ABSTRACT
This chapter documents visual representations of Hindu divinity that are available to devotees in Singapore and seeks to establish their source as well as the channels through which they travel before being accessible as commodities to Hindus in the Diaspora. A primary focus is on itemising the varied material forms through which these images are concretised and to capture regnant debates and practices about the suitability of some forms over others for the purpose of home worship. One such discussion relates to the comparative value of statues over framed prints and sees the community of devotees and religious specialists divided. A related query is grounded in modes through which deities are conceptualised, i.e., ‘expert’ or ‘lay’ renditions of Hindu images-an issue that assumes specific significance in Singaporean Hindu domains given the centrality non-Sanskritic deities at an everyday life level in the persistence of the ritual complex of folk Hindu religiosity. Conceptualisations, typically of non-Sanskritic, folk deities, are initiated by non-Brahmin devotees and have produced original physical interpretations for consumption by the Hindu market. The focus on producers, distributors and retailers enables me to demonstrate how notions of ‘commodity,’ ‘deity’ and ‘material’ are simultaneously implicated and intermingled, often in the same physical object-in this case, visual images of divinity and to attempt to disentangle them for analytical clarification, even if such unscrambling is futile in practice. Given the emphasis here on how objects are used and related to in everyday Hindu religiosity, I attend to the multitude of ways in which these material forms of divinity are consumed by devotees within the home, as well as the attitudes and mindset with which retailers and traders relate to commodities that they know will eventually embody ritual connotations. This focus facilitates reflections about how notions of ‘visuality,’ ‘materiality’ and ‘ritual practice’ intersect and interact, with a view to articulating the varied meanings embodied in material representations of divinity, as they rest on shelves of shops and then on prayer altars.
