There are times when a writer ‘nativates’ words in the barest skin sans implants, form, inhibitions, dogmas… these are times when the birth pangs can be smelt in a rusty blood-like aroma and felt between the fingers like nectar. Here’s one such instance where Mukherjee P meta-communicates nudity at its nudest.
P.S: The piece that follows is naked, as was born out of the writer’s notebook –
unclothed in grammar, correct spellings or punctuation.
No, I won’t start this piece about temple art. No, I won’t start this piece(or end) with details of iconography in Indian aesthetics. No, I won’t tell you…how disarming is a young Meetei woman with her body as means of protest..even though I am writing this piece inside my hotel room opposite the historic Kangla Fort in Imphal. Instead, let me begin with an extract:
….Strange dignity in her smile. Sons.
Have fed at her breasts, her milk satisfies
In her body
A woman’s heart; strange dignity in her eyes
(Concluding lines from Toronto-based Indian poet Gavin Barrett’s poem A Fat Woman’s Dignity)
Look at her..don’t look away…come on…look at her..that’s fine…
She is stark
Nude
Cloth-less
Don’t be ashamed to gaze longingly at her buxomness
No, unlike some western notion of installation art, she does not have a butterfly covering her vagina or the hands covering the nipples (as if to say..i showed it to the photographer..does not mean i will show it to you…that was art..this is consumption..i am not for it…but what to do)
Yes, she is desirable and yes, she does have a mind. And she knows the difference between a cunt and a CAN’T.
And that is our dilemma and therein lies our middle class semi-sanity or elite voyeurism. As to look at what liberation, libido, limits, de-limitation, tautness, tantalising, ownership, territoriality….that naked body poses that question:
Do you own me after marriage? Is all this legality fuss about legal access to my private parts?
Is sex such an intense act of satisfaction exchange that being lost in the hustings would be called performance anxiety?
When a stark nude body of Mita Vashist floats in Rabindranath(Mani) Kaul’s Siddeshwari…as the camera lingers on…in a stillness of Kashi air that breathes kajris, chaitis and thumris..for once i i understand …imbibe…inhale…the idea of the body as a specific site…the idea of an ongoing, ever-evolving site of a never-to-conclude performance… that how misplaced are we with the fixed academic ideas of social consciousness…
Yes, social consciousness is protest, dissent, counter culture, understanding conflict (I agree with all that and more)..yet it also knowing the micro-climates of the body. Not body as a binary between fables of fear or elitist idea of an implant(supplant could have been such a better word) . But body as the means of a larger metaphor..body as a text..body as an idea-island…which brings me to a the question: As a society why are we so fidgety about nudity? I don’t mean that the opposite of this claustrophobia is dropping all our clothes(though I am fine when Paoli Dam does it fair enough conviction and even if that conviction has little or no political understanding of body as a weapon..she still has all the right to be both vocal ands oral)…and foolishly hoping that the collective stares become political…..but yes we do need political stares too….in these times.
It is also an undeniable truth when rape becomes an armed forces modus operandi..when Bilquis Bano struggles with the foetus in Gujarat..when rods are shoved inside the body in Khairlanji or when showing nude baby bump becomes a celebrity style statement.
We are back to square one….the status quo of the status quo: either being destructively primitive (as opposed to constructive primitivism) or trying too hard to be modern (mind you not post-modern)
What then is the idea of nude?
How nude is nude? How bare is bare? what is unclothed? what is bare flesh? in times of globlisation fetish these are questions that keep coming back…recur..
for example a reclining nude in a temple architecture is art/erotica..a nude in a adult film industry is pornography..are we so body obssessed in such times …
in that case is nudity a political exercise like Mahasveta Devi’s story Draupadi or is nudity an exercise in titilliation ..what are the borders of nudity…how nude is nude….what are the frontiers of nudity..if one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter..then one man’s art can be another man’s pornography.
