Anger as affect: Modernity and the visual everyday in the image of the angry Hanuman

Abstract

The figure of Hanuman has long occupied a central place in Hindu visual traditions as the protector and devoted servant of Ram. This article examines the emergence and proliferation of a distinctly angry Hanuman in the visual ‘everyday’, on stickers, flags and temple exteriors. Through close readings of its formal features, genealogy and circulation, it analyses how contemporary regimes of image production generate a dense field of divine prints marked by recursive repetition. Drawing on visual anthropology, sociology and affect studies, the article argues that the aesthetic labour performed by musculature enables anger to become a legible affect in this latest iteration. Building on scholarship centred around ‘seeing as knowing’, and ‘interocularity’, it places the ubiquity of angry Hanuman in the processes of Hindu identity formation and examines the force of its gaze in the public sphere. The article highlights technologies that expand religious patronage and the current ordering of the religio-political sensorium. Here, anger is theorised as an affective force circulating across surfaces and spaces, contributing to the structuring of affective publics, and not merely as an attribute of the deity.