Piercing the Skin of the Idol

The ‘supreme fiction’ of the absent beholder becomes – in colonial India – a mark of Western ‘distinction’ and a marker of distance from Hindu idols. The convention of single-point perspective was seen as the key which would unravel an Indian resistance to the ‘powers of observation’. The European art whose shadow was cast over India had passed through engagements with vanishing points that incarnated corporeal viewers to a practice that in Norman Bryson’s words implied a ‘transcendent point of vision that has discarded the body’. In India, the reawakening of the human sensorium went hand in hand with the insertion of mass-produced images into spaces of Hindu worship. A recurrent refrain in the analysis of popular art traditions concerns the ways in which consumers of images are either unable or unwilling to speak about their form. The glass mirrored image depicts Samvaliyaji, Avari Mata and Bhadva Mata who are the subject of a recently flourishing cult in Mandsaur District.