Sonagachi prostitute and the yellow turbaned Sarpanch

Have you seen the posts on India Yatra series on the Hindustan Times webpage? I think they are wonderful in getting a feel of India as it readies for the 2009 elections.

The yellow turbaned Sarpanch in the Maharashtra village has a masters degree and practices participatory democracy and development, bringing prosperty to the village and to them the national elections are not so important, the Gram Sabha is much more so.

Durbar, the NGO set up by a group of prostitutes from Sonagachi in Kolkatta is the only organisation providing support to the tribals in an area that saw starvation deaths. To those tribals, the politicians mean nothing, they only see hope in Durbar.

In UP the internet surfing farmer is a millionaire and is providing new agricutlure knowledge to many other farmers. To them the new eight lane highway that is coming up next to their village is their road to prosperity and rather than look at the Ram mandir issue in Ayodhya, they would rather look westwards to Punjab, Haryana and Maharasthra for better agriculture.

In Andhra Pradesh, the world-class road is just a confirmation of the State priority in fighting the Naxalites and it fuels the desire for the separate Telangana state. Prosperity will come with their own state, they are convinced. People are calculating which politicians are likely to support them to realise their Telangana dream.

In Bihar the bicycles for the high school girls may be another round of chess moves between Nitish Kumar, Ram Vilas Paswan and Lalu Prasad, but girls are feeling more confident and see a hope for their future.

These are some of the examples of the stories under India Yatra.

HT has 30 correspondents travelling all over India and collecting stories from places that usually are forgotten in newspapers and TV news. It gives me an opportunity to go beyond the usual media representations of India, to a more varied mosaic of the country. Great stuff and interesting as well.

Befana - Female Santa Claus of Italian Tradition

Today Christmas means Santa Claus bringing the gifts for children but it wasn't always like this. Traditionally the gifts were brought by Befana, an old ugly lady with a crooked big nose, who came flying on her broom and brought socks of gifts for children. Befana day is celebrated on 6 January of each year, it is a national holiday in Italy and marks the end of Christmas festivities.

It is thought that the Befana gift tradition also represents the gifts brought by three wise men of orient to infant Jesus.

During Christmas, many Italian homes set up their Christmas floats with the holy family and other representations of popular life. For Befana day, on 6 January Bologna holds a live float (Presepe vivente) of Christmas with people dressed in medieval clothes, who enact the birth of Jesus. 

Here are some pictures from todays Presepe Vivente of Bologna

Sexuality in Pelagio Palagi collection

Probably most persons, even if they like art, have never heard of Pelagio Palagi. I believe that the man was grossly under-rated, probably because he was born in a rich family and dabbled in lot of different things. Fact is for a long long time Pelagio Palagi was not taken seriously, seen mostly as a collectionist. (all images in this essay are by Sunil Deepak)



To be a collector and spending your riches for bringing together treasures of art and at the same time, supporting lot of artists, is not to be looked down at. Most persons with their billions, if they did that, perhaps the world would be nicer place. Palagi was a good collector and in addition, a wonderful painter and designer.

Born in a rich family in Bologna in 1775, Palagi loved art. His paintings were not considered important for a long long time. He also collected antiques and art from different places including two important collections from Egypt and ancient Greece. During those years, antiques and art were not seen as national treasures but rich persons, especially Europeans could buy what ever they wanted. Thus important scultures, documents, paintings came to the colonial powers of Europe.

Palagi left all his treasures to the municiple government of Bologna and these treasures are important parts of different Bologna museums. Bologna, a comparatively small city in Italy, has been an important centre of culture and science, and has a huge number of museums that are all free for visitors and have a rich programme of guided tours for adults and children.

So if you are planning to visit Bologna, remember to keep a few days for visiting its museums and for discovering Pelagio Palagi.

In this post I want to touch on two aspects of Pelagio Palagi's works. The first relates to his paintings. I love his portraits and I like his technique of adding the big white/pale areas in the bottom half of the portraits, that some times give an impression of part of the canvass being torn off. Below you will find two of his portraits - the first is the study for the portrait of Major Lattuada done in 1819 done for hospital of Milan; the second is the portrait of his close friend Giuseppe Guizzardi done around 1808-09.





The second aspect is related to sexuality. Below you will find two examples -

(1) the first is a 4000 years old Egyptian stele from Palagi's collection showing a man called Aku praying to male fertility god Min. At the lower end of the stele behind the god Min, his phallus shaped temples are shown that remind me of Shivalings.


