The subject that I have chosen for my analysis of
photography is Antarghat, meaning
“the vessel within”, the
first book in a series called Sa or “the feminine”, by photo-editor of India Today, Bandeep Singh. In the
book, Singh has taken a series
of pictures of the nude female body, juxtaposed with the patra or vessel. The
pictures, though mostly silhouettes,
show the features of the subjects quite prominently. The figures are not
curling into themselves as photographs of the female are often seen to do in
the genre of Eurocentric
photographs, but rather proudly displaying the sacredness
of the feminine. Even though the bodies are not
clad or covered in any way,
they do not impart a sense of voyeurism or the intrusion of the gaze as is the
case in pornographic pictures. Singh’s depiction of the female, looks at the
body not just as a sum of its
parts, or as a commodity, but as a metaphor,
having multilayered connotative meanings.
Stephen Bull, in his
essay Making Meaning of Photographs, separates
the meaning of photographs using semiotics used by Sassure, which divides
linguistic signs into two inseparable parts, the signifiers and the signified. The
signifier is the linguistic symbol while the signified is the object it refers
to. “While Sassure’s concept worked on the level of language, Barthes argued
that it is also important to take into account the culture in which language
produces meaning.” Hjemslev gave the term of “denotation” to describe that
which the signs communicate on the level of language while he used
“connotation” to mean the cultural meanings that arise from the specifics of
context and discourse. The given series of pictures denote the naked female
body in several postures with an earthen pot. However when looking at the
connoted meaning, one has to look into the discourse of Indian mythology and
the sublimity of womanhood.
Generally, the naked body
of the female depicted in any photograph would constitute a voyeuristic gaze.
According to Susan Sontag, in her essay, In
Plato’s Cave, “Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation
to the world which levels the meaning of all events.” A pornographic photograph
would have been the ultimate proof of this statement. However, although the
women in these pictures are completely unclothed, the photographs still
maintain a transcendental aura about them. The very fact that the women in the
photographs have completely bared their bodies to the photographer instead of
curling into themselves shows a link of trust between the photographer and his
subject, not the type of relationship found between the voyeur and his object.
The women in the pictures have also been kept from being commodified by the
lack of focus on their faces, highlighting instead in the sensuality and
aesthetic beauty of the feminine body. This is further supported by the fact
that there are photographs of three women in the book but they cannot be
differentiated from each other.
The discourse here is
not the modern Eurocentric approach which would look at nakedness as something
to be condemned but rather the post-modern mingling of the old and new styles,
of tradition and technology, Singh acting as the architect or potter of the patra, the camera being his chisel and
potter’s wheel. “Most postmodernist critics of this
ideological bent insist that postmodernist art be oppositional. This opposition
can be conceived in two ways: as counter to the modernist tradition, and/or as
counter to the ruling “mythologies” of Western culture, which, the theory goes,
led to the creation of the modernist tradition in the first place.”[1] Postmodernism, and especially postmodernist
art, therefore seeks to break the myths of the “western” and the “modern”, the
“myths” of the “autonomous individual” and the “individual subject”. In the
photographs of Bandeep Singh, the myth of commodification of the naked body
shatters and what we are left with is art at its most worshipful of feminity
and its sacred gift of fertility as connoted by the kalas or the kumbha and the triangle.
Hindu mythology and the tantric which Singh
draws from do not treat the female as a commodity. Quite the contrary, “from
the dancing girl of Mohenjodaro, to the yakshis,
to the shalabhanjikas/tree spirits, apsaras/
celestial
beings, and the nayikas/heroines in their munificence, the
female nude is worshipped, celebrated, adored but never really
commodified in traditional Indian art practice. Within
Indian culture, be it Buddhist, Hindu, or Tantric, from
the sacred to the pleasurable, the nude woman is always represented
within the domain of the sublime.”[2]
The emphasis
that Singh gives in some pictures is to the concept of beauty of the Indian
female. Unlike the photographic tradition in India, which has mostly followed
western patterns, the nude is an integral part of painting and sculpture, the
traditional art forms of India. Singh inculcates these forms of art into his
photography, thereby becoming the artist and the sculptor. The bodies are not
clothed, they are not covered: they flow freely, the lines of the body
conveying an eroticism which is beautifully articulated, uninhibited by
concepts of false modesty. The monochromatic nature of the photographs helps to
emphasise the feminine form, not distracted by colour. What Singh has played
with are light and shadow, creating a juxtaposition of the earthen pot and the
female, thereby bringing out the sacred and ethereal realm of fertility that
Indian mythology has worshipped and uplifted. The merging of the pot and the
woman, especially in the first picture of the pot-bearer, shows fertility in a
light that is other than the mundane physical plain, making it miraculous. The
centering on the ghat or earthen pot,
as well as the representations of the tantric mudras signifies fertility. Also depicted
in one of his pictures is the “primal symbol of the inverted triangle, the seed
and cosmic womb, the creative genetrix feminine power and the female emblem of
the Shakti-principle is the foundation of many compositions.”[3]
Bandeep Singh’s
photographs should not even be called completely post-modern or
post-structural, these concepts being primarily western. His work can be seen
as a revival of the richness of Indian tradition and the magnificence of the
Indian feminine figure at its luxurious and productive. Modern technology
merges with ancient tradition and thought in Singh’s work to bring out aspects
of the trade heretofore unexplored.
Bibliography:
Grundberg: The Crisis of the Real
Bandeep Singh: Sa
Susan Sontag: In Plato’s Cave
Stephen Bull: The Meanings of Photographs
