Pinney, Christopher

English

UCL Discovery

Newsletter No. 17 - Summer 2019​ > ​Interview with Christopher PinneyChristopher Pinney, Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London, was aguest professor at the CEIAS in February 2019.Here, he answers Zoe Headley’s questions about his recent work, his current project and the Hield of visualstudies in South Asia in general.ZH : You have recently added to your vast and very rich publication record, two new volumes: A Waterless Sea (ReaktionBooks, 2018), which delves into the theories and history of mirages, and Lessons from Hell: Printing and Punishment inIndia (Marg, 2018), which documents a speciFic genre of prints, the Karni Bharni (reap as you sow). Could you tell me moreabout the political history of these hellish images and how they contribute to what you term the “tenacious presence ofmessianic thought” in contemporary India? CP: Like most of my work its origins lie in the village in Madhya Pradesh that I’ve been visiting since 1982. That was where ILirst encountered these amazing “karni bharni” prints, which show the punishments enacted in hell for sinful acts. Theimages were clearly powerful pedagogical tools for the villagers and they would use them to instruct me in the principles of(their version of) Hinduism, pointing to diTerent transgressions and their punishments. I was immediately struck by theimages’ ambivalence: the clarity of their moral condemnation seemed to be at odds with the obvious fascination of the artistswith naked bodies being tortured. Over decades of collecting as many images as I could and talking to their owners I came to see that the images have acomplex history and politics. The politics is perhaps a little more straightforward than the history: in essence they articulate aclean-caste vegetarian code that prescribes punishment for eating meat and Lish, and for cruelty to animals. The code is alsohighly patriarchal, even misogynistic one might say. So one of things I explored in the book was this politics and socialpositioning, or rather the sociology of the anxiety. Much of the imagery also seemed to speak about the frontier between therural and the small-town market (the sin of “overloading a bullock cart” is for instance a stock motif). It was also possible tosee that what appeared to be unchanging concerns (e.g. about the sin of theft) were inflected with anxieties about change.The thief is often depicted as an Adivasi for instance, and one can begin to glimpse how these apparent changeless imagesmight also be viewed as historicized vignettes testifying to anxieties about a newly mobile workforce and so on. So looked atin the right light the image can be seen to have a history and to express an awareness of historical change alongside whatappear to be epochal cosmological and eschatological divides. So on the one hand the images can be seen to embody a subtle history of changing (and remarkably tenacious belief). Butthey are also material evidence of a history of changing media, especially of the rise of lithography. The sins andpunishments in these popular printed images have several deep textual antecedents (most notably the Garuda Purana). Butwithin Hinduism there is no deep tradition of visualizing these punishments (except within various Swaminarayan texts,which are relatively recent). The images seem to be indebted to a Jain manuscript tradition, part of which is co-opted by earlyCalcutta presses. So it is possible to detect various continuities between how 17th century illustrators of Jain manuscriptswere conceiving of punishments and the motifs that early lithograph entrepreneurs looking for new saleable material c. 1880were encountering. Sometimes this continuity comes through very clearly as with “the fruit of killing birds,” which wasalways a distinctively Jain trope. These images are supposed to evoke horror and condemnation: their task is to mimetically convey “badness” but the skills ofthe artist and printer are usually such that one is left admiring, and sometimes enjoying, the terrible scenes depicted. This iswhere (to echo Homi Bhabha) the intentionally “pedagogic” mutates into an unpredictably “deformative-performative.” Theinstability of these images interested me a good deal and I suppose connects with my interest (following Walter Benjamin) inthe role of contingency in determining photographic possibility. The 1952 Film Censorship Directive (which I discuss at lengthin the book) provides an interesting exploration of what Ravi Vasudevan called the “exhilaration of dread,” and I also found J.M. Coetzee’s discussion of the “Problem of Evil” in his novel Elizabeth Costello highly productive. Coetzee wonderfullydescribes the prurient compulsions of such forms of obscenity, the addictive pleasures to be had from observing what shouldbe abject and which after all ensures the survival of these images of atrocity. A further historical twist occurs from the 1970s onwards when the cellular karni bharni template gets co-opted into series of“Ideal Boy” (Adarsh Balak) posters and large format Nehruvian-style exhortations with titles like “Good Citizen” or “Our Dutiestowards Our Government.” Like the original karni bharni, these were intended to be hung in schools as charts oTering moralinstruction. The Ideal Boy images, together with their complementary pairs, “Bad Habits” (Buri Adaton), have since acquired aretro appeal and been subject to several recent parodies (as well as found their way into the Mumbai artist Atul Dodiya’swork). One of the features that Lirst attracted me to karni bharni images