Floating Words and the Aesthetics of the Visual Vernacular: Political Culture in Contemporary India

Impression

Looking at ‘the municipal sign’ as a ‘colonial invention’, Sudipta Kaviraj in his study of the public sphere of Calcutta analyses it as a mark of the ‘presence of a distinctly Weberian rationalist intelligence acting through the agencies of the state that constantly kept the rules, governed conduct, and imposed restrictions, without which the minimal precarious order of modern life threatened to dissolve into chaos’ (Kaviraj, 1987, p. 85). Between the order-aspiring municipal sign of Kaviraj and the wall of Manto scribbled in an act of defiance, in the aforementioned impression, words float in the public. These words are essentially endowed with visual properties. They are meant to be seen and not merely to be read. How do we make sense of such banal scripts and everyday acts of defiance like that of Manto’s wall? These words occupy public spaces and, in that sense, like political symbols and icons, they are deeply contested too. This article asks, what is the visual status of these words floating around us in the contemporary public realm?

Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented amount of conflict around symbols in India (Express Web Desk, 2018; Press Trust of India, 2021; Shukla, 2018; Thapaliyal, 2021). The field of the visual is the new terrain for rumour-mongering and for maiming of uncomfortable oppositional voices. With the fast-spreading mobile culture, penetrating social media and continued legacy of the pictorial as an embodiment of the real, the visual has taken over both the oral as well as the written in its usefulness to serve the political. Yet the question remains: Can we simply comprehend such a visual aggression by taking recourse to the enhanced role of visual media in our everyday life, a la pictorial turn? (Mitchell, 1995, pp. 11-–13). At one level, this is an act of mapping a vast and open territory of the visual in contemporary India and, at another, the essay promises to revisit the equation between the visual and the political. These are two ambitious exercises that I hope to undertake by restricting my ambit to a few key events and by emphasizing the diverse and dispersed forms that constitute the heterogeneous and contested domain of political communication in particular and the field of political culture in general.

By harping on the diversity within the vernacular field of political communication (which is itself an ignored arena of scholarship), I wish to engage with wall writings and floating words constituting an archive of contemporary aesthetics that is largely ignored and contested (for some exceptions see Chattopadhyay, 2012; Hoek, 2016). At times, in this domain, the experimentation with the form is embedded in the idea of resistance to authoritarian practices and institutions, and on other occasions, this archive leads us to the myriad ways in which the act of walking on the street orients our gaze.

For this study, I have selected registers that can be broadly conceptualized as a vernacular arena of visual political communication in India. Within this field, I further narrow down to the popular archive of signs, traces and representations written in the Devanāgari script and in the Hindi language. In a vast and amorphous world of Hindi, I have restricted myself to wall writings, or more appropriately, what I term as floating words in the public arena, and the question of resistance. ¹ These examples stem from the Hindi public space. I would also refrain from referring to this political geography as ‘the Hindi public sphere’, as I do not intend to engage with institutional structures or forms that the concept of public sphere, in the Habermasian sense of the term, would presuppose. I have selected these registers to emphasize the heterogeneity of forms that constitute such a vernacular visual field. I have selected three analytical sites or registers for this purpose.

The first set of examples is about words that circulate as images, the second set anchors on a song and the third set is about a performance in a newsroom. ² This selection is based upon insights mobilized from Jacques Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, which is central to his idea of the relation between aesthetics and politics. While scholars pursuing visual registers and visuality as methods to understand and decipher social realities have focussed upon various theoretical and epistemic trajectories mobilizing insights coming from different directions (including practices like sacred ways of seeing, that is, darshan (Babb, 1981; Cort, 2012; Eck, 1981/1985; Pinney, 2004]) as well as different disciplines (Freitag, 2015; Rajagopal, 2001), the itinerant words floating in public spaces have largely eluded these scholars’ attention. Furthermore, the question of the aesthetics of these floating words outside any formal literary contexts, like those of novels, poems or even cinema, has pushed me to draw insights from Jacques Rancière (Rancière, 2006).

Reading Plato, Rancière identifies three broad axes along which aesthetic practices are arranged. These are writing, theatre and the ‘choreographic form of a community that sings and dances’. Here, in this classification, neither speech gets differentiated from written words nor written words are distinguished from images. ³ Here, I must add a disclaimer that though I follow Rancière’s tripartite classification, in this article, I have taken certain liberty in interpreting ‘the choreographic form of the community that sings’ as cinematic representation of a song (in the section titled as a ‘choreography of the contemporary’) and the theatre as a news anchor’s conversation with two mime artists (in the section titled as ‘resistance’).

