South Asian ways of seeing,

Muslim ways of knowing

By Sandria B. Freitag
1.Key words
Id: 201901445
Jaimit Joshi
1. Minority
2. Ocular regime
3. Niche market
4. Martyrdom
5. Narrativisation
6. Industrialisation
7. Mobility
8. Mohurram
9. Patronage
10. Photographs
11. Identity
12. Posters
13. Mughals
14. General market
15. Bourgeois family
16. Pilgrimage
17. Devotionalism
18. Calligraphy
19. Community
20. Muslim
21. Nationalism
22. Historiographical
23. Westernised
2.Key sentences
Id:201901451
Parin Jasoliya

1. “ Expansion of these early efforts measured not only the embrace of new
technologies made available through the global, imperialised circumstances
but also the creation of demand among the growing middle class. ” This line
is present at the beginning of the case study, this line is used to show the origin
of demand for visual materials. The ‘early’ efforts that are mentioned here are
the industrialisation that British rule was trying to bring and hence bringing
new forms of art and decorations. This line also points to the feature that was
only available for the upper class of the society but now was widely
distributed, thanks to new technologies.

2. “(i) I argue we can identify specific South Asian visual practices and
expectations related especially to the construction of narrative to make sense
of the world; (ii) that these take on added duties and functions, at least from
the late nineteenth century, shaped in part by an expansion in the
consumption of visual artefacts; and (iii) that the resulting conjuncture of
narrativisation and consumption is fundamental to creating a modern civil
society in which popular participation plays a critical role ”
This is quite a long sentence as well as an important one. Similar to the first
sentence, this sentence also wants to highlight how we can grasp the ‘true’
public by studying the visual practices. Most of the things in the sentence are
not too complex to understand and the idea is quite coherent and clear.
Emphasis is given on the construction of narrative in south India to make sense
of the world and to understand the civil societies in south Asia better.
3. “The British awarded to those who invoked the particular labels they
favoured. ”
The ‘labels ’ that are talked about here are the poster publishers of the visual
market.
This line doesn’t convey directly the significance of the visual market in the
opinions of the people. The British government tries to influence the market by
giving grants and awards to those labels which favoured them. This shows the
keen interest that the government has in influencing the competition and
shaping opinions of the mass.
4. “almost all of these responses drew on the font of Shi’i vocabulary in
emphasising the ‘martyrdom’ of the Muslim community to the interests of the
majority ”
This line cannot be understood without a proper context. The ‘responses ’ the
responses here that are talked about here are the motive of the poster
designer that they want to evoke from the public. The “font of Shi’i ”
vocabulary refers to a poster that is printed in the case study. The poster in the
study is a picture of Tipu Sultan and some text written in Arabic below him.

Through this line, we get the idea of how posters transported the greater
meaning and purpose of the community as a whole. In this particular poster
described above, the text emphasises on the ‘martyrdom ’ of the individual for
the interest of the community as a whole. Tipu Sultan is seen as a great warrior
king and protector of the kingdom until his last breath from the British
invaders. His image is symbol of courage, intelligence, chivalry and martyrdom.

5. “A range of ‘Islamic’ images (to use the Brijbasi catalogue’s term) all
reinforce an identity called ‘Muslim’ in India. ”
To give the context, the images refer to the posters of the Brijbasi catalogue
term. The ‘identity of ‘Muslim’ in India ’ has a deep and quite broad meaning
which is important for Muslims living in South Asia. Muslim in India needs to
be understood with more careful and deeper way because the followers of
Islam in South Asia see themselves as a part of two ‘WORLDS’, first is the
greater Muslim world that they are the part of Mecca and Medina unites them
and they all function together as a community.

6. “recent scholarship has devoted much attention to the image of the new
bourgeois woman who emerges in posters for the general market produced
during the nationalist and post-independence periods. This Indian woman is
active in both devotion and consumption. ”
 Not talking about the Muslim niche market but the general market, the
Feminine Identity portrayed in the posters were Bourgeoise women who were
quite active in participation of these visual elements. Another article -Uberoi,
‘Feminine Identity’ is the scholarship and other studies that are being talked
about here.

