Image-Making-India

Visual Culture, Technology, Politics

Paolo Favero, Paolo Silvio Harald Favero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367624378
• eBook ISBN: 9781000182033
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Image-Making-India explores the evolving meaning of images in a digital landscape from the vantage point of contemporary India.

Building upon long-term ethnographic research among image-makers in Delhi, Mumbai and other Indian cities, the author interrogates the dialogue between visual culture, technology and changing notions of political participation. The book explores selected artistic experiences in documentary and fiction film, photography, contemporary art and digital curation that have in common a desire to engage with images as tools for social intervention. These experiences reveal images' capacity not only to narrate and represent but also to perform, do and affect. Particular attention is devoted to the 'digital', a critical landscape that offers an opportunity to re-examine the significance of images and visual culture in a rapidly changing India.

This volume will be of particular interest to scholars of visual and digital anthropology and cultures as well as South Asian studies.

1 In uncompleted circles, spirals and swirls

An introduction

A book, like research and like life, is a collection of circles. These circles are not perfect though. They do not open up and close at the same point; drawing stories of endless beginnings and endless returns they do not allow for control. A book is like this, a choreography of circular forms, anarchic spirals and swirls surrounding and connecting the subject with the object, the ‘self’ with the world. They may speak of knowledge, affections, or just of banal mundane events. Each swirl may intersect with some other but it may also not. It may just keep swaying in the air on its own or land somewhere and intersect with other swirls and spirals. This is when new geometries can be seen, new shapes mirroring the world that surrounds them. Like a Qawwali (devotional Sufi music), these swirls can open up a space of endless reflections. Such is a book, such is life, a collection of swirls, spirals and uncompleted circles.

This book was born long ago. The first reflections (and possibly also materials) were gathered in the years 2001 and 2002 when I decided to pursue my desire to combine my then ongoing research on middle-class youth and globalization in Delhi with active image-making. During fieldwork, I progressively started taking photographs, recording sounds and filming. I worked on combining these materials in various exhibition formats. Then I moved on to making video installations and eventually, documentary films. All these experiences held ethnography at their centre, my core tool for penetrating and being penetrated by (cf. Stoller 1984) the world.

During the making of my 2004 documentary Flyoverdelhi (see below) I became increasingly involved with the networks of art in the city that hosted me during this time. Later, during a field trip in 2007 when I was still based out of London, I started actively interviewing artists and filmmakers in Delhi. I wanted to explore their ways of thinking about what images mean, do and ‘want’ (Mitchell 2006). I never stopped having these conversations. Concentric circles. Swirls.

My simultaneous involvement in transnational networks of academia and arts progressively enlarged my group of interlocutors. I moved away from documentary practices into other circles; into the world of contemporary arts, of theatre, app-design and activism. Every now and then I lost my way. I entered new loops, new circles, new swirls, only to then find myself submerged, unearthing new patterns to follow and dive into. At the end of this path, I had collected an almost unbearable quantity of fairly unstructured material that I then began organizing around the idea of image-making, intervention (social and political) and technology. The data I collected and the observations I made, stretched from the early days of digitization in India to its eventual boom. I followed the transformation of India from a humble Congress-led secular nation-state to an aspirational ‘Tiger India’ clamouring for its Hindu roots. I was (on and off) there throughout this time and I felt the calling to make sense of these experiences.

And in the meantime, my own life unfolded in circles, spirals and swirls too. India stayed permanently in the frame. My mother faced the return of her cancer in 1999 during the last phase of my official PhD fieldwork. I decided to stay in the country until the end of my work and then returned to Europe to accompany her towards her death in May 2000. Later I went back to India and the years ahead brought more separations. From the living, the dead and the unborn. My father passed away in 2015 and took away with him the certainties of a point of return, my dominant circle, the small town in northern Italy where I grew up. This was another separation that, however, also brought along a new union with my sister, her family, and with the village elders. Then followed other circles of life, a divorce, the selling of the ancestral home. The contemplation and acceptance of these events became also a bliss, opening up the doors to new discoveries and joys. And during this entire period, my work, the practice of writing, photography, filming, and music stayed on as my pillars, keeping me tightly anchored to life. These were places where I was able to ‘rest my thoughts’, as my father would have said. The ‘ghosts of my life’ (Fisher 2014) kept me company on this journey which is still ongoing today. And so did Delhi, the city of Djinns (a Hindi word for invisible spirits), the place that I inevitably learned to make my home and to which I, as this book is being completed, have already returned for a new chapter of life, work and love. New swirls, spirals and circles await me, drawing new shapes possibly connecting all the previously opened ones.

