changing times
and tastes. In today’s consumerist festival, Durga easily takes up her role as the most
sought-after advertising icon of the season. Not only has she allowed
266
every girl child or modern multi-tasking woman to morph herself into her image (Image
9.2), she has liberally lent her face and her iconography to the endorsement of all
products and amenities, from computers to alcohol brands, from matrimonial services to
football tournaments, without any sense of threat to her sacrality. It is more than
acceptable for illustrators to depict Durga and her family’s arrival in a packed car, in a
market-survey volume on Puja consumptions—or to show the divine family on the eve
of their annual trip to earth, with the mother (Durga) surrounded by shopping bags and
suitcases, the father (Shiva) booking e-tickets on MakeMyTrip. com, while Ganesh
plays Batman games on his computer, Kartik swings to his iPod music, Lakshmi surfs
the stock market on the internet, and Saraswati sits immersed in her e-book reader. To
treat this divine pantheon with gentle humour and irreverence is a taken-for-granted
licence of artists and advertising campaigns. This licence suddenly found itself facing
the wrath of the Hindutva brigade in the autumn of 2017, when Durga and her family
were shown partaking of beauty treatment at a Jawed Habib parlour. As the avid
supporters of her beauty-parlour visit pointed out, if every modern, multi-tasking woman
can morph herself in Durga’s image, the goddess, too, has every right to impersonate
her human counterparts. Who are these Hindus, they wanted to know, whose religious
sentiments have been offended by her and her family’s visit to the Jawed Habib
parlour? How dare they selectively direct their venom against this parlour owner using
the ploy of his Muslim name and force an apology out of him?
The Goddess under the Shadow of the National Register of Citizens Durga’s brush with
the rising threat of the Hindu right wing took on a new dimension in the season of 2019.
This was a few months before the divisive and discriminatory Citizenship Amendment
Act (CAA) was bulldozed through parliament by the ruling BJP government at the
centre, throwing the country into a turmoil of resistance and agitation.13 As the debacle
of the Assam experiment with producing a National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the
threat of its implementation was throwing its long shadow across Bengal,14 Durga gave
herself over to the same anxieties of displacement and proof of citizenship. In one
illustration, she appears homeless, hauling her meagre belongings and family through
flood waters on her way to a
267
Image 9.2 Kaustuv Saikia, ‘Dainandin Durga/The Daily Durga on Behance’, photograph
dated 5 October 2019 Source: © @kaustuvsaikia, open access internet image,
https://protect-eu.mimecast.com/s/ D0WbC1r11I18E4quLo4kM?domain=behance.net
(accessed 15 July 2022).
refugee camp. In another witty cartoon, as the family trundles off in a truck for their
annual visit to Durga’s parental home on earth, Shiva tells them that all their citizenship
papers have been packed in their bags, and if they have any problems, they should tell
‘Didi’ (meaning ‘elder sister’), as Mamata Banerjee is widely known. The reference here
is to ‘Didi-ke Bolo’ (Tell Didi), a large public outreach campaign of assistance that had
been launched by Mamata Banerjee, with her own face and a contact number, in an
attempt to recover the lost ground of the electoral setback of her party in Bengal in the
Lok Sabha elections of 2019. That year’s Durga Puja saw the political critique shift from
lighthearted satire to ambitious art installations. The climate in which the
268
Durga Puja festivities are taking on a new performative intensity can be tracked along
two distinct registers. One of these registers is the making of a space for public art,
which over the past two decades has emerged as a distinctive feature of the city’s
Durga Puja celebrations. The other emergent register is that of a new conjunction of
anti-BJP protests, political activism, and art production that was unfolding in university
campuses and sit-in resistance sites like Shaheen Bagh, outside Jamia Millia Islamia,
New Delhi, or the Park Circus Maidan in Kolkata, since the fateful winter of 2019. Its
resonances within the Durga Pujas in Bengal have been closely tied to the support of
the ruling party, the TMC, and the personal endorsement of the chief minister. To track
the first trend, we can turn to the way the festival has come to nurture a large
community of small-time artists and designers, many of whom have turned Puja pavilion
designing into an annual vocation, and have carved out a small space for themselves
within the city’s contemporary art worlds, through the renown and publicity they have
gained in this field of festival art. These artists in turn have patented a new genre of
public art for the festival that has taken on the nomenclature of ‘theme’ Pujas. Growing
out of the central concept of covered pavilions on open streets and in parks of the city
(locally called pandals), which serve as temporary abodes of the goddess during the
week of her worship, these ‘theme’ Pujas placed a new premium on artistic conception,
innovation, and authorship in the tableaux that came to be conceived around the central
worshipped icon. It is in this genre of Puja productions that contemporary artists have
left their strongest imprints—in the experimentation with different material, medium, and
concepts; in the changing iconographies of the goddess; and in the radical
reconceptualization of the form of the pandal as art installations15 (Image 9.3). It is also
here that the political anxieties and dystopias of the present have overtly intervened
within an arena of mass festivity. Let us take the case of two Puja productions of 2019.
Diverse in their visual effects and conceptions, they stand together in their common
theme of the detention camp. I encountered one of these in an old south-western
neighbourhood of the city, Khidirpur, with a dense Muslim demography amidst remnants
of several once-wealthy Hindu homes, which had emerged during the 2000s as a major
location of the city’s ‘theme’ Pujas. Here, while at one site the veteran Puja artist
Sanatan Dinda took on the theme of the
269
Image 9.3 Sushanta Pal, Durga Puja installation with the artist appearing on the video
screen, Jodhpur Park, 95 Pally Club Puja, Kolkata, 2016 Source: Photograph courtesy
of the artist.
looming urban crisis of water shortage and non-biodegradable plastic waste, at another
nearby location of the Khidirpur Pally Sharadiya Puja a lesserknown artist, Rabin Roy,
produced a dramatic installation of a dimly lit fortress leading into a detention camp. In
keeping with this genre of Puja art, it carried a short concept note and a title, Oborodh
(which translates as a blockade, and carried the parallel title Barricade). Constructed
over three months, the temporary structure built with steel and wood had three
concentric interiors. The outer circle made stunning use of an old craft of puppet-making
with date palm leaves (a craft which produced the local proverb talpatar sepai, meaning
‘sepoys made of palm leaves’, who could be easily blown away), to create rows of tiny
marionette shadow puppets in cubicles; the next two circles presented a play of hand
shadows in lighted boxes, iron figure silhouettes, and wood and bamboo designs of
police helmets and shields. As one entered the final inner circle, there were video clips
running on the upper walls of police holding back barricaded protesters—while at the
climactic centre was an unusual figure of a Durga, on a horse lion, embellished with iron
plate ornaments (Images 9.4 and 9.5). That season, the same theme of incarceration
and detention was at the heart of another Puja installation, in a relatively new south
Kolkata
Images 9.4 and 9.5 Rabin Roy, Durga Puja installation titled Barricade and its
iconography of the goddess, Khidirpur Pally Sharadiya Puja, Kolkata, 2019 Source:
Photographs by the author.
271
neighbourhood, Rajdanga, that has developed a newer profile in the art-scape of the
festival. Titled Thikana (Address), it spoke of this very lack of a secure address for the
millions of those the state was rendering homeless. Unlike the Khidirpur installation, this
one of the Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha Puja directly foregrounded the contentious
NRC and its threat.16 Running through it was a narration that began stating, ‘The day
the state will tell you, this country is not yours, that day onwards, you are a refugee.’17
The artist, Subrata Banerjee, made the shuttlecock the metaphor for the stateless
persons who were being lobbed from one country to another. He put to use more than a
hundred thousand of real size and simulated enlarged shuttlecocks, with beautiful
effects, in different parts of the installation, spread out over 28,000 square feet of a
neighbourhood park—from its outer structures, walkways, and ceilings to the willowy
tree-like structures that filled the open grounds and the open pavilion in which the
goddess was housed. What was added along the central walkway were fenced up walls
of bamboo and rope, with disembodied human hands and legs crawling out of them and
a set of small baby heads, each protected as it were by a pair of crossed adult hands
(Images 9.6 and 9.7). Many of these designer Puja productions have over the years
developed a multimedia dimension, using accompanying soundtracks, narrations,
ambient music, and atmospheric night lighting. At the Rajdanga Puja, there was a
professional sound engineer and a contemporary Bangla music collective that
composed the sounds for the piece and blended them with the theme narration. Much of
this public art of the city’s Durga Pujas carries with it the endorsement of Bengal’s ruling
party (the TMC), with its strong oppositional stand against the controversial CAA and its
Hindu majoritarian agenda. It is often asked, by religious purists and now most
vociferously by the BJP in Bengal, what have any of these themes and productions got
to do with the worship of the goddess. The answer can be pitched in many ways. If the
festival has, over the past decades, opened up a novel space for local artists to do
public art for a mass spectatorship, it is also becoming the occasion for a more political
and socially committed art practice. That this political turn of the festival’s art comes,
more often than not, with the open patronage of Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata
Banerjee and her party, with its deep roots in the local clubs that organize the festival,
creates a specific equation between the political culture of the TMC and the
Images 9.6 and 9.7 Subrata Banerjee, Durga Puja installation titled Thikana [Address],
Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha Puja, Kolkata, 2019 Source: Photographs by the author.
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artistic propensities of the festival—but one which ends up dislodging the autonomy of
the political and the artistic and foreclosing their more radical possibilities. There are
many instances where the artist is pushed into the shadows, as was the case with the
installation at Rajdanga, with the head of the Puja committee, a TMC leader and
chairman of the local municipal borough, emerging in the media as the sole spokesman
for the production. This becomes a typical instance of the ways in which the political, in
the process of claiming the work of public art, is also heavily trampling over it.
Performing the Secular: The ‘Azaan’ Controversy Let us briefly step back here by a
decade to take stock of the systematic takeover of the festival by Bengal’s chief minister
and her political party, since its coming to power in the state in 2011, after thirty-four
years of Left Front rule. In a sharp break from the Left government’s ideological self-
distancing from all religious events, including the state’s biggest mass festival of the
Durga Pujas, Didi went all out to embrace this mega-festival and made it a central
platform of her cultural politics. In a recent essay, I have analysed the potent pact that
has been forged between the goddess, her festival, and the TMC in its workings as a
one-woman populist party. Through a focus on the visual field of Mamata Banerjee’s
populist politics, I have looked at the particular template of popular festivity and
spectacle that has come to pervade the political and cultural life of the state, particularly
the city of Kolkata. This has brought into the fray what could be termed a ‘festival-mode’
of politics and governance: a mode in which festivities serve as both the surrogate and
the performative grounds of the political.18 Walking her own tightrope between religion
and politics, Mamata Banerjee’s stake in Goddess Durga has been avowedly ‘secular’.
This path of the ‘secular’ remains an ever-slippery one, even as she keeps walking it at
her heady pace with the grip of her signature rubber slippers. From trying her own hand
at designing Durga’s pavilions and iconography to beginning the state’s Durga Puja
awards under her brand logo of ‘Bishwa Bangla’ (Global Bengal), to putting herself at
the centre of a new state-run immersion pageant that is being marketed as a tourist
spectacle, she has left no stone unturned in securing her personal political imprint on
the festival. With her face competing with that of Goddess Durga in festival hoardings
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proliferating across the city, the chief minister makes her boldest statement in ones that
began to appear from 2017, where she appears painting on the third eye of the
goddess, on the auspicious occasion of Mahalaya, the day that inaugurates the ten
days of Devi-paksha (Image 9.8). In her selfacclaimed role as an ‘artist’, she
impersonates in this act both the hereditary idol-maker and the modern Puja artist, for
both of whom the painting of the eyes of the goddess has served as the moment of the
ritual awakening to life of the images they have sculpted. Is the secular here serving as
just an eyewash for a political appropriation of a divinity? Or can we see the secular as
a performative index, in which the devotional, the artistic, and the political come
together in the enactment of new rituals around the festival? In its most literal form, the
‘secular’ translates into an act of inclusiveness of other religious communities to project
a non-communal, culturally inclusive identity of the Durga Puja. At an organizational
level,
Image 9.8 West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee painting the third eye and
awakening the goddess to life, Chetla Agrani Sangha Puja, Kolkata, 2017 Source:
Photograph by Debashish Bhaduri.
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the pre-festival planning and coordination meetings that are organized by the police and
municipal authorities with members of Puja committees are made to include token
representatives of Muslim, Sikh, Christian, and Buddhist bodies. Politically, the inclusion
of the Muslim ‘other’ becomes the most crucial gesture. Pitted against the anti-Muslim
bigotry of the BJP government and its pernicious CAA, taking on with bravado the
allegations about her politics of ‘Muslim appeasement’, Didi has taken pains to brandish
the political Muslim faces in her Durga Puja cultural brigade. An important role is played,
for instance, by the TMC leader and city’s present mayor, Firhaud Hakim, as a prime
Puja patron, with his neighbourhood Chetla Agrani Puja’s artistic and public profile
growing in leaps and bounds over this period. It is at this chosen Puja site that Didi first
came to perform her inaugural act of painting on the eye of the goddess. It is this
definition of the ‘secular’ that has also given festival organizers and creative personnel a
handle on showcasing their secularism as a direct political statement. So it was the
case with a Durga Puja production, from the same season of 2019, in the old
neighbourhood of Beliaghata, where the theme was ‘Communal Harmony’ and the spirit
of tolerance of all religions. This was certainly not the first time that Puja pavilions in the
city have projected this theme and experimented with housing the goddess in an
architectural ensemble combining the structures of a temple and a mosque or even
directly replicating Indo-Islamic architectural forms and designs19 (Image 9.9). In a
parallel trend, Puja organizers and pandal makers have had the liberty of housing the
goddess in whatever architectural structures caught their fancy, local or global. Loose
remakes of grand buildings drawn from across the globe (the choices here have ranged
from the Kremlin cathedral to the Paris Opera House, from Buckingham Palace to the
Burj Khalifa of Dubai) have regularly featured as festival attractions for touring
spectators. While this trend of pandal architecture says a lot about the free-wheeling
licence and vernacular global imaginary of the festival, it stands apart from another kind
of production, where artists and Puja committees wish to make a pointed anti-
communal, and by that definition, secular stance. It was such a stance that made the
Beliaghata 33 Pally Puja committee showcase multi-religious unity as their festival
theme of 2019, surround the pavilion with religious motifs of Hinduism, Islam, and
Christianity, and take on the title ‘Amra Ek, Eka Noi’ (We are united, not alone). What
threw this Puja into a public controversy was the playing on loudspeaker
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Image 9.9 Puja pandal architecture in the form of a Mughal mosque, Ruby Hospital
roundabout, Kolkata, 2011 Source: Photograph by the author.
of the Azaan (the Muslim call for prayer), alternating with Sanskrit chants and hymns, as
part of the video footage playing at the site through the day. It led to a local resident, a
Calcutta High Court lawyer, lodging a police complaint against the organizers, alleging
that the playing of the Azaan was a deliberate and mischievous act to hurt the religious
sentiment of the Hindus. The complaint, as is typical of the times, went viral on social
media, bringing into the fray the Hindutva mouthpiece Swarajya, and a video clip of a
Muslim cleric who voiced objections against the playing of the Azaan through all times
of the day as a violation of Muslim sentiments as well. More than censoring the Puja
organizers, the local police station had to turn to monitoring incendiary posts on social
media. Not to be missed in this controversy was the way the term ‘secular’ was thrown
both ways. That their production took on the name of a ‘secular’ Puja became a matter
of pride for the Puja committee secretary and the local TMC political patron, while critics
openly ridiculed their ‘desperation to show secularism’.20
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The secular as political can easily tilt into the secular as provocation and incitement,
turning the Pujas into a site of brimming animosities. The Beliaghata Puja may have
come through relatively unscathed, and may even have gained more media publicity
and crowds due to this controversy. But such a case throws open a set of
uncomfortable questions about the perceived inclusiveness of the festival, and the
terms on which the Muslim ‘other’ can be safely accommodated within its ambit. As a
cultural and political mandate, Indian secularism can be seen to have evolved uneven
terms of accommodation of different religious minorities. Concessions or protections
granted to other religious minorities, such as Christians, Sikhs, or Buddhists, have never
brought on the same contentions and hostilities as those concerning the largest, most
economically vulnerable, and politically volatile of these minorities, the Muslims. No
other minority has invited the same slew of allegations of ‘appeasement’ or the same
extremities of prejudice, attacks, vilification, and violence.21 In a partitioned and thickly
Muslim-populated state like West Bengal, the ‘secular’ mask of the Bengali bhadralok is
one that easily falls off. The politics of secularism on this side of Bengal has always
borne within it the deeply anti-Muslim sentiments of the elite and non-elite, urban and
rural, mass of Hindu Bengalis. And these sentiments, in past and recent times, have
needed the smallest triggers to surface in different social and political arenas. In the
field of the Durga Pujas, it would appear that a Muslim political patron (Firhaud Hakim)
or a young Muslim television star turned politician, the TMC member of parliament,
(Nusrat Jahan) who dances at festival programmes are easy to bring on and publicize.
The many anonymous Muslim artisans who lend their craft to the goddess’ image and
abodes or Muslim touring spectators who become a seamless part of the festival
crowds can also be assimilated. Bringing in the forms and motifs of Islamic architecture
within Durga Puja pavilions, with their touch of syncretism and appeal to a select
discerning art public, also holds its ground. But the playing of the Azaan at a Puja site
ended up touching a raw nerve and testing the limits of the secular selfpositioning of the
festival.22
The Migrant Worker and the Goddess Let me turn, at this point, to other
representational registers of the secular, as a different order of political challenges
confronted the Durga Puja
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during the prolonged pandemic and its extended lockdown. In 2020, the prospect of a
year without a festival hung heavy over the state for months, with much to lose
(economically and politically) for the many stakeholders who are centrally invested in it.
If there were crippling implications for the multiple artisanal and creative livelihoods and
consumer economies that are sustained by this mass-event, there were also the
mounting political anxieties of the many Puja committees and the ruling regime that
needed this festival platform for its show of strength against the rising onslaught of the
BJP, in a critical pre-election year in the state.23 The most disastrous consequences of
a suddenly announced country-wide lockdown fell upon hordes of migrant workers and
their families (the most invisible and vulnerable of the informal workforce), who were
overnight locked out of wage, livelihood, food, and shelter in the large cities, factories,
and constructions sites where they worked, and were left with no option but to begin
their long journey to their distant village homes, by foot and by piecemeal transport,
along highways, train tracks, and mud roads, with large numbers perishing on the way.
What has been called ‘India’s long walk home’ became the most heartrending image of
the country under lockdown.24 A sculpted tableau of a migrant worker-mother and her
children also became one of the most memorable icons of Kolkata’s scaleddown Durga
Pujas of 202025 (Image 9.10). As with the Azaan controversy, social media once again
took centre stage in the life of this Puja production. In a delayed ritual calendar of the
Pujas, with the pandemic still raging in late October, as citizens’ groups, doctors, and
the Calcutta High Court came together in a last-minute decision to close all pandals for
touring spectators, the Durga Pujas were converted perforce into a virtual event. For the
first time in history, the city’s Pujas went almost fully online, as much for the rituals of
worship as for the fanfare of inaugurations, cultural programmes, award ceremonies,
and virtual tours. Several pieces of Durga imagery and Puja pavilions had already gone
through their elaborate process of fabrication and on-site installation only to have their
public life as virtual images. In the case of this figural group of the migrant worker
mother and her children, the image began to circulate on social media even as it was
still in preparation at the studio of the Krishnanagar sculptor, Pallab Bhowmick, and yet
to become part of artist Rintu Das’s installation around it at the Barisha Club Puja in
Behala, in the deep southwest of the city.26
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Image 9.10 Pallab Bhowmick, sculpted tableaux of Durga and her children as a
displaced migrant worker family, Barisha Club Puja, Kolkata, 2019 Source: Photograph
by the author.
That the pandemic would create its own topical iconography of a goddess slaying the
virus demon was only to be expected.27 The imagemakers of Kumartuli, Kolkata’s
oldest and biggest artisanal hub of this trade, reported on a number of orders that
season for the figure of a ‘Coronasura’ (Corona in the form of Mahishasura), 28 even as
some among them were hit by the virus and theirs was among the worst-hit of the
livelihoods that centrally revolve around the festival. But, by far, the biggest internet
sensation of the season was the ‘migrant mother as goddess’ tableaux. Pallab
Bhowmick and Rintu Das talked about how they wanted this figure of a poor mother
accompanied by her children to appear as if she was seeking food and relief from the
goddess, who appears as a hanging laser animation. But, in the process of her turning
back to look
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at us, she herself takes on the third eye and the radiant face of Durga. Her
impersonation is subtle, as are those of her children, marked out as little Lakshmi,
Saraswati, and Kartik by their animal carriers (an owl, a swan, and a peacock), whom
they clutch under their arm like toys. It is the way each of them glances back in a
collective gesture that makes for the key provocation of this sculpture. We could think of
their act of looking back at us as marking the moment when the fate of this invisible
workforce of our cities entered middle-class conscience and became visible to the
nation through the television screen. The artist-duo purposefully used the fluidity of
identity that has been an essential part of the imagination of Bengal’s Durga. Their idea
was two-fold: to accord the migrant worker family the grace and dignity it has always
been denied; and to make the goddess group partake of the plight of a labouring mother
and her children seeking relief. There were many iconographic liberties taken with the
image of the goddess, which disqualified its eligibility for worship. For one, there was no
body to the arms and face of the goddess; also, one of the children of Durga, the
elephant-headed Ganesh, was missing. He appeared as the worshipped deity beneath
the sculpture, sanctifying the ritual of the small ghat puja (worship of a clay pot) that was
conducted at the site, as is often the case with many such ‘theme’ productions. This
liturgy seemed entirely incidental to the dimly lit, haunting ambience that Rintu Das had
created here of a relief camp for stranded workers. The title of the installation, Traan
(meaning ‘relief’), was stamped on all the empty gunny sacks that were arranged in a
layered semicircle around the central figures. Made with bamboo and jute cloth, the
installation was stark and monochromatic, devoid of any objects barring these food
sacks, a stray abandoned cart, and a bicycle. A soundtrack kept playing, with noises of
people scrambling, children crying, and a voice commanding everyone to stand in order,
saying ‘no mask, no relief’, which would then suddenly break into the sonorous
scriptural recitation of Birendra Krishna Bhadra that marks the onset of Devi-paksha,
and has become the quintessential devotional voice of Bengal’s Durga Puja.29 We see
here another form of ‘secular’ interpolations of the devotional, one where the secular
situates itself in the space of an art installation and puts out a strong political statement.
If there had to be a festival in Bengal during the year of the pandemic and the cyclone, it
had to make room for social empathy and political protest; it had to carve out a place
not
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just for celebration but also for a socially committed art practice. Like all the major Puja
organizing clubs, the Barisha Club too took pains to advertise its own relief work with
migrant workers during the months of the draconian lockdown and drew attention to its
greatly shrunken Puja budget that year. The artist, Rintu Das, made capital of this
paucity of funds to make deprivation the theme of his production, putting to use the
empty ration sacks that lay in the club room. By replacing the weapons of the ten arms
of the goddess with sacks of food, and by doing away with the figure of Mahishasura,
hunger was rendered into the symbolic demon to be vanquished in this Barisha Club
installation. We can keep debating how genuine such gestures of empathy are—just as
we need to keep questioning the rhetoric of the Durga Pujas as a secular, socially
inclusive festival. Yet, in a Puja season, where faces of destitution were everywhere,
where the trudging migrant worker and the homeless victims of the cyclone became the
pervasive leitmotifs of festival pavilions (Image 9.11), it is hard to
Image 9.11 Photographs of children from villages devastated by Cyclone Amphan in

Bengal surrounding the goddess at Kumartuli Sarbojanin Puja, Kolkata, 2019 Source:
From a photography competition organised by Nikon for this Puja site; photograph by
the author.
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dismiss these choices as only social tokenism or political eyewash.30 By drawing

attention to the loss of income and livelihood, the Durga Pujas of 2020 were also made
to confront the severe deprivations of the many in the state—from idol- and pandal-
makers to artists and craftsmen, from priests and village drummers to those who set up
street stalls or are employed as crowd-control staff—who grievously lost out that
season. If the chief minister has made this mega cultural festival of Bengal her prime
platform of governance and political mobilization, an expanding creed of local artists are
also making optimum use of this festival as a space for social commentary and political
critique.
The Dissembling Place of Art Unsurprisingly, the public life of this sculpture (dare we
give it that name) was as brief as the festival itself. With the image gaining so much
attention in the media, the chief minister announced her proposal to preserve the work.
Even if it is to find a corner in a cultural complex or leisure park in some part of the city,
as has the occasional Durga image, it will lose the aura that belongs strictly to its time
and place in the festival. And it will recede from public memory with the same rapidity
with which it had gone viral on the internet. If this is the fate of much of contemporary
internet imagery, this is also the specific condition under which the best of Durga Puja
productions come and go each season. Ephemerality and post-festival obsolescence
are taken-for-granted factors in this field, for organizers, makers, and viewers.
Ownership and authorship over these productions constantly spill outside the hold of the
Puja designer to become the property of organizing clubs, who have paid for their
making, whose prime concern thereafter is to sell off the works piecemeal to other
subsequent festivals to recover costs and clear public spaces. Whereas the older
practices of idol- and pandal-making have the logic of destruction, dismantling, and
recycling of material built into the rationale of their trades, the newer genres of Durga
Puja ‘art’ are often left struggling with aspirations for an afterlife of collection. That these
aspirations are seldom fulfilled—that year after year extraordinary pandal installations
are routinely dispersed, and stunning Durga imagery made with durable material like
wood, stone, or fibre-glass is left forgotten in club backrooms, studios, or public sites—
produces a continuous ambivalence in the worlds of art that the festival
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has nurtured.31 It also keeps unsettling the grounds on which art as secular practice
can secure its place within this mass festival. If the designations of art and artist are
seldom a stable index in this creative domain, neither is the denomination of the
secular. The complementarity of these twin practices of art and secularism remains
inevitably fractured in this field. In her essay in this volume, Karin Zitzewitz proposes
that it may be useful to think less about how ‘secularism is defined’ and more about
‘how it is practised’ in the circuits of modern and contemporary art—a circuit where, to
quote her, ‘the secular is thick rather than thin, and actively put into practice’. The
record of practice in this sphere, she writes, serves best to explain ‘what secularity
might produce, both in the material form of art and in its social life’.32 But how do we
deal with such a record of practice, when neither the artists concerned nor their
artworks belong to an institutionally accredited sphere of contemporary art? How are
alternative forms of practice struggling to carve out a space for secularity and public art
in a festival sphere that has none of the other institutional parameters in place—gallery
sponsorships, curation, criticism, or initiated art viewing? The challenge is centrally
posed for me by Zitzewitz’s formulation about how ‘art-historical methods, with their
combined [obsessive] historicization of the circumstances of production and theorization
of the ongoing experience of works of art, [allow us] to isolate and differentiate the
practices of secularity that make art, and make art possible’.33 But what if the
conditions of production and reception do not allow for the kinds of historicization and
theorization of the artwork that arm the discipline of art history? In what ways may we
still think of art and secularity as mutually enabling practices that have laid claims on the
public sphere of a mass festival? To address some of these questions, let me return to
the creative team behind the migrant worker tableau—to think about the terms on which
such persons carry out their practice of art. Rintu Das and Pallab Bhowmick stand
typical of the many little-known artists who have come to build their livelihoods around
the Durga Puja festival and the year-round demand for public statuary and street decor.
They inhabit an art world that is ‘vernacular’ and Bengali medium,34 hovering on the
edge of artistic and artisanal livelihoods, where art school training is feeding into the
changing occupations of craft-making, pavilion construction, interior decoration, creative
signage, and graphic and set design. This sphere of festival art too
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has generated distinctions between ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ artists—between a few who
have developed a signature style and presence in this domain over the past decades
and have developed their own profile as installation artists, and a multitude of others of
varying skills and training who are also using the festival as a public creative platform.
Yet, there are no hard tests here of artistic eligibility, nor any exacting parameters of
critical evaluation. The legacy of modern and contemporary Indian art hangs loose over
this domain as a set of free-floating citations. Many pointed out the clear resemblances
between Pallab Bhowmick’s sculpted figure of the migrant worker-mother and the
painter Bikash Bhattacharya’s visualizations of Durga in a series he titled Everywoman,
especially one of Durga looking back from within a crowd at a Puja pandal. If the former
work speaks of the art school training in life-study and academic realism of the maker, it
also announces his freedom to openly draw on the works of his far more renowned
predecessors and introduce these in the realm of the festival. This is another
representational licence that is freely accorded to the contemporary art of the city’s
Durga Pujas, without any charge of piracy or plagiarism. While Jamini Roy’s paintings or
Nandalal Bose’s linocut illustrations for the primer Sahaj-paath are in greatest
circulation in Puja pavilions, as the most recognizable emblems of Bengal’s modern art,
there are many other masters too who are actively put to work during this season.35
The point to underline is the way Durga Pujas have, over the past two decades, opened
up what we may call an ‘openlicense’ domain of public art production. The mass
viewership it invites is quite different from that of the parallel circuits of contemporary
art. The festival, as I have been arguing, has thrown up its own array of creative
livelihoods which seek the equivalence of the more established worlds of modern art but
enjoy none of its prestige and privileges. Neither the same authorial prerogatives and
copyright over the created works nor the same assurance of their preservation are
guarantees they can claim. Notwithstanding these conditions, the city’s festival art
continues to seek out its own spaces of artistic articulation, social commentary, and
seasonal fame. The biggest challenge for artists working in this festival arena is to ride
the wave of media awards and the political clout that the organizing clubs have on their
side, while retaining their artistic autonomy. It is often outside media limelight, with a
free hand extended to them by a supportive Puja committee, that groups of artists are
carving out a quieter
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space for a socially engaged, experimental public art. In the first decade of ‘theme’
Pujas in Kolkata, it was a proliferating folk-as-fine-arts aesthetic— the turn to vanishing
rural art forms and the making of exquisite tribal art villages in crowded urban sites,
often with tribal painters and performers brought in from distant parts of the country—
that defined the modern art of the festival and marked out its social commitment to
these endangered art forms (Image 9.12). More recently, artists have used the Pujas to
draw attention to a different set of dying urban trades and skills, consciously collapsing
the thin line of divide between themselves and the artisanal labour they work with. As
the theme of displacement resonated throughout the art-scape of the Pujas of 2019, at
a well-known Puja site in south Kolkata, a young artist, Pradip Das, chose to profile the
dying trades of the washermen, the barber’s saloon, the tailor’s shop, the old-style
photographic studio, the bicycle repair shed, and the trunk painting store.
Image 9.12 A goddess group and pavilion designed by artist Subodh Ray, with
participating tribal artists from Chattisgarh, headed by the aged award-winning Sonabai,
at Behala Agradoot Club Puja, Kolkata, 2006 Source: Photograph by the author.
286
The ceiling was hung with old trunks and chests; the interior filled with wall signs, shop
shutters, heaps of broken furniture, crumbling homes with danger signs, and glimpses
of their dark interiors.36 In its ode to labour, this installation, titled Kurnish (meaning
‘salute’), had its outer wall lined with photographs of workers, those who worked on this
production standing in for those who still ply these trades (Images 9.13 and 9.14).
Situated near the exit of the pavilion, the goddess’s ensemble stood dissociated from
the theme, with no attempt by the artist to visually integrate her iconography within the
larger ambience of the work. In this dextrous blending of the recreated and the real, the
close weaving of one kind of urban fabric into another, the brightly illuminated goddess
altar could have been an older-style Puja pandal in one such dilapidated neighbourhood
of the city that still has vestiges of such shops and signage. There were two forms of
dissembling that can be traced here. In one, Durga retreats into becoming as much the
observed as the observer, as much an object of worship and display as a participating
subject. In the other, the work of installation art merges into an urban landscape of
decrepitude and disappearing livelihoods and struggles with its own transience.
Enchantment and disenchantment confront and collude. These are spaces where
neither the rituals of devotion nor those of art-viewing can find a stable ground—where
neither the goddess nor the artist can effectively fulfil their predesignated functions, but
where they find themselves pulled into a pact of continuous renegotiation of the work
they wish to perform. In ending this essay, I would like to think of the goddess as
playing out her role of part-agent and part-witness in sustaining this sphere of public art
that that has grown around her annual festival. The act of enabling is as important as
the act of witnessing. They together provide a framework of affirmation and affect that
allows a set of art practices to find a public forum both within and beyond her festival
and its secular cultural politics. The enduring test of secularity of the festival can be
seen in the way it ‘makes art possible’ and expands that possibility into a spreading
sphere of practices. Over the past years, young artists like Pradip Das have become a
part of larger artist collectives, community art practices and residencies, and street art
festivals that are carving out time and space outside the Durga Pujas, seeking out
corporate sponsorships, and a more committed art public. If alternative kinds of public
and community-based art initiatives in and around the city are setting fresh trends,
pushing art outside galleries, and
Images 9.13 and 9.14 Pradip Das, Durga Puja installation titled Kurnish [A salute to
dying urban trades], Samaj Sebi Sangha Puja, Kolkata, 2019 Source: Photographs by
the author.
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marking the place of the political and the contemporary within it, several of the artists
whom the Durga Pujas have nurtured are fully participating in this sway. The aspiration
for equivalence with national and global worlds of contemporary art is now propelling
these artists to work with professional videographers to archive and document their
ephemeral productions, to organize post-Puja discussions of these works, and to look
for art books and catalogues to emerge from these. This is a local art world that has
begun drawing in its own circle of curators and art-writers, and has over the past few
years been working with sound, kinetic, and animation technologies in collaboration with
sound and robotics engineers. A new arc of practice links the indispensability of
artisanal labour and craftsmanship in this field of production with the entry of this new
class of creative professionals. That among these professionals are figures such as a
young robotics engineer, Syed Shahidul Islam, who has been working closely with the
Puja productions of artist Bhabatosh Sutar, or the established environmentalist architect
Asim Waqif, specializing in sustainable building resources, who came in with an all-
Indian and international team in 2019 to work on a pavilion with raw bamboo and sound
sensors at a small Puja club in an obscure inner neighbourhood in the northeast of
Kolkata,37 can be cited to showcase the secularity of this sphere of art practice. There
may not be any need, though, to name these figures as Muslims. To do so may even
seem like an affront to them, in order to score a few brownie points about the religious
inclusiveness of the festival. Doing away with this need can be seen as a mark of
transition of the art of the Durga Pujas from the political ideology of the secular to the
more naturalized ontological secularity of contemporary art worlds. Yet, in this coming of
age, the art worlds spawned by the goddess and her festival remain consigned to the
local and peripheral, and steeped in a vernacular milieu that binds it from within. Within
the city, there are ways in which these art practices are often consciously moving away
from established art centres of Kolkata to inhabit distant locations on the edge of the
metropolis, drawing connoisseurs and viewers to these outer peripheries. This parallels
the way Durga Pujas of Kolkata, in this new millennium, have mapped new urban and
peri-urban geographies of touring and artviewing. But this place of the periphery
acquires a different connotation when positioned against the aspirations of these artists
to become part of a national and global citizenry of contemporary art and pitch
themselves
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into its network of art festivals and biennales. The concept of trespass or unentitled
intrusions that I raised at the beginning returns here to underline the anomaly of these
artistic aspirations, marking this periphery as a place of deep asymmetry, unfulfilled
longings, and perennial waiting. Yet, as centres of global art shift and new margins
emerge and recede, the periphery can also be thought of as a mercurial zone that hosts
its own artistic vanities and transacts its own terms of exchange and circulation.38 My
chance encounters with lines of laundry hung across a narrow street in two vastly
divergent art sites—first, as one of the installations at the Venice Biennale of 2015, that
immediately reminded me of an old Kolkata alley; second, as the entrance display of the
production of Pradip Das at the Samaj Sebi Puja of 2019, that sparked off memories of
the street at Venice—brought home to me this point about artistic affiliations and flows
that defy the logic of centre and periphery (Images 9.15 and 9.16). The scene, as much
in real life as in art, could belong as intimately to an old alley of Venice as to one of
Kolkata. To bring into the same frame the work of a fledgling Kolkata Puja artist and a
work from the last grand curatorial venture at Venice, titled All the World’s Futures, of
the celebrated US- and
Image 9.15 A stand-alone street installation, outside the main exhibition site, Arsenal, at
the Venice Biennale, 2015, ‘All the World’s Futures’, curated by Okwui Enwezor Source:
Photograph by the author.
290
Image 9.16 Pradip Das, street installation at the entrance to Samaj Sebi Sangha Puja,
Kolkata, 2019 Source: Photograph by the author.
Germany-based Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor is bound to smack of impropriety.

