Tasveer Ghar (A House of Pictures)

Tasveer Ghar is a digital repository for visual materials and scholarship pertaining to South Asian popular visual culture. This repository includes discussions on a variety of popular visual objects: posters, calendar art, maps, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other kinds of street arts. Created by distinguished historians and art historians of South Asia, the database contains what are called "visual essays." Each essay is centered on a set of visual images; essays either use these images to contextualize a particular socio-political or cultural event or process, or, to explain the potential of the imagery themselves. For example, an essay on early Indian print advertisements showcases image clippings of advertisements that appeared in British Indian newspapers and magazines to consider who these advertisements were meant for in colonial India. They shed light on the consumption patterns in colonial Indian urban society. Within Tasveer Ghar, there are two options to search for essays and images--a search function and a list. There are also a couple of filter and sort options to narrow down the choices.
Tasveer Ghar has grown out of an interdisciplinary multi-institutional effort to create a digital space for popular modern South Asian visual culture. The database is still growing, new essays being added continually. Currently it has a strong focus on modern South Asia and issues of gender, nation, and visual imagery. The essays in the database are not introductory since they deal with complex and nuanced issues that require some grounding. Therefore this database would be most useful for instructors teaching modern South Asia and for students in college-level seminars.