Kajri Jain

Professor Jain is interested in how the efficacies, affects, and values associated with images arise not only from what goes on within the picture-frame but also from the production, circulation, and deployments of images as material objects. She therefore finds it useful to bring ethnographic sensibilities and methods to the study of images. Her work on popular images in modern and contemporary India encompasses the bazaar icons known as “calendar art;” monumental statues; theme parks; and representations of “nature” in temples, gardens, zoos, and popular cinema. It has largely focused on a vernacular business ethos where religion has been the primary site for adopting new media and expressive techniques.

The unfinished business between images, religion, politics, and commerce troubles the legacies of European Romanticism and secular modernism that underpin much of our thinking about the aesthetic. So while Prof. Jain’s teaching is often based on South Asian materials, her courses take a postcolonial/decolonizing and transcultural approach to interrogating the disciplinary assumptions of art history, cinema studies, and visual studies. These critical perspectives also inform her writing on questions of method in art history, and on contemporary art in India and elsewhere. For instance, a recent strand in her work proceeds from the sensorium of caste and untouchability to trouble the universality of vision as the hegemonic sense, and the attendant celebration of touch and the haptic.

Prof. Jain’s current book project, tentatively titled Nature in the Time of the Gods, is intended as the third in a trilogy of monographs about contemporary Indian images. It asks what vernacular images and spaces in India might tell us about how ideas of nature are mobilized— or come to grief— in the post-reform Indian public sphere. What can these sites tell us about aesthetic or moral-ethical values that sit in tension with modern artistic traditions predicated on our separation from nature and the sublimation of the sacred into art? What happens to nature in an expressive context where religious images are still efficacious, and where Romanticism arrived with colonialism rather than responding directly to the Industrial Revolution?