‘Welcome to selfiestan’: identity and the networked gaze in Indian mobile media

Introduction

In the mediascape of contemporary India, it is hard to avoid selfie culture, even for those socially or economically excluded from online life. In a recent video advertisement for Gionee smartphones in India (2017), Hindi film actor Alia Bhatt dances through a series of locations with a smartphone in her outstretched hand, posing for and taking selfies with people she encounters along the way. With a soundtrack and choreography recalling Bollywood song sequences, Bhatt sings ‘Welcome to selfiestan’, the term ‘selfiestan’ being a twist on ‘Hindustan’, the Hindi word for India. In a competing advertisement for Oppo (2018) smartphones, actor Deepika Padukone waves a smartphone in an empty studio space, taking selfies and admiring the results. ‘Isn’t life full of fun choices?’ she asks at the sequence’s start, closing the video with a directive to the audience to ‘capture the real you’. An advertisement for Vivo (2017) smartphones depicts a cheerleader and her squad practicing on a playing field alongside cricket players. She states in voiceover, ‘Turn watchers into spectators, men into fans … with our practiced smiles’. The video ends with her smiling broadly as she takes a high-angle selfie, her voiceover declaring, ‘This is not a selfie. This is my self’. An advertisement for Xiaomi (2018) smartphones highlights actor Katrina Kaif shooting selfies – alone and with others – concluding with a voiceover call to ‘Go ahead and love your selfie’. Such selfie-centric marketing has spilled into India’s streets. Since at least 2017, it has been common to see billboard and bus shelter ads for rival phones side by side along highways and roads, all touting the selfie capabilities of their respective products. One advertising industry journal produced an extensive report (Ambekar, 2017) examining how campaigns in India from competing smartphone manufacturers tend to mirror one another in their invocation of the selfie as the nucleus of the user–device experience.

Rising from less than a fifth of sales in India in early 2016 to account for more than half of sales by early 2017 (Gurnaney, 2017; Phartiyal, 2017), smartphones from Chinese companies such as Gionee, Vivo, Oppo, and Xiaomi have been systematically marketed there less as dazzling technological accomplishments than as devices for self-exploration, self-expression, and self-actualization. Cutting deeply into the Indian market share of competitors who have mostly avoided selfie-oriented marketing (such as domestic brand Micromax and global brands Samsung and Apple), these Chinese brands consistently position their products not as ‘smartphones’, but as ‘selfie phones’. Accordingly, Gionee makes the ‘super selfie’ A1, Oppo has the ‘selfie expert’ F3, Vivo’s products include the ‘perfect selfie’ V5 and the ‘clearer selfie’ V7, and Xiaomi’s Redmi Y1 is marketed under the ‘Love Your Selfie’ slogan. Through these tactics, these brands promote their smart-seeing phones as principally reflecting and extending individual identity by visually mediating and materializing the subject through intimate lenses that are backed by vast, unseen communication networks.

This article considers the potential cultural significance of thinking of smartphones as primarily selfie devices within India by exploring the performativity of networked practices of visual technologies in relation to deeper, more established South Asian practices and beliefs surrounding imagery, vision, and the gaze. Specifically, it traces affinities between the affirmation of self and presence in personal, digitally networked visuality and the cultural influence of the traditional Hindu practice of darshan. An integral part of daily Hindu worship anchored in spatial presence and the active gaze, darshan entails a visual exchange between the worshiper and a material embodiment of a holy being (typically a statue or printed image, though it can be a living person, such as a guru). In associating the digitally networked visuality of the self with beliefs and conditions surrounding the interface of darshan, this study establishes points of contact between earlier research on darshan and visual media and more recent scholarship on the aesthetics and meanings of selfies and selfie culture. Although it does not postulate that smartphone-based image culture duplicates or replaces traditional image practices surrounding darshan and selfhood, it does consider that such long-standing cultural traits and social routines can contribute significantly to epistemologies of the user–device–network relationship within and across differing discursive contexts of contemporary communication technology. It recognizes the proliferation of generalized practices that would appear to be standard across cultures as a global discourse of selfie production, with established codes of self-representation and dominant technological and commercial formats (Hjorth and Hendry, 2015; Veum and Undrum, 2018). Yet, it also acknowledges that our understanding of, and engagement with, personal media and their extended networks cannot and should not strive for any universal explanation or norm (Robertson, 1994) in spite of more or less globally adopted platforms, affordances, and techniques (Costa, 2018). As such, it underlines the role of culturally specific frames of understanding that may not be evident from the manner and means of production but may be deduced from surrounding systems of meaning, such as those found in marketing campaigns for these technologies or their adoption in political discourse.

