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Place, Space, and Representation: Transporting Sacred Geographies

Jyotindra Jain BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2010 1: 91 DOI: 10.1177/097492760900100109 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bio.sagepub.com/content/1/1/91

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Article

Place, Space, and Representation: Transporting Sacred Geographies

Jyotindra Jain
Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts

BioScope 1(1) 91 101 Screen South Asia Trust 2010 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/097492760900100109 http://bioscope.sagepub.com

Abstract Building upon the notion that space is a practiced placeand that spatial practices activate places, the article explores Indian pilgrimage maps and painted narrative panels of itinerant picture showmen as examples of portable geographies. It argues that these materials act as condensed and iconized places of pilgrimage activated in the case of maps by their worship and by audio-visual performance in the case of the painted narrative panels of Dev Narayan. These visual forms are not merely imaginary or imaged representations of particular sacred places but are representations of a very specific type: akin to mobile shrines, they facilitate the translocation of ritual, symbolic and performative functions. When delineated as pilgrimage maps, picture showmens panels, or theater backdrops, sacred place and sacred space become iconized and transportable. In turn, they become vehicles for the imaginary transportation of audiences into their spatial form. Keywords Kashi, picture showmen, pilgrimage, pilgrimage in reverse, naksha, Dev Narayan phad, Gujar, audio-visual performance, spatial practices, mobile shrine

In contemporary theory, there is a broad consensus that space is a practiced place (Certeau, 1984; Lefebvre, 1971; Harvey, 1996; Foucault, 1986), that place relates to stability, fixity, and definite location, and space to mobility, journeys, circuits, and routes which activate places. WJT Mitchell draws attention to a third related concept, namely the landscape, which he triangulates with those of place and space as a dialectical triad to examine how the three terms conceptually resonate together (Mitchell, 2002, p. viii): landscape is that site encountered as image or sight and may become the object of imaginary renderings (ibid., p. xi). What interests me in the context of this article is Mitchells notion that spatial practices (ritual, pilgrimage, tourism) may then activate the place, and it may become the object of imaginary renderings (postcards, descriptions, son et lumire, spectacles, fantasies, memories) (ibid.). Using this as point of departure, this article proposes to explore spatial structures of Indian pilgrimage maps on the one hand, and painted scrolls and panels of itinerant picture showmen on the other. The term was first used by A.K. Coomaraswamy (1929) to refer to itinerant storytellers who used pictorial scrolls or panels to illustrate their narrative. Buddhist, Brahmanical, and Jaina literature contains abundant references to the practice of such traveling minstrels, at least from the third centuryAD onwards. One of the common terms used for them in early literary sources