(2) the second is the painting of Sappho and Rodope done by Palagi around 1808-09 - Sappho and Rodope's painting is interesting as it shows the two women in loving embrace, that has been the popular interpretation to the Sappho legend. According to the Greek legends, Sappho was a poetess while Rodope was a slave girl or a courtesan in ancient Egypt (the legend of Rodope or Rodopi from ancient Egypt is supposed to be the inspiration for the Cindrella fable), who had an affair with Sappho's brother. Those initial legends depicted Sappho as having many lovers. However, later popular legends saw Sappho as a woman in love with other women and her island, Lesbo, also acquired notoriety, giving rise to words like Lesbians.






As you can see, trying to understand the art of Pelagio Palagi can take you in many interesting directions. Art museum, archelogical museum and medival museum of Bologna have thousands of works from Pelagio Palagi collection, some are his creations and others are his collections, remember that if you ever come to Bologna.

***

Boundries of forbidden Love

I was chatting with an Italian friend. Somehow those discussions had lead to some talk about our first crushes. I suddenly remembered about the time in India when I had just started to go to university and how I had adored my cousin brother’s fiancee.

“I used to think that she was the most beautiful girl in the world and even now, after almost forty years, I still feel that she is very beautiful”, I had said.

Perhaps it was something in my voice or my expression. My friend had laughed and asked, “So you were in love with her! And did you ever get intimate with her or was it just loving her from a distance and fantasising about getting into bed with her?”

Suddenly I was very angry and offended at her question. I had not said anything to her, suddenly deciding that it was late and I had to go.

“How dare she insinuate that my adoration was not pure and that there was any element of lust in my feelings for Bhabhi”, I had thought after saying goodbye to my friend, “these Europeans they can’t have any pure relationships, they need to dirty everything, nothing is sacred for them.”

I remembered this episode when yesterday I saw “Sorry Bhai”, the new film by Onir.

There were some scenes in the film, especially the love making scene between Sharman Joshi and Chitrangada Singh in the changing room of a clothes shop, which really disturbed me and I was squiriming on my seat, trying to not to look at the film during those scenes.

There are many shades of devar-bhabhi relationship that can vary from playfulness, and naughty banter to respect due to a mother. All the Ramleelas seen as a child probably contributed, so the strongest image of a bhabhi for me is defined by Sita-Lakshman relationship as described in Tulsi’s Ramayan.

Apart from Ramayan, I think that a number of old Hindi films also helped in defining these ideas of devar-bhabhi relationships in my mind. An archetypical film in that sense can be “Bhabhi ki Chudiyan”.

“Sorry Bhai” is not the first film to explore the taboo areas of attraction and sex between devars (brother in laws) and bhabhis (sister in laws). Two brothers or close friends falling in love with same woman like in Sajaan or younger brother falling in love with the ex-girl friend of his elder brother as in the recent Mehbooba, also touched on it. What kind of relationship exists between the brother who did not get the woman and his brother’s wife is usually left out from such films. In Mehbooba, the awkwardness is avoided by killing one of the brothers.

Other films that touched on this theme from another angle, have the younger brother marrying his widowed Bhabhi like in Silsale, where Amitabh is forced to marry Jaya, pregnant girlfriend of his elder brother Shashi Kapoor. Another film that brought out this dilemma of a boy forced to marry marry a woman he has always looked as a surrogate mother was Rajinder Singh Bedi’s "Ek Chadar Maili Si", where Rishi Kappor, asked to marry his widowed Bhabhi (Hema Malini) is horrified when elders of the village ask him. “You get married to your mothers”, he replies angrily.

It is true that in Sorry Bhai, the couple are not yet married but they are supposed to be getting married in a week and the family has come especially from India for the marriage. Plus, it seems that the couple has been together for five years. So even if they are not married, in a family, the woman would be seen as a de-facto wife of the man she is going to marry. In spite of this area of unease, I liked Sorry Bhai. I like films that provoke me, that make me think about forbidden areas of my own deepest thoughts. Often we tend to keep such forbidden areas buried deep down the conscious mind.

Actually there are also a number of Hindi films where brothers do lust after their Bhabhis and try to force themselves on them like the scene from Nagesh Kuknoor’s Dor, where the young brother tries to take advantage of recently widowed Ayasha Takia, but these are somehow more acceptable to us because in such films we tend to accept that men are beasts, they can’t control their sexual urges, while the women remain pure and resist such advances.

It is Sharman Joshi who makes the character of Sidharth Mathur, a younger brother falling for his future sister in law and trying to resist it, believable. I like Joshi, he is not a conventional Bollywood hero but very likeable and good actor.

