概 要: |
報告1
発表1 中村忠男
"Hindu Pilgrimage and Formation of the New Body for God/Nation"
From the second decade of the 20th century, local religious and social leaders in India began gradually to adopt the new trend of religious painting which Ravi Varma and other art school graduates had elaborated as “Fine Art” in the western sense, and introduced a group of traditional painter-priests to the western technique of realism, modern printing systems, and popular image markets to promote the pilgrimages they patronized. Through this re-traditionalisation of modern religious imagery, the referent of the divine body painted was bifurcated between the human body and its murthi, the material body in the form of which the deity is actually enshrined in the local pilgrimage center. This confusion of the referential frame produced several hybrid prints, for example, composite prints mixing the Ravi Varma-like painting of a deity with photographs of its murthi. As its realistic reproduction risked eroding the religious power of the priests, which is generated by controlling the regard of the pilgrims in a temple, religious authorities would repress any mechanical reproduction of the murthi by the popular image market and monopolize the rights to it. However, once mythical scenes depicted in popular prints were connected directly with the real world of the viewers, the surface of the print would necessarily assume an opaque depth which could be deciphered according to the viewer’s own worldview and political agenda, and captured the popular imagination with regard to the nation to which they aspired. While the Great Mother Goddess (Bhārat Mātā, Tamilttāy…etc.) acquired such political meaning before Independence, the pilgrimage prints were also fitting to symbolize the integrity of the regional culture through the local pilgrimage network, and, particularly after the middle of the last century, Char Dham prints (an India-wide pilgrimage) visualize the geographical body of the newborn India and the unity of the Indian nation.
発表2 Jyotindra Jain
"Indian Popular Visual Imagery: Curating Culture, Curating Territory"
My presentation will focus on the emergent new forms of Hindu nationalism in Gujarat, spurred by the organised channelling of global/diasporic capital; by the usurpation of new media technologies of image production for spectacularising the religious as “art”, “culture”, and “tradition”; and above all, by the recent phenomenon of strategically constructing and mobilising ritual spaces from the national to the local (and vice versa) to serve communal nationalist goals.
Probing the objectives and processes of the transfer of ritual spaces, I shall examine the recent constructions in Gujarat of facsimile replicas of Amarnath and Vaishnodevi, two of the most revered north Indian places of Hindu pilgrimage; the state government’s mega project of resurrecting the lost Vedic river Saraswati in the territory of the state; and the creation of Akshardham in Delhi, a massive religio-cultural complex of the regional, Gujarat-based Swaminarayan sect.
発表3 Christopher Pinney
"Gandhi, Camera, Action! Anna Hazare and the 'media fold' in twenty-first century India"
Staring with observations concerning the neo-Gandhian Anna Hazare's presence in contemporary India, the enduring relationship between politics and media will be explored. If, as is often claimed, Hazare is in some sense 'repeating' Gandhi, can we also detect a more widespread repetition and citation at work which embeds contemporary Indian politics in something akin to what Jameson termed 'Third World allegory'? The burden of India's colonial history will be explored from this perspective, and the concept of the 'media fold' explored. It is is hoped that this will explicate the layering and bricolage which characterizes much popular Indian visual culture.
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