Brinda Bose - No More Goddesses, Please. Bring in the Sluts
A compelling image of a physically abused Hindu goddess has recently been swirling through social networking sites. At first glance, it is just a familiar face: that of Durga, in all her glorious finery, glistening headgear and lustrous eyes. At second look, the horror hits home: this is a female model dressed up as Durga, her clear cheek and forehead emblazoned with angry whiplash bruises. A smudged line of kohl below one eye betrays her pain. Durga, beloved among the Hindu pantheon of goddesses, iconic daughter, wife, mother, protector and creator, carries in this enacted, transformed image the burden of pan-Indian consciousness-raising about domestic violence against women, a savaging that both romances divinity and wounds it irretrievably.
In this campaign by Save Our Sisters, an anti sex-trafficking initiative, other models re-enact the battered yet statuesque glories of Saraswati and Lakshmi, graphic images of mutilation that elicit an immediate response of total recoil. While many effusively laud the campaign for boldly using a loathsome cultural shocker to jolt brutalising men, others deride it for reasons that could be activist-feminist or economic or aesthetic. Then some ask whether the advertisement may not be effective in converting the ‘masses’ through shock value alone, despite its images being objectionable. Others offer nuanced, intellectual arguments on the efficacy of the image itself as a critique of the very patriarchy it depicts. There is also a discussion of the cultural mnemonic, to see the goddess figure in its pre-modern, anti-Enlightenment mode as a symbol of the transgressive rituals of society that defy all questions on the rights of, and justice for, women—and whether, therefore, reading the emblem as an enforced deification that is demeaning to contemporary women disallows all potential for stepping outside the rule of law in society.
In response to these conflicted cogitations on the ‘Abused Goddesses’ campaign, I want to think through the ideas that will stay with us along with these hideous images, in the thick as we now are of debates on risk and safety for women—inside and outside the home. My first reaction was one of disgust at the blatant appeal to Hindu sentiment to secure safety in the conjugal home. Ah, I said with rhetorical flourish on Facebook, ‘Right. Put her right up there with Durga and her daughters, worship her, strip her of individuality, sexuality, emotion, agency, power, politics. And if/when she is raped, beaten, silenced—Save her, of course: she is your Sister.’ I also said I was disturbed to see many men in mea culpa mode while circulating the link for the advertisement (as Indian men have increasingly been in the wake of rapes since 16 December), and many women apparently undismayed to be likened to bruised Kumortuli clay figurines in glorious technicolour. I was not alone in this reaction. But this is not to claim that women who felt instinctively that the campaign had done something right in making female models impersonate handpicked gentle, nurturing, battered Hindu goddesses were out on a limb—in fact, from what I had seen till then, most women were comfortable with the images because they strongly believed that they served their didactic purpose.
Some others thought the objections I had raised to this campaign were peripheral to other questions like who had made money out of this obviously offensive advertisement, and that I should not read it on my own academic/feminist/activist terms but try to gauge the impact it could have on ‘the masses’—that ubiquitous sea of vagabond, lecherous, exploitative, violent men who had no time to waste on niceties such as agency, individuality, sexuality or power for their women. While these arguments did not seem to me to be worthy of the point of the debate, I was more intrigued by the proposition that one should see the images in isolation from their lexicon of accompanying words or the history of the campaign’s original sponsors (which had by now piggybacked on social networking sites to far greater effect). This appealed fugitively, but left me irreconcilably uncomfortable about reading such inflammatory images shorn of their repugnant contexts. Another complex suggestion that made me think—the image of a goddess, a primitive/mythic concept, should be analysed as a symbolic cornucopia of excess, and so be allowed to transgress post-Enlightenment (non)virtues of choice, sensibility, understanding, responsibility and justice... Read more:
