Page - 72 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

72 | Philippe Bornet www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 55–86 photograph is the position of the attendant at the site, a detail easily adapt- ed in producing the derivative engraving. When looked at in isolation, the image certainly does not reflect missionary propaganda; instead it conveys a sense of both the site’s majestic beauty and the technical prowess required to sculpt such a gigantic monolithic statue. It is worth noting that images of the iconography of Hindu gods became important building blocks in the construction of a nationalist and anti-co- lonial imagery around the same time. Art studios active out of Bombay, Cal- cutta, and Madras specialised in the production of images showing Indian deities as well as scenes from the Indian epics, and artists such as Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) specialised in the representation of mythological scenes, with reference to visual codes typical of western “orientalist” images.35 Abandoning the images’ local contextual specificities – such as the specific location of that statue of Basava/Nandi in Mysore, or a specific South Indian style in the previous image – their decontextualised reproduction turned them into visual components of an essentialised notion of a Hindu India. It is striking that images similar to those that were used for anti-colonial purpose appear in the present volume, thus showing the “unruly character” of images which can take on different meanings as a result of their context of performance. 35 Mitter 1994; Pinney 2004. A striking example is Ravi Varma’s new version of the “orientalist” painting by Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant (1845–1902) entitled Judith; see Mitter 1994, 187. Fig. 12: Panel 33, “India: religion”, “The bull Bassawa near Mysore”, Bilder-Tafeln, Calwer Verlagsverein. Fig. 13: Nandi on Chamundi Hills in Mysore, British Library, Photo 512/(13), photographer unknown, London, http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ onlineex/apac/photocoll/g/019pho000000512u 00013000.html [accessed 15 January 2021]. (© The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)