Impropriety, like the idea of trespass, is a syndrome that the fledgling entities of Durga
Puja art and artists have to continually contend with, as they hover at the edge of worlds
in which they cannot quite belong. But it can be argued that Enwezor’s radical
decentring of European and American art and redrawing of a map of postcolonial non-
white global art (in a career cut short by his untimely death)39 was intended to dislodge
the existing centres and open out to many such far-flung margins of contemporary
practice. In the process, it could have pushed the reach of
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an art history of the present into many such unexplored peripheries as the one I have
laid out—where a new dispensation of public art unfolds under the benign gaze of a
goddess and redefines the remit of what constitutes art and what secures the secularity
of its practice. Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Kamalika Mukherjee of the
CSSSC archives for helping me improve the resolution quality of the images used in this
chapter.
Notes 1. In Bengal, the martial Durga, in her role of killing the buffalo demon
Mahishasura, as invoked in the Devi Mahatmya of the Markendaya Purana, is coupled
with her identity as Uma or Parvati, daughter of the presiding deities of the Himalayas,
and consort of Lord Shiva. Over a long history, the goddess in Bengal has developed a
unique iconography, in which she appears to be killing Mahishasura while flanked by
her four divine children, her sons Ganesh and Kartik and her daughters Lakshmi and
Saraswati. Every autumn, in an emotional ritual of ‘homecoming’, the goddess is
welcomed home both as beloved mother and daughter, who descends to earth with her
four children from her mountain abode, and returns there after five days of worship. 2.
This essay takes off from my book, In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of
Contemporary Kolkata (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2015), and puts the notion of the
‘secular’ to test in the context of the festival in a way that I did not attempt in the book. In
the Introduction to the book, I had argued that neither the term ‘religious’ nor its
opposing term ‘secular’ has an easy fit in this sphere. If the disappearing religiosity of
the public festival has been a matter of long-standing lament, the ‘secular’ has proved to
be an equally difficult denomination to attach to a celebration where Durga remains the
central affective protagonist; and where the term ‘puja’ has remained an immovable
fixture, referring sometimes to the organizing local club, sometimes to the entire festival,
and only in passing to the ritual practices from where the term emerged. If the urban
Durga Puja has always been inadequately ‘religious’, it has also remained
incommensurately ‘secular’. It was my contention that the festival has, over a long
period of its history, opened up a domain of social affect and transaction where the
normative, institutional categories of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ can neither fall
comfortably in place nor be set off in opposition to each other. Guha-Thakurta, In the
Name of the Goddess, 5–6, 15–19. Pushing the study into a different history of the
present, this essay will be looking at how the festival has become the site for the
interplay of a specific political ideology of secularism with the ontological secularity of art
practice, but where neither finds a stable location.
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3. The urgency of protecting the separate normative and jurisdictional sphere of art vis-
à-vis that of religion has come up most persistently in the past decades in the context of
the spreading fundamentalist attacks on works of art, literature, and film for their alleged
‘offence to religious sentiments’ of contending communities. This issue became
particularly critical in the defence of the iconic artist Maqbool Fida Husain, and his
artistic licences with the iconography of Hindu goddesses. See Sumathi Ramaswamy
(ed.), Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (London:
Routledge, 2011); and Malvika Maheshwari, Art Attacks: Violence and Offence-Taking
in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019). The case is also discussed in the
essay of this volume by Akeel Bilgrami (see Chapter 2). 4. Guha-Thakurta, In the Name
of the Goddess, 21. 5. Kajri Jain, ‘In Which Contemporary Indian Iconopraxis Devours
Some Sacred Cows of Art History’, ch. 4 in this volume; Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar:
The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 17. 6. In
her latest book, Gods in the Age of Democracy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021),
Kajri Jain shifts her focus from printed iconographies of calendar art to these newer
objects of massive religious statuary that have come to dominate the landscape of the
contemporary Hindi–Hindu heartland of northern India. 7. Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘A
Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India’, ch. 10 in this volume, 296. 8. This
distinction between the two processes and the notion of ‘profane contagion’ is drawn
from Giorgio Agamben’s essay, ‘In Praise of Profanations’, in Profanations, trans. Jeff
Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73–78. 9. This history finds good coverage in
Rachel McDermott, Revelry, Rivalry and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal: The
Fortunes of Hindu Festivals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), where the
author places the changing forms of the Durga Pujas in Bengal over the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries vis-à-vis the Kali and Jagaddhatri Pujas that follow
in the ritual calendar of Bengal. 10. Discussed in Tithi Bhattacharya, ‘Tracking the
Goddess: Religion, Community and Identity in the Durga Puja Ceremonies in
Nineteenth-Century Calcutta’, Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 4 (November 2007):
919–962; and in my book, In the Name of the Goddess, ch. 2, 97–102. 11. Guha-
Thakurta, ‘Introduction’, in In the Name of the Goddess, 4–22. 12. The opening
sentence of Talal Asad’s foundational work, Formations of the Secular: Christianity,
Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1; this separation of the
larger ontological and epistemic category of the secular from the political doctrine has
been a persistent issue taken up by all theorists of secularism. 13. The Citizenship
Amendment Bill which became an Act (CAA) in December 2019 singled out Muslims as
‘illegal migrants’ and refugees, in the move of selectively extending citizenship status to
the ‘Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsi or Christian
14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
19.
20.
21.
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community from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who entered India on or before
31st December 2014’, and who have been exempted from the Foreigners’ Act of 1946.
On the larger implications of this crisis of citizenship and its specific threat to the Bengali
Muslims of Assam and West Bengal, see Romila Thapar, N. Ram, Gautam Bhatia, and
Gautam Patel, On Citizenship (New Delhi: Aleph, 2021). A succinct analysis is provided
in Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, Assam: The Accord, The Discord (New Delhi: Penguin
Books, 2019). This is the core theme of my book, In the Name of the Goddess, and is
extensively developed through chapters 6 and 8. ‘Kolkata: In the Festival of
Homecoming, a Pandal Talks of a Refugee’s Thikana’, Indian Express, 5 October 2019.
My translation of the opening line of the Bengali voice narration. Tapati Guha-Thakurta,
‘A Goddess, a Chief Minister and a City: Reflections on a Festival Mode of Populist
Politics’, in State of Democracy in India: Essays on Life and Politics in Contemporary
Times, ed. Manas Ray (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2021), 138–176. In 2002, in protest
against that year’s state-backed communal carnage in Gujarat, at a prime south Kolkata
locality, an art designer working in the film industry, Gautam Basu, created a melange of
the architectural styles of a temple and a mosque, interspersing Radha–Krishna images
with Islamic calligraphy and lattice screens along the pavilion arches, with the Durga
image carrying the appearance of a figure from a Mughal miniature painting. At the
entrance to the pavilion was a widely circulating photograph of a Muslim riot victim
pleading for police protection. News portals that carried this controversy over the
playing of the Azaan at the Beliaghata Puja pandal during the season of 2019: ‘“Azaan”
at Kolkata Durga Puja Pandal Triggers Controversy’, NDTV, 8 October 2019,
https://www.ndtv.com/ kolkata-news/kolkata-west-bengal-azaan-at-kolkata-durga-puja-
pandal-triggerscontroversy-2113269 (accessed 16 February 2020); ‘Azaan from
“Secular” Durga Puja at Kolkata’s Beliaghata Sparks Outrage on Social Media, Lawyer
Files Plaint’, Firstpost, 6 October 2019, https://www.firstpost.com/india/azaan-from-
seculardurga-puja-at-kolkatas-beliaghata-sparks-outrage-on-social-media-lawyer-
filesplaint-7459271.html (accessed 16 February 2020). It is widely acknowledged that at
the time of Independence and Partition the secularism of the Indian state was centrally
premised on the political resolution of ‘the Hindu–Muslim problem’, and that the
containment of communal tensions between these two politicized religious groups came
to stand as the main test of its secularism. In 1992, at the cusp of the Indian state’s
sharp slide towards an overtly Hindu majoritarian ideology, it was the fateful destruction
of a sixteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, to make way for a Ram temple at the
same site that most ominously signalled this turn and epitomized the most flagrant
violation of the secular principles of the nation-state.
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22. There is a need for reflecting on what constitutes the particular sense of assault of
sound in an inapposite religious location and what historically propelled the sonic wars
between the sparring religious communities of Hindus and Muslims. This contemporary
provocation of the playing of the Azaan at a Durga Puja site reminds us of the growing
resentment in different neighbourhoods of the city in recent years at the rising sound
decibels and the use of loudspeakers for Azaan and namaaz prayers in local mosques,
which in turn becomes the point of selfassertion of the religious communities of these
mosques. It also takes us back to the ‘music before mosque’ incitements (the
contentious rights of singing Hindu religious processions to walk past mosques) in
different parts of East and West Bengal that sparked off the riots of the 1920s and
1930s. See Pradip Kumar Datta, ‘War over Music: Meaning and Implications of the
Riots of the 1920s and 1930s’, in Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth
Century Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). 23. Tapati Guha-Thakurta,
‘Festival Ruminations in Pandemic Times’, The Wire, 3 May 2020,
https://thewire.in/religion/covid-19-durga-puja-mamata-banerjee (accessed 3 March
2021). 24. With no inter-state public transportation made available for them, forced into
relief camps, queuing for minimum ration, these workers and their families faced death
more from starvation and disease than from the coronavirus. In the gruelling summer,
while the central government looked the other way, and the affluent and the middle
class sealed themselves off in their homes, these migrant worker families were largely
left to fend for themselves and found themselves in penury back in their villages. In
Bengal, the situation of these returning displaced workers was rendered even more
precarious, as the state was struck by a devastating cyclone in the third week of May
2020, leading to massive wreckage across the countryside. Two hard-hitting books
addressing this issue were simultaneously published at the beginning of 2021: Harsh
Mander, Locking Down the Poor: The Pandemic and India’s Moral Centre (New Delhi:
Speaking Tiger, 2021); and an anthology of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Ishan
Chauhan and Zenaida Cubbinz (eds.), India’s Long Walk Home (New Delhi: Paranjoy;
Authors Upfront, 2021). 25. This part of the essay is taken from my article, ‘The Migrant
Worker and the Goddess’, published on the online portals of Newsclick
(https://www.newsclick. in/the-migrant-worker-goddess [accessed 3 March 2021]) and
the Indian Cultural Forum on 30 October 2020. 26. Debraj Mitra, ‘Migrant Mother as the
Goddess’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, Metro section, 15 October 2020. 27. A
phenomenon discussed in Ramaswamy’s essay, ‘A Historian among the Goddesses of
Modern India’; and in Ravinder Kaur and Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘The Goddess and the
Virus’, in The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi, Asia Shorts
series (Ann Arbor, USA: Association of Asian Studies; Columbia University Press,
2020).
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28. One of the most widely circulating images on Facebook was of Durga as a
whitecoat-wearing lady doctor benignly attacking a Corona-headed Asura, while her
family stood next to her representing different public personnel dealing with the
pandemic—Ganesh as a policeman, Lakshmi as a nurse, Saraswati as a schoolteacher,
and Kartik as a sanitation worker. The last representation was seen to be the most
sensitive, in the way it pushed across the caste boundaries of these professions. While
some lauded and others railed against such irreligious impersonations, the provenance
of this image remained uncertain, as is the case with so much that goes viral on social
media, with it being attributed to different makers and different provincial locations.
Indian Express, 21 October 2020. 29. This scriptural chant by Birendra Krishna Bhadra
is part of what was once a live radio programme of the Calcutta station of All India
Radio, titled ‘Mahishuramardini’, which was put together in 1931–1932 by the finest
talents of the Bengali film and music industry. Aired in its present form since the 1950s,
this radio programme, the longest continuing pre-recorded programme of All India
Radio, is still played at the crack of dawn on the morning of Mahalaya each year. The
voice of the master radio performer, Birendra Krishna Bhadra (1905–1991), has
remained the perennial symbol of this emotionally charged hour of the homecoming of
the goddess. 30. It was no coincidence that the plight of the migrant worker exploded as
a repeating theme in Puja pandals across Kolkata at the very juncture that the central
government made its scandalous declaration in parliament about its ‘lack of data’ about
the number of hapless workers who had perished during their ‘long walk home’, evading
all its onus and obligations. 31. This is one of the key running themes of my book, In the
Name of the Goddess, and is explored particularly in chapters 6 and 8. 32. Karin
Zitzewitz, ‘Art and the Secular in Contemporary India: A Question of Method’, ch. 3 in
this volume. 33. Ibid. (emphasis mine). 34. The expansion of the term ‘vernacular’ from
the sphere of language and dialect to other areas of art and cultural practice, and its
specific postcolonial South Asian connotation of being non-English medium, are critical
issues to be further explored. While the term ‘vernacular’ has an important place in
global contemporary art practice, I would like to push the category to address a different
circuit of provincial and non-English speaking art worlds. And bring in here Kajri Jain’s
powerful formulation: ‘Vernaculars are normal and not normative; they can be modern
but not modernist’ (Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, 14). 35. To cite a few more instances, the
festival field has seen a mix of Ramkinkar Baij’s Santhal Family and Mill Call appearing
as a Durga family group in a Dumdum Park Puja of 2007 within a Santhal village
remake by artist Rupchand Kundu, and a set of Ganesh Pyne paintings invoked by
artist Ramkumar Manna, in the Abasarika Club Puja in Dhakuria around the same time.
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36. It is in the very nature of this field of festival productions that originality and
innovation have little lasting value; that such interiors of dilapidation, with old signage,
unused post-boxes, and ceilings of hanging trunks are not entirely novel to Pradip Das’
work, just as depictions of displacement and dispossession have quickly become the
riding trend of Puja installations of 2020–2021. 37. Asim Waqif, Loy, a bilingual (Bengali
and English) book commissioned by the Puja club which hosted his production,
Arjunpur Amra Sobai Club, Baguihati, Kolkata (designed and printed in Delhi,
September 2020). It speaks of the different national and international circuit that Waqif
belongs to, which enabled him to bring such a team to work on this Puja, and to bring
out a beautifully designed art book on it within the next year. Such a book fuelled the
aspirations of the club organisers and local artists to follow in its track, and resulted in
another extraordinary art book that emerged out of a local veteran Puja artist’s work at
this same site: Bhabatosh Sutar, Mathey Ghatey Shilpa [Art on Ground Zero] (Kolkata:
March 2022). 38. An artists’ residential collective that emerged a decade ago, largely
through the earnings and experience of Durga Puja commissions, on the south-western
peripheries of Kolkata, stands exemplary of this trend. Called Chander Haat (which
literally translates as ‘a fair on the moon’, and metaphorically means ‘a place of wish-
fulfilment’), this art space has steadily grown and attracted the attention of the city’s art
worlds. Most recently, its artistic ambitions scaled new heights in a large solo exhibition
of the lead artist of this collective, Bhabatosh Sutar, held during March–April 2022—
setting a new score, both in the range of animation, sound and video technologies it
employed across its site-specific installations, and in the kinds of publicity and
viewership it attracted. 39. ‘Okwui Enwezor, Curator Who Remapped Art Worlds, Dies
at 55’, New York Times, 18 March 2019.
Image 10.1 Tamilttay, poster published on the occasion of the fifth International Tamil
Conference in Madurai under the guidance of Professor Aru. Alagappan, Tamil
Curankam, Madurai, 1981 Source: Author’s collection.
10 A Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India* Sumathi Ramaswamy
We make the gods, and the gods make us.1 I am no longer beset by the need to
occlude the traces of the irreducibly autobiographical in cultural speculations of this
sort.2
he ‘fragile social achievement’ that is modern secular life has needed many symbolic
fictions—some enduring, others more ephemeral—to sustain itself over time and across
numerous (rivalling) constituencies.3 Among the most intriguing of these fictions in
modern India, with its own specific history of secularity, is the mother/goddess, a more-
than-human figure with roots in a hoary ancient past but with a palpable consequential
presence in the present, a being whose simultaneous claim to transcendent divinity and
earthly maternality undercuts any easy separation as sacral or secular, divine or
worldly.4 In this essay, I offer some reflections on what I have learned as a professional
historian over the past two decades and more as a series of these intriguing more-than-
humans succeeded in capturing my imagination, in disturbing the terms of my
engagement with official documentary archives, in troubling the text-saturated
categories of my analysis, and in redirecting my work along paths that I had not
envisioned before my unanticipated encounter with them, compelling me to become, in
the process, goddess-aware. This awareness, I would insist, does not imply ‘a nostalgia
for religious forms that would oppress selves and impede reason’, but rather a
willingness ‘to enter into productive assemblages with them’,5 and an inclination
towards cultivating ‘a porous self’.6 You have to take my word: I did not seek out these
multi-armed miracle-working beings of my own accord; instead, they erupted over and
again in the most unexpected ways and places, demanding my scholarly attention and
refusing to go away. Unlike scholars of religion who work on the South Asian
subcontinent, especially feminist scholars of Hinduism, for whom the goddess is indeed
a staple, the respectable card-carrying historian of modern India typically maintains a
discreet distance from these sites of affective intensity.7 We keep them at bay on the
margins of our disciplinary practice, occasionally invoking them in passing sometimes,
but then moving on, all too quickly, seemingly embarrassed about incorporating them
more centrally into our ‘objectivist’ narrative(s).8 ‘A secular subject like history faces
certain problems in handling practices
A Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India
299
in which gods, spirits, or the supernatural have agency in the world,’ writes Dipesh
Chakrabarty. Secular histories, he argues, are usually produced by ignoring the signs of
divine presences. Such histories represent a meeting of two systems of thought, one in
which the world is ultimately, that is, in the final analysis, disenchanted, and the other in
which humans are not the only meaningful agents. For the purpose of writing history,
the first system, the secular one, translates the second into itself.9
To use a Weberian phrase, the discipline is essentially ‘robbed of gods’, and its good
professional adherents are expected to conform to methodological atheism.10 So, what
happens when the professional historian wilfully ceases to honour the great divide
between disenchanted worldly and the supernatural extraordinary, and instead allows
the godly more-than-human to power her narrative? As I explore this question, I also
consider how the goddess conspires and collaborates with the enchanting labour of the
image11 to destabilize the certitudes of my prosaic social science analyses, compelling
me into the visual turn upon which many historians have (somewhat reluctantly)
embarked.12 Visual work in fact spurs the disciplinary historian into a realm not
constituted exclusively by words and texts, even as it reveals truths otherwise occluded
by focusing entirely on the verbal. I make no case for the sovereignty of the visual
image or the artwork; on the contrary, a shuttling back and forth between the discursive
and the figural is critical to the method of the visual historian, as I have suggested
elsewhere.13 But this very act of shuttling has also convinced me of the capacity of the
image to operate as an agent ‘with power over people who believe in that power’.14
Visual history has enabled me to puncture the received narrative and to upend
recognized truths, propelling me in the process into states of rapture that frequently
accompany new discoveries and revelations, if only momentarily, before the
(disenchanting) professional protocols of the discipline inevitably reassert themselves.
The goddess, as it were, seizes that window of opportunity before the historicizing
imperative sets in, and inserting herself into my narrative, begins to fundamentally
transform its tenor and texture.
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Sumathi Ramaswamy
Even as I research and write about the work of the goddess, I am all too aware of the
risk of opening the gates of the seemingly safe space of secular history to these more-
than-human beings who also power the imaginaries and politics of Hindu nationalism
which has dug itself deep into the Indian democratic landscape with its own brand of
illiberal enchantment. I would insist nonetheless that the very act of historicizing—of
putting the gods and other divine beings in their time and in their place—is an important
safeguard, since fundamentalisms are by definition anti-historical. Nevertheless, I am on
a highly charged tightrope walk, a walk that I cannot but take as I heed the call of the
goddess to make me contend with her and take her full measure from within my
‘buffered’ disciplinary practice.
The Goddess of Language Devotion The first of such goddesses to so take over my
scholarly world was Mother Tamil, referred to in Tamil in various ways (Tamilannai,
Tamiltevi, Tamilaraci), but most frequently as Tamilttay: the language spoken by several
millions imagined as goddess, queen, and mother (Image 10.1). The disciplined
historian in me can assert with some degree of certitude that she is a figure virtually
unknown in the Tamil lifeworld before the late nineteenth century when she manifested
herself, in response to various pressures of colonial modernity ranging from the
pedagogical to the governmental, in very many tantalizing ways in poetry, prose, and
pictures, almost always wearing about her an aura of the sacred and the hallowed.15
Tamilttay came into my professional life when I was in graduate school in the United
States in the late 1980s, attempting to write a doctoral dissertation on the cultural
politics of Tamil nationalism in twentiethcentury India: a respectable historical subject
and a lively one at that point. Virtually nothing in the existing scholarship on the subject,
however, especially in the English language, had prepared me for this embodied being
whom I soon began to encounter in arcane literary musings, in mystical religious
verses, and in populist poetry of the street, almost invariably all in Tamil. If, following the
political theorist Jane Bennett, we agree that to be enchanted is ‘to be simultaneously
transfixed in wonder and transported by sense, to be both caught up and carried away’,
Tamilttay was certainly such an enchanting personage for those who sang
301
and wrote about her.16 She was, however, curiously absent in the published and
unpublished government documents in the official state archives to which historians of
colonial and postcolonial India typically turn, and in fact start with, when beginning their
investigation of a problematic from the past. And yet, whenever I left the accustomed
space of the familiar official archives with its privileging of the English language and of
prosaic narratives, and read Tamil poetry and song, I frequently felt as if I was
momentarily immobilized by what Philip Fisher has described as a ‘moment of pure
presence … the object’s difference and uniqueness being so striking … that we find
ourselves delaying in its presence for a time’.17 In Jane Bennett’s words, at such
moments, ‘thoughts, but also limbs … are brought to rest, even as the senses continue
to operate, indeed, in high gear. You notice new colours, discern details previously
ignored, hear extraordinary sounds, as familiar landscapes of sense sharpen and
intensify.’18 In other words, I too was in body and thought propelled into a state of
(worldly) enchantment. In that state, the contours of what I was all too quickly—and
safely—characterizing in prosaic social science language as ‘Tamil nationalism’ began
to blur and to take on other shapes and forms. Before long, I found myself abandoning
the familiar ‘secular’ framework of linguistic nationalism with which I had started several
years earlier (and under whose mandate my doctoral dissertation did indeed get
written), but which by now I found inadequate to capture the array of passionate
attachments between the deified, feminized, and embodied language—a site of
wondrous intensity—and its enthralled speakers. Instead, under their force, I felt
compelled to propose a new analytic of Tamil devotion (tamilpparru) around which,
eventually, my first book came to be written, albeit in the routine language of social
science discourse but nevertheless considerably leavened by the lively more-than-
human presence of the mother/goddess in my narrative. This analytic also allowed me
to show that attachment to Tamil and Tamilttay cannot be easily contained within the
timeworn binary of ‘secular’ versus ‘religious’, for one bled into the other, making
boundaries blurry and contours confused. I have since come to see that giving in and
heeding the call of Tamilttay enabled me to respond to Prasenjit Duara’s exhortation to
‘rescue history from the nation’—in fact, perhaps to even hear it—and to Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s injunction not to write the history of our parts of the world as ‘an already
known history, something which has already happened
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Sumathi Ramaswamy
elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced with local content’.19 Ironically then, it was
my entanglement with a more-than-human being from the other side of the so-called
secular divide which pushed me to begin engaging with one of the most productive of
turns in history-writing in the subcontinent, namely, the postcolonial, with its emphasis
on allowing the unassimilable, the untranslatable, the singular, and the different to
reverberate through the empty homogeneous—and putatively godless— time of
disciplinary history. The mother/goddess also came to the rescue in helping me argue
that I was not conjuring up something tangible out of the intangible. If Tamilttay was only
a figure of speech, as some naysayers might argue, how could one account for her
manifestation in colourful posters, magazine illustrations, newspaper cartoons, wooden
statues, and metal images which transformed metaphorical imagination into material
image? Coming of age as a historian at a time when the clarion call of my discipline was
to make the hidden, the submerged, and the suppressed ‘visible’, I asked myself how
one writes the history of something that is hidden in plain sight. My attempt to answer
such questions led me to contend seriously with the work of the image for the first time
in my professional life as a historian, and to explore its transformative role over time in
producing the enchanted web of piety which binds Tamil to its devoted speaker. I came
to think of the image ‘as a source of action, as something which has efficacy, as
something that does things in the world and with the world, and as having sufficient
coherence to make a difference, to produce effects, and to alter the course of events’.20
In other words, the image is constitutive, rather than merely reflective or communicative,
world-making rather than world-mirroring. My own consequential entanglement with the
image—and artwork more generally—also allowed me to unravel, following the
historicizing protocols of my discipline, new truths about Tamilttay and the fraught
circumstances that enabled her emergence in the first place. For one, despite
assertions by her devoted votaries about her singularity and uniqueness, she resembles
the standard industrial-age ‘poster’ deities who became visible from the closing years of
the nineteenth century in the burgeoning commercial and visual art complexes of British
India. Her devoted speaker might insist that she is the most ancient of goddesses, and
indeed a shrewd archaism is central to her visual look. Nevertheless, all kinds of telltale
signs of modernity also have crept into her image persona. Despite the fact that she
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is deemed a ‘Tamil’ goddess, she does not particularly resemble the women of the
region in her features, mien, or even the style of the sari she wears; and indeed, she is
generally presented with a (unnatural) pale complexion. In fact, unless she is
specifically named as such, the Tamil goddess runs the risk in the visual realm of being
confused with Saraswati, the more well-established and widely known Sanskritic
goddess of knowledge and learning, although many Tamil devotees started their career
as such in opposition to what was widely portrayed as Sanskrit (and north Indian)
imperialism. As a matter of fact, although Dravidian nationalism, which underwrote a
large part of the Tamil movement from the 1920s, claimed to be secular, even anti-
Hindu, in its ideology, Tamilttay herself looks very much like a Hindu goddess in her
standard iconography (Image 10.2): she
Image 10.2 S. K. Ayya, Tamilttay, chromolithograph published by Kamban Kazhagam,

Karaikkudi, circa 1941 Source: Author’s collection.
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wears the crown that many Hindu divinities customarily sport; she extends her right
hand—one of four, typically!—in the standard gesture of offering protection and blessing
(abhaya mudra); she sits on a large lotus or her feet rest on it; and her face often carries
the look of remote transcendence that marks the countenance of many a deity. Her
votaries have clearly found it difficult to escape the grip of the Hindu iconographic canon
to which they turn, again and again, in their effort to imagine Tamilttay as a singular
image and icon, or even as an intimate mother. Not least, over the course of her career
as the (novel) goddess of the devoted Tamil speaker, Tamilttay’s path frequently
crossed—and not always harmoniously—the trails of another (new) symbolic personage
who began to loom large in the Indian national imagination, and whose appearance in
the Tamil country can be traced back to about the same time as the birth of Tamilttay.21
Indeed, in certain contexts, they could well be each other’s twin, especially in the image
realm where it is sometimes difficult to tell one apart from the other. So, it seemed
inevitable that my sustained entanglement with one goddess would perforce lead me to
take on the other.
The Goddess and the Nation And yet this was not a path that I immediately took, and
might even have intuitively resisted as a historian committed to my secular discipline.
Instead, my evolving interest in understanding how national territory— rather than a
spoken language—was visually imagined took me into the interdisciplinary field of the
history of cartography to document how, under two centuries of colonial rule starting in
the 1760s, a place called India (or ‘Hindoostan’) began to be progressively reconfigured
and spatially stabilized on the earth’s surface as a geo-body through empirical
observation, terrestrial survey operations, triangulation, and inscriptions.22 This
mapped image of India was certainly among the proudest achievements of a colonial
state that sought to wean its subjects away from the stranglehold of superstitious
attachments in order to make them modern and civilized. Many of these subjects—
especially those who went to colonial schools and those who became part of the state’s
evolving bureaucratic regime—did indeed become good learners, and to this day, the
secular scientific empire of mathematical geography and cartography
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holds sway in the subcontinent long after British rule has formally ended. The mapped
image of India has prevailed as a dominant visual look of national territory, and it is an
image around which ‘cartographic wars’ have been waged, and lives given and
sacrificed.23 And yet even as I began to attend to the historical force of the mapped
image of India, it became apparent that outside the realms of cartographic science and
the secular state, it was routinely seized and occupied by a morethan-human, the
abstract geo-body recast as the divine mother/goddess Bharat Mata, gloriously pictured
in all manner of visual media ranging from oils and acrylics to chromolithographs and
cinema (Image 10.3).
Image 10.3 Appu, Untitled [Bharat Mata], published by Brijbasi, Delhi, circa 2005
Source: Author’s collection.
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Indeed, in the noisy demotic image-worlds of the bazaar and the street, in contrast to
secular scientific and state cartography, the anthropomorphic, the patriotic, the
devotional, and the maternal are privileged, so that the mapped space of the national
territory is taken over by varied bodies, human and divine, known and anonymous, lofty
and plebian. In such works—which I describe as the creations of ‘barefoot
cartographers’— India rarely appears as empty social space as it does in statist secular
maps marked by tantalizing, even alluring, lines and grids. In the artful mapping of the
bazaar instead, bodies appear to matter more than boundaries, the affective more than
the abstract. And most conspicuous among such affect-laden bodies is Mother India
who fills up the map of India, or merges partially with it, or is seated or standing on it.
Most destabilizing of all, she even dispenses with it entirely and stands in for the geo-
body of India, her figure artfully reproducing the form of the nation.24 Ironically, but
altogether not surprisingly, given what we concede now about modern science’s
capacity to generate new wonders, even ecstatic enchantment, the mathematized map
of India, the proud artefact of a secular colonizing state and its sciences, is in fact the
essential guarantor of Mother India’s novel persona as deity of national territory: the
map is indeed the very ground on which she appears, and its presence assures her a
distinctive identity, enabling her to not be readily confused with or mistaken for an
ancestral goddess—like Durga—on whom she is clearly (but not exclusively) modelled.
In fact, Bengali artist Abanindranath Tagore’s early picturing of Bharat Mata in 1905
stands out in this regard because it did not draw on the map of the emergent nation to
provide a discrete iconography for the new goddess of territory (Image 10.4). Much
lauded in art-historical circles, it had little impact on popular visual culture which
continued to resort to the map form, enchanting in a way that only objects of science
can be.25 And yet, in being hijacked for the cause of the goddess, the secular–scientific
map is anthropomorphized, its abstract(ed) space filled with the sensuous, feminine,
and quite Hindu presence of Mother India. In other words, one kind of enchantment is
supplemented by another, through the work of the barefoot cartographer. In this
manner, the goddess once again interrupted my ‘disciplined’ pursuits, and put pressure
on a good social scientific question I had been asking, cued by my reading of Benedict
Anderson, Thongchai Winichakul, and a whole host of insightful scholars of cartographic
science—namely,
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Image 10.4 Bharat Mata, chromolithograph of Abanindranath Tagore’s tempera on

paper, circa 1905, published by the Indian Press, Allahabad, circa 1910 Source: Image
courtesy of the Osian’s Archive, Research and Documentation Centre, Mumbai.
why does the nation long for cartographic form? The carto-graphed figure of Mother
India asserted itself to remind me that this yearning for form not only takes recourse to
that abstract mathematized reasoning that undergirds the sciences of geography and
cartography but was also radically supplemented in twentieth-century India by the
anthropomorphic, the sacral, and the maternal. In 1931, the Tamil thinker and poet
Bharathidasan, reared in a spirit of Dravidian ‘rationalism’, had asked, ‘In the days when
we did not the know the shape of India, it might have been a woman.… Have not,
however, the British taught us about the geographical shape of India as early as the
fourth grade?’ The answer to the rhetorical question is yes, of course, the British—and
the postcolonial nation-state—indeed
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taught Indians this foundational fact, but outside the realms of secular science and the
state, thanks to the work of Bharat Mata, the geographic form of the nation is repeatedly
confronted, disrupted, and ‘de-formed’ by the anthropomorphic-sacred and the more-
than-human. This revelation led me to change course, take her on board, and
demonstrate how the image of the mapped mother was deployed to persuade patriots
to give up their lives for a few lines drawn on a piece of paper. As one passionate patriot
—a fictional character though he was—insisted, ‘No one can give up his life for a map,’
but they can—and do—for a piece of mapped territory named and pictured as
motherland. All the same, the pursuit of enchantment—for ideological, ethical, or artistic
purposes, or even out of a sense of personal wonder—is not without considerable risk,
even to the point of threat to one’s life and limb, as witnessed in the career of late
Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s most famous modernist. Muslim though he might have
been by birth, Husain was drawn from early on to the plethora of Hindu deities,
especially goddesses, whom he painted on thousands of canvases with great artistic
acumen but also in a spirit of ecstatic abandon not dissimilar to the love felt by the bhakt
(devotee) for a chosen deity. Celebrated in the decades after Independence as
exemplary of India’s much-vaunted pluralism and secularism, these canvases returned
to haunt the artist in darker times, the very presence of the goddess on their painted
surface making him vulnerable to attacks from a resurgent Hindu nationalism with its
own brand of illiberal enchantment centred on the figure of Bharat Mata. This was
especially the case when in 2005 that goddess made an insistent appearance in one of
his works as a nude body in pain, the names of various Indian cities scattered across
her torso, with the words Bhopal and Gujarat—sites of industrial and communal
genocide—inscribed on her bare breasts. The resulting furore sent the ninety-year-old
artist into selfimposed exile from the country of his birth, work, and passions, never to
return until his death in London in June 2011. It also brought Husain—a household
name in the India I grew up in—into my professional orbit, pushing me to explore the
manner in which the artworks of Muslims like him have been marginalized or even
excised from the visual tradition that has accumulated around Mother India. Once again,
the goddess had intervened to remind me that the historian of every generation has to
rise and meet the obligation, even at great risk to their own life and labour, ‘to
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recover the voices of past sufferers and thereby provide them with some small measure
of secular salvation’.26
The Goddess and Geo-piety Indeed, Husain’s travails at the hands of illiberal forces
caution us from assuming that goddesses—enchanted though they might seem—have
had an easy journey through India’s complex secular modernity. The mixed fortunes of
one ancient goddess—whose origins, unlike Tamilttay’s or Bharat Mata’s, stretch back
into the distant beginnings of religious life in the region—is a case in point. I write of the
being variously known as Prithvi, Bhudevi, Bhumata, or Dharti Ma, our Earth imagined
as an embodied female whose existence has been documented from the earliest known
Sanskrit texts as a consistent, if muted, presence. In pre-modern art practices, she was
especially manifest in the context of her rescue from the clutches of a cosmic demon by
Varaha, the boar god and third incarnation of the Puranic super deity Vishnu. Although
there is considerable variation in how she was visualized across various media (as
indeed in how her rescue is imagined), more often than not she was cast as a beautiful
demure female, obviously in awe of the immense male animal god who is her saviour
(for example, Image 10.5). In contrast to the fierce mother/goddesses of the Hindu
pantheon, she is typically not multi-limbed. She is more humanoid than unambiguously
divine.27 Fast forward to the closing years of the nineteenth century and early years of
the twentieth to consider a chromolithograph printed by a publisher who made ‘god
posters’ famous across colonial India, and which seriously updated ancestral accounts
of Earth’s primeval rescue by a manly deity (Image 10.6). The poster shows a blue-grey
Varaha—half man, half boar— emerging from the swirling waters, his four hands
bearing the standard symbols associated with Vishnu. He is gloriously adorned in
jewels, a crown atop his head. Resting on his tusk is a magnificent terrestrial globe with
exquisite attention paid to oceans and landmasses. Although the Indian subcontinent is
quite prominently on view on the surface of the globe, the artist has set aside ancestral
ways of representing our Earth for the relatively novel form of an inanimate but perfect
sphere, itself a gift of the West to the rest. As historians of cartography have shown
(albeit largely based on evidence from Euro-America), the terrestrial globe emerged
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Image 10.5 Varaha rescuing Prithvi, sandstone sculpture, Eran, Madhya Pradesh, late
fifth or sixth century CE Source: Photograph courtesy of the American Institute of Indian
Studies.
as a proxy for our planet and a material stand-in for what I have called (following
Thongchai Winichakul) Modern Earth.28 It is as such that the object circulated under
the force of pedagogic modernity in British India, with its disciplined production of
schooled subjects through educational practices that were putatively secular. And yet,
as I discovered in the course of my archival research, outside colonial schools and
educational contexts, the terrestrial globe centred on the map of India was also put to
the service of transforming Hinduism’s many deities into ‘Indian’ gods as they came to
be visualized sitting or standing on it, holding it in their hands, or simply placed in its
company. So, it seems that on the face of it, the (Hindu) gods have once again
prevailed in a modernizing India—and with the complicity of the very instruments of
secular science that ought to have banished them.
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Image 10.6 Varaha, published by Ravi Varma Press, Karla-Lonavla, chromolithograph,