This research takes a critical technology approach, placing recent scholarship on selfies and selfie production in conversation with anthropological descriptions of darshan and prior work on darshan’s impact on South Asian mass media. It includes consideration of the selfie’s role within political communication in contemporary India in examining the intersection of darshan and visual social media in the rise to power of the Hindu Right through the Hindutva politics of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These endeavors are augmented by two, necessarily limited, studies of content on Instagram – the world’s largest photo-based social media platform (Constine, 2018) – as initial steps in exploring potential intersections with darshan in visual practice and image production. The first study considers practices on Instagram directly pertaining to darshan by using as its sample all publicly available photos tagged #darshan or #dailydarshan posted on Instagram during a 1-week period in August 2018. It applies a visual and textual semiotic analysis to evaluate the content and potential significance of these images. This is meant to set in relief darshan’s possible relationship to the rituals of selfie culture versus its direct invocation within selfie practice (i.e. selfies tied to the traditional practice of darshan in places such as temples). The second study compares activity on the Instagram account of Narendra Modi, who is not only Indian prime minister but also the head of the conservative Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with that of his principal political rival, Rahul Gandhi, who is president of the broad-based and historically socialist Indian National Congress party. It similarly relies on a visual and textual semiotic analysis to determine the nature and frequency of images of religious rituals and worship in each account as well as to assess differences in the use of social media and images of worship toward the promotion of divergent political aims.

Digital India, Hindutva, and selfiestan

India is the second-largest and fastest growing smartphone market in the world (Ho, 2017) and figures on social media use there suggest a strong potential for selfie making and sharing. According to Facebook, India had the largest number of monthly users of the social media platform of any single country – with up to 241 million monthly users – as of July 2017 (a million more than the United States; Kemp, 2017). Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, had as many as 120 million monthly users in India as of February 2019, with daily users estimated at 60 to 80 million (Ananth and Sharma, 2019). ‘We think of [India] as a market with a lot of promise and excitement’, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger stated in a 2017 interview (Sharma, 2017). ‘So as we draw up a path from 800 million to 900 million to a billion users, we see India as being a very key market for us’.

India’s increasing importance in the global economy, its continuously growing gross domestic product (GDP), and its widening middle class likely contribute to the recent rise of its smartphone market and concomitant growth in social media use. National politics has also played its part. Modi (2015) has called Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter ‘the new neighborhoods of our new world’ (p. 353) in promoting his Digital India initiative, which seeks to extend fiber-optic networks to 600,000 Indian villages and towns and install Wi-Fi in 500 train stations. Perhaps not surprisingly, during the 2014 national election that brought Modi to power, he and the BJP campaigned vigorously in some of those ‘neighborhoods’, using social media tactics – including candidate selfies – highly effectively (Baishya, 2015) toward shaping a form of political discourse that Shakuntala Rao (2018) has labeled ‘selfie nationalism’ (p. 168). In addition to campaign-trail selfies posted on Facebook, the BJP generated a mosaic image of Modi from thousands of selfies of followers via the #SelfieWithModi hashtag, which briefly became the top-trending hashtag across all social media worldwide upon Modi’s election (Price, 2015). Joining Instagram shortly after his victory (Mohan, 2014), Modi has become the most-followed sitting world leader on that platform, with 18.9 million followers as of March 2019 (compared to 12.2 million for US President Donald Trump, 5.9 million for Pope Francis, and 584,000 for Modi’s chief political rival, Rahul Gandhi). This dedication to new social media forms in general, and the selfie in particular, contrasts with the decidedly conservative ideology of the BJP, which is based in Hindutva, or the conviction that traditional Hindu customs, values, and rituals amount to the cultural hegemony of India (Kaul, 2017; Sinha, 2017). Nevertheless, the apparent success of ‘selfie phone’ marketing and sales coupled with the popularity of selfies within Hindutva politics may indicate an alignment of contemporary technological affordances and interpersonal communication methods with wider, long-standing South Asian cultural norms more deeply embedded in Hindu-influenced cultural frames and practices. The use of the smartphone as a dynamic object that observes, visualizes, and reflects back on the user in a direct and proximate face-to-face exchange bears strong affinities with the rituals of darshan, suggesting that processes of selfie culture in India – where 80% of the 1.2 billion population identify as Hindu – in some ways mark a continuity of visual and communicative regimes rooted in sacred traditions. As such, the imagined ‘selfiestan’ of social media practice promoted by movie stars in smartphone campaigns not only may overlap with BJP populist nationalism centered on the ‘Hindu’ of Hindustan but also may merge with it.

