Jyotindra Jain was Director of Crafts Museum, Delhi, until recently, and is now Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Jain has been an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow, a Homi Bhabha Fellow and a Visiting Professor at the Center for the Study for World Religions, Harvard University, USA. He is the author of „Ganga Devi: Tradition and Expression in Mithila Painting“, „Other Masters: Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India“ and „Kalighat Painting: Images from a Changing World“. Jain is a recipient of the Prince Claus Award for his initiatives and activities in the field of cultural heritage.

Eclectic citations

The production of Hindu cultic and mythological imagery underwent a major aesthetic and conceptual transformation during the nineteenth century. The colonial art school’s pedagogy of perspective and realism (3) endowed the idealized traditional imagery with a more tangible and sensual presence. Combined with features from the newly introduced proscenium theatre, that used eclectic but powerful iconic and narrative formations, and from photography, which was able to depict heightened corporeality and individuality, this engendered a new class of popular cultic, mythological and nationalist imagery. Its mass reproduction and circulation (as chromolithographs, oleographs, etc.) became a potential instrument for the seizure of aesthetic and cultural meaning in the times to follow. The eclecticism of visuality also led to a piling up of images from diverse visual sources on one visual plane, and brought into effect an ambivalent language of collage and citation facilitating juxtaposition of Indian and western, traditional and modern, national and subaltern, sacred and erotic elements, on a single receptor surface.
The artist Ravi Varma (1848–1906) and several others appropriated a range of heterogenous scenes and images from across genres and recontextualized them in the overall scheme of their Hindu cultic and mythological painting. This technique of archiving elements from different visual sources to create ambivalent spaces in which mixed cultural responses could be evoked at will, soon became the standard idiom of picture construction. The collage effect became all the more obvious in the formal aspect of Ravi Varma’s paintings when, in the culling out of an image belonging to a different pictorial source and with its individual perspectival context and its placement in his own pictorial scheme, the requisite foreshortening did not get adjusted, making the image appear out of proportion. Ravi Varma’s pictures are clearly informed by the visual contexts of the theatre and photography of his time where painted backdrops were used and the lack of the requisite foreshortening of figures vis-à-vis the backdrop was evident. He painted in the days of black and white photography when portrait studios used monochromatic (sepia or indigo) backdrops with the scenery rendered in hazy, subdued tones, letting the figure of the sitter emerge clear-cut, detached from the background and not even casting a shadow, almost like a cut-out or collage. This distinctive ground-figure relationship is noticeable in many of Ravi Varma’s works. However, the culmination of this technique of virtual collage occurred later, in the 1920s and 30s, when frame-makers resorted to actually cutting out images from one picture and pasting them on to another, to cater to the taste and ideology of their patrons. I shall return to this later.
To meet the increasing demand, initially, Ravi Varma got his Hindu cultic and mythological pictures printed in Germany, but eventually (between the 1880s and 90s) he set up his own lithographic presses where he mass-produced oleographic prints which became instantly popular all over India. This was a unique instance of visual imagery acting as an instrument of a pan-Indian Hindu resurgence and consolidation of Hindu unity. Ravi Varma’s Lithographic Fine Arts Press served ‘not only [to] further his own fame, but as a service to the Indian people’. (4)

