Page - 70 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

70 | Philippe Bornet www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 55–86 Kali. It was created entirely in order to project a dark light on Indian reli- gious traditions. Conversely, the image of the god Brahma and his haṃsa (a goose or swan) (fig. 9) had previously appeared (see fig. 10) in The Complete Hindoo Pantheon by Etienne Alexander Rodrigues (1842), who had evidently copied traditional iconography. The example in Figure 11 is typical of the syncretistic style of painting characteristic of the Thanjavur court, Tamil Nadu. The Indian artist, who had himself copied another version of a similar image – possibly a painting on a wooden panel on display at the Thanjavur court – worked with a technique that had been originally imported from Europe: gouache painting on European paper. While the Indian artist’s copy already marked the move from an iconographic representation of the deity with religious function to a “neutralised” version on paper, the republication of a very sim- ilar image in the Bilder-Tafeln was meant to illustrate the strange, often zoo- morphic, shapes of Hindu deities and their vāhanas. Also illuminating is the engraving of the Mysore bull (Nandi) statue (fig. 12), very likely based on a photograph, perhaps even the 1865 photo- graph in Figure 13. The only major difference between the engraving and the Fig. 9: Panel 30, “India: Religion”, “Brahma”, Bilder-Tafeln, Calwer Verlagsverein.