Animalizing India: emerging signs of an unruly market

Abstract

Focusing on recent artistic and photojournalistic portraits of India as an animal – an elephant or tiger – that wanders alone or sometimes with another animal companion – dragon or panda bear – called China, this article analyzes the ways in which India's potential as an emerging market and a rising power is being conjured in the popular aesthetics of magazine and nonfiction book covers. Even as an outpouring of verbal discourse from business and policy experts has hailed an India that is transitioning from a peripheral Third-World nation to a rising power, a steady stream of visual illustrations, including, those that deploy animal avatars, has sought to illuminate the vicissitudes of India's newfound economic recognition. Ultimately, my article's tracking of the visual semiotics of India's animal imprints seeks to get inside an economy of appearances in which zoological embodiments arbitrate this non-Western nation's prospects for entering economic globalization's newly minted scale of “emerging market.”