Let us look at the ever growing(in this case a dozen snapshots) islands of nudity as we flip through some stray post-it notes of such times…
1: that bare bodied boy trudging back home after floods/tsunami/war
2: that half-smiling cloth-less divine peering out of a fresco
3: that mms clip of school children indulging in a hormone raging defiance of times (age of the mind as opposed to age of the body) playing out a misplaced physical fantasy
4: that model in the centrespread wanting to seduce with his/her looks yet holding back (or that’s what I thought) enough to colour your imagination
5: a bare tree without any hint of a foliage
6: a deep back cut blouse revealing a slice of nude back
7: an almost see through white vest of an iron pumping hunk in a gymnasium
8: anorexic fashion television model walking in the ramp with bare legs-stiff; bored; selectively naked
9: an extract from an young Iranian poet Maryam Ala Amjadi:
This is a NO PARKING area
relevant or irrelevant
that is not my question
anyway
last night two people got married inside me
and three lunatics
with three ugly mouths
offered me three times as a cigarette to one another
in this chaos
an old blind man
stole me from my solitude
and kissed me three times
for one of his three sweethearts
I still warn you
“NO PARKING”
9: an empty neon-bathed nude road
10: a bare bodied elephant taking bath
11: an artiste going beserk while furiously completing his field sketches notebook in Khajuraho
And 12: a canvas with a close up of a bare torso
What then is nudity…germ of an idea…which idea…a pre-historic notion ..a modern construct..a liberal gateway or a theology fuelled do’s and don’ts that forget the basic right: my body is mine
Is it a limited vocabulary word or a tired cliche that has taken refuge inside the tired realms of liberalism… or the legal vocabulary whether it is inside or outside the umbrella of a consenting/underage bandwidth nude is such an undulating landscape..caves of desire…desire caving in…crib, crave, crawl, calling…all rolled in one…
it can range from an uncluttered idea to the decadence of strip poker
it can range from an Akka Mahadevi vachana to a grossly overrated idea of performance anxiety or a liberal notion of a latent (and on-your-face) libido…
it can range from a celebration of a primitive spirit that needs a much needed comeback to those fascists who attack Husain canvases with the pretext and that is why a Bollywood(as an industry..i am not talking about exceptions) in all it’s unsocial/semi-social/para-social (shall we say escapist or disgusting) consciousness will never understand the bandwidth of nudity nor would be an academic mandarin who is lost to the polemics of the body without inhaling the dissident voices of Bhakti (many of whom outgrew) notions of nudity..
the emperor may or may not have any clothes..that is immaterial…trite…what is material and now, is the fact that why do we attach strings to the much modern idea (mind you not post-modern) of no strings attached (more as shunyavad and less as escapism)
“All cities are temporal. And if the body is a country..and our emotion becomes the city that we inhabit…then let us reiterate for once that nudity is another synonym of/for sovereignty.”
Beyond bra-burning feminism and the misunderstood national notions of the body..let’s create a micro-climate of understanding the rudimentary idea of nudity which is exploitation versus artistic/socio-political use of body as a weapon. After all sparse is indeed sparse. And bountiful is indeed bountiful. Till you import scientific methods of exploitation in that defined landscape of sparseness and bounty.the choice as the cliche unfailingly says is ours..but for once this is a necessary cliche..like all documentaries are a re-arrangement of perceived truths and all feature films are unfailingly a re-arrangement of perceived documentation…so is the basic drift of nudity..it isn’t about breast fixation, nihilist navels, infinite packs, intelligent vagina, literate clit, bulging biceps. Metro-sexual gelled hair, tanned torso or well-formed hips..it is still and always will about an idea that either fits in seamlessly or becomes the instrument of an artificial moral code (constructed out of an inherited sense of mythology and psycho-social notions of conduct). These walls of binary have to be dismantled. And these are far older than the one that came down in Berlin.
Penis. Pen Is.
All cities are temporal. And if the body is a country..and our emotion becomes the city that we inhabit…then let us reiterate for once that nudity is another synonym of/for sovereignty. After all nudity that is not exploitative is a lived experience of the body…a kind of revolution you cannot window-shop…a kind of revulsion that asks the right questions and hints as to what can be the final frontier(or shall we say caving in) of “shame” or unbridled high. Or shall we see the achieving of that “high” in our lifetime which goes beyond the mundane notion of this shame/holding back/being knotted.
…There is neither a first word nor a lost word. The contents of the dialogue are without limit. They extend into the deepest past and the most distant future. Even meanings born in dialogues of remotest past will never be grasped once and for all, for they will always be renewed in later dialogue…..Nothing is absolutely dead, every meaning will some day have its homecoming festival…from Mikhail Bakhtin’s Estelika..
Look at him… Dark, mid-thirties tribal young man… nude… Staring at you… Classic case of an exotic photo-feature..so that the west can now the intense Indian gaze. His nipples are tight-a shade more darker than the body. He knows how to navigate the landscape and has a mind more intense than the sub-altern construction of tribal ethos. He isn’t a still small voice of history but an active participant of our times. He is a furious lover but has no urban fetish…especially he neither uses fairness cream nor fantasises a white/brown lover. There is a minute grin on his face mocking your notions of nudity. He would break into a throaty laughter, if he knows that in your body obsessed flesh chasing middle age menopause…you have nothing but a half-formed mind. Nudity is also human rights. Nudity is also one of the last challenges to the pseudo-clamour of the liberal-secular mafia. And the last stain on selective silences. You cannot globalise nudity. Because it is still a localised metaphor of lived joy, lived protest and yes-a lived orgasm of more mental and less physical.