These examples can be seen as three different facets that serve to make a case for the study of political communication outside its usual scholarly confines of English language realms. Disjointed illustrations are not brought within any singular frame or to achieve a singular understanding of politics. Instead, dissimilarities point towards a domain that may be vast and may not be coherent in terms of interlinkages among its constituting elements and practices. Yet, in the mapping of this field, we may be able to throw some light on facets of political communication that largely remain absent in the scholarly discourses on politics in India. These three selected facets take us to three different regimes of political communication. While writings on the wall (the subject of the first section) allow us a glimpse of the local politics that is extremely temporal and fluid in nature, the second section engages with elements that make claims at the national scale. However, only when we move to the third section, we get to engage with the element of resistance, perhaps the most potent element, without which our understanding of the politics will remain incomplete. It is in this sense, an example from the mainstream media (whereas we shall see, the authoritarian impulses of censorship are countered in the language of performance), vernacular political communication is not isolated from the politics of democracy and its ideologies. Thinking together, these three strands hopefully reveal the experiments and creative energy that go into the making of varied nature of communication in the contemporary milieu of India. If there is one common thread that weaves this field together as a valid analytical exercise, it is the inherent visual nature of all the registers selected for the study here. It is this visual dimension (where words are selected because they make claims on the eyes and because they are displayed) that immediately transforms the field of political communication as essentially a visual field.

This enhanced focus on forms (instead of an elaborate reading of their contexts and contents) may help us to pay particular attention to aesthetics and its relation to ‘the political’ in the making of ‘the contemporary’.

Exterior/Surface

In 2002, the Raqs Media Collective brought out a broad sheet as a part of an installation (Raqs Media Collective, 2002; Figure 1). ⁴ The caption on the front page of this broad sheet reads, ‘Homestead interior converted into a public wall in the aftermath of a demolition. Faiz Road, Central Delhi, January’. The caption is supplemented by words taken out of the ‘Bengal Act of 1976, as extended to the territory of Delhi’ (Ministry of Home Affairs, 1985, p. 3). ⁵ Both these texts (the caption and the ‘Act’) disturb the free-floating gaze falling over the beautiful, captivating expression of what is presumably a child’s leisure activity. The figurative art, the ‘breaking of interior’ and its conversion into a public wall, the black thread hanging loose and dividing the gaze, the smiling face of the tiger, the scattered alphabets giving an impression of some names, and the numerous absences constitute this frame. It is confusing. What is the punctum in this frame? Is it the smiling face of the tiger or the midpoint of the rope where it is tied, forming a bundle? It is absorbing; we need to move out of this frame. Can we search for those children, the possible artists who scribbled on this wall from the comforts of their home before demolition ruined it and before the government, in the name of development, might have exposed the interior to installation artists and to a camera? I ask an obvious question: who is the artist? Is she a nameless, homeless child, or is it the Raqs Media Collective who clicked it and brought it out in the form of a broadsheet? Or is it the state which, in its act of demolition, has ‘revealed’ an interior before us? Moving along this axis, we may soon exhaust our energy while locating the artist. Abandoning this search may be an immoral act (particularly for those absent children), yet not a completely unjustified one, given the focus of this exercise.

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Figure 1.

Source: Raqs Media Collective (2002).

It is an artistic expression of innocent city life. It is also a political statement, an opportunity to show the appropriation of space by the state. This loss is both felt and informed when our gaze gets punctured through the written words of the caption and the legal act. Oscillating between its multiple coordinates, that is, the authority of the state and the innocence of children’s art, the public space of Delhi manifests its interiority.

However, the innocence of the wall does not always provide similar impressions. In another case, we came across walls along the sidewalks with the names of gods and goddesses—Sita Ram, Radhe Shyam— densely written on them (Figure 2). While walking from Shakti Nagar Circle to the Amba Cinema, these walls and other surfaces like MTNL telephone line boxes were filled (sometimes densely, sometimes sporadically) with these letters. We tried to enquire about the author. Someone told us about a cynical old lady who wrote these names. Others thought that an old man was behind these scribblings. Why does he or she write this text? The immediate question that was supposed to incite our curiosity came much later. In fact, initially the sheer hard work that went into the production of this text excited us.

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Figure 2.