Selfies, dualism, and the device

Although the selfie has become a well-known and banal part of contemporary life for many, accurately defining it as object and practice has remained difficult. Beyond the consensus that a selfie is a photograph, definitions and understandings vary according to the image’s subject, the mechanics of its making, and the contexts within which it is circulated and viewed. In exploring the interface of face-to-face interactions between networked mobile devices and their users, however, this article is primarily concerned with the relatively narrow but most widely accepted form of selfie (Zappavigna, 2016): a self-portrait made by holding the photographing device at (more or less) arm’s length. However, beyond this understanding – in which the self is evident both as agent and object of the process – it is important to note that ‘selfie’ has come to encompass nearly any form of photography that seeks to express one’s lifestyle and world view, especially, when shared through the maker’s social media accounts (Eckel, 2018: 145; Shipley, 2015: 404). As such, an individual’s Instagram feed, for example, may be approached as a collection of selfies, even when its images only occasionally are snapped by the individual or include their body in-frame (Hess, 2015: 1631; Senft and Baym, 2015: 1589).

Selfies imply or often express outright the relationship between individuals and their personal communication devices, as well as the technological and social networks that intersect through that relationship. They would appear to embody the ‘networked individualism’ described by Manuel Castells (2004: 223). Although it will be argued otherwise in this article, the success – and marketing – of selfie culture in the Indian context could be interpreted as indicative of a compulsion toward networked individualism, where the self is articulated to and through peers within neoliberal frames of self-promotion, freedom of circulation, and endless production and consumption. Much mainstream and scholarly writing on selfies (Fox and Rooney, 2015; Giroux, 2015; Ibrahim, 2017; Jin and Muqaddam, 2018; Mendelson and Papacharissi, 2011; Sorokowski et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2017; Weiser, 2015) has focused on this individualism, treating selfies as narcissistic or self-obsessed visual currency in the globalized exchange of social capital. Calling the selfie a ‘streamlined device for self-promotion’, Rd Crano (2018) states that ‘the selfie, whether it explicitly pictures the operative individual or not, publicizes an identity, builds the brand of the de facto self-entrepreneur’ (p. 11).

Research on selfies in India has tended to focus on areas typically examined elsewhere, such as the agency of ‘self-depiction’ (Shah and Tewari, 2016) and youth habits and attitudes around selfie making (Dutta et al., 2016), including the use of selfies to negotiate the pressures of family and peer groups (Diwakar, 2016). Nevertheless, the success of the selfie as an idea and practice in India may be embedded in long-standing cultural approaches and practices that are specific to South Asia, such as darshan. The apparent solipsistic or self-promotional turn of this individualized networked imagery, therefore, may be anchored in rituals, routines, and ideas that have structured understanding and relationships between the individual and others for centuries.

The idea of a self within the Indian context that is constructed through interaction in the production of selfies builds on, but diverges from, earlier theorizations of Indian portrait photography. Writing on commercial studio conventions in late 20th-century India, Christopher Pinney (2002) notes a ‘preference for “doubles” and “poses”’, claiming that this ‘reflects (and in turn engenders) the lack of a centred, visible “personality”’. Bodies and faces are shown to be ‘infinitely multiple and contingent’ (p. 89). Pinney attributes this to a ‘persuasive dualism’ in Hinduism, ‘in which a contingent and mutable external surface is contrasted with a moral character which can be made visible only through action’ (p. 90–91). The photograph captures the vyaktitva or the ‘signs of being a person’, he states, rather than the charitra, or interior moral character, which can only be revealed by one’s action, or karma (p. 92).