Eventually, as I was writing this book, I saw the irony of my interest for the performativity of images (a pillar in my theoretical approach to visual culture). I am intrigued by how images mediate our experiences of life, how they accompany us through our mundane lives, as if they were the ghosts of our past. In recent years I had directed the attention of my work to the immersive and performative craving that images seem to have, exhibiting their desire to mediate our experiences of living, longing to close the gaps between ourselves and the world that surrounds us. I realized that I had (probably unconsciously) directed my attention to all those visual practices that primarily present the image as a tool for overcoming the separation from the world, for acting upon it, and transforming it: images as beacons to the future and not only mirrors of the past. This is a key characteristic of all the works I discuss in this book. Images allow us to search for unity in a world of separation. A separation that is not only my personal struggle but also the destiny of this post-globalizing world that is solidly marching towards the erection of new borders, new distinctions; a ‘walled’ (Khosravi 2018) world that re-promotes new/old beliefs in the intrinsic diversity of peoples and ‘races’.

The experiences that I collect in this book are all united by this common intent: to overcome separations, to put images at the service of something bigger than just documentary filmmaking or photography, or even art. The image-works I discuss here are about life (and death), change and transformation. They are not about the past but represent concrete attempts to craft our present and future. From the struggles for freedom discussed through the work of Sanjay Kak in Chapter 3, to Zuleikha Chaudhari’s reflections on a photograph ‘performing the memory of the Mutiny’ of 1857 in Chapter 4, to the interventionist archive of images produced by the Shared Footage Group in the aftermath of the Gujarat carnage in 2002 in Chapter 5. The images central to this book focus on life and death, on circles of work, intersecting with circles of life.

It needs pointing out that this book is not about India but in India. It has not been my ambition to hunt for a sense of ‘Indianness’ in the artistic and filmic experiences that I have followed and analyzed. Rather, all the works this book focuses on have been crafted at the point of encounter of various transnational flows (of technology, culture, media, politics) and culturally situated practices and debates. Again, this is a matter of intersecting circles and swirls that cross boundaries and dive into each other generating products that are at once local and trans-local. The projects and experiences that this book focuses upon are the result of an intense process of selection. Instead of offering an overview of the various phenomena taking place in the field of image-making, technology and politics in India, I decided to dive into three very specific experiences. Through each of these experiences I aim to address topics that have both a theoretical and an ethnographic bearing. My goal is to provide a rethinking of the assumptions and approaches to the world of image and image-making based on my experiences in India. Simultaneously, I also offer a contribution to the rethinking, on the basis of the work of image-makers, of the debates that surround some critical events in Indian society.

Let me now begin this book by taking a leap back in time. In this introduction I offer some background to the work I have conducted in India and which has led to the making of this book. Addressing also the progressive consolidation of digital practices in the country, this chapter will close with a few reflections on my approach to images and on the structure of the book.

A visual anthropologist swirling in India

I conducted my PhD fieldwork in Delhi between 1997 and roughly 2001 on the topic of young middle-class men, globalization and cultural identity¹. My original idea was to explore the cultural changes that followed the opening of India’s economy to the global market, an entry officially sanctioned in 1991 with the economic reforms designed by then finance minister Manmohan Singh². I was keen on understanding how the generation that epitomized this entry experienced and constructed their identities vis-à-vis the growing number of messages and images, rapidly reaching the country from all over the world. I created a network of interlocutors among English-speaking, educated, Delhi-based men between 20 and 30 years of age who were enthusiastically exploiting the opening up of India for personal incentives in career and leisure. They belonged to the worlds of tourism, the internet, journalism, sports (mainly tennis), multinationals, etc. Progressively, I let myself be pulled into their circles of friends and colleagues and became involved in a web of relations characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity. My interlocutors were young men like Amitabh, at the time, a 24 year old manager of the Delhi arm of a Bombay-based family-run car dealership. There was also Amitabh’s best friend Rahul who worked as the India correspondent for the Japanese broadcast channel NHK. Rahul was 34 and worked as a tour guide for Italian travel agencies after having quit his career as university lecturer. In the field, I also met Abhishek, (born in 1973) on the very same day that he had returned from the USA (to which he had migrated at 19) with the dream of setting up India’s first tennis academy. I met Hrithik, the son of the owner of one of the most successful travel agencies in Delhi. I rapidly became part of a variety of networks where I met people with significant differences in backgrounds (despite them all being privileged in some sense). What they did share in common, however, was a faith in the new era, one filled with great hopes for change in India.

My fieldwork was very dynamic. I had to move between different work environments and also commute between different parts of the city. I ended up spending endless hours hanging out with my interlocutors in public places in different neighbourhoods being exposed to the visual culture that surrounded them. All my interlocutors, who organically became my friends, shared a common desire in their search for a way of living that they often described as ‘stimulating’ and ‘rewarding’. They didn’t want their marriages to be arranged by family and hoped to choose their girlfriends and friends themselves without being confined to caste, class and ethnically defined boundaries. For all of them, the opening of India to the global market was a key event making it possible to fulfil their career, sexual and leisure dreams. Their involvement in wider networks of both career and leisure was a constitutive part of their identity and part of a ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu 1990) that they carefully administered at work and in private life and through which they created and demarcated their status. Their stories were a window into a new India – a country which, with all its compromises and difficulties, was dreaming of a new historical phase, a Kalyug³, a return to the centre of world history.

