Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (review)

Gods in the Bazaar is a rich and sophisticated treatment of visual culture in India. Kajri Jain's subject is the colorful world of calendar art and its presence across public and private spaces in India. Through close reading and ethnographic exploration, Jain provides a compelling account of the way in which these images permeate everyday life and animate the meaning of modernity in postcolonial India. Jain unpacks the complexity woven into the everyday appeal of calendar art in a riveting discussion that is bound to generate conversation across disciplines. The book offers a meticulous examination of this art form and forces a rethinking of a series of interrelated issues which Jain aptly terms an "epistemic bundle." A bundle that includes ideas about "the efficacy of representation; the authority of visual evidence; the imaging of identity, the notion of 'fine art'; taste as an arbiter of social distinction; the institution of authorial property; and the denigration of fetishism, of technological mass production, and of commodity relations" (12). Jain locates this epistemic bundle within the colonial and postcolonial landscape through the use of a historically grounded analysis of Indian "calendar" or "bazaar" art.

This is an ambitious book about aesthetics and a commercially successful art form; at the same time it is also a carefully structured social history of popular culture and the cultivation of publics. Jain makes an exemplary contribution to the scholarship on how popular art forms intertwine with quotidian practices and gain both meaning and value across communities and over time. Jain makes a strategic choice to reclaim the centrality of the term "bazaar" to her analysis in contrast to Christopher Pinney's use of chromolithograph which foregrounds the technology of reproduction or H. Daniel Smith's term "god posters" highlighting the predominance of religious themes. Situating the images within the bazaar with all its clutter and messiness, she shows how "this arena of circulation has inscribed images in an economy where sacred, commercial, ethical, aesthetic, and libidinal forms of value are closely intermeshed" (16). The bazaar, from Jain's analytical standpoint, is at once a place, a social formation, a node of convergence in space and time, a cyclically repeated event and a web of far reaching relationships. Hence although stigmatized, the very terms "calendar" and "bazaar," serve as the point of departure to Jain's project of situating the images within intersecting discourses and lines of power.

Jain advances a compelling argument for why she wants to hold on to the terms calendar and bazaar and says with a flourish—"What happens when ungraspable numbers of lurid, pungent, frequently tatty, often undatable, questionably authored, haphazardly archived, interdeterminably representative, hitherto undisciplined Indian bazaar pictures come crowding into the chandeliered baroque halls and immaculate modernist spaces of art history: Do they render the master's house unrecognizable?" (17). Jain notes that there must be ways in which they do. The book, in a sense, demonstrates how this happens. When calendar art unsettles, disturbs and speaks back to the secular face of modernity, the terms of the relationship between the West and its others are constituted.

In an important intellectual move, Jain grapples with the limits of the term visual culture and how bazaar art both problematizes and complicates modes of visuality. Jain argues that art history tends to talk about the corporeality of images in terms that are bounded to specific contexts. Her objectives instead are conceptualized through a much broader framework where she works through the significances of images generated through "their circulation and exchange, their rhythms and orchestrations, their enfolding into habit and ritual" (19). Hence what she offers is a "processual account" of the way the images work by addressing "the corporeal aspects of images and the ways in which people engage with them" (18).

What is most striking about calendar art is its sheer presence in a variety of spaces both secular and religious, public and private. It is not uncommon to see a...