However, Sorry Bhai suffers from some weak characterizations in my opinion.

The elder brother, Harshwardhan’s character is the most superficially drawn and you never really understand his motivations and his way of thinking. He also does not seem very convincing in the pub scene as drunk, but otherwise Sanjay Suri is good, especially in the last emotional scenes. Sanjay Suri must be a nice serious guy and this trait seems to come out in all his roles.

Chitrangada is wonderfully ravishing but a bit wooden in her interpretation of Aaliya. You never really understand how did she end up in Mauritius, it is not a country known for its higher education. However she makes up for such details by looking wonderful.

Perhaps they were all retired and didn’t need to go back to work? After Harsh postpones his marriage, they all decide to stay on in Mauritius without any explanation. Or perhaps it was the period of summer holidays? The same can be said for the last part of the film where it seems that they are all still living in Mauritius or perhaps it was a Mauritius-looking Mumbai?

And why doesn’t Sidharth call his brother’s fiancee Bhabhi when he first meets her, as you would expect normal Indian younger devars to do? It may be true that rich and the high class Indians are more westernized and they call each other by names rather than as Bhabhis or Bhaiyas but he does call his brother Bhai and never by his name, and he also seems a conventional boy willing to let his mother decide about his future wife!

So there are bits and pieces of the films that are not very logical but it is made up by wonderful looking Mauritius and great performances from the ever reliable Shabana Azmi and Boman Irani, and of course by Sharman Joshi. The music is good, especially Jalte Hain and Mere Khuda.

Onir is taking on all kinds of different subjects. I had liked My Brother Nikhil, though at that time I had thought that it had taken the idea and style from a Hollywood film Jia, but had changed it by making it a man’s story in an intelligent way. I didn’t watch all of “Bas ek pal”, I had seen bits and pieces of it during my stay in Guyana where it had seemed to be a favourite of the cable walla. But I had liked those bits and pieces.

And now Sorry Bhai, that could have been inspired by Love according to Dan, but that is not so important since he does take only inspirations of the basic idea, does intelligent work on it and makes the subject his own. Most important, he does not go whole hog in copying something and then claiming creative ownership over it.

In any case, as people say about Mahabharat that all stories are already told there and all playwrites must copy or get inspiration from some where. What matters is how one deals with those ideas and Onir seems to do it quite well. I am sorry that the film got sidelined due to the Mumbai terror attacks. It must have been hard on all those persons who had worked on the film.

***

Bollywood in Italy

Lazy, hot summer days of August. Olympics are on. I wish I could watch some badminton and table tennis matches at the Olympics but I don't think that I will get to, since both games are not a priority for Italy and so they are focusing on games that are more popular here and games where Italian teams are playing.

Last night, on the Italian national TV channel, they showed "Cheeni Kum" at prime time, dubbed into Italian. It was an absolute first for Bollywood here. One arty channel had shown films like "Kagaz ke phool" and "Pather Pachali", in late night slots. Another private TV channel had shown "Lagaan", starting it around midnight and finishing it around five in the morning. So I don't know how many people had actually watched those films.

Thus "Cheeni Kum" was a pleasant surprise. The film, quite urbane and witty most of the time, without any naach-gaana, was quite European (except for the scene of loud crying at Qutub Minaar by Amitabh Bacchan and his melodramatic running between the pillar and his mother, near the end of the film), so probably they thought that this one Bollywood film could be shown to normal Italian audience or does it mean that Italian TV is going to give more space to Bollywood in the future, remains to be seen. (BTW, Chinese films have been on prime time TV for many years now).

However there are lot of Bollywood fans here and there is a market for Indian DVDs that is not being tapped now. Actually it is partially being tapped by friendly neighbourhood pirated Asian DVD shops, but since even they do not have Indian films with Italian subtitles, so I am sure that there is scope for doing much more.

Every month I get two three enquires about how to buy Indian DVDs with Italian subtitles. Since I have been writing articles on Bollywood cinema and doing film reviews in Italian (on the Italian part of my website), people often come to me to ask "expert" advice. "Taare Zameen Par" got so many enquiries including persistent enquiries from an association of Dyslexic children, who want to use this film to create awareness about Dyslexia in Italy (if Aamir Khan is reading this please do something about it!). It would be easy to take the film and do Italian subtitles and distribute a few copies, but that would be illegal and I personally don't want to get into that. Last year, we did do Italian subtitles for small parts of different Indian films (Chameli, Umrao Jaan, Veer Zara, Bombay, etc.) for a women's festival but we didn't make any DVDs out of that experience.

