Possible Futures

In “What Do Pictures Really Want?” W. J. T. Mitchell posits that pictures “present not just a surface, but a face that faces the beholder” (72). While this seeming personification of nonliving objects entails the familiar risks of backwardness, including fetishism and idolatry, neither iconoclastic critique nor a taxonomy of healthy and perverse, progressive and regressive images/objects has the capacity to make fetishism disappear. The political task of the cultural critic in such circumstances is the reverse of straightforward; an understanding of the relationship between cultural forms and political practices needs to be not so much diagnostic as much as an endeavor to understand and engage the magical residue that clings stubbornly to visual (and other) objects. Mitch-ell’s provocation has had wide purchase among art historians and among historians and theorists of media and visual culture. It is worth noting its special salience for any consideration of the public culture of the subcontinent, which has come to invest popular prints of deities as well as public monuments (especially but not exclusively temples and mosques) with the politics of Hindu rightist nationalism. Of the works broadly inspired by Mitchell, two texts published in the last decade have been widely influential in turn: Christopher Pinney’s “Photos of the Gods”: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (2004) and Kajri Jain’s Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (2007). For Pinney, the popular chromolithographs he examines encompass not just the visual artifact but also the social and visual affect of visual and material objects. He names this dynamic social relationship of viewer and viewed a “corpothetics”—a somatic and performative engagement with sacred and secular images. This visual field, including its human networks of production, consumption, and circulation, must be read, he insists, as crucial to the shaping of a public culture in the subcontinent; it is not merely a sphere of application, replicating an ideological content produced in orbits recognized as more properly political or historical. “Is it possible,” he asks, “to envisage history as in part determined by struggles occurring at the level of the visual?” (8). Such a conception of the work that the image does should make us wary of a realist idiom predicated on a mistrust both of images and the commodity form and an understanding of viewers as lacking the capacity to resist their lure. “The default mode of critical thinking about the role of images in social and political change has tended to be a juridical one,” says Jain, pointing out how this tends often to slight the complex ways in which images function (10).

Bishnupriya Ghosh’s Global Icons must be situated within this important conversation, which she reenergizes and extends in ambitious ways. More than an examination of visual culture alone, it stakes out the imaginative practices and the political possibilities of mass media in a globalized and neoliberal contemporaneity. Focusing on three contested female figures she calls “bio-icons,” she seeks to investigate the ways in which they function, not so much as charismatic leaders of movements or like traditional stars of cinematic culture as much as mediums, “anthropomorphic apertures” to the vision of more just futures. These figures are Phoolan Devi, the untouchable/Dalit “bandit queen” whose surrender to Indian security forces, election to Parliament, and death by assassination established her as a prototype of the subaltern insurgent and female avenger for constituencies in India but also across the world; Mother Teresa, the saint beatified by the Catholic establishment and linked to global capital yet also venerated by the poor of Calcutta among whom she worked; and Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize–winning novelist and environmental activist. What is at stake is not so much an accounting of three particular figures, though Ghosh’s scrutiny of their biographical, virtual, and popular cultural incarnations is thorough and multiply scaled. Nor is the book’s understanding of iconicity peculiar to South Asia, even though Hindu South Asia’s histories of iconophiliac religious devotion and of feminized figurations of community and territory give the material...