Essay: The hidden agendas in the ‘I LOVE …’ sign
India’s unity-in-diversity, a thing we had been forced to assume as a thing of the past or even of the imagination, is suddenly evident everywhere. Climate and class, gender and geography, caste and lineage – all of these recede into the background, for wherever we now go, we are reminded of one fundamental trait in our DNA. No, not the reminder of being an Indian but of being a lover. For in every town and city, even neighbourhoods and piss-stops in the mountains, is a sign that says ‘I LOVE …’, followed by the name of a place. A heart sign that often replaces the ‘o’ in ‘LOVE’ – as if one of these, the word or the heart sign alone, wouldn’t be enough; the heart sign must do the work of italicisation.
The ‘I LOVE …’ sign, primarily in blue with the heart sign in red – the colours borrowed from digital culture, they do not come from history – is a metaphor of a new India. Then there’s the literality – everything must be said, pronounced aloud, with no scope for a missed syllable or slipped meaning. We must say that we love – just feeling it isn’t enough, it has to be articulated, but orality isn’t enough either, so it must be committed to writing. And even that is not enough – so people, both tourists and local residents, stand in front of the sign to get their photos taken. This optic, offered almost as evidence, as much to the world as to themselves, makes them look like signs on a Google map, a 3D hologram of a few things: the visit, the ‘love’, and themselves. One must become part of one’s GPS, one must become Google Maps itself.
In an older time, one stood before the Taj Mahal or the Kanchenjunga. These photos, without accompanying words or location in albums, demanded an acquaintance with history and geography in the viewer. That has now been made unnecessary – one just needs to stand before a sign declaring its location. It’s a substitution of a manner of reading, based on an intuitive and playful indexical relationship with the world, built on attention, history and memory, by words that could well be the ‘destination’ on a railway ticket. In this is a simultaneous loss of subtlety and the ability to read the latent unexpressed, which I understand as the sign of a good and even efficient lover. One has to say ‘I love …’ – that seems to be enough today. In South Asian cultures, where love was rarely expressed in words – I couldn’t be the only one who has never heard their parents say ‘I love you’ to each other – this is only in line with a new politics.
One must say ‘Jai Shri Ram’, for instance, to prove one’s allegiance to their religion. Just the private practice of its ideals is no longer enough. Everything must be said, everything must be versions of ‘I LOVE …’ To be an Indian, therefore, is an unceasing performance of one’s Indianness – ‘I LOVE INDIA’ and the Indian flag are ‘profile photos’ that are offered as evidence of their nationalism. Bhakti must be revealed repeatedly – not only in the way, for instance, Hanuman bared his chest to show Ram and Sita, but in words, so that if this were to happen today, it is possible that Hanuman would have had to either tattoo Ram and Sita’s Aadhar cards on his chest or appended an ‘I LOVE …’ to their images.
Though these signs are new to our eyes, I feel like I’ve heard the likeness of its sound before. Days pass before I am able to trace their aural lineage – it’s from Yeh Duniya Ek Dulhan, a song in the Hindi film Pardes, from a quarter of a century ago, when the grease of globalisation was just beginning to accumulate inside India’s arteries. The refrain of the song is Yeh mera India, I love my India … The words that come before this, in the second stanza for instance, are “London dekha, Paris dekha, aur dekha Japan, Michael dekha, Elvis dekha, Sab dekha meri jaan, Saarey jag main kahin nahin hai dusra Hindustan”. The names of places, of Paris and London and Japan, have been replaced by the names of places in India, the sum ‘India’ in ‘I love my India’ by its parts, the different places that come together to make India; and the bindiya of “Dulhan ke mathey ki bindiya” by the red heart sign in the ‘I LOVE …’ construction.
