Indian Economic & Social History

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Book Review: Muslim Devotional Art in India

Sandria Freitag
Indian Economic Social History Review 2013 50: 528
DOI: 10.1177/0019464613503248
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528 / The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 50, 4 (2013): 511534

that domestic trivia can yield many insights into early colonial social relations.
For Robb stereotypes about Indians in these diaries reflect incomprehension and
powerlessness rather than the opposite. The physical facets of Calcuttabuildings,
roads, drains, aqueducts sometimes make an oblique appearance in the diaries.
The project for improving the city began with great fanfare with the publication of
Governor General Wellesleys Minute in 1803, and Blychenden as Superintendent
of Roads had a decisive role. Robbs selection has deliberately eschewed the public
but some of this material was probably used by Blychendens great grand daughter
Kathleen Blychenden when she published Calcutta, Past and Present in 1905.
Partho Datta
Zakir Husain Evening College, Delhi University
Yousuf Saeed, Muslim Devotional Art in India, New Delhi: Routledge/Taylor &
Francis Group, 2012, pp. 209.
DOI: 10.1177/0019464613503248
Examinations of Indias popular visual culture have become a growth industry in
recent years (see, for example, the writings on this subject by Kajri Jain, Christopher
Pinney, Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Patricia
Uberoi, as well as collections such as Jyotindra Jain, Richard Davis and Sumathi
Ramaswamy). Rather disappointingly, almost all of these studies have not only
been limited to the visual culture related to Hinduism and Hindu visual practices,
but they have developed analytical frameworks, even theorizing, that depends
wholly on what is labelled Hindu philosophy and understandings. Yet many of the
practices being scrutinized should be understood as more broadly South Asian in
naturean understanding impossible to reach when the evidence being presented
has been pre-selected from a Hindu archive. Now that we are able to juxtapose
these studies with Yousuf Saeeds important new treatment of Muslim motifs and
visual-culture practices, we can move beyond this Hindu-focused myopia to grasp
the larger context for the popular visual culture of South Asia.
A number of important characteristics of Saeeds study make it stand out among
its peers. Most obviously (in light of the previous point), it situates the images
within a carefully contextualised larger set of practices that demonstrate the shared,
even inclusive nature of South Asian ways of seeing (see below for the nuanced
treatment of these). He is equally good at pointing out certain aspects distinctive
to Muslims as well, such as the much larger proportion of visual materials devoted
to Perso-Arabic calligraphy, an art form acceptable across the spectrum of viewers
and especially appealing to orthodox and educated Muslims. Running throughout his discussion is the tension that inheres in these circumstances, when some
practices reflect larger South Asian cultural understandings, and others insist on a

