Celebrating More Than the New Year: The Hindu Nationalist Greeting Cards

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The primary dangers represented in this New Year card are cultural domination (Westernisation); the alleged threat to Indianness from ‘alien’ religious practices of Christianity and Islam (conversion and separatism), and the politics of economic globalisation (capitalism as colonising practice). One way of appealing to the citizenry is by appropriating the idea of the nation as Mother India and the national community as her children via associations with threat and imprisonment. Responding to economic liberalisation in what sounds like an evocation of Hell, the words on the back of another new year card read, “slaves of foreign money are burning in the fire when the motherland calls her sons, when the lion’s strength of patriotic devotion attacks...” States B.:

	“There is definitely a cultural invasion - but how to react? Be Indian, listen, see, be modern, but remain essentially Indian!”

The idea of deshbhakti as devotion to mother goddess and land is mirrored in the daily RSS prayers practiced in shakhas and reflected in the following quote by B.:

"... even in Vishnu Purana, which is a very ancient text, we have a shloka which says ‘Bharat is that God-created nation, to whose north is the mighty Himalayas, to whose south is the great Ocean’. Hence this form of Bharat Mata is very ancient."

Unfortunately, not many people know this. ... India may or may not have been a singular political unity in history, but it was always one as a cultural entity. We would like every Indian child to know this in his or her childhood... when a boy or a girl comes to the Sangh we teach these things to them... This is not because we want to indoctrinate them but (because) they should know that ours is a very ancient land.
For the year 1997 (or Vikram Samvath 2055), B. was asked once again to design a New Year card addressing the populace with the subject of cultural invasion.

But India’s political history took a different turn anyway and another year down the road a theme surfaced that seemed to suit the question of national unity: the nuclear tests conducted under the new BJP-led government in May 1998, two months after their victory in parliamentary elections. B. designed a New Year card in direct response to the nuclear tests. It displays a combination of logos: in a green sky emerges a red map of India, a deepak (sacred candle) placed at its southern tip, and in its centre these three logos of nuclear power, the lingam and Shiva’s third eye merge as one source of light. The poem at the back of the card tells the reader that “Today, the nation’s sleeping pride has woken up .... Shiva’s third eye has opened, and the World-destroyer has woken. ... The nation’s sleeping pride has woken up.”

Since the turn of the millennium, the visual print culture of the Sangh Parivar has been relatively passive; no new images have come up, it seems as if the representatives have run out of new ideas to fuel their ideological imaginaire. Some of the reasons for this are given by the political developments: the BJP’s rise and decline, the lack of ‘movement’ in terms of issue-based campaigns, and, possibly, the advent of a younger generation of people who do not necessarily respond to these imaginations, whose sources of visual communication have been shifted to the internet. Having said this, the intervisual journeys of some of the icons, such as Bhagat Singh, or Bharat Mata, have to be further contextualised.

[A longer version of this article is published in the book PICTURING THE NATION — Iconographies of Modern India: Richard H. Davis (Ed.). Printed here with kind permission]

Gallery of Greeting Cards