Oxford Centre for
Hindu Studies Online
Oxford Centre for
Hindu Studies Online
Over the past two centuries Hinduism has taken up print, cinema, and the graphic novel, turning each new medium into a canvas for the gods. This on-demand course tells that story through more than 25 hours of richly illustrated video, tracing how popular art has reshaped the way the divine is seen, sold, and worshipped in India.
We begin in the early lithography workshops of Calcutta and Bombay, where traditional folk arts met the printing press, then follow the story through textile trade labels, the paintings and press of Raja Ravi Varma, and the allegorical images of Bharat Mata that helped galvanise the movement for Indian Independence. Later sessions turn to the “mythological” genre in Indian cinema, and to comics and graphic novels including Amruta Patil’s Adi Parva. Throughout, the course combines religious studies with art history, examining technique, design, and how representations of the divine mirror a changing Hindu society.
The course was created by Dr Layne Little. It is an on-demand course of eight sessions with 25 hours of video lectures, a 43-page illustrated coursebook, and invitations to three general-interest Zoom sessions. Enrol anytime and study at your own pace, with lifetime access. For more courses on Hindu Culture, click here.
Much of modern Hinduism and its popular religious art arises in response to colonialism and European aesthetics. In this first session, we will explore how history has shaped the course of modern Hindu art. This comprehensive introduction gives us a visually rich overview of the course ahead.
This first two sessions will focus on the development of lithographic art in Calcutta (now Kolkata). We will explore traditional folk arts influencing early printing workshops in the region and see how iconography and Indian aesthetics find expression in a new modern technological medium. We will also examine how the religious imagination is changed by print art in a variety of ways responding to market demands and other social shifts in communal and political spheres.
At the same time as the new presses are thriving in Calcutta, they are also making a great impact in Bombay (now Mumbai). While Calcutta was a colonial center flourishing through trade, Bombay increasingly saw British colonial expansion through the same lens that it viewed Mughal domination. In this session, we will turn to the more overt political element that shaped the advent of lithography here.
Trade labels are an important form of lithography that appears at the same time as the early prints we have been discussing. In this session, we see the intersection between Hindu lithography, the textile trade, and advertising as we explore how trade labels first appeared alongside prints and lithographs in the late 19th century and was at the heart of what has been called “a trade war in pictures.”
In this session, we explore the life and art of Ravi Varma, India’s most famous painter and the story of the press that he founded. Ravi Varma’s training in European painting techniques makes the gods come alive while the artist employs some “sly civility” to depict powerfully striking moments in Hindu epic lore to offer a subtle but powerful critique of colonialism.
This week, we will immerse ourselves more fully in the world of print culture, a very particular form of “bazaar art” rooted in social critique, political dissent, and reform. We will explore how popular art reimagined India as the anthropomorphised goddess, Bhārata Mātā, through a vast stream of allegoric images that galvanised the movement towards Indian Independence and helped shape a collective vision for a new and modern India.
We turn our attention to that peculiar genre of cinema that Indian scholars of film studies refer to as “mythologicals.” Beginning with the profound influences of Parsi theater, we will trace the history of Hindu cinema to gain some insight into the ways in which it has reimagined sacred narrative in what is most certainly the dominant and most diverse form of Hindu visual culture.
For our final session we turn to one of the most vibrant mediums of Hindu popular culture: comics and graphic novels. We look at graphic novels that offer strikingly sophisticated and socially poignant takes on the Hindu mythological genre as great contemporary artists and authors reveal the innermost depths of their being through amazingly innovative new ways of visual storytelling.
