An array of artifacts from Indian popular culture contexts establishes that the acts of seeing became acts of knowing in 20th century India (1). Here is proposing a Kerala archive of print pictures as an unarticulated specimen of the visual culture practices of 20th century Indian literate societies. I choose Kerala because this region had been a lively laboratory of literacy that tested the ideas of public sphere, print capitalism and public action (2). Focus of this paper is on the historical making of a ‘reader-viewer’ whose everyday act of seeing and knowing constituted a range of civil society identities like editors, writers, artists, readers, intellectuals, critics and onlookers who keep on constructing meaning from their world. A print-picture is the forensic evidence of this public domain (3). The reader-viewer of a modern Indian civil society looks, witnesses, watches, reads, fantasizes, interprets and even thrives on a discourse of the verbal and the visual ingredients of the world. The periodical print media is a metaphorical space where fact and fiction merge easily, though often fictitiously. The printed page also generated and sustained many suitable representational languages of art for a merge of the aesthetic ‘high art’ and the commercial ‘low art’ in modern India. Only upon a critical reading, the page shows the discreet drama of hegemonicrelations between people involved in it as editors, writers, artists and readers. The legacy of ‘reader- viewer’ also historically makes sense of the contemporary art’s critical acts of photo-romancing, parodying and masquerading. Not necessarily forming a homogenous national identity or popular culture with binding characteristics, this identity is discreetly shaped by the specific social history of ‘mind- watching’ in different print-culture industries of India in regional languages.
From the flip side of Looking:
Early stages of life spent in the world of Malayalam periodical magazines of 1970s, 80s and 90s first signaled a characteristic world of pictures to me. Many elders had pretty prided collection of illustrated magazines of culture and current affairs. When these home libraries grew into quite uncontainable size over a time, these bundles inadvertently got disposed off in the name of old stuff, ‘the trash’. The pictures and stories thereafter persist in memory, if not archived. Those magazines had plenty of photos, drawings and sketches, mostly of men and women in actions, gestures, dialogues and messages. On flipping through many bundles, I have seen that those people in pictures, especially women, got extra spectacles, a moustache, lips or eyebrows doodled with pens.
Once I consecrated to the study of art history in ‘the faculty of fine arts’, this picture-world receded as a matter from some obscured cultural confinement, an ossified pictorial stuff pertaining only to the cultural orthodoxies and mundane behaviors of a particular reading class. But the impact of those periodical images was so appealing and brittle that they need be consciously waged, otherwise will be shelved and disposed. To recognize their collective cultural functionality, it turned important to articulate their register. Interestingly, after decades long silence, the Malayali cultural public (editors, readers, writers) was perhaps feeling an irresistible need to acknowledge their modern art’s local operational mould, particularly the genre of literary illustration. By the late 1990s, the cultural scenario of the region turned on a celebrative mode for selected ‘illustrators’. Selective celebration of couple of illustrators was perhaps an act of cultural pride, but not yet convincing registers of visual culture agencies. In an effort to locate the undercurrents of visual modernity brought in by print-pictures, one need to historically contextualize the Malayali reader in his own pictorial materials. This would also be a vision from the unarticulated flip side, the Malayali looker”.
A picturesque public domain:
Emerging through periodicals was a field of the public that kept on picture-capturing itself as readers or onlookers from a higher vantage point (Fig.1). Dreams of an epochal shift in sensibility were offered by the tools of generic illusionism and representation. Book was a dramatic object of the time where objectification of ‘the other’ generated various ideological subject positions for the ‘reader viewer’ in a picturesque public domain. The camera, the pen, ink and paint turned up as double edged tools that make up the ‘beauty’ of the land and break this beautiful eye’s various romance-looking practices into a demand for truthful record and vindication of reality4. Some periodicals of 1930s declared visions ‘in our artist’s imagination’. Presence of picture was a distinction for the periodical. In 1931, ‘Deepam’ -‘an illustrated journal’ advertised in Keralam magazine that it is the only ‘picture journal’ (chitrapatrika) in Malayalam. It claimed to be ‘a first-rate mirror’ accurately reflecting the events and incidents around the world. ‘Entertaining pictures’ (‘rasikan chitrangal’) and ‘amusing articles’ (‘sarasa lekhanangal’) were said to be the attractions of this magazine. These spectacles raised a confluence of visual tastes, creating contradicting promises of representation, truthful record vindicating reality as well as the challenges raised by tools and artistic abilities. The tool itself turns up as the greatest of artistic challenges. When the goat that is drawn, looks like a dog in the picture.
