ART: A SCEPTER AGAINST GENDER-SEXUAL NORMS

Centuries of human existence has witnessed demonstrations by people, governments, and institutions amongst others, both intra and inter, against norms or actions that appear contrary to the favorable conditions of co-existence. The medium of resistance, however, varies in accordance to groups, people and communities.

The dichotomy between Art and Resistance is astonishing. While in most cases, one tends to drift towards the mode of rallies and gathering as a standard of resistance, what one misses to see is expressing dissatisfaction and protest have been channeled through various Art forms.

The Ghazals of Faiz Ahmed Faiz are like forces that unleash all the pent up emotions and serve as weapons against atrocities. Paintings of Amrita Shergil earned her the title ‘India’s Frida Kahlo’, for use of self-portraits to express the plight of women. The dichotomy becomes even more clear when we see through the perspective of the marginalized groups, who, when making art, take up spaces that have not been offered to them, use resources that were not meant for them and insinuate themselves into new and often, hostile spaces. Under such conditions, even if there are no motifs or themes of resistance, its mere existence is resistance.

Paintings are the visual representation of a subject. It can include a plethora of subjects in one canvas or sometimes project a singular subject. Paintings emerged as a medium for artists, especially Indian women artists, to express their resilience towards the never-ending norms on women, by society. As the famous quote goes, ‘A picture speaks a thousand words’, these female artists found their 'sceptre' in paintings, to expose the stigmatization and persecution faced by women of India, since Pre-Independence times. While endless efforts have been made to make citizens aware of these atrocities (sati, dowry, sexual assault); they continue to perpetuate gender norms in the name of culture and tradition.

The use of various forms of styles like Modernism, Impressionism, realism and the utilization of different hues of colours provide vibrancy and depth. The texture and the time-space dimensions bring forth the emotions that the artist envisages the viewer to feel. Armed with all these techniques, painting serves as a powerful platform for aesthetics and resilience.

Nilima Sheikh, born on 18th November 1945 is a visual artist based in Baroda. She studied history at Delhi University and received her Masters in Fine Arts from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1971. Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore, Nilima Sheikh became interested in the connection between stories and images and between murals to ancient manuscripts. Sheikh turned her attention to miniature paintings because of her interests in historical traditions of paintings in Asia and claimed her artistic lineages deriving from the pre-modern Rajput and Mughal paintings, which represent everyday life with a poetic vibrancy.

As an advocate of gender equality, Nilima Sheikh’s work portrays the injustices faced by women in India. With her miniature painting skills, she ventures into the arena of the predicament faced by women in their lives, especially married lives. Nilima Sheikh portrayed the atrocities suffered by women in the 20th century when patriarchal norms dominated the societal life of people.

Nilima Sheikh’s expression of resistance to atrocities against women is best presented in her work “When Champa Grew Up” which is a series of twelve paintings. Each of these paintings depicts an episode in the life of a young girl named Champa, who has an arranged marriage and then murdered by her in-laws because of dowry-related issues. The paintings blended in the Mughal miniature and Rajput style; present accurately the darker to the colourful celebration and amazing food associated with Indian weddings of the mid and late 19th century. On one hand, where marriages are times of joy and celebrations, on the other hand, it exposes the practice of girl child marriages and how later as married women they suffer torture and immolation from the hands of their in-laws and husbands over dowry issues.

Young Champa

In the series of painting, it is after the marriage that the series takes a darker turn. The husband, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law plot to, and then successfully kill Champa. This tragic end showcases the darker side of arranged marriages, wherein new brides are subjugated by their new family members who still treat them as an outsider. One of the miniature paintings from this series shows a picture of exhausted Champa who dozes off in between her household chores while the in-laws plan to murder Champa. This picture exposes the hardships faced by newly married women burdened with household chores by themselves while being confined in the four walls of their homes.

Plotting of Champa’s murder Conflict between Champa and her in-law

The last among the twelve series show the funeral pyre of Champa. Unlike Sheikh’s other paintings, the painting of Champa presents the artist’s personal connection to Champa along with sadness that emanates from this story. Nilima Sheikh through her painting envisages the viewer to understand the truth about the life of women in India during the 19th and 20th centuries. She presents before us the true image of Patriarchy and what it has done to women and their lives, and how fighting against it is still important for the present and future generations of women.

Champa’s Funeral Pyre

Arpita Singh is another prominent artist born in 1937, Kolkata, West Bengal. She is known to be a figurative artist and a modernist whose artistic approach is illustrated as ‘an expedition without destination’. Her career at the Weavers Service Centre and her close experience with traditional artists influenced her artworks and style. Each of Singh's work is presented as a story. Troubled by the atrocities that are faced by women in their daily lives, Arpita Singh paints an array of emotions that she associates closely with these women-centric subjects- from sorrow to joy and from suffering to hope.

Arpita Singh

The artist's colours are vibrant - her palette is usually dominated by pinks and blues, and her paintings burst at the seams with teeming life forms and objects or motifs like guns, cars, graffiti, traffic signals, toys, crowded roads, planes, animals, trees and flower. She transfused these daily usable, common elements and fun objects as constitutive of a sign of individual ‘icons’ to explore small narratives through her pictorial space.

Arpita Singh in her paintings presents men in a well-draped manner whereas her women are almost nude. Her paintings, however, do not have sexual overtones but reflect the woman's vulnerability. Singh has fabricated women in free-flowing linear implementation, with small and delicate motifs from the Indian folk traditions. She has tried to build ‘a secret world of women’ in her paintings-the colours used are bright and symbolic with the use of a specific expression of relative temperature, making her nude female figures more real and has freed them from the pre-established constraints of femininity. These female figures, painted by Arpita Singh are no silent like the stereotyped representation of women.