The ‘Love is …’ comic strip – created by the New Zealand cartoonist Kim Casali in the 1960s – that helped inaugurate and sustain many romantic relationships in the English newspaper-reading world, such as in India, worked to a different syntax of thought. I do not only mean the replacement of ‘Love is …’ by ‘I LOVE …’, the replacement of the abstract noun ‘love’ by the strong verb ‘love’, but the difference in their approaches. The comic strip, created from notes by Kim Casali for her future husband and therefore emerging from the nerves of specificity, was meant to articulate the unsaid and the unsayable (‘Love is … turning his head’, for instance); the ‘I LOVE …’ syntax of pronoun-verb-proper noun has no room for the unsaid – everything is known and understood and complete. The hyper-confidence in the construction, both the sentence and the visual architecture of the sign, Disneyfied as the colours are, leave no room for the sibilants that we experience in love: shyness, subtlety, slowness, a subterranean nervous energy.
‘I LOVE …’ is not an innocent sign. It is emblematic of the loss of synecdoche from Indian culture and the Indian nation. Krishna could be imagined through just the sound of his flute, he could be drawn in four lines, his flute, and his crown and his two feet; Gandhi with a few strokes, his glasses, a line for his bald head, a stick; a Hindu goddess with just her third eye. What has replaced it is an urge where one must be shown everything and told everything, a favourite habitat of the right wing – this neoclassical temperament, that has no patience with the synecdoche or the fragmentary, buttressed and packaged by a Disney-like dumbing down ethos of both word and image, is what has led to this ‘I LOVE Sonipat/Keshtopur/Chandigarh …’ sign. It’s the iteration of a template, of a uniform as it were – the same packaged emotion, the same colours, like an application form, with just the name of the place changed.
This new culture, imported primarily from the United States, where everything is named or explained, whether a tap in the toilet or where one must not put one’s feet while walking, such is the distrust of the citizen’s intelligence – the opposite of, say, Magritte’s ‘This is Not a Pipe’, that mocks this easy understanding or meaning or decidability – indulges the belief that love is knowable, verifiable, and must be constantly articulated, like the proof of one’s patriotism through the production of one’s citizenship papers or saying “Jai Hind”. It is the Uniform Geographical Code.
Sumana Roy is a poet and writer.
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India’s unity-in-diversity, a thing we had been forced to assume as a thing of the past or even of the imagination, is suddenly evident everywhere. Climate and class, gender and geography, caste and lineage – all of these recede into the background, for wherever we now go, we are reminded of one fundamental trait in our DNA. No, not the reminder of being an Indian but of being a lover. For in every town and city, even neighbourhoods and piss-stops in the mountains, is a sign that says ‘I LOVE …’, followed by the name of a place. A heart sign that often replaces the ‘o’ in ‘LOVE’ – as if one of these, the word or the heart sign alone, wouldn’t be enough; the heart sign must do the work of italicisation.
The ‘I LOVE …’ sign, primarily in blue with the heart sign in red – the colours borrowed from digital culture, they do not come from history – is a metaphor of a new India. Then there’s the literality – everything must be said, pronounced aloud, with no scope for a missed syllable or slipped meaning. We must say that we love – just feeling it isn’t enough, it has to be articulated, but orality isn’t enough either, so it must be committed to writing. And even that is not enough – so people, both tourists and local residents, stand in front of the sign to get their photos taken. This optic, offered almost as evidence, as much to the world as to themselves, makes them look like signs on a Google map, a 3D hologram of a few things: the visit, the ‘love’, and themselves. One must become part of one’s GPS, one must become Google Maps itself.
In an older time, one stood before the Taj Mahal or the Kanchenjunga. These photos, without accompanying words or location in albums, demanded an acquaintance with history and geography in the viewer. That has now been made unnecessary – one just needs to stand before a sign declaring its location. It’s a substitution of a manner of reading, based on an intuitive and playful indexical relationship with the world, built on attention, history and memory, by words that could well be the ‘destination’ on a railway ticket. In this is a simultaneous loss of subtlety and the ability to read the latent unexpressed, which I understand as the sign of a good and even efficient lover. One has to say ‘I love …’ – that seems to be enough today. In South Asian cultures, where love was rarely expressed in words – I couldn’t be the only one who has never heard their parents say ‘I love you’ to each other – this is only in line with a new politics.
