Scattered across the many books, newspapers and magazines, pamphlets and sundry printed matter at the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL) in Chennai are images, pictures, and visual gems that it has been my pleasure over the years to discover with the help of the Library's Director G. Sundar, and his colleague and head of reference services S. Muthumalathi (Mala). I take you into this treasure trove through one such image that I hope will convince you as well of the potential of visual history as an innovative means for reaching into pasts that might not be otherwise visible if we remain solely and exclusively within the world of words as scholars and researchers.
In Figure 1, you see an advertisement in Tamil for the "B. B. H. Restaurant," also known as "Paratapantu Intu Kapi Hotal." Located on Dalhousie Street in Rangoon, this establishment prided itself on its tasty snacks and confections made with the purest of clarified butter (ghee) and oil. The fact that B.B.H. Restaurant was owned by one S. R. Chettiar might not come as a great surprise to historians, given what we know of Chettiar entrepreneurship in Burma since the later 19th century. What might be more of a surprise is the logo that S. R. Chettiar consciously chose for his restaurant-and that justified as well the name he bestowed on it-for flanking the text in the advertisement is an image of Parata Mata (Mother India or Bharat Mata) as a four-armed goddess. There is no date mentioned in the textual part of this advertisement: instead, it is the image that comes to our aid and enables us to both date the advertisement, and also provide us with a rough timeline for S. R. Chettiar's Rangoon restaurant. In order to date this artifact, I am first drawn to the presence of the partial outline map of India in this image within which the unknown artist has placed Bharat Mata. As I have documented at length in my recently published book, The Goddess and the Nation, such images of Mother India in the company of the map of India, began circulating across India (and the Tamil country) in a wide variety of media from the early years of the 20th century: calendar art and wall posters, oil and acrylic paintings by some of India's best known artists, textbook illustrations and jacket covers of nationalist pamphlets and books, newspaper cartoons and mastheads, advertisements and package labels, and even commercial films with a patriotic theme. So the first thing I can say about Figure 1 is that it belongs to the twentieth century, no earlier than that. But wait! I can also further narrow the time range by analyzing the banner that Bharat Mata holds in one of her four arms: not only is this banner conceived with three colors, but inscribed on the central panel is Gandhi's spinning wheel. Such a banner becomes ubiquitous in nationalist prints, and in images of Bharat Mata from the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, so it is possible for us to say that this advertisement might date from those decades (even given the fact that we know that often images are recycled and put to use well after their original time of production).
For a historian of visual culture like me, the importance of this visual artifact emerges also from the fact that taken together, image and text (or "image text" as some scholars call it) point to the B.B.H. Restaurant as an establishment that sought to use various patriotic means of persuasion to attract its Rangoon clientele-presumably diners nostalgic for some native fare in a place far away from their Indian homeland. The use of patriotic imagery, including Bharat Mata, the map of India, and the national flag, in advertisements for selling goods and services became popular from the early years of the twentieth century in colonial India, especially with the rise and spread of the so-called swadeshi ("of one's own country") movement from around 1905. The presence of the map of India in the company of Mother India in this advertisement also confirms the use made of patriotic themes by Indian businesses-like the B.B.H. Restaurant-abroad. It also reaffirms that while members of the Chettiar community were frequently devoted patrons of Tamil language, literature, and learning, they were also supporters of the cause of Indian nationalism both within the borders of the Madras Presidency and elsewhere in the Indian diaspora in south-east Asia.