While selfies on social media often display the ‘infinitely multiple and contingent’, unlike the studio portraits of Pinney’s research, they function in a context where one’s image is also typically one’s action. In other words, selfies imply the action of self-portraiture, or self-production. In this way, the smartphone, as a ‘selfie phone’, acts as an integral component of one’s being. Writing on selfie practices, Jessica Leigh Maddox (2018) has emphasized self-reliance and expression as fundamental aspects of the production process. Makers of selfies have ‘agency and control in their own image production because they are no longer relying on an extra person (or, outside photographer) to take the picture for them’ (p. 31). Setting aside, for the moment, those selfies where another person operates the device, the practices Maddox describes conform to an understanding of the production of self through assertive action aimed primarily at controlling and shaping the representation of the subject to be shared with others. It leaves out the role of the device – in its affordances and limitations – in shaping production. While the selfie-taker, in most cases, may have wrested control of the camera from another to direct the process themselves, the device and its properties, as socially produced materials, structures, and protocols, function as a source of control as well (Costa, 2018). The self bridges between body and device, such that being requires some union of the two. Making selfies becomes a communicative act, both between user and device, and between the user–device pairing and social media embedded in digital networks extending out from the device. The self thus emerges through interconnectedness, and the selfie is that photograph that not only depicts the person, but through its relationship with social media also represents that person’s active acknowledgment of – and engagement with – social interactions through ever-present technological infrastructures.

Media, darshan, and the tactile gaze

Darshan, a Hindu worship technique anchored in physical presence and the active gaze, may be associated with these imaging actions in the South Asian context. Meaning ‘sighting’ or ‘viewing’ in Sanskrit, darshan most commonly refers to the meeting of gazes between a worshiper and the material embodiment of a god, such as a statue or printed image, though it can also refer to similar exchanges between a worshiper and a living being, such as a guru or even a politician (Gell, 1998: 116). The material representation of a god can range from a precious object in a temple to a mass-produced one displayed in a home. Central to darshan is the belief that this object functions as a device allowing direct interchange between worshiper and god. While gods may exist unseen everywhere – much as we often believe contemporary wireless and cellular networks to exist ubiquitously – these beings are accessed through such material instantiations. Darshan is only possible after the god-object has been given life through ritual. Lawrence Babb (1981) states that this often occurs through the addition of eyes to the object or image. Representations of gods ‘are likely to have eyes, if nothing else in the way of facial features’ (p. 387).

Gregory Price Grieve (2003) has called darshan a ‘conversation of gazes’ (p. 65), where the worshiper reveres the god and the god acknowledges the worshiper’s devotion. Once the object is invested with ‘the ability to look at us in return’, Grieve claims, ‘there is no absolute distinction between gods and people’ (p. 67). Alfred Gell (1998) similarly describes it as a ‘union’, stating that the image of the god under these conditions functions as ‘a manifestation of a social Other’. As a ‘two-way affair … of reciprocity and intersubjectivity’, Gell states that ‘the god/devotee relationship is a social one, absolutely comparable to the relationship between the devotee and another human person’ (p. 117).