The voyeuristic patron

Though the pattern of consumption of these pictures may have been similar among the wealthy families of most cities and towns of India at least from the late nineteenth century, I shall confine this study to pictures from the mansions of traders from the Shekhavati region in Rajasthan, whose contexts of acquisition and consumption are still partially traceable. The majority of these traders had lived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) or Bombay (now Mumbai) at least from the middle of the nineteenth century, either working as “banians” for British firms or running their own business houses. (5) Their wealth was invested in building palatial mansions in their hometowns in Rajasthan and Haryana, which they visited during the summer vacation or on ritual occasions such as a tonsure ceremony, engagement or wedding in the family. (6) Prabhashankar Kedia, a descendant of the renowned aristocratic Kedia family from Bhiwani in Haryana, is one such trader. He spent his early years in Calcutta where his forefathers, from the beginning of the twentieth century, owned a trading house called Rameshwar Dass Radhakrishen & Co. at 21, Burtalla Street — a subsidiary of the British firm, Indian Wood Products Ltd. Prabhashankar belongs to a sub-sect of the Vaishnava Aggarwal caste that is spread over southern Haryana and the Shekhavati region. Staunch devotees of Krishna, the Aggarwals filled their houses with a range of popular pictures especially depicting the “Krishnalila”, and contributed generously towards the construction and maintenance of temples and “dharamshalas” (pilgrims’ rest-houses) in their hometowns. Their life in Calcutta or Bombay primarily centred around business, while their marriages were organized within the community living in Haryana and Rajasthan. (7) According to Prabhashankar, on the day of the Diwali festival, the merchants displayed all the colonial novelties in their “havelis” — imported chromolithographs, oleographs, Manchester and Glasgow mill-labels depicting Hindu mythology, German ceramic figures of Hindu deities, colonial furniture, clockwork toys, chandeliers, gramophones, imported crockery, etc. — as spectacles of their riches and modernity, for public viewing.
Mathura, Vrindavan and Nathadwara were among the most sacred places of pilgrimage for these Vaishnava families. To cater to the pilgrims’ need for religious souvenirs, Nathadwara had long become a colony of painters who, besides painting “pichhwais” for the temples and domestic shrines of the Vaishnavas, churned out large numbers of cheap and quickly executed “Krishnalila” pictures on paper. In the beginning, these pictures were only sold at Nathadwara, Mathura and Vrindavan but in view of the swelling market demand, S.S. Brijbasi & Sons of Mathura and Karachi, Harnarayan & Sons of Jodhpur and Hemchandra Bhargava of Delhi, among others, began to produce oleographs based on the Nathadwara idiom. A large number of pictures of this genre belong to the “havelis” (8) of the area.
In a fine study, Anne Hardgrove has explored the issues of migrancy, diaspora and deterritorialization in relation to the vernacular domestic architecture evolved by the rich traders of Shekhavati. Hardgrove points out how the visuality of these houses ‘attempted to elaborate a devotional “bhakti”-centred identity of the families in the community through regional ties, yet with the explicit acknowledgement of the hybrid modernity of British rule in India’. (9) It is from this point of departure that I analyse a set of Hindu mythological pictures on the theme of the “Krishnalila” and some depicting nationalist/Hindu-nationalist subjects, obtained from some of the “havelis” of this region. I explore how the ambivalent spaces of these visual practices using the technique of the collage and based on the reconfiguration of hybrid colonial material acted as instruments of cultural power in the hands of their aristocratic patrons, who continuously moved between two socio-economic milieus—the modern/commercial/urban, which was the source of their power, and the communal/familial/religious/nationalist, which was the space they wished to occupy for cultural/social legitimacy.
Framed pictures of white women in seductive poses, together with those depicting the sensual, promiscuous relationships of Krishna with Radha and with other “gopis”, became objects of their patrons’ strongly voyeuristic gaze in a society fraught with moral double standards with regard to women and sexuality. The love affairs of Krishna recontextualized in the space of colonial aristocratic mansions, in a way, legitimized the adulterous and orgiastic relationships that were quite commonly prevalent in the bourgeois society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
At that time urban society all over northern and eastern India was marked by a medley of ongoing regional cultural practices, revivalistic classical Sanskrit and Mughal courtly traditions, and western manners and lifestyles acquired from colonial missionaries, administrators and merchants. The “urban nouveaux riche”, due to their greater access to English education and proclivity towards local British settlers in general, developed a taste for the European outlook and for western goods. For example, European objects of desire accumulated by the Calcutta rich included copies of Raphael and Claude. (10) In one house, ‘French prints were hung around the room and a large portrait of Venus, in all her loveliness, was placed at the front so as to be visible to a person reclining on the bed.’ (11)
In the theatrical performances, oral poetry, and chromolithographs and oleographs of the time, there was a tendency towards conceptualizing gods and goddesses as human beings — as ordinary mortals, members of next-door middle-class families. In a nineteenth-century Kalighat painting from Calcutta, an image of Shiva–Parvati recalls a marriage anniversary photograph, complete with half-folded velvet curtains on the side. In the hands of these artists, Shiva also came to be depicted as a ‘gawkish hemp-addict, forgetful of his slipping loin-cloth … quite uninhibitedly showing his genitals’. (12) Once gods began to be depicted thus in their tangible human forms, charged with gross physicality and carnal desire, there was a spurt in the production of sleazy pictures of the love affair between Radha and Krishna conceived with references to European erotic imagery and romantic settings, as well as with overtones of the promiscuous relationships between upper-class men and their mistresses or between Vaishnava priests and their female devotees, as were prevalent at the time.
Let us take a look at some of the social and religious practices of the “Pushtimargi” Vaishnavas (13) of the time. The “Pushtimargi” priests apparently saw their own promiscuous relationships with female devotees as a legitimate continuation of the “lilas” of Krishna with Radha and other “gopis”. According to an account (14) of the Bhatia Vaishnava community of Mumbai and Gujarat, many a “Pushtimargi” priest of the mid-nineteenth century exploited his female devotees monetarily and sexually, by claiming to be an incarnation of Krishna. They made these women accept and eat half-chewed betel-leaves from their own mouths as Krishna’s benefaction, and advised them to surrender their body, mind and wealth to them in the same spirit as “gopis” would to Krishna. They granted ‘authorized’ permission to the women to sleep with them. Often, male devotees willingly offered their wives to these priests as an act of religious merit. On account of such sexual promiscuity, several of the priests are recorded as having contracted venereal diseases. If any family opposed or criticized the behaviour of the priests, it was likely to face the threat of excommunication from its caste and religion. A few forward-looking young men of the Gujarati Bhatia Vaishnava community settled in Bombay, initiated a movement against such exploitation of their women by the temple priests. Karsandas Mulji started “Satya Shodhak” (‘Investigator of Truth’), a small newspaper, in 1861, through which he exposed the wrong-doings of the priests. A priest filed a defamation case against the newspaper, which came to be known as the Maharaja Libel Case. One of the most debated cases in the recent history of Hinduism, it changed the face of Vallabhaite religious practices. It is even argued that after this case the popularity of Krishna was replaced by that of Rama, seen to be an upholder of moral values. (15)
Several such situations of sexual abuse in religious places seem to have prevailed in nineteenth-century north India. Bharatendu Harishchandra, the renowned Hindi writer from Banaras, once wrote:

What are temples? They are like mines of women. Take whichever you choose. On any festive occasion, the priests and gurus dressed up like dolls and holding “chauris” stare at women … whichever pleased the eye was to be enjoyed by them. Assistants of priests give them sermons: Why don’t you ‘go’ with the priest and get blessed in this life of yours. Simple ones surrendered but those who professed loyalty to husbands were taken by force or gave up going to the temple. (16)

Balakrishna Bhatt, another social reformer from Banaras, published a satirical piece in 1884 on the voyeuristic tendencies of traders, “babus”, Vaishnava devotees and priests ‘who went to temple fairs to watch the naked bodies of women who came there for a sacred dip’. (17)
Thus, the sensual pictures of the “Krishnalila” set in the contemporary environment of their patrons’ colonial aristocratic homes metaphorically reflected the libertine, upper-class Hindu society of the time, as sketched above, and, in a way, even legitimized it.

