Kajri Jain
Bio
Kajri Jain is an Associate Professor of Indian Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Her work focuses on images at the interface between religion, politics, and vernacular business cultures in India. She is the author of Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke University Press, 2007). Her current research on the emergence of gigantic iconic statues in India after the neo-liberal economic reforms of the 1990s extends her interests in the efficacies of circulation, the aesthetics of modern religion, and vernacular capitalism to their interface with material infrastructures (highways, the automotive industry, dams), domestic tourism, landscape/“nature”, governmentality, and democracy (particularly the politics of caste).