Soon something called an editor’s eye developed for the control of meanings and ever reinstating promises of print-pictures to vindicate reality. There were editorial requests for photographs ‘immortalizing the moment from life’. Representation and a fantasy of representation co-existed when the promise of true record is not contradicted, like in a photograph or possibly in a painting. When the thing that is referred is not what it looks like, as in a cartoon or caricature, a picture for light reading. Pictures-in-print could either be cultural items, or information that the editors choose them to. Some aesthetic and cultural guards were in place by late 1940s and early 1950s. The ‘real’ is fast dubbed into fictional.
Making of a Malayali:
A private bliss of looking at emotional bodies was more entertained to consciously mark the discreet charm of ‘Malayali’ identity in poster pictures.(Fig 2). Mind-watcher’s eyes turned up as a private-watch of people from a cordial distance. Highly self referencial ‘special society’ was formed. Other Indian regions were also doing it and the ‘Malayali’ quite picturesquely mediated a large group of literate middle class. That needed some unchanging and uncontested typologies of people and their ideals, marked by their vocations, caste, class, gender etc. in a split sensibility of high and low order. The editors and readers opened up different pictorial featuring possibilities based on their placement in the order, their ideological mind-life and their capability to be carried away by a literary world that randomly merges fact and fiction. The editors, the competent cultural ideologues were mostly the upper caste male and they were basically the writing class. All others in the graded ladders of social empowerment were left with the sole power of looking, reading and being pleased by one’s own strange visibility through the other’s camera. (fig.3)5. So periodicals are not very organic spaces for them to exercise any autonomy of purpose. Thus a beautiful woman in a cover photograph turns up ‘my dearest’ for a reader. The male writerly editor underlines the discreet charm of his own page as a site / sight of a cover girl’s desire in front of a mirror. At the same time, a woman’s lack of entitlement to writerliness and her ‘need to wait’ is also featured in the pages inside. The cultural momentum is conveyed, for instance by a laborer when it is a woman performing it. The visual momentum is sometimes conveyed by a human form using the sickle for a violent purpose. The fantasies of representation, the fictionalizing of one’s own act of looking are complex and they allude to the absurdities of a class of male writerly people who wanted to assert their purposes as the same as that of some others like women, children, men of lesser order who still suffered from embarrassment in their obscured power to look and assert. A Malayali is made in a fantastic male gaze and editorial entrepreneurship.
Emotional Bodies:
People looked like carriers of their meaning on body. How people looked like, was a curious objective of a culture of reader-viewer. This reflected well in a maturing genre of literary illustrations in post-independent era. In 1950s an artist M.V.Devan joins in Mathrubhumi magazine of the times as illustrator for stories6. Devan first brought in the Madras School attitudes, but translating into a literate media purpose. Devan’s presence in Mathrubhumi for almost a decade had brought in a good number of readers to another world of ‘Art’ where the whole question of fact and fiction is addressed in a way different from the literariness of the journalistic practices. (Fig.4).Fact and fiction is addressed for more assertive purposes of artist-illustrator. But assertions and breaks were not coming from any strong institutional practice of art. It came from an ambition of the literary behaviors and its accommodativeness. Literary illustration in magazines of lesser order used ‘photographic’ lay outs. Photographers like P K Rajan and K P Kurian addressed art where the question of fact and fiction addressed in an on-going journalistic way along with titles, captions, ad-like and film like. Photography and Art (drawing and painting) looked like split sensibilities of low and high orders respectively, in this matter. Literariness of journalistic communication and the discipline of literature were also split for the low and high order of reading-viewing.
