Pictures are worth a thousand words. Exhibition in Mumbai to explain why!

A print showing Radha Krishna listening to the gramophone. Pics /Suresh Karkera

Among the engravings, chromolithographs, oleographs, photographs, postcards and film posters of popular Indian imagery from the 19th and 20th centuries that are ready to go up on the museum walls, Dr Jyotindra Jain points out a particular frame. It is a collage with Radha and Krishna, cut and pasted from an Indian calendar, listening to the gramophone. This, when Photoshop was still a century away.

"The collage reflects the time when modernism was making its way to India through colonial gadgetry," shares Dr Jain, who has curated the exhibition, Indian Popular Visual Culture: The Conquest Of The World As Picture. Presented by Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, The Marg Foundation and The Sanskriti Foundation, it is a result of Dr Jain's work in anthropology and Indian popular visual culture for over two decades as a scholar and professor.

Seated against a theatrical backdrop from the 1960s, he explains how the colonial art school's emphasis on perspective added depth to Indian art. The 90-plus images have been divided into various themes of which, the story of Indian advertising, also lends itself to the theme of the latest issue of the Marg magazine to be launched at the preview today. To take us back to early advertising, Dr Jain points at a collection of tiny images of Hindu deities. A closer look reveals that they are all motifs on matchboxes. Unlike the morbid graphics of today, back then, packets of cigarettes had deities on them, too. Gods, as it turns out, were the first brand endorsers.

From April 9 to 30, 10 am to 6 pm
At Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum.