South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20

Gods in the bazaar: The subjects of calendar art

Kajri Jain

To cite this article: Kajri Jain (1998) Gods in the bazaar: The subjects of calendar art, South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, 21:1, 91-108, DOI: 10.1080/00856409808723326

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856409808723326

Published online: 08 May 2007.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 288

View related articles

Citing articles: 9 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csas20
South Asia, Vol. XXI, no. 1 (1998), pp. 91-108

GODS IN THE BAZAAR: THE SUBJECTS OF

CALENDAR ART*

Kajri Jain
University of Sydney

O ONE WHO HAS SET FOOT IN INDIA CAN HAVE ESCAPED THE DIVINE

N GAZE of the printed icons, countless millions of which have been seen
and circulated all over the country since they first began to be mass-
produced in the late nineteenth century. Such pictures are available to
absolutely everyone: even if you can't afford the rupee or so that they now
cost to buy, they are given away as calendars and advertisements or can be
salvaged from labels and packaging, to be worshipped in personal and
community shrines, or simply pasted up wherever there is space, behind shop
counters, in kitchens and living rooms, temples and offices, teastalls and
vegetable markets, to watch over every drama and banality of our everyday
lives. This genre of mass-produced prints is often called 'calendar art',
because such images are often used on actual calendars, which are given out
every year by businesses all over India (and beyond) between Diwali (the
beginning of the Hindu financial year around October-November), and the
secular New Year. The term 'calendar art' tends to be used interchangeably
with the term 'bazaar art', and as such it relates not just to the calendars per
se, but also to a broad visual idiom that they employ, which extends to
smaller prints, called 'framing pictures' and larger posters, and has also
inflected advertising, packaging, comics and book illustrations, theatre, film
and TV.
The vast majority of calendar images are Hindu god-pictures, and the
point has been well made by Patricia Uberoi and others that even in their

1
I would like to thank Sandria Freitag and Sujata Patel for their comments on this paper,
presented to the 'Translatings' conference, Sydney, July 1997. Another version of this paper
entitled 'Producing the Sacred: The Subjects of Calendar Art' is forthcoming in the Journal of
Arts and Ideas.
92 SOUTH ASIA

more 'secular' imagery they predominantly envision a sacralised and

feminised nation, inscribing the subject of its address into a patriarchal and
pre-eminently Hindu semiotic structure.2 But if calendar art primarily figures
the nation in the context of religious icons, this suggests that there is also a
different kind of relationship to the image here, where it acquires significance
at semiotic levels other than that of representation. As well as looking
through the formal and figurative frame of the image to the content 'behind'
it, we have an embodied, performative relationship to the image, as a material
object which is produced and circulated, with a physical presence in space and
time. My focus here will be on the kind of subject that is addressed as the
image circulates at these other levels: as a commodity in the marketplace, and
as a ritual object, modalities which I would contend are closely intertwined.
The question I would like to start framing is that of the relationship in the
post/colonial public sphere between the forms of subjectivity inscribed by the
moral and commercial ethos within which this circulation takes place, and
those of a legacy of EuroAmerican liberal-bourgeois thought and colonial
governmentality. But I would like to emphasise that these are domains
retroactively constituted and refracted through the prism of a necessarily
contradictory postcolonial episteme; they have never existed as pure, distinct
formations, and any attempt to specify them has to be seen as a step towards
thinking through the terms of an ongoing, complex, messy and mutually
transformative negotiation between these (and other) modalities.

Art historians have tended to locate the originary moment of calendar art
around the mid to late 19th century, with the adoption of illusionist painting
techniques and technologies of mass reproduction, and in particular with the
much-imitated chromolithographs of work by artists like Raja Ravi Varma
and Bamapada Bannerjee. These were gentleman painters, patronised by the
colonial administration and the indigenous elite, who re-visioned themes from
Indian mythology using the academic conventions of western oil painting.
Their work became part of a public discourse on Indianness and civilisation
that adopted the terms of the Victorian public sphere in its colonial avatar,3

2 2 Patricia Uberoi, 'Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar Art', Economic and
Political Weekly, 28 April 1990; Tapati Guha Thakurta, 'Women as Calendar Art Icons:
Emergence of Pictorial Stereotype in Colonial India', Economic and Political Weekly of India,
26 Oct 1991.
3 3 Here I am drawing on Habermas's account of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in
Europe in the eighteenth century. While his neo-Kantian formulation has been subject to
criticisms on several fronts (including by Habermas himself), in its broad outlines it can be
taken as providing a normative framework from which modes of publicness in the postcolonial
nation-state can be seen to depart (in both senses, as beginning and as divergence). Jurgen
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. P. Burger and F.
Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 1989), and 'The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia
Article', New German Critique, Vol. 3 (Fall 1974), pp. 49-55.
 SUBJECTS OF CALENDAR ART 93

not least through its interface with the discursive realm of 'fine art' - art
schools, exhibitions, journals and societies4 - and as such it was taken up as
part of a nationalist imaginary, with all its attendant paradoxes. Here the
nation was figured in terms of a mythic Hindu golden age, corresponding
both formally and ideologically to European Academic painting's reassertion
of its civilisational roots in classical Greece and Rome; it was within this
representational frame that religious and mythic imagery became a legitimate
part of an elite nationalist public sphere5 [Fig. 5]. But as such work was taken
up for broader dissemination in the form of prints, a different set of
imperatives came into play from the marketplace, where religious icons and
pilgrim souvenirs had already been circulating since at least the late 18th
century.
To this extent the genealogy of calendar art goes back to this period
before technological mass reproduction, when religious images emerged from
the temples and courts into the bazaars: the pata paintings of Kalighat in
Calcutta, the luminous Tanjore paintings in the south, and the pilgrim
souvenirs produced by the Chitrakar community of Nathdwara in Rajasthan
for the influential Krishna-worshipping Pushtimarg (or Vallabha) sect.
Indeed, over the past century calendar art has been the site of a complex relay
of influences from the Tanjore and Nathdwara lineages and the British-
instituted art schools in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. Given the emphasis in
the marketplace on religious icons, it is hardly surprising that the academicist
narrativity in the work of painters like Ravi Varma reverted in the prints to a
more frontal, iconic schema, characterised by a central figure in the
foreground against a lush mythic or decorative background, with very little
middle ground [Fig. 4]. This, along with the flatter, simpler tones which
went with optimising output in the lithographic process, is seen by later
commentators as a regression somewhat loosely attributed to popular demand
and subsumed under the general evil of commodification.6 And Varma's
critics around the beginning of this century soon spurned his hybrid idiom for

4 4 Our knowledge of the mechanics of this owes a huge debt to the painstaking art historical
labours of Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Partha Mitter. See Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of
a New 'Indian' Art (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), and Partha Mitter, Art
and Nationalism in Colonial India: 1850-1922 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1994).
5 5 On the ideological aspects of Varma's mythological painting, see in particular Geeta Kapur,
'Ravi Varma: Representational Dilemmas of a Nineteenth Century Indian Painter', Journal of
Arts and Ideas, nos. 17-18 (1989); Ashish Rajadhyaksh, 'The Phalke Era: Conflict of
Traditional Form and Modern Technology', Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 14-15 (1987);
Tapati Guha-Thakurta, 'Westernisation and Tradition in South Indian Painting in the
Nineteenth Century', Studies in History, Vol. 2, no. 2, n.s. (1986); Partha Mitter, Art and
Nationalism in Colonial India, as above.
6 6 See in particular Ashish Rajadhyaksh, 'The Phalke Era', Journal of Arts and Ideas, as above.
94 SOUTH ASIA

the supposedly more authentically 'Indian' forms of the so-called Bengal

Renaissance.
But despite this fall from grace in one arena of nationalist imagining,
commercial prints had already begun to trace physically a pan-national sphere
of common address, through their circulation via what colonial reports
referred to as the 'bazaar' sector, the indigenous trading networks dominated
by Vaishnava merchants from northern and western India.7 Not only was this
the constituency which circulated prints, and indeed continues to do so, but it
was also often a source of capital for their production. To give you a sense of
the profile and spread of this market, the Ravi Varma Fine Arts Litho Works
was set up in Bombay in 1892 with capital partly supplied by the Vaishnava
merchant, Govardhandas Khatau Makhanji; its main distributors from around
1897 were the picture merchants or publishers, Anant Shivaji Desai. The
Delhi picture publishing firm of Hem Chander Bhargava and Sons was set up
in 1900. In 1902 Ravi Varma's brother, Raja Raja Varma, wrote in his diary
of seeing their prints for sale in Visakhapatnam.8 From 1927 onwards the
Brijbasi brothers, followers of the Vallabha sect, were reproducing paintings
by Nathdwara artists and distributing them from their framing shop in
Karachi - after partition they returned to Mathura. A painting dated 'Mysore,
1932' was printed at the Ravi Varma press near Bombay for a framing
company in Bangalore. Another early picture publisher, the Marwari firm of
Nathmal Chandelia, had branches in Calcutta and Jaipur.9
Busily negotiating their own sophisticated modes of intimacy with
capital in the bazaar were the predominantly Vaishnava mercantile
communities such as the Marwaris, Banias, Khatris, Aroras and Bhatias. The
historian, C. A. Bayly, has traced the development of these communities in
the late precolonial and early colonial periods as an increasingly mobile, yet
unified and successful group, which was able to forge a 'sense of moral
community' across caste boundaries with Brahmins and ascetics on the one
hand and local rulers on the other. Bayly's account suggests that while this
intermediate alliance did not consolidate itself into an indigenous bourgeoisie
by channelling capital towards industrial production, as a moral community
its ethos formed the basis for an alternative public sphere, which has
resurfaced from time to time as a socio-political presence: he links it to the