late nineteenth century Source: Image courtesy of the Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology, University of Cambridge, catalogue number Z 44986.15.
But not all deities were completely successful in this regard, and Prithvi appears to have
become victim to the triumphant takeover by the ubiquitous image of Modern Earth as
an alluring mathematized sphere silently and mysteriously twirling about its own axis. In
fact, the poster printed by the Ravi Varma Press was not singular in its displacement of
Prithvi by the globe. Over the course of the twentieth century into the present, this is
the standard manner in which Varaha’s cosmic rescue mission is more often than not
depicted in book illustrations and children’s colouring books, in paintings on home and
temple walls as well as stone statuary, in brass plaques, clay toys, and wooden
figurines, in ephemera like ganjifa playing cards and board games, and in mythological
cinema.
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All this is not to say that Prithvi as a female goddess disappears from the visual
landscape of modern India. Indeed, and fascinatingly, Ravi Varma—the artist who likely
produced the globe-bearing Varaha in Image 10.6—had painted in 1880 a work in oil
titled Sita Bhumipravesh (Sita’s entry into Earth). Although much attention has been
paid to the figure of the hapless Sita ‘who may have been read as a figure of the nation
and its people, whose honour was also threatened by colonial interrogators’,29 I am
focused upon the other woman who is part of the mis en scène: Bhoomi Devi, beautiful
and bejewelled, but a far cry from the inanimate terrestrial globe rescued by the mighty
Varaha. All the same, if one did not know her complex (his)story or if she is not
specifically named as such, there is very little to distinguish her as a deity who
personified Earth. Indeed, a colonial censor recognized this in the early years of the
twentieth century when he noted, after observing all manner of innovations that had
begun to accrue around the annual celebrations of the Ramayana in the town of Meerut:
A chauki [tableau] of Prithvi Mata [Mother Earth] is shown in the above procession along
with those of other gods.... Prithvi Mata is exhibited as being the mother of Sita … the
educated classes probably call it or will call it Bharat Mata, whatever she may be called
by the pandits….30
Prithvi as a bejewelled goddess may also be spotted in the ubiquitous prints of Mother
Cow, variously referred to as Gau Mata or Kamadhenu, in which she is frequently
pictured as a two- or four-armed goddess, perched inside the belly of the bovine.31 The
theriomorphic imagination of Earth as a cow also reaches way back into antiquity and is
revived in the context of a resurgent Hindu nationalism. Again, it is only because the
goddess is named as such that we would even know that she is Prithvi or Bhoomi Devi.
Given such representational challenges, artists have turned, ironically, to the terrestrial
globe to distinguish Prithvi from the generic Hindu goddess, such recourse also only
possible, again ironically, with the consolidation of Modern Earth in the Indian
imagination. An artist called M. Ramaiah thus painted an image that was subsequently
mass printed in 1953 with the title (in English) Bhoodevi. Bhoodevi is pictured
simultaneously as a four-armed Hindu goddess and as a terrestrial globe contained by
the graticule of latitudes and longitudes within which the peninsular outline
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of India is clearly demarcated. Indeed, if we are to go by the title of the print, the viewer
is called upon to see the gridded globe itself as Bhoodevi: there is a strategic ambiguity
at play here that is worth underscoring.32 A few decades later, the publishers of the
comic book Dasha Avatar (The ten incarnations) in the widely read Amar Chitra Katha
series intended mostly for young readers, creatively brought together the spherical and
the anthropomorphic despite their essential incommensurability. In their pictorial
rendering of the cosmic rescue mission performed by Varaha, ‘Mother Earth’ also
known as ‘Bhoomi Devi’ is rolled up inside a large globe, a damsel in distress.33 Not
least, we can point to a 2009 painting in acrylic by Mithila artist Shalinee Kumari—with
graduate and postgraduate degrees in geography, whose study inspires her to include
globes and maps routinely in her artwork—titled Weeping Mother Earth Prays to the
Sun God to Spare the Earth from Global Warming, in which ‘Dharti Ma’ springs out of
(or merges into) a terrestrial globe whose surface is inscribed with the five continents of
the modern world.34 Indeed, in the age of climate change, global warming, ‘green’
ethics, and (eco)feminism,35 Prithvi may well begin to make common cause with
animated entities like Pachamama and Gaia, who too have in recent decades
experienced a resurgence, albeit in radically transformed terms, even in the writings of
some heterodox scientists who have not hesitated to use the gendered language of
anthropomorphism. In Bruno Latour’s words, ‘Gaia is the great Trickster of our present
history.’36 Not surprisingly, ‘we seem to have great difficulty housing her inside our
global view, and even more difficulty housing ourselves inside her complex cybernetic
feedbacks’.37 Reflecting on James Lovelace’s Gaia theory—itself rebuked by
mainstream scientists for its vague mysticism and for flirting with metaphors of the
divine (for the very reason it was also embraced by some admirers)—Latour concludes
his short essay in which he too seems to be ‘waiting for Gaia’: ‘The idea, at once daring
and modest, is that we might convince Gaia that since we now weigh so much upon Her
shoulders—and Hers on ours—we might entertain some sort of a deal—or a ritual.’38
Some years after Latour’s essay, the controversial Tamil politician H. R. Raja gave us a
preview of what one such deal or ritual might look like in the Indian context one hot
summer when photographs of him ‘cooling’ down Earth by pouring water over a
mounted school globe—the master object of secular pedagogic modernity, as I have
characterized it—circulated on
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social media, attracting both attention and attack.39 Once again, Prithvi’s female form
appears to have conceded to an inanimate (metal or plastic) sphere, but all the same, it
is worth noting in Raja’s action the transfer of rites and rituals from the sacral body to
the secular object placed on a lotus-shaped pedestal, no less. Geo-piety has perforce to
resort to some unexpected salvational strategies in the time of Modern Earth.
The Goddess and English Enchantment Having been exposed thus to such surprising
encounters with and unexpected appearances of more-than-humans from the other side
of the secular divide, one might say that the ground was well prepared for me to be
receptive to the hail of yet another goddess in October 2006. She is the goddess
English in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, but relocated now to a new home: the map
of India, its critical western, northern, and eastern boundaries all undone (Image
10.7).40 Her formal name is English the Dalit Goddess, but since her birth—precisely
on 25 October 2006, the 206th birthday of Thomas Macaulay, the colonial administrator
(and Victorian historian) who is most associated with the pedagogical ascendancy of
English in British India—she also came to be known in Hindi as Angrezi Devi (literally,
English goddess) and Dalit Ma (literally, Dalit Mother). She is the product of the
imaginations of two Delhi-based Dalit men: the artist Shanti Swaroop Baudh and
especially the journalist and public intellectual Chandra Bhan Prasad. Starting in 2004
but especially from 2006, Prasad spearheaded for a few years an intriguing campaign to
change the very terms of recognition of his fellow Dalits by proposing that English be
their sole language, and in fact that his fellow Dalits should resolutely turn their backs
on the caste-saturated languages of India which they habitually speak. As was the case
with Tamilttay, Bharat Mata, and Bhoodevi, the entry of English the Dalit Goddess into
my professional life compelled me to begin asking new questions, this time about the
Dalit relationship to Indian languages—something that I had not sought to ask at all in
my early career—and the Dalit relationship to Indian national territory that was totally
occluded in my earlier work on Mother India. Once again, a goddess had manifested to
interrupt my ways of thinking, create trouble for my past arguments, and redirect the
flow of my work in new and productive ways. For these reasons, I have not been
persuaded to dismiss or forget Prasad’s
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Image 10.7 Shanti Swaroop Baudh and Chandrabhan Prasad, English the Dalit
Goddess, print, 2009 Source: Author’s collection.
abbreviated project, as some may be inclined to do, as ‘gimmicky’ or as ‘performative

excess’. As I began to research the image of this novel goddess, I encountered the
curious history of the iconic Statue of Liberty in New York which art historian Darcy
Grigsby has shown might have had its origin in the subaltern form of the peasant
woman or female fellah who Frederic Bartholdi witnessed at work in the fields, when he
first visited Egypt for a few months in 1855–1856. Grigsby writes that there can be no
doubt of the ancestral connection between fellah and ‘Liberty’, although Bartholdi
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himself vehemently disavowed this. In other words, occluded in all the copybook notions
of the Statue of Liberty as an exclusive and pure EuroAmerican iconic statue is the prior
migration of a figure from further east— and closer to India—in the form of a humble
female fellah labouring in the Egyptian fields of whom Bartholdi made at least five extant
clay models and two watercolour drawings which subsequently morphed into what is
today known as the Statue of Liberty. Grigsby concludes, ‘The Statue of Liberty, so
remote and abstractly chastened and generalized, began in actual encounters with
Egyptian peasant women.’ The cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell has reminded us that
we need to shift from a question such as ‘What do we know of images?’ to ‘What do
images know? Are images not just objects of our knowledge, but also repositories of
their own knowledge?’41 Building on this question, I propose that the Statue of Liberty
is an image that carries traces of its travels and peregrinations, sedimented in its very
form. By looking with new eyes at this most familiar of statues from the postcolonial
margins of Egypt (and India), it becomes harder for us to see it any longer as merely a
Euro-American image. Instead, I find it more productive to deem it transcultural, an
image ‘that shows us the imbrication in any one culture of other cultures, culture itself
being nothing more nor less than these imbrications or traces of otherness’.42 So, the
Statue’s ontology as a ‘strong’ image—as something that lends itself to appropriation
and mimicry in other contexts—derives from its very forging in the migration of forms,
first from Egypt to France, and then from France to the United States, and then from the
United States to elsewhere, including India.43 And in India, it is altogether fitting that the
new Dalit goddess actually might have had her eventual origins in the labouring female
body, complicating a simple judgment that its creators have been conned by Euro-
American capitalism into adopting one of its core symbols. In their mimetic capture of
such an iconic image of the metropole from their own location in northern India, I
underscore Baudh and Prasad’s conspicuous refusal of markers that are visibly
identifiable with an Indic universe, especially a deep Hindu–Sanskritic symbolic world,
that has so dogged the visual imagination of other novel modern goddesses of
apparently secular projects, such as Tamilttay or Bharat Mata. There are few
subterfuges of antiquity at work here. Everything in her formal appearance (with the
singular exception of the Buddhist spoked wheel) is
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largely novel to the iconographic landscape of pre-modern India, and is a product of its
recent experience of secular, even industrial, modernity: the fountain pen, the floppy
hat, the computer monitor, even the map of India. The Dalit theorist Gopal Guru has
observed, ‘Dalits have no nostalgia: what they remember is only the history of
humiliation and exploitation.’ An invitation letter that Prasad sent out to commemorate
the 2009 English Day insisted, ‘We will deactivize our roots-based preferences—caste,
language, religion, culture, food habits, and lifestyle. We will realize that nostalgia is a
psychological weapon of the dominant. For at least a few hours, we will sign off from the
wisdom that we have never asked for.’ This critical anti-nostalgia might well be the
signature sentiment animating this particular Dalit secular visual politics, a politics that
does not have to bear the burden of maintaining authenticity, purity, and a commitment
to a hallowed, especially Hindu past that are essential to upper-caste status.
Paradoxically, the historically oppressed, as Kancha Illaiah reminds us, have a greater
freedom to choose new symbols in the new global age. So, does this particular Dalit
immersion in a politics of what political scientist Aditya Nigam has called ‘the here and
the now’ free the followers of Chandra Bhan Prasad from the clutches of what
anthropologists Jill Reese and Urmila Mohan have called veneration nation, ‘the
recursive culture of adulatory practices and aesthetics’ that they have identified as
coursing through the long haul of India’s history, and that is especially visible in the
charged movements around Tamilttay and Bharat Mata?44 The answer is not all that
straightforward because Prasad has clearly assigned the English goddess an important
performative, even ritual, role that is revealing of his larger aspirations regarding the
future place of English in India, especially Dalit India. Like so many others who set out
to start new social movements in India, he too wishes to build a ‘temple’ for his
goddess, although its proposed iconography takes the shape of a large computer. At
the foundation-stone-laying ceremony on 30 April 2010 in a school yard in eastern Uttar
Pradesh, as journalist Anand observed: The chief priest was a suit-clad Chandra Bhan
Prasad, the mantra chanted—ABCD. After a few crisp speeches—in Hindi—
emphasizing the need for English among Dalits and other oppressed groups, a 30-inch
bronze idol was installed, and a song composed by teachers of the school soared over
the din: London sey chalkar aayi, yeh Angrezi
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Sumathi Ramaswamy
Devi Maiyya / Computer-wali Maiyya, hai Angrezi Devi Maiyya / Hum sabki Devi
Maiyya, jan-jan ki Devi Maiyya … (She hails from London, this Goddess English / She
reigns over computers, hail Goddess English; she’s everybody’s goddess, she is the
goddess of people the world over).45
Prasad’s entire project is also indebted to a father figure, none less than the colonial
administrator Thomas Macaulay. It is one of the fitting paradoxes of history that a man
attacked by the (upper-caste-dominated) historical establishment in the subcontinent for
his disdain for Indian knowledges and for his thinly veiled ethnocentrism has been
installed in this particular Dalit symbolic regime as ‘the father of Indian modernity’.
Macaulay’s birthday on 25 October is the new English Day, to be celebrated every year;
in the 2009 English day celebrations, a big chocolate cake, with the words ‘Happy
Birthday M’, was placed under Macaulay’s portrait. At a time when few perhaps in his
own homeland even remember who Macaulay is, or recall his birthday, let alone
celebrate it, that a group of Dalits and their supporters in distant India would gather to
commemorate this ghostly presence from the imperial past is not least of the
carnivalesque ironies that pulse through this incipient movement.
The Goddess of Great Things At the heart of India as veneration nation is the charge of
affective embodiment that puts pressure on any historian who seeks to write about the
place and people in an objectivist and prosaic hand. In his autobiography, the man who
would go on to become independent India’s first prime minister famously worried over
his fellow citizens’ ‘tendency’ to anthropomorphize, a tendency which he put down to
‘the force of habit and early associations’. This was clearly something that Jawaharlal
Nehru hoped we would get over in our march forward on the path of scientific socialism
and secularism guided by the spectral—and formless—Spirit of the nation. Often, as
I look at this world, I have a sense of mysteries, of unknown depths.… What the
mysterious is I do not know. I do not call it God because God has come to mean much
that I do not believe in. I find
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myself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in

anthropomorphic terms, and the fact that many people think so is continually a source of
surprise to me.46
Many of us who came of age in Nehruvian India, and that certainly includes me,
followed our first prime minister in our state of bemused suspicion at, even hostility
towards, the anthropomorphic, the credulous, and the idolatrous—and in our efforts to
estrange ourselves from these in our abstract(ed) vision of a secular and democratic
(and from 1976, socialist) India immortalized in the preamble to our Constitution. If
historians are the paradigmatic narrators of the secular socialist nation, no wonder then
that the histories we are trained to write fence off the agency of the godly and the more-
than-human, or at best, translate it into the prosaic language of social science, as I have
already noted. And yet paradoxically, it is by becoming a professional academic that
I have learned to contend and cohabit with some of these wondrous beings that no
Nehrvuvian citizen or secular historian would ‘naturally’ wish for, but who press
themselves upon me in ever proliferating ways. Bruno Latour has most insistently
reminded us that we live in times in which we are witness to ‘a fabulous population of
new images, fresh icons, rejuvenated mediators, greater flows of media, more powerful
ideas, stronger idols’.47 These ‘modern’ goddesses who have entered my professional
life are such ‘stronger idols’, bolstered as they have been by their co-optation of all
manner of other icons of secular modernity such as the map and the globe. As such, in
their novel presence I have simultaneously felt ‘both caught up and carried away’,
experiencing ‘a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet
unprocessed encounter’, and ‘a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or
torn out of [my] default sensory–psychic–intellectual disposition’.48 This, Jane Bennett
tells me, is the overall effect of the mood of ‘worldly’ enchantment. ‘Enchantment is
something that we encounter, that hits us,’ she reminds me, ‘but it is also a
comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.’ Such a comportment,
she argues, enables us to develop an affective attachment to this world. It is an ethical
aspiration, indeed critical obligation, ‘which requires bodily movements in space,
mobilizations of heat and energy, a series of choreographed gestures, a distinctive
assemblage of affective propulsions’.49 It is a comportment that prohibits us from
slipping into
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the banal and the humdrum, or worse, lapsing into indifference and complacency,
refusing to heed the need for secular salvation or call for social justice. In Bennett’s
words, ‘The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored
with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable
of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.’50 And so,
I have come to believe that history-writing itself can and should be a deliberate strategy
for such affective propulsion, or ethical worldly enchantment, ‘of which no one, however
hard-bitten he or she may be, need feel ashamed.… All we need to do is to immerse
ourselves in the epiphanies of form taking place before our eyes.’51 In this call to
immerse myself in ‘the epiphany of form’ whose ‘scandalous’ presence in my work
blasts me out of the homogeneous course of history,52 and renews my commitment to
doing a history that does not lapse into indifference, I hear the hail of the mother/
goddess who, over the long course of the subcontinent’s history originating in the valley
of the Indus river in the third millennium BCE, has herself been something of a scandal:
fierce, volatile, unpredictable, even becoming a weapon in the hands of illiberal forces
(as we have seen with the travails of M. F. Husain), but also playful, mischievous,
compassionate, and alert to the pleas of the disenfranchised, the marginal, the
subaltern (as we have seen in the project of Chandra Bhan Prasad). Not least, my
entanglements with these diverse goddesses have taught me to seriously question my
opening premise, cued by influential social theory, that modernity ushers in the
inevitable and necessary disenchantment of the world. Instead, I have learned to
recognize that the enchanted figure of the goddess in all her complexity contends with
rivalling regimes of enchantment with their own proclivities and passions, including
those produced by being engaged in the work of worldly historical scholarship which too
has frequently held me spellbound and enthralled, prohibiting me from lapsing into
indifference, and holding out the promise of secular salvation in the service of others.
Coda: Life Interrupted—A Pandemic Goddess And just when I thought I was about done
with goddesses, I have been proven wrong, yet again, as the world came to a standstill,
literally, in the early months of 2020 with the arrival of COVID-19 in our midst. In India,
the spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 also precipitated
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the arrival of a new goddess in the midst of its citizenry. Or to be more accurate, she is
the adaption of a recent goddess to the current moment, as Mother India takes on a
completely new job, as a slayer of disease and a protector against a pandemic. Indeed,
Bharat Mata’s morphing into such a form affirms that COVID-19 is a disease that even
in its earliest phase was deemed serious enough to demand a dedicated deity.53
Scholars who work on religion and disease—and the few historians amongst them, like
David Arnold—have long noted that peoples of the subcontinent, especially Hindus,
have over the centuries turned to various goddesses of contagion in times of pandemic.
In anthropologist Tulasi Srinivas’s words, ‘These goddesses act as celestial
epidemiologists curing illness. But if angered they can also inflict disease such as
poxes, plagues, sores, fevers, tuberculosis and malaria. They are both poison and
cure.’54 These ‘disease devis’ go by various names in different parts of India: Sitala and
Mariamma(n) for smallpox, and Olabibi for cholera; there is even a ‘plague amma’ and
‘an AIDS amma’. The very presence of such deities—who have not disappeared even
after the spread of secular medicine or the adoption of vaccination—not only
underscores that faith enables their devotees to come to terms with horrific diseases,
but also confirms that ‘religious beliefs do not necessarily stand in the way of
prophylaxis and treatment but might actually serve to support such measures’.55 These
disease devis are in other words a standing reserve who can be drawn upon and ‘re-
conscripted’, in Srinivas’s words, and indeed this is what has come to pass in the
course of the latest pandemic to hit the subcontinent. As the pandemic began, the new
avatar of Bharat Mata as a diseasefighting deity primarily manifested herself as an
image. Her iconography is still very unstable, with elements borrowed from the old, the
near-new, and the entirely novel. As with her prototype, the new goddess too has her
votaries who are all too willing to appropriate her for an illiberal Hindu nationalist cause,
particularly dangerous at a time when the party in power propelling the battle against
the virus is also Hindu nationalist. Most importantly, in striking contrast to the ancestral
disease devis, the new goddess is not the deification of COVID-19, but a warrior
summoned to destroy the disease. As I draw this essay to a close, I introduce you to
three images among several others that may well be harbingers of more to come—if
I know my goddesses well!
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Sumathi Ramaswamy
In Maharashtrian artist Monal Kohad’s wash painting titled Bharat Mata, completed on
12 April 2020, Mother India—whose distinctive identity is confirmed by the presence of
the outline map of the nation—has slain a new enemy, the ‘China virus’ whose head
she holds triumphantly aloft in in one of her four hands, another bearing the Indian
tricolour (Image 10.8). In contrast to many other past images of the goddess in which
she was featured either looking to the West or gazing directly at the viewer, the slayer of
the coronavirus looks up and towards the east, to the land in which the disease was first
reported. Completed in the midst of the world’s most stringent lockdown, Kohad’s
Bharat Mata is also a celebration of the
Image 10.8 Monal Kohad, Bharat Mata, watercolour wash technique, tempera, 2020
Source: With permission of artist.

323
Indian state’s (apparent) success in limiting the spread of the virus amongst the
citizenry, conjured up in the painting celebrating and paying homage to the goddess
who has so efficiently and powerfully come to their aid. The same triumphalism is also
apparent in Sandhya Kumari’s Maa Bharati (Image 10.9). The artist, a native of
Jharkhand currently living in Ghaziabad, clothes the new goddess in the colours of the
Indian flag as she stands victoriously on a terrestrial globe. In her many arms, she holds
the various objects with which she has destroyed the virus (whose head she holds in
one hand), all of which are essential to the work of modern secular medicine but now
placed at the service of Bharat Mata in her new role
Image 10.9 Sandhya Kumari, Maa Bharati, acrylic on canvas, 2020 Source: With
permission of artist.
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Sumathi Ramaswamy
as disease vanquisher: gloves, hand sanitizer, mask, syringe, stethoscope, scalpel, and
first-aid kit. But it is worth noting that in this female artist’s imagination, what really does
the trick is the old weapon with which goddesses in the hoary past have killed their
cosmic foes, the trident which snares and destroys the virus pinned down artfully under
one foot. A different look is bestowed upon the goddess for her Bengali subscribers, a
look that would have been all too familiar indeed to the informed reader of the venerable
Ananda Bazaar Patrika on whose front page she appeared on the morning of the
Bengali new year day (‘Baisakh’), 14 April 2020 (Image 10.10). As in the paintings by
Monal Kohad and Sandhya Kumari, in this work as well Bharat Mata is a four-armed
goddess, but she is neither armed, nor is she pictured overtly slaying the virus (which is
nowhere to be seen). Instead, she benignly offers other means by which to conquer the
disease: food, knowledge, riches, and as importantly, her personal blessing. In the
words of Bengali artist Amitava Chandra, also the principal designer for the newspaper,
he sought to present the goddess as a hopeful and inspiring figure. It is notable that in
aspiring to do so, he turns to the archive and retrieves an ancestral image from the early
beginnings of Mother India’s career as an image: Abanindranath Tagore’s Bharat Mata
(Image 10.4). Tagore’s saffron-clad four-armed Mother however has been replaced by
the nurse and the physician, clothed in white, wearing a mask around her face and a
stethoscope around her neck. The calming lotus pond of Tagore’s painting gives way to
a fiery red earth ‘burning with the coronavirus’, in the words of the artist.56 Born at the
height of British rule in the late nineteenth century as a substantial embodiment of
national territory—its inviolable essence, its shining beacon of hope and liberation—and
serving over the course of much of the next century at first as a powerful rallying symbol
in the anticolonial movement, and then as the guardian deity of a resurgent Hindu
nationalism with all its politics of inclusion, exclusion, and violence especially directed
against the Muslim, Bharat Mata or Mother India has embarked today on a new career
as a disease devi (but again and importantly, not as an embodiment or vector of
COVID-19, but as its vanquisher). As such, the enemy—strikingly left out of the picture
in most received images of Mother India—is now rendered all too visible and
anthropomorphized with a bright green or fiery red spiked demonic face, the target of
the goddess’s new wrath (possibly Muslim, probably Chinese).
325
Image 10.10 Amitava Chandra, Untitled, acrylic on paper, 2020 Source: With
permission of artist.
In the process, the disease itself has been nationalized as the devi goes to work on
behalf of the entire body-politic whose borders stand threatened by the new (unseen)
enemy. And just in case the (disenchanted secular) historian had begun to think she
had become redundant, the goddess has once again—with the help of the image that is
her vehicle—proven otherwise, creatively but also scandalously reasserting her
presence, for better or worse, in our midst.
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Sumathi Ramaswamy
Notes * I thank two anonymous readers of an earlier version of this essay for their
astute insights, and the editors of the volume and Margrit Pernau for their thoughtful
comments. Versions of this essay were presented at Yale, Columbia, McGill,
Dartmouth, Oxford, Oslo University, Osmania University, and at Somberikatte/ Visual
Arts Collective in Bangalore. I thank the various organizers and interlocuters for their
suggestions and responses. 1. David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of
Enchantment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 21. 2. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, ‘Moving Devi’, Cultural Critique 47, no. 1 (2001): 120. 3. Arjun Appadurai,
Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 179. As will
become apparent as this essay unfolds, I subscribe to philosopher Bruno Latour’s
contention that ‘we have never been modern’, notwithstanding powerful claims to the
contrary. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1993). It is also worth noting with W. J. T. Mitchell that when it comes
to images ‘we have never been and probably will never be modern’ (W. J. T. Mitchell,
‘The Surplus Value of Images’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature 35, no. 3 [2002]: 19–20). All the same, I have used the term modern in the
title of my essay to refer to a temporal horizon rather than a contested conceptual
category. 4. I follow Rajeev Bhargava in noting that when terms like ‘secular’ and
‘secularism’ are used in Indian public discourse, ‘their connotation [can] never be
antireligious or simply non-religious but rather the principled management and
accommodation of religious diversity’ (Rajeev Bhargava, ‘Secular’, in Keywords for
India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century, ed. Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter
Ronald de Souza [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020], 406–408). This usage is in
contradistinction to much academic writing where the secular is more often than not a
convenient shorthand for phenomena and practices that are quite devoid of the
religious, the ritualistic, and the sacred. See also the introduction by the editors in this
volume. 5. Jane Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and
Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 87, 131. 6. Charles Taylor, A
Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 27–41. 7. The scholarship
on this topic is vast, but see especially David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the
Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1987); John
Stratton Hawley and Donna Marie Wulff (eds.), Devi: Goddesses of India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996); Vidya Dehejia (ed.), Devi, the Great Goddess:
Female Divinity in South Asian Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1999); and
Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl (eds.), Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of
South Asian Goddesses (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
327
8. For historians of modern India who have taken on the goddess more centrally and
almost all of whom study Bengal, see especially David Kopf, ‘A Historiographical Essay
on the Idea of Kali’, in Shaping Bengali Worlds, Public and Private, ed. Tony Stewart
(East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1989), 112–125; Susan Bayly, Saints,
Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body:
State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993); Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘Clothing the Goddess: The Modern
Contest over Representations of Devi’, in Devi, the Great Goddess, 157–179; Tanika
Sarkar, ‘Birth of a Goddess: “Vande Mataram”, Anandamath, and Hindu Nationhood’,
Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 37 (2006): 3959–3969; Tithi Bhattacharya,
‘Tracking the Goddess: Religion, Community, and Identity in the Durga Puja
Ceremonies of Nineteenth-Century Calcutta’, Journal of Asian Studies 66, no. 4 (2007):
919–962; and Tapati GuhaThakurta, In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of
Contemporary Kolkata (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2015). See also Kumkum Chatterjee,
‘Goddess Encounters: Mughals, Monsters, and the Goddess in Bengal’, Modern Asian
Studies 47, no. 5 (2013): 1435–1487. 9. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), 72. For an extended treatment of ‘the secular logic’ of disciplines such as history
and art history in colonial and postcolonial India, see Tapati Guha-Thakurta,
Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India
(New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). 10. Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 59. On
methodological atheism, see Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the
Enchantment of Technology’, in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics, ed. J. Coote and A.
Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 40–67. For a comparable argument about
‘the buffered self ’, see Taylor, A Secular Age, 27–41. 11. Morgan, Images at Work.
Morgan helpfully defines images as ‘agents in quest of visibility’ (Morgan, Images at
Work, 52). See also Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of
Technology’. 12. Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.), Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices
and Ideology in Modern India (New Delhi: Sage, 2003); and Martin Jay and Sumathi
Ramaswamy (eds.), Empires of Vision (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). See
also Peter Burke, ‘Art and History, 1969–2019’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 50,
no. 4 (2020): 567–586. 13. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation:
Mapping Mother India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 233–234. 14. Peter
Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion
Books, 2001), 7. 15. Unless otherwise noted, the discussion in this section is based on
Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India
(Berkeley:
328
16. 17. 18. 19.
20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26. 27.
28.
Sumathi Ramaswamy
University of California Press, 1997). See also Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘When a

Language Becomes a Mother/Goddess: An Image Essay on Tamil’, Tasveer Ghar, 15
April 2008, http://www.tasveergharindia.net/essay/language-mother-goddess. html
(accessed 23 June 2022). Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, 5. Quoted in Bennett,
Enchantment of Modern Life, 5. Ibid. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation:
Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian”
Pasts’, Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 17–20. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A
Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 14. Sumathi
Ramaswamy, ‘The Goddess and the Nation: Subterfuges of Antiquity, the Cunning of
Modernity’, in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002), 549–566. Unless otherwise noted, this section is based on
Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation. Vinay Lal, ‘Hindutva’s Sacred Cows’, in
Fear and Loathing, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Robin Yassin-Kassab (London: Hurst and
Co., 2012), 65–84, 74. Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Artful Mapping in Bazaar India:
Cartographic Reflections on the Priya Paul Collection’, Tasveer Ghar,
http://www.tasveergharindia.net/ essay/artful-mapping-bazaar-india.html (accessed 13
August 2021). Much has been written on this artist and this image in art-historical
circles, but see especially Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art:
Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 255–260; and Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial
India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 294–299. This paragraph is based on Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Mapping India
after Husain’, in Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India,
ed. Sumathi Ramaswamy (New York: Routledge, 2011), 75–99. Unless otherwise
noted, this section is based on Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Of Gods and Globes: The
Territorialisation of Hindu Deities in Indian Popular Visual Culture’, in India’s Popular
Culture: Iconic Spaces and Fluid Images, ed. Jyotindra Jain (Mumbai: Marg
Publications, 2008), 19–31. See also Archana Venkatesan, ‘Bhudevi’, in Brill’s
Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 1, Regions, Pilgrimages, Deities (Leiden: Brill, 2009),
491–498; and Vijaya R. Nagarajan, ‘Embedded Ecologies and the Earth Goddess’, in
Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in India—An Exploration of
Kolam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 204–224. Sumathi Ramaswamy,
Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2017).
329
29. Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle
in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 67. For a reproduction and
discussion of this work, see Rupika Chawla, Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India
(Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2010), figure 4.10. See also
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/sita-bhumipravesh-raja-ravi-varma/
jwHVOcEP79vPhg?hl=en (accessed 21 August 2021). I thank Arnav Adhikari for
bringing this site to my attention. 30. National Archives of India, Government of India,
Home, Political (Confidential), December 1911, no. 14 (Deposit). 31. Pinney, ‘Photos of
the Gods’, 109 32. Ramaswamy, Terrestrial Lessons, 288. 33. Kamala Chandrakant,
Dasha Avatar: The Ten Incarnations of Vishnu (Bombay: Amar Chitra Katha, [198?]).
34. American Debut: Shalinee Kumari, 18 June–19 July 2009, Frey Norris Gallery, San
Francisco, plate 13. 35. Purnima Bakshi Kanwar, ‘Bhudevi and the Gaia Hypothesis’, in
Cult of the Goddess, ed. Arputha Rani Sengupta, (New Delhi: D. K. Print World and
National Museum Institute, 2015), 522–538, 528. For a recent activist project on
women’s rights that has taken recourse to Bhu Mata, see http://bhumatafoundation.org/
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsNhPQthwJ4 (accessed 11 May 2021). 36.
Bruno Latour, ‘Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts and
Politics’ (lecture at the French Institute, London, November 2011), http:// www.bruno-
latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-SPEAP_0.pdf (accessed 23 June 2022).
37. Bruno Latour, ‘Some Experiments in Art and Politics’, E-flux 23 (2011): 1–7, 1. 38.
Latour, ‘Waiting for Gaia’, 12. For Latour’s more extended later discussion on Gaia, see
Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2017). 39. Rohini Swamy, ‘BJP’s “Antics” Raja in Tamil Nadu Gets a Lot of
Attention But Not the Kind His Party Needs’, The Print, 19 June 2019,
https://theprint.in/politics/ bjps-antics-raja-in-tamil-nadu-gets-a-lot-of-attention-but-not-
the-kind-his-partyneeds/251643/ (accessed 13 August 2021). 40. Unless otherwise
noted, this section is based on Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘The Work of Goddesses in the
Age of Mass Reproduction’, in Transcultural Turbulences: Towards a Multi-sited
Reading of Image Flows, ed. Christiane Brosius and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Berlin:
Springer, 2011), 191–220. 41. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Migrating Images: Totemism,
Fetishism, Idolatry’, in Migrating Images: Producing ... Reading ... Transporting ...
Translating, ed. Petra Stegmann and Peter C. Seel (Berlin: House of World Cultures,
2004), 14–24, 16. 42. Ackbar Abbas, ‘Framing the City through Cinema’, in Migrating
Images, 112–118, 117. 43. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 82–
83.
330
Sumathi Ramaswamy
44. ‘India: Veneration Nation’, UCL Anthropology, 23 April 2012, https://www.ucl.

ac.uk/anthropology/news/2012/apr/india-veneration-nation (accessed 13 August 2021).
45. S. Anand, ‘Jai Angrezi Devi Maiyya Ki’, Open Magazine, 8 May 2010; partially
translated by author. 46. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1981), 28. 47. Bruno Latour, ‘What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World
Beyond the Image Wars?’, in Iconoclash, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
(Karlsruhe; Cambridge: ZKM and MIT Press, 2002), 14–37, 14–15. 48. Bennett,
Enchantment of Modern Life, 5 (italics added). 49. Ibid., 3. 50. Ibid., 4. 51. Joshua
Landy and Michael Saler, ‘Introduction: The Varieties of Modern Enchantment’, in The
Re-enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, ed. Joshua Landy and
Michael Saler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1–14, 2–11. 52. Walter
Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1985), 253–264, 263. 53. This
section is based on Ravinder Kaur and Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘The Goddess and the
Virus’, in The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (Ann Arbor:
Association of Asian Studies, 2020), 75–94. See also Sria Chatterjee, ‘Making the
Invisible Visible: How We Depict Covid-19’, 30 June 2020, https://
blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2020/06/30/making-the-invisible-visible-how-we-depictcovid-19/
(accessed 19 May 2021). 54. Kaur and Ramaswamy, ‘The Goddess and the Virus’, 78.
55. Ibid. 56. Interview with artist, 30 May 2020.
PART 4 Architectures of Devotion
Image 11.1 Interior of the main mausoleum of the Taj Mahal, Agra Source: Antoine
Taveneaux, 19 August 2011, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Interior_of_the_Taj_Mahal_02.jpg (accessed 16 July 2022).
11 Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture A Critique of the Secular Disenchantment of

