1st Edition
Seeing South Asia Visuals Beyond Borders
This book critically examines the cultural politics of visuals in South Asia. It makes a key contribution to the study of visuals in the social sciences in South Asia by studying the interplay of the seen and unseen, and the visual and nonvisual. The volume explores interrelated themes including the vernacular visual and visuality, ways of seeing in South Asia and the methodology of hermeneutic sensorium, anxiety and politics of the visuals across the region and the trajectory of visual anthropology, significance of visual symbols and representations in contemporary performances and folk art, visual landscapes of loss and recovery and representation of refugees, visual public in South Asia and making of visuals for contemporary consumptions. The chapters unravel the concepts of visual, visibility, visuality while attending to determinant meta-ideas, such as memory and modernity, trajectories of tradition, fluidity and hybridity, and visual performative politics. Based on interdisciplinary resources, the chapters in this volume present a wide array of empirical findings across India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, along with analytical readings of the visual culture of the subcontinent across borders.
The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of visual and cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, sociology, political studies, media and communications studies, performance studies, art history, television and film studies, photography studies, and South Asian studies. It will also interest practitioners including artists, visual artists, photographers, filmmakers and media critics.
1. Introduction – Visuals in South Asia: The Interface of Seen and Unseen
Dev Nath Pathak, Ratan Kumar Roy and Biswajit Das
Part I: Ways of Seeing and Showing
2. Vernacular Visual: Seeing in South Asia
Sadan Jha
3. Hermeneutic Sensorium: Positing a Methodological Dynamics of Seen-Unseen
Dev Nath Pathak
4. Visual Anthropology in Nepal: A Critical Trajectory of Practices and a Way Forward
Fidel Devkota
Part II: Approaches, Representations and Politics
5. Myths, and the Visual Imagination: The ‘Duplicitous Maiden’ as a Narrative Theme in Gond Art
Roma Chatterji
6. Transport Art of Dhaka: Where the Invisible City Becomes Visible
Tabassum Zaman
7. Visual Inscriptions upon Landscapes of Loss: Memorialising Thileepan in Sri Lanka
Malathi de Alwis
8. Seeing the Invisible: Anthropological Reflections on the Representation of the Rabari Community in Rajasthan
Urmi Bhattacharyya
Part III: Seeing Public and Mediation
9. South Asian Ways of Seeing: Towards a Visual Public Sphere
Amrita Ajay
10. Visual Public in South Asia: Seeing and Showing in the Digital Sphere
Ratan Kumar Roy and Ridhi Kakkar
11. Visibility of Sindhi Progressive Sufism in the New Media Domain of Pakistan
M. Rafiqe Wassan
12. Visual, Visibility and Memory: Television in Everyday Life in Rajasthan
Biswajit Das
Part IV: Image-Making and Manufacturing Meanings
13. Collective Making of Press Photographs: An Ethnographic Enquiry
Siddhi Bhandari
14. The Vulnerability of Visual Vocabulary on Refugee Representation: The Voyage of Boatwo/men Rohingya
Dilpreet Bhullar
15. Visual Matters: Unpacking Political Communication and Politics of the Camera
Farhat Basir Khan
Biography
Dev Nath Pathak is a founding faculty member of sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi, India.
Biswajit Das is Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.
Ratan Kumar Roy was Research Fellow at the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India and is currently Coordinator of International Research Center, SIMEC Institute of Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
