Making of ‘visual behaviors’ in print
In this well researched essay noted art historian Kavitha Balakrishnan sketches a brief case history of illustrations in Malayalam periodicals.
In the age of mechanical reproductions and universal elementary education, periodical publishing developed through various colonizing modernizing and nationalizing contexts of Indian vernacular cultures in late 19th century. Visuality has been pretty well habituated into this milieu as assorted journalistic, artistic and popular interactive practices. It was also a transitional stage for local caste societies into pretty symbolically assimilated class identities and for locally specific knowledge systems into colonial systems of pedagogic and mediatic diffusions.
Periodicals in almost all regional Indian cultures created a charismatic public domain signifying an epochal shift in sensibilities and experiences for an aspiring ‘literate Indian’ at the turn of 20th century. But as Robin Jeffrey called Kerala as a ‘lively laboratory to examine how print arrives spreads and affects people’s lives’, one has to take note that the literate identities were so politically constructed in this culture as to give birth to some specific ‘visual behaviors’ subtly characterizing typical patterns of a ‘literatured identity’.
This essay attempts to feature some of these patterns of visual-behavior in Malayalam periodical media of 20th century. Here visuals often functioned in ways quite passive compared to the loud and verbose posits of ‘literary ness’. At some points visual behaviors forged the share of aesthetic importance for itself interfacing with literature as a discourse and thus put both in equivocal situations. At all these points ‘illustration’ as a charismatic signifier of a ‘literate-sensibility’, got double-quoted into journalistic constructs of reality.
Metaphors of epochal change: A graphic world
The public domain created by the periodical press depended on the diffusion of a word-culture. A simplified language of symbols and dialogues to attract more number of people was created not simply through scripts and words but primarily through metaphors, signs and decorations that were made to look suitable to modern values like reason, aesthetic sense, progressive thinking and a feel for ‘the nation’. That was a graphic world. Clear and detailed that was. At the same time, it was used far more illusively than the ‘word-ed’ space to suggest a grandeur that can be ascribed to the very act of ‘reading’.
In the dialogic and verbose world of ideas, it is very important to see that these graphic materials were not disputed or even discussed. On some very rare instances one finds pictures as presented for the sheer fun or excitement of competitions to recognize or identify pictures from reader’s familiarity and memory.
While a newly formed reading class directly coined their ideologies through written and spoken word, there are many elements that preserved pictures as undisputable objects of illusive meanings within a ‘word-culture’. It is basically seen in the manner in which editorial subjectivities used words and pictures. The symbolic meanings and tones inserted through visuals have great role in forming a passive and immobile mediatic vision even in social situations that somehow appeared to mobilize the ‘progressive’ and ‘active’ in the word-ed spaces.
From ‘dark’ to ‘light’:
In the first three decades, most of the magazines carried illustrations of the world that entered into ‘word culture’ from the cultures of oral or visual transmission of ideas as a dramatic entry from ‘dark’ to ‘light’. Rising sun had been a much favored motif. Women, angels, open book, landscapes, flowers and flower vases were there.
Periodical page was used as if it were a stage for performance. It was vindicating a metaphoric spirit in the time of the ‘east’ that met with the ‘west’. Take an example of a cover picture. ‘Navayugam’ magazine in 1922 used an interesting cover picture that repeated for many issues.
The two ideas of ‘east’ and ‘west’ are presented in two female forms. One is a woman clad in sari with hairdo decorated with flowers. The other one is a woman in Roman attire and armor. This is a cordial picture that shows them coming together with mutually extended hands. Their hands are but covered with a ‘content space’ that informs what is inside of the book. Background to this dramatic scene is the rays of the rising sun. Interestingly most of the discussions on the status of women at the turn of the century hovered around the twin ideas of eastern and western women. These portrayed femininities as in this cover picture sited a diplomatic cordiality for this situation.
Whatever heated debates and participatory dialogues conducted using the ideas of civilizational grand polarities, periodical public domain visually hinted that it is an inevitable stage-set for ‘print & media-capitalism’ generating identities of passive consumption and interactive entertainment.
Title vignettes and other decorative motifs formed a completely new repertoire. Actually Print material was a functional rupture that could not accommodate a traditional iconography as such but transformed into a hybrid world of cordiality and courtesy within the trichotomous divisions of state, civil society and family. Modernity, newness, literacy and such assorted value systems got a metaphoric presence through pictures. Even the tensed debates to grasp the contradictions of the time were presented through a periodical page containing pleasant pictures of rising sun hill valleys, flower vases, trumpets, goddesses (of knowledge) and coconut trees.
These pictorial elements were almost like tropes in the tableau of periodical publishing.
Early magazines wanted to make ideas as simple as mother’s milk. They declared themselves as carriers of ‘truth’. A missionary magazine was titled as ‘satyanadakahalam’. It means the trumpet of ‘truth’ that was virtually daily events and incidents happening at unfamiliar and unknown regions of the world. The decorative pictorial materials that demonstrated this did not carry any mark of editorial subject behind them. Picture functioned as if part of a natural given or arbitrary elements. These ships, flower vases, angels and hills did not declare any direct claim either of the real or imagined worlds.
Pictures at this stage were stock motifs. They could go with any matter. The picture of a ship or rising sun could go with an essay on ‘morality’ or that on ‘social conditions’. A nature-picture could go with article on ‘malayala brahmanar’ or ‘bharatha dharma mahamandalam’. There are no visible editorial claims. But pictures were an object-world that virtually functioned as props in this verbose sensibility and its theatric extensions. Ship is a picture of colonizing act? Or it is simply suggesting a voyage that contains inordinate spirit to see the unknown and unseen? Or it is simply a beautiful sketch by somebody? Such questions were not asked at any point of time. But pictures recurred affirmatively.
It was difficult for these pictures to exist as part of any aesthetic and stylistic intention that inherently connects pictorial with the verbal in the context of European printed books of 17th century though most of these pictures must have been taken from many printed books floated in 19th century bazaars here. However, it is clear that in Malayalam periodicals of the first three decades of 20th century, the vignettes and other pictures were used not as part of any consistent care for pictorial properties of pictures as visual material. The reformative intelligentsia could not assort such a discursive premise for visual aspects of communication. Malayalam even lacked an editor (like Ramananda Chatterji of ‘Modern Review’ for example), who could present beautiful half tone prints of paintings by Ravi Varma, Abanindranath Tagore and many revivalist painters as a major element of visual attraction for the magazine at the very moment of production of their work as an ‘Art entity’. Visual was rather eluded as an object world / prop in the major political rhetoric of modernity and social reformation here.
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