India’s Past Santhi Kavuri-Bauer
n the fall of 2017, the Taj Mahal (Image 11.1) made international news once again. This
time it was not due to pollution, or its sectarian registration as a Muslim cemetery, or
tourism development schemes, but because the state government of Uttar Pradesh,
controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party,
commonly known as the BJP), removed it from its tourism brochure. This removal was
the final incident in a series of public actions, and the one that gained global media
attention. Earlier in the year, the newly elected Hindu nationalist chief minister Yogi
Adityanath claimed in a speech that the Taj did not represent Indian culture. This
statement was followed by the BJP legislator Sangeet Som’s public claim that the Taj
Mahal was a ‘blot’ on India’s culture and built by traitors, which then led BJP leader
Vinay Katiyar to resuscitate the theory that the tomb was once a temple dedicated to the
Hindu god Shiva.1 These actions were by no means the first challenge to the Taj
Mahal’s existence as a monument of Mughal achievement. The first case of disrespect
was reported in 1830 when the first governor general of India Lord Bentinck wanted to
dismantle the tomb and sell its marble at the going market rate. The story was never
corroborated by eyewitnesses or written evidence but with every retelling it signalled the
colonial approach to land management and the East India Company’s desire to turn its
territories, along with their monuments, into profitable holding.2 Fanny Parks, the wife of
an East India Company clerk, who sympathized with the Mughals, wrote in her travel
diaries against the wanton destruction of their monuments in the name of profit. After
she cites the article about Bentinck’s scheme in the Calcutta newspaper John Bull, she
asks: ‘If this be true, is it not shameful? … By what authority does the Governorgeneral
offer the taj for sale? Has he any right to molest the dead? To sell the tomb raised over
an empress, which from its extraordinary beauty is the wonder of the world?’3 When
Parks’s diaries were published in 1850 in London her writings represented an early
challenge to the East India Company’s valuing of India’s Mughal monuments for no
more than their raw material. Later in the nineteenth century, the arts administrator and
noted scholar of Indian art E. B. Havell would also repeat the story of Bentinck’s
misguided programme against Mughal monuments in order to grow support for Indian
monument preservation and encourage colonial benevolence toward these sites.4
Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture
335
Since the nineteenth century, any mention of tampering with, dismantling, or

misrepresenting the Taj has led to frenzied attention from the press, followed by
isolation of the offensive action and offender, and a renewal of pledges by the state to
protect the monument from harm. Since its independence from the British in 1947, the
Indian state’s rhetoric and policies regarding monument protection aligned with its
commitment to secularism. While the adherence to this ideology and its principles of
separation of religion from the public sphere, of impartiality, and objectivity toward
religious culture seems like a good solution to periodic sectarian controversies, it does
not provide a longterm answer to the question of why the Taj Mahal and other religious
monuments continue be sites of contestation. However, if the analysis of why these
monuments continue to erupt into sectarian battlegrounds is centred on why they
compel affective attachments that can be both positive and negative, a new line of
thinking about India’s religious patrimony can begin to take shape. This essay proposes
to advance a line of investigation that follows its history of preservation and destruction
not from the monument’s facts and form but its quality of enchantment that draws
people to its space. Monuments are enchanting spaces. They were designed, visited,
and remembered for being so. However, this property does not often inform public
knowledge or policies toward their protection and representation. That is because
enchantment operates on the register of the uncanny, is unquantifiable, and produces
feelings of pleasure and surprise. Jane Bennett further describes the encounter of
enchantment as being ‘simultaneously transfixed in wonder and transported by sense,
to be both caught up and carried away—enchantment is marked by this odd
combination of somatic effects’.5 In the instance of the Taj Mahal, the traces of
enchantment or experiences of the uncontrollable and immeasurable emotional effects
that emerge in the encounter with its improbable beauty can be found in diaries, poems,
and songs that date from its completion to the present. The knowledge that emerges
from these encounters with a monument is often relegated to the poetics of the personal
and dismissed as inappropriate for serious historical study or preservation policy. Not
taking account of enchantment thus reveals the limits of secular modernist
epistemology, which renders a disenchanted and incomplete representation of
monuments
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Santhi Kavuri-Bauer
like the Taj Mahal. Additionally, as state policies of monument preservation and secular
ideology of national patrimony are based on such disenchanted knowledge, they do little
to protect the monument from future attacks and contestation. Instead of providing
hope, the secular resolution of controversies regarding the recent sectarian attacks on
the Taj Mahal leaves most academics a little more uncertain about the meaning and
place of monuments, especially Islamic ones, in the national topography of India. Even
the very small satisfaction of seeing Yogi Adityanath sweeping around the Taj in a show
of contrition after sparking global outrage and anti-BJP sentiment gives way to a more
disturbing realization: What real difference does the critical scholarly attention of the
uses and abuses of Mughal monuments in history really make in the protection of the
Taj Mahal?6 In the art-historical study of the long history of the Taj Mahal’s harassment,
another line of questioning needs to emerge that demands answering if the field is to
remain relevant to the public good. If the long and valued tradition of critical inquiry that
art historians participate in and identify with is really that compelling, why do the Taj
Mahal and other world-renowned Islamic monuments in India continue to be so
vulnerable to attack? Is it possible that in the end academic inquiry makes little to no
difference in how these spaces are being targeted for possible destruction and political
gain? To begin to answer these questions, first there must be an acknowledgment that
there has been little change to the colonial perception of Mughal monuments: they are
considered signs and spaces either of protosecular rulers whose architecture should be
protected as cultural patrimony, or of Islamic jihadists and temple destroyers whose
monuments are blots on the national topography. In fact, I would argue these
representations have become even more entrenched and overvalued as they are now
constitutive of rival political identities of the BJP and their enemies, most notably the
secular Congress Party. Additionally, in the moral battle to control the national narrative,
both Hindutva actors and secularist academics have used Mughal monuments to
support their drastically different but similarly disenchanting versions of India’s history.
What is still largely ignored, both in academia and politics, are questions about how and
why Mughal architecture has remained relevant over the centuries, enchanting and
soliciting us to visit them and, through their very wonderment, make new or renew
aesthetic attachments to the past.
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Sustaining the limited perception of Mughal monument spaces as arenas of political and
historical contestation is the unquestioned influence of secularism that casts a spell of
disenchantment over both academic and civic spheres of knowledge. Under this spell
there seems to be no sensible choice for the liberal, educated, and humanist individual
but to be disenchanted, dispassionate, distant, and distrustful of the affects and effects
of enchanting spaces and things. How can academics be expected to help protect
monuments, whose value over time has been their power to enter us, disorient and
shock us, and make us wonder, if we cannot fully engage with their enchanting power
due to the epistemic boundaries constructed by our liberal humanist field’s secularism?
Is there an academically acceptable way to break the spell of disenchantment and
finally be with these monuments, learn from them, make place for and in them, through
a different sort of academic inquiry? At stake, if secularism’s attitude of disenchantment
continues uncritiqued in our field, is the very way we exist in this world, with others and
with beautiful things that we identify with. Before contemplating a way out of the state of
disenchantment, as produced at the Taj Mahal, it will be necessary to first describe how
secularism shapes the perceptions of Islamic material culture and its relationship to
Islamic belief, which is indeed central to the enchanting design of the Mughal
monument.
Political Modernism and Secularism To help outline how secularism functions to

forestall and limit the study of the enchanting qualities of Mughal architecture, I move
across the Islamic world to its western frontier, Spain. In his book The Mercenary
Mediterranean,7 Hussein Fancy examines secularism’s disenchanting effects on the
study of medieval Spain by looking at the convivencia debates in modern Spanish
history. Fancy’s observations about how modern Spanish historians have written about
Islam in Spain parallel those of Indian historians, who replicate this disenchanting mode
of history-writing of the Mughal era (c. 1526–1707). For example, both sets of historians
produce a secular reinterpretation of their respective nation’s history by reducing or
ignoring the metaphysical logics of historical agents and their actions; in other words,
replacing spirituality with politics as the primary driver of history.8 In Iberian
historiography, la convivencia is a
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Santhi Kavuri-Bauer
modern term invented in the nineteenth century to describe the culture of religious
tolerance that existed in medieval Spain. Although there is no evidence of such peaceful
co-existence, it did not stop Spanish secular liberals or religious conservatives from
using the myth of convivencia to inform their history of Spain’s pre-modern golden age.
Medieval beliefs were misrepresented by both sets of writers, whose respective
inquiries were informed by a common desire to identify an incipient Spanish nation in
the pre-modern past. Whether the writer was a liberal positivist or conservative
theologist, Fancy observed, they shared the same pattern of pitting secularism against
religion and turning them into binary opposites. The only difference between the two
camps, claims Fancy, was that of the value given to religion, where ‘one sees religion
as an impediment and the other as a fundament without which politics cannot function’.9
From this point Fancy makes a very important observation about the fate of spiritual
belief in modern Spanish histories that can be seen in historical narratives of pre-
modern India as well: ‘More than opposing empirical, methodological, or even
philosophical positions, … [the liberal and the conservative histories] are better
understood as competing moral narratives of modernity.’10 In these histories, religion
was cast as little more than something that had to be shed or reclaimed for Spain to
take its place in the European community of nation-states. Attempting to avoid this
political and polemical use of religion, more recent historians, rooted in the discourses
of cultural studies, have tried to centre spirituality as playing a decisive part in medieval
Spanish history. Modelling their inquiry on Clifford Geertz’s theory of religion as a web
of significance,11 these recent scholars of medieval Spain represent belief as an
external factor, helping soldiers and rulers to access or maintain power in the political
realm. For these contemporary scholars, religion, Fancy contends, is reduced to an
ideological mask or communal delusion, and sincere belief, by extension, is only to be
seen ‘as a form of blind adherence, or irrational commitment’.12 In other words,
contemporary medieval histories of Spain, although less polemical, continue the
disenchanted view of religious interactions between Christianity and Islam. The same
scholarly practice of writing out or suppressing the role of belief in cultural forms and its
enchanting effects can be found in modern history writing on the Mughals.13 While
there is important scholarship on all aspects of Mughal patronage, there is with very few
exceptions14 little investigation

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into its metaphysical meaningfulness, which in the case of architecture is what informed
and guided the design and building practices of emperors like Akbar and Shah
Jahan.15
The Limits of Art-Historical Critique The only way to breach this impasse that prevents
belief from entering historical investigations, Fancy argues, is by revealing the
conditions of modern epistemology, where the methodological assumptions about
religion in academic research share the same secular horizon with the polemic historical
narratives of present-day sectarian political parties.16 If this realization occurs, the next
step can only be described as an agonistic choice: pretend that secularism has no effect
on how Mughal architecture is studied, and continue with business as usual; or, now
knowing the limits of secular inquiry—that it is finite and fallible—to pursue another path
to represent a more accurate history of Islamic culture, whether it be in Spain, India, or
anywhere in between. A new attitude must however grow as part of selecting the
second choice best described by the literary scholar Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique
as not being against the norms of academic discussion and rhetoric per se, but to be
sceptical of its prowess, its aspirations to dislodge other forms of inquiry, and its
approach of disenchantment and cynicism as the only sensible choice to academic
study.17 By loosening the grip of secularism and its limiting mode of inquiry, we can be
more curious, generous, and inventive in the ways we access knowledge about belief
and its meaning in space and across time. Similar representations of religious
interactions and their political uses that Fancy outlined in modern Spain exist in the
political and scholarly domains of modern India. Academic studies of the political uses
and abuses of Mughal monuments remain on the registers of political ideology and
social identity and render these vital spaces into little more than political pawns in a
zero-sum game. Art history, too, as a humanist discipline that shares the same
intellectual horizon with secularism must assume an attitude of disenchantment as it
studies monumental spaces. The methodologies employed by the discipline to
demonstrate rigour are thus part of a larger system of modern thought that the German
sociologist Max Weber noted in 1918 as ‘characterized by rationalization and
intellectualization’ that leaves no room for the ‘mysterious incalculable
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forces that come into play’.18 Whether it is an examination of art of the past or the
present, the analytic methods of art history are tied to the limitations imposed by
secularism, where the only things that matter are those that can be mastered through
observation and quantification.19 Under the influence of secularism, art historians have
thus moved through the world removing from view the magical and wonderous while
conferring rational meaning to their objects of study. This process of disenchantment,
we know from reading the seminal works of Bernard Cohn and Tapati Guha-Thakurta,
started with the advent of modernity in India and the work of colonial administrator-
scholars.20 These men set down the limits of inquiry and engendered two fundamental
characterizations of Indian Islamic art and architecture that continue to have purchase in
art-historical writing. The first characterization, that developed in the late nineteenth
century was the reframing of religious attitudes—Hindu, Muslim, and others— as
motivated by rational political self-interest rather than guided by the ‘mysterious and
incalculable’ power of spiritual belief. This view resulted in religious categories such as
Islam being overdrawn as political identity, which then instantiates the understanding of
its presence in India as foreign and illegitimate. This practice of separating out the
Islamic from the Indic, of overlooking the syncretic or hybrid culture that developed out
of years of mutual admiration, dialogue, immersion, and cooperation, as well as war,
revulsion, and bigotry, we now know was started for imperial ends and continues for
electoral gain. Colonial architectural historians then adopted those identitarian
categories for their studies, as they dispassionately fit the architecture they surveyed
into pre-ordered taxonomies. The religious categories also supported the periodization
of South Asian history, a practice started by the eighteenth-century Orientalists, into
self-contained chapters defined by chronological ruptures, whereby the Buddhist period
gives way to the Hindu, which then gives way to the Islamic. In this manner, the
transtemporal meaning of South Asian art and architecture, how some motifs and forms
continued to make meaning precisely due to their mystery and incalculable nature, are
not considered real knowledge.21 In my own research on Mughal architecture after the
coming of the East India Company, I not only considered the political uses and
archaeological study of the sites as constituting their meaning but also gave equal
attention to the centripetal emotional pull they had on poets, travellers, revolutionaries,
and artists. For these figures, Mughal monuments functioned as affective
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and subjective spaces to enjoy the present and imagine better futures.22 The forms and
ornaments of Mughal architecture I endeavoured to show did not endure as silent
remains of the precolonial past but transgressed into other historical periods, disrupting
and disorienting modern knowledge-making practices. Observing this condition, I
argued that Mughal monuments could not be completely understood when framed as
political signs and disenchanted knowledge but needed further elaboration as affective
agents. However, the demand for addressing the complexity of meaning of Mughal
architecture meant swimming against the tide of over one and a half centuries of art
history oriented toward satisfying the administrative and institutional demand for
disenchanted knowledge. Ten years after the publication of Monumental Matters, I also
see the recalcitrance of my field’s commitment to stay steadfast to this form of
knowledge. There is simply no need to question the methods and categories that inform
historical writing of Islamic and Mughal monuments because of their tautological nature,
which makes them unsusceptible to verification, critique, or disproof. The lack of
methodological self-questioning is also connected to the second characterization of the
secular and disenchanted study of Islamic art in India, which is much more difficult to
maintain. It is the ‘necessary’ position of distance in order to arrive at the truths of
Islamic culture. The idea here is simple: that the farther removed you are from the locale
or culture that you are studying, the more secure you can be in your analysis. Edward
Said ironically called this the ‘happy attitude’ that comes with an unqualified confidence
associated with the certainty of mastery over objects and spaces of research. As Said
further explains: ‘Most students of Islam in the West have not doubted that despite the
limitations of their time and place, a genuinely objective knowledge of Islam, or some
aspect of Islamic life, is achievable.’23 Distance is thus seen as a positive rather than a
negative, as it supports the attitude of disenchantment and claims of intellectual rigour.
However, as many art historians know, this position of distance is not an easy one to
maintain. The nature of art history’s visual and spatial evidence implores us to form
aesthetic attachments and disturbs the distance we seek to hold. In close proximity to
an intricately carved jade Mughal bowl, or standing in a Mughal diwan-i-khaas, the
highly ornamented private audience hall, the spell of disenchantment is easily broken.
The eminent historian of Islamic art and architecture, the late Oleg Grabar, reveals the
impossibility of scholarly impassivity in the face of such
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objects and spaces in his 1976 essay ‘What Makes Islamic Art Islamic?’24 To start with,
he delineates the limits of his secular positionality and reveals the inability of his analytic
frames to access the full meaning of the art he studies. However, instead of locating the
source of his failure in the distancing manoeuvre of art-historical inquiry itself, he faults
past and present Muslims for not helping him cross the divide. He writes that to better
understand Islamic art we need more examples of aesthetic and artistic judgments
within the tradition, and for contemporary Muslims to share their psychological and
emotional attitudes toward their art. Without these contextual reference points, he says
he is forestalled from writing a thorough history of Islamic art and architecture. But
Grabar’s unique intellect does not allow him to remain trapped for long. Toward the end
of the essay he follows a different line of questioning and asks perhaps if not knowing
all the secrets of the artwork may have been the artist’s intent. Looking squarely at the
muqarnas, a uniquely Islamic embellished vault, another truth then reveals itself to him,
one that does not require an aesthetic backstory from history or more social context.
From this proximate vantage point, I argue, he was able to see more clearly the
phenomenological interplay between the muqarnas and himself. When he writes about
this exchange, his voice is one of exaltation and enchantment: ‘Few exercises are more
exciting, … it is easy enough to become fascinated … [in things that] for so many
centuries … are still not well understood.’25 In the enthral of the muqarnas, he writes, it
is possible to see it whole and then ‘lose oneself in the parts’ or start with the smallest
facet and be shown a way to contemplate its totality. In this process of looking squarely
at the mysterious muqarnas, without the limiting attitude of distance, Grabar is able to
finally be availed of its secret. As he writes: It is the tension which ought be stressed, it
seems to me, for, in a deeper sense, it bequeaths the interpretation and pleasure of the
artistic experience to the viewer and leaves him free to make his own choices and
judgments. Therein lie its greatest achievements, even if we cannot quite explain as yet
why it was so.26
This point of tension is where the failures of secularism’s methodology to fully answer
‘the why’ of the muqarnas is revealed, and it is where Grabar senses that there is
another way to access the meaning of Islamic art and
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architecture, yet leaves it to others to find it, for now he is just happy to be enchanted by
it.
Secularity and Enchantment in Today’s Study of Islamic Monumentality New research in

Islamic art and architecture picks up where Grabar left us. It emerged in the last decade
to correct the Western media’s biased and misinformed representation of Islamic art
history. News stories about cartoons and caricatures of Muhammad that spurred some
Muslim radicals in Europe to murder and violence were conflated with colonial secular
tropes of Islam’s iconoclasm and proscriptions against representing the Prophet and
other human forms. The latest research focused primarily on answering ‘the why’, which
Grabar had observed to be fertile ground for new art-historical inquiry. For example,
Wendy Shaw’s book What Is Islamic Art (2019) levels a critique of the misalignment of
Western secular frameworks to study Islamic art and answers the question posed in the
title by considering how Islamic philosophical and religious discourses shaped the
reception of Islamic art.27 Along with the research of other contemporary scholars,
Shaw’s book allows us to avoid the limits of secularism and modernist academic
epistemology by introducing readers to the sophisticated thinking about aesthetics,
space, and desire discussed in the courts of Islamic rulers since the Umayyad Dynasty
(661–750 CE).28 Building on this research, questions of enchantment, or how wonder
and other affective qualities of monuments and their reception determined the
architectural projects of Islamic India, can find a more appropriate framework to explain
the persistence of these wonders to inspire presentday culture and artistic production.
For an example of the promise for a more expanded and truthful study of Islamic art this
line of argument holds, we can look to new art exhibitions, whose central focus is the art
object and framing it as practice rather than ornament. Among such exhibitions is
Manifesting the Unseen, curated by Nazia Mirza in 2018 for Guest Projects at Sunbury
House, London. The exhibition featured Muslim women artists and was planned to
‘remove barriers and reveal hidden truths through creating a discursive space to subvert
the “Orientalist gaze” and experience the unique artistic language of Islamic art and its
modern cultural expression’.29 Instead of avoiding the
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Santhi Kavuri-Bauer
Image 11.2 Samira Yamin, January 11, 2010, TIME Magazine, 7.875 × 10.375 inches;
20 × 26.4 centimetres, 2016–ongoing Source: Courtesy of the artist and Patron Gallery,
Chicago; photograph by Patron Gallery.
spiritual and enchanting qualities of the art, the curator highlighted the Islamic principles
of unity, divine revelation, and the connection between the concept of the unseen
essence and infinite nature of Allah and the visible manifestations of this hidden design
in the artists’ work. Another exhibition that used the nature of Islamic design as its
organizing concept was Mashrabiya: The Art of Looking Back that opened in 2017,
which I co-curated with Kathy Zarur at San Francisco State University’s Fine Arts
Gallery. Working closely with the art of Samira Yamin, Sanaz Mazinani, Sherin Guirguis,
and Hayv Kahraman, I gained an appreciation of the transtemporality of Islamic
architecture and how its forms continue to exert power and demand reverence in
different periods as well as different conceptions of time, enchanting artists and gallery
visitors today the way they did in the past.30 Forms uniquely associated with Islamic
architecture, like the mashrabiya, the tessellated windows used for cooling the interior
and protecting it from the public gaze, I observed had remained culturally relevant.31 In
the case of these contemporary artists,

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the form helped them develop attachments with distant geographies, histories, and
cultural sources. For example, the mashrabiya as seen in Yamin’s work January 1,
2010 (Image 11.2) connects American and Middle Eastern geographies where the news
media was forcing division. The beauty of her delicately cut TIME magazines drew
people in, and through the visual encounter, viewers/visitors were encouraged to
translate between two geographies and cultures and recognize their own subject-
position within this exchange. The Islamic architectural form of the mashrabiya I noticed
was being reinvigorated by Yamin, as she was using it to help maintain attachments to
Middle Eastern cultures, as well as mediate and modify the governing social and
political conditions she and the other artists in the exhibition were living and working in.
Through this curatorial project, I too was able to remember my own enchanted
experiences with the building blocks of Indian Islamic architecture, and the wonder of
discovery of their rapturous and impossible forms. The awe-inducing art of these
contemporary artists reminded me of why I chose to study and dedicate years of
research to Islamic architecture and the subject of Islamic monumentality. Co-curating
Mashrabiya: The Art of Looking Back helped me find a way to circumvent the possibility
of disenchantment, which meant not only seeking a path to mitigate the limitations of
secularism in academic work, but also the mood of disenchantment that prevents a
study of the effect of being absorbed, involved, immersed, and of course enchanted by
art-historical spaces and objects. Moreover, I knew what I was also lacking if I wanted to
bring into the frame of inquiry the forces of enchantment that enliven and activate these
spaces and objects: a methodology that allowed me to follow a line of inquiry into the
‘wow’ factor of Islamic building practices and forms, to get to its ‘why’. The first step was
to finally abandon the false promises of secular poststructuralist theory to rid us of
modernity’s hierarchical and teleological mode of knowledge production. Identifying and
interpreting the fictions of discursive knowledge while still maintaining the scholarly
attitudes of detachment and suspicion only led to more distortions of Islamic art.
Instead, what is needed is to step down and be on the same plane as the object of
study, where I could implicate myself in the human dimension of the study of Islamic art.
Taking this analytic position, I would be contributing to what Kandice Chuh calls illiberal
humanism of the underrepresented as opposed to liberal humanism
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Santhi Kavuri-Bauer
of the secular academic. She explains the changed perspective of such a positioning
‘wherein mastery is displaced by the prompt to collective thought, and subjects (critics)
and objects (texts) are understood in their mutuality’.32 In a similar vein, Said called this
perspective promoting antithetical knowledge: ‘The kind of knowledge produced by
people who quite consciously consider themselves to be writing in opposition to the
prevailing orthodoxy [of positivism].’33 In developing a new framework to study Islamic
architecture, I thought of the reformist and polymath, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–
1898), whose hybrid writings provide both positivist and poetic descriptions of the
architecture of Delhi. Texts like his opus Asar-ul-Sanadid of 1847,34 a survey of Delhi’s
monuments, are valuable for modelling a kind of history that centres rather than
marginalizes the experience of enchantment. Scholars like Sir Syed teach us to take
nothing for granted in our pursuit of knowledge and that being disenchanted with the
disenchantment of secularism, its exceptionalism, and dismissal of spiritual ways of
thinking and creative production, need not be a dead end but a signpost informing us to
seek alternative routes to access the meaning of Islamic and Mughal monumentality. Art
historians of Islamic art and architecture, due to the affective nature of our evidence, are
uniquely positioned to inquire into other less quantifiable registers of their meaning. In
Islamic culture, where wonder and enchantment are designed to inform and enliven art
and architecture, this is in fact an important and new thread of investigation that allows
us to ask different and ‘illiberal’ kinds of questions. For example, in view of the 2017
story of the Taj’s deletion from the list of heritage sites, instead of decrying and
dismissing the act as a sectarian stunt, we can ask why the BJP keeps returning to the
Taj Mahal. Moving beyond the polemic analysis and conclusions of secular modernity
that lead to the ridiculing or silencing of the BJP, an effect of secularism which the
fundamentalist party uses to claim Hindu disenfranchisement by the Congress party, we
can ask if the BJP and its members are, in fact, enchanted with the Taj Mahal and its
power to cause wonder. A final descriptive point: here enchantment is not the theatrical
interpretation, but one that is drawn from actor–network and new materialist theories
that allow us to appreciate the agency of nonhuman abiotic actors such as
monuments.35 The frameworks drawn from these
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theories also allow us to consider monuments and artworks as historically active

participants or phenomena that work alongside humans instead of being inert objects
that are worked on by humans. We see them as producing multiple ties to the world we
inhabit, based in spatial awareness or orientation, subjectivity formation, and power
affiliations.36 From here we can begin to ask how monuments like the Taj Mahal have
made and continue to make a difference by giving us access to deep-rooted ways of
thinking that are based in other more affective logics.37 Or, as Felski, following Bruno
Latour, describes, how art and architecture and history might look through a relational
and transtemporal lens offered by new materialism: ‘New actors jostle alongside those
with thousandyear histories; inventions and innovations feed off the very traditions they
excoriate; “the past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected,
recombined, reinterpreted, and reshuffled.”’38 Secularism’s conception of history, based
on the view that all nations are on the same multi-lane road of steady progress toward
an imagined existence of full mastery and disenchantment, can be replaced by new
trajectories that follow other timelines that connect to spiritual, poetic, and utopian
temporal experiences with architectural and artistic marvels.39 Through the
transtemporal view of art production, enchanting Islamic masterpieces and monuments
can be seen as formed and reformed through their interdependency with the past and
the present. We are thus free to write new narratives that follow other kinds of arcs
based on an artwork or monument’s affective range across time, their power to enchant
and make us—all of us—wonder. By allowing the affective quality of enchantment into
our frameworks, new conceptualizations of both the subject, those that are enchanted,
and the object now also subject, that which does the enchanting, become possible. We
no longer see the monument or artwork as an inert object of tamed liberal humanist
knowledge, but as Felski explains, we see that it is an active and activating source of
intractable knowledge, ‘one whose cognitive impact and complication are tied up with its
affective reach’.40 Furthermore, from this vantage point of enchantment we can more
clearly see how secularism also casts its own spells, churning up similar attitudes of
enjoyment, as well as limiting our analysis to the art we study to its historical and socio-
political enclaves. This reality that reveals the affective attitudes of our own work helps
us move past
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Santhi Kavuri-Bauer
the fantasy of disenchantment with our objects of study and brings us to a more curious
and generous disposition toward art and architecture, as well as other experiences
besides our own. Enchantment, drawn on the theories and methods of new materialism,
puts people, texts, artworks, and monuments on the same ontological footing and
emphasizes not their differences but interdependencies.
Mughal Architecture as Enchanted Spaces of Future Scholarship and Nationhood

Seeing the transcendent in the material world, and the material world as imparting
spiritual lessons to access the transcendental is how I propose to frame the
phenomenon of enchantment as it was and still is experienced in Mughal architecture
and city planning in India. Making room for enchantment means allowing ourselves,
scholars and citizens, to simultaneously remain beside and be taken over by these
spaces. Making room also means knowing that how we respond to the affective
experience of enchantment is determined by our own subject-position of secularity and
that the rhetorical logics and conceptual conditions of the moment and spaces in which
we think and write shape how we respond to being enchanted. Making room for
enchantment also means leaving open the possibility that certain aspects of the
experience of enchantment we will not clearly understand due to limitations imposed by
our secularity. However, with regard to Islamic art and architecture, the fascinating
combination of forms, design, and urban plans that give us pause and cause to wonder,
still can within the strictures of secularity open up new lines of inquiry that go beyond
the singular patronage of Mughal emperors and their built environments, or the
identification of forms and motifs. For example, if we centre the feeling of enchantment
in the study of Islamic monumentality, we are finally free to ask if and how Islamic
aesthetics as they developed through discourses and debates on place making, since
the inception of Islam, were imported to and disseminated in India, and then spatialized
by the Mughals in the design and ordering of their built environments. This new line of
investigation I am hoping will allow us to remain enchanted by these monuments while
we set about answering why they were built in the first place and how they can continue
to remain meaningful for generations to come.
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Notes 1. Omar Rashid, ‘Taj Mahal Built with Blood, Sweat of Indians: Adityanath’, The
Hindu, 18 October 2017, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/adityanath-tovisit-
agra-says-it-doesnt-matter-who-built-taj/article19875964.ece (accessed 12 July 2021);
‘“Taj Mahal Used to Be a Shiva Temple That Mughals Destroyed”, Says BJP MP Vinay
Katiyar’, Times of India, 18 October 2017, https://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/india/taj-
mahal-used-to-be-a-shiva-temple-that-mughals-destroyed-saysbjp-mp-vinay-katiyar/
articleshow/61131286.cms (accessed 12 July 2021). 2. Percival Spear, ‘Bentinck and
the Taj’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1949): 180–
187, 181. Ebba Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006),
241. 3. Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim: In Search of the Picturesque during
Fourand-Twenty Years in the East; With Revelations of Life in the Zenana, vol. 1
(London: Pelham Richardson, 1850), 220. 4. Ernest Binfield Havell, A Handbook to
Agra and the Taj, Sikandra, Fatehpur-Sikri and the Neighbourhood (London: Longmans,
Green, and Company, 1904), 53–54. 5. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life:
Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5,
http://www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt1ggjkxq.4 (accessed 21 July 2021). 6. Siraj Qureshi,
‘Yogi Picks Up Broom to Clean Taj Mahal, Says Monument Belongs to No Religion’,
India Today, 26 October 2017, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/ story/up-agra-bjp-yogi-
adityanath-taj-mahal-broom-swachh-bharat-10708332017-10-26 (accessed 12 July
2021). 7. Hussein Fancy, The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and
Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2016). 8. This practice of privileging the political over the spiritual in secular history
writing is nicely outlined by Romila Thapar in ‘Imagined Religious Communities?
Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity’, Modern Asian Studies 23,
no. 2 (1989): 209–231, www.jstor.org/stable/31273 (accessed 16 July 2021). 9. Fancy,
The Mercenary Mediterranean, 147. 10. Ibid. 11. Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of
Cultures (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1973), 5. 12. Ibid., 149. 13. The secular
historiography of Mughal India can be loosely divided between the Marxist-leaning
historians of Aligarh Muslim University lead by Irfan Habib, who concern themselves
with the pragmatics of fiscal and military administration, and the other culturally oriented
historians who emerge in the 1990s like Stephen P. Blake, Muzaffar Alam, and Sanjay
Subramanyam, whose focus is on explaining why the patrimonial–bureaucratic state
was so long-lived and its power diffused across India. Both groups avoid discussing the
religious convictions of the Mughals.
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Santhi Kavuri-Bauer
14. See Wayne E. Begley, ‘The Myth of the Taj Mahal and a New Theory of Its
Symbolic Meaning’, Art Bulletin 61, no. 1 (1979): 7–37; and James L. Wescoat Jr.,
‘From the Gardens of the Qur’an to the “Gardens” of Lahore’, Landscape Research 20,
no. 1 (1995): 19–29. Less concerned with architecture than art but still impactful in the
study of the former is A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and
Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 15. Santhi Kavuri-
Bauer, ‘The Impact of Akhlaq-i Nasiri on the Forms and Spaces of Akbar’s Fatehpur
Sikri’, South Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (2019): 43–62. 16. Fancy, The Mercenary
Mediterranean, 147. 17. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), 9. 18. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, lecture given at
Munich University, 1918,
https://web.archive.org/web/20000901000124/http://www.ne.jp:80/asahi/moriyuki
/abukuma/weber/lecture/science_frame.html (accessed 6 July 2020). 19. Jeffrey Kosky,
Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity—Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James
Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), xii. 20.
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996); Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art
in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 21. For
an exception to this practice, see Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, ‘The Wisdom to Wonder: ‘Aja’ib
and the Pillars of Islamic India’, International Journal of Islamic Architecture 6, no. 2
(2017): 285–310. 22. Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, Monumental Matters: The Power,
Subjectivity and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture (Durham: Duke University Press,
2011). 23. Edward Said, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 128. 24.
Oleg Grabar, ‘What Makes Islamic Art Islamic?’, in Islamic Art and Beyond:
Constructing the Study of Islamic Art, vol. 3 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 247–251. This
essay was first published in Art and Archaeology Research Papers 9 (1976): 1–3. 25.
Ibid., 250. 26. Ibid., 250–251. 27. Wendy M. Shaw, What Is Islamic Art: Between
Religion and Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 28. See
Jamal Elias, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Mohammed Hamdouni Alami, Art and
Architecture in the Islamic Tradition: Aesthetics, Politics and Desire in Early Islam
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); Samer Akkach, Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern
Islam: An Architectural Reading of Mystical Ideas (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2012). 29. Manifesting the Unseen,
https://www.manifestingtheunseen.com/exhibitiongallery (accessed 1 July 2022). 30.
These are the artists’ websites: https://samirayamin.com/ (accessed 1 July 2022);
https://www.sanazmazinani.com/ (accessed 1 July 2022); http://www.
31. 32. 33. 34. 35.
36.
37. 38. 39.
40.
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sheringuirguis.com/ (accessed 1 July 2022); https://hayvkahraman.com/ (accessed 1

July 2022). For images and a definition of the term` mashrabiya, see https://en-
academic. com/dic.nsf/enwiki/1731579 (accessed 12 July 2021). Kandice Chuh, The
Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘After Man’ (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2019), 5. Said, Covering Islam, 149. Sayyid Ah. mad Khān, Asar al-Sanadid
(Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1966). One of the compelling arguments for this
this approach is Donna Harraway’s. As she writes: ‘No species, not even our own
arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts,
acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the
evolutionary kind and the other kinds too.’ Donna Harraway, Staying with the Trouble:
Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 100. Another
significant scholar of new materialism is Sara Ahmed, who helps us understand how
social orientations are produced through our relationship with material objects and the
spaces we share. For example, in her study of queer phenomenology, she
demonstrates how ‘things’ in space orient us physically around a line created by given
points of view. A line in space thus ‘both divides ... and creates spaces that we imagine
we can be “in”.… So space itself is sensation: it is a matter of how things make their
impression as being here or there, on this side or that side’. Sara Ahmed, Queer
Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006),
14. See Kavuri-Bauer, Monumental Matters, 1–17. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 158.
The utopian temporal experience with things is explained by José Muñoz: ‘The
anticipatory illumination of certain objects is a kind of potentiality that is open,
indeterminate, like the affective contours of hope itself.’ José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia:
The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009),
10. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 84.
Image 12.1 Sun Temple, from northeast, Gwalior, 1984–1988 Source: Photograph by
author.
12 Rebuilding Konarak in the Twentieth Century Legacies of Colonial Archaeology and

Discourses of Inclusivity in Gwalior’s Birla Temple Tamara Sears
etween 19 January 1984 and 23 January 1988, a remarkable new temple was
established in Gwalior (Image 12.1). According to a placard positioned at its entrance,
the monument was commissioned by Basant Kumar (B. K.) Birla at the request of his
famous philanthropistindustrialist father, Ghanshyam Das (G. D.) Birla, who had passed
away on 11 June 1983, just seven months before the laying of the temple’s first
foundation stone. That G. D. Birla would have been an inspiration for the monument is
not surprising as it was he who had initiated a longer tradition of building monumental
complexes popularly known today as ‘Birla temples’. Frequently located in cities and
towns associated with the family business interests, these temples represent revivalist
efforts to bring together architectural traditions rooted in ancient and medieval India with
new visions concerning the role of religion within modern industrial society. Whereas the
monuments themselves represented abstracted appropriations of traditional Nagara
temple forms, the vast landscaped grounds provided respite for the increasingly
crowded conditions of urban life by creating inviting spaces for burgeoning middle-class
leisure. At first glance, the temple at Gwalior follows the typical Birla temple pattern. It
was built to serve the community that had grown around the city’s long-standing textile
mills, and its design hearkens back to India’s architectural past. However, whereas the
revivalist impulse in earlier Birla temples had been realized by combining references to
multiple histories and regional styles in order to project a totalizing new vision, the
temple at Gwalior was intended to recreate a specific monument, the famed Sun
Temple at Konarak, originally built in the thirteenth century along the coast of eastern
India (Image 12.2). The choice to model the Gwalior temple on Konarak is curious. Not
only are the two removed by over 1,400 kilometres (or nearly 900 miles), but the two
places also share very little in terms of their local or regional history. Built on a grand
scale by King Narasimha Deva of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, the original temple at
Konarak had been largely destroyed over the centuries. Very little remains of the main
sanctum, and all that exists is its preceding mandapa (pillared hall) and a large dancing
hall. When first encountered by British officials in the nineteenth century, the tower had
completely fallen and all that could be seen above ground was the mandapa, until a
concerted effort at excavation fully cleared the grounds in 1906–1907.1
Rebuilding Konarak in the Twentieth Century
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Image 12.2 Sun Temple, Konarak, circa 1250 Source: Photograph by author.
As a result, it has become a site primarily of archaeological rather than religious

interest, drawing in crowds of tourists rather than worshippers and pilgrims. The
decision to model a new living temple in Gwalior on a ruined archaeological artefact
raises two sets of questions. The first regards the relationship between modern religious
revival and the realm of secular archaeological practice, which manifested in late
colonial India with manifold implications for postcolonial attitudes concerning past
temple traditions. The rise of conservation programmes, particularly at places with still-
living pilgrimage traditions, created conflicts between archaeological officials and
priests, and fuelled what Deborah Sutton has described as a blurring of ‘the secular
veneration of material antiquity’ with the worship of Hindu divinity.2 British officials
placed the primary value of medieval temples in their status as antiquities, and sought
to restrict the modernization of temple grounds, remove later additions to temple
complexes, and relegate stray sculptures to the protective custody of archaeological
museums. By contrast, priests saw continuation and resuscitation of worship as the best
mechanism for preserving past
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monuments and sculptures. As Sraman Mukherjee has argued, colonial efforts to

discursively classify monuments as ‘secular’ history led to the physical alteration of sites
in ways that ultimately produced new regimes of sacrality and reconfigured spaces of
religious practice.3 The second is the underlying ethos of the larger Birla temple project,
which found its origins at a key historic moment in the 1930s during which architectural
revivalism went hand-in-hand with swadeshi politics. More specifically, this era saw the
emergence of the idea of the sarvajanak mandir, or ‘temple of the people’, which has
been defined by Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai, and Miki Desai as ‘both a place of worship
and place of congregation open to Hindus of all classes and castes as well as followers
of other religions’.4 Intended to serve a wider public, the sarvajanak mandir was
specifically outfitted with peripheral buildings and wide, sweeping grounds that provided
spaces that could be enjoyed for a broader range of non-religious purposes, from
leisurely walks to family picnics. By integrating public functions into religious spaces,
sarvajanak temples participated in the formation of a new secular sensibility embraced
by modern Indian intellectuals and urban middle classes, one that was quite distinct
from secularism as defined in Europe and the United States (US). Secularism in India,
as Ashis Nandy has noted, should be understood as accommodative rather than
absolute in its separation of religion from the realm of state governance and public life.5
In the case of Birla temples, the notion of an accommodative secularism intersected,
somewhat uneasily, with an adherence to Sanatana Dharma. Originally articulated as
the need for harmony and unity among all religions by Swami Vivekananda in the
nineteenth century, Sanatana Dharma was embraced and redefined by various
nationalist leaders, including Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946), Bal Gangadhar
Tilak (1856–1920), and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), with all of whom
the Birlas had a close personal connection.6 In the early decades of the twentieth
century, prominent members of the Birla family understood Sanatana Dharma as
absolute truth articulated through Vedic literature, and particularly in the Bhagavad Gita.
The earliest Birla temples grew out of a nationalist vision that was rooted in a belief in
the need to revive and restore unity among Indians, who, regardless of current religious
affiliation, were understood as originally Hindu. As such, the earliest Birla temples
embodied an ethos of religious inclusivity while projecting
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a timeless and totalizing vision of an Indian nation that ultimately came with distinct
attendant exclusions. The essay that follows has two parts. In the first, I look closely at
the Gwalior temple, excavating its local history and its connections with the Birla family,
before turning to the ways in which it variously engages with and meaningfully deviates
from its earlier model, the Konarak Sun Temple. The second moves back in time to
connect with how discourses of inclusivity, secularism, and architectural revivalism
played out through the larger history of Birla temples. My particular focus is on the
1930s and 1940s, a period during which the family’s close alliance with Gandhi and the
Congress party played a significant role in establishing the Birla temple tradition. In
addition to introducing them to Sris Chandra Chatterjee, a key proponent of the
establishment of an Indian national style of architecture, the Birla family’s involvement
with the Congress party contributed significantly to the design and production of their
temples.
The Birlas in Gwalior For anyone familiar with India, the Birla family needs no
introduction. Like the Fords and Rockefellers in the US, the Birlas are well known for
their diverse businesses and industrial expertise as well for the vast array of
philanthropic activities that their wealth has engendered. The origins of the Birlas’
fortunes go back to the late nineteenth century, when B. K.’s great-great grandfather,
Shiv Narayan Birla, began to capitalize on the opportunities brought about through the
increasing trade in cotton and opium under the British. He and his son, Baldeo Das (B.
D.), expanded the family business from their original home in Pilani, Rajasthan, to
Bombay, and then Calcutta. However, it was Baldeodas’s son G. D. Birla who is often
recognized as the scion of the family. In addition to growing the family’s enterprises, he
also was committed to educational, political, and philanthropic ventures. A close
confidante and friend of Mahatma Gandhi, he became deeply involved in the movement
for Indian Independence. Over the decades, the branching Birla family has fostered the
growth of many corporate groups that continue to dominate the Indian Fortune 500
today. All are major multinational conglomerates operating in dozens of countries with a
vast array of subsidiaries and diverse investments. The
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patron of the Gwalior Sun Temple, B. K. Birla (1921–2019), had interests in sectors as
diverse as cotton, paper, cement, tea, coffee, piping, and plywood.7 The Gwalior Sun
Temple appears relatively late in the history of Birla temples. However, the family’s
close connections to the city are more deeply rooted in the early twentieth-century
development of Birla industries. In 1918, G. D. Birla began expanding his family
interests from trade to production, focusing particularly on jute and cotton. After
establishing a cotton mill in Delhi and the first ever Indian-owned jute mill in Calcutta, he
had a chance encounter with Maharaja Madho Rao Scindia (1876–1925) of Gwalior that
culminated in the establishment of a textile mill in the city. Initially registered under the
name Jiyajeerao Cotton (J. C.) Mills Ltd on 9 August 1921, the mill was no small
establishment. It boasted 1,811 looms and 71,704 spindles, and it was outfitted with all
equipment necessary for printing, dyeing, and processing finished fabrics.8 The
establishment of the mill exemplified the close relationship between G. D. and the
maharaja, after whose son, Jivajirao Scindia (1916–1961), the mill was named.9 As
both were strong Congress party stalwarts, the investment more specifically in textile
production went hand-in-hand with swadeshi politics and the emphasis on homespun
industries. In 1947, G. D. Birla established a second mill nearby under the name
Gwalior Rayon Silk Manufacturing, later known as Grasim Industries. Over the decades
that followed, the area around the two mills developed as the neighbourhood of Birla
Nagar, complete with a music school, primary school, and secondary school, named J.
C. Mills High School, established specifically to accommodate the mill’s workers.
Although the Birla textile industries started to decline in the 1990s, at the time of the
temple’s construction in the 1980s, the mills at Gwalior still supported a robust
population, providing extensive employment to the city’s residents.10 The choice to
build a temple there at the time might have been influenced by G. D. Birla’s advanced
age and impending passing. In his memoirs, Aditya Vikram (A. V.) Birla, the son of the
temple’s patron and the thenchairman of Gwalior Rayon, wrote that shortly before his
death in 1983, G. D. had explicitly requested that B. K. and his wife Saraladevi build a
Sun Temple in Gwalior.11 The selection of the Gwalior temple’s site was likely
determined by its close proximity to the Birla family’s industries. It stands less than
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5 kilometres down the road, along an almost direct path from Birla Nagar and the
family’s textile mills. The location was in many ways idyllic. Situated along a greenway
towards the northeastern outskirts of the city, the temple stands within the Morar
residency, just west of the Morar river. Founded originally in 1844 as a separate military
cantonment for British troops, the Morar residency is located 5 kilometres outside of the
older city and now serves as an Indian military base. While Morar currently boasts a
population of 48,464 people, it remains far less congested than the historic areas closer
to Gwalior fort and was, until the past two decades, relatively green.12 While its
greenery has been steadily giving way to ongoing development, Morar remains home to
an ecological park, stretching directly to the south of the Birla temple’s grounds. In
keeping with the model established by earlier Birla temples, the site at Gwalior was
designed to serve as a space of both worship and leisure, with ample grounds that
could be easily accessed by the nearby community of Birla industries employees.
Carefully landscaped, they cover an area of approximately 20,500 square feet. The
temple itself is set at a distance from the street. To approach it, the visitor must follow a
meandering hedge- and tree-lined path that extends the entire length of the building,
beginning from the main gateway at the far west end of the site. From the path, the
temple remains partially hidden from view, its surfaces and towers appearing only
occasionally through the foliage in the far distance. It is only upon turning the last corner
that the temple suddenly reveals itself as an impressive monument, rising to a height of
just over 76 feet (Image 12.3). Both its unique architecture and beautifully landscaped
grounds have made this temple a site of daily worship and a tourist attraction even in
the present, particularly for locals and regional travellers who have come to Gwalior also
to see the older fortress and precolonial monuments closer to the city’s centre. Whereas
for locals, the temple is well known, tourists are often drawn by guidebook
recommendations and online reviews that herald the temple’s architecture for its unique
resemblance to Konarak. In online reviews, visitors also frequently appreciate the
diversity of flora and fauna, including the prevalence of squirrels, peacocks, and parrots
that populate the lightly wooded premises.13 Locals treat the temple as a pleasure park
and use it frequently for family picnics. Early in the morning, one can find yoga
practitioners performing surya namaskar on the temple platform as they welcome the
rise of the sun in direct view of the enshrined
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Tamara Sears
Image 12.3 Sun Temple, from east, Gwalior, 1984–1988 Source: Photograph by author.
icon. In short, the temple has continued to serve as a public space, to be used for both
worship and pleasure by local individuals and families.
The Design of the Temple Whereas the activities fostered by the temple grounds are
aimed at modern publics, the encounter with the monument is mediated through
conventions more typically associated with protected archaeological monuments than
with active sites of worship. Upon approaching the temple, the visitor encounters an
informational placard, situated to the left side of the walkway leading to the temple
platform and directly along the path leading to the shoe storage area (Image 12.4). Both
the positioning of the placard and the
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Image 12.4 Informational placard, Sun Temple, from east, Gwalior, 1984–1988 Source:
content of the text emulate institutional practices commonly applied at sites deemed
historically significant by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). As in the case of
informational placards posted at archaeological sites, the temple’s name and location
are printed in large bold letters at the top centre, followed by a series of enumerated
paragraphs. These serve a pedagogical function in teaching the viewer simultaneously
about its salient architectural features and sculptural imagery, and ensuring that they
can identify its key elements. The fact that no English translation is given suggests that
the intended audience is a relatively local Hindi-speaking middle class. While the
opening of India’s markets over the past twenty years has made English language
acquisition in Gwalior much easier, at the time of the temple’s construction in the 1980s,
English was yet to become the primary language of local communication and daily
business. The first two points outlined on the placard provide an introduction to the
monument. Whereas the first lays out the precise dates of the temple’s
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construction, its patronage, and its overall size, the second makes it clear that the
temple was modelled after the historic monument at Konarak. From there, the text
moves on to detail the temple’s form and symbolism and establishes the historicity of
the design choices, some of which were connected specifically to Konarak, and others
of which were more broadly connected to traditional Surya worship. The third paragraph
begins with the temple’s overall plan, which evokes Surya’s chariot, whose form and
iconography suggest the passing of time. The platform possesses seven horses,
signifying the days of the week, and twenty-four wheels, to mark the fortnights of the
year, each of which has sixteen spokes to mark the yamas (ninety-minute interval) of
the day. Presiding over the chariot is the Surya image enshrined in the sanctum, which
is brightly illuminated through the placement of windows above, on all four sides of the
temple tower. The fourth and fifth paragraphs turn to the ancillary structures around the
temple. These include three smaller shrines containing icons of Brahma, Vishnu, and
Mahesha to the north, west, and south, and also a pair of chattris housing bronze, life-
like statues of the patron’s parents, Sri Ghanshyam Das Birla and his wife Srimati
Mahadevi Birla, who face the temple standing in a gesture of perpetual devotion.
Finally, the text provides an overview of the sculptural programme. The lintels of the
mandapa doorways are topped by navagraha panels depicting the nine planets and an
image of Ganesha, and the temple wall is adorned by the twelve Suryas (adityas); the
ten avatars; Brahma, Vishnu, and Narada; the seven mothers (saptamatrikas); and the
nine Durgas (navadurgas), along with female dancers and musicians (paragraphs six
and seven). The last paragraph of the text concludes with a turn to the temple’s
devotional significance, heralding it as the first and only twentieth-century Surya shrine,
and proclaiming the spiritual benefits of Surya worship. Taken on its own, the text of the
placard might suggest to the average visitor that the temple at Gwalior can be seen as a
relatively faithful replication of its earlier model. This impression is reinforced through
the form and format of the text, which, with only a few exceptions, could easily be
overlaid onto the archaeological site at Konarak. For example, an International Council
on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) advisory board evaluation produced in 1982 begins
its summary of the Konarak Sun Temple’s architecture in a very similar fashion, by
describing it as a ‘monumental representation of the chariot of Surya pulled by a team
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of seven horses’ and possessing twenty-four wheels.14 Other details are consistent
with widely circulated publications, which were summarized succinctly by Susan and
John Huntington in their 1985 volume The Art of Ancient India: Buddhist, Hindu, Jain. In
addition to highlighting the evocation of Surya’s chariot, the Huntington volume included
an extended discussion of the navagraha panel that once was situated above the
doorway of the main hall (jagamohan).15 With the exception of the temple’s date and
the insertion of the patron’s parents into the visual programme, a viewer unfamiliar with
Konarak could easily assume that the key features were identical at both places.
However, to anyone familiar with Konarak, it is clear that the Gwalior temple departs
significantly from its earlier model. The original monument’s extreme state of ruination
alone makes a faithful imitation untenable. It is thus worth considering briefly what might
have been meant by the notion of a model at Gwalior. The precise term used in the text
of the informational placard is anukriti, which can be literally translated as ‘imitation’,
‘copy’, ‘simulation’, or ‘emulation’. However, anukriti possesses a degree of semantic
fluidity that allows for a flexibility of meaning. For example, it can be understood as an
‘imitative shape or form’ rather than an exact copy, or, in poetry, as something that is
inspired by another object or that can evoke something essential about another object’s
nature or form.16 In this case, the Gwalior temple appears to have been intended as a
new version of the Konarak temple, modified in order to bridge the gap between past
and present. As such, the text makes it clear that the temple was intended as ‘an
unparalleled Surya temple for a modern era’ (adhunika yuga ka ekamatra surya
mandira) that also embodied one of the most important monuments in the history of
temple architecture as a whole. Even if the temple was not meant as an absolute
likeness, it had to be designed so as to be readily recognizable as Konarak. In this
case, the reference was made legible by drawing upon the original temple’s most
famous iconic features, namely the horses and large wheels. By the 1980s, both
features had long entered the realm of popular representation and were widely
associated with the Sun temple at Konarak. The iconic horses, for example, were
featured as early as 1949 on a definitive issue postage stamp as part of a series
commemorating India’s archaeological history released on the second anniversary of
Independence. And in the 1975 redesign of the 20-rupee note, Konarak was
represented synecdochically through an image
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of a sculpted wheel. The body of the temple sanctum, which no longer stood in situ,
similarly drew upon a well-known image, in this case a conjectural drawing published in
Percy Brown’s Indian Architecture (circa 1940), which circulated widely through frequent
reprintings, including in 1981, just three years before the first stone was laid in Gwalior
(Image 12.5).17 Brown’s own reimagining of the site owed much to earlier, colonial-era
archaeological investigations, and particularly to James Fergusson’s reconstruction
drawings of the temple’s original plan and elevation, published in 1876.18 In following
the model presented in colonial-era archaeological drawings, the Gwalior temple
effectively gave a new body to the temple sanctum that had long been absent at the site
itself. In so doing, it also reinforced a persistent vision that was rooted in the entangled
history of colonial archaeology, and particularly in a colonial-era desire to impose a
secular logic on ancient sacred sites. As Sraman Mukherjee has suggested, the ability
of colonial-era officials to isolate and conserve the temple without any contestation from
local religious communities enabled it to ‘emerge as the epitome of the new “secular”
archaeological monument in
Image 12.5 Conjectural reconstruction of the Sun Temple at Konarak Source: Drawing,
after Percy Brown, 1940, pl. 88.
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colonial Orissa, inviting only the new generation of enlightened “tourists” who would
view the relics purely through the lens of scientific historicity and objective aesthetic
appreciation’.19 The secular objectification had the effect of unhinging the monument
from its association with both a particularized historical moment and a particularized
regional tradition, thereby enabling scholars to ‘graft it onto the map of emerging
national heritage’.20 One might argue that this process of conversion—of ancient
monument into historical artefact—had the effect of not only stripping the temple’s
sacrality but also rendering it a blank slate upon which new meanings could be more
freely superimposed. In the case of Konarak, the extent of the ruination, and particularly
the loss of much of the sculptural programme of the sanctum, may have enabled the
original temple to be desacralized, and, in the process, reinvented in completely new
ways. In the case of Gwalior, the Sun Temple was remade following a distinctively
synthetic vision of Hinduism that emphasized unity and the erasure of sectarian division.
The synthetic impetus notably begins with the icon enshrined at the centre of the
temple’s sanctum. Described as ‘an extremely beautiful image of Vivasvan’ in the
informational placard situated at the foot of the temple’s platform, the sanctum image
depicts Surya seated frontally in lotus posture on a marble plinth rendered, like the
temple, in the form of a seven-horse chariot led by the charioteer Aruna. However, as
the text also tells us, the image is not of the sun god alone. Instead, it is meant to
represent a composite form, drawn from ancient Hindu religious tradition (pauranik
hindu dharma) in which Surya is endowed with emblems associated with the sacred
trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, thereby combining all four gods into a single body.
In two of his hands are two lotus flowers belonging to Surya and Vishnu, respectively.
The other two hold Shiva’s trident and a garland associated with Brahma. On the
surface, the notion that the main icon follows an ancient Hindu tradition is well founded.
Such syncretistic forms of Surya, specifically known as Hariharahiranyagarba, were not
uncommon in medieval India, and the iconography of the new image follows typical
patterns from the Gwalior region. However, it would have been highly unusual in earlier
periods to find such a form enshrined as the main icon. Instead, Hariharahiranyagarba
typically occupied a central bhadra niche along the exterior wall of a temple.21 This
likely was true of the icon that once
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occupied the sanctum of the original thirteenth-century Sun Temple and that is believed
to be commensurate with a large sculpture that was originally discovered in the remains
of the detached Natamandir (dance hall) at Konarak. Currently housed at the National
Museum in Delhi, the icon represents Surya as a singular, non-syncretic deity,
accompanied by his attendants Pingala and Dandin, his consorts Chhaya and
Suvarchasa, and his charioteer Aruna, who drives the god’s seven-horse chariot.22 An
even more expansive field for the production of a new syncretic vision was on the walls
of the temple sanctum, whose disappearance from the original effectively offered
designers an open field for anachronistic experimentation. On the whole, the
programmatic frame is drawn from well-established medieval Indian traditions, seen
both in Orissa and more
Image 12.6 Diagram of images on the Sun Temple sanctum wall, Gwalior, 1984–1988
Source: Drawn by author.
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locally in Madhya Pradesh. As in the case of most temples built in the region from the
tenth century onwards, the sanctum is pancharatha (five faceted) in plan, and features
two tiers of imagery that place the guardians of the directions (dikpalas) on the corners
and a mixture of fantastic beasts (vyalas) and beautiful heavenly maidens (apsaras) in
the recesses (Images 12.6 and 12.7). Following the pattern at earlier temples, the
bhadra niches possess images that reinforce the nature of the icon enshrined within.
Although the main deity enshrined in the sanctum is Surya, Surya remains absent from
the sculptural programme of the exterior of the temple proper. Instead, we find icons of
Shiva and Vishnu, accompanied by their spouses Parvati and Lakshmi, respectively, on
the north and south bhadras and the elephant-headed Ganesha appears in the rear
(west) central niche.
Image 12.7 West wall of the sanctum, Sun Temple, Gwalior, 1984–1988 Source:
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Brahma, accompanied by Savitri appears above him. Although this is a clear departure
from the original temple at Konarak, which featured large icons of Surya in all three
central niches, the programme’s logic is in keeping with the altered identity of the main
icon, as it effectively extends the aspects of Surya’s composite form as
Hariharahiranyagarba outward, along central axes, through the temple wall. This axial
emanation is reinforced through the presence of three subsidiary shrines standing
beyond the temple platform. Facing the temple to the north, west, and south, these
house syncretistic images of Surya–Brahma, Surya–Vishnu, and Surya–Mahesha (or
Shiva), respectively. From there, the imagery continues to depart from traditions.
Instead of finding generic images of divinities on the subsidiary projections (pratirathas),
we see specific portraits of a wide array of human saints and spiritual leaders spanning
roughly 2,000 years of Indian religious history. Like all of the images on the Gwalior Sun
Temple’s walls, each one is labelled to ensure easy identification, and their positioning
on the lower register ensures that they reside at the viewer’s eye level. Significantly,
what brings them all together is their fame as primarily Vaishnava bhakti poet-saints.
Encountered in circumambulatory order, we find on the south wall the thirteenth-century
Maharashtra saint Jnaneshvar and Kabir, who is popularly thought of as an iconoclast
and social critic of established religions, but whose poems were deeply rooted in
Vaishnava forms of devotionalism.23 On the west are Tulsidas (circa sixteenth–
seventeenth centuries), who famously wrote the Ramcharitmanas, and the legendary
Shankaracharya (circa 650–750), who first systematized Advaita Vedanta. Finally, on
the north wall can be found Valmiki, the circa Fifth-century BC author of the original
Ramayana, and Surdas, the sixteenth-century blind poet-devotee of Krishna from Braj.
The Vaishnava emphasis introduced through the imagery of the lower pratirathas is
reinforced through the sculptures on the wall’s upper register. Adorning the eight karnas
(corners) and two of the pratirathas are Vishnu’s ten avatars. They appear in clockwise
circumambulatory order with Matsya (fish), Kurma (tortoise) and Varaha (boar) on the
south wall; Vamana (dwarf), Rama, and Narasimha (man-lion) on the west wall;
Parasuram and Krishna on the north wall; and Buddha and Kalkin on the east. In the
upper bhadra niches, we find Radha–Krishna (on the south) and Rama–Sita (on the
north).
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The preponderance of Vaishnava imagery on the temple wall is in keeping with the
privileging of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanatana Hinduism. In fact, the majority of Birla
temples are dedicated to Vishnu, often in consort with his wife Lakshmi. G. D. Birla was
personally devoted to Vishnu and reportedly could recite verses from texts such as the
Vishnu Sahasranamam and Ramcharitamanas as a young child. Shortly before his
death, he authored a book in praise of Krishna, entitled Krishnam vande jagadgurum
(1981), republished subsequently in an English translation.24 This connection with
Krishna specifically has implications for the temple’s main dedication not merely to
Surya but to Surya in the form of Vivasvan. More precisely, Vivasvan serves not merely
as one of Surya’s many forms but as the agent through whom Krishna, as the
paramatma (supreme divine self), transmits the Bhagavad Gita, thereby becoming the
original disciple and prime disseminator of the text.25 As the placard preceding the
temple platform informs the visitor, the Gwalior temple thus stands as the only
twentiethcentury monument to Surya that gives direct witness to the knowledge of god,
which, by extension, implies the idea of god as promulgated by Krishna.26 Even more
striking than the creation of a completely new visual programme at Gwalior is the
deliberate omission of the sculptural imagery that is most visible at the original site of
Konarak, namely the hundreds of erotic images that proliferate along the surviving
temple walls (Image 12.8). Visitors to Konarak have long remarked on the overly sexual
nature of the temple’s imagery, and discussions of the temple’s eroticism have
dominated both art-historical writings and the popular press. Indeed, the explicitly
sexual nature of much of Konarak’s sculptural programme has posed a significant
problem for archaeologists and public audiences for over 150 years. As Tapati Guha-
Thakurta has noted, the initial impulse of archaeologists and art historians was to ignore
the erotic sculptures in favour of emphasizing the ‘magnificent wholeness’ of the
building. Thus, when James Fergusson first encountered the monument that was known
to him as the remains of the ‘Black Pagoda’ in the 1840s, his ‘inability to appreciate or
comprehend the temple’s erotic sculptures led him to highlight the whole monument (the
grand effect) rather than the puzzling (and what to him clearly were repellent)
particularities’.27 Writing many decades later, Percy Brown was able to engage the
monument’s sculpture, but in a manner that remained indubitably vexed. He praised the
design of the temple as a horse-pulled chariot (and
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Image 12.8 Detail of erotic scenes on the platform, Sun Temple, Konarak, circa 1250
Source: Photograph by author.
the manner of treating the wheels and horses as inextricable from the monument’s
surfaces) as ‘an inspiration, splendidly realized’. Similarly, he saw the sculptural
composition, style, and framing of relief sculpture across the temple’s surfaces as an
‘amazingly beautiful’ ‘intricate tapestry of form’. The content of the sculptures
themselves, however, was deeply problematic. While some were ‘of outstanding
beauty’, others were ‘of such a shamelessly erotic character that they have no parallel
in any known building’. He described them eloquently as ‘plastic obscenities’,
‘representations of sexual perversion’, and ‘grossly obscene’. They were unfit for normal
society, and most likely the work of outcast esoteric Tantric sects.28
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Needless to say, while such overtly erotic images were common on the walls of royally
sponsored temples in medieval India, they would have been considered distasteful to a
modern urban audience. They also would have been at odds with the Sanatana Hindu
religiosity embraced through the temple’s visual programme. Thus, Gwalior’s architects,
like colonial-era archaeologists in the nineteenth century, chose to emphasize the
overall architectural form of the temple as a horse-drawn chariot while ignoring the
troubling array of erotic figures. Perhaps it was because the Sun Temple at Konarak
had long been relegated to the sphere of secular archaeology that the images that had
vexed earlier viewers could be fully excised in order to reinforce the ‘magnificent
wholeness’ of the design that had been so admired also by colonial-era pioneers.
Nationalist Visions and the Longer History of Birla Temples This leads me to the second
set of questions, which engage the relationship of Gwalior to the larger history of Birla
temple projects. I start by going back to the earliest completed project, the Lakshmi-
Narayan Temple in New Delhi, which was built between 1933 and 1939 along a ridge
and forested reserve on the western edge of the then newly developed colonial capital
city, almost directly to the north of the Viceroy’s Residence (now Rashtrapati Bhavan),
designed by Edwin Lutyens, and its accompanying Mughal Gardens and to the west of
the main commercial centre at Connaught Place. Designed by the architect Sris
Chandra Chatterjee (1873–1966), the temple represents a key movement in the 1930s
which advocated for an eschewal of both the Western classical styles that had been
popular in the earlier decades of the century and also the art-deco and the international
styles that were gaining traction at that moment. Instead, Chatterjee favoured the revival
of traditional approaches to building, and the creation of a distinctively Indian national
style of architecture.29 Chatterjee’s overarching ideas about revivalism were laid out
clearly in his various publications. The most often cited is his 1942 book Magadha:
Architecture and Culture, but his views were already fully formed by the 1930s and
visibly articulated in his designs for not only the Lakshmi-Narayan Temple but also the
Mahasabha Bhavan in Delhi (1939), the Buddhist Arya Dharma Sangha Dharmasala in
Sarnath (1935), and the Deshbandhu Memorial to Chittaranjan Das in Calcutta.30 His
work in the
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1930s and 1940s can be characterized as forging an ahistorical vision of a timeless

precolonial past that was, as Farhan Karim has noted, ‘stirred by significant
archaeological discoveries of its time’, including the excavations of Harappa and
Mohenjodaro. 31 Although not explicitly religious, Chatterjee’s vision was deeply
influenced by the spiritual teachings of Ramakrishna and Gandhi. In a lantern lecture
entitled ‘Architecture and Religion’, given at the International Parliament of Religions in
Calcutta in 1937, Chatterjee expressed a firm belief that ‘India’s broad, spiritual outlook
on life’ could provide the solution to the societal problems of ‘racial recrimination,
religious bigotry, and social intolerance’, as well as the ‘rank materialism and barbarity’
that had been ‘threatening to undermine all that human culture has produced in the past
ages’.32 In his view, architecture was the perfect mechanism for materializing this
utopian vision. He saw art and architecture as having ‘a profound relationship with
Religion, relating as it does to the fundamental experience of the human soul in its
communion with God’. It had the power to bring together the fields of science and
religion, to reconcile the growing divide between mankind and nature, and to promote
brotherhood among nations. To this end, he proposed a ‘national school of neo-Indian
architecture’, which, in his view, ‘must be Indian first’, but which also should not ‘neglect
to take the fullest advantage of modern materials and modern methods of construction’.
He advocated for incorporating ‘occidental’ advances in engineering and science, but
argued against the full embrace of Western modernist stylistic approaches. New
materials and methods of construction could be employed as long as they were
accompanied by the study and application of old Indian materials.33 In his ‘Draft
Manifesto for the Proposed All-India League of Architecture’, published in the 1940
Calcutta Municipal Gazette, Chatterjee envisioned the creation of a league of architects
that would ‘foster the development of Indian Architecture and evolve a simple style’ that
would be both modern and Indian. In his estimation, a new national style should be
‘consistent with current economic conditions’ and ‘the social needs of the Indian today’
while still retaining ‘a definite Indian feel’. The national style should draw widely from the
best of India’s cultural achievements, most of which were inevitably mediated through
archaeological survey and excavation.... These could be seen, in his view, ‘as the finest
embodiment of man’s thinking’.34
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Chatterjee’s views made him a natural fit for the Congress party, of which he became
an active member. In the 1930s, he served on the National Planning Committee that
was chaired by Jawaharlal Nehru. It is likely that Chatterjee’s close association with
Nehru and the Congress party put him in close contact with the Birla family and led to
his commissioning as architect of the first Birla temple in Delhi. In the 1920s and 1930s,
Baldeo Das Birla became increasingly involved in swadeshi politics and the swaraj
movement led by Gandhi. His son G. D. became the first president of the Harijan Sevak
Sangh, founded by Gandhi in 1932 for the purpose of eradicating untouchability and
discrimination based on caste. Among the key issues that the Sangh faced was the
problem of temple entry, which was increasingly becoming a point of political
mobilization in the 1920s and 1930s. It was against this historical backdrop that the Birla
temple in Delhi came into being. The foundation stone was laid in 1933, just a year after
the pivotal Pune Pact which reserved slots for untouchables in various legislatures, and
it was inaugurated in 1938 by Gandhi, reportedly on the condition that the temple be
open to all castes. As a result, the temple, along with many other Birla temples, has
long been praised for their transcendence of religious difference. In a recent publication
marking the culmination of a multiyear project, a Polish team of researchers based
primarily at Jagiellonian University in Krakow suggested that it was planned from its
very inception as a nationalist project that would project a cohesive vision of Hinduism
and promote a ‘message of monotheism, nationalism and unification’.35 In essence, it
reflected the thinking of Jugal Kishore (J. K.) Birla (1883–1967), B. D. Birla’s oldest son,
who had been the originator of the Delhi temple project that was eventually completed
by his younger brother. J. K. was a close follower of the saint Swami Shraddhananda
(1856–1926), who was a key proponent of the Arya Samaj movement, and also a
member of the Hindu Mahasabha, both of which sought to expand and consolidate
Hinduism by advocating for equal rights for untouchable castes, but also by promoting
more orthodox forms of Hinduism, including the incorporation of a Vedic curriculum in
secular institutions and the reconversion of formerly Hindu converts to Christianity and
Islam. His proposal was to build a new form of ‘national Hindu temple’ (Hindu Rashtriya
Mandir) that could promote a vision of a unified Hinduism, free of factionalism and
sectarianism that had weakened the religion in the past and left native Hindus
susceptible to what he perceived as the disunifying threat of conversion.36
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Accordingly, signposts installed around the Delhi temple at its inception evoke an ethos
of contingent inclusivity, one that embraced all varieties of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists,
and Jains while subtly excluding Muslims and Christians. For example, one panel
described the temple’s visual programme as including Vedic mantras, Upanishads,
Shlokas, and Bhajans and ‘artistic life pictures’ in order to ‘awaken the Aryadharami
Hindus to regain their ancient glory and power’ and to ‘preach the message of peace
and true happiness to the whole world’. Others implore future builders to similarly
include such images in their temples in order to develop ‘a spirit of fellow feeling and
close co-operation which may in turn lead to consolidation and mutual service’ among
Aryadharami Hindus. The signs explicitly define Aryadharami Hindus as including
‘Sanatanists, Aryasamajists, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs’.37 Notably absent from the
listings are Muslims and Christians. It is not surprising that another signpost welcomed
Sanatanists, Sikhs, Arya-Samajists, Buddhists, and Jains, while explicitly directing
native, Indian-born Muslims and Christians to temple officials in order to obtain
permission to enter the temple. Indeed, as Kajri Jain has pointed out, the articulation of
the sarvajanak mandir as embodied by the Delhi Birla temple, served multiple ends—on
the one hand, it gestured towards social egalitarianism by formally promoting the
inclusion of lower castes. On the other hand, it served as a way for more conservative
groups to bolster the number of Hindus in population counts in order to establish a
definitive religious majority in a politics of communal exclusion, directed specifically
against Muslims and Christians.38 In no uncertain terms, the Lakshmi-Narayan Temple
in Delhi embodies Chatterjee’s revivalist vision of a national Indian architecture while
also reinforcing the promotion of a selectively universalizing Hinduism. The main body
of the temple itself brings together a variety of architectural references, rendered using
a mix of traditional and modern materials with a universalizing synthetic vision of Indic
religions. While the Vaishnava affiliation is reinforced through the presence of an icon of
Lakshmi-Narayan in the centre of three sanctums, it is flanked on either side by images
of Shiva and Durga. The towers rising above each of the three sanctums directly draw
from Orissan temple traditions, and particularly from temples in Bhubaneshwar, which
served as Chatterjee’s initial inspiration for studying architecture. The curvilinear spine
and slim profile follow a traditional Nagara-Latina expression. Added to this is a hint of
shekhari architecture,
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Image 12.9 Lakshmi-Narayan Temple, Delhi, 1933–1939 Source: Photograph by

author.
indicated through the flattened gesture towards an urahsringa in the centre (Image
12.9). The rest of the temple draws from other sources. Whereas the multi-storied
terraces and projecting chattris are drawn from palace forms, the horse-shoe shaped
chaitya arches are deliberately Buddhist. Ancillary structures around the temple grounds
expand the range of regional allusions. We find Dravida gateways (gopura), sloped
Bengali roofings, and a small model of a Vesara temple, gesturing towards a regional
tradition associated with the medieval Deccan. The grounds surrounding the temple
expand the range of the religious pantheon while also attempting to bring together
different moments in Indian visual and cultural history. In addition to elite references are
rustic allusions to vernacular traditions, both ancient and ongoing. These include
models of tribal villages, miniature huts, and recreations of Indian cave temples. A
particularly dramatic moment can be found in a demonic, Tantric cave, which was
described in orientalizing terms, unflatteringly as ‘A Baleful Monster’s Mouth Attracts
Hindu Children Visiting Lakshminarayana Temple’, in a 1947 article published in the
National Geographic. Notably the article’s authors praised the temple complex as a
whole in grand terms,
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remarking on its innovative revival of older traditions and describing it as ‘a wonder of

elaborate detail in a modern version of ancient temple architecture’.39 In sum, the
temple projects a totalizing vision, bringing together exoteric and esoteric religious
references, tribal and Brahmanical cultural traditions, and regionally diverse
architectural forms. Other parts of the grounds represent more deliberate efforts to
articulate a revisionist civilizational history for the imagined nation. A good example can
be seen in a set of murals painted along the entablature of a small pavilion situated in
the gardens just to the south of the main temple. As a group, the paintings interweave
images that emphasize India’s diversity and naturalize present-day nationalist
aspirations as growing out of a glorified imperial past. Each painting is labelled clearly in
Hindi in order to maximize legibility for the viewer. Interspersed among the images are
monuments representing India’s primary homegrown religions, including the ancient
Buddhist caves at Ajanta, the Dilwara Jain temples, and a range of Hindu places of
pilgrimage. These include a number of temples sacred not to Vishnu but to Shiva: the
Meenakshi Sundareshwara Temple at Madurai, the Nataraja Temple at Chidambaram,
and the Rameshwaram Temple at Setubandhu. However, it is worth noting that the last
is also revered by Vaishnavas as marking the place from which the god Rama built his
bridge to Sri Lanka. Additional paintings highlight key historic events. The most striking
perhaps is a representation of Gandhi performing puja at the time of the Delhi temple’s
inauguration. He is accompanied by Indian Hindu priests and Buddhist monks from
China and Japan. As if to emphasize their presence, the image directly to the left
depicts a large monument identified, though an accompanying label, as an ancient
Buddhist temple in Indochina. Despite the distant geography, the text superimposes a
distinctly Indian nationalist claim upon the monument, informing the viewer that
Buddhism was exported from India to the region of Indochina several millennia ago.
Together the two lay claim to an expansive international vision, one that situates India
as a global cultural centre exerting a continuous sphere of influence extended from
ancient times into the present. This notion is reinforced through other images which
emphasize India’s ancient internationalism. Directly to the left of the Indochinese
temple, is a representation of the legendary King Porus setting off to war with Alexander
the Great during his proverbial conquest of India
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in the fourth century BCE. And on one of the adjacent sides is a full-length frieze
chronicling the famed emperor Chandragupta Maurya’s wedding to the Greek Helen,
daughter of Seleucus I Nicator. Whereas the former emphasized the role of Indian
leaders in fending off foreign invaders, the latter reinforced India’s place in a larger
international community of ancient empires. What remains notably absent from the
programme is any reference to Delhi’s rich Islamic history. That this history was not
merely omitted but deliberately effaced can be seen in a final image depicting the
Quwwat al-Islam mosque complex, which is labelled not as such but rather as
representing two Hindu structures: an amazing iron pillar from a fifthcentury Vishnu
temple and a temple dedicated to the goddess Yogamaya established by Prithviraj
Chauhan, the last Rajput ruler of Delhi, whose defeat led to the establishment of the first
Delhi sultanate, and the construction of the mosque. The composition of the painting
carefully frames the monument so as to erase any trace of the mosque which remains a
prominent landmark in the Delhi landscape. This was no easy feat given that the iron
pillar was placed intentionally in front of the mosque’s enormous mihrab. Instead, what
is emphasized are the temple pillars that were reused in the hypostyle cloisters framing
the courtyard. Although it is labelled, the Yogamaya Temple, which stands a short
distance from the mosque complex, is not pictured in the image, which seems to
suggest that it is somewhere to be found in the reuse of materials. The effect is to claim
both an antiquity for a relatively recent monument and also to establish a Hindu claim
over a monument that stood as an Islamic emblem of conquest. It is worth noting that
the representational erasure of the mosque was vastly at odds with the priorities of
British archaeology, which had historically placed a great emphasis on the conservation
of Delhi’s imperial past. The idea of rooting a universalizing vision of Hinduism in a
deeper revisionist civilizational framework is reinforced elsewhere on the grounds
through larger-than-life-size sculpted figures of famous Indian rulers, both mythic and
historical. These include Yudhishthara, the Dharmaraja of the Mahabharata; Ashoka,
who famously converted to Buddhism, although the accompanying label describes him
as ‘The Great Arya (Hindu) Emperor’; and Prithviraj Chauhan, ruler of Delhi in the late
twelfth century, who successfully repulsed the Ghurids a number of times before finally
falling in the second battle of Tarain in 1192. In short, the lineage of rulers
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established through the statuary glorifies India’s imperial past as a natural precursor to
its political future. The Lakshmi-Narayan was just the first in a much longer lineage of
Birla temples that have been built over the past eighty years. The sheer diversity and
geographic span of monuments is impressive. Altogether, the Birlas have built temples
in at least nine Indian states, which are variously dedicated to at least eleven different
gods. While the majority represent a form of Vishnu, other pan-Indic deities such as
Shiva and Ganesha are also represented, as are regionally significant divinities, such as
Lord Venkateshwara in Andhra Pradesh and Vithoba in Maharashtra.40 In every case,
the location has a close tie to either the Birla family’s personal history (as in Banaras,
Calcutta, and Pilani) or to their industrial holdings. Temples are also found sometimes in
close proximity to a Birla office complex or factory or on college campuses either
established by the Birlas or that have sustained ties to the family. Within this diversity of
buildings, a number of intertwined trends emerge, two of which I re-emphasize briefly
here. The first is the rhetoric of inclusivity, of providing access to members of all
religions and all castes. The second is the rhetoric of revivalism, through which temples
are modelled after specific monuments built in the past. A prime example of these can
be found in the new Vishvanath temple in Varanasi. Constructed as part of the Banaras
Hindu University (BHU) campus, the temple is loosely modelled after the Kashi
Vishvanatha Temple located less than 4 miles to the north, in the sacred city centre.
Following local traditions, it is built on a panchayatana (five-fold) plan, consisting of a
main shrine surrounded by four subsidiary shrines, and its tower presents a gesture
towards the shekhari forms found commonly in many of the city’s eighteenth-century
monuments, including the holy Kashi Vishvanatha (Image 12.10). As in the case of the
Lakshmi-Narayan Temple in Delhi, the new Vishvanath represents a response to the
temple entry movement. Whereas entry to its older counterpart is highly restricted even
today to Hindus, the new Vishvanath temple was built in order to allow people of all
castes (and presumably religions) to approach the city’s most sacred manifestation of
Shiva. Although the temple was completed only in 1966, it was begun in 1933, just a
few years before the inception of the Lakshmi-Narayan temple in Delhi. In the case of
Banaras, the building of a new Vishvanatha Temple on the BHU campus was closely
tied also to the Birla family’s connections
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Image 12.10 New Vishvanatha Temple, Varanasi, 1931–1966 Source: Photograph by

