Indianness in Photography

Abstract

This article explores the question whether there is a specifically Indian style of photography. A survey of photography students from various institutions revealed that though there is little clarity about the actual look of an Indian style of photography, students clearly define their own photographs as Indian. Intriguingly, the focus is less on certain visual characteristics, but more on the feelings they derive from the photographs, a scenario which is reminiscent of the rasa theory. Even though this was hardly mentioned by the students, this psycho-social element seems to have left a cultural imprint but also reflects an act of claiming ownership and agency. In addition, the students identified alienating aspects in photography, such as seeing one’s own culture like an outsider, but at the same time consider it to be integrating, since photography paves the way for a deeper engagement with one’s own culture, and as such strengthens Indianness.

Introduction

Photography is everywhere nowadays; it has become ‘the preferred idiom of a new generation’ (Van Dijck, 2008: 58). Ever since the social media have picked up in a big way, ambitious hobbyists and professionals from all over the world are part of our homes, sharing photographic inspirations, becoming buddies and competitors in sending and sharing attractive pictures. Hence, one could assume that pictures all over the globe are becoming more similar in terms of their aesthetics and their motifs. Much work remains to be done to understand better how this ubiquitous use of photography impacts on patterns of intercultural communication and on people’s understanding of the cultural significance, meaning and nature of photography.

Some aesthetical aspects and motifs are universal, no matter what cultural imprint one has. Furthermore, as every art form finds its limitations in the means that produce it, photography has to be seen not only in the context of its development and its historical situation but also its technological base, including general indexicality. Regarding early photography, Christopher Pinney (2008: 59) saw an upcoming ‘anxiety about photography’s revolutionary introduction of a “sense of sameness in the world”, the mechanisation and industrialisation of perception, the rise of the “aesthetics of the same”’. At the same time, he also noted that the richness of detail inherent in photography ‘produces a surplus and profane realism which exceeds the requirements of a narrow national iconography. Photography has too many meanings for any efficacious nationalist instruction’ (Pinney, 2008: 59).

Such comments from a specialist on South Asia raise the question how certain photographs can be identified as ‘Indian’, whether through their style or content. Without delving too far into the inconclusive debates about what constitutes ‘India’ and the heavily politicised discourses on whether such an entity is merely imagined (Anderson, 1991) or real, and thus losing focus, the present article zooms in on the subjective perceptions of a variety of Indian students of photography on what makes a photograph Indian.

This article explores the question whether there is a specifically Indian style of photography, and whether it could be asserted by Indians as photographers and observers of photos used in India that ‘every frame has some touch of Indian culture to it’, as one of the interviewed students puts it. The article first provides a brief historical backdrop about photography in India and touches on attempts to define the problematic terms ‘Indian’ and ‘cultural identity’ in order to circumscribe notions of ‘Indianness’. After introducing the sample and the survey, it moves on to discussing the results, which at first sight seem contradictory. A special tolerance of dissonance may offer explanations, as the question whether photography rather means integration or alienation is also answered controversially in different contexts. The article indicates the role played by cognitive style, which can consider both aspects next to each other or even in an interwoven or overlapping manner.

Photography in India in an Intercultural Context

Photography in India has a long history in its colonial context, dating back to salt-fixed calotypes. The first photographs were probably taken between 1843 and 1845. The Photography Society of Bombay’s inauguration took place in 1854 (Pinney, 2008: 176). Even though Indians took pictures themselves in this period, pictures from non-Indians, mostly British, dominated for a while. This phenomenon of turning Indians into an object of photography and the resulting pictures can be compared to literature about India written by non-Indians. From the outside, as Lamont and Bates (2007: 308) have observed, orientalist scholars ‘constructed India as a land of eternal essences, presenting Hindu philosophy and rituals as evidence of a land where imagination was privileged over reality, and of Indian thought as essentially irrational’. Late nineteenth century British writers emphasised that India was the home of mystery. Greenberger (1969: 42) observed: ‘They were expressing not only a belief that the East and the West were very different, but also that the British were at something of a disadvantage in that India possessed knowledge beyond that of the West’. This image ‘of India as a land of miracles and magic remains a familiar one today, and continues to attract sensational journalists, the alienated, or otherwise philosophically disenchanted westerners’ (Lamont & Bates, 2007: 324).

