The Buried Appraisals of Popular Art

AbstractThis article explores some ways in which even positive publicity may entail the censorship of the persons and things being publicised. It focuses on the case of the nationally celebrated Indian artist Mario Miranda, some of whose productions reflected his attachment to his home-state, Goa. Since the 2000s, a fraction of his oeuvre has been used as a means of branding and individuating the region for a tourist clientele. I discuss the disjuncture between a limited repertoire of displayed images and a much larger archive of the artist’s work. As Miranda’s illustrations are made ever more widely available in the form of souvenirs and ‘public art’, the images themselves are bowdlerised and their political content evacuated. This repertoire of Miranda’s work, created in the likeness of the tourism industry against which he fulminated, has the retroactive effect of authoring the author and circumscribing the extent to which he is known.Keywords: Prakruti RameshMario MirandaGoapublic arttourism industrypublicitycensorshiplatent archivesactualised repertoiresauthorshipcommodificationIndia Notes1 The images are ‘familiar’ in a double sense. Firstly, they constitute a ‘family of images’, in that they appear related to each other in style and content. Secondly, at least to some of their viewers, the images look familiar, in that they have been seen before in print publications.2 Under orders from the central government in New Delhi, the Indian military forcibly expelled the Portuguese colonial administration in 1961. This event is officially commemorated as Goa’s ‘Liberation’, but it is described by some commentators, and remembered by some of those who identify as Goan, as the commencement of India’s ‘Annexation’ or ‘Occupation’ of Goa. While noting that ‘Liberation’ is contested nomenclature, this article continues the use of the term as a proper noun because it is currently the most common way to designate the inaugural moment of ‘decolonisation’ in Goa. It is, however, beyond the scope of this article to reflect on whether the events of 1961 truly index Goa’s liberation from colonial subjection. For more extensive comments, see Prakruti Ramesh, ‘Public Monuments, Palliative Solutions: Political Geographies of Memory in Goa, India', History and Anthropology, 2023, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2023.22203433 Noel B Salazar and Yujie Zhu, ‘Heritage and Tourism’, in Lynn Meskell, ed, Global Heritage: A Reader, Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex, 2015, p 2414 Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella, eds, Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2009, p 95 A large corpus of literature investigates how heritage projects perpetuate selective and problematic modes of remembering the ‘lost’ past. See, for example, Edward M Bruner, ‘Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora’, American Anthropologist, vol 98, no 2, 1996, pp 290–304; Katharina Schramm, ‘Slave Route Projects: Tracing the Heritage of Slavery in Ghana’, in Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands, eds, Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, 2007, pp 71–986 Ramesh, ‘Public monuments', op cit7 Pamila Gupta, ‘Goa Dourada, the Internal Exotic in South Asia: Discourses of Colonialism and Tourism’, in V G Julie Rajan and Atreyee Phukan, South Asia and its Others: Reading the ‘Exotic’, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, 2009, p 1268 According to the Census of India 1961, vol XXVII, for Goa, Daman and Diu, territories which constituted the extent of Portuguese colonial control in the Indian subcontinent, Hindus, Catholics and Muslims comprised 61.3%, 36.2% and 2.3% of the population respectively (see the summary of data on p 329). The Census of India 2011 states that Hindus, Christians and Muslims comprised 66%, 25.1% and 8.3% of the population respectively (see https://www.census2011.co.in/data/religion/state/30-goa.html#, accessed 26 August 2021).9 Rochelle Pinto, Between Empires: Print and Politics in Goa, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2009, p 22610 See, for example, Margret Frenz, ‘Global Goans: Migration Movements and Identity in a Historical Perspective’, Lusotopie, vol 15, no 1, 2008, pp 183–202 and Pamila Gupta, Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 201911 D D Kosambi, Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 196212 Raghuraman S Trichur, Refiguring Goa: From Trading Post to Tourism Destination, Goa 1556, Saligao, 201313 In doing so, the book A Family in Goa inadvertently confirms the argument that Raghuraman Trichur develops about the co-dependent relationship between the Hindu mercantile elite and the Portuguese colonial administration.14 Ibid15 Ibid16 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p 14717 Arun Saldanha, Psychedelic Trance: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 200718 See Devika Sequeira, ‘European Tourist Numbers to Goa Are Falling, And that’s a Worry’, The Wire, 25 September 2015, https://thewire.in/economy/european-tourist-numbers-to-goa-are-falling-and-thats-a-worry, accessed 26 August 202119 Ibid20 Paul Routledge, ‘Consuming Goa: Tourist Site as Dispensable Space’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol 35, no 30, 2000, pp 2647–265621 There is also a quite well-developed pharmaceutical manufacturing sector in Goa.22 Pius Malekandathil, ‘Economic Processes, Ruralisation, and Ethnic Mutation: A Study on the Changing Meanings of Lusitanian Space in India, 1780–1840’, Itinerario, vol 35, issue 2, 2011, pp 45–6223 Pinto, Between Empires, op cit, p 9824 Frances Brown and Derek Hall, ‘Introduction: The Paradox of Peripherality’, in Frances Brown and Derek Hall, eds, Tourism in Peripheral Areas: Case Studies, Channel View Publications, Clevedon, 200025 Julie Scott, ‘Peripheries, Artificial Peripheries and Centres’, in Frances Brown and Derek Hall, eds, Tourism in Peripheral Areas, op cit, pp 58–73. See also Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, Routledge, London, 199126 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 199127 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1993, p 15228 The word repertoire, to follow and adapt Diana Taylor’s definition, refers to ongoing, embodied knowledge not yet documented or preserved outside of its living transmission because it is constantly in improvised use. See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2003. See also Kajri Jain’s annotations on the terms archive, repertoire, and warehouse in the context of collections of ‘calendar art’, a genre of images popular in South Asia, and among a transnational South Asian expatriate community, which express religious and patriotic themes: Kajri Jain, ‘Archive, Repertoire or Warehouse? Producers of Indian Popular Images as Stakeholders in a Virtual Database’, South Asian Visual Culture Series 3, 2009, pp 1–1429 Christopher Steiner, ‘Authenticity, Repetition, and the Aesthetics of Seriality: The Work of Tourist Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Ruth B Phillips and Christopher B Steiner, eds, Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, p 9730 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, p 22731 Ibid, p 20332 Ibid, p 22733 Ibid34 Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2007, p 20735 John Frow, Signature and Brand, in Jim Collins, ed, High/Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p 6236 Ibid, p 6837 Ibid. See also John Frow, ‘The Signature: Three Arguments about the Commodity Form’, in Helen Grace, ed, Aesthesia and the Economy of the Senses, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1996, pp 151–20038 In cartoons about Goa, Miranda often used the term ‘Indians’ to refer to people from other parts of India than Goa. In these cases, he used the term ‘Goans’ as if to refer to an independent, mutually exclusive set of people.39 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Harry Zohn, trans, Hannah Arendt, ed, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Schocken Books, New York, 2007, p 22340 Ibid, p 22441 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, vol 146, 1984, p 5942 Dwijen Rangnekar, ‘Remaking place: the social construction of a Geographical Indication for Feni’, Environment and Planning A 43, 2011, pp 2043–2059. Since 2009, Feni has been registered as a Geographical Indication, meaning that a product can only sell under that name when it is produced in a circumscribed territory and according to predefined specifications of process.43 Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text, Stephen Heath, trans, Fontana Press, London, 1977, p 38