| |
BOOKS
Written On The Body
The ordinary and the erotic in Chandralekha's song
of
the sixties
By Geeta Doctor
It's a dancer-poet-activist's
answer to that most persistent of questions: so what did you do in the
sixties? In the slim volume of tangential tales, Rainbow on the Roadside-Montages
of Madras, Chandralekha stands witness to her reality as a dancer. She
centres her experience on what she knows most intimately-her body-so that
when she speaks of the changes that she has noticed in the air and earth
and water of the city in which she lives, she speaks of it in terms of
what she feels with her skin, her mouth and tongue. In her dance, as in
her life, Chandralekha is instinct with a sense of the erotic.
|
|
|
|
RAINBOW
ON THE ROADSIDE
By Chandralekha
Earthworm Books
Price: Rs 200 Pages: 68
|
|
In this book of prose-pictures that she composed
when both she and the world was a more innocent place, she discovers how
the everyday can also be erotic. More importantly though, she discovers
what it means to be a woman. She choreographs the past in a series of
tightly worded vignettes that she unfurls for us through a stream of images
that dance and cavort across the page. In her brief introduction she explains
why she has chosen to reproduce a poem printed in the days when The Illustrated
Weekly of India was the only magazine read in households throughout the
country. When she tells us that the poem revolves around a servant woman
named Kamala who used to work at her house, there is already a sense of
deja vu.
It was a good time for stories of buxom belles
travelling to the big city. If they did not always end up in print on
the pages of The Illustrated Weekly, they were there on film with incandescent
images of the famous actresses of the time, Nutan or Nirupama. While artists
of the Husain vintage vigorously gave us the urban equivalent, painted
in the Soviet realist manner, Mother India meets Kamatti maiden, the inevitable
pots balanced on her head, the children on her hip. It was to be the new
India's response to the fertility goddesses of the past. Chandralekha's
narrative belongs to this era.
|
|
|
|
|
AGE OF KALI: Chandralaekha
celebrates womanhood |
There is toughness as well as an easy listening
sentimentality that fills the work. The seasons are rendered with an insistent
imagery of hunger and lust, a dry season full of fires fuelled by a dry
and desperate hunger bursting its boundaries, consuming every creature
in its wake, the Summer of Kali on the rampage once again, followed by
the rains. The floods that sweep through the landscape are lifegiving
as every poet since Meghadutam-Kumarasambhava-style has recorded.
Chandralekha differs from them in that her focus
is on the women of the slums. They too swell and surge with the ripening
tide. Their bodies fill with sap as the land does, but as Chandralekha
describes it, watching the milk flood through the breasts of Kamala, when
it was time for her to nurse her child, is not with the lustful hunger
of a patriarchal point of view but with the tenderness and awe of the
instinct that we call feminine, mother, life itself. The last few lines
sum up the lessons that Chandralekha has learnt from women like Kamala.
The image of Shakti riding triumphant astride the supine form of a man
remains the dominant note in Chandralekha's dance form. This slender book
of prose-poems celebrates the unknown women of the slums, who pointed
the way as she watched them, a long time ago.
|
|
|
Garhwal Himalaya
Ed by O.P. Kandari & O.P. Gusain
(Transmedia, Rs 1,250)
Study of the area's nature, culture and society.
|
|
Indian Agriculture
By G.S. Bhalla & Gurmail Singh
(Sage, Rs 450)
Analyses four decades of agri-development.
|
|
Forests of Kashmir
By M.A. Kawosa
(Natraj, Rs 550)
History, status and possibilities in the region.
|
|
Unheard Voices
By Harsh Mander
(Penguin, Rs 250)
The stirring lives of 20 contemporary heroes.
|
|
 Reform
of Fiscal and Economic
Policies for Growth
By S.S. Kothari
(Macmillan, Rs 495)
Studies developing countries, special
reference to India.
|
|
|
METRO TODAY
Web
Exclusives