‘Nuff
said. The following piece shall not cater to your ridiculing or glorifying cults
of belief. Rather, this piece shall scratch open the dogmatic morality of lynch
mob and let you sniff some of its pungent hot-air! A Lynch Mob, feasting on
herd mentality has been hinted at beautifully(sic) in a recent newspaper headline:
“Why Humans Go Mad in Herds”[1]. Even though the news
article laments the stoically pathetic situation of Pakistan’s politics, its
universal brilliance lies in quoting couple of examples from Psychology
experiments, testing the effects of popular opinion, however irrational and
flawed, upon rational calculated individual thought. The article goes on to
state that, “Men go mad in herds, but recover their sanity one by one”. It ends
with a hope that de-individuated beliefs and actions can be somehow countered.
But how can “one” lynch the lynch mob? This piece feels no shame in taking the
reader trekking after its own tail.
They are all around.
The
Lynch mob can be easily characterized, at least if speaking hypothetically. First
of all, they surround you and me all the time. They infiltrate their opinions
effortlessly and thus are infectious. They grow by their gifts of rehearsed
oration, ritualized acts and some charisma to gel it all together. All of it
does seem obvious but what spurts in confusions is their affect, their
collective sentiment or emotionality. They camouflage themselves as harmless
cockroaches but can soon turn into blood thirsty mutant zombies.
They
seem to function not from their hearts, but from their stomachs. If heart is
the keeper of sensitivity, it is the stomach and the bowels that house
sentimentality, perhaps. The Lynch mob thinks from its intestines, it only
knows the hunger for excretion and elimination. And this group is of the middle
aged persons, always in majority, finally well toilet trained and at the
heights of sexual misadventures, juggling between approvals and disapprovals.
Collective sentimentality is the spine of this demographic, inevitably always
in majority. This is the mob that nourishes and nurtures the belief systems
with fervour and all the glandular bile and juices.
Beliefs
emerge and appear like an innocent damsel inviting the mob between her legs
only to bite it hard because she always wears a chastity belt with clawing
teeth. But that's not enough. Pain from being bitten is never objective. It
appears in various combinations of sadism and masochism. Beliefs breed epics
and pleasure follows suit.
Intestines v/s Chastity Belt
The
modus operandi of a Lynch mob is simple. It will gobble up the damsel as and
when it bites it. Keep her in the intestines for a while and then excrete it
from the system. How many of us have dared to talk about the Lynch monster
itself and not the metaphorical damsel. The lynch mob has no face; it
perpetuates itself as harmlessly as meme trolling jokesters even. How many of
us continue to shame Radhe Maa on either obscenity, conning religious followers
or on many other charges. How many of us have jumped into the same hamaam and
how many of us are as naked or shagging at the same time!
Source:
internet
There
are damsel systems which will not be lynched at all. Damsel systems like Behen
Priti or the famed hotheaded alleged criminal Sadhvi Pragya who rides a
motorbike sporting a masculine bob-cut are spared. Lauded either for their
ruthless masculine violence yielding phallic authority or their submissive
motherly ascetic asexualized bodies, they are accepted, appreciated and
digested well. Raudra, Veera, Krodha are the rassa that seem to compliment the
bile and peptic juices in our sentimental intestines. But what about the spring
of Shringaar rassa in our damsel?
From A Wife to a “Maa”
When
Sukhwinder Kaur decided to deepen the blood red of her lipstick, lengthen the
tilak in the middle of her forehead, and adorn complete ‘sherawali ma-red’
designer costumes, she had moved beyond the dead confines of her marriage with
a good for nothing husband. She had decided to abandon her job as a small time
tailor following her calling as a spiritual guru. An ardent theist, much like
the lead protagonist in Satyajit Ray's Devi[2], she believed herself to
be the live incarnate of holy Goddess. In much lauded Devi, the young docile
bride is all of a sudden proclaimed as the holy goddess herself. She is taken
aback at first but soon realizes that in her very submission lies her power.