Source: Sadan Jha and Prabhas Ranjan (2001–2003).

We were amazed. It is not that we were witnessing this phenomenon for the first time. Our childhood experiences of small towns and villages flashed in our minds simultaneously. But this text disturbed our existing understanding of public space and the politics of representation. For a mind filled with the Foucauldian notion of power, the questions that came spontaneously were these: What types of claims and counter-claims are in circulation in this textual field? How to problematize the desire of its author? What are his or her constructs of public space? We very soon found that these questions, this line of enquiry, have their own closures too. We shifted our position. New questions emerged: Where can we locate this text in the wider field of the practices that constitute the visual public space of a metropolitan city, such as Delhi? What are the scopic zones that this text produces? Is it the psychopathology of a city that makes a person so cynical that he/she goes on to produce such a huge text? These walls filled with the names of gods and goddesses like Sita Ram produces its own regimes, which are very different from the regimes of standardized tin plates with similar names—Ram Ram, Sita Ram, and Radhe Shyam.

In India, devout Hindus (particularly old men and women) customarily chant names of gods and goddesses. In many cases, such chanting is an essential component of their lives and becomes part of their daily routine. Along with these chants, people also rehearse/meditate over these names by writing them on slates and in paper notebooks. Writing in this manner is another form of prayer. However, this writing often takes place in private. Taking a cue from such an act of prayer, where the devotee on a daily basis enters into a ritualized act of writing names of gods and goddesses, we may say that the written words, that is, the names of gods and goddesses found on the sidewalks of a Delhi street, may be perceived as graffiti in prayer or prayer in graffiti. ⁶ Instead of chanting the names of gods and goddesses, the old man/woman is using the public space, the materiality of the wall, as a surface. In place of acting individually or inwardly, he/she is unfolding the names of gods and goddesses in public and attempting to purify the gaze of the city. Through this act, he/she also endeavours to purify the act of wall writing and the wall itself. Through these written words, an ordinary citizen volunteers his/her labour in the construction of a particular kind of gaze.

In both these cases (i.e., in broadsheet and in the writing of the names of gods and goddesses), the boundary between private and public overlaps. The public is superimposed on the private. A private message is communicated on a public canvas or on a surface that is essentially public. These are dispersed sites of communication that broadly function outside the institutionalized fields of political communication. One may also term these as unregulated, individual and personal expressions that are public in character by virtue of their location, that is, the street. What is also worth underlining is the irrefutable persistence of a trace of innocence that continues to survive in the public in both these cases. These sites also defy the ordering of the gaze that Kaviraj (1987) referred to. Through their investment in innocence and religiosity, these two examples also initiate us to question rationalized and state-centric frames of looking at political communication as well as political culture. For me, political communication is inseparable from political culture. However, it is beyond the scope of this article to explain how these two are inseparable. Yet, in brief, it may be stated that by harping upon elements like innocence and religiosity, I try to move away from the institutionalized and rational domain of political communication and suggest a cellular, messy and thickly layered domain.

Though I have occasionally used the word ‘graffiti’ for the wall writing here, it may not be irrelevant to point out the difference between these two examples and what is commonly referred to as ‘graffiti’. Graffiti is well-recognized as a form of street art, as an expression of counter-culture, and as an urban form. With these characteristic features, graffiti comes before us closely tied to the history of capitalism and its alienating metropolitan landscapes. In the case of India, we find graffiti as a very recent phenomenon. When taken in the literal and broad sense of the term, where graffiti may mean any form of wall writing, graffiti is not a post-liberalization phenomenon in India. Yet, it is safe to argue that in recent decades, the word ‘graffiti’ has acquired certain specific connotations and is increasingly perceived as an expression of street or public art practice. In this later sense, graffiti is still confined largely to the mega cities of India, that is, Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. From my own observations, and on the basis of the research carried out in 2001–2003 (Jha & Ranjan, 2001–2003), I can confidently argue that the nature of wall writing has changed in massive ways in the last two decades (also see Varma, 2015). The use of spray paints, their easy availability in the market and the rise of individualism, alienation and urban violence are closely linked in the coming of graffiti in Indian megacities. Thus, in terms of the form, one can easily differentiate these examples from ones that are comparatively recent (Figures 3(a) and 3(b)). It can be safely assumed that these graffiti (figures coming from Connaught Place) are different from the rest of the examples of wall writings given earlier (Figures 1 and 2). A crucial factor differentiating the two may be the consciousness of artists in the case of graffiti in conceiving them as an art form. Does this mean that the naivety of such art or the absence of this consciousness in earlier cases of wall writings makes them insignificant or hierarchically inferior in the domain of aesthetics?

