Contemporary Images of Hindu Bhakti: Identity and Visuality

Abstract

AbstractHistorians writing on modernity often remark on the power of the visual, appealing to Walter Benjamin's influential observation that ‘modernity under late capitalism is dominated, and haunted, by dream-images and commodified visual fetishes’ (Benjamin 1968; Levin 1993, p.23; Ramaswamy 2003, p.xiii). Yet, studies of bhakti commonly focus on the literature and biographies of the bhakti saints instead of its visual dimensions in art, material culture, and performance. In this special issue, scholars of religion and art history writing on diverse visual cultures, communities, and geographical locations under the umbrella of the contemporary era reveal two distinguishing features of bhakti. The first is bhakti's impetus to establish the artist's, devotee's, or saint's individual and communal identity that resituates today's religion. The second is bhakti's formation of emotive imagery with visual agency animated by participatory desires that inspire the creation and re-creation of imagery and performances that speak directly to the everyday. Identity and visuality, found together in contemporary bhakti imagery, shape our distinctive analysis and redirect Benjamin's original statement from postcolonial nation-building towards the vitality of devotional participation.