Images such as those reproduced in Figure 1 allow us, therefore, to make numerous connections and arguments that might not be readily apparent in texts and written documents, and hence their very presence in RMRL's collection is important for us to know about. This is especially so because images such as these have not yet begun to be archived in many major collections in Tamilnadu, given that they are treated as "ephemera" at worst, "curiosities" at best-and not the source for "serious" history and rigorous cultural analysis. In this essay, I argue to the contrary and also note that the very fact that such images have been collected, preserved, and in some cases catalogued, in the Library enables us to chart new territory in Tamil history, culture, and politics, even as they bear testimony to the archiving skills of the staff of the Library. It is these skills which Mala drew upon to bring to my attention the interesting image reproduced in Figure 2, an advertisement for a firm called Gemini Rubber Stamp Works located in Gudiyattam in North Arcot. The advertisement displays logos used by various firms across Madras state for which Gemini manufactured rubber stamps. I am of course immediately drawn to No. 77-a stamp featuring Bharat Mata in a map of India, much like the figure we encountered in Figure 1, which served as the logo for a firm called Bharati Vilas in Karaikkal. While I may not learn what that firm's business might be from this logo, I can use it to speculate about the manner in which an increasing number of businesses in early 20th century India were willing-in fact eager- to advertise their patriotic credentials verbally as well as visually. The very presence of Mother India and the map of India in this image also confirms for me that by the 1930s, this image had become popular in even small towns like Karaikkal, away from the big colonial metropolises of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, or Kanpur, Poona, and Lahore, places where many of the pictures I have analysed in my book were printed or circulated. Stepping back and looking at the page as a whole, though, I am struck also by the irony of juxtaposing No. 77 with No. 76 placed above it, for the latter features a youthful C. N. Annadurai and is a rubber stamp for a branch office of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Cuddalore. If I were a business historian attempting to reconstruct the history of the Gemini Rubber Stamp Works in Gudiyattam, North Arcot, I would use this example to note that this firm did not allow politics to (necessarily) interfere with business, being quite willing as the firm appears to have been to serve commercial enterprises that overtly at least supported the cause of Indian nationalism (such as Bharati Vilas in Karaikkal), even while working with entities such as DMK which were then considered to be anti Indian nationalists. If I were a business and economic historian, I would also use this page to conclude that firms such as Gemini Rubber Stamp Works in Gudiyattam were not limited in their reach, and indeed their client base appears to have extended across northern and eastern Madras state-Kanchipuram, Erode, Dindivanam, Tiruppur, Cuddalore and Karaikal-and also included Muslim firms. At the same time, the very presence of No. 76 on this page allows me to date this advertisement to at least 1949 (when the DMK was formed), even as it confirms a point I made in my discussion of Figure 1 about the manner in which motifs might circulate well after their initial time of production: for although Gandhi was certainly dead by 1949, his spinning wheel continues to be patronized by the goddess Mother India and by Bharati Vilas! At the same time, the stamp reproduced in No. 77 possibly evidences that Bharati Vilas might have been in existence in Karaikkal since the 1920s or 1930s.
Images such as Figure 2 allow the visual historian to trace micro-practices and activities that might otherwise escape our purview. One such patriotic micro-practice for which I was able to find evidence in RMRL's collection is the use of patriotic slogans such as "vande mataram" (I worship the mother) on personal and business letterheads from at least the 1920s. Figure 3 shows one such letter dated to October 11, 1940, written by V. Velautham, based in Colombo, to M. Meyappa Chettiar in Vithiyur in mainland India. While the contents of letter-written in English between two Tamilians!-are interesting in and of themselves for the various monetary transactions narrated therein, I am drawn to the trilingual inscriptions at the top which reveals Velautham's apparent devotion to the Indian nation (even while being based in Ceylon); this is not apparent from the words that follow. At the head of the letter is the Tamil inscription "vande mataram," made popular in Madras since at least the opening years of the 20th century in Bharati's poetry, prose, and pictures, as well as in the work of many nationalists who were fired up by the swadeshi movement. This inscription in turn is flanked by the image of Mother India (very similar to the logo for the firm of Bharati Vilas in Karaikkal that we encounter in Figure 2) as a four-armed goddess carrying a flag in one hand and the Gandhian spinning wheel in another, occupying an outline map of India. The words "vande mataram" are inscribed above and below the image in Devanagari and Telugu scripts, possibly suggesting Velautham's attempt to connect with a world that was not exclusively limited to Tamil speakers. In RMRL's collection, there are many such examples of letters and postcards bearing such "image texts" (not necessarily patriotic), that researchers can draw upon to understand how selves come to be constructed through the everyday practice of letter-writing, as well as will enable us to begin to get a sense of how grand projects (such as Indian or Tamil/Dravidian nationalism) enter the realm of the private and the intimate.
Admittedly, the majority of such images and image-texts pertain to the public sphere, although even here, the visual and the pictorial often appear in tantalizing places and spaces which, even in an image-saturated country like India, can easily be missed, unless we have decided-cognitively and intellectually-that pictures, too, have stories to show and arguments to manifest, and that images are not just illustrative and reflective, but also constitutive and world-making rather than world-mirroring. This is the fundamental premise of the new visual history that scholars like Christopher Pinney and Kajri Jain have taught us to appreciate in their fine works that have provided inspiration for my own foray into this emergent territory of scholarship. While their scholarship examines weighty issues such as the manner in which the "bazaar" or marketplace functions as an important site for the production, circulation and consumption of popular visual artifacts, or the role played by "chromolithographs" in nationalist struggles against colonial rule, it is also possible to use images to write the history of political satire, humor in India, or the play of irony. This is certainly one of the many uses to which cartoons (of which we have a good tradition in the Tamil country going back to the early years of the 20th century) can be put, and the RMRL has preserved numerous examples from magazines, journals, and newspaper articles. Here, I invoke one example in Figure 4 that Mala brought to my attention recently, which appeared in October 1932 on the cover page of Kanti (which took its name from the Mahatma, whose head adorned its banner), and was drawn by cartoonist K. R. Sarma. Set up in the form of a grid which reminds us of another visual genre that becomes very prolific, namely the school chart, the cartoon offers a satirical commentary on the state of the colonial economy and society in the 1930s by inviting its viewers to compare the relative incomes of various occupations, with the British viceroy at the top of the heap (first square of the grid), and the poor Indian peasant who works and toils all day and all year and makes a fraction at the bottom (the last square of the grid).