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Figure 3.

Source: Sadan Jha.

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Jacques Ranceire’s discussion on politics and aesthetics can be insightful here. He reminds us that ‘the aesthetics should not be understood as the perverse commandeering of politics by a will to art, by a consideration of the people qua work of art’. He treats ‘aesthetics as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience’ and as ‘a delimitation of space and times’, which ‘determines the politics as a form of experience’ (Rancière, 2006, p. 13). Locating such an experience in the broader milieu of the democratization of aesthetics, he further indicates that with the logic separating the world of artistic imitations from the world of vital concerns and politico-social grandeur crumbling down ‘the well-ordered distribution of sensory experience was overturned’ (Rancière, 2006, pp. 16–17). In this landscape, to delineate the distribution of the sensible, he goes back to Plato’s threefold division of the field of aesthetics into ‘the surface of depicted signs, the split reality of theatre, and the rhythm of dancing chorus’. Thus, not merely does different forms of wall writing fall under the first category, but an overemphasis on the distinction between word and image, between written archive and pictorial archive, becomes insignificant too. ‘A pictorial surface’ in its two dimensionality of form comes before us as a ‘surface of shared writing’ (Rancière, 2006, p. 15). Politics, then ‘revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it and around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of space and the possibilities of time’ (Rancière, 2006, p. 13). Rancière’s recognition of ‘talent to speak’ as a crucial factor in shaping the politics of aesthetics then also pushes us to pay attention to the authorial figures behind these writings. This may be pertinent for our purpose, as these words do not always come before us bereft of authorial markers. Walking on the streets of Delhi, we encountered one such illustration with a well-designated authorial presence in the name of Srinath. Squarely targeting the top bureaucracy of the country, the message is a call against corruption (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Source: Sadan Jha and Prabhas Ranjan (2001–2003).

Srinath is not an urban dweller but an inhabitant of village called Nadini in a far away district of Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh. There are other messages from Srinath addressing social issues such as dowry and the morality of the youth. The concerns are pan-Indian. The phrase ‘the state of the country’ reminds us of Ernest Renan’s formulation of ‘daily plebiscite’, where the nation makes its presence through repeated re-assertions and by way of yearning for a consent. ‘Large-scale solidarity’, ‘consent’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘clearly expressed desire to continue a common life’ are some of the crucial coordinates in Renan’s conceptualization when he says, ‘A nation’s existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life’ (Renan, 1991, p. 19). Is Srinath making an appeal to bureaucrats to sacrifice their bribes and adopt an austere lifestyle based only on their salary? Or is he articulating an obvious stereotype and thereby creating a community who may share a common concern for the health of the country? The message is open to interpretation. The stamp of the authorial individual—Srinath, along with his complete postal address—may also be read as a rhetorical defiance to mute subaltern, to the provocation that the subaltern cannot speak or write.

At times, marks of authenticity are inscribed to legitimize a private suffering so that it can be read as an authentic story. In 2002, during a visit to Jammu, the author observed that even the registration number of a vehicle was found cited in the text of a wall writing along with date and time to enhance the truth value of the written complaint on the sidewalks addressed to the ‘governorji’ of the city of Jammu. Along with this text, we also had a number of adjacent wall writings voicing the sufferings caused by displacement, poverty and homelessness.

The vernacular field of communication constituted by such words floating in the public stems from a non-bourgeois city. Unlike a city of big hoardings, screen-painted images and neon-light advertisements of multinational companies, this is not a city of spectacles. It is too demeaning for the bourgeois society to associate itself with these representational spaces, but it is too difficult for the bourgeoisie to ignore them.

For Sudipto Kaviraj (1987), it is the conceptual boundary that demarcates the public and the private. He has also pointed towards various ways in which non-bourgeois sections of the city imagine and use this conceptual boundary by drawing its imagination not from meta-narratives of representational spaces but primarily from their vocabulary of day-to-day life experiences and demands. This archive of words in Devanagri script suggests that such a conceptual boundary is also marked by constant attempts of appropriation, negotiation and resistance by the non-bourgeois city. Quite often, the case is not about the extension of the private into the public or the appropriation of the public into the private. Perhaps, away from the private–public dichotomy, practices are aimed at perceiving the potential of the spaces in terms of their own constructs of what a city ought to be. So, they purify this landscape by writing the names of gods and goddesses or by giving a clarion call, as in the case of Srinath.