was the crowd scenes that featured in the “false speaker”vignette. This was initially a lying Brahman who over time as the images evolved became a politician speaking (usuallythrough a microphone) to an assembly of people signifying the “public.” The vignette is very similar to an episode in the HindiLilm Pratighaat. Initially I thought that this was a manifestation of the “public sphere,” of a new axis of evaluation in thesphere of morality. My hunch was that one could see the signs here of a new “horizontal” dimension of judgment and thataccompanied the rise of a new model “citizen” who supplanted the religious devotee. At the end of my study I had to concludehowever that this was illusory and that the cosmological axis remained totally vertical, i.e. predicated upon a visible materialworld underneath which lay vengeance (performed by devilish rakshasas). In the false speaker vignette the politician iscertainly speaking to an assembly that looks as though it could form a public but in the end they don’t have any role to play inthe matter: the punishment is performed on the vertical, cosmological, axis. In this sense the world of karni bharni remainsviolently enchanted, this is the “tenacious presence of messianic thought” to which I referred. Karni bharni still just about survive in rural marketsand several Indian publishers still produce them. I wasamazed on a recent trip to Bangladesh to discover thatin the Lirst rural house I entered near the border withMeghalaya that pride of place was given to a karnibharni image! I also encountered many near Barisal inthe south of the country. Maybe in the future I will beable to study the valence of such images of retributionas part of a fragile minoritarian religious culture. ZH: You are currently leading the ERC-funded project“Citizens of the Camera: Photography and thePolitical Imagination” (2016-2020) for which you areconducting Fieldwork in Bangladesh, Nepal andPakistan. This project also involves researchersworking on Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, Cambodiaand Sri Lanka. I am curious, are there at this stage anystriking facts or Findings which allude to a speciFicityof South Asia, as compared to the other regions understudy, in the interplay of images, citizenship andpolitics? CP: Well if I may be permitted a rather contradictoryresponse I think that the evidence from South Asiapoints to something speciLic in the formal potential ofphotography which however, once identiLied, turns out to be a feature of practices in other regions as well. This wascrystalized for me recently when responding to the Mumbai photographer Ketaki Sheth’s recent project on Indian photostudios. Her photographic documentation of these provincial spaces, and some of their remaining customers, plays withwhat Andre Bazin termed the camera’s “screen” as opposed to a painting’s “frame.” Bazin imagines the screen, characterizedby arbitrary edges and “cut-oT-ness” as something like the default setting for photography (Benjamin also has somethingsimilar in mind, I think, when he writes of what is “native” to the camera). Ketaki Sheth’s project underlines the extent towhich Indian studio practices resist this default, favoring instead symmetry and frontality, i.e. features associated with theframe. It would be tempting (and quite easy in fact) to see this as characteristic of South Asia but actually once identiLied in anIndian context it becomes possible to identify it elsewhere (e.g. in Nicaragua, Nigeria, and in other locations where studiossurvive). This is the cultural space that I’ve described in the past as “more than local, less than global.” It’s not peculiar toSouth Asia, although it is very marked and visible in South Asia. It is very striking how iconophiliac India and Nepal are, andhow tenaciously local studios survive (due in large part to the bureaucratic state’s demand for ID photographs and also thecontinuing importance of wedding photography). Thinking about this extra-regional space is driving our thinking in theproject about “demotic” photography rather than “vernacular” photography. Demotic suggests a ground up, often shared,subaltern practice as opposed to reactive practices determined through their opposition to dominant class practices) as inBourdieu’s account of 1960s French peasant photography.The emerging comparative themes in the project concern (among others) visual representation as the precondition forpolitical representation, the emergence of “proleptic” photographic identities, and the role of social media and these cutcomplexly across the diTerent Lieldwork locations. ZH: The so-called “visual turn” in South Asian studies, heralded by Diane Eck’s Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India isclosing into its third decade. In your opinion, what are the new frontiers of this Field of study? CP: Well the Lirst thing is that I think that the “career” of darshan, post-Eck says something about the unfulLilled need foranthropologists to cling to over-arching concepts in the wake of the collapse of the culture concept. I think part of the appealof “darshan” as a tool was that was a means of restoring coherence. In this sense I think we should be skeptical about itshegemony. In the part of Madhya Pradesh I know, you are just as likely to hear the term “barkat” (from the Arabic “baraka”) inrelation to (the fruits of) Hindu image worship but maybe because it’s too hybrid it doesn’t get invoked by scholars in thesame way. However, I think the study of visual practices in South Asia still has a long way to go.Lessons from Hell