ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that printed visuals emerged as an important component of performative Hindu religious politics and feature the performative politics of Gita Press of north India by locating it in the rich tradition of the reception of the printed visuals. The religious presses like Gita Press were crucial religio-political organisations that voluntarily surfaced as religious pedagogues for the Hindu masses and strived for silent religious transformation. If Ravi Verma's oleographs produced the religious imagery of Aryanised past, it was presses like Gita Press that recreated and revised such imagery responding to the political necessities of the 1920s. The iconography of Gita Press eschewed the glaring political narrative to produce the cartography of the nation where images of mother goddesses acquired prominence, besides images on the sacrifices of the individuals in the service of mother goddesses; or picturing of historical events narrating political crisis; or the saga of deplorable condition of India under colonial rule.