7 7 On the bazaar economy see Rajat Kanta Ray, 'Introduction', Rajat K. Ray (ed.),
Entrepreneurship and Industry in India 1800-1947 (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992),
and "The Bazar: Indigenous Sector of the Indian Economy', in Dwijendra Tripathi (ed.),
Business Communities of India: A Historical Perspective (Delhi, Manohar, 1984).
8 8 Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, p. 213.
9 9 Amit Ambalal, Krishna as Shrinathji: Rajasthani Paintings from Nathdwara (Ahmedabad,
Mapin, 1987), p. 90.
 SUBJECTS OF CALENDAR ART 95

Hindu Mahasabha of the 1930s and the Jana Sangh of the 1970s, both
precursors of the present-day Hindu Right.10 I would contend that the
influence of this nexus extended over both verbal and visual forms of print
capitalism to inform the anticolonial Hindu/nationalist imaginary, as the
dominant communities of the bazaar sector became involved in the
indigenous culture industry from the late nineteenth century onwards. This
occurred at various levels, the idiom of the bazaar prints forming continuities
with that of illustrated magazines aimed at 'neo-literates' (such as Kalyan,
published by the Geeta Press11), as well as plays, novels, and religious tracts,
articulating the specifically Vaishnava ethos of the bazaar as a kind of public
Hindu/nationalist commonsense, both at the level of popular religiosity and in
the invocation of 'tradition' in the discourse of the nationalist elite.12

According to the accounts of C. A. Bayly and Rajat Kanta Ray, many of

the bazaar's trading mechanisms were able to persist alongside the formal
market structure regulated by the colonial state: mutual adaptation and
coexistence were in the interests of both sides. The bazaar's complex and
sophisticated mercantile systems combined the use of monetary forms with
bills of exchange or promissory notes called hundis (in other words,
instruments of credit),13 circulating through agents working on commission
and forming long-distance networks which interfaced with global trade in all
directions, through Persia, China, Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula and
eastern Africa. Because its 'informal' dealings were not subject to a
standardised system of legal enforcement, the bazaar economy initially relied
heavily on long-distance networks of trust. This meant that participation in

10
C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British
Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983). See in particular
Ch. 13, 'Corporations, qasbahs and the new politics, 1870-1920', pp. 449-457.
11
Monika Horstmann gives an account of the Marwari/Vaishnava background of Kalyan and the
other Geeta Press publications in 'Towards a Universal Dharma: Kalyan and the Tracts of the
Gita Press', V. Dalmia and H. von Stietencron (eds), Representing Hinduism: The
Construction of Religious Tradition and National Identity (New Delhi, Sage, 1995).
12
I do not want to overstate this hegemony, because of course this is still an extremely varied
field of complex interactions, but as I argue in the dissertation from which this paper is an
offshoot, there are aspects of popular visual representation which appear to be specifically
informed by the reformulation of Vaishnava bhakti traditions through the colonial period, even
as they are then adapted to other forms of religious imagery. On the evolution of Vaishnavism
as a hegemonic form of Hindu self-representation in literature, particularly the writings of
'Bharatendu' Harishchandra (who again hailed from a Pushtimargi background), see Vasudha
Dalmia, '"The Only Real Religion of the Hindus": Vaishnava Self-Representation in the Late
Nineteenth Century', in Dalmia and von Stietencron (eds), Representing Hinduism, as above."
13
On the global trade interface and monetary forms, see Frank Perlin, 'Proto-Industrialisation and
Pre-Colonial South Asia', Past and Present, Vol.98 (Feb. 1983), pp. 30-95.
96 SOUTH ASIA

the ethos was crucial to, and indissoluble from, business success.14 A key
value here was creditworthiness, which depended on social, moral and
religious as much as economic performance, such that the moral qualities of
piety and frugality would somewhat paradoxically translate into wealth and
status. Notions of value in the marketplace as they affected, say, interest rates
or the conservation and mobilisation of capital, were thus inseparable from
the moral economy which dictated the circulation of goods, money, hundis,
favours, people and their reputations.15 Calendar art, I would suggest, is an
index of the ongoing negotiation of certain features of this bazaar ethos with
industrialised mass production.16 This is evident both in the organisation of
the calendar industry and in the way in which the annual ritual of giving
calendars to business associates and steady customers continues to reinforce
the personalised networks of trust and reciprocity, and the moral index of
piety, associated with the functioning of the bazaar.
In the pre-Independence era the reliance on lithography and halftone
letterpress blocks made coloured prints somewhat expensive and restricted
their circulation to a more affluent constituency. But the introduction of
cheap offset printing from the '50s and '60s onwards gave rise to a boom in
calendars as a popular and affordable form of indigenous publicity for
businesses of any size, from the local grocer's shop to industrial giants like
the Birlas and Mafatlals. This boom has largely been centred on a tiny but
extraordinary town called Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu, and the enterprise of its
so-called 'backward caste' Nadar community, which came to compete so
successfully on price that by 1980 Sivakasi alone housed 40 per cent of the
country's offset printing capacity. The calendar industry owes its immense
reach to its pan-national bazaar-type network of agents, working on
commission, who scour local markets for orders from annual catalogues of
so-called 'ready-made' designs from Sivakasi printers. These orders are