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was yamapattika, carriers of the panels of Yama, the God of Death. These didactic panels were meant to enlighten people about Hindu mythology and morality as well as the notions of karma and punishment in hell. Among the living traditions of picture showmen, the Garoda tradition of Gujarat and the patua tradition of Bengal end with scenes of hell punishmentsin Bengal, even today, these panels are referred to as jampot or the panels of Yama. Besides these, the chitrakathi (storyteller) traditions of Maharashtra, the Telangana scroll tradition of Andhra Pradesh and those of Pabuji and Dev Narayan of Rajasthanall dealing with local epics and legendsare still alive, but on the wane. Due to the rise of cinema and TV, these traditions have suffered a setback. However, in Bengal, the patuas havebegun to paint and narrate incidents from the contemporary world such as the tragedies of tsunami or 9/11.A patua scroll from around 1950s deals with the evil effect of cinema on the youth and its instrumentality in destroying joint family life. The patua curses cinema for overall destruction of moral values in society. I argue that these visual forms are akin to mobile shrines which are not merely imaginary or imaged representations of particular sacred places but are representations of a very specific typethey simulate real places as complexly activated spaces and facilitate the translocation of ritual, symbolic, and performative functions. When delineated as pilgrimage maps, picture showmens panels, or theater backdrops, sacred place and sacred space become iconized and transportable. In turn, they become vehicles for the imaginary transportation of audiences into their spatial form. These specific sites, organized through images, symbols, and distributed across genres, while imaginary and idealized, also refer to specific places, as we will see in comparing the spatial organization of the pilgrimage maps of Banaras and phads, the large painted canvas panels depicting the epic of the folk deity Dev Narayan. These canvases are used for audio-visual performance related to his cult, and travel widely in south Rajasthan. Such imaged sites detach places from their geographical locations and reconfigure them as acutely condensed schemata in emblematic diagrams. In ritual context, these iconic figures acquire a magical significance that turns them into shrines and objects of worship. Literature on yatra or pilgrimage, especially the puranas, enumerate saptapuri (seven sacred cities including Banaras and Dwarka), char-dham (four sacred abodes of Vishnu including Jagannath Puri), dvadasha-jyotirlinga (12 fiery phallic symbols of Shiva including the one at Somnath in Gujarat) and chaushastha-svayambhu lingas (64 self-emanating phalluses of Shiva) as the main places of pilgrimage in the sacred Hindu topography of India. Besides these, there are spots marking the confluence of rivers as at Prayag or places dedicated to regional deities such as the Kalighat temple in Kolkata. Transportation of sacred spaces through symbolic, replicative, and representational practices has an old history in India. Pilgrims carrying lit oil-lamps or a bottle of water from a sacred spot to their home or another shrine serve as an example of the symbolic transportation of a sacred space. Replicative transportation of sanctified places is exemplified in the reconstruction of sacred sites from all over India in Banaras. These include Pushkar in Rajasthan and Puri in Orissa and, conversely, the Vishvanath temple has been reconstructed in Uttarakashi in the Himalayas (Jain, 2009). Portable, mass-produced maps of places of pilgrimage are the most common examples of the representational mobilization of ritual spaces. Artists colonies sprang up around Jagannath Puri in Orissa, Banaras in Uttar Pradesh, Nathadwara in south Rajasthan, Kalighat in West Bengal, and Shatrunjaya of the Jainas in Gujarat, painting emblematic maps and images of the main deities for pilgrims. This practice received a sudden boost with the establishment of a country-wide railway network which enhanced pilgrim traffic to these centers. Jagannath Puri is the single most sacred Hindu pilgrimage center in eastern India. Initially, the old artists village of Raghurajpur, mainly inhabited by the Mahapatra Brahmins and situated on the highway between Bhubaneshwar and Puri, supplied patachitra or painted sacred images to the pilgrims of Puri. Subsequently, with increased BioScope, 1, 1 (2010): 91101

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numbers of pilgrims, new settlements of painters sprang up in Puri itself. The patachitras produced at this center ritually benefited the families of pilgrims who could carry home the form and essence of the shrine in its portable representation. Similarly, a major colony of painters came up in the late medieval period around the popular Vaishnava shrine of Shrinathji at Nathadwara in Rajasthan. They created an array of images depicting maps of Shrinathjis palace complex as well as the main deity of the shrine for the benefit of the pilgrims. Banaras represents the cosmos of the entire sacred Hindu geography of India as well as the original fountainhead of the ritual topography of the country. Highly stylized maps depicting every sacred spot of the holy city as if strung on a necklace circulate in the bazaars of this pilgrim center. Almost all places of pilgrimage have their own temple bazaars selling such maps of their sites. Interestingly, the English term map, which is commonly translated as naksha in Hindi, (as in naksha kashi kshetra ka) is misleading when used for these visual representations of sacred places. Map, in the western sense, is a flat diagram of an area of land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads, and so on, and is meant to guide a person to a particular location within a given place. The pilgrimage nakshas are not location maps but are iconized representations of the place. In their formal construction, they often use multiple vantage points and provide selective and idealized representations of the sacred locations of a place. These are not guide maps but sacred objects. Pilgrims bring these portable shrines home, add them to the religious paraphernalia of the house and offer them annual oblations along with other sacred images. Among the Shvetambara Jainas, a large painted panel of Mount Shatrunjaya, the most sacred of their pilgrimage centers, is displayed in temples even today on the annual day of pilgrimage commencement. Thus, those who cannot conduct a pilgrimage on account of age, disability or pecuniary reasons may still attain the religious merit arising from pilgrimage in this way. Another striking example of space transference in the living ritual practices of the Jainas is the consecration of a new temple by anointing its reflection in a large mirror with milk and yoghurt. The temple is transformed into its image reflected in a mirror, and it is always the image which is the real object of worship. The pilgrimage maps, too, are, in a sense compact, synthesized reflections of actual sacred places which, in turn are said to be replicas of the celestial abodes of deities. Devotees consecrate and worship the pilgrimage maps which metaphorically invoke the real sacred spaces in the same manner as the consecration of the reflection (image) of the temple in a mirror consecrates the temple itself. A large number of nakshas of Hindu places of pilgrimage are conceived in the form of mandalas or circular diagrams. Some of them have the representation of the main deity in the form of a yantra, a highly condensed and abstract geometric diagram, representing a sacred image, site, text, or sound, or all of these together. It is significant for my argument that nakshas are not just maps but objects of worship. These have a magical connotation in the sense that even by a mere glance, touch or evocation of it one may obtain the highest worldly or spiritual merit, not to speak of the merit of having conducted a pilgrimage to Kashi.1 Since the pilgrimage of Kashi (and several other places of Hindu pilgrimage) is conducted by circumambulating the main shrine on one level and the whole city on the other, the naksha is stylized to appear as mandala and yantra, deriving from the circularity implied in the visual delineation of circumambulation. In marking out sacred points, the nakshas do gesture to approximate geographic location in terms of cardinal directions as they exist; however, in stringing together the significant locations of the site into a compact geometry, the nakshas maintain a mathematical purity to the number of locations depicted. Geometrical structuring and mathematical accuracy form the essence of a yantra. As a spatial form, it condenses the macrocosm onto the microcosm, representing dimensions and elements of the former in the construction of the latter. Interestingly, the earlier nakshas of Kashi (see Image 1) did not follow the modern system of cardinal directions but showed the north on the right, the south on the left, the east below, and the west above. The BioScope, 1, 1 (2010): 91101

