Introduction 40

The study of visual culture is a prominent field of research in sociological and anthropological disciplines. In a book articulating the visual representations of and by the Hindutva movement, (Davis, 2007) argues that “visual iconography plays a fundamental role in the imagining of nationhood.” He deliberates on “Anderson’s central questions in

imagined communities: How is it that so many persons have been persuaded to sacrifice and die willingly for something so recently imagined into being as the nation?” and argues that “a visual imagery places us in a better position” to respond to this question. (p. 5).

Though social psychological research is sparse in utilising visual material as data,

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anthropologists have traditionally been interested in the ‘visual’ as a subject of enquiry. In the field of anthropology, MacDougall remarks “Anthropology has had no lack of interest in the visual; its problem has always been what to do with it” (p 276, MacDougall, 1997). Visual Anthropology is now an established sub-field of study that includes a range of data such as performance arts, museum artefacts, paintings, posters, photographs (MacDougall, 1997). These are described as forms of ‘persuasive’ communication. There is a wealth of research on visual representations in the field of communication studies, management especially in advertising and also in political discourse (Pellegrino, Salvati, & De Meo, 2013). Unsurprisingly, the focus in advertisement is in the impact of visual imagery towards attitude change in consumers (Rossiter & Percy, 1980; Slade, 2003). These studies analyse not just the contents, but also argue about the plausible impact that such visual communication might have on the intended audience by analysing the contents of the visual medium. This is worth keeping in mind as one traverses the muddied waters of ‘causal’ implications and the question of valid interpretations of qualitative data (Cho, 2006; Golfshani, 2003; Whittemore, Chase, & Mandle, 2001) in the following piece of work.

Anthropologists have examined discourse and studied visual imagery, particularly in the form of editorial and political cartoons. Katz (2004) traces the history of posters as a medium of communicating political messages in 1754 when the American President, Benjamin Franklin, sketched a snake cut into pieces with the caption “Join, or Die”. This was one of the first visual representations of an argument, exhorting the then British colonies to either unify or perish. More recently, a set of 13 posters depicting the Prophet Mohammed by Danish artists became fiercely contested sites of identity, security and the right to free speech (Hakam, 2009; Kuipers, 2011; Laegaard, 2009; Weaver, 2010).

In 2006, when we stumbled across a set of posters in a VHP tent, set up in the middle of a largely Hindu religious gathering in India that caught our attention for its narrative content of tortured cows and vividly stereotypical caricatures of Muslims as threats, the Danish cartoons that evoked almost worldwide polarised reactions were yet to have been sketched. However, as an Indian researcher conversant with the rhetoric of banal

prejudice and of being a part of the community of shared cultural repertoire, the use of cows in the set of posters (which could otherwise have been interpreted as part of animal

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rights discourse) stood out to me as symbolising the sacred Mother Cow of Hindus.14 I shall explain the relevance of the cows in further detail in the analysis and discussion sections.

In a book chronicling India’s rich history of cartooning, Mushirul Hasan traces and analyses the publication of editorial cartoons published in Urdu in the Awadh Punch as a social commentary on the colonial times (Hasan, 2007). Later, work by the sociologist Patricia Uberoi examining the content of posters produced during the 1940’s and the early 1960’s (when Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of India) demonstrates that the ‘poster’ was an essential tool of mass communication in the visual culture of India (Uberoi, 2002). Those were the days of nation-building and bringing together a country born out of horrific inter-group violence, still firmly within the shackles of colonialism. Building up a secular national identity was of paramount importance to the leaders of the fledgling democracy. This is a point worth noting especially in the overall context of this thesis that the Hindu right has not had an uncontested ride, and that pluralism has been an ideal that was strongly endorsed by the state and populace. Uberoi’s research elucidates the contesting ideas of Indian nationalism that find expression in the posters (Uberoi, 2002).

It is important however, to differentiate between the lampooning of power structures, as seen in the analysis of Hasan, and the reinforcement of hate representations of minority communities. The social psychologist, Michael Billig, in his study of racist jokes in the Ku Klux Klan webpages, argues that a distinction must be drawn between jokes that seek to comment on unequal power relations in a society and jokes that seek to derogate minority and oppressed communities, i.e., jokes made within the context of extreme bigotry (Billig, 2001, 2005). In other words, the ‘context of reproduction’ of the power equation of the groups in question, i.e., the group that is being made fun of and the group that is making the jokes becomes critical in determining which form of humour the cartoons represent. It is within this extreme bigotry of Hindutva ideology (Khan, 2011; D. Reddy, 2011) that the following study is analysed. While, racism and prejudice have been of central concern in the study of social psychology (Blee, 1996; Miller, 2004; Katz,

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I shall explain the relevance of the cows in further detail in the sections on establishing validity (2.4) and analysis (2.5)

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1991; Reicher, 2001; Reicher, 2012; González, Verkuyten, Weesie, & Poppe, 2008), racist humour as a study of enquiry in social psychology is limited (Billig, 2005), political cartoons as subjects of enquiry is rare (Weaver, 2010), and within the framework of critical social mobilisation, this study is, perhaps, one of the first.

As argued earlier in the introduction, the emotions that are sought to be maintained within and between groups are neither self-sustaining nor do we come to our understanding of the world by just ourselves. Communication forms an essential neural system to the body of emotions that sustains the group identity in dissent and in consensus (Reicher et al., 2006). It is therefore, critical that as researchers we look at the variety of ways in which people seek to communicate their ideas with one another. Specifically, looking at the ways in which entrepreneurs of identity would seek to communicate their messages to mobilise people. For social researchers, the medium of communication is as important as the contents of ‘what is being said’, or in this case, what is being visualised. It is in this regard that these cartoons can be seen as ‘visual arguments’ (Hatfield & Hinck, 2006; Shelley, 2001; Slade, 2003; Wekesa, 2012).