Tirchhi Nazar: The Gaze in South Asia Beyond Darshan: The Gaze in South Asia beyond Darshan

As the Delta variant ravaged through Indian cities in the summer of 2021, the glossy sheen on the Indian economic success story appeared to be coming apart. Viewers were confronted with photographs of crowded crematoriums on the front pages of newspapers and videos of breathless patients shared with trigger warning signs made their way as the lead story on international news programs. Just a few months earlier, images of the mass migration of workers on foot and crowded on trucks, buses and trains had exposed the shadow workforce that kept the economy afloat. For a governing dispensation that had astutely exploited the power of the media image, the diseased and dying bodies on screens were stubborn reminders of the fickle indeterminacy of images that refused to be subsumed under the sunny airbrushed optimism of the 'achhe din' promised by the government in slick advertising images.