The Shekhavati collages: ambivalent spaces, mutating identities

Two distinct genres of collages have come out of the merchants’ “havelis” of Shekhavati and Bhiwani — one, an assemblage of German and Indian visual material circulating in Calcutta, the commercial headquarters of these families; and the other, a piecing together of backdrops and images originating in the north Indian Vaishnava configuration of Nathadwara – Mathura – Vrindavan, the sacred geography of these families. I shall loosely refer to them as ‘Indo-German collages’ and ‘Nathadwara collages’, respectively. The former primarily depicted the “lilas” of Krishna with German oleographs of popular western European tourist spots in the background; the latter had imaginary landscapes and scenes of colonial mansions with allusions to English gardens painted as backdrops, over which Hindu mythological, nationalist and political imagery was pasted.
The background prints of the Indo-German collages were produced in Germany and were primarily addressed to the European market, but several of them found their way into India via Calcutta, to be used as exotic landscapes for the depiction of Krishna’s love-sport with Radha and other “gopis”. Frame-makers (18) cut out figures from locally produced mythological prints and collaged them over these imported pictures, and thereby reconfigured them into new sets of relationships with each other, altering their identities and relocating them in another time and place. In almost all the examples of this genre, the original pictures from which figures were cut out were produced in Calcutta by the halftone process in the 1920s and around. (19) This, combined with the fact that the merchants of Shekhavati and Bhiwani had business offices in Calcutta from where they brought colonial novelties to their country homes, indicates a Calcutta origin for these pictures. It is difficult to ascertain whether such collages were displayed only by the Marwari trading families in their country mansions and Calcutta homes, or were patronized by others too.
In the Nathadwara collages, the ground invariably comprised romantic scenery or landscapes dotted with art-deco mansions, lawns, fountains, potted plants, garden arches, avenues lined with cypress trees and lamp-posts — all speedily and sketchily painted in high-contrast chiaroscuro with opaque pigments on off-white, mill-made cardboard. These pictures were typical of the popular Nathadwara idiom, in which theatre and photo-studio backdrops of the time were also painted. The prints from which figures of the “Krishnalila” were cut out and collaged over these landscapes were mainly from S.S. Brijbasi & Sons, Mathura and Karachi, but some also came from Harnarayan & Sons, Jodhpur, and Poona Chitrashala Press. A majority of these pictures were based on paintings by the Nathadwara artists or by others who worked in the combined idioms of Nathadwara, Rajput miniatures, Ravi Varma, photography and Parsi theatre. From the stickers still intact on some of the pictures, it would appear that they were put together by frame-makers. According to an eye-witness, (20) the frame-makers kept ready cardboard silhouettes of Radha, Krishna and “gopis” in various postures and gestures, and, arranging them in various permutations–combinations over the Nathadwara landscapes, obtained the consent of their clients for constructing the final pictures, using approved figure-ground relationships. The Vaishnava patrons acquired these pictures from Nathadwara, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Delhi and Bombay. Gandhi Bhailal Devkaran, frame-maker from Madhubag, Bombay, was among the best known of these collage-makers. (21)
The ground in both series of pictures described above was a landscape — in the former case, of actual European locales, and in the latter, of imaginary, pseudo-colonial settings. In both cases, it was construed as a space of modernity appropriated as a ‘divine’ setting for Krishna’s erotic love-play. As observed by Kajari Jain, ‘The nation as geography, as body, as present, is curiously absent, giving way instead to a mythical, undifferentiated foreign.’ (22) As we shall see, these newly constructed divine/modern spaces then came to be appropriated as spaces of political and ideological power under the rising tide of nationalist/Hindu-nationalist movements supported by the merchants of this region.
As the iconic began to ‘correspond to its contemporary system of interests and values’ (23) through the agency of an emergent colonial modernity fancied by the “noveaux riche”, this class of collages in which freely circulating landscapes and locales easily passed for the desired other—a European landscape for Vrindavan or a colonial mansion for Krishna’s palace — became popular among the Vaishnava merchants. This transformation of the meaning of space in a different cultural context provides a literally apt example to W.J.T. Mitchell’s argument that ‘landscape is a dynamic medium that is itself in motion from one place or time to another’. (24) Taking further clues from Mitchell, I shall examine these transposed landscapes ‘as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed’ (25) in that ‘landscapes can be deciphered as textual systems’, (26) that ‘natural features such as trees, stones, water, animals, and dwellings can be read as symbols in religious, psychological, or political allegories’, (27) and that landscape ‘doesn’t merely signify or symbolize power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power’. (28)
The landscapes used in these pictures were found objects, manipulated each time and given a new identity in relation to the figures pasted over them. At the visual level, they acted as theatrical backdrops for the performance of “Krishnalila” and therefore all the action is shown as taking place in the open foreground — like frozen scenes from the theatre of Krishna’s “lilas”. In the pictures using European landscapes, the castles of Lake Geneva, Rheinstein or Miramare become Krishna’s palaces; all the water bodies act as the Jamuna river; a full-moon night serves as “Sharad Purnima” (the full-moon night of autumn sacred to Krishna); an alpine or western European landscape as Vraj and Vrindavan; and lush-green meadows surrounded by clusters of trees as the legendary “kunjs” or groves of Krishna’s dalliances with “gopis”.
In the Nathadwara pictures, Krishna and his beloveds are shown in the hybrid background of idealized colonial mansions, cypress-lined avenues of Roman and southern European affinity, garden arches, swimming pools, potted plants and fountains imitating the English and colonial garden, and banana trees and arched gateways stemming from Rajput miniature paintings. Interestingly, in one such picture, the scene of Krishna taking away the clothes of bathing “gopis” is located in the swimming pool of an aristocratic house, allegorically linking the modern space of a residence with Krishna’s celestial space. In another, Radha and Krishna are shown squatting on the verandah of a colonial mansion listening to a gramophone record, exactly as would a wealthy merchant in the company of his wife or mistress (fig. 1). A popular theme of these collages is the “nauka-vihar” or ‘boat-trip’, in which Krishna, Radha and the “gopis” are shown taking a ride in a boat (fig. 2). Such pleasure-trips were common among the aristocratic grandees of the time. One of the Indo-German collages, depicting a scene of the Gudvanger Fjord in Norway, shows a steamer anchored ashore on a full-moon night. A collaged figure of Radha, who has just alighted from the steamer, is shown embracing Krishna, who has come there to receive her. The description of a typical such pleasure-trip, popular among the nineteenth-century Bengali rich and using the metaphor of the Radha-Krishna liaison, is contained in a street song where a woman speaking in the voice of Radha says:

Taking me up in the boat, the rake started all his tricks. He said: ‘See, Rai [Radha]! The Jamuna river is turbulent. You have worn a blue garment. Mistaking it for the clouds, the wind is getting excited.’ In the middle of the river, he then asked me to strip. Alas! Where am I to hide my shame? (29)

Collage allowed shifts of locales and characters, facilitated their transfer from one time, place or genre to another. The landscape was thus turned into an ambivalent space between the sacred and the erotic, between the celestial and the terrestrial, between the mythical and the colonial, where the corresponding spaces of each binary did not remain mutually exclusive but could be confused one with the other, thereby becoming an instrument of cultural manipulation.

Moving incognito in Bollywood’s ‘Switzerland’ or Norway’s Gudvanger Fjord

Looking at the use of landscapes in these collages, what inevitably comes to mind is the strong parallels between them and most song-and-dance sequences of ‘Bollywood’ films. In both cases the use of the foreign locale is more of an exotic backdrop than a specific location where the plot unfolds. It has been observed about the song-and-dance sequences in Bollywood films, shot in Switzerland, that ‘the landscape is not treated as a quantity in its own right, but as an aesthetic garnish, as a screen on to which emotions can be projected’ (30) In the Indo-German and Nathadwara collages too, readymade prints of landscapes of actual or imaginary locales are used as backgrounds in which cut-out characters move around without any intrinsic connection with the former. They are similar to the Bollywood dance sequences where there is ‘no acknowledgement of any human contact or awareness of the local culture. The Hindi film inhabits an insular, self-contained world that borrows only externals from others.’ (31) The ‘dreamlike condensation of settings, people and events that can be interpreted as the fantasy world of plot motor operating on a meta-diegetic plane’ (32) is comparable to scenes of the “Krishnalila” collaged over readymade pictures of popular European tourist spots such as Chillon Castle on Lake Geneva, Gudvanger Fjord in Norway, Rheinstein Castle in Germany or Miramare Fort on the Adrian Sea. These early twentieth-century collages had, therefore, in a sense, pre-empted Bollywood by at least seven decades. As pointed out by Rachel Dwyer: ‘In the Hindi movie, love is expressed in particular settings. These are usually pastoral, that is, in a city dweller’s imagined form of the countryside.’ (33) ‘Switzerland in Hindi films does share some of the features of Kashmir—a pastoral idyll of mountains and tamed nature that is ideally suited to the traditional landscape of love. Switzerland is the Indian version of pastoral.’ (34) A rural setting for the visual depiction of love goes back to the paintings of Ravi Varma and pervades the entire corollary of popular picture production during the twentieth century.
In almost all Indo-German collages of the “Krishnalila”, the setting is rustic — moonlit landscapes with snow-covered, thatched huts (fig. 3), alpine lake-side cottages with smoking chimneys, and fields covered with furrows of crops. Here Krishna embraces a semi-clad Radha, plays the flute to her as she clings to his body or lies on his lap, holds a “gopi” in embrace as a jealous Radha turns her face away (fig. 4), receives supplication from two women devotees at a time, or intercepts Radha or a gopi passing by with a pot of butter.
The pastoral — the urban’s other — has another important dimension: it is a space for concealment, a space for moving incognito. In Hindi cinema, the heroine indulges in all that is ‘unethical’ away from the stifling and ever- watchful eyes of friends and relations—wearing ‘western’ clothes, exposing her body at a swimming pool, publicly drinking at a bar and dancing with her boyfriend in close bodily proximity. When she returns home, she is usually clad in a “sari” or “salwar–kameez”, the epitome of traditional Indian values. Just as ‘Switzerland is the long foreplay for the discreet orgasm reserved for the native marital bed’, (35) so are the European and colonial backdrops in the “Krishnalila” collages spaces of erotic fantasy within the orthodox/double-standard conventions of man–woman relationships in the society of the patrons of these pictures.
Among the many “lilas” of Krishna, “chhadma lilas” or “lilas in disguise“ were quite commonly staged in Vrindavan and were depicted in popular prints, especially those from Calcutta. The tradition of Krishna going to meet Radha in disguise is quite central to “Krishnalila” performances of Vrindavan and find expression in several Bengali pictures of the 1920s. (36) Vrindavandas, a Vaishnava poet, composed twenty-seven “lilas” in which Krishna goes to Barsana (Radha’s village) dressed as a female, to gain incognito access to Radha. (37) In many of the popular Bengali prints of the early twentieth century, Krishna is shown approaching Radha disguised as a flower girl, a mendicant (fig. 5), itinerant female musician or urban woman, to get secret entry to her chamber. In the collages where “Krishnalila” is ‘performed’ against the backdrop of European landscapes, the incognito effect is transferred from individual to place, just as it is in Bollywood escapades.

