THE NEW MYTHICAL ICONOGRAPHY OF
HINDUISM:
FROM CULTURAL NATIONALISM
TO POLITICAL THEOLOGY
Bipin Balachandran

Among the various goals of the rationale of colonial modernity, the one
which attains a particular preference in the context of the formation of our
nation-state is that of “demythification” and the execution of secular civil society
through this process. In its practicality, demythification, a process through
which colonial modernity tried to denigrate the shared belief systems of their
‘subjects’ has created complex socio-cultural situations in those societies which
had to undergo this process. As the frames of reference for this project are largely
derivatives of Western concepts of religion, faith and secularism emerged from
the historiography of the colonizers who sought to create ‘the other’ for their
propositions, it has brought forth a definitional ambiguity in the demarcation
of secular-public realm and religious realm in a country like ours where multi
levels of cultural and religious systems co-existed. Indian societies have always
expressed a predilection for the specificity of contexts and have accepted myths
originating and reestablishing as the result of the re/production and re-reading in
specific historical contexts, as an integral part of life. Then, it will not be a wrong
assumption that for such sensibility modernity seemed to be yet another context.
It is also important to note that while, through the critique of the rationale of
modernism, post-modernism tries to contextualize modernism; it has never
been a totalitarian concept in India. At this point, the history of modern visual
culture of India can be seen as a domain where new myths were being produced
as a result of the friction between the values of tradition and modernism. We can
obtain some adequate examples for this from the history of the popular visual
culture of India.