Illustration announced highbrow tastes by placing the drawings by Devan followed by other contemporaries, A.Shivaraman and Vasudevan Namboodiri in 1960s. Both projected human figure as a carrier of his/her provenance making it the most authentic in a literate-media society. Provincial body clarified with its emotions was supposed to give ‘character’ to the great fictional works of the post independent time.
Literature was illustrated for the self-referential purpose of a ‘picturesque public’ and its journalistic attitude. This was also an enterprise of artist’s negotiation with the dominant literate behaviors. Readers who once kept looking at the page as ‘mirror’ of the world, now start looking at ‘other’s bodies’ as fictional characters belonging to their life. Picture magically captured the body by sketching, caricaturing, spacing, shortening, darkening, smudging and elongating tricks of an expert artist. The fictional work legitimated these visual activities of one’s mind. Namboodiri and A S tried all these techniques within the mould of academic figuration. There were also many unsigned, almost pornographic filmic illustrations – Though they kept the promise to magically connect the picture with life, they were unguarded by any cultural gestures. In them, looking was literally like a forbidden pleasure. The literary work was so pulpy that it was often unable to grant any aesthetic cultural sanction for the image. At the verge of it one finds pornography, a finality of pleasure, something that embarrasses the looker, removes a cultural power of looking. On the other hand, even when works up a voyeuristic gaze of the reader-viewer, Namboodiri attained a cultural distinction by consciously bringing in a modern art educational orientation of Madras school, his connections with major writers of the time etc. (Fig.5). He merged his affinities for classical traditions of performance and sculpture with his illustration drawings. All this could function as cultural sanctions of distinctions for an artist working in the ephemera.
An anachronistic Graphic novel : Specimen of a culture critic:
From this discreet melting pot of cultural and peculiar liking, there must have emerged a necessity for a new form and technique to communicate critical self-reflection for this reader-viewer. Film maker G.Aravindan tied the knot to this wandering cat displaying vanities of harmony between writers and artists. Aravindan’s cartoon strip called ‘Cheriya Manushyarum Valiya lokavum’ (small men and the big world) and O.V.Vijayan’s cartoon pages ithiri nerampokku, ithiri darshanam (Bit of Pastime, bit of Vision) in Mathrubhumi Weekly exposed the reader-viewer’ to possible experimental modes of a graphic attitude.
Arguably India’s first graphic novel, Small Men and the Big World presented episodes that caught hold of modernism’s experience with culture and society through the other way round, the route of levity taking the reader through a predominantly visual way, towards a critical gravity, an intellectual desire for self-criticism that was weighing down upon the malayali cultural public in 1960s and 70s (Fig.6). These full page strip cartoons were comic genres that were adaptable to the ‘insider interests’ of literature, journalism and the desires of a new middle class malayali men involved in a loud politics of culture; the one who wished to climb up the snobbish ladder of social privileges, one who faced utter unemployment, politically conscious voracious readers dreaming of the family, private property and socialist state, all in a single breath. It is a world of inevitable tragedies of ideological minds. There are people with whom the reader-viewers identified like the protagonist in the series Ramu, the unemployed youth who eventually turned into a business magnet or the pragmatic Guruji who advises him. Like literary illustrations, these graphic episodes also eked out an ‘in-between space’ from this culture public, another genre of art mixing gravity and levity.
Inspite of this almost naturalized ‘connect’ with the bigger world, the erosion of ideals is the paradoxical framework in which one perhaps continued to find Ramu, also certain malayali public. A section of its writers, artists, thinkers, readers and the lookers were found in the crucible of a political culture sprouting from largely unauthenticated mind-life of critical awareness in a small human locale vis-à-vis the world . The young painters and sculptors of the radical group of 1980s had by and large projected a political aesthetics of this social condition in the discourse of artist subjectivities in modern India.
In spite of this ground-breaking graphic fiction work, the Malayali publishing industry still doesn’t promote this genre well as a contemporary medium of culture criticism. A lively public of self- assured writers, thinkers, and readers emerged in 20th century Kerala while another public of artists, lookers and mind-watchers were only categorically gratified and relatively discounted by this lively public led by writers and publishers. An independent graphic authorship is still in wait. A graphic attitude pervades as a signature of the contemporary in book cover designs and the illustrations of a few youngsters, K.Sherif for instance.