The transgressive embrace

Now I shall turn to the collaged figures themselves. The technique of collage provided freedom to relocate figures from popular prints of one genre into the time and space of another, altering their identity in relation to the locales as well as to other figures. Freely circulating stock characters easily passed for the desired other in the imagination and fantasy of the patrons of these pictures — a white woman for Radha, a nautch girl for a “gopi”, or an aristocratic lord for Krishna. And since the female consorts rarely had their own distinct iconography, Radha or “gopi” from one picture passed for Sita or Parvati in another. The identity of the female consorts, as that of the mistresses of aristocratic grandees, always mutated — one was as good as the other. The female identity depended solely upon the male with whom she was associated: in conjunction with Krishna she was Radha or a “gopi”, with Rama she was Sita.
Let me cite a few examples. Figure 5 is a popular Calcutta offset print from around the 1920s. (38) The title of Figure 5, Joge Beshe (‘In the guise of a Mendicant’), is printed below the picture. Here Krishna is shown in the disguise of a Shaivite mendicant going to Radha’s house, and she comes out to meet him under the pretext of giving alms to a holy man. The image of Radha from Figure 5 reappears in Figures 6 and 7, which are collages. In Figure 6, Krishna is shown seated on a rock in a European landscape (a German print), being approached by two women, of whom one is the Radha of Figure 5. However, it is not clear in this picture, which of the two women is meant to be Radha and which a “gopi”. Figure 7 represents another “Krishnalila” scene in a European setting (again a German print). Here, Radha and Krishna from Figure 8 are shown under a tree, and Radha of Figure 5 reappears in the role of a devotee or a “gopi”.
Similarly, Figure 9, an offset print, shows Krishna disguised as a mendicant approaching Radha, who turns her face away from him, supposedly to express her anger at his flirtations with other women. Here, Radha is shown as a modern woman, wearing a sleeveless blouse and “sari”, standing on a semi-circular stage-like platform, surrounded by her female companions. In Figure 4, the entire tableau of Radha and her companions from Figure 9 is cut out and pasted on the left of a European print depicting a pastoral landscape, and an image of Krishna in embrace with a woman is collaged on the right. In Figure 9, the cause of Radha’s anger, i.e. Krishna’s flirtations with other women, is not actually depicted. But using a sort of flashback technique, the frame-maker who created the Figure 4 collage has juxtaposed on the same picture plane, the figure of an angry and jealous Radha on the left and of Krishna with ‘another’ woman on the right, the latter presumably being the cause of Radha’s anger in Figure 9. If one was to interpret the ‘other’ woman with Krishna in Figure 4 as Radha, then the jealous Radha of Figure 9 is just ‘another’ sulking woman.
In another offset print titled “Anjaly” (‘Offering’) (39), a woman is sitting at the feet of a standing Krishna. She is seen offering flowers from her joined palms (“anjali”). This female figure (or its variations) appears in three different pictures, all prints of European landscapes. In a different print, she is shown sitting on the ground near a waterfall and making an offering to a standing Krishna, who is collaged on to the picture, while another woman watches on. As such, the relationships between the two women and of theirs with Krishna are ambivalent. In Figure 10, the same woman appears as Radha worshipping Krishna disguised as Kali in a European rustic landscape, while Radha’s husband watches them from behind a tree. In Figure 3, ‘Winter Night’, once again the woman is seen, but this time as Sita in association with Rama, who has his back towards her, keeping her at a distance from him while angrily looking at Krishna holding a woman in close embrace. This picture reflects the change that was coming into Vaishnavism after the Maharaja Libel Case and the spread of nationalist/reformist movements all over India which privileged “Ramarajya”, an ideal Hindu nation, governed by the moral order of “varnashramadharma” in which Krishna ‘as the embodiment of sensual mystical religiosity’ (40) would not fit.
From these few examples it becomes clear that the technique of collage was used to bring about, on the picture plane, a degree of ambivalence, illusion, duplicity, opposition and transgression with regard to the setting and the characters moving in it. Coincidentally, collage in French also stands for illegitimate sexual union or an adulterous relationship between a man and woman. Collage in these pictures too was used as an effective tool for ‘transgressive embrace’.