7. “for Muslim consumers, this emphasis on the Mughals and the Indo-Persian
culture they forged is most obviously an attempt to remind viewers of the high
status enjoyed by such Muslims in the subcontinent, as well as of the concept
of the right rule that is inclusive and recognises their important contributions.
”
As discussed earlier, Muslims in South Asia identifies themselves with the dual
identity. To give some context, this line is being delivered while discussing the
emergence of the Mughal and Indo-Persian monuments in posters like the Taj
and other structures.
8. “Thus the Muslim-niche posters imagined an ‘elsewhere’ encompassing
both the Indian foreground on which the subject stood and the Islamic-world
background. Indeed, just such an imagined elsewhere pro-vided the
understanding of the demand for Pakistan in the 1946 elections ”
This line has quite big implications. We already discussed before in the lines
how Muslims of south Asia perceived their identity, the imagined elsewhere
talked about in the line is the same ‘Two Worlds’ of the Muslims that
Mohamad Ali said in the round table conference.
Muslims reminded themselves through these posters about their Muslim
world as well as their state that they were part of, many supporters of Muslim
league in Muslim minority areas like UP demanded a different state, a state
that they can identify themselves with even though it would be quite
impossible for even a possibility of implementing such state.

Bibliography: Sandria B. Freitag, South Asian ways of seeing, Muslim ways of

knowing: The Indian Muslim niche market in poster.

3.Sectionwise Summary
Id:201901445
 Jaimit Joshi
Introduction
The visual turn in different regions of the world helps us to uncover popular
concerns and values in ways that a historiographical focus on texts could not
do. Through such methodologies we gain the ability to understand concers in
the civil society that emerged in 20th century South-Asia. Previous
historiography on middle-class patters and developmentsis where we had
begun to understand Indian constructions of Modernity and Related issues.
Thus this case study ensures to answer and address the fundamental questions
posed in the past.

Context
Most of the research has been devoted to the beginnings of poster-making in
the late 19th century by Ravi Varma and the graduates of the Government Art
School who formed the Calcutta Art Studio. New idols ofGods were created
using brighter colors. This enlarged market of consumers made a place for
lower-class urban dwellers as well as rural consumers. Also witb printing there
was a development of patnerships with European printers. Most of the
dwellers sent their prints to German who enlarged the prints and returned
them to India.

South Asian Visual Practices

The centrality of vision and the impact of the gaze came to the subcontinent in
the train of Western industrialisation, especially through the increased
technological capacity to mass-produce visual materials that were then
consumed at all levels of society.

The Muslim Niche Market: Shared Practices and Understandings

A range of ‘Islamic’ images (to use the Brijbasi catalogue’s term) all reinforce
an identity called ‘Muslim’ in India. The term suggests a worldwide identity,
but is,nevertheless, specific to the subcontinent. Important among these
images are the ones relating to Muharram, which at least by the nineteenth
century had become an observance that—rather than delineating Shi‘a from
Sunni—stood as an identifier of Indian Islam itself. Observances of Muharram
became combined public/private civic exercises that emphasised the place of
Muslims in local society while still providing private sessions for ‘readings’ that
could focus on specific and differing interpretations of the events at Karbala

The Muslim Niche Market: Distinctions and Difference

However, the long-lived appeal of the image of the Taj also relates to newer
associations made by the ‘general’ market, in this case with being ‘modern’
and situating representations of India within a global array of images, as well
as with romantic understandings of ‘love’. It also recognises the Islamic side of
the Mughal cultural system. In these images, a much greater emphasis on ‘the
word’ and the power of calligraphy is shown. In part it also reflects the
orientation of a revealed religion to ‘the word’ of God. And in part it reflects
the aesthetic interest, for the larger Islamic world to which this niche market
connects, in the art of calligraphy and its role in representing ‘the word’ and
other aspects of this world.
4.Identifying and supplying
collateral information
Id:201901451
Parin Jasoliya
The case study by Sandria Freitag brings new evidence and methods to study
civil society in South Asia through the popular visual culture that emerged over
the 19th and 20th century.