author.
with Madan Mohan Malaviya, the co-founder and later chancellor of BHU as well as co-
founder of the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha. As such, it was intended to promote new
forms of religious values through the education of a new type of Hindu citizen.41 At the
same time, it was also entangled with a deeper history of communal politics and
revivalist projects in the holy city. The main Vishvanatha Temple that served as the
focus for pilgrimage activity was itself a product of a larger project of reviving antiquated
temple forms that was undertaken by Maratha patrons in the eighteenth century.42 An
even more innovative combination of these two rhetorical devices can be found in the
Birla temple at Pilani, Rajasthan. Built in the 1950s, the temple took as its most basic
formal inspiration the Khandariya Mahadeo Temple at Khajuraho. The only known
shrine dedicated primarily to the
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goddess Saraswati from any period in Indian history, the temple is heralded as being a
true monument to knowledge, as is befitting its location on the campus of the Birla
Institute of Technology and Science (BITS).43 BITS itself has a longer history,
stemming back to its origins as a rudimentary grade school for the Birla family in 1901.
However, its present form owes a lot to its transformation, first into a degree college in
1942, and later into a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
in 1962.44 In his 2007 autobiography, Brushes with History, Krishna Kumar Birla makes
it clear that the ambition of his father was to ‘make BITS one of the premier institutes in
the country’.45 The Saraswati temple was built a decade and a half after the college
was formed, and only a few years before it became transnational. An Amar Chitra Katha
comic book highlighting the life of its patron, G. D. Birla, describes it as ‘an unusual
Saraswati temple’ whose walls are adorned with ‘figures of renown saints, scientists,
and scholars of the world’.46 Included among these are portraits of scientists,
philosophers, industrial scions, and politicians, such as Confucius, John F. Kennedy,
Henry Ford, Lenin, and Albert Einstein. While the global reach of this imagery is fitting
given the increasingly transnational impetus of the BITS mission in the 1950s and
1960s, the inclusion of secular figures along the walls of a religious monument
highlights the temple’s unusual dedication to the goddess of learning and knowledge.
Indeed, as Marta Kudelska, Agnieszka Staszczyk, and Agata Świerzowska have
suggested, both the temple’s visual programme and its location reinforce the idea that
knowledge in Indian traditions was not purely intellectual but also deeply spiritual.47
What remains constant among the dozens of Birla temples built over the decades is
ultimately less an embrace of secularism or even inclusivity than an emphasis on the
universalism of Hinduism and a desire to encompass an increasingly global range of
traditions. On the walls of the LakshmiNarayan Temple in Jaipur, built in 1998, are a
roster of representations whose reach easily parallels that of the Saraswati temple at
Pilani. The temple’s sculptural programme interweaves portraits of Hindu, Jain, and
Sikh holy men, prophets, and saints—such as Ramakrishna, Ramanuja, Rshabha, Guru
Nanak, and Kabir—with those of Christian, Greek, and pre-Islamic Persian traditions,
including Moses, Socrates, Zoroaster, St Francis, and Jesus Christ. In highlighting their
temple projects, the official website of the C. K. Birla group describes the
Venkateshwara Temple in
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Hyderabad, built in 1976, as projecting ‘the concept of universality and unity of religions
and universal brotherhood among all religions through panels devoted to Guru Nanak
Dev, Guru Gobind Singh, Lord Buddha, Bhagawan Mahaveera and Jesus Christ.
People of all religion, race, caste and creed are free to visit the temple.’48 While the
rhetoric across the board appears inclusive, what remains notably absent, in almost
every case, is any mention of or reference to Muslims. The universalism expressed
through most examples is aimed at social reform but is also embedded in a worldview
that is, at its core, exclusively ‘Hindu’.
Conclusions As a whole, the Birla temple project represents an endeavour that was
situated between two competing epistemologies. On the one hand, the secularization of
antiquity produced a mechanism for framing the nation’s history through a succession of
cultural achievements manifest in a growing canon of monuments that could be
referenced and reproduced. On the other hand, the very notion of secular modernity as
developed through Enlightenment-era writings in Europe was arguably incompatible
with the Indian national project. As Ashis Nandy has pointed out, Gandhi himself was an
‘arch anti-secularist’ who ‘claimed that his religion was his politics and his politics was
his religion’.49 Instead, Gandhi espoused an approach that has been described
variously as religious pluralism, pantheisim, and a ‘constructive postmodern’
multiculturalism.50 The Lakshmi-Narayan Temple in Delhi was arguably the first of a
new class of sarvajanak mandirs that effectively materialized a Gandhian nationalist
project. By including spaces for secular activities and opening up spheres of worship to
historically marginalized caste groups, they projected a Gandhian politics of
egalitarianism, which recognized the equal nature and essential unity of all human
beings. However, they must also be seen within the larger context of new movements
that sought to universalize Hinduism in response to the introduction of colonial
modernity and the rise of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
As such they were at once a reinvention of Hinduism and a nation-building project.
Indeed, the very notion of producing a universalizing idea of India through the
establishment of what J. K. Birla explicitly referred to as a new type of ‘national Hindu
temple’ reinforced the ongoing challenge of
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embracing India’s communities of Christians and Muslims. By including everyone but

Christians and Muslims, the temple literally built a politics of exclusion into its otherwise
inclusive architectural vision. At the same time, it would be a mistake to adopt a
totalizing vision of Birla temples, to see a nation-building project in the capital of the Raj
in the late 1930s, a full decade before Independence, as fully commensurate with the
building of a new temple in an industrial neighbourhood in a provincial city in the 1980s.
What brings them together is their location at crucial historical moments, during which
India’s stature on an international arena was at the cusp of radical change. Whereas the
Lakshmi-Narayan Temple represents the first monumental effort to produce a new
spatial and visual vocabulary for an imagined nation that was both inclusive and
distinctly Hindu, the Sun Temple at Gwalior was built at a moment when India was
actively lobbying for entry into UNESCO’s World Heritage list. Konarak ranked high
among the twenty-five monuments that India submitted for consideration in the early
1980s, and a formal evaluation of the site was conducted by ICOMOS in 1982. In 1984,
as the foundation stone was being laid in Gwalior, the Sun Temple at Konarak had the
distinction of becoming one of two new entries, along with the ensemble of monuments
at Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram), which comprised only the second group of Indian
monuments included in UNESCO’s prestigious list. In appropriating the form of a newly
minted UNESCO World Heritage monument, the Gwalior temple effectively reinforced
its universalizing vision of Hinduism by drawing upon the secular category of universal
cultural heritage. Just as the Lakshmi-Narayan Temple played a crucial role in
producing the material conditions for an exclusionary Hindu nationalism, one might ask
whether the Gwalior temple similarly presaged the rising communal tensions that
erupted with particular violence in the early 1990s. It is certainly notable that the Gwalior
temple was the last to be built on a monumental scale by any member of the Birla
family.51 One might surmise that the increasingly aggressive tactics of Hindu
nationalists were at odds with the original Sanatana Dharma ideals expressed through
Birla temples, in which the embrace of the idea of a Hindu nation was connected also
with the promotion of a code of ethics that included both the development of a
harmonious, rather than a divided, society and the eschewal of violence. In short, the
creation and promotion of the sarvajanak mandir as a new type of National Hindu
temple came with unintended
383
consequences. Indeed, the Birla temples arguably laid the groundwork for monuments
like the 2005 Delhi Akshardham, an architectural revivalist project built by the
Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), which projects a
universalizing vision of a Hindu nation that comes with intentional exclusions to a large
audience on a monumental scale.52 This unintended extrapolation should serve as a
reminder that the meanings and underlying intentions of architectural forms and visual
programmes are never entirely fixed, and that the difficulty of reconciling India’s
religious diversity, which included Christians and Muslims, at the cusp of Independence
was eventually heightened through efforts to reframe Hinduism in universalizing, and
ultimately monotheistic terms.
Notes 1. James Fergusson, Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in

Hindostan (London: J. Hogarth, 1848), 27–28; John Marshall, Annual Report of the
Archaeological Survey of India, 1906–07 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government
Printing, 1909), 41. 2. Deborah Sutton, ‘Devotion, Antiquity, and Colonial Custody of the
Hindu Temple in British India’, Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 1 (2013): 135–166. 3.
Sraman Mukherjee, ‘Configuring Sacred Spaces: Archaeology, Temples, and
Monument-Making in Colonial Orissa’, South Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (March 2013): 15–
29. 4. Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai, and Miki Desai, Architecture and Independence: The
Search for Identity—India, 1880–1980 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 136. 5.
Ashis Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’,
Alternatives 13, no. 2 (April 1988): 177–194. 6. Marta Kudelska, Dorota Kamińska-
Jones, Agnieszka Staszczyk, and Agata Świerzowska, The Temple Road Towards a
Great India: Birla Mandirs as a Strategy for Reconstructing Nation and Tradition
(Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2019), 101–144. 7. Basant Kumar Birla, A Rare
Legacy: Memoirs of B. K. Birla (Bombay: Image Incorporated, 1994). 8. Alan Ross, The
Emissary: G. D. Birla, Gandhi and Independence (London: Harvill, 1993), 29–32;
Tirthankar Roy, A Business History of India: Enterprise and the Emergence of
Capitalism from 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 135–136. It is
worth noting that Tirthankar Roy’s account erroneously dates the mill’s establishment to
1923. 9. Krishna Kumar (K. K.) Birla, Brushes with History: An Autobiography (New
Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2007), 128.
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10. Namit Arora, ‘A Place Called Home’, 3 Quarks Daily, 22 September 2014,
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/09/a-place-called-home.html (accessed 29
December 2020). 11. Minhaz Merchant, Aditya Vikram Birla: A Biography (New Delhi;
New York: Viking, 1997), 284. 12. Numbers are drawn from the 2011 census,
https://censusindia.gov.in/census. website/data/population-finder (accessed 19 June
2022). 13. These are too numerous to cite individually, but comments to this effect can
be found on sites such as https://www.tripadvisor.in/ (accessed 19 June 2022) and
https://www.trip.com/ (accessed 19 June 2022). 14. ICOMOS, Advisory Body Evaluation
(ICOMOS), World Heritage List no. 246, 1984,
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/246/documents/ (accessed 3 September 2018). 15.
Susan L. Huntington and John C. Huntington, The Art of Ancient India: Buddhist, Hindu,
Jain (New York: Weatherhill, 1985), 433, 437–440. All of the mandapa doorways were
originally adorned by navagraha sets. The one adorning the east side is now in storage
in an archaeological shed, and we know from colonial sources that the Raja of Khurda
removed a number of sculptures from the jagamohan in 1837, including a large
navagraha panel, and used them in the construction of new temples. 16. Syamasundara
Dasa, Hindi sabdasagara, Navina samskarana (Kasi: Nagari Pracarini Sabha, 1965–
1975), highlights particularly its use in Canto 3, verse 6 of the famous Hindi epic poem,
Kamayani (Allahabad, 1936), a retelling of the story of Manu penned by Jayashankar
Prasad in 1936. Jayashankar Prasad’s Kamayani experienced a resurgence of interest
in the 1960s, with multiple reprints being issued through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s,
including in Calcutta by Rupa and Co. in 1975. In the Canto in question, Manu is gazing
out at the ‘world’s seashore’ alone in ‘overwhelming silence’ when he hears the ‘sweet
hum’ of the ‘bard’s first verse’. Looking for the source of the song he sees ‘a carefree
tall form with an appearance [anukriti] as compassionate and free as her heart. As if a
sal sapling swaying in breeze, was playfully adorned with its fragrance.’ Quoted text is
drawn from the translation by Pratibha Vinod Kumar (Singapore: Pratham Manjari
Books Pte. Ltd., 2013). 17. Percy Brown, Indian Architecture, vol. 1, Buddhist and Hindu
Periods (1940; reprint, Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons & Co. Ltd, 1971 [1941]), plate
88. 18. James Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (London: John
Murray, 1876), 222–223, 426–428. 19. Mukherjee, ‘Configuring Sacred Spaces’, 24. 20.
Ibid., 25. 21. Uta Schröder, ‘The Arrangement of Hariharahiran.yagarbha:A Unique
Image in the Collection of the Asian Art Museum, Berlin’, Indo Asiatische Zeitschrift 17
(2013): 37–49. 22. The sculpture (Acc. No. 50.178) is technically on loan to the National
Museum from the ASI.
385
23. See, for example, John Stratton Hawley, ‘Can There Be a Vaishnava Kabir?’,
Studies in History 32, no. 2 (August 2016): 147–161. 24. Medha M. Kudaisya, The Life
and Times of G. D. Birla (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 15;
Ghanshyamdas Birla, Krishnam vande jagadgurum (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan,
1981); Ghanshyamdas Birla, Alive in Krishna: Living Memories of the Vedic Quest
(New York: Paragon, 1983). 25. That this association was clear in G. D. Birla’s mind can
be seen from his book Alive in Krishna, 15, 44, 69. Mahatma Gandhi also made this
clear in his own teachings on the Gita, disseminated to his followers in a series of talks
at the Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad in 1926. See John Strohmeier (ed.), The
Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 2000), 53. 26. The
text in Hindi reads as follows: bisvi sadi ka ek matra suryamandir lokasakshi pratyaksha
deva jnana … data hai. 27. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories:
Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004), 12. 28. Brown, Indian Architecture, 106–109. 29. Samita Gupta, ‘Sris
Chandra Chatterjee: “The Quest for a National Architecture”’, Indian Economic and
Social History Review 28, no. 2 (June 1991): 187–201. 30. Sris Chandra Chatterjee,
Magadha: Architecture and Culture (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1942). 31. Farhan
Karim, Of Greater Dignity than Riches: Austerity and Housing Design in India
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). 32. Sris Chandra Chatterjee,
‘Architecture and Religion’, in Sri Ramakrishna Centenary Committee, The Religions of
the World, vol. 1 (Calcutta: The Ramakrishna Mission, Institute of Culture, 1938), 241–
245, 241. 33. Ibid., 241–242. 34. Also reprinted in full in Lang, Desai, and Desai,
Architecture and Independence, 307–308. 35. Kudelska et al., The Temple Road, 39.
36. Ibid., 152–153. 37. Images of these panels are included in figures 48–49 of
Kudelska et al., The Temple Road. 38. Kajri Jain, ‘Tales from the Concrete Cave:
Delhi’s Birla Temple and the Genealogies of Urban Nature in India’, in Places of Nature
in Ecologies of Urbanism, ed. Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Hong Kong:
University of Hong Kong Press, 2017), 129–130. 39. Phillips Talbot and Volkmar
Wentzel, ‘Delhi, Capital of a New Dominion’, National Geographic Magazine, November
1947, 604–608. 40. For a full listing, see Kudelska et al., The Temple Road, 451–454.
41. Kudelska et al., The Temple Road, 117–128, esp. 122–123. 42. Madhuri Desai,
Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2017).
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43. A longer discussion of this temple and its architectural inspirations was published by
Marta Kudelska, Agnieszka Staszczyk, and Agata Świerzowska, ‘On the Road to Great
India—A Program of National Revival: The Saraswati Temple in Pilani as an Expression
of the Worldview of G. D. Birla’, Politeja, no. 40 (2016): 129–158. 44. Ross Bassett, The
Technological Indian (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2016), 238. 45. Birla, Brushes
with History, 281. 46. Yagya Sharma, ‘Ghanshyamdas Birla: A Builder of Modern India’,
ill. Ramanand Bhagat, Amar Chitra Katha, vol. 733 (14 June 2004). 47. Kudelska,
Staszczyk, Świerzowska, ‘On the Road to Great India’, 142. 48.
http://www.ckbirlagroup.com/art-and-culture.php (accessed 9 July 2018). 49. Nandy,
‘The Politics of Secularism’, 192. 50. See, for example, Nicholas F. Gier, ‘Gandhi, Deep
Religious Pluralism, and Multiculturalism’, Philosophy East and West 64, no. 2 (2014):
319–339. 51. The last was an uncharacteristically modest Vikram Vinayak Mandir,
dedicated to Ganesha, and built in Alibaug, Maharashtra by Aditya Vikram Birla
between 1996 and 1998. 52. An excellent analysis of the monument can be found in
Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh, ‘Reincarnations of the Museum: The Museum in an
Age of Religious Revivalism’, in No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in
South Asia, ed. S. Mathur and K. Singh (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015), 203–218, esp.
209–213.
Image 13.1 Ayyur Temple awaiting restoration, Tamil Nadu Source: ‘Temple, Travel and
Sport’, 5 October 2021, https://prtraveller.blogspot.com/2021/10/ pinna-vaasal-sowri-
rajan-bhattar.html (accessed 16 July 2022).
13 For the Love of God Conservation as Devotion in Tamil Nadu Kavita Singh

M
any of the objects of Indian art history began their life as religious buildings or things.
Some remain under worship and attract devotees; others have entered the secular
frame as artworks and monuments, and are now valued for their aesthetic and historic
significance. As they move from one category to another, buildings and artefacts find
themselves placed within one of two regimes of care. Icons that are under worship are
nurtured through regular lustrations and offerings of clothing and food, and living
temples are often expanded and altered to serve growing congregations and changing
needs. These processes support the spiritual life of the artefact while impinging upon its
material body. But in the case of musealised artefacts and monuments, the priorities are
reversed: utmost attention is paid to the preservation of their physical bodies and not
the numinous presences that are meant to inhabit them (Image 13.1). Icons are to be
stripped of extraneous matter, cleaned, and protected from touch and corrosive
substances; temples are to be preserved in their original form without additions and
alterations or coats of garish paint. Practices and substances that sustained the spiritual
life of a building or artwork are seen as harmful for the material body of the art object,
and secular institutions that took charge of India’s artefacts were able to justify their
desacralization as a necessary condition for a superior kind of care that would ensure
the survival of these objects in the longue durée. In this framework, it was the secular
regime of care that possessed the expertise and the protocols that could preserve
India’s heritage, which worshippers would actually damage and wear down through their
devotions. This claim—that secularism preserved what devotionalism destroyed—gave
authority to the state institutions as the legitimate entities responsible for the protection
and conservation of monuments and works of art. The protocols of the two regimes
produced artefacts and monuments that had very different ‘looks’: bare metal or stone
on the one hand, and embellished and encrusted surfaces on the other. In this essay,
however, I study a growing trend in south India in which the boundary between
devotional care and professional conservation is getting blurred through the work of
several civil-society initiatives which combine professional conservation standards with
devotional care. The result is one can no longer so easily distinguish between Indian
artefacts and monuments that have remained sacred and those that have been
secularized. The
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implication of this seemingly small shift in the aesthetic of the restored monument, I
believe, will prove to be profound. At the heart of this essay is a discussion of the
REACH Foundation, a Tamil Nadu–based organization that conserves ancient temples
that have fallen to ruin. REACH adheres scrupulously to conservation norms, producing
restored temples that look like artefacts of the secularized monumental type. However,
while REACH’s conservation efforts follow the norms and protocols of the museal
regime, they do so as a form of devotional care, for REACH’s goal is not merely to
conserve the buildings, but to make these neglected temples fit for worship once again.
The revival of a living temple is intended to catalyse the revival and consolidation of
local communities of worship. As the successful work of organizations like REACH is
lauded and recognized, it emerges as a challenge to the state’s secular institutions of
archaeology and conservation. The latter were officially recognized as uniquely qualified
custodians of India’s monuments, but as others replicate and even better the state
institutions’ work, the former’s competence comes into question and is de-authorized.
But REACH is not simply filling a gap that, say, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI)
has left. A crucial shift seen in the discourses pertaining to REACH and other such
organizations is that devotionalism is necessary for the care of these monuments: that
communities of worship alone possess the motivation to preserve ruined temples that
the state and its bureaucracy have allowed to fall into neglect. With the dual advantages
of professional competence and religious devotion, REACH belongs to a growing
number of organizations that are set to challenge the secular regime of Indian
archaeology and make a bid to desecularize it.
Venkadu It is the weekend and a group of men set out on a road trip from Chennai.
Turning off the highway, they travel on country roads that give way to unpaved village
tracks. Following rumours, word-of-mouth information, and references from old
publications, these men are searching for forgotten temples scattered across the Tamil
landscape. On this trip, they go to a village called Venkadu. They find what was once a
temple, now reduced to a heap of stones, and overgrown with
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brambles. In the mud and rubble of what remains of the sanctum, they see that a
shivalingam, the aniconic representation of Shiva, still stands. As they push through the
brambles towards the shrine, a group of villagers arrives, curious to know what has
drawn the city dwellers to this place. The group speaks to the villagers about the value
and importance of the temple and the need to take care of it. Together, they begin clear
the bushes and explore the site. A few weeks later when the group returns, it is pleased
to find that the local community has cleared the vegetation and has hooked up an
electric line to the site. This time the urban volunteers bring earth-moving equipment,
which they use to uproot trees, unearth pillars and sculptures, and dig around the
temple to find the original level of the base. Over time, this group of volunteers will
mobilize private foundations, local communities, and government agencies to repair and
revive the temple, salvaging and restoring what they can find. They will do it well. They
will document the building, decipher its inscriptions, and research its historical
significance. As they repair the structure, they will take care to use proper conservation
methods: they will use lime mortar to join the stones rather than modern concrete; they
will not use sand-blasting machines to clean the surfaces as some others do for this
abrades them; they will adhere to professional conservation norms in the repair work
they undertake; and they will engage traditional sthapatis to make the most faithful
substitutes possible for the parts that are missing and need to be replaced.1 But while
this group’s activities seem to resemble the actions of established conservation
organizations, like the state-owned ASI, or the non-governmental Indian National Trust
for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), in fact, their aims are markedly different. To
understand this difference, let us see the way the members of this group describe the
work they do.
Conservation as Devotion On that first day in Venkadu, when volunteers struggled to

reach the shrine and found that the shivalingam was still present amid the rubble, the
blogger among them exclaimed: ‘Almost buried, the shivalingam was popping out as if
calling us for attention!’ A member of their team rushed over with flowers and other
offerings: ‘His eyes showed the determination
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of drenching the shivalingam with his first Abhishekam [ablution] after centuries
together!’ The shivalingam was anointed and offered flowers. Afterwards, as the group
cleared the ground, they chanted ‘Aum Namah Shivaaya’ (a mantra in praise of Shiva)
and this ‘made the bushes get cleared fast.…’2 In this account, it appears that it was the
god lying dormant in the shrine who had willed the volunteers to come and rediscover
him; chanting the god’s name made the physical task of clearing the site easier because
they were doing this in service of Him. This kind of animism is seen often in the
accounts written by this group of their temple explorations. When the dry stone of a
shivalingam absorbs the oil that is poured on it, it is described as thirsty, eagerly
drinking in all that is offered after a centuries-long drought. When a project needs funds
and a wealthy philanthropist offers to provide the money, the blog exults that the ‘Lord
himself has sent his devotee’ to help them do their work. And when the team comes
upon a cache of buried bronzes from the ninth century, they are excited because these
are incredibly rare—Pallava bronzes that pre-date the Chola period—but credit for the
discovery belongs not to the team that dug them up, but to the god who chose to
manifest himself to them on that auspicious day. Who are these urban volunteers and
why do they invest such great efforts and funds in caring for the hundreds of ruined
temples that lie scattered all over the Tamil region? They are part of a motley group in
which young professionals, mostly from Chennai’s information technology (IT) industry,
have joined hands with retired archaeologists, scholars, and epigraphers to track down
and restore small untended sites of Tamil Nadu’s crumbling heritage. Inspired by
Ponniyin Selvan, a famous twentiethcentury Tamil novel set in Chola times3 that paints
a picture of a region humming with devout worshippers and exquisite temples, they set
out to rediscover and preserve the material heritage that the book evokes. When the
volunteer group first came together, it called itself the Temple Cleaners and undertook
weekend trips to clean neglected temples. But what began as a small group with
modest aims has grown into the REACH Foundation, an organization that undertakes
ambitious temple conservation and restoration projects. Their on-site work is
accompanied by an impressive online presence through blogs, e-publications, and
heritage documentation initiatives. REACH’s range of members brings together both
energy and
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experience; the elderly archaeologists understand the historical value of the temples
and the techniques appropriate for their restoration; the IT crowd has the drive to
sustain their campaign and manage the documentation and the online presence that is
so valuable for publicity, networking, and raising funds. Key among the elder experts is
Dr T. Satyamurthy who retired as the superintending archaeologist of the Chennai circle
after a long and distinguished career in the ASI. REACH is an acronym for the Rural
Education and Conservation of Heritage Foundation. As the name suggests, the
foundation’s focus is on heritage sites lying forgotten in small villages in Tamil Nadu.
The REACH Foundation’s activities seem a perfect illustration of good heritage
management practices. They bring together boundless enthusiasm for small and
neglected sites, a knowledge of history, and an understanding of professional standards
of conservation practices. But in seeking out these temples, gathering their scattered
pillars and stones, and reconstructing them, this group’s conservation projects are
powered by not just an interest in history and heritage. Instead, they are informed by a
devotional attitude and their aim is not just to repair the physical body of the temple but
also to restore its spiritual life. In its conservation projects, REACH ensures that
somebody—whether local priest or layperson—commits to performing regular worship
within the structure so that the divine spirit can reanimate the temple’s icons and the
religious life of the building can be resumed. Monument conservation is not REACH’s
goal; its goal is temple revival.
Preserving the Monument’s Body Historically, monument conservation and ritual
observance have been at odds with each other in India. In the colonial period, when
authorities began to take an interest in the monuments and artefacts of India and sought
to exert their control over them, they realized that many buildings and sculptures of
historical interest had been made in service of faiths that were still practiced in India.
Religion was an important feature of Indian social and political life, and perceived insults
to it could light the fuse of explosive reactions. As the colonial state established the
Archaeological Survey and vastly expanded the network of museums in India, it had to
negotiate a path between its own desire to control the artefacts of Indian
For the Love of God
393
history, and its concern to avoid lighting the tinderbox of communal sentiment. In
dealing with Indian antiquities, colonial authorities devised a rule of thumb. If buried
sculptures were discovered on land that belonged to a functioning temple, they were to
be handed over to the temple and returned to worship. If sculptures were excavated
elsewhere, on private or government lands or in proximity to disused temples, then they
belonged to the state and could be transferred to a museum. A similar yardstick was
used for dealing with historic buildings. If any temple, mosque, or other religious edifice
was under active worship, its control would remain with its community and however
historic the body of the building, the government would assist in repairing it only if asked
to do so. If, however, the building had fallen out of worship, if there was no living
community of owners or traditional guardians available to stake a claim to it, and if it
was architecturally, artistically, and historically significant enough for the state to feel
impelled to extend its care, then the ASI or the state department of archaeology could
notify it as a monument. Once notified, the building left its religious life behind and
entered a secularized domain of history, archaeology, and art. The state was obliged to
protect it and protection extended to the prevention of inappropriate behaviours within
the building. Ironically, one of these ‘inappropriate behaviours’ was the resumption of
the worship for which the building had originally been made. Guards were posted at
notified monuments with express instructions to prevent acts of devotion at these now-
secularized buildings. These acts had to be prevented for at least three reasons: first, to
protect the body of the building from damage that might occur through ritual actions that
involved touching, pouring libations, burning incense, and so on; second, because an
act of worship was often the locals’ first step towards staking rights over the building
which the government had taken over and this challenge to its authority had to be
prevented; and third, because the monument, once secularized, was designed ‘to
encourage and enhance a new public gaze’, that focused on history and aesthetics.4
Addressing the citizenry at large, the secularized monument also testified to the colonial
state’s commitment to a rational modernity; the lapsing of its secular monuments into
religiosity would be a blemish upon this goal. Once a monument was in their custody,
archaeological authorities were concerned with preserving its physical body and this
was subject to
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the conservation protocols that had been laid down by the ASI. The policy was a
cautious one. The ASI’s Manual of Conservation warned that although there are many
ancient buildings whose state of disrepair suggests at first sight a renewal, it should
never be forgotten that their historical value is gone when their authenticity is destroyed,
and that our first duty is not to renew them but to preserve them.… Broken or half
decayed original work is of infinitely more value than the smartest or most perfect new
work.5
According to this conservation philosophy, it was the archaeological conservator’s job to

stabilize the historic building and prevent any further decay, while leaving intact upon its
body all the marks of its age. Any plan to return a building to its ‘original’ condition by
providing new substitutes for its missing parts was strongly discouraged. If it was
structurally necessary to add supports or rebuild a collapsed wall, the new additions had
to be bare and functional elements that did not imitate the carving or decoration on the
older parts so new interventions could easily be distinguished from the older fabric of
the building. All layers of paint and limewash that had accrued on the surfaces were
treated as later accretions; to recover the ‘original’ surface, these were scraped off,
revealing the underlying stone. As a result, ‘conserved’ Indian monuments became
united by a common vocabulary of partially ruined but stabilized structures whose
surfaces were free of plaster and paint.6 Indra Sengupta and Deborah Sutton have
shown how the conservation policy for India developed in the context of furious debates
about monument conservation in Britain; over-restoration of churches in England in the
1840s had provoked a strong reaction which shaped the less interventionist policy that
took hold in British India.7 Fortuitously for the Raj, the conserved-but-not-restored
Indian monuments that this policy produced satisfied the Romantic taste for the
picturesque ruin while also confirming India as the site of a decaying civilization, in need
of resuscitation through colonial intervention. After Independence, the ASI continued
with the policy of conserving rather than restoring monuments. This is the reason why
temples-turnedmonuments in India have all come to wear a certain standardized ‘look’
of age, typified by bare stone surfaces stripped of any whitewash or colourful
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paint. Over time, the aesthetic of plain stone surfaces and half-ruined structures has
become imbued with the aura of historical authenticity that has been ratified by an
officially authorized heritage regime.
Maintaining the Spirit of the Temple A functioning temple on the other hand, shows no
such restraint. It is free to grow and change with time, expanding to accommodate
expanding congregations, being updated in the style and fashion of the day, acquiring
layers of brilliant paint on its sculptures or ceramic tiles on its walls, or even adding gold
plating to its doorways and temple spires if its donors are generous enough. This
continual work of renewal, expansion, and renovation in a living temple is called
jirnoddhar—literally ‘uplifting the old’—in Hindi and tiruppani—or ‘divine work’—in Tamil,
and typically depends upon donations from the devout. Such renovation does not
respect old elements for their antiquity per se: an ancient portion of the building may be
preserved because it is associated with a revered personage, but it may equally be
‘improved’ by being replaced by something new. The renovations of living temples do
not just follow functional needs but are also undertaken as a form of conspicuous
consumption that signals the importance of the temple and the potency of its deity. The
fact that the temple has attracted enough donations to allow it to grow and renovate
becomes an advertisement of how powerful the temple is, how many devotees and
pilgrims flock to it, and how many grateful worshippers have found an answer to their
prayers. In a similar manner, sculptures that are secularized and valued as aesthetic
and historic artefacts exist in a very different context from sculptures that are placed
under worship in a shrine. For worshippers, icons are material vessels to be filled with
the presence of God. Once inhabited by the deity, the icon must be nurtured and cared
for as though it were a living being. It needs to be bathed, clothed, and fed and should
be offered incense and flowers and light. For many icons under worship, the day starts
with a ritual bath with water mixed with auspicious substances such as sandalwood,
turmeric, honey, ash, and milk before being dressed in garments and ornamented with
jewels and flowers. When a historic icon enters a museum, it becomes subject to very
different standards of care. The museum has a duty to preserve its body,
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for which it must be protected from contact with substances that could corrode it. No
museum conservator would allow honey or turmeric or milk to touch the surface of a
sculpture in their care. But to the priest in the temple, these substances that may be
harmful for the physical body of the sculpture are essential for maintaining the living
presence of God within it. For the museum, the artistic quality and historic authenticity of
the sculpture are of primary concern. In the sphere of worship, this is much less true.
Rather than history it is the biography of the object that is important—the significant
patrons who commissioned it or gave it gifts during its long history; the miracles it
performed or the boons it granted to its worshippers. Not only is the icon heaped with
layers of clothes, flowers, and ornaments, but its body can be added to—through in-
setting of jewels, the repair of damaged portions, or the covering of the face with masks
made of precious metal. The ‘original’ sculpture is not the entirety of the icon but is a
support for all of these acts and marks of adoration that have accrued to it.
Religious Management by the Secular State As we have seen, two very different
protocols apply to temples (and artefacts) that have entered different regimes of care.
Those that are under active worship are living buildings that are often modified for
changing needs; those that have been turned into monuments are valued in their
‘original’ historic state and are conserved in a manner that attempts to keep them frozen
in time. The latter kind of building seems to be set squarely within the secular domain,
subject to the government’s control. The former seems to belong to an entirely different
domain of living faith where communities of worship and religious authorities would hold
sway. Yet, despite their apparent differences, both kinds of temples are placed under
forms of secular state control, albeit by two distinct bureaucratic apparatuses. Although
the colonial government was committed to a policy of ‘non-interference’ in religious
affairs, it was centrally occupied with the collection of revenue, and many temples were
wealthy institutions that had notable assets. While this was true for all parts of India, this
was markedly the case in Tamil Nadu, due to a historical legacy of land-grants. Temples
in this region owned much of its most fertile agricultural land and their agricultural
income was also taxed. While assessing the temple’s lands and
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income, the colonial state inevitably became drawn into disputes regarding
embezzlement of temple wealth and misappropriation of temple property and felt
compelled to step in to oversee the system of temple management. It was able to do
this while maintaining the fiction of arm’s-length distance by creating temple
management trusts whose composition the government would control, and whose
management of temple finances a bureaucrat would oversee. The precise arrangement
by which the state governs temples varies from region to region and has changed over
time, but in Tamil Nadu temples that have remained in worship come under the purview
of the state government’s Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HRCE)
Department.8 As Franklin Presler notes in his study of the HRCE, the avowedly secular
state’s role in managing temples creates a piquant situation.9 As an instrument of the
secular state, the HRCE must appear to be occupied with the ‘secular’ aspects of
temples such as budget management. In fact, no aspect of temple upkeep escapes the
HRCE’s gaze, and it extends its supervision to what most would think of as squarely un-
secular and/or religious concerns. At times we find the HRCE dictating the way daily
worship is conducted, or prescribing the hymns that should be sung in the temple, or
deciding what kind of training the temple priests will receive. To justify its incursions into
these aspects of the temple’s functioning, the HRCE speaks of them not as religious
practice but as part of temple ‘culture’, which presumably falls within the secular sphere
that the HRCE can legitimately supervise. The HRCE wraps its actions in the language
of secular rationality and democratic reform, often using the same argument to support
interventions of diametrically opposite kinds. For instance, the HRCE may claim that
priests have succumbed to superstition and deviated from the proper rituals, organizing
classes to tutor priests to maintain the tradition in its pure, classical form. On the other
hand, the HRCE has also overseen the implementation of reformist laws allowing non-
Brahmins to enter the priesthood and has issued orders to use Tamil rather than
Sanskrit as the ritual language during worship ceremonies. These are dramatic changes
in religious custom that are proposed in the ‘public interest’, and are obviously potent
gestures designed to appeal to a large demographic in an era of electoral democracy.10
It is clear that although the temples controlled by the HRCE seem at first to escape
secularization by remaining living sites of worship, in
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its own way the HRCE turns temples into loci of ‘social reform, cultural protection and
efficiency—ideals closely linked with modernity and the modern state itself’.11 Thus,
even the brilliantly coloured, crowded, and busy living temple—where tin-sheet
verandahs extend tenth-century carved stone walls, worshippers offer coconuts and
flowers, priests burn camphor and bring out ornaments to dress the god, and religious
tradition seems to hold sway—is pervaded by a form of secularism, albeit one that looks
and behaves differently from the desacralizing secularism of the musealized monument.
REACH’s Code-Switching After this brief detour through the different regimes of control
to which temples in Tamil Nadu are subject, let us return now to the REACH Foundation
and the temples they restore. Since the foundation is concerned with temple revival
rather than monument conservation, one would expect the shrines revived by them to
take on the appearance of other living temples, like the ones under the HRCE’s care.
Instead, we find that the temples restored by REACH bear that very look of age that we
associate with archaeological monuments rather than living temple sites. Their stone
surfaces unpainted, any modern plaster peeled away, newly carved elements carefully
matched with the old, REACH’s renewed temples exhibit a tastefully restrained
aesthetic reminiscent of ancient monuments protected by the ASI. It is evident that this
aesthetic is a consciously chosen one. In their blogs and in interviews, REACH
members speak witheringly of temple custodians who cover old stone temple walls with
garish paint or ceramic tiles. Instead, they are concerned with reconstructing what
appears ‘historically authentic’ in accordance with the protocols followed by the ASI.
This intent is summed up by Mr Satyamurthy who says, ‘The aim of conservation should
be to make the heritage structure or temple appear old but fresh’;12 unlike the ASI,
REACH does not balk at restoring damaged temples by adding newly carved elements
to ‘complete’ the structure, but it wants to make them look like ancient buildings that just
happen to be in pristine condition. REACH is not alone in the kind of work that it does.
Today it is one of several initiatives in south India engaged in temple revival, and their
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number is growing. In Karnataka, the Sri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara

Dharmothana (SDMD) Trust, founded by a wealthy and influential temple, has restored
more than 250 temples so far.13 Like REACH, the SDMD Trust also uses the services
of retired archaeologists, and its projects too are concerned to produce that same look
of age in the temples they restore. A journalist covering their work exulted: While the
restoration carried out is of the kind that those who originally built them would have
been proud to see, the structures are not just stronger but also true to their original
forms … rarely had I seen intervention efforts which didn’t look like a terrible cosmetic
surgery [whereas in the temple restored by the SDMD Trust] … [t]here were no
whitewashed walls, no terrible replicas or sculptures. The temple seemed as if it had
been actually ‘restored’.14
Here too the aesthetic intent of the conservation project is to achieve the look of an
ancient monument that has miraculously survived into the present day in its pristine,
original form. Does the favouring of the ‘look of age’ by these foundations simply reflect
the habitus of the retired archaeologists who direct these projects? Perhaps. But this
phenomenon reminds me of the way many contemporary religious complexes in India
today consciously appropriate the display modes of the secular museum to exhibit relics
or to project sectarian narratives. In a paper that I had co-authored with Saloni Mathur,
we had observed that through this manoeuvre ‘the entire epistemological authority
established by the museum through its secular avatars, where it declares itself as the
teller of truths, was now proving useful for the reconstruction of society along religious
lines’.15 Something similar is happening here through the choice of this mode of
conservation for temple reconstruction. By taking on the appearance of ASI-protected
monuments, the newly revived temples benefit from the reputation and authority of an
officially approved and scientifically verified heritage regime. The look of antiquity
becomes the look of authenticity. The fact that these temples were recovered through
an archaeological process— where layers of vegetation, soil, and stone were peeled
away to reveal what was already present beneath—is used to suggest that the
restoration has not introduced something new but has revealed the hidden truth of the
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place, long buried and forgotten and patiently waiting to be rediscovered. Now the
temple, and through it the village in which it is situated, can return to an imagined
originary past.
An Archaeology of the Psyche What is true of the place is true of the people as well. As
several of REACH’s blog posts recount the willingness of the villagers to learn about
these temples, and to commit to taking care of them, their interest is presented as
evidence of the people’s inherent connection with the temples. It just needs a small
push by an external catalyst to be reactivated. On their way back from one of their trips,
a REACH team came upon a shivalingam that they believed to be quite antique. It was
lying in the open, not near any temple, but just adjacent to a school. The REACH
volunteers asked the cooks in the school’s kitchen to ‘do at least an abhishegam [sic]
daily (i.e., to anoint it) and offer the food before serving [it] to the children’. This would
maintain Shiva’s presence in the lingam, and it would also turn the school’s mid-day
meal into prasad or sacramental food. The blogger exults: ‘Even though the (kitchen
staff) are converts (Christians) now, they readily agreed to do the abhishegam daily and
offer food as requested.’1 In these accounts it seems that, just as temples and icons lie
buried under layers of soil and debris waiting to be revealed by the archaeologist’s
spade, there lies buried within the people an ancestral memory of being Hindu, which
can still be discovered under the more recent layers of secular indifference, or of
conversion to another faith. It is not just temples that are being restored here: it is the
restoration of a community that is being forged through the act of temple repair. What is
being effected here is a psychic conservation alongside a material one. Ironically, this
vision of a primordial Hindu community waiting to be reunited around the hub of the
revived temple points to, even as it glosses over, many uncomfortable truths relating to
the state of the community and the fissures and fractures within it. Neither the faith nor
its temples have historically been welcoming to all: Hinduism’s caste divisions have
been particularly pernicious with members of the ‘lower’ and ‘untouchable’ castes
subject to great discrimination. Although the inequities of the caste system pervaded all
aspects of the community’s life, early in the twentieth century, the temple in south India
became the site where tensions between
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notions of purity and the realities of caste, maintenance of tradition and the cruelty of
exclusion, came to a head. Social reformers led temple-entry campaigns where lower
caste groups attempted to enter the temples that had been closed to them. The
attempted temple entries forced a confrontation between those who claimed rights
based on their common humanity, and those who resisted in order to retain the purity of
their tradition, a purity that was based on exclusion. Read in this light, narratives of a
buried reverence for Hindu deities in the minds of those who converted to other faiths—
probably to escape caste oppression—seem wishful. The long struggle against caste
discrimination in Tamil Nadu has also included a rejection of religion altogether. The
Dravida movement for self-respect has publicly espoused atheism, and in its most
militant form Dravidian activists even publicly attacked temples, condemning them as
sites of superstition and discrimination.17 Thus if a buried communal unity is sought to
be excavated and restored through the efforts of REACH and other such organizations,
then another history of disunity and discrimination within the community has
simultaneously to be buried in its place.
Spectres of the Ruined Temple Soon after they began operations, the work done by
organizations like REACH or the SDMD Trust was lauded in Hindu right-wing circles.
Rightaffiliated media outlets such as the Swarajya and the Organiser featured their
projects and lavished praise upon them. It is inevitable that there would be a
convergence of interests between groups who revive Hindu temples and right-wing
Hindutva groups. This is not just because these temple-revival projects serve the faith;
the convergence of interests is inevitable because these conservation efforts revolve
around the figure of the ruined temple, and the ruined temple is central to the Hindutva
imaginary. Early in the twenty-first century, when Hindutva-leaning organizations and
websites featured these south Indian temple revivals, they accentuated the
devotionalism undergirding the projects and spoke of them as a service to the Hindu
dharma. In recent times, the discourse around these temple revivals has become much
more strident. The focus has shifted from the positive work done by temple revival to the
negative factors underlying the decay that made these repairs and revivals necessary in
the first place.
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The image of the temple has always been central to Hindutva discourse. But rather than
celebrating the many existing and flourishing temples in India, this discourse has tended
to dwell upon the temple that has been damaged or destroyed. Here, the damage done
to temples by Hindu groups—whether these be warring dynasties in the medieval period
or rival sects or anti-caste activists in modern times—is carefully avoided and forces
extraneous to the Hindu fold held responsible for the ruination of Hindu temples. For
decades, the dominant narrative was of temple desecration by Muslim invaders. Muslim
rulers were turned into effigies of bigoted, marauding iconoclasts. In these accounts,
Muslim conquerors visited a trio of humiliations upon vanquished Hindus, including
temple destruction, sexual violence, and forcible conversion to Islam. ‘They had
desecrated our womanhood, demolished temples and places of pilgrimage and
converted large numbers to their faith at the point of sword or with the lure of material
pleasures,’ Hindutva ideologue Golwalkar says more than once in his book Bunch of
Thoughts.18 As Hindu majoritarianism has gained power, the image of the ravaged
temple has been used to bolster discourses of victimhood.19 The ruined temple has
become a fetish object upon which is projected the imagined body of the Hindu person,
wounded and killed by marauding iconoclasts. The more thoroughly ruined a temple is,
the more prominent it has become in this discourse; indeed, no temples have been
more visible in the Hindutva imaginary than the ones that have been entirely effaced.
The preoccupation with the temple of Somnath, destroyed and rebuilt and again
destroyed so many times, and the emotions surrounding the Ram Janmabhoomi temple
that is believed to once have existed in Ayodhya well illustrate the frontal position
occupied by the vanished temple in the Hindutva imagination. Here the temple turns into
a spectre, absent but inescapable, that haunts the present. Hindus have been called
upon to unite in vengeance and undo the depredations of the past. If every act of temple
destruction cannot be avenged, at the very least temples must return to the Indian
landscape from which they were evacuated, in order to salvage Hindu pride and stamp
Hindu presence upon the land. But recently the marauding Muslim has slipped into
being a threat of the past. A new culprit has been identified who is responsible for the
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damage to Hindu temples. This new enemy is the secular state. In the feverish space of
social media, which plays such a vital role in the Hindutva ecosystem, it is now
becoming clear that all forms of governmental control over Hindu temples have become
targets. Archaeological authorities are seen as being professionally inept for having
failed in their duty to protect and conserve India’s Hindu heritage. Many activists in the
Twitterverse direct their ire towards the ASI. Sharing photographs of neglected or poorly
maintained Hindu monuments, they ask, ‘Why is @ASIGoI [the Archaeological Survey
of India, Government of India] not preserving these temples? Are funds of
@MinOfCultureGoI only for renovating moghul tombs and mosques? No money for
preserving heritage of our Hindu temples?’20 Posting a short video of a crumbling
temple, another twitter user asks: ‘Do we need anymore [sic] proof that the Govt. has
failed to protect our ancient temples?’21
Deauthorizing the Secular It is here in the online world that the temple conservation and
revival projects of REACH and other such organizations can be seen to take on added
significance. The kind of temple—disused, abandoned, and fallen into disrepair—that
REACH revives is the kind of temple that, under current law, should come under the
remit of the state’s archaeological authorities. Their architecture is historically and
artistically valuable, but the temples are no longer worshipped and are practically
ownerless. They are ripe for translation into the secular sphere as historic monuments.
But there is such a surfeit of architectural heritage in the area that the ASI and the Tamil
Nadu State Archaeological Department have extended their protection only to a few
dozen major temples of the reputedly tens of thousands of historic temples in the
state.22 For decades, these lesser temples have failed to attract the attention of the
Archaeological Survey or the Tamil Nadu Department. By taking the initiative caring for
these neglected temples, REACH is entering into a space left vacant by the
archaeological authorities and is able to present itself as the more responsible
custodian of cultural heritage. Foundations like REACH or the SDMD appear to be
performing something like archaeology but in fact they are appropriating archaeological
methods to counter the state’s archaeology and to eliminate its authority.
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By bringing attention to the many temples of great worth that were left to decay, they
show the inadequacy of the state as the custodian of heritage. What the state could
once have offered—technical expertise in restoration—is now ably taken over by others.
REACH’s professional competence in restoring the body of the temple, and its success
in reviving its spirit by reinstating worship within it, also shows that secularism is neither
a sufficient nor a necessary condition to ensure the well-being of architectural heritage.
Instead, through its own works, REACH shows that a religiously minded, devout
custodian can be as literate, as proficient, as scientifically informed, as professional and
responsible, and as respectful to historical and material aspects of heritage as
archaeological authorities. The state’s secularization of monuments that disallows
worship at ancient sites is seen as alienating temples from the communities to whom
they should rightfully have belonged. Through its work, REACH seems to be showing
the way to a future that Hindutva groups would like to see, in which the Indian
landscape has been repopulated with living temples that are tended by the devout, with
no interference from the state. If Hindutva voices are raised against the state’s secular
archaeological regime, voices are also raised against the state’s control of temples that
are under worship; the state’s right and competence to supervise temple functioning is
sharply questioned. Early in 2021, the HRCE became the target of an intense social
media campaign which questioned its right to ‘interfere’ in the running of temples.
Popular god-man ‘Sadhguru’ Jaggi Vasudev launched a campaign with the hashtag
#FreeTNTemples demanding that the state entirely withdraw from any control of Hindu
temples—whether through the ASI or the HRCE. With his tweets read and retweeted by
3.7 million Twitter followers, the campaign became highly visible. ‘Tamil Nadu’s temples
are dying’, proclaimed one of his tweets. ‘Returning temples to the community of
devotees is the only way to restore Tamil Temples and preserve Tamil Culture. Only
devotees will give their lives to protect and preserve, not uncommitted officials.’ The
implication was that a secular government was disinterested in temple heritage, and did
not have the will to protect it. The #FreeTNTemples campaign coincided with the run-up
to the Tamil Nadu state elections in 2021 in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had
promised to release temples from government control. In the event, the BJP and its
allies lost the election and the campaign died down, but the passions it aroused are
capable of
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being rekindled. In one of his tweets, Vasudev even seems to have set a target to
liberate Tamil temples from the state: ‘To all Tamil people—If the word “Independence”
means something to you, before Bharath’s 75th Independence Day, you must stand up
& ask for liberation of Temples from government control.’23
Conclusion: Desecularizing the Monument When I first heard of the REACH foundation,
its aim of restoring ruined temples and returning them to ritual life seemed to harmonize
well with the newest developments in the field of heritage conservation. ‘Classical’
conservation of the nineteenth and twentieth century was driven by a concern to
maintain the physical integrity of the monument being conserved, but towards the end of
the twentieth century, the paradigm began to shift. In recent years, UNESCO
resolutions have proposed that a building’s ‘authenticity’ lies not just in the oldness of
the physical structure but also in ‘the meaning of associated traditions, rituals, and
practices for the community’.24 This change marks a profound shift in the attitudes and
practices of conservation. As one scholar observes, ‘The core values of heritage are
now increasingly deemed to reside in the cultural meanings and values humans invest
in monuments and landscapes, not their physical substance.’25 REACH’s concern to
restore temples in order to return them to worship accords well with this paradigm in
which the tangible elements of the building, and the intangible elements of the rituals
and practices, both deserve to be restored. Moreover, by involving local communities in
restoration and maintenance, the organization’s work seems to be a remarkable
initiative of grassroots conservation. As the Indian context changes, and an increasingly
powerful and increasingly strident Hindutva extends its grip, the work of REACH and
other such organizations is likely not to remain as localized initiatives but will have far-
reaching consequences for the field of heritage and art history at large. They will
become—in fact have become—justifications for the de-authorization of the secular
state over any artefacts that were made to serve a religious purpose. If the process of
secularization was necessary for the production of the category of ‘art’—a manoeuvre
that lifted objects out of particular denominational contexts and gave them
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universal significance through their aesthetic qualities—then the value of this kind of
value is itself being challenged; becoming ‘art’ is no longer the highest station for an
artefact. What will soon be at stake will not only be the future ‘monumentalization’ of
disused temples but also, I anticipate, the de-secularization and the re-sacralization of
those that already have been monumentalized. The days when things were available for
secularization seem to be numbered, and perhaps the question we should be asking is
not ‘how’ secular is art, but ‘when’ and for which brief moment was secularization
possible.
Notes 1. This narrative account is based on blog posts by the REACH Foundation (see
the section, ‘Conservation as Devotion’) describing their temple cleaning and
conservation work at Venkadu in 2006. An account of the first visit to Venkadu is at
Gokul Seshadri, ‘Venkadu—Conserve Heritage’, http://conserveheritage.
org/index.php/temple-revivals/venkadu/ (accessed 5 February 2021). The second visit is
described at ‘Kunrathur and Venkadu Visit—Conserve Heritage’,
http://conserveheritage.org/index.php/tours/temple-visits/kunrathur-venkaduvisit/
(accessed 5 February 2021). 2. ‘The Second Temple Cleaning Activity of “REACH”—
Venkaadu’, Temples Revival, February 2006,
http://templesrevival.blogspot.com/2006/02/ (accessed 6 March 2021). 3. Ponniyin
Selvan, or The Son of Ponni, by Kalki Krishnamurthy is widely regarded as the greatest
Tamil novel ever written. Serialized in the weekly magazine Kalki from 1950 to 1954, it
was subsequently published as a novel in five volumes. The book gives a fictionalized
account of battles, court intrigues, and affairs of the heart in the time of Rajaraja Chola
who reigned circa 985–1014. Kalki Krishnamurthy and Varalot.t.i Rengasamy, Kalki’s
Ponniyin Selvan: A Historic Novel by Kalki (Chennai: Kavitha Publications, 2016). 4.
Deborah Sutton, ‘Devotion, Antiquity, and Colonial Custody of the Hindu Temple in
British India’, Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 1 (2013): 135–166, 155. 5. John Marshall,
Conservation of Ancient Monuments: General Principles for the Guidance of Those
Entrusted with the Custody of and Execution of Repairs to Ancient Monuments (Simla:
Government Press, 1906), 10 (emphasis original). 6. Indra Sengupta, ‘A Conservation
Code for the Colony: John Marshall’s Conservation Manual and Monument Preservation
between India and Europe’, in Archaeologizing Heritage? Transcultural Entanglements
between Local Social Practices and Global Virtual Realities, ed. Monica Juneja and
Michael S. Falser (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 21–37.
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7. Ibid.; Sutton, ‘Devotion, Antiquity and Colonial Custody’. 8. Just as Tamil Nadu’s state
government has an HRCE, other states too have government departments that exercise
oversight over temple administration. The present system of state control over temples
seems to descend from colonial governmentality, but the interrelation of temple and
state in India goes far back in time. At least from the fifth century on, most prominent
temples were built and maintained through royal grants, and rituals performed at the
temple were essential for the legitimation and maintenance of sovereignty. Care of
temples and pilgrimage sites was part of the dharma of the king. The colonial and
subsequently the postcolonial state inherited some of these responsibilities and the
HRCE or the Devasthanam boards that oversee temple functioning are not merely
extractive but continue the tradition of the state’s care for these religious institutions. 9.
Franklin A. Presler, Religion under Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 6. 10. Ibid., ch. 7. 11. Presler, Religion under Bureaucracy, 155. 12. Staff
Reporter, ‘Modern Conservation Efforts Doing More Damage to Heritage Structures’,
The Hindu, 2 July 2012, https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/ Coimbatore/modern-
conservation-efforts-doing-more-damage-to-heritagestructures/article3594169.ece
(accessed 15 November 2021); REACH Foundation, ‘Heritage Wardens Symposium in
Coimbatore’, REACH Foundation (blog), 12 July 2012,
http://reachhistory.blogspot.com/2012/07/ (accessed 15 November 2021). 13. Other
organizations involved in similar work include the Women’s Renaissance Centre
Chennai in Tamil Nadu, https://www.wrcchennai.com/ (accessed 15 November 2021);
Ugra Narasimha Charitable Trust in Kerala, https:// ugranarasimha.in/ (accessed 15
November 2021); Bharata Punarutthana Trust in Karnataka, https://reclaimtemples.org/
(accessed 15 November 2021); and Arsha Seva Kendram in Tamil Nadu,
https://arshasevakendram.org/ (accessed 15 November 2021). 14. Harsha Bhat, ‘This
Non-profit Body Which Has Restored Over 200 Heritage Temples Should Be
Celebrated’, Swarajya Magazine, 3 September 2018, https://
swarajyamag.com/culture/this-non-profit-body-which-has-restored-over-200heritage-
temples-needs-to-be-celebrated (accessed 15 November 2021). 15. Saloni Mathur and
Kavita Singh, ‘Reincarnations of the Museum’, in Asian Art History in the Twenty-First
Century, ed. Vishakha N. Desai, Clark Studies in the Visual Arts (Williamstown, MA,
New Haven: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; distributed by Yale University
Press, 2007), 149–168. 16. REACH Foundation, ‘Arasar Kovil, Edamachi and
Kidangarai—Conserve Heritage’, http://conserveheritage.org/index.php/tours/temple-
visits/arasarkovil-edamachi-kidangarai/ (accessed 30 March 2021). 17. Presler, Religion
under Bureaucracy, 115.
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18. Mahadev Sadashiv Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana,

2000), 167. 19. See Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Hindu Nationalism and the (Not So Easy) Art
of Being Outraged: The Ram Setu Controversy’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic
Journal, no. 2 (2008), https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.1372. Christophe Jaffrelot
observes: Hindu nationalists have become experts in the art of being outraged. It is part
of a discourse of victimization which is the very matrix of Hindu nationalism.… This
ideology was shaped in the late 19th century as a reaction to a strong feeling of
vulnerability. Hindus, though in a majority, were seen by its proponents as weak,
compared to the Muslims, because of their inner divisions along caste and sectarian
lines. This majoritarian complex of inferiority made Hindu nationalist leaders prompt to
outcry as soon as some of their sacred identity symbols were ‘under attack’ because of
religious minorities, be they Muslim or Christian. 20. https://twitter.com/search?q=
%40VAJR%20%40ASIGoI&src=typed_query (accessed 15 November 2021). I thank
Swasti Kumar for drawing my attention to this tweet. 21.
https://twitter.com/hardyatrow/status/1376516151191085062 (accessed 15 November
2021). 22. The list of centrally protected monuments in Tamil Nadu is available here:
https:// www.asichennai.gov.in/monuments_full_list.html (accessed 15 November 2021).
For the list of monuments under the protection of the state department of archaeology,
see https://www.tnarch.gov.in/monuments-subnames (accessed 15 November 2021).
23. https://twitter.com/SadhguruJV/status/1374688284194959361 (accessed 15
November 2021). 24. For a summary and assessment of these changing protocols, see
Tim Winter, ‘Beyond Eurocentrism? Heritage Conservation and the Politics of
Difference’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 2 (2014): 123–137,
https://doi. org/10.1080/13527258.2012.736403; Aylin Orbaşli, ‘Conservation Theory in
the Twenty-First Century: Slow Evolution or a Paradigm Shift?’, Journal of Architectural
Conservation 23, no. 3 (2017): 157–170, https://doi.org/10.1080/135
56207.2017.1368187. 25. Gustavo F. Araoz, ‘Preserving Heritage Places under a New
Paradigm’, Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development 1,
no. 1 (2011): 55–60, https://doi.org/10.1108/20441261111129933, cited in Aylin Orbaşli,
‘Conservation Theory in the Twenty-First Century: Slow Evolution or a Paradigm Shift?’
Journal of architectural conservation 23, no. 3 (2017): 157–170.
About the Contributors
AKEEL BILGRAMI is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia

University, where he is also professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He has
been the director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities as well as the director of the
South Asian Institute at Columbia. A philosopher of language and mind, as well as
political philosophy and moral psychology, he has been an important interlocutor on
Indian secularism. His publications include Belief and Meaning (Blackwell, 1992), Self-
Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard University Press, 2006), Secularism, Identity, and
Enchantment (Harvard University Press; Permanent Black, 2014), and Culture, Capital,
and the Commons (Juxta Press; Permanent Black, 2022). His edited volumes include
Marx, Gandhi, and Modernity (Tulika Books, 2014) and Beyond the Secular West
(Columbia University Press, 2016). He has two forthcoming books, What Is a Muslim?
(Princeton University Press) and Gandhi’s Integrity (Columbia University Press).
TAPATI GUHA-THAKURTA is an honorary professor of history at the Centre for Studies
in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), where she was director from 2012 to 2017. She
has written widely on the art and cultural history of modern India, and has held several
visiting fellowships abroad. Her major works are The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art:
Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992),
Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-colonial India
(Columbia University Press; Permanent Black, 2004), and In the Name of
410
the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Primus Books, 2015). She is
also the author of exhibition monographs, among them Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal
(Seagull, 2002), The Aesthetics of the Popular Print (Birla Academy of Art and Culture,
2006), and The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories (CSSSC, 2011), and has
co-edited two anthologies of essays—Theorising the Present: Essays for Partha
Chatterjee (Oxford University Press, 2011) and New Cultural Histories of India:
Materiality and Practices (Oxford University Press, 2013). KAJRI JAIN is a professor of
art history and visual studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on
images in relation to religion, politics, and commerce in India; she also writes on
contemporary art. She is the author of Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke University
Press, 2021), which examines the emergence of monumental iconic sculptures in
postliberalization India, and Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art
(Duke University Press, 2007), which is about printed icons. Her current book project,
intended as the third in this trilogy, is called Nature in the Time of the Gods. Her work
has featured in forums across art history, anthropology, media studies, and religious
studies including Art History, Third Text, Current Anthropology, and The Immanent
Frame, and in edited volumes such as Capitalism and the Camera, Places of Nature in
Ecologies of Urbanism, the Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, and New
Cultural Histories of India. ZEHRA JUMABHOY is a lecturer in the history of art at the
University of Bristol, UK. She is an art historian, curator, and writer specializing in
modern and contemporary South Asian art and its diasporas. In Bombay, she was
editor of the Visual Art section for Time Out Mumbai and assistant editor at ART India
magazine. Her book The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today was published by
Random House, London, in 2010. Subsequently, she was the Steven and Elena Heinz
Scholar at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she completed her doctorate
and lectured on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes (2016–2020). She has
been a visiting lecturer at various academic institutions in the UK, India, Pakistan, and
Singapore, including teaching on MA programmes dedicated to Asian art and theory at
the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, and Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore. In
2018, she guest curated The Progressive Revolution: Modern
411
Art for a New India at New York’s Asia Society Museum. The show was inspired by her
PhD at The Courtauld on the intersection of Indian art with ideas of secular nationalism
and postcolonial theory. SANTHI KAVURI-BAUER is a professor of art history at San
Francisco State University, where she teaches the art and architecture of South Asia,
the Islamic world, and Asian American art. Her book Monumental Matters: The Power,
Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture (Duke University Press, 2011)
focuses on the prominent role of Mughal architecture in the construction and
contestation of the Indian national landscape. Her recent research is concerned with the
influences of Islamic discourses on wonders, or ‘aja’ib, and ethics, or akhlaq, in the
design and form of Indian Islamic cities and architecture. Her essays have appeared in
The International Journal of Islamic Architecture, South Asian Studies, and Third Text.
She has received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute and the Graham
Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. SUMATHI RAMASWAMY is the
James B. Duke Professor of History and International Comparative Studies at Duke
University. She has published extensively on language politics, gender studies, spatial
studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and
more recently, digital humanities, and the history of philanthropy. She is a co-founder of
Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture
(www.tasveerghar.net). Her books include The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping
Mother India (Duke University Press, 2010), Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the
World as Globe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and the edited volume Barefoot
across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (Routledge, 2010). Her
most recent works are Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (Roli Books,
2020) and the digital project B Is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India
(https://sites.duke.edu/bisforbapu/). She is presently working on the history of
educational philanthropy in British India. TAMARA SEARS is an associate professor of
art history at Rutgers University, with a focus on art and architecture in South Asia. Her
first book Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval
India (Yale University Press, 2014) received the American
412
Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE) in Architecture

and Urban Planning. Her essays have appeared in over a dozen volumes and journals,
including the Art Bulletin, Ars Orientalis, and Archives of Asian Art. She is currently
working on two book projects. One examines the relationship between architecture,
environmental history, and travel, while the other interrogates architectural revivalism
and secularism in twentieth-century temple architecture. Her research has been
supported by grants and fellowships from Fulbright, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the
National Humanities Center, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Clark Art Institute. HOLLY
SHAFFER is an assistant professor of history of art and architecture at Brown
University, with a focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South Asia. Her book,
Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910,
published by the Paul Mellon Centre with Yale University Press in 2022, won the
American Institute of Indian Studies Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr Prize in the Indian
Humanities. Essays related to this subject, including eclecticism and empire, ecology
and western Indian paintings of rhythm, and nationalism and contemporary art, have
been published in the Art Bulletin, Art History, Modern Philology, and Third Text. She
has recently edited volume 51 of Ars Orientalis (2021) on the movement of graphic arts
across Asia and in Europe, and is developing a project on food and art. KAVITA SINGH
is a professor of art history at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, and her research focuses on the history of Indian painting and
the history and politics of museums. Her books include the edited and co-edited
volumes New Insights into Sikh Art (Marg, 2003), Influx: Contemporary Art in Asia
(Sage, 2013), No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia
(Routledge, 2014), Nauras: The Many Arts of the Deccan (National Museum, 2015),
Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt (Routledge, 2017), and Scent
upon a Southern Breeze: Synaesthesia and the Arts of the Deccan (Marg, 2018). Her
monographs include Museums, Heritage, Culture: Into the Conflict Zone (Amsterdam
University of the Arts, 2015) and Real Birds in Imagined Gardens: Mughal Painting
between Persia and Europe (Getty Foundation, 2016). She has also curated exhibitions
at the
413
San Diego Museum of Art, the Devi Art Foundation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and
the National Museum of India. SANJUKTA SUNDERASON is senior lecturer (UD1) in
history of art in the Department of Arts and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. A
historian of twentieth-century aesthetics, she researches interfaces of visual art, (left-
wing) political thought, and historical transition during twentieth-century decolonization
in South Asia and across transnational formations in the Global South. She is the author
of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University
Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Lotte Hoek, University of Edinburgh) of Forms of the
Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks, and Connected Histories
(Bloomsbury, 2022). Her writings have appeared across multiple peer-reviewed journals
including Third Text, British Art Studies, South Asian Studies, and so on. She is
currently working on a second monograph on transnational conceptualizations of art
and liberation across twentiethcentury decolonization, thinking from the locational
scales of South Asia. VAZIRA FAZILA-YACOOBALI ZAMINDAR is associate professor
of history at Brown University, with a focus on decolonization, displacement, war,
nonviolence, the visual archive, and contemporary art. She is the author of The Long
Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories
(Columbia University Press, 2007), and continues to write on minorities,
incommensurability, and belonging. Following two film festivals in 2014 and 2015, she
co-edited Love, War, and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan (Oxford
University Press, 2020). She initiated the interdisciplinary discussion forum Art History
from the South (2018–20), co-organized the symposium Art History, Postcolonialism
and the Global Turn (Fall 2020), and collaborates with the Decolonial Initiative on
Migration of Objects and People. She is presently working on a monograph on
archaeology, art history, photography, film, and war on the Indo-Afghan borderlands,
and a graphic novel with Sarnath Banerjee on Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan. KARIN
ZITZEWITZ is an associate professor of art history at Michigan State University with a
focus on modern and contemporary art of India and Pakistan. She is the author of
Infrastructure and Form: The Global
414
Networks of Indian Contemporary Art, 1991–2008 (University of California Press, 2022),

which received the Millard Meiss Award from the College Art Association. Her earlier
books are The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary
India (Hurst; Oxford, 2014) and The Perfect Frame: Presenting Indian Art: Stories and
Photographs from the Kekoo Gandhy Collection (Chemould, 2003). She has co-edited
special issues of the Journal of Material Culture and Art Journal, and curated exhibitions
by Pakistani artist Naiza Khan (2013) and Indian artist Mithu Sen (2014) for the Eli and
Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. Her research has been
supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Institute for Indian
Studies, and the Fulbright programme. She was chair of the Editorial Board of Art
Journal and Art Journal Open from 2020 to 2022.
Index
Abedin, Zainul, 15, 157, 161–175, 178–184 Acworth, H. A., 231 Agrindas, 231 Ahmad,
Aziz, 177 Ahmad, Novera, 174 Ahmad, Safiuddin, 162, 174 Ahmad, Salman, 150,
152n21 Ahmed, Sara, 351n36 Ahsan, Aitzaz, 146 Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, 379
Akshardham temple project of Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan
Sanstha (BAPS), 383 Alagappan, Aru., 297 Alam, Muzaffar, 349n13 Ali, Amjad, 169 Ali,
Asad, 150 Ali, Kamran Asdar, 130 Ali, Muhammad, 55 Aligarh Muslim University,
156n62, 349n13 Altaf, Navjot, 66 Ambedkar, B. R., 58 Thoughts on Pakistan, 129,
151n6 Amin, Nurul, 163 Amin, Shahid, 152n23
Anderson, Amanda, 24 Anderson, Benedict, 51, 94, 107, 306 Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 118n3 Anisuzzaman, 160, 173,
188n27 Appadurai, Arjun Modernity at Large, 326n3 Arabian Nights, The, 208
Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), 22, 229, 361, 389, 392, 399, 403–404 Manual of
Conservation, 394–395 Arendt, Hannah, 119n14 Arnold, David, 321 Arya Bhushan
Press, 254n3 Aryadharami Hindus, 374 Asad, Talal, 51, 64, 114 Formations of the
Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, 292n12 Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and
Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, 121n47 Asia Foundation, 165 Auerbach,
Eric Mimesis, 48 Awami League, 155n49 Aye, Mansur, 138
416
Index
B. R. Ambedkar statue at Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Prateek Sthal,