From Vaishnavism to Vaishnava nationalism

Today, collage and montage are ‘processes and effects within television, video, and varieties of products resulting from digital image manipulations’ (41) intrinsic to modern media technology. Appropriation of spaces and image manipulation in the preceding era of mechanical reproduction, as apparent in the collaged pictures under discussion, in a way pre-empted the processes and effects of the new media. As a potential instrument that ‘subverts all conventional figure-ground relationships’, (42) collage in these pictures transforms the modern European and colonial urban spaces consumed by their “noveaux-riche” patrons to the Hindu mythological arena of Radha and Krishna, and by confusing the identities of the female figures who promiscuously circulate in these places of desire, the urban spaces of enchantment are legitimized as sacred. Once the figure-ground relationships are thus subverted, the spaces become more eclectic and interactive and therefore also susceptible and contested.
Now I shall discuss how these spaces, having been turned into spaces of power — divine and mercantile — became vehicles for the expression of a nationalist/Hindu-nationalist ideology.
Subhash Chandra Bose (1897–19??), the nationalist freedom fighter who had organized the Indian National Army (INA) to fight British rule, was rather popular among the merchants of Shekhavati and Bhiwani. A large number of prints and collages depicting Subhash have come out of the “havelis” of this region. In one image he is shown standing in the open courtyard of an aristocratic house — a space hallowed by the presence of Krishna in other related pictures. The space of the divine is here legitimized as political space apt for a nationalist leader who, in other similar pictures, is shown being blessed by the goddess Durga appearing as “Bharat Mata”, and even in the presence of Krishna.
Figure 11, a collage collected from Bhiwani, has a riverine landscape painted in the Nathadwara idiom, over which images cut out from two different offset prints are pasted. One of these prints is “Subhash Balidan”, in which Subhash, dressed as Commander of the INA, is shown squatting amidst the decapitated heads of freedom-fighters and offering his own blood-dripping head to Durga/”Bharat Mata”, who stands resting against her vehicle, a lion, a trident in her right hand and the left hand held out in the gesture of a blessing. (43) Near her feet is a dragon covered with the British flag, ready to devour the rolling heads of the freedom-fighters. Up in the clouds are two images of Subhash Bose, one in a standing posture holding the Indian flag and the other half-emerging from the clouds next to an image of the Red Fort. In the collaged version (fig. 10), the images of Durga and the dragon from the offset print are cut out and pasted on a winding alley near the river. The image of Subhash squatting amidst the heads of martyrs and offering his own head, from the same print, is separated and placed at a slight distance from that of the goddess. The image of Subhash half-emerging from the clouds is cut out in the form of a memorial bust and pasted on the horizon. The image of the Red Fort is excluded in the collaged version; instead, an image of Krishna playing the flute, from another print, is added at the right bottom corner. This exclusion and addition draws one’s attention. The original offset print had a reference to Subhash’s speech at a military review of the INA in 1943, where he gave a new battle-cry to his soldiers — ‘To Delhi, To Delhi!’ — and resolved to hold a victory parade at the Red Fort. This historic detail is eliminated in the collage by removal of the image of the Red Fort (an Islamic monument) and addition of an image of Krishna. History is replaced by mythology. The nationalist struggle for independence led by Subhash is incorporated into the fold of Vaishnava Hinduism. The secular–nationalist theme of “Subhash Balidan” is subverted and appropriated to the Vaishnava domain of the Shekhavati and Bhiwani patrons, and thereby to the ideology of India as a Hindu nation, which was quite popular at the time.
The popularity of the ideology of independent India as a Hindu nation is also underpinned by a number of framed pictures showing photographic images of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leaders, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (fig. 12); these cut-out images form collages that belong to the same Nathadwara genre as the “Krishnalila” collages and that of Subhash’s self-sacrifice described above. On six annual festival days (of which “Guru Purnima” or the festival of guru worship is the most important), the images of these two leaders receive homage. (44) Figure 12 shows the rising moon — a sign of “Guru Purnima” — and two saffron flags on the terrace of a building in the background, indicating the (RSS) connection.
While, in Figure 11, Vaishnava appropriation of a nationalist theme was achieved by excluding the image of the Red Fort from the collage and replacing it with an image of Krishna, in Figure 13 there is an even more direct stratagem at work—of a Vaishnava take-over of an Islamic space. Here one sees an open courtyard of an Indian Islamic monument, (45) mimicking the Mughal emperor Akbar’s tomb in Sikandra, at the centre of which an image of a flute-playing Krishna is collaged over the tomb. “Gopis”, attracted by the sound of his flute, flock around Krishna. What is being conveyed here is the dominant “Hindutva” rhetoric of foreign invasion—invasion of the Hindu nation, desecration of the motherland. The invaded territory is to be retrieved and reconsecrated as Hindu “rashtra” (here, of the Vaishnava faith).