Defining Human Sexualities

On Shunya’s Notes, there is an interesting post about Sudhir and Katherine Kakkar’s recent book "The Indians: Portrait of a people" (2007), focusing on issues related to homosexuality in India.

I briefly met Kakkar earlier this year during a literary event organised by Grinzane Cavour Awards in north of Italy and I remember him as very likeable and soft spoken person. ‘The Indians’ sounds very interesting and I hope that it will be soon available in Italian as well and I will have an opportunity to read it.

To come back to the blog post on Shunya’s Notes, it mentions various differences between the Western and Indian attitudes and practices towards homosexuality, such as the following:

• Christian West, homosexual acts were persecuted as a sin against God (and less often, seen as a disease). Indians, on the other hand, denied the idea of homosexuality, while tolerating homosexual acts.
• Notion of a homosexual liaison as a proud and equal alternate to a heterosexual one doesn't exist outside a small set of urban Indians;
• (In India) Vast majority of even those who continue having sex with other men do not see themselves as homosexual

I agree that in India, persons deciding to live as overt gay or lesbian couples would have a difficult time, even if their public display of affection such as holding hands, putting arms around each others' necks, etc. would probably be seen as less problematic, since that is accepted behaviour for both men and women in Indian culture (but their kissing in public would be very problematic, but then even heterosexual kissing in public would also be equally problematic in India). And I also agree that for young homosexual Indian men and women, there would be tremendous family pressure for a “normal” marriage.

However, in my experience, there are infinite variations in the way people perceive, exercise and express their sexualities and I find a bit problematic this way of classifying persons in groups such as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, transgender, etc. If we look at life stories of persons spanning different decades, the variety of sexual behaviours and desires that usually comes out, are difficult to put neatly into a few boxes.

To restrict sexuality to sexual intercourse is another problematic area for me. During a research that I did almost a decade ago , the definitions of sexuality that had come up during discussions in a group of Italians, also included terms like intimacy, affection, feelings, closeness, etc. If we consider sexuality in these broader terms, then in my opinion, ideas of homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality, etc. become even more problematic.

I think that part of the problem lies in what I call “western dichotomous way” or “psuedo-scientific way” of thinking, that is based on the assumption that every thing can be defined and classified, and if something is one then it can’t be another at the same time.

I believe classifying and putting everything in to neat boxes is fine if it serves as an exercise for understanding the key issues, the barriers, the oppressions, the violations, and finding solutions to these through laws and practices that respect dignities and rights of people. In that sense, I understand the usefulness and importance of categories like homosexual, heterosexual, etc. However, I have some difficulties when we start confusing the categories and boxes with people and how they are suppose to behave in their every day lives.

I think that like everything else, even human sexuality is a spectrum that varies from exclusively gay or lesbian to exclusively heterosexual in terms of sexual intercourse, but also in terms of psychological affinities and affective relationships, at different times & ages in our lives. In between these two extremes there are infinite variations. And if people do not wish to be put into a box or under a category, I think that it is absolutely fine for them to choose to do so.

In the post on Shunya’s Notes, the author writes, “While the Indian response reduces open conflict, the flip side is a muffled suffering: countless men and women lead double lives, hiding from their true natures and denying themselves the most precious of intimacies and self-knowledge”. While I agree that there are many homosexual men and women in India who are forced into marriages that create needless suffering for them and for their spouses, I also find such views problematic in terms of denying that there can be persons whose sexuality encompasses both sexes and can be forced into a corner because someone believes that “they are not aware of their true natures”.

Thus, I also think that overcoming barriers and finding solutions does not mean that all persons who enjoy homosexual relationships are all supposed to "come out" and be either gay or lesbian in the way the two distinct gay and lesbian cultures have developed in the west.

This is also because, I feel that people from different cultures fighting oppression and exploitation, can find and negotiate emancipation and self-expression in different ways. The gay and lesbian cultures developed in the west are legitimate and can be empowering, but this does not mean that they are the only path to sexual emancipation. Here I would like to draw parallels from works of Indian feminism activists like Madhu Kishwar, who have looked at the way women in India have negotiated spaces for their own emancipation and empowerment, in ways that are different from the way western feminists look at this.

The Indian (or perhaps I should say eastern) way of inclusive thinking, that looks for harmony among apparent contradictions is a different approach to life compared to the rational and scientific approach. While looking at issues of human sexuality, I would be cautious in throwing away the specific cultural solutions towards homosexuality that have been found over a period of centuries in the Indian societies . I would rather prefer to look at them critically, without the using western eyeglasses, but analysing them on their own terms and merits.