Notably, postcolonial India has taken advantage of this orientalised image and uses the slogan ‘Incredible India’ (Sudipto, 2016) for its own marketing. However, Indianness does not play a role only in presentation to non-Indians. Looking at the descriptions of pictures posted on social media by institutions like the Indian Institute of Photography (IIP), the Indianness of photography seems to be an important topic. For many observers, from different angles, this raises the intriguing question to what extent India is Indian, and what that means and implies.

Typically, we often speak of the Indian subcontinent to indicate that there are many different cultural contexts, languages and traditions, with much heterodoxy from very early days (Sen, 2005: xii), which ‘has helped to make heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India’ (Sen, 2005: 12). Politically, too, for a long time, there had been a bewildering variety of princely states and kingdoms, especially in the North, which all had to join either India or Pakistan in August 1947, a step which many Indian princes did not readily take, as recent research documents suggest (Adhikary, 2021: 344–5). This indicates not so much a reluctance to become Indian, but a desire, familiar from earlier European territorial maps, to preserve one’s own little kingdom or domain and specific elements of local cultural identity.

The Indian subcontinent gave birth to several of the world’s religions, among them Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, but even though there were great empires under Ashoka and the Mughals, ‘it was left to the last foreign invaders, the British, to establish a unified empire’ (Hockings, 2001: 1019–20). To what extent this was unified is of course highly debatable. As the names ‘India’ and ‘Hinduism’ are both believed to be derived from the name of the river Sindhu, there have been certain Hindu nationalist efforts to establish the ‘proper’ Indian name of ‘Bharat’ for India. Connected to this, in efforts to reshape Indian identities, some Indian cities have been renamed, so that Madras became Chennai and Bombay is now Mumbai. Overall, it is evident that India as a huge country unites very different traditions and that it is in general very difficult to define Indianness or ‘the’ Indian cultural identity, which would cause fierce multi-focal debates about the politics and dangers of essentialism.

Cultural identity is generally understood by academic commentators as a value-based connection and it undoubtedly also has ethnic dimensions, formed in distinction to others (Niekisch, 2002: 27). It is thus viewable as ‘we consciousness’, for which cultural traditions of one’s own, shared customs and beliefs are fundamental (Bailey & Peoples, 2011: 19), informing and shaping a certain ‘way of life’ (Ray & Singh, 2015: 11). Such apparently straightforward definitions, however, become shaky in the face of multiple Indian diasporas and extremely diverse affiliations. Circumscribing Indianness remains difficult since India has so many different cultural traditions and has been exposed to so many different waves of immigration, colonial impacts and now globalisation. In their recent study on Indian identity, Ray and Singh (2015: 15) suggest rather vaguely, but entirely appropriately, that the issue should be subjected to further empirical studies.

The Sample and the Survey

The present article seeks to make a contribution to this ongoing debate about cultural identity, asking specifically whether photography has ‘significant effects’ on communication and identity (Winston, 2013: 2). Having taught photography and related subjects both in Germany (University of Trier, University of Applied Sciences Trier, German POP Academy, Fotoakademie Köln) and in India (IIP, Ajeenkya DY Patil University) has given me an overview of people of a certain age group and education that study about photography. It can be taken for granted that people who study photography share a deep interest in the subject, more broadly speaking, in visual aesthetics, and are more ambitious than most amateur photographers.

My research is based on a written survey with mostly open questions that I conducted with 50 students, aged 18–29 years; 44 of them are male, due to the much larger number of men studying photography in India. All of them identified themselves as Indian, and most of the participants had a middle- or upper-class background. This is because photography does not come for free. Camera bodies, lenses, a computer and other equipment are needed, and the institutions I work with also charge some fees. Furthermore, as the families of these students usually pay for their education, they must be relatively open to the field of photography, which means that their children might not take a ‘traditional’ job and might even get in touch with aspects like fine art nude photography. The students come from various regions all over India to study photography; however, most of them were from the North.