Other Hindu cultic pictures attempting to appropriate Islam to Hinduism are those that depict Kamadhenu or the ‘wish cow’, found in abundance in the “havelis” of Shekhavati. One such picture (fig. 14) shows the body of the cow studded with images of Hindu deities and below her several men receiving the cow’s milk, of whom the first recipient is a Muslim. Near him an inscription reads: ‘Drink milk and protect the cow.’
At the right bottom corner there is another inscription in Hindi, which reads: ‘Their flesh and blood may not reach Allah but your abstinence certainly will; see 36th “ayat” of “surah haj” in the Koran.’ Mass-produced prints of Hindu pictures were addressed to a larger/national audience and dealt with themes of broader interest. While the mass circulation of imagery homogenized certain forms of iconography and mythology, one way of imaging regional ideological themes was the collage. This facilitated desired transformation of spaces and reconfiguration of images to suit local collective or even individual ideological manipulations. The technique of collage as used in these pictures isolated and transferred some of the familiar images from the nationally circulating popular prints (images of global Indian nationalism—Bhagat Singh’s or Subhash Chandra Bose’s martyrdom or “Bharat Mata”) on to the popular Nathadwara landscape, which was also to emerge as a nationalist landscape, the ‘richly-watered, richly-fruited utopic space of a free India’, (46) and, in the process, act as an effective instrument to negotiate regional nationalisms by reconfiguring the national and the local.
Figure 15 has, once again, a portion of an aristocratic mansion and a garden painted in the Nathadwara idiom. An image of Mahatma Gandhi squatting on the floor engrossed in deep thought, cut out from a popular print, is pasted in the foreground. Behind him is collaged, from another print, a standing figure of Rama with his right hand blessing Gandhi. As we have seen earlier, the palatial mansions and gardens of the Nathadwara collages simultaneously represented the modern spaces of the rich merchants of Shekhawati and the sacred groves and alleys of Vrindavan, where Krishna dallied with his “gopis”. This was therefore an empowered space. An opponent of the ideology of India as a Hindu nation, Gandhi was a liberal thinker whose personal faith was rooted in Rama. His favourite devotional song, “Vaishnava jan to tene re kahiye”, places a true Vaishnava in a liberal civil context, devoid of narrow religiosity. In the popular imagination, though, Gandhi remained a Vaishnava, devoted to Rama (he was born into a Vaishnava merchant family of Porbandar in Gujarat). (47) As is the case with the two Subhash Chandra collages described earlier, here too, Gandhi is demonstratively appropriated into the Vaishnava fold by the juxtaposition of his image with that of Rama in the metaphoric space of the regional Vaishnava aristocracy. In the 1989 election campaign, Rama was projected as a national hero as a part of the Hindu-nationalist strategy. (48)
Figure 16 shows a collaged image of Nehru riding a galloping horse, carrying the national flag in his right hand, in front of a large castle-like Art Nouveau mansion and next to a colonial garden fountain. The cut-out image is from a popular print that has a reference to Nehru’s election as Congress President at the Lahore session, held in 1929, where he led a procession of a few thousand delegates riding a white horse, at the bank of the Ravi river. (49) Jawaharlal Nehru had succeeded his father, Motilal Nehru, in this position. ‘The handing over of office from father to son had all the appearance of an apostolic succession, one who was present alleged later.’ (50) I came across this picture in a “haveli” in Bhiwani. When I asked the Vaishnava merchant-owner of the “haveli” about its significance, he explained in a matter-of-fact manner: ‘Here Nehru is shown as Kalki, the future incarnation of Vishnu; this is because Nehru was to be the future of India.’ In Hindu iconography, Kalki, the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, appears at the end of the Hindu apocalyptic era of Kali, riding a horse, to save the people from anarchy and degeneration of ethical values. According to the “Agni Purana”, Kalki would ‘learn the arts of wielding weapons and handling missiles and destroy all lawless ones’. (51)
In pictures such as these, as observed by Christopher Pinney in another context, we see that ‘there is a striking transformation of the explicitly political and topical into the divine’. (52) Further, ‘by the late 1930s, there was a sufficiently substantial anti-colonial allegorical and metaphorical infrastructure in place for politics to be articulated through religious images’. (53) Religious nationalism, both in the days of the freedom struggle and after independence, adopted different regional forms in response to local cultural and social situations. The collages of this region, however, appropriated images from mass-produced and nationally circulated pictures, and reconfigured and negotiated them in terms of regional cultural, aesthetic and ideological currents.

