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  Tuesday, July 28, 2009  

 
THE VISUAL CULTURE OF        
 
 
SWAMINARAYAN SECT
   
 
 
Atreyee Gupta reports the lecture on the collective research on the temples of the
Swaminarayan sect, by Prof. Shivaji Panikkar, on January 23, 2007, at the School of Art
   
and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.    
 
   
The Department of Art History and Aesthetics, M.S. University, Baroda, has been  
consistently working towards reconstituting, reformulating, and redrawing the boundaries
of Art History in an attempt to address issues of class, caste, religion, and gender within
 
 
the larger domain of art production in India. Over the years, through a series of national and
international conferences, the Department has successfully foregrounded questions of the
 
 
minority within a discipline, which has till recently, concerned itself mostly with elite forms
of cultural production.  

  The Department's commitment to what is today broadly called ‘New Art History’, specifically
from a postcolonial position, is very much in conversation with similar and simultaneous
developments in various departments of art history and cultural studies across the globe.
The recent project by Shivaji Panikkar, Abha Seth, and Parvez Kabir (a three-member team
from the Department) on the temples of the Swaminarayan sect resonates well with this
larger intellectual and political concern. Portrait of Sahajanand
Swami, c. 1890.
Artist unknown.
Panikkar presented their collective research on January 23, 2007 at the School of Art and Woodblock print on
Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Although the project is still in its initial paper.
stage, the presentation served well to foreground the central concerns that have guided the  
project. The Swaminarayan sect and its associated visual culture yields an interesting  
account of the negotiations among colonialism, nationalism, and religious organizations
that occurred in the late 19th and the early 20th century. Panikkar, Seth, and Kabir then go
 
on to trace the career of the sect in post-colonial India - locating the political and aesthetic  
concerns of the Swaminarayans within current political crises including the Akshardham  
attack and the ‘Gujarat program’ of 2002. Their reading of gender, sexuality, and power in  
the use of space within the temple precinct provides insights into the modes in which
morality and the notion of the ‘appropriate’ have been constructed in Gujarat over the last
 
hundred years. Perhaps this project becomes all the more relevant considering the  
location of the authors and the persistent right wing presence in the state.  
 
Given the history of the Swaminarayans, this sect lends itself well to the sort of questions
Panikkar, Seth, and Kabir want to bring to art history. Somewhat curiously, the beginning of  
the sect is marked by the meeting of the founder Sahajanand Swami with John Malcolm,  
the Governor General of Bombay - a meeting that resulted in a lifelong alliance between the  
two. Quite possibly, the two had come together through their mutual desire to institute
 
social reform in the 19th-century western India. In 1820, the British collector of Ahmedabad
issued land and subsequently the first Swaminarayan temple was built. The early temples  
of the sect, much like the numerous structures built in colonial India both by the British and  
the Maharajas, are marked by Victorian arches, Corinthian columns, and gigantic clock  
towers in the Indo-Saracenic style.
 
With the turn of the century, nationalism coupled with internal politics and a desire to
 
expand the movement brought about a fissure within the sect itself, leading to the  
establishment of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Sanstha (BAPS) in 1906. BAPS -  
    the "new school" - was strictly aligned along the lines of the "original" philosophical  
principles of the founder, reasserting strict codes of celibacy and gender segregation.
Simultaneously, the sect claimed itself as modern, progressive, and tolerant of all  
religions. While from Panikkar's presentation it becomes clear that it is at this point that the  
Swaminarayans articulated their notion of the nation, strengthened perhaps by a desire to  
realise their spiritual vision on a pan-Indian scale, a further flushing out of the break, the
 
fissure between the "old" and the "new" school would have been useful.
 
The transformation of the temples themselves in the late 20th century provides an inkling of  
the ways in which a hegemonic religion is constructed and it is here that the political  
relevance of the project becomes most evident. This new self-fashioning has been  
accompanied by systematic renovation of the older temples - effectively transforming these
Indo-Saracenic structures into Brahmanical temples types complete with toranas and
 
nagara sikharas. The iconographic programme too, not surprisingly, has been revamped
to incorporate a plethora of Hindu saints and mythological narratives, in effect ‘cleansing’
the temple of all ‘foreign’ traces. This pedagogic attempt to project a ‘pure’ Indic religion
and culture is further reinforced through films and exhibitions. In spite of a self-professed
tolerance of all religions, the Swaminarayans are now, of course, an essentially Hindu
sect.

Although the new Swaminarayan temples emulate the 11th-century Solanki style, female
imagery like apsara figures has been replaced with male figures. In terms of visual culture,
the enforcement of strict gender codes thus become quite apparent, Panikkar notes. While
the subordination of women seems to be the norm, there exists a comfortable ‘closeness’
between the Swaminarayan sadhus and their male devotees. This homosociality is seen
by Panikkar as "prime capital in maintaining certain hegemonic power over socially
subordinate others". Although most queer scholarship on India, till date, has celebrated the Portrait of Mehmed II,
homosocial world of mysticism as providing liberating alternatives to heteronormativity, c.1480.
Attributed to Siblizade
Panikkar renders difficult such easy appropriations. Ahmed. Opaque
watercolour on paper.
 In spite of being in its formative stages, this project clearly has an immense potential in re-
conceptualising the notion of the religions and the community within a colonial and post-
colonial public sphere. Certain other interesting dimensions that are still beyond the
framework of the project come to mind. For example: the role of the diaspora and the
much-celebrated Swaminarayan temple in London. An obvious question is the relation of
the diaspora with ‘home’. How does this organisation negotiate its international devotee?
How far can the organisation retain its "structures of subordination" and control in a land far
from its locale? One also hopes that the researchers will look at the broader spectrum of
visual culture to understand how the Swaminarayans constructed and disseminated their
ideology. An arbitrary example immediately comes to mind: 19th-century woodblock prints
of Sahajanand Swami are uncannily similar to Ottoman royal portraits [Figure 1 and Figure
2]. The similarities are too obvious to be dismissed easily. Much like Sahajanand Swami,
the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II (r. 1451-81) holds a rose - an iconographic feature adopted by
later Ottoman painters and also by 16th-century European artists who worked from an
Ottoman model. This is not to draw a direct correlation between the two, but only to imply
that, along with Indo-Saracenic architecture, the Swaminarayans may have adopted other
Islamicate signs to construct a pluralistic identity. Questions of the minority and its
relations with majoritarian traditions can thus be made more nuanced. Of course, one is
certain that, as the project develops, such issues will be raised and addressed.
       

 
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