South Asian ways of seeing, Muslim ways of knowing

Abstract

The new ‘visual turn’ in history invites us, through new evidence and related methodologies, to look beyond middle-class issues and concerns in reconstructing the civil society that emerged in twentieth-century South Asia. The case study presented here addresses fundamental questions of how the emerging civil society scrutinized the state (both the imperial form and its independent heir), as well as how claims to authority and legitimacy continued to exist outside as well as within the state. New visual modes of communicating created a number of markets for groups of consumers in which both the shared cultural practices of South Asians, and group-specific meanings elaborated for those practices, helped individuals to define identities and to mobilise their passionate commitments on behalf of their respective group interests. This article examines one such group of consumers—South Asian Muslims—within the larger South Asian context. Thus, the ‘visual turn’ enables us to move from the specifics of particular posters (and how those changed over time) to the broader implications for the creation of a new public, and its concerns around abstracted values and issues.