(Dis)continuities:
The technical and cultural prowess of ‘the picturesque’ refused to recede even in the post- modern time. Illustration lost the charismatic support of literature in 1990s. The Malayalam edition of India Today magazine had randomly brought forward a host of young artists to occasionally illustrate not only literature but even the current affairs reporting. Only an illustrator of earlier generation, Namboodiri, survived because he was working out a matrix of desire and representation in the malayali looking public. The active agents and respondents were reading-class men, especially those with a considerable cultural pedigree in this society7. Illustrator’s established role as literary interpreter was in fact fetching its purpose from a signifying system of fictional emotions and sentiments on the axis of sheer familiarity and the axis of pleasurable watching habit. Namboodiri’s drawings by habit were projecting a ‘cultural eye’ that went ahead of a people-watcher, the reader of the novel, and informed him of literature in some manner or the other. Literary information was still looked upon as an immediate text of the real life. Illustrations worked in an apparently ‘open and liberal’ society where women, no matter profile or frontal, submissive or assertive, were not simply the illustrator’s but the writer’s and the columnist’s delight8. Literature and Namboodiri’s illustration in 1990s did not necessarily harmonize anywhere but variously converged in reader-viewer’s sustained curiosity in the human body and its behaviors.
Illustrative purposes were thus carried away from the domain of culture or literature into the imagined domain of pure viewing. The cultural eye liked to experience the rhythmic movement of painter’s brush /hand ‘as giving real life to fictional characters’, just like one looks at men and women around; grotesque, or grandiose, or classical, even ordinary! Illustrator functioned in public domain, both real and metaphoric, as an artist-performer. He is also often found in the real public spheres as a jugalbandi performer of sketching in tune with music or other stuff. He is celebrated as ‘India’s leading Illustrator’, though non-existing is such a connected national culture discourse of regional illustrators in India (Fig.7). The sketches of the performance forms like Kathakali, were found running across the page. The legendary characters of epic dimensions were found as thoughtful muscle men, or it could be men with familiar destinies but haunted by problems of the epic scale! Since 1980s, Namboodiri had pulled these threads of gazing at characters, into further pleasurable realms. There, illustrator reoriented his cultural charisma around some fetishistic themes, women, kathakali, nature etc. Namboodiri’s illustration in 1980s could condense the most difficult details of the figure and posture into a simple contour. It could evoke anything between the classical and the popular iconography to illuminate the experience alive of the ‘character’ in the verbal text. Illustrations thrived on this twisting game rather than getting historically fixed for its problematic of ‘secondary status’ in the discursive purview of literature or a culture of modernism where writers outsize the artists. It is a paradox that Namboodiri’s expert integrations were only presented to a readership that tended to ascribe his professional techniques to another basic (literary) text, not to his ‘artistic’ manipulation of a visual culture.
The missing ‘culture critic’ or the obscured Reader-viewer:
The looking habit of the reader-viewer is just retained in the local cultural memory, not yet surfacing as a culture register of visual modernism in India even when Namboodiri was one of the participating artists in the second edition of Kochi-Muziriz Biennial of 2014. There was no hint that this is an artist from a specific problematic of the ‘cultural ephimera’, not from the cultural autonomy of artist-practices otherwise found in the list of Biennial artists. In the first edition of Kochi- Musiriz biennial, 2012, my ten year long researches and the archival materials were further selectively documented by a team called ‘varavazhi’ and there held an archival show, ‘Revisiting the Print-Pictures’. It was a curious archive floating in a gallery. But ‘the critic’s register was missing in that show also. Then I realized that by choosing to investigate, write, curate and expose the contra-dictions within a very extensive corpus of archival materials, I am also a reader-viewer, a critical participant of contemporary times.