Throughout the case study, Sandria Freitag first introduces us to the context of
why looking at the social society through visual lense is important, especially
through the poster market in this particular study. Followed by how the market
functioned over time and how the consumer who was mostly Religious social
groups affected the demand and in return created a visual culture.
Muslims and the Muslim niche market in the poster is an extended case study
of how many visual elements played their part in designing an ‘imagined world’
for the Indian Muslims who are a 
minority in India.

This answer will also be structured similarly in the context of the content of the
case study.

Need for Visual examination and its reach in civil society

Expansion of new technology and new forms of modernity has created a

growing middle class who has demands for the posters and other visual
decoratives which could be used for wall hanging and home decoration. As
cited by the Author (citation 3) -- ”Each year the journal Modern Review would
produce a packet of prints on heavy stock, suitable for framing and hanging on
middle-class walls. ”. This shows there were a market and people consumed
these new forms of artefacts that were now entering the market.

Examining civil society through a visual lens can explain and help grasp some
peculiar complexities like the embrace of both Gandhian non-violence and
Bhagat Singh's use of violence. Images of both Gandhi and Bhagat Singh were
well received and this is well talked in Photos of God, Pinney. Which has
discussed how nationalism can affect the public. 
Visual culture all together might not be a new phenomenon. Already in
Vijayanagar kingdom, Mahanavmi Dibba used to be a great stone structure
onto which beautiful carvings resided which depicted erotic dancing beauties,
hunting scenes, historical scenes and mythical carvings. These carvings also
showed the lifestyle of people and celebrations that were happening in the
kingdom.
The public in South Asia was fundamentally different from the public in
western Europe. Live performances had a crucial and vital place in the public of
south Asia. At least in Britain text was substituted as the primary mode of
conveying information and to communicate ideas. The text was the well known
and well-consumed mode of transmission, Due to the Sunday school
movement which brought literacy to the lower class. But in the case of South
Asia Visual mode remained the primary form of communication to the public.
This highlights the importance of using a different approach, a visual approach
to studying and researching south Asia and other contemporary parts of the
world.

This case study also included this citation included by the researcher as to
assert the demand of visual forms of consumptions (citation 41) --” From
collections like those of Priya Paul and Bobby Kohli, it is clear that people not
only collected matchboxes and packaging labels (for bidis, smallgoods, etc.) as
stamps and coins are collected in the West (a process fostered by the sellers of
the cloth, etc.: they would produce labels in a series so that consumers would
want to acquire the whole set), consumers also went so far as to arrange these
labels in assemblages for display, even surrounding them with decorative
elements from book covers and other papers. It should be noted that the
producers of these images were most frequently British manufacturers (for
example, fabric labels by Manchester mills). For our purposes, however, the
emphasis is not on the intentions of the sellers, but on the uses made of these
by Indian collectors.”
This also shows the demand and active consumption of these visual artefacts
and hence they are important to take into consideration the identity of the
public in South Asia.

Social changes and Muslim poster market

 In an interview with an Old Delhi calendar publisher which was published on
January 2001, it was noted that trends and themes of the poster market were
not the same everywhere, the themes sometimes would cycle in different
forms, influenced by the popular tastes. Sometimes minor alterations were
made and sometimes old posters were fabricated for an element of nostalgia.
Even the archive maintained by the poster company would not have entire
ranges of the historical posters that existed, most of them altered and cherry-
picked their posters.

The posters in Muslim niche market glorified Martyrdom and had a theme of
mecca, practising the right way and to work as a whole for the Muslim
community. Many examples of posters dating 1940s were themed around being
a protector of the community. These posters were having those themes
because of the minority status of the Muslim community in India. These posters
give them a sense of guidance on how to become an Indian Muslim and protect
the Indian Muslim community and preserve their identity.