One must say ‘Jai Shri Ram’, for instance, to prove one’s allegiance to their religion. Just the private practice of its ideals is no longer enough. Everything must be said, everything must be versions of ‘I LOVE …’ To be an Indian, therefore, is an unceasing performance of one’s Indianness – ‘I LOVE INDIA’ and the Indian flag are ‘profile photos’ that are offered as evidence of their nationalism. Bhakti must be revealed repeatedly – not only in the way, for instance, Hanuman bared his chest to show Ram and Sita, but in words, so that if this were to happen today, it is possible that Hanuman would have had to either tattoo Ram and Sita’s Aadhar cards on his chest or appended an ‘I LOVE …’ to their images.
Though these signs are new to our eyes, I feel like I’ve heard the likeness of its sound before. Days pass before I am able to trace their aural lineage – it’s from Yeh Duniya Ek Dulhan, a song in the Hindi film Pardes, from a quarter of a century ago, when the grease of globalisation was just beginning to accumulate inside India’s arteries. The refrain of the song is Yeh mera India, I love my India … The words that come before this, in the second stanza for instance, are “London dekha, Paris dekha, aur dekha Japan, Michael dekha, Elvis dekha, Sab dekha meri jaan, Saarey jag main kahin nahin hai dusra Hindustan”. The names of places, of Paris and London and Japan, have been replaced by the names of places in India, the sum ‘India’ in ‘I love my India’ by its parts, the different places that come together to make India; and the bindiya of “Dulhan ke mathey ki bindiya” by the red heart sign in the ‘I LOVE …’ construction.
The ‘Love is …’ comic strip – created by the New Zealand cartoonist Kim Casali in the 1960s – that helped inaugurate and sustain many romantic relationships in the English newspaper-reading world, such as in India, worked to a different syntax of thought. I do not only mean the replacement of ‘Love is …’ by ‘I LOVE …’, the replacement of the abstract noun ‘love’ by the strong verb ‘love’, but the difference in their approaches. The comic strip, created from notes by Kim Casali for her future husband and therefore emerging from the nerves of specificity, was meant to articulate the unsaid and the unsayable (‘Love is … turning his head’, for instance); the ‘I LOVE …’ syntax of pronoun-verb-proper noun has no room for the unsaid – everything is known and understood and complete. The hyper-confidence in the construction, both the sentence and the visual architecture of the sign, Disneyfied as the colours are, leave no room for the sibilants that we experience in love: shyness, subtlety, slowness, a subterranean nervous energy.
‘I LOVE …’ is not an innocent sign. It is emblematic of the loss of synecdoche from Indian culture and the Indian nation. Krishna could be imagined through just the sound of his flute, he could be drawn in four lines, his flute, and his crown and his two feet; Gandhi with a few strokes, his glasses, a line for his bald head, a stick; a Hindu goddess with just her third eye. What has replaced it is an urge where one must be shown everything and told everything, a favourite habitat of the right wing – this neoclassical temperament, that has no patience with the synecdoche or the fragmentary, buttressed and packaged by a Disney-like dumbing down ethos of both word and image, is what has led to this ‘I LOVE Sonipat/Keshtopur/Chandigarh …’ sign. It’s the iteration of a template, of a uniform as it were – the same packaged emotion, the same colours, like an application form, with just the name of the place changed.
This new culture, imported primarily from the United States, where everything is named or explained, whether a tap in the toilet or where one must not put one’s feet while walking, such is the distrust of the citizen’s intelligence – the opposite of, say, Magritte’s ‘This is Not a Pipe’, that mocks this easy understanding or meaning or decidability – indulges the belief that love is knowable, verifiable, and must be constantly articulated, like the proof of one’s patriotism through the production of one’s citizenship papers or saying “Jai Hind”. It is the Uniform Geographical Code.
Sumana Roy is a poet and writer.
Enjoy unlimited digital access with HT Premium
Subscribe Now to continue reading
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