A great website on South Asian Popular Visual Culture

Came across a delightful website while browsing on the topic of Indian Print Ads .

The site is named Tasveerghar

From the website:

Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture. Tasveer Ghar is a trans-national virtual “home” for collecting, digitizing, and documenting various materials produced by South Asia’s exciting popular visual sphere including posters, calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art.

Here is what you get at the site:

Kitschy Indian 'Welcome' Posters, Raunchy Bhojpuri album cover, Gender in Early Indian Print Advertisements, Stereotypes of Muslim Piety in Calendar Art and Hindi Cinema, The Hindu Nationalist Greeting Cards, Commodification of Gender in the Titles of Popular Hindi Novels, 'Female Film Stars' in Print Media, An Image Essay on Tamil...and lot more.

The site not only has some unique images (collecting them must have taken an enormous task) but also insightful essays accompanying these images.

Three essays from the site that I enjoyed:

'Female Film Stars' in Print Media: by Madhuja Mukherji
Gender in Early Indian Print Advertisements: By Javed Masood
Stereotypes of Muslim Piety in Calendar Art and Hindi Cinema: By Yousuf Saeed

Warning: this site would actually gobble up you time :)

You can also visit their blog and leave in your feedback.

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Image: Courtesy of Yousuf Saeed at tasveerghar.net

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You may also like to read my series on Vintage Indian Print Ads

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