Gods in the time of democracy 9781478010340, 1478010347, 9781478011392, 1478011394

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GODS IN THE TIME OF DEMOCRACY

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GODS

in the

TIME of

DEMOCRACY Kajri Jain

Duke University Press Durham and London 2021

© 2021 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Drew Sisk Typeset in Portrait Text and ITC Century by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jain, Kajri, author. Title: Gods in the time of democracy / Kajri Jain. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020020342 (print) | LCCN 2020020343 (ebook) ISBN 9781478010340 (hardcover) ISBN 9781478011392 (paperback) ISBN 9781478012887 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art and religion—India—History—21st century. | Gods in art. | Idols and images in art. | Art and popular culture— India. | Religion and culture—India. | Commercial art—India. | Aesthetics—Religious aspects. Classification: LCCN 72.R4 J356 2021 (print) | LCCN 72.R4 (ebook) | DDC 201/.67—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020342 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020343 Illustrations by Prasad Khanolkar Cover art: Kashinath, 65-ft. seated Shiva at Kids Kemp department store, also known as Kemp Fort, Old Airport Road, Bengaluru, inaugurated in 1995. Photograph by Kajri Jain, 2007. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction EMERGENCE

1

1

29

STATUES AND SCULPTORS

2 DEMOCRACY 3

81

ICONOPRAXIS

120

4 CARS AND LAND 5

SCALE

Notes

220

259

Bibliography Index

323

307

181

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Acknowledgments

This is ultimately a book about time. Fittingly, it also embodies a great deal of time—not just mine but also that of many other people in many different places. Much as I wish to, I cannot name everyone here, and some people prefer not to be named, but I am deeply grateful to them all. First and foremost, I thank the marvelous sculptors and architects who shared their work, ideas, process, images, and more, with unfailing generosity, grace, and good humor. Naresh Kumar and Matu Ram Varma in Gurgaon and Pilani, Sridhar and Kashinath in Bangalore, Sanjay and Bijoy Sakya in Sikkim, and Anil and Ram Sutar in Delhi went out of their way to help me understand what they do and how, patiently answering many questions over many years. Similar thanks to Shamaraya Acharya, Rekha Bhoite and Subhash Bhoite, S. K. Chopra, Dharmendra Kumar, Rajesh Nayak, Amar Pal, Navin Pradhan, Shravan Prajapati, Babu Kazi Sakya, and Thangam Subramanian. I was also fortunate to interview several people responsible for commissioning or supervising monumental statues and associated projects. Many thanks to Anil Bachoo, B. K. Birla, J. R. “Raj” Dayal, Sat Maharaj, Ravi Melwani, Sonam Paljor, Prasadji, Manju Safaya, B. K. Saini, R. N. Shetty, and Thobchen Takapa. This project ranges over multiple locations and areas of specialized expertise, so I have relied on information, insights, and other assistance from others with deep understanding and experience of specific contexts, for which I am hugely thankful (though any lapses remain my responsibility): in Bangalore, Annapurna Garimella; in Delhi, Y. S. Alone and Vivek Kumar; in Lucknow, Ram Kumar; in Kanyakumari, A. K. Perumal and “Mamaji” Angiras Hazrat; in Mauritius, Amenah Jahangeer-Chojoo and Vinesh Hookoomsingh; in Sikkim, Tashi Densapa, Chetan Shreshtha, and Pema Wangchuk; in Murudeshwar, Jairam Madigal; in Trinidad, Christopher Cozier, Steve Ouditt, Raymond Ramcharitar, Glen Ramjag, Indrani Rampersad, Rhoda Reddock, Deokinanan Sharma, and Pandit Satnarine Sharma. Thanks also to my wonderful research assistants, on-site and long distance: Rohit Dhanuk, Sushumna Kanan, Jaby Mathew, Akshaya Tankha, Sarah Richardson, and Sumanlata Singh. I was lucky to have delightful and erudite companions on some of my field trips: Dean Arlen, Shalmali Guttal, Sameera Jain, Yamuna Mukherjee, Sarah

Richardson, Aveek Sen, and Dayanita Singh. I can only hope that something of their superb sensibilities and spirits permeate this book. I was also immensely fortunate to enjoy the warm hospitality, assistance, and enthusiasm of friends and family on my travels. My gratitude to Champak and Vimoha Bagla, Kuhu and Arijit Banerjee, Shalmali Guttal and Randall Arnst, Sameera Jain, Sheena Jain, Yamuna and Sandeep Mukherjee, Vanita Pai, Rhoda Reddock and Dean Arlen, Vivek and Shamim Saraswat, Dayanita Singh, Aveek Sen, Aradhana Seth, and Nilita Vachani. I am grateful every day to live and work in a society that believes in the public funding of the humanities. This research was funded by Canadian taxpayers, by way of a Social Sciences and Humanities Standard Research Grant and my position at the University of Toronto, with the time and funding it provided: a Connaught Start-Up Award, a Dean’s Special Grant, and a University of Toronto Research Completion Award. I am also indebted to the organizers of the many excellent academic forums who invited me to engage in stimulating conversations and share my work in various parts of the world. Here I particularly want to mention the multiyear Transcultural Visuality Learning Group at the University of Heidelberg led by Christiane Brosius, Barbara Mittler, and Sumathi Ramaswamy; the Wenner-Gren Symposium on “New Media, New Publics?” organized by Maria José de Abreu, Carlo Caduff, and Charles Hirschkind; the “Ecologies of Urbanism in Asia” workshops organized by Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan; and the “Markets and Modernities” project at the University of Toronto’s Asian Institute, led by Ritu Birla and Tania Li, which convinced me that the University of Toronto was the place to be. I have been working on this project as long as I have been in Toronto. Over that time, I have come to depend on the advice, support, and inspirational brilliance of an extraordinary community of colleagues and graduate students within and beyond my own university, most of whom have also become deep and dear friends. Those who commented on drafts of chapters or helped me sort through specific issues include Mark Cheetham, Francis Cody, Naisargi Dave, Shubhra Gururani, Elizabeth Harney, Tong Lam, Jaby Mathew, Radhika Mongia, Brian Price, Bhavani Raman, Aparna Sundar, and Meghan Sutherland. Beyond Toronto, too, I am indebted to those who commented on chapters or related papers in formal or informal settings: Nikhil Anand, Adam Bobbette, Anne Hartig, Shobhita Jain, Monica Juneja, Dipti Khera, William Mazzarella, Rosalind Morris, Constantine Nakassis, Ying Qian, Anna Seastrand, Aveek Sen, and participants at conferences, workshops, and seminars too numerous to list here. viii

AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

In addition to the two insightful, encouraging, and enormously helpful readers for Duke University Press who worked so generously with the manuscript, beautifully in tune with its spirit, three people read the whole first draft. One is Ravindra Jain, my father; my parents’ approval and enthusiasm mean the world to me. Simryn Gill is in my mind the paradigmatic reader of this book: a serious intellectual who is not an academic but, as an artist and writer, is far, far more than that. Many thanks to her for suggesting the illustrations and to Prasad Khanolkar for conceiving and executing them with such intelligence, imagination, skill, and keenness, which also entailed reading the entire manuscript. Other colleagues and friends whose imprint appears here in various ways—through conversations, observations, references, images, connections, excitements—include Susan Bean, Catherine Becker, Ritu Birla, Joseph Clarke, Rory Crath, Ramu Dhara, Christoph Emmrich, Richard Fung, Tejaswini Ganti, Roos Gerritsen, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Yi Gu, Tapati Guha Thakurta, Jack Hawley, Stephen Inglis, Malavika Kasturi, Ravinder Kaur, Sonal Khullar, Tania Li, Victor Li, Philip Lutgendorf, Saloni Mathur, Ranjani Mazumdar, Arvind Rajagopal, Srilata Raman, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Katharine Rankin, Anupama Rao, Srirupa Roy, Tamara Sears, Bhaskar Sarkar, Orijit Sen, Kavita Singh, Ajay Sinha, Patricia Spyer, S. V. Srinivas, Alison Syme, Akshaya Tankha, Ravi Vasudevan, and Karin Zitzewitz. Portions of this book have appeared in the following earlier versions. Chapter 2 is derived in part from “Partition as Partage,” Third Text 31, nos. 2–3 (March–May 2017): 187–203 (© Third Text, a Taylor and Francis publication); from “Tales from the Concrete Cave: Delhi’s Birla Temple and the Genealogies of Urban Nature in India,” in Places of Nature in Ecologies of Urbanism, edited by Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2017); and from “Gods in the Time of Automobility,” Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (February 2017): S13–S26 (© 2016 by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved). Chapter 4 is derived in part from “Post-Reform India’s Automotive-Iconic-Cement Assemblages: Uneven Globality, Spectacle, and Iconic Exhibition Value,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 23, no. 3 (2016): 327–44 (© Identities, a Taylor and Francis publication). One of the most difficult and the most joyful things about what academics do is the inextricability of work and pleasure, the professional and the personal. If so far my scales have consistently tipped on the joyful side, surely it is because for me this has been a family business from the start: my anthropologist parents, Shobhita and Ravindra Jain, showed me how it was done. They have been constant interlocutors, exemplars, and supports. They encouraged AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

ix

me to make the visit in my opening anecdote, with which this project began, and came along, too. In this and many other ways, my work is theirs. Another deep well of well-being, similarly both intellectual and otherwise, has been the fictive extended family in Toronto into which my daughter and I have been so happily enfolded. Alok, Aparna, Radhika, Shubhra, and Terry, I cannot thank you enough for your unhesitating, unconditional, abundant care for both of us over all these years. Amitav, Ilan, Rishabh, Rosa, and Sumana, it is such a delight to watch you lovely beings grow. And then, of course, there is the dear bright sun around which my life has revolved throughout the writing of this book, keeping me warm, laughing, and vital, steadying my orbit, making it all worthwhile. This book is for Ira.

x

AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

500 ft

200 ft

STATUE OF LIBERTY

01

02

03 04 05

600

100 ft 50 ft

06 07

1000 1500 1900 1950 1960

1970

08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 1980

1990

1995

21

22

23 150 ft 108 ft 50 ft

24

25 26

27

2000

28

29

30

31 32 33

34

35 36

37

38

39

40

2005

41

42

150 ft 108 ft 50 ft

43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50

51 52

2010

53

57

54 55 56

2012

58

59 60

61

62

63

500 ft 400 ft 300 ft 200 ft 108 ft 50 ft

64

65

2014

66

67

68 69

2016

70

2018

71

72

73

74

75

76

FIGURE FM.1 Time line of statues mentioned in the book (not exhaustive; scales are approximate). As of 2018, statues in lightest gray were proposed; those in medium gray were in progress. See Table FM.1 for key to time line and map of statues.

TORONTO, CANADA

68 43

37

BATU CAVES, MALAYSIA

71 CARAPICHAIMA, TRINDAD

55

45 GANGA TALAO, MAURITIUS

CHATSWORTH, SOUTH AFRICA KABUL

01 02

60

03 ISLAMABAD

SIDHBARI LAHORE

46 DELHI

72

54

11

23

33

32 SHIMLA 19 48 16

HRISHIKESH HARIDWAR 24

12 51 53 GURUGRAM

49 13

BADRINATH

KATHMANDU LUCKNOW

06

KARACHI 29

62

BHOPAL

50

67

40

09

DHAKA

22

BODH GAYA KOLKATA ROURKELA BHUBANESHWAR

74

36

HYDERABAD 17

10 59

41

35

VIJAYWADA CHENNAI

04 MYSORE COIMBATORE 38 21 14 25 19 70 KOCHI RAMESHWARAM

28

SHILLONG

PATNA 26

20

JABALPUR

44

56 05

KOHIMA

PURI

42

31

MURUDESHWAR

39

NAMCHI SOLOPHOK

63

69

MUMBAI

30

75

66

58

07

KUSHINAGAR 15

34

SAGAR

VADODARA NARMADA DAM 61

73

64

57

47 JAIPUR

DWARKA

56

NOIDA 65

PILANI

27

76

08 COLOMBO

BANGALORE

Char Dham shrines

FIGURE FM.2 Map

of statues as of 2018 (not exhaustive; scales and locations are approximate). See Table FM.1 fo key to timne line and map of statues.

TABLE FM.1

Key to timeline and map of statues (FM.1, FM.2).

DATE

NAME

CITY/STATE/ COUNTRY

SCULPTOR

1

ca. 507

Buddha (standing)

Bamiyan Valley, Afghanistan

115

Sedimentary rock

2

ca. 554

Buddha (standing)

Bamiyan Valley, Afghanistan

174

Sedimentary rock

3

ca. 700

Buddha (seated)

Swat Valley, Pakistan

22

Granite

4

ca. 938/981

Bahubali/ Gommateshwara (standing monolith)

Shravanabelagola, Karnataka

57

Granite

Chavundaraya

5

1432

Bahubali/ Gommateshwara

Karkala, Karnataka

42

Granite

Veera Pandya

6

1962

Chambal Devi

Gandhi Sagar Dam, Madhya Pradesh

7

1963

Bahubali

Kumbhoj, Maharashtra

8

1970

Vivekananda (standing)

9

1975

Bahubali/ Gommateshwara (standing monolith)

Ram Sutar

HEIGHT MATERIAL (FEET)

45

PATRON

Government of India

28

Marble

Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu

Narayanrao 12 Sonawadekar

Bronze

Vivekananda Rock Memorial Trust

Dharmasthala, Karnataka

Renjala Gopalakrishna Shenoy

Granite

Veerendra Heggade (temple trustee)

39

TABLE FM.1

(continued )

DATE

NAME

CITY/STATE/ COUNTRY

SCULPTOR

HEIGHT MATERIAL (FEET)

PATRON

10

1979

Ganesha (for festival)

Shimoga, Karnataka

Kashinath

29

Clay

11

1980

Hanuman (kneeling)

Sidhbhari, Himachal Pradesh

Kashinath

25

Concrete

Chinmaya Mission

12

1985

Mahavir (seated)

MehrauliGurgaon Road, Delhi

Shamaraya Acharya

13.5

Granite

P. C. Jain (watches)

13

1987

Hanuman (standing)

Panchavati Park, Pilani, Rajasthan

Matu Ram Varma

21

Concrete

L. N. Birla (businessman)

14

1989

Ganesha (seated)

Kolar, Karnataka

Kashinath

45

Concrete

Chinmaya Mission

15

1989

Buddha (seated)

Bodhgaya, Bihar

V. Ganapati Sthapati

64

Chunar sandstone

Daijokyo, Japan

16

1990

Hanuman

Basant Gaon, New Delhi

45

Granite

Prabhudutt Brahmachari

17

1990

Hanuman

Puttaparthi

70

Concrete

Sathya Sai Baba

18

1992

Krishna

Vishwa Shanti Ashram, Bangalore-Tumkur Rd, Karnataka

Kashinath

45

Concrete

Sadguru Sant Keshavadas, Temple of Cosmic Religion

19

1994

Shiva (standing) “Mangal Mahadev”

Birla Kanan, New Delhi

Matu Ram Varma

85

Concrete

B. K. Birla (businessman)

20

1994

Hanuman (standing)

Rourkela, Orissa

Laxman Swamy

75

Concrete

Jai Hanuman Trust

21

1995

Shiva (seated)

Kemp Fort, Bangalore

Kashinath

65

Concrete

Ravi Melwani (department stores)

22

1995

Krishna (standing) “Mangal Madhav”

Calcutta

M. Muthia Sthapati

45

Granite

B. K. Birla

TABLE FM.1

(continued )

DATE

NAME

CITY/STATE/ COUNTRY

SCULPTOR

HEIGHT MATERIAL (FEET)

PATRON

23

(1997)

Maitreya (proposed)

Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh

(500)

Concrete

Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition

24

1998

Shiva (standing)

Film City, Noida, Uttar Pradesh

Matu Ram Varma

Concrete

Gulshan Kumar, T-Series

25

1999

Surya (standing)

Eagleton Golf Resort, near Bangalore

Sridhar

Concrete

M. Ashok Kumar, Sri Chamundeshwari Developers

26

1999

Maitreya

Bodhgaya, Bihar

27

2000

Shiva (sitting)

Nageshwar temple, Dwarka, Gujarat

Kashinath

65

Concrete

Gulshan Kumar

28

2000

Thiruvalluvar (standing)

Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu

V. Ganapati Sthapati

133

Granite

Govt. of Tamil Nadu (M. Karunanidhi, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam)

29

2002

Shiva (standing) “Sarveswhar Mahadev”

Sursagar Lake, Vadodara, Gujarat

Matu Ram Varma

111

Concrete

Yogesh Patel (Bharatiya Janata Party)

30

2002

Shiva (seated)

Murudeshwar, Karnataka

Kashinath

123

Concrete

R. N. Shetty (builder, businessman)

31

2002

Ganesha (seated)

Kolhapur, Maharashtra

Kashinath

75

Concrete

Chinmaya Mission

32

2002

Hanuman (standing)

Chattarpur, New Delhi

Matu Ram Varma

101

Concrete

Anonymous (for Baba Sant Nagpal)

33

2003

Shiva (standing)

Haridwar, Uttarakhand

Kashinath and Sridhar

75

Concrete

Gulshan Kumar

34

2003

Shiva (seated)

Kachnar City, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh

Sridhar

81

Concrete

Arun Tiwari (builder, Kachnar City)

65

24

Lama Zopa Rinpoche

TABLE FM.1

(continued )

DATE

NAME

CITY/STATE/ COUNTRY

SCULPTOR

HEIGHT MATERIAL (FEET)

PATRON

35

2003

Ganesha (seated)

Kanakapura Road, Bangalore

Sridhar

45

Concrete

Vishranthi Dhama Health Club and Spa

36

2003

Hanuman (standing)

Paritala, near Vijaywada, Andhra Pradesh

135

Concrete

Paritala Anjaneya Temple

37

2003

Hanuman (standing)

Carapichaima, Trindad

Thangam Subramanian

85

Concrete

Avadhoota Datta Peetham

38

2003

Ganesha (seated)

Bangalore

Sridhar

32

39

2004

Guru Rimpoche/ Padmasambhava (seated)

Namchi, Sikkim

Naresh Kumar Varma (initial design)

135

Concrete

Government of Sikkim (Pawan Chamling, Sikkim Democratic Front)

40

(2004)

Shivaji (proposed)

Mumbai, Maharashtra

Ram Sutar

(309)

41

2005

Hanuman (standing)

Tumkur, Karnataka

Kashinath and Sridhar

75

Concrete

Kote Anjaneya Swamy temple

42

2006

Shiva (seated)

Bijapur, Karnataka

Sridhar (initial design)

70

Concrete

Basant Kumar Patil (Kannada film producer)

43

2006

Murugan (standing)

Batu Caves, Malaysia

44

1992–2006

Buddha (standing)

Hussain Sagar Lake, Hyderabad

S. M. Ganapathi Sthapati

58

Granite

Government of Andhra Pradesh (N. T. Rama Rao, Telugu Desam)

45

2007

Shiva (standing)

Ganga Talao, Mauritius

Naresh Kumar Varma

108

Concrete

Government of Mauritius (Anil Bachoo)

46

1994–2007

Hanuman (standing)

Karol Bagh, New Delhi

108

Concrete

Brahmaleen Nagababa Shri Sevagiri Ji Maharaj

Government of Maharashtra (Congress Party)

140

Sri Subramaniar temple

TABLE FM.1

(continued )

DATE

NAME

CITY/STATE/ COUNTRY

SCULPTOR

HEIGHT MATERIAL (FEET)

PATRON

47

2008

Ambedkar (seated)

Ambedkar Memorial, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh

Ram Sutar

27

Bronze

Government of Uttar Pradesh (Kumari Mayawati, Bahujan Samaj Party)

48

2009

Ram, Sita, Radha, Krishna

Birla Kanan, New Delhi

Naresh Kumar Varma

31

Concrete

B. K. Birla

49

2009

Shiva (standing)

Pilani, Rajasthan

Matu Ram Art Centre

80

Concrete

S. K. Birla (businessman)

50

2009

Ganesha (seated) “Mangal Murti Morya”

Talegaon, Maharashtra

Naresh Kumar Varma

72

Concrete

B. K. Birla

51

2010

Shiva (standing)

Palam Vihar, Gurgaon, Haryana

Naresh Kumar Varma

65

Concrete

Balkrishna Saini (real estate, automobile service station)

52

2010

Durga (standing)

Ballari, Karnataka

Sridhar

26

Concrete

B. Sriramulu (Bharatiya Janata Party)

53

2010

Shiva (seated)

Bishangarh, Jalore, Rajasthan

Sridhar

65

Concrete

Bhawarlal Khivesra, Maharaja Build Tech Ltd. (construction)

54

2010

Hanuman (standing)

Shimla, Himachal Pradesh

Naresh Kumar Varma

108

Concrete

H. C. Nanda Trust (Nikhil Nanda, Escorts Ltd., engineering and manufacturing)

55

2010

Hanuman (standing)

Chatsworth, Durban, South Africa

40

Concrete

Shri Vishnu Temple Society

56

2011

Shiva (standing)

Sanga, near Kathmandu, Nepal

Naresh Kumar Varma

108

Concrete

Kamal Jain, Hilltake (water tanks)

57

2011

Shiva (seated)

Solophok, Namchi, Sikkim

Sridhar (initial design)

108

Concrete

Government of Sikkim (Pawan Chamling, Sikkim Democratic Front)

TABLE FM.1

(continued )

DATE

NAME

CITY/STATE/ COUNTRY

SCULPTOR

HEIGHT MATERIAL (FEET)

PATRON

58

2012

Basaveshwara (seated)

Basavakalyan, Bidar, Karnataka

Sridhar

108

Concrete

Mate Mahadevi, Basava Dharma Peetha

59

2012

Hanuman (standing)

Mysore, Karnataka

70

Granite

Avadhoota Datta Peetham

60

2012

Guru Rimpoche/ Padmasambhava (seated)

Tso Pema, Rewalsar, Himachal Pradesh

123

Concrete

Lama Wangdor Rinpoche

61

2012

Hanuman (standing)

Nandura, Maharashtra

105

Concrete

62

2013

Shiva (seated)

Sagar, Madhya Pradesh

Sridhar

61

Concrete

Shivmandir Development Trust, Sindhunagar Colony, Sagar (developers)

63

2013

Gandhi (standing)

Patna

Ram Sutar

40

Bronze

Government of Bihar (Nitish Kumar, Janata Dal)

64

2013

Sakyamuni (seated)

Ravangla, Sikkim

Sakya Brothers

95

Concrete

Government of Sikkim (D. D. Bhutia, Sikkim Democratic Front)

65

2013

Hanuman (standing)

Shahjahanpur, Uttar Pradesh

Veerendra Shekhawat

104

Concrete

66

2014

Hanuman (standing)

Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh

Naresh Kumar Varma

101

Concrete

Anonymous (constituency of Kamal Nath, Congress Party)

67

2015

Basaveshwara (standing)

Gadag, Karnataka

Sridhar

111

Concrete

Karnataka Tourism Development Corporation, Government of Karnataka

68

2016

Hanuman (standing)

Toronto, Canada

Naresh Kumar Varma

50

Concrete

Richmond Hill Vishnu Mandir

Drupa Kunzang (Bhutan)

TABLE FM.1

(continued )

DATE

NAME

CITY/STATE/ COUNTRY

69

2017

Hanuman (standing)

70

2017

71

HEIGHT MATERIAL (FEET)

PATRON

Damanjodi, near Koraput, Odisha

108

Concrete

National Aluminium Company, Abhaya Anjaneya Parichalana Samiti

Shiva (bust) “Adiyogi”

Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

112

Steel

Jaggi Vasudev, Isha Foundation

2018

Durga (standing)

Ganga Talao, Mauritius

Naresh Kumar Varma

108

Concrete

Government of Mauritius (Anil Bachoo)

72

2018

Vallabhai Patel (standing) “Statue of Unity”

Kevadiya, Gujarat

Ram Sutar

597

Concrete

Government of Gujarat, Government of India (Narendra Modi, Bharatiya Janata Party)

73

(Stayed by court, 2019)

Shivaji (equestrian)

Mumbai

Ram Sutar

(690)

Concrete

Government of Maharashtra

74

(In progress, Hanuman 2019) (standing)

Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh

Shankar (structural engineer)

(176)

Concrete

Sri Ram Bhaktha Hanuman Seva Samithi Trust

75

(In progress, Saibaba (seated) 2019)

Shahdol, Madhya Pradesh

Sridhar

72

Concrete

Virat Sai Dham Seva Samiti

76

(Proposed)

Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh

Maitreya (seated)

SCULPTOR

200

Lama Zopa Rinpoche

This page intentionally left blank

Kashinath, 65-ft. seated Shiva at Kids Kemp department store, also known as Kemp Fort, Old Airport Road, Bangalore, inaugurated in 1995. Photographed in 2007. PLATE 1

Kashinath, 123-ft. seated Shiva, Murudeshwar, Karnataka, completed in 2002. View from Shri Murudeshwara temple gopuram, March 2012. PLATE 2

PLATE 3 135-ft. seated Guru Rinpoche, or Padmasambhava, at Samdruptse Hill, Namchi, Sikkim, inaugurated in 2004. Initial design by Naresh Kumar Varma; completed by Lobdon Lhundrup, Bhutan. Photographed in March 2013.

Sanjay Sakya with Sakya brothers’ 95-ft. seated Sakyamuni at Ravangla, Sikkim, before the statue’s inauguration in March 2013. PLATE 4

Thangam Subramanian, 85-ft. standing Hanuman, inaugurated in 2003, and plywood cutout featuring Sri Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swami, leader of the Avadhoota Datta Peetham. Sri Dattatreya Yoga Center, Carapichaima, Trinidad, December 2009. PLATE 5

Vivekananda Rock Memorial (left) and Thiruvalluvar statue (right). Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, April 2018. PLATE 6

PLATE 7 (above)

Kanwariya pilgrims returning from Haridwar arriving at Birla Kanan for a rest stop and to pay obeisance to Mangal Mahadev, July 2009. PLATE 8 (left)

Mangal Mahadev illuminated at night, Birla Kanan, May 2009.

PLATE 9 (right)

Shri Sundhara Rameshwara lingam, under Shiva statue, Murudeshwar, including lingam cover in the form of Shiva’s head and painted diorama-like backdrop. March 2012. PLATE 10 (below)

View of Murudeshwar beach from steps ascending to Shiva statue, with rajagopuram under construction on right. December 2007.

PLATE 11 (above)

Mural in Gita Ashram prayer hall, Carapichaima, Trinidad, December 2009. PLATE 12 (left)

Gita Ashram mural, detail showing Shiva lingam in gazebo with jhandis (flags) next to it. Trinidad, December 2009.

PLATE 13 (above)

View of temple complex at Ganga Talao, Mauritius, New Year’s Day, 2014. On the far side of the lake is the Hindu Maha Sabha’s Kashi Vishwanath Mandir. PLATE 14 (right)

Shiva statue outside Mauritiuseshwarnath Shiv Jyotir Lingum temple (Shiv Parivar Mandir) with monumental Shiva in the background. Ganga Talao, Mauritius, January 2014.

Introduction

EMERGENCE Here is a list of top 10 tallest Hindu God Murtis (Statue or idols) in the World. . . . As per Hindu tradition, the Supreme Truth (Brahman) is beyond imagination. But human beings need a form to worship and we modern day people are obsessed with size and height. So we are constantly increasing the size of Hindu Murtis. Therefore this list will be constantly updated. — ABHILASH RAJENDRAN The history of images is a history of objects that are temporally impure, complex, overdetermined. It is therefore a history of polychronistic, heterochronistic, or anachronistic objects. . . . Is it not to say . . . that the history of art is itself an anachronistic discipline, for better or for worse? — GEORGES DIDI- HUBERMAN The transition from the first kind of artistic reception [cult value] to the second [exhibition value] characterizes the history of artistic reception in general. Apart from that, a certain oscillation between these two polar modes of reception can be demonstrated for each work of art. —WALTER BENJAMIN

MONUMENTAL STATUES

On January 9, 2003, the front page of the New York Times carried a picture of a 108-ft. concrete statue of the god Krishna that fell as it neared completion at the peri-urban village of Narsinghpur near Gurgaon, on the outskirts of New Delhi, killing at least one person and injuring several others. The Associated Press report on the incident claimed that “the village and people from the surrounding district had raised $417,000 to build the statue,” shoring up

the stereotype of Indian villagers as gullible and god-fearing, with dubious priorities. The local priest was quoted as calling the incident a “bad omen” (despite the statue’s numerologically auspicious height of 108 ft.). A more indepth piece in an engineering journal put the cost of the statue at $200,000.1 It provided the scientific explanation, interviewing an architect who blamed the absence of soil testing (the statue was situated in a dried-up pond) and the imbalance created by a pose with the worst possible center of gravity, in which Krishna’s massive concrete arms held his flute off to one side of his head. It also noted that the sculptor of the statue was a traditional murtikar (icon maker), with no formal training in architecture or engineering, who had earlier successfully built an 80-ft. Shiva and a 60-ft. Hanuman. And, indeed, although this statue fell, dozens of other giant icons have been springing up, and staying up, all over India and amid the Indian diaspora since the late 1980s—that is, in tandem with the rollout of economic reforms and the resurgence of Hindu nationalist politics. (For a map, timeline, and list, see figures FM.1, FM.2, TABLE FM.1.) Initially emerging in stone and concrete, with heights of around 20–30 ft., they had reached 140 ft. by 2006 and continued to grow, breaking the world record for the tallest statue in 2018 with a 597-ft. figure of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first home minister and deputy prime minister.2 While this is a secular figure, most of these colossi are Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain icons. They are usually freestanding, unlike the colossal rock-cut images of earlier South Asian traditions, such as the second-century Swat Valley and sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas and the medieval Jain statues of Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. Many of them are situated in theme parks (another mushrooming feature of India’s postliberalization landscape), featuring religion, culture, leisure/entertainment, political memorials, commerce, environmentalism, or some combination of these. Most notably, they have been increasingly deployed in “statue wars” in which politicians seek to outdo one another in building spectacular statues for their electoral constituencies (known in India as vote banks), despite inevitable public criticism for squandering limited state resources on such symbolic projects. These controversies predate, and differ from, the intensified protests from 2015 onward against Confederate memorials in the United States and statues of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa and elsewhere, which are struggles over historical memory and the ongoing legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racism. The Indian statues are a form of monument that is not necessarily subsumed within the secular frame of memory. However, as this book will argue, as embodiments of public presence they ultimately have very similar political stakes. 2

INTRODUCTION

In December 2006, I went to Narsinghpur to find out more about the fallen Krishna statue, driven by curiosity—tinged with suspicion—about the story I had read. There I gleaned that the story about the villagers’ funding the statue had likely been fed to the media to deflect attention from the statue’s effective patron, whose nearby factory manufactured seats for cars and multiplex cinemas, again both key features of the postreform landscape. The company’s website described itself as a “365 million dollar conglomerate.” I was told that a charitable trust in the name of this entrepreneur’s mother had acquired land next to the village temple, perhaps including the pond. It is not clear whether this was wasteland, the village commons, or both; in any event, the pond had dried up and turned into a waste dump as Gurgaon’s industrial and housing development pushed down the water table. The trust had built an orphanage with a dispensary and ran occasional “women’s empowerment” programs. The role of the seat baron came as no surprise to me, given that my earlier work on printed bazaar icons emphasized the role of vernacular capitalists in the twentieth-century production and distribution of religious images (more on vernacular capitalism later).3 But I did not anticipate how quickly the big statue genre would lead me beyond this anonymous domestic capitalist—and others featured more explicitly in this book—to a host of powerful political players: members of state legislative assemblies, cabinet ministers, a panoply of chief ministers, the vice prime minister of Mauritius, the prime minister of India. As I followed the big statue trail over the decade following that 2006 visit to Narsinghpur, I learned that the same industrialist had earlier funded another statue for a large temple complex on the (then) outskirts of Delhi. He was also associated with a later 101-ft. Hanuman in Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh, the constituency of Kamal Nath, who had served in the United Progressive Alliance government as cabinet minister for commerce and industry, for road transport and highways, and for urban development. So much for the cliché of the god-fearing “common man” as the primary locus and driver of religiosity. The Chhindwara statue was inaugurated in the run-up to the national elections in 2014, as other politicians scrambled to initiate similar projects for their vote banks. Akhilesh Yadav, then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, laid the foundation stone for a 200-ft. statue of Maitreya in Kushinagar, reviving a plan for a 500-ft. Maitreya that had earlier been abandoned by his predecessor Kumari Mayawati in the face of resistance from farmers (backed by the Congress Party), whose land was being appropriated for the project. Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa of Tamil Nadu announced plans for a “mega INTRODUCTION

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statue” of Thamizh Thaai (Mother Tamil) in a theme park on Tamil ideas of landscape. The Maharashtra government revived plans for a 300-ft. monument to the Maratha king Shivaji on an island off Mumbai in response to the Statue of Unity, a 597-ft. statue of Sardar Patel (twice the size of the Statue of Liberty) that was to become the world’s tallest statue, being erected by Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat. On October 31, 2018, after his election as prime minister, Modi inaugurated the Statue of Unity; by that time, the proposal for the Shivaji statue had been scaled up to surpass it at 695 ft. That inauguration also unleashed a further spate of proposals for politically motivated colossi all over India, as did the 2019 elections, when Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s proposed 823-ft. (251-meter) statue of the god Ram at the controversial site of Ayodhya joined the fray, vying to surpass the world record. There is a continuum here between secular and religious figures, which can be seen as part of the same genre. As I describe in chapter 1, not only do they use the same technology and often the same sculptors, but they also, importantly, are incorporated into a similar structure of political patronage, albeit one in which the patronage of religious figures tends to be more at arm’s length. Religious icons feed into secular power, while secular figures partake of iconic efficacy and animation. I use the term icon to address this spectrum without adjudicating between the contested categories of the religious and the secular, while also taking into account their discursive force.4 The icon here simply becomes a figurative image that is treated as somehow efficacious. I adopt the term iconopraxis (elaborated later) to describe practices of engagement with images within a frame that treats the devotional and the aesthetic as both overlapping and distinct. This book traces the emergence of the monumental statue genre on the Indian religious and political landscape during the economic reforms of the 1990s and describes the complexly layered forms of aesthetic, political, social, commercial, and religious efficacy in which it participates and that it helps bring into being.5 It is not enough to simply ascribe this phenomenon to Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva—as though that was a monolithic entity with stable characteristics—or to large scale as a universal expression of power and dominance, for neither “explanation” illuminates the significance of this form in its novelty: as an index of emergence. What distributions and redistributions of the sensible unfold in the appearance of this new form?6 What is it that becomes otherwise? This pursuit of emergence—the very newness of the new and its relations with the systems from which it arises—is in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s 4

INTRODUCTION

legendary artwork essay, which, like this book, is centrally concerned with the politics of new image technologies at a moment of increasingly authoritarian right-wing populism.7 Emergence takes on a twofold aspect in my account: it refers both to the (re)appearance of the monumental statue form in time and to the literal coming out of religious icons from temples into public space. Outdoor location has been a condition of possibility for the growing size of deities, their publicness giving the colossus form a political charge that was subsequently harnessed by secular icons. This spatial emergence is central to the political stakes here, for the sequestration of icons in the sancta sanctorum of temples has been a key element of the priestly power of Brahmins as mediators between mortals and gods, in a sensorium of caste in which the community now self-identifying as Dalit (oppressed)—known during the colonial period as Untouchable—was once forbidden to enter caste Hindu temples. What made it possible to supplement priestly mediation of the gods with this new form, extending beyond caste Hindus to a heterogeneous democratic public that must reckon with the palpable presence of Dalits and non-Hindus? How might this relate to the intensification of caste-based politics that was also a crucial force of transformation in the 1990s, alongside economic liberalization and a resurgent Hindu nationalism? Examining what monumental icons add to existing devotional practices and how, this book asks what this tells us about the pressure politics exerts on religion. It also asks the reverse: how did these colossi come to be added to a material vocabulary of political and social power that could have contented itself with spectacular infrastructure projects such as dams or with the related and similarly viral mushrooming of temple complexes (of which the global Akshardhams are only the best-known instance)?8 After all, canonical features of temples such as gopurams (entrance towers) and shikharas (towers over the central shrine) can—and, as we will see, do—achieve similar heights. In short, these new incarnations of the gods in the time of democracy are a material entry point into tracking the co-constitution of religion and politics. The description of how these intimacies articulate with technological, social, and governmental processes, including economic liberalization, is also necessarily a reflection on time that confronts secular narratives of development and periodization in art history with the uneven, temporally layered modernity and contemporaneity of religion. In the process, it revisits core concepts of the image such as cult value and exhibition value, scale, spectacle, and darshan (a key term for describing the devotional engagement with icons in South Asia), as well as their relation to the political valences of publicness and, hence, to the aesthetics of democracy. INTRODUCTION

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In this introduction, I identify the book’s presuppositions, stakes, methods, and interventions; its scope; and its limits. In doing so, I briefly gloss some of its informing concepts: sensible infrastructures, iconopraxis, emergence, assemblages, circuits, layered temporalities, and vernacular capitalism.

SENSIBLE INFRASTRUCTURES OF CASTE

A central theoretical presupposition of this account is that the aesthetic is not an epiphenomenon or secondary effect of politics or economy but the very ground on which politics unfolds: that images, what they do with people, and what people do with them, are elements of what I call, as a polemical shorthand, “the sensible infrastructures” of politics. Like other recent work on political images, the book draws on Jacques Rancière’s compelling insistence on the centrality of aesthetics to politics, where politics itself is formulated as a redistribution of the sensible arising via dissensus.9 While Rancière’s elaboration remains firmly within the European tradition, I selectively hijack his ideas to the service of nonmetropolitan sites and contemporary public icons—that is, to images that bear a tenuous and contested relation to the domain of “art” and to secular, anthropocentric formulations of the sensible or the aesthetic.10 Those familiar with South Asia will recognize the relevance of Rancière’s thought to the aesthetics of caste and the sensible regime of untouchability, which I posit as key to the emergence—in both senses—of monumental statues. Central to the relationship between aesthetics and politics for Rancière is the idea of partage, an allocation of proper places that entails both separation and sharing within the signifying logic of a given regime. This constitution and classification of roles and status within the polity—as with the occupational hierarchy of caste (as well as gender, race, religion, ethnicity, ability, and so on)—is at the same time also a distribution of the sensible, where “sense” is both knowing and embodied sensing. “Distribution,” therefore, also pertains to the relationship between these two forms of sense: how we understand sense experience and how the senses inform knowledge (e.g., the privileged link between knowledge and vision is a particular historical formation). A regime’s prevailing aesthetico-political consensus or common sense unfolds via what presents itself to the senses and what is made sense of: who or what can be heard, seen, or—key to caste and untouchability—touched; what is intelligible; what is understood as speech or silenced as noise; who is admitted and who is cast out or outcaste, rendered abject.11 This excluded element of the polity is what Rancière calls the “part without a part”; its exclusion plays a defining part in the polity, although this is not 6

INTRODUCTION

recognized (think here of gendered domestic labor). The caste schema consigns Dalit labor to realms of social activity that are essential but nonetheless considered polluted, such as working with dead bodies (animal and human) or waste. The “part without a part” is not present to the dominant regime of the sensible; its absence is actively enforced through the distributions that inform governance or social practices (such as exclusion from temples, schools, housing, or wells). For Rancière, this is not a preconstituted political subject, a “people” with given characteristics. It emerges as a political subject in the process of staking claims, as Dalits did through the Temple Entry Movement in the 1920s–30s, among others. Politics here is the necessarily violent (both symbolic and physical) dissensus through which the claims of the “part without a part” break through a given distribution of the sensible to be heard and seen, to occupy space, to become intelligible, enabling the cognition that is a precondition for recognition. What Rancière neglects in his emphasis on the radicality of dissensus, but is central to my account, is the ongoing and mutating nature of these struggles and the messy, often violent reterritorializing responses to them as the prevailing order undergoes upheavals and reconfigurations. In the case of caste, one flashpoint for such violence was the announcement in 1990 of plans to implement public service job reservations for “Other Backward Classes” (OBCs) recommended by the report of the Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission, known as the Mandal Commission. This was met with widespread protests—notably, a spate of self-immolations by upper-caste students—and followed by the rise of OBC and Dalit parties in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, in which public statues played a key role. But there is also a far longer history of attacks (termed “caste atrocities”) on Dalit homes and bodies, both human and iconic, as well as of counterassertions in the aesthetic domain such as monumental statues. Such counterassertions by the prevailing regime are comparable to the spikes in the building of Confederate statues in the United States at times of heightened civil rights tensions (1900s and 1950s).12 Crucially, the aesthetic here is not restricted to images or to art. Rather, it extends to a far more broadly construed domain of sensation, perception, and intelligibility and the relations between them that Rancière calls a “primary aesthetics.”13 As he puts it, “Aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense— re-examined perhaps by Foucault—as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and stakes of politics as a form of experience.”14 Aesthetics INTRODUCTION

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describes historical (yet functionally a priori) regimes of sense experience; politics hinges on aesthetic experiences of matter, form, space, and time. Emergent material forms that constitute an upheaval in an entrenched order, such as public supplements to temple worship (monumental deities, printed icons, outdoor processions, and shrines), are therefore a key element of politics, for this emergence indicates a reconfigured distribution of the sensible. Given this insistence on the a priori nature of the sensible, the aesthetic or the symbolic cannot be understood merely as the superstructure on a primarily economic base.15 As I describe in chapter 2, the ubiquitous journalistic critiques of Indian monumental statues that decry the misdirection of public funds to the “merely” symbolic politics of recognition fail to reckon with the value and force of recognition in the prevailing distribution of the sensible. It is against this tendency to think of the aesthetic as superstructure that I posit “primary aesthetics” as infrastructure: as the sensible and material infrastructure that enables a given aesthetico-political regime to function.16 The embodied practices that constitute the infrastructure of caste enact a primary aesthetics in which sense experience and concepts commingle: as spatial exclusion, untouchability, invisibility, illiteracy, silencing, manual labor, and polluting substances for Dalits. Conversely, for Brahmins this regime entails privileged access to and control over icons, sacred texts, writing, scholarship in general, and purifying substances. This is the sensible infrastructure informing my genealogy of public icons (in assemblage with other infrastructures, as the next section elaborates). In keeping with this infrastructural quality, however, caste does not constitute the primary thematic focus here, except in chapter 2. Instead, it runs through the entirety of this account as an omnipresent but relatively subterranean thread, surfacing periodically to show how the ruling order of the sensible has been pervaded by the primary aesthetics of caste. If the sensible underpins political exclusions that are fundamentally embodied, experiential, and aesthetic, this has implications for its theoretical analysis. The sensible infrastructure of the political first makes itself evident through the claims of the “part without a part”; it does not emerge from prognostic or activist analyses by others. Rather than proceeding, like Plato’s philosopher kings, from an avant-garde position of theoretical knowledge to awaken oppressed political subjects or predict the workings of a system, critical analysis by others is, precisely the other way around, a response to dissensus. Its challenge is not to lead the struggle but to sense it, to be affected by it, in order to declare, enact, and strengthen solidarity. So the description of the present here is also necessarily a revisionary and speculative genealogy that attempts in hindsight to retool the sense of sense to see and hear what was 8

INTRODUCTION

always there, hidden in plain sight: the aesthetico-political terms of a consensus that is indubitably crumbling yet still wields force as a sensible infrastructure of oppression—in this case, that of caste.

BEYOND C IRCULATION: A PRO CESSUAL ART HISTORY

The responsive mode called for by an aesthetic understanding of politics is well served by art history’s method of working from descriptions of objects or spaces and anthropology’s close ethnographic observation of practices. Images as objects with value, power, and efficacy are at the heart of art history; anthropology also knows such beings well. If art history is nonetheless embracing methods and terms from the “new materialisms,” it is doing so in order to describe the networks and systems in which objects or forms participate in richer and more complex ways, moving beyond the immediate historical and geographical contexts of their creation to address their deeper genealogies and their ongoing social and material lives.17 This was already underway in part in the strong disciplinary push to decenter Euro-American art history through histories of circulation and “intercultural” or “transcultural” exchange. However, these approaches have run into structural problems. Those arguing for a “global” or “world” art history based on studies of circulation, such as Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, face the charge of Eurocentric universalism, while others arguing for a recognition of the incommensurability of cultures, such as Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, fail to take into account the production of cultures as entities via “culture” as a category.18 Negotiating between universalism and the hypostatization of “culture” as discrete “cultures,” others, such as Barry Flood and Monica Juneja, have used the anthropological term transculturation to signal that cultures are not fixed or bounded but always in formation.19 Ultimately, however, Juneja is dissatisfied with such models centered on cultural flows, arguing that cultural “incommensurability and commensurability . . . are better grasped as processes rather than reified or static attributes,” such that “different grades of the commensurable and incommensurable [are produced] in specific historical conjunctures and local contexts.”20 Here commensurable and incommensurable modes of encounter are processes. They are historically produced and paradoxically coexist. It is Juneja’s critical postcolonial perspective—including, I would suggest, a lived sense of postcolonial unevenness and its paradoxes—that leads her to identify the limits to circulation studies’ negotiation of “cultural difference” (with its echoes of civilizational narratives). Instead, she calls for a change in register to address INTRODUCTION

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the complexities of taking art history beyond its European roots. The paradoxes attendant on the category of culture—and hence, on questions of universality and incommensurability—also apply to other key analytical categories, such as art, nation, and modernity. These categories emerged in and for Europe in the context of colonial encounters, alongside the development and spread of capitalism as a unified and unifying network, mediated by nationstates, that both is driven by powerful universalizing master narratives and mobilizes zones of exception.21 The zones of exception include ideas of the human that rendered certain people inadequate—or, at best, aspiring—to a normative, “civilized” humanity (slaves, women, colonized “natives,” Indigenous peoples, the “masses”). The “customary” modes of exploitation, social organization, and symbolic systems of the colonized strategically left in place by colonial rule are another exception; I describe one such instance later. The experience of modern master categories for those inhabiting such (truly global) forms of exception is therefore one of profound unevenness. It is simultaneously an experience of the inadequacy or disjuncture of master categories and of the continuing force with which they work in the world. This book experiments with an art historical method that goes beyond circulation to keep in play this epistemological unevenness, holding under erasure master concepts such as culture, art, nation, modernity, and—crucially in this case—religion while also attending to their undeniable salience. It does so by focusing on an obdurately noncirculating form (massive statues, mostly built in situ), but one that is nonetheless, like all images, also a temporally moving target of analysis, still in the making. While I do address the global— indeed, multiscalar—travels and exchanges of this genre, they are not my sole focus, for if circulation posits objects as nodes in networks, “transcultural” encounters are just one of many types of constitutive processes that course through them in many different registers. Why, then, should we persist in reading them primarily in terms of periods, nations, or “cultures”? The approach I want to propose and test here reintensifies art history’s focus on the object, this time not just as a bounded and given entity that is a node in networks of circulation, but as itself a bundle of multiple interlinked processes unfolding stochastically, at varying speeds and intensities: an assemblage. Here, as with cultures and individual subjects, the object is seen not as a stable totality but as a field of moving forces, a matter of becoming as much as of being. In this disaggregation of putatively discrete phenomena—not least enormous, static objects that seem to be all about their size and shape—into clusters of processes, objects-events belong both to the moment and space of these processes’ convergence and to multiple other space-times.22 10

INTRODUCTION

In a processual art history, then, works/objects (human-made or otherwise), styles, and genres take on the provisional coherence of assemblages at varying scales, as convergences of processes with varying logics and varying consistencies within those logics that draw their force from potentially vastly different moments. The analytical method is to tease out and describe certain strands of this complex, intrinsically mutable assemblage. The particular strands and scales of analysis that are chosen arise contingently from a particular encounter between the object and the researcher as a matter of investments, interests, capacities, affordances, and other affections. This approach obviates the impasse in art history between a formalism that engages objects in a moving phenomenological present and a contextualism that privileges the singular moment, location, and human agent of a work’s production. It also accounts for objects’ ability to inhabit multiple frames of value, efficacy, and understanding, such as art, visual culture, and religion. It might help here to briefly gloss the concept of the assemblage in its technical sense to see how it might be useful for art history (i.e., without disappearing into the thickets of systems theory). For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the assemblage is a conjuncture of material processes from heterogeneous systems (organic, inorganic, linguistic, ideational, etc.); it is a set of working links that takes on a certain consistency, coherence, and durability but does not form an organic whole or a closed structure and is open to making further linkages across systems.23 Manuel DeLanda describes assemblages as wholes with emergent properties—that is, properties that are not present in their component parts taken alone but are produced by the interactions between them (to take a statue-related example, the properties of bronze are emergent because they are not reducible to those of copper and tin, its constituent elements).24 Assemblages are not reducible to the properties of their individual components or to any particular level or scale at which these parts are specified. Further, unlike in a totality, these parts are not defined by their place within the whole. They are decomposable, available for redistributions and interactions with other assemblages that might activate capacities and tendencies in these parts that have not yet been exercised. Despite this fluidity, emergence is not totally random. The origin and endurance of specific properties in an assemblage unfold in a “concrete space of possibilities within a definite structure” and can therefore be accounted for, albeit never once and for all as they are in a taxonomic or botanical categorization.25 Crucially for my purposes, “The identity of an assemblage should always be conceived as a historical process, the process that brought its components together for the first time as well as the process that maintains its integrity INTRODUCTION

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through a regular interaction among its parts.”26 If emergence brings elements of an assemblage together in a network, my account deploys the idea of circuits to signal one type of regular interaction between these elements. The terms circuit and network are related but not interchangeable: a circuit implies two-way movement in a (relatively) closed loop, whereas a network can be open-ended or one-way, so circuits are subsets of networks. The repetition and intensification of the network entailed in a circuit contribute to the coherence and durability of an assemblage. Circuits can be spatial, as with the scalar connections that statue patrons make between small towns or villages and cities, states, or nations; they can also be temporal, like the ritual cycles that make for both the persistence of religious traditions and their ongoing transformations. In this account, then, emergence features in a theoretical sense that adds another layer to the empirical aspects of the term (temporal newness and coming out into public space). As part of the sensible ground of politics, emergence as the newness of aesthetic form materializes and activates unrealized potentials within the assemblage: the appearance of political subjects to the senses and to sense. Thinking political emergence via the assemblage is a corrective to the “social anthropologistic” centrality of human agency that Pheng Cheah identifies in Rancière’s account of politics. If dissensus, as what Rancière terms the “verification of equality,” is the activation of a capacity within the space of possibilities in an assemblage, this emergence of political subjects arises through interactions with the nonhuman components involved.27 Political processes fundamentally depend on, but are not entirely reducible to, human will or intention. Framing these processes as part of assemblages also enables a richer description of the recapture of emergent elements, for assemblages can be highly resilient, often expansively reconfiguring the underlying logics of certain processes even as they radically interrupt them (again, something Rancière’s formulation of dissensus tends to foreclose).28 The assemblage is a powerful concept for thinking about images because of its open-ended capacity to work historically across multiple registers of analysis that are not ultimately or exclusively a matter of human culture, spirit, or will, even as human intent remains crucial. Such analysis therefore remains attuned to unrealized potentials or emergences that may be activated through contingent encounters, with unpredictable results. (In this respect, the assemblage is akin to Benjamin’s notion of the constellation.) Importantly, the assemblage is well suited to describing unevenness, because it depends not on logical consistency within a system but on material, machinic linkages. Here I describe the big statue genre in terms of a vernacular capitalisticonic-democratic-neoliberal-concrete-territorial-automotive assemblage. This 12

INTRODUCTION

assemblage brings together a postcolonial socioeconomic formation; a type of object/body/image; a political system; a dominant political ideology; a building material; relations to land; and a mode of transport tied to systems of manufacturing and infrastructure and, at another scale, to natural resources and geopolitics. As I describe, all of these processes, to varying degrees and in different ways, are involved in the distributions and redistributions of the sensorium of caste and its hierarchical social ordering. This concern is ultimately what guides the identification of parts and their scales in analyzing images and iconopraxis (explained shortly) as part of the sensible infrastructure of democracy. I describe this sensible ground across a range of sites: the temporal cycles of festivals and the intensifications of inaugurations; the material operations of commensuration, where different constituencies within the polity adopt the same novel medium of representation but in different numbers or sizes; the mimetic play of iconopraxis across these constituencies; similarly mimetic play between religious practices, governmentality, and industrial technologies; the resignification of land through the occupation of territory by spectacular forms; and the affects engendered by scale-making projects. The properties of the big statue form are emergent in the technical sense in that they are not reducible to any of these component parts but embody their ongoing interaction; having emerged, the form also dynamically interacts with those parts. Each of these parts has multiple levels of organization within it, with their own potentials for plasticity, their own rhythms and speeds. In other words, the temporalities of emergence are heterogeneous and nonlinear. Emergence therefore demands nonlinear historiography and plastic, multilevel mapping. That is what I attempt in this book, which is why it will make for unusual reading, for it is not easily assimilable to a single overarching argument or central theme but instead offers a concatenating description of many processes, entailing multiple interventions in different registers. For the object here is both theoretical and empirical, virtual and actual, generic and singular: it is the monumental statue genre as assemblage, massive, physical, proliferating, changing, and, above all, growing.

I CONOPRAXIS AND LAYERED TEMPORALITIES

Media studies and anthropology have been working for some time with such processual ideas of media ecologies, image operations, and image complexes that track images in their interactions with other bodies and systems.29 The film studies concept of genre similarly addresses novelty and dynamism from within a provisionally coherent structure. Art history’s moves to decenter the INTRODUCTION

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location and moment of an artwork’s production—its putative origin—are conceivably headed in a similar direction, although this is in tension with the discipline’s organization as an institutional practice. (Art history departments are carved up into expertise in historical periods and geographical areas.) In processual accounts, temporal and spatial parameters are not easily thought apart either from each other or from the object itself. If spatial circulation is one axis of decentering, another is a reassessment of linear temporality in the periodization of styles. The Renaissance was central to the emergence of art history as a discipline, so it is fitting that scholars of that period have led the reassessment of periodization, using the terms anachronistic and anachronic for art histories and artworks untethered from what Georges Didi-Huberman calls the “euchronistic consonance” characterizing the historian’s “canonical attitude.”30 This more recent work reanimates earlier art historical and critical thinking on the temporality of forms, such as that of Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Henri Foçillon, and Foçillon’s student George Kubler. It argues for layered, folded understandings of temporality that encompass the moment of artistic production, which draws on multiple pasts and imagined futures, as well as the ongoing sojourns of images through varying sites and frames of engagement, meaning, value, and technical remediation (the reworking of “old” media forms by new ones).31 Similarly, writing on ancient and medieval South Asian temple sculpture— and therefore more squarely within the frame of religious ritual—Michael Meister advocates a move from a “canonical linearity” in the scholarship on India’s past to a recognition of “layered traditions” and “anti-canons.”32 Here he introduces the term iconopraxis as a crucial supplement to art history’s methods of iconography and iconology that explicitly goes beyond the picture frame and the static, intact, finished work to attend to embodied and processual relations with the image. Meister refers to “the fluidity and multiplicity of practice” that both responds to and generates what he calls “iconoplasty,” or “the semantic fluidity of forms at times of ritual definition and the transformational characteristics of meanings attached to forms in the same period by different users synchronically and over longer durations (diachronically).”33 Again, however, this is a view of iconopraxis and iconoplasty primarily as a matter of human meaning. The frame of the assemblage supplements this with other techno-material processes, so I use these terms in that more expansive sense. It is no coincidence that art historians dealing with religious and ritualistic images (whether in Renaissance Europe or in medieval India) should be the 14

INTRODUCTION

ones calling out the “canonical” nature of the discipline’s temporal euchronicity and linearity, for they are confronting a humanist notion of the aesthetic whose secularizing movement is at art history’s very core. This influential idea of the aesthetic, arising from Romanticism, sublimated the sacred into nature as the work of God, with art as a human endeavor whose privileged relationship to nature and insight into the essence of the world sprang from natural or God-given genius.34 Art history does not just assume secularization; it runs deeper than that: secularization has been its raison d’être. The putative supersession of ritual by art for a secular age was plotted along a linear-cum-cyclical timeline, where an organicist model of the rise and fall of civilizations and period styles came to be ranged along a Hegelian telos of the evolving movement of Spirit’s incarnation in increasingly dematerialized forms. Thus, while pre-Renaissance art can be placed within the frame of religious ritual, the Renaissance is a secularizing bridge between religion and art such that modern art becomes “normatively secular.”35 Although this situation is changing, the relegation of religion to the past or to a dematerialized spiritual or unworldly realm still implicitly informs art history and media studies in many ways. (I discuss an instance of the former in chapter 3 and of the latter later in this chapter.) This book asks—and performs—what happens to art history and theory of the modern and contemporary period when, rather than assuming a linear narrative of religion’s secularizing sublimation into art, they must also contend with religion as part of the modern and contemporary. Simply bracketing contemporary religious images as visual/material culture, popular culture, or kitsch rather than art evades the deeper issues underlying the temporality of images that art historians looking at art “proper” have raised and that are further complicated on the uneven terrain of postcoloniality. It is not just that yesterday’s religious icons or everyday objects of material culture have become today’s art, and vice versa (mass-reproduced art on mugs and T-shirts becomes visual culture). Such distinctions also hinge on, and reinstate, a historically specific regime of image value tied to the role of taste in performing social distinction in bourgeois Western Europe.36 This regime of taste is arguably not as hegemonic now as it once was; nor is it easily transplanted to the former colonies. In contemporary India, knowledge and patronage of religion carries far more social weight than that of art; at the same time, however, the discourse of taste is not absent and, indeed, comes into assemblage with other forms of distinction, such as caste and class. Artists, too, work across and between artistic taste and religious value: some monumental statue sculptors, like calendar artists, have attended art schools and bring that training to their iconic images. INTRODUCTION

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In such a situation, and as my use of the term icon indicates, the images I deal with here are most usefully understood not as definitively religious, secular, or artistic but, following Talal Asad, as frontiers in the ongoing boundary work that constitutes the very categories of religious, secular, and art.37 I therefore deploy “iconopraxis” to refer to the force of images in general in and on the world, including religious images that are not reducible to art but are not fully separable from it, either. Describing iconopraxis entails analyzing the terms on which images move between frames of value and social distinction, both inscribing differences between these frames and forming circuits between them. In its interest in frames of valuing images, and in their spatial and temporal emergence, this account is an extended meditation on the single footnote from the third version of Benjamin’s artwork essay from which the chapter’s third epigraph is taken. It tarries with the “oscillation” between cult value and exhibition value—that is, between the cultic efficacy of sequestered religious images and the exhibitionary force of implicitly secular images meant for public viewing (an oscillation that, as I will show, inscribes circuits informing the work of both religious and secular icons). But I do not see this oscillation as fully “apart from” the powerful narratives of historical “transition” to which cult value and exhibition value are often harnessed. Rather than choosing between modernity’s linear telos and what Keith Moxey calls “heterochronic” forms of temporality, I want to think these together, in their frictional, uneven coexistence.38 I therefore describe the resonances and interferences that the oscillations between cult and exhibition value create in processes and narratives of progress, development, and transition—particularly the “transition” to the secular. This account is thus situated in the spatiotemporal blind spot created by narratives of linear transition that elide the layered contemporaneity of religion and its emergent forms. It also brings to religion media archaeology’s insight that technologies do not necessarily replace one another in linear succession (while acknowledging the pervasive hegemony of that habit), for new configurations exist in parallel to, link with, reactivate, and remediate existing ones.39 For instance, as I show in chapter 3, the new monumental public statues do not replace the smaller icons sequestered in temples or that appear by the roadside, even as their emergence might affect those icons in ways that produce further assemblages such as temples-cum-theme parks. Similarly, heterogeneous temporality is rarely a matter of parallel and distinct strands of heterochronicity pegged to discrete cultures in multicultural multiplicities or multiple modernities. There are complex, layered, productive 16

INTRODUCTION

interactions between them.40 The critique of linear temporality does not mean doing away with the force of modernity’s progress narrative, which has material effects even if not in forms that it anticipates or recognizes (such as monumental concrete statues of Asian deities). The universalism of the development narrative entails a promise to, and uptake by, all those who desire progress, including—indeed, especially—those who are not “yet” enjoying its fruits.41 Universals, Anna Tsing observes, hold promise for “both the powerful and the powerless . . . elite and excluded alike.”42 As we will see, the imaginative potentials unleashed by the quantifying operations of commensuration and scaling are part and parcel of this promise. But because universals spreading with capitalist expansion gain traction (or not) through encounters—Tsing calls them “frictions”—with varying specificities or incommensurabilities that are not simply reducible to cultural differences, these “engaged universals are never fully successful in being everywhere the same.”43 Tsing dispenses with the problem of choosing between singular and multiple modernities, for modernity, however putatively singular (or freshly singularized for sale to others), unfolds via multiple, heterogeneous actualizations.44 In the chapter’s first epigraph, the “Hindu blog” author Abhilash Rajendran effects one such actualization when he writes, “We modern day people are obsessed with size and height.” Here he (re)formats Hindu worshipers like himself as belonging to a universal “modern day,” maintaining modernity’s association with periodization, quantification, and measurement even as he simultaneously invokes a “Supreme Truth” that is “beyond imagination” (and presumably beyond the “modern day”). Religion here is not antithetical to or replaced by a secular modernity; it is better understood as a manifestation of a “postsecular” condition in which the “post” does not signal the demise of secularisms but their presence as possible horizons. My account contains several similar instances of how putatively heterochronic notions of time are inhabited, and remixed, by the same subjects and in the same objects, demonstrating that even if we can speak of different cultures, they are not easily mapped onto particular subjects, objects, or locations. More broadly, too, apart from this methodological intervention into art historical temporality, the attempt throughout is to think of emergence through the complex layering and assemblage of systems and processes rather than choosing between them: persistences as well as transformations; circuits and networks as well as linearity; contingency as well as systematicity; boundary work as well as the force of delineated concepts and structures. Trying to hold open becoming while describing being means that the binary force of either–or coexists with the rhizomatic “and . . . and . . . and.”45 In the service of a rigorous nonbinarism INTRODUCTION

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(where binarism is itself not subject to binarism), I therefore often deploy a seemingly contradictory and paradoxical “both–and” formulation. This is necessary to describe the concurrence of universalizing forces and the exceptionalities that make their spread possible, as I now describe for the “vernacular capitalist” ethos of the bazaar and its production as an arena of difference. This historical background is also key to understanding the epistemological and institutional frames in which modern religious imagery in India took shape, as vernacular capitalist producers and patrons were produced as cultural subjects in the late colonial period.

VERNACULAR CAPITALISM AS “CULTURAL CONTEXT”

The question with which I started this investigation is a conventional one: why does this form appear in India at this moment? In the processual mode I am advocating, however, these spatial and temporal terms in which the question is posed start to disintegrate, for location and period, like culture, are, precisely, conventional: conceptual artifacts that acquire force through institutional and discursive formations. Further, given the frame of uneven co-constitution, what might initially seem highly context- or locationspecific in this account can also illuminate phenomena elsewhere (as I suggest in my discussions of spectacle, scale, and what I call iconic exhibition value). In spatial terms, I treat my nation-based locus, India, as a fuzzy, permeable category, whose borders are differently configured and loom in and out of focus and efficacy depending on the processes being described: pre- or postPartition; as the “South Asia” of Cold War area studies; extending, or not, to the diaspora. My method, in this and previous work, has been to start with the practitioners of a form—artists, in this case sculptors—and follow their networks with what Bruno Latour describes as a moronic, literal, ant-like myopia, looking up every once in a while to see what this was doing to my “big picture” concepts.46 Here I trace the statues’ rhizomatic encounters with other human and nonhuman entities—patrons, viewers, fabricators, administrators, critics, priests, deities, materials, other images, weather events, landforms, all manner of re- and deanimators, gatekeepers, whoever and whatever enters my moving frame—until I find I have strayed too far.47 Thus, the array of sites drawn into this story at varying scales and levels of detail very quickly extended from Delhi and Bangalore to Shimoga, Shimla, Dwarka, Shahdol, Pilani, Lucknow, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Mauritius, Trinidad, Hong Kong, Kamakura, Durban, and Toronto, to name just a few. 18

INTRODUCTION

The recent spate of monumental statue building is not confined to India. Modi’s Statue of Unity was part of a global race for statue supremacy. One observer, the photographer Fabrice Fouillet, dates this phenomenon from the 1990s and calls it “statuomania,” redeploying the term used for the statuebuilding craze of the Third Republic in Paris just over a century earlier, soon after the dedication of the Statue of Liberty.48 He remarks that the majority of the more recent colossi are Buddhas located in Asia (according to Wikipedia’s “List of Tallest Statues” in 2020, most of the largest statues were in China, India, Japan, Myanmar, and Taiwan).49 Given my emphasis on emergence, I make no attempt to take into account all of these sites or provide an overarching universal logic for this phenomenon. At the same time, however, as the resonances with late nineteenth-century French statuomania, the parallels with Confederate statuary, and the Statue of Unity’s retake on the Statue of Liberty and its use of Chinese technology suggest, I retain a sense of the interconnections and patterns across locations and periods that might provide a meaningful basis for a broader conversation. In temporal terms, accounts of India’s postliberalization landscape tend to be dominated by the radical transformations, particularly evident in the megacities, wrought by the political and technological developments of the “long 1980s.”50 In tracing the emergence of monumental postliberalization icons, however, I again take a less euchronistic, more temporally and spatially expansive view of the processes at work in these transformations. This means situating these icons within longer genealogies of changing iconography, iconopraxis, and patronage unfolding in an emergent arena of custom or culture marked by an uneasy relationship to the colonial and then the postindependence state. These genealogies show how the specificity of the “Indian context” is not simply a matter of the anachronistic persistence of heterochronic precolonial cultural practices but also of the reconfiguration and resignification of these practices, first by colonialism and then by the ongoing global production of “culture” as a site of essentializing difference. In the Indian case, religious iconopraxis has been a particularly recalcitrant site for the essentialism that dogs cultural difference. At a material level, this is so because religion entails cyclical, repetitive rituals and other performances that make its forms particularly sticky, as it were (i.e., these are particularly persistent and coherent assemblages). This is exacerbated by the primordialist discourses of religious nationalism, but those discourses, in turn, mobilize identitarian categories codified by colonial law. As chapter 1 describes, the monumental icons and the religious theme parks in which they are often situated emerged, in part (like the calendar art and film industries), from the arena INTRODUCTION

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of what I call vernacular capitalism. In my previous work, I have traced how the colonial genealogy of the “bazaar”—as the domain of “native” commerce was known—helps to explain the semiformal, quasi-legitimate character of the postindependence vernacular culture industries and the interpenetration of commerce, religion, and sociality that continues to inform not just the culture industries but the conduct of business and politics more broadly.51 The historian Ritu Birla has also usefully described how this arena took shape through colonial law and governance.52 Here I want to briefly recap those elements of the bazaar that are relevant to the postliberalization resurgence of religious patronage as a capacious site of social mobility and political power. Vernacular capitalists emerged from a comprador class of mercantile and moneylending communities in India (such as the Banias and Marwaris in the north and east, the Parsis and Lohanas in the west, and the Chettiars in the south), whose extensive community- and kin-based networks were key elements of colonial expansion. These communities acted as translators and intermediaries between the agrarian economy and colonial administration and trade. Profiting from this trade, as well as from speculation in the colonial economy, they entered manufacturing. This included the vernacular culture industries—printed images including calendars and magazines; novels, plays, and pamphlets; and eventually the cinema—in which they were producers and distributors, as well as consumers. These industries became sites for assertions of identity vis-à-vis other vernacular constituencies and particularly influenced the material forms of anticolonial nationalism by giving them a Hindu-hegemonic inflection. Vernacular capitalists also became involved in philanthropy and religious patronage. Prime exemplars of this are the Birlas, one of India’s leading business families, who feature prominently in this account as the pioneering patrons of a landmark temple, an early religious theme park, and a much-copied giant Shiva statue.53 Religious and charitable giving is part of the interpenetration of commerce, religion, and sociality in an ethos in which capital has typically been kept within the family and the circulation of goods and credit traditionally depended on social relations rather than being underwritten by formal legal institutions. Here commercial creditworthiness is part of a network of trust shored up by family and caste alliances, religious merit, and social standing. Since the late nineteenth century, the means of acquiring merit have included, on a sliding scale of importance, patronage of temples and dharamshalas (pilgrim guesthouses); sponsorship of shrines for annual festivals; the display and worship of printed icons; and giving printed calendar icons as gifts, which also serves to annually lubricate social-cum-commercial networks. The 20

INTRODUCTION

status acquired through giving and tribute in these networks has also enabled the negotiation of relative autonomy from sovereign power to assert nonstate dominance at various scales.54 However, as Weber insisted, contra Marx, the acquisition of religious merit, wealth, social power, and territorial control cannot be reduced to serving a primarily economic or political self-interest.55 Against the economic or ideological determinism that tends to afflict critique, I suggest that all of these must be recognized as powerful ends in themselves—or, rather, that in practice the distinctions between them are operationalized to varying extents in different contexts. This is a contested field: charitable giving is normatively noninstrumental in this ethos but is therefore also prone to popular accusations of being undertaken to relieve the guilt of possessing material wealth, or of being used cynically for political or economic ends, as evinced in the idea of temple or statue building as “land grabbing” (discussed in chapter 4). However, even as it often plays a part in “accumulation by dispossession,” religious patronage need not be construed in terms of bad faith.56 The entanglement of capitalism with kin and community networks or social power and status shored up by religiosity and philanthropy is not specific to the Indian, Asian, or former colonial context. What has marked the Indian case, though, is colonial law’s explicit naming and framing of this in terms of cultural exceptionalism.57 The colonial Indian Companies Act of 1882 placed family-based firms of the bazaar not under corporate law but under Hindu and Muslim personal law, thus producing and institutionalizing a zone of difference that was specified in terms of “custom” (a precursor of the more capacious “culture”) rather than “economy.”58 Thus, colonial law designated as separate and preexisting what was in fact an integral element of the colonial economy, operationalizing it as a constitutive outside that perpetuated existing structures of exploitation. The state’s market governance, based on corporate laws and formal banking, was thus co-constituted with the business ethos of the bazaar, characterized by informal credit systems and fluid exchanges between commerce, kinship, religion, and social power—or, rather, by the absence of clear epistemological and operational distinctions between these categories. This coexistence was marked, however, by a frictional legal interface, particularly around the regulation of charitable and religious giving, which, in turn, was mapped onto a fraught distinction between public and private.59 Merchants resisted the regulation of potentially self-interested private (familybased) religious gifts but did so in the name of religio-cultural autonomy. In the process, as Birla observes, this very acceptance and deployment of culturalist terms and the public-private distinction “rendered the ethico-political INTRODUCTION

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currencies of their market practices negotiable with modernity.” 60 Thus, in the period leading up to and beyond independence, new pathways opened up for existing systems in the bazaar to form assemblages with market governance, nationalism, democracy, and social reforms. Indian capitalists’ combination of economic subjecthood and performance of community gave them recourse to both the legal frameworks of the market and to a discourse on custom or culture that perpetuated the kin and caste networks so integral to their success. The discourse of culture and community also became the basis of demands for political equality and then independence as they aligned themselves with anticolonial nationalism in the 1930s and ’40s. The identitarian logic of these demands was accompanied and enabled by the commensurative and mimetic work of iconic images (discussed in chapter 2). In this way, Indian commerce, including the vernacular culture industries, was fundamentally shaped by the legal and epistemological conditions of a semiformal, familial, culturalized sphere, with varying degrees of interface with the formal, state-regulated market, on the one hand, and outright illegal practices, on the other. After independence, as state enterprise dominated the formal economy during the era of Nehruvian quasi-socialism, the vernacular culture industries continued to operate on a bazaar-style basis. For instance, printed icons were produced by family firms using casual labor and multiple semiformal, small-scale, ancillary services and circulated through seasonal networks of mobile agents. A more extreme case is the popular cinema, with its informal, if not illegal, sources of financing that range from family businesses to transnational crime syndicates.61 In other words, then, what media scholars describe as the “porous legalities” (Lawrence Liang) or “pirate modernity” (Ravi Sundaram) characterizing India’s globalizing cities in the late twentieth century may be radically new developments in certain respects, as Sundaram suggests, but these features also trace their genealogy to the earlier globalizing moment of British colonialism.62 This deeper genealogy illuminates the form and character of media technologies in the vernacular capitalist milieu: their speed of proliferation, organizational flexibility and informality, spatial fluidity, and rampant piracy of content. It also reveals how these features have mobilized certain kinds of content and practices—notably, those associated with religion and other avenues of building merit and status, gaining social mobility and social power, and expanding resource networks. In India, religion has arguably been the most responsive arena for new media technologies of all kinds from the nineteenth century onward: oil painting, chromolithography, the proscenium stage, photography, cinema, radio, the gramophone, offset printing, audiocassettes, 22

INTRODUCTION

television, video, CDs, DVDs, mobile phones, animation, animatronics, IMAX, vinyl banners, and, of course, digital media. (Facebook and WhatsApp thrive on images of deities.) Piracy and informality were rife from the start in most of these media, except gramophone records and state-controlled radio and television broadcasting. So while the latter were a key feature of the Nehruvian era, so were the black market; cinema; calendar prints; mobile photo studios; painted signs; billboards and cut-outs; and ephemeral forms of images, such as notebook covers, pendants, and wallet cards, all forging their own, nonstate compacts with nationalism and with what Partha Chatterjee calls a broader “political society.”63 Placing post-1980s media technologies on a continuum with these older forms of the bazaar makes the changes wrought by liberalization appear more as an intensification and layered expansion than a fundamental transformation. This framing also adds crucial context to Liang’s claim that “porous legalities are often the only modes through which people can access and create avenues of participation in the new economy.”64 While this may be the case for participation in the economy per se, a central concern in my account is the convertibility between economic wealth and social power, something achievable through religious patronage but that for centuries has been denied to those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. The aspiration for participation (as opposed to survival) is never just economic; nor is the means of achieving it. That religious patronage is still one such means is lost in the blind spot where contemporary religiosity sits, for media studies as much as for art history. For instance, both Liang and Sundaram discuss the case of the (now deceased) audio and film magnate Gulshan Kumar to illustrate how piracy enables successful entry into the formal market. Famously starting out as a roadside juice vendor, Kumar made his fortune in the cassette industry via a combination of piracy, covers, and legal loopholes (ironically, his company, T-Series, now a major player in the music and film industries, fervently safeguards its own copyrights).65 Neither account, however, mentions the key role of a highly visible—indeed, spectacular—religiosity in Kumar’s social mobility. Before he was assassinated while coming out of a Shiva temple in Bombay (allegedly by gangsters linked to the film industry) he had created a huge new market for devotional music and videos; a worshiping Kumar appeared on the covers of all of T-Series’s devotional music releases, often in its pilgrimage videos, and in the 1993 film Shiv Mahima. His production studio in Delhi features two temples and a giant Shiva statue, unsurprisingly pirated from (or, we might say, a cover version of ) one built by the Birlas. He also financed several new temples and another gigantic Shiva at the important Hindu pilgrimage INTRODUCTION

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center of Dwarka, in Gujarat, and was involved in the proposal for an 85-ft. Shiva in Mauritius. Temple building is a well-established (“old” but recently reintensified) means by which wealth—or the ability to commandeer resources—translates into social standing, then back into economic and political clout. Devotional audiotapes, CDs, videos, and gigantic statues are newer, more visible forms of a similar process—similar, but also crucially different in their publicness or what I call their iconic exhibition value (see chapter 3). My attempt here (most explicitly in chapter 2) is to outline the significance of that different publicness and the conditions of its emergence, both of which hinge on how the interface between caste and democracy began to change the terms on which social mobility and transformation could occur. This is ultimately what is at stake here; this is why it is important to illuminate the current forms of globalization that fly under the radar of the modernist narrative of modernity and its functional separations, such as the cordoning off of religion as (private as opposed to public) “custom” or “culture” that colonial law attempted in India in the late nineteenth century.66 The gigantic icon indexes the vernacular capitalist combination of political, social, economic, and religious power and merit in a temporally layered, unanticipated, yet variously familiar form, its iconography drawing on twentieth-century calendar prints while its uses of scale and concrete draw on the poetics of infrastructure and the aura of historical colossi. Its changing spaces of iconopraxis are constantly resignified as primordial by iconodules and atavistic by secular-modern and other iconoclasts; the gigantic icon is caught, therefore, between anachronicity, or timelessness, and anachronism, or belatedness. The task of this book, however, is to make sense of its presence (i.e., its present-ness): to apprehend the contemporary aesthetic forms of religiosity and, through them, the everyday mechanics that operationalize politics as the distribution and redistribution of the sensible.

THIS ASSEMBLAGE

The linear sequence of chapters in a book is hardly the most appropriate form for describing an assemblage, with its multiple scales and rhythms, complex spatiotemporal circuits, networks, and processes whose rhizomatic openings can readily be followed in any direction. My solution is to approach each chapter as a set of processes, presented as if it were an optical filter over a lens or a layer of information on a map: a partial view that forges a certain coherence and sense on its own, but with the knowledge that it it is selective and needs 24

INTRODUCTION

to be seen in conjunction with many other possible layers, of which these are just some. The themes of the chapters follow the heterogeneous logic of the assemblage, working in different registers to each make its own arguments. The temporal dimensions appear within the often but not always chronological narratives of each chapter, as well as via layerings and recursions across chapters. The photographs and diagrams are intended to help with visual recognition of the statues in relation to their location, chronology, and intertexts. Chapter 1 sets the stage by sketching a techno-figural history of the monumental statue form—the artistic, architectural, and craft traditions it draws on—through four major teams of sculptors in India; their work; and their vernacular capitalist, religious, and political patrons. It introduces some of the form’s more prominent objects, sites, materials, and actors, which reappear in subsequent chapters in relation to specific themes. It also provides a sense of the importance of religious patronage as a key element of legitimacy and status in an arena whose social, economic, and political aspects cannot be disentangled. In keeping with its function as a base layer of the map, or a set of core building blocks in the assemblage, the chapter is also a story about concrete: a privileged material not only for modernism, but also for monumental statues and other religious structures. Concrete, a lumpy, messy material trying to be smooth and even, appears here as a figure for modernity’s disavowal of its unevenness—that is, of modernity’s own processes of emergence. Chapter 2 examines the relationships between statues, democracy, and publics in contemporary India: the “statue wars.” Against the separation of the material and the symbolic that informs public critiques of statue building from left and right alike, it attends to the sensible infrastructures of democracy and their entanglements with iconopraxis. Focusing on the commensurative and mimetic force of new, noncanonical religious forms within the logic of democratic representation, I examine four moments, three of them linked to a particular configuration of the religio-political public explicitly named at the time as sārvajanik, or pertaining to “all the people” (sarvajan). They are the rise of public religious festivals such as Ganapati Puja as part of the anticolonial movement of the 1890s; the new temple form of Delhi’s Birla Mandir, a response to the Temple Entry Movement and the Poona Pact in the 1930s; the postindependence emergence of memorials that further territorialized a (caste) Hindu-hegemonic nationalism, starting with the Vivekananda Rock Memorial in the 1960s; and, in the 1990s, Kumari Mayawati’s Dalit monument-building program, which attempted to institute a Dalit-Bahujan vision of the sarvajan. New remediations of iconography and new vocabularies of iconopraxis that emerged at these moments offered ways to contend with, INTRODUCTION

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and reformulate, the sensible ground of caste oppression. This genealogy of publicness takes the discussion of monumental statues beyond the given terms of public commentary—that is, their subjects, size, expense, and visibility as spectacles—and attends to their occupation of outdoor space that is the infrastructural precondition for monumentality. Chapter 3 offers a detailed examination of the varying forms of iconopraxis at some of the main statue sites, with a view to specifying the circuits between new and canonical forms of images and iconopraxis, between the religious and the secular, and between cult value and exhibition value. The two-way traffic between state and religion continues here in the way the statues mobilize quantification, an idiom of legitimacy that neospiritual movements in particular have adopted from governmentality. Tracing the links between cultic or auratic and spectacular or enumerative forms of authority, I discuss instances in which cultic authority and aura are not superseded by iconic exhibition value but instead both authorize and benefit from it. This leads me to revisit Benjamin’s artwork essay to propose the category of “iconic exhibition value” as an equivalent to what ought really to be specified as artistic exhibition value rather than exhibition value tout court. Chapter 4 describes how giant statues dovetail with the postliberalization boom in the car industry, as well as in construction, real estate, tourism, and leisure. Infrastructure appears here not only as a heuristic category in relation to the sensible, to describe new visual regimes and resignifications of land, but also as an object of analysis: as a means of generating value and efficacy through its “politics and poetics.”67 Here I relate earlier discussions of space, iconopraxis, and iconic exhibition value to the theorization of spectacle, focusing not on its deterritorialized, mass-mediated aspects, as has been the tendency of media theory, but on the physical spectacle’s integration into the boosterism of putting places “on the map” and legitimizing territorial enclosure. This territorialized spectacle speaks to its theorizations in terms of both sovereignty (Foucault) and capital (Debord), and to the articulation of the two via speculation in a global dispensation that constructs capital as highly fickle, volatile, and hypermobile—and, indeed, as the ultimate addressee of the spectacle. The ensuing discussion of the spatial and scalar imaginaries of speculation segues into chapter 5, which finally tackles both the most obvious and the most opaque characteristic of the statues: their scale. As throughout, it looks at the sensible ground of scale not as a universal, given quality but as projects or processes of scaling that make particular kinds of sense in a particular assemblage. It examines the scalar regimes of the neoliberal discourse of globality, where the vicissitudes of mobile capital are exacerbated by the 26

INTRODUCTION

structural adjustment imperatives of fiscal devolution and decentralization. This distribution exhibits an intense plasticity and circuitry between scales and competition for resources at national, subnational, and transnational levels. This fosters boosterist infrastructure projects such as the giant statues, as well as the volatile populist politics and local and translocal identity projects that attempt—not always successfully—to harness their efficacy. Here I examine three big statue sites and the scalar circuits at work in their significations of territory, both beyond and within the nation. The first two are in the diaspora, in Trinidad and Mauritius; the third is Modi’s Statue of Unity. Clearly, this last is a secular statue, but I hope that my account will show that it has a great deal in common with the far smaller and less ambitious religious icons that paved the way for it and that, like the proposed Ram statue in Ayodhya, hope to succeed it. The Statue of Unity is a contingent end point for my description of this assemblage. The big statues and proposals for new ones continue to proliferate, despite snowballing opposition, so it is hard to predict whether the Statue of Unity and the statues of Shivaji and Ram represent the (literal and figurative) peak of this phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is fitting that I end with the Statue of Unity, for even though I started my research well before it was announced (and very likely even conceived), the two projects converged in their completion: the statue was inaugurated on October 31, 2018, Sardar Patel’s birth anniversary, as I readied this book for submission. I hope that the assemblage of the big statues and the academy in this book is a joyful, generative encounter in Spinoza’s sense of one that increases the capacities of the bodies involved. The big statues can intensify processes in the academy that engage the contemporaneity of religion, deepening our understanding of its aesthetics and politics and thereby expanding the scope, methods, and salience of art history as a discipline of images—that is, of objects-events-spaces, senses, and material imaginings. And conversely, if, as the book argues, the statues are a symptom of the ongoing verification of Dalit equality, it is not the further production of statues but this verification, proceeding apace in spite of the statues, that it seeks to recognize and amplify in its own modest measure.

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1

STATUES AND SCULPTORS

CONCRETE: A KUTCHA HISTORY

Concrete and steel: what materials are more emblematic of modernity, the urban, progress, and development? Indeed, what has modernity become but an assemblage of concrete, steel, petroleum, capitalism, and the ideology of progress: a lumpy, shiny, filthy skin of roads, buildings, mines, dams, canals, bridges, parking lots, and waste dumps steadily creeping over the planet? So is it any wonder that late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Indian gods and heroes should take on a corresponding material form? This chapter tells some of the stories of the recent monumental statue genre’s genealogy, growth, and spread: its most prominent practitioners and their journeys to this form; their techniques, particularly their use of cement; and their major patrons and sites. This is not to say that cement is the only material featured in this assemblage—key instances in stone also figure here—but my focus is on concrete as an emergent, rather than canonical, element of iconic statues. Why is this a kutcha history? Kutcha in Hindi means raw, uncooked, provisional, amenable to reshaping, as opposed to pukka, which means cooked, firm, solid, sturdy, set, like concrete. Pukka is often used in relation to housing: the aspiration is for a durable, pukka house of reinforced cement concrete, as opposed to mud, which is vulnerable to the elements and needs constant maintenance. Here I want to treat both history and concrete as kutcha, in part because this is a necessarily provisional and partial account of a form that has gone viral. More fundamentally, though, as described in the introduction, I want to keep the very

idea of time, and therefore of history, of objects-events, and of matter, kutcha: constantly in the making, consonant with a Deleuzian-Bergsonian conception of time not as a container filled with quantifiable units (Benjamin’s “homogeneous, empty time”) but as inseparable from space, matter, thought and experience, and processes of emergence, actualization, and becoming.1 But what could be more pukka than concrete? In his book Concrete and Culture, the architectural historian Adrian Forty exposes the kutcha underside of concrete, unsettling its association with modernity.2 Modernist architects recognized and embraced this underside: Forty quotes the brutalist Paul Rudolph as saying “concrete is mud.”3 At the heart of concrete for Forty is its capacity to be two things at once, its “doubling.” It is both liquid and solid, of course, but it is also both modern and nonmodern in that it is an icon of modern industrial technology but also a natural material that was used by the Romans and relies not so much on mechanization as on unskilled or semiskilled physical labor. (So, as the website for a 123-ft. concrete Padmasambhava statue in Rewalsar/Tso Pema, Himachal Pradesh, puts it, “Few people realize that very, very little of the work on the statue is performed with heavy machinery.”4) Forty also highlights concrete’s mimetic qualities, citing instances where concrete inefficiently masquerades as industrial materials such as steel, with its precise edges and corners. While he does not take it this far, we might read concrete as indeed the perfect figure for modernity in that it indexes modernity’s constitutive duplicity and unevenness: the doubling between its images or narratives of itself and the structural inequity with which they are actualized. The smooth, industrial-looking surfaces of built concrete depend on its having been lumpy, messy, noisy, and physically labored on; modernity promises development to all, but that development is predicated on the exploitation of those who do not (yet) count as the “all.” Concrete construction lends itself to speed; it can also be scaled up or down to an astonishing degree. Forty makes the provocative claim that socialdemocratic welfare states in Western Europe subsidized prefabricated concrete construction to create a palpable sense of progress and change, maintaining electoral advantage by “keeping the scenery moving, even if life stood still.”5 This suggests that the speed of concrete construction is harnessed not only to the symbolic uses of spectacular infrastructure in totalitarian political regimes, but also to the fickle temporality and public persuasion of democracy’s electoral cycles. Here “infra”-structure reveals itself as a term that enacts modernity’s disavowal of the symbolic aspects of technology, for in the form of dams, bridges, highways, and monuments, infrastructure is not invisible but a spectacular expression of state power. But concrete is also part of the everyday techno-political 30

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making of modern subjects as a demotic material whose relative affordability, plasticity of scale, and reliance on manual labor enable it to pervade our lives in the most intimate—and, when it fails, all too often deadly—ways. This plasticity has made concrete available to aspirational projects of selffashioning, social mobility, and political legitimation at a range of scales. The manual labor or craft involved here has made these projects sites of innovation and vernacularization.6 So, for instance, while Le Corbusier’s modernist Chandigarh was being built in the 1950s, in the same city Nek Chand, the Public Works Department road inspector, whose job dealt with the infrastructural use of concrete, was building a magical 12-acre rock garden with, among many other things, cement and sand. Elsewhere in the state of Punjab, whose extensive system of concrete-lined canals irrigated its agricultural Green Revolution, overhead water tanks made of concrete and fiberglass take on fantastical shapes: tractors, airplanes, horses, whisky bottles, and water jugs (to list just a few). Here concrete’s plasticity and doubling in elaborating what Brian Larkin calls the “poetics of infrastructure” bring the materials and technologies of development into assemblage with other processes and forms: in the case of monumental statues, with innovative forms of iconopraxis, or what people do with icons, both religious and secular.7 As these examples illustrate, this is not a case of opposition between the official or state-driven and the vernacular (or the hegemonic/elite and the subaltern/popular), not of either–or, but of productive circuits and exchanges between these domains, forged through the affordances of materials and techniques. This kind of exchange, assemblage, and layering pervades postliberalization monumental statue building and its cognate forms: theme parks, temples, museums, and memorials. The efflorescence of concrete in these forms is consistent with a postliberalization boom in construction following the partial “decontrol” of cement prices and distribution in 1982, followed by full deregulation in 1989.8 The major sculptors of monumental statues in India are father–son teams. The fathers were born into craft communities, three of them in the 1940s, undergoing hands-on apprenticeship or institutional training in art or craft. The sons, who also run the business side, grew up helping their fathers, as well as gaining technical qualifications in art, architecture, or engineering. Unlike their fathers, they do much of their design work on computers. The oldest sculptor, Ram Sutar, was born in 1925 to a Vishwakarma family in Maharashtra and attended the J. J. School of Art in Bombay; his son Anil went to Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture and earned a master’s degree at Washington University in St. Louis. Sutar is based in Delhi; his main patrons have been various organs of the state. He is India’s most prolific political S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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sculptor and designed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 597-ft. Statue of Unity. Matu Ram Varma, born in 1946, is from the Kumawat or Prajapati community of Rajasthan’s Shekhawati region. He lives in Pilani, the hometown of the Birla industrialist family, who have been his primary patrons and feature prominently in the genealogy of monumental statues. Varma’s grandfather Chokharam was a sculptor in the Sikar royal palace; his father was a construction laborer. His son Naresh Kumar, based in Gurgaon (near Delhi), studied sculpture at Baroda’s renowned Faculty of Fine Arts. Bangalore-based K. Kashinath, born in 1944, also works with his son, Sridhar, who is trained as a civil engineer. Kashinath’s father was a civil draftsman, but Kashinath was apprenticed to his maternal grandfather, learning stone sculpture, silver and gold casting, and wood carving. Babu Kazi Sakya, who has a jewelry and crafts shop in Gangtok, Sikkim, is a Newari metal craftsman from Nepal; his son Sanjay trained as a civil engineer in Nagpur and, with his older brother Bijoy (a chartered accountant by training), built a 95-ft. seated Sakyamuni at Ravangla in 2013 and has statue projects at Buddhist monasteries in Sikkim, Nepal, and Bhutan. Each team illuminates the multiple genealogies of this form in its own way, but inevitably their paths have also, at certain junctures, overlapped.

MATU RAM ART CENTER: CEMENT, LANDSCAPE, AND VERNACULAR CAPITALISM

Matu Ram (figure 1.1) learned art at the Birla Higher Secondary School in Pilani from Bhoor Singh, a graduate of the J. J. School of Art and a contemporary of the calendar artist S. M. Pandit, imbibing the academic realist tradition of fine art as well as the skills of a mistri (builder) from construction work with his father.9 His artistic talent, like that of his teacher Bhoor Singh, was fostered by the Birlas, one of India’s earliest and most successful vernacular capitalist families, who provide patronage to their ancestral town, Pilani, through educational and charitable trusts. Matu Ram worked as a teacher in local Birla Education Trust schools, involving students in art contests and making murals, paintings, and jhankis (festive displays) for annual celebrations of Saraswati Puja, Janmashtami, and Republic Day. He also made secular sculptures and murals for local institutions such as the Birla Museum at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) and the Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute. So Matu Ram’s practice, like the Birlas’, brought into assemblage science, religion, and the state, his formal vocabulary ranging from the constructivist-inflected aesthetic characterizing scientific and industrial projects of the Nehruvian era (figure 1.2) through the J. J. School of Art’s brand 32

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Matu Ram Varma working on head of Mangal Mahadev Shiva statue. Birla Kanan, Delhi. Courtesy of Naresh Kumar Varma. FIGURE 1.1

FIGURE 1.2 Matu Ram Varma, mural on façade of Central Electronics Engineering Institute. Pilani, Rajasthan.

of Indian academic realism to local Rajasthani traditions of miniature painting and calendar art. Matu Ram’s artistic trajectory is intertwined with the Birlas’ wider program of religious, scientific, and moral-political pedagogy and merit building as it has unfolded through the public forms of museums, temples, and parks. Enabling this program and reconciling its multiple forms and agendas is the mechanism of the trust, where philanthropy and charity map ideas of the public good onto religious merit, and vice versa.10 In addition to the one at BITS, there are Birla science museums and planetariums in several Indian cities, as well as a high-tech Eternal Gandhi Multimedia Museum at the former Birla residence in Delhi, where Gandhi was assassinated while staying with his devoted follower Ghanshyam Das Birla. Best known are the Birlas’ innovative and spectacular pan-Indian temples. At last count, there were nineteen scattered across sites of religious significance (such as Varanasi and Kurukshetra) and Birla companies (Nagda, Renukoot, Brajrajnagar, Akola). Popular mythology has it that, according to a Birla family superstition, completing the temple-building program will bring bad luck, so a Birla Mandir (Hindu 34

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temple) must always be in progress (a belief that, incidentally, parallels the processual approach to art historical objects I pursue here). Crucially, cement was one of the early products on which the Birlas built their business empire. By 2013, the Birla company UltraTech was India’s biggest manufacturer of cement; in 2015, the Aditya Birla Group was the tenth largest in the world, and India ranked second after China in global cement production.11 One of the first Birla temples was the 1939 Lakshminarayan Mandir in Delhi (discussed in the next chapter). Built in brick and cement rather than the canonical stone, the Lakshminarayan Mandir set the template for the Birla Mandirs’ architectural innovativeness and their orientation toward an inclusive public, which often entailed landscaped open spaces with theme park–like features, including statues. Delhi’s Birla Mandir has concrete statues of animals dotted around its gardens, along with concrete caves replete with concrete hermits, to signify a forest or wilderness. This, too, is part of the genealogy of the current spate of religious theme parks, well before neoliberal “Disneyfication.”12 Continuing the family’s patronage of landscaped public spaces, in 1987 G. D. Birla’s eldest son, Lakshmi Narayan Birla, and his two sons, working via their Pilani Charity Trust, inaugurated the Panchavati Park, a tourist attraction (paryatan sthal) featuring episodes from a much-loved section of the Ramayana: Rama’s exile in the Panchavati forest (figure 1.3). Here Pilani’s Rajasthani desert trees and scrub form the setting for life-size outdoor dioramas, again made in cement. These dioramas depict scenes such as Ram, Sita, and Lakshman sitting outside their forest hut; Ram and Lakshman with Jatayu; and Ram accepting berries from the “tribal” woman Shabari (figure 1.4). Along the pathways visitors might spot the occasional deer or marvelously unlikely kangaroo hiding in the foliage or be directed by a similarly non-native chimpanzee. It was in this park that a set of contingent conditions and processes converged in a techno-figural impulse driving the scaling up of a Hindu religious figure—that is, this park was one of the sites of emergence for the monumental statue form. One process in the big statue assemblage has been the elaboration of naturalist iconographic techniques adopted in the late nineteenth century. Here, oil painting and chromolithography took gods from stylized canonical forms in temple interiors and released them simultaneously out into their diegetic mythological landscapes and onto circulating images.13 This will to iconic mobility can be traced in part to the Krishna cult of Shrinathji in the Vaishnava merchant communities of northern and western India (including the Birlas’ Marwari community), with its painted backdrops (pichhwais) for icons that S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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Entrance to Panchavati Park, Pilani, inaugurated in 1997, featuring concrete langur monkey.

FIGURE 1.3

Matu Ram Varma, diorama depicting Ram’s meeting with Shabari, Panchavati Park. Courtesy of Naresh Kumar Varma.

FIGURE 1.4

could be carried by mobile merchants (or the open bedchamber windows that allowed a temple’s Krishna to fly out at night to frolic with his beloved gopis [cowgirls]). Artists from Nathdwara’s Shrinathji temple began to paint for bazaar prints, particularly those published by the Brijbasi brothers, who, like many of their customers, were merchant-entrepreneurs circulating between Shekhawati and the major port cities. These prints, popular across the nation and beyond, drew on Rajasthani miniature traditions and the European picturesque to situate Saraswati, Lakshmi, Krishna, Ganesh, and Satyanarayan in lush, fecund landscapes replete with waterfalls and wildlife. In addition to visualizing Krishna in the groves and rivers of Braj and Vrindavan or Ram, Sita, and Lakshman in the Panchavati forest, they gave Shiva a Himalayan backdrop. This painted mise-en-scène paved the way for the larger-than-(mortal)life statues of Shiva situated against three-dimensional mountains, both real (at Haridwar; Sanga, in Nepal; and Namchi, in Sikkim) and artificial (including at Bangalore’s Kemp Fort and Jalore, Rajasthan). It was this naturalism, further mediated via the diorama form and the plasticity of cement, that led to a big Hanuman statue’s emergence into a three-dimensional mise-en-scène at Panchavati Park. One of the park’s tableaux depicts the episode in which the monkey god Hanuman first meets Ram and Lakshman and takes them to meet Sugreev, the monkey king. Hanuman is S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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said to have carried Ram and Lakshman on his shoulders, but here Matu Ram faced a “representational dilemma” that occasioned a moment of emergence.14 For Ram and Lakshman to fit on the shoulders of a human-scale Hanuman, they would have to be smaller than life-size. In a temple interior with no other reference points this might not matter, but this diorama was subject to the naturalist pressure exerted by its surrounding landscape. So the only option was to enlarge the figure of Hanuman. This was canonically acceptable, being consistent with Hanuman’s shape-shifting qualities (later in the Ramayana narrative he enlarges himself to leap across the ocean to Lanka, then becomes tiny to enter the demoness Surasa’s mouth). Hanuman is, in fact, as plastic as concrete. Matu Ram was therefore able to seize on the plasticity of cement— that is, its scalability—to create a 21-ft. cement Hanuman (figure 1.5) who could accommodate human-size heroes on his shoulders. He tells the story with a flourish, describing his client L. N. Birla’s surprise and anger (since it was made without his permission), followed by joy at the successful experiment. So this Hanuman’s massive size emerged from its literal emergence as an outdoor icon—that is, from the formal pressures of its life-size natural location. What made this possible was a conjunction of factors that were all latent in the situation but had not been activated in such a form until this moment: the Ramayana’s narration of a plastic Hanuman; the scalability of cement; its plentiful availability for experimentation (because Matu Ram’s patrons manufactured it); and the paternalist ethos of the family firm—specifically, the indulgence of Matu Ram’s employer at the Birla Education Trust, who allowed him time for this experimentation—as well as the filial dynamic between artist and patron. While this Hanuman statue was not the sole source of the emergence of the giant statue form, it was certainly a powerful one, for it had a cascading mimetic effect. To begin with, it led Basant Kumar Birla, G. D. Birla’s youngest son, to ask Matu Ram if he could build a 60-ft. Shiva in Delhi (figure 1.6). Starting in 1989, agricultural land was acquired along National Highway 8 (NH8, now NH48) linking Delhi to Jaipur, opposite Delhi’s international airport. Surely it was no coincidence that this is also the route from Delhi to Gurgaon, a hub for the multinational presence enabled by economic liberalization (spearheaded there by the Maruti Suzuki car factory and back offices for American Express and General Electric) and poised to explode as an industrial, technological, and residential satellite city. Indeed, a monumental Jain statue had already appeared in 1985 on a hillock along another artery connecting Delhi to Gurgaon, the Mehrauli–Gurgaon road: an initially controversial 13.5-ft. granite Mahavira in a landscaped park known as the Ahimsa Sthal (figure 1.7), initiated by Prem Chandra Jain, who had a watch business in Old Delhi, and the 38

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Matu Ram Varma, Hanuman bearing Ram and Lakshman on his shoulders. Panchavati Park, Pilani. Courtesy of Naresh Kumar Varma. FIGURE 1.5

Matu Ram Varma, 85-ft. Mangal Mahadev Shiva, Birla Kanan, NH48, opposite Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, inaugurated in 1994. Photographed in 2007.

FIGURE 1.6

Shamaraya Acharya (Karkala, Karnataka), 13.5-ft. Mahavira statue, Ahimsa Sthal, Mehrauli–Gurgaon Road, Delhi, installed in 1985. FIGURE 1.7

prominent Karnataka figure Dr. Veerendra Heggade.15 The Shiva project was delayed by land disputes but completed in 1994. The statue was named Mangal Mahadev (auspicious/holy Shiva), and its surrounding park was named the Birla Kanan (garden). Notably, this novel use of concrete did not replace more traditional materials. As the Mangal Mahadev project neared completion, B. K. Birla and his wife, Sarla (figure 1.8), also commissioned a 45-ft. granite Krishna, known as Mangal Madhava (auspicious Krishna). Made by the traditional stone sculptor (sthapati) M. Muthia Sthapati at the stone-carving center of Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram) in Tamil Nadu, it was transported by train from Chennai to Kolkata and installed on a 15-ft. concrete base next to a temple in the gardens behind the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in 1995. The names Mangal (auspicious, prosperous) Madhava and Mangal Mahadev echo that of B. K. Birla’s grandson, Kumar Mangalam Birla, born in 1967 and G. D. Birla’s most illustrious successor, who went on to become one of the ten richest people in India. (Among other things, he is the chairman of UltraTech Cement.) Presumably, he also inspired the name of Mangalam Cement Limited, incorporated in 1976, S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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Naresh Kumar Varma at his studio, February 2010. His screen desktop wallpaper features Basant Kumar Birla and Sarla Birla. FIGURE 1.8

the manufacturer of Birla Uttam cement, the material used by Matu Ram and now by his son Naresh Kumar. In keeping with the fluidity of roles in the family firm, the managing director of Mangalam Cement oversaw the Mangal Mahadev project, while its experimental copper coating was developed in consultation with the director of Pilani’s Birla Museum. While these were the formal, techno-material, economic, spatial, and institutional factors in the Mangal Mahadev Shiva’s emergence in Delhi, the political conditions helped, too. The project took shape during the regime of Congress Party Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, but it coincided with the ascendance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from the mid-1980s on and the growing legitimacy of the Hindu nationalist politics that had been driven underground by the Congress Party’s official secularism during the Nehruvian period. A focal point of the BJP’s resurgent Hindu nationalism was a claim over territory: the putative Ramjanmabhoomi (Ram’s birthplace) at the site of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya. Among the BJP’s strategies to mobilize public sentiment around this issue was a series of long, spectacular intercity rath yatras (chariot processions), which literally covered 42

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space with Hindutva (Hinduness). At the level of generic expectations and possibilities, this circulation of the rhetoric and spectacular performance of Hindu territoriality in the second half of the 1980s paved the way for the appearance of this monumental Hindu icon in a highly visible, high-profile, public (albeit privately funded) space in the national capital, right across from its international airport. Such an appearance might have been unacceptable even a decade earlier, as was still the case for the relatively hidden Mangal Madhava statue in Kolkata, tucked away behind the large Birla Academy building, in keeping with the left-secular ethos of West Bengal’s communist government (if not with its public culture, given its enthusiastic annual celebration of the spectacular public Durga Puja festival). Compared with the explicitly communal politics of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, however, Delhi’s Birla Kanan and Mangal Mahadev were avowedly benign, charitable endeavors. They were built under the auspices of the Jayashree Charity Trust (Jayashree is B. K. Birla’s daughter), and the structure below the statue initially housed a charitable medical dispensary before it was turned into a souvenir shop.16 The project’s slippage between religion and charity enabled the Birlas to hedge their political bets: it was inaugurated in 1994 by both the BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee (who would become prime minister in 1998) and Dr. Karan Singh, a former Congress Party minister and ambassador to the United States. This echoes a similar political hedging at Delhi’s Birla Mandir between the Hindu nationalist Madan Mohan Malaviya and the reformist Gandhi and between the religio-political affiliations of G. D. Birla and his older brother Jugal Kishore. As we see in the next chapter, the overlaps between their seemingly divergent ideologies reveal the political stakes in the publicness of these religious forms. Later chapters return to the Birla Kanan’s innovative forms of iconopraxis and its location along NH48 between Delhi and Gurgaon. Here, however, let me briefly trace the afterlives of Mangal Mahadev in the careers of Matu Ram and Naresh Kumar Varma in order to highlight their other sources of patronage. Mangal Mahadev has been replicated at least half a dozen times, including, in order of appearance (see inset map, figure 3.7): • A version for the music producer Gulshan Kumar at his T-Series studio in Noida, near Delhi • A 51-ft. version at the Shri Vaishno temple, Ghewra Mod, Delhi, in 1998 • One of the earliest monumental religious statues commissioned by a politician, the 111-ft. Sarveshwar Mahadev in 2002 at Sursagar Lake in Vadodara, for Yogesh Patel, the BJP’s state-level representative for

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Raopur (and now Manjalpur), who organizes a Shivaratri festival there and who introduced Naresh Kumar to Narendra Modi and BJP Cabinet Minister Maneka Gandhi17 • A 108-ft. version in 2007 for the government of Mauritius at Ganga Talao, the site of a massive pilgrimage on Maha Shivaratri (see figure 5.5) • The 80-ft. Siddheshwar Mahadev in Pilani in 2009, built by S. K. Birla (who, with his father, L. N. Birla, had also been involved in the Panchavati Park) • The 65-ft. Mangal Mahesh in 2010 at the Raj Automobiles service station in Palam Vihar, Gurgaon (see figure 4.1), near Naresh Kumar’s studio, Matu Ram Art Center, at the edge of an anticipated Relianceowned special economic zone (which did not materialize due to landacquisition disputes) • The 144-ft. 2011 Kailashnath Mahadev statue at Sanga, 20 kilometers from Kathmandu, for Kamal Jain, a manufacturer of water tanks. Apart from these statues in which Matu Ram and Naresh Varma have been involved, there are versions of Mangal Mahadev by other sculptors, including a 75-ft. standing Shiva next to a bridge over the Ganga at Harki-Pauri in Haridwar (figure 1.9); the Bangalore sculptor Sridhar built it for Gulshan Kumar in 2003. Other monumental sculptures by Matu Ram and Naresh—“towering statues,” as they call them—include several of Hanuman: a 101-ft. one at Chhatarpur, Delhi, built in 2002 by an anonymous businessman (figure 1.10); a 108-ft. version in Shimla (2010), funded by a charitable trust run by Nikhil Nanda of the Escorts Group, which manufactures agricultural and construction machinery and auto suspension products; and a 101-ft. one (2014) at Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh, the constituency of Cabinet Minister Kamal Nath of the Congress-dominated United Progressive Alliance. They also did the initial work on a 135-ft. statue of Guru Rinpoche, or Padmasambhava (2004), commissioned by the state government of Sikkim at Namchi, the constituency of Chief Minister Pawan Chamling, who was once a building contractor and therefore is very familiar with cement. In 2009, Swami Tejomayanand, the head of the Chinmaya Mission—itself another major player in the big statue narrative, as I show shortly—inaugurated B. K. and Sarla Birla’s 72-ft. seated Mangal Moorati Mourya, or “Birla Ganapati,” at Talegaon, home to the B. K. Birla Center for Education (a large, “worldclass residential school” established in 1998) and India’s second-largest General Motors plant. 44

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Sridhar Shilpi, 75-ft. Shiva statue, completed in 2003. Har-ki-Pauri, Haridwar. Courtesy of Aradhana Seth.

FIGURE 1.9

While most of the really “towering” statues are male (in keeping with the patriarchalist schema of Hindu iconography), some are not. In 2017, the team completed a 108-ft. statue of Durga at Ganga Talao in Mauritius to accompany the Shiva statue there. The Shri Vaishno temple complex at Ghewra Mod on Rohtak Road, Delhi (1998), has two 51-ft. Shivas, as well as smaller, 21-ft. figures of Durga, Ram, Lakshmi, Ganesh, and Shabari. In 2009 at Birla Kanan, Mangal Mahadev’s seated wife and sons (15-ft.) and Nandi the bull were added on each side of him, along with 31-ft. figures of the divine couples Ram-Sita (figure 1.11) and Radha-Krishna. Although a 54-ft. statue of Buddha was also planned for this second phase, plans were dropped after objections from the Airports Authority of India, which had already taken issue with Mangal Mahadev for interfering with flight paths.18 Emerging from these details of patronage is a sense not only of the key role of cement as a construction material but also of the exchanges between the monumental statue form and other kinds of infrastructure at the leading edge of postliberalization development. If cement and construction feature prominently in these lists of patrons, so do the automobile industry, water provisioning, and mechanized S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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Matu Ram Varma, 101-ft. Hanuman inaugurated in 2002 at Chhatarpur Mandir (Shri Aadya Katyayani Shakti Peetham), Delhi. FIGURE 1.10

agriculture. It is at this leading edge that wealth from new sources, gained by relatively new constituencies, translates into social mobility and political authority via religious patronage in combination with patronage of development. Such spectacular patronage is part of the temporal, territorial, and moral-economic infrastructures not only of domestic capitalism but also of electoral democracy, particularly via the mobilization of annual religious festivals (as with the Vadodara and Mauritius Shivas). These elements recur in the accounts that follow. It is worth noting, however, that Matu Ram and Naresh Kumar’s practice— and the arena of changing iconpraxis—extends beyond monumental statues. At his studio in Palam Vihar, Gurgaon, Naresh also makes smaller statues, mostly cast in bronze, while at his factory in Manesar he manufactures interior design artifacts that include, but are not limited to, small religious statues. A steady sideline for Matu Ram and Naresh Kumar are life-size memorial statues and busts in painted plaster or bronze (figure 1.12), often for businesspeople but also for the families of soldiers killed, for instance, in the Kargil War of 1999, who use part of their state compensation for statues. Here statues have become a three-dimensional, public equivalent to memorial photographs, 46

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Matu Ram and Naresh Kumar Varma, 31-ft. statues of Ram and Sita under construction in 2008. Birla Kanan, Delhi. FIGURE 1.11

enabling families to gain merit via this sacrifice to the nation (often referred to as martyrdom), bringing the domestic into assemblage with the state. On a continuum with these private military memorials, Naresh has also designed and constructed Indian Army war memorials at Patiala and Firozpur in Punjab, as well as one at Palam Vihar, Gurgaon, commemorating the battle of RezangLa in the 1962 war with China. These memorials incorporate statue making into an efflorescence of militaristic nationalism that emerged after the Kargil War (becoming particularly evident in the cinema), another element in the assemblage that merits further examination.

KASHINATH KALAMANDIR: CLAY, CONCRETE, FIBERGLASS, AND NEOSPIRITUALISM

The Matu Ram Art Center is the go-to studio for monumental concrete statues in Delhi and northern India. The southern equivalent is the Bangalorebased Kashinath Kalamandir studio. Growing up near Shimoga, Karnataka, Kashinath (figure 1.13) learned to work in stone, precious metals, and wood S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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Memorial figures in progress at Matu Ram Varma’s studio in Pilani, Rajasthan, December 2007. FIGURE 1.12

FIGURE 1.13

Kashinath at work on a stone sculpture. Courtesy of K. Sridhar.

from his grandfather and learned mechanical drawing from his draftsman father. As a young adult he started working with a shilpi (sculptor/builder) from Madras, learning temple construction in the ornate Tamil Nadu style, including decorative relief work in cement. Here concrete’s mimetic ability and speed meant that it began to replace other clay and sand-based mixes such as gara, a longer-lasting but more labor-intensive mix of limestone, sand, and tree sap used in the south to ornament temple façades.19 It also meant the emergence of durable large-scale statues out of the tradition of spectacular yet ephemeral neighborhood icons made for the annual festival of Ganapati Utsav (or Ganapati Puja, also known as Ganeshotsav), which are publicly worshiped for ten days and then taken out in processions for immersion. This, then, is another source or origin of the big statue form. Kashinath had been making clay idols for Shimoga’s Ganapati festival, up to about 10 ft. tall, beyond which the clay would crack. But in 1979, the twentyfifth anniversary of his sponsoring festival committee, he made a 29-ft. Ganesh, using putty to fill the inevitable cracks (according to his son Sridhar, he was inspired by the celebrated wish-fulfilling 12-ft. Lalbaugcha Raja Ganapati in Bombay). Hearing of this, the Chinmaya Mission, for whose Bombay ashram Kashinath had earlier carved a wooden mandap (ceremonial structure), commissioned him in 1980 to make a kneeling, 25-ft. cement Hanuman—the eminently scalable figure of devotion—facing the Ram temple at its ashram in Sidhbhari, Himachal Pradesh (figure 1.14). This was followed in 1989 by a 45-ft. Ganapati at the Chinmaya ashram near Kolar, Karnataka, and then a 75-ft. one in 2002 along the highway near Kolhapur (figure 1.15). Cement was chosen over clay for its durability, as these statues were intended to be permanent; however, the earthy finish of the two large Ganapatis evokes their lineage in clay festival icons. The Chinmaya Mission is a neospiritual (neo-)Vedantist organization founded in 1953 by devotees of Shri Chinmaya, a cofounder of the Hindunationalist cultural organization the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Shri Chinmaya was also, salient to the statue narrative (and discussed in the next chapter), the first contributor to the Vivekananda Rock Memorial initiated by M. S. Golwalkar, leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing, grassroots Hindu-nationalist paramilitary organization with close ties to the BJP. The Chinmaya Mission’s worldwide centers promote an expansive Hinduism that embraces “anyone and everyone” into the Hindu “way of life.” If festivals such as Ganapati Utsav in western India and Durga Puja in Bengal were introduced as anticolonial mobilizations of an inclusive Hindu public in the late nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century the ritual forms 50

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Kashinath, 25-ft. kneeling Hanuman for Chinmaya Ashram, Sidhbari, Himachal Pradesh, installed in 1980. Courtesy of K. Sridhar. FIGURE 1.14

Kashinath, 85-ft. Ganapati for Chinmaya Ashram, Kolhapur, completed in 2002. Courtesy of K. Sridhar. FIGURE 1.15

of Hinduism were also expanding through neospiritual movements such as those of Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. Such movements have typically adopted a discourse of universalism that is nonetheless Hindu and sought noncanonical, often spectacular forms for their institutions (as discussed further in chapter 3). Several patrons of Kashinath’s statues have had a similar neospiritualist bent. The Vishwa Shanti Ashram complex, about 25 kilometers from Bangalore along the Bangalore–Tumkur highway, features a large meditation hall with a 45-ft. statue depicting Krishna’s cosmic form (1992 [figure 1.16]) and a massive cement chariot alongside a Bhagwad Gita temple (1997). The ashram was established by Sadguru Sant Keshavadas (1934–97) as the headquarters of his Temple of Cosmic Religion, which emphasizes devotional music and seeks to unify the world’s religions under the motto “Truth Is One. Many Are the Names.” The temple’s logo describes it as a “Sanatan Vishwa Dharma” (Hindu orthodox world religion), which speaks both to its universalist aspirations and to Keshavadas’s diasporic following. 52

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Kashinath, 45-ft. statue of Vishwaroop Krishna (Krishna’s cosmic form) in meditation hall, installed in 1992 at Vishwa Shanthi Ashram, Bangalore. FIGURE 1.16

FIGURE 1.17

July 2007.

Kemp Fort department store, view from Old Airport Road, Bangalore,

Visiting the Vishwa Shanti Ashram inspired the Bangalore businessman Ravi Melwani to have Kashinath build a 65-ft. seated Shiva (plate 1) to support a charitable foundation informed by his own, inimitable brand of spirituality, which is inspired in turn by another neospiritual movement, the Sadhu Vaswani Mission (Melwani, like Vaswani, is a Sindhi). The statue and accompanying temple, inaugurated in 1995 on Bangalore’s old airport road, were soon hidden behind Melwani’s Kemp Fort luxury department store, which featured turrets like those of a Disney castle (figure 1.17), salesmen in Dalmatian-print ties, and enormous stuffed animals as tall as the ceiling. Visitors walked past 8-ft. teddy bears and monkeys (figure 1.18) to the 65-ft. Shiva surrounded by plywood Himalayas.20 As with several other statues, including Delhi’s Mangal Mahadev and Chhatarpur Hanuman, the Kemp Fort Shiva statue is rumored to have been built as a “land grab,” for the statue, deeply recessed from the road, preceded the department store.21 The Kemp Fort store, a losing proposition, was leased to the Total Mall in 2008, but the temple behind it continued to boom under Melwani’s ongoing creative guidance.22 I return to its many novel ritual features in chapter 3, 54

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FIGURE 1.18

Kemp Fort department store interior, Bangalore, July 2007.

but one that is pertinent to concrete construction is its display of animated dioramas featuring the twelve jyotirlingas (powerful Shiva shrines spread across India), replete with light and sound effects, in the dark, grotto-like space inside the statue. Concrete construction of the seated statues characteristic of South Indian Hindu iconography generates a capacious internal space due to their wide base, as with seated Buddhist figures. This internal space can be put to use exhibiting dioramas, narrative murals, paintings, photographic displays, or artifacts such as relics. Here ritual circumambulation and worship are incorporated within the deity’s body and combined with pedagogy, cultural heritage, or spectacle. Further, in terms of external spectacle, a seated statue appears much more massive than a standing one, since it occupies a larger area on the ground, and its height is only about half what the figure would be if it stood up. Concrete affords these statues both their internal exhibitionary capacity and the external spectacle of scale, lending them what I term “iconic exhibition value” (chapter 3). The Kemp Fort Shiva and its use of internal space for dioramas also inspired another similar but larger (123-ft.) Shiva statue that Kashinath built for R. N. Shetty in his tiny hometown of Murudeshwar, on the North Karnataka S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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Shri Murudeshwara temple and pilgrim guesthouse, with Shiva statue behind and gopuram diagonally across from them, Murudeshwar. View from south fishing beach, March 2012. FIGURE 1.19

coast (plate 2). Shetty, a Bangalore-based businessman and construction baron, had attended the Kemp Fort Shiva’s inauguration. His Shiva, completed in 2002, sits not in front of fake Himalayas but against a gorgeous vista of the Arabian Sea. It faces a centuries-older Shiva temple (figure 1.19) housing what is said to be a fragment of the Atmalinga, a powerful lingam whose scattered pieces are worshiped at several temples along the northern Karnataka coast. This legend is the subject of the statue’s dioramas, which are larger than those at Kemp Fort, but similarly use concrete to simulate the interior of a cave, a space that conjures auratic associations with natural rock lingams and meditating hermits (figure 1.20). Like many other monumental statue patrons, Shetty understands cement and infrastructure: he has built dams, roads, bridges, and tunnels, including for the coastal Konkan Railway, from which the big Shiva is visible. He also has a mini-hydropower plant, luxury hotels, and a suite of Maruti car showrooms and driving schools in Bangalore and North Karnataka. His sons run manufacturing units geared to the construction industry, producing the tiles used to clad the buildings he designs. The Shiva statue is one of many concrete 56

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Diorama in cave-like interior of Murudeshwar Shiva statue, depicting episodes from the Bhookailasa myth, March 2012. FIGURE 1.20

structures Shetty has built in Murudeshwar. As part of a massive renovation of the old temple, he gave it a 249-ft. gopuram, or temple entrance tower (“the tallest in Asia”), also built in cement, where an elevator takes visitors up seventeen stories for a panoramic view of the statue, the coast, and the town.23 He has built a suite of “RNS” (for R. N. Shetty) resorts and guesthouses right on the water, ostensibly meant for pilgrims and therefore built on temple land exempt from beachfront zoning regulations (so they do not serve meat and alcohol, although another Shetty resort, set back from the beach, does). Less spectacular but crucial to the statue and temple complex is the concrete dam Shetty built to connect the town by road to the old temple, located on an island that previously was accessible only by boat or on foot at low tide. Now visitors can drive right up to the temple parking lot, the statue, and the guesthouses. Subtler still is the covered concrete fish market structure that likely helped persuade the fishing community not to use one of two beaches during the tourist season, leaving it clean and available for recreation, and to convert their homes into modest public baths and guesthouses. While all this has turned Murudeshwar from a quiet fishing village into a bustling tourist-cumpilgrim destination, Shetty has also brought development to his hometown S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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through RNS educational and medical institutions (again through the mechanism of the philanthropic trust), as well as an RNS Maruti showroom on the highway (see figure 3.38). Again, there is much more to be said about iconopraxis and patronage at this site (chapter 3) and its nexus with automobility (chapter 4), but here I want to stay with Kashinath and Sridhar and their icons’ further entanglements with concrete and steel, as well as with coal and diamonds. From 2000 onward, Sridhar, adopting the moniker “Shilpi” (sculptor/builder), took over the monumental statue projects after Kashinath suffered a heart attack while working on a 65-ft. statue of Shiva commissioned by the music baron Gulshan Kumar at Dwarka’s Nageshwar temple (one of the twelve jyotirlingas, like Haridwar, where Sridhar built another big Shiva for Gulshan Kumar in 2003). Dynamic and irrepressible, Kashinath continued to work on temples and stone statues, some of them up to 30 ft. tall; he was also commissioned to cast an innovative 52-ft. figure of the goddess Vasavi Kanyaka Parameshwari at a temple in Penugonda, Andhra Pradesh, in panchadhatu (the auspicious alloy of five metals). As with Naresh Kumar and Mangal Mahadev, Sridhar has replicated the Kemp Fort Shiva at multiple sites with minor variations: an 81-ft. version at Jabalpur (2003); a 70-ft. version in Bijapur (2006) for a Kannada film producer (though Sridhar pulled out of this project over a disagreement); and a 65-ft. version for a “Shri Kailash Dham” at Bishangarh near Jalore, Rajasthan, funded by a Jain businessman’s charitable trust and inaugurated in 2010 by Rajasthan’s Congress Party Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot (figure 1.21). Around 2008, Sridhar also started work on a 108-ft. version for Chamling’s Sikkim state government at the Char Dham pilgrimage-cum-cultural complex, which opened in 2011 in Namchi (on a hilltop facing the one with the Guru Rinpoche statue with which Naresh Kumar had been involved), but again due to a disagreement it was finished by another sculptor.24 Meanwhile, the Murudeshwar Shiva was struck by lightning, which broke its left arm, so its arms had to be supported by an ornamental device and a couple of artfully positioned snakes. Soon, however, Sridhar expanded his repertoire beyond these seated Shivas, adding art students to his team and working with fiberglass molds for the larger figures’ heads. This was a major technical breakthrough. Sculpting on this massive scale requires constant movement between the working surface of the figure and a viewpoint distant enough to perceive its proportions. Here the head, the most critical part, is also the highest, which means the sculptor needs to keep climbing up and down the full height of the scaffolding. With fiberglass, the head can be sculpted separately in plaster on the ground, cast in 58

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Inauguration of 65-ft. seated Shiva statue by Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, Jalore, 2010. Courtesy of K. Sridhar. FIGURE 1.21

a negative fiberglass mold, which is light enough to transport to the site, and then cast in concrete in situ. This has also meant that Sridhar can work on several projects simultaneously out of his studio workshop in Bangalore. His statues vary from 25 ft. to taller than 100 ft.: Shiva, of course, including a new pose (seated with one leg down, his foot resting on his tiger skin’s head); Hanuman in various poses, including a 75-ft. one with Ram and Lakshman on his shoulders (like Matu Ram’s at Panchavati Park but much larger) for a temple at the entrance to the town of Tumkur, Karnataka (2005 [figure 1.22]); Ganapati; Sai Baba; Durga; and Basaveshwara, founder of the Lingayat sect (108 ft. at Basavakalyan in 2012 and 111 ft. at Gadag in 2015 [figures 1.23 and 1.24]). While Sridhar handles the concrete statues, Kashinath’s clients from 2000 onward have mostly been temple committees from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, where, as in the rest of India, temple building and renovation are booming in the postreform economy. Patronage for Sridhar’s statues in the same period has largely come from Karnataka, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh—states where the BJP was consolidating its power—in part from bazaar-style traders, as with the Shiva statue for the Jain businessman in Bishangarh, Rajasthan, or for a grain merchant with a warehouse near Sagar, Madhya Pradesh. Sridhar has had several such clients in the rapidly S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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Kashinath, Hanuman bearing Ram and Lakshman on his shoulders at entrance to Tumkur town, Karnataka, built in 2005. FIGURE 1.22

developing trading hub in the quadrilateral of Bhopal, Sagar, Shahdol, and Jabalpur. Jabalpur is a key rail and road exchange right in the center of India; there Sridhar has built an 81-ft. Shiva, an 81-ft. Hanuman, and a Sai Baba statue for real estate developers. Shahdol, where he is building a 72-ft. Sai Baba statue for a Sai Dham complex featuring a 2,000-sq.-ft. meditation hall, lies on the western edge of the central Indian coalfields. In addition to Sridhar’s statues in this area, India’s largest statue of Jesus, at 43 ft., was blessed in 2013 at a SyroMalabar Catholic church at Khajuria Guru, or Dayasagar, 15 kilometers north of Sagar on NH146, primarily catering to the region’s Indigenous, or “tribal,” population. Here again, many of Sridhar’s statues appear at the leading edge of urban development—indeed, sometimes as the leading edge, as with a couple of Hanumans and an unusual five-faceted Ganapati sculpture on the outskirts of Bangalore that were commissioned to attract buyers to new housing developments. According to Sridhar, these statues were built to ward off the evil spirits thought to frequent uninhabited spaces. Similarly, the Sai Dham complex on the Shahdol–Jabalpur highway announces the protective, mainstreaming presence of Sai Baba, with his wide, cross-religious appeal, in a predominantly 60

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Reinforced cement concrete framework for 108-ft. Basaveshwara sculpture, Basavakalyan, while under construction by Sridhar Shilpi in 2008. Courtesy of K. Sridhar. FIGURE 1.23

Indigenous area. These statues are often built in small towns (entrepreneurs’ hometowns, politicians’ constituencies) or newer peri-urban and interurban spaces such as highways; as territorial spectacles, they work to put such places both literally and figuratively on the map. Of course, this is also where space is available for such projects, but they play a part in development by generating symbolic value—and, hence, real estate value—on the outskirts of cities and along interurban highways (as discussed further in chapter 4). The generic possibilities opened up through statues built by entrepreneurs, particularly their normalization of spectacular Hindu deities in exterior spaces, gradually enabled the involvement of politicians. Until the late 2010s, politicians were careful to emphasize the development aspects of these projects while also using their religious aspect as a quick and easy way to shore up their standing with specific vote banks or in areas where they have economic interests, or both. Take, for instance, the Durgamma temple renovation in the S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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Reinforced cement concrete shell detail, 111-ft. Basaveshwara sculpture, Gadag, while under construction by Sridhar Shilpi in 2011. Courtesy of K. Sridhar. FIGURE 1.24

B. S. Yeddyurappa, chief minister of Karnataka, honoring Sridhar Shilpi, 2010. Courtesy of K. Sridhar. FIGURE 1.25

iron and manganese ore–mining and steel town of Bellary (now Ballari), Karnataka. Sridhar made a 26-ft. Durga statue and several other figures here in 2010, at the entrance to a garden used for an annual festival. Bellary, which has a largely Indigenous population, was the constituency of Karnataka’s (then) BJP Minister of Health B. Sriramulu, himself a member of the state-demarcated Scheduled Tribes; his mentor was Minister of Tourism Gali Janardhan Reddy, whose wealth and clout had helped the BJP come to power in Karnataka in 2008. Reddy and his brothers, also from Bellary, controlled the town and its mining through a formidable mafia, for whose illegal operations they were arrested in 2011. Sridhar wistfully speculated that had Reddy not been jailed, he would have commissioned statues of Shiva and possibly also Lord Venkateshwara (a form of Vishnu), at whose powerful shrine at Tirupati Reddy had famously offered a diamond crown. Also implicated in the Bellary mining scam, and in illegal land deals in booming Bangalore, was B. S. Yeddyurappa, Karnataka’s BJP chief minister at the time, in whose constituency Shikaripura Sridhar had made a 30-ft. Shiva in 2007 (figure 1.25). In 2011, Yeddyurappa resigned under pressure from the BJP’s central high command but remained in the wings with his own breakaway S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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party, perhaps confident of his following in his community, the Lingayats (who represent about 14–15 percent of the state’s population and have dominated its politics, aided in part by their religious organizations, the mathas or mutts). In 2012, Yeddyurappa inaugurated Sridhar’s 108-ft. statue of the Lingayat saintpoet Basaveshwara at Basavakalyan. In a speech, he said that his government had sanctioned 490 million rupees (about $10 million) for the Basavakalyan Development Board (the statue cost 90 million rupees), because the Lingayat spiritual leader Mate Mahadevi and her Viswa Kalyana Mission are “involved in development work.”25 With the BJP in disarray, the Congress Party came back to power in Karnataka in 2013, but the Congress had to reckon with the legacy of the BJP’s statue-building program. In April 2015, Congress Chief Minister Siddaramaiah inaugurated Sridhar’s 111-ft. standing Basaveshwara statue near Gadag, started as a state government project under the BJP in 2009—an opportunity for him, too, to woo the Lingayats.

THE SAKYA BROTHERS AND THE TATHAGATA TSAL: FIBERGLASS, COPPER, AND THE AURA OF HISTORY

Unlike in the rest of India, in Sikkim it was politicians rather than entrepreneurs who initiated the emergence of monumental religious statues in outdoor spaces, again in the name of development and again through the vehicle of the religious trust. Here the initiatives of the long-serving (uninterrupted from 1994 to 2019) Chief Minister Pawan Chamling in his constituency, Namchi, brought two statues initially involving Naresh Kumar and Sridhar face to face across two hilltops rising above the town. They are a 135-ft. statue of Guru Rinpoche/Padmasambhava, completed in 2004 at Samdruptse (plate 3) and the 2011 Char Dham pilgrimage-cum-cultural complex at Solophok, featuring a 108-ft. Shiva (figure 1.26), as well as a smaller (16-ft.) Kirateshwar, a local “incarnation of Shiva” sacred to Chamling’s own Kirant community—in fact, the statue bears a striking resemblance to Chamling himself (see figure 3.4).26 The plan is to link the two sites via a scenic cable car. While large statues have long been part of Buddhist traditions, here again, as with the Shiva at Murudeshwar that is visible from the railway, new visual regimes of mobility through the landscape, and the scale of features within the landscape—as well as the resignification of the land itself as landscape—have worked to call forth large images that are visible from vast distances. The Char Dham complex is a one-stop Shiva shop featuring scaled-down replicas of the four major Shiva pilgrimage sites (Char Dham), each staffed by priests and just large enough to enter and worship in. The ritual authenticity 64

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108-ft. seated Shiva at Solophok Hill, Namchi, Sikkim (initial design by Sridhar Shilpi), inaugurated 2011 and photographed in March 2013. FIGURE 1.26

of what might seem a greatly inferior replication of these powerful temples was established via the site’s inauguration by Swaroopananda Saraswati, the Shankaracharya, or head guru, of Dwarka, one of the Char Dham. (He also makes a—disputed—claim to be the head of the Jyotirmath Dham.) Similarly, His Holiness the Dalai Lama laid the Guru Rinpoche’s foundation stone (figure 1.27). This religious legitimacy underwrites Chamling’s attempt to shore up his standing with his Hindu and Buddhist voters through both this gesture of recognition and his economic initiative to develop tourism in South Sikkim, which is drier and not as endowed with natural attractions as other parts of the state.27 On the way up the hill to the complex there is also a large, ornate new Sai Baba temple, further extending the site’s appeal. In 2013, the Namchi icons were followed by a 95-ft. Sakyamuni (plate 4) seated on a 40-ft. building at a magnificent site now called the Tathagata Tsal, in Ravangla (or Rabongla), also in South Sikkim, about a four-hour drive from Namchi. This was backed by D. D. Bhutia, a former member of the legislative assembly and local “big man” who served as the vice president of Chamling’s Sikkim Democratic Front party and was appointed minister for power in 2014. Bhutia also owns real estate in Ravangla, which is part of his constituency, S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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FIGURE 1.27 Inauguration plaque in wall of structure for Guru Padmasambhava statue at Samdruptse Hill, Namchi, Sikkim.

Barfung. In the 1980s, a local Ravangla official began to revive and promote the annual Pang Lhabsol festival featuring colorful ritual dances.28 From at least 2003 on, Bhutia headed the Pang Lhabsol Celebration Committee, pushing heritage- and tourism-driven development with a new monastery and monastic school as part of the Mane Choekerling complex (completed in 2008) and the adjacent Tathagata Tsal park, with the Sakyamuni statue, gardens, restaurants, gift shop, congregation hall, and guesthouses, inaugurated by the Dalai Lama in 2013. A third phase, unbuilt as of 2019, seeks to create a crafts center in an “eco-village” around a nearby lake.29 The Sakyamuni project team, which included the architect Navin Pradhan, who trained at the J. J. School of Art and Architecture, sought a different kind of authenticity from those in charge of the Namchi statues. Their sights were set not on domestic tourist pilgrims but on the “International Buddhist circuit” and on what they described as both “the pilgrim and the aesthete.”30 This was likely inspired by the controversial Maitreya Project—particularly 66

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given the similar title, “Sakyamuni project”—a proposal for a massive (at one point, 500-ft.) Buddha statue to be built by the international Buddhist Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT).31 In its quest for authenticity, the Sakyamuni project team did not hire sculptors with experience in concrete statue building but turned instead to Sanjay and Bijoy Sakya, from a lineage of Himalayan Newari metalworking craftsmen. The statue was made from copper cladding painted gold (due to budget constraints and contrary to the initial plan, real gold was used only for the head) riveted to a fiberglass shell and internally supported by a steel and concrete armature. This use of beaten copper sections is much like the repoussé technique used for the Statue of Liberty (though here some casting was also used for smaller, more ornate elements, such as the Buddha’s curls), but attaching them to fiberglass was an innovation (figure 1.28). The fiberglass sections were cast from plaster molds, formed, in turn, from clay elements fashioned by craftsmen from West Bengal who create figures and decorations for the Durga Puja festival. So here again, as with Kashinath’s Ganapati icons, the new monumental statue form draws on a tradition of making public icons for an annual religious festival revived during the colonial period. Indeed, here it does so in the context of another festival revived within an identity-building frame, the Pang Lhabsol. But in this case, as with the Statue of Liberty, the statue was crafted at some distance from its ultimate site, to which it was transported in sections and reassembled. The Sakyamuni’s fiberglass and copper elements were made about 40 kilometers away from Ravangla at a largely outdoor workshop in Sangkhola, along the Rani Khola river, which provided the mud and water for the Bengali craftsmen to combine with straw for their clay forms. The emergent media assemblage of the Ravangla Sakyamuni thus brought together the metalworking traditions of the Newari Sakyas from Nepal, the clay traditions of West Bengal, late nineteenth-century French engineering, and the twentieth-century technology of fiberglass (increasingly manufactured in India since the reforms of the 1990s). Its design was also inspired by the 1993, 112-ft. bronze Tian Tan Buddha (Sakyamuni) near the Po Lin Monastery on Lan Tau Island, Hong Kong, built by the Art Statue Division of China’s Aerosun Corporation.32 A key element borrowed from the Tian Tan Buddha, as well as from the initial Maitreya Project in Uttar Pradesh, is the use of the statue’s internal space for a shrine housing Buddha relics, as well as displays of paintings (i.e., mobilizing both cult and exhibition value). While a Guggenheim-style ramp gradually ascends the structure, lined with galleries of paintings depicting the Buddha’s life (figure 1.29), the relics are S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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FIGURE 1.28 Craftsmen at work on beaten-copper sections of Padmasambhava statue at Sakya brothers’ workshop at Sangkhola, Sikkim, May 2009.

housed in a gorgeously adorned room that is accessible only to monks. In a transnational, trans-sectarian transaction in keeping with the expansive global audience envisaged for the statue, fourteen relics were given by monasteries in Southeast Asia and brought to Mane Choekerling by Vietnamese monks. Adaptive rituals effected their transition to a Tibetan Buddhist context. Buddha relics have a long history of transfers for legitimizing purposes; in this case, they were seen as essential to impart not only the aura of the sacred but also “history”—with its attendant authenticity and legitimacy— to a site that otherwise, according to the project team, had none.33 Here “history” emerges as a quality whose auratic legitimacy depends on its attachment to a specific site, but also, in order to be seen to exist, paradoxically requires a generic, universally recognizable form of exhibition value that can be engineered afresh or imported from elsewhere (as the relics were). As we see in the next chapter, the aura attached to the temporal and spatial specificity of “history” is rendered similarly malleable, replicable, and portable at Delhi’s Birla Mandir. 68

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FIGURE 1.29

March 2013.

Narrative murals in interior of Sakyamuni statue, Ravangla, Sikkim,

This assemblage of ritual and secular sources of value (discussed further in chapter 3) characterizes other aspects of the project, too. A key difference from the Tian Tan Buddha is the somewhat controversial adoption of the dharmachakra mudra (teaching gesture) rather than the usual bhumisparsha mudra (earth witness or enlightenment gesture), so that the Buddha’s hands remain well above eye level and are not subject to visual distortion. While some lamas were opposed to this noncanonical pose for such a statue, aesthetic considerations won out, with the blessings of Gyalsup Rinpoche, the abbot of nearby Ralang monastery. Another canon-bending decision, also made in consultation with Gyalsup Rinpoche, was to use copper instead of wood for the statue’s sog-shing (lit., life stick), a seamless spine placed through the center of a stupa or statue and carved or wrapped with sacred sutras. Given the difficulty of sourcing a 77-ft. tree, the sog-shing was cast in copper, a feat in itself, as it had to be cast as a single piece and then installed using a system of pulleys. The Sakyas are rightly proud of the heroic effort involved in the installation, with more than forty people working almost nonstop for forty-eight hours (figure 1.30). S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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Transporting the sog-shing to the Sakyamuni statue. Tathagata Tsal, Ravangla, Sikkim, October 2010. Courtesy of Bijoy and Sanjay Sakya. FIGURE 1.30

At the statue’s inauguration on March 25, 2013, Chief Minister Chamling spoke about how the state had been working for all of its religious communities, listing the various types of religious institutions in Sikkim, from gompas to gurudwaras (an enumeration and commensuration of the polity, as discussed in the next chapter). While foregrounding their impact on the economy, he also said that morality and religion were as important as economic and social development. Sikkim’s Governor Balmiki Prasad Singh said that Chamling had joined an “august chain of human beings” to have honored the Buddha, starting two thousand years ago with the Emperor Ashoka. The Dalai Lama, however, had the last word. Huge stupas and Buddha statues are “wonderful,” he said, referring to those built by the modern Japanese Daijokyo sect at Bodh Gaya, the Guru Rinpoche at Namchi, and this one. And yet, studying the Buddha’s teachings is more important than faith and prayer, for “the stupa does not speak . . . with respect . . . this Buddha here will not speak.” “Now,” His Holiness said to the assembled crowd, “it is time to build Buddha within ourselves.”34 70

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RAM SUTAR: CONCRETE, STONE, BRONZE, AND DURATION

The bulk of the sculptor Ram Sutar’s commissions have been figures of political leaders for patrons from a wide political spectrum across various levels of the Indian state.35 For instance, he is responsible for the Gandhi statues installed in more than fifty countries as gifts or displayed in Indian consulates. But until the Statue of Unity, Sutar’s humans, however great, had never exceeded 18 ft. (about three-and-a-half times life-size) or 21 ft. astride a horse—as though the gesture toward the infinite had been reserved for the gods. Although he started out working in concrete, from 1973, in keeping with these commissions, he switched almost entirely to bronze, for it is easier to achieve the verisimilitude required for humans (especially those, such as famous leaders, for whom photographic or painted portraits exist) in cast bronze than in concrete, stone, or the repoussé technique used for large metal statues. To my knowledge, the only monumental statue of a human before the Statue of Unity—not counting Buddha and Bahubali, who arguably count as deities, or the politicians and movie stars on ephemeral plywood cutouts and billboards in South India—was a 133-ft. granite figure of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar (ca. 3–1 BCE, too early for accurate evidence of his appearance). Inaugurated at Kanyakumari in 2000, the Thiruvalluvar statue was backed by M. Karunanidhi, the avowedly atheist leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and built by the renowned stone sculptor V. Ganapati Sthapati (1927–2011 [more on this statue in the next chapter]), who also made a 64-ft. Great Buddha statue in pink chunar stone at Bodh Gaya (funded by Japan’s Daijokyo sect and inaugurated in 1989).36 I return to the issue of scale in the last chapter, but here I want to use Sutar’s work to broach the temporality of materials; the exchanges between religious iconopraxis, art, and the poetics of infrastructure; and the limits to these exchanges. After completing his diploma in sculpture at the J. J. School of Art in 1952, Ram Sutar became intimately familiar with cement while working on the restoration of the Ellora cave sculptures for the Archaeological Survey of India from 1954 to 1958. He was then employed as a modeler for the Exhibition Division of the central government’s Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity in Delhi but quit in 1959 to take on freelance projects. They included sculptures and murals in concrete for agricultural and industrial fairs at Delhi’s Pragati Maidan (lit., Progress Park), in the socialist-realist and constructivist modes prevalent at the time, fostered by exchanges between Nehruvian India and the Soviet bloc. His art education would also have exposed him to the work of the Santiniketan-based modernist Ramkinkar Baij (1906–80), the first major Indian fine artist to sculpt in cement. Ramkinkar’s best-known works, Santhal Family S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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(1938) and Mill Call (1956), sit at the cusp between primitivism and socialist realism: vigorous, earthy, larger-than-life ensembles of Indigenous people of the region in rough, textured concrete using an aggregate of the local red laterite, an appropriately modernist vernacularization of the medium. Sutar’s largest statue commission prior to the Statue of Unity, which overlooks the Sardar Sarovar Dam in Gujarat, was, revealingly, also closely associated with a big dam project, the scale of art mimicking the scale of infrastructure.37 It was a 45-ft. concrete figure of the river goddess Chambal Devi and her two sons (figure 1.31), completed in 1962 at the Gandhi Sagar Dam in Madhya Pradesh, one of several dam projects in Nehru’s first Soviet-style FiveYear Plan. The abundance of concrete and steel at the dam site meant that the cost of the statue was not much more than Ram Sutar’s 10,000-rupee fee for the immense labor of manually carving it out of a massive concrete block. But although he won a competition in 1963 to make a similarly monumental— but far more dynamic—50-ft. ensemble sculpture of laborers for the Bhakra Nangal Dam, that project was shelved, apparently due to a lack of funds.38 Bhakra Nangal was what inspired Nehru’s famous remark about the sacredness of dams: “These days the biggest temple and mosque and gurdwara is the place where man works for the good of mankind. . . . Where can be a greater and holier place than this[?]”39 Here it is the dam itself as an embodiment of developmentalist labor that is to be revered and iconized; there is no need for any additional representation of the “man” who built it. The dam was monument enough; the poetics of infrastructure trumped those of art. Ram Sutar, however, made up in quantity for what he was (then) prevented from achieving in height. From the early 1970s onward, having bought land in Delhi for a studio and foundry, he provided a steady supply of bronze sculptures for political and cultural monuments all over India—indeed, all over the world (figures 1.32 and 1.33). Most notably, he and his son Anil executed the bulk of the Dalit politician Kumari Mayawati’s bronze sculpture and mural commissions during her prolific monument-building program as Bahujan Samaj Party Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. They established a new foundry for this in Noida, in the greater Delhi area, around 2005; when I met them in August 2010, as they were working on the Manyavar Shri Kanshi Ram Ji Green (Eco) Garden, a park with bronze animals, they employed 190 people working two shifts and casting 3.5–4 tons of bronze per day. It was a surreal sight: furnaces and molds labeled (with English words in Devanagari script) “giraffe” or “Ambedkar ka head” (figure 1.34); an arm with a sword; massive Mayawati legs (figure 1.35); elephants’ trunks—with blood red wax and metal rods glistening in the bellies of open molds, like the aftermath of a car crash.40 72

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Ram Sutar with his 45-ft. Chambal Devi statue, built in 1962. Gandhi Sagar Dam, Madhya Pradesh. Courtesy of Anil Ram Sutar. FIGURE 1.31

Anil and Ram Sutar in Ram Sutar’s studio with plaster crocodiles for Kumari Mayawati’s Manyavar Shri Kanshi Ram Ji Green (Eco) Garden in Lucknow. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, August 2010. FIGURE 1.32

As I have described at length elsewhere, what is notable about Kumari Mayawati’s projects is her insistence on not using concrete and grass—features of a site such as the Birla Kanan—but bronze and a dozen types of stone used in other historic structures, such as Ashokan pillars: expensive, properly monumental materials thought to withstand neglect and decay (see figures 2.8– 2.10).41 It was widely understood that this choice indexed what she was up against: the short time cycles of electoral franchise and the very real possibility that her monuments to “Dalit icons” would be destroyed, neglected, or rendered invisible once she lost power. It also indexed a keen attunement to the material signifiers of heritage and tradition on the part of the projects’ architect, Jai Kaktikar, also from Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture, with graduate degrees from the United Kingdom, where he worked on conservation projects. Here, as with the Ravangla Sakyamuni’s relics, stone and bronze were brought in to signify history. At both sites, the primary problem with using concrete was its inability to signify historicity, to make a claim to history; its modernity was a liability. 74

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Ram Sutar’s studio/workshop with larger-than-life political sculptures. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, August 2010. FIGURE 1.33

Ram Sutar’s foundry casting bronze sculptures for Mayawati’s memorials; the mold is labeled “Ambedkar ka head” (Ambedkar’s head), Noida, Uttar Pradesh, August 2010. FIGURE 1.34

Bronze sculpture of a section of Mayawati’s legs at Ram Sutar’s foundry. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, August 2010. FIGURE 1.35

But if the absence of historicity is one side of the problem of concrete’s duration, the other is the absence of futurity. Modernists, modernizers, and politicians concerned with dams, pukka housing, monsoons, electoral terms, and human life spans think of concrete as strong and enduring. But those intimate with gods and canonical icons—worshipers, patrons, and sculptors alike—know very well that reinforced cement concrete’s life expectancy of, at most, a couple of hundred years pales in comparison to the metal alloys and hard stones such as granite used for temple deities designed in accordance with the Shilpashastras’ prescriptions and ritually maintained to last for eternity.42 Thus, the medieval Jain sculptures of Bahubali in Karnataka, as well as more recent ones such as the 39-ft. standing statue in Dharmasthala (1975) and the 13.5-ft. seated statue of Mahavira in Delhi (1985), were sculpted in granite by sthapatis in Karkala, Karnataka. Sthapatis from Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu, made the Birlas’ Mangal Madhav and the early granite colossi for chief ministers in the south: the 58-ft. Buddha in Hyderabad (1992) and the 133-ft. Thiruvalluvar in Kanyakumari (2000). According to Sridhar and Kashinath, in the sthapati tradition different types of stone are classified and assigned genders, so softer stones such as marble are female while the long-lasting granite is male. The patrons of the Dharmasthala Bahubali initially wanted the statue in white marble, like a 28-ft. Bahubali installed in 1963 at Kumbhoj near Kolhapur, but were persuaded that granite would be more suitable for Dharmasthala’s climate.43 Sridhar and Kashinath are therefore often asked to place a smaller deity or lingam of stone inside their concrete statues. Similarly, the priest from the Avadhoota Datta Peetham, another neospiritual “mission,” who supervised the construction of an 85-ft. concrete Hanuman at Carapichaima in Trinidad in 2003, was very clear that the 70-ft. statue to be built at the mission’s main headquarters in Mysore had to be a granite monolith, since stone has “more intrinsic value for worship . . . than cement” (Avadhoota Datta Peetham’s granite Sri Karyasiddhi Hanuman was inaugurated in December 2012).44 In this temporal schema, then, concrete’s duration is second rate, temporary, little better than that of a plywood cutout—like the large cutout of the Avadhoota Datta Peetham’s leader, Sri Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swami, placed along the compound wall of the mission’s concrete Hanuman in Trinidad in 2009 (plate 5; this statue is discussed in chapter 5). If canonical religious infrastructures are calibrated to eternity, the infinite, and theologies of all-pervasive presence, what we see in these emergent religious forms’ adoption of new materials, techniques, and scales is their ability to become plastic, uneven, and heterogeneous, coevolving with development 78

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infrastructures to shrink to those infrastructures’ combination of reduced time horizons and territorial (as well as cosmic) expansiveness. Development infrastructures are geared to a secular human scale, independent of sacred temporality (and, for that matter, they are independent of other earthly timescales, such as the geological), so here the gigantism of monumental concrete statues paradoxically cuts the divine down to size in temporal terms. This might make such statues auratically second rate, but that does not prevent them from proliferating. The “intrinsic value” of canonical materials such as stone and metal inheres not only in their duration but also in their intactness; by contrast, as Sridhar put it, concrete is “too porous” (and hence, presumably female). This makes it prone to corrosion but also less ritually efficacious because it leaks out the energy thought to be stored in the icon; in this respect, several people I spoke with, including priests, likened icons to batteries. Unlike dams or brutalist concrete architecture, the surfaces of giant concrete deities are covered with other materials to make them more durable—less porous—and smoother and more intact-looking. This also keeps them within the iconographic fold, making them recognizable on a continuum with more familiar forms: they are either colorfully painted after the fashion of calendar art images or, more often, given a uniform coating of metallic paint to resemble temple icons made of metal alloys. In either case, there is a gesture toward a certain authenticity— in the former case, that of realism, and in the latter, that of the auratic icon. Here, as with calendar art, authenticity and value are primarily located not in authorship but in iconicity; here, too, even though the works are often signed in some way, there is little knowledge or recognition of the sculptors.45 While the modernist artwork strives for authorial uniqueness, monumental icons remain generic while nonetheless invoking novelty in displaying their sculptors’ technological prowess, primarily indexed by the statues’ height. If concrete icons intermedially mimic printed or metal ones, brutalism in architecture is a perfect example of the modernist aesthetic’s fetishization of the medium’s specificity, for here the deliberately rugged surfaces of concrete signify modernity by signifying concrete itself.46 However, the characterization of concrete with which this chapter began puts a different spin on its medium specificity, for if it is, as Adrian Forty argues, inherently double and mimetic, concrete deities mimicking metal and print are also true to this very quality of doubling. But it is not only concrete that is subject to doubling, to being pukka as well as kutcha, whether as modernist architecture or as monumental deities. This is true for all of the materials of developmentalist modernity, given modernity’s structural duplicity, its inherent heterogeneity and S TAT U E S A N D S C U L P T O R S

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unevenness—which, as I just suggested and argue further, equally characterize emergent infrastructures of iconopraxis. Here the notion of medium specificity itself begins to dissolve, for everything pukka is also kutcha, including stone and metal temple icons in their productive exchanges and circuits with publicly accessible concrete, paper, fiberglass, vinyl, and digital forms. These exchanges are what make emergence and newness possible: ultimately, it’s all a matter of time, of matter in time. In the next chapter, I take this story of the emergence of monumental statues back to an earlier moment, one that illuminates how they emerged not only from the materials, techniques, economics, and poetics of infrastructure and development as they encountered those of religious and other artistic traditions, but also from the technics and optics of democracy.

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2

DEMOCRACY What are the various shapes of the assemblies that can make sense of all those assemblages? — BRUNO LATOUR

STATUE MANIA

Prime Minister Modi’s Statue of Unity, a 597-ft. tall statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel on an island in the Narmada River overlooking the controversial Sardar Sarovar megadam, is the secular apotheosis of the assemblage of icons and developmental infrastructures described in the previous chapter. If, for Nehru, dams alone sufficed to embody theologico-political power, the Statue of Unity revitalizes the use of figurative public sculpture to perform the “magic of the state.”1 This magic, like that of religious icons, is woven and maintained through spectacular ceremonial rituals such as inaugurations and annual celebrations. But it is also simultaneously dispelled and reanimated through dramatic desecrations, such as the famous toppling of the Vendôme column and statues of Stalin, Lenin, and Saddam Hussein.2 As with the state’s symbolic uses of infrastructure, the use of statues and monuments is not confined to imperial, totalitarian, autocratic, or non–First World regimes. Indeed, one of the most intense periods of state statue building—its critics called it “statuomania”—was from 1900 to 1918, when about two hundred monuments were raised in Third Republic Paris, with its political scandals and debates over the nature and formation of the polity.3 There, as in the present account of monumental statues in India, political, social, and symbolic upheavals manifested themselves as claims over public space and visibility. Statues and

monuments are not characteristic features of any particular type of regime, but are revitalized at times of intensified political competition and change. This chapter traces some of the transformations in the basis of power that crystallize in the monumental statue form in postliberalization India. Republican statuomania in Paris followed soon after the French construction of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World, dedicated in 1886) as an explicitly global icon of freedom and democracy. The statue was quickly adopted as a more specific icon of the United States and its particular modality of inclusion, as encapsulated in Emma Lazarus’s fundraising poem “The New Colossus” (1883). Here, Leviathan returned as the fantasy of a unified democratic body politic—a monster that attempted to unite and embody the Old World and the New World, France and the United States, in their joint venture of Enlightenment.4 It reared up to show its singular might in the face of difference as, in the heyday of colonialism, foreign objects and the spectacle of the other crowded into the new spaces of the World Fair and the department store; as suffragists protested the exclusion of women from the statue’s opening ceremonies; and as people of color expressed disgust at the absence of liberty and protection for those within the nation’s own borders.5 The Statue of Unity refers to this Ur-figure, both in its name (which also invokes Sardar Patel’s role in incorporating the princely states into the Indian nation) and in the way its height is constantly described as twice that of the Statue of Liberty.6 And like Joseph Pulitzer’s crowdfunding campaign for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal or the Ram Shila Pujan campaign in 1989 to collect bricks for the Ramjanmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) election campaign in 2014 ran a “Statue of Unity Movement” that asked villagers to donate iron implements to melt down and use in the statue.7 These performances of participation in the very body of the statue attempt to constitute the public as a public: a body politic actualized in the statue. How might we think about the relationships between statues, democracy, and publics as they appear in early twenty-first-century India, and the resonances of these relationships with other figures and histories? In July 2008, the newsmagazine Outlook published a story billed on its cover as “Statue Mania in India.”8 In it the historian Ramchandra Guha is cited as dismissing statue and memorial building as “the old bread and circuses game that parties are playing to deflect attention from real issues by stoking regional or caste pride.” But the story concluded that political parties were “fooling themselves” in treating statues as the “new opium of the masses,” citing an Uttar Pradesh villager who made a similar distinction to Guha between statue building and the “real issues” of “the basic needs of millions of poor people,” 82

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such as roads, food, and water. The story uses critique’s familiar trope of cultural dupes. Political parties treat villagers as dupes, but the parties are themselves dupes for doing so; meanwhile, the intelligentsia can see exactly what is going on, for the template is the same from the Colosseum to Kailash Dham. The Outlook story was part of an intensification of media commentary on political statue-building projects in response to the monuments to Dalit leaders being erected by Kumari Mayawati, then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. These commentaries largely unfold as a drama of “real” material issues against symbolic decoys and of enlightened reason in the service of the public good against the dark forces of power, corruption, self-interest, particularism, and megalomania. Questions of recognition are dismissed as cynical identity politics, because it is taken for granted that, for “millions of poor people,” recognition and status are not “needs” like food and water and, more to the point, these are separate—and separable—issues. Critical responses to the Statue of Unity were far less personalized and vituperative but similarly entailed unmasking the ideological deception of the superstructure in the name of an ultimately economic base. Such analyses are often conducted in the name of materialism. However, their methods depend primarily on projecting cynical intent, bad faith, faulty reason, dysfunctional psyches, moral evil, and regressive ideology onto other human actors (politicians, the public) rather than actually attending to the material registers (technological, formal, generic) in which politics also unfolds—that is, its aesthetics. So no matter what statues or monuments look like or what they do, their materiality is ultimately reduced to the abstraction of the money spent on them and the failure to create more acceptable— “useful”—types of infrastructure instead. But the thing about things is that they cannot be fully contained by or reduced to the ideological structures or abstractions that are actualized in them at particular moments, as useful as ideological analyses can be. If things exist in assemblage and are constantly in process, the potential for emergence coursing through them might make any of them—and hence the ideological structures they actualize—otherwise. I want to explore how we might think more capaciously of statues as things of politics. Here the political is not only what Bruno Latour characterizes as the unified, homogenized, representable, trying-to-be-organic, monstrous “Body Politik” of the state (most obviously embodied in the Statue of Liberty and the Statue of Unity, although again even these are not reducible to that) but also what he calls “Dingpolitik,” the dissensual, public, often literally outdoor modality of politics that refuses organic representation, that cannot be contained within the dome of the Parliament and the body politic.9 Think here D E M O C R AC Y

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of the 2011 Occupy movement puppets or the 1989 foam-and-papier-mâché Goddess of Democracy at Tiananmen Square, which referenced both the Statue of Liberty and the Soviet sculptor Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937).10 As things, statues are active in, and activate, distributions and redistributions of the sensible, where the sensible—that which is understood through the senses—speaks to the material nature of signifying processes: to the actualizations of meanings in practices, and vice versa.11 In short, the sensible refuses the separation of the “symbolic” and the “material.” It is therefore a simultaneously more expansive and more literal materialism that I want to bring to the question of how the “statue wars” became such a prominent feature of the early twenty-first-century Indian political landscape.12 I focus in this chapter not so much on the size, expense, and visibility of statues as spectacles as on their occupation of space—specifically, the outdoor location that enabled their monumentality in the first place. The previous chapter described various routes by which icons emerged from temples into public view, often unmediated by priests, but how did this become not just acceptable but generic? Controlling access to sacred icons and texts is a key element of Brahminical power, and controlling access to space has been entrenched in the aesthetics of social distinction in general, particularly when it comes to women and Dalits. Such a radical addition to the possible forms of iconopraxis must surely index a deep symbolic upheaval, an adjustment in the vocabularies, mechanics, and sensorium of social power: the distribution of the sensible. What is the nature of this upheaval? How does emergence arise, and what does it do to the systems that produce it? Approaching these questions via the monumental statue genre as an assemblage of processes of varying durations, I begin with two earlier moments in their emergence. Here I link these moments, described in the previous chapter as key to the techno-figural genealogy of monumental statues, to a particular configuration of the political public. The first is the late nineteenthcentury expansion into public space of the community festivals of Durga Puja and Ganapati Utsav, and the second, the emergence of an innovative public temple form in the 1930s. Both explicitly deployed the term sārvajanik (public, pertaining to everyone), elaborated later. At both these moments, remediations of iconography and new vocabularies of iconopraxis were central to claims on democratic representation and anticolonial mobilization. It was the very novelty of these vocabularies and techniques that lent them to the aesthetic imperatives of electoral democracy, particularly the enumerative and commensurative terms of a diverse political field riven by multiple identity claims; conversely, the emergent forms of iconopraxis took up these idioms 84

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of enumeration and commensuration. A central driver of emergence in these processes has been mimesis, as what Michael Taussig, working with the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, calls “the nature that culture uses to create second nature,” a fundamental faculty of imitation that enables the enfolding of ideology into embodied habit, but whose ludic potentials can also open onto ways of being otherwise.13

THE SĀRVAJANIK PUBLI C

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, icons and mythological or religious themes rerendered using the illusionist techniques of neoclassical Academic oil painting began to be reproduced as chromolithographic prints, notably by the Chitrashala Press in Poona (now Pune) and the Calcutta Art Studio, both established in 1878.14 These prints were mobilized in a nationalist movement developing in a milieu of public debate on social and religious reforms, conducted in associations, public meetings, newspapers, journals, novels, plays, and pamphlets. They also became vehicles of Sanatana (orthodox and icon worshiping) rather than reformist (antiritual, anti-icon) Hindu hegemony, not so much challenging temple worship as extending the arena of iconopraxis beyond the temple. The introduction of offset presses around the 1960s led to near-universal access to printed icons, where even the poorest devotee might find a deity printed, say, on a discarded incense package and keep it to worship. In this hegemonic regime, the nation has often been sacralized in recognizably Hindu terms, and communities other than caste Hindus have been allegorically vilified, as when the cow-slaying demon of Kali Yuga in cow protection movement prints stood in for those who eat beef.15 The realist devotional icons in these prints, endlessly plagiarized, adapted, and recycled in print and then on the internet and elsewhere, provide one source or template for the later monumental statues; several artists and patrons (or patrons’ agents) I spoke to model their designs on such images from the internet. Another source, as described earlier for Kashinath and the Sakya brothers, are the processional deities in festivals such as Ganapati Utsav and Durga Puja, which also emerged in a newly public form in the late nineteenth century (figure 2.1). These spectacular annual festivals, stretching over several days, involve the installation and worship of large, lavishly decorated temporary statues, typically in neighborhood parks, climaxing with huge processions to immerse them in the nearest water body. They echo the ritual form of periodic idol-procession festivals in temples, when designated icons are brought out and paraded on set routes through the streets with great fanfare but under D E M O C R AC Y

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FIGURE 2.1

Kashinath, Ganapati Utsav icon in clay, 1995. Courtesy of K. Sridhar.

strict priestly protocols.16 The neighborhood shrines, known as pandals, are sites of annual innovation and topical commentary. They soon started attracting visitors from beyond their immediate neighborhoods, eliciting devotion, aesthetic appreciation, and the fascination of spectacle; they are now sites of artistic competitions and corporate sponsorship.17 The new monumental statues can be seen as permanent and more spectacular but less topical and protean forms of festival shrines. The efficacy of both forms derives from the sheer physical presence of the icon in the very specific territory that it inhabits, hence embodying a devotional-cum-political constituency. The immensely popular Ganapati Utsav in its current form was initiated in 1893 by the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (sārvajanik is a compound of sarva [all] plus jan [people]; sabha means “assembly”), a political association established in 1870 for “representing the wants and wishes of the inhabitants of the Deccan, being appointed on a popular elective system under rules framed for the purpose.”18 A precursor of the Indian National Congress, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha sought equal political and social status for Indians and British subjects. It was dominated by the upwardly mobile Chitpavan Brahmins, who had used the English language to secure positions in government and education; its proceedings were published in a quarterly English-language journal. It was therefore accused of representing Brahmin interests and not being truly sārvajanik, particularly by the anticaste activist Jotirao Phule.19 Initially led by moderates, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha was taken over by the Hindu nationalist hardliner Tilak in 1895 after his success in popularizing Ganapati Utsav. Another member of Tilak’s antireform faction was Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, founder of Poona’s Chitrashala Press (which produced prints on mythic and religious themes).20 The Hindi/Marathi term sārvajanik came to be used by local festival mandals (organizing bodies) to signify the Ganapati Utsav’s participatory, inclusive nature, while the Bengali variant sarbojanin was adopted for public Durga Pujas. What made these festivals sārvajanik was the participation of people other than elite landowners, princes, and wealthy merchants in creating, installing, and worshiping idols in publicly accessible spaces. However, this inclusivity, like that of the nation envisaged by Tilak and his ilk, instituted its own restrictions and conditions.21 Indeed, the publicness of the Ganapati Utsav was orchestrated primarily as a provocation to Muslims against the colonial state’s attempts to maintain public order. Tilak’s call for a reinvigorated mass celebration of the festival in 1894 with music and processions came hard on the heels of the Yeola riots of 1893, in which a mosque and a temple were desecrated during the Ganapati festival. The events followed other skirmishes between D E M O C R AC Y

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Hindus and Muslims in Bombay and during festivals at Belgaum and Prabhas Patan. The festival’s claim to space was not confined to a visual register: one of Tilak’s demands was for the right to play music in front of mosques, which had been banned by the District Police Act of 1890. The Ganapati Utsav provided the perfect vehicle to protest the ban.22 Further, this meant that Muslim musicians playing in Hindu processions were no longer able to maintain a respectful silence when passing mosques, so this strategy served to resignify Hindu and Muslim festivals as mutually exclusive. The Ganapati festival’s political mobilization worked—as it still does—in three ways. First, it constituted an affective public through the repeated ritual reenactment of devotionally charged community participation and the spectacle of the people presenting themselves as one. Second, such festivals enact physical assertions of territorial claims by occupying specific neighborhood spaces, as well as through noisy immersion processions able to provoke antagonism by passing through non-Hindu localities. In these ways, the exteriorized sārvajanik space of devotion, like the literate sārvajanik sphere of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, has enacted exclusion and antagonism as well as inclusion and expansion. Third, and less widely recognized, the festival has been a site for mandal functionaries to consolidate local power and patronage networks, initiating a spatial logic of protoelectoral populist representation mediated by popularly nominated (rather than hereditary) leaders.23 Thus, for instance, the Times of India reported of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party’s campaign in the 2014 State Assembly elections in Maharashtra that “Sarvajanik mandals— which run vyayam-shalas [gyms], libraries and temples, and host Ganeshotsav idols—have a firm grip on Mumbai’s chawls [tenements] and nagars [neighborhoods].”24 This political role of mandals and other local religious organizations has echoed and anticipated other circuits between public spectacle and individual social mobility via grassroots political mobilization and locallevel development and welfare projects, including cinema fan associations (often linked with party politics, particularly in South India) and the recent pilgrimage-cum-cultural complexes pitched as tourism development described in the previous chapter.25 The anticolonial moment thus witnessed the emergence of a religiopolitical public via the state-sanctioned pervasion of religion in “native” public life and economy. As discussed in the introduction, this pervasion attended the legal codification of Hindu and Muslim religion, law, and “custom,” including the conduct of business, as arenas of cultural exception. Religion, now freighted with the burden of representing identity, took on a drive to publicness along with new forms of iconopraxis such as worshiping and giving 88

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printed icons or organizing public festivals. Prints adorned the interiors of homes and shops while festivals were conducted outdoors, but both extended the icon’s address beyond temples and sanctified shrines in elite homes. Participation in both was pertinent not only to audiences at the point of “reception” but also to the infrastructural “back end,” for as sites of production and circulation (prints and calendars) or of organization (mandals), they provided upwardly mobile caste Hindu groups and local “big men” with new forms of access to religious merit and social networks beyond the institutional domain of temples and mathas (monastic orders). Specific to the festival form, however, was the embodied performance of territorial control. Here the constitution of a sārvajanik public in its visibility to itself unfolded not in the simultaneity of “homogeneous, empty time” (as with Benedict Anderson’s print capitalism) but in the repeated, cyclical assertion of control over public space.26 Publicness thus achieved durational traction in assemblage with the sticky cyclical temporality of religious ritual (unlike the heterogeneous publics that came together for the global uprisings around 2010–11, ranging from the Arab Spring and Occupy to the anticorruption protests in India led by Anna Hazare). Also key to the sensible force of this embodied territorial assertion, but so far unremarked, has been the infrastructural control and denial of access to space in the performative vocabularies of caste, class, and gender hierarchy.

UNTOUCHABILITY’S SENSORIUM: DELHI’S BIRLA TEMPLE AS SĀRVAJANIK MANDIR

The spatial vocabulary of untouchability—that is, of the Brahminical regime of the sensible—has extended from considering contact with even the shadow or smell of an “Untouchable” polluting to barring access to wells, streets, temples, education, health care, work, habitation, markets, and other public spaces. These practices of apartheid are now illegal, but many continue into the present. Clearly here, visibility is just one aspect of a sensorium that includes sound, smell, movement, and—of course—touch. Indeed, arguably in this schema all the other senses can be seen as interconvertible with touch as ritually fraught contact (note that this also extends to women, though that would require its own, albeit related, discussion). This primacy or pervasion of touch is consistent with the icon’s indivisibility of semiotic signification from ritual-material efficacy, or of likeness from presence—hence, the efficacy of embodied icon worship, as well as the force of desecration.27 It is therefore also consistent with analyses of visuality in South Asia that characterize the gaze—like the divine essence—as a fluid, emphasizing its transactional nature D E M O C R AC Y

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as a reciprocal exchange, as with the two-way traffic or chiasm of touch.28 This is the case for the key concept of darshan (both seeing and being in a presence), where the visual and the tactile or spatial are inseparable, or Chris Pinney’s notion of “corpothetics” in relation to iconopraxis.29 Entering a darshanic engagement with the icon is not just about vision. It is fundamentally also a matter of space, presence, and touch, where occupying the same space—being present to the other via vision—becomes a form of touching via the fluids of the gaze and the air.30 Here the mimetic faculty takes on a particularly powerful charge in mediating social relations, directly linking vision and embodiment in what Taussig calls “optical tactility.”31 Take, for instance, the codification of castes through dress and comportment and the scandals caused by transgressions construed as mimetic, from the infamous nineteenth-century “breast tax” on Nadars, who covered their upper bodies like the “upper” castes, to the Dalit politician Kumari Mayawati’s adoption of the leather handbag.32 In this sensorium, then, untouchability translates to invisibility: invisibility of and to the divine due to the ban on Dalits entering temples and priestly policing of access to the icon; invisibility to caste society via strictures on Dalit presence. In other words, the obverse of canonical iconopraxis, darshan, and corpothetics is untouchability; in this infrastructure of the sensible, they are all part and parcel of the same partage, the same Brahminical distribution of the sensible. Crucially, then, while touch and embodiment have been valorized in a great deal of scholarship on the image, because they have been marginalized by the post-Enlightenment separation of mind and body or vision and touch, this ritual regime alerts us to proceed with caution. The fourfold varna schema of caste would appear to enforce a mind–body split similar to the Cartesian schema (with literate, scholarly, and darshan-controlling Brahmins at the top and manual laborers such as farmers and artisans at the bottom). However, it is not clear that the relation of vision to signification—the relation of sense and sense: perception and knowledge—necessarily works in the same ways as it has in the post-Enlightenment schema, or, indeed, that the haptic is necessarily to be valorized in that schema either. This demands further inquiry. Similar caution needs to be exercised in valorizing emergence, for while it is crucial to actively seek out, nurture, and lend force to the possibilities of emergence, it is equally crucial to remain alert to the reincorporation (albeit never total) of emergent processes within equally protean and expansive assemblages and ideological structures. The primacy of space and touch in the sensorium of caste has meant that struggles for the right to share space, to see and touch, to become visible and audible have been key to struggles for the right to political representation. Correspondingly, however, this primacy has 90

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also been key to reterritorializations of these struggles within the aestheticopolitical terms of electoral democracy. Here, if mimesis is generative of difference, it also becomes a mechanism for the commensuration of identities: the counting and establishment of differences between constituencies within the polity, but within an overarching frame of equivalence.33 Commensurative operations—most notably, the census—rendered India legible for the exercise of colonial biopower, seeping, in turn, into the demographic imaginary of political vote banks based on language, caste, region, and religion (a category whose constitutive equivalences extend to secularism and atheism).34 Demographic commensuration took on a deeply mimetic character in an emergent political field shaped by new media technologies and forms of iconopraxis. Biopolitical democracy became, as it were, an engine for mimesis, and vice versa. For instance, the mimetic adoption of the Muharram procession by new forms of Hindu devotion, in which the icon emerged into public view, forged a new mode of iconic efficacy, elaborated in the next chapter as iconic exhibition value. This loosened the spatiotemporal embeddedness of the icon within canonical temple rituals and their sensory regime of untouchability. However, once loosened, the icon could be reterritorialized onto land now resignified in terms of religious and national identity. Similarly, the Temple Entry Movement that became an issue across India in the 1920s and 1930s, in which Dalits and “lower” castes claimed the right to enter temples and the roads around them, enabled Dalits to see and be seen by the divine and to share space across castes, but this, too, was accompanied by similarly expansive reterritorializing resignifications. One such resignifying aesthetico-political response to these converging struggles appears in the innovative built form of Delhi’s Lakshminarayan Temple, or Birla Mandir, a key element in the genealogy of monumental statues both for its vernacular capitalist patronage and for its significance as a self-identified sārvajanik mandir (temple). Understanding this emergent temple form requires a brief recap of the moment that consolidated the plural polity of protodemocratic India into the broad taxonomy, or partage, adopted by the postindependence Nehruvian state: “Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Isai [Christian]” (as Raj Kapoor sang in the film Chhalia [1960]), with no mention of Dalits. This moment was the Poona Pact of 1932, which followed a period of heated negotiations over electoral reservations for minorities in the All Parties Conference of 1928 and the Round Table Conferences of 1930–32 (which prepared the ground for Partition), catalyzed by the 1928 boycott of the all-white Simon Commission on constitutional reforms.35 A central operation performed in these debates was the mapping of identities onto numbers. British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s 1932 Communal D E M O C R AC Y

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Award granted separate electoral representation to Muslims, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, Europeans, and, crucially, the Depressed Classes, or Untouchables, a move initiated by the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar. For Gandhi, however, it was unthinkable that the “Harijans” (children of god), as he called Dalits, could be classified as external to the Hindu fold; to do so would be to destroy the fabric of Hindu society.36 He therefore went on an indefinite fast at Yervada Jail in Poona, until Ambedkar was forced into a compromise known as the Poona Pact, signed in 1932 by him and the orthodox Hindu Madan Mohan Malaviya, founder of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha.37 Under this agreement, “Untouchables” remained within a single, joint Hindu electorate, but with reserved seats.38 What I want to highlight in this politics of numbers is that while Hinduhegemonic projects have most glaringly taken the form of a majoritarian Hindu nationalist and primarily anti-Muslim politics of exclusion, the Poona Pact also crystallized its obverse: a politics of hegemonic inclusion. Here Gandhi’s anticommunal and antiuntouchability (but not anticaste) push for inclusion dovetailed with a broader Hindu nationalist drive to amass and strengthen the community, in particular through the shuddhi (ritual purification) of Dalits, Sikhs, and Muslims.39 Initially conceived by the reformist Arya Samaj in the 1850s as a mimetic response to Christian proselytization, shuddhi was harnessed in the 1920s to the cause of Hindu sangathan (unification, a rapprochement between reformists and the Sanatani orthodoxy in the face of the Muslim anti-British Khilafat movement, which spilled over into inter-religious conflicts).40 Gandhi’s position is not reducible to the latter logic, however. Recognizing untouchability as the canker at the heart of his utopian arche, Ramrajya—he called it hamara kalank (our stain)—Gandhi sought to purify not noncaste Hindus but himself and the caste Hindu “we” as a whole through a moral and ethical, rather than a political, process. He took it upon himself to shoulder caste Hindu responsibility for the oppressed within the fold through his crusade for Harijan uplift, prioritizing this over his civil disobedience campaign. A week after the Poona Pact was signed, he instituted the All-India Anti-Untouchability League with the industrialist G. D. Birla, his steadfast supporter, as its president. The Poona Pact was unpopular not only with Ambedkarites but also with Hindu nationalists, particularly Sanatani caste Hindus, who balked at its formulation of their status as numerical minorities and began to disrupt Gandhi’s Harijan meetings.41 It precipitated Malaviya’s break with the Congress; even Nehru was impatient with Gandhi’s involvement in the Harijan issue at the expense of civil disobedience. Moments like this, when something emerges on 92

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the horizon that is widely intolerable across the political spectrum—as was the case with Kumari Mayawati’s monument building—demand particular attention as symptoms of a dissensus accompanying a redistribution of the sensible: the entry into the field of perception of what hitherto had been invisible, unheard, unthinkable, “Untouchable.”42 Here it was the glimmering apprehension of Dalits as the “part with no part” in the social and political order, a perception that activated another sense of what constitutes the demos. This, pace Arjun Appadurai, was a fear not of small numbers but of big ones (of the bahujan [majority]), an anxiety not about an incomplete whole but about what the complete whole actually looked like.43 This anxiety attendant on Hindu electoral consolidation found permanent expression in another new spatial form in addition to the neighborhood festival, this time in architecture: the modern temple form that has been called the “sārvajanik mandir,” of which Delhi’s Lakshminarayan Temple/ Birla Mandir is an early instance (figure 2.2).44 It was Madan Mohan Malaviya, signatory to the Poona Pact just a year earlier, who laid the Birla Mandir’s foundation stone in 1933. The colonial government’s plan for New Delhi had made space for a large church and retained existing mosques but neglected to include a Hindu temple, so Sanatanis approached Malaviya to help find land and funds for one. The government provided land along the Delhi Ridge, which was so rocky that all of the initial funding from the Maharajas of Dholpur and Darbhanga was used up just to flatten it. The rest was provided by J. K. Birla, G. D. Birla’s Hindu orthodox older brother. However, it was Gandhi who inaugurated the temple in 1939 (also the year of the Madras Temple Entry Ordinance) on condition that it admit all castes. Here again, as with the Poona Pact, we see a dovetailing—albeit an uneasy one—of Malaviya’s Hindu orthodox and Gandhi’s reformist approaches to constituting an inclusive polity.45 As the term sārvajanik gained currency in describing public festivals where icons were not confined to temples, the designation of temples themselves as “public” from at least 1883 onward was crystallizing in laws on religious endowments. These laws drew a distinction between “public temples,” which, as a service for the common (Hindu) good, were not subject to taxes, and “denominational” temples, such as those of mathas, whose more circumscribed membership could deem them personal or private.46 This distinction was invoked in legal challenges to temple entry acts by specific sects or mathas attempting to maintain their authority over rights of entry. The postindependence Constitution, for its part, expanded the definition of “Hindu” in relation to the publicness of temples in order to extend temple entry rights to other cognate D E M O C R AC Y

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Lakshminarayan Mandir, Delhi (Birla Mandir), façade with three distinctive shikharas (spires), December 2012.

FIGURE 2.2

religions, raising further legal quandaries.47 The Birla Mandir’s sārvajanik reterritorialization of religious identities at this moment of struggles around Dalit political representation and temple entry illuminates the genealogy of this peculiar constitutional clustering of cognate religions. A bilingual sign at the entrance to the Birla Mandir describes it as a sārvajanik space: All persons erecting places of public worship [sārvajanik mandir] should likewise inscribe Ved mantras, Upnishadas [sic], Shlokas, Bhajans and Artistic life pictures [chitra] . . . to improve the religious life of the Aryadharmi Hindus (including Sanatanists, Aryasamajists, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs etc.) and to develop among them a spirit of fellow feeling and close co-operation which may in turn lead to consolidation and mutual service. As with the neighborhood festival form of the sārvajanik, the temple’s inclusivity was built on a Hindu-hegemonic Sanatani (orthodox, icon-worshiping) foundation, but this sign now sought to specify “all Hindus,” even more expansively, as “Aryadharmi.” The notion of “Arya Dharma” here refers not to the 94

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reformist Arya Samaj sect’s proscription of icons, but to all religions originating on Indian soil, a conception that consolidates the link between religion and territory while simultaneously expanding the constituency of Hindus. (Recall that expanding the constituency of Hindus was the goal of the Arya Samaj’s practice of shuddhi, its equivalent to Christian conversion.) Used by the nineteenth-century reformer Karsondas Mulji, among others, the term Arya Dharma—and its expansive, inclusive-yet-conditional predication on ritual purity and territorial origin—was taken up by a broad range of nationalists, again constituting a point of commonality between Gandhi; V. D. Savarkar, the ideologue of Hindutva whose pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva was published in 1923; and Eknath Ranade, a senior member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a powerful Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization.48 As described later in this chapter in relation to the Vivekananda Rock Memorial (plate 6), this expansive yet strongly territorial conception of Hindus and Hinduism would be naturalized via the spiritualist ideology of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the grassroots activism of the RSS from the mid-1960s. Arya Dharma’s inclusion of Buddhism also resonated with the pan-Asianism in vogue at the time and was invoked in messages of goodwill from the ambassadors of China and Japan at the simultaneous inauguration of the Birla Mandir and the adjacent, and (until recently) connected, Buddhist temple. It should come as no surprise that Dalits are not mentioned separately on this Birla Mandir sign, even within the broadened umbrella of “Aryadharmi” Hindus. There is no contradiction between this and Gandhi’s insistence that Dalits be allowed into the temple, for in this partage Dalits are being made to count as Hindu, although the conditionality of this will become evident shortly. It is also consistent with this schema that the Birla Mandir’s vision of the sārvajanik as Aryadharmi is clearly defined against Muslims and Christians. One of the external walls of the temple still bears a plaque, somewhat above eye level, that politely declares in Hindi: “Apart from residents of foreign lands such as Europe, America, Africa etc. and Indians of special repute (famous), local Muslims and Christians wishing to enter the temple need not take the trouble of entering without the permission of temple officials.”49 Resistance to the incorporation of Dalits into the sārvajanik (Hindu) fold is not quite so explicit, but the fraught nature of this enterprise appears in the familiar terms of purity and pollution. A key feature of the Birla Mandir is its landscaped outdoor space, featuring extensive grounds with innovative theme park elements recalling a forest ashram: semi-open ritual structures; fountains; trees; and lawns dotted with obelisks, sculptures of animals, and caves made in concrete (figures 2.3 and 2.4).50 D E M O C R AC Y

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FIGURE 2.3

Birla Mandir, Delhi, artificial caves and sculptural lion, December 2012.

The Indraprastha Dharma Vatika garden was intended, as a sign at its entrance tells us, for “organization, worship, meditation, festivals and fairs.”51 Providing a space for “organization” speaks to the politicized, nationalist origins of the temple; listing this in the same sentence as worship and festivals echoes the spatial configuration of the sārvajanik set in train by the Ganapati Utsav and the newly public form of Calcutta’s Durga Puja from around 1910. Note that the Birlas’ jute-manufacturing operations had been based in Calcutta since the 1890s, exposing them to the public, sarbojanin religiosity of Durga Puja. The Birla Mandir’s gardens created a sārvajanik space, with all of the political connotations by then attached to the term. But they are also a primary site for the copious, almost obsessive signage intended to regulate visitors to the mandir, signage that encapsulates the tensions at the heart of the sārvajanik, where the prospect of a shared space and sensorium clearly evoked intense anxiety. This anxiety is literally writ large in the attempt to control and shape the public through discourses of hygiene and civility, where the terms of caste discrimination and its obsession with ritual pollution and bodily fluids map onto those of colonial biopolitics. The one sign mentioning “Harijans” specifies that they may enter the temple “subject to the prescribed conditions of cleanliness, full faith and sincere devotion,” while beggars and those with 96

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FIGURE 2.4

Birla Mandir, Delhi, landscaping and picnicking visitors, December 2012.

infectious diseases “are not allowed in or near” it. Signs at the garden entrance strictly prohibit “spitting, bathing, washing, cooking, passing of urine and disfiguring walls” and entering with “unclean or dirty” ( gande, maile) clothes, a pleonasm that reflects the finely discriminating vocabulary of pollution. Elsewhere, visitors are enjoined to behave in a “civilized” manner. Belonging to this sārvajanik, then, is conditional on civilization, hygiene, and devotion— that is, on a form of comportment in which the social, corporeal, and spiritual are deeply intermeshed, as in the habitus of caste where Brahmins are seen as naturally possessing all of these qualities. These signs are one aspect of the Birla Mandir’s anxious pedagogical program of educating the (possibly not quite Hindu) masses into the proper forms of Hindu majoritarian citizenship. Another is the abundance of murals and texts on the interior (and some exterior) marble and sandstone walls of the temple: “artistic life pictures” depicting historical and Puranic tales or plaques quoting leaders and saints or passages from the Bhagwad Gita and Upanishads (figure 2.5). J. K. Birla commissioned them to the chagrin of its architect, the neotraditionalist Sris Chandra Chatterjee (1873–1966), a member of the Indian National Congress and ardent admirer of Gandhi. Chatterjee wrote: “However attractive may have been the exterior character of the massive group, D E M O C R AC Y

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Birla Mandir, Delhi, image inscribed in sandstone on pillar. Both reinscribing caste hierarchy and holding out hope of overcoming it, the text reads (my translation): “Sutaji and Shaunak Rishi from the era of the Mahabharata. Despite arising from the Shudra community he [Suta] is narrating a tale to sages and saints.” Suta (also Ugrashravas, Sauti) is said to have narrated the Mahabharata and several Puranas to a gathering of sages led by Shaunak.

FIGURE 2.5

the interior has been affected by garish over-ornamentation and cheap oilpainting discordant with the epical music of the sky-scraping ‘sikhara’ and faulty in respect of grammar and composition of the architectural language.”52 This formal clash emerges as the symptom of another anxiety about the “religious life of the Aryadharmi Hindus,” for these elements reinscribe the authority of texts and images within the temple’s noncanonical, inclusive iconopraxis. In other words, the textual and iconic ingredients of Brahminical power persist here, but in exhibitionary or public rather than cultic or ritually sequestered form (i.e., they have religious or iconic exhibition value). These pedagogical elements also thematize history, thereby providing an alternative source of legitimacy to offset this new temple’s inadequate historicity. The writer Narayan Chaturvedi sees J. K. Birla’s use of pictorial tableaux to represent the “history of Hindu dharma (religion)” as a way of compensating for its absence in the temple itself and its means of construction.53 While there is a tradition of temple construction in brick, stone temples have greater prestige; however, this temple was built in brick and cement as part of Chatterjee’s 98

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program for a “Modern Indian Architecture” that advocated the revival of traditional building techniques while using modern methods when appropriate. These modern materials enabled the most distinctive and unusual feature of the temple’s architecture, consistent with its all-inclusive Hinduism: not one but three shikharas (spires) over three sancta sanctorum featuring different deities, the tallest rising 165 ft.54 These are the “skyscraping” elements that Chatterjee described earlier in terms of their “epical music.” Chatterjee’s “Modern Indian” vision was putatively inspired by Magadha, the seat of several ancient empires, including the Mauryas and the Guptas, but was based only loosely on that template. The shikharas are reminiscent of the Lingaraj temple in Bhuvaneswar, but there are a number of other elements from a variety of sources and periods, including chaitya-style windows from early Buddhist architecture and an Akbari bangladar (sloping) roof.55 Chatterjee also admired the Tennessee Valley Authority as a model of large-scale planning—again, the ubiquitous dams—and wrote ecstatically of the view from the quintessential “skyscraper,” the Empire State Building.56 Already, as with the later monumental statues, height enabled by concrete construction and inspired by the scale of the big dam and the skyscraper figured here as a meeting point between the “modern” and the “Indian.” The issue of the absence of historical authenticity in newly built forms already came up in the previous chapter, as did the use of murals, dioramas, and other museum-like or exhibitionary spaces, as well as scale itself, as a means of compensating for this absence. I return to this question of authenticity in the next chapter but emphasize here (echoing Narayan Chaturvedi) that this modern temple is clearly doing more than just providing a space of worship. Its significance extends beyond indexing the presence of the divine to representing a cultural-political constituency, the Aryadharmi Hindus, with history as well as religion—or, rather, with a history of and in “religion.”57 Further, it is doing the additional work of making a simultaneously spatial or territorial and discursive claim to universality for this constituency, explicitly marked here as sarvajan, all the people.

INTERMEZZO/REPRISE: THE SĀRVAJANIK AS PUBLI C

What kind of public is it, then, that materializes in these sārvajanik spaces of the annual festival and the new temple form? Like the bourgeois public sphere, the sārvajanik public was self-identified and explicitly geared to political participation; it similarly claimed universality and open-endedness, even as participation was premised on exclusionary D E M O C R AC Y

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conditions. However, it emerged under a colonial regime where the state, market, and public, while conceptually distinct, were effectively one: the colonial state existed for trade, and the market and public shared the same basic unit of liberal ideology: the bourgeois individual. For the colonized—the “part of no part” of colonial liberalism—the separation between these domains had little actual salience, even as it provided the template for conceiving democratic participation. The sārvajanik public is an assemblage generated by this colonial formation, much as the “bazaar” is the colonial economy’s constitutive outside. It adopts certain protocols of the bourgeois public sphere vis-àvis the colonial and then the postindependence state and depends to some extent on recognition by the state, but it also deals in legitimacy, status, and power gained from religious patronage, paternalist projects of social reform, and populist political mobilizations, with their attendant affects and objectsbodies-events (notably, icons and devotional bodies). Participation in the sārvajanik therefore strategically both invokes the normative ideals of the Habermasian public sphere and departs from them: it slips between secular and devotional idioms; it is predicated on individual liberal subjecthood as well as collective affect and communal belonging; and it is enacted not only through reasoned debate but also through embodied, spatialized spectacles of self-presencing, often organized around a powerful or charismatic central figure. While these elements of religiosity and communal affect appear in the scholarship on Indian and other publics, they have until recently tended to be framed in binary opposition to the bourgeois public sphere. I submit that it is more useful to emphasize the uneven coexistence of, and circuits between, these practices of publicness.58 As a formation of the colonized, the sārvajanik’s raison d’être was not so much to exert pressure on the state from the (socially authorized, propertyowning) outside as to claim the recognition and inclusion that provide access to social/economic, divine, and state resources and power. Emergent sārvajanik forms provided spaces for social mobility through the control and organization of people, spaces, and resources—that is, at an infrastructural level. The salient distinctions for the sārvajanik are therefore not so much between state and nonstate forces, or between private as domestic and public as stranger sociable, as between inclusion and exclusion from both state and nonstate networks of power, as well as between spatial, territorial inclusions and exclusions.59 So it shares some features of a counterpublic but is even less reducible to the subaltern or popular than in Michael Warner’s formulation.60 While the sārvajanik is a space of what Warner calls “poetic world-making” (i.e., it imagines and attempts to realize a world, which is why and how it mobilizes new aesthetic 100

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forms), it ultimately seeks a more capacious sensory consensus within existing modes of hegemony—specifically, those of caste Hinduism and patriarchalism. In this sense, it is like the body politic of the multicultural public in that (as I outline shortly) it deals in equivalent or commensurable variations within an overarching sameness rather than seeking to do justice to difference. However, in the ongoing play of de- and reterritorialization, to the extent that things—aesthetic forms—elude and exceed such determinations, particularly in their mimetic encounters with one another, performing equivalence can also willy-nilly generate difference. The sārvajanik has therefore given rise to its own counter-sārvajanik publics—nested or second-order counterpublics—as with the Dalit assertions I describe later. With increasing social, economic, and physical mobility and new technologies, the sārvajanik formation has expanded its scale of address and forms of participation, giving a greater range of social actors ways of accessing religious and political patronage and, in the process, expanding the forms of religion itself.

MIMETI C ESCALATION: GANDHI, VIVEKANANDA, THIRUVALLUVAR, SHIVAJI

So far I have focused on new forms of spatiality and iconopraxis attending the formation of a unified category of the “Hindu,” but they emerged within a wider set of conversations and mimetic exchanges between aesthetic forms. It is well established that the Ganapati festival both imitated and competed with the Muharram processions in which Hindus had also participated (a practice that Tilak, attempting to define Hindu space more sharply and exclusively, explicitly asked Hindus to discontinue).61 The Imperial Durbars in Delhi, modeled on Mughal durbars, also used processions as a theater of politics, as did imperial subjects. At the first Imperial Durbar of 1877, a representative of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha used the occasion to put forward a demand for Indians to be granted the same political and social status as British subjects. There was surely also an escalating mimetic relay between nationalist deployments of public festivals in the 1890s and the 1903 Imperial Durbar’s transformation into a far grander and more public spectacle than the one in 1877 (although this was also consistent with the “exhibitionary order” of colonialism at the turn of the century, with its world expositions and the increasing use of photography and film).62 As with annually circulating calendar prints, the cyclical, expansive form of the festival enabled constant innovation and the fractal proliferation of identitarian address. By the 1920s, neighborhood Ganapati Utsav mandals had started to differentiate, particularly as non-Brahmin D E M O C R AC Y

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movements gained impetus and sought their own configurations of the sarvajan. Dalits, too, adopted this form. For instance, in 1929 Dalit icons were carried on elephants at the Kumbh Mela, and Chamars in Kanpur organized Ravidas processions from 1936 after building a temple to the Dalit poet-saint Ravidas.63 These new configurations often followed a similar template, because the new public forms appearing in assemblage with the representational infrastructures of electoral democracy were addressed not only to their own constituencies, but also simultaneously to all the others within a polity that recognized itself as plural. They emerged in a formal idiom that was mutually recognizable, translatable, and imitable. This, then, is another aspect of the newness of new forms: departures from canonical iconographies and mimetic adoptions of common idioms allow new visual forms to take on an intensified commensurative force, which then also extends to those forms of iconopraxis performed primarily for and within a given community. Thus, communities defined as “religious” came to be signified in terms of equivalent places of worship (mosque, church, temple, gurudwara), texts (Quran, Bible, Gita, Guru Granth Sahib), or sacred symbols (crescent moon and star, cross, Om, khanda or Ik Onkar). Such denominators brought the various groups that were defining themselves and jostling for recognition in a plural polity onto a plane of equivalence within the terms of electoral democracy. In colonial India, these processes of commensuration in the vernacular arena dovetailed with the enumerative and taxonomic operations of colonial biopower: census taking, museology, historiography, surveys, and travel writing, as well as ethnographic painting, photography, and writing.64 Robin Jeffrey argues, for instance, that the counting of Dalits in the colonial census was among the factors that led to the Temple Entry Movement in the south in the 1920s.65 In other words, being counted in the biopolitical arena enabled a claim to count in the arena of iconopraxis. Bazaar prints provide a clear illustration of this commensuration and institution of identitarian equivalence via new visual forms, exacerbated by the genre logics of mass production (the next chapter argues for adding formal commensuration and equivalence to the increased circulation and proximity that Walter Benjamin identified as features of mass reproduction in the artwork essay).66 From the late nineteenth century on, Indian artists adapted Western naturalist techniques to a vast range of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Dalit, and other themes; such images were then printed using the same technology, with the same format and finish, for the same price—but in varying numbers of designs for each constituency, with some represented more than others. Often these images appeared together in publishers’ catalogues or 102

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retailers’ stacks, like a mini-parliament. Proliferating processions and festivals took on a similar comparability and equivalence, mapping the communities embodied in public icons onto competitive territorial claims that, as the prospect of democratic representation loomed in the 1930s, also took a quantitative turn. As the postindependence state was carved up into electoral constituencies, the mapping of communities onto territories came to be understood and mobilized in terms of political “vote banks.” While the visibility of such iconic images-objects-events, old and new, mapped them onto communities and territories in a semiotic register, their embodiment of these communities was actualized through desecrations and conflicts. The translation of an attack on an icon or the disturbance of a procession to an attack on the community was already enshrined in—if not produced by—section 295A of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, which deals with “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” One of the censorship laws introduced after the anticolonial uprisings of 1857, section 295A became a vehicle for understanding and performing identitarian subjecthood (via identification with a “class” with “religious feelings”). It also became an indispensable tool for political mobilization through the making and taking of offense at various types of desecration, commonly cited as the ostensible cause of riots.67 This genre of political violence/victimhood came to supplement and reinforce the routine, everyday social violence of controlling boundaries between castes, communities, and genders via clothing; bodily marks; comportment; sexuality; ablution; access to spaces, food, and water; and so on, where, for instance, the very presence of a Dalit or a menstruating woman in a temple or a kitchen could constitute a desecration. Again, as with darshan, this is a sensible regime that melds the visual, spatial, and haptic, where social transgressions are subject to similarly melded spectacular corporeal punishments, from burning homes to hacking off limbs and tarring and feathering. These forms of violence toward humans lie on a continuum with violence to images, such as the burning of effigies of the demon king Ravana in public Ramlila festivals. They are part of the same sensible infrastructure. What the commensuration effected by public visual forms added to the sensible infrastructure of everyday social violence was the public staging of the installation and defacement of icons as an antagonism between political communities. Here icons became media or mediators of political violence in direct proportion to their publicness, so permanent public statues became potent sites for this. However, as several scholars have compellingly argued in varying contexts, far from destroying images or their power, desecrations D E M O C R AC Y

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and “iconoclashes,” whether or not they are framed in explicitly iconoclastic terms, serve only to generate more images or intensify their efficacy—indeed, to sacralize them.68 Desecration is the obscene underside of the icon’s power. So disputed images, whether intended as religious or secular, come to inhabit a liminal zone between the secular and the sacred, remaining vital, animated, and agentive. Particularly when they are tied to a regime of political commensuration and competition (most often the source of the dispute), they can have an escalating mimetic cascade effect. Take, for instance, the Vivekananda memorial on a rock just off the coast at Kanyakumari, at India’s southernmost tip (see plate 6). It was proposed in 1962 by a group ostensibly headed by the local Hindu nationalist Haindeva Seva Sangh (Hindu Protection Society), to commemorate the 1963 birth centenary of Swami Vivekananda, the monk and mystic who founded the neoVedantist Ramakrishna Mission in 1897.69 Vivekananda had meditated on the rock before traveling to address the World Congress of Religions in Chicago in 1893. The memorial was inspired by the 1956 Mahatma Gandhi Mandapam, a relatively modest 79-ft. monument (Gandhi died at seventy-nine) in the hybrid neoclassical Modern Indian mode, marking the spot where Gandhi’s ashes were placed for public viewing before their immersion off the coast.70 In 1963, the Vivekananda Rock Memorial Committee was formed, including M. S. Golwalkar, then head of the RSS, and Shri Chinmaya (or Swami Chinmayananda, who inspired the Chinmaya Mission, patron of Kashinath’s first big concrete statues); Chinmaya and Golwalkar founded the VHP in 1964.71 The committee also included Mannathu Padmanabha Pillai, who founded the Nair Service Society as a response to the prominence of Syrian Christians in Travancore State. (Nairs are a set of non-Brahmin but largely dominant caste groups.) Pillai was active in the 1924–25 Vaikom Satyagraha, a movement to give Dalits the right to use the roads leading to the Vaikom temple. However, this was not antithetical to his support for a memorial to Vivekananda, who held that “caste is a natural order. . . . [C]aste is good.” 72 For here, too, as with the Birla Mandir’s claim to space in the name of an expansive Hindu sarvajan, Padmanabha’s Hindu nationalist uptake of the antiuntouchability cause was primarily driven by the numbers game of Hindu unification in opposition to non-Hindus. Unusually, the Kanyakumari area had fewer Hindus than Christians and Muslims combined; the Vivekananda memorial served as a rallying point for this putatively vulnerable “Hindu minority” and enabled the RSS to infiltrate the region.73 Plans for the memorial were immediately opposed by the Catholic fishing community, which claimed the rock on the grounds that St. Francis Xavier 104

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had meditated there four hundred years ago.74 At the center of the ensuing controversy was a cross that the Hindus insisted had just been installed but the Christians claimed had been there for hundreds of years. In the dead of night, a large group of young men from the RSS swam across to the rock and destroyed the cross, galvanizing Hindu support for the memorial and animating the rock. The cross was reinstated but destroyed again with impunity, since the rock was administered by the area’s Hindu temple trust, the Kanyakumari Devaswom Board.75 A plaque commemorating Vivekananda was installed at the site on his centenary in 1963. Meanwhile, Eknath Ranade of the RSS raised funds and rallied political support to overcome the objections of the Congress Party’s M. Bhaktavatsalam, chief minister of Tamil Nadu. President V. V. Giri finally inaugurated the rock memorial in 1970.76 Ranade describes how he enlisted support from people with divergent views from across the political spectrum, including the left and the anti-Brahmin Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), because they all “had complete identification with Swamiji’s ideas.” Indeed, C. N. Annadurai, the DMK’s leader, became a member of the committee’s General Body.77 Ranade even garnered funds from Hokishe Sema, the Congress Party chief minister of Nagaland, who knew nothing about Vivekananda (and whose government had no funds of its own but depended on the central government), persuading him that “Vivekananda and his ideals represent the soul of India, which is needed for the future of the country.” (Sema eventually joined the BJP in 1999.) What made this wide-ranging identification possible was Vivekananda’s capacious, dematerialized, “spiritual” religiosity—the “soul” and “future” of India—which could be spun as a nationalism that meshed with secular developmentalist ideals while also shoring up Hindu majoritarian interests.78 Here Ranade cites a “significant” conversation with Madhavananda Maharaj of Vivekananda’s Ramakrishna Mission in which Madhavananda explained why it was better that Ranade take on this project via the committee than for it to be an initiative of the mission itself, for, given the opposition from the Christians, the central government would steer clear of the project if “sannyasins” were behind it (i.e., if it was seen as exclusively religious). In this instance, then, the novelty enabling this mimetic escalation of the memorial form had to do with a new, capacious form of spiritualized Hindu religion that spoke to secular ideals rather than a new material or technology. Crucially, this reformulated Hinduism also further consolidated and naturalized the Hindu majoritarian sangathan (the numbers-led unification discussed earlier), as well as the nation-based territorializing ideology of the RSS. D E M O C R AC Y

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The next link in the mimetic chain of public monuments in Kanyakumari that started with the Gandhi Mandapam was a 133-ft. granite statue of the ancient Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar on another rock less than 100 meters away from the Vivekananda Rock Memorial (see plate 6). According to a halfhidden sign there, it was the DMK leader M. Karunanidhi who “conceived the idea of installation of the statue of Thiruvalluvar in 1975.” This choice of icon, an atheist Tamil poet, reflected the DMK’s Tamil language–led political agenda (against the imposition of Hindi, spoken in the north, as the national language) and Karunanidhi’s own atheism. Its height can be seen on a continuum with the massive cutout billboards in Madras at the time featuring film stars, politicians, and combinations of the two, such as Karunanidhi’s rivals M. G. Ramachandran and then Jayalalithaa.79 For the politically beleaguered Karunanidhi, the statue promised a political presence as tall as the billboards but far more durable, forever cut out against an uninterrupted backdrop of sea and sky. By the same token, however, it took even longer to build than the Vivekananda memorial: its foundation stone was laid in 1979, but it received funding only in 1990, when Karunanidhi regained power as chief minister, and was finally inaugurated on January 1, 2000. More work is needed on the conception and building of this statue, but my informants insisted that it was in fact the canny Ranade who first proposed the statue of Thiruvalluvar; he allowed Karunanidhi to claim the credit in order to forge an alliance with Tamil nationalists and prevent a less suitable (i.e., less appropriable) secular figure from appearing on the rock next to the Vivekananda memorial. Like Vivekananda, Thiruvalluvar has been a polyvalent figure open to multiple claims; one common narrative, for instance, is that his father was a Brahmin and his mother was from the Dalit Parayar caste.80 Karunanidhi’s adoption of him as an icon resonated perfectly with the DMK’s primary constituency: non-Brahmin but dominant castes who championed Dravidian culture, and in particular ancient Tamil literature, as commensurate with and alternative to a Brahminical and Sanskritic canon (seen as an Aryan imposition from the north, along with the Hindi language).81 So here textual authority, central to Brahminical power, remains intact even as it is redeployed in a non-Brahmin arena. Indeed, Thiruvalluvar’s ethical treatise, the Tirukkural, is often called the “Tamil Vedas.” At a similarly infrastructural level, even as the statue signified atheism, it also reappropriated the canonical material of granite used in Tamil Nadu’s stone temple-building tradition, of which its sculptor, V. Ganapati Sthapati, was a celebrated exponent and institutional revivalist. Even the height of the statue can be read as echoing the gopuram (temple entrance tower) in the Dra106

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vidian temple tradition, which has been explicitly associated with the need to provide darshan of deities to those unable to access the sanctum (i.e., Dalits).82 Here the simultaneous visibility and untouchability of the gopuram was a strategy for appeasing the ban on temple entry through controlled public darshan (as was the case with public temple icon processions). In short, then, even as this crucial early monumental icon extended iconopraxis beyond the temple, it reinstated Brahminical infrastructures of the sensible. The sārvajanik forms of the festival and the temple commandeered Dalits to the cause of Hindu unification but on conditional terms; similarly, if Dalits, Christians, and Muslims count as addressees of the Thiruvalluvar statue, they do so as Dravidians within the sensible terms of a caste Hindu hegemony that is compatible with the ideologies of both the DMK and the RSS. This compatibility is possible due to the polyvalence of the site itself, since Kanyakumari is the synecdochic tip of India and of Tamil Nadu. Next in this mimetic chain was the Maharashtra Congress Party’s promise, in the 2004 state elections, to build a 309-ft. statue of Shivaji (3 ft. taller than the Statue of Liberty) off the coast of Mumbai. The Vivekananda Rock Memorial was explicitly cited as inspiration, along with the Statue of Liberty, both clear reference points in terms of their national significance and offshore locations.83 The region-specific Thiruvalluvar did not figure in the discourse here, even though it must surely also have been a model. As an explicitly partypolitical initiative subject to intense scrutiny, like Thiruvalluvar, the Shivaji statue proposal foundered for a decade. The Indian Navy was concerned about violations of Coastal Regulatory Zone (CRZ) codes (which were amended in 2015 to accommodate the statue); the film composer and singer Vishal Dadlani filed several right-to-information applications expressing concern about the money being spent.84 The opposition Shiv Sena party, resentful of this appropriation of its figurehead, expressed similar concerns. However, the project was revived by the Maharashtra BJP in the run-up to the 2014 national elections, in response to the campaign for the Statue of Unity. In this iteration, Shivaji returned as an even taller, 623-ft. statue “to be built on a pedestal shaped like a shivling [lingam].”85 Here again there is a slippage between religious and secular iconicity, but in the opposite direction: if Vivekananda was secularizable, Shivaji, like Gandhi, is even more explicitly sacralizable than Thiruvalluvar.86 This story of mimetic escalation from a 79-ft. memorial to a proposed 623ft. behemoth is one of both physical face-offs and mass-mediated competition. It also demonstrates how, for instance, the Kanyakumari fishing community’s attempts to maintain its iconopraxis, territory, and livelihood via a religious counterclaim were met—slowly but surely—by a literally massive assertion of D E M O C R AC Y

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Hindu nationalist might during the years of Nehruvian secularism. In other words, “statue wars” as a political form had already appeared on the landscape (both literally and metaphorically) well before the resurgence of Hindu nationalist political parties in the 1980s and economic reforms in the 1990s. How, then, did this form come to suddenly explode in the political arena, accelerating and intensifying into the “statue mania” of the 2000s?

I CONS, MONUMENTS, AND THE MAKING OF A DALIT SARVAJAN

The instances outlined earlier of the assemblage of biopolitics, spatial iconopraxis, and electoral democracy at three moments—the 1890s, 1930s, and 1960s—demonstrate the logics of sārvajanik inclusion via processes of spatial exteriorization, formal commensuration and differentiation within a reterritorializing frame, and mimetic escalation. The first two instances unfolded with the anticolonial nationalist consolidation of Hindus—in the first case (public festivals), in mimetic opposition to Muslim iconopraxis; and in the second (the sārvajanik mandir), through the inclusion of Dalits. In both cases, Dalit thinkers—Phule and Ambedkar, respectively—opposed the underlying assumptions of sārvajanik inclusion. In the third case (memorials), a Hindu territorial claim against Christians articulated with a regionalist and linguistic territorial claim by the DMK, a political party identified with non-Brahminism (though not with Dalits) and with Tamil language and Dravidian culture. At all three sites, there is a deterritorialization of the Brahminical canon and its reterritorialization in the terms of the expansive sārvajanik Hinduism entrenched by the Poona Pact. This hegemony was subjected to a further redistribution of the sensible in a process that also emerged via mimesis to eventually achieve one kind of assemblage in a different, yet equivalent, modality of the sārvajanik. Accounts of Dalit political assertion and image culture in northern and western India show how, after Ambedkar’s death in 1956, icons of Ambedkar (and to some extent, of Phule) came to be treated as equivalent to Hindu idols, despite Ambedkar’s own critiques of idolatry.87 Owen Lynch, for instance, describes how in 1957 Agra’s Jatav community replaced its Kans Mela (a fair celebrating the victory of Krishna over his evil uncle Kans) with an Ambedkar Jayanti festival on Ambedkar’s birthday, April 14, which came to include a procession of floats accompanying an Ambedkar bust carried on an elephant. Lynch also analyzes a set of paintings at the 1964 Mela that place Ambedkar in calendar art–style landscapes that might otherwise feature Krishna, Yamunaji, or Shiva.88 This kind of sacralizing commensuration was intensified and 108

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consolidated by violent desecrations of Ambedkar images, public and domestic: stone throwing at Ambedkar’s funeral and commemorative processions such as Ambedkar Jayanti (also witnessed by Lynch in 1964); picture smashing in homes, as was done by Bombay police in the 1974 clashes between the Shiv Sena and the radical Dalit Panthers; beheadings and other forms of destruction of statues and their vandalizing by garlanding with shoes or smearing with mud, tar, or feces.89 The metal cages in which Ambedkar statues have been housed in Tamil Nadu since 2005 speak to the ongoing nature of this threat—indeed, its intensification.90 If, as described earlier, desecration is a mechanism for the animation of icons and their ability to embody communities, it has also been central to the performative vocabulary of caste. Desecration as ritual pollution is the ground on which untouchability has been justified, and desecration as violence is the means by which it has been enforced. If Dalit icons mimicked caste Hindu ones, the caste Hindu response often mimicked the form of desecration via ritual pollution, thereby recuperating the offense of creating a counter-icon to the sensible idioms of caste hierarchy. But in performing this “labour of the negative,” as Taussig calls it, desecration or defacement also exposes the “public secret” of the violence at the heart of the caste order, rendering this antagonism visible.91 The labor of the negative also continues its productive work by posing its own mimetic quandaries, for even destruction calls forth iconopraxis that demands specific forms within the terms of iconic equivalence or commensuration. Thus, a decapitated Ambedkar statue in a village in the Rae Bareli district (figure 2.6) remained wrapped up in a sack in a corner, because the Dalit community there could not think of a way to dispose of it that would follow neither the Hindu practice of immersion nor the Muslim practice of burial. In the distribution of the sensible under discussion here, restricting the visibility of icons is closely intermeshed with restrictions on occupying space; conversely, claims to visibility are also claims to space. According to Nicolas Jaoul, the first public Ambedkar statue in Kanpur was an unauthorized one made of cement, which was damaged when its arm fell off in a clash with police en route to its installation in 1969.92 That attempted installation failed, but four years later, when the Congress government was wooing Dalit votes, the state installed its own civic statue of Ambedkar, this time made of stone. This was one of several early Ambedkar statues of stone or bronze installed by the state in cities such as Delhi, Bombay, and Nagpur. However, from the 1980s onward in the north and from the 1990s in the south they were joined by thousands more, many of them small, informal, cheaply made cement, plaster, D E M O C R AC Y

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Remains of decapitated Ambedkar statue. Rae Bareli district, Uttar Pradesh, June 2009. FIGURE 2.6

and fiberglass statues and busts (figure 2.7). Dalits installed them as a way of asserting their presence—even, Christophe Jaffrelot suggests, as a way of provoking caste Hindus, much as Tilak sought to provoke Hindu-Muslim conflict and catalyze Hindu unity with the Ganapati festival.93 Like the festival, these modest statues provided a means of staking claims to territory, particularly the parcels of land granted to the landless as part of Indira Gandhi’s Twenty Point Program (promulgated during the infamous Emergency of 1975–77) but often not actually given until the 1990s.94 The confidence and ability to stake these claims came out of a number of Dalit mobilizations across western and northern India, at times reaching the south, that both led to and were catalyzed by the Emergency: the militant street politics of the Dalit Panthers (founded in Mumbai in 1972); the struggles in 1977–79 to name Aurangabad’s Marathwada University after Ambedkar; the rise of the Backward and Minority Community Employees Federation, founded by Kanshi Ram in 1973 but inaugurated in 1978; the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti, formed in 1981; and then the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which Kanshi Ram started in 1984.95 Lynch describes how in 1978 Jatavs in Agra finally retaliated against the stone throwing they routinely expe110

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Concrete Ambedkar statue bought because its owner (pictured) had heard he was a famous baba (holy man or saint). Ambedkar is popularly known as Babasaheb, though this does not usually have the same religious connotation. Rae Bareli district, Uttar Pradesh, June 2009. FIGURE 2.7

rienced when their Ambedkar Jayanti procession passed through upper-caste neighborhoods, leading to full-scale, multiple-day rioting. The ensuing parliamentary inquiries led, among other things, to the declaration of Ambedkar Jayanti as a public holiday in Uttar Pradesh.96 So by the time the BSP leader Kumari Mayawati, Kanshi Ram’s protégé, first became chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1995, the BSP and its Dalit constituency were very well acquainted with the power of using icons to occupy public space for catalyzing dissensus, galvanizing the Dalit community, and putting pressure on the state—and with the attendant iconopraxis, violence, and state procedures.97 And they were primed to use it. Mayawati’s terms as chief minister were marked by, among other things, institutional name changes and statue installations: by 1997, fifteen thousand Ambedkar statues had been installed all over Uttar Pradesh, particularly in designated “Ambedkar Villages” (with Dalit populations of 30 percent or more).98 Most notorious, however, was her extravagant state-funded program of monuments, memorials, and parks to commemorate Dalit icons—in particular, Ambedkar and Kanshi D E M O C R AC Y

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Ram Sutar’s memorial statue of B. R. Ambedkar, clearly modeled on the white marble statue of Abraham Lincoln by Daniel Chester French at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Prateek Sthal (Ambedkar memorial), Lucknow, June 2009. FIGURE 2.8

Ram—that started as soon as she came to power in 1995.99 They are mostly located in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh’s state capital, but are also found in Noida, at the boundary with Delhi, right under the central government’s nose. Their centerpiece is the impressive Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal (Bhim Rao Ambedkar Monument to Social Change) in Lucknow, featuring a bronze memorial statue of Ambedkar by Ram Sutar closely modeled on the Lincoln Memorial (figure 2.8). I have discussed this in detail elsewhere, but I want to reiterate two specific points in relation to my argument here.100 First, the Lucknow Ambedkar memorial performs a complex dance of mimesis, commensuration, and differentiation in order to configure a Dalit sārvajanik space and iconopraxis on par with those of caste Hindu, Other Backward Class (OBC), Gandhian, and global publics. Even as it deals in icons, it is not a temple but a memorial whose immense 150-acre site features elements drawing on colonial and postindependence civic statuary, ancient Buddhist sources, and global imperial architecture across the centuries: Lutyens’s Delhi, Akbar’s Fatehpur Sikri, Luxor, 112

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Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Prateek Sthal (Ambedkar memorial), Lucknow, under construction in 2009. The famous elephant colonnade is visible on the right. FIGURE 2.9

Karnak, Persepolis, the ancient Ionian cities of Anatolia, the Pantheon of Rome (figures 2.9 and 2.10). It studiously avoids any elements of Hindu icons, art, or architecture, therefore installing these, by negation, as its primary referents.101 But this negation does not mimic Brahminical exclusion, for the exclusion here is not of caste Hindu visitors but of their symbols. The memorial’s neoclassical elements use stone and bronze, signaling a will to endure in the face of social and political vulnerability (discussed in the previous chapter). It is located directly opposite a symbol of what was then the BSP’s most immediate threat: a park commemorating the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, built by the BSP’s early collaborators and then archrivals, the Samajwadi Party (SP), whose OBC followers were the primary perpetrators of anti-Dalit iconoclasm by the 2000s. The invocation of Lincoln in Ram Sutar’s main Ambedkar statue draws a parallel between casteism and slavery, while its plaque, which reads “Mera jeevan sangharsh hi mera sandesh hai” (My life’s struggle is my only message) is styled on and closely echoes—but differently—the caption that often features on Sutar’s sculptures of Gandhi: “Mera jeevan hi mera sandesh hai” (My life is D E M O C R AC Y

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Front approach to main Ambedkar memorial (Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar Smarak). The Ambedkar statue, framed by the central arch, is visible when ascending the steps. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal, Lucknow, June 2009. FIGURE 2.10

my only message). Ambedkar’s message is a call to politics; Gandhi’s, to ethics. Both messages are attached to their own bodies and personae, which therefore both invite mimicry and claim iconicity. These plaques stage another layer of mimetic intimacy and commensuration between antagonists: because of the Poona Pact, Gandhi is anathema to the BSP. This memorial can also be seen as a sārvajanik space, for by this time Mayawati was addressing an expanded political constituency that she called the sarvajan (all the people, not just the bahujan), that included caste Hindus alongside Dalits. This reappropriation of earlier configurations of the sārvajanik builds on Phule’s influential early critique of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. Consistent with Phule’s vision of the sarvajan, nobody is excluded at the Ambedkar memorial; there are no conditions for entry other than a nominally priced ticket. The key difference from the Hindu-hegemonic sarvajan unfolds at the level of the sensible. In contrast to the verdant Birla Mandir, the sensorium of the memorial’s sparse landscaping and vast expanses of stone call up the legacy of exposure to the heat and glare of the sun to which Dalits (as putatively “natural” laborers) historically have been subjected, universalizing 114

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this corporeal experience rather than the variously meditative, playful, erotic, and martial modalities of the forest ashram.102 And unlike the Birla Mandir, the Ganapati Utsav, and the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, the Ambedkar memorial reconstitutes the polity in terms not of religious nationalism but of the authority and beneficence of the BSP-led state, which is repeatedly—indeed, excessively—thematized in its statuary and murals and ultimately embodied in Mayawati herself. Here Latour’s Dingpolitik—the dissensual, outdoor, thingly public emerging via thousands of modest Ambedkar icons claiming the Dalit right to space—is reterritorialized in the body politic; Mayawati returns as Leviathan. This reterritorialization was widely interpreted in the mainstream media as megalomania, but as I am arguing, this was an insufficiently materialist and object-driven move that missed the crucial redistribution of the sensible at work here. This interpretation fueled the media frenzy accompanying Mayawati’s building program, particularly once she expanded the area and budget for the Ambedkar memorial when the BSP came into power in its own right in 2007. The Outlook story from 2008 with which this chapter began was an early, thoughtful piece; in 2009, Mayawati was the target of a public interest litigation for wasting public money on her own “whims and fancies,” and the influential television journalist Prannoy Roy was representing public opinion as “infuriated and sickened.”103 But, of course, this mainstream—that is, nonDalit and primarily caste Hindu—media antagonism played right into the politics of iconoclash that have been Mayawati’s bread and butter.104 To Dalits and those in solidarity with them, the mass-mediated public critique of Mayawati was yet another instance of desecration, albeit virtual; like physical defacements, it not only iconized Mayawati and kept her visible, but, more to the point, it simultaneously revealed the public secret of caste antagonism and highlighted its invisibility to the mainstream public.105 Here mass mediation added the axiom of “any publicity is good publicity” to the potency of iconoclash, taking iconoclash to another level by expanding the arena of recognition. In this sense, even before they were opened to the public, Mayawati’s monuments were efficacious through their double labor of the negative. If critique’s “exposure” of megalomania, corruption, bread and circuses, and so on performed a certain kind of defacement, the monuments’ own unimpeachable claim to recognition for Dalits (whatever might be said about Mayawati) in turn exposed this critique as defacement. This prolonged massmediated performance of conflict and antagonism—this dissensus—was what it took to bring Mayawati’s Dalit monuments into visibility and onto a plane of commensuration and equivalence with monuments to Gandhi or Lincoln, and D E M O C R AC Y

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with the Hindu-hegemonic sārvajanik space. What mainstream critiques have failed to recognize is that this “symbolic” struggle for recognition is part and parcel of the struggle for redistribution, for the oppression of Dalits has been perpetrated through a distribution of the sensible that has not allowed economic success to translate to social mobility.106 The unmaskers unmasked—a limitless process—and the power of iconoclash now widely palpable, the images cascaded thicker and faster, particularly in the intensified media ecology of the 2000s. By now all political players apprehended the value of Dalit recognition—and, indeed, of recognition in general. Mimetic appropriations also continued thick and fast, bringing Dalit and caste Hindu practices into ever more intimate circuits of exchange. For one, Ambedkar statues were yet again brought back onto the terrain of caste Hindu purity and pollution, this time not via desecration but via protests against it that mimicked both casteist idioms of offense from Hindu nationalist victimology and the form of Hindu purificatory rituals.107 In Jalandhar (Punjab) in 2005, Chaudhary Jagjit Singh, a Congress Party Legislative Assembly member, garlanded a civic Ambedkar statue on Ambedkar Jayanti; however, because the Congress government had withdrawn Ambedkar Jayanti’s status as a public holiday and atrocities against Dalits had increased, BSP workers objected that the statue had been touched by those who “did not believe” in Ambedkar’s principles. In other words, it had been desecrated. They therefore washed it with milk—a Hindu form of ritual purification—before garlanding it afresh.108 Similarly, in 2008 in Vijaywada members of the Telugu Desam Party and “Dalit groups” cleansed a Congress politician’s insults to Ambedkar by pouring milk onto a statue of Ambedkar at the Tummalapallivari Kshetrayya Kalakshetram.109 Such ritual uses of milk had already featured in inter-Dalit conflict there: in 1997, members of the Dalit Mala community (the second largest in Andhra Pradesh) had protested against subcategorization demands by the Madigas (the largest Dalit group) by garlanding and pouring milk over an Ambedkar statue in Vijaywada.110 Vijaywada is one of the fastest growing towns in India, with a 135-ft. Hanuman; this points to a correlation between opportunities for economic and social mobility and an intensification of emergent iconopraxis. However, these circuits of exchange between caste Hindu and Dalit iconopraxis are a matter not just of Dalit “Sanskritization” but also, conversely, of Hindu nationalist reappropriation. The widespread adoption of the statue form across political parties in the 2000s can also be read as a mimetic response to the way Dalit assertion intensified and co-opted the process, mobilized by Tilak and others, of bringing the power of icons and iconoclash into 116

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an explicitly political public arena. This Dalit appropriation was already underway by the 1920s and 1930s in the form of processions, but the territorial claims from the 1970s onward mobilized permanent, public statues, of which Mayawati’s monuments became the most spectacular and controversial instance. Meanwhile, as outlined in the previous chapter, domestic capitalists and neospiritualist organizations were building larger and larger public icons. So the technical, generic, and political conditions were ripe for Hindutva’s use of massive scale as a retort to the vast numbers—the bahujan—of Dalit Ambedkar and Buddha statues and for a reinvigorated assertion of political icons to counter Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram, and Mayawati. Recall that one of the first religious statues initiated by a politician, the BJP’s Yogesh Patel, was the Sarveshwar Mahadev Shiva, inaugurated in 2002 (the year of the infamous Godhra riots in Gujarat) in Vadodara’s Sursagar Lake. Sarveshwar (sarva, “everything/all”; ishwar, “god”), “god of all,” also adopts the idiom of the sārvajanik. This statue was enabled by the BJP’s consolidation of power in Gujarat, a BJP stronghold since 1995. (The BJP did not come to power at the center until 1998–2004.) It is thus no surprise that Narendra Modi adopted the monumental statue idiom in his 2010 proposal for the Statue of Unity to celebrate ten years as chief minister of Gujarat. Enter the statues of Shivaji, Sardar Patel, and Thamizh Thaai: monsters unleashed by the state to subsume the people into a singular body politic, poised to swallow up (through inclusion) or spit out (through exclusion) the Dalit, Muslim, Christian, and Indigenous “parts of no part.” Like Tilak’s processions, the Birla Mandir, the Vivekananda Rock Memorial, the Thiruvalluvar statue, and Mayawati’s memorials, the later statue projects have sought to actualize forms of the sārvajanik through their simultaneous assertion and promise of territorial sovereignty and access to resources, enacting a claim to space and a demonstration of infrastructural capacity. The Shivaji project’s vision was to dominate the “Gateway to India”; Thamizh Thaai sought to encapsulate the “Tamil landscape”; and the Statue of Unity aimed to enact Gujarat’s and India’s globality. As I elaborate in chapters 4 and 5, such figures—much like the Statue of Liberty—play with a circuit of scales, looking both outward and inward to assert their constituents’ place in the world and, in so doing, create this constituency as a constituency. Tilak’s sārvajanik public constituted Indians as Hindus by mapping them onto urban localities and pitting them against both Muslims and the colonial state—that is, against both an internal and an external other. Similarly, the Statue of Unity’s bid for Indians’ outward-facing “global” stature is located at a site from which an estimated forty-one thousand families, the majority of them Indigenous D E M O C R AC Y

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people, were displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Dam, and several more villages faced flooding because of the statue project. However, according to the project’s official website, one of its primary features is “icon based rural and tribal development.”111 Indigenous people are the new frontier for the violence of inclusion: they, along with Muslims, have been subjected to a renewed push to “reconversion” from Christianity to Hinduism from the late 1990s onward, even as they are bearing the brunt of India’s exploding resource extraction as mining pushes into once-protected forest areas. In this movement, known as Ghar Wapsi (homecoming), Arya Samaji shuddhi (purification) returns in a clearly territorialized form, predicated on the Aryadharmi assumption is that India is not the home ( ghar) of Christians and Muslims.112 This also reminds us that even as we might speak of a new frontier and new forms, they do not replace the old ones. As I explore in the next chapter, even as new forms are introduced, generating processes of commensuration, mimesis, and redistribution, none of the old forms has disappeared. They, too, persist and mutate, forming layers and circuits with the new ones. Ganapati Utsav and Durga Puja are upscaling and booming under corporate sponsorship; new temple building continues apace; old temples are renovating and expanding, as is also the case for mosques and gurudwaras (in 2012, the foundation stone was laid for the Sha’ar-e-Mubarak Grand Masjid in Kozhikode/Calicut, primarily funded by Persian Gulf–based nonresident Indians, projected to become the largest mosque in India).113 What has fallen into relative disuse in political discourse, however, is the term sārvajanik. Other than Mayawati’s invocation of the sarvajan, it largely disappeared after independence, perhaps because the new republic was supposed to be just that: sārvajanik. While it is used to describe festival committees (sārvajanik mandal), which are still key to grassroots political organizing in western India, and appears in the names of a few educational and charitable trusts, its most common current usage is in signs for sārvajanik suvidhayein (“public conveniences,” toilets). There is something appropriate about this, for it signals another persistence that impedes the constitution of a true sarvajan: the structural and infrastructural conditions that undergird continued Dalit employment in sanitation and janitorial work and the ongoing perception of Dalits as ritually polluted. My focus on the sārvajanik illuminates how emergent media at various moments and sites have been harnessed to constituting publics within a politics of access to the twinned goods of resources and status or recognition, unfolding through commensurative, mimetic relays in a competitive plural 118

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polity. Key to this politics is the spectacle of control over sacralized space, as are the bodies that move through it, ultimately because the control of bodies in space is still key to the performance of social hierarchy. The news media remind us every day of how this performance unfolds and is contested not just through the now old “new” media described earlier but through even older media: killings, blindings, rapes, burnings, desecrations, speeches, songs, processions, massed bodies. New forms emerge into milieux dealing with very old problems constantly made anew, not least the sārvajanik problem of caste.

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3

ICONOPRAXIS Modern statistics is the strongest language of all. —TALAL ASAD To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticed in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception. —WALTER BENJAMIN The aura and its decline are . . . part of the same system. — GEORGES DIDI- HUBERMAN

RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR

Chapter 2 examined some of the emergent images, spaces, and publics generated when religious images, and iconopraxis more broadly, came into assemblage with new image technologies and the sensible forms of governmentality, particularly electoral representation: its logics of inclusion and recognition, its operation of commensuration, and their material infrastructures. Here, new image technologies—public festivals and processions, illusionist paint-

ing techniques, mass-reproduced icons, temple architecture and landscaping, public statues—effected a commensuration in the register of the sensible between otherwise heterogeneous bodies of “religious” practice.1 Medium, genre, and style served here as vehicles of commensuration, generating what Walter Benjamin calls a “sense of the universal equality of things” in a manner akin to statistics.2 So did the notion of “religion,” bringing heterogeneous sections of the polity onto a plane of sensible equivalence, “as much for thinking as for perception.” Just as colonial governmentality’s commensurative categories gained constitutive force through biopolitical instruments such as the census and then the (aptly named) Constitution, they were also institutionalized, naturalized, and rendered efficacious in a religious register by new images and media performing publicly visible ritual iconopraxis.3 The representational equivalence of communities on the basis of religion laid down a new, common infrastructure for iconopraxis that both interfaced with the state and remained beyond its secular purview. This chapter continues to explore this assemblage and its generation of new forms of iconopraxis and recognition, particularly in relation to monumental statues, but with an emphasis on the layering and circuitry—the two-way traffic—between emergent and existing forms. The stake here is taking the next step beyond the very useful moves made so far in looking at vernacular icons, such as Chris Pinney’s or Sumathi Ramaswamy’s arguments that the nationalism that popular prints index and engender is shot through with religiosity.4 Pinney calls this “messianism,” after Benedict Anderson, who in turn follows Benjamin. This nationalism goes beyond scientific mapping to visualize territory as a space of enchantment or a mother goddess and to depict themes of martyrdom and sacrifice that point to the centrality of the sacred and subaltern radical militancy. But these imagebased refutations of Anderson’s much-critiqued account of secular nationalism are more concerned with nationalism than with religion, thus leaving intact nationalism’s basic assumptions about religion. Quite aside from the question of whether Benjamin’s singular retake on the specifically Judaic term messianism is appropriate for the religiosities in play here, these accounts do not dwell on, first, whether what “persists” if religion never went away is the same as what we imagine to have existed before; and second, whether religion and secularism are mutually exclusive. What this forecloses is an examination of what kinds of other things religiosity turns into in its articulation with the institutions of a secular, democratic nation-state. The idea that modernity is necessarily secular or that religion is a thing of the past has been soundly critiqued and is disproved every day in the news. But certain lingering conceptual habits from a polarizing and temporally linear—not to ICONOPRAXIS

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mention Orientalizing—schema, which pits the religious/traditional/archaic (barbaric, superstitious, irrational) past against the secular/modern/contemporary (civilized, enlightened, scientific) present, tend to underpin our understandings of religiosity and, hence, the work of these understandings in the world. This is evident not only in any instance of contemporary Islamophobia, but also in many pat dismissals of, say, Hindutva or Christian fundamentalism. Perhaps one reason for the stickiness of these habits is that there is indeed a distinction to be made between those forms of religiosity that are not shaped in relation to a secular horizon, or within what Charles Taylor has called the “immanent frame,” and those that are: between pre- and postsecular forms, if one wanted to use temporalizing terms.5 The confusion arises when these forms are lumped together under the singular rubric of religion and is further compounded by the ways in which they do in fact come into assemblage, interacting with and informing each other, as when revivalist movements make primordialist claims for religiously authorized ideas or practices (creationism, polygamy, caste, taboo on homosexuality, control of women’s bodies, and so on). So religion or the sacred is neither simply that which is rendered obsolete nor that which “persists” in some kind of authentic, essential, or singular form, but in practice ends up being treated as both, even as it is constantly being remade to become a prolific site of emergence—indeed, in order to become productive in this way. Modernity is commonly associated with the separation of church and state, on the one hand, and the rise of commodity capitalism, on the other. Correspondingly, there are two corollaries of thinking the religious-secular binary along a linear timeline on which the secular is the modern. One is that any overlap between religious practices and statecraft is a regression; this underpins secular accusations that religious nationalism is atavistic. The second is the idea that the commodification of religious practices is a secularizing process, entailing an instrumentalist materialism that deviates from a spiritual core of religious experience. Thus, questions to me about the commercialism and “Disneyfication” of monumental statues and theme parks are sometimes framed in terms of secularization or deauraticization. (I return to the notion of Disneyfication in the next chapter.) Likewise, Tapati Guha-Thakurta cites “the familiar Bengali lament about the desacralization of the religious occasion” of Durga Puja attendant on its intensified corporate sponsorship.6 As we will see, a similar sense of inappropriateness underlies some visitors’ responses to the spectacular, commodified postliberalization public religion at monumental statue sites. The assumption in both cases, which also takes on a moral valence, is that worldly instrumentality, material profit, and public spectacle are 122

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antithetical to religion’s higher, more abstract, and transcendental concerns. Or, in other words, they are antithetical to that form of privatized, interiorized, and spiritualized (Judeo-Christian, Protestant) religion that is compatible with modernity’s liberal self-descriptions, particularly its functional separation of politics, commerce, and religion, culture, or sociality.7 But how useful or accurate is it to think in these linear, polarized, and disaggregated terms when faced with modernity’s actually existing unevenness and temporal heterogeneity? Modern states everywhere—not least in Europe and North America—articulate with religion in some form, whether explicitly or by virtue of drawing on the vocabularies, tropes, and genres of religious practices.8 As Talal Asad cautions, however, this does not imply simply characterizing states or nationalism as religious. Rather, it requires attending to how the categories of religion and the secular are defined in particular contexts, or to what science studies has termed the “boundary-work” between them.9 The context I am concerned with must contend with the legacy of the colonial institution of a culturalized exception—the “bazaar”—that both reinforced and chafed against the “native” enmeshment of religion, commerce, and sociality (see the introduction). Here it is clear that, rather than assuming the separation of the material and the spiritual as an essential feature of religion, it is better to treat their separation and their rearticulation as active processes through which these categories take on varying discursive and performative salience. The question of boundary-work is therefore not just one of when and how distinctions are made between categories, but also of when and how the categories come to be blurred or conjoined. In this and the next chapter, I explore how the productive boundary-work and layering between the religious and the secular, the spiritual and the material, and different modalities of iconopraxis have generated new iconic and religious forms, including monumental statues, expanding the avenues for social, economic, and political mobility in the postreform economy. This chapter starts on the religious side and the next on the secular and commercial side, but both succumb to inevitable entanglement. The focus in this chapter is on the expanding forms of material iconopraxis, or what people do with icons and icons do with people (creation, patronage, engagement, discourse, efficacy), and how these forms extend the ambit and capacities of institutional—and institutionalizable—religion. A key element of this institutionalization, I argue, is the deployment and naturalization of a discourse of quantification that brings the sacred authority of numbers into assemblage with the enumerative idioms that legitimize governmentality and the economic logics of mass markets. So I begin by continuing the discussion ICONOPRAXIS

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of liberal-democratic commensuration’s assemblage with iconopraxis, venturing some speculative propositions about the uptake of enumeration by (neo) spiritual movements. Benjamin sees mass reproduction as an “adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality” that expands the exhibitionary address of the bourgeois artwork via a commensurative perception akin to statistical thinking. Similarly, I place the quantitative, commensurative aspects of the publicness and scale of big statues within the frame of a more general expansion and reconfiguration of institutional religion in its “adjustment” to demographic governmentality. Chapter 2 shows how sārvajanik (public) festivals, temples, and statues, emerging as claims to political participation, had both de- and reterritorializing aspects: they fueled antihegemonic claims, but they also enabled a more inclusive and expansive reinstitutionalization of hegemonic caste Hindu religiosity. Both aspects generated alternatives to the Brahminical control of cultic icons, unleashing an ongoing redistribution of the sensible that further articulated with the commensurative (not to be mistaken for egalitarian) forces of consumerism in the postliberalization era. In this chapter, I analyze iconopraxis at specific monumental statue sites to demonstrate that alternatives to priestly privilege have meant not its erosion but new circuits of mutual reinforcement. Nor do alternatives to priestly intercession entail the decline of religious patronage. Again, on the contrary, they have expanded opportunities for it and for conversions between state and nonstate forms of power and sovereignty, as well as between symbolic and economic capital.10 I conclude by discussing the implications of this for rethinking Benjamin’s account of the value, power, and efficacy of images in his influential but enigmatic artwork essay—in particular, the distinction between cult value and exhibition value and the fate of the aura in the age of mass reproduction.

NUMBERS AND THE MATTER OF SPIRIT

Bernard Cohn’s paradigmatic listing of the enumerative as one of the “investigative modalities” that shaped British colonial knowledge of India has focused discussions of enumeration in India on operations of governmentality.11 Here the production of statistical facts through the census produced and reified social categories. But this taxonomic operation also backfired, according to Sudipta Kaviraj, by providing unity and salience to what had until then been “fuzzy” communities that now demanded democratic representation.12 Having been enumerated for the census, these communities now demanded to literally “count” in the electoral scheme and, as the previous chapter described, 124

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in the distribution of the sensible. After independence, the Nehruvian state’s calculative project was directed toward planning and welfare, particularly for the urban and rural poor, aiding improvement schemes and maintaining control over land management. Much like the colonial census, as Asher Ghertner recounts in relation to the Delhi Development Authority’s “slum surveys,” this calculative idiom was reappropriated by nongovernmental organization (NGO) countersurveys that claimed greater legitimacy and became a tool for political demands.13 However, Ghertner argues that by the 2000s the state’s enumerative modality was seen as inefficient and unreliable and had given way to an aesthetic modality in which aesthetic judgments and visual appearances—of dirt, crowding, and disorder in the case of slums—were paramount. Here municipal bureaucracies adopted the optic of the “world-class city,” whose main goal is to attract investors and tourists. Given his focus on governmentality, Ghertner does not dwell further on the dissemination of calculative rationality from state to nonstate actors (via the countersurvey) accompanying the state’s use of quantifying technologies. But as Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff observe for South Africa around the same time, “The tide of statistics . . . is swelled, in this age of neoliberalism, by the ever more statelike exertions of nongovernmental organizations and the private sector.”14 Therefore, they argue, the range of “sites and styles” constituting the political field, particularly under the neoliberal dispensation, cannot be understood solely via governmentality as an “all-purpose social regulation.”15 This is also germane to India and other sites, both postcolonial and metropolitan, that feature layered sovereignties and nongovernmental “infrapower.”16 India’s neoliberal market reforms of the late 1980s onward, I would suggest, generated a new wave of constitutive demographic effects of the “strong language” of enumeration and statistics, operationalized through the nonstate biopower of private corporations, NGOs, and the media. This nonstate biopower rearticulated with the technics of the state through projects such as the biometric Aadhaar card.17 But, pace Ghertner, this is approached more usefully as a matter of additive layering and circuitry than of linear replacement: not either numbers or aesthetics, but both. Further, pace the Comaroffs, while nonstate uses of numbers might be exacerbated by neoliberal reforms, attending to religion also reveals a deeper genealogy of “statelike” quantification. As enumeration came to be naturalized as a source of state authority, it also provided a potent new source of legitimacy and value in the expanding institutional domains of iconopraxis—that is, in the realm of religion. Among the many palpable effects of economic reforms in India was the subjection of a hitherto “fuzzy” market (the trading communities of the bazaar ICONOPRAXIS

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have been notoriously secretive about financial matters) to various forms of quantified and objectified representation, as corporate operations adopted the style of “transparency” to investors and advertising was harnessed to market research. These market-driven enumerative processes dovetailed with changes in media financing and distribution structures, so the boom in television and print media (including, notably, in the vernaculars) and the reconfiguration of the film industry around multiplexes were also caught up in the numbersoriented, virtualized logic of advertising to imagined niche audiences and investors. But at the same time, as both Nitin Govil and Tejaswini Ganti have described for the Bombay cinema after it was finally granted official industry status in 1998, the statistics that were produced in these paroxysms of number crunching and graph production also had a highly fuzzy provenance.18 Importantly, Govil also acknowledges the salience of numerology here, remarking on the film industry’s “slippage between science and superstition that is constitutive of modernity as well as its alternatives.”19 The coexistence of numerically and numerologically based decisions is entirely consistent with the industry’s genealogy in the bazaar, but it took on sudden visibility in the postreform media boom—for instance, in the rash of quirky numerological spellings of film titles and stars’ names.20 It is also consistent with the intense corporatization of quasi-scientific “traditional” knowledge systems: alternative healing; “spiritual” personal development and organizational management; dietary supplements; beauty products; and the use of Vastu Shastra (cosmological principles for spatial arrangements) in real estate development, architecture, and interior design. The burgeoning value of these neotraditional knowledges draws on, and reinforces, the popular and historiographical hegemony of Brahminical classical Sanskrit traditions and the instant aura and authority attached to the so-called Vedic period (around 1500–800 BCE, when the sacred texts the Vedas were composed). At the same time, it reformulates these traditions via a numerical discourse whose history warrants further investigation. While there are scholarly accounts of Indian mathematics—which also depend on Sanskrit textual sources—it is unclear how and when specific numbers and forms of enumeration, including numerology, gained their current preeminence in iconopraxis.21 Why is it, for instance, that chapters from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) publication Punya-Bhoomi Bharat: Introduction to Map of the Sacred Land Bharat, published in 1993, are titled “Five Lakes,” “Seven Mountains,” “Four Abodes of God,” “Seven Cities Conferring Moksha,” and “Twelve Jyotirlingas”?22 A history of this emphasis on numbers would aid a deeper understanding of the assemblage of numerological, techno-corporate, and governmental 126

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enumeration at postreform monumental statue sites. The number 108, for instance, is the most common sacred number in contemporary Hinduism; accordingly, the most favored height so far for these statues has been 108 ft. Instances include the 108-ft. Hanuman at the “108 Foot Sankat Mochan Dham” in Delhi between the Karol Bagh and Jhandewalan metro stations (built 1994– 2007); the Shiva (2007) and Durga (2018) at Ganga Talao in Mauritius; the 2010 Hanuman in Shimla; the 2011 Shiva at Solophok in Sikkim; and the 2012 Basaveshwara at Basavakalyan. Another significant height is 101 ft., as with the Hanumans in Chhatarpur (2002) and Chhindwara (2014); 101 is an auspicious sum, particularly for gifts of money, where one rupee is added to a round number to invite barkat (growth or abundance). Even before liberalization’s intensified corporate quantification, the secularist state’s calculative governmentality was already in assemblage with the aura of numbers via nationalist and regionalist cultural mobilization. Recall the mimetic chain at Kanyakumari discussed in the previous chapter, starting with the 79-ft. Gandhi memorial (its height reflecting the age at which Gandhi died), leading via the Vivekananda Rock Memorial to another numerically significant statue, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader M. Karunanidhi’s secular—indeed, atheist—133-ft. statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar. Foregrounding the Tamil language (the DMK’s primary platform, along with anti-Brahminism), the height of the statue signifies the 133 chapters of Thiruvalluvar’s ethical treatise the Tirukkural, a nonreligious classic of Tamil Sangam literature. The 38-ft. base of the statue represents the thirty-eight chapters in the first section, and the 95-ft. figure represents the second and third sections. The statue was inaugurated on another significant date: January 1, 2000, the turn of the millennium. This statue was a turning point at which scale became an important feature of modern iconic figures. Unable to draw directly on cultic authority (in Benjamin’s sense of the authority attached to auratic religious sites), this atheist icon had to find another basis for its value and power. It found this in the numbers associated with the authority of archaic canonical texts. Here its attempt to inscribe Tamil as an equivalent to Sanskrit maintained the sensible infrastructure that upheld the power of literacy and, hence, the hierarchical order of caste. Similarly, its carved granite was a secular appropriation of the stone sculpture idiom of Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian temple form, its scale further reinforcing the association of height with an address to Dalits excluded from the sanctum (achieved in temples via the spectacular, publicly visible entrance tower [gopuram]). So the statue’s invocation of numbers, its canonical materials, and its form expanded the ambit of Brahminical textual and ritual authority ICONOPRAXIS

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Char Dham pilgrimage-cum-cultural complex. Visible are the giant Shiva statue, Char Dham, jyotirlinga shrines, and Kirateshwar statue. Solophok, Namchi, Sikkim, March 2013. FIGURE 3.1

rather than refuting its logic. It is hardly surprising, then, that the idioms of scale and numbers could also be recuperated back to Hindu icons. Along with height, enumeration at big statue sites surfaces in replicas of quantified religious features, directly echoing the enumerative RSS geography of “the sacred land Bharat” in the book Punya-Bhoomi Bharat, cited earlier. Thus, the twelve jyotirlingas (Shiva shrines) figure as animated dioramas in a circumambulatory path within the body of the Kemp Fort Shiva (1995) and in a series of standalone mini-shrines encircling the 108-ft. Shiva statue at the Char Dham pilgrimage-cum-cultural complex at Solophok Hill, near Namchi, Sikkim, the constituency of Pawan Chamling, then Sikkim’s chief minister (figure 3.1). The Char Dham (also known as Siddheshwar Dham) website describes these replicas in the language of commensuration, as offering “one platform for Shiva devotees.”23 This “one platform” service extends to small-scale replicas of the Char Dham, the major Hindu pilgrimage centers that Punya-Bhoomi Bharat calls the “Four Abodes of God,” located roughly at the four cardinal points of India: Dwarka, Puri, Badrinath, and Rameswaram. (Dwarka and Puri are also mathas [monastic orders] established by Shankara, the eighth-century 128

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founder of Advaita Vedanta.) Further, the exterior walls of the main Shiva temple on which the big Shiva statue rests feature relief panels of the nine forms of the goddess Durga. Why does this numerological and replicative program feature at such sites, and so extensively at Char Dham in particular? The historian of science Theodore Porter, writing about Western Europe and the United States after the French Revolution, relates the “trust in numbers,” and the recourse to quantitative objectification more generally, to the conditions of distrust stemming from the breakdown of old hierarchies and social authority.24 The reliance on numbers and quantitative manipulation “minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust” and has therefore been central to bureaucratic governmentality, underpinning the authority of otherwise unimportant officials. It also enables translation or commensuration over disparate regimes of intelligibility and is therefore what he calls “a technology of distance.” The turn to numbers and replication at the Char Dham and elsewhere can be seen as a similar move that mimics and deploys the secular authority of enumeration, institutionalized and naturalized via governmentality and revitalized by economic reforms. Here quantification shores up religious authority and legitimacy at new sites unable to make cultic claims of the usual sort, such as the miraculous appearance of an icon or lingam, association with a powerful holy figure (e.g., Shankara), or a mythic narrative. These new sites are where they are because their patrons want them there for their own strategic reasons. (Of course, this is likely the case for established cultic temples, too, but seldom features in their mythology.) The value of the newer sites for iconopraxis derives primarily from their publicness: inclusivity, ease of access (such as the provision of a one-stop shop, or “platform”), novelty, and spectacular display—what Benjamin called exhibition value—rather than from the ancientness, singular location, sequestration, and ritual maintenance by priests that constitute cult value (a distinction I return to later).25 Crucially, however, this is not to say that “cult” features are irrelevant to these sites, for they are also often at work indirectly or secondhand, through circuits with older, more established temples. For instance, the Shankaracharya or head of the Dwarka Peetha, one of the four dhams (holy abodes), inaugurated the Char Dham complex at Solophok, thereby authorizing its replicas of the dhams (figure 3.2). But at the same time, such circuits of legitimation also depend on maintaining a boundary between the cultic and the spectacular, for without this distinction, the cultic would lose its special power. Thus, photography is strictly prohibited inside the replicated Char Dham temples (figure 3.3), protecting the replicated aura (an oxymoron to ICONOPRAXIS

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Shankaracharya Swaroopananda Saraswati (right) featured on a sign along the road leading to the Char Dham complex, March 2013. FIGURE 3.2

Sign prohibiting photography inside a temple at the Char Dham complex, March 2013. FIGURE 3.3

which I return) of their replicated sancta sanctorum, in contradistinction to the made-to-be-photographed gigantic Shiva and 16-ft. Kirateshwar, a local form of Shiva venerated by the Kirant community (figure 3.4). The statue of Kirateshwar establishes two types of circuits. Its resemblance to the site’s effective patron, Chief Minister Chamling (figure 3.5), and its representation of his community link it to state politics. But it also refers to the famous Kirateshwar Mahadev temple in Legship, West Sikkim, with its miraculous lingam and mythical connections to the Mahabharata. Thus, a tourist pamphlet for the Char Dham is able to claim, in its heading for the section on the Kirateshwar statue, “Solophok Hill has a historical fact in religious belief.” As we will see, this additive formulation of heterogeneous sources of authority and onto- epistemological frames—history and religion, fact and belief, number and spirit— often pervades the self-presentation of such sites. This layering extends to their visual regimes, as priestly control of the devotional gaze melds with secular control via surveillance, legitimated by the discourse of risk characterizing neoliberal states. The Char Dham is peppered with signs warning of CCTV cameras (figure 3.6), just as the Swaminarayan cult’s Akshardham temples ban photography and cell phones and tightly police the flow of visitors (following an attack at Gandhinagar’s Akshardham in 2002). The drive for quantitative authority extends to other novel religious forms and to neospiritual movements in general. As we saw in chapter 1, one strand in the genealogy of the monumental statue form was its early adoption by neospiritual movements espousing an expansive, inclusive, devotional Hinduism, often with global aspirations. The first patrons of Kashinath and his son Sridhar’s concrete statues were the Chinmaya Mission, the Vishwa Shanti Ashram, and the businessman Ravi V. Melwani (a.k.a. RVM), a follower of the Sadhu Vaswani Mission (whose leader at the time, Dada J. P. Vaswani, held an master’s degree in physics). The Chinmaya Mission commissioned three concrete deities of increasing heights between 1980 and 2002; Shri Chinmaya, closely associated with the RSS in founding the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), had been a major player in the building of the Vivekananda Rock Memorial. As described in chapter 2, the rock memorial was the immediate precursor to the establishment of the VHP as part of a numbers game that sought to unite global Hindus under its umbrella against Muslims and Christians. This quantifying sensibility continues to pervade the mission’s worldwide centers, which seek to “provide to individuals from any background, the wisdom of Vedanta,” with the motto: “To give maximum happiness to maximum people for maximum time.”26 This mantra of the maximum is consistent with the globalizing imICONOPRAXIS

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FIGURE 3.4

Kirateshwar statue at the Char Dham complex, March 2013.

Roadside sign en route to the Char Dham complex, featuring Pawan Chamling with the president of India, March 2013. FIGURE 3.5

FIGURE 3.6

March 2013.

Surveillance warning near jyotirlinga shrines, Char Dham complex,

peratives of inclusion and translatability across “backgrounds,” fulfilling the missionary objective of increasing Hindu numbers. It is also consistent with the use of quantification as a “technology of distance” deployed in the absence of ongoing face-to-face interactions. The mission’s website even features a “Spiritual Miles” program, with quantified activities through which devotees can accrue spiritual mileage points under the categories “service,” “study,” and “spiritual practices” (donating labor, downloading apps, or purchasing books and courses, as well as counting rounds with prayer beads). This melding of spirituality and quantification may seem like a contradiction, but, on the contrary, the “spiritual” is eminently suited to quantifiable abstractions enabling its animation, expansion, and mobility, as opposed to the singular materialities of ritual activities centered on specific powerful sites. Anything, animate or inanimate, bounded or infinite, present or remote, can be a vehicle of “spirit”; spirit is the ultimate medium of commensuration (as art historians know well, for what is it that gives a period a style but the “spirit of the age”?). Spirituality is also a medium par excellence of hegemony through what Lise McKean identifies as its ability to simultaneously effect universal inclusion and the reinstitution of hierarchical relations; like concrete, it is structurally duplicitous (see chapter 1).27 This is why Vedantism in particular (the doctrine espoused by the eighth-century Shankara, the nineteenth-century Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and the twentieth-century Chinmaya), with its putative rejection of canonical rituals, has become such a capacious set of hegemonic philosophies, harnessed to reformist movements and to their institutionalization, as well as to the democratic discourse of inclusion and the expansive axiomatic of capital.28 Another instance of Vedantist quantification is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), also known as the Hare Krishnas, whose mammoth temple in Bangalore, inaugurated in 1997, requires visitors to repeat the same mantra on each of 108 steps just to get in (echoing, if not inspired by, a similar ritual at the Shiv Mandir at Kemp Fort, described later). In 2017, ISKCON Bangalore was also developing proposals for its Chandrodaya Mandir in Vrindavan, a “nice skyscraper temple” with a 700-ft. spire, and for a “grand-scale” Krishna Lila theme park on the Kanakapura Road just outside Bangalore.29 The enumerative mode is not confined to self-identified Vedantist organizations, however; it has become an increasingly common idiom for many postliberalization neospiritual organizations. Already on the Kanakapura Road since 1986 is the verdant 70-acre campus of the Art of Living ashram, one of hundreds of centers in 155 countries of an “educational and humanitar-

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ian movement engaged in stress-management and service initiatives” based in yoga and meditation, led by the doubly honorific (quantity at work again) Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, “humanitarian leader, spiritual teacher and ambassador of peace.”30 The Art of Living invokes spirituality but does not identify itself as a religious movement. Here the inverse relationship between quantification via spirituality and explicitly cultic religious authority reaches its apotheosis: as of 2013, the Art of Living had set twelve Guinness World Records (an Indian obsession that warrants further investigation) for its “mega-events,” including the world’s largest vegetarian buffet, the largest bhangra dance, the largest sing-along, and the largest bagpipe ensemble.31 Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swami of Mysore’s Avadhoota Datta Peetham, builder of an 85-ft. Hanuman in Trinidad (discussed in chapter 5), came next in 2018 with nine Guinness World Records.32 Quantification as a medium of expansion for new religious institutions, in circuitry with canonical sources of religious authority, is particularly evident in the Indian diaspora with its more fragile claims to the mythic and historical aura of place. Monumental statues in the diaspora include Hanumans at Carapichaima, Trinidad (85 ft., 2003), Chatsworth in Durban, South Africa (40 ft., 2010), or Richmond Hill near Toronto (50 ft., 2016); Murugan at the Batu Caves in Malaysia (135 ft., 2006); and Shiva at the sacred lake known as Ganga Talao/Grand Bassin in Mauritius (108 ft., 2007), with a 108-ft. Durga (“the biggest Durga statue in the world,” 2018).33 At Ganga Talao, the power of quantification also extends to the lingam form. Deploying the logic of the series, at the Mauritiuseshwarnath Shiv Jyotir Lingum temple, one of several temples at Ganga Talao (see chapter 5), the lingam is deemed by its patron J. R. “Raj” Dayal, dismissed as commissioner of police of Mauritius in 1997, to be the “13th Jyotir Lingum of the world, the only one outside India.”34 This claim is reinforced by accounts of “miraculous manifestations,” such as the appearance of Shiva’s face on the lingam during a Mahashivaratri prayer. It is also supported by visits from various “spiritual dignitaries” from India, including members of the Ramakrishna Mission, the Brahma Kumari World Spiritual University, ISKCON India, and the Divine Life Society and—by now this should come as no surprise—an explicit endorsement from Shri Chinmaya. These claims emerged in a field of Mauritian cultural politics where the official discourse is one of cooperation and a disavowal of caste hierarchy, but where in fact, according to several informants, Hindu groups and individuals with varying caste and political affiliations have sought to establish their distinct presence and shore up authority via temples

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at Ganga Talao. Not far from the Mauritiuseshwarnath temple, work was underway in 2014 on a spiritual park–cum-religious retreat initiated by Veerendra Ramdhun, a prominent planter and the president of the Hindu spiritual and cultural organization Hindu House. In the first structure in the park, already completed, the authority of numbers is given yet another novel spin: it is a Shiva temple with a massive lingam nearly two stories high, surrounded by 108 smaller lingams (see figure 5.7).35

GENRES OF I CONOPRAXIS

While quantified sources of authority such as height and record-breaking numbers enable inclusion, expansion, and mobility through translatability, their downside is the ephemerality that is also a quality of quantity: numbers can always be surpassed. This was already a problem with the 95-ft. Sakyamuni statue at Ravangla, in Sikkim, even before the Dalai Lama consecrated it in 2013. In the bus on the way to the inauguration ceremony, a local schoolteacher said she was more excited about seeing His Holiness than about the statue itself, for while the statue was nice enough, there were other, larger ones, even within Sikkim. For her, then, the cultic aspect of the statue—its ability to bring the Dalai Lama to her tiny town—was more significant than its status as a spectacle of scale. And yet big statues continue to proliferate, many of them as explicitly religious icons, and people continue to flock to them. What kinds of efficacy, value, and pleasure do these icons draw on and generate; where and how do they locate and elaborate their authority? I attend to these questions by examining the forms of iconopraxis at three of the sites I observed over the period of my research, 2007–18: one that does not call itself a temple, one that does, and one where a new monumental statue works in tandem with a preexisting temple. The 85-ft. Mangal Mahadev, inaugurated in 1994, is situated in a green, well-maintained park called the Birla Kanan along National Highway 48 (NH48), just opposite Delhi’s airport runways (figures 3.7–3.9).36 Its primary patrons, B. K. Birla and Sarla Birla, of the preeminent Birla business family, belong to the Marwari Maheshwari community and are therefore particular devotees of Shiva. But Mangal Mahadev is not part of a temple, nor was he intended to be. When asked about the absence of a temple, B. K. Birla said his approach was to “let the people come. . . . They should follow their sentiments. . . . No need to offer prasad [ritual food offerings].”37 Here again we see an inclusive, antiorthodox, sārvajanik impulse, as with Delhi’s Birla Mandir, embodied in an unconventional religious form set in a pleasant, landscaped 136

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4

5

Other versions of standing Shiva:

6 7 1

2

1. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India 2. Vadodara, Gujarat, India 3. Ganga Talao, Savanne, Mauritius 4. Pilani, Rajasthan, India 5. Palam Vihar, Gurgaon/Gurugram, Haryana, India 6. Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India 7. Chapol, Sanga, Nepal

3

Water fountain representing the Ganga

Coating of automobile paint Concrete skin Steel reinforcement bars Reinforced cement concrete coloumn

Parvati, Ganesha, and Kartikeya

Nandi bull

Jayashree Trust office and souvenir shop in statue base FIGURE 3.7

Schematic diagram of Mangal Mahadev statue at Birla Kanan, New Delhi.

14 13 1 12 2 11

7

3 4 5 6

N

8 10

9

1. Delhi International Airport 2. National Highway 48 (formerly NH8) 3. Birla Kanan 4. Dee Marks Hotel and Resorts 5. Hotel Glitz Westend Inn 6. Shiv Murti petrol pump 7. Road to Dwarka FIGURE 3.8

8. Jatin Motors 9. West End Motors 10. Jaipur Auto Service Pvt. Ltd. 11. Puma Factory Outlet 12. Benetton Factory Outlet 13. Adidas and Levi’s Factory Outlet 14. KS Automobiles Hero showroom

Built elements along NH48 in the vicinity of Birla Kanan, New Delhi, 2017.

space that lends itself to what a sign at the entrance to Birla Mandir’s garden describes as “organization, worship, meditation, festivals and fairs.” It also embodies a similar reinstitution of an expansively inclusive Hindu hegemony: Birla repeatedly described the statue as “imposing.”38 For what we see at the site is the transformation of a “spiritual” intention (B. K. Birla’s “sentiments”) into a reconfiguration of canonical image worship that does away with the intercession of priests. Over the years, the site has accrued its own elements of temple-style iconopraxis. For one, as with most other such statues, worshipers might touch the feet of the statue, either with a hand that is then brought to the forehead or heart or directly with the forehead. They may also bow, pray, or (more rarely here) prostrate before it. Further, contrary to B. K. Birla’s vision, they might also offer prasad to the open-air lingams in the park, one positioned right in 138

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1 2 3

4

5 6 9

11 8

10 7 13 14

12

N

1. Delhi International Airport 2. National Highway 48 (formely NH8) 3. Kanwariya pilgrims 4. Drive-by devotion 5. Informal shop at the entrance 6. Security guard office 7. Playground FIGURE 3.9

8. Radha and Krishna statues (31 ft.) 9. Ram and Sita statues (31 ft.) 10. Main Shiv lingam 11. Parking lot 12. Main Shiva statue (85 ft. including pedestal) 13. Nandi statue 14. Parvati, Ganesh, and Kartikeya statues

Schematic map of features at Birla Kanan, New Delhi.

Birla Kanan lingam with worshipers, December 2007. Statues of RamSita under construction are visible on right. FIGURE 3.10

front of the statue and another on the lawns (figure 3.10). Stalls have come up outside the gates to sell these offerings, particularly packets of milk on Mondays, Shiva’s special day (figure 3.11). Although there is no priest here, the caretaker plays recorded bhajans (devotional hymns) over loudspeakers twice a day at arati time (morning and evening prayers). When I started visiting the park in 2007, there was some ambiguity as to whether to take off one’s shoes and, if so, at what point in one’s approach to the statue. By 2010, however, there was a guarded shoe rack outside the gates, and the understanding was that shoes should not be worn in the environs—or, at least, not in the paved areas. Such direct public worship maps onto a centuries-old tradition of unattended roadside shrines, albeit at another scale.39 Mangal Mahadev has become an object of what I call “drive-by devotion,” as drivers of two- and four-wheel vehicles stop or slow down for a passing darshan with obeisances of varying abbreviation (figure 3.12). Appropriately, the Mangal Manjusha (Auspicious Jewel Box) souvenir shop in the complex sells, among other things, icons for car dashboards and CDs of bhajans to play in the car (figure 3.13). While several monumental statues elicit one-time visits, often as part of a pilgrimage

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Entrance to Birla Kanan with stall offering packets of milk, flowers, coconuts, and bananas to offer the deity. The sign behind it lists religious items available at the Mangal Manjusha gift shop, December 2007. FIGURE 3.11

package tour, the highly visible location of this Shiva along a regular commuter route has meant that it is often inscribed into repetitive daily cycles of worship, whether as drive-by devotion or more elaborate ritual offerings. The guards at the gate kept track of the better-heeled regulars, identifying factory owners and managers in the automobile, manufacturing, and technology industries of Gurgaon. The Birla Kanan has also been folded into the annual Kanwar Yatra pilgrimage that takes over northern Indian highways every July and August as pilgrims trek to Haridwar carrying pots (kanwar) to be filled with water from the Ganga (plate 7). There has been a major expansion of this festival in the postliberalization era, with trader, real estate, and Other Backward Class patronage that enables smaller-scale players to participate in the expanding economy of religious merit by erecting temporary shelters or piggybacking on spaces such as the Birla Kanan to provide food, clean water, and medical aid for pilgrims (figure 3.14), all in a manner that is publicly visible along major highways (I return to the assemblage of statues and automobility in chapter 4).40

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FIGURE 3.12

Drive-by devotion at Birla Kanan, December 2007.

Sign for Mangal Manjusha gift shop featuring dashboard icons, Birla Kanan, July 2007. FIGURE 3.13

Temporary medical relief station for kanwariya pilgrims (in foreground), Birla Kanan; the name of its patron appears at the bottom of the banners. July 2009. FIGURE 3.14

The Mangal Mahadev statue’s visibility from the highway—particularly at night, when it is illuminated (plate 8), and on special occasions when a jet of water representing the River Ganga spurts out of Shiva’s hair—gives it the aspect of a tourist attraction. So does the site’s use of red sandstone, as with the Birla Mandir, reminiscent of the vocabulary of Delhi’s historic monuments. Its theme park aspect was enhanced in 2009 with the addition of Shiva’s family under the statue and 31-ft. figures of the divine couples Ram-Sita and RadhaKrishna (figure 3.15). Indeed, the site fosters tourism and leisure as much as ritual. There is no prohibition on photography, so people pose in front of the statue and take pictures with their cameras and cell phones. There are play structures on the grounds where children frolic; families and couples picnic on the lawns as they watch planes descending toward the airport (figure 3.16). One group of schoolteachers said they were en route to the latest shopping mall farther up the highway, touted as the biggest in Asia. (They laughed uproariously as they described their first experience with escalators.) Whatever the aims with which the space was conceived, as its heterogeneous idioms came into everyday use, it turned into a mixed-use space in which people seemed intuitively to know what to do and how to be, drawing on their experiences of temples, roadside deities, pilgrimages, “spiritual” spaces, tourist sites, historical monuments, and public parks. By contrast, the RVM Foundation Shiv Temple in Bangalore (now known as the Shivoham Shiva Temple), with its 65-ft. seated Shiva (plate 1), explicitly describes itself on its billboards, banners, and website as a temple—in fact, as a “temple of faith where dreams come true,” with the motto “believe and achieve” (figure 3.17). It was inaugurated in 1995 by the Shankaracharya of the Sringeri Matha, another orthodox Advaita Vedantist religious order that traces its lineage to the eighth-century Shankara. It does have a stone lingam attended by a priest (figure 3.18). However, this is literally a sideshow to the centrally placed statue and the other innovative attractions in this dense complex, all pitched as varying means to wish fulfillment, which have steadily ramped up since I first visited it in 2007. These attractions can be grouped into roughly four categories, though they also overlap. One category is the icons and lingams. The big Shiva with water spurting from his hair, with a painted plywood and concrete Himalayan backdrop and a mini-replica of Lake Mansarovar in the foreground (figure 3.19), has a marblepaved floor seating area to view the statue, meditate, and pray (from silent prayers to bhajans, from folded hands and bowed head to full prostrations). Adjacent are a stone lingam to which a priest offers prayers, including bathing

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Statues of Krishna and Radha at Birla Kanan with kanwariya pilgrims, July 2009. Festooned kanwars are visible in the background. FIGURE 3.15

Picnickers with Mangal Mahadev and Radha-Krishna statues, Birla Kanan, December 2008. FIGURE 3.16

it with milk; the Pratyaksh Linga, which emerges from the lake at the three arati times; the Navagraha Temple, where icons of the nine planets are housed in a planetarium-like dome, with a world atlas painted on the outside; and a 25-ft. lingam at the temple entrance, added in 2012, that is constantly bathed in water (figure 3.20). The first feature that visitors encounter on entering the statue area from a passage along the side of the Total Mall is a high platform with a 32-ft. statue of Ganesh, consecrated by Dada J. P. Vaswani, head of the Sadhu Vaswani Mission, in 2003. Devotees queue to climb up the stairs and tie Vighnaharan (obstacle-removing) threads to the railings around the statue (figure 3.21). This icon thus overlaps with the second category of attraction: the wish fulfillers. They include the Paap Nash Diya (sin-cleansing lamp [figure 3.22]) that can be purchased to set afloat on the lake, with its Mansarovar Miracle Spot, where devotees chant “Om Namah Shivaya” seven times before making a wish and throwing a Miracle Coin into the water, as well as the self-explanatory Upchaar Patthar (Healing Stone) and sacrificial fire for Letters to God (figures 3.23 and 3.24).

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FIGURE 3.17

Sign at the entrance to the RVM Shiv Mandir, Bangalore, June 2009.

FIGURE 3.18

Stone lingam attended by priest, RVM Shiv Mandir, June 2009.

Rooftop view of Shiva statue at the RVM Shiv Mandir, March 2011. Photograph by Sushumna Kanan. FIGURE 3.19

Lingam at the entrance to the RVM Shiv Mandir, December 2012. A new sign has replaced the one shown in figure 3.17. FIGURE 3.20

The third category includes the mini-yatras (pilgrimages), echoing the “one platform” services of the Solophok Char Dham complex. In 2010, the Jyotirling Yatra, with its animated dioramas inside the statue (figures 3.25 and 3.26), was joined by the Pahadi (Mountainous) Shiv Dham Yatra, which takes visitors through mini-tunnels and across mini-bridges into the fake Himalayas at stage right of the statue (figure 3.27) to view replicas of the lingams at Haridwar, Rishikesh, Badrinath, and Kedarnath. Its climax is a cave containing the ice lingam at Amarnath, dripping in the Bangalore heat (figure 3.28).41 And in the Om Namah Shivaya Yatra, devotees recite the mantra 108 times (as with Bangalore’s ISKCON temple entry ritual) as they drop 108 coins into “holy bowls.” The attractions in the fourth category, focusing on the temple’s patron, are less spectacular but attention-seeking nonetheless. They include a centrally placed bust of Jethanand Melwani, grandfather of the founder, Ravi Melwani (visible in figures 3.22 and 3.32); souvenir stalls, starting with one that sells CDs of Shiva bhajans, including recordings by RVM himself; publicity for the RVM Foundation’s charitable organizations (a hospital and a “transit home” [figure 3.29]), with a donation box in the form of a model ambulance; 150

C H AP T E R T H R E E

Ganesha statue with Vighnaharan threads representing wishes. Bowls for Om Namah Shivaya yatra are visible in the foreground. RVM Shiv Mandir, June 2009. FIGURE 3.21

Paap Naash Diya and Miracle Spot, next to Lake Mansarovar, RVM Shiv Mandir, June 2009. On the right is a bust of Jethanand Melwani, grandfather of the founder, Ravi Melwani. FIGURE 3.22

a large poster of Dada Vaswani (visible in figure 3.32); and many posters and banners with RVM’s words of wisdom, often accompanied by his photograph (figure 3.30). Here, as elsewhere in India since around the mid-1990s, digitally printed vinyl banners are used as an effective medium of customized publicity. At no other big statue site is the patron’s presence and style quite as prominent; the temple is clearly RVM’s vehicle for spiritual self-making. (Melwani is now calling himself “AiR,” for “Atman in Ravi”; atman is a Vedantist term for the inner or essential self/soul.)42 RVM’s emphasis is on faith and belief as the means to all kinds of worldly well-being, with himself as the prime example. The temple’s wish-fulfilling claims are largely unverifiable, even as it deploys a discourse of quantitative superlatives. They are often fuzzy (“the most powerful Shiv statue in the world”; “one of the tallest yagna structures in the world,” describing a 6-ft. sacrificial pyre built in 2015 for the temple’s immensely popular Mahashivaratri festival) or underwhelming (“the biggest such Shiv Linga Gate in the city”). The temple’s website features testimonials from devotees who claim to have been healed or blessed with children after praying at the temple—again, due to “Faith, Hope, and Belief.”43 More concrete 152

C H AP T E R T H R E E

Explanatory sign for Healing Stone; to the right is the dome of the Navagraha temple painted like a globe. RVM Shiv Mandir, June 2009. FIGURE 3.23

Visitor writing a “Letter to God” on provided paper and clipboard, RVM Shiv Mandir, December 2012. FIGURE 3.24

Animated statue of the sage Narada accompanied by a soundtrack of his trademark phrase, “Narayan, Narayan,” featured in the Jyotirlinga Yatra within the Shiva statue. RVM Shiv Mandir, December 2012. FIGURE 3.25

evidence of the temple’s efficacy is provided in its own, insistent advertising of the successes of the RVM charitable missions across the city, funded by the proceeds from the temple; the message is that the temple will help devotees realize their dreams through their faith, just as it is enabling RVM to realize his philanthropic dreams. This link to charitable, humanitarian works provides secular legitimacy to this explicitly religious enterprise—and it is, indeed, an enterprise that generates profits from ticket sales, souvenirs, and donations (figure 3.31).44 This commercialism is the source of much criticism, not allayed by the Shiv Mandir’s humanitarian aims, that appears in many comments from local, as well as international, visitors on websites such as TripAdvisor and from my friends in Bangalore—though, unsurprisingly, not so much from visitors interviewed at the site itself.45 The criticism is based on the seemingly selfevident contradiction between the “spiritual” and the material/commercial. Yet almost all Hindu temples, particularly in the south, display a schedule of fees for various priestly services (see figure 3.35) and are surrounded by souvenir stalls. So what is so galling about the RVM Shiv Mandir’s commercialism? In part, it is the ritual features that, as TripAdvisor reviews put it, are “tacky,” “new and artificial”—that is, noncanonical—and therefore “not worthy.” According to a twenty-eight-year-old visitor who works for Oracle in Bangalore and had been associated for three years with the Isha Foundation, another global neospiritual organization, which installed a 112-ft. steel bust of Shiva near Coimbatore in 2017: “The spirituality should be improved upon. . . . Traditional things should be used rather than these artistic things [the Shiva statue]—lamps, for example.”46 Scale and novelty (the latter identified here with the “artistic”) have their limits, and there is no attempt here to supplement these with “authentically” auratic distancing elements, either mythic or historical. In contrast to Ravangla’s Tathagat Tsal, with its spectacular public consecration and Buddhist relics, or the Akshardham complexes, whose novel features (IMAX cinemas, animatronic shows, and amusement park–style rides) are vehicles for historical or mythic narratives and are counterbalanced by a revival of the ancient sculptural traditions of the sthapatis, the “history” section on the Shiv Mandir website is all about RVM’s personal vision of the temple. Other visitors, however, are ready to embrace this newness, foregrounding it as a positive feature. “Be ready to Entering [sic] a New Dimension,” wrote “ajaykapadia” on TripAdvisor in 2014. Indeed, many visitors, particularly those interviewed at the site, described the temple as touching, peaceful, wonderful, awe-inspiring, serene, and beautiful (figure 3.32). But many also remarked that ICONOPRAXIS

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One of the twelve jyotirlinga dioramas constituting the Jyotirlinga Yatra circumambulation inside the Shiva statue at RVM Shiv Mandir, December 2012. FIGURE 3.26

while the temple had started out well, the experience has now become far more commercial. Others spoke or wrote about negotiating between the beauty and interest of the statue or the space and—the most frequent complaints—the moneygrubbing, crowdedness, and loud music. Revealingly, a couple from Coimbatore in their thirties, visiting with their huge family, remarked on the discomfort they felt with performing unfamiliar rituals on their own for fear that they would get them wrong. This speaks to this temple’s difference from canonical ones: after all, what you expect from a temple is properly conducted intercession with the divine. Yet another visitor from Kerala liked the idea of devotees performing many of the rituals, saying, “Yes, it is a good thing. God is for all.” At the heart of these negotiations and tensions around what constitutes the properly religious is a simultaneous unease with, and enjoyment of, the compression of several otherwise spatially and temporally heterogeneous genres of religious experience into a single packed space: canonical temple rituals; community-based devotionalism (bhajan singing, sermons by gurus); unmediated personal spirituality; and pilgrimage, with its elements of spectacle and commerce. Each of these has its own generic codes and sources of legitimacy, 156

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Replica of hanging bridge in the Pahadi Shiv Dham Yatra. RVM Shiv Mandir, December 2012. FIGURE 3.27

FIGURE 3.28

Replica of ice lingam at Amarnath. RVM Shiv Mandir, December 2012.

Banner advertising RVM charities above the staircase to the wishfulfilling Ganesha and the wishing bowls of the Om Namah Shivaya Yatra. RVM Shiv Mandir, December 2012. FIGURE 3.29

RVM featured on a banner at the temple’s exit. RVM Shiv Mandir, December 2012. FIGURE 3.30

which come into conflict here. Canonical temple spaces are associated with certain types of ritual performance, soundscapes, and material exchanges conducted under priestly control, while spiritual spaces emphasizing personal faith, belief, and relatively unmediated worship are associated with quiet meditation halls, ordered sermons, yogic discipline, and harmony with nature in the form of landscaped parks invoking mythic ashram spaces and a Romantic sensibility.47 Sometimes the two happily coincide. Here, however, devotees are enjoined to take charge of their faith in the mode of personal spirituality while also being tightly orchestrated and controlled and participating in material exchanges. Further, this occurs within a cramped space subordinated to—because it is hidden behind—a shopping mall featuring Disneyesque castle turrets (see figure 1.17) rather than in a structure whose sacred aura and authority are announced from afar by a shikhara (spire) or gopuram. Several commentators remarked on the temple’s unorthodox entrance next to a shopping mall. The Birla Kanan and the RVM Shiv Mandir illuminate the delicate balance of generic codes required to successfully orchestrate inclusion and public acICONOPRAXIS

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Sign listing items for sale at the Shiv Mandir bookshop. RVM Shiv Mandir, December 2012. FIGURE 3.31

Vision-impaired visitors, including a Muslim woman, who spoke about enjoying their visit to the RVM Shiv Mandir, June 2009. Visible in the background is a large poster of Dada Vaswani, affixed to the mountains on the right. FIGURE 3.32

cess to the divine while maintaining religious legitimacy. Both were faced with a sense that more auratic, distancing elements were needed. The Birla Kanan achieved this by providing just a little more of the familiar ritual infrastructure alongside the spirituality embodied in the park’s verdant, well-ordered landscaping, while the Shiv Mandir, although hugely popular (perhaps more so than the Birla Kanan in terms of the sheer number of visitors), remains subject to heavy criticism. This vulnerability to criticism stems from its claim to be a temple but without the requisite auratic elements, whether canonical, spiritual, or historical. The Birla Kanan makes no such claim to be a temple but effectively functions as one through its judicious mix of each of these elements. Another relatively successful solution to the problem of establishing a balance of accessibility and auratic legitimacy appears at Murudeshwar, where a monumental Shiva statue and other exhibitionary elements have been interwoven into a pilgrimage complex featuring an old cultic temple. This, in turn, echoes another monumental statue site 200 kilometers down the coast at Dharmasthala, but with significant differences.

EFFI CACY

The 123-ft. seated Shiva statue at Murudeshwar (see plate 2; see also figure 1.19), inaugurated in 2002, was inspired by the RVM Shiv Mandir statue and built by the same sculptor, Kashinath. Its patron, the Bangalore-based construction baron R. N. Shetty, had attended the RVM Shiv Mandir’s inauguration. Set dramatically against the Arabian Sea, it sits on an artificial hillock behind a centuries-old Shiva temple whose Atmalinga features in the Bhookailasa legend, known across southern India through plays and films.48 The legend is illustrated in a series of dioramas in the statue’s cave-like interior (see figure 1.20), as well as in a large sculptural tableau next to the steps leading up to the statue (visible in plate 2). This rekindles Murudeshwar’s aura by linking it to the powerful nearby shrine of Gokarna, reinserting it into Shiva pilgrimage routes. It also establishes a circuit between the statue and the temple such that the statue’s exhibitionary aspects both draw on and reinforce the temple’s cultic aura. Indeed, it was Shetty’s effective takeover of the old temple’s trusteeship via a massive renovation that enabled him to position the statue and the temple as the core of a pilgrimage and leisure complex that extends through the town and farther down the coast (figure 3.33). The renovation included a kitchen and dining hall, pilgrim guesthouses, golden paint for the shikharas, and the addition of “the tallest [gopuram] in Asia” (see figure 1.19).

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The gopuram is a canonical element of the Dravidian temple form, but one whose scale and visibility speak to spectacle rather than sequestration, inclusive exhibition value rather than exclusionary cult value, and Dalit rather than caste Hindu address. The Murudeshwar gopuram’s orientation to spectacle is amplified by its concrete construction, which affords an internal cavity that visitors ascend in an elevator to take photographs of the statue and its scenic environs. (The space had been earmarked for a museum, but that plan has been shelved.) The gopuram is, unusually, offset from the temple’s actual entrance rather than in line with it or with the sanctum, because directly in front of the temple is the sea (figure 3.34). The gopuram is built on landfill that dams a narrow channel separating the temple from the mainland, just off a bus terminus at the head of the main road leading to the statue complex. (Before Shetty built the road, devotees had to wade over to the temple at low tide, another source of aura.) As a result, therefore, the gopuram faces both the statue and the temple but neither directly. More to the point, like the Bhookailasa dioramas, it mediates between them, shoring up the temple’s status while tipping the balance away from sequestration and inaccessibility toward spectacle and ease of access. As with the other statue sites described earlier, this is not an easy balance to strike and is subject to ongoing negotiation and adjustment. Several years after the statue was built, around 2008–9, a large stone lingam was installed in the structure on which the statue sits, near the entrance to the Bhookailasa Yatra dioramas inside its body (plate 9). The lingam shrine contains similar dioramic elements: a painted backdrop featuring Shiva and family, plasterrelief mountains, and a doorway to a staircase resembling a grotto. It has its own priest in attendance, but for 10 rupees, visitors are also able to perform their own kumbabhisheka (ritual bathing of the lingam [figure 3.35]). A few devotees take this opportunity, such as a couple from Nellore who described their community, the Devangas (traditionally weavers), as “more holy than the Brahmins.” However, most do not, and some, as with one group from Kerala, strongly object to the practice on the grounds that it destroys the lingam’s madi (purity). This is not the fear of getting things wrong that we saw with the RVM Shiva Mandir rituals; here, the issue with providing universal access to cultic objects is like Groucho Marx’s problem of not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member: this very participation destroys the auratic basis of its authority. But again, what is being played out is the tension and coexistence between the deterritorializing, hegemonizing imperative of expansion and inclusion and a reterritorializing conservation of the hierarchical and exclusionary basis of religious power.

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1. Murudeshwar island and temple complex 2. National Highway 66 3. Konkan Railway 4. Murudeshwar railway station 5. Murudeshwar Bypass bus stop and town gateway 6. Arabian Sea 7. Avekodi River 8. Ternamakki Beach 9. Murudeshwar Beach 10. Fish market 11. RNS Golf Resort 12. RNS Highway Resort FIGURE 3.33

Map of the Murudeshwar area.

13. RNS Motors Ltd. 14. RNS Rural Polytechnic 15. Murudeshwar bus stop 16. Naveen Beach Restaurant 17. Naveen Resort 18. RNS Residency 19. Netrani Adventures 20. Shree Venkataraman temple 21. RNS Pre-University College 22. RNS Vidyaniketan (school) 23. RNS Nursing College 24. Other hotels, guest houses, and lodges

1. Murudeshwar Shiva statue (123 ft.) 2. Rajagopuram (237.5 ft.) 3. Old Murudeshwar Atmalinga temple 4. Temple Guest House 5. Landfill connecting the village and the island 6. Parking lot 7. Arabian Sea 8. Gita chariot statue 9. Surya chariot statue 10. Ravana statue 11. Shiva statue with Ganga in hair 12. Nandi statue 13. Shani temple 14. Traveling bath bus 15. Maruti van photo studio 16. Naveen Beach Restaurant 17. RNS Residency hotel 18. RNS Guest House 19. Fishing beach 20. Murudeshwar bus stop 21. Fish market

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FIGURE 3.34

Schematic diagram of the Murudeshwar Shiva statue site.

Sign advertising prayer rates for the Shri Sundhara Rameshwara lingam under the Shiva statue, Murudeshwar, March 2012. FIGURE 3.35

The emphasis on access, visibility, and spectacle extends to the form of the statue itself, which is built in a style similar to that of the RVM temple’s earlier Shiva, but with significant differences that speak to their very different locations and spatial constraints. The Murudeshwar statue is nearly twice the height of the Bangalore statue, and while the Bangalore Shiva is surrounded by painted plywood Himalayas, in a confined urban space crammed with attractions, the Murudeshwar Shiva’s backdrop is a magnificent open vista of the Arabian Sea, with several small islands in the distance. The Bangalore Shiva is meditative: his eyes are half-closed, and his two front arms are folded in his lap (the others hold a trident and the damru drum). The more dynamic and engaged Murudeshwar Shiva’s eyes are open (figure 3.36); his front right hand is held up in a blessing gesture (abhaya mudra), with the thumb and forefinger touching in gyan (knowledge) mudra, and the left hand is in the same posture facing the ground (the left arm is supported by a yoga-danda, a crutch-like yogic prop). The Bangalore Shiva is painted a flat, calm ivory color, while the Murudeshwar Shiva is a metallic silver that catches the sun. And while the Murudeshwar Shiva is also accompanied by many other attractions, they are spread out along a circumambulating walk around the hillock on which the statue sits, with none of the overwhelming density and tight orchestration of the RVM complex. Nearer the statue are a large sculpture of Nandi and the Bhookailasa tableau mentioned earlier, while at some distance are spectacular golden statues of Surya, the sun god, with his seven horses and of Krishna driving Arjuna’s chariot in the Mahabharata (the occasion for Krishna’s sermon, the Bhagwad Gita; Kashinath and Sridhar had already executed such a statue for the Vishwa Shanti Ashram in 1997). There are also several smaller figures of hermits and ascetics, including Ved Vyas dictating the Mahabharata to Ganesh (all visible in plate 2). The natural setting of the Murudeshwar Shiva has two related implications for its ritual form and efficacy. For one, unlike the RVM Shiva, it is relieved of the burden of explicitly thematizing spirituality and contemplative, inward-looking faith, since the landscape works to provide this element, as does the landscaping of the Birla Kanan. This is particularly evident at sunset and twilight, when the atmosphere at the statue palpably changes to a hushed awe for some and intensified excitement for others. Second, the statue’s integration into the landscape and its deliberately elevated position mean that it can be seen from very far away. It is visible from the Konkan Railway (one retired bank employee cited seeing it from the train as what inspired his visit); from many parts of the town; and from the water, a unique attraction for visitors

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Left: 65 ft. seated Shiva at RVM Shiva temple, Bangalore

Open eyes blessing the landscape Arm struck by lightning (June 2006) and repaired Metallic silver car paint Abhay mudra

Gyan mudra Seated on gold painted lion Cave with stone lingam for public worship and Bhookailasa

FIGURE 3.36

Diagram of the Shiva statue at Murudeshwar.

taking boat rides from the beach. But this also means that this Shiva is tasked with watching over and blessing the town and the surrounding countryside, something his Bangalore avatar cannot do—hence, his open eyes and gesture of blessing. In other words, the Murudeshwar Shiva engages in an expansive yet still strongly territorialized darshanic exchange that extends the efficacy of a canonical temple site into neospiritual registers, in contrast to the RVM Shiva’s emphasis on a more abstracted and quantified personal “faith” channeled via a variety of innovative rituals.49 The Murudeshwar Shiva statue’s placement in the wider landscape is consistent with its patron’s program of territorial control, which reveals it to be part of a much longer genealogy of statue building in the region. According to one local theory, Shetty is attempting to emulate another “big man,” also from the same Bunt Shetty community: Dr. Veerendra Heggade, a Jain but also 168

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the dharmadhikari (hereditary administrator) of the powerful Hindu temple of Manjunatha 200 kilometers south, in Dharmasthala. Heggade wields remarkable authority in this capacity, autonomous from, yet highly influential over, the state.50 In 1975, shortly after taking office as dharmadhikari, Heggade installed a 39-ft. granite statue of the Jain icon Bahubali (or Gommateshwara) at Dharmasthala, in the tradition of the region’s medieval princes. The last such statue was erected in Venur in 1604 CE by Veera Timmannarasa Ajila IV, who, like Heggade, was a Jain Bunt. The Dharmasthala Bahubali’s sculptor, Renjala Gopala Shenoy, a sthapati from Karwar, studied the Venur statue as a model, as well as the famous 57-ft. Bahubali at Shravanabelagola (thought to have been built around 983 CE by the general and poet Chavundaraya) and others at Gommatagiri (20 ft., twelfth century CE) and Karkala (42 ft., 1432 CE). There is still a community of sculptors at Karkala, including Shamraya Acharya, who sculpted the Mahavira statue on Delhi’s Mehrauli–Gurgaon Road. If the Dharmasthala Bahubali provided inspiration for the Murudeshwar Shiva, this would add another, far longer thread to the genealogy of the contemporary concrete statues based on the mode of patronage rather than the form or method of construction. The emulation theory is convincing, particularly since Shetty makes it a point to claim hereditary, not just appointed, trusteeship of Murudeshwar’s old Shiva temple (although this is covertly contested, which is unlikely for Heggade’s far older, hereditary trusteeship of the Manjunatha temple).51 Unusually—although by no means on the scale of Melwani’s visibility at the RVM Shiv Mandir—a photograph of Shetty hangs in the old temple, on a wall facing the sanctum. The board outside the temple trustees’ office lists Shetty as “managing trustee” above one other trustee, a Kamath (a Saraswat Brahmin surname). Shetty comes from a modest farming family, although his father was the sarpanch (elected head of the village council) and exercised a certain amount of authority in this capacity. Shetty has taken this authority to another level, consolidating quasi-feudal control over the town through a process centered on his religious and philanthropic activities: the temple renovation, including the big statue and gopuram, through which he consolidated his trusteeship; the construction of pilgrimage-related amenities, such as the road, hotels, and guesthouses, all of which bear his initials (RNS), and display photographs of him at the reception (figure 3.37); organizations that combine philanthropy, commerce, and education, such as RNS schools and a nursing institute; and the RNS car showroom at the entrance to the town that, according to its manager, attracts visitors from nearby towns who combine pilgrimage with a car purchase or annual service (figure 3.38; see also figure 3.33). ICONOPRAXIS

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Shetty’s quasi sovereignty over Murudeshwar also yields benefits farther afield. Coconut groves a few kilometers down the coast have been cleared for an RNS golf resort and “nature cure center” with a private beach. According to Shetty, this was not so much about making money as about “goodwill”—favors for his fellow golfers at the Bangalore Golf Club and elsewhere: judges, captains of industry, and other “VIPs” whom he wanted to “oblige.”52 His temple guesthouses are also part of this economy of goodwill. For instance, one of them is dedicated to the Khodays, silk and liquor manufacturers (somewhat ironic, given the ban on alcohol at the guesthouses) based in Bangalore. Similarly, I saw a “VIP” from the state administration and his family being given special access to the sanctum at the old temple, no doubt following a phone call from Shetty’s offices. Shetty’s religious patronage has enabled his authority to flow from trusteeship of the old temple, via the spectacular Shiva statue and gopuram’s command over the town and countryside, out to a world of secular obligation and favors extending beyond the vicinity of the town, along the Karnataka coast, into the Uttara (northern) Karnataka hinterland, and farther to Bangalore and beyond. Key to this process is the way religious spectacle has worked to put Murudeshwar “on the map,” a formulation to which I return in chapter 4. This is very similar to the way the local big man D. D. Bhutia consolidated his political clout in Ravangla and in the Sikkim Democratic Front through his patronage of the revived Pang Lhabsol festival; the Mane Choekerling monastery complex; and the Tathagata Tsal park, with its 95-ft. Sakyamuni statue. In 2014, Bhutia was appointed minister of power in Sikkim. Again, this is a case of productive circuitry between older forms of iconopraxis and new ones and, spatially, between a large urban node and a very small town. In both instances, control of secular resources and infrastructure is layered onto, enables, and is enabled by religious patronage and legitimation. Quantification is a key element in this legitimation, via the scale of the monumental statue, adding evidence of modern technological expertise to a spectacular demonstration of faith and a concern for the public good. These are not contradictory. At Murudeshwar, scalar quantification is layered onto the cultic basis of the Atmalinga myth, while at Ravangla, the cultic element takes the form of imported Buddha relics. However, the relics, along with the murals in the Ravangla Sakyamuni’s internal exhibitionary space, were also part of a conscious effort at the site to create the aura of the history it was seen to lack. Here quantification, myth, history, and ritual all work together as sources of religious-cum-secular legitimacy and authority. In other words, the power and value of these sites do not depend solely on cultic sequestration or on the 170

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Photograph of R. N. Shetty next to a sign at the temple guesthouse reception. Murudeshwar, March 2012. FIGURE 3.37

FIGURE 3.38

Maruti Suzuki RNS Motors showroom, Murudeshwar, March 2012.

uniqueness and distance seen as central to Benjamin’s formulation of the aura of religious images or bourgeois art; rather, the sites’ power and value flow from a constantly negotiated combination of the excessive accessibility associated with spectacle and the inaccessibility or separation from everyday life that constitutes one definition of the sacred. Layered onto this are the comparability and competition between different sites of iconopraxis that flow from their quantitative commensuration. In the next section I argue that these (un) holy entanglements call for a reconsideration of Benjamin’s account of the salience of mass reproduction and, in particular, his distinction between cult and exhibition value.

I CONI C EXHIBITION VALUE

In revisiting Benjamin’s artwork essay, my aim is not, as has been the case for most commentaries, to elucidate the intellectual and political trajectory of a brilliant, enigmatic, and enormously inspiring thinker.53 Instead, I want to ask to what extent we might use Benjamin’s ideas about what is made possible by the newness of new image technologies at a moment of intensified capitalist development, twinned with an authoritarian political regime based on a populist ideology of palingenetic-cum-futurist/developmentalist ultranationalism, to think about a very similar situation at a very different time and place. The central theme of the artwork essay is what new techniques of mass reproduction do to the basis of the value of the artwork and what this means for the artwork’s political efficacy. The artwork, a form here specifically associated with the rise of bourgeois society in Western Europe, is the privileged bearer of the power of a tradition, encapsulated in its “aura.” This, for Benjamin, is destroyed by mass reproduction’s “sense of the universal equality of things.”54 Here he makes a distinction between exhibition value, based on the public showing and appreciation of (what came to be called) artworks, and cult value, which derived from the sequestered ritual use of images where “what mattered was their existence, not their being on view” (218). Cult value is cast as the element in the artwork that binds it to a regressive tradition: it persists in the artwork via the criteria of authenticity and uniqueness and in the sensation of distance, all key ingredients of the aura. Although the artwork’s secularization means that the particular form of cultic uniqueness “is more and more displaced by the empirical uniqueness of the creator or of his creative achievement” (237 fn. 6), the “parasitical dependence on ritual” (218) lingers in the auratic figure of the artist-genius and in the fetish value of the work—that is, until the artwork is “emancipated” by mechanical reproduction. The conservative force of ritual, ICONOPRAXIS

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with its embeddedness in tradition—operationalized in particular by fascism— is now counterposed to the emancipatory force of revolutionary politics. So it is the “destructive, cathartic aspect” of mass reproduction, the “decay of the aura,” that constitutes its “most positive form” of social significance (215). Despite an ambivalent nostalgia that pervades his descriptions of the aura, in the context within which Benjamin is writing, cult value and the aura of the artwork are problematic because they shore up traditional hierarchical authority. Benjamin’s method, as he states in the essay’s preface, is to show how the conditions of the superstructure are gradually affected by changes in the base by analyzing the “tendencies of art under present conditions of production” (the emergence of mass reproduction and the mass audience), and the qualitative changes wrought by this quantitative character of the audience (212). These qualitative transformations are an extension of the way the bourgeois artwork came to be geared toward exhibition rather than ritual. Thus, the painting is oriented to exhibition and mobility, as against the mosaic or fresco that is embedded in a specific cultic site; the same goes for the symphony as against the mass. Similarly, my concern here is with what happens to images in the face of new technological conditions that enable enhanced access and address a quantitatively conceived audience—here, competing constituencies within the polity rather than the masses as a whole—leading to qualitative transformations in the tradition. However, given that Benjamin’s ideas are focused on the fate of the bourgeois artwork and geared to the political situation in early twentieth-century Western Europe, they require some revision when it comes to religious images, not just in (post)colonial India, but everywhere. In India, the introduction of “fine art” via colonialism meant that the form of social distinction exercised so powerfully in Western Europe by the bourgeois artwork and its attendant exhibitionary culture was by no means able to supplant existing forms of cultic image efficacy and religious patronage or the visual/sensible regimes of existing forms of social hierarchy, particularly caste. So the secularization of cult on which Benjamin seems to predicate his analysis cannot be taken as given here. But further, as is often the case, this postcolonial site also illuminates how the ideology of modernism disavows “nonmodern” phenomena within the metropole, for in fact the artwork never fully supplanted the religious image and cult value in Western Europe, either. At one level, Benjamin’s deep attunement to nonlinear temporalities does lead him to acknowledge this. As regards the temporal relationship of exhibition value to cult value, he wants to have it both ways: “The transition from the first kind of artistic reception [cult value] to the second [exhibition value] characterizes the history of artistic reception in general. Apart from that, a certain 174

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oscillation between these two polar modes of reception can be demonstrated for each work of art” (238 fn. 8, emphasis added). As with his earlier work on the Trauerspiel, he refuses to conceive emergence in terms of linearly substitutive “transition” or total “transformation,” insisting on the duration and persistence of earlier forms in an “oscillation” akin to what I have been calling the circuitry between old and new forms.55 As Georges Didi-Huberman argues, the “decline” of the aura should be read in this light.56 Yet this oscillation unfolds within a focus on the artwork qua work of “art,” not as an object of ritual, and within a narrative of secularization. Benjamin’s concern is not, as mine is here, with the persistence of primarily religious forms alongside the changing artwork or the changes in ritual forms through interaction with new technologies of art and the salience of quantification. Cult value and exhibition value are modes of reception, not types of images, so both Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and photographic portraits oscillate between these “polar modes of reception.” But is exhibition value something that appears only with the public showing and appreciation of artworks and that therefore is applicable only to them, as Benjamin’s text would suggest? In his understandable desire for a “tremendous shattering” (215) of the auratic basis of tradition inherent in cult, and particularly the urgent need to respond to the deeply alienated aesthetics of futurism that he sees as “the consummation of l’art pour l’art” (235), Benjamin is simply not oriented to the possibility that religion, too, in Europe as elsewhere, has always had its elements of exhibition value, as well as of cult value: a visible, public side whose ritual cycles have complemented those of the hidden, “sacred” side. This is evident in architecture (I have mentioned gopurams but think also of church spires and the bells that still ring out over the most modern of cities), processions, festivals, theater, dioramas, roadside shrines, monumental and polychrome statues, and devotional prints, not to mention films, televangelism, and multimedia spectacles. Such forms of public religion and iconopraxis—and their exhibition value—came to be hidden in plain sight under a concatenation of hegemonic modernist formulations. One such is modernity’s secular self-image, in which religion belongs to the past; another is the idea of religion as either “sacred” (i.e., set apart from everyday life) or “spiritual,” in the (invisible) image of a hegemonic Protestant religiosity, with its emphasis on interiority, the Word, and personal “faith.” This is not to say that Benjamin’s notion of the aura and his distinction between cult and exhibition value are not useful but to suggest a modification that is not, perhaps, contrary to his complex sense of temporality and of the multiply auratic aspects of the image—or to the actual fate of both icons and ICONOPRAXIS

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artworks with the further spread of capitalism and mass culture. I want to argue for a category of “iconic exhibition value” to name the visible, public face of iconopraxis, operating in the realm of religious images that may or may not also be seen as artworks. This enables a recognition of the dynamic between sequestration and exhibition as a key ingredient of religious authority (as it is for the artwork in Benjamin’s account), instead of simply collapsing all religious power and efficacy into the cultic power that stems from sequestration. After all, would the monumental Shiva at Murudeshwar be as firmly “on the map” had it not been associated with a full-service temple containing a rare, sequestered Atmalinga? Or would the Atmalinga temple be as popular without the Shiva statue? And why else would the Shankaracharya of Dwarka endorse a replica in Sikkim of his powerful temple? In other words, a productive oscillation between cult and exhibition value obtains for the icon as much as for the artwork. Iconic exhibition value and its oscillating dynamic with iconic cult value cannot be elided as characterizing popular or folk practices rather than institutional religion, for it is a feature within canonical, priestly religion, as well. This is evidenced in the Hindu tradition, at least a thousand years old, of parading temple icons outside the temple on festival days and at the evening arati, as is still the case at the old temple at Murudeshwar.57 Here the circuit between iconic cult and exhibition value echoes Richard Davis’s description of the way “the movements of emission and reabsorption appear throughout daily worship, and all Saiva ritual, as basic organizing principles” in an “oscillating universe.”58 But this oscillation is not confined to Shiva worship; Vaishnava temple icons are also rolled out on enormous chariots in the spectacular Jagannath festival at Puri (one of the Char Dham), the origin of the term juggernaut. Vaishnava merchants and Vaishnavism were also central to the nineteenth-century spread of printed icons in northern India as a Sanatana (icon-worshiping, orthodox) response to reformist aniconism.59 Ananda Coomaraswamy’s reading of the shastras (classical texts on aesthetics) tells us that they frequently describe “pictures, sculptures, and architecture” as darshaniya (worth seeing or, more accurately, worth an encounter).60 Both darshan as the reciprocal interaction of the deity with the devotee and darshaniya as a quality of the icon illuminate its exhibitionary aspect, where what matters is not its mere existence, but its existence in relation to other bodies, where its “being on view” entails being available for material transactions. Darshan is an embodied exchange where the devotional subject is not the (putatively) intact or dematerialized liberal individual engaging the bourgeois artwork; rather, the devotional subject is constituted via flows of material substance. As I have argued elsewhere, drawing on Davis, agency in the darshanic image is distrib176

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uted over a trans-subjective arena that includes the individual devotee, the ritual community, the icon, and, crucially, the deity as the privileged viewer who must be pleased enough with the icon to inhabit it (much as the spectacle of infrastructure must please the imagined gaze of the investor, as I elaborate in chapter 4).61 Indeed, perhaps the most salient questions within the terms of this image regime are, What kind of value does the icon have for the deity? Is this cult value or exhibition value? Arguably, in the absence of a secular horizon—that is, for the deity—there is only exhibition value, all the way down; the very distinction between cult and exhibition value is an artifact of the boundary between the religious and the secular inaugurated by what Bruno Latour calls “the Modern Constitution.”62 Recognizing iconic exhibition value as integral to religious authority refutes the assumption that exhibition value or spectacle in religious images is an indicator of secularization in some simple sense. If anything, it is better seen as a response to the increased salience to religion, and to iconopraxis, of the secular horizon and its forms of value and authority. Religion’s propensity for exhibition value accounts for what Guha-Thakurta describes as “the elastic grips of the ‘religious’ ” that enabled the Durga Puja to articulate with commercialized or corporatized as well as more explicitly “artistic” impulses.63 It also addresses some of the putative paradoxes that Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh point to in their account of museums in the age of religious revivalism. They treat the “museumization” of the temple as though it were a recent phenomenon, but, in fact, it picks up on and intensifies qualities that were already present.64 In this chapter, I have described how the intensification of iconic exhibition value shores up the power of cultic icons, and vice versa, even as it expands the range of forms available for iconopraxis. Here the oscillation between cult and exhibition is not a zero-sum game but a means of further expanding the systems of institutionalized religion to include new media, new forms, and more players: more devotees (as with Dalits at the Birla Mandir), more priests (spiritual leaders who start their own cults), more patrons (entrepreneurs in the colonial, postindependence, and postliberalization economies), and more image producers (art school–trained or self-taught artists, as well as traditional shilpis [sculptors] and sthapatis). This expansion of the system via mass reproduction is true of the secular artwork as much as of the icon. Mass reproduction does nothing to destroy the aura of celebrated artworks, from the Mona Lisa to Campbell’s Soup Cans. On the contrary, it shores up the value of the authentic original and expands the opportunities for milking this value through an oscillation between bourgeois distinction and celebrity or commodified metapopularity. Art collecting ICONOPRAXIS

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and patronage continue to shore up social status, undeterred by artworks on posters and refrigerator magnets, just as religious patronage of both auratic temples and spectacular statues shores up social power in a system in which printed deities also abound. The same goes for the secular celebrities, from Jayalalithaa to Justin Bieber (and his “Beliebers”), whose aura is a product of the very mass reproduction that was supposed to do away with cult. With changes in technology and conditions of reception the nature of works may change, but any work—and its maker—contains the potential for both cult and exhibition value. New media, genres, forms of reception, and ideological forces arise, but that does not mean that old or existing ones go away. Little withers in the age of mass reproduction. There is just more of everything. In expanding the ambit of institutionalized religion through new media and new players, iconic exhibition value has not radically changed the terms on which religion interfaces with social power. It is still predicated on hierarchies of access to resources, and the brokerage and gatekeeping that attend this, even as the balance of that gatekeeping power may be shifting away from the hereditary priesthood per se (again, without doing away with the priesthood’s forms of authority). New forms of iconopraxis in India have largely indexed a hegemonic, caste Hindu, inclusive reconfiguration of religious sites and practices through public visibility, as Brahminical privilege is supplemented by more populist links between patrons, their publics, and their personal networks. Again, this parallels the reconfigured status of elite art historians, critics, and connoisseurs, with their quasi-priestly authority to arbitrate the value of artworks in the “late” capitalist culture industry, as populist appeal and celebrity are also commandeered to keep the art world going under the neoliberal dispensation. The newness entailed in this expansion follows the logic of genre, working with a changing set of familiar elements and expectations within a system that seeks to address an ever-larger public through the delicately balanced introduction of novelty. Central to the development of this generic vocabulary, however, is not just the expansive movement of capital with its “sense of the universal equality of things” (217), but also, as I argued in chapter 2, the egalitarian force of democratic representation and claims to sacred space—in particular, Dalit assertions and the ensuing counteridioms of Hindu-hegemonic inclusion. In this scenario, what is efficacious about mass reproduction’s publicness and mobility is not its destruction of cult or aura but its work of commensuration at the level of form—that is, of sensible infrastructure. Here novelty and exhibitionary address come together to consolidate and disseminate the mimetic work of formal commensuration and competition 178

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through new media, from oil painting and printing to sārvajanik festivals (arguably a form of mass reproduction whose proliferation of icons brings them closer to “the masses”). As we have seen, sārvajanik festivals made Hindu and Dalit iconopraxis commensurable and competitive with Muslim public processions; similarly, oil painting as a novel means of reinterpreting mythic and religious themes meant the translation of diverse ritual and secular traditions into the commensurable forms of oil on canvas or watercolor on paper. Photographic and then print reproduction further standardized formats, colors, sizes, surfaces, and textures. Iconic cult value inheres in heterogeneous modalities of ritual mediated by priests: bathing lingams and offering prasad to icons, listening to the azaan and reciting duas, singing hymns in a congregation. Iconic exhibition value, on the one hand, and spirituality, on the other, institute palpably commensurable (though not homogeneous) religiosities in keeping with the institution of identitarian similarities-yet-differences in avowedly plural liberal democracies. A key element of this mimetic commensuration, which I discuss in chapter 4 in relation to spectacle, is an awareness of the gazes and presence not just of the divine and those within the community but also of comparable yet heterogeneous—including secular—others. This push to commensuration is another redistribution of the sensible that indicates, in Benjamin’s phrase, the ongoing “adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality” (217). Quantification figures as a key element of this commensuration as part of the pervasive “reality” of modern biopower, with its quantification of populations or “the masses,” and as a feature of commodification. It figures in the numbers, sizes, and prices of paintings and prints; the heights of statues, gopurams, and shikharas; the spans of domes; the numbers of lingams; the loudness and timing of religious music; the spatial extent of processions; the popularity and sponsorship figures of pandals (neighborhood shrines); the “likes” for icons on Facebook. “Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticed in the increasing importance of statistics” (217), a form of the sensible based on the transcendent authority of secular, scientific modernity, rendered auratic and naturalized by biopolitical governmentality and commerce. Rather than being diminished or destroyed, the forms of aura of the image are multiplied. Here, too, the value of quantification as an element of the image oscillates between the modalities of cult and exhibition, between the importance of statistics as a source of scientific authenticity in a “theoretical sphere” whose high priests are scientists and technocrats and the public visibility or palpability of quantity in the “field of perception,” in large part via the everyday banality of commodification. ICONOPRAXIS

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Quantification here is the very means of “adjustment” between the conceptual and the perceptual, between sense and sense. Or, to put it another way, quantification is ideological, and it is aesthetic (indeed, it is ideological because it is aesthetic). But because its cultic aspects articulate with numerological and other forms of religious and spiritual authority, quantification pushes biopolitics beyond governmentality per se into an arena in which governmental, religious, and corporate modalities of power are deeply enmeshed. I have explored this enmeshment by focusing, in turn, on democracy and on iconopraxis. Chapter 4 focuses on the reconfigurations and resignifications of space, time, and movement in India’s postreform economy.

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4

CARS AND LAND

THE AUTOMOTIVE-I CONI C-TERRITORIAL ASSEMBLAGE

“Officially not open, Yamuna Expressway already a hit,” proclaimed an NDTV headline on June 4, 2012.1 The Yamuna Expressway—which soon came to be known as “death highway”—is a six-lane highway along the river Yamuna between Agra and Delhi, built during the regime of Kumari Mayawati, who in March 2012 had lost her position as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.2 The story recounted how “speed junkies” were already testing out the highway, despite its official inauguration being stalled by the new chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, of the Samajwadi Party (SP). Those interviewed were enthusiastic about the time saved, the comfort of the journey, and the panoramic views from the elevated road; according to one interviewee named Sudheir, “We could see herds of blue bulls (Neel Gai) sitting in the shade far away.” Mayawati, a Dalit, had come under intense criticism during her regime for spending public funds on building grand memorials to “Dalit icons” (see chapter 2). However, she garnered resounding approval for building the Buddh International Circuit, a “world-class” Formula One racing circuit for the first Indian Grand Prix in 2011, thereby salvaging India’s infrastructurebuilding reputation after its Commonwealth Games debacle the previous year. This time, no one objected that the money spent on the Buddh International Circuit, or the land expropriated from farmers by the Uttar Pradesh government, would have been better used for schools, hospitals, or roads that actually went somewhere rather than around and around in a loop; clearly, for the mainstream media and its public, putting India on the global map was laudable and worthwhile, but putting Dalits on the Indian map was an abominable waste.

In this sensible regime, such uses of technology, however limited their beneficiaries, serve the public good, while monuments to so-called Dalit icons are seen as the narrow concern of a specific community that cannot lay claim to public representativity. With the Yamuna Expressway, then, Mayawati had scored another infrastructural “hit.” However, her SP successor, Akhilesh Yadav, shelved six elevated road projects Mayawati had initiated in Noida (in Uttar Pradesh but also part of the Greater Delhi area) in favor of underpasses and flyovers.3 It is unclear whether the decision to scrap these, or to build them in the first place, was made on “material” or “symbolic” grounds, as a matter of function or of the oxymoronically spectacular aesthetics of infrastructure, for the public good or for political status. This echoes the ambivalence of religious patronage described in previous chapters. Similarly ambivalent was Yadav’s announcement that he would prioritize metro projects in four cities in Uttar Pradesh, as was the announcement by his father, former Chief Minister Mulayam Singh, of the revival of a scheme for a lion safari park near his constituency, Etawah.4 This would require lions to be relocated from the Gir Forest in Gujarat, but Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat (and dubbed the “Lion of Gujarat”), took a dim view of this proposal, deploying the global language of conservation against it just as effectively—and again, as ambivalently—as the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena in the case of its totem, the tiger (which it seeks to “save”).5 Just as transport infrastructure harnesses a global imaginary of technological progress to the power of individuals to command resources, participation in global environmentalism can entail claiming specific animals as local symbols of personal or party power. Patronage, whether religious or political, whether in India or elsewhere, is ripe for such elisions of the distinction between public good and private interest. Thus, the transport infrastructure of roadways and metros is ranged alongside totemic animals and massive iconic monuments as ammunition in a war of political spectacle. Automobility and nature are harnessed here in their aesthetic capacity as part of a powerful infrastructure of the sensible that underpins developmentalist imaginaries. It is no coincidence that highways and animals are bundled together as privileged sites for this symbolic work, because the valorization of technology and progress in the linear, vectoral temporality of the moderns, preeminently signified by the highway, has as its flip side a nostalgic discourse of conservation and salvage where animals embody the Romantic idea of nature at the heart of global environmentalism.6 Indeed, the twinned “centrifugal” aesthetic experiences of speed and of nature as landscape, rather than the functional imperative of road haulage, were the explicit mandate for the early “parkways” in the United States, the autobahns of Nazi 182

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Germany, and one of the first expressways, the Autostrada dei Laghi, built in 1925, that took residents of congested Milan to the lakes.7 The view of nilgai (blue bulls) from the Yamuna Expressway speaks to the institution of a similarly accessible-yet-distant aesthetic appreciation of nature, in consonance with the sensibilities of the television channels National Geographic and Animal Planet (both hugely popular in postliberalization India). Here the thrill and appeal of getting up close and personal with nature is predicated on our everyday distance from it and on our attendant interpellation into a “global” or “worldclass” modernity centered on automobility.8 But how do big statues fit into this account of automobility-led technological modernism’s sensible regime, with nature as its constitutive outside? While the previous chapters situated the emergence of monumental statue building within processes unfolding over a longer duration, this chapter locates it squarely within the timeframe of its (re)appearance in the late 1980s, in tandem with India’s market-oriented economic reforms. Chapter 1 placed the practitioners and patrons of this form in relation to the materials and processes of a structurally uneven developmentalist modernity—in particular, construction in concrete. This chapter resituates concrete in the postliberalization real estate boom: the intensified enclosure and “accumulation by dispossession” of land, and its resignification as capital investment, private property, or public spectacle.9 This unfolds in assemblage with the rise of the automobile industry, a key harbinger of India’s economic reforms. The auto industry is the paradigmatic site of modern industrial production, consumption, and labor organization and, hence, a privileged signifier—along with the city—of modernity and its affects. It is closely linked to monumental statue projects in a similar manner to concrete construction and the resignification of land through a mix of materials, techniques, bodies, significations, and affects, whose interrelations are better specified as contingent conjunctures than as causalities—or, in other words, as emergences in an assemblage. Also running through this automotive-iconic-territorial assemblage are the other strands that I have described in the genealogies of this form: the commensurative representational imperatives of electoral democracy, the enumerative authority of biopolitics beyond governmentality, and the generic modalities and techniques of iconopraxis. Here I link the idea of iconic exhibition value developed in chapter 3 to the theorization of spectacle. Picking up on spectacle’s peculiar temporality in relation to modernity—for Michel Foucault, it is a premodern technique of sovereignty, while for Guy Debord, it indexes late capitalism’s penetration of social relations—this chapter rereads spectacle as a category that speaks CAR S AN D L AN D

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to a situation of temporal heterogeneity or unevenness that obviates modernity’s functional differentiations, yet must contend with them (like Walter Benjamin’s oscillation between cult and exhibition value in relation to the secularization thesis).10 Here, rather than emphasizing the deterritorialized, mass-mediated avatars of spectacle, as has been the tendency of media theory, I examine spectacle’s integration into the boosterism of putting physical places “on the map” that is used to legitimize territorial enclosure. This territorial aspect of the spectacle speaks to both sovereignty (Foucault) and capital (Debord)—and, indeed, to the articulation of the two via speculation, a phenomenon that, as mentioned in the introduction, came far from “late” to the bazaar’s vernacular capitalism. This discussion of spectacle serves my broader argument regarding the infrastructural role of the sensible, this time via the aesthetic efficacies of automobility and land as developmental infrastructures. At stake here, as with much recent scholarship on urbanism and development, are the effects and limits of planning and economic regulation under neoliberal structural adjustment and what happens when they encounter other world-making logics and sensibilities in the assemblages in which they seek to intervene.11 But my emphasis on automobility calls for a diffusion of this scholarship’s intense focus on cities as the spatial crucibles of neoliberal economic reforms and their fallout (a focus that echoes earlier accounts of the city as the proper site of modernity and its techno-industrial sensorium). If, as Erik Swyngedouw suggests, fixating on a particular spatial scale (local, national, regional, global) fails to do justice to the inherently dynamic and processual nature of social life—and hence, also of economy and governance—surely part of the task in thinking about the city is to examine the mobile, changing spatial networks and scalar regimes in which it is situated.12 Automobility brings the saturated sensory field of the city into a more dispersed sense of what exists to be seen or experienced and what is worth experiencing. This is consistent with Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the urban as the spread of industrial techniques, materials, and processes, of a certain sociospatial orientation, and the promises that these embody, which is not reducible to the space of the city per se.13 A fabric of concrete and steel that travels, unravels, and reassembles in clumps of varying intensity along the thick and thin ribbons of roads leading in and out of the city’s shifting boundaries, the urban at once embodies the promise, the material constitution, and the unevenness of development. Here the processes of iconopraxis that I have been tracing—and of religion in general, the postsecular “resurrection” of which would appear to issue a firm noli me tangere for secular planning—are potent 184

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sites of emergence, of the recombination of elements into something quite different and unanticipated: projects that adopt the idioms of infrastructure but both are and are not part of the plan.

