Smother India : The Telegraph, Kolkata

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Smother India

The Telegraph, Kolkata

NILANJANA S. ROY

 

KOLKATA (Feb 12, 2006): In Bankimchandra's " Anandamath " , three

iconic images go into the making of Mother India. The first depicts

India as she was before the days of British rule: as Jagaddhatri,

the protector of the world. The second depicts India under the yoke

of British rule: as Kali, " stripped of all, therefore naked " . The

third image is of a laughing and radiant ten-armed goddess, Ma

Durga, resurgent against the rising sun.

 

When Bharat Mata became a nationalist icon in the days of the

freedom struggle, the second, fearsome aspect of Mother India was

largely forgotten. The image before which Netaji Bose and Bhagat

Singh offered obeisance was an amalgam of the first and the third

portrait in Bankimchandra's sequence. She was the mother, the

protector and nurturer; sometimes the fierce, powerful warrior.

 

If you trace the evolution of Bharat Mata in calendar art, what

stands out is how rapidly she was domesticated, turned into a figure

that blended the mother and the housewife far more often than the

warrior. The power in the Mother India figure never quite went away;

Sunil Dutt shrewdly picked up on it in his iconic Mother India,

though in the strongest image from the film, her weapon is

the " safe " , domestic plough — not Durga's tridents or swords.

 

But we forgot all about Bharat Mata in her hour of anguish; stripped

naked, or naked by preference, presiding over an India that had

become a cremation ground. That is the image M.F. Husain returned

to, with a twist, in his controversial painting of Bharat Mata. The

painting was put up for auction and Hindutva activists vilified

Husain for " lewdly disrobing our Mother India " . Husain has

apologised, the good defenders of the Hindu faith have declared

their reluctance to be appeased, and no doubt there will be further

ramifications over the next few weeks.

 

Look closely at Husain's Bharat Mata painting. His Bharat Mata is

naked, but you would have to be very perverted to read lewdness into

his lines. Instead of her body forming the map of India, she is

curled in a near-foetal position. She looks exhausted, beleaguered;

the names of the states of India scar her body. There is a political

comment here, but those who care to read it and those who see

lewdness in any form of nudity are clearly not on the same page.

 

Beyond the politics of art, there lies an interesting question: why

is female nudity seen as shocking? Is it not possible to paint or

sculpt the naked female body with respect, even with love? If you

spend some time travelling around India, you'll come across

depictions of the goddess in temples that are far removed from the

sedate, domesticated, neutered iconography so beloved by today's

keepers of the faith. These goddesses — the proudly naked yakshis,

the terrifyingly stripped form of Kali, lushly sensual images of

Parvati — offer an alternative vision of women's bodies as sites of

power and sensuality, freedom, fertility and even, as Husain

depicted, exhaustion. They are not obscene, any more than Husain's

Bharat Mata is. The true obscenity lies in the eyes of the beholder.

 

SOURCE: The Telegraph, Kolkata. Smother India by NILANJANA S. ROY

URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060212/asp/look/story_5830600.asp