Gods in the Bazaar

"Gods in the Bazaar" is a fascinating account of the printed icons known in India as 'calendar art' or 'bazaar art', the colour-saturated, mass-produced images often used on calendars and in advertisements, featuring deities and other religious themes as well as nationalist leaders, alluring women, movie stars, chubby babies, and landscapes. Calendar art appears in all manner of contexts in India: in chic elite living rooms, middle-class kitchens, urban slums, village huts; hung on walls, stuck on scooters and computers, propped up on machines, affixed to dashboards, tucked into wallets and lockets.In this beautifully illustrated book, Kajri Jain examines the power that calendar art wields in Indian mass culture, arguing that its meanings derive as much from the production and circulation of the images as from their visual features. Jain draws on interviews with artists, printers, publishers, and consumers as well as analyses of the prints themselves to trace the economies - of art, commerce, and religion - within which calendar images and ideas about them are formulated.For Jain the bazaar, or popular commercial arena, is crucial to understanding not only the calendar art that circulates within it but also India's postcolonial modernity and the way that its mass culture has developed in close connection with a religiously inflected nationalism. The bazaar is characterized by the coexistence of seemingly incompatible elements: bourgeois-liberal and neo-liberal modernism on the one hand, and vernacular discourses and practices on the other. She contends that from the colonial era to the present, capitalist expansion has depended on the maintenance of contradictory yet coexisting realms: the sacred, the commercial, and the artistic; and the official and the vernacular.