For various reasons, I decided to set up a survey and not to look at students’ portfolios to answer my questions. First, the photographic portfolio is determined to a certain extent by the opportunities available to the students. Their neighbourhood and the places they can reach offer certain landscapes and architecture. Furthermore, closeness to the equator makes photographers’ preferred time of sunrise and sunset relatively short, while long periods of the year are characterised by heat and bright sunshine. Due to historical and cultural traditions, certain aspects such as religion or spirituality are quite ‘visible’ in everyday life, just as Indian or ‘fusion’ dresses are quite frequently worn, especially by women. When it comes to candid street photography, unlike in many other countries, most people on the street feel proud to be photographed, although those in rural areas tend to stand still and straight with a stern expression on their faces. This was described as ‘independent pockets of people’ (Gutman, 1982: 147).

In India, women often do not feel comfortable when being photographed by a male stranger. Thus, model photography faces some cultural restrictions, so that different from Germany or the USA (Brodersen, 2017), so far, no scene of hobby models has emerged in India, where models are often either relatives or friends, while agency models are sometimes not Indian, but come from Russia, Brazil or other countries. In addition to these peculiarities, photography students tend to stick to the assignments given by their professors and do not necessarily take the pictures they present in their portfolios out of personal motivation. This not only refers to exercises given by their professors but also to guidance found in books or magazines about photography. Moreover, taking photographs of students as a basis for my work would lead me to interpret them. Given the general openness of photography, such an approach could easily come up with incorrect readings.

Therefore, I decided to use a survey as the foundation of my research, using open questions to allow students to express their own opinions without being conditioned by response options. However, this also led to the problem that not every student answered every question and that the depth of the answers varied quite a bit. In the survey, I asked for their perception of Indianness regarding motifs and aesthetics, whether they would consider their own photography as Indian and whether photography leads to alienation from their culture or integration. Trying not to prime them, my second last question referred to the rasa theory, the famous theory of Indian aesthetics (Banerjee, 2017). To evaluate the ethical dimension of the project, I also asked for their opinion, and they either wrote that they think it is ‘alright’ or ‘exciting’ or indicated that they would be interested in reading the results.

Assumptions of the Researcher

Conducting this survey, I hoped to find out what makes these pictures Indian, except for very obvious aspects, such as the fact that Indian photographers living in India will probably take more pictures of things in their surroundings. As indicated, Indian spiritual texts have developed their own art theories. One of these is the rasa theory (Barlingay, 2007; Chakrabarti, 2016; Pollock, 2016; Schwartz, 2004). This basically states that ‘the arts generate and consolidate moods, sentiments, and transient emotions (rasa), freed from the fluctuations of fleeting desires and impulses, focus and diffuse these in the minds and hearts of the people’ (Mukherjee, 1965: 91). The original use of this term ranges over a variety of interconnected meanings (Chakrabarti, 2016: 8), such as ‘a fluid that quickly tends to spill, a taste such as sour, sweet or salty, the soul or essence of something, a desire, a power, a chemical agent used in changing one metal to another, the life-giving sap in plants and even poison’. Chakrabarti (2016: 8) argues that ‘[a]lmost all these distinct meanings are exploited at different junctures of the complex aesthetic phenomenology centring the concept of rasa’.

In its most well-known version, this theory defines nine basic emotions which are, for example, embodied by dancers with certain postures and mimics. Jiwan Pani (2004: 37–45) discusses the rasa theory and relates it to bhava, ‘that which brings something into being or causes something to be remembered’ (Pani, 2004: 37), while rasa is ‘basically the aesthetic experience’ (Pani, 2004: 42). Similarly, it was assumed that rasa theory characterises the Indian way of photography, that the focus is more on emotions, and eventually more on colours connected with emotions. Looking at staging, the typical classical depictions of gods and goddesses, which are omnipresent in everyday life, usually show very clear and meaningful properties. Deliberate posing and dresses, props that carry meanings or refer to mythological stories are prominent. Consequently, I assumed that typical Indian pictures were rather complex and comprise more deliberately selected details and thus might be more elaborate and staged to a higher degree. When looking at the photos of students known to me, however, I found it difficult to recognise anything clearly Indian in them.

India’s new self-presentation uses ‘the official slogan “Incredible India” exerting the value of pastness, difference, and exhibition’ (Sudipto, 2016: 87). This brought me to the idea that eventually the focus on the ‘old India’ could mean an alienation from modern urban everyday life. Furthermore, photography usually involves distancing oneself from what is happening. When you take a photograph, you are not part of the action or scenario that is being captured. You are seen differently and look at the events in a different way. It is obvious that ambitious photographers, who deal with design rules and light settings, for example, often proceed not only intuitively but rather analytically. Consequently, I also asked my respondents whether they felt photography is a means of alienation, distancing the photographer from its subject.