In the past 20 years, there has emerged a significant body of work on the cultural influence of darshan in the development of modern visual media in India. This scholarship spans from the popularity of 19th-century calendar illustrations of Hindu gods (Pinney, 2004) to the depictions of gods, celebrities, and social hierarchies in 20th- and 21st-century cinema (Dwyer, 2006; Dwyer and Patel, 2002; Kapur, 2000; Prasad, 1998; Sinha, 2013; Taylor, 2003; Vasudevan, 2011), television (Mankekar, 1999), and video (Brosius, 2003). Madhava Prasad (1998) notes, for example, a transposition of the mechanics of darshan from the temple to the movie theater in his examination of the ‘organization of the look’ (p. 74) in the feudal family romance genre of Hindi cinema from the 1940s to 1960s. He identifies in these films a predilection toward frontality, which resembles the visual conditions found in the darshanic encounter (and today’s selfie practices). This compositional tendency of popular Hindi cinema contrasts sharply with the ‘separation of the object from the look directed towards it’ (p. 73) that is conveyed in Hollywood filmmaking of the same period through point-of-view camera angles and continuity editing, techniques theorized in Western film studies as contributing to a ‘voyeuristic’ or ‘scopophilic’ audience stance. ‘Contrary to the voyeuristic relation, in the darsanic relation, the object gives itself to be seen and in so doing, confers a privilege upon the spectator’, Prasad explains, thereby emphasizing an exchange between viewer and image, rather than the viewer’s immersion within the image (p. 75–76). Building on Prasad’s work, Ravi Vasudevan (2011) contends that ‘instead of seeing the discourse of darshan framing cinematic narration, we need to think of darshan as being enframed and reconstructed by it’. For Vasudevan, popular film in India has tended to ‘reinscribe’ darshan within its codes, creating possibilities for the darshanic within both the film narrative and the viewer’s relationship to the film:

Here, the localized deployment of filmic techniques in the micro-narration of a scene … alert us to how characters and spectators are being cinematically positioned in relation to the darshanic. The darshanic is not static, and generates new sources of authority from it, and in ways not entirely comprehensible in terms of established conventions. (p. 115)

Purnima Mankekar (1999) similarly notes this re-inscription in the production techniques and viewing practices surrounding Indian television serials of Hindu mythology that were broadcast in India in the 1980s and 1990s. Mankekar identifies an overt emphasis on the gaze and gazing in the lyrics of songs on the soundtracks, the statements of characters, and the frontal orientation of divine figures. In her research on viewing habits surrounding these serials, she found that some viewers would bathe and dress themselves as they would for a temple visit before viewing each episode (p. 202). In this vein, Christopher Pinney (2004) contends that the performance of darshan entails a strong corporeal relationship between image and viewer, distancing the practice from the emphasis on a disembodied gaze found in much Western visual aesthetic theory. Examining primarily the circulation and use of chromolithographic images of gods, Pinney argues that engaging such images through the parameters of darshan, whether in private or public settings, necessitates a bodily commitment that merges the visual with the tactile. This ‘corpothetics’ (p. 193) recognizes and rests within the bodily encounter between image and viewer, where each is treated as a material and active contributor. ‘The darshanic relationship that devotees cultivate engages vision as part of unified sensorium. The eye in darshan is best thought of as an organ of tactility, an organ that connects with others’ (p. 193).

In the contemporary context of networked mobile media, the selfie similarly becomes the moment where person, object, and the unseen (but felt) network align in a material performance of visual order and tactility. The hand reifies the ‘tactile eye’ as it makes contact with the touch-sensitive face of the image-bearing device. The selfie emerges as an engaged conversation of gazes between individual and device, then device and network, much as darshan is a direct, physical interaction or meeting between the worshiper and the god-object that is linked to a larger network of mythological and metaphysical concepts and beliefs. Reflecting the multisensory, bodily effects described by Pinney (2004), Babb (1981) claims that through darshan,

visual interaction between deity and worshipper establishes a sort of intimacy between them, which confers benefits by allowing worshippers to ‘drink’ divine power with their eyes, a power that carries with it – at least potentially – an extraordinary and revelatory ‘point of view’. (p. 388)

Point of view – rooted in technological affordances, spatial and ambient conditions, and physical contact and manipulation – functions similarly for the selfie. In particular, Sumin Zhao and Michele Zappavigna (2018) have argued that selfies are specifically about negotiating and expanding point of view, both by capturing the selfie maker’s point of view and by transmitting it through digital networks: ‘What distinguishes the selfie from other photographic genres is its ability to enact intersubjectivity – the possibility for difference of perspectives to be created and this difference to be shared between the image creator and the viewer’ (p. 1735). While the viewer may be construed as anyone in the selfie maker’s social media circles who accesses the image, it could be argued that, at least in the first instance, the viewer articulating, participating in, and negotiating this difference is none other than the device looking back from the maker’s hands. The selfie is rich in meaning because it can represent and address both the perspective of the self and the perspective of another (the camera, the viewer). In fact, the selfie is constantly shifting across these, within and between images, declaring in effect, ‘This is my view, this is the device’s view, this is your view’. As Zhao and Zappavigna contend, even as the makers of selfies may ‘look inwardly into “the self”, they also create a means for the self to engage outwardly with the world’ (p. 1737).