At times, people use statues of gods and goddesses or photos of gurus for this objective of purifying their environment and towards refashioning what a city ought to be. They place pictures or statues of gods/goddesses in street corners, underground passageways and on the stairs of public buildings. There is a market for such ceramic tiles having imprints of gods and goddesses. In the case of Figure 5, we find a similar aesthetic impulse, though along civic and secular axes, when a portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru is placed on the wall alongside words instructing cleanliness. Finding a framed picture of Nehru on a completely exposed wall by the roadside is unusual though.

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Figure 5.

Source: Sadan Jha and Prabhas Ranjan (2001–2003).

The presence of Nehru’s picture also connects this vernacular, non-bourgeois space with the mainstream politics, and it suggests that the two realms, bourgeois and non-bourgeois aesthetics, do not form isolated zones but need to be seen as connected with each other. For us, the frame leads us to our second theme—the contemporary media scape and the crucial role played by similar symbols and icons (identified with the nation and nationalism) in shaping the aesthetics of political communication. I chose to focus on recent controversies pertaining to India’s national flag and the icon of Mother India (Bharat Mata) to illustrate the contested nature and the exclusionary dynamics that shape aesthetic sensibilities of this field. I enter into the next section by anchoring upon a song, a specimen of the second category in Plato’s aesthetics, which Rancière mentions when he talks about the ‘choreographic community that sings and dances’ (Rancière, 2006, p. 14).

Choreography of the Contemporary

Songs are the conscience keepers of the nation and an important constituent of the field of political aesthetics. In the colonial phase as well as in the post-colonial phase, songs articulate and mobilize a wide range of political positions. The song that I wish to particularly refer to here says, ‘Teeja tera rang tha main to, ziya tere dhang se main to…’ [I was your third colour/ O’ tricolor, I was your colour] (Sahni, 2007). In the film, Kabir Khan fails to convert a penalty stroke into a win in a crucial hockey match, resulting in India’s loss to Pakistan in hockey and turning Kabir from a hero to a traitor in the popular eyes. His loyalty to the nation is questioned and he yearns for a supreme sacrifice—maula mere le le meri jaan (O almighty! take away my life). In its visual presentation, the song spreads over the screen as a voice consoling the self that was declared disgraceful.

The visual landscape that the song highlights the colour green—a colour not only of vegetation but also of destiny, of joys coming from green bangles, of prosperity and the colour of the flag of Prophet Mohammad. In popular perception, the pigments of the tricolour are made up of a direct equation between communities and the nation. In the film, Kabir Khan fights back and brings the nation glory unimagined. However, the question this song and its cinematic rendering leaves for a study of political aesthetics is how to make sense of this aggression. Where the entire song laments about its glorious status as the third colour of the nation in past tense.

This lamentation, this unsaid yet clear evocation of colour green and muslim community also points to the contemporary milieu where flags occupy a wide range of terrain, from banal street corners and sports matches to movie frames. It is a site to both display loyalty and pass judgement on betrayal. Such spectacles often come wrapped in the visual vocabulary of majoritarian politics (Express Web Desk, 2018; Shukla, 2018; Verma, 2021).

For those who champion such a majoritarian desire, it would be interesting to suggest that these spectacular shades of the tricolour have a secret minority history—a genealogy that has been happily forgotten. We call India’s national flag as a tricolour, forgetting the presence of blue in it (Jha, 2017).

In the popular memory of the colonial period, blue is the colour of resistance. Commonly associated with indigo, the shade owes its political imagination to the Indigo Revolt (Nil bidroha), a peasant uprising against the white indigo planters in Bengal in 1859–1860. Later, in 1917, the country witnessed a massive peasant mobilization of indigo cultivators in Bihar—an event that also transformed the political orientation of Mahatma Gandhi. It is a fitting tribute to those suffering yet rebellious peasants and to the Mahatma that the wheel in the centre of the flag is navy blue.

The eerie silence over navy blue continues. And, in search of fathoming out our deep political prejudices behind such silence, we are led to Dalit politics and we enter into a sea of symbols (from the flag to the colour of the coat of Dr B. R. Ambedkar), all draped in navy blue. Is it a mere coincidence that the colour of the Ashokan wheel in the Indian national flag, navy blue, remains uncounted whenever we talk about the three-colour flag?

