The realm of the visual: Agency and modern civil society

Abstract

Everyday acts of seeing and knowing enable persons as actors and consumers to constitute their identities and construct meaning from their world. Taken in the aggregate, these individual acts harness the agency of participants in shaping their societies and scrutinising their nation-states. The argument implicit in these two statements is that the study of popular culture points us to modern acts of discernment, identity-formation, and passionate activism. Aggregation matters, for it brings together individual and (various) collective interests. Working through the familiar and the new, the local and the global, popular culture refracts and mediates these interactions and their aggregation. It is through popular cultural artifacts that historians may trace evidence of the ways in which the agency of viewers/consumers impels a civil society to grapple with change, to process change through indigenous sociologies of knowledge so that it can be naturalised and accommodated. I would argue that the visual realm is an absolutely critical component in this process in South Asia. Here we look, therefore, at both the consumption of popular culture (mass-produced and mass-consumed visual materials) and the production of it (especially the intentions of entrepreneurs to serve a market) to delineate how acts of seeing became acts of knowing in 20th century India.