Findings

In the survey, I asked which motifs these aspiring Indian photographers consider as ‘typically Indian’. Of the total respondents, 70% mentioned Indian dresses/costumes, followed by the more abstract ‘vibrant/strong/saturated colours’ (>60%), then ‘Indian make-up/jewellery’ (20%) and finally ‘Indian traditions/festivals/customs’ (<10%). Some also referred to Indian paintings, such as the tableaux of the famous artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906). It is noticeable in the answers that the students name motifs that correspond less to their everyday life in urban India than to special events and celebrations. Showy Indian jewellery is not worn every day, but is reserved for festive occasions, and, although the female students all mentioned Indian clothing, I have rarely seen them wear a saree or salwar kameez in college, but only shirts and pants.

The question for a more abstract level, namely which aesthetics they would consider as Indian, led to very similar, but also very general answers. Nearly every student mentioned ‘harmonious’ or ‘beautiful composition’ and/or the use of vibrant, vivid or strong colours. More than 90% said they would define their own photographs as Indian. Whereas some left this specific question unanswered, several students mentioned aspects of image content: costumes, street life or traditions. Others referred to a vaguely defined ‘Indian culture’, and one student wrote: ‘Every frame of mine has some touch of Indian culture to it’. It is striking that a very high number of students who mentioned ‘colours’ as Indian also identified their own photography as Indian. At the same time, many students answered the question whether they would prefer black and white or colour either as ‘both’ or ‘it depends on the situation’, while some even responded with ‘black and white’. Only 14% answered that they would prefer colour. Incidentally, this also fits in with my observations about the portfolios of the students.

Around one-third did not answer the question of whether rasa theory influenced their work. The remaining answers varied; about half said it would not matter and surprisingly few answered ‘yes’. Two persons first wrote ‘no’, but then crossed it out and replaced it with ‘yes’ and short explanations. This shows that they had to think, possibly not being very aware of this theory in their everyday life. In summary, it can be said that, apart from typical motifs, which can be explained by their availability, the survey provided few clear indications of a typically Indian aesthetic. The only frequently mentioned characteristic was the use of colour. Yet it is astonishing that a considerable portion of the students understood their photos as clearly ‘Indian’.

Looking at this generation of young, urban people, Ananya Pratihar (2017: 51) diagnoses an anchorlessness, ‘the weariness of an era, the loneliness of an entire generation’. Pratihar (2017: 50) also writes of ‘[t]he average Indian growing up in an Indian megapolis and feeling constantly that he will be more at home in New York or London than in a small city of India’. However, in my observation, by far most students clearly identify as Indian and also characterise their photography as such, even though the criteria are very vague and there are contradictions.

How do these young students come to the definition of their own work as Indian? At this point, cognitive dissonance is assumable. In the literature on the theory of cognitive dissonance, which also extends into marketing and consumption theories, Leon Festinger (2012: 27), the founder of this theory, has noted that cognitive dissonance is also related to culture: It defines what is consonant and what is not. Since the foundation of this theory, there have been some additions. McGrath (2017) re-evaluated the theory and dealt with various reduction strategies such as the resistance to change. Vaidis and Bran (2018) added that the understanding of the history of dissonance is necessary to achieve a more comprehensive view. Harmon-Jones (2019) saw connections between dissonance and motivational processes. However, the principle of dissonance was retained. So how can and do the students establish consonance? At this point, cross-cultural psychology comes into play (Keller, 2012: 118), since there are eventual cultural solutions for dissonances (Jerrentrup, 2011: 234).