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Image 1. Naksha of Kashi (Banaras); woodblock on paper, North India, early twentieth century
Source: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, EA 1966.56

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naksha in Image 1 follows a different directional logic from the western paradigm of the map, presenting the ritual geography of the city to the pilgrim as a sacred image encountered frontally. The entrance to the circumambulatory pilgrimage route is from the east and as the term pradakshina (circumambulation) literally means follow the south, the pilgrim is advised to start the journey from the east following the southern direction. If the naksha was to follow the directional arrangement of a modern map, the entrance, which has to be from the east, would fall on the right and not in front of the pilgrim, thus denying him a direct or frontal encounter of the sacred, which is the prerequisite of all image worship. I shall now examine the spatial structuring of the phad in conjunction with that of the pilgrimage maps. In my argument, both are construed as portable representations that respectively mobilize pilgrims and audience-devotees into the sacred circuit. As we will observe, like the pilgrimage nakshas, the Dev Narayan phad does not follow locations in terms of a modern map, even though most of the places that occur in the verbal narrative and the painted phad exist today. However, while pilgrimage maps maintain some approximation to the order of locations, the phad rearranges places in a configuration oriented to the performative structure of the narration. This network of reconfigured spaces underlying the schematic structure of the phad provides the route through which audience-devotees are taken on a pilgrimage of the epics sacred topography. The route is activated through the performed verbal narrative which traverses the sacred geography of the cult of Dev Narayan. My rationale for linking the pilgrimage maps to the itinerant picture showmens painted panels, scrolls and related audio-visual performances is that the picture-narrating tours of the wandering priest-performers are often construed as yatra. This is a kind of reverse pilgrimage where the place of the pilgrimage or the deity is brought to the devotee, rather than the other way around. Significantly, the Garoda picture showmen of Gujarat refer to their ambulatory scroll-reading tours as yatra and treat their picture-scroll as mobile temple, with its topmost portion being painted in the form of a shikhara or temple spire. The painted narrative scrolls relating to the epics of the deified folk hero Pabuji and the neo-Vaishnava incarnation Dev Narayan are also reportedly treated as mobile shrines. After the scroll paintings are completed, they are ritually consecrated in a ceremony invoking the deities. When such a scroll has outlived its life or has proved inauspicious, the bhopa and the painter are said to take it to the Pushkar Lake on an auspicious day. They invoke the main deity by making ritual offerings and reciting sacred stanzas, and request the deity to leave the scroll-shrine. Once the spirits desert the scroll-shrine, the priest can immerse it in the lake in the same fashion as the charred bones of a dead person (Image 2). A similar custom was also commonly observed in the Telangana region; here old and tattered scrolls that could not be used any more, were ritually cremated and immersed in a river, like the remnants of a cremated dead body (Mittal, 1998). Before analyzing the complex spatial web of the phad, let me briefly describe the context and traditions of its production and performance. The life story of Pabuji and Dev Narayan are even today painted on cloth by painters of the Joshi clan living in Shahpura, Bhilwara, Chittorgarh, and Udaipur in Rajasthan. They paint the phad for bhopa clients who combine the functions of priests, narrators, singers and musicians in extolling these deities. Traditionally, the bhopas commissioned these elaborately painted panels, consecrated them on their acquisition, treated them as living shrines, and held performances in front of audiences of devotees. On these occasions, the bhopas and their helpers narrated part of the epic, using prose and verse accompanied by musical instruments and choreographic movements (Image 3). Two sequentially interconnected episodes of the verbal narrative are depicted in the painting at some distance from each other. As the performer seeks to connect and interweave scattered illustrations into his narration, he has an opportunity to dance his way from one point to another, building a sense of duration through the improvisation of song and music. In other words, the pictorial schema of these panels is designed in such a way that it allows scope for a composite BioScope, 1, 1 (2010): 91101

