Stanford Humanities Center
In South Asia, the production of fine art has largely depended on the support of wealthy patrons or connoisseurs who pay for art objects to be stored and appreciated in private spaces—hardly making them available for public consumption. But mechanization and industrialization since the late 19th century have made it possible for many forms of art and artistic objects to be mass produced, as well as to be owned and enjoyed by millions of people. When the printing press enabled the reproduction of popular literature and images in India in the colonial period, the creation of exact replicas of items (hitherto duplicated only by hand) not only introduced a sense of “factory-produced” uniformity, but also allowed a larger number of consumers to access and own the exact same product.[1] Thus, exclusive forms of art and literature started becoming more public, leading to a bigger appetite for these products among the masses. Some of the most famous examples of these were reproductions of oil paintings and portraits made by the artist Raja Ravi Varma (b. 1848), which were initially made for exclusive and elite patrons, but became so popular that they had to be printed in color to be sold to the masses. Thousands of Indians could now access these beautiful chromolithographs of Hindu deities and mythological scenes.
The mass production of images in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to a virtual explosion of colors in India’s public life—the market saw the production and consumption of many forms of popular art such as religious posters, advertisements, product packaging, textile labels, calendars, street graffiti, cinema billboards, and other colorful ephemera. These ephemera are commonly sold on Indian streets and bazaars and have been printed by a number of Indian publishers in various cities, dating all the way back to Ravi Varma Press which had started at the end of the 19th century. Since these were mass produced to be sold cheaply, they attracted a large market all over South Asia and even today can be seen decorating the walls in people’s homes, shops, and places of worship.
As with many bazaar products in India, some of the images and posters were imitated by other printers, even though many of the original ones carried information about the publisher and a copyright notification. It is not just the original illustration that was copied repeatedly due to its popularity; the imitations over several decades, in fact, helped evolve an entire style and color palette which we today call bazaar art. Typically, bazaar art depicts Hindu gods and goddesses, national leaders, natural scenes, beautiful women and babies. These figures are drawn in dream-like scenarios using bright and saturated colors—anything that would attract a buyer in a market or a fair. Some of the most visible forms of this art ranges from large billboards on Indian streets advertising a product or a new movie through the depiction of larger-than-life religious or popular film icons, to tiny matchbox labels displaying miniature versions of the same icons.
These brightly colored art objects often carry aesthetic values that were typically disregarded or even loathed as garish or kitschy by the elite. Even now, these forms of popular art are not taken seriously by museums, libraries or art galleries that aim to exhibit and preserve contemporary or “traditional” art, owing to popular art productions’ ephemeral or transient nature: you see them one day, and they disappear or transform the next. They were usually considered “consumables” to be discarded after use rather than preserved for their artistic quality.
Nevertheless, while a large chunk of these objects from the late 19th or early 20th centuries may have been lost or destroyed, some of them have survived in the private collections of hobbyists in India and abroad, who collect everything from old coins and stamps, to picture postcards and cinema posters, even though these objects might not be classified as “antique” by many.[2] These are, undoubtedly, the most open-access forms of art and knowledge that South Asia has produced over the last century and a half.
Is there any way to preserve and document this bazaar art so that it can be retrieved and studied? These ephemeral posters, calendars and street graffiti allow us to learn more about the society and popular culture of India than the formal artworks preserved and sold in museums and art galleries. A few initiatives have recently been made to preserve and study the nuances of popular Indian art and spread awareness about them.
I have been associated with one such endeavor called Tasveer Ghar (meaning, “A house of images”), an online archive of India’s popular visual culture, that started in 2006. At Tasveer Ghar, I and my co-founders, Christiane Brosius (Heidelberg University, Germany) and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke University, Durham, USA), try to document and contextualize the thousands of images found in our public spaces.
How was the idea of such an archive born? One may find established museums or archives for history, archaeology, anthropology, science, metallurgy, and even manuscripts, but it is difficult to find a museum of everyday ephemeral art. Our very first step was to look for some basic collections or studies on popular bazaar art.[3] Some initial image galleries of popular art were curated on Tasveer Ghar using printed posters from the collection of scholar and enthusiast Patricia Uberoi, who had been collecting these for decades along with her partner (the late) J.P.S. Uberoi.