In this sphere of semiotic politics, the national flag and a popular icon like Bharat Mata share a lot of common trajectories, and both are invoked to give vent to exclusionary strategies targeting minority communities (Menon, 2017). On 16 March 2016, MLA Waris Pathan was suspended from the Maharashtra Assembly for refusing to say ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’—‘Victory to Mother India’.

In a milieu when allegations and allegiances are marked on the basis of slogans, it may be pertinent to note that Waris Pathan was willing to say ‘Jai Hind’—‘Victory to India’. His refusal was only for ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’.

Both these slogans emerged during India’s freedom struggle. Both are reverential. Yet, both are markedly different. While in the first, the nation is abstract, in the second, it is both abstract and an icon—a goddess, a mother (Jha, 2004; Ramaswamy, 2010).

In the history of Bharat Mata, the overarching frame remains religious, having elements drawn from the vocabulary of Hinduism and national struggle together. However, in 1935, when Amrita Sher-Gil chose to paint her own Mother India, her brush rendered the image in the form of tribal women. For Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ was not just about land and geography but about the people themselves, who constitute the nation (Nehru, 1946/1985, pp. 59–61).

By 1907, colonial intelligence reports begin mentioning ‘Vande Mataram’ and occasionally ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ as a ‘war cry’. It may be worth keeping in mind that unlike her siblings ‘Jai Hind’ and ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, barring a few exceptions as mentioned earlier, an element of the divine presence of a Vaishnav Hindu goddess remains central in the slogan ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’. The objections and controversies were bound to arise, and the late 1930s witnessed some bitter communal politics in this regard, which continued in the post-Independence period (Bhattacharya, 2003).

One such case erupted in Kerala when, in the early 1980s, three children belonging to the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect were expelled from a school for refusing to join other students in singing the national anthem. Instead, they stood in respectful deference during the singing. The sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses does not endorse or believe in any symbol of temporal power and only pays obeisance to its God, Jehovah. A case was filed against the children and the legal battle went up to the Supreme Court, which observed that no disrespect was shown to the national anthem by not joining in the singing (Jha, 2016, pp. 178 –206).

Based on this brief overview of India’s history, one may argue that in the popular perception, both the national flag and the figure of Mother India come before us wrapped in the vocabulary of reverence and are bestowed with a language of the sacred specific to the socio-historical moorings of religiosity of the land (for detail see Jha, 2004; Jha, 2016).

This language has a dark side too. On Republic Day (26 January) of 2018, a communal riot broke out in the small town of Kasgunj in Uttar Pradesh. While there is a long history of communal violence on occasions of religious festivals, the Kasgunj violence is unique. It is the first communal riot on the secular day of national rejoice (Express Web Desk, 2018). For the first time, the minority community’s right to unfurl the national flag was allegedly questioned by a crowd adhering to the communal majoritarian ideology. In the song (from the movie Chak De India) with which we began this section, the minority’ anxiety is palpable. Premised upon the popular equation of green with Islam, the song pushes this third colour away from the contemporary. It ‘was’ the third colour, a lament that it has lost its place in the tricolour. Such a transportation of the living present into a domain of the past that does not exist anymore also assigns this song a profile of marsia (a genre of Muslim religious songs characterized by a deep sense of mourning; Jha, 2017).

Resistance

So far, we have identified and briefly touched upon two different domains of vernacular political communication to emphasize the myriad ways in which politics of aesthetics shape this field and influence the ways of seeing. In this journey, we spent time walking on the street and observed the aggression of the majoritarian mediascape. Now, in this third segment, let us move to the aesthetics of resistance, another ignored area of scholarship. Here, we will focus on a key element having high visibility in the contemporary field of organized communication. This is about the figure of a television news anchor—Ravish Kumar, a Hindi news anchor for the television channel NDTV (Gupta, 2014).

I choose this example for its certain investment in the theatrical mode, which is also hugely laden with subversive experimentations. This may be pertinent, as contemporary television news, with its centrality of the space of the news studio, resembles the stage a lot. The frontality of the anchor–spectator relationship and its mobilization of visual ensemble while completing the task of communication leads us to some core aesthetic impulses structuring the visual field of theatre. While in this zone of performativity, the dominant practice in India has been to harp upon the language of excess, acting against the tide, the figure I focus upon tries to achieve maximum effect by relying upon the subversive potential inherent in the language of minimalism. And, in his experiments as well as in his politics, he stands out.