Kanti was launched in April 1931 in the wake of Gandhi's Salt March and of his numerous attempts to bring the plight of the Indian peasant to the center state of nationalist politics. Its founder-editor T. S. Chokkalingam was able to bring out weekly, monthly, and bi-monthly issues with national (and some international) news and featured articles until January 1932, and then again (when he came out of imprisonment, charged by the colonial state for this very work), for a couple years from October 1932 before its last issue was published in December 1934. Kanti is a fascinating example of what we might call an "illustrated" news and features magazine that attempted to deliver the world through words and images to the reading public for a cheap price (it is one of the earliest examples of a kalana itaz, the "quarter anna" periodical). In addition to K. R. Sarma's cartoons and others that routinely appeared on the cover page and on the back cover, Kanti also carried original drawings and illustrations, pictorial advertisements, as well as reproductions of photographs. The history of the illustrated magazine in Tamil-which subsequently became so popular in Tamil with periodicals like Kalaimakal and Ananta vikatan, Kumutam and Kalki-will find an important fore-runner in the short-lived but innovative Kanti, and the RMRL has an almost complete run that should encourage researchers to reconstruct its history and place in the history of Tamil letters.
The implicit hero of K. R. Sarma's cartoon in Figure 4 is the hardworking farmer who comes to be figured in many national periodicals as well from the 1930s as the peasant question loomed large in Gandhian and post-Gandhian politics. And indeed, one of the most intriguing periodicals in the RMRL is titled Meliccelvam ("The Plough's Wealth"), the cover page of which from one of its very first issues is featured here as Figure 5. From its banner, the reader gets a sense of the goals of this periodical that was launched in July 1944 and was published by the Director of Agriculture of the Government of Madras until 1970: cattle pull at a plough in a field from which arise lush crops over which the rising sun casts its glow on a bucolic scene in which a cow gives suckle to its calf. Curiously the toiling farmer is missing from this banner, although the image on the cover of the September issue is revealing: a map of India occupied by a two-armed goddess Bharat Mata, blessing the peasant (and his wife) hard at work in their fields. The image-text declares that "India is our mother land," and "agriculture is our nation's preeminent occupation" (the latter statement in ironic dialogue with K. R. Sarma's cartoon in Figure 4 in which the poor peasant's hard toil is hardly rewarded monetarily), verbal statements that are visually reinforced by the presence of the map of India and Mother India. Meliccelvam was almost entirely dedicated to discussions of the business of agriculture and village life, ways of improving crop output and irrigation, as well as various efforts made by the state on behalf of agriculture. Published as it was by the government, the magazine can be treated as an example of the literature of development, and a mouthpiece of the state's new development vision of which there are other visual artifacts (such as the documentary film produced by the Films Division of India from the 1950s). Many images of farmers at work in their fields, of varieties of the plough and other agricultural tools of the industrial age, of varieties of crops, and of the techniques for improving agriculture and so on were featured in the magazine.
The attractive banner of Meliccelvam points to another visual artifact of which the RMRL has many examples waiting to be analysed and discussed, namely, frontispieces, title pages of books and pamphlets, and mastheads of newspapers and periodicals of all sorts, which are frequently adorned with images of various sorts that are enormously instructive of the history and politics of the publication. An example in the collection that I have found revealing is reproduced here as Figure 6. Most of us in Tamilnadu think of E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, "Periyar," as the fiery and outspoken iconoclastic leader of the Dravidian movement, yet there was a time before 1926 when he was a devout Congressman and supporter of Gandhian nationalism. Interestingly, the masthead of the earliest issues of Periyar's well-known radical weekly Kuti Aracu reflect his Indian nationalist sentiments: in one medallion stands a four-armed goddess Bharat Mata, her sari and posture vaguely outlining a map of India; in another medallion, a Gandhi-like figure sits at the loom, while all around them are figures of toiling peasant, hard at work in the fields or at the spinning wheel; they are the "kuti" whose dominion Periyar and the Congress were dedicating themselves ostensibly to establish in India and Tamilnadu. Notwithstanding his later powerful critique of institutionalized religion and of Hinduism in particular, the upper half of the banner is dotted with religious structures (a temple gopuram and a church) on the right and a meditating figure on the left. The very presence of this banner as a visual residue in the archive is a reminder to all of us about another politics to which Periyar was quite committed before his historic transformation to Dravidianism.