14 14 Similarly, Clifford Geertz describes the Moroccan bazaar economy as one where reliable
information is at a premium precisely because the quality, value and availability of commodities
is not standardised. Clifford Geertz, 'Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou', in C. Geertz, H.
Geertz and L. Rosen (eds), Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1979).
15 15 C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, see in particular Ch. 11, "The Merchant Family
as a Business Enterprise', pp. 394-426.
16 16 I am using the notion of the ethos here partly to avoid the loaded, historically specific term
'public sphere', but more importantly as a way of keeping in play the register of performance.
The usage of 'ethos' as the possession of moral qualities in the register of spirit or essence (the
way it appears in Aristotle's Ethics) is constantly reanimated by its usage as the performance
of these moral qualities in a supplementary register of persuasive practice (as in Aristotle's
Rhetoric, where 'ethos' describes those qualities which make the orator trustworthy). In other
words, it slips between that which simply 'is' and that which must be continually pointed
towards, re/asserted, re/established, re/made. See Jakob Wisse, Ethos and Pathos From
Aristotle to Cicero (Amsterdam, Adolf M. Hakkert, 1989).
 SUBJECTS OF CALENDAR ART 97

passed on to publishers or calendar manufacturers in local centres, who in

turn order bulk quantities of printed calendar designs from Sivakasi with the
bottom third left blank; the publishers then have the requisite number of
calendars (ranging from a few hundred to several thousand) overprinted by
local letterpresses with the client's name.
To the extent that the calendar is a vehicle of goodwill and the renewal
of reciprocal ties, it has two essential features: firstly, the name of the
company, which combines publicity with that embodiment of the donor
which (in the Maussian reading) comprises the spirit of the gift;17 and
secondly, an auspicious image. This auspiciousness is figured not only in its
content - its religious, morally uplifting or otherwise pleasant theme - and in
its form, where bright colours and general decorativeness are at a premium,
but also in its very newness, which is seen not so much in absolute terms, in
the sense of radical originality, but in relation to what has gone immediately
before. There is a veritable taboo among printers against repeating the
previous year's designs in their catalogues, even though creating a 'new'
design might only mean replacing the background on a Ganesh or Shiva or
giving Lakshmi a different coloured sari.

It is in these terms, then, that an image is judged at the level of the

consumer - and I should point out that here the consumers are those who
choose images for their companies' calendars. It is only at second hand or
more that these prints reach the people who put them up and often worship
them, a constituency which includes the urban and rural poor. But for
consumer and 'end-user' alike, the primary consideration with respect to the
image is its ritual appropriateness as either a gift-cum-advertisement or as an
object of worship, not its appeal as an object of contemplative aesthetic
judgement. Accordingly, the focus is on what is known in the industry as the
'subject' of the picture, whether it is Shankar, Mata, Ganesh, Aamir Khan or
the shrine of Ajmer Sharif, and not on the artist - most consumers would be
hard put to name any calendar artist other than Ravi Varma.

Already, then, you can see how we have travelled quite a distance from
the situation where an artist like Ravi Varma was celebrated and denigrated
within the discursive context of 'fine art'. But that other context also persists
within the image in the form of the artist's signature, which appears on most
calendars despite the way in which its value is evacuated in the marketplace.
When you stop for a minute to look at this little mark of excess, you begin to

17 17 ' . . . to give something is to give a part of oneself . . . what is in reality a part of one's nature
and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someone's spiritual essence.'
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (New
York, Norton, 1967), p. 10.
98 SOUTH ASIA

notice a more generalised looseness of fit between the signature, the work and
the artist as producer of the work, which seems to me to signal a negotiation
between the subject inscribed by the calendar industry and the ethos of the
bazaar on the one hand, and 'fine art' and the bourgeois public sphere on the
other.
One of the greatest problems for Ravi Varma's press was that as soon as
his prints entered circulation they were rampantly copied, imitated, or simply
photographed and painted over - to the extent that Varma approached
Gokhale to pass a bill against plagiarism, but to no avail.18 Very few court
cases have been initiated to enforce copyright: the picture publishers S. S.
Brijbasi and Sons were involved in an unsuccessful one in the '50s,19 another
failed attempt was made in the '60s to accuse Kondiah Raju in the Madras
High Court of 'stealing' another artist's design20, and an action was taken out
in 1960 by Johnson and Johnson against the Bombay publisher of an S. V.
Aras calendar alleged to have plagiarised the 'Johnson's baby', also published
by the same printer.21 In the latter case the printer is said to have persisted in
printing the controversial baby despite promises in court to the contrary,
shoring up the common wisdom in the industry that copyright simply does
not exist. To this extent it is significant that this case involved a multinational
firm; within the industry, artists and publishers alike admit that everyone
copies, so none of them can afford to point a finger at the others.
Ever since the early days of chromolithography, artists have not
hesitated to put their signatures to work clearly based on existing and often
well-known prints: so much so that I would suggest that part of the notorious
impossibility of enforcing copyright in the calendar industry is a different
approach to the notion of authorial property. Take the Death of Jatayu
[Fig. 1], for instance, well-known as a Ravi Varma painting, and popular
enough in its day to appear not just as a framing picture but also as a
matchbox label [Fig. 2]; almost exactly the same image appeared again as a
calendar in the late '50s, boldly signed 'Kartik Das'. In a sense it is as though
the signature is attached here to the physical act of re/creating an image
which, through its circulation in the public domain, could be seen as having
18
Balakrishna Nayar, Raja Ravi Varma (Trivandrum, 1953), cited in Partha Mitter, op. cit.,
p. 214.
19
Interview with M. L. Garg, proprietor, S. S. Brijbasi and Sons (Delhi branch), Delhi, Nov.
1994.
20
Stephen Inglis, 'Suitable for Framing: The Work of a Modern Master', in Lawrence Babb and
Susan S. Wadley (eds), Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia (Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), note 12, p. 74.
21
This was the formative period of what is now a well-established genre of 'babies', of which at
least one or two now appear in every publisher's catalogue. Aras is well known in the industry
as the 'baby artist'. Interview with S. V. Aras, Bombay, December 1995.
 SUBJECTS OF CALENDAR ART 99

