To sum up, it can be said that the circulation over a period of time of images of socio-religious reformers have transformed these into icons of veneration through adopting the semiotic paraphernalia of deified ‘Gurus’. Such images of gurus had created a repertoire of representations, and these were subsequently appropriated by followers of various reformist leaders and movements, who refashioned them as divine figures. Popular religious practices in Kerala created the atmosphere for the veneration of saints across the religious spectrum.

The camera helped to capture the personified power of social and religious reform leaders at different moments of their life, and disseminated this through the print media, the calendar and paintings, all of which helped to reinforce their divine status. In fact, the iconography of the reformers and their calendar pictures have evolved out of the improvisations of earlier photographs. Images of reform leaders are worked over following a set of aesthetic principles emphasizing bodily and facial features that communicated an aura of sainthood. In the circulations of these images in the social world, however, they camouflaged the history of particular movements; visuals therefore subsumed such histories in their representational form of iconolatry. The effect of camouflage emerges from the fact that with the construction of the saintly persona of the reform leaders, there developed a gap between their teachings and their popular perception. This led to the deification of reform leaders creating new orthodoxies. The fate of the reform movements of the early twentieth century clearly shows this trend. Instead of understanding the subtlety of meaning of their lives and teachings, the identification of an image as an icon displaces the meanings that the icons create along with their histories.

Fig. 94		Fig. 95		Fig. 96

Fig. 97

Fig. 98

Narayana Guru appears time and again to Keralites in different incarnations: a devotee can stand with folded hands as his idol is being  worshipped with customary rituals [Figs. 97-98]; another, casting a passive glance out of a bus, would see the Guru’s life-size images placed on podiums, as well as his face imprinted on the flexi boards using the latest computerised imaging [Fig. 94]. Pages of newspapers will carry multi-colour images of events featuring various celebrities, some whom are being elevatedto iconic stature [Fig. 98]. Therefore, in his small shop in Kottayam, Cheriyan is still busy, mounting pictures of various iconic figures, including religious as well as reform leaders, which are imprinted at Sivakasi and Ernakulam and have a ready market.

Acknowledgment: Sanal Mohan, Madhava Parasd, Sumathi Ramaswamy and Amruth

Sujithkumar Parayil

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