On the 8th of March, International Women’s Day, women acquire visibility that has been denied to them for centuries. WhatsApp messages of discounts in shops and restaurants flood one’s phone. There are endless invites to seminars and panel discussions.
The concept of Women’s Day began in New York City on March 8, 1857, when female textile workers marched in protest against unfair working conditions and unequal rights. It was one of the first organised strikes by working women, during which they called for a shorter work day and decent wages.
When I was a student of art history in the Seventies, we studied about artists through the ages but there was never any mention of women artists, and I wondered why. Was it because art books were written by men? And, therefore, resulted in a conscious erasure of the female presence?
To come to a fundamental question, what does it mean to be a woman artist? Does it indicate women in general, or does it suggest a group of women who are holding a certain political position within an artistic framework? I personally find it difficult to align gender with the creative impulse. This somehow seems to suggest a certain kind of ghettoisation. The contemporary woman artist would like to see herself as an artist and human being rather than her work being a representation of her gender.
But flash forward to the present days of social media, and suddenly women acquire visibility. Initially, their entry was silent and came without any fanfare. Why is it that it took so long to be discerned? Is it because women were not financially independent; or intellectually free? Perhaps they failed because they were denied the comprehensive worldly experiences required to become an artist? I don’t really know. We can blame patriarchy, domestic chores, raising children, but even within the limits of these possibilities in the past, women as artists took a long time to find their voice.
In the arts, especially in the performing arts, until the turn of the 19th century, most representations of women were constructed by men. These were male ideas of women, based on their concept of ‘the feminine’. The intended audiences were indeed men, and thus confirmed their views about how women should be seen. Women were meant to be objects to be looked at and sexually admired. Their presence, especially in the performing arts, was one of mere artifice, whose only function was to capture the audience’s gaze.
Represented as goddesses, or middle-class housewives, their presence on stage was formulated through an idealised version of what constituted a woman. Either in the role of Shakuntala (in Kalidas’ play written in the 4th century CE) or Vasantsena (the main protagonist from the play ‘Mrcchakatika’ by Shudrak, 2nd century BCE), women traditionally enacted their roles keeping in mind the ideals of classicism. That is the pursuit of beauty. An erotic enactment of these archetypical roles was the only blueprint available to the director and actor. This through the voluptuous images of classical beauties as gathered from temple sculptures, of goddesses and dancers, as well as the kitschy version of the coy and demure ‘ideal woman’ through the popular calendar art. These became the visual iconography through which the classical characters were depicted on stage.
When women entered this profession in the early ’50s and ’60s, the prototypes that existed before them became, inadvertently, their reference points. Women, in the initial stages, used similar story-telling techniques and aesthetics codes that already existed. While reflecting on the work done by a few women artists during that period, what is noticeable is that even while functioning within the paradigms that existed, they sought their own aesthetics, worldview and ways of working.
The word ‘director’ had a male resonance and seemed to suggest male authority, and because of that, acting became the obvious career choice for women. In the past, if you were poor but pretty, or came from a family of dancers, musicians, or if you were hard-done-by with no useful skills, then performance arts were an alternative to penury. Even though some of the women left their mark on the professional stage, they never came into positions of power. They were restricted by the blatant prejudice of not allowing women any say in the decision-making process.
Women artists were completely disenfranchised in the hierarchy of the power structures in the performance arts. Defined this way by the society that exploited their charm, but confined them to a marginalised status, women were robbed of their own agency throughout art history.
In ancient times, the Devadasis or Nagarvadhus were the repositories of classical arts. These women were extremely accomplished and had mastered the art of dancing, acting and music. Despite the nature of their profession, they were never equated with the common prostitute. It is also documented that most processions, religious or social, had the courtesan or the Nagarvadhus (“bride of the city”) lead the procession in the village. This tradition was adhered to in some parts of ancient India, and women competed to win the title of a Nagarvadhu. The most beautiful woman was chosen and was respected like a goddess, for that evening. A Nagarvadhu’s price for a single night’s dance was expensive and only within the reach of the super-rich — the kings, the princes, the lords. In a rudimentary form, they still exist in some parts of India.
Marked as ‘dancing girls’, a nomenclature evocative of the characteristics of the dual role of being both an entertainer and a courtesan, the dancing girls or actresses held the contradictory position of privilege and derision in Indian society. But somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, the reviled female performer was transformed into a ubiquitous symbol of Indian national culture. The melodious voice of MS Subbalakshmi (1916-2004) that charmed the entire nation as well as Prime Minster Nehru, validated their status as being an intrinsic part of our intangible heritage. The iconic performance by film actress Nargis (1929-1981) in ‘Mother India’ epitomised concepts of virtue, justice and honour, which elevated the status of actors and shifted them from the margins into a central position. These representations carefully balanced glamour with propriety, and helped in changing attitudes and perceptions of the performing female artist.
This was not a simple process of easy acceptance but a result of a complicated and tedious form of negotiation, wherein the performer’s status and image had been reworked to include appropriate signs of respectability and Indianness.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) refers to women writers who, despite the success of their work, did not have proper or complete freedom because they wrote behind male pseudonyms and, therefore, lost their identity. One such writer was George Eliot (1819-1880), or Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist, poet and journalist who wrote behind a male name to try and escape the stereotype that women can only write inconsequential romance novels.
But, finally, the need for subterfuge is over and women are being recognised as artists free from any gender labelling.
I don’t think women set out to be different, but it was the urge to tell their stories in their own particular way that acquired visibility.
The real change was noticed in the choice of subject matter: large events and the spectacular were replaced by the quotidian. Plays with epic dimensions were replaced by the poetics of the everyday. Their domestic world became the leitmotif of their imagination. The bubbling of oil, chopping and cutting of vegetables, hens running in the courtyard, washing of clothes, mundane chores, transformed and made ‘anew’. The humdrum aspects of life were equated with climactic events usually associated with high drama. Utilitarian objects transformed into images and images into metaphors.
— The writer is a theatre director based in Chandigarh