indicates that there are whole genres of south Asian visual culturewhich are focused on problematics of looking that have never been properly investigatedand there are entire communities and traditions about whose visual practices we stillknow next to nothing. There have been many important contributions to the study ofvisual practices in South Asia that show the continuing fecundity of the Lield. Forinstance, I think of Andy Rotman’s study of early Buddhism Thus Have I Seen, ClareHarris’s almost detective investigation of photographs produced in the YounghusbandLhasa Mission, Yousuf Saeed’s and Jamal Elias’ tantalizing work on Muslim imagepractices. Then there are important works investigating visual history, whichproblematize the role of the visual as evidence (The Camera as Witness, Joy Pachuau andWilllem Van Schendel’s book on Mizoram and Sugata Ray’s forthcoming book on eco-aesthetics and Krishna imagery. I take all these as evidence of a Lield that is still reallyonly starting to open up: it’s not nearing completion or exhaustion. ZH: Narrowing into the Field of the study of photography in South Asia, would you agree with Sophie Gordon’scharacterization that scholarly output in this Field is largely caught in an “aesthetics versus context” debate? Or would yousay that since her statement (2007) the Field has diversiFied, and, if so, how? CP: To be honest I don’t understand that distinction: it seems to me that context determines aesthetics. If you crave the subtletonalities of John Murray’s wax negatives (huge, amazing records of north Indian buildings made in the 1850s) then paintedphotographs infused with Bollywood excess will probably repel you. With any aesthetics one needs to get inside a context,learn a code, learn what matters, what is beautiful and what might be less so: these are never self-evident superLicial matters.All learning and appreciation involves what Nelson Goodman called “world-making” through which you come to understandinternal coherence and consistency: context helps open up new aesthetic frontiers. Sophie worked as the London curator of the Alkazi Photographic Collection at a time when the collection was moving awayfrom its focus on canonical 19th-century colonial photography (John Murray, Samuel Bourne etc.) towards demotic Indianpractitioners and she may well have been reflecting on that institutional shift of direction. The flip side of this distinction involves subjecting bodies of images that were previously inoculated from political scrutiny bytheir “aesthetic” status to political critique. This was one of the objectives of my Coming of Photography in India (2008), whichexplored how work by photographers like Murray and Bourne was produced within a “colonial habitus.” ZH: Leaving aside academics, but staying in photography, could you share with me which contemporary photographer(s)working in the South Asia you most appreciate, whose vision you Find particularly signiFicant? CP: Well largely thanks to Shahidul Alam’s inspirational vision there is an incredibly strong contingent of committedphotojournalists in Bangladesh. Shahidul’s own work on migration provides a compelling example of how photography canbe used to investigate process and movement. Taslima Akhtar (perhaps best known for her images of the Rana Plaza disaster)shows how the camera can be yoked to activist causes and Munem Wasif has produced an arresting study of the increasinglypoliticized forms of faith in Bangladesh. In India Ronny Sen produces images of mysterious evanescence, and Ketaki Sheth’s recent Photo Studio is a wonderful studyof small-town aesthetics. Cop Shiva from Bangalore shares with Ketaki an interest in how subjects present themselvesperformatively. I’ve recently come to a new appreciation of the late Raghubir Singh, and like him Cop Shiva is a master ofcolor who shoots in the street but whereas Raghubir was fascinated by the contingency and improbable alignments of thestreet, Cop Shiva approaches it very much as a formal theatrical space. I like Ishan Tankha’s quiet and reflective work on Naxalism in Chhattisgarh. His focus on the symbolic and material lexicon ofpeasant struggle puts me very much in mind of Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects. Sohrab Hura is probably the mostremarkable young South Asian photographer/Lilm-maker. His short twin-screen video piece The Lost Head and the Bird istruly remarkable both as a creative invention and a documentary record. It trawls social media images to produce a propheticaccount of the intertwining of political sentiment with the personal in contemporary India. It’s exhilarating and scary. Finally,it’s been good to follow the trajectory of Suresh Punjabi’s work as it has orbited from a small town in Madhya Pradesh (whereI’ve been working intermittently since 1982) into the art world. Both Punjabi’s work, the wonderful Ajmer photographer RamChand (recently documented by Christophe Prebois), and the Tamil studio world you yourself have documented are the tip ofa still submerged iceberg of demotic photography. Centre d'Études de l'Inde et de l'Asie du SudCentre for South Asian Studies - Parishttp://ceias.ehess.fr/Sign in | Recent Site Activity | Report Abuse | Print Page | Powered By  Google Sites

Interview with Christopher Pinney, in: CEIAS Newsletter No. 17 - Summer 2019

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10154964/1/%281%29interview-with-christopher-pinney-ceias-newsletter.pdf

Interview with Christopher Pinney, in: CEIAS Newsletter No. 17 - Summer 2019

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