However, creating such an archive posed many challenges, as the entire process of sourcing and archiving the images, and the question of the intellectual property of such objects had to be thought about from scratch. Since the source (and the consumers) of bazaar art and popular images is public, the archive also needed to work in the spirit of open access, not only in exhibiting but also in acquiring the material. Because of the ephemeral quality and medium of these images, and the diversity of their physical locations and ownership, the digital/online space was considered to be the most ideal and economical way of preserving and exhibiting them.
But the question still remained, that although these ephemera are created and distributed by artists, publishers or traders, who really owns all of this art, after decades of them circulating, traveling, and being imitated? We found some of this material, dating back to the last 50–100 years, in the private collections of enthusiasts like Priya Paul and others. In some cases, the original artists have passed away, or the companies that produced them closed down decades ago. In this scenario, can today’s collectors even lay claim to the copyright of this material? Can one claim to be the exclusive owner of a matchbox label from 1930, or to a cinema poster from 1960—objects that were mass produced at the time?
It is in such cases that digital copying and online archiving helps make these artworks open access for everyone—and return them to the public, where they belong. This was the idea behind our project at Tasveer Ghar to digitize various private collections of popular art and making them accessible to the public.
Most private collectors or hobbyists typically do not like to make the artefacts that they own public for fear of the objects losing their “market value.” They usually wait to show it to someone who appreciates and values the “correct worth” of an object. But art objects do not carry merely economic price, aesthetic quality, or historical significance—their value can be enhanced by treating them as objects of study, research and knowledge by a large number of people. Priya Paul’s collection of old posters, calendars, postcards, commercial advertisements, textile labels and cinema posters, painstakingly accumulated over several decades, is one of the finest archives of such ephemera in India. This rich visual medley breaks a prevalent myth that India was a land of ascetics and modesty; it also gives us a sense of how the rich visual culture of the pre-print India may have adapted to printing technology. Much of this collection includes extremely liberal and unorthodox interpretations of religious themes that defy the puritanical attitudes that some of us may have today about the same.
This is the reason that online archiving of heritage objects can be one of the best ways to preserve them, showcase them, as well as open them up to further study and interpretation, while keeping the physical object itself in safe custody.
An online archive also allows the public to look at an object in detail by zooming in on its various details. At a more advanced level, one could also search for objects within an image or compare one image to other images in the archive. In fact, with online tools that allow one to search databases using voice or local languages, it is possible for anyone, including non-literate users, to search image archives. This interactivity and flexibility is what prompted Tasveer Ghar to start digitizing thousands of images from the popular art collections of Priya Paul, Gautam Hemmady, and others, and make them accessible to public. When Tasveer Ghar was commissioned to digitize and archive these important collections, each image needed careful handling, cleaning, assessment, scanning, digital photography, classification, and detailed annotation. It took more than three months to physically handle and scan the images from just Priya Paul’s collection into raw digital data.
The process of preserving popular art does not stop at digitizing and uploading them online. It is very important to provide the origin, the context, or some textual detail about each image, what we sometimes call metadata or captions. Hence, following digitization, it is important to provide with each image, not only the visual details of its content (correctly identifying what one can see in the image, including any inscription or text), but also technical specifications of the type, size and format of the specimen, such as the quality of the paper, the printing technique, the date/year of production, the artist or producer, its intended use, and if possible, the journey of its acquisition in the current collection, besides any other detail that is visible. Often, this metadata creation requires some research into the antecedents of the image. Experts or historians may also provide other historical contexts that are not apparent in the specimen. Having an open-access online archive allows these details to be added to an image, enriching the range of information and knowledge that images can provide us. On Tasveer Ghar’s website, we have provided this facility to crowdsource information to allow for detailed captioning and contextualization for the visual essays, and we plan to include it with all the images as well. We are also open to image contributions from collectors, scholars or public in general who understand our definition of popular art or the visual culture of South Asia. Online, open-access, and interactive exhibitions of heritage objects such as Tasveer Ghar are ideal educational and research tools that should be incorporated by all museums and archives for wider and global exposure of popular art.
Notes
[1] Jain, Kajri. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Duke University Press, 2007. Also see, Orsini, Francesca. Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India. Permanent Black, 2009.
[2] Some of them, such as paintings on street walls could not be “collected” or preserved in any way, except perhaps in photographic reproductions.
[3] See for instance, Jain, Jyotindra, ed. India's Popular Culture: Iconic Spaces and Fluid Images. Marg Foundation, 2008. Also, Pinney, Christopher. Photos of Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