Contra-dictions and Contemporary natives: Two curatorial specimens:
A fellow member in the Varavazhi team, Chitra sudhakaran also was getting all too conscious of being a ‘looking woman’ who is bemused by the tableau of fictitious self-images in a Malayali metaphoric public domain, the periodical pages. The editorial / curatorial / entrepreneurial reader-viewers function in a discreetly male dominating field. He has mastery for evading a dissection of the metaphoric public domain that would often perhaps twist their sentimental exotica into an absurd and funny vision. This possibility led us to further collaborate in a project called Contra-dictions. In a pursuit of regaining the power of representing the absurdity of our female self in this picturesque public, we mimicked and parodied our own status as ‘contemporary women in Kerala, inheritors of this visual culture’. The works were photo-romances in quite amateurish fashion since we pointed at an easy everyday practice (Fig.8). These were housed in a deserted village office which was earlier a bungalow that was once used by William Logan while writing the Malabar Manual. This project was curated at a rural art context of Mathilakam in Kerala, as part of an independent segment in the second edition of the Chilappathikaram Festival that was originally initiated in the first edition of Kochi Biennial.
As part of that rural art project, Abul Kalam Azad, the contemporary photographer based at the temple village of Thiruvannamalai and running Ekalokam Trust for Photography, also did a project of his own, titled ‘Black Mother-Contemporary Heroines’(Fig.9). It was photo-documenting the contemporary women in Mathilakam village. It seemed like a critical male reader-viewer’s contemporary vision. In his photo-works Azad employed the language of studio photography while infiltrating a dispassionate gaze of anthropological documentation. Here he seemed to be working around a re- representation of contemporary women as ‘native subjects’.
The critical mutations of gender perspectives in the representational languages of the reader-viewer’s visual modern legacy exposed and amazed the self-reflective viewers of these art projects. These two collaborative and curatorial specimens are referenced here as part of my ongoing effort to expose and historicize the much obscured identity of the regional ‘reader-viewer’ in visual modernism and its role in defining the modern art history of India.
NOTES:
1. Sumathi Ramaswamy Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, Sage, 2003.
2. Robin Jeffrey, ‘The three stages of print – testing ideas of “public sphere”, “print capitalism” and “public action” in Kerala’. Presented in the 15th Biennial conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, 2004
3. John Heartly, ‘The politics of Pictures: the creation of the public in the age of popular media’, Routledge, London, 1992
4. Vindication of reality was a cultural as well as commercial strategy, cultural in terms of publishing a photograph related to mundane life, and commercial in terms of an evocative idea for building trust of the client. For instance, an advertisement of Thiruvithamkur Rubber Industries Company explains the specimens of damaged tire, tire while under resoling work and the tire ready after resoling, vindicating the magic of machines in their factory through a photograph showing three tyres.
5. The photo feature in Fig.3 follows the drama in the life of a young girl of 1960s, excited and waiting to get the weekly that carries her name at least in an amateur’s literature section.
6. Before Devan, an artist called M Bhaskaran, who belonged to the earliest generations of artists who went to the Madras Art School in 1930s, was working up various kinds of pictorial attitudes, cartoons, picturesque drawings, caricatures, condolence pictures, features etc – these were all contradicting promises of representation that an editor called M.R.Nair experimented with. This editor-artist duo created plenty of ‘common-man’s mind watches, often outside the realm of idealisms but in fanciful and picturesque romances. Bhaskaran was but an enabler( not an editorial counterpart of the magazine) of M R Nair’s picture-puzzles with textual attitudes in his short lived magazines.
7. A female writer Priya A.S has depicted this voyeuristic male viewer / reader of ‘Namboodiri sketches’ in a short story named ‘Namboodirichitram’ . In the story, a ‘male’ viewer is posited before a painting that is done by a woman. He is sarcastic about the way a female artist portrays a female figure. It is ‘unattractive’ in his terms because it is not as sensuous as a ‘Namboodirichitram’.
8. ‘Illustration’ of a character called Chinnammu in a story was much loved by the author V.K.N and he admiringly declared in praise of the illustrator in a personal letter to him, “if this ‘chaste harlot’ is so excellent, she is my property, Can you please send her to me?” remembered by Namboodiri in his memoirs, Rekhakal, DC, p-108.