Darshan(a)

Abstract

Darshan or ‘(the act of) seeing’ derives from the Sanskrit root दृश् (drs): ‘to see’. Many words related to vision and visual culture take off from this root. Thus, drishya (scene; literally ‘the seen’), from which we say that film is a drishyamadhyama or visual medium. Drishti, the visual ability (or sometimes the evil eye), dooradrishti (farsightedness) and doordarshan as a literal translation of television. In Telugu, film direction is known as darsakatvam (which may be closer in meaning to mis-en-scene) and the viewer is a darsak(a) in some languages. Darshan is also employed in everyday speech to mean meeting (someone), e.g. sandarshan translates as interview. Physical appearance is sometimes styled darshan as in the expression ‘naam bade aur darshan chote’. And then there are the darshana-s, the ancient schools of thought or philosophical systems of the subcontinent. The term and its derivates are thus part of the common vocabulary of Indian film culture. The usage that appeared to hold special promise for Indian film and visual studies, however, was the one related to temple worship. The objective of going to a temple is described as ‘taking darshan’ and involves on the part of the deity the act of ‘giving darshan’. Thus, a significant aspect of the discourse of darshan is that the deity ‘gives itself to be seen’. This ‘giving itself to be seen’ is also a characteristic of theatrical spectacle as contrasted by Christian Metz to the inherent voyeurism of the cinematic image (Prasad, 1998, pp. 100–102). Paul Willemen’s ‘fourth look’ adds a twist to this by suggesting that the screen looks back at the spectator, acknowledging and playing to his/her presence (Willemen, 1994), which may be said to happen in Indian popular cinema in a sense that Willemen did not intend, in the scenes of ‘star entry’ featuring ‘an elaborately staged play with star recognition’ (Srinivas, 2009, p. 100). It is the persistence of frontality as a feature of Indian cinematic spectacle that led film studies to seize upon this term drawn from the discourse of Hinduism. Thus, Ravi Vasudevan refers to Eck’s and Babb’s studies of darshana in his well-known analysis of the scene in Awaara (1951) involving a series of visual transactions between the moral look of Raj’s childhood friend and that of his mother. He shows how the look not only captures Raj but also extends a moral hold over the other world of crime that he inhabits. Darshana involves not only seeing but also being seen by the deity: ‘the prominence of the eyes of the Hindu divine images also reminds us that it is not only the worshiper who sees the deity, but the deity sees the worshipper as well’ (Eck, 1985, pp. 6–7).