Bhakti’s Visualities of Connection in the Arts Today

Abstract

AbstractRecently, artists in drama, dance, and contemporary art have visually evoked bhakti through their engagement with the historically remote Tamil bhakti poet-saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār. For centuries, bhakti in regional languages has been deeply intertwined with the arts, with its emphasis on personal engagement, emotionally inflected expressiveness and declarative performance. The bhakti poet-saints’ own words and deeds promoted a visuality of connection that enabled new and diverse participation in religio-social authority. Drawing on a resonant yet transformed mode of this visuality of connection, the arts today assert that Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār is a socially relevant figure—teacher, feminist, global spiritual icon—grounded in her own time and as speaking to ours. The contemporary arts’ mediation of classical ideas and contemporary concerns through visualities of connection that engage audiences today suggests a challenge to contemporary museum culture, which shares with the arts immersive display, yet grapples with envisioning a visuality of connection that provides a global audience today with an experience of classical art of India as both accessible and relevant.