INTRODUCTION

In everyday communication lately, verbal text comes seldom unaccompanied. From power point presentation to SMS, our interactions have ceased to be purely verbal. Pictorial elements intervene routinely – photographs, video clips, graphics, charts and emoticons. Till even a decade back, visual images merely supported text as in book illustrations, reinforced familiar brands as in advertisements or indicated public utilities and services. Now, however, image is being worked into text seamlessly, powered by technology that drives a globally expanding market for communication gadgets such as internet-enabled computers and cell phones. The new image-embedded text (text-image) is impacting diverse societies outside its parent zone with an overwhelming appeal that is as instant as it is rapid and wide.

In a globalising India, the proliferating text-image has consequences on a scale unprecedented and yet to be charted. It would be tempting to sit back and ascribe to this nascent experience stand-alone virtues, as is customary with all that happens at the advent of a new century, in this case a new millennium to boot. In fact, through much of human history, image and word (spoken or written) have come together, as in ancient Greek and Roman reliefs that depicted Homeric tales and here in India, scrolls and temple murals that illustrated epics and folktales. Word-picture confluence surely has many such hoary precedents from the distant past, enough for comparison to suggest itself. A scrutiny across such a grand time scale, however, is unlikely to yield any more than the broad generalisation that pure text itself is but a relatively recent, post-fifteenth century interlude, triggered by printing technology and the current text-image is a natural relapse.