But it is not the study of society, economics, and politics that is enormously enriched by bringing pictorial materials to the center of our analysis. I close this essay by noting that amongst the RMRL's richest visual treasures are those pertaining to the world of Tamil cinema: not so much the films themselves, but all the print paraphernalia generated by the arrival of this new visual medium into the Tamil country: advertisements, songbooks, and cinema magazines. Figure 7 features one of my favourite examples: the cover image from a songbook for the 1939 film produced by K. P. S. Wadia and titled Parata Kesari. I was drawn to this image in the course of my own research on Mother India and the map of India because of their presence here. But what is also worth noting is an inscription in English, penned by a viewer of the film on the map of India: "Worst Picture." Could this have been a film that Roja Muthiah himself saw and responded to in this fashion? We will perhaps never know, but visual artifacts such as these frequently demonstrate-in various ways, including apparent mutilation-the responses of viewers, and that history too is worth noticing and telling.
1 Ramaswamy, Sumathi. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
2 For a recent work that examines the many configurations of India’s “national” flag, especially in the colonial period, see Virmani, Arundhati. A National Flag for India. Rituals, Nationalism and the Politics of Sentiment. New Delhi: Permanent Black. 2008.
3 The map of India appears as part of Bharat Mata’s iconography from at least 1913 in prints and publications of the Indian diaspora (see my The Goddess and the Nation, pp. 29-32, 254-256)
4 For a discussion of how Indian nationalism and Tamil/Dravidian nationalism conducted their rival politics in the gendered language of embodied figures (Bharat Mata and Tamilttay, see my Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
5 See my Goddess and the Nation, pp. 18-23, 128-129, 147-148.
6 Pinney, Christopher. Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004; Jain, Kajri. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
7 For two important published works on cartoons in Tamil magazines in Tamil, see Venkatachalapathy, A. R. Paratiyin Karuttup Padankal: Intiya, 1906-1910. Madras: (Narmada), 1995, and Venkataraman, V. Cutantira Canku: Karuttup Padankal 1930-33. Rajapalayam: Swatantira Publications, 2001. For an assessment in English, see Venkatachalapathy, A. R. “Caricaturing the Political: The Cartoon in Pre-Independence Tamil Journalism,” In In those Days There was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2006, pp. 42-58.
8 The histories of cartoonists such as K. R. Sarma, or his prolific predecessor M. S. Sarma, or his successor Mali, is yet to be written.
9 For a fascinating work that begins to look at this genre, with many examples drawn from Tamil India, see Sirish Rao, V. Geetha, and Gita Wolf. An Ideal Boy: Charts from India. Stockport, U.K./Chennai: Dewi Lewis Publishing/Tara Publishing, 2001.
10 P. Mathivanan, “Kanti,” In Intiya Vidutalaikku Muntaiya Tamil Italkal, edited by I. Sundaramurthi and M. R. Arasu. Chennai: Ulakat Tamil Araycci Niruvanam, 1998, Vol. 1, pp. 381-396. The very first edition declared, “Our work is to explain clearly to the Tamilians the principles of the Congress and the actions of Mr. Gandhi at this important juncture” (ibid, pp. 395-396).
11 In an essay that was penned on the history of the cartoon in Tamil by Chokkalingam himself under the pen-name “Devidasan,” the founder of the magazine in fact claimed that Kanti was a pioneer among Tamil periodicals in this regard (quoted in Mathivanan, “Kanti,” pp. 386-87
12 For some examples, see my The Goddess and the Nation, pp. 284-86.
13 For another similar example from the RMRL titled “Kiramarajyam” from Ananta Vikatan (Deepavali malar, 1947), see my The Goddess and the Nation, pp. 286-87.
14 The library has a complete run of this magazine, totaling 87 issues.
15 Indeed when V. M. Thanga Perumal Pillai, a key figure in the founding of Kuti Aracu and an ally and friend of EVR died, an editorial in the magazine was titled “Parata Matattayin Turpakkiyam” (Bharat Mata’s Misfortune) (Kuti Aracu, March 1, 1926, p. 8)
(Prof. Sumathi Ramaswany is Professor of History, Duke University, USA. Her recent publication is “the Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India” published by Duke University Press, 2010.
S. Muthu Malathi is in charge of Reference Services at the the RMRL. She also worked with Shri. Roja Muthiah for a five years.)