Representation of Nude Women Figures

The nude pictures of women, painted by Arpita Singh, behold a resistance through their unclothed body; the female body which is one of the important tools of politics of patriarchy. The artist has tried to secure a woman's secret world in another reality and tried to bring resistance by the exposed body. Through the works of Arpita Singh, the female body that was once a tool for men becomes a threat to them.

These paintings, of Arpita Singh, have created several perspectives of resistance by questioning the norms of the society. They question the issues constructed by patriarchal norms such as 'rules of beauty, 'the representation of femininity' and the 'female body’.

In continuation of her resistance to societal norms, Arpita Singh also uses her artistic skills to shatter taboo surrounded by emotions and desires for old women. She challenges these taboos through her sketch of an aged woman with roses inside her body. Roses are symbols of love, desire, romance, thus through this painting, Singh conveys the message that to feel emotions and desires one doesn't have to be of a particular age; that women's emotions and desires matter, they are not to be suppressed. There is no age barrier for love and that women are as free to love again as men.

Arpita Singh strengthened the resistance of women and expressed criticism against male chauvinism through her portrayals of male figures. Unlike her female figures, the male figures are more organized, well dressed in a corporate form compared to the bare and brave presentation of women. These contrasting imageries of men present numerous signifiers of patriarchal gazes which marks the reasons for gender discrimination. Arpita Singh's women figures are unique and different from each other, expressed through differentiation of body language and emotions. They are sometimes in a drape, sometimes nude figures and sometimes the drape is transparent to portray their inner selves.

Ultimately, what Singh presents in her women figures is neither the representation of male perspective nor the accordance to society's notion of femininity; they have their strong identity which liberated their sexuality and their emotions from all kinds of stigmas

Shilo Shiv Suleman

Contemporary female artists like Shilo Shiv Suleman, have employed art to express the necessity for social change by voicing issues and creating safer space for everyone by using public spaces as canvas. A radical figure in the artist community in India, Shilo uses Augmented Reality and has created large-scale installations, paintings and wearable sculptures. Mysticism is the core of Suleman’s art; instead of completely renouncing the rational conviction of science, Suleman uses its idea to create magic. According to Suleman-

‘Stepping into this parallel world of magic requires trusting the power of the stories and myths, trusting them to put your life in the hands of magic and mystery. For not only are you a consumer of these tales, but you are also an active participant in their unfolding’.

Apart from large installations, Suleman's paintings make the viewers feel dreamy, alluring and blissful. Envisaged in altarpieces, some of the paintings cradle human figures, surrounded closely by flowers and vegetation, reminding our close connection with nature. Eyes drooping, shut either because of ecstasy or as a manner of teasing, these human figures look like they are rare for this world, making them perfect and precious by the use of gold, both paint and real metal as well precious stones.

Shilo with her Painting

What is imperative about Suleman's work is how it is split into two sections; one that is connected with technology where Shilo Suleman treads the realm of mysticism and magic and the second is her work with the Fearless Collective- a group of 'artivists’ who employ their art to address issues related to rape and gender-based violence. The Fearless Collective was founded as a reaction to Delhi’s gang-rape case of 2012. Suleman was disturbed by the fear obsession encouraged by the media and society to deprive women of their freedom and push them into so-called ‘safe’ cocoons. According to Suleman, ‘Fearless…began as a way of reacting to that fear. Instead of having women hiding in their homes or being dropped home by their brothers, we needed them out on the streets, taking over and reclaiming our public spaces.’

With over 250 artists from India, Nepal and Pakistan, Fearless Collective uses collaborative murals as a means to create social change, replacing fear and powerlessness with trust and creativity in public spaces. From the small aboriginal village of Olivencia in Brazil to the first known public testament to queer masculinities in Beirut, Lebanon- Fearless objective is to carve out public depictions of women and their significance in the world. For Shilo and the Fearless team, art is not confined to any private quarters- just like women, who are forced and confined to cocoons. Shilo and the Fearless aim at making art a public sphere, where numerous women- irrespective of the intersection they adhere to- group together to paint murals that affirm their choices, desires and stories.

When coming to terms with the news of the Hathras gang rape, Shilo and the Fearless team choose to speak of ‘how women want to be touched’. Syncing their work with the theme of exploring female desires, their mural portrayed two women holding each other (fierce and fearless), speaking the affirmation. Paintings and works like these help in breaking away the preconceived notions of how women’s emotions, how they are expected to readily say yes to a touch, with or without consent and how their desires and wants are to be sidelined for the desires and pleasure of their partner. Murals like these enable people to venture into understanding the true essence of giving values to female desires and the strong message of valuing women's consent.

Shilo and Fearless Team with the Mural of Two Women

Shilo Shiv Suleman, Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh, Amrita Shergil, Sarah Naqvi and Priyanka Paul amongst others have employed art as an instrument for Resistance, for Freedom of Female Sexuality and for exposing the ‘Real Desires and Choices of Women’- one that is not dictated according to the rules of the society but according to the rules of every female out there in the world. The making of Art, even if there are no exact themes, still echoes a powerful voice; a voice against the atrocities and subjugation that has dominated for too long. The journey is hard yet not bleak- the efforts and exposition of the real femininity, through the works of these artists and various individuals, makes us hope of a world that one day will embrace all who identify themselves as female, for what they are and what they can be.