Tirchhi Nazar: The Gaze in South Asia beyond Darshan

As the Delta variant ravaged through Indian cities in the summer of 2021, the glossy sheen on the Indian economic success story appeared to be coming apart. Viewers were confronted with photographs of crowded crematoriums on the front pages of newspapers and videos of breathless patients shared with trigger warning signs made their way as the lead story on international news programs. Just a few months earlier, images of the mass migration of workers on foot and crowded on trucks, buses and trains had exposed the shadow workforce that kept the economy afloat. For a governing dispensation that had astutely exploited the power of the media image, the diseased and dying bodies on screens were stubborn reminders of the fickle indeterminacy of images that refused to be subsumed under the sunny airbrushed optimism of the ‘achhe din’ promised by the government in slick advertising images. The official response was evasive, seeking to clamp down on the circulation of images and grossly underreport the number of the dead, even as its supporters sought to distract viewers by targeting the photographers and journalists instead for their reporting with accusations of sensationalizing Covid deaths. Meanwhile, photographs and videos competed in bringing more and more distressing sights to viewers’ screens, drawing their gaze towards the suffering. In this clash between a deluge of images propped up by news business models clamoring to attract eyeballs with ever more lurid pictures, and an attempted proscription of these potent images by state authorities and institutions through tactics of evasion and distraction, questions of what we see and how we see were starkly laid out as sites of power. As visual culture assumes greater agency in national and international affairs, the essays in this issue ask for a closer examination of practices of seeing and spectatorial positions available to viewers in their engagement with media and visual culture. While film and media scholarship has engaged productively with questions of spectatorship in examinations of contemporary media, this issue asks how we may historicize debates in visual culture by paying closer attention to the politics and practices of seeing. Historical scholarship on the gaze in South Asia has remained wedded to the powerful narrative of darshan, the reciprocal gaze between the deity and the devotee, that has displayed a protean power to adapt to new technologies. We suggest however that a simplistic reliance on darshan has flattened the heterogeneity of the visual landscape in South Asia and obfuscated other ways of seeing that populate the teeming visuality of its multitudes. By taking up under-explored practices of seeing, this collection parses open the visual archive to tease out alternative genealogies of vision and visuality that resonate with contemporary concerns around the politics of sight, misrecognition and the formative role of vision in the constitution of subjects. The papers here follow a panel at the South Asia conference at Madison, Wisconsin in 2019 where we (along with co-editor Megha Sharma Sehdev) broached the idea of exploring theories of the gaze beyond darshan, calling upon the myriad ways that seeing had been invoked in colloquial speech, poetry and cinema. Taking the example of the tirchhi nazar or tedhi-nazar, (the slanted gaze) we used it as a lens to invite speculation on an oblique vision, and consider how dynamics of distraction and deception mediate vision. Views that confound the eye through bedazzlement, inscrutability or deviation produce an optic knowledge that differs from the reciprocal contract implied in the gaze of darshan. Rather than a model in which the gaze is immersed in its object, we asked for instance, how clothing, gesture, and jewelry – the way such objects shine, move, and conceal – might not function simply as accessories to the main spectacle or ‘orders of ornamentation’, but produce an aesthetics of distraction and play (aankhmicholi) between the visible and invisible. How the eye makes meaning from these interactions and the kinds of social relations it produces, both builds upon and departs