Paul Frosh (2015) speaks of this in terms of ‘see me showing you me’ (p. 1610) in his work on the selfie as essentially a gestural image tied to the interaction between the maker and the device. For Frosh, the selfie ‘points to the performance of a communicative action rather than to an object, and it is a trace of that performance … [the] culmination and also the incarnation of a gesture of mediation’ (pp. 1610–1611). Similar to the corporeal aesthetics that Pinney (2004: 193) observes in the physical conditions and techniques of darshan, this process is centered on the body’s performance in a face-to-face encounter with an object believed to be tapped into a larger, unseen network. Frosh (2015) states, ‘The body is inscribed in part into an already existing order of interpersonal signification – gestures have meanings in face-to-face interactions – but it is also inscribed as a figure for mediation itself’ (p. 1611). Within the context of India and the repeated emphasis on the smartphone as specifically a selfie phone, we can consider this discursive relationship as heavily centered on the user–device relationship, from which it may then radiate out to other contexts, other viewers, and other respondents. This aligns not only with Frosh’s claims but also those of others (Warfield et al., 2016) who have asserted that selfie practices are as much about the physical performance of the body in relation to other objects as about the circulation of representations of self.

In developing a materialist theory of distributed personhood, Gell (1998) considers darshan an important example of intersubjectivity built through material conditions and actions hinging in part on the sort of perspective shifts described by Zhao and Zappavigna (2018) and amounting to what Frosh (2015) calls the ‘kinesthetic sociability’ (p. 1608) of selfies. Gell explains,

The devotee does not just see the idol, but sees herself (as an object) being seen by the idol (as a subject). The idol’s ‘seeing’ is built into the devotee’s own self-awareness at one remove as the object which is seen by the idol …. The ‘idol seeing her’ is a nested component of ‘her seeing herself seeing the idol’. (p. 120, emphasis in original)

For Gell, this results in the perspectives of the idol and the worshiper becoming ‘logically interdigitated with one another in this way as a kind of optical oscillation in which the idol’s and devotee’s perspectives shift back and forth with such rapidity that interpersonal boundaries are effaced and ‘union’ is achieved’ (p. 120). We find a similar process at play in the production of selfies. Anirban Baishya (2015) explains, for example, that

The connection of the hand to the cell phone at the moment of recording makes the selfie a sort of externalized inward look, and the point of view of the selfie is … that of the hand that has been extended the power of sight.

Accordingly, ‘the point of view of the selfie seems authentic, because it is as if the human body is looking at itself’ (p. 1688). The photographing device and the individual become unified through their exchange of gazes, such that the user of the device constantly sees themselves, at least in part, through the perspective and presence of the device and its gaze. Remarkably, Baishya’s assessment of the role of the hand and self-reflection bears correspondences not only with Pinney’s (2004) theory of the tactility of vision but also with specific practices he notes surrounding the placement and embellishment of mass-printed devotional images in private settings in India. In his field work in rural central India, Pinney found that devotees commonly hired artisans to paste devotional images behind glass before silvering the surrounding surface, such that they could ‘now visually inhabit the space of the picture, alongside the deity with whom they desire the double sensation’ (p. 197).