been assimilated into a realm of common ownership; thus the Death of Jatayu
also appears etched into a glass window at the recently built Tulsi Mandir (a
Satyanarayan temple) in Varanasi, now unaccompanied by a signature in this
non-commercial and non-'artistic' context. This appropriation of images
from the public realm can be understood not only in terms of plagiarism but
also in terms of a more artisanal approach to image-production, that has not
traditionally dealt in signatures, and in which iconographic knowledge and
techniques are part of a 'commons', a resource available to all (that is, within
a particular community or lineage). And people in the calendar industry often
cite their predominantly divine and supposedly unchanging subject matter as a
reason for the absence of copyright; as one Sivakasi printer disarmingly put it:
Even though we purchase new designs, people are telling, you
are giving the same type of designs. So then what is the use of
purchasing new designs? . . . See, mythological means, gods.
In that we cannot change anything. Only colours we can
change, dress we can change. Subject means, same. Murugan
means Murugan, Ganesh means Ganesh.22
At the same time as calendar art delinks the signature from a certain
notion of authorial originality, it also begins to delink it from location within
a particular individual. For instance, even though the artist Ramlingkum died
in 1992, his works continue to be modified to produce 'new' ones still
bearing his signature. Ramlingkum was taught to paint by Kondiah Raju,
whose own early training was in the Tanjore tradition, and who from around
the mid '40s was at the centre of a veritable school of calendar artists in
Kovilpatti, near Sivakasi.23 Kondiah's disciples, including at one stage
Ramlingkum, used to sign their master's name to paintings they had worked
on, much in the manner of a brand name, like Walt Disney [Fig. 3].
Similarly Venkatesh Sapar, currently the rising star of the industry, first
learned to paint from his father, also a calendar artist; until he graduated from
art school (the prestigious Sir JJ School of Art in Bombay), Venkatesh signed
his work 'Sapar Son'. While he now uses the signature 'V. V. Sapar' for the
majority of his work, he also uses the name of his five year old son Pratik
when 'signing' paintings of subjects he considers more child-like (birds,
butterflies and so on), and likewise both he and his wife Maya (a graduate in
Applied Art from the JJ School of Art) use her signature, 'V. Maya', on the
more 'modern' designs which are her forte, but which Venkatesh paints as
well [Fig. 6].

22
Interview with Chandranath, proprietor, The Orient Litho Press, Sivakasi, Dec. 1994, in
English.
23
On the Kovilpatti artists see Stephen Inglis, 'Suitable for Framing: The Work of a Modern
Master', op. cit.
100 SOUTH ASIA

Figure I 24

Figure 2 25

24
'The Death of Jatayu', signed Kartik Das, calendar, date unknown. (Courtesy of Patricia and
J. P. S. Uberoi.)
25
Version of Raja Ravi Varma's painting, 'The Death of Jatayu', on a matchbox label. (From
Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, Cambridge, 1994, p. 215).
 SUBJECTS OF CALENDAR ART 101

Figure 3 2 6

26
'Narasimha', signed 'C. Kondiah Raju', followed by T . S. Subbiah', and then 'Kovilpatti'.
1975 calendar from Sunshine Calendar Co., Nai Sadak, Delhi. (Countesy of Patricia and
J. P. S. Uberoi.)
27
'Arjuna and Subhadra', by Raja Ravi Varma, oil, 1996, Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum Trust,
Baroda, print. (From R. C. Sharma and Rupika Chawla (eds), Raja Ravi Varma: New
Perspectives, New Delhi, 1993, p. 20).
102 SOUTH ASIA

Figure 5 28

Figure 629

>. >•

28 28 'Rama Patabhishekha' by Raja Ravi Varma, print. (From R. C. Sharma and Rupika Chawla
(eds), Raja Ravi Varma: New Perspectives, p. 139).
29 29 Three of the signatures used by V. V. Sapar: 'V. V. Sapar', 'V. Maya', and S. Pratik.
 SUBJECTS OF CALENDAR ART 103

While the signature in these cases might seem to work somewhat like a
brand name, these names have little - if anything - to do with the commercial
success of an image. Nor does it mark a unique and original locus of
creativity, for it is more strongly associated with a certain type of subject or a
pedagogical lineage rather than an individual's artistic oeuvre. So even as it is
naturalised as an integral part of the artwork through calendar art's colonial
interface with fine art, the signature does not quite mark the place of the
romantic formulation of authorship as it developed in eighteenth century
Europe, with its separation between 'ideas', belonging to the public domain,
and their singular, unique 'expression' by an author, which is seen as an
individual's private property, to be protected by copyright law. Intrinsic to
this formulation, as John Frow has pointed out in his recent work on the
commodity, is the liberal, or to be specific Lockean, conception of the self-
and property-possessing sovereign subject, with proprietorial rights over -
and thus the right to freely trade with - one's body and those unique forms of
information that flow from it, like the signed 'creative' work of art.30

So what is it about the ethos of the bazaar which causes these tight links
between the productive individual and knowledge as intellectual property to
begin unravelling in the ways I have just described? One factor I have
signalled along the way is the location of sacred images within a common
realm of ownership. At the level of the producers of calendar art, the
'commons' of artistic techniques and knowledge of iconographic conventions
is made available by a teacher to an artistic community, family or 'school'
and/or by the mass production and public circulation of images - even Ravi
Varma learned oil painting by copying from reproductions. What we have
here, then, is an example of how commodification in the arena of
industrialised mass production does not automatically engender what Frow
calls the 'second-level' commodification of intellectual property. If the
commodity form transmutes common resources or public goods into private
goods and resources, Frow argues, it does so at different semiotic levels,
which correspond to different historical 'moments'. A distinction must
therefore be made between industrialisation or the serialised mass production
of cultural goods (such as calendar icons), and the commodification of
intellectual property, a second level related historically to the liberal-

30 30 John Frow, "The Signature: Three Arguments about the Commodity Form', in Helen Grace
(ed.), Aesthesia and the Economy of the Senses (Nepean, PAD Publications, University of
Western Sydney, 1996), p. 177. (This formulation is developed at length in relation to the gift
and commodity economies and the continuing encroachment of commodification onto human
bodies and ideas in Time and Commodity Culture: Four Essays (Oxford, Clarendon Press,
forthcoming.)
104 SOUTH ASIA

bourgeois formulation of subjectivity and authorship, which also informed

the category of 'fine art'.31
As far as the 'end-user' is concerned, the singular 'expression' of the
common 'idea' is located in the personality of the deity rather than that of the
artist. Value here is associated with the sacred 'self-production' of the gods
themselves, whose ability to take on numerous alluring manifestations
(avatar) or forms (roop) in a serial economy attracts and maintains their
devotees' attention. While mass replication of the artwork works as one
movement of commodification, there is a strong opposing movement in the
practically universal circulation and ritual use of sacred images outside the
ambit of temple icons mediated by priests, whereby restricted access to
singular images gives way to universal access to the divine. This impulse
corresponds in its turn to a 'moment' in South Asian history, that of the
socio-religious bhakti or devotional movements from around the eighth
century on through the medieval period, which sought to free worship from
the control of the priestly castes, advocating a personalised, often ecstatic
surrender to the divine. So in calendar art, the private ownership of resources
or commodification on one level makes it possible on another level to re-
introduce the image into the realms of possibility or virtuality opened up by
the mass address of the bhakti movements, with their potently twinned
promise of socially egalitarian subjectivation and psychic abjection, equally
imparting to all the freedom to become slaves of love for the divine.

The egalitarianism of the bhakti movements, challenging caste and other

hierarchies (class, patriarchy),32 has been related to the influence of Islam on
the one hand and on the other to the rising aspirations of an artisanal class
becoming increasingly affluent through technological development and
increased production during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.33 The
deterritorialising frontier of the bazaar in the late precolonial north and west
has to be seen in the context of the social and economic upheavals emanating
from these vectors and fluxes of the medieval period: conquest by invading
Muslim forces, warring princely states forming and breaking alliances, the
challenge to caste hierarchy and its reinstitutionalisation, the movement of
peoples displaced by war and opportunity, ideas and goods circulating along