While observing the enthusiasm for a future ‘Tiger India’⁴, as it was described in the early days, my ethnography anticipated a lot of the events that would unfold in the coming decades. This was a moment of intense growth in instances of pride in the country and my interlocutors were among the most vivid signs of such a historical phase. In their ‘life-world’ (Habermas 1987), being ‘cool’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘modern’ (terms adopted by them) was not synonymous with copying the ‘West’ but rather with being proudly ‘Indian’. Playfully inverting the meaning of the so-called ‘colonial dichotomies’, (i.e. India vs. West, tradition vs. modernity, spirituality vs. science cf. Gupta 1998) my interlocutors contributed to renew the discourse that had historically functioned as the foundation for debating change in India. Their creative use of ‘India’, ‘West’, ‘modern’, ‘traditional’ (which, given their changeable, fluctuating and emotional connotations, I chose to label as ‘phantasms’⁵) and their growing faith in India’s future intrigued me and became the main focus of my study. I addressed this faith in a variety of fields, from identity narratives, to masculinity and sexuality, love, and visual and material culture.

During my fieldwork I collected many instances of re-appropriation of symbols belonging to Hindu culture. Advertisements, films and television programmes (addressing mainly young people) progressively began to promote ‘Indianness’, increasingly offering symbols highlighting the ‘coolness of all things Indian, and emphasizing the value of traditional symbols within a modern, cosmopolitan, globalizing context. Take, for example, a significant event held during the Youth Marketing Forum organized in Mumbai in 1999, with the sponsorship of MTV, Pepsi and several other multinational firms. In their messaging, the companies underlined the importance of acknowledging the growing popularity of ‘India’. MTV announced that their slogan was to ‘Indianise, Humanize and Humorise’. They emphasized that their service, which was launched in 1996, began with 70 percent Indian content and 30 percent international music and that now that figure had been inverted. They described their audience as young people who are ‘comfortable with their Indianness’ and for whom ‘foreign is no longer the best’. According to MTV, for instance, the top ten list of young people’s favourite artists was topped by singer Mohammed Rafi, an acclaimed singer for Hindi films in the 1950s and 60s. The only foreign artist in the list was Michael Jackson (who, however, came a decent second). An orientation towards ‘Indianness’ was also visible in the choices of the mass media in general. Star TV, Sony TV and Discovery Channel began dubbing more and more programmes into Hindi. Indian mythology and history proved to be marketable on TV and in cinema. The popularity of new television serials with historical-religious motifs which, according to many, were being used strategically to heighten the consciousness about the Hindu ‘saffron past’ of India (cf. Chakravarty 1998a and 1998b) became a certainty. The world of media and marketing successfully merged to present a proper case of ‘India’ branding (cf. Mazzarella 2003).

Parallel to these changes, the political scene was also drastically morphing into something new. Together with liberalization and the commercial opening up, India also witnessed the emergence of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s with the BJP led the government coalition led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee between 1999 and 2004 (covering hence the core period of my fieldwork).⁶ The BJP belongs to the Hindu nationalist networks and centres on the RSS (the Rashtrya Swamyasewak Sangh, i.e. the national organization of volunteers), a socio-political movement with strong nationalist undertones that was launched in the mid-1920s and was also involved in the assassination of Gandhi. Over the years, the BJP strengthened the implementation of its core mission to promote Hindutva⁷ (cf. Andersen and Damle 1987, and Basu et al. 1993). This agenda found a breeding ground in the growing debates on globalization and Westernization and their consequences on youth. I extensively analyzed the debates regarding the apparent loss of values among Indian youth in my book India Dreams (Favero 2005) from the perspective of a number of criminal events that took place in Delhi around that time (in particular, the murder of a young model, Jessica Lal in a Delhi club). During fieldwork, I interviewed various representatives of the Hindu right on the same theme. While on the topic of Jessica Lal’s killing, one college professor, who was also a strong RSS supporter chose instead to speak about the decadence of society. He said that young people wanted ‘the five star culture, nice discos, hotels, bars, etc.…young people want western things, American things. They no longer dress or behave like Indians’.

None of my informants subscribed to the agenda promoted by the Hindu nationalist organizations. Yet, as I describe in my book, their discourse on India at times echoed some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 In uncompleted circles, spirals and swirls: An introduction
• 2 The present world of images: A theoretical background
• 3 Sharpening ideas on the whetting stone: Independent documentary practices, resistance and revolution
• 4 The ghost of an image: On photographs, truth and colonial violence
• 5 The uncanny destiny of ‘raw’ footage: The politics of image-making from analogic to digital, from filmmaking to archiving
• 6 Conclusions
• References
• Index