Tolerance of Dissonance

An explanation for the seemingly contradictory answers of the students could be a particularly high tolerance of dissonance, which is assumed to be part of the Indian way of thinking (Ray & Singh, 2015: 14). This tolerance is said to be ‘among the core features of the Indian cultural make-up—the coexistence of multiple and (at times) conflicting perspectives and the tolerance of dissonance’ (Bhangaokar, 2020: 338). Some scholars regard such tolerance of dissonance as a deficiency. Fritz and Kämpchen (2015: 171), for example, suppose that the concrete historic cause for the coexistence of opposites lies in the absence of a reformation or enlightenment, which would have made people responsible and rational, even though it was shown that the enlightenment cannot be understood as a process with a long preceding development (Sen, 2005: 135). Moreover, the so-called Western mind may find its limitations precisely in the fact that it sees its own rationality as the measure of all things. Mahbubani (2009: 54) has observed:

The Western mind believes that it understands all worlds, since it is open to all ideas and closed to none. The paradoxical result of this deep-seated assumption is that the Western mind is actually unaware of the limits of its understanding and comprehension.

Irrespective of whether a high tolerance of dissonance should be assessed positively or negatively, this could be seen as a reason for the observed phenomenon here, as very different and even contradictory things can all be understood as ‘Indian’. As one of the students stated, without giving any further explanation: ‘It is a feeling’. Maybe this is an example of what Mahbubani meant when he spoke about the limits of comprehension.

I suggest that the following two aspects of contextuality and diversity of interpretation can be seen as examples illustrating a high tolerance of dissonance. In a widely read article, Sinha and Tripathi (1994: 124) wrote:

The Indian selfhood is so constituted that the typical way in which an Indian responds and reacts is ‘contextual’. Though values occupy a high place in the cognitive-emotional structure of an average Indian, in actual practice they seem to be conditioned by the exigencies of the situation.

When asked about their own photographs, the context of ‘Indianness’ may be activated for the students, and, in this situation, Indianness may be considered accordingly as a very broad concept. Sinha and Tripathi (1994: 136) explain that boundaries are understood in a rather flexible and situational way:

In the Western mind, boundaries appear to be more stable and fixed - self and environment, mind and matter, subjective and objective, material and spiritual, secular and religious, and so on. The Indian mind, on the other hand, is governed by boundaries that are constantly shifting and variable. The self sometimes expands to fuse with the cosmos, but at another moment it may completely withdraw itself from it. The self and in-group have variable boundaries.

These observations about fluidity, dynamism and an awareness of connectivity rather than separateness are, it appears, reflections of broader Indian worldviews. The photographic representation, which itself knows almost no boundaries, paves the way for a particularly broad contextualisation.

Close to this element of contextuality is the concept of diversity of interpretation. This feature is inherent to photography anyway. A picture might tell a thousand words, but it is not at all clear which words. This multitude of options for interpretation (Jerrentrup, 2011: 214) is ‘made possible by photography’s indiscriminating data ratio’ (Pinney, 2008: 145). It records something real and something fake equally well; it deals with ‘what is there’ without giving any explanation. Looking at the relationship between photography and text, as Berger (2000: 50) has observed, the photo literally begs to be interpreted. Irrefutable in its evidence but weak in its meaning, it receives interpretation through words. And these words, which themselves remain at the level of the general, get their specific authenticity from the irrefutability of the photo. In pairs, they then become very powerful, so that an open question seems to be completely answered.

Consequently, as I found on the basis of my students’ responses, photographs leave students the opportunity to interpret them in such a way that they can see an Indian imprint in them, even if outsiders would not judge them that way.

Diversity of interpretations might be something Indians are more used to than other people. Observing that Indian civilisation is not just a melting pot where various civilisations have homogenised, Ray and Singh (2015: 14) argue that, rather, ‘it has added new dimensions to the already existing identity or situation. The Indian, thus, comprises a human with multi-identities which s/he holds together’. Therefore, it might be easier for Indians to cope with this diversity and to navigate it successfully. Thus, to consider one’s own photographs as Indian, but hardly identify corresponding or even contradictory features with regard to the characteristics of these photographs, can be explained by a high tolerance of dissonance, which can be seen in connection to contextuality and diversity of interpretation.

Alienation and Integration

The aspect of diversity also became evident in the students’ answers to the question whether photography leads to alienation from one’s own culture. However, these responses are difficult to evaluate because the students referred to different levels in their answers. About half of the answers mentioned two or more different levels and often saw both alienation and integration.