Indian Muslims had a notion of two worlds, a world where they are Indian and
be part of India, and Muslim world was that they were part of the greater
Muslim community who walk on footsteps of Muhamad. This two-world idea
had an influence on demand for the separate Islamic state at the time of
independence. As Mohamed Ali Jinnah put it to the 1930 Round Table, “I
belong to two circles of equal size, but which are not concentric. One is India,
and the other is the Muslim world... We as Indian Muslims ... belong to these
two circles, each of more than 300 million, and we can leave neither.”

In Islamic tradition, Buraq is the mythical winged horse who is said to be a

transport of some prophets. The prophet himself rode the Buraq into heaven
and hence it is considered as sacred to the Islamic religion. Many posters were
printed and circulated with duldul flying on the top and the background had
many variations. In one the Buraq was flying over an oversized Taj mahal which
signified the place of Muslims in Indian and Indianness of the Muslims since taj
mahal is seen as a symbol of India

References Used

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buraq , http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hadith-v
https://books.google.com/?id=O69zjVnjL10C&pg=PA117, http://hampi.in/mahanavami-dibba
5.Glossary of difficult words.
Id: 201901245
Harshit Parmar
1. Scrutinize – to look at or examine something carefully
2. Legitimacy – conformity to law or rules
3. Historiographic – the study of the writing history and of written history
4. Nuanced – a very small difference in meaning, feeling, sound etc.
5. Aesthetics – concerned with beauty or art
6. Mythological – very old stories and the beliefs contained in item
7. Dweller - a person or animal that live in place mentioned
8. Provenance – the place of origin or earliest known history of something
9. Eclectic – deriving something from broad and diverse range of source
10. Posture – the way that person sits, stands, walks etc.
11. Ephemeral – lasting or used for short period of time
12. Niche – a job, position that is suitable you
13. Underpinnings – a set of ideas, motives or devices which justify or form the
basis for something
14. Incentives – something that encourages you
15. Narrativization – an action, putting the title of narrative and property of
narrativity as something outside of the text which is imposed on it
16. Cluster – a group of people that stand or grow close together
17. Fostered - to help or encourage the development of something
18. Synchronicity – the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear
significantly
19. Tableaux – a scene showing, for example events and people from history
that is presented by a group of actors who don’t move or speak
20. Perquisites – something special like a privilege to which a person has a
special right because of his social position
21. Delineating – to describe or draw something in great detail
22. Ubiquitous – seeming to be everywhere or in several places at the same
time
23. Bourgeois – belonging to or characteristic of middle class
24. Ostensible – seeming to be real or true, but not necessarily real or true, like
artificial
25. Negotiations – discussions at which people try to decide or agree
something
26. Idiosyncratically – distinctively, characteristic
27. Perpetuated – to cause something to continue for a long time
28. Hegemony – control by one country, organization over other countries
29. Manoeuvre – a movement that needs care or skill
6.KEY IDEAS
Id:201901447
Malhaar Thakore
1. Shared practice and understandings: In this the author tells us most of
the Islamic images relating to muharram reinforced an identity called
‘muslim’ in India.

2. Distinctions and Difference: Due to difference in acceptance of art

between general public and muslim niche market there are distinction in
the images produced like ‘the word’, lack of playfulness, etc.

3. Implication for muslim regime: This was done by calling attention to the
problems faced when scholars limit themselves and tracing back the
roots of late twentieth-century communalism.
7.Important Dates
Id:201901424

Denish Hirpara

1. 1900-One of the oldest, still extant, publishers is Hem Chander Bhargava,

founded in 1900s.

2. 1920-Brijbasi was founded in the 1920s.

3. 1940- old general catalogue, dating from the 1940s. At this time a catalogue
was likely to be a hand-stitched ‘book’ containing a number of large pages.

