India’s early 20th century pop-culture
An indistinguishable clutch of film actresses in varying shades of lime advocate green tea, hoardings hoot healthy oats, popular songs popularise size zero and milk cartons come with measuring tapes — these are visuals that hound us today.
If being ‘in-shape’ keeps us so occupied today, it’s rather intriguing to have a glimpse of the visuals that spoke to our great-great-grand parents more than century ago.
Mapping culture through visuals goes beyond advertisements. And in an age of nascent photography and a revolutionising printing technique, paintings made the dominant visual form — the springboard for early advertising. These are a treasure revealing much about late nineteenth and early twentieth century India — its conscience, motivations and aspirations.
To set the context of time — traditional (flat and idealistic) painting was dramatically being influenced by European techniques (oil) and styles (realism and perspective). Raja Ravi Varma rendered ancient Vedic folklore and Hindu mythology with European realism — something unseen so far. And his printing press made art descend from the royal courts to commoners’ roads.
Visuals spoke — the grandeur of Hindu mythologies, fine emotion of its characters and the elaborate episodes of the epics. Decoding the renditions of the Pauranik episodes brings out the immediate social environment of the times. Stories and subjects lifted from the Vedic age often got depicted in settings that were a confluence of Mughal and British influences, the day’s culture — popular clothing and fanciful settings of nineteenth century.
Shantanu, the Kuru king is shown wearing a Jama — a Mughal (or medieval Rajput) garb that of a tight fitting frock flaring up at the waist with a chooridaar, instead of the prevalent Vedic dhoti. So is the heavily embroidered footwear.
An early twentieth century painting — ‘Wedding of Rama’ by M. V. Dhurandar has women draped in contemporary Marathi styled saris and men sport the Mughal court costumes. In fact the landscape gives a hint of several temples and mosque domes lined in the background — an easy mix of the time.
Indian art has always had a fluid intermingling of the sacred and the sensual, before the Victorian sensibilities set in. The male gaze (continued from the translucent women’s garments from Mughal and Rajput miniatures) got accentuated by the realism corporeality of the new style. Semi-nude heroines from mythology (which can otherwise often be seen in sculptures across centuries) became muses as an idealised white-skinned Indian woman, a standard slowly being laid down for future generations. From prints to playing cards — a collection with each depicting ‘Oriental beauty’, the gaze has passed down over a century.
Soon after, with prints rolling out, these visuals became popular culture. In 1888 when Lever Brothers’ Sunlight soap disembarked on a Calcutta port it perhaps had no idea of how it would get reinvented to further forge a ritual with Indian masses. The reverend Sun lord descended to sell the humble soap bar quickly followed by Pears, Lux and Vim.
The army of Hindu gods and goddesses became brand ambassadors a hundred years ago, with each brand competing to have one. Bal Krishna made sure mothers bought Woodward’s gripe water and a goddess assured for Glaxo baby soap. These were usually large prints on calendars given out as promotional devices and the masses grabbed them as objects of worship.
Besides personal care and baby products, Hindu deities and mythological characters in action (primarily picked from Raja Ravi Varma’s renditions) flooded with consumer goods from cloth, dye to even cigarette (Hawagharri brand from Peninsular Tobacco Ltd) and Swedish safety matches. Large prints of deities that came stuck on fabric bundles from Manchester were given out only with bulk purchases. They ended up being framed and worshipped. A healthy preoccupation of one’s mythological stories and deities suddenly found itself accessible, laid out in vivid colour, almost palpable.
If the popular culture in print a hundred years ago celebrated the sacred, it also gradually set in motion the trends that would follow. Just how Bollywood actresses convincingly speak of green tea (in conjunction with massive PR), early communication depicting the particularly English beverage with brown skin weaved the myth of tea always having been Indian. After the saturation of the British and American markets, the Indian colony was craftily taught the tea ritual with visuals that seeded in one’s subconscious. Those are popular brands even today.
Along with products (riding on monies and businesses), the visual culture influenced etiquettes, styles and behaviours en masse. Almost instantly the predominantly Parsi way of draping a sari became popular, pan-India modern style of draping one. These caught up with several print advertisements creating the image of the modern Indian woman — styled in a sari, shoe wearing, pearl adorning ‘lady’ — with a 19th century tennis racquet or a cigarette in hand.
The printed visuals circulated wide and far re-defining fashion, modelling Indian cinema (remember the black and white stars of yore?) and setting the mark for the foreign as modern and aspirational.
But at the same time the imagery ended up rendering itself to the nationalistic fervour. The country was simmering with the struggle for freedom — Swadesi caught up and rampant printing galvanised Indian sensibilities. Soon Abanindranath Tagore’s 1905 Bharat Mata (a saffron clad, sadhvi figure with beads and book in her hand) started being adapted and depicted closer to what we recognise today as Bharat Mata — on the same fabric bundles that once depicted Goddess Lakshmi and Shaivite tilak. Closely entwined is the beginning of the singular story of Hindu identity that went on to define the majority belief as early as the late-1800s — The Ravi Verma (and later others’) prints of gods and goddesses that flooded Indian households and community temples made covers for 1923 founded Gitapress Gorakhpur.
These visuals and their retrospective importance to the idea of building modern India are lost in dusty antique garage stores. Few of us today, are perhaps lucky to have seen a tin box or two with elaborate printed art in our grand mothers’ cupboards.
All images here are from Mumbai’s Bhau Daji Lad Museum’s exhibition curated by the renowned art and culture historian Jyotindra Jain
