India Bazaar [antikvár]

INDIA BAZAAR by Kajri Jain Luminous pink-cheeked gods, perpetually delighted children, Muslim shrines twinkling against calligraphic backdrops, heroes of the Indian independence movement glowing with nationalistic fervor, coy and enticing women, swans and monkeys, radios and keys — intense, graphic, suffused with lush colors, boldly centered within the frame. In India, printed images like these are available to almost everyone, either as small "framing pictures" that you can buy for a couple of rupees; as larger posters that cost a bit more; as packaging labels for inexpensive commodities like matches, incense and fireworks; or as calendars that are given away by businesses as advertisements. These commercially sold prints and inexpensive forms of local marketing, commonly referred to as "calendar art" or "bazaar art," have come to form a parallel image world to corporate-style agency advertising, fine art and craft or folk art (although there has been a certain amount of traffic between them all). Older chromolithographs and match labels have become collectors' items and are actually "vintage" graphics, while many of the other images on the pages that follow, particularly the framing pictures, are still in wide circulation. Despite the common misconception, Indian calendar art is not a primarily urban form. Thriving on the low profit margins enabled by a truly mass market, it cuts across the city and the village, the street and the home, public and private, capitalist, bureaucrat, worker and peasant, it also blurs the boundaries between the realms of politics, commerce, religion and the aesthetic: calendar art and its sacred and secular iconographies appear in the public spaces of work and political spectacle as much as they inhabit the domestic sphere of kitchens, bedrooms and prayer rooms. They bob on the dashboards of buses and taxis; watch over government offices, schools and factories; hang from trees in outdoor markets or above cash registers in shops; animate political propaganda and advertising. Those without access to calendars, posters and framing pictures might even salvage pictures of deities from packaging labels to worship in their own personal shrines. During India's colonial period (in the second half of the nineteenth century), images of deities as well as other mythological and secular subjects began to be commercially mass-produced. Many of these lithographs or oleographs were based on paintings by the most celebrated Indian artists of the day, such as Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), who were encouraged by British administrators and the Indian elite alike to use their training in Western artistic techniques to reinterpret Indian mythology. Indeed, the influence of Western naturalism is often more apparent in these early prints than in some of the later ones, which tend to revert to the more stylized iconography and formal postures associated with temple images used in ritual worship. Take, for instance, Matsya Avatar (p. 27), the first of the ten incarnations in which the Hindu god Vishnu came to save the world. Here Vishnu takes the form of a fish, which appears Keeps skin soft and smooth Kohlnoor Chemical Co. (Pvt) I