Drishti Gombes in Bangalore

The Perceived Gaze of the Anonymous Urban Dweller

Abstract

The intersection of traditional folk practices and urban spatiality is a source of interesting contradictions – especially when one considers it within the context of the Indian silicon city of Bangalore, which lends itself to multiple interpretative gazes. Therefore, the main aim of this paper has been to study the aforementioned practices and the resultant production of a deconstructed city space through a socio-cultural analysis of the Drishti Gombe– the mask that wards off the “evil eye” as per the folk belief of Kannadigas. The paper considers the persistence of these masks in the metropolis by engaging with its perceived significance amidst the urban population, while drawing upon Bhatti and Pinney’s concepts of urban visuality. Through such an analysis, it is thereby established that the engagement of the “practitioners”, as put forth by Certeau, with such elements of the city reflects upon the prevailing, Debordian sense of the spectacular and how it has come to constitute the gaze of the urban dweller.  Thus, the presumed anonymity of the urban dweller challenges and is, in turn, challenged by the non-Western “cityness” of Bangalore as a polysemic space, functioning ambiguously between the urban-rural divide.