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Book Reviews / 529

more orthodox and austere set of behaviours, a subject to which we will return.
That Saeed traces historical shifts and changes in these practices, and the content
of the images themselves, over the last century and a half provides an especially
significant depth of understanding. Chapter 2, for instance, treats together the preprint cultural practices from which have evolved standardized image practices
(p. 39). These are discussed within three categories: (1) Muslim festivals and daily
practices; (2) local sites and institutions (particularly sufi saints shrines); and
(3) Muharram-related rituals, especially significant to Shias but often appealing to
other South Asians, Muslim and non-Muslim as well.
Among the advantages of this historicised analysis is the ability to track changing treatments reflecting the interocularity of the first two mass (multiple-copy)
media of posters and photographs. (See, for instance, what may well be two related,
early-twentieth century renderings, of the kaaba in photograph and calendar-art
sample [Figures 1.11 and 1.12, pp. 3031].) Similarly, his careful documentation
of the treatment over time of Sufis as heroic figures, along with the shifting use of
representations of shrine complexesboth for their local significance and for their
broader reachis especially revealing. These not only provide evidence of popular
understandings of these key figures and their built environments in the South Asian
landscape, but they do so in ways that underscore what is shared with all those
studies of ostensibly Hindu interpretations of visual practice. In contrast, Saeed
also makes clear in Chapter 5 where representations of Muslims (and the paucity
of Muslims viewed as national heroes) present a very different visual record when
compared to the invocations of Congress leaders within a nationalist pantheon.
(This is true as much for those political leaders treated as devoutly Hindusuch as
Gandhi or Swami Vivekenandaas for those known to be secularists and atheists,
such as Bhagat Singh.) Using posters from the 1940s and drawing on the work of
others, Saeed can extend this point to show the neglect of lower castes and women
as well, thus allowing us to discern a larger pattern relating more to social status
than to religion in mid twentieth century content. Partition into two states, however, he identifies as a watershed moment, after which visual and other cultural
production forms in India relate clearly to societys misgivings about the loyalty of
Indian Muslims, which feeds as well into late twentieth century Hindutva attempts
to co-opt the visual field.
Equally revealing is the authors contrasts between the post-1947 poster art
produced in India and Pakistan. Once again, this implicit insistence on a larger
South Asian frame or contextualization helps us see patterns impossible to discern
when the focus is limited to the Hindu archive of India, alone. Most telling in this
respect is the similarity in treatment of Sufis and their shrines in both India and
Pakistan where Sayeed draws especially on the work Jurgen Frembgen, e.g., The
Friends of God Sufi Saints in Islam. Complementing this is an interesting difference in the propensity in Pakistan to use photo cut-outs to compose collage-posters
of the saints, perhaps building on the visual literacy of Pakistanis in recognising
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 50, 4 (2013): 511534

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530 / The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 50, 4 (2013): 511534

particular renditions of the saints ostensible portraits. Not surprisingly, the Pakistani poster market includes frequent images of Muslim political leaders, from
Pakistan as well as other Muslim-majority countries: this is, of course, a pattern
in stark contrast to Indian production and consumption, discussed at some length
in Chapter 5 (The Pakistani material has been analysed in fascinating detail by
Iftikhar Dadi: Political Posters in Karachi, 19881999, South Asian Popular
Culture, 2007, 5(1), pp. 1130.)
The author carefully situates his study as a personal narrative (p. 7), distinguishing it from a more scholarly or academic treatment. An independent filmmaker
treating topics ranging from music in Pakistan to the Basant festival in Delhi (and
Lahore) as well as Muharram in Amroha, Saeed has also used a Sarai fellowship
to systematically develop his understandings of this poster market. Certainly his
approach is based on lived experience and a number of years of close personalised
study of such images and related practices. Perhaps as a result, he does not see
potential political meanings embedded in a number of poster themes that he treats
as apolitical. Still, these personal experiences and insights make the subject matter especially accessible (at least for my America-based students). Moreover, the
breadth of coverage of issues related to Muslim popular visual culture, and the
extraordinary range of images included in the book, make this an important reference work for scholars and others, with real staying power.
Indeed, it is so much more: especially valuable is its nuanced and sensitive
treatment of the tensions between the emerging sanitization of the Arab or globalIslamic world (p. 7) and popular Muslim piety and the devotional gaze (p. 6). And
in the concluding chapter it poses the question, What made Indian publishers and
artists rather orthodox and reluctant about depicting Muslim saints, miracles and
other folklore freely, and what allowed the same to thrive in Pakistan despite its
orthodox elements? (p. 136). Fascinating explorations of the relationships among
the printing practices of various South Asian cities before 1947, and divergences
since 1947, emerge in response to this question, and make for some of the most
interesting analyses of the book. For such insights, as well as the extraordinarily
rich collection of images that will serve as a comprehensive reference for many
years to come, this book is highly recommended to scholars and other readers alike.
Sandria Freitag
North Carolina State University
Arupjyoti Saikia, Forests and Ecological History of Assam, 18262000, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 388.
DOI: 10.1177/0019464613503250
From a historical perspective, this book provides a detailed analysis of forests
and wildlife in Assam and the systematic commercial exploitation of these

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