Clothing the sacred in vain
11 April 2013 12:22 AM GMT
Mumbai aimed for becoming Riyadh by threatening Maqbul Fida Hussain and disrupting the exhibition of his paintings of goddess Durga and Saraswati. Mumbai’s race to cultural barrenness reached another milestone in April. It dispatched its best sons of the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti to the Jehangir Art Gallery to remove paintings of goddess Kali by Kolkata-based painter Eleena Banik.
This is a dangerous game. For people of faith, it is important that gods and goddesses be taken back from the loudest and the most threatening lot of society. Rather, it should be asked that in a plural society, how is anyone able to violently attack, threaten, issue death threats and shut down other voices? The plurality of divine forms in the subcontinent does not originate from scriptures and strictures, but from the agency of humans, however negligible in number, to be able to own, disown, partially own and partially disown the divine. No definition of how gods and goddesses ought to be or ought not to be can be enforced by force in a civilised society. If a group thinks that they are the thikadars of divine beings, I feel it is important to remind them that I did not appoint them to such a post, as far as my gods and goddesses are concerned.
The Hindu Janjagruti Samiti’s targeting of mother goddess Kali has forced me to respond, especially because I am from a Bengali Shakto (followers of the divine mother) family. Our ancestral worship of the divine mother goes back at least 400 years. We take our Kali seriously. Till now, Bengali Shaktos have not had the need to look to any Hindus from Mumbai or elsewhere for its jagruti. We have been worshipping mother Kali before Mumbai got its first temple for Mumbadevi.
The saffron neophytes who forced Eleena to take down her paintings of goddess Kali did not approve of the fact that she had painted her without the garland of skulls. Her breasts were visible, because she has them. The mother goddess does not wear garlands to cover her breasts from the scandalised. She is both maternal and sexual. And if you like your goddess to have lesser qualities than my mother goddess, that is your problem. If you feel ashamed of my naked holy mother, that’s also your problem, not mine. Keep your shame to yourself. Don’t come draping my mother with your cloth. Your mother may like being told by their devotee sons what to wear. My holy mother has a divine mind of her own.
People have conceived goddess Kali variously in different times, in different places. For someone to dictate how my conception of the goddess ‘should’ look like is religious imperialism. While a monolithic Indian Union nation-state helps such pan-subcontinental ‘standards’ to gain wider currency, the goddess is older than the constitution. Those who take their definitions of shame from the sensibilities of the Victorian British, have long been ill at ease with the naked glory of goddess Kali. They have tried to make the garland an essential accessory, have made the garland-heads bigger, have made the goddess always have her hair in front of the shoulder spread out on her body – essentially every cheap trick in the book to cover her breasts. Breasts are sexually desirable. Breasts are also symbols of motherly love. If you have a problem with a sexually active, breast-feeding mother goddess, try a nirgun god. Don’t come draping my goddess.
Sometimes we do not realise how recent some of our imaginations of gods and goddesses are. For example, many consider the blouse of the goddess to be a sanatan item of clothing – just that it was virtually unknown in the subcontinent in that peculiar form before Empress Victoria’s reign. My holy mother is older than that. Maqbul Fida Hussain, that sterling admirer of goddess Durga, had liberated her form from the patently mid-19th century blouse clad look, re-imagining her in naked matriarchal glory. You expect me to give up my holy mother’s timeless antiquity for your second-rate desi version of imported Victorian sensibility?
By way of distortion of an oft-half quoted line by Karl Marx, one can say that in a plural society, religions have to be defended from becoming the tool of bigoted creatures, the face of a heartless worldview, the mechanical output of scripture-reading zombies. It has to be defended from becoming the enemy of a plural society. So-called ‘distortion’ is the long-term life-blood of plural, democratic societies. Without that, Riyadh is not far off. (IPA)
This is a dangerous game. For people of faith, it is important that gods and goddesses be taken back from the loudest and the most threatening lot of society. Rather, it should be asked that in a plural society, how is anyone able to violently attack, threaten, issue death threats and shut down other voices? The plurality of divine forms in the subcontinent does not originate from scriptures and strictures, but from the agency of humans, however negligible in number, to be able to own, disown, partially own and partially disown the divine. No definition of how gods and goddesses ought to be or ought not to be can be enforced by force in a civilised society. If a group thinks that they are the thikadars of divine beings, I feel it is important to remind them that I did not appoint them to such a post, as far as my gods and goddesses are concerned.
The Hindu Janjagruti Samiti’s targeting of mother goddess Kali has forced me to respond, especially because I am from a Bengali Shakto (followers of the divine mother) family. Our ancestral worship of the divine mother goes back at least 400 years. We take our Kali seriously. Till now, Bengali Shaktos have not had the need to look to any Hindus from Mumbai or elsewhere for its jagruti. We have been worshipping mother Kali before Mumbai got its first temple for Mumbadevi.
The saffron neophytes who forced Eleena to take down her paintings of goddess Kali did not approve of the fact that she had painted her without the garland of skulls. Her breasts were visible, because she has them. The mother goddess does not wear garlands to cover her breasts from the scandalised. She is both maternal and sexual. And if you like your goddess to have lesser qualities than my mother goddess, that is your problem. If you feel ashamed of my naked holy mother, that’s also your problem, not mine. Keep your shame to yourself. Don’t come draping my mother with your cloth. Your mother may like being told by their devotee sons what to wear. My holy mother has a divine mind of her own.
People have conceived goddess Kali variously in different times, in different places. For someone to dictate how my conception of the goddess ‘should’ look like is religious imperialism. While a monolithic Indian Union nation-state helps such pan-subcontinental ‘standards’ to gain wider currency, the goddess is older than the constitution. Those who take their definitions of shame from the sensibilities of the Victorian British, have long been ill at ease with the naked glory of goddess Kali. They have tried to make the garland an essential accessory, have made the garland-heads bigger, have made the goddess always have her hair in front of the shoulder spread out on her body – essentially every cheap trick in the book to cover her breasts. Breasts are sexually desirable. Breasts are also symbols of motherly love. If you have a problem with a sexually active, breast-feeding mother goddess, try a nirgun god. Don’t come draping my goddess.
Sometimes we do not realise how recent some of our imaginations of gods and goddesses are. For example, many consider the blouse of the goddess to be a sanatan item of clothing – just that it was virtually unknown in the subcontinent in that peculiar form before Empress Victoria’s reign. My holy mother is older than that. Maqbul Fida Hussain, that sterling admirer of goddess Durga, had liberated her form from the patently mid-19th century blouse clad look, re-imagining her in naked matriarchal glory. You expect me to give up my holy mother’s timeless antiquity for your second-rate desi version of imported Victorian sensibility?
By way of distortion of an oft-half quoted line by Karl Marx, one can say that in a plural society, religions have to be defended from becoming the tool of bigoted creatures, the face of a heartless worldview, the mechanical output of scripture-reading zombies. It has to be defended from becoming the enemy of a plural society. So-called ‘distortion’ is the long-term life-blood of plural, democratic societies. Without that, Riyadh is not far off. (IPA)
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