87 Monuments, Landscapes and Romance in Indian Popular Imagery Kajri Jain This essay examines the peculiar conjunction between monuments, landscapes and romantic couples in Indian popular images, particularly the printed posters known as calendar art. I explore how images of romantic couples posed against outdoor back- drops of monuments and landscapes draw on several different kinds of pictorial prac- tice and frames of viewing: colonial representations of monuments and landscapes, the backgrounds in depictions of deities, and the treatment of the conjugal couple in commercial Hindi cinema. In doing so, I argue that while these popular images might dismantle the ways in which monuments and landscapes were incorporated into colo- nial structures of representation, their depiction as sites of romance harnesses them to other modalities of power. Challenging the colonial world-as-picture The initial inspiration for this brief meditation was a discussion of monuments in In- dian popular imagery in a publication accompanying Traces of India, a wonderful trav- elling exhibition of colonial photographs of Indian monuments curated by Maria Antonella Pelizzari in 2003. 1 In the book, Pelizzari is careful to counteract the colonial perspective characterizing the images in the show with essays on later Indian uses of images of monuments. In many of the colonial photographs in the show, local people are either missing from the monuments, or are added into the frame to provide an ex- otic ‘local flavour’ with little concern for who they are as individual subjects: hence their images are often very small, indistinct or silhouetted (for examples of colonial Fig. 1 The tragic lovers of Punjabi legend, Sohni and Mahiwal. Poster published by Swastik Picture Publishers, Delhi (courtesy Patricia and JPS Uberoi).