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Image 2. Ritual of de-consecration of a phad performed at Pushkar, Rajasthan

Credit: Jyotindra Jain.

Image 3. A bhopa in performance playing jantar, a string instrument, accompanied by diyala, holder of lamp, South Rajasthan
Credit: Jyotindra Jain.

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performance of an oral narration through prose, verse, and dance. This oral narrative tends to proceed through a linear temporal sequence, with episodes following one after the other. But in the case of Dev Narayan panels, the narrative and pictorial sequence do not dovetail in a linear fashion. Here the time of narrative and the space of the image interweave and then separate out, building a pattern of alternating convergence and divergence. The performances generally start after sunset and continue overnight, or at least till after midnight. The space of the priest-performer of the phad and that of the audience-devotees, is not sharply divided. The latter squat on the ground, with the phad stretched out over vertical pieces of bamboo in front of them. A space of a couple of metres is maintained between phad and audience for the bhopa to perform the invocatory ritual. To the accompaniment of dance and music, the bhopa sings stanzas related to the particular segment of the epic he narrates. In tandem with the bhopas narration of a stanza the diyala, literally holder of the lamp, opens up the corresponding painted scene on the phad by holding an oil-lamp close to it. Long interludes punctuate the performance, during which bhopa, diyala and, more sporadically, the audience participate in a dialog about the narrative conducted between characters of the epic. The most common local term used for this audio-visual performance is phad-banchana, literally to read the phad . Since the bhopa does not read out a written text, we may interpret banchana to refer to the bhopas telling or oral narration of the story. Remarkably, the phad painters insist that each and every detail of the phad has to conform to the bhopas narration, and to some extent, the audiences knowledge of it. However, we observe the actual performance to be more casual. The bhopa points the bow of his musical instrument toward the broad space of the phad to indicate the pictorial representation of the incident he recounts. In illuminating the incident, diyala holds the lamp in front of the image in a way that can only approximate to a specific image, leading to several painted segments of the story coming into focus simultaneously. Except for the larger figures of the main deities and deified characters placed at the center of the phad, the rest are too small to be properly visible to the audience.2 Such casualness of focus is also observable in the audiences disposition when the bhopa points to specific painted scenes. My contention is that the primary object and function of the phad for its audience-devotees is to be a faithful and complete depiction of the narrative. As shrine and sacred object, its ritual value lies in its purity and iconographic completeness, appropriate to its status as object of worship. On the other hand, at the level of performance, there appears to be no ritual requirement that the orientation of bhopa and audience to images of the phad have to converge or be strictly integrated. This happens in the case of temple worship, too, where, while it is imperative that the cultic image be perfectly made in accordance with iconographic requirement, its placement inside the semi-dark sanctum sanctorum and its adornment with flowers and other material does not leave much scope for a complicity of gaze of worshipper and sacred image.3 To make a contrast, a modern-day proscenium stage provides for a focused engagement between audio-visual performance and audience, where in the case of the phad such attention and focus is of marginal value. Rather, the very presence of audience-devotees in the phad-banchana itself fulfils the objective of the performance. In a way unique to the genre, the relationship between audience and performance is, therefore, perched somewhere on the cusp between the actual and the virtual, between the performance and the ritual. To explore the spatial structure of the phad in terms of portable sacred geography, I shall confine my analysis of the phad and its performance to the Dev Narayan cult. Dev Narayan, is one of the most popular deities of the Gujar community of Rajasthan.4 He was born to Sadhu Mata, the wife of Sawai Bhoj, the eldest of the 24 brothers of the Bagrawat clan. According to the epic, a young widow, Leela Sevdi, saw a man called Hariram Rawat carrying a lions head in his hands. Through this vision, she bore a lion-headed child called Bagh Rawat. He married 12 women who gave birth to the 24 Bagrawat brothers. Once, on a drinking binge, BioScope, 1, 1 (2010): 91101