Most students responded that by giving them an opportunity to ‘showcase their culture’, photography does not lead to alienation but facilitates a preoccupation with, and a conscious representation of, their culture. Psychology, however, has revealed that any sense of identity is initially based on a kind of alienation anyway, as the mirror experience makes clear. Since the ego of the mirror experience is based on an image, the identification of the subject with the self-image in the mirror is based on alienation. Just like the mirror, photography transforms the subject into an image (Brodersen, 2017: 145). One sees oneself or one’s own culture as if from the outside and thus learns to differentiate and identify. Nevertheless, the same argument can also be used in the opposite way. ‘We make a concept from our culture and environment’, wrote one student and described this as alienation because conceptualisation implies that a kind of rationalisation process is taking place, which alienates the photographer from the subject. Yet, this conceptualisation of alienation or of creating some space and distance can also lead to better understanding, thus enabling a deeper feeling. Hence, it is not surprising that the same student also wrote that ‘this also helps personal integration’, matching some other students’ statements.

Regarding the aspect of technology, some students pointed out that photography is the only technology whose products can vary according to the cultural context in which they are used. The technological aspect, however, was also stressed by answers like: ‘Photography means alienation from my culture as it comes from outside of our country’. This answer can be seen in the tradition of medium-is-the-message theories, as it could be due to cultural reasons that the technique was not invented in India and, furthermore, that the mere existence of photography produces a different cultural set-up.

The individual psychological level was also addressed. One person wrote that photography is ‘a way to alienate myself away from the normal world and gives me a way to escape’. Another respondent used the expression ‘personal escape’, indicating that the question had been understood on an individual level. One could interpret that it could even have some therapeutical aspects to it, seen in the context of mindfulness as a category in psychotherapy and psychosomatics, as pointed out by Ulrike Anderssen-Reuster (2009: 1) or as flow (Eberle, 2017: 99). The answers show that students were able to understand the question at different levels at the same time. Further, it is again striking that even though they identified their photography as Indian, many also regard photography as rather alienating, or as both alienating and integrating.

Conclusions

Asking if there is an Indian style of photography, it seems that a lot can be understood as Indian or fall under that category. Apparently, the students understand so much as Indian that the term almost seems to dissolve. But this also creates an integrative perspective. In the final analysis, Indian photography appears to be more attached to a feeling than to a simple fact, which in turn is strongly reminiscent of rasa theory. In rasa aesthetics, as Chakrabarti (2016: 5) notes, affective states received as much philosophical attention as cognitive or intellectual states: ‘All that moves in front of our consciousness was taken as alive with breath (prān˙a) and capable of subjective feelings (cinmaya). To be is to feel or be felt’.

This feeling, however, seems to be dependent on the situation or the respective recipient, if s/he feels the Indianness, maybe in view of the fact that the questioner is perceived as a foreigner. With reference to Abhinavagupta’s work on reception theory (Pollock, 2016), it has been argued by Gupta (2017: 110) that even in the case of plays and poetry, the separate identity of the perceiver and the perceived is totally superseded. By enjoying the photograph, recipients become integrated, as a part of the picture, whether they would label it as Indian or not.

Considering the question of alienation, the students used a variety of possible ways of interpretation. Although some generally understood photography as rather alienating, they regarded their own photographs as Indian, thus claiming intellectual and, more specifically, creative ownership. Again, a particular cognitive style plays a fundamental role here. The reflection on India necessary for its photography is understood as distancing, in that Indianness is no longer felt, but gets rationalised. Yet, on the other hand, this can be seen as integrative, made possible by the mental occupation and one’s own imagination and re-creation of India in photographs, which leads back to the element of feeling, the sensory and emotional experience for both the photographer and the viewer. The parallel to the rasa concept is again obvious.

These findings match a post of the IIP on social media in February 2020. I had conducted some workshops there and took pictures of a Brazilian model wearing Indian clothes and jewellery, shot in a very touristy alley in old Delhi, about which one could say that it corresponds to the typical image of ‘Incredible India’, stressing pastness and exoticism. Rajesh Goyal, the founder and director of IIP, posted one of my pictures along with the text: ‘How do you define Indian Ethnicity in one word? A. Graceful B. Original C. Beautiful’, knowing that the picture did not show an Indian woman, nor was it taken by an Indian photographer, and that is aimed at a global audience. As the already quoted student wrote: ‘It is not a fact, it is a feeling’.