Dr. Kajri Jain, Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto

Keynote address - 18 June, 15:45-16:45

Gods in the Time of Democracy

Every day the news reminds us that religion is part and parcel of modern societies all over the world. Yet we are only just beginning to come to grips with the ways in which religion is not simply an atavistic, anachronistic throwback that somehow “persists” alongside modernity, but can be seen as modernity’s constitutive outside, that both responds to and informs developments in society, politics, and economy. This talk describes these exchanges in relation to India, drawing on material from a forthcoming book on the monumental statues, many of them religious icons, that have emerged as a political weapon in India since the 1990s – that is, in tandem with economic liberalization. What might these massive, immobile figures tell us about the dynamism of religion?

Bio

Kajri Jain's work focuses on images at the interface between religion, politics, and vernacular business cultures in India. She is the author of Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke University Press, 2007). Her current research on the emergence of gigantic iconic statues in India after the neoliberal economic reforms of the 1990s extends her interests in the efficacies of circulation, the aesthetics of modern religion, and vernacular capitalism to their interface with material infrastructures (highways, the automotive industry, dams), domestic tourism, landscape/“nature”, governmentality, and democracy (particularly the politics of caste).