Ravish Kumar from NDTV transcends the language divide and defies India’s linguistic hierarchy too. He is quite popular even among television consumers coming from non-Hindi backgrounds. People, irrespective of their language background, watch him and comment on as well as share his shows on social media. One may quip that he is critical to the current government, and this is why he is popular among the secular, progressive middle class. But then, his popularity is not new. The graph has been moving steadily upward for a long time and pre-dates the current government regime. He was no less critical to the establishment under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA).

In an age of news studios and noisy debates, with a microphone in his hand and a camera to follow, till recently, he used to take his viewers out of the confines of the studio. Away from middle-class metropolitan landscapes, you walked with him into dingy and dark alleys of migrant slums of satellite towns, grain markets and conflict-ridden, communally charged villages. He does his homework beforehand, and his questions ride on the shoulders of meticulous research. He frames his debates and stories magically with this carefully collected information, but does not frantically aspire to control the flow of the discussion. At times, he casually but humbly feigns ignorance and allows the anchor to look vulnerable on the screen. The viewers identify themselves with the anchor and become doubly curious to know what his experts or his respondents in the field have to offer.

The fact that he does not seem to be in a hurry either to jump to conclusions or to move from one thread to another facilitates viewers to dwell on the nuances of the subject and reveal its complexities as a journey rather than as an assault of pre-cooked facts and opinions.However, this style of handling the content is not to put up facades of passive neutrality. He takes the side where critical thinking and reason reside. Moving a step further, his critical attitude and deep investment in reason are wrapped in his ethical commitment, which is socially inclusive, democratic and humane.

To articulate his commitment to these values, Ravish and his team of Prime Time (the show he anchors five days a week) constantly experiments. His play with the language has been consistent in this endeavour, and at times it brilliantly mobilizes the subversive potential of the audio-visual medium of television news.

In one such example, on 19 February 2016, in one of the Prime Time shows, the screen was made to appear black, empty of visuals (Figure 6). This was an unusually reflective moment to draw home the politics of media and spectatorship in recent years.

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Figure 6.

Source: Ravish Kumar NDTV Prime Time Fans (2017).

On the blank television screen, the voice of the anchor hammered the message to produce a mesmerizing effect. The television became a radio, viewers turned into listeners and ears took precedence over the eyes.

On 4 November 2016, he once again jolted the screen to emphasize a fundamental point, that is, the right and the need to ask questions in journalism and, by default, in a democracy. A seemingly mundane point, but extremely political and existential in the contemporary milieu. The context was an encounter of eight SIMI men in the city of Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, that week. A lot of mutually contradictory facets and statements came up after this encounter. When uncomfortable questions were asked to Kiran Rijiju, a central minister looking after the home affairs, the minister told reporters that the ‘habit’ of questioning the authorities and the police ‘should stop’. Earlier, NDTV was also censored for one day by the government for its coverage of the terrorist attack on the military establishment at Pathankot. The ministry’s panel had given the verdict that NDTV’s reporting compromised national security and announced that the channel would be taken off the air for 24 hours on 9 November 2016 (Express Web Desk, 2016).

This time, Ravish Kumar chose to mobilize the power of not merely visual but all three components: the speech, pictorial and language. The journalism, which rarely questions its role as a carrier of information, preferred to go mime (Figure 7). Two mime artists enacted the role of an authoritarian ruler and his troll. Ravish performed the task of an anchor seriously begging to ask questions and firmly communicating his commitment to the same. The gibberish these guests uttered and their facial expressions virtually made the language of the programme irrelevant. From a Hindi news journalist, Ravish Kumar became a conscience-keeper of liberal values—a figure who stands firmly and questions; an anchor who can defy.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

Source: NDTV (2016).

To me, these television shows add a new dimension in the contemporary practices of political communication. These are theatrical performances, as in both the cases, we see attempts to creatively tweak the visual aesthetics. In the first case, by blackening out the screen and making it bereft of any visual, and in the second case, through the deployment of a mimetic mode of communication. A news show, by its seer investment in the politics of subversion and resistance, acquires the audacity of a theatrical stage.

