Page 263 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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Fig. 12.1. Moments of Transition. From wooden slippers to Adidas trainers (screen
capture, Jai Jai Shiv Shankar MTV).

coeval with the high-tech lifestyles of urban India exemplify the mass-mediated
imagination of a syncretic worldview.
Rather than focus on the seductive appeal of cross-cultural mish-mash evi-
denced in such a video clip, and move from an analysis of visual culture at the
surface to grand pronouncements of the “postmodern social condition,” this
chapter probes below the surface of such visual proliferation and relationally
considers how processes of identity-formation, the constitution of the public
sphere, and the question of the aura are symptomized in visual culture. An
empirically concrete historical analysis of the present, then, would situate and
conceptualize how resurgent discourses of religious identity within the public
sphere can be analyzed through and with changes in visual culture. To do a “his-
tory of the present” thus implies a critical distance from the fascinating imagery
of consumer culture in order to consider how “tradition” is currently being re-
invoked. Fredric Jameson reminds us that “historicity is . . . neither a represen-
tation of the past nor a representation of the future . . . it can ¤rst and foremost
be de¤ned as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to
the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from
immediacy” (1994, 2984). The key words in this quotation (“representation,”
“perception,” “relationship”) underline the conceptual frames of the analysis of
Hindu nationalism and consumerism that follow. “Critical distance” is crucial
in order to defamiliarize the seductive appeal of such imagery so as to situate

252 Sudeep Dasgupta