Such a critical appraisal of Indian responses to the issue of sexual diversity in India can’t be done by outsiders, but requires persons who face these challenges in India. Perhaps persons linked to GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender) organisations in India would take up this challenge (or perhaps they already have done such analysis, but I am not aware about it and such views are not well known internationally?)

One summer afternoon

I had woken up at nine. I am on holidays so there is nothing strange about waking up at nine. And it was a Saturday morning. But I have always insisted that I am incapable of sleeping till late and that I must go to bed at ten and wake up at five in the morning. This is my natural rhythm of life, I say.

Perhaps, over the past few years, my sleeping and waking hours depend upon my computer and internet? Early morning is the time for reading emails, writing blogs, reading on internet. And, here in Bibione I have no internet, so I don’t have any incentive to wake up earlier.

After a lazy coffee and cereals, I put on my swimming costume and a t-shirt, Nadia was wearing her two piece swim suit and off we went to the coast. It takes about ten minutes to reach the seaside and every day we follow the same routine - a walk towards the light house of Bibione and back to the beach for a swim, before coming back home for lunch and afternoon siesta.

Yesterday was no different. It is liberating to wear swim suits and walk in the city centre where other persons are more or less in the same state of undress. The sky was bright blue and there was not even a tiniest bit of cloud floating up there. But it was not hot, there was a nice cool breeze.

It was almost 10.30 when we had started from home and by the time we reached the light house it was almost mid day. I asked Nadia to climb on some rocks in the beginning of the sea, so that I could take her pictures. While I was clicking her pictures, I remember thinking that those pictures were like love letters. Probably all marriages go through this process that starts from love, goes trough a process of friction, discussions, fights and mutual adjustments and then finally finds its groove, where you understand each other and in spite of all the differences, love each other’s company.

In front of the light house, we asked someone to take our picture. Every year, in front of the light house, we ask someone to take our picture. Looking at these pictures from the past 26 years, I can see how age has been changing us.

1988

1991

2005

2008

As we walked back, I remember that we looked at a family with a dog that was walking towards us and we talked about the absolutely cuddly dog. And it was almost as an afterthought, when I realised that the lady in the group was topless. How quickly you get used to the human bodies, and why do fundamentalists of different religions make such a hoo ha about female bodies, I had thought.

Back at the beach, it was time to go for the swim. The water was slightly cold and absolutely transparent. Putting the head under the water, I felt that I was floating in the beautiful green coloured world. I could see Nadia swimming close by but there were not many other persons swimming at that time. Probably people were going back for lunch since it must have been around 1 PM. Then I started to do rotations, I love rotating in the water, going round and round like a seal. The only problem is that nowadays my head starts to spin so after some rotations I must lie still waiting for them to pass.

I was floating in the water, when I heard Nadia call me. “Don’t go near the boulders, they are sharp and cut you”, she called. During my rotations and floating, I had drifted close to the boulders placed inside the sea like a finger going inside the water from the beach. I dived in and swam away from the boulders. As I came up for air, I saw that I had not moved away but rather I was a little closer to the boulders. I tried to feel the ground with my feet but it was too deep and I couldn’t touch the ground. I could feel the strong current pushing me towards the boulders, so I tried again, making big powerful strokes to move away. Again, as I raised up my head from water, I saw that I had made little headway. Suddenly I panicked. I could feel the sea as something living, surrounding me from all sides and pulling me inside.

Nadia was swimming towards me and I told her to stay away and not to come closer in that strong current. “Go towards the boulders, let the current take you, go the other side of the boulders”, she cried, sensing my panic. I followed her advice, going towards the boulders and slowly got up on a boulder just underneath the water surface. The surface of the boulder was full of sharp cutting edges but I did manage to get up and sit down. Nadia on the other hand, had gone beyond the tip of the boulders and passed to the other side. “This means it can be done and the current is not that bad”, I thought and slowly the panic passed.

After five minutes, when I had got back my breath, I moved gingerly over the boulders underneath the water surface and then dived in, swimming away from them without any problems.

Perhaps I had not been in mortal danger and it was all panic and if I had shouted, life guard would have heard me or other persons swimming not so far would have heard me and would have saved me. But for me, that sensation of being pulled inside the sea, feeling the sea as a living being surrounding me and laughing at me and tempting me to go and loose myself in its wonderful green world, were very real and if Nadia had not been there, perhaps that panic could have ended differently.