4. 1860-In India the buraq—with a woman’s head, wings, and a horse’s body—
becomes associated with the Muharram story, where it ‘carries’ tazias (replicas
of tombs) in the processions .A patua story-teller scroll segment picturing
buraq with tazia from the 1860s.

5. 1996-The terms in quotation marks come from the two Brijbasi catalogues
offered in 1996,one for the ‘general’ market and one for the ‘Islamic poster’
market.

8.Important Names And Their

Significance.
 Id:201901414
Zala Ravirajsinh Kiritsinh
1) M.L Garg :

 M.L.Garg has been able to provide the author with the two
“Brijbasi Catalogue Cover” images among which one was for the
‘general’ market whereas the other for the ‘Islamic poster’
market.

2) Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger :

 Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger have provided the

author with three images which were of great importance in
understanding the efforts of Muslims of South Asia in marking
their significance in the society and helping their people secure a
better position in the society.
 Duldul : The image of Duldul marked Muharram which helped the
minority of Muslim in South Asia mark their significance in the
society as Duldul represented the sacrifice their people had given
for the society.

3) Ravi Varma : He was one of the nationalist artists who applied western
aesthetics to India’s historical and mythological stories.
 Unlike the Ravi Varma Press,most of the new companies sent their
original paintings to German or other printers, who did relatively
large print runs and returned the posters to India.

4) Fritz Schleicher : Fritz Schleicher was the chief German technician at Ravi
Varma’s Press who purchased Varma’s print and painting stock as well as
 the name so he could continue producing under the Ravi Varma
imprimatur.

5) Hem Chander Bhargava and Brijbasi Publishers : These are one of the
oldest publishers which offered images aimed at a range of audiences.

 They used regional representatives, first to assess the desires of

consumers ‘in the street’ (for content, ranging from subject
matter to colours used), which they conveyed back to the central
office, and then to create distribution networks down to footpath
hawkers in each locality.
 A range of ‘Islamic’ images (to use the Brijbasi catalogue’s term)
all reinforce an identity called ‘Muslim’ in India,thus this way
Brijbasi catalogues helped reinforce the identity of Muslim in
India.

6) Tipu Sultan : Figures such as of Tipu Sultan were continuously made to

show how South Asian Muslims were not merely martyrs, but key figures
of resistance to western imperialism, as well as creators of alternative
state cultural systems that incorporated all communities.

7) Muharram : Important among the images of Muslim Niche Market were

that relating to Muharram, which at least by the nineteenth century had
become an observance that—rather than delineating Shi‘a from Sunni—
stood as an identifier of Indian Islam itself.

 Observances of Muharram became combined public/ private civic

exercises that emphasised the place of Muslims in local society
(during the public parts of the exercises) while still providing
private sessions for ‘readings’ that could focus on specific and
differing interpretations of the events at Karbala (thus reinforcing
sub-identities for those attending).
 The competition between Muharram and Ramlila (in the sense of
a desire to excel in pleasing north Indian audiences) fuelled much
of the expansion, which emerged from shared understandings
about how to exercise passionate devotionalism in public and how
to satisfy civic pride.
 8) Duldul : Duldul, Husain’s horse, who stands in for the humans in the
story of martyrdom and heroism on behalf of community and just rule.
Early in the twentieth century a single image conveyed a range of
meanings inherent in the rendering of Duldul ; by the late twentieth
century it took two different images to tell either a bloody story of
martyrdom (as in the image of Duldul hit by numerous arrows), or to
invoke an amalgam of signs for ‘royal’ representation.
 We thus may assume that right rule, as evoked through this Indian
Muslim imagery, generally asserted a broader claim regarding the
Muslim contribution to Indian models of the state.