These overlaps and affinities between the interfaces of selfie making and darshan may explain not only the appeal of smartphones in India as primarily selfie devices but also the power of the selfie in Hindutva politics based on Hinduism as a unifying and essential cultural foundation of Indian identity. Christiane Brosius (2003) has argued that the mechanics of darshan have long been at play in Hindutva media, noting the movement’s reliance on shots of popular devotional images in its propaganda videos of the 1990s. She identifies a Hindutva ‘intervisuality’ that places religious imagery within differing social spaces and media texts, ‘changing their meaning over time and according to the context’, to forge a bond between political discourse and religious rhetoric (p. 270). Brosius focusses on images of gods such as Ram. However, in the context of Hindutva’s contemporary political mobilization, it is important to recall that, although darshan most often involves a god-object, it can apply as well to encounters between gurus and disciples, and even between politicians and their supporters. This is significant in light of the media techniques of Modi, who has used his intimate encounter with the device and its networks (while skirting mass media outlets) to suggest a corollary intimacy between himself and his supporters as they access his image through social media feeds (Baishya, 2015). This contributes to what Nitasha Kaul (2017) has called the ‘Modi Myth’, which casts the BJP leader as an ‘ascetic, paternal, and decisive ruler’ (p. 533). Such political usage brings darshan into a secular arena, while also suggesting how it can function for the Indian prime minister as an endorsement of contemporary technology and communication that nevertheless bears correspondences with long-standing, everyday cultural concepts and rituals vital to the Hindutva movement.

#Darshan, Instagram, and political worship

Social media and worship, technology and politics, innovation and tradition – in the Indian context all would seem to come closer to being one and the same through the selfie. Such correspondences may be possible through the social and cultural influence of the routines and practices of darshan, rather than necessarily through direct involvement in these routines and practices. That said, the traditional act of darshan does have a presence within image-based social media platforms. Images of god statues and lingas (aniconic representations of the god Shiva, usually made of stone) regularly appear on Instagram with the hashtag #darshan or #dailydarshan. The act of darshan is also represented in the Instagram feeds of politicians such as Modi and Gandhi. Content analysis of these images can elucidate the difference between the potential influence of the cultural practices and meanings surrounding darshan on the device–user–network relationship, on one hand, and the device and network’s influence on the religious practice of darshan itself. For this article, all publicly available images marked #darshan or #dailydarshan on Instagram from a 1-week period in summer 2018 were examined and subjected to a semiotic analysis. The analysis does not consider algorithmically generated rankings tied to relevance or popularity but rather relies exclusively on user-produced tags as indicators of the accountholder’s understanding of the photo’s subject and potential significance for social media users. On 23 August 2018, there were over 135,000 Instagram posts tagged #darshan and over 20,000 tagged #dailydarshan. Many images tagged #darshan, however, were related to account holders, products, or celebrities named ‘Darshan’, such as the popular singer and reality television star, Darshan Raval. Examining Instagram activity for the period 17–23 August reveals that, of the 1630 posts added between those dates that were tagged #darshan, 894 (55%) appear to be related to the religious practice of darshan. The vast majority of these 894 posts (743, or 83%) present straightforward depictions of god statues or lingas. The remaining posts (151, or 17%) depict religious ceremonies (puja), processions, temples, or gurus. Of the 329 posts tagged #dailydarshan, nearly all (322) depict either god statues or lingas (266, or 81%) or puja (56, or 19%).

This quantitative and qualitative data, while limited, suggest that the camera acts as a simple extension of the human regard at the moment of religious darshan as the lens aligns with the view – and perspective – of the worshiper of the religious object. However, such technological intervention would presumably diminish the power of the act of darshan itself, or at least complicate it, as the viewer would likely be looking at the device (screen) while the device’s lens converts the idol or linga into an image. Many of the images in this study appear in feeds owned and operated by the temples themselves – usually temples outside Asia that serve South Asian Hindu diasporas – making the act of photographing and posting the results less the representation of an individual’s experience and more a surrogate for devotees accessing the temple through social media platforms. Similarly, a devotee taking a selfie with an idol or linga at the moment of darshan – or rather the moment just before or after darshan – is unusual enough that when a photojournalist for The Hindu (Waydande, 2018) photographed a worshiper in precisely such an act in Mumbai, it was published by that news outlet as a stand-alone photo with the caption ‘capturing a divine moment’. These examples suggest that the user–device relationship, while bearing aspects of darshan, rarely interrupts or intervenes in the visual and material interaction of the traditional practice of worship.

