South Asian Ways of Seeing: Contemporary Visual Cultures

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South Asian Ways of Seeing: Contemporary Visual Cultures brings together eminent as well as new scholarly voices from across disciplines to explore South Asia from a visual standpoint, exploring multiple mediums and multiple ways of seeing, including tarot, film, graphic novels, painting, death pictures, graffiti, and installation art. With an intent to establish conversations between and across disciplines like history, sociology, literature, art history, culture and media studies, the discursivity of visual cultures in framing a South Asian imaginary is attempted. Attention to the production, circulation and consumption of visuals, which recognizes their embeddedness in material and cultural practices, is combined with an in-depth

analysis of form, technique and the afterlife

of less-examined media/genres.

Through this wide-ranging exploration, we ask the compelling question: Is there a South Asian way of seeing?

Amrita Ajay is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maitreyi College, University of Delhi. She teaches Shakespeare, Indian English writing, Romanticism and literary theory. She has contributed articles and reviews to popular magazines, journals and textbooks. Her interest in literature and visual arts has evolved into a comprehensive interest in visual language and culture, which are her current subjects of research and writing.

Samarth Singhal is pursuing a PhD in English Literature at the University of California, Riverside. He has taught at Maitreyi College and Kamala Nehru College at the University of Delhi. His MPhil dissertation discussed the 'fantastic' across contemporary Indian mediums. He has published on political cartooning, painting, and detective fiction. Other forthcoming publications include anthology essays on picture books, indie comics, twenty-first-century visual satire in India, and contemporary 'genre fiction'.

Is there a need for another book on Visual Studies? Have we not read reams and reams of material on the 'image'? These questions weighed on our minds as we sifted through the essays that were sent to us after the call for papers. We had no way of knowing how the anthology would turn out. The idea for the collection came to us as we organized a National Conference on Visuality in March 2016 at the Department of English, Maitreyi College, University of Delhi. We knew then that the density and wealth of commentary on the 'visual' deserved another volume. We also knew that it would conveniently shed light on more contemporary

ideas.

 We quickly realized, however, that it was necessary to narrow our focus. It became evident that 'visuality' was too large a term to effectively deal with. So we chose 'South Asia'. Of course, 'South Asia' itself presented problems. Is it possible to club together diverse experiences under one blanket term current in academia? Does the term ignore inter-personal relations and their complex permutations in the region? There is beginning to develop a strong body of critical scholarship on South Asia, and these are only starting points of enquiry into the dense subject. As readers will reckon, these questions can be asked more piercingly through visual mediums.

We extend heartfelt gratitude to our teachers, students, and colleagues at Delhi University for their determined efforts in enabling us. We thank Mr Varma at Primus for his generosity with time and advice. We could not have asked for a better mentor for our own journey through this anthology. We would like to thank the British Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Tasveer Ghar, The Alkazi Collection, Brijbasi Printers and J. B. Khanna Printers for letting us reproduce their images.

The Charlie Hebdo moment of our collective history has been an affirmation that all visual practises must be taken seriously. Clearly, images are not dismissable as trivial accompaniments to serious news any longer. They are indeed constitutive of the everyday reality of our technologized modernity and perceptual universe, in hitherto unforeseen ways. It is almost like a solid material force exists behind what is perceived through the eye. How we understand visuals today needs to acknowledge discursivity at the macro and micro levels. This is a caution that South Asia has imbibed since proclaiming self-rule across the region. We can confidently say that forces of power exist in South Asia that take sustenance from specific differences in gender, property, caste, and community. These forces, or 'politics', account for the diversity of visual cultures that are embroidered into the fabric of a fraught and complex history. Consequently, how visual (art) is received or understood can become points of contestation in light of these differences, which are often silenced yet completely potent in the region.

The 'visual turn', now ubiquitous across cultural and media studies since the nineties, has been in the making for over a century. Modernity has emerged at the cusp of old and new ways of seeing, as modern scopic regimes and their workings have come to be theorized across various disciplines. In South Asia, the question has organically emerged at this critical juncture as indigenous ways of seeing, already complex and multifarious themselves, encounter the hegemonic ocular-centrism of globalization and rapid digitalization. The hybridity of contemporary cultural artefacts has necessitated an exigent exploration of what Sumathi Ramaswamy has called the 'hermeneutic of the visible' in South Asia.

As editors, we have been trained in the discipline of Anglophone literature and have discovered fruitful connections between our native discipline and visual studies. As with the social sciences, we have confronted the brick wall that sometimes exists between text and image. The novel is only one particular medium when seen against painting, film, photography, illustration, cartooning, the picture book, visual poetry or even animation. Sometimes these mediums walk together, but owing to their varied histories of development, they also meander on divergent and convoluted paths. Hence, we decided to welcome work from across disciplines and mediums, for it would be cloistering to assume literature as a point of reference for a worthwhile conversation around visual studies. Additionally, this also helped avoid an over-reliance on anthropology and art history as the only available frames for approaching visual materials in South Asia, where most conversations around visuality have turned so far.

The epistemological questions are more pronounced when we observe the marquee of interdisciplinarity that has been threatening to engorge the humanities and social sciences. From an objective distance, dissolving disciplinary/methodological delineations in favour of a bricolage of methods is always underscored by the need for utter caution. In case of visual studies, the materials easily lend themselves to such proclivities. In the present Delhi University syllabi alone, special papers on visual studies have found currency in both the English literature and sociology departments.