Gods, Guns and Gore

Later, when the film Jai Santoshi Ma renewed the cultural habit of fasting for solah shukravaar, the sociologists at home, notably Dr Patricia Uberoi, got mighty interested in studying and collating this new cult and its antecedents in commerce and politics.

The next big popular phenomenon was of course Ramanand Sagar8217;s Ramayan television series in 1987, now a textbook case for every scholar and social commentator, especially of the subaltern perspective. Its culmination was Ayodhya politics and the current images of 8216;Ram rampant8217;, in contrast to pre-Partition Bharat Mata images, in which she sundered her chains or accepted the severed heads of freedom8217;s martyrs like Sardar Bhagat Singh. Art writers like Geeti Sen have studied this genre from an artistic point of view as well, especially the influence of Western images, even in the outlawed but still potent Rajasthani cult of Sati Matas. All roads lead back to Raja Ravi Varma8217;s new flood of religious images, their unholy but also charming adaptation to advertising, the technological changes from Calcutta woodcuts to lithographs and oleographs, the colour-printing in Germany, the arrival of the machines in India and the cheap democratic image that for ever after pervaded rich homes and poor. But these were 8216;contemporary8217; in the sense of new mass-production technology and its creative opportunities, the colonial marketplace, the fresh faces of the deities when rendered in the Western portrait style, their links with mythological films. Otherwise, these developments rode an already old and thriving culture of popular images, of pilgrim takeaways from holy places and the cycle of renewal in the demand for new images in festivals each year.

Pinney8217;s book is neither new nor startling, since these things are already known. Nor is it a lively read, being overly scholarly and leaden-footed in both language and ideation. What makes the book a collectible though is its excellent production by OUP and the wealth of unusual illustrations, including some that were proscribed by British censorship as too political.

But Pinney has missed something going on under his nose in Hindu society: the calendar 8216;baby gods8217;. Whereas the only Hindu Holy Child used to be Navaneetha Krishna makhan-chor, today you find the pavements blooming between 8216;stud-god8217; pictures with innocent child images of Ram and even a Baby Shiva who is usually never portrayed as an infant since he is considered sans beginning and end. It is a subtle but deep rejection of the muscular BJP Ram shooting flaming arrows astride the model of his proposed temple at Ayodhya. In a reflex so old that Hindus may not even be aware of it, they have cut their now unpleasantly macho gods down to size by reducing them to infants, exactly as Arundhati, wife of Sage Vashisht did with Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva when they hassled her in an ungodly manner.