NOTES:

(1) Krishnalila (Raslila) refers to the divine love-play of the Hindu deity Krishna with his beloved Radha and gopis (milkmaids), wherein Krishna appears in dalliance with them in the groves and meadows of Vraj and Vrindavan, places sacred to him.
(2) Phrase taken from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 230.
(3) For a detailed account of the pedagogy of colonial art schools, see Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922, Occidental Orientations, Part Two, 2, ‘Art Education and Raj Patronage’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 29–54.
(4) Christine Schelberger/Erwin Neumeyer, ‘The Diary of C. Raja Raja Varma, Brother of Ravi Varma (with Historic Photographs)’, unpublished Ms., p. 14.
(5) Jyotindra Jain, Kalighat Paintings: Images from a Changing World (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1999), p. 42.
(6) Bhiwani in Haryana and several towns in the Shekhavati region of Rajasthan were home to several Vaishnava Aggarwal families who owned business houses in Calcutta and Bombay.
(7) According to Ilay Cooper, the Aggarwals of Shekhavati migrated from the north, i.e. from Haryana. Even today, Bhiwani in Haryana is an Aggarwal stronghold. See Ilay Cooper, The Painted Towns of Shekhavati (Ahmedabad, 1994), p. 34.
(8) One of the most important shrines dedicated to Krishna in his form of Shrinathji, situated in Nathadwara, Rajasthan, is known as haveli. ‘To devotees of this sect, Shrinathji is not a mere image but a living deity, and the place where he resides must therefore be a mansion, a haveli’: Amit Ambalal, Krishna as Shrinathji (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1987), p. 19.
(9) Anne Hardgrove, ‘Merchant Houses as Spectacles of Modernity in Rajasthan and Tamilnadu’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (ed., Sumathi Ramaswamy), Vol. 36, Nos 1 and 2 (Delhi: Sage Publications, January–August 2002), p. 326.
(10) Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989), p. 38.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Ibid., p. 142.
(13) Pushtimarga is a sect related to devotional worship of Krishna, founded by Vallabhacharya in the early sixteenth century.
(14) Swami Anand, Kulkathao (in Gujarati) (Ahmedabad: Navbharat Sahitya Mandir, 2000), pp. 20–21.
(15) Jürgen Lütt, ‘From Krishnalila to Ramarajya: A Court Case and its Consequences for the Reformation of Hinduism’, in Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron, eds, Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 143.
(16) Veer Bharat Talwar, Rassakshi: Unnisvin Sadi ka Navajagran aur Pashchimottar Prant (in Hindi) (New Delhi, 2001), pp. 179–80.
(17) Quoted in ibid., p. 188.
(18) According to stickers still found intact on some of the collages, the frame-makers who did this job included Hari Narayan & Sons, Jodhpur; Gandhi Bhailal Devkaran, frame-makers, Madhubag, Bombay-4; Himalaya Picture Palace, Delhi; and B.L. Dass & Co. Picture Frames Importers, Manufacturers and General Contractors, 161–63, Lower Chitpur Road, Teritta Bazar, Calcutta.
(19) Most of these pictures were published by Art Publishing Company, Art Framing Company, Roy Babaji & Co., S.C. Banerjee & Co., all based in Calcutta. Some of them bore signatures of artists, such as Sital or Nareen, and dates going back to the early 1920s. Based on this, I venture to date the collages to the 1920s.
(20) This information was given to me by Mr G.C. Jain of Delhi, who is now 67 years old and who has seen frame-makers making collages in Delhi and Calcutta.
(21) A sticker to this effect has been found on two collages.
(22) Kajari Jain, ‘Of the Everyday and the “National Pencil”: Calendars in Postcolonial India’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos 27–28 (March 1995), p. 77.
(23) Phrase borrowed from John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Harlow: Prentice Hall, 2001), p. 47.
(24) W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 2.
(25) Ibid.
(26) Ibid.
(27) Ibid.
(28) Ibid., pp. 1–2.
(29) Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets, p. 96.
(30) Till Brockmann, ‘Bollywood Sings and Dances in Switzerland’, in Alexandra Schneider, ed., Bollywood in Switzerland. The Indian Cinema in Switzerland (Delhi: The British Council, 2001), p. 21.
(31) Meenakshi Shedde, ‘Switzerland is a Disneyland of Love’, in Schneider, ed., Bollywood in Switzerland, p. 24.
(32) Brockmann, ‘Bollywood Sings and Dances in Switzerland’, p. 20.
(33) Rachel Dwyer, ‘The Indian Middle Classes, Romance and Consumerism’, in Schneider, ed., Bollywood in Switzerland, p. 25.
(34) Ibid., p. 27.
(35) Maithili Rao, quoted in Shedde, ‘Switzerland is a Disneyland of Love’, p. 6.
(36) The tradition of love-poetry of Jayadeva and Chandidas with ‘Devotion to Radha’ as the central theme was well-established in Vraj by Madhavendrapuri. Chaitanya visited Vraj in year 1549 of the Vikram era and subsequently sent six of his disciples to Vraj to permanently settle down there. As such, there has been a long-standing connection between Bengal and Vraj. For further details, see Ramnarain Agrawal, Vraj ka Raas Sahitya (in Hindi) (Delhi: National Publishing House, 1981), pp. 87–88.
(37) Published by S.C. Banerjee & Co., Calcutta. Vrindavandas was born in year 2002 of the Vikram era. For a detailed account of his literary works, see Agrawal, Vraj ka Raas Sahitya, pp. 217–25.
(38) At the bottom left corner of Figure 7 is the artist’s signature, which reads ‘Naren, 1923’. According to the printer’s line, it was published by The Art Publishing Company, Calcutta.
(39) Painted by Sital in 1924 and published by S.C. Banerjee & Co., Calcutta.
(40) Lütt, ‘From Krishnalila to Ramarajya’, p. 151.
(41) Francis Frascina, in Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Vol. 1, p. 382.
(42) Marjorie Perloff, ibid., p. 385.
(43) Generally, Hindu deities are not shown in a gesture of blessing with the left hand.
(44) For full details of the rituals held on the six festivals, see Christoph Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 39.
(45) The monument depicted here bears a strong resemblance to Akbar’s tomb in Sikandra. I am grateful to Ratish Nanda for drawing my attention to this similarity.
(46) Christopher Pinney, ‘“A Secret of their Own Country”: Or, how Indian nationalism made itself irrefutable’, Contributions to Indian Sociology (ed., Sumathi Ramaswamy), Vol. 36, Nos. 1 and 2 (Delhi: Sage Publications, January–August 2002), p. 143.
(47) Gandhi had asserted that he was a Sanatani Hindu and as such he believed in the Hindu scriptures and therefore in avataras and rebirth, varnashramadharma, protection of the cow and idol worship; see Mahatma Gandhi, What is Hinduism? (Delhi: National Book Trust of India, 1995), pp. 6–7.
(48) For a detailed account, see Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement, p. 389.
(49)Michael Edwards, Nehru, A Political Biography (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1971), p. 77.
(50) Ibid.
(51) Vettam Mani, ed., Puranic Encyclopaedia (Delhi/Patna/Varanasi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979), p. 82.
(52) Pinney, ‘“A Secret of their Own Country”’, p. 141.
(53) Ibid.

I acknowledge my gratitude to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, where I partially wrote this article under their Artist in Residence (air) programme.