India's Popular Culture: Iconic Spaces and Fluid Images

India's popular culture, in its colonial phase, witnessed several social and technological transformations: the pedagogy of the colonial art schools; exposure to European pictures; the advent of engraving, lithography, and oleography; the emergence of photography and proscenium theatre. These changes led to the rise of a new popular imagery since mass-production and circulation acted as a potent instrument in creating and negotiating the interstices between the sacred, the erotic, the political, and the colonial modern. With the rise of technical imaging - film, television, and the digital media, in conjunction with the developments in the areas of vision, semiotic studies of visual images and signs and symbols, psychoanalytic investigations of the scopic drive, studies of the visual process, sociological studies of spectatorship and display, visual anthropology, etc. the field of visual studies has got expanded with increasing emphasis on the visual construction of the social. The new image mobilization in India, resulting from and feeding into the resurgence of cultural, religious, and regional nationalism; rise of political re-configurations emerging from the changing ideological equations; as well as the phenomena of globalization, consumerism, and diaspora, play a critical role.