Within the frame of contemporary Indian politics, however, the image of darshan on social media becomes a significant component of the visual rhetoric of campaigning and governing. Evaluating the presence and prevalence of images of worship in the Instagram accounts of Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi offers a glimpse into the differing approaches to political imagery by the BJP prime minister and his Congress party rival. As of 7 March 2019, there were 267 posts in Modi’s Instagram feed, compared to 198 posts in Gandhi’s feed. There were 34 posts (13%) in Modi’s feed with overt religious themes, compared to 14 such posts (7%) in that of Gandhi. In both accounts many of these posts document visits to Hindu temples or holy sites, such as sacred mountains or ashrams (hermitages). Others depict visits to Sikh, Buddhist, or Muslim sites, or attendance at religious festivals. Modi’s feed included 11 posts (4%) of the prime minister in the act of darshan, while Gandhi’s feed included 8 such posts (4%). Eight out of the 11 images of darshan (73%) in Modi’s feed, however, included both Modi and the object of his gaze within the frame, while only 4 out of the 8 images of darshan (50%) in Gandhi’s feed depicted both him and the object worshipped.

It is important to note that neither Modi nor Gandhi indulged in self-activated imagery – that is, posting photographs of themselves that appear to be taken by themselves. In this regard, their social media practices break from the typical user–device relationship and its potential ties to darshan as explored in this article. Nevertheless, both engage in religious imagery and images of themselves at worship within feeds heavily concentrated on their image. Modi does so at nearly double the frequency of his Congress party rival, as one might expect from a leader whose politics are rooted in religious populism. Both depicted themselves in the moment of darshan at nearly equal rates. However, Modi’s feed more frequently depicted both him and the object of his gaze at that moment. This difference may signal divergent approaches to the interlinking of politics, worship, and visual social media by the two. To an extent, the mise-en-scene of Modi’s images of darshan more often than not situates the viewer as a potential participant, rather than as an observer. That is, from the camera’s perspective, the viewer of the posted image has the option to gaze upon the devotional object ‘alongside’ Modi or to gaze at Modi as he engages with the object. Of course, the viewer’s gaze may oscillate between the two. In Gandhi’s images of darshan, this composition is less frequent, and it is just as likely that the posted image will not include the devotional object, thereby providing an image of darshan that precludes the viewer’s participation in the act. In other words, one is typically ‘invited’ to worship ‘with’ Modi through the image’s construction, while this is less often the case with images of Gandhi. In this regard, Modi’s images more closely align with the data on #darshan and #dailydarshan posts, which overwhelmingly focus on god statues or lingas. They also reinforce the ascetic quality of Modi’s character, identified by Kaul (2017) as a key component of his public persona.

Conclusion

While the proliferation of photo-based social media in recent years has established certain global norms of image production and circulation, this does not diminish the possibility – indeed, the likelihood – of differing understandings of image practices extending across diverse cultural contexts. Selfie culture in India appears to be a particularly rich area for exploring the inflection of contemporary communication technologies with traditional beliefs and practices of the self, identity, and subjectivity. Examining recent theories on selfie production and reception in conjunction with anthropological studies of darshan and theorizations of this ritual’s role in the development of mass media in South Asia, this article has explored potential correspondences and intersections between the successful marketing of smartphones in India as specifically ‘selfie phones’, the use of selfies in conservative Hindutva politics, and the cultural influence of darshan as a concept and practice. In his work on darshan in mass visual media, Pinney (2004) has remarked that ‘Rather than create a specifically Indian enclave of darshan-related practices we should also be aware of the continuities and resonances with popular visual practice elsewhere’ (p. 193). By working through issues of image, agency, and self in the Indian context in theorizing the role of the cultural framework of darshan, one can contribute to the formation of a critique of contemporary human–technology relations that lays emphasis on the material specificity and performative significance of the user–device interface in addition to, as well as in conjunction with, that of the user and network. Conditions of interaction between the user and the device become a fundamental component of performing the self, regardless of any resultant image that might be stored or circulated. This approach diverges from interpretations of selfie production and mobile media use that stress the networked transmission of messages between discrete senders and receivers. In doing so, it suggests new paths to studying personal applications of media in the face of global conglomerates and data flows. By exploring the potential influence of long-established, traditional interactive media practices such as darshan, we can begin to imagine ways that the smartphone is much more than a technological device. We can see it function as an integral visual and material component of contemporary identity that demands user acknowledgment and an active gaze to produce and maintain the self within the social exchange that is communication.