AUTOMOBILITY AS AESTHETI C INFRASTRUCTURE

What first alerted me to the monumental statues’ coemergence with the automotive-territorial/cement assemblage was the striking number of vernacular capitalist patrons with some relation to the automobile industry, construction, real estate, or some combination of these.14 R. N. Shetty, encountered in previous chapters, is a construction baron who also owns nine Maruti car showrooms across Karnataka, one with a driving school. One of his showrooms is on the highway at Murudeshwar (see figure 3.38), enabling customers to save on transportation costs to larger centers such as Udupi. This also increases traffic to the town. According to the manager of the Murudeshwar showroom, people often combine the ritual of car servicing with pilgrimage-cum-tourism at the statue, temple, and beach, consonant with a logic of layering to which I return. Another patron manufactures car seats and has now expanded to cinema seats for multiplexes (another postliberalization phenomenon, which has transformed Indian commercial cinema). The giant Hanuman he commissioned in Delhi’s Chhatarpur temple complex in 2002 blesses his own commute from his Chhatarpur “farmhouse” to his seat factory in Gurgaon. Does the statue signal a phenomenological attunement to the sedentary gaze of cars and cinemas? Naresh Kumar Varma’s 2012 “Mangal Mahesh” Shiva in Palam Vihar (also in Gurgaon) stands opposite its patron Balkrishna Saini’s Maruti auto service station, the statue’s base housing a temple on one side and a driving school on the other (figure 4.1). Across the street from the service station and just behind the statue and temple, Varma built a workshop for his Matu Ram Art Center on land acquired on Saini’s advice (figure 4.2). Saini also deals in real estate and chose the location for its strategic position on the edge of a special economic zone (SEZ) proposed by the Reliance Industries conglomerate, now shelved after a fraught land-acquisition process. At one level, the connections between the new economy, land, automobility, and monumental statues are obvious. Development needs infrastructure—land for building (and for resource extraction), as well as transport and power—so this is where the money is in the new economy and, hence, the opportunities for religious patronage. However, the connections between automobility and the monumental statue form are not confined to enabling patronage. As is the case with concrete, the CAR S AN D L AN D

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Mangal Mahesh at Raj Automobiles and Apra Auto Maruti Driving School, Palam Vihar, Gurgaon, March 2012. FIGURE 4.1

Matu Ram Art Centre studio, opposite Raj Automobiles, Palam Vihar Gurgaon, February 2010. FIGURE 4.2

connections also unfold in several other, interconnected ways, as we began to see in chapter 3 with “drive-by devotion” as iconopraxis. The automobile industry is arguably the single most powerful source of material, spatial, and temporal—and hence, sensible—transformation unleashed by India’s economic liberalization. After all, automobility has been central to urban and industrial development everywhere, and thus to planetary ecology and geopolitics, since the early twentieth century. It has also been integral to the self-understandings, imaginaries, and material manifestations—the forms, spaces, and affects—of both modernity and postmodernity. The car is the commodity par excellence; the growth of national economies has typically been pegged to the development of transport, particularly the production and consumption of cars.15 The system of industrial mass production, mass consumption, and labor organization—the “regime of accumulation”—that dominated Europe and North America in the mid-twentieth century is known as “Fordism”; the oil crisis in the 1970s and the competition from flexible just-in-time Japanese manufacturing that led to upheavals in the Western nations’ automobile industries ushered in the era of globalized, “disorganized,” “post-Fordist,” or “postindustrial” capitalism.16 Modernist excitement about automobility informs tropes of the electronically networked “global” condition—superhighways, circulation, flows, connectivity, flexibility—though cars also figure prominently in the list of modernity’s downsides: accidents, traffic jams, suburbia, pollution, car bombs, terrorist attacks, road rage, fetishes, kitsch (billboards, bumper stickers, roadside attractions, girlie calendars).17 If trains were the quintessential symbols of modernity in Indian cinema until the 1990s, in twentieth-century Europe and North America cars and highways were the privileged vectors of progress, accompanied by the affects of unidirectional speed, power, will, individualist selfhood, and smoothness edged with risk, celebrated as beauty by the futurists and decried by Paul Virilio as “dromocracy.”18 The car, big enough for the nuclear family but glamorized by the young (mostly male) individual and the couple, encapsulates the privacy and atomization that modernity inaugurates. It also encapsulates the separation from and instrumentalization of nature that fundamentally organize the world as a view or picture (Heidegger’s Weltbild), configuring space into city, suburbs, and countryside-as-landscape to be viewed through the windscreen with what Wolfgang Schivelbush calls (in relation to trains) “panoramic perception.”19 Here, as Edward Dimendberg describes for Nazi Germany and the United States and Kristin Ross for postwar France, there are intense exchanges between cars, highways, and the cinema as they orchestrate space, time, and affect.20 There is a similar articulation between cars and the built environment, CAR S AN D L AN D

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as Marshall McLuhan argued in the 1960s, positing the motorcar as a medium, or as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour describe for the United States of the early 1970s in Learning from Las Vegas, the Ur-text of postmodernism.21 But contrary to McLuhan’s prediction of the demise of the motorcar in a linear logic of succession, the built forms produced by the spatial and visual regimes of automobility—highways, flyovers, spaghetti junctions, suburbs, billboards, parking lots, strip malls, motels, petrol stations, driveins, and, of course, roadside attractions—continue to proliferate across the earth’s surface, along with the life-threatening geopolitics of the petroleum industry. Automobility’s visual and kinesthetic regime is geared to the drive-by viewing of large-scale, public images from a distance and at fast speeds. If New York’s 1886 Statue of Liberty and early twentieth-century skyscrapers greeted approaching ships, early objects of automobile aesthetics included, in addition to the immersive spectacle of nature, impressive bridges (particularly in Nazi Germany) and the more vertical billboards and roadside attractions of the United States in the recessionary 1930s and onward: the 1931 cement over metal Big Duck at Flanders, New York; the 1937 Paul Bunyan with his blue ox, Babe, at Bemidji, Minnesota, and many other versions across the northern United States; and, of course, the casinos and signage of Las Vegas.22 These assemblages also worked fractally, in another register and scale from automobility’s regime of distanced, high-speed vision: the Long Island Duck’s eyes were made from Model-T Ford taillights; at Bemidji, Babe the Blue Ox’s eyes were also made of taillights and connected to a battery.23 If these became iconic exemplars of the postmodernist attunement to vernacular or “low” forms, this enthusiasm belongs to a later 1970s moment of resignification, for the emergence of the early U.S. roadside attractions must also be understood as a response to uneven development, as small towns fighting to survive the Great Depression or marginalized by the new interstate highway system tried to stay on the map.24 Las Vegas, too, developed as a result of the Hoover Dam, another Depression-era project. Such multiscalar exchanges between automobility, urban form, and media have unfolded in India, too, but with significant differences. John Urry sees automobility as an autopoietic system: a pervasive, selfreplicating complex of objects, infrastructures, and techniques with far-reaching implications for relationships to land, space, time, labor, corporeality, and desire, and for regimes of value, aesthetics, and subjectivity working across multiple scales and sensory registers.25 While Urry’s description of these implications is

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useful and insightful, his emphasis on autopoeisis, as Matthew Paterson convincingly argues, does not adequately factor in the role of political will in actively promoting and implementing this “system of automobility.”26 India is a case in point: political will was key both to India’s absence from this putatively global system during the era of Nehruvian market protection and to its belated entry into it in 1983, when a joint venture between the government of India and Japan’s Suzuki Motor Corporation started producing compact Maruti cars at a plant in Gurgaon near Delhi.27 (Maruti, “Son of the Wind,” is a name for the monkey god Hanuman.) In 1971, Indira Gandhi’s cabinet had passed a resolution to manufacture an affordable “people’s car,” controversially assigning this task to her younger son, Sanjay, who had been tinkering with cars since an abortive internship at RollsRoyce in the United Kingdom.28 Despite his mother’s connections (funding was sought from the Birlas, among others), free land in Gurgaon, and tax breaks, his company, Maruti Udyog Ltd., was liquidated in 1977. However, the project was revived after Sanjay Gandhi’s death in a plane crash in 1980, when the Indian government solicited partnership proposals from Volkswagen, Renault, and Suzuki, among others, to set up a car factory owned 74 percent by the state. (In 2007, the government sold all of its shares in the company.) Before Maruti Suzuki began production in 1983, annual car production in India was just over thirty thousand (and the largest of four car manufacturers was the Birlas’ Hindustan Motors); by 2011, Maruti was one of many manufacturers and selling about 100,000 cars per month.29 In 2012, the automobile sector accounted for more than 4 percent of India’s gross domestic product, growing nearly four times as fast as the economy as a whole, even as labor unrest intensified.30 By 2013, India was the world’s sixth-largest motor vehicle producer; by 2017, it was the fourth-largest automobile market and growing.31 State infrastructure has been hard-pressed to keep up. The National Highways Authority of India was instituted only in 1988, and in 1998 it launched the National Highways Development Project to build 45,000 kilometers of highways. The total length of roads in India more than quadrupled in the four decades from 1970–71 to 2010–11, from about 1.3 million kilometers to just over 7.2 million kilometers, necessitating a highway renumbering in 2010. But construction was unable to meet targets due to difficulties with funding (particularly given rising land values, in turn driven up by the increased presence of roads), land acquisition, and environmental clearances.32 This led to a push for public-private partnerships and exemptions to environmental clearance policies, as well as to intensified political struggles around land acquisition

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laws. Notably, a major catalyst for struggles to reform land acquisition legislation (essentially unchanged since it was instituted in 1894) was the 2006–8 resistance to the state’s acquisition of farmland in Singrur, West Bengal, for a factory to produce the Tata Nano car, another iteration of a “people’s car,” but this time produced by the private company Tata Motors.33 Maruti Suzuki was part of a technological upheaval generated by the easing of import restrictions in the late 1970s, which enabled local cassette and video production, the pan-national expansion of state-run television broadcasting and the introduction of color television (both in 1982), and the rapid development and penetration of telephony following the establishment of the Center for Development of Telematics in 1984. So, unlike in Europe and North America, in India mass television, telephony, and automobility effectively arrived at the same time, rapidly followed by digital information networks. Here automobility arrived as part of an assemblage of media technologies that simultaneously conjured and fostered imaginaries of a nation entering globality and promoted actual, territorial mobility and networks: the ease, scale, and intensity of movement through physical space. Many more Indians could now both imagine themselves and actually operate not just in a range of locations, but also at a range of scales, from the global to the subnational and highly local, and as members of multiple social networks and publics, at varying degrees of separation: face to face, stranger sociable, and others in between. In other words, the circulation of new forms in India from the 1980s onward is a function not just of mass-produced media artifacts but also of the mass mobility of people. So if, as Ravi Sundaram and others suggest through the rubric of “media urbanism,” the modern urban experience cannot be thought apart from the experience of media, then urbanism needs to be proactively thought beyond the city, and media need to be proactively thought not only beyond the secular (as argued in the introduction), but also beyond the virtual. This is where iconic statues and religious theme parks come—quite literally—into the picture as new media that are visible to mobile viewers from the cars and roads that open up space for construction on the urban peripheries and between urban concentrations—that is, at the frontiers of development. At this frontier, monumental statues and religious theme parks join technology and industrial “parks”; fancy gated residential complexes; shoddy housing projects for those displaced from urban slums; gigantic malls with multiplex cinemas; private schools and hospitals; offices and hotels; spiritual and wellness complexes; sylvan wedding “palaces”; memorials; ceremonial gateways, including gateways between towns and highways; leisure and amuse-

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ment parks including “eco-parks”; and, of course, yet more roads for the continuing deluge of cars. Recall that two of the earliest monumental statues appeared along transport arteries linking southwestern Delhi to the industrial and technical hub of Gurgaon, home of the Maruti and its ancillaries. One is the 1985 granite statue of Mahavira along the Mehrauli–Gurgaon Road, instigated by a Jain watchmaker; at 13.5 ft., it is smaller than the later statues but is situated on a hillock visible from the road. Another is the Birlas’ 1994 Mangal Mahadev Shiva opposite Delhi’s international airport on National Highway 48 (NH48) from Delhi to Gurgaon (and from there on in a massive, 2,807-kilometer curve to Jaipur, Mumbai, Pune, and down to Karnataka and Tamil Nadu). Similarly situated to bless both car and airplane travel was Ravi Melwani’s Kemp Fort Shiva, built along Bangalore’s old airport road. R. N. Shetty’s Shiva at Murudeshwara is visible from NH66 (formerly NH17), as well as from the Konkan Railway; Delhi’s metro runs past the waist of the enormous Hanuman, famous for revealing Ram and Sita inside his chest at the Tuesday evening arati, at the “108 Foot Sankat Mochan Dham” near Pusa Road and the Jhandewalan metro station (figure 4.3).34 The 2009 Mangal Murti Morya Ganapati at Talegaon overlooks both the 2002 six-lane Mumbai–Pune Expressway and NH48, also blessing autoworkers at Talegaon’s General Motors plant, which started production in 2008. This is another Birla statue (the Birlas have a boarding school and a hospital at Talegaon), the “Morya” here a localizing gesture that echoes the Marathi processional chant at Ganapati Utsav. Also in Maharashtra, a 105-ft. Hanuman built in 2012 at Nandura towers over travelers on the major east-west highway NH53. The auspicious aspect of Indian iconic statues adds an extra layer to the aesthetics of automobility described earlier for Europe and North America, even as their scale speaks to the same visual regime of speed and distance and to a similar developmental boosterism (more on this later). Their positioning along roads and highways is not primarily a form of advertising, as it was in North America, or of orchestrating the mise-en-scène for the Heimat, as it was in Nazi Germany—although they are clearly sources of national pride (as the 3,500 “likes” in the Better India’s Facebook album “India’s Tallest Statues” attest).35 Instead, their auspicious presence recalls the smaller roadside shrines that feature at significant crossroads or sacred landmarks, except with a far wider, more expansive public gaze of darshanic blessing (as with the Murudeshwar Shiva discussed in chapter 3). This is a rather different religious modality from that of the memorializing roadside shrines with a Catholic influence (including in Mauritius, where Hindu shrines also take on this inflection).36

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108 Foot Sankat Mochan Dham Hanuman, view from the Jhandewalan metro station, New Delhi, July 2007. FIGURE 4.3

The monumental statues no doubt serve to guard against the perils of travel, whose specter has loomed large over India’s roads since the hokey roadside slogans of the Nehruvian era (“Better be late Mr. Motorist than the late Mr. Motorist”).37 However, in conversations about them, their raison d’être primarily revolved around their reallocations and resignifications of land—their role in real estate, infrastructure, and tourism development—and the obverse of these: the “land grab,” all of which speak to far deeper entanglements between automobility, iconopraxis, and development.

I CONS AND LANDSCAPE AS AND AT THE DEVELOPMENT FRONTIER

Iconic religious or otherwise auspicious statues, visible to passing traffic, often explicitly promote urban development and real estate schemes, much as contemporary culture industry and “starchitect”-led gentrification projects do (as with Renzo Piano’s Whitney Museum along the High Line in New York’s Meatpacking District or Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles).38 But unlike postindustrial redevelopment, this development process 192

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is not so much one of gentrifying a hollowed-out urban core via the appropriation of the aesthetic by the culture industry or the “creative class” but one akin to suburbanization: making peri-urban and interurban spaces desirable for habitation rather than sites for insalubrious heterotopias such as cemeteries, jails, and hospitals.39 As with suburbanization elsewhere, this automobility-led development leads to further demand for cars, setting up a self-perpetuating system of the type Urry describes as autopoeitic. However, if the appeal of the Euro-American suburbs rested on combining urban infrastructure with the beauty, space, and healthy environment of nature, the development frontier in India cannot necessarily take this aestheticization of nature for granted.40 Rabindranath Tagore and his Santiniketan project notwithstanding, the Romantic imaginary has had an uneven and partial uptake in Indian popular culture, so, as discussed in chapter 3, there is little sense in which the aesthetic, either as sublime landscape or as fine art with its exhibition value, served to supplant a theological or cultic apprehension of the divine. Instead, these take on a layered co-presence. Thus, the automotive industry baron who built the 101-ft Chhatarpur Hanuman lives in a “farmhouse” (part of Delhi’s suburbanization process, which materializes elite fantasies of a rural idyll through the appropriation of farmland), collects Ganesh-themed artworks, and builds monumental icons. In this process of urban development, neither “art” nor “landscape” alone is quite enough to attract real estate buyers, although they do have a role; the gods and “spirituality” play their part, too. Take, for instance, the Kanakapura Road leading southward from Bangalore toward Coimbatore.41 The neospiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar established his 65-acre ashram there in 1986. This was followed by Pyramid Valley, “home of the world’s largest meditational pyramid,” built in 2003 by Brahmarshi Patriji, a soil scientist who founded the Pyramid Spiritual Societies Movement. Also in 2003, Sridhar built a 45-ft. Ganesh like the one at Kemp Fort, sitting above a small temple at the entrance of the Vishranthi Dhama Health Club and Spa. Built on land initially acquired for an aged-care facility, the site now houses a conference venue-cum-health resort with a “unique” pyramid-shaped meditation hall featuring a statue of Sai Baba, a swimming pool, and a “mini-zoo.” Its Ganesh statue also likely inspired Sridhar’s three large (approximately 15-ft.) icons of Hanuman, Krishna, and Ganesh, again unusually—but visibly—placed atop three small temples set in a garden at the Trimurthy temple, which is also on the Kanakapura Road. Several elite schools have now mushroomed along this corridor. In 2015, the Karnataka government approved a 400-acre SEZ on the Kanakapura Road for apparel and textile factories, led by Gokaldas Exports; the road is scheduled for widening into a divided CAR S AN D L AN D

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highway.42 Vaikunta Hill, which looks out over Kanakapura Road’s South Bangalore developments, is also the proposed location for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness’s Krishna Lila theme park, which includes the 600-unit Gokulam Apartments. (Gokul is the pastoral area near Mathura where Krishna spent his childhood.) These apartments will join South Bangalore’s housing boom along the Kanakapura Road, alongside developments with names such as Concorde Napa Valley (Bangalore is known as India’s Silicon Valley), Brigade Meadows, Comfort Heights, Prestige Falcon City, Salarpuria Sattva Misty Charm, and Chartered Hummingbird.43 If the spiritual complexes, resorts, and temples that opened the Kanakapura Road for development came up because of the peaceful, verdant surroundings and the availability of space and water, elsewhere on the outskirts of Bangalore the connection between religious statues and real estate development has been more directly purposive. This is particularly the case where nature is seen as insufficiently picturesque or hospitable (as it was in South Sikkim, home of Chief Minister Chamling’s monumental statue projects). Sridhar has built a dynamic 35-ft. statue of Hanuman for a new housing complex at Nelamangala, in northwestern Bangalore, and a 65-ft. Surya statue for the Eagleton Golf Village, near Bidadi in the south; at Kengeri Satellite Town, in the southwest, he showed me an unusual, large, five-headed (panchamukhi) Ganesh statue under construction as part of a real estate development along the Mysore Road, near the intersection with NH48. These statues were all explicitly built to “make the area more popular,” as he put it, because they “automatically improve all types of business, infrastructure, everything—it gets a quick response from the public.” The efficacy of these statues goes beyond the aesthetic, for their auspicious presence is thought to ward off the ghosts and evil spirits that frequent uninhabited—or forcibly (dis)possessed—spaces, as figured in several Indian horror films set in new housing developments.44 Sridhar has also built giant Shivas, Sai Babas, and a Hanuman in central India at Jabalpur, Sagar, and coal-rich Shahdol, all booming as mining intensifies (as elsewhere in India) in a region largely inhabited by Indigenous people. Here the development frontier is the risk-laden jangal (jungle), the domain of “tribals,” where the visible presence of Shiva, Hanuman, and particularly Sai Baba—a safe nondenominational bet— serves to reassure new settlers from different parts of the country of its habitability.45 Sridhar’s clients for a big Hanuman statue in Jabalpur featured the statue as the cover photograph on their Facebook page, which also resignified and euphemized the jangli frontier as “landscape”: “Chaitanya promoters and developers is a real estate firm based in Jabalpur [Madhya Pradesh]. The firm 194

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provides services in various segments of the real estate sector including promoting and developing landscapes. The company is an established name in a highly competitive and fluctuating real estate business of central India with collateral in hospitality as well.”46 Resignifying land as the abode of visible deities and as landscape speeds up its reterritorializing conversion to real estate, in assemblage with the deterritorializing auto industry. This resignification enables further assemblages with domestic tourism, hospitality, and leisure that have proliferated with increased car ownership. Temples, monumental statue sites, and religious theme parks feature prominently here. The need to build monumental icons at tourist sites, as with the frontier of residential settlement, suggests that the landscape alone, however sublime or picturesque (like the utterly beautiful beach and islands at Murudeshwar), is not quite enough to constitute an attraction in and of itself; it must be mediated by iconopraxis. In one sense, then, as with the much earlier and initially peri-urban Birla Mandir in Delhi, the new interand peri-urban tourist sites map onto the conventions of pilgrimage, where worship has always combined with elements of what we now call tourism, entertainment, and commerce. However, the landscape figures rather differently at monumental statue sites from sites where landscape forms the backdrop for a temple or shrine with a sequestered deity (as with various cave lingams, such as the famous one at Amarnath). In contrast to hidden temple deities or lingams, monumental statues of gods are situated directly within the landscape. This landscape could be natural, as with the spectacular backdrops of the Shivas at Namchi, Murudeshwar (see plate 2), Sanga, and Haridwar, or the more modest landscaping of the Birla Kanan and Panchavati Park. It could also be simulated, like the Kemp Fort Shiva’s plywood Himalayas (see plate 1; figure 3.19), or the unusual painted rendition of Shiva and his family in the Himalayas behind the lingam for public kumbabhisheka (ritual bathing of the lingam) under the big statue at Murudeshwar (see plate 9). These are fairly consistent with the gods’ mythic locations, such as Mount Kailash for Shiva, Panchavati for Ram, or Brajbhoomi for Krishna, like the landscapes of the gods in the “realist” modality of calendar art or cinematic and televised epics.47 Such realism delinks deities from their image’s location at specific auratic shrines and from the local or sectarian iconographic traditions to which temple icons must conform. This deterritorialization makes deities mobile and available for reterritorialization at new locations that may or may not have prior mythic or auratic significance but that take on a mimetic aura through their resemblance to, or association with, mythic sites. So as I have been arguing, the very newness of such realist forms has enabled CAR S AN D L AN D

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the expansion and more inclusive reinstitutionalization of caste Hinduism, both through their address across a wider range of devotional constituencies and through increased opportunities for patronage as a means of gaining social mobility and political power. If this realism takes gods and their iconographies traveling out of auratic temples, it also hijacks illusionist techniques away from the particular types of relationship between art and life associated with them in bourgeois Europe. Similarly, the scale of the statues introduces heterogeneity into notions of the sublime associated with externalized nature or technological achievement. European theories of the sublime, fundamental to secularizing (yet still Judeo-Christian) conceptions of the aesthetic from the mid-eighteenth century until about the mid-twentieth century, were predicated on a deterritorializing spiritualization of the divine that enabled its reterritorialization onto nature or technology.48 Here divine power is apprehended via its embodiment in immensities: features in nature or human achievements, though not iconic figures of the divine itself, for the divine is conceived as beyond any such material manifestation. This sublimation is of a piece with a secularizing aesthetics focused not on iconic but on artistic exhibition value and on nature as landscape—that is, as the object of the proprietorial-cum-aesthetic gaze of the bourgeois subject.49 At Indian monumental statue sites, by contrast, a similar move toward the externalization of nature as landscape (with all the ideological baggage and material ramifications that carries) is accompanied by the scalar sublimity of the icon itself—its iconic exhibition value. In this version of sublimity, the divine is rematerialized in a register of comparability with both human and (humanized) landscape, just as the duration of concrete diminishes the icon to a human temporal scale (as described in chapter 1). All this makes for a highly productive polyvalence at these sites, enabling them to slip across religious and secular frames of value and significance, in a manner that religious patronage alone cannot provide. These sites can be variously positioned in terms of tourism- and infrastructure-based development; identity or vote bank politics; cultural heritage and nationalism; leisure and amusement; health, healing, and “wellness”; environmentalism; and charitable causes and religiosity. While the iconic exhibition value of big statues is directly linked to the visual regime of automobility, their distance from urban centers also puts pressure on them to provide multiple sources of attraction (e.g., the Birla Mandir and Vishranthi Dhama described earlier). A telling example is the Char Dham pilgrimage-cum–cultural complex at Solophok, near Namchi (figure 4.4), which Sikkim Tourism’s website describes in terms of “Religious Tourism, coupled with Village and Eco tourism” (emphasis added). 196

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Plan for the Char Dham pilgrimage-cum-cultural center, administrator’s office, Solophok, Namchi, Sikkim, March 2013. FIGURE 4.4

Another attraction in Sikkim is described as a “tourist villa cum socio-cultural and amusement park.” There is a certain excess in these compound descriptors that registers the heterogeneous frames of value and modes of legitimation working at these sites; “pilgrimage-cum-cultural” does not subsume “pilgrimage” under secular “culture,” or vice versa, but keeps both “culture” and “religion” in play. The Char Dham and the Padmasambhava statue on nearby Samdruptse Hill, next to the Guru Padma Sambhava Smriti Van (Memorial Forest), inaugurated on World Environment Day in 2000 (figure 4.5), exemplify the vote bank politics of Sikkim’s long-serving former Chief Minister Pawan Chamling, providing identitarian symbols for his Hindu, Buddhist, and Kirant constituencies while also demonstrating his capacity for development and his concomitant concern for the environment. While tourism-led development and environmentalism provide a legitimating layer of secular governmentality and public service to politicians’ religious patronage, for private entrepreneurs such as R. N. Shetty and Ravi Melwani, the emphasis is clearly on religious and charitable philanthropy. But this is vulnerable to even greater suspicion of personal gain, for one of the most CAR S AN D L AN D

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Inauguration plaque for Guru Padma Sambhava Smriti Van (memorial garden), en route to the Padmasambhava/Guru Rinpoche statue on Samdruptse Hill, Namchi, Sikkim, March 2013. FIGURE 4.5

frequent explanations I heard for the appearance of these statues was that they are a “land grab.” Naïvely, I initially found this hard to parse, because clearly nothing else—nothing economically productive—can be done with land used for a religious complex, for an icon once established cannot be removed (so, for instance, the use of Delhi airport’s third runway seems to be permanently restricted due to the height of the Mangal Mahadev Shiva).50 But it soon became evident that these are, in fact, very productive sites indeed, where the spectacular monument or theme park is a relatively cheap investment that catalyzes the conversion of territorial control, a highly prized good in and of itself, not only into economic value, via tourism and pilgrimage, but also into social mobility or political power. Perhaps the clearest instance here is R. N. Shetty’s establishment of quasi-sovereignty over his hometown and its environs, discussed in chapter 3. However, even as the land grab for temples and icons is a bid for territorial control, as I suggested in the introduction, it should not necessarily be read in terms of bad faith, for it is precisely part of a religious ethos (i.e., a performance of good “faith”) in which the acquisition of religious merit has to be recognized as a powerful end in itself, along with wealth, social 198

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power, and territorial control—or, rather, in which the distinctions between these goods are shifting and circumstantial. Here I would suggest that the criticism of grabbing land for statues and temples, like that of the commercialism of sites such as Kemp Fort (also, in my experience, the most frequent target of accusations of land grabbing), is most intense when patrons draw attention to themselves, thereby flouting the code of anonymity for charitable giving (dāna or zakat).51 This moral code of anonymity in religious patronage layers onto the distinction between public and private interest that underlay the colonial state’s attempt to separate the charitable and religious aspects of vernacular giving and that remains the legal criterion for the legitimacy, or otherwise, of charitable works. Clearly, the odds here are stacked against new entrants into the game of religious patronage, for unlike in a feudal scenario based on hereditary privilege, in which it is usually obvious where patronage comes from without needing to spell it out, status claims from those who are not the usual suspects require publicity. Again, there is a delicate balance to be maintained, as with the generic conventions of iconopraxis—in this case, between anonymity and recognition. The idea is to be recognized by others in a trans-subjective visual regime as the “anonymous” donor rather than advertising oneself. And again, if, as discussed in chapter 3, Melwani and, to a lesser extent, Shetty tip this balance on the wrong side (as did Gulshan Kumar, discussed in chapter 1), the more discreet Birlas have been relatively successful here, while the patron of the Chhatarpur Hanuman is a powerful backroom player who stays within the code and insists on anonymity. The fraught distinction between public good and private interest that dogs religious patronage is also the bone of contention in debates on land acquisition by the state, where the key question is whether or not capitalist development led by private industry is a matter of the public good and therefore appropriate for the exercise of eminent domain. Various bills have been introduced, contested, and implemented since the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s attempt to amend the Land Acquisition Act in 2007, resulting in higher compensation for those who are dispossessed (e.g., by the Yamuna Expressway).52 In 2011, Kumari Mayawati officially withdrew from a transnational project to build a 500-ft. statue of Maitreya Buddha at Kushinagar (Uttar Pradesh) after farmers’ protests over state land acquisition policies turned into political capital for Rahul Gandhi and the Congress Party. Before these protests, however, the period during which the genre of monumental statues emerged was characterized by rampant state acquisition of land for development—a “land grab” if ever there was one. This included periurban land; interurban highway corridors such as the Yamuna Expressway and CAR S AN D L AN D

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their environs; and risky, environmentally sensitive floodplains. The Yamuna floodplain in Delhi now has the 2005 Akshardham religious complex, the 2010 Commonwealth Games site, and the 2011 Ambedkar memorial in Noida, while the massive 2008 Ambedkar memorial in Lucknow is situated on the Gomti floodplain.53 A great deal of agricultural, fishing, and forest land has been incorporated into the postliberalization economy, resulting in the marginalization of the dispossessed, particularly Indigenous people, or their repurposing for the new economy as landlords, entrepreneurs, and consumers (as with the spectacular changes in fortune of the agropastoral communities of Jats and Gujars around Gurgaon).54 In admitting new patrons into vernacular capitalist avenues of social and political recognition, the new icons and temples have enabled and blessed these processes of repurposing the land.

INTERMEZZO: MACHINI C LINKS IN THE NEW ECONOMY

A variety of new corporeal experiences have opened up for the growing range of consumers in this new economy at leisure sites whose distance from the spaces of home and work, enabled by automobility, also reinforces the temporal separation between work, domesticity, and leisure. They include religious theme parks featuring media experiences such as monumental statues (plate 10), sound and light shows, dioramas, animatronic shows, and IMAX (at Delhi’s Akshardham), as well as kinesthetic experiences such as going to the beach; riding on elevators, escalators, speedboats, and cable cars; hiking; diving; paragliding; golf; Ayurvedic massage; sun tattoos; and so on—all, of course, accompanied by photography on mobile phones (figure 4.14; see also figure 1.20 and plate 8). Here the resignification of land as landscape or nature not only entails experiencing the “world as picture,” but is also intermeshed with attention to the body and soul as sites of sensation, stimulation, care, transformation, and work (one’s own and that of others). New formulations of consuming subjects are layered onto existing ones: for instance, R. N. Shetty described Murudeshwar and its large sculptures in terms of “family enjoyment,” very likely not how a pilgrimage would have been described a few decades earlier.55 The forms and spaces that have appeared for these new functions and subjectivities include not just new forms of icons and religious architecture, but also various kinds of services accompanying them, layering a service economy onto primary production. In Murudeshwar, for instance, the fishing community was persuaded to give up one of the beaches used for fishing for part of the year and open bathing facilities or guesthouses in their homes (figure 4.6). This parallels the proliferation of services such as food and souvenir stalls, 200

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FIGURE 4.6

March 2012.

Bathing facilities, Murudeshwar (note the water tanks on the roof ),

roadside restaurants (dhabas) and shops, car repair shops, and petrol stations along highways. In the logic of the assemblage, however, the relationship to automobility is one not just of similarity but also of material—literally, machinic—linkages, as when two such tourist service facilities in Murudeshwar make ingenious use of motor vehicles. In one case, a passenger bus stationed on the beach has a water tank installed in the roof and an interior converted to bath stalls; each bather gets a bucket of water, a bath mug, and a few square feet of privacy (figure 4.7). In the other, defunct vans—a Maruti van at the foot of the steps leading up to the Shiva statue and an ice cream truck opposite the gopuram (entrance tower)—have been repurposed as on-site photo studios: automotive-photographic machines (figure 4.8). While male photographers take digital photographs of tourists, particularly of the many groups that are too large for selfies or have to include everyone (figure 4.9), young women sit hidden behind curtains inside the vans, literally in purdah (a curtain or screen, as well as a veil), making prints on inkjet printers running on repurposed car batteries (figures 4.10 and 4.11). Here the appearance of new forms and technologies does not mean that “older” forms of gendered corporeal control disappear. CAR S AN D L AN D

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FIGURE 4.7

Bus with bathing facilities, Murudeshwar beach, March 2012.

Similarly, women might frolic on the beach, but they mostly do so in their saris, salwar-kurtas, and burqas. The automotive-photographic machine is an aspect of the automotiveiconic assemblage that resignifies land as a landscape of tourism, layered onto the sacred geography of pilgrimage (figure 4.12), and that repurposes machines (cars, car batteries). Such techno-material encounters or machinic linkages with automotive technologies also characterize the monumental statues themselves. The sculptor Naresh Kumar Varma has developed a technique based on 3D printing to design molds for casting statues in sections on-site, which cuts the statue-building process down by months. He said the idea came to him as he was looking at equipment used to design molds for the ferrous casting of components such as steering knuckles, brake discs, and brake drums at the Hero Motors auto parts factory in Manesar (another manufacturing hub adjacent to Gurgaon). He has subsequently branched out into producing smaller molded statues. Similarly, the stone elephants at the Ambedkar Memorial Park in Lucknow were not carved from single blocks but assembled from smaller ones, like 3D jigsaw puzzles; these interlocking forms were also designed with 3D printers used in the auto parts industry. But perhaps the most striking instance of the machinic links in the automotive-iconic assemblage is the very 202

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Photography van under Murudeshwar Shiva statue (note the comb dangling from the side mirror), March 2012. FIGURE 4.8

Van photographer taking group photograph of visitors to Murudeshwar Shiva statue, March 2012. FIGURE 4.9

Woman making prints inside a photography van, shielded by a curtain. Murudeshwar, March 2012. FIGURE 4.10

Young women making photo prints inside a repurposed ice cream van near a bus stand. The images on the wall include a photograph of R. N. Shetty and his wife next to garlanded deities. Murudeshwar, March 2012. FIGURE 4.11

Van in a temple parking lot at Murudeshwara, with a rear window sunshade displaying an annual festive procession (jatra) in Karnataka, March 2012. FIGURE 4.12

FIGURE 4.13

Can of automotive paint at the Matu Ram Art Studio, May 2009.

FIGURE 4.14

Police contingent sightseeing at Murudeshwara.

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surface of the statues, which are often given a coating that mimics the metallic finish of temple icons. What is the perfect weatherproof finish for a large object that spends all its time outdoors? The concrete surfaces of Mangal Mahadev, Mangal Mahesh, and Mangal Murti Morya are sandblasted, coated with zinc or copper, then painted with polyurethane-based bronze Duco automotive paint (figure 4.13). The Shiva of Murudeshwar is similarly finished in a shade R. N. Shetty identified as “Suzuki gray” (figure 4.14).

SPECTACLE/SPECULATION: THE MATTERING OF APPEARANCES

India’s postliberalization automotive-iconic-territorial assemblage proceeds, then, across a range of material-semiotic registers and at various scales: of patronage, land use, built form, iconography/iconopraxis, subjectivity, and technology. Some processes in this assemblage, particularly those that have to do with icons and iconopraxis and their slow, sticky ritual temporality, have been unfolding over a longer period, as outlined in previous chapters. However, it is also clear that others—such as the car industry and attendant pressures on the acquisition and resignification of land—gathered force through specific political decisions about India’s development that were taken from the early 1980s onward, with the aim of integrating the nation’s economy more fully with global “free” trade. How do the layered processes and temporalities in this assemblage— and, more specifically, in monumental statues as a form generated by this assemblage—square with theorizations of the visual, spatial, and value regimes of “late” or “postindustrial” capitalism, where social life is seen as pervaded by commodity relations and culture and the symbolic are seen as increasingly salient in producing value? Here the concepts most relevant to monumental statues and theme parks would appear to be spectacle and Disneyfication (or Disneyization). Thus, for instance, Sanjay Srivastava writes about “Disneydivinity” in analyzing Delhi’s Akshardham in terms of cultures of consumption and middle-class identity formation.56 However, as with the distinction between cult and exhibition value, I argue that these terms cannot be applied uncritically as simply repeating the familiar linear self-narrativization of consumer capitalist development that has already unfolded elsewhere. Instead, they need to contend with the heterogeneous temporalities of uneven development, as manufacturing and service industries intensify together with quasifeudal social power. Indeed, existing theorizations of spectacle unwittingly already do this. Monumental statues partake both of the “political economy of the sign” seen 208

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as characterizing putatively postindustrial or late capitalist postmodernity and of the performance of sovereign power that Foucault associates with the premodern (though in the case of statues, the spectacle is one not of punishment but of access to resources and the display of religious patronage).57 Is spectacle postmodern—that is, where “we” (in the “developed” countries) are and where “emerging” economies are headed? Or is it premodern—that is, what we have left behind? The opposed vectors of these conceptions speak to the capaciousness of spectacle, not so much as indexing the replacement of one form of visuality, sociality, power, or value with another, but as a trans-subjective site that mediates between and remixes different forms in a situation of unevenness, which is the situation of capitalist development in general (provincial modernist grand narratives or the bleak, dystopian teleologies of Debord and Baudrillard notwithstanding). The genealogy of spectacle is usually traced back to what Aristotle called opsis (aspect, appearance), but even here spectacle is not simply that which is visible. It is an image characterized by an excess deriving from its ability to attract attention. On the aesthetico-moral downside, this makes it a distraction from a nobler truth or way of being. For Aristotle, invested in a hierarchy of genres and forms, spectacle’s attention-getting quality borders on both inessential and undesirable, as it threatens to distract from the cathartic aim of tragedy.58 It features lowest on his list of elements of tragedy, for its pleasures are sensational rather than abstract, cognitive, and emotional. Its effects are more of shock than of pity and terror; they are contrived through masks and costumes—that is, by the look (opsis) of the actors, which, in turn, depends on financial backing—rather than through the very structure of the events, the latter being “[the mark] of a better poet.”59 Debord’s twentieth-century critique of spectacle cathects these aspects of distraction and reification onto the commodity so that the spectacle becomes the commodity’s “most general form.”60 Spectacle, as a materially based but fully ideological distraction from the realities of capitalism, works to defuse critical thought and action, a “permanent opium war waged to make it impossible to distinguish goods from commodities, or true satisfaction from a survival that increases according to its own logic.”61 This idea of spectacle has primarily been taken up by media studies, with an emphasis on its deterritorialized, mass-mediated avatars.62 But Debord’s invocation of a lost, noble authenticity (“true satisfaction”) is also echoed in critiques of territorial Disneyfication as a way of reorganizing space for consumption through sanitized, simplified, and controlled theming, as in the paradigmatic case of Disney World. Just as Debord valorizes the “directly CAR S AN D L AN D

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lived” relations that have been replaced by images and commodity exchange, here the experience of “authentic” urban space and community is replaced by the commoditized or mass-mediated image. As Sharon Zukin puts it, Disney World is not simply “a symbol of capitalism, but . . . the capital of symbolism.”63 Debord’s formulation of spectacle as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” plays into what William Mazzarella calls a “fantasy of immediation” (that persists alongside an acknowledgment of immediation’s impossibility, thus taking on a fetishistic character); we need go no further than Debord’s contemporaries Jacques Lacan and Claude Lévi-Strauss to recognize that any social relationship is mediated by images/objects.64 As Bruno Latour makes abundantly clear, critiques of images based on an abhorrence of mediation or of human fabrication—qualities that are a given for the vast majority of images—fail to do justice to the energies and affects that images concentrate and unleash.65 The very denigration of spectacle as illusion does its own ideological work (much like the denigration of the fetish), itself becoming a distraction from recognizing the spectacle’s varied modes of efficacy.66 In particular, it forecloses the recognition of spectacle as a productive site for converting between, or rendering indistinguishable, the putatively separate domains of the symbolic and the material, culture and political economy, or the formal and informal economies. And, of course, the valorization of “earlier” forms of sociality also forgets that this nostalgia for a lost Gemeinschaft is unlikely to be shared by anyone acquainted with the “directly lived” realities of caste, gender, or feudal exploitation. The spectacle’s demand for attention makes it an excessive image, abhorrent for critique. But its refraction through the gazes of others makes it desirable for a spectacle machine where it is mobilized and becomes efficacious via the trans-subjective realm of sociality in which, for better or for worse, appearances matter. Here the value of the image is enhanced by the perception of its value to others. Its publicness is thus efficacious as a matter not only of the gazes of multiple individual rationally communicative subjects, but also of mimetic contagions and of what Mazzarella calls “public affect.” 67 If competing projects of value and patronage attempt to harness these volatile intensities unleashed by the mass-mediated image, this is only ever an attempt (I return to its incompleteness later), for harnessing public affect is itself an efficacious fantasy that is the obverse of the “fantasy of immediation.” Anna Tsing has described how the “economy of appearances” brought into play by globalized finance from the 1980s is a matter of performance in both senses: economic performance, or the actual delivery of profits, and a dramatization of capacity

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and possibility that deploys the “self-conscious making of spectacle.” 68 But this economy of appearances was already at work in publicity, advertising, marketing, speculation, real estate, tourism, entertainment, religion, and representative democracy, which have long recognized that the very perception of investments, commodities, land, celebrities, icons, or tourist destinations as sought after, or of political candidates or gurus as charismatic, is enough to give them value. For all of these, public attention—or, rather, the perception of public attention—is a highly valued good in and of itself inasmuch as it renders palpable and efficacious the claim to puissance, the capacity to create possibilities. As the online economy has made abundantly clear, the massmediated advertising industry has thrived not so much on selling goods as on selling attention. Here, spectacle’s mobilization of the aesthetic, mass-mediated and otherwise, ties it to speculation, or risk-laden gambling on fluctuations in value in the future. Speculation, like spectacle, entails a refraction or transitivity in which others’ perception of value is key. As we have seen, at the frontiers of capitalist expansion spectacle is closely linked to land speculation and territorial value. Via this (appearance of ) future promise, it is also tied to the consolidation of sovereignty through the political, social, and commercial mileage garnered from (the appearance of ) control over a territory and its resources. When a spectacle is associated with a specific territory, it generates speculative value for that territory and for those (seen as) controlling and functioning within it. Pilgrimage-cum-tourist complexes are a good example of this, as is civic boosterism focused on spectacular starchitecture or hosting global media events such as the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, or the Commonwealth Games. Here, the visual, spatial, and temporal modalities of spectacle work together as territorial spectacles are boosted by media publicity, and vice versa: again, as throughout, it is a matter not of one or the other, territorial or media spectacle, but of the circuits between them. The Olympic Games, for instance, are a highly localized spectacle, whose temporal delimitation to a couple of weeks every four years warrants the mass-mediated capture of the world’s eyeballs and an advertising bonanza, which also translates—or so host city councils hope, despite guaranteed budget overruns—into accelerated infrastructure development and raised real estate values and political clout, not to mention kickbacks. Further, as Kumari Mayawati’s monumental complexes (see chapter 2) and Modi’s Statue of Unity (see chapter 5) attest, media publicity means that the spectacle need not have been built, or be open to the public, to start taking on political efficacy. Given the large-scale investment involved, the

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very project qua “project”—an embodiment of futurity—is itself a spectacular, performative, speculative enterprise. The aesthetics of modernity has always had an orientation toward the future, anticipating the potential for technological development as much as performing its present capacity. Here the speculative power of spectacle and of its economy of appearances has been productive not only for capital but also for the state in its wager on modernity. The modernist spectacle is predicated on a nationalism bound up with internationalism: it shores up sovereignty by addressing a national polity through the demonstration of competitive capacity vis-à-vis other nations. This is evident in the “poetics of infrastructure” through which highways, flyovers, spaghetti junctions, and bridges, along with railways, dams, factories, silos, power plants, steel-and-glass high-rise buildings, and experimental architecture, all partake of the “technological sublime.”69 Such spectacles served to legitimize both colonial authority and nation-building projects (dams, as we have seen, are a potent example of nation-building projects in the Indian instance), and are now central to the image of the “world-class” city. This is not just a matter of what is seen but also of how it is seen and who sees: citizen-subjects are interpellated by the state as spectator, whose technologically mediated movement through the world mediates the framing of the world as image. If, say, in the opening sequence of Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, dir., 1935) viewers identify with the state (and Hitler) by seeing Nuremberg from the air, Asher Ghertner describes how, in 2005, the Delhi Development Authority’s commissioner of planning spoke about doing a visual “windshield survey” of slums from cars rather than gathering quantitative information to establish land-use patterns for Delhi’s Master Plan, thereby interpellating the city and its residents into the view from the automobile.70 The early World’s Fairs, associated with the visual regime of the “world picture” and what Timothy Mitchell has called the “exhibitionary complex,” encapsulate how the technological competitiveness of national regimes was staged via the international gaze at a moment when it was the European imperial powers that were the “emerging” economies.71 As I elaborate in chapter 5, this nation-building function of spectacle has not disappeared, even as the intense use of spectacle by a new set of “emerging” economies from the 1980s onward—as well as by others struggling not be submerged—also embodies global competition for transnational financial capital in a media-saturated environment. The contemporary territorial spectacle, refracted and amplified by the media, is Janus-faced, with one face directed to a local, territorially speci-

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fied audience that is invited to identify with the spectacle’s performance of capacity and seen as particularly invested in it, and the other, to the mediasphere as a whole. Here, the spectacle keeps nations in play as the global neoliberal dispensation attempts to reconfigure the state as units of varying scales, all competing, via an intensified theater of appearances, to provide managerial, financial, and policing services for mobile capital. Yet even in the very act of addressing transnational investment, media attention, and tourism—that is, in claiming “world-class” status by performing comparability or commensuration with global others (whether or not it actually captures their gaze)—the spectacle also suffuses its patrons with legitimacy in the eyes of the national or local constituencies they represent, via the speculative and entrepreneurial aura and the staging of puissance so valued by neoliberalism.72

GETTING ON THE MAP: THE TERRITORIAL SPECTACLE

In this sense, the use of monumental statue sites, poised at the leading edge of development, to put a place on the map is akin to the “generation of promissory values . . . about geopolitical significance” that, Aihwa Ong argues, accompanied the bid to attract hypermobile global capital through “hyperbuildings” in early twenty-first-century Asian megacities.73 Ong emphasizes that this form of spectacle, unfolding in mimetic competition with similar developments in other megacities, did not undermine national sovereignty but reconfigured the space of national sovereignty as “emphatically and intractably global.” 74 So against Fredric Jameson’s analysis of postmodern architecture, she argues that these hyperbuildings are not disorienting and dislocating (as Jameson claims for the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles) but ultimately reinforce a situated sense of locality.75 This observation can be reframed in terms of the formal implications of the spectacle’s Janus-faced, trans-subjectively refracted, otherdependent public address. As we have seen for the big statues and other new iconic forms emerging within the context of representative democracy, the competitive, mimetic, and representative aspects of the spectacle mean that it must have recognizability and commensurability across multiple viewerships, even as it makes claims to novelty and distinction for the specific constituency it represents. In addressing the imagined gaze of the global, the spectacle refracts a certain generic image of what constitutes the global or “world-class” inward to the imagined gaze of a local polity (including diasporic constituencies that identify with a particular locality), which must recognize the spectacle both as spectacular and as its own.

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The territorial spectacle’s claim to locality is achieved primarily through its sheer presence in a particular space, so the international starchitect need not necessarily gesture toward local forms (while Jean Nouvel might try, in Disneyfying mode, Rem Koolhaas does not).76 Similarly, as with developers and their generically modern buildings and plans, the same sculptors can create similar, if not identical, statues in widely differing locales, albeit within the constraints of regional iconography (seated deities in the south, standing deities in the north). Here the claim to significance and uniqueness lies not in the sculptor’s aura but in the sculpture’s height—the aura of infrastructure, if you will—which performs mimetic commensurability and a claim to technological prowess on a global scale, however finely specified (“tallest seated Shiva statue in the world”). Even with hyperbuildings, participation in globality stems not just from the starchitect’s aura or brand name and the technologically innovative nature of the architectural statement, but from the fact that other “worldclass” cities feature such buildings. As with political constituencies competing for democratic representation, mimeticism is rampant here. If Ong describes how Shanghai’s satellite mini-cities designed by international planners have names such as Weimar, Bellagio, and Santa Monica, Indian developers sell their plans through comparisons with Shanghai, Singapore, and Bangkok. (The title of Dibakar Banerjee’s 2012 thriller Shanghai refers to an Indian urban housing development.) However, in an aesthetic milieu in which the aura of the architect, artist, or sculptor does not supplant that of the divine, what is relevant is not the sculptor’s signature or style but the auspicious presence of the icon, the capacities of its patron, and its address to a given constituency. The statue’s efficacy as a spectacle is layered onto its iconic exhibition value: it is a speculative venture that invites the attention of the deity; the devotee; the patron’s networks; the fickle, roving gaze of capital as consumption and investment; and public recognition. In this sense, it both embodies and promises development and recognition; speculation, like political recognition, collapses value in the future into value in the present. Similarly, the icon both embodies a deity and points to that deity’s more abstract, ubiquitous yet inaccessible and uncontrollable presence and promise. Here, as we have seen, public visibility plays its part in the cult value of icons, operating within a ritual frame that disavows the social constitution of the divine even as it opens icons up to efficacies more explicitly located in the social, such as those of patronage. However, this, as we have also seen, is a somewhat risky business when there are new forms and new players involved and the generic balance is tipped so that

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religious merit might be construed as a matter of self-interest. So new types of religious patronage can also be construed as speculative: socially risky investments in religious merit that promise dividends within the ritual schema of iconopraxis as a transaction with the divine mediated by priests, as well as via the efficacy of merit as interconvertible with economic and political power. The stakes, as is evident from Gulshan Kumar’s assassination (see introduction), can be high. Spectacle’s Janus-faced economy of appearances is centered on “name” or “face,” of places as much as of people, trading on status, capacity, largesse, merit, wealth, and connections. It plays across both “formal” infrastructureand tourism-development projects and “informal” nonstate or quasi-state processes of accruing social value and territorial power, including religious patronage, philanthropy, gifts, favors, corruption, and violence (including the defacement of icons). But if one face of the spectacle is directed at the global, what kind of territory is the other face looking at? What is its “local” scale of operation? This spatial question is also, as always, a temporal, historical, and ideological one. If Ong is concerned with the way spectacle reconfigures sovereignty as global, her focus on particular cases from city-states such as Singapore and Dubai, or from China, where the megacity stands metonymically for the nation, means that sovereignty is fixed in her account at the scale of the nation. Tsing, however, makes the important point that the neoliberal economy of appearances is accompanied by a project of “scale-making” that “conjures” the globe in articulation with national and regional projects. As she puts it, “In these times of heightened attention to the space and scale of human undertakings, economic projects cannot limit themselves to conjuring at different scales—they must conjure the scales themselves. In this sense, a project that makes us imagine globality in order to see how it might succeed is one kind of ‘scale-making project’; similarly, projects that make us imagine locality, or the space of regions or nations, in order to see their success are also scale-making projects.”77 If Tsing’s account of the scale-making project in neoliberal Indonesia includes the regional with the national, in postreform India (as elsewhere) the increasing role of public-private partnerships at a range of subnational levels of the state, from municipal, subfederal, or federal units to regional and national, has also allowed for more points of access to power, capital, resources, and infrastructures at different scales and, hence, to more pathways to convert—to “conjure”—between their various forms.

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Central to such scale-making projects is an institutionally backed and enforced idea of capital as essentially hypermobile and fickle, circulating via “global free trade” rather than confined to a national tax base and a centralized planning process. Recall that in 2014, his first year as prime minister of India, Modi dissolved India’s central Planning Commission. (A similar concern informs the supranational scaling projects of economic alliances, such as the European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement, and BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa], but that is not the salient scale here.) Among the primary institutional mechanisms fostering and enforcing neoliberalism’s sensible infrastructures of scale, I would suggest, are the structural adjustment policies of lending agencies such as the World Bank and, in particular, the push for fiscal decentralization. According to the World Bank’s website, this “involves shifting some responsibilities for expenditures and/or revenues to lower levels of government,” so subnational entities gain greater autonomy to collect taxes, on the one hand, and allocate expenditure, on the other.78 In a dispensation in which the economy is paramount, this is tantamount to a distribution of sovereignty. This becomes the process through which the global is hitched to other scales in conjunction with the scaling operations of media (content as well as distribution). Thus, the idea of the “world-class city” links the municipal directly both to the idea of globality and to actual flows of transnational capital, and neoliberal-era city mayors turn into international figures, if not heads of state (for instance, Rudolph Giuliani, Boris Johnson, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Jacques Chirac, François Hollande, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Rodrigo Duterte, Andrés Manuel López Obrador).79 Here, pathways between sources of capacity at different scales institute territorialized networks along which capitalists, politicians, and local big men and big women—or some combination thereof—assert dominance and creditworthiness through boosterism, patronage, and identity politics at certain scales (putting towns, cities, or regions “on the map”) in order to maneuver for dominance at others. As we have seen with several monumental statue sites, the pathways in these networks often form circuits or feedback loops between specific types of territorial nodes: a politician or industrial baron’s tiny constituency or hometown; emerging industrial and commercial hubs in the postreform economy; and the state capital or national megacity as a center of political power. Other types of pathways in patrons’ networks may be prone to dissipation or extension. For instance, once a big statue has been built, its patron may not return to its sculptor, though the patron may refer the sculptor to another client. However, the 216

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repetitive intensity and durability of patrons’ circuits of territorial mobility, as with religious rituals, is what enables the coherence of the assemblage between iconopraxis and vote banks, social- commercial networks, and capital investment at many levels: local real estate developers in Shahdol and Bangalore, automotive industry manufacturers in Gurgaon, pan-Indian pharmaceutical companies in South Sikkim, and the Birlas and General Motors in Talegaon.80 Further, the monumental statue form and its circuits of patronage enable development opportunities to be resignified in social and moral terms as acts of charity or gifts (“largesse” is an apt term here). Narendra Modi announced the Statue of Unity on his tenth anniversary as chief minister of Gujarat, proclaiming it was his “gift to Gujarat and the world,” which in turn fed back into his popularity. R. N. Shetty’s benevolence put Murudeshwar on the tourist and pilgrimage map and gave him leverage with his associates in Bangalore and coastal Karnataka, which further increased his status in his hometown. There is a scalar circuit between D. D. Bhutia’s patronage of the Sakyamuni in Ravangla aimed at global Buddhist tourism, his cabinet post in Gangtok, and his status in his constituency. Pawan Chamling’s development of his tiny constituency of Namchi via two statues raised South Sikkim’s profile in the state and the nation, along with his own, attracting investment and again further consolidating his political clout. The features at these sites often reveal multiple scales at work. On the one hand, the promise of “geopolitical significance” embodied in the monumental statue as spectacle proceeds via a global comparison based on height. On the other hand, as with the scaled-down replicas of the Char Dham and the twelve jyotirlingas (shrines) accompanying the big Shiva statues at Namchi and Bangalore, there is also a metonymy with the sacred geography of the nation—or, in the case of the diorama of the Atmalinga story at Murudeshwar, that of the coastal Karnataka region. (In chapter 5 I take up the resignification of land as sacred or otherwise auratic geography as the automotive-iconic-territorial assemblage plays out at multiple scales in relation to nationalism and democratic claims to political belonging.) Scale-making, then, is conjured by the global and conjures the global. What characterizes the neoliberal conjuncture and distinguishes the global from the international is the former’s range of levels of subnational devolution of capital, as well as of sovereignty. This devolution opens the assemblage to varying styles of performing and consolidating sovereignty, including religious-cum-developmental patronage. I have discussed the layering of sovereignties in relation to the colonial and postcolonial state; what also disCAR S AN D L AN D

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tinguishes the period under discussion—the late 1980s onward—is the proliferation of avenues for building social and political power, not only due to economic reforms but also, more pertinently, through processes of political democratization, particularly Dalit-Bahujan and Other Backward Class (OBC) movements. Spectacle in this scenario lends itself to social mobility as new political players demand recognition via new forms and objects of patronage, reconfiguring the status quo—again, a controversial process. But at the same time, spectacle also reinforces and replicates the sensible infrastructures that link status to religious patronage. So far I have focused on projects of entrepreneurs and politicians who have successfully gained wealth, status, and power in the postreform economy through religious patronage in the automotive-iconic-territorial assemblage. However, the speculative futurities embodied in new forms including automobiles, highways, and big concrete statues, or in resignifications of land, are not just harnessed to the projects of the successfully upwardly mobile. They are also, often by dint of their association with religion and ritual—particularly pilgrimage rituals—caught up with wishes and aspirations, fulfilled and unfulfilled, across the social spectrum. One example of this is the Kanwar Yatra in North India in July and August, for which, as we saw in chapter 3, the Birla Kanan has come to serve as an important rest stop. Here millions of pilgrims fulfill vows they took for prayers that have been granted by walking or running to the major North Indian pilgrimage center of Haridwar to fetch water from the Ganga, often accompanied by support vehicles blasting discobhajans. The festival intensified massively in the postreform period, with the number of pilgrims tripling to 700,000 between 1990 and 1996, then rising to four million in 2002 and twelve million in 2011.81 Estimates in 2017 news reports were around twenty million. One newspaper report correlated the rise in popularity of the festival with the Ramjanmabhoomi movement; certainly, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President L. K. Advani’s massive, month-long rath yatra (chariot procession) to Ayodhya in 1990 through much of North India had demonstrated the power of a spectacular devotional occupation of the streets.82 Taking over highways and creating traffic snarls, the kanwariya pilgrims turn North India’s road infrastructure into a theater of devotion, as with the Ganapati and Durga Puja processions but on a massive and regional rather than civic scale (figure 4.15). Municipal and interstate road authorities initially tried to offload the responsibility onto each other, eventually coming together to divert traffic on the Delhi–Haridwar highway for the duration of the festival, while police stepped up security because of the pilgrims’ “aggres-

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FIGURE 4.15

Kanwariya pilgrims occupying a lane of NH9, Uttar Pradesh, August 2015.

sive” behavior.83 For a brief moment every year, the kanwariyas, wearing bright saffron clothing and carrying water in pots (kanwar) hanging from wooden frames bedecked with fluttering multicolored tinsel (see plate 7), occupy the automotive-iconic-territorial assemblage to unleash their own shining spectacle of swarming mobile dreams and desires.

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5

SCALE

SCALE: MORALITY, AESTHETI CS, AFFECTS

Now, perhaps, we can finally begin to sort out how to think about the scale of these statues. The question of scale is confounding in its simplicity, as large size is so easy to associate with power, dominance, exteriority, and distance; there is a similarly pat, universal, ahistorical association between excessive verticality, the phallic, and the patriarchalist aggression this connotes.1 Monumental structures demonstrate their patrons’ command over resources, while the figure–ground relationship they establish bespeaks a will to enduring power via visibility.2 Enormity, like spectacle, is also burdened by an aesthetico-moral hierarchy of forms that goes back to Aristotle, for whom too vast an object cannot be beautiful because it cannot be perceived all at once in its unity and wholeness.3 Thus, monumentality in architecture came to be associated with the political excesses of despotism (nineteenth-century commentators, for instance, decried Egypt’s Pyramids), then of fascism and totalitarianism.4 Further layered with Romantic and marxisant critiques of capitalism, industrialization, and development, all this has cohered in an ideology of scale whose aesthetico-moral common sense opposes the mass-produced, the monumental, and the technological to that which is “organically” produced by, or addresses, the individual subject or the small community at a human scale or at the grassroots.5 Hence, “local” is also better than “global.” (Here again space and time are interlinked, so by the same token, slowness is better than speed.) For capitalists and postmodernists, bigger is better and “less is a bore”; for the doxa of critique (an oxymoron, I know) big is bad and “small is beautiful.”6 What more is there to say? A salutary attempt in art history to think scale afresh is Darcy Grigsby’s Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama

Canal, which examines four massive engineering projects from the heyday of European imperialism.7 Key to Grigsby’s account is the idea that scale is always comparative—it concerns relative, not absolute, size—and is therefore inherently unstable. Central here are the translations between drawings, models, photographs, stereo views, miniature souvenirs, and the colossi themselves; Grigsby’s narrative unfolds as a rich discussion of intermediality, through the varied modes of representation of colossi, and hence also of engineering, across their production and reception. Not unlike Adrian Forty’s account of the duplicity of concrete (see chapter 1), what transpires for Grigsby in these translations between three and two dimensions, and in the enterprise of European imperial engineering, is a disavowal of labor, the human, and humanism. (Thus, her account accords with critical doxa’s antimonumentality.) Here the relativity or comparison inherent in scale—what I am calling commensuration, the establishment of a common unit that enables hierarchical positioning—also plays out in the colonial relation, with its familiar logic of simultaneous mimesis and denigration of the other, as French engineers position their modern colossi as democratic versions of the Pyramids. Grigsby is sensitive to the historicity of scale, observing, “To look at Western modernism in conjunction with capitalism is to see that immense size became a supercharged value at the peak of imperial expansion.”8 Yet in her concluding description of the spate of vertical structures vying for the top spot up until 2012, she writes, “The rhetoric of the colossus has changed little over the centuries. . . . [It is] pitched as a symbol and a trademark of progress, profit, and local pride, no one of which can be separated from the other.”9 Both observations hold, of course, particularly within the logics of unevenness and layered temporality being pursued here. The challenge, however, is to tease out how this seemingly unchanging rhetoric is harnessed to another aspect of the historicity and relationality of scale, operating at the level of sensible infrastructure: the varying yet layered projects of “scale-making” or the “production of space.” Here, the world-making discourses of European imperialism at its peak are both different from and akin to, or preempt, those of neoliberal and other forms of globalization, while the local (as in “local pride”) can mean a wide range of things: cities, nations, states, linguistic or religious identities, and so on. It is therefore also crucial to recognize and trace how globalizing and localizing projects depend on circuits, or what Anna Tsing calls “thick collaborations,” between scales, which often entail assemblages with discourses and practices not reckoned with in modernity’s self-narrativizations.10 This is the approach I am pursuing, emphasizing the processual and ideological aspects of scale—that is, not scale as a noun but scaling as a verb—as with S CA L E

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the approach I have been taking to temporality in art history. I draw on Tsing’s idea of “scale-making” introduced in chapter 4, as well as the geographer Erik Swyngedouw’s elaboration of the “production of scale.” Swyngedouw sees this as part of the “production of space” theorized by Henri Lefebvre, where with capitalist expansion “the rhizomatic rescaling of economic networks and flows on the one hand and the territorial rescaling of governance on the other” accompanies the de- and reterritorializations of nature or land that turn “place” into endlessly resignifiable “space.”11 Both Tsing and Swyngedouw specify the hegemonic neoliberal globalization discourse as a project of producing or making scales in order to better understand how its claims gain—or fail to gain— force in the world.12 Swyngedouw’s social-science take on producing scale and space emphasizes politics and economy, but, as I have shown throughout this book, politics and economy are constitutively entangled with matters of sensibility and material form—that is, aesthetics. They unfold at the level of the sensible. So what is at stake for art history in emphasizing scale making as a process, rather than scale as an ontology of relative size in which size has given aestheticomoral qualities, is how form is mapped onto political efficacy. Rather than simply reading off political import from a static form’s material qualities, internal relations, and external references, we need to locate all of these qualities as part of the multiple processes coursing through the form as an object-event and in relation to the sensible infrastructures of the political: the sensible regimes within which formal qualities become operative, including those within which scales are imagined and made.13 To gloss chapter 2 in this light, there I related the size of monumental statues to their exteriority, or outdoor location, seen as a redistribution in the spatial practices of untouchability at the heart of caste hierarchy. This redistribution became possible as the logics and affects of representative democracy circulating via anticolonial nationalism entered thick collaborations with those of popular devotion, in turn deeply intercalated with commerce, kinship, and community in the bazaar. In this process, the national and the sārvajanik (public) were introduced as scales that remade the spaces of the community, the neighborhood, the family, and the individual. The violently policed ban preventing the “Untouchable” body from occupying the caste sensorium and the gaze of temple icons was disrupted by a two-way movement: of icons out into public space during new sārvajanik festivals and of Dalits into new sārvajanik temples (such as the Birla Mandir). The latter redistribution was a response to dissensual verifications of Dalit equality through the Temple Entry and Non-Brahmin movements. This response took on a re222

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territorializing, Hindu-hegemonic character via Gandhi’s movement to uplift the “Harijans,” but what emerged here via the machinics of democracy was the opportunity—the sensory-affective conditions, an infrastructure of the sensible—for in principle universal participation in scaling projects that operationalized the speculative value of the public gaze in an economy of merit. So, unlike the Pyramids of Egypt or the sixteenth-century gopurams of the Annamalaiyar temple, now, in principle, anyone could be the patron—or part of a community of patrons—of a neighborhood Ganapati or Durga Puja idol, just as in principle anyone could have a say in government. By the same token, the icon addressed an expansive, scaled-up public whose attention gave it iconic exhibition value as a spectacle (chapter 3). In the decades after Indian independence, this putatively universal participation in scaling via spectacle was effectively arrogated to the infrastructure projects of the quasi-socialist state as the collective embodiment of the people, or to neospiritual entrepreneurs or vernacular capitalist temple builders and philanthropists such as the Birlas. A significant initiative during this period was Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) leader M. Karunanidhi’s proposal for a massive figure of the poet Thiruvalluvar as an assertion of Dravidian, non-Brahmin identity, in mimetic conversation with the Vivekananda Rock Memorial’s nationalist expansion of the Hindu fold. This was one of the first instances where a political patron and his constituency’s status were mapped onto the scale of an iconic statue: a secular figure that could not draw on religious sources of power (miracles, ritual efficacy, association with a famous temple) even as it used their sensible idioms (granite construction, the centrality of text and number). In the 1980s, following the upheavals of the Emergency, Dalit political movements reasserted democratic participation by proliferating publicly visible markers of presence: small Ambedkar and Buddha statues, whose scale-making worked through sheer number and public presence rather than size, reclaiming and redistributing land through these claims to visibility and the occupation of space. This was of a piece with the redistribution at work in Kumari Mayawati’s monumental Dalit memorials from the mid-1990s through the 2000s.14 It is crucial, therefore, to make a distinction between the latter and the formally very similar totalitarian spaces of Nazism or Stalinism—that is, to analyze the regimes and processes within which scaling takes place rather than simply analyzing built forms as static objects. None of the processes I have just outlined has disappeared. On the contrary, as chapter 4 suggests, what distinguishes India’s postliberalization period is the concatenation of scale-making forces, media, technologies, and institutional mechanisms, including resignifications and redistributions of S CA L E

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land and the devolution of scales of state access to capital, which intensifies the circuits between scales. New media, technologies, and commodities compressing space and time—automobility, mobile telephony, television, the internet, and a range of transnational consumer goods, all exploding in India within a decade—brought with them images and experiences that both constituted and invited participation in various modalities of the global and the local at various scales. Crucially, this unfolded alongside the valorization of infrastructural and place-making projects by fiscally decentralized levels of government competing for resources, and by local and trans-local identity projects organizing to tap into those resources. It was in this concatenation of scale-making that the scale of icons began to mimic the scale of infrastructure. These processes have intensified the sensations and efficacies of what Bhaskar Sarkar describes as the spatiotemporal “plasticity” that characterizes the global, with its “dual conditions of relationality and mutability.”15 Sarkar, too, stresses the processual aspects of the global as “a set of relations between units that are in a continual state of transformation,” a field of becoming and emergence.16 As we have seen, this plasticity is characteristic of the privileged materials of global development: concrete, steel, glass (including fiberglass), and plastic. These materials, like technologies of communication, transportation, and governmentality, have entered unforeseen assemblages with both iconopraxis and democracy. In this plastic sensorium, digital technology, functioning via the infinite resignification and combination of bits and bytes, elementary units on a surface, is of a piece with the “production of space” (the resignification, repurposing, and reconfigured administration of land), as well as with the reinvention of selves and social relations. The tabula rasa of the AutoCAD screen is more than a figure for the possibility of resignifying land conceived as space; it actualizes that conception on a planetary scale. The current age of “globalization,” then, is an age of scaling, not only as a matter of linguistic and cognitive processing, where scale is harnessed to a discourse of enumerative comparison institutionalized by the market and biopolitics, but also as the sensation of plasticity: as percepts and affects that work through forces, intensities, and desires. Indeed, scale is an affect, a force generated in the encounter between bodies, for any instance of relative size necessarily stages such an encounter, which in turn is mutually transformative and constitutive (in a processual model these amount to the same thing), albeit to varying degrees.17 A monumental building, sculpture, or landscape can make us feel small or afraid or inspire us to become bigger, but 224

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more to the point, it interpellates us as subjects, its address specifying and constituting this “us” in particular ways. In this latter capacity, the affects of scale are also historical, working, for instance, in the dispensation that we have come to call neoliberal, to reconstitute identities and spaces via the intensified valence of ideas of the global: the affections of the global, its material forces and processes. This sensory-affective field is shot through with the scalar forces of democracy, capital, and devotion (religious and otherwise), departing from modernity’s secular self-narrativizations in all the ways I have outlined so far. So these states of plasticity cannot simply be labeled “modernity” and left at that, for while “all that is solid melts into air,” it is reterritorialized in increasingly complex ways, where “all that is holy” is not necessarily “profaned.”18 In this chapter, I return to the primary locus of political modernity, the nation-state, to look at three instances of how monumental statues and the nation come to be mutually implicated in a proliferating play of scales, scale making, and identity or subject making in a time when ideas of globality have come to be intensely efficacious. All these statues participate in resignifying both the physical landscapes and the sacred geographies in which they are embedded. In the process, as participants in national and other identity projects, they add complexity to the nation and the forms of globality and locality that constitute it, as well as to the arena of iconopraxis. I start by outlining the circuits that iconic statues in Trinidad and Mauritius have instituted with India and with other local sites of iconopraxis. While these are global circuits, closely linked with capital’s adventures over the longue durée, they have not been a concern for secular accounts of economic globalization. They also barely feature in accounts of the ongoing salience of caste. They shore up claims to religious authority, as well as to political representation and recognition; in doing so, they display the features we have already encountered of mimeticism, replication, and commensuration. The third statue returns us to India, where we have encountered the play of scales as patrons put their small towns on larger maps. In the case of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Statue of Unity, both patron and statue have jumped scale from the federal unit of the state to that of the nation, via the global. In short, then, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that if we want a big statue to tell us something about politics, economy, and religion, we might want to ask it questions of scale as well as of size per se. Who and what is being scaled up or down here in relation to what or whom, and where and when; with what materials, within what frames of value, what enactments of equality or hierarchy, what layered infrastructures of the sensible? S CA L E

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NATION-SPACE AS SACRED GEOGRAPHY: THE TRINIDAD HANUMAN

Domestic tourism in India intensified and acquired definition in the postliberalization period with the development of the automobile and airline industries, but this was hardly a new phenomenon. If monumental statues have been folded into existing pilgrimage routes, playing between secular and religious valences, this kind of play was already a feature of an older, largely railwaybased, postindependence governmental tradition of traveling through and appreciating the diverse cultural and natural heritage of the nation. This was fostered by Leave Travel Concessions for government employees, as well as institutionally organized “Bharat Darshan” tours, darshan here implying both viewing/being in the presence of and worshiping the nation. Institutionally based tourism is still very much in evidence, including at monumental statue sites. Thus, for instance, the big Shiva, temple, and beach at Murudeshwar attract a steady stream of schoolchildren, college students, and contingents from the police and armed forces on organized bus trips alongside informal groups of retirees, followers of a guru, or pilgrims en route to Shaivite shrines in the south (see plate 10; see also figures 4.9 and 4.14). Here, as I have stressed throughout, devotionalism is not replaced by the sentiments of national or identitarian pride shored up by pedagogical constructs of “culture” and “heritage,” or by the aesthetic or consumerist gaze and sensory delights of tourism. They all form part of the layers of experience at these sites. Indeed, nationalism has itself hardly been a secular affair. As discussed in earlier chapters, against the post-Romantic production of national landscapes whose sacrality is subsumed into the aesthetic (as with the American Sublime) or the folkloric (in Nazi aesthetics), South Asian popular cultures have visualized national and subnational territories through landscapes and maps featuring deities and pilgrimage sites that fold the nation into explicitly sacred geographies.19 If bazaar prints figure the nation as a sacred space, monumental icons also serve to resignify their surrounding land both as potential real estate and as a symbolic space of religiously inflected identitarian belonging, in conversation with avowedly secular discourses of culture, history, and environmentalism. We have seen how the “realist” modality in which monumental icons occupy their surroundings forges a new type of relationship to location but also operationalizes circuits with auratic sites at some distance. Their novelty enables them to appear at, or even spearhead, the frontier of development, while the iconopraxis they engender (re)imbues their location with aura. The same qualities of realism and novelty also enable subaltern constituencies to make 226

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claims on territory through new icons and for new players to enter and expand the arena of iconopraxis. If the former is a deterritorializing movement, the latter reterritorializes these impulses and reharnesses them to a new hegemonic consensus. Chapter 2 describes how this has played out in relation to Dalits and others in India; here, I begin with an instance from the Indian diaspora in a similar situation of “improper” belonging, of being a “part without a part” of the polity. The 85-ft. Hanuman statue at Carapichaima, Trinidad, was built in concrete by the Bangalore-based sculptor Thangam Subramanian for Sri Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swami of the Avadhoota Datta Peetham, a spiritual organization headquartered in Mysore, India (see plate 5; figure 5.1). Its inauguration in 2003 was a grand occasion, a helicopter showering the statue and the swami at its feet with water and flowers. Addressing the Ramayana-based devotion of most Indo-Trinidadians, and particularly the identification of their laboring bodies with Hanuman as Ram’s devotee, the statue is part of a complex featuring a Hanuman temple with a smaller stone statue. However, the raison d’être of the complex is the Sri Dattatreya Yoga Center, a large, decorated hall with a Dattatreya shrine at one end. As the story goes, it came to Swamiji in a dream that Trinidad was the location of a sacred river in the Brahma Purana called the Sararipo; this turned out to be a small river in the Aripo Mountains, now known as the Aripo Datta Ganga. Since 1990, a modest shrine has stood beside it at a remote spot identified by Swamiji.20 Belonging to the Hindu tradition proceeds here via the doubled circuit of appearance in canonical texts and a mimetic replication of the Ganga, echoing Indian migrants’ journey from an auratic origin to a new homeland that is resignified through the ongoing projection of memories onto its landscape.21 The Datta Ganga is not the location of the Hanuman statue, however; nor is it the organization’s main center. The statue and the Sri Dattatreya Yoga Center were built on eleven acres of flat land, easily accessible by car, in a sugarcane-growing area with a large population of Indian descent, about five kilometers inland from the famous “Temple in the Sea” built in the 1930s by the indentured sugar plantation worker Sewdass Sadhoo off the coastal village of Waterloo.22 The center’s land was leased from Caroni (1975) Limited, the nationalized sugar-producing company (taken over from Tate and Lyle), which in 2000 was the largest single landowner in Trinidad.23 By then, Caroni was leasing out 40 percent of its land, much of it to small-scale agricultural producers, as its profits plummeted through the 1990s.24 The sugar industry was closed in 2008 after the European Union withdrew its subsidies. The closure was widely construed as a strategy of the Afro-Trinidadian–dominated People’s National S CA L E

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View of Hanuman statue and cutout of Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swami (on left) from cane fields, Carapichaima, Trinidad, December 2009. FIGURE 5.1

Movement to “shaft the Indians” (two Indo-Trinidadian interviewees, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, used the same phrase) by separating them from the land, to which they still had strong symbolic and emotional attachments despite rapid urbanization through the 1990s.25 Caroni (1975) Limited had already folded in 2003, the year the Hanuman statue was inaugurated; the redistribution of about 77,500 acres of land to the company’s former workers began only in 2017, after a long struggle. Indo-Trinidadians feared that the land would be converted into residential real estate to edge them out; further, compensation was only for Caroni workers, not for the small-scale Indian cane farmers leasing from Caroni who also lost their livelihoods. So the Hanuman statue, rising above Caroni’s abandoned cane and citrus plantations on Orange Field Road, simultaneously symbolizes and repurposes the agricultural land associated with Indo-Trinidadians: from primary production to an identity project, and from one global circuit (flows of sugar and other agricultural commodities to Europe and the United States) to another (flows of religion/culture from India and the North American diaspora). This spectacular new vertical marker of Hindu presence joins the clusters of beloved 228

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jhandi flags announcing Hindu households, often next to a little kutiya shrine in the front yard, just as Kumari Mayawati’s massive memorials joined the many small Ambedkar and Buddha statues asserting Dalit presence in northern and western India.26 In both instances, the “part of no part” claims space at a new scale, deploying new forms to embark on a project of scale-making in conversation with the global. If, in the case of Mayawati’s Dalit memorials, globality featured through references in world history to non-Hindu monumental spaces, in this case it figures via the generic idioms of an expansive neospiritual global Hinduism. The repurposing and resignification of land for spectacular Hindu identity projects in Trinidad had already begun in a different mode with the “Hindu Renaissance” of the 1980s, alongside an interest in “roots tourism” among the post–oil boom Indo-Trinidadian middle class and the resurgence of the cultural politics of Hindutva in India and the diaspora.27 An instance of this repurposing is Divali Nagar, an annual multiday Divali celebration organized by the National Council for Indian Culture (NCIC) featuring a bazaar and food court, a themed exhibition, stalls of nonprofit organizations, and cultural performances (in collaboration with the Indian government’s Indian Council for Cultural Relations and promoters from Bollywood).28 Here, too, the iconic articulates with the automotive-territorial assemblage: Divali Nagar, first held in a car park in 1986, was granted a dedicated space off Trinidad’s main northsouth artery, the Uriah Butler Highway, under the new, multiracial National Alliance for Reconstruction government in 1989—again, on 15 acres of Caroni land (figures 5.2 and 5.3).29 In its first decade, Divali Nagar’s displays were conceived and executed by local artists, often under the direction of Pandit Ravi Ji of the Hindu Prachar Kendra. From 1999 on, however, the displays came from India through Baba Satyanarayan Mourya, a charismatic, highly mobile Hindu nationalist artist, performer, and speaker from Madhya Pradesh. Rising to prominence through his association with the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) during the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, Mourya began traveling all over India and the diaspora with displays and live shows proselytizing about “Hindu culture.” The Divali Nagar displays have shifted accordingly, from Ravi Ji’s local themes, such as the inaugural “Girmitya Gaw” (indentured laborers’ village) and “This Is Ramayan Country,” to more expansive, global Hindu topics, such as “Vedas—The Way of Light” and “Hindu Vivah” (the Hindu wedding), presented on digital vinyl panels, which Mourya has shown at Indian locations, as well (figure 5.4). Mourya’s exhibitions bring with them a subtle but unmistakable anti-Islamic undercurrent (e.g., through references to “Islamic invaders”), S CA L E

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Divali Nagar pavilion, off-season exterior with Shiva statue at the entrance. Trinidad, December 2009. FIGURE 5.2

Divali Nagar pavilion, off-season interior with leftover display shrine and permanent busts of Gandhi and Vivekananda. Trinidad, December 2009. FIGURE 5.3

Example of Baba Satyanarayan Mourya’s portable vinyl print displays, Divali Nagar, Trinidad, December 2009. FIGURE 5.4

which is a far cry from the Gandhian vision of the NCIC’s first president, Bisram Gopie.30 Less subtle is the anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, and anti-secular rhetoric of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, a Hindu organization founded in 1952 that has close ties to India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), VHP, and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and runs the Hindu radio station Radio Jagriti. Unlike the NCIC, the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, according to its president at the time, Sat Maharaj, did not want to deal with the Indian High Commission because it was “too secular” (this was in 2009, with the United Progressive Alliance [UPA] in power). Maharaj also spoke about learning “new tricks of the religious trade” from the Catholics, who knew how to access the national wealth, and from Muslims who obtained funding for mosques “from Saudi Arabia.” Among these “new tricks” was an initiative to build a monumental Ganesh statue, for which 25 acres of land had been obtained along the highway. Naresh Kumar Varma of the Matu Ram Art Center was invited to Trinidad to quote on the project, but it failed to gain clearance from planning authorities (ostensibly for fear of distracting motorists). Maharaj’s stated inspiration for this was his “roots” visit to the pilgrimage site of Shukratal, near Muzaffarnagar, Uttar S CA L E

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Pradesh, which features a 36-ft. Ganesh, a 72-ft. Hanuman, a 51-ft. Durga, and a 101-ft. Shiva. However, the ricocheting mimetic impulses here clearly also included competition with local Christians and Muslims, as well as with the rival NCIC’s Divali Nagar. Another reason Maharaj cited for the Ganesh statue initiative was the overly “South Indian” appearance of the Sri Dattatreya Yoga Center’s Hanuman (unlike in Mauritius, only a tiny minority of Indians in Trinidad trace their ancestry to South India). This sense of an uneasy fit with the “authentic” source was reciprocated in the Avadhoota Datta Peetham’s own sense of hierarchy, for it decided that while a concrete statue might do for Trinidad, the Hanuman statue at its Mysore headquarters had to be granite. This was consistent with a pervasive discourse in India of the indentured labor diaspora as low-caste/class, shared by Hindus and secular liberals.31 But the Mysore Peetham’s bid for legitimacy via canonically correct materials is also unsurprising given its own upstart neospiritual character in the hierarchy of religious institutions within India. The diaspora enabled the organization to establish a presence and expand, but this constituency also expects it to be an authentic vehicle of tradition. If the Hanuman statue as a bid for Hindus’ recognition and space within Trinidad does not translate to a recognition of equality from the homeland, it is precisely the “authentic” homeland’s perceived superiority that gives this spatial circuit its local efficacy. As Maharaj said of Swamiji, describing him as his personal guru, “We need someone to plead our cause.” So while the statue’s size is efficacious in one regime of iconopraxis, its material composition renders it inferior in another. As with many other statues described so far, it, too, oscillates between cult value and iconic exhibition value, creating a circuit between an “original” source and a spectacular supplement that produces, feeds, and feeds off the aura of the original. Contrast the big Hanuman statue to another, far more modest and unspectacular performance of belonging that deploys landscape in a quite different but complementary way. While visiting the Sri Dattatreya Yoga Center one Sunday morning in December 2009, I was disappointed to see very few people there; perhaps I had missed the main “service.” But then I noticed a buzz on the far side of the field containing the big Hanuman, with cars arriving at what seemed like an ordinary residential bungalow and unloading dozens of people, all dressed up and carrying things. This was a Krishna temple called the Gita Ashram, run by Pundit Satnarine Sharma, with regular gatherings for worship, followed by a community lunch that families took turns preparing. Inside was a small prayer hall with neat rows of white plastic chairs facing a shrine with

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white marble statues of Krishna and Radha on a platform in the center, flanked on their right by smaller statues of Ram, Sita, and Hanuman and on their left by Ganesh, Lakshmi, and Saraswati (plate 11). In the foreground, again on each side of the central shrine, were platforms with Shiva and the mother goddess Parvati. These were the main figures, in the typically ornate, colorful Jaipur marble style favored by many diasporic temples; the area was also dotted with various smaller icons, including a garlanded Gandhi. Most striking, however, was the large (about 4 by 9 ft.) painted mural forming the backdrop to these deities, depicting a landscape whose felicitous hybrid of Thomas Kinkade and Indian calendar art is also unmistakably Trinidadian (plate 11). The central river fed by a waterfall to the left, framed by lush vegetation, with rocks in the foreground, is common to Kinkade’s pastoral idylls and to the backdrops of deities in the bazaar prints of Raja Ravi Varma and Narottam Narayan Sharma.32 But the trees are recognizable as palm, hibiscus, flamboyant, and poui, as is Trinidad’s Northern Range rising up through the mist in the far distance. Dominating the foreground at the extreme left, visually almost on par with the main Krishna statue, is a trademark Kinkade gazebo, from paintings such as Gazebo of Prayer and Garden of Prayer (plate 12). However, it has Roman rather than flat arches (perhaps intended as Indianizing?), and the perspective of its floor has been adjusted to show us that we are not dealing here with the dematerialized divinity of Romanticism and interiorized, private prayer, for this gazebo is occupied by a lingam. “In India you can go to a holy place; here you have to make a holy place in your yard”: for Pundit Satnarine Sharma, it was as though India’s holy places were not made but have always existed, while Trinidad’s Hindus have to make the space they inhabit a space they inhabit. This is what the landscape mural does, as does the Gita Ashram, but differently from the Hanuman statue. For one, the idiom of the mural bears the traces of circuitry not just between Trinidad and India, but also with the Indian diaspora in North America. Sharma lived in the United States for twenty-five years before returning to Trinidad to set up the Gita Ashram; that is where he saw Kinkade’s work. He was so taken with it that he asked an Afro-Trinidadian artist from San Juan (whose name he could not recall) to refer to it for the mural. Further, as Sharma put it, referring to the absence of Brahminical strictures at his temple, “We have to craft a religion . . . to satisfy this community,” or again, “We have crafted our way of Hinduism here for all of the people”—an Indo-Trinidadian sarvajan. This work of crafting inclusion for this community with its specific history and location, also in evidence in the early local NCIC displays, was reflected in

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many elements of the Gita Ashram and its iconopraxis: the mural; the bhajans (devotional hymns), accompanied by the dantal; the sermon that began (in English), “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Om”; and the communal meal at the heart of the gathering.33 This was quite a different modality of inclusion and performance of community from the spectacular exteriority of the sārvajanik festivals and temples, with their address to a far more deeply spatialized distribution of the sensible. Commensality—taboo within the regime of untouchability—establishes an even more intimate connection than simply occupying the same space (which, as we saw with the Birla Mandir, was still fraught by an anxious attempt to control public comportment and flows of matter). There is a layering of idioms of Hindu/Indo-Trinidadian national belonging at work between Divali Nagar, the Gita Ashram, and the Sri Dattatreya Yoga Center, with its Hanuman statue. At one pole is the idiom of the Hanuman statue that connects to an auratic source in the homeland, a spectacle that also stages commensuration with a range of others within and beyond the nation and gains efficacy via this scale-making. This bears out Patrick Eisenlohr’s observation (regarding Hindus in Mauritius) that not all diasporic identity formations deploy idioms of hybridity.34 But at the other pole is, in fact, an unspectacular hybridity that performs belonging without refraction via the gazes of others outside its community (to whom, and against whom, its cause must be pleaded), and that explicitly embraces its status as made and in the making: as an assemblage. While the spectacular idiom of the Hanuman statue may have been on the ascendant as agricultural land was repurposed and resignified, the quietly hybrid idiom of the Gita Ashram did not disappear but continued to thrive, at least until Pundit Satnarine Sharma’s passing in 2016. This parallels the situation Eisenlohr describes in Mauritius, where Hindus’ claims to participation on the national stage—in that case, as the politically dominant majority—are made via connections to the “authentic” traditions of the homeland, particularly ancestral languages, even as they participate in an everyday Creole/creolized culture.35 It also reinforces his important point, again taking issue with Benedict Anderson’s account of nationalism and Fredric Jameson’s analysis of postmodernity, that identities and communities make themselves through plural temporalities that may relate to the formal aspects of semiotic or media technologies but are not entirely structured by them. This is because the efficacies of these forms are tempered by historical consciousness and memory, or what I have been calling temporal

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layering—and, I would add, by the distributions and redistributions of the sensible.36 Concrete and marble sculptures coexist with paintings and exhibitions; the remembered Ganga becomes the Datta Ganga; the land of the Carib and Arawak peoples becomes cane country, Ramayan country, and the country of the globalized Vedas.

MAURITIUS: BIG SHIVA IN “CHHOTA BHARAT”

Trinidad has a Datta Ganga; Mauritius has a Ganga Talao. Also known as Grand Bassin, this crater lake in the forested hills of central-southern Mauritius has become the island’s most important Hindu pilgrimage site. Like the Datta Ganga, the Ganga Talao is said to have first appeared in a dream (indeed, it could well have been an inspiration for the Datta Ganga). In 1897, Jhummun Giri Gossagne, a priest from northern Mauritius, dreamed of the Jahnavi (a tributary of the Ganga) emptying into a lake; in one version, he saw fairies dancing on its banks, so it came to be known as Pari Talao (Fairy Lake).37 This led to a pilgrimage a year later with Pandit Sajeewon (or Sajhiwon), the chief priest and founder of the 1892 Maheshwarnath (Shiva) temple in Triolet. The pilgrims took water from the lake back to the Shiva temple—hence, its significance as a Shiva pilgrimage site, particularly on the festival of Shivaratri, when pilgrims carry colorfully festooned bamboo kanwars (pots) to fetch water, just as they do in the North Indian Kanwar Yatra (the Shivaratri festival is dominated by those of North Indian backgrounds, rather than the sizable Tamiland Telugu-speaking communities).38 The Shiva pilgrimage seems to have largely, though not fully, eclipsed an earlier practice of women journeying there to seek boons from Pari Mayi (Fairy Mother), particularly for the birth of a child.39 There was also an explicit conflict between Sajeewon and others who had set up earlier altars, including one involving animal sacrifices. Sajeewon prevailed, in alliance with the local Hindu Maha Sabha, which in 1962 was granted a ninety-nine-year lease on the lands around Grand Bassin, along with the right to oversee the Shivaratri pilgrimage. This was when development of the site began in earnest, with concrete roads, paving, bridges, and a succession of temple structures (plate 13). In 1972, four years after Mauritian independence, the lake was renamed Ganga Talao in a ceremony in which water flown in from the Ganga at Haridwar was poured into it so that the “physical link between Grand Bassin and the Holy Ganga was established.”40 This was also when Grand Bassin got electricity and piped water, on the initiative of Dayanand Basantrai, then the minister

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of commerce and industry, president of the Mauritian Hindu Maha Sabha, and a disciple of Swami Krishnananda of the India-based Divine Life Society. Here, as with the North Indian kanwariya pilgrimage, the movements of water and dreams flow into the iconic-automotive-territorial-cement assemblage. And, as with the Datta Ganga, the fluidity of water and dreams rescales the Hindu diaspora by placing it on the larger Hindu map via links with an expansive global neospiritual organization (in Trinidad, the Avadhoota Datta Peetham; in this case, the Divine Life Society). But how did the elements of this assemblage, and this scale-making project, come to similarly cohere in a monumental statue? Again, this question takes us back to caste. Driving up to Ganga Talao from the west coast, as I did over the turn of 2013–14, means winding for nearly half an hour on the steep, narrow Plaine– Champagne road through the often spectacular Black River Gorges National Park, until the terrain flattens to a lonely plateau dense with vegetation. Here the road meets the B102 highway: still narrow, but well surfaced. A few kilometers on, you turn right onto the B88, and there—suddenly, in the middle of the forest—is a smooth, well-marked three-lane highway, as wide as Mauritius’s main highway, the M1, but newer.41 As you drive on, over a rise in the road to the right, dramatically silhouetted against the sky, a trident appears followed by Shiva’s head. This is the 108-ft. Shiva (figure 5.5) built by Matu Ram and Naresh Kumar Varma and inaugurated in 2007 by Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam. At the far end of a large parking lot with a designated area for tour buses is a 108-ft. statue of Durga (inaugurated in 2017 but still under construction during my visit [figure 5.6]). She stands across the road from her husband, Shiva, behind whom is another spacious parking lot; by now, it should come as no surprise that on festive occasions (such as New Year’s Day, which I witnessed there) these giant statues rise up from a sea of cars. The upgrade of the B88, the Shiva and Durga statues, and, presumably, the parking lots were projects of the prominent Labour Party politician and devout Hindu Anil Kumar Bachoo (also Baichoo). On his account, the inspiration for the Shiva statue was Delhi’s Birla Kanan Mangal Mahadev, which he visited during a trip to India as the minister for commerce and industry in 1991 (in another version of the origin story, the Ganga Talao statue was initiated by the murdered media baron Gulshan Kumar, who had close connections to Mauritius, but the project was “hijacked by the government”).42 Bachoo spearheaded the statue project and other “embellishments” to Ganga Talao as he alternated between the posts of minister of public infrastructure and land transport (2001–5 and 2008–14) and minister of environment and national development unit (2005–8).43 However, he did this not in his capacity 236

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FIGURE 5.5

Approach to 108-ft. Shiva statue at Ganga Talao, Mauritius, January 2014.

as a minister but as the chairman of the government-led Maha Shivaratri Task Force, which manages and services the throngs of pilgrims during the festival (Bachoo’s estimate was approximately half a million people over three or four days). The task force includes government bodies, as well as Hindu religious organizations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); here, Bachoo was careful to emphasize the charitable and voluntary aspects of the undertaking. Working through the task force is akin to using trusts as distancing mechanisms by politicians in India when they initiate such projects (as with Pawan Chamling’s monumental statues, where local government administrators such as Namchi’s district collector were similarly closely involved, or Narendra Modi’s Statue of Unity, discussed later). Hindu politicians in Mauritius are enmeshed with local Hindu activist and religious organizations, which, in turn, are closely linked with such organizations in India. Describing these dense networks, Eisenlohr notes that global Hindu organizations such as the VHP were active in Mauritius well before their resurgence in India in the 1980s. Thus, for instance, Cabinet Minister Dayanand Basantrai (who changed Pari Talao’s name to Ganga Talao in 1972) addressed the VHP’s second World Hindu Conference in 1979. These networks S CA L E

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Durga Maa statue under construction, with Shiva statue across the street. Ganga Talao, Mauritius, January 2014. FIGURE 5.6

have shored up political authority in a polity dominated by Hindus of northern Indian descent, scaling up this local dominance through articulation with global Hindu assertions. If Eisenlohr shows how ancestral languages are deployed here to perform the connection with India, Ganga Talao exemplifies how his observations can be extended from language to iconopraxis. Ganga Talao’s name change from Pari Talao signaled a suppression of the local—and female—association with Pari Mayi in favor of consubstantiality with the Indian Ganga and replication of the Shiva kanwar pilgrimage. Similarly, at the second visit of Atal Behari Vajpayee (then BJP leader of the opposition) in 1995, the Hindu Maha Sabha’s Shiva temple at Ganga Talao was renamed the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir, forging a link with the Vishwanath Mandir in Varanasi; this temple’s head priest is now customarily brought in from Varanasi.44 The 2007 Shiva statue follows the same logic of authenticity by mimesis. There is no problem whatsoever that it imitates those at Birla Kanan, Gulshan Kumar’s T-Series studio in Noida, or the Sursagar Lake in Vadodara (the initiative of Gujarat BJP Minister Yogesh Patel). Indeed, the Wikipedia entry for the statue makes it a point to mention that it is a “faithful copy” of the Sursagar Shiva.45 238

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Such assertions of “faithful” mimesis and consubstantiality are encapsulated in the phrase “Chhota Bharat” (Little India), which is often used to describe Mauritius and puts scale at the heart of the two nations’ relationship.46 These assertions are central to the efficacy of Ganga Talao as a concentration of politico-symbolic real estate.47 Following its resignification as a microcosm of Little (northern Hindu) India, Ganga Talao became a dense site for claims to status and authority within the Hindu community, with all of the competitive rivalry and alliance building this entails. When I first visited Ganga Talao, I was puzzled by the number of temples there, with construction activity still underway—not only the giant Durga Mata but also a spiritual park– cum-religious retreat being built by Hindu House (presumably inspired by the Saiva Siddhanta Church’s 1999 spiritual park in northern Mauritius, featuring an 8-ft. Panchamukhi Ganesh statue). Here a Shiva temple with a giant, onestory-high lingam surrounded by 108 smaller lingams was almost complete (figure 5.7); still in progress was the Swattuntranund Gau Shala Gau Mata Mandir (possibly modeled on the Mauritian International Society for Krishna Consciousness’s Vedic Farm Goshalla), a cowshed housing calves named after Indian rivers (figure 5.8). The cowshed features colorful fiberglass icons and religious murals by artists from Kutch, including a painting of Krishna over the entrance in the ornate Kutch–Saurashtra style favored by the global Swaminarayan sect, builders of the Akshardhams (figure 5.9). Other proposed elements of the spiritual park include a museum, a library, and a meditation and yoga center. The spiritual park will join the existing Kashi Vishwanath Mandir, Hanuman temple on Neel Parbat, Ganga Yamuna Saraswatee Temple, Gayatree Maa Temple, Mauritiuseshwarnath Shiv Jyotir Lingum temple (Shiv Parivar Mandir), monumental Shiva and Durga, several smaller outdoor murtis (icons) along the paved banks of the lake, and other features, including a 1998 centenary monument to the first Shivaratri pilgrims with a statue of Jhummun Giri Gossagne, a large Om (the Om Kar Monument, marking the Hindu Maha Sabha’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2000), ceremonial gateways, and so on.48 All of these features bear plaques recognizing the donor or patron and, sometimes, the dignitary officiating at the inauguration. Similarly, Hindu House’s publication The History of Ganga Talao painstakingly names those who sponsored buildings, murtis, renovations, additions, books, pavements, ramps, monuments, gates, shelters, water fountains, and even tea at events. But it also, significantly, sometimes lists these sites of charity without naming their patrons, for this proliferation of sources of symbolic capital is not just about individuals jockeying for status and authority within a political system enmeshed with religious and ethnic identity. It is also about caste assertion. If S CA L E

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108 lingams at the Shiva temple, Hindu House spiritual park, Ganga Talao, Mauritius, December 2013. Note second-floor pulpit at top left. FIGURE 5.7

Swattuntranund Gau Shala Gau Mata Mandir, built by Hindu House, Ganga Talao, Mauritius, January 2014. FIGURE 5.8

the older temples established the dominance of the Babuji-Maraz (KshatriyaBrahmin) elite, this was challenged by the Vaish middle castes who established a presence in politics with independence. All the prime ministers so far have been Vaish, as is Anil Bachoo. This assertion, dating from the mid-1980s, was followed by that of the “lower” castes: Rajput and Ravived (formerly Dusad and Chamar, respectively, both classified in India as Dalit).49 All of this is reflected in patronage at Ganga Talao, including Bachoo’s initiative with the monumental Shiva. So here again, as I have been arguing in the Indian case, public and inclusive iconopraxis expands the system of religious patronage as a means to achieve social and political mobility. And again, this is not always smooth sailing. The absent name in the Hindu House publication is that of a politically controversial figure who has built a temple in a prime spot at Ganga Talao.50 The patronage plaques affixed to the features at Ganga Talao constitute a fascinating node in the global networks running through the site, demonstrating how its nexus of religion, commerce, and politics brings a globalized bazaar ethos into thick collaboration with corporatized, neoliberal multinational capital and the state’s legal-bureaucratic regimes. At the heart of the S CA L E

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Krishna mural by K. G. Rathod from Kutch over the entrance to the Gau Mata Mandir, Ganga Talao, Mauritius, January 2014. FIGURE 5.9

strong business connections between India and Mauritius has been the Indian government’s Avoidance of Double Taxation Treaty, introduced in 1983 to increase foreign investment (though it was revised in 2016). This “Mauritius window” or “Mauritius route” enabled investors based in Mauritius to avoid India’s 15 percent capital gains tax, as a result of which, by 2011, 40 percent of India’s foreign direct investment (FDI) was routed through Mauritius, much of it apparently via one building in Port Louis.51 A major area of benefit from the treaty has been the supply of staff and technical expertise. While large investors include Oracle Global, Vodafone, and Merrill Lynch Mauritius, much of this FDI is believed to include “round-tripping” by Indian residents using letterbox companies—literally, a circuit.52 If religious donations shore up business networks, the political and religious clout of Mauritian Hindus may also be helpful for those Indians seeking to gain leverage back home through what we might see as political and social “round-tripping.” In this quid pro quo, Mauritian religious players gain legitimacy from connections to the homeland, and vice versa. Thus, for instance, a Shiva statue outside the Mauritiuseswarnath temple (plate 14) was funded in 2005 by Dinesh Patidar and family from Dungarpur, Rajasthan; Patidar runs 242

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Section of plaques recognizing patrons of the Hindu House spiritual park–cum-religious retreat. Ganga Talao, Mauritius, January 2014. Baba Ramdev appears in the third row from the top, second column from the right. FIGURE 5.10

the firm Maurice Associates, which deals in hospitality services, personnel for the garment industry, gemstones, and jewelry. Revealingly, the plaque says that the statue was donated “to Dayal Family,” pointedly naming those who established the temple, the family of J. R. “Raj” Dayal, a former commissioner of police. In this act of globalized patronage, the Patidar family upscaled its connections to a figure of national significance in Mauritius, simultaneously shoring up that figure’s significance as a religious player in the idiom of family and kinship so central to caste-based status. Similarly revealing is a wall of plaques thanking patrons of the new Hindu House spiritual park temples (figure 5.10). In addition to the donors from Mauritius—interestingly, a couple of Muslim names feature here—and other diasporic locations such as the United Kingdom (e.g., an economic researcher turned hotelier associated with the Dharma Mandir in London), there are also several based in India. The Indian donors range from a couple with a hotel in Mumbai and owners of a cold-storage firm in Nagpur to Dr. Neeraj Bora, a state-level politician, health philanthropist, and Uttar Pradesh Vaish Mahasammelan (All India Vaish Federation) caste activist from Uttar Pradesh S CA L E

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who has used his Vaish representation to variously align himself with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Congress Party, and BJP. Another is Baba Ramdev, a celebrity yogi, television personality, manufacturer of Patanjali Ayurvedic products, and active supporter of Narendra Modi.53 Also listed is the public relations manager of Jain Irrigation Systems, the firm that sponsored Hindu House’s The History of Ganga Talao publication. Jain Irrigation Systems, the world’s second-largest drip irrigation company, is a multinational conglomerate based in Jalgaon, India. It has expanded into several allied areas, from plastic piping to preserved foods, and has taken over other companies in the United Kingdom, United States, and Israel. It was represented at the Group of Eight Summit on Food Security in 2012 addressed by President Barack Obama. And like other such firms, it has a substantial charitable and philanthropic presence via the Bhavarlal and Kantabai Jain Multipurpose Foundation. These charitable endeavors enable a depth and breadth of networking via religious patronage, linking the firm to centers of trade and power in Mauritius. The scale of the island and the relative openness of its networks are key here: it is far easier and faster to access powerful figures in “Little” India than in the enormous, messy India (so even an unknown academic like me, whose sole connection was to Naresh Kumar Varma and his team at Ganga Talao, was able to interview the vice prime minister within a week of arriving in Mauritius). A similar nexus between religious patronage, philanthropy, and business networking is forged by the Jain International Trade Organization (JITO); the boiler manufacturer Anil Bhandari, donor of the Shiv Mandir’s “108 Narbadeshwar Shivling,” belongs to its Indore chapter.54 A “global forum of Jain entrepreneurs,” JITO is a scaled-up, enormously plastic version of the caste associations of the bazaar that historians such as Christopher Bayly have described for the colonial period, where religious and community affiliation underpin networks of trade and philanthropy.55 (The multiscalar postreform salience of such associations is also evident from Dr. Bora’s affiliation with state- and national-level Vaish organizations extending to the diaspora.) The urban “chapters” of JITO throughout India and the diaspora consolidate local, regional, and national networks through a range of philanthropic activities. They also send representatives to what one JITO video describes, in familiarly quantifying terms, as global “mega-events,” “mega-multi product trade fairs,” and “triple grand events,” such as the JITO Global Summit in 2009 in Ahmedabad, where Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, and the senior BJP leader L. K. Advani addressed 7,500 delegates from all over the world.56 Baba Ramdev addressed the “JITO Connect” conference in 2016 in Pune.57 Bhandari’s donation to the Shiv Mandir, with its enormous lingam and 108 smaller ones, 244

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mobilizes iconic exhibition value—the efficacy of the perception of public recognition—through the plaque connecting him to the scale and number legitimizing the Shiv Mandir’s novel iconic form. This echoes a similar operation of spectacle and scale in JITO’s mega-events, with their public performance of legitimacy and success across commercial, social, and philanthropic arenas. Here again, as described in chapter 4, the efficacy of spectacle maps onto that of speculation. In short, if Ganga Talao enables Mauritian Hindus to leverage their connections with India, this works reciprocally as well, forging transnational circuits in the big statue assemblage. Providing another instance of this two-way traffic are the Indian film, television, and music industries’ links with Mauritius: as a market, a scenic location, and a base for distribution to Africa and elsewhere.58 Conversely, these industries provide Mauritians with authentically Indian cultural content and access to glamor and celebrity. There are several traces of this at Ganga Talao. A Ganapati statue built outside the Mauritiuseshwarnath Mandir in 2008 was donated, again “to Dayal Family,” by Madhu Entertainment and Media of Mumbai, a global distributor of Indian films and television content. As mentioned earlier, Baba Ramdev, who effectively controls India’s religious Aastha TV channel, was a donor to Hindu House’s Shiv Mandir; he also established a yoga center in Mauritius in 2009. Kirit C. Mehta, who founded Aastha TV in 2000 (before Ramdev took control), also visited Ganga Talao and had covered the Shivaratri festival on Aastha TV; apparently, having suffered polio, he appreciated being able to drive right up to the temple.59 Similarly, several informants mentioned frequent visits from the famously devout Gulshan Kumar of T-Series and his collaborator, the playback and devotional singer Anuradha Paudwal. Gulshan Kumar appeared in the introduction in relation to the salience of religion to media urbanism and, specifically, to religious patronage as a means of social mobility for players in newer industries. Here, too, as with neospiritual organizations, a relatively small and porous diasporic site such as Mauritius becomes a means of jumping scales to access prestigious political, business, and religious connections, not only in Mauritius, but also in India and the wider diaspora. In India, as we have seen, public icons are harnessed to political projects, and make land inhabitable for housing and special economic zones, through the twinned appeal to iconopraxis and spectacular “world-class” aesthetics. In Trinidad and Mauritius, the political adoption of spectacular iconopraxis is geared not so much to “world-class” commensurability within a schema of neoliberal globalization as to a public demonstration on the national stage of religious and cultural ties to India. This unfolds in an ethos in which business S CA L E

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is equally enmeshed with World Bank– and Group of Eight–style globalization and with the myriad networks of global Hinduism (and Jainism as part of the Aryadharmi Hindu fold, as conceived by the RSS and the VHP). These networks include, but are not confined to, the projects of politico-religious Hindutva. In Trinidad, national assertion via links to global Hinduisms folds in with economic pressures from structural adjustment programs from the late 1980s onward, which have reconfigured Indo-Trinidadians’ relationships with the land. Indo-Mauritians, however, have by and large not faced this kind of alienation; they have been politically dominant from independence onward, and the economy has been more resilient. This and its relative proximity to India have meant denser and deeper circuits with a greater reciprocity of exchange.

“CHHOTE SARDAR” AND THE STATUE OF UNITY

I have described these diasporic networks of Hinduism and Hindutva in some detail for a granular sense of the thick collaborations that co-constitute various senses of the local and the global through icons and iconopraxis. But they also provide a somewhat counterintuitive background for another such scaling project in India: Narendra Modi’s pet project, the Statue of Unity. I am coming at this obliquely, via the diaspora, to denaturalize the nation by foregrounding its ongoing processes of constitution and dispersion (such as the VHP’s global activities), that is, its status as a node in multiple networks rather than as an intact, pre-given entity. For here, too, the nation is being reconfigured in relation to new imaginaries of globality and locality and new techniques for translating between them. And again what we see is the valence of a smaller territorial unit whose staging of capacity can be upscaled. In this case, the subnational scale of Gujarat as a federal unit becomes a site for configuring economy and identity on the global stage, which, in turn, is leveraged to reimagine—and re-embody—the nation. Thus, the secular Statue of Unity inhabits the same sensible infrastructures as the religious icons whose massive, unmoving presence seeks mobility and plasticity for their patrons, viewers, milieus, and constituencies through their spectacular, speculative display of capacity. The 597-ft. (182-meter) statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the first home minister and deputy prime minister of independent India, first appeared on the global stage in a full-page “Request for Proposal for Providing Consultancy Services,” published in The Economist on June 11, 2011. The advertisement was issued by three entities: the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Rashtriya Ekta Trust (SVPRET); the government of Gujarat; and the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam 246

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Ltd. (SSNL), which built the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam, named for Sardar Patel, which the proposed statue would face. They are, respectively, a taxexempt trust or society, a state government, and a corporation wholly owned by the government of Gujarat and listed on the stock exchange as of 2009. All avatars of the state, the entities in combination forge a continuum between, and differentially adopt, the legal faces of philanthropy or public service, government, and commerce, each with its own mode of legitimation and efficacy for this icon. All three are embodied in the figure of Narendra Modi, who had already announced the proposal in India on October 7, 2010, as he celebrated ten years as chief minister of Gujarat. In his blog he wrote, “Friends, I hope you would love this gift, one more from Gujarat to the nation and world on this joyous occasion,” encouraging readers to watch a video about the statue and send in suggestions.60 Modi presents himself here—and accrues merit—as a gift giver, implicitly to Gujarat but explicitly from it to the “nation and world” (just as the plaques at Hindu House in Mauritius often feature patrons’ donations in the names of their parents, children, or grandchildren). His rhetoric installs him simultaneously as Gujarat’s representative, its patriarch, its son, and its friend. The first version of the video was indeed worth watching, for in it—and in the iterations that followed, in Hindi, English, and Gujarati—the ideological work of the statue had already begun: that of resignifying Gujarat and its regions both as metonymic with the nation and as global entities in their own right.61 It starts with an exaggeratedly staged “historical” black-and-white leader and whirring projector, simulating a newsreel of the late 1940s. However, this projection (in both senses) is soon revealed as a retrojection in the similarly retro title card “Global News,” which is strategic but anachronistic, for it is unlikely that the term global was used for the news anywhere at the time.62 This launches a newsreel-style account of Sardar Patel’s role in incorporating the princely states into the new nation, highlighting Kathiawar and Saurashtra, now in Gujarat and major beneficiaries of irrigation from the Sardar Sarovar Dam. This direct link between subnational (indeed, substate) and global scales is underscored as we learn of Patel praising Saurashtra for presenting “an example of unity to the world.” Echoing this scalar distribution, comments on the video at DeshGujarat.com (a domain name that maps Gujarat onto the nation) in 2011 state enthusiastically that the statue “will make Gujarat global.”63 Patel is then described as saying he was inspired by Gandhi. This forges a link between the two nationalists who were (scaled-up) sons of the Gujarati soil, but it also posits Patel as an alternative to Gandhi, whose embrace of nonviolence, and of Muslims and Dalits, fails to provide the symbolic resources S CA L E

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for Modi’s brand of RSS-style muscular Hindutva. Patel, by contrast, has been made over as India’s Bismarck, the lauh purush (iron man), a more fitting political ancestor for NaMo, as his followers call Modi.64 Sure enough, commentators at DeshGujarat.com were quick to describe Modi—again in the idiom of scale—as Chhote Sardar (smaller/younger Sardar) and a “real muscle man.”65 The implicit comparison between Gandhi and Patel also maps these models of masculinity onto models of governance. The video anachronistically associates Patel with “good governance,” a favored term in the developmentalist discourse and structural adjustment programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (whose imperative of fiscal decentralization fosters a particular sensible infrastructure of scale [see chapter 4]). This is vernacularized in the project’s publicity as su-raj (good government), which sounds similar to, but is quite different from, Gandhi’s swaraj (self-rule), with its insistence on the inseparability of moral/cultural, political, and economic sovereignty.66 Along with explaining the reasons for building the statue as “not just a tourist spot but a source of inspiration,” the videos present vivid visualizations of the statue’s scale compared with others across the world and of the project’s multiple elements: the statue, panoramic viewing gallery, memorial and visitor center, museum, convention and training center, amphitheater, underwater aquarium, and sound and laser show “developed through the mediums of tourism and entertainment infrastructures” (here the voiceover, understandably, runs out of breath). We also learn that the project will be executed in a “worldclass manner,” as a “landmark,” a “national monument” involving “publicprivate partnership” and international tendering, carrying on a proud legacy of economic and social development. The first proposal, outlined in the 2010–11 publicity videos, included a “knowledge hub” with research centers for subjects described, again anachronistically, as “close to the Sardar’s heart”—environment, biotechnology, agriculture, water, and “tribal welfare”—as well as “tribal universities.” They were clearly pitched as a riposte to the strong opposition to the Sardar Sarovar Dam based on environmental damage and disregard for the territorial rights and livelihoods of the area’s displaced Indigenous people, which had caused the World Bank to pull out in 1994. (The SSNL completed the dam.) The statue was thus an attempt to convert the dam from a site of massive, long-drawn-out protests and conflict to the symbol of a unified nation, and from an Indigenous lifeworld to a spectacle of national-cum-Gujarati developmentalist pride, where an artificial dam is in harmony with its “beautiful natural surroundings” (the Vindhya and Satpura ranges, visible from the statue’s “360 degree observation deck”). While the knowledge hub is absent from later publicity videos, in 2017 248

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Modi laid the foundation stone for a “tribal museum” near the statue, part of an intended series of museums across India showcasing Indigenous contributions to the independence movement.67 But the attempt to erase the area’s continued Indigenous presence by consigning it to the past and appropriating it to the nationalist cause proved unsuccessful, as thousands of Adivasis mounted protests at the inauguration in 2018, despite pre-emptive state detentions.68 Protests continued as the site developed. Paralleling the displacement of Indigenous people, the appreciation of nature was soon belied by the postinauguration removal of endangered mugger crocodiles from waters around the statue for a seaplane service.69 (Needless to say, this supplemented a new four-lane highway and a new train station at Kevadiya.) In 2019, it was announced that, instead of domestic crocodiles, visitors would be treated to a “world-class” zoo featuring exotic animals.70 In the lead-up to the 2014 national elections in which Modi successfully ran for prime minister, the statue’s publicity focused on tourism and national integration, consistent with the campaign’s priorities of economic growth, infrastructure development, and national security. The focus shifted from the Gujarati significance of the statue to its status as a national icon: SVPRET, with the NGO Citizens for Accountable Governance, launched a Statue of Unity Movement, consisting of a nationwide drive to collect iron farming implements to be melted down to use in the statue; a Run for Unity marathon; and a “Suraaj Petition” for people to offer ideas for good governance.71 These initiatives were not as successful as hoped. Several states barely contributed to the drive; donating implements for a statue of Patel was not quite the same as donating bricks for a temple of Ram (as part of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement of the late 1980s that contributed to the BJP’s electoral success in 1998). Further, the iron from the tools was soon found to be too low-grade for the statue and was therefore used “in some other part of the project.” 72 Modi became prime minister in May 2014 with a resounding mandate; in July 2014, the Statue of Unity was given the status of a “national project” with 2 billion rupees (about $30 million) in funding from the central government.73 In October 2014, the engineering firm Larsen and Toubro (L&T India) was awarded the contract for design, construction, and maintenance with a winning bid of 29.89 billion rupees ($440 million). Construction began on October 31, 2014, Sardar Patel’s birthday, designated by the Modi government as Rashtriya Ekta Diwas (National Unity Day). As with the neospiritual movements discussed in chapter 3, numbers were harnessed here in their capacity to do symbolic work, this time as dates and anniversaries, which also hitch the statue to an annual cycle of ritual reanimation. S CA L E

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Modi’s electoral success resignified the statue as a national initiative that would put India, not just Gujarat, on the global map and justified the use of central funds for the project. Critics seized on the BJP’s attempt to insert itself into the freedom movement’s legacy by appropriating Patel as a counterpoint to Nehru, layering this onto the initial scale of Gujarat and Gandhi.74 But the lackluster response to the Statue of Unity Movement had also made it clear that the nation’s affective investments in Modi were located elsewhere than in this rather grumpy-looking secular symbol of “good governance.” While developmentalists were excited about foreign investment, infrastructure such as highways, and purging corruption, Hindu nationalists were whipping themselves into a frenzy over cows, flags, reservations, terrorists, and antinationals of every stripe. While the statue had shored up Modi’s popularity in Gujarat, which he then leveraged to a national scale, the popular appeal of the statue itself could not be scaled up in the same way, at least not until after its inauguration. The statue’s play of scales continued, however, attempting to balance Gujarati, national, and global significance and identification through ongoing circuits between the three levels. One element of this balancing act was a website (www.statueofunity.in) run by the multinational firm Accenture.75 This included the online Fund for Unity, “India’s first crowdfunding platform for civic projects,” inviting contributions from the public in addition to the mashup of charitable, public, and corporate bodies already involved in its construction.76 The latter was launched on Sardar Patel’s 140th birth anniversary in 2015 in Gandhinagar, the Gujarat state capital, by Anandiben Patel, Narendra Modi’s successor as chief minister, rather than by him in New Delhi. This suggests that the Modi government was downplaying the statue’s national profile once the elections were over and refocusing on its Gujarati constituency, perhaps due to the absence of national traction or to establish continuity between Modi and Anandiben, but also perhaps in an attempt to elide contradictions between the national and global aspects of the project. I return to this shortly. Another, more literal element in the statue’s scalar circuitry was the proliferation and circulation of scale models. While launching the Fund for Unity, Anandiben Patel inaugurated a replica of Ram Sutar’s 30-ft. model in front of the Gujarat state secretariat at Gandhinagar.77 Earlier in 2015 she also inaugurated another 30-ft. replica at Baben, a peri-urban village in Bardoli (where Sardar Patel was involved in a satyagraha, or nonviolent protest, in 1928). The Bardoli statue was to be part of a proposed “Sardar Patel Tourism Circuit” covering important places in his biography: a secular pilgrimage akin to the 250

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Buddhist circuit projected for the Ravangla Sakyamuni in Sikkim.78 But Patel was not destined to trade on these statues’ aura. In August 2016, she was directed to resign following serious challenges to her BJP government, on one hand, by unrest following a brutally violent attack on Dalits near Una by overly zealous cow protectors that July (captured on a video that went viral), and on the other, ironically, by protests from the Patidar or Patel community, affluent peasants agitating for reserved status as a “Backward Class” and claiming Sardar Patel as their icon. The Patidar challenge, then, entailed an implosion of scales, where the volatile affective force of the statue’s populist or people-making aims was hijacked down to the level of caste claims rather than up to the level of national unity. Thus, the statue’s initial scale, looking outward from Gujarat, ran into trouble both a level up (at the scale of the nation) and at a level down (at the substate scale). Meanwhile, back in the Statue of Unity’s comfort zone that linked Gujarat directly to the global, this time at a diasporic site and explicitly in the context of inviting subnational investment, another replica was featured at the August 2015 Glorious Gujarat USA trade show organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry at the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center.79 The saffron, white, and blue logo for Glorious Gujarat 2015 featured a lion in profile above a rising sun and the silhouettes of skyscrapers, windmills, and solar panels. As mentioned in chapter 4, Gujarat has lions in the Gir Forest, and Modi is known as the “Lion of Gujarat.” The same logo, but with monuments such as the Taj Mahal instead of skyscrapers, was used for Glorious India USA at the same venue in 2017, reinforcing the metonymy brokered by Modi between Gujarat and India. (The same firm, Praveg Communications, based in Ahmedabad, organized both exhibitions and designed both logos.) The publicity poster for Glorious Gujarat 2015 superimposed the lion logo on a diagonally composed image of the Statue of Liberty, as though the Lion of Gujarat was knocking Lady Liberty off to one side. It is surely no coincidence that one of the densest concentrations of Modi’s overseas supporters lives in New Jersey, right under the nose of the Statue of Unity’s key global intertext.80 The Statue of Unity trades on the fame and aura of the Statue of Liberty in its echo of the name and the constant proclamations that it is twice Liberty’s size (and four or five times the size of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, depending on whether the pedestal is counted, thereby putting paid to the Christians). But it also trumps “Liberty” with “Unity,” an essential attribute of a state in its neoliberal avatar as broker, manager, and policeman for transnational capital, concerned not with the whole range of liberal freedoms but S CA L E

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with “economic freedom,” stability, and security. This agenda is encapsulated in the Modi government’s early mantra, “Minimum Government, Maximum Governance.”81 Clearly—albeit ironically, given the diaspora’s role in the BJP’s success—the Statue of Unity’s “world-class” “world-wide welcome” extends not to subaltern exiles, migrants, or “huddled masses,” but to a particular vision of transnational capital and its articulation with identitarian populist politics.82 In this vision, the globality of the Statue of Unity does not stop at comparisons with the Statue of Liberty, Christ the Redeemer, and other tall statues, or its circulation in the diaspora. In its capacity as a world-class project that sought international tenders via an international newsmagazine, it had to draw on the experience and expertise of engineering and architectural firms with global track records. The multifirm consortium that designed and constructed the project included the North America–based Turner Construction Company, a subsidiary of the German company Hochtief, which supervised the construction of Taipei 101 and the Burj Khalifa (the world’s tallest building since 2009, unchallenged as of 2020). Another member was the engineering consultancy firm Meinhardt Group, which is particularly active in the Asia-Pacific region, where it has undertaken large-scale projects such as Shanghai’s Xintiandi “lifestyle center” and Hong Kong’s Tamar Development government center, as well as a number of skyscrapers; in West Asia its projects include a proposed Aladdin City in Dubai, with three towers resembling magic lamps. As should be clear by now, the Statue of Unity is about far more than profit-driven commercial development via Disneyfication (see chapter 4), yet drawing on more literally Disney-related expertise, as with this Aladdin connection, makes sense for a major global spectacle. Appropriately, then, the Statue of Unity’s project architect was the quintessential postmodernist Michael Graves, designer of the Team Disney Building in Burbank, with its famous fascia featuring the Seven Dwarfs (1985); the Dolphin and Swan Resorts at Walt Disney World in Orlando (1990); and several other buildings associated with theme parks.83 While all this Euro-American expertise attracted no comment, conforming perhaps to the acceptable parameters of globality, in October 2015 it came to light that the 25,000-odd bronze plates cladding the Statue of Unity were being manufactured not in one of India’s 4,600 foundries employing half a million people but by Jiangxi Tongqing Metal Handicrafts Co., Ltd., in China’s Jiangxi Province Foreign Investment Industrial Zone. According to a spokesperson for SVPRET, the project contractor, L&T India, was “free to get the material from the best possible place.”84 The media, however, were quick to seize on the contradiction between this and Modi’s “Make in India” campaign, 252

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launched soon after he took office in 2014, also with a lion logo, with the aim of transforming India into a “global design and manufacturing hub.” “Make in India” hinges on massively increasing FDI, consistent with the ideology of global free trade—an aim that appears to have been achieved practically overnight.85 This is in stark contrast to Gandhi’s Swadeshi version of economic nationalism based on not just national but also decentralized, village-level selfsufficiency, a conception that informed the nationalist movement and postindependence protectionism (although the Nehruvian regime adopted a more centralized model). The contrast between “Make in India” and Swadeshi as models of economic nationalism echoes the difference between their cognate concepts, suraj (good governance, embodied in the statue) and swaraj (self-rule) and their modalities of scaling. Swaraj hinges on a radically decentralized, utopian model of self-rule that scales up from individual moral self-regulation, via self-sufficient villages, to the scale of the nation. In this Gandhian model, caste roles remain intact, relying on morality and ethics to rid caste of its hierarchical structure. Suraj, by contrast, must negotiate the oxymoronic imperative of “Minimum Government, Maximum Governance.” While it, too, espouses decentralization, since this is in the service of “free trade” it must also provide a stable infrastructure and orderly management of labor, markets, and capital flows and do so at various scales, including the national. Each of these scales must coalesce into a unit—indeed, a “Unity”—whose brand is distinct from others in a competitive global arena. Further, this takes place within a democracy characterized by many, often competing scales of populism or people-making. All of this suggests that, while the focus in analyzing the cultural politics of globalization has been on the imaginaries and practices unleashed by the explosion in consumerism, it is also worth considering the infrastructural retooling of nationalism via the proliferation of subnational scales and their political circuits. Here the necessarily paradoxical and unsustainable populist rhetoric of national economic integrity returned in increasingly hollowed-out yet spectacular forms. This was evident in the contemporaneous jingoism around Brexit, or with Donald Trump and his border wall and chimera of a return to the greatness of industrial America. It was also evident in Modi’s overnight demonetization of 500-rupee and 1,000-rupee banknotes in 2016 as a spectacle of war against tax offenders, where the prime minister who had dissolved the centralized planning commission was now championing tax revenue as a national good. The symbolism of this was particularly apposite, given the Chhote Sardar’s makeover of Gandhian Swadeshi, for the decommissioned notes were part of the “Mahatma Gandhi series” introduced in 1996 featuring an image of S CA L E

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Gandhi; they were replaced by the “Mahatma Gandhi New Series.” The Statue of Unity stands as a similarly fitting exemplar of India’s made-over nationhood, negotiating an uneasy détente between local populisms refracted via an idea of the global and the actual adherence to the institutional imperatives and protocols of neoliberal free trade. Arguably, then, it is the tenuous status of the nation’s economic sovereignty, attendant on its participation in economic competition, that has necessitated such muscular, spectacular/speculative declarations of identity and unity at various scales of the state, alongside state and nonstate spectacles of violence directed against “antinational” others. The Statue of Unity is exemplary of these structural tensions within national yet global neoliberal regimes: in its multiscalar symbolism, in its multinational production, and in its unpredictable uptake in a populist political field. No amount of global engineering expertise can compensate for these stresses and torsions in its foundation.

BIGGER

How, then, has this account further illuminated the introduction’s first epigraph, in which the blogger Abhilash Rajendran claims, “We modern day people are obsessed with size and height”? Chapter 3 argued that this has to do with the authority, legitimacy, and value of quantification, institutionalized via biopolitics, science and technology, and electoral democracy, in assemblage with remediated forms of religious iconopraxis, textuality, and numerology. The pervasion of quantification through inter- and intranational competition in a speculative “economy of appearances” mediated by the global intensifies this obsession with scale—that is, with relative numbers: the “maximum” (maximum happiness, maximum governance, world records), not just big but bigger than. The forces of comparison here consist of sensible infrastructures that are actualized in aesthetic forms, which further operationalize mimetic relationships between commensurable and competing others. One force of comparison and commensuration is the competition for investment produced at various scales (nations, regions, cities, towns) by neoliberalism’s institutional push to fiscal devolution. Another is the competitive identities into which plural polities have been partitioned in biopolitical democracies as vote banks trading in recognition and redistribution: religion, caste, regional cultural heritage, and so on. This engenders its own scaling, as identities are fashioned through diminutive versions that mimetically partake of an authentic essence or aura: Chhote Sardar, Chhota Bharat, the “faithful copy,” the Datta Ganga, Ganga Talao, Char Dham, twelve jyotirlingas, a melting Amarnath ice lingam. 254

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The scalar circuits inscribed here are not just spatial, for scaling is also a matter of temporal comparisons between past, present, and future selves. On the one hand, scaling hinges on aspiration and imagination, on the plasticity of subjects: the possibility of becoming bigger and better than we feel we are, or than we feel others see us to be, to gain puissance in a theater of spectacle that is at once social, political, economic, and religious. On the other, it is the ability to become the microcosmic embodiment of an auratic origin, historical as much as mythic. This plasticity resonates with many other models of metamorphosis ranging across the divine, the human, creatures, plants, and things. (The idea of the incarnation or avatar is just one such model.) But it also has aspects that are specifically of our times—that is, of ideologies of our times: the times of a constitutively colonial modernity and of neoliberalism, whose unevennesses and exceptionalisms enable “earlier” models to persist. If these metamorphic potentials, as engines of emergence, have entailed redistributions of the sensible, they have also simultaneously entailed modulations and expansions of existing systems. The verification of equality is also both a verification and a modulation of the terms on which democracy’s sensible infrastructures, and those with which it is in assemblage, create value and efficacy. Specifically, this account has shown that when icons have been harnessed to the verification of equality within electoral democracy, what is also verified as central to the sensible is the patronage of secular and religious icons and monuments as a means of social and political recognition, with the latter integrally bound up with economic success. The modulation in this system is the expansive inclusion of participating constituencies and, hence, the expansion of the types of forms that become available for patronage, such as monumental statues. Here, religion, with its new forms of iconopraxis, is co-mediated with democracy, for democracy, like religion, necessarily unfolds in and through mediation, through the aesthetic. It involves forms, genres, sensoria. Verifications of equality are necessarily aesthetic in the processual, emergent sense outlined here: not as a Hegelian journey of Spirit unfolding toward a higher purpose through evolving forms, but as fields of variously stable and fluctuating forces whose actualizations become political in assemblage, that is, through material links and spatiotemporal circuits. As we have seen, possibilities for newness or emergence can arise from the persistence, reappearance, and recombination of fragments or blocs of systems that never quite disappear; here, new additions do not replace the old but become part of a complex layering and circuitry. This means that no aesthetic form—no work, medium, or genre—is in and of itself inherently or permanently progressive or regressive, radical or S CA L E

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reactionary. It is, rather, an assemblage of processes that can lend themselves to politics in multiple, often contradictory, ways. So, lest my account of the Statue of Unity be read as proof of the inherently totalitarian tendencies of the big statue form, let me close with another instance of this form that is far more ambivalent. The Statue of Equality is a proposed (in 2020) 350-ft. bronze-clad statue of B. R. Ambedkar, also to be designed by Ram Sutar, near the Chaitya Bhoomi memorial in Dadar, Mumbai, where Ambedkar was cremated in 1956.86 Another instance, like the Trinidad Hanuman, of the identity-based repurposing of land from another economic moment, its site is the now defunct India United Mills (Indu Mills) No. 6, the property of the centrally administered National Textile Corporation until it was handed over to Maharashtra’s state government in 2012. This allocation followed a protest in which a Dalit group, the Republican Sena, led by Ambedkar’s grandson Anand Ambedkar, broke into and occupied the guarded site on Ambedkar’s death anniversary on December 6, 2011, demanding that the entire twelve-and-a-half-acre area (rather than the four acres initially allotted by the central government) be handed over for a bigger Ambedkar memorial. The protestors established a Buddha Vihar (Buddhist temple) inside the mill with icons of Buddha and Ambedkar. These icons remained after the protestors relinquished control on December 30, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of the UPA agreed “in principle” to hand over the land. The subsequent prime minister, Modi, laid the memorial’s foundation stone in 2015, but construction tenders were not invited until 2017. Prakash Ambedkar, Anand’s brother, expressed concern over the Maharashtra government’s process, seeing it as politically opportunistic and “not serious.”87 According to the scholar and activist Anand Teltumbde, it was the BJP’s Atal Behari Vajpayee who first suggested an Ambedkar memorial at the site in 1997.88 While Teltumbde applauds the radical turn in Dalit politics represented by the Republican Sena’s occupation of Indu Mills, he also cautions against both the political reappropriation of Dalit icons and the deification of Ambedkar: “The only dark lining on an otherwise inspiring act is the issue itself, which is rooted in identity and emotions around Ambedkar as a demigod. The State is adept at manipulating both to neutralise dalit anger and pave the way for their further dispossession. As a strategy, it may be alright to mobilise around the issue of the memorial to start with but it should soon be extended to tackle the material deprivation of dalits.”89 Teltumbde’s commentary encapsulates the multiple forces running through this object in the making (which, this book has argued, is what all images are, including those already “made”): the tensions between religion 256

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and secularism, recognition and redistribution, the material and the symbolic, the deterritorializing political event of dissent and its inevitable reterritorialization. But unlike those who refute icon building altogether in the name of economic development, he sees the strategic assertions over this icon as a step toward redressing caste injustices. If they are such a step, this book has argued, it is because the social, economic, and political dimensions of this struggle are, as with all struggles, also integrally aesthetic, sensory, sensible. This is what makes it so deep, difficult, and ongoing. In the run-up to India’s 2019 elections, the Supreme Court expressed its “tentative” view that Kumari Mayawati should repay the public exchequer for the monuments she built, as if the thousands of visitors to “Dalit memorials” still somehow failed to count.90 In a very different accounting, the media celebrated the Statue of Unity’s reign as the biggest statue in the world, a bonanza of tourism revenue for Gujarat and India whose daily visitor footfall quickly surpassed that of the Statue of Liberty.91 Of course, in the regime of scale—as, indeed, for the aesthetic tout court— as Abhilash Rajendran reminds us, none of this is forever: “Therefore this list will be constantly updated.” Meanwhile, in yet another kind of accounting, at once playful and deadly serious, in April 2020 a prankster put the Statue of Unity up for sale on the online marketing site OLX for 3 trillion rupees (about $4 billion) to help fund the Gujarat government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The statue’s administration registered a police case against the unknown culprit. Its statement to the media claimed that the advertisement “[hurt] the sentiments of the several crore people who idolise Sardar Patel.”92 Subtly, but surely, this echo of the language of religious offense in Section 195A of the Indian Penal Code pulled the Statue of Unity right back into the circuits between religion and democracy whose sparks ignite life in all the statues in this book.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION: EMERGENCE

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Epigraph: Abhilash Rajendran, “Top 10 Tallest Hindu God Murtis,” http://www .hindu-blog.com/2010/11/top-10-tallest-hindu-god-murtis-statue.html. In fact, the list was not updated—or, at least, not by the time this book was published. Epigraph: Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image, before Time,” 35. See also his Confronting Images. Epigraph: Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 238 fn. 8, emphasis added. Ashok Sharma, “Giant Statue of Hindu God Falls in India,” Midland Daily News, January 10, 2003, http://www.ourmidland.com/import/giant-statue-of-hindu-god -falls-in-india/article_cf5ec286-7604-5a10-9ca3-31e04a788f30.html?mode=story; Saibal Dasgupta, “Giant Statue Topples in India Just Days before Completion,” Engineering News-Record, January 20, 2003, accessed August 29, 2013, http://enr .construction.com/news/bizLabor/archives/030120.asp. Most sculptors and patrons prefer to include the pedestal when specifying the height of a statue, since this makes for a larger number. I generally follow this convention. Jain, Gods in the Bazaar. The concept of religion has received sustained interrogation, particularly the narrative of its demise or waning with the rise of secularism and modernity, and the Judeo-Christian and Eurocentric assumptions—and colonial power relations— underlying its mobilization in disciplines such as anthropology and religious studies. I do not therefore attempt a substantive definition of religion here but track its uses and limits as a category in relation to a certain assemblage. This follows Talal Asad’s anthropological approach to the secular (and hence, religion), or Stanley Cavell’s approach as described by Hent de Vries: “ ‘Religion,’ in Cavell’s view, is what we are willing and able to take it to be. Its features and actual existence (for us) will depend on the stakes we are willing and able to grant them. Its import and ‘importance’ can be found only in how we let it matter to us, in the ways we think and act, judge and feel. . . . [It is] our call, that is to say, nothing but (or beyond) what we claim, proclaim, or acclaim as its name and concept, its uses and abuses, its meaning and end.” Asad, Formations of the Secular; Asad, Genealogies of Religion; de Vries, “Introduction,” 31. J. Barton Scott and Brannon Ingram cogently sum up the status of religion as a category in South Asia scholarship. “This distinctively modern concept constrains our analysis of South Asian culture . . . by implying a clear distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular.’ Consequently, scholars of early modern India have increasingly sought out alternate terms (e.g., ‘ritual’),

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which allow them to sidestep ‘religion’ in approaching topics like sacred kingship. For the colonial and post-colonial periods, however, the problem is more complicated: no longer a culturally foreign concept that we as scholars impose on South Asian materials, ‘religion’ becomes part of the conversation in South Asia, actively shaping modern cultural practice in significant ways.” Scott and Ingram, “What Is a Public?,” 360. The scant existing scholarship on this genre has focused on specific deities or statues. An early piece centered on big Hanuman statues is Lutgendorf, “My Hanuman Is Bigger than Yours.” On a proposed Maitreya statue in Uttar Pradesh, see Falcone, Battling the Buddha of Love; Falcone, “Maitreya or the Love of Buddhism.” The Maitreya Project is also mentioned in Mathur and Singh, “Reincarnations of the Museum.” Catherine Becker’s Shifting Stones, Shaping the Past has an excellent chapter on Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. T. Rama Rao’s 58-ft. granite Hussain Sagar Buddha, installed in 1992. Thanks to Becker’s exhaustive treatment of this statue, and the emphasis I place on concrete as an emergent material, it appears in my discussion but is not central to it. Rancière, Dissensus; Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. A discussion of the “distribution of the sensible” follows shortly. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” All references to the essay in this volume are to the third, and final, version, published in Illuminations, the collection edited by Hannah Arendt, because it seems to have had the most widespread circulation and impact. For an excellent account of Akshardham, see Singh, “Temple of Eternal Return.” Examples include Eder and Klonk, Image Operators; McLagan and McKee, Sensible Politics. Jane Bennett and Pheng Cheah both challenge Rancière’s emphasis on human agency, arguing for the inclusion of nonhuman actants in the political field: Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Cheah, “Emergence.” (I thank Pheng Cheah and Dilip Gaonkar for sharing this essay.) For a brilliant, far-reaching phenomenological account of touch as a sensible regime and ground of social distinction, see Jaaware, Practicing Caste. Unfortunately, this pathbreaking book appeared too late for me to engage its insights here, but they resonate strongly with my concerns and approach (albeit with some significant caveats). “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, February 1, 2019, https://www.splcenter.org /20190201/whose-heritage -public-symbols-confederacy. Rancière also uses “aesthetic” in another sense, which pertains to what he calls the “aesthetic regime” of art: one of three regimes within the European tradition (the others are the ethical regime, associated with the pedagogical role of images in Plato’s ideal republic, and the poetic or representative regime, associated with an Aristotelian hierarchy of the arts). The aesthetic regime dates from around the French Revolution onward—that is, when the most influential modern concepts of the aesthetic were taking shape, as formulated theoretically by Schelling and Kant and in the modern novel by Balzac and Flaubert. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

14 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. The reference to Foucault tempers the Kantian a priori level of the aesthetic, rendering it historical rather than universal, essential, timeless, and transcendent. Pheng Cheah calls Rancière’s schema “quasitranscendental.” Cheah, “Emergence.” 15 This refutation of the base–superstructure opposition is a foundational view of cultural studies and the development of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony by Marxist thinkers such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. That tradition, however, is more concerned with representation and cultural forms as mediators of ideology than with the kind of a priori “primary aesthetics” described earlier. See, e.g., Williams, Marxism and Literature. 16 The term infrastructure is far from transparent; its use demands such an identification and declaration of commitments. Brian Larkin argues that infrastructure’s usual definition as the invisible substrate of a system is not as straightforward as it seems, for it is hard to pin down precisely which elements constitute that substrate. Infrastructure is thus perhaps better understood as a means of establishing causality within a system or network. In this sense it is an analytic in itself, and the process of selecting what elements count as infrastructural—that is, primary or causal—entails particular “epistemological and political commitments.” Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 330. 17 The “new materialisms” are broadly concerned with the constitutive role of matter, its liveliness, force, and agency, though as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost point out, some advocates of the various distinct approaches under this umbrella see these as renewed rather than new materialisms (Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” 4). Emerging from science and technology studies, feminist and vitalist philosophies, and cultural theory, the new materialisms are seen as a reaction against the linguistic or cultural turn and social constructionism, the anthropocentric domination of nature implied in CartesianNewtonian scientific models, and the binary between nature and culture that both these strands uphold. Indeed, a feature of this return to matter is the attempt to think past such binaries in general: nature and culture, essentialism and constructionism, the mechanical and the organic, meaning and matter. 18 An excellent overview, which both performs and reflects on these debates, is Kaufmann et al., Circulations in the Global History of Art. See also Moxey, Visual Time; Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art. Failing to acknowledge the historicity and relational production of “cultural difference” runs the risk of positing it as primordial or essential, and enabling it to substitute for an analysis of capital’s movements in search of its “spatial fix” (Harvey, “Globalization and the ‘Spatial Fix’ ”). Fredric Jameson makes this point about the uses of “culture” in A Singular Modernity, 12. 19 Flood, Objects of Translation; Juneja, “Circulation and Beyond.” 20 Juneja, “Circulation and Beyond,” 62. 21 Partha Chatterjee describes the persistence of such colonial exceptionality in postindependence nation-states, having defined imperialism in terms of the ability to declare such exceptions. Thus, “Empire is immanent in modern nations.” Chatterjee, “Empires, Nations, Peoples,” 89.

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22 Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage, as agencement, is a matter of becoming; in the Deleuzian–Bergsonian concept of la durée, as in the anthropological conception of Nancy Munn, space and time cannot be thought apart: see Hodges, “Rethinking Time’s Arrow”; Phillips, “Agencement/Assemblage,” 108. In many ways this echoes George Kubler’s formulation of art-historical objects in terms of a “formal sequence” that “in cross section . . . shows a network, a mesh, or a cluster of subordinate traits; and in long section . . . has a fiber-like structure of temporal stages.” However, the linearity in the idea of the “sequence” does not capture the circuits and rhizomatic networks I propose here: Kubler, The Shape of Time, 37–38. 23 DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 24 DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation. 25 DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation, 17. 26 DeLanda, Philosophy and Simulation, 185. 27 Cheah, “Emergence.” 28 Again, Raymond Williams’s exposition of dominant, residual, and emergent forms is a remarkable attempt to address the complexity and fluidity implied in the assemblage but also, unlike the assemblage, focuses on the human. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 121–27. 29 See, e.g., Eder and Klonk, Image Operators; Fuller, Media Ecologies; McLagan and McKee, Sensible Politics. 30 Didi-Huberman, “Before the Image, before Time,” 35. Anachronic is used in Moxey, Visual Time; Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance. 31 The classic media studies text on remediation is Bolter and Grusin, Remediation. 32 Meister, “Image Iconopraxis and Iconoplasty in South Asia,” 15. 33 Meister, “Image Iconopraxis and Iconoplasty in South Asia,” 15. 34 On the sublimation of the sacred into art via Romanticism, see Morgan, “Art and Religion in the Modern Age”; Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age. This is why comparisons of the temple and the museum, or the displaced terminology of canonicity, have a sound historical basis. For such comparisons, see Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing”; Duncan, Civilizing Rituals; Davis, Lives of Indian Images. 35 On modern and contemporary art as what Karin Zitzewitz, following Saba Mahmood, calls “normatively secular,” see Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism, 4. See also Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. 36 Bourdieu, Distinction. Bourdieu’s study did not account for unevenness within the postcolonial metropole either. 37 Asad, Formations of the Secular; Asad, Genealogies of Religion. 38 Keith Moxey argues for “an awareness of heterochrony, the sense that different cultures have distinct notions of time and that these are not easily related to one another. Heterochrony relativizes the significance attributed to Western history and encourages the creation of narratives that are contemporary but not synchronous” (Moxey, Visual Time, 173). Similarly, for Terry Smith, “Multiple temporalities are the rule these days, and their conceptions of historical development move in multifarious directions” (Smith, “Introduction,” 5). 39 See, e.g., Acland, Residual Media. 262

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40 There are at least three related frames through which heterogeneity is produced, accessed, and managed. One is the protean processes of capitalist expansion whose ultimate will to homogenization thrives on temporal and other heterogeneities, seeking them out or producing them in order to exploit them (whether as conditions of production or as markets made to occupy cosmetically diverse “niches”). Here anachronism becomes, as Harry Harootunian puts it, “not a residual anomaly . . . but an essential attribute of the present” (Harootunian, “ ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’ after Area Studies,” 32). Another frame is a powerful universalism wedded to an ideology of progress and development that hierarchizes differences along a linear axis of evolutionary time. A third is the neoliberal program of multiculturalism that seeks to manage differences and contain frictions between them, not least through our institutional practices in the academy. Harootunian reminds us that uneven development and its heterogeneous temporalities are at the heart of the dominant global capitalist project, which in its neoliberal avatar is “indifferent to the older division of center and periphery and capable of reproducing new forms of untimeliness on a scale hitherto unimagined” (Harootunian, “ ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’ after Area Studies,” 29–30). This suggests a need for accounts of difference and unevenness within the Western heartlands, as capital abandons certain of its sites (one type of Band-Aid solution for this, in which art and art writing are deeply enmeshed, is gentrification led by the culture industry and the “creative class”). One such account is Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, which describes how the unevenness within the metropoles gives rise to its own modalities of heterochrony. This is a salutary attempt to think together decolonization and modernization—although for Ross these heterogeneous temporalities are fated to disappear in the face of unilinear progress rather than subject to layering. 41 Thus, as Brian Larkin points out, those in developing countries are particularly taken with the “poetics of infrastructure” (Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” 332). 42 Tsing, Friction, 9. 43 Tsing, Friction, 9. 44 On the process of singularizing modernity, see Jameson, A Singular Modernity. 45 “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be.’ Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25). 46 In invoking the ant, Latour is playing with the acronym for actor-network theory (ANT). “We have to behave like good ants and to be as moronic, as literalist, as positivist, as relativist as possible.” Or again, “One must remain as myopic as an ant in order to carefully misconstrue what ‘social’ usually means” (Latour, Reassembling the Social, 170–71). This project, however, has no pretensions to the systemic rigor of ANT, holding instead to the art historian’s commitment to the inexhaustibility

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of the image (a commitment that hinges on the aesthetic, given that inexhaustibility can also be built into a system). That said, the enormous power or public profile of some of the actors in this story means that I am not always able to cite my informants or use what they have shared because of the possible consequences for them. In such cases, wherever possible I make the argument by other means while leaving out some things altogether. My approach here therefore differs from my previous work on calendar art, which drew heavily on close analyses of interviews with artists and publishers. While still starting from the actors (in this case, sculptors and patrons) as the central nodes in this genre’s networks, this account is both more formalist and more synthetic or broad-brush. But it is only fitting that each project should adopt an approach that is responsive to its particular object. Fabrice Fouillet, “Colossi in the Countryside,” 2014, https://www.lensculture.com /articles/fabrice-fouillet-colossi-in-the-countryside. On “statuomania,” see Michalski, “Democratic ‘Statuomania’ in Paris.” Wikipedia, “List of Tallest Statues,” https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/List_of_tallest _statues. The “long 1980s” was a period of rapid transformation in India, roughly dating from Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975–77 that ended three decades of Congress Party hegemony in national politics, enabling the resurgence of Hindu nationalist parties. In 1980, Indira Gandhi’s reelected Congress government borrowed $5 billion from the International Monetary Fund, followed by a gradual easing of import restrictions that spearheaded the demise of the quasi-socialist Nehruvian compact. India’s economic liberalization is usually dated from the 1991 New Economic Policy in which Rajiv Gandhi’s minority Congress government sought to address a crisis in the balance of payments through wide-ranging economic reforms. Jain, Gods in the Bazaar; Jain, “Mass-Reproduction and the Art of the Bazaar.” Birla, Stages of Capital. The Birlas, Marwari “trader-industrialists” from Pilani in Rajasthan, had moved to Calcutta and Bombay as middlemen and speculators in the colonial economy. After making substantial profits from opium during World War I they pushed into the jute export industry and other forms of manufacturing, emerging as one of postindependence India’s richest business families (Ray, “Introduction,” 58–59). (I should clarify that while the historian Ritu Birla is, in fact, related to this Birla family, by “the Birlas” I mean the industrialists and refer to the historian as “Birla.”) Birla, Stages of Capital, 25. See also Hansen, “Sovereigns beyond the State.” Weber, Economy and Society. See also Gane, Max Weber and Contemporary Capitalism. Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism.” My use of the term vernacular for this capitalist ethos specifies it not in terms of locality or language but in terms of this relationship of subordination and exceptionality (though the association with the local has proved hard to shake). For a discussion of the vernacular and its etymology in the Latin verna, a slave born in the master’s house, see Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, 14–15.

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58 Birla, Stages of Capital, 27, 199. Birla does not explicitly discuss the use of the term culture, deploying it as a given category even as she problematizes its constitution vis-à-vis “economy.” For a discussion of the development of the culture concept in relation to colonialism, see Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History. 59 The very categories of public and private first arose in late nineteenth-century commercial and financial law, underpinning the notion of “general public utility” which persists as the criterion for the legitimacy of charitable works (Birla, Stages of Capital). 60 Birla, Stages of Capital, 237. 61 Ashish Rajadhyaksha points out that popular cinema in India has been both indispensable to the state, because of its hegemonic role in constituting national subjects, and structurally excluded from it by its informal mode of production and its undesirable, antirealist antiaesthetics (Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid). The Indian film industry, which produces the largest number of films in the world, was granted official industry status only in 1998. But even as the industry takes on an increasingly formalized corporate aspect, its third and fourth generations of producers, stars, directors, and other personnel attest to the continuing importance of kinship. 62 Liang, “Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation”; Sundaram, Pirate Modernity. Liang’s account takes a less epochal tone than Sundaram’s but nonetheless follows Sundaram’s primary focus on post-1980s “media urbanism.” 63 The scholarship on printed images in particular has highlighted their role in nonelite politics (see Jain, Gods in the Bazaar; Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”; Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation). On the (contested) distinction between civil and political society, see Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed. 64 Liang, “Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation,” 8. 65 See also Sundaram, “Uncanny Networks.” 66 Bruno Latour describes these functional separations as part of what he calls the Modern Constitution (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern). 67 Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” CHAPTER 1: STATUES AND SCULPTORS

1 For concise overviews of these conceptions of time, see Hodges, “Rethinking Time’s Arrow”; West-Pavlov, Temporalities. 2 Forty, Concrete and Culture. Forty’s otherwise marvelously detailed, insightful, and generative account does not provide much of a sense of how concrete is understood in the Global South. His remains a view from the pukka side, primarily focusing on architecture and tending to think in terms of failures of modernity and cultural stereotypes. In keeping with my supplementary view from the kutcha, vernacular side, I often use the term cement rather than concrete, since cement is the term that sculptors and patrons usually use. This reflects the use of cement mixes with aggregates of varying grades, from the usual coarse gravel and crushed limestone for the main reinforced cement concrete structure to sand and marble powder for shaping forms and finishing. N OT E S T O C H AP T E R O N E

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3 Forty, Concrete and Culture, 39. 4 “Guru Padmasambhava Statue Project,” 2013, http://www.customjuju.com /wangdorrimpoche/statue.htm. 5 Forty, Concrete and Culture, 164. 6 Here I use vernacular the way I specify it in Gods in the Bazaar, not as “local” or “Indian” but as a relational category, akin to minor as opposed to official or subaltern as opposed to dominant (Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, 14–15). 7 Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” 8 Bapat et al., “History of Cement and Concrete in India.” 9 This information on Matu Ram draws on interviews with him and his son, as well as on a biography (Rathore, Chintan Se Srijan Ki Ore). 10 See Birla, Stages of Capital, for an account of the legal tensions between this idea of the public good and the colonial perception of religious merit as self-interested. 11 Chandan Kishore Kant, “Birla Guns for Pole Position in Cement,” Business Standard, December 30, 2014, https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies /birla-guns-for-pole-position-in-cement-114123001005_1.html; Amy Saunders, “Preview: The Top 100 Global Cement Companies and Global per Capita Capacity Trends,” Global Cement Magazine, December 1, 2015, http://www.globalcement.com /magazine/articles/964-preview-the-top-100-global-cement-companies-and-global -per-capita-capacity-trends. 12 See Jain, “Tales from the Concrete Cave.” 13 On this process, see Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, 141–44. 14 The reference here is to Geeta Kapur’s argument about Raja Ravi Varma, whose solution to the problem of reconciling perspectival realism and iconic frontality was key to the aesthetics of bazaar icons. Matu Ram’s representational dilemma signals a similar defining moment (Kapur, “Ravi Varma”). 15 According to P. C. Jain’s son, the Mahavira statue was initiated after he (the son) visited Japan as part of a collaboration with a Japanese watch firm and saw the Kamakura Buddha, which inspired him to revive the medieval Karnatakan tradition of monumental Jain statues (although this figure is not a standing Bahubali but Mahavira, seated like the Kamakura Buddha). P. C. Jain consulted with Dr. Veerendra Heggade, a Jain but also a powerful nonstate figure in Karnataka as the hereditary trustee (dharmadhikari) of the Hindu Manjunatha temple in Dharmasthala. Heggade had worked with sculptors in Karnataka to have a 39-ft. granite statue of Bahubali, or Gommateshwara, installed at Dharmasthala in 1975, shortly after he took office. (According to a press interview, Heggade had also helped with an Avalokiteshwara statue in Japan.) When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Karnataka in 1981 for the twelve-year mahamastakabhisheka ceremony of the 981 CE, 57-ft. Bahubali monolith at Sravanabelagola, according to Heggade, she expressed a desire for more “spiritual and religious content” in the modern capital of Delhi and supported a land grant to build the Mahavira statue. However, the project ran into controversy when the heritage organization INTACH and Muslim community groups objected on the basis that the Mahavira statue was not in keeping with the Sultanate and Mughal monuments of the area. (Note that, as part of the Digam266

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bara tradition, this Mahavira figure is naked.) Rajiv Gandhi, who had succeeded his mother as prime minister by the time the statue was installed, was sympathetic to the objections but legally unable to support them (interviews with Ashok Kumar Jain, Delhi, and Shamraya Acharya, Karkala, December 2007; “It’s Ugly; It’s Beautiful; It’s Right; It’s Wrong: A Mahavira Statue in the Vicinity of Qutab Catches the PM’s Eye,” The Week, August 3–9, 1986). Interview with Captain R. P. Sharma, in charge of security at Birla Kanan, Delhi, December 2007. The first major state-funded monumental statue was arguably M. Karunanidhi’s massive 133-ft. stone statue of the Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar at Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, whose foundation stone was laid in 1979 (though it was not completed until 2000), but this was a cultural rather than religious icon (see chapter 2). The first state-funded religious colossus was N. T. Rama Rao’s 58-ft. granite standing Buddha in Hyderabad’s Hussain Sagar Lake, installed in 1992 and consecrated by the Dalai Lama in 2006 (Becker, Shifting Stones, Shaping the Past). “Buddha Disrupts Flight Path at Delhi Airport,” The Guardian, December 23, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/23 /buddha-flight-path-delhi -airport. On gara and cement, see Gambetta, “Material Movement.” Smriti Srinivas suggests that “Kemp Fort” is a short form of “Kempe Gowda Fort,” after the sixteenth-century chieftain considered the founder of Bangalore, so the turrets can be read as referring as much to this as to Disney’s Fantasia. Srinivas describes the store in relation to the commercial appropriation of urban space by theatrical displays but does not mention the Shiva statue and temple behind it (Srinivas, Landscapes of Urban Memory, 241–42). See, e.g., the blog entry at Guruprasad, “The Story of Airport Road Shiva Temple,” Guruprasad’s Portal, http://guruprasad.net/posts/the-story-of-airport-road-shiva -temple. Incidentally, in a recombination of the elements in the big statue assemblage, in May 2015 the Total “hypermarkets” in Bangalore, started by the Jubilant Bhartia Group, were taken over by Kumar Mangalam Birla’s Aditya Birla Group. “Murudeshwar Temple Now Tallest Gopuram in Asia,” Daijiworld.com, April 14, 2008, https://www.daijiworld.com/news/newsDisplay.aspx?newsID=45696. However, there is some debate as to whether it actually surpasses the gopuram built in 1987 at the Ranganathaswamy Temple in Srirangam, Tamil Nadu, as their heights are very similar. Sridhar was taken to Sikkim by the Mumbai-based temple architect Subhash Bhoite, who had worked on a temple at Nageshwar, Dwarka, for Gulshan Kumar. “Decision to Quit BJP Final: Yeddyurappa,” New Indian Express, October 29, 2012, accessed February 4, 2013, http://newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka /article1318009. Technically, the statue was funded by private donations to the Basava Dharma Peetha, a religious organization based in Basavakalyan and headed by Mate Mahadevi. It was Yeddyurappa who made this connection between Mahadevi and the Basavakalyan Development Board.

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26 Guru Rinpoche is another name for Padmasambhava, a Buddhist master venerated in the Himalayan regions of India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan. This monumental Padmasambhava in Sikkim spearheaded several others: a 64-ft. one along with a 67-ft. Amitabha Buddha and a 64-ft. Chenrezig, all by the sculptor Kunzang (or Kunsang) from Bhutan, consecrated in 2007 in the Three Buddha Park near Kathmandu’s Swayambhu temple; a 123-ft. one inaugurated in 2012 at Rewalsar, Himachal Pradesh, also by Kunzang; and a 154-ft. one completed in 2015 at Takela near Lhuntze in Bhutan by Rajkumar Shakya, a Newari artist from Nepal. 27 Sikkim’s economy is primarily based on agriculture (it is India’s largest producer of cardamom and is focusing on organic farming), but tourism is a significant and fast-growing sector. The Indian Army controls large sections of the state because it borders China. Road-based trade between the two countries through the Nathu La pass is also growing. 28 Pema Leyda Shangderpa, “Festival Pays Tribute to Mountain Deity,” The Telegraph, September 3, 2003, accessed July 10, 2018, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1030903 /asp/siliguri/story_2322702. asp. 29 Srestha, Tathagata Tsal, 11. 30 Interviews with Naveen Pradhan, architect, Gangtok, May 2009, and Thobchen Takapa, project supervisor, Ravangla, May 2009, March 2013. The “Buddhist circuit” is part of a global vision for heritage tourism. In July 2014, India’s Ministry of Tourism launched a plan with the World Bank to develop Buddhist heritage circuits in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, just after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced 5 billion rupees to develop five tourist circuits, including the Buddhist circuit. Forty percent of funding will come from the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank; 50 percent from the Central Government’s Ministry of Tourism; and 5 percent each from the two state governments. Jaitley focused this development initiative on Bodh Gaya and Sarnath, destinations serviced by tour operators and preferred by international tourists (“Investing in the International Buddhist Circuit: Enhancing the Spiritual, Environmental, Social and Economic Value of the Places Visited by the Buddha in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India,” International Finance Corporation, World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017 January 2017, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org /handle/10986 /26096; “Jaitley’s Buddha Circuit Plan Is a ‘Masterstroke,’ ” Times of India, July 11, 2014, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/varanasi/Jaitleys-Buddha-Circuit -plan-is-a-masterstroke/articleshow/38184422.cms). 31 The project was initiated in 1982 by the FPMT’s Lama Yeshe, who envisaged a massive statue of Maitreya, the future Buddha, at the Buddha’s birthplace, Bodh Gaya. Difficulties with the Bihar government led to the site’s shift in 2003 to Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh, where Chief Minister Mayawati was keen to house it, particularly given her major constituency of Dalit Buddhists. However, it ran into trouble again as farmers protested against the state’s acquisition of their land (likely given strength by the successful 2006–8 opposition in Singur, West Bengal, to a Tata Nano automobile factory planned there). In 2010, the state government was forced to “reconsider” the project. This and other successful protests against develop268

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ment projects, including expressways, led to the Mayawati government’s revisions of Uttar Pradesh’s Land Acquisition Act in 2010 and 2011. In 2013, the Central Government’s Land Acquisition Act was revised, as well. In 2013, Mayawati’s successor, Akhilesh Yadav, granted the project land at Kushinagar for a scaled-down (150-ft.) version of the statue. As of 2017, another, more modest FPMT statue is to be built at Bodh Gaya, as well. On the Maitreya Project, see Falcone, “Maitreya or the Love of Buddhism”; Mathur and Singh, “Reincarnations of the Museum.” Interviews with Naveen Pradhan, architect, Gangtok, May 2009, and Thobchen Takapa, project supervisor, Ravangla, May 2009, March 2013. Aerosun was part of a consortium that unsuccessfully bid for the Statue of Unity project, which went to L&T India. An article in China Foundry lists Aerosun’s other projects as “Buddha in Betong, Thailand (Height: 14.4 m[eters]), the Lingshan Buddha in Wuxi, China (Height: 88 m), the Statue of Lao Tzu in Maoshan, Jiangsu province (Height: 28 m), the Statue of Kwan-yin in Macao (Height: 20 m), the Buddha in Nanshan, Shandong province (Height: 28 m), the Buddha Maitreya in Chiang Rai, Thailand (Height: 19 m), the Statue of ZHENG [sic] Cheng-gong in Quanzhou, Fujian province (Height: 28 m), the trihedral Statue of Kwan-yin in Hainan province (Height: 108 m), the Puxian Bodhisattva in Emei mountain, Sichuan province (Height: 42 m), the Gold Buddha in Chongqing (Height: 20 m), the Great Buddha in Bhutan (Height: 42 m), the Great Buddha in Nepal (Height: 20 m), and so on” (“Craft of Aerosun, Wonderful Article Excelling Nature: Brief Introduction to Aerosun Corporation Art Statue Division”). On such uses of relics, see Strong, Relics of the Buddha. The problem of having no history came up in my interviews with Pradhan and Thobchen. H. H. the Dalai Lama, address at the inauguration of the Tathagata Tsal and Sakyamuni statue, Ravangla, March 25, 2013. My information about Ram Sutar comes from interviews with him and Anil Sutar, Noida, August 2010, and two exhaustive, lavishly illustrated books by Anil Sutar produced for a show of Ram Sutar’s work at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi (India’s state-sponsored national art academy), February 13–22, 2010 (see Sutar, Monumental Sculptures by Ram V. Sutar; Sutar, Sculptor Ram V. Sutar). V. Ganapati Sthapati, who was the principal of the Government College of Architecture and Sculpture in Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram), Tamil Nadu, is not to be confused with S. M. Ganapati Sthapati (1931–2017), who carved the 58-ft. Buddha statue installed in Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad in 1992 for Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister N. T. Rama Rao. Both were trained by V. Ganapati Sthapati’s father, M. Vaidhyanathan Sthapati (Becker, Shifting Stones, Shaping the Past, 148 fn. 14). Another conjuncture between a dam and a statue culminated in Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Rama Rao’s installation of the 58-ft. granite Buddha in the center of the Hussain Sagar Lake in 1992. As Catherine Becker recounts, after an ancient Buddhist site at Nagarjunakonda was submerged by the Nagarjunasagar Dam (constructed from 1955 to 1967), plans were made to install a massive Buddha image nearby. Soon after Rama Rao first took office in 1983, he visited the United States,

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where a campaign was underway to refurbish the Statue of Liberty. He returned with a mission to build an equivalent and relocated the proposed Buddha statue to Hyderabad (Becker, Shifting Stones, Shaping the Past, 146–47). Perhaps the changing artistic landscape played a part in this decision, too, as the tastes of Nehruvian technocrats and bureaucrats shifted to modernist painters such as M. F. Husain, who was being commissioned around this time to make murals for Air India (1957), the World Health Organization (1963), and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (1964). Across the border in what was then West Pakistan, the painter Sadequain was commissioned to make a mural at the Mangla Dam on the Jhelum (1967). Nehru, “Speech at the Opening of the Nangal Canal,” 214. The foundry was subsequently used as the setting for Bani Abidi’s video work Death at a 30 Degree Angle, 2012, part of an installation at documenta (13), 9 June– 16 September 2012, Kassel, Germany. On the Manyavar Shri Kanshi Ram Ji Green (Eco) Garden, see Jain, “Tales from the Concrete Cave.” Jain, “The Handbag That Exploded.” Note, however, that while bronze is durable and weather-resistant, it is also vulnerable to being melted down and reused, as was the case for about 1,700 statues that the Vichy regime recycled in 1940–44 after the period of “statuomania” during the Third Republic (see Karlsgodt, “Recycling French Heroes”; Michalski, “Democratic ‘Statuomania’ in Paris”). This applies not to earlier structures, such as those of ancient Rome, but to modern reinforced cement concrete, whose strength relies on metal rods, for these rods are subject to corrosion and decay. Climate change could be making this life expectancy even shorter (see Saha and Eckelman, “Urban Scale Mapping of Concrete Degradation from Projected Climate Change”). Prabhakar, Sri Dharmasthala Bhagawan Bahubali Pratishthapana Samsmarana Grantha; “Bahubali of Dharmasthala,” herenow4u, May 21, 2012, http://www.herenow4u.net /index.php?id=87106. Interview with H. V. Prasad, personal secretary to Sri Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swami, Mysore, December 2010. The Trinidad Hanuman statue was built by the Bangalore sculptor Thangam Subramaniam, from the sthapati sculpting tradition of Tamil Nadu famously revived by V. Ganapathi Sthapati (see note 36 in this chapter). On authorship in relation to printed icons, see Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, chap. 4. The brut in Brutalism signifies “raw” (from French) rather than “brutal,” though many Brutalist buildings do feel like a brutalization of the urban fabric and of the sensibilities of its inhabitants.

CHAPTER 2: DEMOCRACY

Epigraph: Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” 14. 1 Taussig, The Magic of the State. 2 On this (re)sacralizing aspect of desecration, see Taussig, Defacement. See also Latour, “What Is Iconoclash?” 3 Michalski, Public Monuments. 270

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4 The Statue of Liberty was conceived by the French jurist Laboulaye, whose republican values construed liberty as the handmaiden not of revolutionary equality but of law and order and the rule of reason. However, this ideological genesis is undercut by the heterogeneity of the statue’s formal origins in its sculptor Bartholdi’s voyages to Egypt. Here the colossal scale of the pyramids inspired him to propose a monumental statue of an Egyptian peasant woman at the head of the Suez Canal. This formed the basis for his design for the Statue of Liberty (Grigsby, Colossal, 42–69). 5 “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the ‘liberty’ of this country ‘enlightening the world,’ or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme” (“Postponing Bartholdi’s Statue until There Is Liberty for Colored as Well,” Cleveland Gazette, November 27, 1886, 2). 6 Similarly, in 2013, when Jayalalithaa, who was then chief minister of Tamil Nadu, announced her proposal for a “megastatue” of Thamizh Thaai (Mother Tamil), she likened it to the Statue of Liberty (“Jayalalithaa Plans Rs 100-Crore Statue for Mother Tamil,” Times of India, May 15, 2013, https://timesofindia.indiatimes .com/india/Jayalalithaa-plans-Rs-100-crore-statue-for-Mother-Tamil/articleshow /20058508.cms?; “Mother Tamil Statue to Be Erected in Madurai,” The Hindu, May 15, 2013, https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Madurai/mother-tamil-statue -to-be-erected-in-madurai/article4715161.ece?homepage=true). 7 The latter initiative failed, in part due to the emphasis on creating a buzz around the drive rather than actually implementing it, and possibly also because of an announcement that the quality of the iron collected would not be adequate for the statue, which would use high-quality steel while the iron would be used in the “non-statue parts of the project” (Aditi Raja, “Statue of Unity Project Rusts, No New Iron in Two Months,” Indian Express, June 25, 2014, https://indianexpress.com /article/india/india-others/statue-of-unity-project-rusts-no-new-iron-in-2-months /2; Sumit Khanna, “Farmers’ Iron Not to Be Used for Sardar Patel Statue,” DNA India, December 9, 2013, http://www.dnaindia.com/ahmedabad/report-farmers -iron-not-to-be-used-for-sardar-patel-statue-1932089). I return to the Statue of Unity in chapter 5. 8 Omair Ahmad, “Bronze Age Booming,” Outlook, July 7, 2008, 90–92. The subhead reads: “Across a fractious India, identity battles are being waged figuratively. Statues are at war.” 9 Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik.” 10 On the Goddess of Democracy, see Tsing-yuan, “The Birth of the Goddess of Democracy.” On the Occupy puppets, see Graeber, “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets.” 11 Jacques Rancière’s conception of how the distribution of the sensible is intimately tied to the political, discussed in the introduction, radically expands the notion of redistribution in a way that takes into account the material nature of cultural

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and symbolic processes. The redistribution of the sensible is not itself politics—it is not, as with identity politics, a substitute for politics that operates in a cultural realm putatively divorced from economy. Yet it is intimately linked to the political, for it is a disturbance in the perceptual field, or in the habitus, accompanying the political subjectivization of those hitherto excluded, unheard, unseen, or unable to speak (Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics). Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” 4. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, xiii. Jain, Gods in the Bazaar; Pinney, “Photos of the Gods.” Starting in Punjab in the early 1880s and then spreading to northern and central India, the cow protection movement was a major rallying point for forging a Hindu community in opposition to those who eat beef. Here Muslims in particular, but also so-called Untouchables and nomadic cattle-herding tribes, were subject to Cow Protection violence. The movement’s revival after Modi’s BJP came into power in 2014 led to vigilante groups targeting both Dalits and Muslims. On the use of printed images in the movement, see also Pinney, “Photos of the Gods.” For an analysis of these images in terms of caste, see Jain, “Partition as Partage.” (See also Freitag, “Sacred Symbol as Mobilising Ideology”; Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Samuel Parker observes that in South Indian processions, the vehicles used for the deities get larger in proportion to the distance they travel from the sanctum (Parker, “Sanctum and Gopuram at Madurai,” 149). On this aspect of Ganapati Puja, see Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism. On Durga Puja, see Guha-Thakurta, In the Name of the Goddess. S. H. Chiplonkar, The Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sārvajanik Sabha, title page. Omvedt, “The Struggle for Social Justice and the Expansion of the Public Sphere,” 130–31. Rao, “Religious Identity and Conflict in the Nationalist Agenda of Tilak,” 14. Tilak and his nationalist followers opposed education for girls (as “dewomanising”), as well as for “Untouchables.” Tilak insisted that “caste alone is the basis of the Hindu nation” (Rao, “Religious Identity and Conflict in the Nationalist Agenda of Tilak,” 14–16). Rao, “Religious Identity and Conflict in the Nationalist Agenda of Tilak,” 14–16. See also Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India. This sonic conflict continues, as when a Muslim anti-noise pollution campaigner lodged a complaint against the Shiv Sena for exceeding decibel limits during its Dussehra festivities in 2010, to which the Sena retaliated with an aggressive editorial in its party newspaper Saamna (“Shiv Sena Objects to Mosque Loudspeakers,” Indian Express, October 20, 2010, http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/article292937.ece). Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism. “Sena Banks on Unions, Sarvajanik Mandals,” Times of India, October 15, 2014, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/specials/assembly-elections-2014 /maharashtra-news/Sena-banks-on-unions-sarvajanik-mandals/articleshow /44819092.cms.

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25 On fan associations in southern India, see Gerritsen, “Fandom on Display”; Pandian, The Image Trap; Srinivas, Megastar. 26 Anderson, Imagined Communities. It would be inaccurate, however, to call all religiously informed temporalities “messianic” in opposition to this “homogeneous, empty time.” Theological conceptions of temporality in the many varieties of Hindu iconopraxis differ from those of the Judaism—and the complex, singular approach to that legacy—informing Walter Benjamin, whose formulation Anderson cites here (Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”). 27 “Likeness” and “presence” are the terms Hans Belting uses in relation to similarly materially conceived Christian icons before the Renaissance and the Reformation: Belting, Likeness and Presence. 28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm describes the reciprocities and overlaps in the shared sensation of touching while nonetheless differentiating between the touched and the touching. This enables an acknowledgment, for instance, of the power differential between icon and devotee (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible). 29 Pinney proposes “corpothetics” as a “sensory, corporeal aesthetics” against an “anaesthetizing” Kantian aesthetics centered on a distanced, disembodied, disinterested beholder (Pinney, “Photos of the Gods,” 8, 23, 193). Darshan is a central term for describing the engagement with South Asian icons (extended by some scholars to other types of images): an embodied two-way exchange between the seer and the seen, with the gaze conceived as a fluid coursing between them. My argument here supports interpretations of darshan (notably Lawrence Babb’s) that emphasize its tactility, against Owen Lynch’s critique of such approaches. Lynch attempts to reduce “feeling” in darshan to a dematerialized emotion, such that the devotee experiences the image as “a divinity, not as a mere material artifact.” Yet there can be nothing “mere” about the material in a sensorium in which untouchability is so central (the context Lynch is addressing); “feeling” has to be conceived in its fullest, most tactile sense here, as is the case with affect in general as inseparable from the force of material, bodily encounters (Babb, “Glancing”; Lynch, “We Make These Floats So That They Will See What We See/Feel”). 30 This resonates with Marie-Josée Mondzain’s formulation of the correspondence between territorialized power and the formal space of the Byzantine icon (Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy). However, as with Benjamin’s notion of messianic time, there are theological differences that must be taken into account here—notably, the idea of kenosis characterizing Christian iconopraxis and Christianity’s “globalizing” project. At the same time, of course, Christianity’s “globalizing” project extended to the colonies with mimetic effects, as we will see shortly. 31 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 35. 32 In the early nineteenth century, Travancore State’s council of “upper” caste Nairs imposed a “breast tax,” or mulakkaram, that fined Nadar (formerly Shanar) men and women who covered their upper bodies like the “higher” castes. Shoes, gold ornaments, and umbrellas were also proscribed for Dalits. Women from the Nadar and Ezhava communities protested in the “Channar Revolt” of 1822; one of them,

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Nangeli, is said to have cut off her breasts and given them to the tax collector. This episode’s political reverberations have not died down. Accounts of it were excised from the Central Board of Secondary Education curriculum in 2016 following the Tamil Nadu DMK party’s objections to the textbook’s characterizations of the Nadar community (e.g., the suggestion that breast covering was inspired by Christian missionaries). On Kumari Mayawati and her handbag, see Jain, “The Handbag That Exploded.” Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens outline the social and political stakes of commensuration as an interpretive framework characteristic of modernity. They define commensuration as “the expression or measurement of characteristics normally represented by different units according to a common metric. . . . Commensuration transforms qualities into quantities, difference into magnitude. . . . This transformation allows people to quickly grasp, represent, and compare differences.” They describe how the rationality of commensuration—its “ideologically potent” quality—has played an essential role in managing uncertainty, imposing control, and securing legitimacy, particularly in situations of weak authority; in this latter claim they draw on Porter, Trust in Numbers (Espeland and Stevens, “Commensuration as a Social Process,” 315–16, 324). Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Dirks, Castes of Mind. Sumit Guha cautions against linking identity formation and enumeration exclusively to colonialism (as opposed to precolonial formations) but concedes that, due to intensified communication, “electoral significance came to depend upon reaching rising thresholds of political visibility” (Guha, “The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India,” 163). In the Nehru Report of the All Parties Conference of 1928, the various political factions seeking an independent India attempted to fashion a working agreement on a desired constitution and electoral framework. But this was fraught with wrangling over numbers to ensure adequate minority representation in a climate of intense communal tension. Jinnah later described the Nehru Report’s compromises with the Hindu nationalist Hindu Mahasabha’s demands for a centralized, unitary structure of government with minimal reservations for Muslims as “the parting of the ways” between himself and the Congress Party, precipitating Muslim leaders’ alienation from Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement and paving the way for Partition (Sarkar, Modern India, 263). Gandhi’s opposition to untouchability was complex and merits detailed treatment in its own right. Although he maintained caste as a nonhierarchical occupational distinction, in a letter from 1933 he also wrote, “Today if we must classify the whole of Hindus according to varna, there is only one varna possible, and that is Shudra. Acceptance of the fourth varna by all will represent not only the true state of Hindu society, but it will at one stroke level down all distinctions of high and low” (Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Letter to Satis Chandra Das Gupta, March 9, 1933,” in Gandhi, Collected Works, 59:481). Surely, some of his apparent inconsistencies here arose from the tension between the radical recognition that Hindu society had to be fundamentally reconceived and the pragmatics of selling anti-untouchability

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and temple entry to caste Hindus. How could the “they” be made part of the “we” without changing the very nature of that “we”? One of Gandhi’s proposed strategies on temple entry was to decide case by case via referendum, depending on the wishes of the majority constituency of the temple. If the verdict was exclusion, orthodox worshipers and reformers would share the cost of building new temples to accommodate the excluded. Again, the problem arose as one of numbers, of accounting and redistribution, of parts that would not cohere as a whole, and of the surplus that had to be shared rather than being allowed to escape (Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Statement on Untouchability—VII,” Bombay Chronicle, November 17, 1932, in Gandhi, Collected Works, 58:4). Gandhi, Collected Works, 58:3. “Untouchables” gained greater representation under the Poona Pact than under the Macdonald Award (Sarkar, Modern India, 328). On the reformist Arya Samaj in Punjab and its internal debates on the practice of shuddhi (purification) of “Untouchables,” Sikhs, and Muslims, in part as an effort to shore up Hindu numbers, see Jones, Arya Dharm. See also Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India. Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 44. Sarkar, Modern India, 329. Jain, “The Handbag That Exploded.” Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers. Mittal, “Changing Temple Form.” I thank Akshaya Tankha for his research assistance on the Birla Mandir. Apart from observations and interviews on-site by Tankha and myself, information on the Birla Mandir is from Chaturvedi, Nagar Shaili Ke Naye Hindu Mandir, and a brief mention in Lang et al., Architecture and Independence. Narayan Chaturvedi also draws an explicit parallel between the Swadeshi aims of the Birla Mandir and Tilak’s anticolonial deployment of the sārvajanik Ganesh Utsav (Chaturvedi, Nagar Shaili Ke Naye Hindu Mandir, 45). A poem by Malaviya on a plaque at the temple encapsulates the Birla Mandir’s articulation with nationalism, mapping dharma (religious duty) onto swadheenata (sovereignty, freedom) and describing dasata (slavery or serfdom) as a sin. Justice R. V. Raveendran, “Distinction between a ‘Math’ and ‘Temple’: The Law,” Legal Blog, October 20, 2011, http://www.legalblog.in/2011/10/distinction-between -math-temple-law.html. Galanter, “Temple-Entry and the Untouchability (Offences) Act.” On Karsondas Mulji’s use of Arya Dharma, see Pruthi, Arya Samaj and Indian Civilization, 45. V. D. Savarkar’s Hindutva was expansive and inclusive: “A Hindu means a person who regards this land of Bharatvarsha, from the Indus to the Seas, as his Fatherland as well as his Holy Land, that is the cradle land of his religion.” But this inclusion also entailed the exclusion of those whose religions did not spring from Indian soil—that is, Muslims and Christians (Savarkar, Hindutva, front matter, cited in Davis, “The Cultural Background of Hindutva,” 115). Similarly, Narayan Chaturvedi celebrates the inclusivity of Malaviya’s poem featured at the temple

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and its implication that all religions originating in India are essentially Hindu (Chaturvedi, Nagar Shaili Ke Naye Hindu Mandir, 45). Gandhi’s adoption of this idea of Arya Dharma is evident in a letter to Raychand in Gandhi, Collected Works, 1:142. My translation. In an interview in 2012, temple officials insisted that this injunction against Muslims and Christians is never enforced at the Birla Mandir, although it still was at Madurai’s Meenakshi temple (where Dalits’ entry in 1939, the year of the Birla Mandir’s inauguration, gave rise to the Madras Temple Entry Ordinance). For a more detailed discussion, see Jain, “Tales from the Concrete Cave.” This sign ends, “Note: During the celebration of fairs and festivals only Hindu shops, see-saws merry-go-round and swinging apparatus etc. etc. will be permitted in the premises of the garden” (emphasis added). This combination of Hindu exclusivity and playfulness in the Birla Mandir’s gardens becomes even more portentous in light of Christophe Jaffrelot’s interview with one of the very first recruits to the Delhi branch of the RSS, who was playing in the Birla Mandir gardens with his friends when they were spotted by Vasant Rao Oke (who started the Delhi branch of the RSS at the nearby Hindu Mahasabha headquarters, also funded by J. K. Birla). Oke recruited them by asking if they wanted to learn to wield a lathi (stick) (Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 283). Chatterjee, Magadha, Architecture and Culture, 83. Chaturvedi comments on this additional pedagogical function, “This temple is not only for prayer and ritual visits, but for the purpose of educating the visitor on the history of Hindu dharma as well” (Chaturvedi, Nagar Shaili Ke Naye Hindu Mandir, 53, my translation). According to Chatterjee, the Birla Mandir was “intended to be a modern development of the ancient [Gupta] model into a new form of ‘sikhara temple’ ” (Chatterjee, Magadha, Architecture and Culture, 83). Unlike temple plans based on the Vastu Purusha Mandalas, it forms a complex incorporating three temples (each with its own garbhagriha [sanctum]), a dharmashala (pilgrim rest house), shops, administrative offices, and the gardens. Lang et al., Architecture and Independence, 136. The height of the temple is enhanced by its 12-ft. elevation in relation to the road in front of it, built at the same time as the temple (Chaturvedi, Nagar Shaili Ke Naye Hindu Mandir, 43). Chatterjee, India and New Order, 55–57, 116. Chaturvedi, Nagar Shaili Ke Naye Hindu Mandir, 53 (see note 53 in this chapter). On publics in South Asia, see, e.g., Freitag, “Aspects of the Public in Colonial South Asia.” A recent corrective has been J. Barton Scott and Brannon D. Ingram’s nuanced treatment; however, they do not mention the term sārvajanik (Scott and Ingram, “What Is a Public?”). This sometimes appears when critiques of Habermas’s Eurocentrism invoke religious publics, but is not really dwelt on (see, e.g., Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism; Madan, “Considerations of Cultural Context”). As mentioned earlier, Gail Omvedt does foreground the use of the term sārvajanik by the Dalit reformer and activist Jotirao (or Jyotirao) Phule (1827–90) to equate it with a truly inclusive public. However, it may be more heuristically useful

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to see Phule’s reformulation as a counterpublic, explicitly positioned in response to the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha’s exclusionary version (made hegemonic by the Ganapati festival) (Omvedt, “The Struggle for Social Justice and the Expansion of the Public Sphere”). 59 This resonates with Chris Berry’s framing of “public space” as avoiding the “ideological lure” of the state–nonstate binary inherent in the notion of the public sphere and acknowledging nonstate sites of power (Berry, “New Documentary in China”). 60 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics.” 61 Jaffrelot cites Tilak as making this mimetic contest quite explicit (Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 348). See also Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism, 20; Masselos, “Appropriating Urban Space”; Rao, “Religious Identity and Conflict in the Nationalist Agenda of Tilak.” 62 Codell, Power and Resistance; Fraser, At Delhi; Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition.” 63 Jaoul, “Learning the Use of Symbolic Means”; Lynch, “We Make These Floats So That They Will See What We See/Feel.” 64 Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Dirks, Castes of Mind. 65 Jeffrey, “Temple Entry Movement in Travancore.” 66 Another example of such commensuration beyond South Asia, unfolding at a global scale in the imperial context of industry, commerce, and international relations rather than national electoral democracy, is the world exposition form in colonial Europe and North America. The space of the world exposition is akin to both the tributary space of the durbar and the hegemonic sārvajanik space of the Birla Mandir: purporting to be universal, it stages highly managed incorporations of the colonized “part of no part.” It also lends itself to mimetic face-offs such as those described later between icons in public space. A famous instance of this is the 1937 Paris exposition, in which the Nazi and Soviet pavilions were deliberately placed opposite each other. Each featured a pair of monumental sculptural figures, the Soviets’ being Vera Mukhina’s iconic Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (a reference for the Goddess of Democracy at Tiananmen Square). 67 See Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 305–23; Jain, “Taking and Making Offence.” On riots and their rumored or reported causes, see, e.g., Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. 68 Latour makes a distinction between iconoclasm and iconoclash, writing, “Iconoclasm is when we know what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations for what appears as a clear project of destruction are; iconoclash, on the other hand, is when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive” (Latour, “What Is Iconoclash?,” 16). Michael Taussig formulates the generative force of iconoclash as a Hegelian “labour of the negative” (Taussig, Defacement). 69 According to Ranade, The Story of the Vivekananda Rock Memorial. Ranade was the right-hand man to the RSS leader M. S. Golwalkar and the organizing secretary of the Vivekananda Rock Memorial Committee. A master strategist, he was keen in

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his account to foreground the local players in the memorial project, since it was clearly a means for the RSS to penetrate the south. 70 This inspiration was claimed by Angiras Hazrat (a.k.a. “Mamaji”), retired treasurer of the Vivekananda Kendra (interviewed in Kanyakumari, April 2018). The Vivekananda Kendra is not a branch of the Ramakrishna Mission, the religious organization founded by Vivekananda, but a “spiritually oriented service mission” started by Ranade in 1972. It conducts a mix of cultural/spiritual (yoga camps, lectures, exhibitions, cultural classes, and competitions) and welfare (education, health, sanitation, income-generation, and environmental) programs in the Kanyakumari district, as well as in “border areas,” particularly those with Indigenous populations: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, and the Andamans. On the Kendra and Ranade’s involvement, see Beckerlegge, “An Ordinary Organisation Run by Ordinary People”; Pandya, “The Vivekananda Kendra in India.” 71 The VHP was founded in August 1964, hard on the heels of the pope’s announcement that the International Eucharistic Conference was to be held in Bombay that November. This inspired the mimetic countermovement by the VHP of organizing a series of World Hindu Conferences, starting in 1966 at the Allahabad Kumbh Mela (Jaffrelot, “Vishva Hindu Parishad”). 72 Vivekananda, Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 317–18. 73 This was the phrase used by the historian and folklorist A. K. Perumal in nearby Nagercoil (the Kanyakumari district headquarters), who had joined the RSS as a youth but gave up his membership in later years (A. K. Perumal, interview by the author, Nagercoil, April 2018). I thank Arun Vijai Mathavan for introducing me to Perumal and helping with translation. Chinmayananda was of the same view, saying, “If we are not integrated despite the 82% of the population which we represent, our voices will never be heard. While the 18% of Christians and Muslims are well organized. Their demands and their needs are well taken care of by the democratic government” (Swami Chinmayanandji, Shraddhanjali Smarika, 69, cited in Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 233). 74 Perumal interview; Sundar, “Capitalist Transformation and the Evolution of Civil Society in a South Indian Fishery,” 161. See also Mathew, “Hindu-Christian Communalism,” 415. 75 The Kanyakumari Devaswom (lit., property of god) board was separated from the Travancore Devaswom board with the linguistic reorganization of states in 1956 but was still dominated by Nair Pillais, now doubly minoritized as Hindus and Malayalam speakers in Tamil Nadu. 76 The Rock Memorial ferry led to a further eight-year dispute with the fishing community, who claimed that the dredging required created problems for their fishing and their homes (Sundar, “Capitalist Transformation and the Evolution of Civil Society in a South Indian Fishery,” 161 [corroborated by Perumal]). 77 Ranade, The Story of the Vivekananda Rock Memorial. 78 Hindutva’s appropriation of Vivekananda continues in two Vivekananda Kendra exhibitions on him at Kanyakumari and the bookstalls at the Rock Memorial (also 278

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curated by the Kendra) that foreground books such as Ranade’s compilation of Vivekananda’s writings titled Rousing Call to the Hindu Nation. The bookstalls also feature titles in the popular self-improvement and success mode that easily accommodate Vivekananda into the Modi-led nexus between Hindutva and entrepreneurialism, with titles such as Entrepreneurship Formulas (Based on Swami Vivekananda’s Message) and, drawing on and reinforcing the aura of numbers discussed in the next chapter, Go with Vivekananda to Reap the 26/131 Advantage (131 Crore Indians with 26 Average Age). Jacob, “Tamil Cinema in the Public Sphere.” Geetha, Contesting Categories, Remapping Boundaries, 49–50. On these grounds Thiruvalluvar has recently been mobilized as a Dalit figure, though again, as with the Kanyakumari statue’s Tamil nationalist version, not by Dalits but by the Hindu right. Protests against the installation of a 12-ft. statue of him at Haridwar’s Shankaracharya Chowk often called him a “Dalit poet.” The Haridwar statue, finally installed in December 2016, was initiated by Tarun Vijay, a former BJP Rajya Sabha member for Uttarakhand, who also spent fifteen years as the editor of the RSS Hindi weekly Panchajanya and, before that, worked with the RSS-affiliated “tribal welfare” organization Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram. Founded in 1952, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram has taken on the conversion of Indigenous vanvasi (forest dwellers) since the late 1980s. Priests and ascetics objected to the statue, backed by Swami Swaroopananda Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Dwarka and Jyotirmath (the latter claim is disputed), an outspoken critic of the RSS. Saraswati could not have done Tarun Vijay a bigger favor than to lend his—negative but substantial— weight to the animation of the statue. Recall also that if in this case Saraswati was acting as a paragon of canonical Hinduism, in 2011, in an instance of the generative circuitry between cult and spectacle, he was quite willing to inaugurate the Char Dham “pilgrimage-cum-tourism” complex in Sikkim, with its 108-ft. Shiva (“Caste Angle Sours Thiruvalluvar Statue Row,” Times of India, June 30, 2016, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/dehradun/caste-angle-sours-thiruvalluvar -statue-row/articleshow/52994329.cms; “Thiruvalluvar Finally Gets Pride of Place in Haridwar,” The Hindu, December 20, 2016, http://www.thehindu.com/news /national/other-states/Thiruvalluvar-finally-gets-pride-of-place-in-Haridwar /article16907620.ece). For a synoptic account, see Kannan, Anna, 16–33. Parker, “Sanctum and Gopuram at Madurai,” 158, 171. Strictures on darshan still extend to menstruating women and even women of menstruating age (at the controversial Sabarimalai temple in an injunction legally overturned in 2018). “Shivaji Memorial to Be Set Up on Lines of Statue of Liberty,” Rediff India Abroad, October 29, 2005, http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/oct/29shivaji.htm. S.O. 556(E) [17-02-2015]: Amendment to CRZ, 2011 regarding Memorial/Monuments in CRZ-IV (A), Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change Notification, February 17, 2015; “Mumbai’s Shivaji Statue: A Forgotten Promise?,” NDTV, April 3, 2010, https://www.ndtv.com/cities/mumbais-shivaji-statue-a-forgotten -promise-414361.

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85 Shalini Nair, “Statue versus Statue: Maharashtra Shivaji Taller than Gujarat Patel,” Indian Express, January 21, 2014, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india -others/statue-vs-statue-maharashtra-shivaji-taller-than-gujarat-patel/. 86 The efficacy of statues is not entirely reducible to such politically driven sacralization and commensuration with religious communities. Catherine Becker argues, for instance, that the granite Buddha in Hyderabad’s Hussain Sagar Lake took on its own animation and agency by falling into the lake in 1990 and killing eight people as it was being installed, becoming subject to political superstition as a cursed, inauspicious image. It was retrieved and installed two years later but not inaugurated until 2006, after it had been “beautified” and consecrated by the Dalai Lama (Becker, Shifting Stones, Shaping the Past, 179–90). Conversely, the Thiruvalluvar statue’s aura was enhanced by its celebrated survival of the devastating tsunami of 2004. 87 Jaoul, “Learning the Use of Symbolic Means”; Tartakov, “Art and Identity.” See also Tartakov, Dalit Art and Visual Imagery. Christophe Jaffrelot’s and Anupama Rao’s broader histories of Dalit struggles are also excellent sources (Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India; Rao, The Caste Question). 88 Lynch, “We Make These Floats So That They Will See What We See/Feel.” 89 “Policemen entered . . . screaming ‘Break the idols of these Mahardes’ ” (Rao, The Caste Question, 201). According to the BJP’s Gopinath Munde, arguing for an antidesecration law, in the five years from 1992 to 1997 in Maharashtra alone there were about one thousand recorded incidents of statue desecration, nearly 30 percent involving statues of Ambedkar. Munde was then deputy chief minister and home minister of Maharashtra (“Maharashtra Plans Anti-Desecration Law,” The Telegraph, July 21, 1997). 90 For a thoughtful analysis of increasing caste violence in Tamil Nadu as a response to Dalit mobility, coupled with the declining incomes of the “intermediate” agricultural castes, see M. Rajshekhar, “Why Tamil Nadu Is Erecting Cages around Statues (Hint: It’s Linked to Caste),” Scroll.in, September 26, 2016, https://scroll.in /article/815377/why-tamil-nadu-is-erecting-cages-around-statues-hint-its-linked-to -caste. 91 Taussig, Defacement, 1. 92 Jaoul links this to the exposure of another public secret, writing, “Although the attempt to install the statue failed, it was successful in opening a breach in Congress rhetoric by highlighting the authorities’ ambivalence toward Ambedkar and the Scheduled Castes and exposing the casteism that lay behind official secularism” (Jaoul, “Learning the Use of Symbolic Means,” 187). 93 Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 548, citing Gaborieau, “From Al-Beruni to Jinnah.” 94 Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 552, citing Pai and Singh, “Politicisation of Dalits and Most Backward Castes.” 95 Jaoul, “Political and ‘Non-Political’ Means in the Dalit Movement.” 96 Lynch, “We Make These Floats So That They Will See What We See/Feel,” 188–90. 280

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Mayawati first became chief minister briefly in 1995 in coalition with Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP). He became chief minister again for six months in 1997 and then from 2002 to 2003 in alliance with the BJP, before the BSP came to power in its own right in 2007. The BSP lost to the SP in 2012; both were ousted by the BJP’s Yogi Adityanath in 2017. Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 553. According to a 2014 report, the Lucknow memorials and parks (Bhimrao Ambedkar Samajik Parivartan Sthal, Kanshiram Smarak Sthal, Kanshiram Green Eco Garden, and Bauddha Vihar Shanti Upvan) together were selling twenty-five thousand tickets a day (“Memorials and Parks Shut as Staff Continue with Stir,” Indian Express, January 13, 2014, http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/lucknow /memorials-and-parks-shut-as-staff-continue-with-stir/#sthash.woehgxuP.dpuf ). Jain, “The Handbag That Exploded.” A notable exception are the ubiquitous elephants, but they have been thoroughly recoded as the BSP party symbol. This contrast is discussed in Jain, “The Handbag That Exploded”; Jain, “Tales from the Concrete Cave.” “PIL Filed to Restrain Mayawati to Install Her Statues,” Outlook, June 19, 2009, https://www.outlookindia.com/newswire/story/pil-filed-to-restrain-mayawati-to -install-her-statues/661490; Prannoy Roy, “Mayawati’s Statue Building Spree,” NDTV 24x7, July 14, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-hv0WyCvS0. The play with iconoclasm is evident in Mayawati’s rhetoric. For instance, she once said that Gandhi was “the biggest enemy of the Dalits. If Harijans means children of God, should it be considered that the Mahatma was the son of Satan?” (Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 550). Yet precisely because the BSP understands desecration’s “labour of the negative,” its iconoclasm has not extended to statues of Gandhi. I thank Shuddabrata Sengupta for this question, which has taken me several years to answer. This was borne out by the activist Ram Kumar of the Lucknow-based Dalit Action Group, who pointed out that there were no Dalits in the mainstream media (Ram Kumar, interview by the author, Lucknow, June 2009). This has been particularly keenly felt by the Chamar community (of which Kanshi Ram and Mayawati are both members and who constitute their primary following). Chamars traditionally have worked with leather, which has been a major Indian export since the mid-nineteenth century, but the economic gains achieved here did not dislodge casteist barriers to social mobility. On majoritarian victimology in this context, see Jain, “Taking and Making Offence”; Jaoul, “Politicizing Victimhood.” For an instance from South Africa, see Coombes, History after Apartheid. “Protest against Garlanding of Ambedkar Statue,” The Tribune, April 14, 2005, http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050415/punjab1.htm. D. Karthikeyan and H. Gorringe, “Rescuing Ambedkar,” Frontline, October 22, 2012; “YSR Defends MP over Alleged Remarks on Ambedkar,” Greatandhra.com, February 25, 2008, accessed July 29, 2015, http://www.greatandhra.com/politics

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/political-news/ysr-defends-mp-over-alleged-remarks-on-ambedkar-5956.html. “YSR” is Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy of the Congress Party, who was then the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. 110 Gundimeda, Dalit Politics in Contemporary India, 232. 111 Nishit Dholabhai, “Statue of Unity’s Dark Side,” The Telegraph, May 1, 2014, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140501/jsp/nation/story_18297722.jsp# .Vb98NypViko. According to the project’s official website at the time, “This monument will not just be a mute memorial like the rest, but a fully functional, purpose-serving tribute that will spur all round socio-economic development, in the form of better connectivity, healthcare & education infrastructure, research centre for agriculture development and various tribal development initiatives” (StatueofUnity.in, accessed August 3, 2015, http://www.statueofunity.in/project -objectives.html#sthash.9xlJoBmM.dpuf ). 112 Here it is entirely consistent that a figure such as Swami Aseemanand, a preacher with the RSS’s Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, was jailed for bombing mosques and a train. Recall the prior involvement in this organization of the BJP politician Tarun Vijay, who had a Thiruvalluvar statue installed in Haridwar. As we have seen, violent inclusions (of Dalits and Indigenous people) and exclusions (of Muslims) are of a piece. On Aseemanand, see Leena Gita Reghunath, “The Believer: Swami Aseemanand’s Radical Service to the Sangh,” The Caravan, February 1, 2014, http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/believer#sthash.2Ttt5iM6.dpuf. 113 Abdul Basith M. A., “Foundation Stone of Rs. 40-Crore Mosque to Be Laid amid Controversies in Kerala,” Twocircles.net, December 13, 2011, http://twocircles.net /2011dec13 /foundation_stone_rs_40crore_mosque_be_laid_amid_controversies _kerala.html. CHAPTER 3: I CONOPRAXIS

Epigraph: Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power,” 78: “Statistics is a vital part of what I have elsewhere called ‘strong languages’ . . . , discursive interventions by means of which the modes of life of non-European peoples have come to be radically transformed by Western power. . . . What makes statistics a strong language is that statistical figures and statistical reasoning are employed in the attempt to reconstruct the moral and material conditions of target populations. . . . Statistics converts the question of incommensurable cultures into one of commensurable social arrangements without rendering them homogeneous.” (Italics in original.) Asad, “Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power,” 78. Asad argues that comparative statistics are at the heart of the concept, and the political aspiration, of progress, so statistics also have a temporal aspect. Epigraph: Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217. Epigraph: Didi-Huberman, “The Supposition of the Aura,” 5. The aura is an important yet enigmatic and ambivalent term in Benjamin’s writing, with its own, extensive commentaries, including this piece by Didi-Huberman. My discussion here refers to its deployment in the artwork essay as that quality of an image 282

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derived from “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”—that is, from the authenticity of its singular location and historicity, the quality that Benjamin describes as liquidated by mass reproduction. It is thus a quality that the ritual, cultic image shares with the artwork (Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 220). While I deploy this term from Benjamin, I should note that its connotation of a source of power and value that is invisible and dematerialized—spirit as opposed to matter—bears rethinking as a formulation within a Judeo-Christian regime of the sensible. (I thank Matthew Engelke for pointing toward this issue.) Yet its association with distance also lends itself to a more literal, materialist interpretation within the sensible regime of untouchability. See note 4 in the introduction on my use of the term religion. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217. Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens argue that the naturalization of commensurative procedures—the degree to which they constitute what they purport to represent—depends on the extent of their institutionalization (Espeland and Stevens, “Commensuration as a Social Process,” 329). On colonial categorization, see Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; Dirks, Castes of Mind. Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”; Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation. Taylor, A Secular Age. Guha-Thakurta, In the Name of the Goddess, 11. There is much in Guha-Thakurta’s marvelous account that resonates with my concerns here, although her focus is more on how the category of “art” is mobilized in the religious field of the Durga Puja festival. See Asad, Formations of the Secular, esp. 181–201. See, e.g., the work of Talal Asad, Robert Bellah, Kevin Kruse, Robert Wuthnow, and Andrea Muehlebach, to name a few. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 201. Asad does not call this “boundary-work,” but this term from the history of science seems a useful shorthand to describe what he is suggesting (Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science”). In this respect, my account of the boundary-work and circuits in iconopraxis dovetails with the “social value projects” that Constantine Nakassis and Llerena Searle describe in relation to postliberalization India, except that I do not see them as specific only to this period. These social value projects are “reflexive and purposive attempts by social actors to produce, negotiate, transform, maintain and sometimes abjure various types of value,” where value emerges from the interactions between regimes of value rather than being reducible to exchange value and to the terrain of political economy. Indeed, it is precisely in the uncontainable excess of value projects—their constant reaching beyond singular regimes of value to convert to others, with the inevitable risk of failure—that these projects find their vitality and power. Here, too, importantly, the interarticulations between value regimes are simultaneous, not successive along a linear timeline (Nakassis and Searle, “Introduction,” 169, 177).

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Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India.” Ghertner, “Calculating without Numbers.” Comaroff and Comaroff, “Figuring Crime,” 210. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Figuring Crime,” 213. On “infra-power,” see Hansen and Verkaaik, “Urban Charisma.” In 2009, the Unique Identification Authority of India (headed by Nandan Nilekani, cofounder in 1981 of the Bangalore-based global information technology consulting firm Infosys) was established as part of the now defunct Planning Commission of India to implement the Aadhar (foundation, basis) card, a unique twelve-digit number linked to biometric and demographic information for all of the residents of India. Dubbed “the world’s biggest social inclusion programme,” this initiative encompassed varied goals, which included ensuring that state benefits reach their intended targets, territorial security, and aiding rural financialization by providing a means of credit checking (Sarkar, “The Unique Identity [UID] Project”). Govil, “Size Matters,” 108; Ganti, “Fuzzy Numbers.” Govil, “Size Matters,” 107. On the “hybrid” projects of Indian scientific elites, see Prakash, Another Reason. See also Arnold, “Nehruvian Science and Postcolonial India.” Some instances of numerologically enhanced film titles are Heyy Babyy (2007), Singh Is Kinng (2008), Rokkk (2010), and Dabangg (2010). Stars who have changed the spelling of their names include Ajay Devgn, Irrfan Khan, Rani Mukerji, and Suneil Shetty. This dependence on Sanskrit texts is acknowledged and contextualized in Plofker, Mathematics in India, 10–12. Sharma, Punya-Bhoomi Bharat. Another edition is cited in Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India, 31–32. Official website of Sikkim Tourism, Tourism and Civil Aviation Department, Government of Sikkim, http://www.sikkimtourism.gov.in/Webforms/General /PlacesOfInterest/Solophok.aspx. Porter, Trust in Numbers. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” This motto is featured on the Chinmaya Mission website’s masthead (www .chinmayamission.com). “Through its embodiment in specific religious organizations, spirituality is Janus-faced in its effects: universalist claims occult the inequalities of class, caste, and gender hierarchies; regimes of interpersonal relationships with the deity or guru (super)naturalize relations of asymmetrical exchange” (McKean, Divine Enterprise, 12). See, e.g., Richard King on the shaping of Vedantism as the hegemonic form of Hindu religiosity (King, Orientalism and Religion). See “Vrindavana Chandrodaya Mandir” and “Krisna Lila Park,” https://www .iskconbangalore.org /vrindavana-spiritual-capital, https://www.iskconbangalore

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.org /krishna-lila-park. On the Chandrodaya Mandir and ISKCON’s presence in Vrindavan, see Hawley, “Vrindavan and the Drama of Keshi Ghat.” “About Us,” Art of Living, http://www.artofliving.org /ca-en/about-us. “The Art of Living’s World Records,” Art of Living, http://www.artofliving.org /art-livings-world-records. Religious and religio-political organizations able to harness large numbers of literally devoted followers are well placed in this regard. For instance, the Shiv Sena was in the Guinness Book of Records in 2010 for the maximum amount of blood collected in a day. The previous record holder for this feat was the Dera Sacha Sauda, a controversial religious cult in Punjab (Kiran Tare, “24200 Donors Help Sena Set Record,” DNA India, April 26, 2010, http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-24200-donors-help -sena-set -record-1375590). The only scholarly attempt I know of at making sense of this Indian obsession is Lal, “Indians and the Guinness Book of Records.” In his interesting and insightful (albeit essentializing) account of the “Indian imagination,” Lal reads the uselessness of these extreme endeavors as both a mimicry and a mockery of modernity’s fetishization of production and its spirit of competition. See also Samanth Subramanian, “Why Is India So Crazy for World Records?,” New York Times Magazine, January 23, 2015. Unsurprisingly, Canada’s most prolific Guinness World Record holder, Suresh Joachim, is also of South Asian origin (he was born and grew up in Sri Lanka); he is featured in the film Mission Possible (dir. Chandra Siddan, 2011). “World’s Largest Postal Stamp: Seer Gets Ninth Guinness World Record,” Star of Mysore, May 27, 2018, https://starofmysore.com/worlds-largest-postal-stamp-seer -gets-9th-guinness-world-record. In 2018, efforts were underway to include the Durga statue in Guinness World Records and the Limca Book of Records (“Mauritius Unveils Biggest Durga Statue in the World,” NewsMobile, September 27, 2017, http://www.newsmobile.in/articles/2017 /09/27/mauritius-unveils-biggest-durga-statue-in-the-world). Dayal, Mauritiuseshwarnath Shiv Jyotir Lingum. Elsewhere, in another variation on the theme, plans appeared to be afoot for a 1,008-ft.-tall lingam, initiated by the mysterious—if not downright dubious—Sri Sri Sri (one better than the Art of Living’s Sri Sri Ravi Shankar) Kshetra Bhookailasa Mahasamsthana Trust, Bangalore, https://www.facebook.com/diamondmanjunath ?fref=ts, accessed May 6, 2016. This is an ongoing source of frustration and legal battles for the Airports Authority of India, as the height of the Shiva statue restricts the use of Delhi airport’s third runway, particularly in the notorious winter fog. B. K. Birla, interview by the author, December 2007. At the inauguration, B. K. Birla’s wife, Sarla Birla, called it a bhavya, divya vishal murti (grand/stately/imposing, celestial/heavenly, enormous statue). She also quoted from Kalidasa’s Sanskrit play Shakuntala (Abhijñānaśākuntalam) asking Shiva to do good for all at all times (Rathore, Chintan Se Srijan Ki Ore, 72). D. D. Kosambi, describing ancient crossroads shrines to mother goddesses, argues that the practice of sacrifices to these mothers, dating back to at least the seventh

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century, originated in “non-Aryan” or “aboriginal” (Indigenous, non-Brahmin) cultures (Kosambi, “At the Crossroads,” Parts I and II). The Kanwar Yatra is mentioned in Lochtefeld, God’s Gateway, and receives fuller treatment in Singh, Uprising of the Fools, but neither provides a satisfactory account of the explosion in participation since the late 1980s. A news story in The Hindu associates it with the Ramjanmabhoomi movement of the early 1990s (“Kanwariyas Flock Highways,” The Hindu, July 14, 2004, http://www.thehindu.com/2004 /07/14 /stories/2004071409790300.htm). According to Jitendra Tiwari, the Shiv Mandir’s chief operating officer in 2010, there was also a plan to build a Vaishno Devi yatra on the other side of the statue because people would ask why Shiva was there without mata (the mother goddess) (Jitendra Tiwari, interview by Sushumna Kanan, Bangalore, May 2010. I thank Sushumna Kanan for her assistance with interviews in Kannada). The acronym AIR also stands for “All India Radio,” the national public radio broadcaster (officially known as Akashvani, or voice from the sky). Since around 2018 Melwani has been operating the AiR Institute of Realization (http://air.ind.in/). A Wikipedia entry on “Ravi V. Melwani,” accessible until at least July 2018, has been removed, likely following public accusations of sexual harassment by former and potential employees in the wake of the Me Too movement. “Testimonials,” Shivoham Shiva Temple, http://shivohamshivatemple.org /testimonials, 2017. There is some (possibly deliberate) ambiguity as to whether the Shiv Mandir requires a ticket. While it seems darshan of the Shiva and Ganesh statues is free, everything else has to be paid for through an all-inclusive Shiv Mandir Activities Package. In 2010, the package cost 170 rupees or 100 rupees, depending on whether it was bought inside or outside the temple area, with the possibility of “Special Entry” without queuing for an extra fee (50 rupees in 2010). Comments at https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g297628-d1219275 -Reviews-or10-Shiv_Mandir_Temple-Bengaluru_Bangalore_Karnataka .html#REVIEWS, 2018. Sushumna Kanan and I conducted the interviews. Anonymous site visitor, interview, May 11, 2010. On the connection between the ashram space and Romanticism via Goethe’s uptake of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, see Jain, “Tales from the Concrete Cave.” The films include Bhukailasa, Tamil (1938); Bhookailas, Telugu (1958), starring N. T. Rama Rao, released in Tamil as Bhaktha Ravana; and Bhookailasa, Kannada (1958), starring Raj Kumar. The legend describes the demon king Ravana’s attempt to obtain a powerful lingam, the Atmalinga, from Lord Shiva. Ravana performs penances to persuade Shiva to grant him the Atmalinga. However, the god Vishnu, via the sage Narada, attempts to thwart this by tricking Ravana into asking for Shiva’s wife Parvati instead. After Ravana is given a fake version of Parvati, he realizes the trick, performs more penances (including severing his own head), and finally gets the Atmalinga, but Shiva warns Ravana that if it is ever placed on the ground, its powers will revert to Shiva. Narada, worried about what Ravana will do with the Atmalinga’s powers, swings back into action, this time deploying Ganesh. Appear-

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ing as a young Brahmin boy, Ganesh offers to hold the Atmalinga while Ravana performs his evening rituals, the “evening” having been initiated by Vishnu, who blocks the sun as Ravana arrives at the coastal town of Gokarna. As soon as Ravana hands over the Atmalinga, Ganesh puts it on the ground, from where it cannot be budged. In his furious attempts to dislodge it, Ravana splinters it into pieces, which fly off and are embedded at four other sacred pilgrimage sites along the Karnataka coast: Dhareshwar, Gunavanteshwara, Murudeshwar, and Shejjeshwar. For a gloss on darshan, see note 29 in chapter 2. Heggade is routinely asked for counsel and commentary by the media and politicians in Karnataka, while the Dharmasthala deity has itself been dragged into political feuds, as when B. S. Yeddyurappa challenged H. D. Kumaraswamy, leader of the Janata Dal (Secular) party, to swear before Lord Manjunatha that Yeddyurappa had tried to pressure Kumaraswamy not to reveal further evidence of Yeddyurappa’s corruption. Heggade was awarded an honorary doctorate by Mangalore University in 1994 and is often referred to as Dr. Heggade; R. N. Shetty has an honorary doctorate from Bangalore University (awarded in 2009). A claim to Shetty’s father’s status as muktesar (hereditary administrator) of the temple appears in the Wikipedia entry on Shetty at http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/R ._N._Shetty, accessed April 30, 2020. As with other self-made “big men,” a number of colorful myths circulate about Shetty’s sudden wealth. R. N. Shetty, interview by the author, Bangalore, March 17, 2012. This was substantiated by a review of the resort on TripAdvisor in May 2013 complaining about bad service because the staff was busy with “2 tables of VIPs . . . probably Dr. R N Shetty’s friends” (see https://www.tripadvisor.ca/ShowUserReviews-g1071655 -d3616807-r162103612-RNS_Golf_Resort-Murudeshwar_Karnataka.html#CHECK _RATES_CONT, accessed May 5, 2016). I cannot list all of the scholars in what has become a veritable subindustry within the academy, but some of the most influential English-language commentators on Benjamin are Susan Buck-Morss, Andrew Benjamin, Howard Caygill, Miriam Hansen, and Irving Wohlfarth. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217. Hereafter, page numbers from this source are cited in parentheses in the text. Pierre Bourdieu would later theorize the social power of this tradition in terms of a bourgeois modality of distinction (Bourdieu, Distinction). Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Didi-Huberman makes this point in relation to Benjamin’s conception of the origin as something that is not left behind but always remains open, emergent; in this temporality, “the aura and its decline are . . . part of the same system.” For DidiHuberman, “decline” in Benjamin “does not mean disappearance. Rather, it means (as in the Latin declinare) moving downward, inclining, deviating, or inflecting in a new way” (Didi-Huberman, “The Supposition of the Aura,” 4–5). Richard Davis describes this in relation to an eleventh-century Shiva icon, an utsavamurti expressly created for processions (utsava) (Davis, Lives of Indian Images, 20).

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58 Davis, Ritual in an Oscillating Universe, 60–74. 59 Jain, Gods in the Bazaar. 60 Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, 101–2. 61 Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, 290–301. 62 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. 63 Guha-Thakurta, In the Name of the Goddess, 11. 64 Mathur and Singh, “Reincarnations of the Museum.” CHAPTER 4: CARS AND LAND

1 “Officially Not Open, Yamuna Expressway Already a Hit,” NDTV, June 4, 2012, https://www.ndtv.com/agra-news/officially-not-open-yamuna-expressway-already -a-hit-486503. 2 As of February 2017 there had been 4,054 accidents on the Yamuna Expressway, including 548 fatalities (i.e., an average of more than one a week), in the four and a half years since it opened in August 2012 (“Yamuna Expressway Becomes Death Highway,” Economic Times, February 27, 2017, accessed July 6, 2017, http:// economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/yamuna-expressway -becomes-death-highway-with-548-fatalties-in-5-years/articleshow/57372591.cms). 3 “Noida Authority Scraps Six Elevated Road Projects,” Hindustan Times, May 31, 2012, accessed June 4, 2012, http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news /UttarPradesh/Noida-authority-scraps-six-elevated-road-projects/Article1-863766 .aspx. 4 “U[ttar] P[radesh] Goes All Out for Metro in Major Cities,” News18, March 27, 2012, https://www.news18.com/news/politics/up-goes-all-out-for-metro-in-major -cities-459575.html. 5 “Mulayam’s Safari Project May Face Modi Hurdle,” Indian Express, March 28, 2012, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/mulayams-safari-project-may-face-modi -hurdle/929405. Modi’s refusal to part with Gir’s lions, despite a 2013 Supreme Court order to relocate some of them to a wildlife sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, surfaced again when floods affected them in 2015. Modi has cultivated the lion as a symbol, including the use of a lion’s roar at the beginning of his political rallies and the lion mascot for his “Make in India” campaign. The Modi government has also considered a proposal to replace India’s national animal, the tiger, with a lion (“These Adorable Lion Cubs Are Part of a Political Uproar,” Washington Post, July 17, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015 /07/17/indias-modi-loves-his-states-rare-lions-others-say-love-isnt-enough). On the Shiv Sena’s approach to tiger conservation and its leaders, the Thackerays, as “wildlife enthusiasts,” see, e.g., “Shiv Sena Cub Adopts a Tiger at S[anjay] G[andhi] N[ational] P[ark],” Mid-day.com, May 19, 2014, http://www.mid-day.com/articles /shiv-sena-cub-adopts-a-tiger-at-sgnp/15308167. 6 As with religion and modernity, the term nature is deployed here in invisible scare quotes (under erasure due to its many critiques, including those of its putative separation from culture and its Judeo-Christian Edenic underpinnings). At the same time, it is also treated as an idea with undeniable ideological force in the 288

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world. For an excellent overview, see Castree, Making Sense of Nature. An influential early intervention is Smith, Uneven Development. The term centrifugal is deployed in Dimendberg, “The Will to Motorization.” On the contradictions of technological modernism, see Gandy, “Technological Modernism and the Urban Parkway.” On the relationship between mediatic and organic animals in modernity, see Lippit, Electric Animal. For a critique of this, see Jain, “Tales from the Concrete Cave.” Harvey, “The ‘New’ Imperialism.” On “the great Indian land grab” by the Indian state, see, e.g., Sud, “The Indian State in a Liberalizing Landscape.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. A marvelous example of a study that seeks to trace such logics, and that takes a very similar assemblage-driven approach, emphasizing heterogeneous temporalities (particularly striking is the speed characterizing the “survivalist orientation” it describes), is Simone, For the City Yet to Come. Simone’s account of urban becoming in African cities is explicitly human-centered, squarely focusing on those who are struggling to survive in cities and their emergent forms of social collaboration. However, this is a strength, as it does not come at the expense of describing other material processes and, indeed, is clear-eyed about how these other processes intervene in human efforts. Similarly, Thomas Blom Hansen and Oskar Verkaaik suggestively identify the former colonial city as a site of what they call “urban infra-power,” centered on charisma. This charisma is exchangeable and distributed, embodied not just in individual leaders—big men, hustlers, and fixers whose knowledge, resources, connections, and personal style or aura constitute an ability to “distribute certainty” in an uncertain, opaque, unforgiving milieu—but also in spaces and objects, such as the city itself, its spaces and landmarks, its sounds and smells, as sensed and narrativized entities (Hansen and Verkaaik, “Urban Charisma”). Scaling is a theme that runs through much of Swyngedouw’s work (see, e.g., Swyngedouw, “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’?”). This may involve some creative reading on my part. Lefebvre’s formulations are notoriously difficult to pin down (Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution). This may well be the case in other parts of the world, too. A massive three-headed Erawan elephant with a museum in its interior near Bangkok, Thailand, was constructed in 2004 under the supervision of Pakpian, both a senator and the president of the Thonburi Auto Assembly Company, which assembles Mercedes-Benz vehicles. (The company entered a joint venture with India’s Tata Motors in 2006.) The Erawan museum is less than half a kilometer from a Toyota production plant, consistent with the kinds of development on urban peripheries in India discussed later (McDaniel, “Spectacle, Attractions and Buddhism in Southeast Asia,” 9). Paterson, “Automobile Political Economy,” 91–120. On regulation theory’s view of Fordism as a regime of accumulation, see Paterson, Automobile Politics. See also Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation. Think, e.g., of Ballard, Crash; David Cronenberg, dir., Crash, film, 1996; Davis, Buda’s Wagon.

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18 Virilio, Negative Horizon. On speed and modernism, see also Duffy, The Speed Handbook. In Bombay cinema, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, dir., 1995) can be seen as a turning point at which trains begin to signify tradition rather than modernity, which is now embodied in cars (albeit still in foreign spaces). Automobility plays a prominent role in postreform Hindi cinema—for instance, in the genre of the “small town film” and in a spate of neo-noir films in which roads and highways feature as fraught spaces. Examples include Rajat Mukherjee, dir., Road, 2002; Imtiaz Ali, dir., Highway, 2014; Navdeep Singh, dir., NH10, 2015; and the work of Ramgopal Varma and Anurag Kashyap. Cars also appear in a more lighthearted vein in Siddharth Anand, dir., Tara Rum Pum, 2007; Zoya Akhtar, dir., Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, 2011; Rajesh Mapuskar, dir., Ferrari ki Sawari, 2012; Aashima Chibber, dir., Mere Dad ki Maruti, 2013. 19 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. Schivelbush, however, does not problematize the concept of “landscape,” valorizing this as what is displaced by panoramic vision from the train. 20 Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity; Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. 21 McLuhan, Understanding Media; Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas. 22 On Las Vegas and automobility, see Venturi et al., Learning from Las Vegas. Edward Dimendberg makes the point that Nazi highway spectacle centered on a purified aesthetic experience of the land, so billboards and advertisements were banned along the autobahns. Here, as Eric Michaud describes, it was the bridges that were to be the “pyramids of the Reich.” In the United States, by contrast, as Dimendberg puts it, “The ‘circulation value’ of the American highway was understood through categories of commerce rather than aesthetics; its public sphere was collapsed onto that of the commodity world”; Dimendberg, “The Will to Motorization,” 125; Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, 213. On roadside advertising in the United States, see Gudis, Buyways. 23 “Building the Legend,” VisitBemidji.com, http://www.visitbemidji.com/things-to -do/history-culture/paul-bunyan-babe/building-the-legend/. 24 Marling, The Colossus of Roads. 25 Urry, “The ‘System’ of Automobility.” 26 Paterson, Automobile Politics. 27 Note the role of Japanese firms as precursors to other multinationals in the 1990s. This is germane to the big statue story because of the Jain watchmaker from Old Delhi who visited Japan as part of an ongoing collaboration with a Japanese watch firm. Here a visit to the Kamakura Buddha inspired the granite statue of Mahavira, inaugurated in 1985 along Delhi’s Mehrauli–Gurgaon Road, at the time an undeveloped, largely agricultural, peri-urban stretch (see figure 1.7). For more detail on the statue and the controversy that ensued, see n. 15 in chapter 1. 28 “Analyst,” Maruti to Mafia; “In Conversation: R. C. Bhargava, Chairman, Maruti Suzuki India Limited,” Economic Times, December 18, 2008, http://economictimes .indiatimes.com/in-conversation-r-c-bhargava-chairman-maruti-suzuki-india -limited/articleshow/3855033.cms. 290

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29 Chattopadhyay, “Demystifying the Growth Story of Indian Passenger Car Industry,” 113. 30 “Restarting Trouble in Indian Auto Industry,” Forbes India, December 6, 2010, accessed June 5, 2012, http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/features/restarting -troubleindian-auto-industry_503398.html. 31 “India Chapter Set to Overtake Global Auto Industry Growth Story,” Times of India, February 3, 2016, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business /India-chapter-set-to-overtake-global-auto-industry-growth-story/articleshow /50830265.cms; “Automotive Industry in India: Statistics and Facts,” Statista: The Statistics Portal, https://www.statista.com/topics/3771/automotive-industry-in-india. 32 Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Basic Road Statistics of India, 2008–09, 2009–10 and 2010–11, August 2012, (i), cited in “National Highways Development Project: An Overview,” Lok Sabha Secretariat Parliament Library and Reference, Research, Documentation and Information Service (LARRDIS), Members’ Reference Service Reference Note no. 23/Rn/Ref./August/2013, 1. (The LARRDIS report clearly states that it is not for publication and should not be cited, as its information is based on other sources; however, no specific sources are provided for the analysis of the delays in achieving targets.) New land acquisition laws that doubled the cost of urban land and quadrupled the cost of rural land were cited as pushing the percentage of land costs in highway construction from 10–15 percent of the total project cost to 30 percent (“Rising Cost of Land a Major Roadblock in National Highway Expansion,” Economic Times, March 28, 2016, http://economictimes .indiatimes.com/news/economy/infrastructure/rising-cost-of-land-a-major -roadblock-in-national-highway-expansion/articleshow/51576935.cms). 33 See Majumder, People’s Car; Nielsen and Nilsen, “Law Struggles and Hegemonic Processes in Neoliberal India.” 34 A video of this is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LO7uOVSuxE, accessed July 8, 2017. 35 “Tallest Statues in India,” The Better India Facebook page, accessed February 24, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/thebetterindia/photos/?tab=album&album_id =10154214332199594. I thank Kavita Singh for alerting me to this. 36 A notable instance that again conjoins automobility and concrete is Giovanni Michelucci’s 1960–64 Church of the Autostrada (Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista), near Florence along Italy’s major north-south highway, the Autostrada del Sole (A1), which commemorates the workers who died during its construction (“Out of Obscurity: Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista,” A10: New European Architecture, no. 53 [2013]: 62). 37 “Death and the Accident” is a chapter in Sundaram, Pirate Modernity, although, like the rest of the book, it focuses on the city from the 1990s onward and does not engage the longer and wider history of managing risk on Indian roads. 38 While Zukin and others have developed the idea of “Disneyfication” or “Disneyization” as a metaphor for a certain process of consumerism-led gentrification and sanitization (to which I return later in this chapter), Zukin also notes that in the United States, Disneyfication is as much literal as it is metaphoric, given the

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Walt Disney Company’s own substantial interventions in urban redevelopment, as with the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Disney Store in New York’s Times Square, and Disney’s role in financializing 42nd Street (Zukin, “Politics and Aesthetics of Public Space”). On the “creative class” as harbinger of urban renewal, see Florida, Cities and the Creative Class; Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class; Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class; Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited. On heterotopias, see Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.” On suburbs and their aestheticization of landscape, see Duncan and Duncan, “The Narrative Structures.” Smriti Srinivas describes a couple of other, similar sites on the outskirts of Bangalore. While she mentions them in relation to the “sacrality of urban sprawl,” she relates them not so much to peri-urban development as to the “urban performative complex” produced by Bangalore’s religious cults and their ritual performances (Srinivas, Landscapes of Urban Memory, 89–94). “No Yarning Gap: Apparel, Textile SEZ for City,” Times of India, Bangalore City ed., March 28, 2006, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/No-yarning -gap-apparel-textile-SEZ-for-city/articleshow/1466530.cms. “A Disneyland Is Unfolding along Kanakpura Road,” Times of India, Bangalore City ed., January 9, 2012, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/A -Disneyland-is-unfolding-along-Kanakapura-road/articleshow/11419772.cms. See also the real estate advertising site 99acres.com, http://www.99acres.com/new -projects-in-kanakpura-road-bangalore-south-ffid. Ghosh, “The Security Aesthetic in Bollywood’s High-Rise Horror.” On the jangal and jangli, see Skaria, Hybrid Histories. “About,” Chaitanya Promoters and Developers Facebook page, accessed June 6, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/ChaitanyaPromoters/info/?tab=page _info. On the role of landscape in this “realism,” better translated as “lifelike-ness” or “livingness” (sajivata), that admits the visible presence of the divine, see Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, 190–203. Thus, the idea of the “technological sublime” developed, e.g., in Marx, The Machine in the Garden. On the spiritualization of art, see Morgan, “Art and Religion in the Modern Age.” This ideology of landscape is outlined in Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. The matter has bounced between the Airports Authority of India (a public sector enterprise), the Delhi International Airport Limited (a public-private joint venture), and the Birlas’ Jayashree Trust for years (“Shiv Idol near IGI Likely to Lose Height,” Times of India, October 3, 2012, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com /city/delhi/Shiv-idol-near-IGI-likely-to-lose-height/articleshow/16647285.cms; “Height of Shiva Statue Worries Airport Authority,” Millennium Post, April 1, 2015, http://www.millenniumpost.in/height-of-shiva-statue-worries-airport -authority-59535).

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51 On Kemp Fort as a land grab, see Guruprasad, “The Story of Airport Road Shiva Temple,” Guruprasad’s Portal, http://guruprasad.net/posts/the-story-of-airport -road-shiva-temple. 52 Manu Balachandran and Itika Sharma Punit, “Timeline: 200 Years of India’s Struggle with Land Acquisition Laws,” Quartz, August 5, 2015, http://qz.com/471117 /timeline-200-years-of-indias-struggle-with-land-acquisition-laws. 53 In 2016, the Uttar Pradesh government’s Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) began promoting the approximately 2,689-sq.-kilometer area around the Yamuna Expressway for development. Its website initially pitched “an integrated development environment to investors from all over the world,” while its electronic newsletter was in Hindi (YEIDA website, accessed July 13, 2016, http://yamunaexpresswayauthority.com). According to a news report in May 2016, one prospective investor was Baba Ramdev, a yoga guru with close connections to Modi and the BJP government (and who effectively took over Vedic Broadcasting, which runs the Aastha religious television channel). Ramdev was looking for 150 acres to set up a university and a factory to manufacture his Patanjali-brand Ayurvedic products (“Yog Guru Baba Ramdev Scouting for Land in YEIDA Area,” Times of India, May 21 2016, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/noida/yog -guru-baba-ramdev-scouting-for-land-in-yeida-area/articleshow/52376194.cms). Ramdev reappears in chapter 5. 54 On Gurgaon (now Gurugram), see Gururani, “Cities in a World of Villages.” 55 R. N. Shetty, interview by the author, Bangalore, June 21, 2009. 56 Srivastava, “Urban Spaces, Disney-Divinity and Moral Middle Classes in Delhi.” See also Brosius, India’s Middle Class. In practice, the terms Disneyfication and Disneyization are often used interchangeably. Alan Bryman, however, distinguishes Disneyfication—“the often criticized way in which . . . an original work [was put] through a Disney mincer to emerge with a distorted version of it”—from “Disneyization.” He theorizes Disneyization as a process akin to McDonaldization, by which the consumerist principles of the Disney theme parks are diffused into other kinds of institutions through the four elements of theming, dedifferentiation of consumption, merchandising, and emotional labor (Bryman, “The Disneyization of Society”). 57 Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign; Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 58 For a nuanced discussion, see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “Scene.” 59 Baxter and Atherton, Aristotle’s Poetics. For a discussion of the denigration of opsis, see also Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 66–67. 60 “The real consumer . . . becomes a consumer of illusion. The commodity is this illusion, which is in fact real, and the spectacle is its most general form” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 32). 61 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 30. 62 This media studies approach to spectacle is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Douglas Kellner, one of the most authoritative commentators on Baudrillard, Debord, and spectacle. See, e.g., Kellner, Media Spectacle.

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63 Zukin, Landscapes of Power, 232; “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 12). For Zukin, if Disney World is one model of the reorganization of space by consumption that links economy with culture, the other is gentrification. In Zukin’s later work, theming and gentrification come together in the theming of authenticity itself (see Zukin, “Consuming Authenticity”). 64 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 12. See also Mazzarella, “Affect.” Mazzarella is too subtle a thinker to simply dismiss this fantasy, however. He builds on its productivity in Mazzarella, Censorium, 40. 65 Latour, “What Is Iconoclash?,” 25. 66 For this argument about the fetish, see Jain, Gods in the Bazaar, 222–28. The emanation of value from a social realm of circulation and exchange rather than from the laboring or perceiving subject is what makes spectacle, like the fetish, such a festering sore for post-Enlightenment Platonist critique. Spectacle shares this quality with the commodity inasmuch as the commodity has exchange value (value that inheres in its tradability, or its potential/perceived/desired desirability to others); exchange value is the source of the fetish character of the commodity, as well as of its spectacular nature—hence, the commodity’s equation with image as illusion. 67 Mazzarella, Censorium. 68 Tsing, “Inside the Economy of Appearances,” 118. 69 Costa, Le sublime technologique; Costa, Il sublime tecnologico; Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure”; Marx, The Machine in the Garden. See also Nye, American Technological Sublime. 70 Ghertner, “Calculating without Numbers,” 206. But see chapter 3 in this volume for a critique of Ghertner’s claim that aesthetics replaces quantitative calculation. 71 Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition.” 72 I use the term aura to gesture toward the magical aspects of speculation (see Appadurai, “The Ghost in the Financial Machine”; Bear et al., “Speculation”). 73 Ong, “Hyperbuilding,” 209. Here Ong sees spectacle as a function of the “play of exception,” referring primarily to zoning exceptions such as SEZs (Ong, “Hyperbuilding,” 206). However, as outlined in the introduction, the arena of Indian vernacular capitalism—the “bazaar”—has been exceptional from the start, emerging as it did from the structural exceptionalities of colonialism and its strategically layered yet subordinate sovereignties. What this longer genealogy of exceptionality suggests is that the “play of exception” is not confined to SEZs but is both exceptional and structural, for it is built into the exclusionary presuppositions of capitalist modernity’s self-narrativization. In this light, SEZs can be reread as the necessary reinstitution of constitutive outsides to the neoliberal state in the absence of the colonial exception. 74 Ong, “Hyperbuilding,” 207. 75 Jameson, Postmodernism. 76 The operation of the mobile international starchitect is similar to the way the same few companies produce the Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies: staging the games means following a specific generic format (Five Currents of Los 294

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Angeles, for instance, has worked on eleven, including the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the Rio Olympics in 2016). However, the serial centrality of nations here means that each ceremony must be tweaked to display easily recognizable— indeed, stereotypical or “Disneyfied”—national content. Tsing, Friction, 119. Tsing’s insights in this regard are preempted by Marilyn Strathern’s reflections on scale (Strathern, The Relation). “Decentralization and Subnational Regional Economics: Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations,” World Bank Group website, 2001, http://www1.worldbank.org /publicsector/decentralization/fiscal.htm. Michele Acuto and Parag Khanna, “Around the World, Mayors Take Charge,” The Atlantic, April 26, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04 /around-the-world-mayors-take-charge/275335. Writankar Mukherjee, “South Sikkim Turns into a Pharma Hub,” Economic Times, November 3, 2009, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare /biotech/pharmaceuticals/sikkim-turns-into-a-pharma-hub/articleshow/5192355 .cms. These estimates are sourced from Lochtefeld, God’s Gateway, 193; Singh, Uprising of the Fools, 25. “Kanwariyas Flock Highways,” The Hindu, July 14, 2004, http://www.thehindu.com /2004 /07/14 /stories/2004071409790300.htm. Pilgrims travel to Haridwar from as far afield as Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. While he does not go so far as to see automobility and the Kanwar Yatra as co-constituting, on the takeover of roads by kanwariya pilgrims and the risks to them from traffic, see Singh, Uprising of the Fools, 149–52. From 2014 on, the Delhi– Haridwar highway (NH58) has been closed for the duration of the Kanwar Yatra (“Kanwar Yatra: Delhi-Haridwar Highway Closed for Traffic,” News18, July 18, 2014, http://www.news18.com/news/india/kanwar-yatra-delhi-haridwar-highway -closed-for-traffic-702578.html; Kautilya Singh, “Kanwar Yatra: Diversions in Delhi to Doon via Haridwar,” Times of India, July 31, 2015, http://timesofindia.indiatimes .com/city/dehradun/Kanwar-yatra-Diversions-in-Delhi-to-Doon-via-Haridwar /articleshow/48300153.cms. See also Purnima S. Tripathi, “The Long Walk for Worship,” Frontline, August 27, 2004, http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2117 /stories/20040827000206600.htm).

CHAPTER 5: SCALE

1 A beautiful and sophisticated instance of this, rooted in a Eurocentric historical narrative, is Stewart, On Longing. 2 Monumental statues often take advantage of hilltop or waterside locations to further amplify their visibility from afar (e.g., the Murudeshwar Shiva, the Namchi Padmasambhava and Shiva, the Delhi Mahavira). Smaller sculptures establish this figure–ground relationship in other ways: via pedestals, of course, or through location in dedicated parks or along the banks of a water body (hence, the rows of statues along the lake in Hyderabad or the beach in Chennai or the statue of Shiva in the Ganga at Rishikesh). N OT E S T O C H AP T E R F I V E

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3 Baxter and Atherton, Aristotle’s Poetics, 79. 4 On the pyramids as monuments of despotism, see, e.g., Smith, The Student’s Ancient History, 46; Ward, Letters from Three Continents, 165. 5 This is also a methodological issue. The ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes builds on the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s meditations on the “headache” of anthropological scale to point out that scale is ideological, not an analytic in itself, demanding attention to how ideologies of scale are produced (such as the valueladen methodological opposition in his field between the authenticity of the intimate and grassroots and the less trustworthy large-scale abstractions of “theory”) (Martin Stokes, “Publics, Masses, Crowds: Reflections on Affect and Scale in Music Study,” paper presented at the University of Toronto, April 29, 2011 [I thank Martin Stokes for sharing this with me]; Strathern, The Relation). 6 “Less is a bore” was Robert Venturi’s famous response to Mies van der Rohe’s modernist dictum “less is more.” Strictly speaking, however, this has less to do with size than with the internal elements of a work (Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 17. The classic encapsulation of the virtues of smallness is Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful). 7 Grigsby, Colossal. 8 Grigsby, Colossal, 19. 9 Grigsby, Colossal, 174. 10 Tsing, Friction, 59. 11 Swyngedouw, “Scaled Geographies.” 12 To denaturalize this hegemonic understanding of globalization, Swyngedouw calls it “glocalization.” He writes, “The twin process whereby, firstly, institutional/regulatory arrangements shift from the national scale both upwards to supra-national or global scales and downwards to the scale of the individual body or to local, urban or regional configurations and, secondly, economic activities and inter-firm networks are becoming simultaneously more localised/regionalised and transnational” (Swyngedouw, “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’?,” 33). Swyngedouw seems to have had his own take on glocalization independently of Roland Robertson, who is generally credited with popularizing the term (Swyngedouw, “The Mammon Quest”; Robertson, “Glocalization”). 13 To recap: following Jacques Rancière, the aesthetics of politics (not the same as the politics of aesthetics) is a matter not of aesthetico-moral formalism, where the qualities of a form or work reflect or reinforce a given political economic base, but of how these qualities are situated in the “distribution of the sensible” that upholds the ruling consensus. This distribution or partition (partage) pertains to members of the polity and to forms, both assigned given functions and positions in hierarchies of sensing and doing, such that they do or do not appear as sensible— that is, able to be perceived and made sense of. (This can be seen as an extension of Gayatri Spivak’s famous question, “Can the subaltern speak?”) This distribution is neither universal nor stable, even as the material properties and internal relations of forms may seem to be. Politics is the dissensus that disrupts a consensual distribution of the sensible. 296

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Jain, “The Handbag That Exploded.” Sarkar, “Plasticity and the Global,” 453. Sarkar, “Plasticity and the Global,” 453. Spinoza formulates affect as “affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections” (Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader, 154). Affect is a force generated in the encounter between bodies, where bodies can be material or ideal, virtual or actual; they could include ideas, images, objects, object-events. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 38). Jain, Gods in the Bazaar; Pinney, “Photos of the Gods”; Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation. Satnarine (Sat) Maharaj, general secretary, Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, interview by the author, Tunapuna, Trinidad, December 2009. Similarly, in 1993 Pandit Ravi Ji of the Hindu Prachar Kendra introduced/revived an annual “Ganga Dhara” festival at the Marianne River in Blanchisseuse, Trinidad, based on the Indian Ganga Dussehra he had seen celebrated as a student in Varanasi. It is highly likely that this initiative was a mimetic response to the shrine at the Aripo Datta Ganga. Sadhoo built the temple against all odds, initially using oil drums and concrete to lay a foundation on swampy land. The sugar company demolished it, and Sadhoo was jailed for trespassing, but he rebuilt it. It is now a tourist attraction and a source of pride as a testament to the devotion and grit of Indo-Trinidadians. Childress, “Caroni Ltd.” The sugar industry was already struggling in the 1970s as Trinidad’s economy shifted to petroleum (the force of global capital working via the automotiveterritorial assemblage); its nationalization in 1975 came with unfavorable trade agreements with the European Economic Community and the United States, which provided the bulk of the market for Trinidadian sugar (Francis, “Lomé and the Trinidadian Sugar Industry”). See also Prorok, “Trinidad’s D’sugared Landscape.” Glen Ramjag, vice-president, National Foodcrop Farmers’ Association, interview by the author, St. Augustine, Trinidad, December 2009; Maharaj interview. Aisha Khan outlines how planters propagated the idea that Indo-Trinidadians have a special affinity for the land, instituting a “hegemonic equation” between “Indian” and “rural” that the community has itself taken on board, despite its actual occupational diversity (Khan, Callaloo Nation, 69–76). On jhandis and kutiyas, see Ouditt, “Kutiya Geometries”; Rampersad, “Hinduism in the Caribbean.” Khan, Callaloo Nation, 127–29. The term Hindu Renaissance was used by Rampersad, the first female priest in Trinidad (Pandita Indrani Rampersad, senior research fellow in Ram Lila, University of Trinidad and Tobago, interview by the author, Barataria, Trinidad, December 2009).

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28 Deokinanan Sharma, president, National Council for Indian Culture (NCIC), interview by the author, Valsayn, Trinidad, December 2009. The NCIC presented an alternative vision to that of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha: less hard-line Hindu and more willing to work on cultural exchanges with the Indian government, which at the time was headed by the Congress Party–led UPA. 29 “History of the NCIC’s Divali Nagar,” National Council for Indian Culture website, http://www.ncictt.com/divali-nagar/history-of-the-divali-nagar. 30 Bisram Gopie, first president of the NCIC’s earlier avatar, the National Council for Indian Music and Drama, also led the Gandhi Sevak Sangh, started in Trinidad in 1948 (Gowricharn, Caribbean Transnationalism, 150). According to Deokinanan Sharma, the Muslim community celebrated Eid at the Divali Nagar site one year, but this was discontinued after the Anjuman Sunnat ul Jamaat Association, the dominant Islamic organization in Trinidad, objected to it because the site contained Hindu murtis (icons). As regards Christians, he said that while Presbyterians take part in the Divali Nagar celebrations, Pentecostal converts do not. 31 On the secular-liberal reproduction of such prejudices, see Niranjana, Mobilizing India, 50–51. 32 On landscapes in calendar art, see Jain, Gods in the Bazaar; Pinney, “Photos of the Gods.” 33 The dantal is an Indo-Caribbean percussion instrument consisting of a metal (iron or steel) rod beaten with a horseshoe-shaped metal beater. 34 Eisenlohr, Little India, 12. 35 Eisenlohr, Little India. This echoes Steven Vertovec’s observation that, in the Indian diaspora in general, the kind of universal Hinduism propagated by global Hindutva often coexists with a more localized, eclectic, and “ecumenical” Hinduism (Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora, 162–64). On the tensions between these modalities in South Africa, see also Hansen, Melancholia of Freedom. 36 Eisenlohr, Little India, 267–71. 37 Unless specified otherwise, background information on Ganga Talao is drawn from The History of Ganga Talao by Hindu House. My understanding is also shaped by conversations with Amenah Jahangeer-Chojoo and Vinesh Y. Hookoomsing. I am deeply grateful to them for taking the time and trouble to share their work and observations with me. Any misinterpretations are entirely my responsibility. 38 Eisenlohr, Little India, 250. 39 Ramdin, “Pari Talao—Lake of the Fairies,” 75–82. 40 The History of Ganga Talao by Hindu House, 130. 41 Contrast this with Acharya Hanslall Sooklall’s account. “It needed the collective courage of a whole team of members of the local sabha or at least half a dozen devotees to even start walking on a road that was full of difficulties and perils. Wild animals, bad weather, rivers and torrents would all unite forces to set hurdles in front of devotees. I remember the road dying at La Marie giving way to a track full [sic] bushes, trees, boulders crisscrossing towards the lake. I remember those bridges made of wood that the devotees had to cross one by one and I remember

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the single temple made of wood, grass and iron sheets” (The History of Ganga Talao by Hindu House, 189). Anil Bachoo, interview by the author, Port Louis, Mauritius, January 2014. For obvious reasons, the source for the alternative story must remain anonymous. From 2010 to 2014, Bachoo was also vice prime minister of Mauritius, an honorific title not designated in the Constitution. On Vajpayee’s first visit in 1977 as minister of external affairs, he suggested a Hanuman temple on Neel Parbat, a hillock overlooking the lake. It was completed in 1981. The family of another former commissioner of police, Mr. Fulena, built the temple; the Sanatan Dharma Sabha, New Delhi, donated the icon. “Ganga Talao,” Wikipedia, accessed July 14, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki /Ganga_Talao. For a critical background to this concept, see Hookoomsing, “Chota Bharat, Mauritius.” This is not the same as the theologico-political, for the political here does not replace divine sanction with a secular notion of the state or the people. Instead, it plays across the boundaries between religious and secular efficacies and understandings of the state (as described in chapter 3). As the priest from Varanasi officiating at the Mauritius Kashi Vishwanath Mandir pointed out, many of these temples, including Kashi Vishwanath, depart from the canonical Indian form in their extensive use of glass windows. He attributed this to the Muslim builders who made the temples (rather than the influence of Christian churches) (interview, Ganga Talao, Mauritius, January 2014). This was the analysis of a few informants who did not wish to be named, in keeping with a general reluctance on the part of Hindus in Mauritius to speak publicly about caste, partly because it is seen as divisive and therefore a threat to Hindu dominance. But see Claveyrolas, “The ‘Land of the Vaish’?”; Jahangeer-Chojoo, “From Minority to Mainstream Politics.” This patron was variously identified as Vaish and Kurmi, the latter classified in India as Other Backward Class (OBC). Whatever the facts of the matter, what was revealing was the readiness of my informants to map this person’s controversial status onto caste. Annex A, Fact Sheet on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Government of India, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, 2011, 5, accessed July 17, 2016, http://dipp.nic.in /English/Publications/FDI_Statistics/2011/india_FDI_December2011.pdf; “India Closes Tax Loophole with Mauritius,” Financial Times, May 11, 2016, https://next.ft .com/content/c78e52d4-1760-11e6-b8d5-4c1fcdbe169f#axzz4EPOTcQnJ; “40 Percent of India’s FDI Comes from This B[uilding],” Indian Express, August 21, 2012, http:// archive.indianexpress.com/news/40—of-indias-fdi-comes-from-this-bldg /990943. “Amended India-Mauritius Tax Treaty Only Covers Investments in Shares,” Economic Times, May 13, 2016, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy /policy/amended-india-mauritius-tax-treaty-only-covers-investments-in-shares /articleshow/52246626.cms.

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53 Perhaps it was Dr. Neeraj Bora’s Vaish association activism that brought him to Mauritius. Bora, the son of a Lucknow politician, runs a Lucknow hospital and is an exemplary networker: he has been president of the Indian Medical Association’s Lucknow chapter; a Lion’s Club member; Uttar Pradesh senior vice president of the All India Vaish Federation; and editor of the fortnightly Vaish Jagran. Initially with the Congress Party, he and his father joined the BSP in 2006. Although he did not win a seat, Mayawati appointed him coordinator of the Vaishya Bhaichara Samiti and chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Bridge Corporation Ltd. After being expelled from the BSP in 2009, he joined the Congress Party as chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee’s Traders’ Cell, becoming the party’s Lucknow president in 2013 before resigning in 2014 to join the BJP, finally winning his first seat (Lucknow North) in 2017. Meanwhile, in 2012 he also lost a campaign to become mayor of Lucknow. 54 Jito in Hindi means “win” (in the imperative). According to its website, JITO is a “worldwide organisation of Jain businessmen, industrialists, knowledge workers and professionals reflecting the glory of ethical business practices.” Its vision is “To become a World Class organization, to achieve higher economic prosperity and to take care of the underprivileged” (Jain International Trade Organization website, https://jito.org /). 55 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars. 56 JITO Ahmedabad Chapter, “JITO Global Summit 2009,” June 24, 2013, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=n-MsSRj4j1s. 57 Swami Ramdev, “JITO Connect 2016,” April 12, 2016, https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=8O1LjpLLtl4. 58 On the dubbing of a Bollywood film in French for the Francophone market via Mauritius, see Grimaud, “Maps of Audiences.” 59 In May 2001, Aastha TV featured a live Ram Katha recitation in Mauritius by Morari Bapu via satellite in 156 countries, the first such broadcast of a katha (a narrative recitation; in this case, of the Ramayana, interspersed with commentary). Morari Bapu, a Gujarati, has made statements supporting Narendra Modi and has close links with Baba Ramdev (“Aastha Beams First Ever Live Satellite Telecast of ‘Ram Katha’ from Mauritius,” Indiantelevision.com, May 24, 2002, https://www .indiantelevision.com/headlines/aastha-beams-first-ever-live-satellite-telecast-of -ram-katha-from-mauritius). On Baba Ramdev’s takeover of Aastha, see “Behind the Curtain,” The Caravan, September 2012, 1, http://www.caravanmagazine.in /perspectives/behind-curtain. 60 Narendra Modi, “Statue of Unity,” Narendra Modi blog (official website), October 7, 2010, https://www.narendramodi.in/ma/statue-of-unity-3018. 61 The video no longer appears to be available. “Modi Announces Statue of Unity Project near Narmada Dam (Video),” Desh Gujarat, October 6, 2010, accessed July 12, 2106, http://deshgujarat.com/2010/10/06/modi-announces-statue-of-unity -project-near-narmada-dam. A later version of that video is still online in some countries (apparently not in the United States) at http://www.dnaindia.com/india

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/report-rs-200-crore-for-sardar-vallabhbhai-patel-statue-but-only-rs-100-crore-for -women-across-india-2001119 (accessed May 3, 2020). 62 Patel’s efforts to unify the princely states began with India’s independence in 1947. It would be worthwhile to trace the rise of the term global to describe the news; presumably, it occurred well after Marshall McLuhan’s term global village gained currency in the 1960s. Even the BBC’s “World” Service was not named as such until 1965. 63 “Modi Announces Statue of Unity Project near Narmada Dam (Video).” 64 In Sanskrit, namo means “I bow to” or effectively (since it is used in prayers) “I worship.” 65 Comments section, “Modi Announces Statue of Unity Project near Narmada Dam (Video).” 66 The term suraj or su-rajya predates this World Bank version, however. For instance, it was used in 1957 by the Gandhian K. G. Deodhar, of the Ambar Charkha Instructional wing, Khadi and Village Industries Commission, in a text reflecting on the nation’s progress since independence (the ambar charkha was a new type of spinning wheel used to spin khadi fiber) (Deodhar, Ambar Charkha Kyon?, 1). I thank Leslie Hempson for this reference. According to a speech by Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani in 2004, he had used the terms swaraj and suraj in 1997 to compare the Congress Party and the BJP while on the Swarna Jayanti Rath Yatra (a procession across the country commemorating fifty years of Indian independence). This, Advani claimed, aided the BJP’s victory in the 1998 elections (“Promise of Good Governance Helped BJP in 1998: Advani,” The Hindu, March 1, 2004, http:// www.thehindu.com/2004 /03/01/stories/2004030105531100.htm). 67 “Government to Open Museums to Honour Tribal Freedom Fighters: Narendra Modi,” Economic Times, September 17, 2017, https://economictimes.indiatimes .com/news/politics-and-nation/government-to-open-museums-to-honour-tribal -freedom-fighters-narendra-modi/articleshow/60722299.cms. 68 Aarefa Johari, “ ‘Statue of Unity Tourism Zone Will Displace Us from Our Lands’: Why Adivasis Protested Modi Event,” Scroll.in, November 1, 2018, https://scroll.in /article/900473/drowned-dreams-why-nearly-300-adivasis-were-detained-before -modi-could-unveil-the-statue-of-unity. 69 Nandini Oza, “Statue of Unity: NGO Sues Gujarat Gov[ernmen]t over Shifting of Crocodiles,” The Week, February 5, 2019, https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2019 /02/05/ngo-sues-gujarat-government-over-shifting-of-crocodiles.html. 70 “Gujarat to Get World Class Zoo near Statue of Unity: Official,” Livemint, August 18, 2019, https://www.livemint.com/news/india/gujarat-to-get-world-class-zoo -near-statue-of-unity-official-1566133573917.html. 71 Citizens for Accountable Governance, headquartered in Gandhinagar and consisting of a group of young, highly educated professionals, was the “unofficial support team” for Modi’s 2014 election campaign (“Cagey: A New Style of Indian Campaign,” The Economist Banyan Asia blog, February 10, 2014, http://www.economist .com/blogs/banyan/2014 /02/new-style-indian-campaign). 72 “Farmers’ Iron Not to Be Used for Sardar Patel Statue,” DNA India, December 9, 2013, accessed July 21, 2016, http://www.dnaindia.com/ahmedabad/report-farmers

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-iron-not-to-be-used-for-sardar-patel-statue-1932089. It was also reported that schoolchildren had been coerced into participating in the run and fined if they did not (“Notice to Students for Not Attending Narendra Modi’s Run for Unity,” NDTV, December 22, 2013, http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/notice-to-students-for -not-attending-narendra-modis-run-for-unity-545304). Parimal A. Dabhi, “L&T to Build Statue of Unity, Centre Grants Rs 200 Crore,” Indian Express, July 11, 2014, https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/lt -to-build-statue-of-unity-centre-grants-rs-200-crore/. Vasudhevan Sridharan, “India Has World’s Largest Statue, but Satisfying Modi’s Ego Still a Tall Order,” South China Morning Post, October 31, 2018, https://www .scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/2171060/india-has-worlds-largest-statue -satisfying-modis-ego-still-tall. “Accenture Creates High-Impact Digital Solutions and Builds India’s First Civic Crowdfunding Platform for Iconic Gujarat Government Project,” Accenture report, 2015, https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets /DotCom/Documents/Global/PDF/Digital_3/Accenture-PS1508-75-SoU%20Credential-Ver13.pdf. In October 2017, it emerged that several oil companies in the Indian public sector had been directed to channel their mandatory corporate social responsibility funds to the statue to make up for a funding shortfall in 2016–17. This was justified on the grounds of protecting “national heritage, art and culture” but flagged as dubious in the comptroller and auditor-general’s report for that period (Sachin P. Mampatta, “5 P[ublic] S[ector] U[ndertaking]s Gave Rs 1.47 B[illio]n for Statue of Unity,” Rediff .com, November 8, 2018, https://www.rediff.com/news/report/5-psus-gave-rs-147-bn -for-statue-of-unity/20181108.htm). “Gujarat C[hief] M[inister] Unveils Statue of Unity Replica,” Economic Times, October 31, 2015, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation /gujarat-cm-unveils-statue-of-unity-replica/articleshow/49611122.cms. “Gujarat Government to Develop Tourist Circuit on Sardar Patel, Says CM Anandiben Patel,” Economic Times, May 4, 2015, https://economictimes.indiatimes .com/news/politics-and-nation/gujarat-government-to-develop-tourist-circuit-on -sardar-patel-says-cm-anandiben-patel/articleshow/47142874.cms. Glorious Gujarat is just one of a series of “global” Gujarati conventions in New Jersey, which include Chaalo Gujarat (since 2012) and Global Gujarati Conference (since 2013; the 2016 edition was called Gatisheel Gujarat). Gujarat has held a biennial Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors’ Summit since 2003. But diasporic Gujarati pride is not a new phenomenon. The magazine Garavi Gujarat (Proud Gujarat) was started in 1968 in the United Kingdom and now has a U.S. edition. Its Englishlanguage section for second- and third-generation Gujaratis, GG2, gives out annual “Leadership and Diversity” awards known as the “ethnic Oscars,” including the GG2 Hammer Award for smashing through the United Kingdom’s glass ceiling (see Asian Media Group website, https://www.amg.biz/company). The popular phrase Garavi (or Garvi) Gujarat, often used by Modi—it is also a brand of snacks— comes from the patriotic poem “Jai Jai Garavi Gujarat” by Narmadashankar Dave

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(1833–86). In 2010, the government of Gujarat commissioned A. R. Rahman to create a musical version of the poem to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of Gujarat State. Gujaratis constitute one-fifth of Indians living in the United States, and in 2010 New Jersey had the highest percentage of Indians of any U.S. state (Parth Shastri, “Gujaratis 6 Percent of Indians, but 20 Percent of U.S. Indians,” Times of India NRI, January 4, 2015, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/Gujaratis -6-of-Indians-but-20-of-US-Indians/articleshow/45746350.cms). According to the Economic Freedom of the States of India report for 2013, Gujarat was the top state for “economic freedom.” This report was a retort to the listing of Gujarat as a “less-developed state” in the 2013 report of a panel aimed at rationalizing central allocations of funds to the states headed by Raghuram Rajan, who then became governor of the Reserve Bank of India (Swaminathan S. A. Aiyar, “Gujarat Is India’s Top State in Economic Freedom,” Economic Times, April 13, 2014, http:// economictimes.indiatimes.com/swaminathan-s-a-aiyar/gujarat-is-indias-top-state -in-economic-freedom/articleshow/33693169.cms; “The Report of the Dr. Raghuram Rajan Committee for Evolving a Composite Development Index of States,” September 26, 2013, https://dea.gov.in/sites/default/files/Report_CompDevState _press.pdf ). The “mantra of ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’ ” features in President Pranab Mukherjee’s address to Parliament on behalf of the Modi administration (“Address by the President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee to Parliament,” June 9, 2014, http://presidentofindia.nic.in/speeches-detail.htm ?293). For an interpretation and critique of this motto, see Ruparelia, “ ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance.’ ” The Statue of Liberty was named “Liberty Enlightening the World” and intended as a symbol of the Old World passing the beacon of Enlightenment to the New World, but the statue was soon resignified to turn the tables on the Old World, with its fleeing immigrants. The phrases “huddled masses” and “world-wide welcome” come from the poem “The New Colossus,” written by Emma Lazarus in 1883; the poem was used to raise funds for the pedestal and is engraved on a plaque on the statue. The comparison in the title is with the “conquering” Colossus of Rhodes, an emblem in the poem of the “storied pomp” of Europe. The Statue of Unity project is listed among others, with images, on the website of Michael Graves Architecture and Design, https://www.michaelgraves.com/projects /the-statue-of-unity. Meetu Jain, “Nationalism, Made in China,” Outlook, October 29, 2015, http://www .outlookindia.com/magazine/story/nationalism-made-in-china/295605; Paul John, “Iron Man Statue Is Outsourcing Magnet,” Times of India, October 30, 2016, http:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/Iron-man-statue-is-outsourcing -magnet/articleshow/55136676.cms. Jiangxi Tongqing’s other projects include a 54.36-meter Amitabha statue at the Lushan Donglin Temple (2007) and a 153.79meter copper tower at Changzhou (2006) (“Calendar Year Engineering Performance,” Jiangxi Tongqing Metal Handicrafts website, http://www.jx-yf.com/en /Item/list.asp?id=7).

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85 According to fDi Intelligence, a division of Financial Times Ltd., in 2015 “India replaced China as the top destination for [foreign direct investment] by capital investment following a year of high-value project announcements, specifically across the coal, oil and natural gas and renewable energy sectors” (The fDi Report 2016: Global Greenfield Investment Trends, Financial Times Ltd., London, 2016, 2). While the BJP government and the media were quick to link this growth in foreign direct investment to the “Make in India” initiative, there has been little discussion of how much of this growth is linked to the power and energy sectors rather than to “design and manufacturing.” 86 There are, in fact, two Statues of Equality; the other one is a 216-ft. statue of the Sri Vaishnava saint Ramanuja made of a five-metal alloy (panchaloha) at Muchintal, near Hyderabad airport, constructed by China’s Aerosun Corporation. It is a project of Chinna Jeeyar Swamy, the personal guru of Telangana’s Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao. As of early 2020, the statue had been built, but the site was still under development (see the Statue of Equality website, accessed May 2, 2020, https://www.statueofequality.org). Information on the Ambedkar statue proposal is from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority website, accessed January 10, 2019, https://mmrda.maharashtra.gov.in/indu-mill; Anand Teltumbde, “The ‘Precariat’ Strikes”; “Dalits to Vacate Indu Mills Land Today,” DNA India, December 30, 2011, https://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-dalits-to-vacate-indu -mills-land-today-1631399. 87 Swapnil Rawal, “Maharashtra Floated Tenders for Ambedkar Memorial without a Master Plan, Project Report,” Hindustan Times, June 13, 2017, https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/maharashtra-floated -tenders-for-ambedkar-memorial-without-a-master-plan-project-report/story -BOWyTkJHxtfuE6WX3z8AxI.html. 88 Teltumbde, “The ‘Precariat’ Strikes.” Vajpayee had just been narrowly relegated to leader of the opposition and was busy assembling the alliances that would bring the BJP back to power in 1998. He was clearly attuned to the power of monuments: Vajpayee had co-inaugurated the Mangal Mahadev in 1994. But more to the point, the year 1997 also marked Mayawati’s second term in office, and her monumentbuilding program was gathering steam, with both the BJP and the Congress/UPA forced to reckon with its power. 89 Teltumbde, “The ‘Precariat’ Strikes.” 90 “Mayawati Should Reimburse Public Money Spent on Building Statues, Observes Supreme Court,” Scroll.in, February 9, 2019, https://scroll.in/latest/912521 /mayawati-should-reimburse-public-money-spent-on-building-statues-observes -supreme-court. 91 In November 2019, the Statue of Unity’s average number of daily visitors was fifteen thousand; the Statue of Liberty’s was about ten thousand (“Statue of Unity Surpasses Daily Average Footfall at USA’s Statue of Liberty,” India Today, December 7, 2019, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/statue-unity-surpasses-daily -average-footfall-usa-statue-of-liberty-15-000-tourists-1626036-2019-12-07).

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92 “Man Puts Up Gujarat’s Statue of Unity for Sale on OLX to Meet Gov[ernmen]t’s COVID-19 Expenses, Case Filed,” News18, April 6, 2020, https://www.news18.com /news/india/man-puts-up-gujarats-statue-of-unity-for-sale-on-olx-to-meet-govts -covid-19-expenses-case-filed-2565963.html. Section 195A of the Indian Penal Code, discussed in chapter 2, deals with “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” However, the cases against the unknown prankster, inexplicably identified as male, were filed under the Epidemic Diseases Act (1897) and the Information Technology Act (2000). International media reports framed the episode as part of a spike in cybercrime during the pandemic. See, for instance, “India: Virus Spikes Cybercrime, World’s Tallest Statue ‘on Sale,’ ” Al Jazeera, April 7, 2020, https://www .aljazeera.com/news/2020/04 /india-virus-spikes-cybercrime-world-tallest-statue -sale-200407070035468.html.

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Index

Page numbers followed by f indicate illustrations. Adityanath, Yogi, 4, 281n97 Adivasis, 249. See also Indigenous communities advertising, 126, 191, 211, 290n22 aesthetics, 175, 182, 189, 196, 212, 226, 245, 261n14, 265n61, 266n14; automobile, 188, 191, 290n22; and numbers, 175, 294n70; and politics, 5–6, 27, 83–84, 222, 296n13; primary, 7–8, 261n15. See also infrastructure: sensible; shastras; touch: corpothetic Akshardhams, 5, 131, 155, 200, 208, 239, 260n8. See also theme parks; temples Ambedkar, B. R., 92, 108, 110, 280n92; birth anniversary of (Ambedkar Jayanti), 109, 111; icons and statues of, 72, 76f, 109, 111, 116–17, 223, 229, 280n89, 304n86; memorial, xvii, 112–15, 200, 202, 256 anachronism, 24, 263n20. See also circuitry; heterochrony; layering; linearity; temporality; time anthropology, 9, 13, 259n4 art, 6, 16, 31, 71, 196, 263n40; aesthetic regime of, 260n13; calendar, 19, 32, 34, 79, 195, 233; corporate sponsorship of, 302n76; fine, 32, 174, 193; Hindu, 113; mass production of, 264n47; and scale, 72; spiritualization of, 292n48 art history, 5, 23, 27; canonical qualities of, 14–15; periodization and temporality in, 9–11, 22, 134; processual, 11, 35; and scale, 220; and secularization, 15–16, 174–75 Arya Dharma, 94–95, 98–99, 118, 246, 275n48

Arya Samaj, 92, 94–95, 118, 275n39. See also shuddhi ashrams, 95, 115, 159, 167, 193, 286n47; Art of Living, 134–35; Chinmaya, 50–52; Gita, 232–34, plate 11, plate 12; Vanvasi Kalyan, 279n80, 282n112; Vishwa Shanti, xiv, 52–54, 131, 167 assemblage, 8, 14–17, 19, 22, 24, 32, 47, 69, 83, 89, 100, 102, 108, 121–27, 141, 188, 217, 221, 224, 234, 236, 254–56, 259n4, 262n28; automotive, 183–85, 195, 202–5, 218–19, 229, 297n24; logics of, 25, 201, 289n11; materiality of, 29, 31; media, 67, 190; statues in, 27, 35, 141, 245, 267n22; theories of, 11–13, 262n22 aura, 24, 26, 68, 120, 124, 126–27, 129, 135, 159–60, 163, 173–80, 195, 213–14, 226, 232, 251, 254, 278n78, 280n86, 282, 287n56, 289n11, 294n72 authenticity, 64, 66–68, 79, 99, 173, 179, 209, 238, 283, 294n63, 296n5 authority, 93, 115, 123, 159, 169, 174, 178, 212, 239; auratic/cultic, 26, 126–27, 135, 167, 174; of numbers, 123, 129–31, 136, 179–80, 183, 254, 274n33; political, 46, 238; religious, 131, 135–36, 170, 174, 176–77, 180, 225; textual, 98, 106 automobile industry, 45, 141, 183, 185–86, 189, 226 automobility, 58, 141, 182–93, 196, 200–201, 224, 290n22, 291n36, 295n83. See also cars; highways Avadhoota Datta Peetham, xvi, xvii, 78, 135, 227, 232, 236. See also Datta Ganga; Sri Sachchidananda, Swami Ganapathy

Ayodhya, 4, 27, 42, 82, 219. See also Ramjanmabhoomi Movement Baba Ramdev. See Ramdev, Baba Bachoo, Anil Kumar, xvi, xix, 236–37, 241, 299nn42–43 Bahubali, xiii, 71, 78, 169, 266n15 Bahujan Samaj Party, xvii, 72, 110, 244 Baij, Ramkinkar, 71 Bamiyan Buddhas, xiii, 2 Bangalore, xii, xiv–xvi, 18, 32, 37, 44, 47, 53f, 54, 55f, 56, 59–60, 63, 134–35, 144, 147f, 150, 155, 162, 167–68, 170, 191, 194, 217, 227, 267nn20–22, 270n44, 284n17, 285n35, 286n41, 287n50, 292nn41–43, 293n55; BangaloreTumkur highway, 52 Basaveshwara, 59, 61f, 64, 127. See also Lingayats bazaar, 18, 20–23, 100, 123, 125–26, 184, 222, 241, 244 Benjamin, Walter, 4, 12, 14, 16, 26, 30, 85, 102, 121, 124, 127, 129, 173–76, 179, 184, 273n26, 282–83, 287n53, 287n56 bhajans (devotional hymns), 94, 140–41, 144, 152, 156, 234; disco-, 219 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), xv, xvii, xix, 42, 82, 219, 230 Bhutan, xviii, 32, 268n26, plate 3 Bhutia, D. D., xviii, 65–66, 170, 217 biopolitics, 96, 108, 183, 224, 254 biopower, 91, 102, 125, 179 Birla, Basant Kumar (B. K.), xiv, xvii, 41, 42f, 43–44, 136, 140, 285n37 Birla Family, 23, 32, 34–35, 41, 43, 78, 96, 136, 189, 191, 199, 217, 223, 264n53, 292n50 Birla, G. D., 35, 41, 92–93 Birla, Jugal Kishore (J. K.), 93, 97–98 Birla Kanan, xvii, 33f, 40f, 41, 43, 45, 47f, 74, 136, 137–38f, 139–40f, 141, 141–42f, 143f, 145–46f, 159, 167, 195, 218, 236, 238, 267n16, plates 7, 8 Birla, Lakshmi Narayan (L. N.), 35, 38 324

Birla Mandir, 25, 34–35, 43, 68, 91, 93–97, 98f, 104, 114–15, 117, 138, 144, 177, 195–96, 222, 224, 275nn44–45, 276n49, 276n51, 276n54, 277n66 Birla Museum, 32, 34, 42 Birla, Ritu, 20–21, 264n53, 265n58 Birla, Sarla, 41, 42f, 44, 136, 285n38 Birla, S. K., xvii, 44 body politic, 82–83, 101, 115, 117 Bollywood, 229, 300n58 Bombay, 23, 31, 50, 88, 109, 264n53, 278n71; cinema of, 126, 290n18. See also Mumbai Bora, Dr. Neeraj, 243, 300n53 boundary-work, 17, 123, 283n9 Brahmins, 5, 8, 84, 87, 89–90, 97–98, 106, 163, 169, 241, 287n48. See also priests brick, 35, 82, 98, 249 bronze, xiii, xvii–xviii, 11, 46, 67, 71–72, 74, 76–77f, 109, 112–13, 208, 252, 256, 270n41 Buddha, 68, 170, 256; statues of, xiii–xiv, xvi, 2, 19, 45, 67, 69, 71, 78, 117, 199, 229, 260n5, 266n15, 267n17, 268n26, 269n32, 269n37, 280n86, 290n27. See also Sakyamuni; Tian Tan Buddha Buddhists, 94–95, 197. See also Dalai Lama Calcutta, xiv, 85, 96, 264. See also Kolkata calendars, 20, 89, 187 canonicity, 262n34. See also emergence canons, 14, 69, 106, 108. See also Hinduism; icon; iconography; iconopraxis; images; materials; religion; ritual; statues; temples; text capital, 20, 26, 134, 178, 183–84, 212, 224–25, 241, 251, 253, 263n40, 297n24, 304n85; mobile, 212–16, 261n18; political, 199; symbolic, 124, 239 capitalism, 10, 21, 29, 46, 89, 122, 176, 183, 187, 208, 209, 220–21; vernacular, 3, 6, 12, 18, 20, 184, 264n57, 294n73 Carapichaima, xii, xvi, 78, 135, 227–28, plate 11 Caroni (1975) Ltd, 227–29. See also sugar

INDEX

cars, 3, 185–91, 193, 202, 212, 236, 286n18. See also automobility; highways; Maruti caste, 15, 25, 85, 87, 96–98, 106–7, 119, 122, 124, 135, 163, 174, 178, 196, 210, 225, 232, 236, 239, 241, 251, 257, 273n32, 279n80, 284n27, 299nn49–50; Gandhi and, 89–93, 253, 274n36; sensorium of, 5–9, 13, 26, 101, 127, 222; and social power, 20, 22–24, 243–44; and violence, 103–4, 109–16, 272n15, 280n90; and voting, 82, 91, 254 casteism, 113, 280n92 Catholics, 60, 104, 191, 230 cement, 29, 31, 35, 41–45, 50, 52, 56–57, 61–62f, 71, 78, 98, 109, 137f, 185, 236, 265n2, 266n11, 267n19, 270n42; plasticity of, 37–38. See also concrete census, 91, 102, 124–25 Chambal Devi, xiii, 72, 73f Chamling, Pawan, xvi–xvii, 44, 58, 64–65, 70, 128, 131, 133f, 194, 197, 217, 237 Char Dham, xii, 58, 64–65, 128–34, 150, 176, 196, 197f, 217, 254, 279n80. See also Solophok charitable trusts, 3, 32, 35, 43–44, 54, 58, 150, 155, 158f, 244, 250. See also philanthropy Chatterjee, Sris Chandra, 97–99, 276n54 Chennai, xii, 41, 296n2. See also Madras Chhindwara, xviii, 3, 44, 127 Chinmaya Mission, xiv–xv, 44, 50, 104, 131, 284n26. See also Shri Chinmaya Chitrashala Press, 85, 87 Christianity, 118, 273n30 Christians, 92, 95, 105, 108, 118, 131, 232, 251, 275n48, 276n49, 278n73, 298n30; Syrian, 60, 104 cinema, 3, 20, 22–23, 47, 88, 126, 155, 185–88, 190, 195, 265n61 circuitry, 27, 121, 125, 135, 170, 175, 233, 250, 255, 279n80. See also temporality circuits, 6, 88, 100, 116–18, 124, 129–30, 163, 176, 211, 216–17, 232, 242, 246, 253,

INDEX

257, 262n22, 283n10; global, 225–28; and networks, 12, 16–17, 24; productive, 31, 80, 170; of scales, 26–27, 117, 221, 224, 250, 255; tourist, 251, 268n30 circulation, 10, 14, 20, 43, 89, 102, 187, 190, 250, 252, 260n7, 294n66 clay, xiv, 50, 67, 86f Coimbatore, xii, xix, 155, 193 colonialism, 19, 82, 101, 174, 265n58, 274n34, 294n73 commensuration, 13, 17, 70, 85, 91, 102–3, 108–9, 112–33, 173, 179, 221, 225, 234, 254, 274n33, 277n66, 280n86, 283n3. See also enumeration concrete, xiv–xix, 1–2, 11–12, 17, 24, 35, 41, 47, 55–60, 67, 71–73, 80, 95, 99, 104, 111, 131, 134, 144, 163, 169, 183–88, 196, 208, 218, 221, 232, 235, 260n5, 291n36, 297n22; material qualities of, 25, 29–31, 50, 79; modernity of, 74, 78; plasticity of, 38, 224; reinforced cement, 29, 61–62f, 137f, 265n2, 270n42; and scale, 99. See also cement Confederate monuments, 2, 7, 19 Congress Party, xvi, xviii, 3, 42–44, 58, 63, 87, 92, 97, 105, 109, 116, 199, 244, 264n50, 274n35, 280n92, 281n109, 298n22, 300n53, 301n66, 304n88 copper, 11, 42, 67–69, 208, 303n84 corpothetics. See touch counting, 91, 102, 134, 274n36. See also census; numbers; quantification Cow Protection Movement, 85, 250–51, 272n15 cult value and exhibition value, 1, 5, 16, 26, 67–68, 124, 129, 163, 173–78, 184, 196, 214, 232. See also art; iconic exhibition value; museums culture, 2, 9–10, 12, 16–17, 19, 21, 24, 108, 123, 74, 176, 208, 261n18, 265n58; and consumption, 210, 294n63; material, 15; and nature, 85, 261n17, 288n6; and secularism, 197, 226, 228, 259n4; visual, 11, 15. See also transculturation 325

culture industries, 20, 22, 178, 192–93, 263n40 custom, 10, 19, 21, 24; and law, 22, 88. See also culture Dalai Lama, 65–66, 70, 136, 267n17, 269n34, 280n86 Dalits, 5–8, 27, 72, 101–18, 127, 163, 177, 177, 218, 23, 227, 241, 247, 251, 256–57, 268n31, 272n15, 273n32, 279n80, 280n87, 280n90, 281nn104–5, 282n112; monuments, 25, 74, 83–84, 181–82, 223, 229; and temple entry, 7, 90–95, 222, 276n49. See also untouchability Dalit Panthers, 109–10 dams, xii–xiii, 5, 29–30, 56–57, 78–79, 99, 212; Bhakra Nangal, 72; Gandhi Sagar, 72, 73f; Hoover, 188; Mangla, 270n38; Nagarjunasagar, 269n37; Sardar Sarovar mega-dam, 72, 81, 118, 247–48 darshan, 5, 90, 103, 107, 140, 168, 191, 226, 273n29, 279n82, 286n44 Datta Ganga, 227, 235–36, 254, 297n21 Delhi, xii, xiv, 3, 18, 23, 25, 33f, 34–35, 41f, 42–45, 46f, 47, 54, 68, 71, 78, 81, 91, 93, 94f, 96f, 97f, 98f, 101,109, 112, 181, 185, 193, 195, 208, 212, 219, 266n15, 267n16, 276n51, 295n83, 296n2; airport, 38, 40f, 136, 191, 198, 267n18, 285n36, 292n50; Development Authority, 125, 212; metro stations in, 127, 192f; Greater, 72, 182; New, xv–xvii, 137f, 138f, 139f, 169, 192f, 250, 269n15, 299n44; Old, 38, 290n27; School of Planning and Architecture, 31, 74. See also Gurgaon; Noida democracy, 5, 22–25, 80, 82, 180, 223–25, 253–55, 257; electoral, 30, 46, 91, 102, 108, 254–55, 277n66; representative, 211, 213 desecration, 81, 89, 103–4, 109, 115–16, 119, 270n2, 280n89, 281n104. See also iconoclash; iconopraxis 326

development, 5, 16, 29–31, 45–46, 57, 61, 63, 70, 80, 173, 182–88, 199, 208, 212–13, 217, 220, 224, 249, 252, 257, 282n111, 292n41; capitalist, 10, 208; rural, 118; tourist, 66, 88, 192, 196–97, 215; uneven, 183, 208, 263n40; urban, 3, 60, 184, 187, 192–96, 214, 291n38. See also infrastructure; unevenness developmentalism, 72, 79, 105, 173, 182–83, 248 dharamshalas. See pilgrim guesthouses dharma, 52, 94–98, 275n45, 275n48. See also Arya Dharma Dharmasthala, xiii, 78, 162, 169, 266n15, 287n50 diaspora: Indian, 2, 18, 27, 135, 228–36, 244–46, 252, 298n35. See also IndoTrinidadians; Mauritius; Trinidad dioramas, 35, 37f, 38, 55–57, 99, 128, 150, 156f, 162, 163, 175, 200, 217 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 14, 175, 282, 287n56 Disneyfication, 35, 122, 208, 209, 252, 291n38, 293n56 Disneyization, 208, 293n56 dissensus, 6–8, 12, 93, 111, 115, 296n13 distinction, 15, 21, 84, 93, 100, 122–24, 129, 174, 177, 199, 213, 260n11, 287n54 distribution. See redistribution; sensible: redistribution of donations, 150, 155, 242, 244, 267n25 Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), xv, 71, 105, 127, 223. See also Karunanidhi Durbar, Imperial, 101, 277n66 Durga, xvii, xix, 45, 59, 63, 127, 129, 135, 232, 236, 238–39, 285n33 Durga Puja, 43, 50, 67, 84–87, 96, 118, 122, 177, 219, 223, 272n17, 283n6 Dwarka Dham, xii, xv, 18, 24, 58, 65, 128–29, 138f, 267n24, 279n80 economic reforms, 2, 4, 108, 125, 129, 183– 84, 217, 264n50. See also liberalization

INDEX

efficacy, 11, 16, 18, 26, 155, 174, 215, 223, 239, 244–45, 255; iconic, 4, 87, 89, 91, 123, 136, 247; of images, 9, 104, 124; political, 173, 211, 222; of statues, 27, 167–68, 176, 194, 214, 232, 234, 280n86 embodiment, 2, 90, 103, 212, 223, 255 emergence, 4–8, 11–19, 24–25, 30, 35–38, 50, 63, 80, 83–85, 90, 122, 174–75, 183–85, 224, 255. See also canonicity; canons Emergency, State of, 110, 223, 264n50 enumeration, 70, 85, 124–28, 274n34. See also commensuration; numbers environmentalism, 2, 182, 196–97, 226 equality, 22, 120–21, 173, 178, 225, 232, 271n4; verification of Dalit, 12, 27, 222, 255. See also Statue of Equality festivals, 13, 20, 25, 46, 63, 66–67, 89, 101, 103, 108, 120, 175–76, 276n51, 297n21; Muslim, 88; sārvanajik, 93–94, 96, 99, 107, 124, 138, 152, 170, 179, 222, 234. See also Durga Puja; Ganapati Utsav; Kanwar Yatra; Kumbh Mela; mandals; Muharram; Shivaratri fiberglass, 31, 58–59, 67, 80, 110, 224, 239 fiscal decentralization (devolution), 27, 216, 224, 248, 254 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), 242, 304n85 Forty, Adrian, 30, 79, 221, 265n2 Foucault, Michel, 7, 26, 183–84, 209, 261n14 Ganapati, 50, 52f, 59–60, 67, 191, 223, 245 Ganapati Puja. See Ganapati Utsav Ganapati Sthapati, V. See Sthapati, V. Ganapati Ganapati Utsav, 25, 50, 84–88, 96, 101, 110, 115, 118, 191, 219, 272n17, 276n58 Gandhi, Indira, 110, 189, 264n50, 266n15 Gandhi, M. K., xviii, 34, 43, 71, 92–97, 104, 107, 113–15, 127, 223, 231, 233, 247– 50, 253–54, 274n36, 275n48, 284n104

INDEX

Gandhinagar, 131, 250, 301n71 Ganesh (Ganesha), 167, 286n48; statues of, xiv–xvii, 37, 45, 137–38f, 146, 151f, 158f, 193–94, 230–33, 239, 275n45, 286n44. See also Ganapati Utsav Ganeshotsav. See Ganapati Utsav Ganga Talao, xii, xvi, xix, 44–45, 127, 135–36, 137f, 235–45, 254, 298n37, 298n41, plates 13, 14 Gangtok, 32, 217, 268n30, 269n32 gara (material), 50, 267n19 garbhagriha. See sanctum gender, 6–7, 89, 103, 201, 210, 284n27; of stone, 78 genre, 3–4, 10–13, 29, 84, 102–3, 121, 123, 156, 178, 199, 209, 255, 260n5, 264n47, 290n18 gifts, 20–21, 71, 127, 215, 217, 247; anonymous, 199. See also donations; philanthropy globality, 26, 117, 214–16, 225, 229, 246, 252 globalization, 221–24, 245, 253, 293n12 gods, 1, 5, 29, 35, 72, 193, 195–96. See also individual gods gopurams (entrance towers), 5, 56–57, 106–7, 127, 159, 163, 169, 175, 179, 201, 223, 267n23, plate 10 governance, 7, 20–22, 184, 222, 248–50, 254, 303n81. See also suraj (good governance) governmentality, 13, 26, 120–29, 180, 183, 197, 224 granite, xiii–xviii, 38, 41, 71, 78, 106, 127, 169, 191, 223, 232, 260n5, 266n15, 267n17, 269n37, 280n86 Gujarat, xv, xix, 4, 24, 72, 117, 137f, 182, 217, 238, 244, 246–51, 257, 302nn79–81 Gurgaon, xiv, 1, 3, 32, 38, 41f, 43–44, 46–47, 137f, 141, 169, 185, 186f, 189, 191, 200, 202, 217, 290n27, 293n54 gurudwaras, 70, 102, 118 Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava), xviii, 44, 58, 64–65, 70, 198, 268n26, plate 3 327

Hanuman, 38, 189; statues of, xiv–xix, 2–3, 37, 39f, 44, 46f, 50, 51f, 54, 60, 78, 116, 127, 135, 185, 191, 192f, 193–94, 199, 227–28, 232–34, 256, 260n5, 270n44, plate 5 haptic. See touch Haridwar, xii, xv, 37, 44–45, 58, 137f, 141, 150, 195, 219, 235, 279n80, 282n112, 295n83, plate 7 Heggade, Veerendra, Dr., xiii, 41, 169, 266n15, 287n50 heterochrony, 1, 16–17, 262n38, 263n40. See also anachronism; circuitry; layering; linearity; temporality; time heterogeneity, 79, 123, 184, 196, 263n40, 271n4 highways, 3, 30, 50, 52, 58, 60–61, 141, 144, 181–82, 185, 187–91, 194, 199, 201, 212, 218, 231, 236, 249–50, 290n18. See also automobility; cars, roads; space: interurban Hinduism, 50, 52, 95, 99, 105, 108, 118, 127, 131, 233, 246, 298n35; canonical, 279n80; caste, 101, 196; neospiritualist, 229. See also Vedantism Hindu House, 136, 239–41, 243–45, 247 Hindutva, 4, 43, 95, 117, 122, 229, 243f, 246, 248, 275n48, 278n78, 298n35. See also nationalism: Hindu history, 29–30, 68, 74, 98–99, 131, 155, 170, 226, 229, 262n38, 269n33, 276n53. See also art history iconic exhibition value, 18, 24, 26, 55, 91, 98, 176–79, 183, 196, 214, 232, 244 iconicity, 79, 114 iconoclash, 104, 115–16; and iconoclasm, 277n68. See also desecration iconography, 14, 24–25, 84, 196, 208, 214; canonical, 102; Hindu, 45, 55 iconoplasty, 14 iconopraxis, 4, 6, 13–16, 19, 24–26, 58, 90, 102, 107–9, 111, 125, 129, 136, 140, 170, 184–86, 192, 195, 199, 208, 215, 217, 224–25, 232, 234, 238, 241, 245–46, 328

273n26, 283n10; canonical and noncanonical, 26, 90, 98; emergent, 116, 120; infrastructures of, 80, 121; innovation in, 31, 43, 84–85, 88, 101, 123, 175–78, 226–27, 254–55; and numbers, 126, 173; sārvanajik, 112, 179 icons, 16, 19, 35, 38, 50, 58, 65, 79–80, 82, 84–85, 87, 91–95, 100, 140, 144, 146, 178, 198, 200, 211, 223–24, 233, 239, 247, 251, 255, 257; atheist, 106, 127; Buddhist, 2, 256; canonical, 78; and darshan, 90, 177; defacement of, 103–4, 109; Dalit, 74, 102, 111–12, 115, 181–82, 256; Hindu, 2, 38, 113, 128; Jain, 2, 169; monumental, 107, 193, 195, 226–27; printed, 3, 8, 20, 22, 89, 270n45; public, 67, 117, 277n26; religious, 4, 15, 27, 31, 81, 136, 246, 257n17; secular, 2, 5, 31; temple, 208, 222. See also murti idols, 50, 85, 87–88, 108, 223, 280n89. See also murti images, 1–2, 4–7, 10, 23, 27, 30, 35, 64, 79, 85, 90, 109, 116, 124, 179, 188, 206f, 256, 260n13, 264n46, 282–83, 294n66, 297n17; canonical, 26, 98, 138; iconic, 15, 22, 102–4; as mediators, 210–12; printed, 20, 103, 265n63, 272n15; religious, 3, 14–15, 16, 18, 120–21, 173–77, 280n86. See also icons; murti India: as category, 18; central, 60, 194–95, 272n15; colonial, 24, 91, 102, 124, 174; medieval, 14; northern, 47, 110, 141, 176, 218, 229, 235–36, 238–39, 272n15; South, 55, 71, 88, 162, 231, 273n25; western, 50, 108, 110, 118, 229. See also diaspora: Indian Indigenous communities, 60–61, 63, 72, 117–18, 194, 200, 248–49, 278n70, 279n80, 282n112, 286n39. See also Adivasis; Scheduled Tribes Indo-Trinidadians, 227–29, 233, 234, 246, 297n22, 297n25 infrastructure, 5, 26–27, 45–46, 72, 83, 120–21, 170, 177, 184, 192–96, 211,

INDEX

214, 253; poetics of, 24, 31, 71, 80, 212, 261n16, 263n41; scale of, 78–79, 214, 216, 224, 248; sensible, 6, 8, 13, 25, 90, 103, 107, 127, 178, 216, 218, 221–23, 225, 246, 248, 254–55; state use of, 30, 81, 181–82, 189; transport, 56, 188, 250. See also dams; highways; railways; roads; trains International Society for Krishna Consciousness, 134, 194, 239 iron, 63, 82, 248–49, 271n7, 298n33, 299n41. See also steel Islam. See Muslims; mosques; Muharram Islamophobia, 122, 229 Jains, 94, 169, 191, 246, 300n54 Jayalalithaa, J., 3, 106, 271n6 jyotirlingas (Shiva shrines), 55, 58, 126, 128, 133f, 154f, 156f, 217, 254 Kaktikar, Jai, 74 Kanwar Yatra, 141, 218–19, 235–36, 238, 286n40, 295n83, plate 7 Kanyakumari, xiii, xv, 71, 78, 104–7, 127, 267n17, 278n70, 279n80, plate 6 Karnataka, xiii–xviii, 2, 41, 47, 50, 55–56, 59–60, 63–64, 170, 185, 191, 193, 207f, 217, 266n15, 286n48, 287n50 Karunanidhi, M., 71, 106, 223, 267n17 Kashinath, K., xiv–xvi, 32, 47, 49f, 50, 51f, 52–55, 58–60, 78, 85, 86f, 104, 131, 162, 167, plates1, 2 Kashinath, Sridhar. See Sridhar, S. Kemp Fort, xiv, 37, 54–58, 128, 134, 191, 193, 195, 199, 267n20, 293n51, plate 1. See also Melwani, Ravi; RVM Foundation Kirateshwar, 64, 128f, 131, 132f Kolkata, xii, 41, 43. See also Calcutta Krishna, 35, 37, 108, 194–95; painting of, 239, 242f; statues of, xiv, xvii, 1–3, 41, 45, 52, 53f, 139f, 144–46, 167, 193, 233; temple of, 232

INDEX

Kumar, Gulshan, xv, 23, 43–44, 58, 199, 215, 236, 238, 245, 267n24 Kushinagar, xii, xv, xix, 3, 199, 268n31 kutcha (raw, provisional), 29–30, 79–80, 265n2. See also pukka Lakshmi, 37, 45, 233 Lakshminarayan Mandir. See Birla Mandir land, 3, 13, 26, 64, 91, 93, 110, 125, 183–85, 188–90, 192, 195, 200, 202–4, 211, 217–18, 222–24, 226–29, 245–46, 256, 268n31, 275n48, 290n22, 291n32, 297n25 land grabs, 21, 54, 192, 198–99, 289n8, 293n51 landscape, 4, 35, 37–38, 64, 108, 117, 138, 159, 168, 182, 187, 193–96, 200, 202, 224, 225–27, 232–33, 290n19, 292n40 Latour, Bruno, 18, 83, 115, 177, 210, 263n46, 265n66, 277n68 layering, 17, 25, 31, 121–25, 131, 185, 217, 234–35, 250, 255, 263n40. See also temporality liberalization, 2, 5, 19–20, 23, 38, 82, 127, 187, 264n50; post-, 26, 31, 124, 141, 183, 223. See also economic reforms limestone, 50, 265n2. See also stone linearity, 14–15, 17, 262n22. See also anachronism; circuitry; heterochrony; layering; time lingams, 78, 129–30, 136, 138f, 144, 146, 148f, 150, 158f, 163, 166f, 167, 168f, 179, 195, 233, 239, 240f, 244, 254, 285n35, plates 9, 12; atmalinga, 56, 163, 165f, 168, 179, 217, 286n48 Lingayats, 59, 63. See also Basaveshwara lions, 96f, 168f, 182, 251, 253, 288n5 Lucknow, xii, xvii, 18, 74f, 112–14f, 200, 202, 281n99, 300n53 machines: automotive-photographic, 201–2; heavy, 30, 44; spectacle, 210 machinic linkages, 12, 202, 223 329

Madhya Pradesh, xiii, xv, xviii–xix, 2–3, 44, 59, 72, 73f, 194, 229, 288n5, 295n82 Madras, 50, 106. See also Chennai Madras Temple Entry Ordinance, 93, 276n49. See also Temple Entry Movement Madurai, 271n6, 276n49 Mahabharata, 98, 131, 167 Maharashtra, xiii, xv–xix, 4, 31, 88, 107, 191, 256 Mahavira, 38, 41f, 78, 169, 191, 266n15, 290n27, 296n1 Maitreya, xv, xix, 3, 66–67, 199, 260n5, 268nn31–32 Malaviya, Madan Mohan, 43, 92–93, 275n45, 275n48 mandals (organizing committees), 88–89, 101, 118 mandir. See temples Mangal Mahadev, xiv, 33f, 40f, 41–45, 54, 58, 136–46, 191, 198, 208, 236, 304n88, plates 7, 8 marble, xiii, 78, 97, 112f, 144, 233, 235, 265n2 Maruti, 3, 36, 56, 58, 165f, 172f, 185, 186f, 189–91, 201; and Sanjay Gandhi, 89 masses, 10, 82, 97, 120, 124, 174, 179, 252, 303n82 mass reproduction, 102, 124, 173–74, 178–79, 283 materialism, 83, 122; new, 9, 261n17 materiality, 83–84, 123, 155, 257 materials, 13, 18, 25, 30–31, 42, 45, 71, 74, 78–80, 99, 105, 183–84, 201, 224–25; canonical, 29, 35, 79, 106, 127, 232. See also individual materials Mauritius, xii, xvi, xix, 3, 18, 24, 27, 44–46, 127, 135–36, 137f, 191, 232, 234–47, 299nn42–43, 300n53, plates 13, 14 Mauritiuseshwarnath Temple, 135–36, 239, plate 14 Mayawati, Kumari, 3, 25, 72, 74, 76f, 77f, 83, 90, 93, 111, 114–18, 181–82, 199, 211, 330

223, 229, 257, 268n31, 273n32, 281n97, 281n104, 281n106, 300n53, 304n88 media, 3, 13, 15, 67, 103, 115–16, 121, 125–26, 177–79, 188, 200, 213, 216, 223, 234, 245; archaeology of, 16; emergent, 118–19; new technologies of, 22–23, 91, 190, 224 mediation, 5, 15, 210–11. See also remediation Melwani, Ravi, xiv, 54, 131, 150, 152, 169, 191, 197, 199, 286n42. See also Kemp Fort; RVM Foundation mimesis, 85, 91, 108, 112, 118, 238–39 miniatures, 34, 37, 221. See also replicas modernism, 25, 174, 183, 188, 221, 289n7, 290n18 modernity, 10, 16–17, 22, 24–25, 29–30, 74, 79, 121–23, 126, 175, 179, 183, 187, 212, 221, 225, 255, 259n4, 263n44, 265n2, 274n33, 285n31, 288n6, 289n8, 290n18, 294n73 Modi, Narendra, xix, 4, 19, 27, 32, 44, 81, 211, 246, 272n15, 278n78, 288n5; and Baba Ramdev, 244, 293n53, 300n59; and “economic freedom,” 252, 303n81; and Gujarat, 117, 182, 217, 247–48, 250–51; as prime minister, 32, 216, 225, 249, 253, 256. See also Statue of Unity monasteries: Buddhist, 32, 66–69 monumentality, 26, 84, 220–21 monuments, 2, 25, 30, 72, 74, 81–82, 93, 104, 106, 144, 198, 239, 248, 251, 255, 257, 266n15, 282n111, 296n4; Mayawati’s, 83, 93, 111, 115, 117, 182, 304n88. See also statues: monumental mosques, 42, 72, 87–88, 93, 102, 118, 231 Mourya, Baba Satyanarayan, 229, 232f mud, 29–30, 67, 109. See also clay Muharram, 91, 101 murals, 32, 34f, 55, 69f, 71–72, 97, 99, 115, 170, 233–34, 239, 242f, 270n38, plate 11 Murudeshwar, xii, xv, 55–58, 163, 163–76, 185, 191, 195, 200–209, 217, 226, 286n48, 296n2, plates 2, 9, 10. See also Shetty, R. N.

INDEX

Mumbai, xii, xvi, xix, 4, 88, 107, 110, 191, 243, 245, 256, 267n24, 304n86. See also Bombay murti (icon, idol), 1, 239, 285n38, 298n30. See also icons; idols; statues murtikar (icon maker), 2. See also sculptors museums, 31, 34, 99, 163, 177, 239, 248–49, 262n34, 289n14. See also Birla Museum Muslims, 87–88, 92, 95, 104–7, 117–18, 131, 230–31, 247, 272n15, 274n35, 275n39, 276n49, 278n73, 282n112 Mysore, xii, xviii, 78, 135, 227, 232, 270n44 Namchi, xii, xvi, xviii, 37, 44, 58, 64–66, 70, 128, 195–98, 217, 237, 296n2, plate 3 Nath, Kamal, xviii, 3, 44 nationalism, 23, 47, 105, 173, 196, 212, 217, 253; anticolonial, 20, 22, 222; Hindu, 4–5, 25, 42; religious, 19, 115, 121–23, 226. See also Hindutva nature, 15, 85, 170, 182–83, 187–88, 193, 196, 200, 222, 249, 261n17 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 72, 81, 92, 250 neoliberalism, 125, 213, 216, 254–55 neospiritual movements, 26, 50, 52, 54, 78, 117, 131, 155, 193, 223, 229, 236, 245, 249 Nepal, xvii, 32, 37, 67, 137f, 268n26, 269n32 networks, 9, 12, 17, 24, 100, 184, 190, 222, 261n16, 262n22, 263n46, 264n47, 296n12; community (caste, kin), 20– 22; global, 187, 241, 246; Mauritian, 237, 242, 244, 300n53; patronage, 88–89, 178, 214, 216–17. See also circuits New Delhi. See Delhi Noida, xii, 15, 43, 72, 74–77f, 112, 137f, 182, 200, 238, 269n35 numbers, 31, 91–93, 104–5, 117, 123–36, 179, 249, 254, 274n36, 278n78. See also commensuration; counting; enumeration; quantification; statistics numerology, 126, 254, 284n20

INDEX

Other Backward Classes, 7, 112, 141, 218, 251, 299n50 Padhasambhava. See Guru Rinpoche Panchavati Park, xiv, 35, 36f, 37, 39f, 59, 195 pandals. See shrines: neighborhood partage, 6, 90–91, 95, 296n13 Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai, 27, 82, 247, 250–51, 257, 301n62; statue of, 2, 4, 81, 117, 246, 249. See also Statue of Unity Patel, Yogesh, xv, 43, 117, 238 patronage, 32, 35, 45, 58–59, 88–89, 91, 123, 141, 169, 210, 243; religious, 46, 100–101, 124, 170, 174, 178, 182, 185, 196–99, 209, 214–18, 241, 244–45, 255 Phule, Jotirao (Jyotirao), 87, 108, 114, 276n58 pilgrim guesthouses (dharamshalas), 20, 56f, 162, 171f, 200 pilgrimage (yatra), 23, 44, 144, 150, 19–60, 163, 170, 195, 200, 202, 218, 226, 231, 235–36, 238, 250, 287n48; -cum-cultural complex, 58, 64, 88, 128, 196–97; -cum-tourism, 141, 185, 198, 211, 217, 279n80. See also Char Dham; Kanwar Yatra; rath yatra; Shivaratri; tourism philanthropy, 20–21, 34, 58, 169–70, 197, 215, 244–45, 247. See also charitable trusts; gifts; public good plasticity, 13, 27, 31, 37–38, 224–25, 246, 255 Poona Pact, 25, 91–93, 108, 114, 275n38 Poona Sarvanajik Sabha, 87–88, 101, 114, 276n58 populism, 5, 253–54 postmodernity, 187, 188, 209, 234 priests, 2, 5, 18, 64, 78–79, 84, 87, 90, 129–30, 144, 148f, 159, 163, 177–79, 238, 279n80, 299n48; and intercession, 124, 138, 215. See also Brahmins processions, 8, 42, 50, 85, 87–88, 102–3, 107–11, 117, 119–20, 175, 179, 206f, 219, 272n16, 287n57, 301n66. See also Durbar, Imperial; festivals; Muharram; rath yatra 331

progress, 16–17, 29–30, 182, 187, 221, 263n40, 282, 301n66 public good, 34, 83, 170, 182, 199, 266n10 publicness, 24, 26, 43, 87, 100, 124, 129, 210. See also sārvanajik public-private partnerships, 189, 215, 248 publics, 25, 35, 84, 88–89, 96, 99–101, 112, 115, 117–18, 120, 144, 178, 181, 190, 194, 222–23, 250, 265n59, 276n58. See also icon; sārvanajik; space; spectacle; statues pukka, 29–30, 78–80, 265n2. See also kutcha Punya-Bhoomi Bharat, 126, 128 quantification, 17, 26, 123, 125, 127, 129, 134–35, 173, 175, 179–80, 254. See also commensuration; enumeration; numbers; statistics Radha, vxii, 45, 139f, 144, 145–46f, 233 railways, 56, 64, 164f, 167, 191, 212, 226. See also trains Ram, 35, 42, 191, 195, 227; statues of, xvii, 4, 27, 37–39, 45, 47f, 59, 60f, 139f, 140f, 144, 233; temples of, 50, 249 Ram, Kanshi, 110–11, 117. See also Bahujan Samaj Party Ramayana, 35, 38, 227, 300n59 Ramdev, Baba (also Swami), 243f, 244–45, 293n53, 300n57, 300n59 Ranade, Eknath, 95, 105–6, 277n69, 278n70, 278n78 Rancière, Jacques, 6–7, 12, 261n14, 271n11, 296n13 Ramjanmabhoomi Movement, 42, 218, 229, 249, 286n40. See also Ayodhya Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 50, 95, 104–5, 107, 126–27, 131, 230–31, 246, 248, 276n51, 277n69, 279n80, 282n112 rath yatra (chariot procession), 42, 218, 301n66 332

Ravangla, xviii, 32, 65–67, 69–70f, 74, 136, 155, 170, 217, 251, 268n30, 269n32, plate 4. See also Sakyamuni realism, 34, 79, 195–96, 226, 266n14, 292n47 recognition, 7–9, 65, 79, 83, 100, 102, 115–16, 118, 120–21, 199–200, 214, 218, 225, 232, 245, 254–57, 274n36 redistribution, 118, 222–23, 254, 257, 274n36. See also sensible; sensorium reinforced cement concrete. See concrete relics, 55, 67–68, 74, 155, 170, 269n33 remediation, 14, 25, 262n31 religion, 2, 5–6, 10, 19–22, 27, 91, 99, 101, 131, 184, 211, 218, 225, 228, 233, 241, 283n1, 288n6; and art, 11, 15, 262n34; canonical, 25, 135, 176; and democracy, 254–57; and exhibition value, 175–78; and secularism, 15, 17, 24, 121–23, 259n4; and the state, 26, 32, 43, 70, 88, 124–25, 305n92; and temple entry, 94–95, 276n48. See also dharma; Hinduism; patronage; ritual Renaissance, 14–15, 273n27; Hindu, 229, 298n27 replicas, 64, 128, 144, 150, 157f, 158f, 176, 217, 250–51. See also miniatures replication, 43, 58, 65, 68, 129–30, 188, 218, 225, 227, 238 Republican Sena, 256 reterritorialization, 91, 101, 108, 115, 195–96, 222 ritual, 14, 19, 50, 54–55, 68, 81, 85, 129, 141, 144, 150, 167, 185, 217–18, 259n4, 286n48; and art, 15, 173–75, 283; canonical, 91, 134, 159; cyclicality of, 12, 89, 175, 249; novelty of, 155–56, 168; and purity, 92, 95–96, 109, 116, 118; and value, 69, 179, 324. See also iconopraxis roads, 29, 54, 56–57, 60, 83, 91, 104, 163, 170, 181–82, 189, 191–94, 218, 235–36. See also highways; infrastructure; shrines: roadside Romanticism, 15, 233, 262n34, 286n47

INDEX

RSS. See Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RVM Foundation Shiv Temple, Bangalore (Shivoham Shiva Temple), 144, 147–51f, 152–56, 157–58f, 159–60, 161–62f, 167–69. See also Kemp Fort; Melwani, Ravi Sachchidananda Swami, Sri Ganapathy, 78, 135, 227–28, 270n44, plate 5. See also Datta Ganga; Mysore; Trinidad sacred geography, 128, 202, 217 Sai Baba, xiv, 19, 59–60, 65, 193–94 Sakya brothers, xviii, 67–69, 85, plate 4 Sakyamuni, xviii, 65–67, 69–70, 74, 136, 170, 217, 251, 269n34, plate 4. See also Ravangla; Tian Tan Buddha Sanskrit, 106, 126–27, 284n21, 301n64 Sanatana Dharma, 85, 92–94, 176 Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, 52, 230, 297n20, 298n28, 299n44 sanctum, 5, 99, 107, 127, 131, 163, 169–70, 272n16, 276n54. See also shrine sandstone, xiv, 97, 98f, 144. See also stone sarvajan (all the people), 25, 99, 104, 114, 118, 233 sārvanajik (public), 84–85, 87–97, 100, 107, 112, 116–19, 124, 179, 222, 234, 275n45, 276n58 Saraswati, 37, 233, 239 Saraswati, Swami Swaroopananda, 65, 130f, 279n80 scale, 5, 18, 20–21, 27, 31, 58, 71, 78–79, 117, 128, 155, 170, 184, 189–90, 208, 214–17, 220–22, 224–25, 239, 244, 246–47, 250–54, 257, 277n66, 295n77, 296, 296n12; in assemblages, 11, 24; and infrastructure, 72, 99, 248; as spectacle, 136, 163, 213, 245; of statues, 26, 50, 55, 124, 127, 170, 191, 196, 271n4 scaling, 17, 26, 35, 216, 221, 223–34, 246, 253–55, 289n12 scale-making, 13, 216–17, 221–22, 225, 229, 234, 236

INDEX

Scheduled Castes, 280n92. See also Dalits; untouchability Scheduled Tribes, 63. See also Adivasis; Indigenous communities sculptors, 2, 4, 15, 18, 25, 31–32, 41, 44, 50, 58, 67, 71, 78–79, 84, 106, 169, 177, 202, 214, 216, 227, 259n2, 264n27, 265n2, 266n15, 268n16, 270n44, 271n4. See also murtikar; sthapati sculpture, 14, 32, 71, 78, 81, 127, 176, 200, 214, 235; monumental, 44, 224, 296n2. See also statues secular (the), 4, 16, 26, 104, 122–23, 177, 190, 259n4, 262n35 secularism, 17, 42, 91, 108, 257, 259n4, 280n92 secularization, 15, 174–75, 177, 184 sensible (the), 7–9, 23, 90, 93, 108, 114, 121, 125, 234, 260n6, 296n13; redistribution of, 4, 6, 11, 24, 84, 93, 115–16, 124, 179, 228, 235, 255, 271n11. See also infrastructure: sensible sensible regimes, 6, 103, 182–83, 222, 260n11, 283 sensorium, 5, 84, 89–90, 96, 114, 184, 224, 273n29; redistribution of, 13 Shahdol, xix, 18, 60, 194, 217 Shankar, Sri Sri Ravi, 135, 193, 285n35 Sharma, Pundit Satnarine, 233–34 shastras (classical texts), 176; Shilpa-, 78. See also canons; texts: canonical Shankara (also Shankaracharya), 129, 134, 144 Shetty, R. N., 55–57, 162, 163, 169–70, 171f, 185, 191, 197–200, 205f, 208, 217, 287nn50–52, 293n55. See also Murudeshwar shikharas (towers over central shrines), 5, 94f, 99, 159, 163, 179 Shiva, 37, 40f, 108, 117, 137f, 140, 144, 163, 176, 194–95, 233, 241–42, 285n38, 286n41, 286n48, 287n57; Kemp Fort statue of, xiv, 54–56, 58, 267n20, plate 1; Mangal Mahadev statue of, xiv, 333

Shiva (continued) 33f, 40f, 41–42, 54, 191, 198, 285n36; Murudeshwar statue of, xv, 162, 165–67, 169–70, 176, 201, 203f, 208, 226, 295n2, plates 2, 9, 10; statues of, xvi– xix, 2, 20, 24, 38, 45–46, 59–60, 64, 65f, 127, 137f, 139f, 141, 155, 162, 185, 214, 217, 230–31, 236, 279n80, 286n45, plate 12; temples of, 23, 56, 136, 235, 238–40. See also jyotirlingas; Kirateshwar; lingams; Mauritiuseshwarnath; RVM Foundation Shiv Temple; Shivaratri Shivaji: statue of, xvi, xix, 4, 27, 107, 117 Shivaratri, 44, 135, 152, 235, 237, 239, 245 Shiv Mahima, 23 Shiv Sena, 88, 107, 109, 182, 272, 285n31, 288n5 Shri Chinmaya (Chinmayananda), 50, 104, 131, 135, 278n73 shrines, xii, 5, 8, 20, 63, 67, 89, 162, 195, 226–27, 229, 230f, 232–33, 285n39, 297n21; neighborhood (pandals), 87, 179; roadside, 16, 140, 144, 175, 191. See also jyotirlingas; lingams shuddhi (purification, “conversion”), 92, 95, 118, 275n39. See also Arya Samaj Sikkim, xvi–xviii, 18, 32, 37, 44, 58, 63, 66f, 68–70f, 127–28, 136, 176, 196–97, 198f, 251, 267n24, 268n26, 279n80, plates 3, 4; South, 65, 217; West, 131 Sikkim Democratic Front, 65, 170 Sikhs, 92, 94, 275n39 Singh, Bhoor, 32 Sir J. J. School of Art, 31–32, 66 Sita, 35, 37, 45, 47f, 139f, 140f, 144, 191, 233 skyscrapers, 134, 188, 251–52 social mobility, 20, 22–24, 31, 46, 88, 100–101, 116, 196, 198, 218, 241, 245, 281n106 Solophok (Sikkim), xii, xvii, 64, 65f, 127–30, 150, 196, 197f. See also Char Dham space, 7–8, 24, 27, 60, 109, 119–21, 144, 156, 162, 179–80, 187, 190, 194, 200, 223–26, 334

232, 233–34, 290n18, 294n63; internal, 55–56, 67, 170; interurban, 61, 193, 199; outdoor, 26, 35, 64, 95, 138; peri-urban, 1, 61, 193, 195, 199, 250, 290n27, 292n41; public, 5, 12, 43, 81–82, 84, 87–91, 111, 277n59; sārvajanik, 94, 96, 99–101, 103–4, 112, 114–17; and scale-making, 213–15, 220–22, 229; and time, 10, 30, 188, 220, 224, 262n22, 283; urban, 167, 184, 187, 210, 267n20, 289n11; and visuality, 89–91 spatiality, 101 Special Economic Zones (SEZs), 10, 185, 193, 294n73 spectacle, 5, 8, 26, 55, 82, 84, 87, 100, 119, 156, 163, 167, 170, 173, 177, 188, 211–12, 215, 217–19, 248, 252–55, 279n80, 290n22, 294n66, 294n73; Aristotle on, 209, 220; Debord and Foucault on, 183–84, 208, 210, 293n60, 293n62; public, 88, 101, 122, 183; of scale, 136, 223, 234; and speculation, 184, 245; territorial, 61, 213–14 speculation, 20, 184, 211, 214, 245, 294n72 spirituality, 134–35, 155, 159, 167, 179, 193, 284n27. See also neospiritual movements Sridhar, S., xvi, 32, 58–60, 78, 131, 167 statistics, 120–21, 125–26, 179, 282. See also enumeration; quantification statues, 1–3, 10–12, 18–21, 24–26, 37, 52, 54, 61, 66–72, 109–13, 116, 118, 122–23, 260n5; aura of, 79, 232, 234, 251, 280n86; canonical forms of, 25, 38, 69; of Cecil Rhodes, 2; concrete, 17, 35, 55, 59, 78, 104, 131, 169, 218; and democracy, 80–84; height of, 19, 44–45, 60, 64, 127, 179, 191; Jain, 2, 266n15; of Jesus, 60; monumental, 4–6, 8, 13, 25–26, 29–32, 38, 50, 85, 91, 99, 128–30, 135–42, 162, 175, 183, 185, 190, 192–93, 195–96, 200, 202, 208, 213, 216–17, 220, 225–26, 236–37, 255, 267n17, 295n2; public, 7, 16, 46–47, 117, 121, 124. See also

INDEX

Buddha; Confederate monuments; desecration; efficacy: of statues; iconoclash; individual gods; Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai; Shiva; Shivaji; Thiruvallavar Statue of Equality, 256, 284n36 Statue of Liberty, xi, 4, 19, 67, 82–84, 107, 117, 188, 251–52, 257, 270n37, 271nn4–6, 303n82, 304n91 Statue of Unity, xix, 4, 19, 27, 32, 71–72, 81–83, 107, 117, 211, 217, 225, 237, 246, 249–50, 252–57, 269n32, 271n7, 282n11, 303n8, 304n91, 305n923 statue wars, 25, 84, 108 statuomania, 19, 81–82, 108, 264n48, 270n41 steel, xix, 29–30, 58, 63, 67, 72, 137f, 184, 212, 224, 271n7, 298n33 sthapati (traditional sculptor), xiv, xvi, 41, 78, 155, 177, 270n44 Sthapati, Ganapati V., 71, 106, 269n36, 270n44 Sthapati, S. M. Ganapati, 269n36 stone, 2, 29, 35, 41, 47, 58, 71, 74, 78–80, 113–14, 127. See also gender; limestone; sandstone structural adjustment, 27, 216, 246, 248. See also fiscal decentralization; World Bank sugar, 227–28, 297n22, 297n24. See also Caroni (1975) Ltd suraj (good governance), 248, 253, 301n65 Sutar, Anil, 31, 72, 73–74f, 269n35 Sutar, Ram, xiii–xix, 31, 71–72, 73–77f, 112–13, 250, 256, 269n35 swaraj (self-government), 248, 253, 301n66 Swat Valley, xiii, 2 symbolic (the), 8, 25, 84, 182, 208, 210, 257. See also materiality Tamil (language), 71, 106, 108, 127, 235, 286n48 Tamil Nadu, xiii, xv, xix, 3, 18, 41, 50, 59, 78, 105, 107, 109, 191, 267n17, 269n36,

INDEX

270n44, 271n6, 273n32, 278n75, 280n90, plate 6. See also Thamizh Thaai technics, 80, 125 techniques, 29, 31, 35, 61, 67, 71, 78, 80, 84–85, 99, 102, 121, 173, 183–84, 188, 196, 202, 246 technology, 4, 19, 30, 67, 102, 105, 141, 178, 182, 190, 196, 224, 254; of distance, 109, 134 telephony, 190, 224 television, 23, 126, 183, 190, 224, 245 temples, 3, 8, 20, 30, 38, 72, 194–96; building of, 21, 24, 34–35, 50, 59, 61, 118; canonical form of, 5, 155–56, 159, 163, 168, 299n48; desecration of, 87, 103; Dravidian form of, 106–7, 127, 163; and land grabbing, 198–200; museumization of, 177–78, 262n34; sārvanajik form of, 84–85, 91–95, 124, 222, 234. See also Akshardhams; ashrams; Birla Mandir; Ganga Talao; gopurams; icons; idols; Mauritiuseswarnath; Ramjanmabhoomi movement; RVM Foundation; sanctum; shikharas; Shiva; theme parks Temple Entry Movement, 7, 25, 91, 102, 222, 275n36. See also Madras Temple Entry Ordinance temporality, 14–17, 30, 71, 79, 89, 176, 182–83, 208, 221–22, 273n26, 287n56. See also anachronism; circuitry; heterochrony; layering; linearity; time territory, 13, 27, 42, 87, 95, 106, 110, 121, 211, 215, 227 texts, 97–98, 223, 284n21; canonical, 127, 227; sacred, 8, 84, 102, 126 Thamizh Thaai, 4, 117, 271n6 theme parks, 2, 4, 16, 19–20, 31, 35, 95, 122, 134, 144, 190, 194–95, 198, 200, 208, 252, 293n56. See also temples Thiruvalluvar: statue of, xv, 71, 78, 106–7, 117, 127, 223, 267n17, 279n80, 280n86, 282n112, plate 6. See also Tirukkural 335

Tian Tan Buddha (Hong Kong), 67, 69. See also Sakyamuni Tilak, 87–88, 101, 110, 116–17, 272n21, 275n45, 277n61 time, 5, 7, 8, 10, 17, 30, 80, 89, 180, 188, 220, 224, 262n22, 263n40, 283; messianic, 273n26, 273n30. See also anachronism; circuitry; heterochrony; layering; linearity; temporality Tirukkural, 106, 127. See also Thiruvalluvar touch, 89–90, 260n11, 273n28; corpothetic, 90, 273n29; haptic, 90, 103. See also untouchability tourism, 25, 65–66, 88, 144, 185, 192, 195– 98, 202, 211–17, 226, 229, 248–50, 257, 268n27, 279n80. See also pilgrimage trains, 41, 167, 187–88, 249, 282n112, 290n18. See also railways transculturation, 9 Trinidad, 18, 27, 28, 135, 225–36, 245–46, 256, 270n44, 297n24, 298nn27–30, plates 5, 11, 12. See also Indo-Trinidadians unevenness, 9–10, 12, 25, 30, 80, 123, 184, 221, 255, 262n36. See also development: uneven untouchability, 5–6, 8, 89–93, 104, 107, 109, 222, 234, 272n15, 274n36, 275nn38– 39, 283. See also Dalits urban (the), 29, 184. See also development: urban urbanism, 184, 190, 245, 265n62. See also highways; scale-making; space urbanization, 228; sub-, 193 Uttar Pradesh, xv, xvii–xix, 3–4, 7, 67, 72, 74–77f, 82–83, 110f, 111–12, 137f, 181–82, 199, 218f, 231, 243, 260n5, 268nn30–31, 293n53, 300n53 Varma, Matu Ram, xiv–xv, xvii, 32–40, 42–44, 46–48, 59, 185, 236, 266n9

336

Varma, Naresh Kumar, xvi–xix, 32, 42f, 43–44, 46–47, 58, 64, 185, 202, 230, 236, 244, plate 3 Vaish caste, 241, 243–44, 299n50, 300n53 value, 9, 11, 14, 125, 127, 136, 189, 193, 197, 208, 225, 255, 283; economic, 198; exchange, 294n66; image, 15, 210; intrinsic, 78–79; religious, 15, 98, 196; secular, 69, 196; speculative, 211–12, 223; symbolic, 61. See also cult value and exhibition value; iconic exhibition value Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 43, 238, 256, 299n44, 304n88 Vedantism, 50, 104, 134–35, 144, 152, 284n28 Vedas, 126, 229, 235 Vijay, Tarun, 279n80, 282n112 vinyl banners, 23, 152, 229, 232f Vishnu, 63, 286n48 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 50, 95, 131, 229 Vishwa Shanti Ashram, xiv, 52–54, 131, 167 visuality, 89; and other senses, 89–90. See also darshan Vivekananda Rock Memorial, xiii, 25, 50, 95, 104–7, 115, 117, 127, 131, 223, 277n69, plate 6 Vivekananda, Swami, xiii, 52, 104–7, 134, 278n70, 278n78 vote banks, 2–3, 61, 91, 103, 217, 254 West Bengal, 43, 50, 67, 190, 268n31 World Bank, 216, 245, 248, 268n30, 301n66 World Fairs, 82 world records, 2, 4, 135–36, 254, 285n31 Yadav, Akhilesh, 3, 181–82, 268n31 Yamuna Expressway, 181–82, 199, 238n2, 293n53. See also highways; space Yeddyurappa, B. S., 63f, 64, 267n25, 287n50 zinc, 208

INDEX

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