Recapitulation

To communicate is to share. Floating words circulating in the public space create a potent yet, in terms of scholarship, highly ignored field of communication. This domain that I have tried to map in this study roughly corresponds to what C. A. Bayly, in the historical context of late medieval and early modern India, has termed the ‘indigenous public sphere’, a site of the production of ‘north Indian ecumene’ (Bayly, 1996, pp. 180–211). For Bayly, this is a zone that informs us about institutions and the controversies about politics, religion and aesthetics that existed across North India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both these spheres are densely made up of communication activities. Yet, differentiated by historical contexts, one may find more incongruence between Bayly’s indigenous sphere and the vernacular domain of communication with which I have tried to engage in this article. While Bayly has tried to carve out a wide range of activities taking place and in turn shaping this sphere, I have confined myself to merely a few fragmentary illustrations through floating words in the Devanagari script in the Hindi language. In their circulations, these words take us to a geography of what Jacques Rancière calls literarity where writing freely circulates, subverting and undermining sensible coordinates of representative regimes of art. For him,

[M[an is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his ‘natural’ purpose by the power of words. This literarity is at once the condition and the effect of the circulation of actual ‘literary’ locutions…they introduce lines of fracture…In short, they contribute to the formation of political subjects that challenge the given distribution of the sensible. (Rancière, 2004, pp. 39–40)

Following Rancière’s notion of aesthetics as a field of the distribution of the sensible, this article has tried to invest its focus on vernacular words circulating outside the confines of a domain that we commonly identify as literature. In this endeavour, the first section attempts to decentre the discourse of political communication by taking it outside the ideological structures and institutionalized spaces of politics to the space of the street. Streets are never considered as sites for an archaeology of words and their politics. In that sense, I have also tried to snatch words from the domain of books, literature and library. I argue that this act of moving away from the confines of the politics of books to investing the focus on the letters floating on the streets is a kind of redistribution of the sensibilities and, in that manner, a political act in the scheme of Rancière’s politics of aesthetics. This act also challenges the discourse on visuality in the Indian context, which is saturated by an understanding of the pictorial, paying only a cursory glance at the relation between word and images. Thus, in its expansion of the scholarly gaze, this investment in the aesthetics of literarity becomes a political act. In such a frame, the politics of aesthetics or distribution of the sensible is about including what is normatively excluded, revealing what is hidden from the discourse.

In the second section, such an engagement with the hidden acquires another shade of politics: the centrality of the sacred in shaping the politics of political symbols and their histories. However, this history also informs us that the hidden presence of the sacred in the language of everyday political communication—which shapes practices and perceptions of political symbols—is also deeply contested and lopsidedly tilted towards the majority community. I argue that this hegemonic language is largely responsible for the contemporary aggression where the size of the national flag becomes a matter of showcasing affection for the nation. I term it an aggression of the contemporary as, for the first time in history, we find communal riots taking place in Kasgunj in Uttar Pradesh on Republic Day in 2018. There is a long colonial history of treating key religious festivals (i.e., Muharram and Ram Navami) as occasions prone to communal tension and violence. However, in recent years, even secular and national festivals associated with the national flag are prone to similar communal vulnerabilities. This sensibility and such an aggression then also acquire a demonic character and get transformed into mobs and trolls lynching any voice of dissent, whether online or on the ground. It would have been a logical corollary to give references of contemporary incidents of mob lynching, authoritarian censorship and trolling of dissenting political positions in the third section of this article. Instead, I chose to take a case in which such a censorship has been creatively resisted. I have tried to show that this resistance to the contemporary aggression is also an intervention in the aesthetics of the politics. In this section, the challenges to the hegemonic language of politics are articulated at least at two levels: first, through subversion of established visual codes (by wiping the screen out of its visual in the first case and by deploying language of mime in the political discussion in the second case); and second, by resisting the authoritarian dictate that abhors the right to question an authority. Taken together, one may conclude that while the first two sections catalogue disjointed sites of political communication and have emphasized the contested terrains of the sacred that go into the making of the vernacular aesthetics of political communication, the third section and its illustrations aspire to locate this field within the domain of democratic politics by harping upon the aesthetic experimentations related to the articulation of resistance. All these three segments (which deal with three different types of political sensibilities, that is, written words, song and theatre) come from specific lineage and are endowed with distinctive characteristics. Yet, taken together, with an added emphasis on floating words connecting the circuits of the contemporary field of politics, these sections and their illustrations challenge us to extend our understanding into vernacular geographies and hitherto unattended sites. In this circulation, vernacular geography manifests its own surface, its own politics of aesthetics.