9) The Buraq : The winged creature on which Muhammad is said to have

journeyed to heaven. In India the buraq—with a woman’s head, wings,
and a horse’s body—becomes associated with the Muharram story,
where it ‘carries’ tazias (replicas of tombs) in the processions (space
precludes showing a patua story-teller scroll segment picturing buraq
with tazia from the 1860s). The unique addition of a Muharram-
connected buraq to the South Asian visual repertoire may be seen as
one of many attempts by Muslims there to create a world in which they
are a self-sufficient community, relying not on a Muslim ruler but on
references back to Muhammad’s story and time (regarded as the ideal),
with exhortations to Indian Muslims to behave as though they were
living in that time.

10) Qur’an and Mecca/Medina : Both Qur’an and Mecca/Medina were

used frequently in the Islamic posters as a standard for appropriate
behaviour for the Indian Muslims and also by showing Mecca/Medina
showed the linkage that Indian Muslims had with the world of Islam.

9.Quotations
Id:201901245
Harshit Parmar
1. Moving us beyond ‘elite manipulation’ and capturing the complexities that
enabled, for instance, the simultaneous embrace of Gandhian non-violence
and Bhagat Singh’s use of violence.

2. Expansion of these early efforts measured not only the embrace of new
technologies made available through the global, imperialised circumstances,
but also the creation of demand among the growing middle class.

3. Cycles of popular taste, accompanied by a recent consumer interest in

nostalgia, have also prompted publishers now to pull out old posters for
reproduction.

4. Within the South Asian processes of narrative-building, what analysts call

the ‘mobility’ of the viewer has proved centrally important.

5. By journey, explorations, colonization, the whole world becomes visible at

the same time that it becomes appropriable.

6. Consumption and participation—as new forms of patronage—became

conflated.

7. Cultural contexts for ‘commodified forms of looking’ became linked to ‘the

experiences of spatial and temporal mobility’.

8. The elaborations of Muharram observances coincided, in north India at

least, with elaborations of Ramlila: both became linked to ruling houses.
9. Pilgrimage here is not the hajj to the sites of Muhammad as exemplar, but to
shrines which have reputations for specific kinds of assistance with human
problems in the here and now.

10. Note the reference to 786, which stands for Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim,
‘In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful’

11. The overlay of heart, cokes, and jeans suggests a popularisation of the Taj
that enables it to bridge the gap between the ‘general’ and ‘Islamic’ worlds.

12. Martyrdom seems to have replaced the focus on the Mughal creation of a
shared Indo-Persian culture.

13. Pinney notes that ‘Popular Indian visual semiosis creates instead what
might be termed a sense of the “elsewhere”, and it is this—operating within a
quite different configuration of cultural factors—which allows many Indians to
“think” their nation’.

14. Many images reflected self-conscious efforts to create a self-sufficient

Muslim community.

15. The problem is much deeper than a myopic view of ‘who counts’ in the
master narrative.

10.References
Id:201901434
Vidhi Badrakiya
  Books:
1. Pinney : photos of the gods
2. Culture and Power
3. Fractured Modernity
4. Hindu wife
5. Tanika sarkar
6. Modern review(journal) and chatterjee’s album
7. Pinney : The Nation (Un)Pictured(journal)
8. Appadurai : Fear of small numbers
9. Friedberg : Window Shopping
10. Pluralism to Separatism: Qasbas in Colonial awadh
11. Select speeches(Mohamed ali)
12. matchbook collection printed by Chronicle Books
13. Platts : Dictionary
14. Qureshi : Transcending
15. Anderson : Imagined Communities
16. Metcalf : Traditionalist Islamic Activism
17. Metcalf : Islamic Revival in British India
18. Judy Pugh :Divination and ideology in the Banaras Muslim community
19. Joshi : Fractured modernity
20. Nita Kumar : The Artisans of Banaras

 Scholarly Articles :
1. Community and collective action
2. Bigelow : ‘Unifying Structures, Structuring Unity’
3. Chatterjee : Beyond the Nation
4. Iftikhar : Political posters in Karachi
5. Taylor : Modes of civil society

 Figures :
1. Priya Paul collection
2. Uberoi’s collection (like unity, Camels Seen through Window)