New Digital Collection of Essays by Tasveer Ghar

Tasveer Ghar – A House of Pictures
serves as a trans-national network for the collection and digitalization of the rich visual cultures of South Asia, and in parallel as an educational platform to raise awareness on the importance of popular images as social and historical agents. The archive´s key fields exploration are the social and performative lives of images, the techniques of visuality they embed, as well as the histories of their producers, disseminators and ‘consumers’. The network was funded and is coordinated by Prof.
Christiane Brosius (Visual and Media Anthropology, HCTS),
Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke University) and filmmaker
Yousuf Saeed.

In 2017, Tasveer Ghar launched the project “
Manly Matters: Representations of Maleness in South Asian Popular Visual Practice.” The initiative focuses on pictorial representations of maleness in South Asian popular visual practice, especially in printed images produced for the mass market. Over the past two decades, representations of masculinity in visual media have hardly been investigated and problematized in scholarship on South Asian visual culture. Hence, the male qua male has been taken as a given, glossed over as gendered subject, and therefore paradoxically rendered invisible, even though its presence is ubiquitous across various media. The project intends to draw the attention on this often-overlooked subject while seeking new trajectories of critical inquiry of national icon formations and visual constructs.

In May 2019, an
international workshop on “Manly Matters” was held at Duke University, Durham, with the participation of several senior scholars. The initiative has now culminated into the publication of a digital collection of visual essays, which also serves as a visual archive on images of masculinity in South Asian visual culture. The following is a complete list of all the contributions to the project:

Sharika Thiranagama
The Leader as Image: Prabhakaran and the Visual Regimes of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
Tarini Bedi
Wheeled Masculinity

Ravinder Kaur
The Market Hunters: Corporate Masculinity and the Art of Opening the Economy

Shaista Anwar
Motorcycle Masculinity in Indian Cinema

Hans Harder
Hypermasculinity in Bengali Comic Books

Sukeshi Kamra
Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Political Cartoon Culture of the Majority Press in 1947

Christopher Pinney
Picturing the ‘Intimate Enemy’: From the Rani of Jhansi to the Indian National Army

Deepa Srinivas:
The Muslim ‘Other’: Figures of Evil and Charisma from Popular Visual Culture in India

Yousuf Saeed
Lions of Islam: Symbols of Masculine Power in the Devotional Art of India and Pakistan

Margrit Pernau
Modern Masculinity, Bought at Your Local Pharmacist: The Tonic Sanatogen in 20th-Century Indian Advertisements

Namrata Ganneri
Pahalwan Portraits: Manly Consumers of Physical Culture in Western India
Kama Maclean
The Embodiment of Quicksilver: Picturing Chandrashekhar Azad

Dannah Dennis and Avash Bhandari
Remembering and Remaking Nepal’s Founder: A Visual History of Prithvinarayan Shah

Madhuja Mukherjee
Framing the Couple: Gender and Intimacy in Hindi Cinema and Film Publicity during the 1950s

Kanika Singh
Masculinity in Sikh Visual Culture: Representing the Guru and the Martyr

Sarunas Paunksnis and Runa Chakraborty
Masculine Anxiety in the Films of Anurag Kashyap

Shabnam Naher and Mossabber Hossain
Male Beautification and the Beauty Salon: Changing Perceptions of 'Masculinity' among Males in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Rupali Sehgal
Selling Intoxicating Bondings, Hyper Masculinity and Print Alcohol Ads in India

Sourav Roy
The Constitution of India: A National Gallery of a Few Good Men
Gaurav Kalra
Politics of Posture and Sartorial Sagacity: The Construction of Ascetic Masculinity in Vivekananda’s Photographs and Posters

The "Manly Matters" project has been funded by the
Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, which was awarded to Sumathi Ramaswamy (2016-2021). An archive of all visual essays published by Tasveer Ghar since 2006 is available at
this link.