Krishna Enters the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

What does Krishna look like, these days? For a significant number of twenty-first century Hindus, he appears as a chubby blue-skinned
infant with curly black hair and immense dark eyes, crawling on the floor with his hand in an overturned pot of butter. Or he may appear as a charming young flute-playing herdsman, standing among the cows he is tending in an enchanted peaceful bucolic landscape. In other words, modern Hindus have come to envision Krishna as they have learned to see him in the widely distributed form of God-prints, also known as calendar prints or framing pictures. Over the past century and a half, these mass produced twodimensional images of Krishna and other Hindu deities have created a visual vocabulary for imagining divinity in bright, compelling, comprehensible,
intimate physical forms.