31
A third level in Frow's schema, further commodifying access to this already copyrighted
information, relates to the contemporary electronic storage of information.
32
On the remarkable number of women bhakti poets, see Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, 'Literature
of the Ancient and Medieval Periods: Reading Against the Orientalist Grain', Susie Tharu and
K. Lalitha (eds), Women Writing in India (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 56-68.
33
Man Habib, "The Historical Background of the Popular Monotheistic Movement of the 15th-
17th Centuries', mimeo, 1965, cited in Harbans Mukhia, 'The Ideology of the Bhakti
Movement: The Case of Dadu Dayal', in Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (ed), History and
Society: Essays in Honour of Prof. Niharranjan Ray (Calcutta, K. P. Bagchi, 1976), p. 451.
 SUBJECTS OF CALENDAR ART 105

with conquerors, preachers, traders, pilgrims, refugees. On the one hand the
expansive movement of commodities can be related to the challenge to
entrenched hierarchies by artisans, 'untouchables', and women, but on the
other hand it can also be related to the hegemonising interests of intermediate
alliances of merchants, priests and/or kings,34 and is therefore also associated
with the frequent reinstitutionalisation of caste within bhakti cults (which has
been the case with the Pushtimarg sect, among others). However, this
expanded devotional realm is not directly articulated with the interests of the
mercantile communities of the bazaar by means of commodification as such,
but is mediated via a sacred economy at a level which actually resists the
'second level' commodification of intellectual property. Underlying this
resistance, I would suggest, is a moral economy which tends to differ from
that of the bourgeois public sphere in its approach to locating the sources of
value.

In his study of the morality of transactions involving priests in Banaras,

the anthropologist Jonathan Parry observes that here commerce and the
marketplace are not regarded as a realm of moral peril, in stark contrast to the
attitude towards the merchant or usurer in Aristotle and then in medieval
Christianity, where money is seen as inherently evil and polluting, and there
is an intense suspicion of 'unnatural' sources of value.35 On this basis he
argues for a distinction between two kinds of moral economies. On one hand
are those which uphold an autarchic ideal of self-sufficiency, where
production, seen as the 'natural' source of value, is for the direct use or
benefit of the producer. Parry's key insight here is to link the mistrust of
commerce to the valorisation of self-sufficiency, rather than to a denigration
of exchange as such;36 his formulation helps us to see how an ethos of self-
sufficiency and the sovereign productive body persists in the liberal
formulation of the subject, even as bourgeois political economy seeks to
overcome feudalism's valorisation of agricultural production and antipathy to
mercantilism.37 Political economy maintains an investment in a rational, self-

34
For instance, during the politically unstable period from the late seventeenth to the mid-
nineteenth centuries, the highly sanctified temple images of the Pushtimargis were moved from
place to place by priests in western India, wooed by warring rajas wanting to shore up their
power and legitimate their rule through the aura of these idols and the pilgrim economy they
would bring in their wake. Norbert Peabody, 'In Whose Turban Does the Lord Reside?: The
Objectification of Charisma and the Fetishism of Objects in the Hindu Kingdom of Kota',
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 33, no. 4(1991), pp. 726-54.
35
Jonathan Parry, 'On the Moral Perils of Exchange', in J. Parry and M. Bloch (eds), Money and
the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 85-6.
36
I thank Paul Brass for pushing me to refine my use of Parry's distinction between moral
economies based on production and exchange.
37
Thus the political historian J. G. A. Pocock identifies a central tussle in the development of a
modern secular, political and historical self-consciousness, between 'virtue' and 'providence'
106 SOUTH ASIA

interested, utilising, or labouring body; indeed, Jean Baudrillard accuses Marx

of perpetuating precisely this aspect of political economy in what he sees as
Marx's fetishisation of production.38
This is counterposed to those moral economies which valorise exchange
as the very constitution of society and delink production from such notions of
self-sufficiency - as with the interdependent division of labour in 'Hindu
society' on the basis of caste. In this second type of system, where we might
place the ethos of the bazaar, exchange itself is the source of value, and is
seen as 'naturally' productive due to the socio-moral imperative that
exchanges (of both gifts and commodities) must attract increasing returns,
and thus maintain reciprocal flows. For instance the gifting of a
calendar/advertisement ups the stakes in what might have otherwise been a
straightforward commodity transaction, where any need for continuing the
relationship between the buyer and the seller is obviated by the equality of
exchange inherent in a fair price. In this system, then, the generation of value
is not located in a sovereign productive body, whether it is the labouring
individual, the corporation or the nation.

Each is situated at the blind spot of the other. The liberal conception of
the subject tends to disavow the way in which the value inhering in, and
created by, the individual subject cannot be thought of apart from the
transactional and transformational networks by which it is constituted even as
it constitutes them. The locus of this disavowal in the bourgeois-Christian
symbolic universe is the category of the fetish, which as value-laden,
animated, libidinalised object poses a direct threat to the subject's sovereignty

on the one hand and 'corruption', 'commerce' and 'fortune' on the other. An ethos in which
men of virtue earn the right to reap the steady benefits of divine providence or nature is
confronted with fickle forms of wealth that appear and disappear as though out of nowhere, as
with financial credit, emerging in the eighteenth century amid hostility and mistrust, its textual
instruments bordering on fiction. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine
Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1975). On credit as fiction, see Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early
Nineteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996).
38
But Baudrillard's critique, both of Marx and of capitalism, is based on a even more radical
Utopia than unalienated labour: the primitivist fantasy of what he calls symbolic exchange,
where Bataillean notions of waste, loss, sacrifice and excess are opposed to production, value
and an exploitative accumulation of power. What he does not account for is the way in which
such excessive forms might be harnessed, as it seems to me they are in the ethos of the bazaar,
to generate value via a libidinal economy of the sacred which is inseparable from, and
interconvertible with, value in political economy. Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production,
trans. Mark Poster (St. Louis, Telos Press, 1975). See also Jean Baudrillard, 'Fetishism and
Ideology: The Semiological Reduction', in Towards a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis, Telos Press, 1981), p. 89. For a materialist critique of
such semiological readings of Marx's notion of fetishism, see William Pietz, 'Fetishism and
Materialism', in Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds), Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca,
Cornell University Press, 1993).
 SUBJECTS OF CALENDAR ART 107

(to this extent the notions of the fetish and of sovereignty belong to the same
fantasy-formation): the problem is not so much that its animation irrationally
points to the work of some supernatural agency, but that it substitutes for the
productive, and indeed reproductive, human subject. Here I need not remind
you that the fetish par excellence in the EuroAmerican imaginary has been
the 'pagan idol', of which calendar icons are the latest, most rampant
incarnation. The subject in the bazaar ethos has as its locus of disavowal the
role of singular, finite bodies in value production: thus the denigration of the
so-called 'untouchable' lower castes through their association with manual
work, ritually polluting carcasses and bodily wastes; the reproductive body of
woman has posed a similar threat to the social order. In calendar art this blind
spot with respect to the location of value and agency in the labouring body
has been manifested, until recently, as a general rule against painting the gods
with muscles (this is often frustrating for the artists, keen to display their
grasp of anatomy). All power is divine, located in the divine will, not the
body; the point of giving the gods a human form is to inspire effect, of which
the main locus is not the body but the face and eyes.

My intention in sketching out this distinction is not for a moment to

shore up any ideas about 'Indian society' as an essentially hierarchical or
transactional monolith, or worse, as essentially spiritual rather than
materialistic. On the contrary, what I have tried to do here is to link these
systemic features to a historically specific, indeed modern constituency, its
interests, and its ethos, one where the material and the sacred are
indissociable. And I hope I have also been able to show how inaccurate it
would be to link the sacredness we see in calendar art to some kind of
romantic notion of self-sufficient rural community and timeless tradition, or
to impute the way that calendars look solely to the tastes and requirements of
the 'masses' (an attitude expressed by calendar publishers and artists as well
as champions of the modernist 'fine art' mainstream). But by now all this
should go without saying. What I am more interested in is how the networks
of the bazaar, with their valorisation of exchange, have in a sense forged their
own direct links with capital, where self-seeking, both sacred and material,
does not necessarily follow the patterns of civil society and the bourgeois
public sphere, and yet must negotiate a certain relationship with them and
with formations such as the nation and democratic politics. Clarifying the
terms of these epistemic, aesthetic and moral-ethical distinctions becomes
particularly relevant, it seems to me, as the bazaar becomes more closely
articulated with a global marketplace and its formal attempts to enforce
copyright and patent agreements through forums such as GATT. In this light
perhaps it might not be too far-fetched to draw a connection between this
renewed valency of the liberal imbrication of subjectivity and property and
the resurgence of Hindu absolutist claims to the nation, their highly
108 SOUTH ASIA

contradictory rhetoric, and of course their muscular images of the god-king

But as with many of the events surrounding the claim to nationhood, and
the ethnic and religious absolutisms of the past decades, the intensities which
traverse the political field often have little to do with the kinds of rational
intersubjectivity assumed by the bourgeois public sphere. And the relative
inability of 'second level' commodification to take hold in the public domain
so far suggests that there are also other forces at work, even within an
increasingly globalised scenario. Just as global capital depends on local forms
of exploitation to maximise its profits, it also interacts with local structures of
desire, an encounter with the potential to destabilise as well as shore up the
liberal subject. The global cultural economy itself trades in increasingly mass-
mediated phenomena of intersubjective effect and desire akin to those of
bhakti - phenomena of the mass, the mob, or the multitude, which both civil
society and the instruments of the modern state have tried so hard to wish
away. Their sporadic, unpredictable power is discounted as an aberration even
as the ecstatic crowd resurfaces everywhere in the realm of global mass
culture - at political rallies and prayer meetings as much as at sporting events
and rock concerts: 'fan' is short for 'fanatic'. Perhaps the greatest challenge
at this point for those of us who trade in reason is to try and begin to
understand, and, who knows, perhaps even to (again) begin to speak, strong
languages of desire such as those in which the calendars so successfully trade.

39 39 The issue of gods and muscular bodies has been explored with erudition and insight by
Anuradha Kapur in relation to the changing depiction of Ram arising out of the janmabhoomi
campaign. Anuradha Kapur, 'Deity to Crusader: The Changing Iconography of Ram', in
Gyanendra Pandey (ed.), Hindus and Others (New Delhi, Viking, 1993).