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the Bagrawats poured a large amount of drink on the ground. The drink seeped into the netherworld, giving offence to the serpent Basag, who complained to his mentor Vishnu about the incident. Vishnu descended to the earth to destroy Sawai Bhoj and the 24 Bagrawats. Sawai Bhojs wife Sadhu, preparing for a bath, came out to propitiate Vishnu in the nude. So pleased was Vishnu with her display of devotion that he promised to be incarnated as her son. Nevertheless, this did not deter Vishnu from his determination to destroy the Bagrawats. Vishnu sought the help of the Goddess who, incarnated as Princess Jaimati, annihilated the Bagrawat brothers. Many battles were fought between the Bagrawats and their adversaries. Subsequently, Dev Narayan appeared in a lotus floating in a divine stream of water emerging from the rocks of the Malasari hills. He gathered all his brothers, step-brothers and cousins, defeated all the enemies of his forefathers and established a new court for himself. Here, at this sacred seat, he is worshipped as an incarnation of Vishnu. Let us now look in more detail at the intricate spatial structure of these painted panels and its relationship to the audio-visual performance of the Dev Narayan narrative. The pictorial schema of the Dev Narayan phad operates on various levels. On one level, the legend is related through the various characters that play a role in its narrative. Here, the dominant mode is temporal as the story unfolds chronologically, with the storyteller describing in prose and verse the events of the legend and pointing at the painted scenes on the phad relating to the event. Underlying this more visible level lies a labyrinthine network of spaces in which the narrative occurs. These often correspond to real places but are reconfigured in the representational form of the phad. As the painter begins work on the phad he marks out the locations firstthe kingdoms, towns, and regions, such as Pushkar, Malwa, Ajmer, Savar, Goth, Ran, and so on; the royal courts, such as those of Piloda, Savar or of Dev Narayan himself; the ponds and rivers, such as Mandal ka Talav or the Khari River, and so on. Then he clusters the characters around these places. Here, the phad maps a distinctive locational and topographic logic that corresponds to the narrative of the audio-visual performance. An analysis of the distribution of the painted episodes in these scrolls reveals an interesting spatial structure. If one were to imagine dividing the horizontal scroll (generally 130 cm wide and 550 to 600 cm long) into four approximately equal vertical divisions, it becomes apparent that a large image of Dev Narayan is placed exactly in the middle facing slightly smaller images of his deified step-brothers and cousins, namely Menduji, Bhunaji, Madnaji, and Bhangiji. Not only is the position occupied by Dev Narayan construed to be his sanctum, housing his cultic image as object of worship; the phad itself is perceived to be his devra or temple, and in this case his mobile shrine. Like any other temple, once the phad is consecrated it has to be tended by daily worship and protected from ritual pollution, such as women touching it.5 Shreelal Joshi, the scroll painter of Bhilwara, points out that when he begins work on a Dev Narayan phad, he folds up the horizontal canvas to define four-fold vertical divisions and then marks out spaces to accommodate all locations of the narrative within these four territorial divisions. It is after this that he gathers characters around these spaces. The first and second vertical divisions on the left show episodes from the heros personal life, his paternal and maternal homes, his in-laws town, his relatives and friends, the attack of his ancestors enemies on their land, and so on. The heros place of birth, palaces, stables, court, royal paraphernalia, harems, and parks and gardens occupy the second and third divisions from the left. The fourth division is primarily devoted to the enemy camps palaces, stables, harems, and events such as the heros attack on the enemy. While this constitutes the broad pictorial scheme, one should not expect watertight compartments, and scenes flow somewhat freely amongst these differentiated spaces (Image 4).

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The counterpart of the figurative spaces of the phad is the sacred topography of real places. A number of places described in the phad are popularly construed to correspond to existing places where shrines dedicated to characters or events highlighted by the phad are located. For example, the place Sadhu Mata puts the cradle (palna) of the baby Dev Narayan, on her way to Malwa, has a shrine called Palna ji ka Devra in Pandal, near Bhilwara. In Sonkhya Pir there is a shrine called Devdan ka Devra where, according to the phad story, Dev Narayan had found a source of water for his cows on his return journey from Malwa. Another site housing a shrine, Demali near Asin is referred to in the phad story as a town established by the 24 Bagrawats. In Rayla, 20 km north of Bhilwara, is a shrine dedicated to Deep Kanwar, Sawai Bhojs daughter. Harni ka Devra, situated between Mangrop and Bhilwara, honours harni, a female deer who chases her baby. The incident, observed by Sadhu Mata, reminds her of how she had left the baby Dev Narayan while camping in Malwa, and is the subject of a highly emotional recitation by the bhopa. In many of these shrines, jagran (or the festival of overnight vigil) is conducted when devotees sing stanzas related to the story of the epic. The bhopas generally keep their phads in devras where they can be ritually tended every day. However, the devras are overseen by a different category of priests from the bhopas, the priest-performers of the phad. The housing of the phads in this way establishes a link between the mobile shrine, its representational functions and the actual devras, which are the objects of pilgrimage. Such a link is further consolidated by the presence of phad-like narrative paintings in several devras around Bhilwara. Early twentieth phad paintings by Kalyanji Joshi are observable on the walls of a devra at Mangrop (Chundavat, 1977, p. 60). As I have noted earlier, there is a convention of establishing symbolic representations of pan-Indian pilgrimage sites in Banaras, to make it the fountainhead of all sacred places of India and, inversely, establishment of Kashi (Banaras) in other parts of the country. Interestingly, this process of assimilating the pan-Indian places of pilgrimage into the cult of Dev Narayan is also prevalent in the Gujar folklore of Dev Narayan. Since Dev Narayan is considered to be the incarnation of Krishna/Vishnu, his devra at Jodhpur is identified with Jagannath Puri, that of Danta with Dwarka, the one in Pharna with Badrinath and the one in Kesava with Kashi, in a stanza preserved in the oral tradition eulogizing the deity. The stanza which reads: danto banyo duvarka, pharne badrinath, kashi banyo kesava, jodhpur jagannath (ibid., p. 49) , is here figuratively the naksha of the expanded space of the Dev Narayan cult. There are two main categories of shrines of Dev Narayan. The first is composed of thousands of devras or small shrines, where the local population install and tend to terracotta plaques or simple bricks representing Dev Narayan, Bheru, the serpent Basag, and other related deities. These have no particular connection with the phad. The second type pertains to larger temple complexes which have become important places of pilgrimage related to the cult. Notably, these temples and complexes are directly related to the characters of the epic as depicted in the phad and narrated by the bhopa. In other words, the small individual devras are, in a way, purely cultic shrines in which Dev Narayan is invoked and worshipped whereas the shrines and complexes such as Palnaji ka Devra, Devdan ka Devra, Demali ka Devra, Harni ka Devra, Deep Kanwar ka Devra et cetera, as well as the Sawai Bhoj temple complex, mentioned earlier, are directly related to the narrative of the phad. Each of these sites is depicted in the phad and invoked in the performance. As such, the phad becomes an emblematic representation of the sacred geography of the cult of Dev Narayan and, conversely, is referred to by the symbolic organization of real sites, which is also the case with the pilgrimage nakshas.

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Image 4. Dev Narayan phad showing its spatial and narrative structure, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi

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Notes
1. The Kashi Khanda of the Skanda Purana has an actual reference to a princess spotting with her index finger all the sacred places of Kashi on a chitrapata (painting/map) and while seeing the depiction of jnana vav (knowledge well) goes into a trance to remember her previous life. In the Amber Fort, Jaipur, four walls of a chamber adjacent to the royal dining hall have painted depictions of four Hindu places of pilgrimage. Maharaja Jaisingh worshipped there before eating his mealsequivalent of actual pilgrimage. 2. Interestingly, today electrical spotlights and flood lights are being used in the phad performance reducing the role of diyala to a symbolic one. This also marks a shift of emphasis from ritual to staging of performance. 3. Ancient cultic images hardly indicated the eyeball. The eye-contact for the returning of the gaze of the devotee by the deity became prominent in Indian worship after the introduction of magical realism based on the colonial art schools impact on the making of cultic imagesespecially the printed ones. 4. Interestingly, the Gujars of Rajasthan took pride, over a couple of centuries, that they had their own incarnation of Vishnu under the name of Dev Narayan, a marker of their upward social mobility until recently, when they began to demand tribal status for the community to obtain economic benefits reserved for the tribal communities in India. 5. Among certain sects of the Vaishnavas, women are considered to be ritually impure and are not allowed to enter the sanctum of Vishnu. The Gujars of Rajasthan, after they invented their own Vishnu under the name of Dev Narayan, they also began to prohibit women touching the scroll of Dev Narayan which is considered to be his shrine.

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