Vernacular Visual

Abstract

Drawing insights from the ‘visual turn’ in social sciences, this chapter looks at few fundamental postulates of seeing in the milieu of South Asia. The chapter argues that the discourse on visuality is highly centred on pictorial registers. Such an emphasis has helped scholars to move away from written archives and word-centric excavations of social realities. However, as a hegemonic agent, just as written registers established their hierarchical superiority over the oral in the modern realms of knowledge production, now the pictorial seems to replace the written in scholarly engagements. As a corollary, ironically, this scholarship is heavily tilted towards technologies and techniques of image-making leaving a vast field of heterogeneous ways of seeing either ignored or reduced to supplementary roles, an analytical background geared towards a richer understanding of how technologies of image-making coming from the post-industrial West are received by South Asian societies. In such a frame, while the contextual complexities are not ignored, the producer of these techniques of observation and their pictorial reproductions are fundamentally sourced from the West. A connected strand, in this discourse, is about offering a new epistemic vantage point by emphasizing practices like darshan and didar—two devotional modes of seeing. Acknowledging the significance of this scholarship that has opened up new vistas of pictorial archives, this chapter moves beyond the picture-centric idea of visuality and offers another possibility to approach the visual experiences in South Asia. These experiences are accessed in this chapter at three historical junctures to emphasize their epistemic potentials for studying the vernacular visual experiences of South Asia. Keywords: Visual experience, South Asian history, Vernacular visual, Word-Image relation, Darshan, Pictorial turn