Lucknow, 115–116 Babri Masjid destruction (6 December 1992) Ayodhya, 7–8, 22,
30n36, 41, 83, 206 artwork after, 66–68, 79 Baij, Ramkinkar, 295n35 Bamiyan
Buddhas, 105 Banaras Hindu University (BHU), 156n62, 378–379 Banerjee, Mamata
(Didi), 267, 273–274 Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan), 13–16, 127, 130, 158–166,
172–179, 185–187, 217n2 Arts Ensemble exhibition, Dhaka, 176 Dacca Art Group (first
exhibition) in 1951, 164, 174–175, 188n28, 217n2 Institute of Fine Arts, 162 Language
Movement of 1952, 170, 172–173 Maulana Bhashani, 181, 183 Monpura ’70, 181–182
Nabanna exhibition, 179–181 postal stamp with Abedin’s artwork, 157, 161, 163, 166
postcolonial pedagogies, dilemmas of, 166–172 Baroda School of Art, 194 Barooah
Pisharoty, Sangeeta Assam: The Accord, The Discord, 293n14 Baseer, Murtaja, 174,
176, 178 Bashir, Shahzad, 150, 152n23 Basu, Gautam, 293n19 Baul singers, 211
Bawa, Seema, 70 Baxi, Upendra, 196 Hindu secularism, 200 bazaar art, 98 Belting,
Hans era of art, 10
Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, 28n20, 86n1,
258n49 Benjamin, Walter, 101, 118n8, 119n14 Origin of German Tragic Drama, The,
48, 60n16 Bennett, Jane, 19, 319–320, 335 Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments,
Crossings, and Ethics, 326n5, 327n10 Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things,
328n20 Berger, John Success and Failure of Picasso, The, 133, 152n15 Ways of
Seeing, 154n45 Bhadra, Birendra Krishna, 295n29 Bhagavad Gita, 356, 369 Bhagavad
Purana, 204 Bhakti, 58, 204, 208, 210–211, 213 aspect of Shaktism, 206 politics of, 205
Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, 254 Bharata Punarutthana Trust, Karnataka, 407n13
Bharathidasan, 307 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 16, 21, 84, 196–197, 213, 263, 278,
334, 336, 346, 404 Bhargava, Rajeev, 19, 326n4 Bhashani, Maulana, 181 Bhonsle,
Fatehsingh, 243 Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali, 133, 141, 144–145, 148 Biennale, Venice, 16, 82–
83, 166, 289 Okwui Enwezor, All the World’s Futures, Venice Biennale, 289–290
Bilgrami, Akeel, 4, 14 Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment, 13 Birla, Ritu Stages of
Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, 120n26
Index Birlas Aditya Vikram (A. V.), 358, 386n51 Baldeo Das (B. D.), 357, 373 Basant
Kumar (B. K.), 354, 357–358 Ghanshyam Das (G. D.), 354, 357–358, 362, 369, 373,
380, 385n25 Jugal Kishore (J. K.), 373, 381–382 presence in Gwalior, 357–360 Srimati
Mahadevi, 362 temple-building programme, 109–110 temples, nationalist visions, and
history Birla temple, Pilani, 379–380 Khandariya Mahadeo Temple, Khajuraho, 379–380
Lakshmi-Narayan Temple, New Delhi, 371, 374–378, 381–382 new Vishvanatha
Temple, Varanasi, 378–379 Vikram Vinayak Mandir, Maharashtra, 386n51 Black
Pagoda, Konarak, 369 Blake, Stephen P., 349n13 Bombay New Press, 240 Bose,
Nandalal, 184 Bourdieu, Pierre, 109 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of
Taste, 118n6 British Council, 165 Brosius, Christiane, 118n2 Brown, Percy, 369–370
Indian Architecture, 364 Bruegel, Flemish Pieter Mad Meg, 205 Buck-Morss, Susan,
96–97, 107 Buddhist Arya Dharma Sangha Dharmasala, Sarnath, 371 Burgess, James,
229–230 Burke, Peter Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence,
327n14 Burney, I. H., 134 Butcher, G. M., 176–177
417
calendar art, 91–92 Carré, John le, 51 Carroll, Lewis Alice in Wonderland, 205 Cartier,
Jacques, 118n4 cartographic wars, 305 Cashman, Richard, 231 Cavell, Stanley, 114
ceteris paribus clauses, 54, 61n25 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 197, 219n32, 301 on modernity
in India, 199–200 on provincialising Europe, 10 Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference, 220n55, 327n9 on secular histories, 299
Chakravorty, Pallabi, 89n25 Chamling, Pawan, 93 Chand, Abhay, 126 Chandra,
Amitava, 324–325 Chandrakant, Kamala Dasha Avatar: The Ten Incarnations of
Vishnu, 329n33 Chatterjee, Partha, 197, 200, 219n32 Chatterjee, Sris Chandra, 357,
374 Draft Manifesto for the Proposed All-India League of Architecture, 372 Magadha:
Architecture and Culture, 371 Chauhan, Prithviraj, 377 Chawla, Rupika Raja Ravi
Varma: Painter of Colonial India, 329n29 Chester, Daniel, 116 Chiplunkar,
Vishnushastri, 231, 254n3, 256n18 Chitrashala Press, Poona, 255n3 Khandoba and
Malsara painting in, 240–241 Chittagong Hill Tracts, 168 Chowdhury, Jogen, 194
Chowdhury, Qayyum, 176 Chowdhury, Rashid, 174
418
Index
Chughtai, Abd al-Rahman, 177 Chuh, Kandice, 345–346 Citizenship [Amendment] Act
(CAA), 2019, 2, 22, 25n1, 190, 266, 271, 275, 292n12 Cohn, Bernard, 340 Coke,
Edward, 48 Institutes of the Lawes of England, 60n18 Commonwealth Art Institute,
London, 176 communal violence, targeting Muslim populations Bombay (1992–1993),
190, 194 Delhi (2020), 190 Gujarat (2002), 190, 208 Congress party, 336, 357, 373
Connaught Place, 371 Constitution of India, 58 Article 19(2), 46 First Amendment in
1951, 45–46 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 240, 250, 252–253 corporate-sponsored festival
deities, 98 COVID-19 pandemic, 8, 11, 17, 22–25, 34, 53, 56–57, 64, 71, 92, 94, 98–
101, 114–116, 320–321, 324 Dadi, Iftikhar, 151n11, 162 Modernism and the Art of
Muslim South Asia, 117n1, 132 Das, Veena, 214 Dasa, Syamasundara Hindi
sabdasagara, Navina samskarana, 384n16 Dasha Avatar (comic book) in Amar Chitra
Katha series, 313 on Radcliffe Line, 213 Dave-Mukherji, Parul, 252 Davis, Richard, 101,
118n2 Lives of Indian Images, 119n14 Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshipping
Shiva in Medieval India, 119n14
decapitation, 15, 126, 134–137, 144, 152n23 decolonization, 133, 158–161, 165, 170,
179, 181–182, 184–186 Dehejia, Vidya Devi, the Great Goddess: Female Divinity in
South Asian Art, 326n7 Desai, Madhavi, 356 Desai, Miki, 356 desecularization, 130–
131, 389, 405–406 Deshbandhu Memorial to Chittaranjan Das, Calcutta, 371 Dhar,
Jyoti, 223n125 Dhurandhar, M. V., 247, 250 Shivaji’s Stone Sculpture from Malvan, 246
Shri Shivaji Maharaj, 248 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 101–102, 117 Confronting Images:
Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, 101–102, 117,119n15, 122n54
disenchantment, process of, 20, 38, 160, 174, 182, 286, 320, 337, 339–341, 345–348
Diwan-i-khaas, 341 Dodiya, Atul, 194 Douglas, James Book of Bombay, 229, 255n4
Duara, Prasenjit, 301 Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of
Modern China, 328n19 Duff, James Grant, 232, 238–239 Dufy, Raoul, 169 Durga puja
festivals in Bengal (Kolkata), 18, 262, 264–265 Azaan controversy in Beliaghata 33
Pally Puja committee, 273–278, 293n19, 294n22 Durga as a migrant worker-mother,
277–282 Durga Puja and the citizenship crisis, 266–273
Index Pallab Bhowmick’s sculpture of Durga and her children, 278–279 Pradip Das’
production titled Kurnish at Samaj Sebi Sangha Puja, 286–287, 290 Rabin Roy’s
production titled Barricade, 270 Subrata Banerjee’s production titled Thikana, 271–272
Dwarka Dham, 110 Dwyer, Rachel, 118n2 Eaton, Natasha, and Correia, Alice To Draw
the Line, 185 Einstein, Albert, 380 Elias, Jamal, 118n2 Eliasson, Olafur, 104 Eliot, T. S.,
47 Elkins, James On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, 120n26
Encyclopaedia of Religion, 99 enchantment, 12, 19–20, 40, 94, 286, 300–301, 306, 308,
314–320, 335, 342–348 Engineering University Union, 154n37 English East India
Company, 229, 255n4, 340 Environmental Art Collective, Barisha Club Durga Puja, 261
epic poetry (mahakavya), 231 Faiz, Faiz Ahmad, 5–6, 148 Hum dekhenge, 6 Naqsh-e
Faryadi, 137, 153n33 Faiz mela (1986), 6 Fancy, Hussein Mercenary Mediterranean,
The, 337–338 Felski, Rita, 347 Limits of Critique, The, 339 feminist–artist–subject, 73–
74
419
Fergusson, James, and Gill, Major 100 Stereoscopic Illustrations of Western India, 229
Fisher, Philip, 301 Foçillon, Henri Life of Forms in Art, The, 122n54 Ford, Henry, 380
Frere Hall, Karachi, 151n13 Ganapati Utsav festival, 92 Gandhara-Nagara sculpture,
Kafirkot, 115 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 356–357, 381, 385n25 Gandhy, Shireen,
88n10 Ganesha Ganapati festival, 231 Geertz, Clifford, 338 General Zia-ul-Huq, 6, 132–
133, 149, 152n17 German Cultural Centre, Karachi, 165 Ghalib, 137 Goddess(es) of
modern India Appu (Bharat Mata), 305 Bharat Mata and the map of India, 304–309
Bharat Mata painting by Monal Kohad, 322–324 Covid-19 pandemic goddess, 320–325
English the Dalit Goddess by Shanti Swaroop Baudh and Chandrabhan Prasad, 314–
318, 320 Goddess Bhairavi Devi with Shiva (attributed to Payag), 206–207 geo-piety,
notion of, 309–314 Maa Bharati painting by Sandhya Kumari, 323–324 Tamilttay,
goddess of the Tamil language, 297, 314, 316 Varaha rescuing Prithvi (sandstone
sculpture), Madhya Pradesh, 310 Golwalkar, Mahadev Sadashiv Bunch of Thoughts,
402, 408n18
420
Index
Gowda, Sheela, 194 dematerialised space, 202 And Tell Him of My Pain, 201 Grabar,
Oleg, 341–342 Grigsby, Darcy, 315–316 Guha, Ramachandra, 190 India after Gandhi:
The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, 217n1 Guha, Ranajit, 197, 200, 219n32
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, 18, 33, 60n5, 94, 118n2, 127, 142, 150, 154n40, 340, 369
Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, The, 87n5,
118n3, 119n13, 328n25 Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial
and Post-colonial India, 8, 87n5, 255n10, 327n9 In the Name of the Goddess: The
Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata, 87n5, 119n12, 291n2, 327n8 Guirguis, Sherin,
344 Guru, Gopal, 317 Gyanvapi Mosque, Varanasi, 22 Habib, Irfan, 59n1, 349n13
Hakim, Firhaud, Mayor of Kolkata, 277 Haque, Anwarul, 162 Hariharahiranyagarba, 365
Harijan Sevak Sangh, 373 Haroon, Husain, 152n16 Harraway, Donna Staying with the
Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 351n35 Hasan, Khalid, 153n28 Hasan,
Mubashir, 146 Hasan, Qamrul, 162, 172, 174–175 Hashmi, Selima, 152n16 Havell, E.
B., 252, 334 Hegel, G. W. F., 102–104, 120n19, 198 Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art,
120n19
heterochrony, 114–117 Hilma af Klint exhibition at Guggenheim Museum, US, 86n3

Hiltebeitel, Alf, and Erndl, Kathleen Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South
Asian Goddesses, 326n7 Hindu absolutism, 114 dharma, 401 hegemony, 107
majoritarian/majoritarianism, 7, 271, 293n21, 402 nationalism, 16, 18, 49, 192, 194
Hindu Code Bill, 58 Hinduism, 20–21, 198, 210, 219n31, 231, 275, 298, 310, 365, 373–
374, 377, 380–383 Bhakti movement, 195 caste divisions, 400 as dharma, 113 folk-
based cults, 204 hard, 202 Sanatana, 369 soft, 16, 198, 200, 202, 213, 215 Hindu
Mahasabha, 373 Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation), 195 Hindu Rashtriya Mandir, 373 Hindu
Religious and Charitable Endowments (HRCE), Tamil Nadu, 397–398, 404, 407n8
Hindutva politics, 60n21, 196, 198, 211–212, 215, 265, 405 Hindutvadi, 211 ideologues,
41 majoritarianism, 208 masculinity, 205 nationalism, 7 nationalistic version of religion,
199 tormentors, 48 violent Ayodhya campaign, 206–207 Hogan, Charles, 122n54
Index Huntington, Susan L., and Huntington, John C. Art of Ancient India: Buddhist,
Hindu, Jain, The, 363, 384n15 Husain, Maqbool Fida, 7–8, 14, 33, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55,
105, 142, 149, 212, 292n3, 308–309, 320 controversy over drawing of nude Saraswati
and painting of Bharat Mata, 37, 44, 52, 212 Mother India, 213–214 Untitled, 212
Hussain, Rummana (performances), 16, 65–66, 75 Conflux, 67, 82 Dissected
Projection, 82 Fragments, Multiples exhibition, 68–70, 73, 88n14 Fragments from
Splitting, 63 Home/Nation, 71, 76–79 Is It What You Think?, 79–81, 85, 216 Living on
the Margins, 71–75 non-performance work, 81 Our Time for a Future Caring, 82–83
Unearthed, 82 Huttenlauch, Eva, 201 iconoclash, 105 iconoclasm, 68–71, 75, 78–79,
84, 343 iconography(ies), 11–12, 204–205, 211–213, 263, 266, 273, 286, 291n1, 306,
317, 362, 365 iconoplasty, 109, 112 icons, 9–10, 17–18, 68, 92, 100–102, 105, 107,
110, 112, 115, 228, 250–251, 264–265, 268, 319, 360, 365–368, 388, 392 Indian
National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), 390 Indian Penal Code, 1860,
47, 60n15 Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA), 9
421
Indian Rebellion of 1857–1858, 229 Instagram, 6 Institute of Islamic Studies, Delhi,

156n62 International Conference of Artists, Venice, 1952, 166 International Council on
Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), 362, 382 Iqbal, Muhammad, 223n124 Islam, Aminul,
174 Islamia College Student Union, Lahore, 154n37 Islamic/Mughal monuments, 19,
213, 334, 336, 339–343, 348 January 1, 2010, artwork by Samira Yamin, 344–345
mashrabiya, 344–345 Mashrabiya: The Art of Looking Back, 344–345 Islam, Mazharul,
162, 164 Islam, Nazrul, 177 Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaiba (IJT), 15, 140, 143–144, 146,
155n49 Jaffrelot, Christophe, 194 on Hindu nationalists, 408n19 Jafri, Saiyid, 210
Jahan, Nusrat, 277 Jahangir, Syed, 176 Jain, Jyotindra, 118n2, 211 Jain, Kajri, 10, 263,
374 epistemic frictions at boundaries of religion and art, 17 Gods in the Age of
Democracy, 292n6 Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, 87n5
Gods in the Time of Democracy, 87n5 Jalal, Ayesha, 143 Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life,
Times, and Work across the India– Pakistan Divide, The, 155n46 Jama Masjid, Delhi,
15, 126, 150 Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), 133, 140, 142–143, 146
422
Index
Jameson, Fredric Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 42, 60n12
Jancigny, Adolphe Philibert Dubois de, and Raymond, Xavier Inde, 235 Sewadji, 236
Jay, Martin Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought, 119n10 Jay, Martin, and Ramaswamy, Sumathi Empires of Vision, 327n12
jirnoddhar, 395 J. J. School of Art, Mumbai, 247 Jones, Amelia, 89n23, 90n30 Body
Art/Performing the Subject, 73 journal/magazine/newspaper Ananda Bazaar Patrika,
324 Dilruba, 164 Fellowship, 153n32 Herald, 152n17 Itihas Sangraha, 247 Jasarat, 146
Javed, 143 John Bull, 334 Kalki, 406n3 Kesari, 255n3 Leader, 138 Mahratta, 229, 233,
241–242, 244, 247, 254n3 Montreal Gazette, 118n4 Morning News, 176 National
Geographic, 375 Nawa-e-Waqt, 140–142, 146–147, 154n37 New Values, 164
Nibandhamala, 255n3, 256n18 Organiser, 401 Pakistan Times, 147, 165 Statesman,
163 Suvarnamala, 243–245, 247–248, 250
Swarajya, 276, 401 Times of India, 231 Viewpoint, 147–148 Jumabhoy, Zehra, 16, 24
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, 159–160, 173, 195, 211 Kahraman, Hayv, 344 Kali Cigarettes
advertisement by Calcutta Art Studio, 206–207 Kalighat Temple, Calcutta, 92, 205
Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan: A Historic Novel by Kalki (Kalki Krishnamurthy and Varalot.t.i
Rengasamy), 406n3 Kant, Immanuel, 118n6, 198 Critique of Judgment, 118n6
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 103–104, 120n20 Kapoor,
Kamala, 73 Kapur, Anuradha, 118n2 Kapur, Geeta, 9, 16, 40, 60n10, 66, 81, 87n6,
88n10, 90n31, 118n2, 192, 194, 197–201, 202–204, 206, 208–211, 215–216, 217n4
Bhakti-Sufi valorisation of sexualised poet-saints, 213 Fragile Inheritance, A, 193 Place
for People exhibition, 194, 203 Progressive Revolution: A Modern Art for a New India,
The, 218n12 ‘Secular Artist, Citizen Artist’, 9, 87n6, 191 Subject of Death exhibition at
Aesthetic Bind, 190, 192 When Was Modernism, 191 Karachi Resolution of Congress
Party, 1931, 59n1 Karode, Roobina, 83 Kashi Vishvanatha Temple, Varanasi, 378–379
Katiyar, Vinay, 334 Kaul, Sanjay Kishan, 44
Index Kaur, Ravinder, 118n2 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 127, 129–130, 151n7 Kavuri-Bauer,
Santhi, 19 Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal
Architecture, 341 Kazantzakis, Nikos The Last Temptation of Christ, 59n4 Kazhagam,
Kamban, 303 Kendriya Shaheed Minar, Dhaka, 174 Kennedy, John F., 380 Khajuraho
sculptures, 8, 44, 51 Khakhar, Bhupen, 87n6, 203, 217n3 Bullet Shot in the Stomach,
189–191 devotional quality in his works, 193 kitsch-sublime of sexual fantasy in his
works, 204 Muslims Around the Mosque II, 203 self-destructive painting, 217 Khan,
Afzal, 231, 233, 238 Khan, Ayub, 133, 144, 155n49 Khan, Inayatullah, 143 Khan, Sir
Syed Ahmad Asar-ul-Sanadid, 346 Khilafat movement, 58 Khilnani, Sunil, 198 Khullar,
Sonal Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India,
1930–1990, 117n1 Kinsley, David Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in
the Hindu Religious Tradition, 326n7 Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi,
83 Konarak, Sun Temple, 14, 20, 354–355, 359, 362–366, 368–371, 382 Krishna, T. M.,
5 Krishnalila, 211–212 Krishnamurthy, Kalki Ponniyin Selvan, or The Son of Ponni,
406n3
423
Kristeva, Julia, 126, 138 capital moment in art history, 15 Euro-Christian conception,
136 Severed Head: Capital Visions, The, 135, 150n1 Kubler, George, 122n54 Shape of
Time: Remarks on the History of Things, The, 122n54 Kudelska, Marta, 380 Kumar,
Gulshan, 110 Kumari, Shalinee Weeping Mother Earth Prays to the Sun God to Spare
the Earth from Global Warming, 313 Kumar, Krishna Brushes with History, 380 Lacan,
Jacques Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, The, 118n4 Lahore Arts
Council, 134 Lahore Museum ceiling, 144 Lahore Resolution, 129 Lahore Students
Council, 154n37 Lalan, 211 Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi, 85n5 Lang, Jon, 356 Langlés,
Louis Mathieu Monuments anciens et modernes de l’Hindoustan, 235 Latif, Shah, 211
Latour, Bruno, 319, 326n3, 347 Gaia theory, 313 Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, 86n4 Lenin, 380 Levinas, Emmanuel, 153n24 Liaqat Baloch Government College
Students’ Union, 154n37 Lincoln, Abraham, 116 Lloyd, Alison, 88n10, 90n29 Lord
Bentinck, 334 Lukács, Georg, 38–39
424
Index
Lutgendorf, Philip, 118n2 Lutyens, Edwin, 371 Macaulay, Thomas, 314, 318 Maclean,
Kama, 152n23 Mahabodhi Temple, Bodhgaya, 8 Mahasabha Bhavan, Delhi, 371
Malani, Nalini, 66, 194, 205, 210–211, 214 Mother India: Transactions in the
Construction of Pain, 213–214 Remembering Mad Meg, 204–206, 210 sexually charged
subversions, 211–212 Sita/Medea, 208–209 video installation Sare Jahan Se Acha,
215–216 Malaviya, Madan Mohan, 356, 379 Mangla Dam, 153n28 Manto, Saadat
Hasan, 138, 145, 148 Thanda Ghosht, 143 Zehmat-e-Mehr-e-Darakhshan, 155n47
Manucci, Niccolo, 145, 239 Marshall, John Conservation of Ancient Monuments:
General Principles for the Guidance of Those Entrusted with the Custody of and
Execution of Repairs to Ancient Monuments, 406n5 material religion, 99 Mathur, Saloni,
84, 117n1, 150, 193, 217n8, 218n10, 399 co-edited with Kavita Singh, No Touching, No
Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, 117n1, 386n52 Fragile Inheritance:
Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art, A, 192 Mawjee, Purshotam Vishram, 243–
245, 247–251, 255n8 Mayo School of Art, Lahore, 162, 165 Mazinani, Sanaz, 344
McDermott, Rachel Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal: The
Fortunes of Hindu Festivals, 292n9 McLain, Karline, 232 Meenakshi Sundareshwara
Temple, Madurai, 376 Meister, Michael, 115 canonical linearity, 108 idea of iconopraxis,
108–109 messianism of anticolonial print capitalist art, 94 methodological atheism, 12
Mill, John Stuart harm principle, 46 On Liberty, 45, 60n13 Ministry of Culture,
Government of India, 83 minorities, 49–50, 56, 129, 131, 134, 191, 277, 408n19 Mirza,
Bashir, 138 Mitchell, W. J. T., 316, 326n3 Mitra Mela, 251 Mitter, Partha, 248 Art and
Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922, 118n3 modern epistemology of art, 11
modernity, 10, 26n8, 27n20, 40, 95–96, 100, 115, 126–127, 173–174, 176, 202 artistic,
184 colonial, 64 cultural, 165 dialectical, 185 nationalist, 12 national-popular, 168
political, 165 postcolonial, 17, 159–161, 163, 178, 185 post-Enlightenment, 99 Modi,
Narendra, 61n21, 83, 190, 196, 208 Mohan, Urmila, 317 Mohatta Palace Museum,
Karachi, 152n16
Index monumental, 78, 92, 132, 354, 362, 382–383, 389 iconic statues in post-
liberalization India, proliferation of, 105 icons, 110 spaces, 339 statues, 110 monument
conservation, preservation of, 392–395 Moore, Henry, 166 Morgan, David, 99, 118n9
Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment, 326n1, 327n11 Moxey, Keith,
114 Visual Time: The Image in History, 121n48 Mughal emperors Akbar, 339 Shah
Jahan, 339 Mughal Gardens, 371 Mughal India, secular historiography of, 349n13
Muhammad, Mir, 235–236, 239 Mukherjee, Sraman, 356, 364 Mullahs, 149
multiculturalism (doctrine of), defined, 56 Muñoz, José, 351n39 muqarnas, 342 museum
effect, 101 Muslim Mass Contact Programme, 58 mythological television serials, 92
Nandy, Ashis, 197, 200, 211, 220n50, 381 dependence on inter-faith communitas, 211
Intimate Enemy, The, 219n37 modern and non-modern secularism, 198, 199, 211 on
secularism, 199 rebuttal to Hindutva, 211 Nasar, Hammad Lines of Control exhibition,
184
425
Nasr, Seyyid Vali Reza Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jamaat-i-Islami of
Pakistan, The, 155n49 Nataraja Temple, Chidambaram, 376 National Art Gallery,
Islamabad, 151n13 National Awami Party (NAP), 181 National Centre for Performing
Arts (NCPA), Mumbai, 71 National College of Arts (NCA), 165 National Endowment for
the Arts (NEA), 89n26 National Institute for Design (NID), Ahmedabad, 85n5 National
Museum, Delhi, 366 National Planning Committee, 373 National Register of Citizens
(NRC), 25n1 nationalist ballads (rashtriya kirtan), 231 Needham, A. D., 196 Nehru,
Jawaharlal, 198, 260n83, 373 Discovery of India, The, 58 Nigam, Aditya, 317 offence-
making, offence-taking, 11 Ofili, Chris Holy Virgin Mary, The, 105 Orme, Robert
Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes, and of the English
Concerns in Indostan, 235, 237, 245 painted bazaar icons, 92 Pakistan, 6, 23, 129
citizenship laws, 134 constitutional history, 29n27 East, 13, 15, 144, 155n49, 158–162,
164–172, 174–180, 182–187 West, 14–15, 126–127, 130, 132–133, 172 Pakistan
American Cultural Centre, 165 Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), 141, 144, 146, 155n49
Pandey, Gyanendra, 212
426
Index
Pandharpur Industrial Exhibition, 251 Paramananda, Kavindra, 232 Shivabharata, 239

Parasnis, D. B., 247, 250 Itihas Sangraha, 244 Parekh, Madhvi, 66 Park Circus Maidan,
Kolkata, 268 Parks, Fanny, 334 Patwardhan, Sudhir, 194 Pernau, Margrit, 326 Pervez,
Ahmed, 138 Phule, Mahatma Jotirao, 255n12 Pietz, William, 103 Pinney, Christopher,
94, 106–107, 152n23, 205 ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political
Struggle in India, 118n3, 329n29 Pirous, A. D., 86n4 Places of Worship Act, 30n36
Pluhar, Werner S., 118n6 postcolonial archive, 132–135 Prasad, Jayashankar, 384n16
Presler, Franklin, 397 Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), 9 propitious adornment
of vehicles of transportation, 92–93 Pune Pact, 373 Punjab University Council, Lahore,
154n37 Punjab University Union, Lahore, 154n37 Purushottam Shivakavya, 232, 234,
240, 256n24 Qasimi, Ahmad Nadeem Naqoosh, 143 Quebec National Assembly, 96
Quranic calligraphies, 137, 145 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 35, 59n1 Raja, H. R., 313
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, 68, 87n8, 88n14, 89n20, 90n27, 118n2 Rajagopal, Arvind,
118n2
Rajan, R. S., 196, 198 Rajwade, V. K., 244, 246–247, 252–254 Ramaiah, M. Bhoodevi,
312 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 19, 94, 106, 152n23, 154n40, 212, 222n108, 252, 263–264,
297 Barefoot across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India, 8, 37,
60n6, 86n4, 292n3 Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideology in Modern
India, 327n12 cartographic representations of goddess’ body, 205–206 Gandhi in the
Gallery: The Art of Disobedience, 87n5 Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India,
The, 87n5, 118n3 Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 327n15
Rameshwaram Temple, Setubandhan, 376 Ramjanmabhoomi Temple, inauguration in
August 2020, 22 Ramjanmabhumi movement, 7 Ramos, Imma, 205 Ranade, M. G.,
255n12 Rancière, Jacques Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics,
118n7 Ranke, Leopold von, 246 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 191, 208 Raza,
Nada Bhupen Khakhar: You Can’t Please All, 191 Untitled, 191 Reese, Jill, 317
Rehman, I. A., 152n17 religious donations, 120n26 religious enchantment, 94 religious
management of Tamil Nadu temples, 396–398
Index religious nationalism, 6, 16, 18, 24, 66, 130–131, 182, 185, 205 representative
democracy, 107 Roy, Jamini, 167, 184 rubaiyaats, 132 Rural Education and
Conservation of Heritage Foundation (REACH) Foundation, 21, 391–392, 398–401,
403–406 Rushdie, Salman, 14, 46, 49–50, 52–53 Satanic Verses, The, 51, 59n4, 60n19
Russian Revolution, 98–99 Sadequain Artist and the Model, The, 128, 131, 139 Arts
Council, 148 association with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, 144 Cobweb Series, The, 138
controversy over Punjab Arts Council exhibition, 140–148 drawings from the/Sadequain
Foundation, 15, 135–140, 150, 151n12 Headless Figure Paints, A, 125 poster of the
symposium, How Secular Is Art? (2018), 127–128 Quaid-e-Azam award, 152n17
Ramazan exhibitions, 146 return to north India, 148–149 Sar-ba-kaf, 140 Under 35
Laureate prize at Paris Biennale (1961), 152n20 Who Is Sadequain? Khayyam Asks
Sarmad, 142 Saeed, Sadia, 130 SAHMAT organization, 9, 37, 70 Said, Edward, 4, 341
‘The World, the Text and the Critic’, 25n3 Saikia, Kaustuv, 267 Sanatana Dharma, 356,
382 Sangari, Kumkum, 90n28
427
Sarkar, Jadunath, 253–254 Sarmad, 15, 126, 130, 135, 141–142, 144–145, 150,
154n41, 155n52 sarvajanik mandirs, 20, 356, 374, 381–382 Satyamurthy, T., 392, 398
Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar, 199, 219n37, 251 Schneemann, Carolee, 73 Scindia,
Jivajirao, 358 Scindia, Maharaja Madho Rao, 358 Scott, David, 182 Sears, Tamara, 14,
20 sectarianism, 41, 373 sectarian politics of identity and art, 52–59
secular/secularism/secularization, 2, 4, 6–22, 26n9, 34–52, 64–65, 185, 191, 196, 198–
200, 216, 262–263, 309, 313–314, 337–339, 347–348, 365 Sen, Amartya, 35, 59n1
Serrano, Andres Piss Christ, 105 Shaffer, Holly, 17–18, 24 Shaheen Bagh women
protesters, New Delhi, 1–6, 14, 22, 25n1, 268 art at the protest site, 2–5, 25n3 Shahi
Igdah Mosque, Mathura, 22 Shankaracharya Advaita Vedanta, 368 Shaw, Wendy What
Is Islamic Art, 343 Sheikh, Gulammohammed, 40–41, 60n9, 87n6, 194 Mappamundi
Suite Marichika II, 195 Sheikh, Nilima, 66, 87n6 Shikoh, Dara, 126, 145 Shiva statue at
Old Airport Road, Bangalore, 105–106 Shivabharata, 232 Shivaji, 17–18, 228–230,
232–233, 235–238, 240–242, 244–254, 256n16, 258n41 portrait of Shivaji and
motivation for revolution, 250–252
428
Index
Shivaji Memorial Fund, 229 Sikkim Char Dham Pilgrimage-Cum-CulturalCentre,

Namchi, 111–112 Guru Rinpoche or Padmasambhava statue, Namchi, 111 Sakyamuni
statue, Ravangla, 113 Singh, Arpita, 66 Singh, Kavita, 21, 117n1 co-authored with
Saloni Mathur, ‘The Museum in the Age of Religious Revivalism’ in their co-edited book,
No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Modalities of the Museum in South Asia,
29n35 Sinha, Ajay, 210 Som, Sangeet, 334 Somnath temple, 402 Soneji, Davesh,
89n25 spiritual crisis of Indian secularism, 126–131 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 326n2
Sri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Dharmothana (SDMD) Trust, Karnataka, 399,
401, 403 Srinivas, Tulasi, 321 Staszczyk, Agnieszka, 380 Stokes, Eric, 219n32 Stratton
Hawley, John, and Wulff, Donna Marie Devi: Goddesses of India, 326n7 Subaltern
Studies Collective (Subaltern Studies Group, the Subaltern historians), 197, 219n32
Subramanyam, Sanjay, 349n13 Subramanyan, K. G. Living Tradition: Perspectives on
Modern Indian Art, The, 117n1 Sufism, 208, 210 Suhrawardy, Shahid, 163–164 Sultan,
S. M., 172 Sundaram, Vivan, 16, 66
Sunderason, Sanjukta, 13–15, 24 Sun Temples, Gwalior and Konarak (also known as
Birla temples), 20, 353–354, 360 Decision to build new living temple in Gwalior by the
Birlas, 355–359 design of, 360–371 inclusion in list of UNESCO World Heritage, 382
sarvajanak mandir, 356 Sutar, Bhabatosh Chander Hat, 296n38 Mathey Ghatey
Shilpa/Art on Ground Zero, 296n37 Sutar, Ram, 116 Sutton, Deborah, 355 Swami
Shraddhananda, 373 Świerzowska, Agata, 380 Syed, Anwar H. Discourse and Politics
of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, The, 155n51 Tagore, Abanindranath, 127, 198, 252, painting,
306–307 Tagore, Rabindranath, 173, 260n83 Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 214 Taj Mahal,
19–20, 22, 334–337, 346–347 Tamil nationalism, 301 S. K. Ayya, chromolithograph of,
303 Tamilttay mother goddess, 297, 314, 316 Taussig, Michael labour of the negative,
105 Taylor, Charles, 59n1 A Secular Age, 220n55, 326n6 Tejani, Shabnum, 198
Temple, Richard, 229 temples conservation/restoration/revival projects in Tamil Nadu
conservation as devotion, 390–392 #FreeTNTemples campaign, 404 maintenance of
temple spirit, 395–396 role of Rural Education and Conservation of Heritage
Index Foundation (REACH) Foundation, 21, 391–392, 398–401, 403–406 shivalingam

in Venkadu village, Chennai, 389–390 spectres of ruined temple, 401–403 temple
effect, 101 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 229–231, 233, 240, 251, 255n12, 356 tiruppani, 395
Tod, James History of Rajasthan, 234 Trinamool Congress (TMC), 265, 268, 271, 273,
275–277 Trump, Donald, 119n11 Tulsidas Ramcharitmanas, 368 Turrell, James, 104
Twitter, 6 two-nation theory, 134 Ugra Narasimha Charitable Trust, Kerala, 407n13
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 166 Vaid,
Sudesh, 90n28 Valentijn, François, 235 Valian, Virginia Why So Slow?, 61n26 Vallejo,
Boris, 115 Valmiki Ramayana, 368 Varaha painting by Ravi Varma Press, 311 Varma,
Raja Raja, 250 Varma, Raja Ravi, 237–238, 253 combined historical, Mughal, and
modern European methods of depiction, 240 Shivaji Maharaj portrait, 227–229, 233–
235 Sita Bhumipravesh painting, 312
429
typology and realistic effect of Shivaji Maharaj painting, 241–250 Venkadu village,
Chennai, 21, 389–390 Venkateshwara Temple, Hyderabad, 380–381 vernacular
capitalism, 109 Virkar, Narayan Vinayak Raigad Fort, 230 Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP), 191 visual histories, 19, 299 Waliullah, Syed, 168 Waqif, Asim Loy, 296n37
Warburg, Aby, 101, 117 Nachleben of images, 102, 105 Watson, John Forbes People of
India: A Series of Photographic Illustrations, With Descriptive Letterpress, The, 242–244
Weber, Max, 34, 339 Wilke, Hannah, 73, 89n24 Winichakul, Thongchai, 306, 310
Women’s Renaissance Centre Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 407n13 Yogi Adityanath, 336 yoni,
70 YouTube, 6 Zaman, Hameed, 147 Zamindar, Vazira, 15, 60n5, 117n1, 187n1 Long
Partition, The, 151n12 Zarur, Kathy, 344 Zitzewitz, Karin, 10, 16, 212–213, 283 Art of
Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India, The, 14, 65,
117n1, 222n109 normative secularity, of modern art, 70, 83, 100, 119n12
reinterpretations of Hindu iconography, in modern Indian art, 213 Zuberi, Abid, 153n32
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In the past decades, this has spurred a set of fresh engagement with precolonial
narratives of conquest and conflict, both Muslim and Hindu, alongside the long-standing
traditions of religious ‘syncretism’ across faiths, with continuing legacies of living
together, and with practices of cultural tolerance and pluralism.12 There has also been
a shift of emphasis as the debate has moved outside the boundaries of India.

How Secular Is Art

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How Secular Is Art

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How Secular Is Art?

As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book

Tapati Guha-Thakurta Vazira Zamindar

1 Introduction Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar

Part 2 Boundaries of Secular Nationalism 5 Displacements of Secularity: Decapitations

9 Can a Festival of a Goddess Be ‘Secular’? Tapati Guha-Thakurta

10 A Historian among the Goddesses of Modern India Sumathi Ramaswamy

Part 4 Architectures of Devotion 11 Re-enchanting Mughal Architecture: A Critique of

About the Contributors Index

Shaheen Bagh women protesters, New Delhi, 15 January 2020

Rummana Hussain, Fragments from Splitting, 1993, bricks, mirror, gheru, terracotta

Rummana Hussain, Conflux, 1993, wood, paint on acrylic, gheru, terracotta

Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins (standing), 1995, performance at National

Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins (crouching), 1995, performance at National

Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (detail), 1996, Perspex, metal key, and phototransfer,

Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (frieze), 1996, installation

Rummana Hussain, Home/Nation (wood panels), 1996, installation

Rummana Hussain, Conflux, Dissected Projection, Unearthed, 1993, installation at Our

Print of Jesus adorning prow of fishing boat, Kerala, 2017

A 135-foot Guru Rinpoche or Padmasambhava completed in 2004, Namchi, Sikkim

A 108-foot Shiva at the ‘Char Dham Pilgrimage-CumCultural-Centre’ inaugurated in

Statue of B. R. Ambedkar by sculptor Ram Sutar at the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik

Poster of Symposium, 2018

Postal stamp of Bangladesh with Zainul Abedin’s artwork

Zainul Abedin with his collection of folk art

Cover of the first annual catalogue of the Dacca Art Group

Zainul Abedin drawing the Monpura scroll, 1973

Zainul Abedin’s painting of Maulana Bhashani, circa 1970

Gulammohammed Sheikh, Mappamundi Suite Marichika II, 2003, gouache on digital

Bhupen Khakhar, Muslims Around the Mosque II, 2001

Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg, 2007–2011, four-channel video/shadow play,

Nalini Malani, Sita/Medea, 2006, reverse painting on acrylic sheet

Sewadji [Shivaji], engraving on paper, 8 x 5 inches, in Dubois de Jancigny and Xavier

Khandoba and Malsara, Chitrashala Press, Poona, 1880s, chromolithograph on paper,

Mahrattas, in J. Forbes Watson, The People of India: A Series of Photographic

M. V. Dhurandhar, Shivaji’s Stone Sculpture from Malvan, February 1906, lithograph

M. V. Dhurandhar, Shri Shivaji Maharaj, in ‘Shiv-Bharat’, Suvarnamala 5, no. 42 (March

Kaustuv Saikia, ‘Dainandin Durga/The Daily Durga on Behance’, photograph dated 5

Photographs of children from villages devastated by Cyclone Amphan in Bengal

S. K. Ayya, Tamilttay, chromolithograph published by Kamban Kazhagam, Karaikkudi,

Appu, Untitled [Bharat Mata], published by Brijbasi, Delhi, circa 2005

Bharat Mata, chromolithograph of Abanindranath Tagore’s tempera on paper, circa

Varaha, published by Ravi Varma Press, Karla-Lonavla, chromolithograph, late

Monal Kohad, Bharat Mata, watercolour wash technique, tempera, 2020

Sandhya Kumari, Maa Bharati, acrylic on canvas, 2020

10.10 Amitava Chandra, Untitled, acrylic on paper, 2020

Interior of the main mausoleum of the Taj Mahal, Agra

Sun Temple, from northeast, Gwalior, 1984–1988

12.2 Sun Temple, Konarak, circa 1250

12.3 Sun Temple, from east, Gwalior, 1984–1988

12.4 Informational placard, Sun Temple, from east, Gwalior, 1984–1988

12.5 Conjectural reconstruction of the Sun Temple at Konarak

West wall of the sanctum, Sun Temple, Gwalior, 1984–1988

Lakshmi-Narayan Temple, Delhi, 1933–1939

12.10 New Vishvanatha Temple, Varanasi, 1931–1966

Ayyur Temple awaiting restoration, Tamil Nadu

1 Introduction Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar

Luminescence: In Situ with Dissent It was an extraordinary winter of protest in India, as

Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar

Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar

Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar

In these fiery debates, ‘Indian secularism’ emerged as an important ground for

Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar