This book studies the politics that make the tricolour flag possibly the most revered of the symbols, icons and markers associated with nation and nationalism in twentieth-century India. The emphasis on the flag as a visual symbol aims to question certain dominant assumptions about visuality. Anchored on Mahatma Gandhi's 'believing eye', this study reveals specificities of visual experience in the South Asian milieu. The account begins with a survey of the pre-colonial period, focuses on colonial lives of the flag, and then moves ahead to explain the contemporary dynamics of seeing the flag in India. The Flag Satyagraha of Jubblepore and Nagpur in 1922–23, the adoption of the Congress Flag in 1931, the resolution for the future flag in the Constituent Assembly of India in 1947, the history of the colour saffron, and the codes governing the flag, as well as legal cases, are all explored in depth in this book.
This article delineates the emergence of saffron as a colour of national importance in the late 1920s, when Nehru recognised it as an ‘old colour’, and Suniti Kumar Chatterji claimed that it was symbolic of ‘Indian life’, thus elevating it from its humble position as a kacha colour. The need to assess such claims has prompted a longue durée approach to unravel the complexities of writing a history of colours in the Indian milieu. An attempt has been made to analyse the role played by history in defining saffron and equating it with Hinduism—marginalising the colour red in the process. This study argues that through a selective interpretation of the past, regional and local usages and meanings of geru, kesari or kusumba came to mean a well defined shade of saffron in the second half of the 1920s and were eventually equated with the nation’s history. At another level, this is a story of the triumph of history over the past, precision over ambivalence, singularity over multiplicity, standardisation over fluidity, and knowledge over the experiential dynamics of seeing.
Looking at a corpus of proverbs (folk sayings) known as Dāk vachan this article explores the ways in which these sayings constitute a field of knowledge production in contemporary Mithila (north Bihar) revealing claims along the trajectories of caste, gender and historical lineages. Addressed to different aspects of agrarian life, presence of these sayings in the Maithil agrarian society also suggests a complicated and contested relation between modern and nonmodern practices of time in general and agrarian environment in particular. This study makes it imperative to take an account of not merely how people conserve their environment through religious and non-scientific idioms (Gold and Gujar) but also the manner in which the discourse on the non-modern knowledge has been fraught along caste lines. Focused on Dāk vachan, an attempt has been made to understand the process, in and through which colonial-modern knowledge, caste politics and multiple worlds of proverbial wisdom intersect with each other. Engaging with both published literature as well as responses coming from the field, the study aspires to make sense of the self of an ethnographer in the manner in which these sayings come to him both through the written sources as well as from the field. Finally, this article is about deconstructing the middle class perception of the domain of the 'folk' in this region.
A venture in a less traversed terrain of Indian scholarship, this article looks at the transformation in the value regimes that go into the making of colours in the Indian milieu. At one level, this study traces the sacredness imbued in colours and at another level the article delves into the genealogy that gives rise to a complex where colour, colonial investment in the economy of colours (with an aim at capitalizing colours as commodities), values and experiential dynamics enshrined in the imageries and practices associated with colours all come together. With these entanglements, the idea is to engage with the social fabrics and the politics of colours in the Indian milieu. In this rendering, the distinction between values and forms collapses giving us in turn a field of aesthetic experience. Mobilizing a wide range of registers (written as well as pictorial, archival as well as literary), this story is narrated with key rubrics, such as, ambiguous location of colour in the discourse on visuality, social and cultural life of colours and the manner in which Western science and modernity has influenced the values pertaining to colours. However, the core anxiety is parked on the relation between colour, aesthetic experience and the question of value. ImpressionTake equal weights of soot and alum, a double weight of gallnuts (māzū) A threefold weight of gum and then (use) the strength of your arm.
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