Sukhwinder Kaur’s self-realization dawned and she found her niche in adorning
the Red of Shringaara, desire, love instead of the celibate Saffron. Thus
became Radha Maa. Thus was born Radha Maa, the fruit of a sensitive heart, not
the sentimental poop of intestines.
Source:
internet
The
performance angle or the abhinaya of Radhe Maa’s “darshans”, divine presence,
so to say, is spectacularly playful. Unlike any other spiritual Guru or
God-people she seems incapable of flaunting the gift of gab, or the skill of
oratory. She lacks the craft of vaachik abhinaya, even though she speaks very
little with an extremely ordinary voice and content. Also, unlike our charismatic leaders, in politics
and otherwise, she does not go on to boast of her gendered prowess, or
shamelessly rattle out the digits constituting her vital-stats! However, there
is humongous amount of cosmetic make-up, highlighting her red and accessories
that work over time to make her what she is. Ahaarya, or the ornamental aspect
is not new to her or to her followers. All goddesses have been imagined and adorned
with finest and most valued ornaments always. Red is unflinchingly the colour
of her godliness and profound femininity that irrevocably is teamed well with
her spiritual name – ‘Radha’ the eternal beloved of Krishna, the undisputed
cauldron of Shringar, love and desire. But the most important and inevitable
aspect is her aangik abhinaya, where she breaks into dance in spells of utter
devotion. She swirls non stop like a dervish all in red and upon feeling giddy,
she likes being lifted in the arms of her devotees, both males and females.
With a youthful face, well powdered and a fairy wand like miniature trident in
her hands, she is a picture of adoration. Who am i or any bigoted atheist to
tell you not enjoy the sight of such beautiful spectacle?
The
god fearing lynch mob is now scandalized because it has been bitten hard not
only by her permissive demeanor allowing her devotees to plant a peck on her
cheek or to lift her in arms, but most ghastly by the revelation of her another
avatar. She appears to love donning short and tight skirts and pose in them provocatively.
To add the cherry to this icing, there are dowry harassment charges lodged
against her, to which she denies vehemently. However, the hot topic of debate in
popular media circles around her obscene pictures, and mostly over look the
latter charges. There are copious chances that this behavior again gets broken
down into the sentimentality of our intestines and may result in a legal
decision influenced by popular opinion and not just on evidences.
Whose Damsel? Whose System?
Then
again this piece is not debating who is innocent and who is not, whose belief
is true and whose not. The Damsel Systems are our own creation. The journey of
Sukhwinder Kaur to Radhe Maa has to be closely studied to follow the process of
cult formation. Unlike most popular Hindu baba’s, she does not have a criminal
background, and has not sexually molested young children or adult men or women.
She has very much played her character of “pure and pious” god-fearing woman as
has been enshrined in the so called meta-religion of Hinduism. She is one of
our own embodiments of the larger than life godly ‘saas-bahu’ divas we love to
hate and adore, day in and day out. Whose
is the greater con? Ekta Kapoor’s or Radhe Maa’s? Where and how can you
pin-point among the both?
Here,
I am not to follow suit with the Lynch mob but to astound its very own senses, and
to point out where in our guts the Art lurks. Art lurks in nodes and rhizomes,
in random subversive occurrences. Radhe Maa had been lurking too. She has revealed
the chastity belt under her short tight red skirt and the mob is ready to lynch
her like a rabid dog. Sometimes she appears lost in her ecstatic childish dance
in her garden or swirling and meaning serious business in her durbar. Sometimes
she also comes across as possibly drugged and at loss of control. Drugged on
herself, on substances, by knowledge or by being duped? One cannot say since
she has by now become an institution with more people at helm. At moments, she
appears almost as an artist, subverting all the systems of beliefs and
god-people on its naked head.
Duchamp’s Radha
Marcel
Duchamp’s mightily famed work called “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors,
Even”, also known as “The Large Glass” is one intricate artwork whose mention
here is irreplaceable. Apart from its very apt and fitting title, the artwork
is challenging in its purported functioning and interpretation. Readers of Duchamp’s
work say that the title is “a tease, purposely salacious, sensationalistic and
misleading even”[3]. Expert readers of this work expound that
Duchamp imagined this as an impossibility of grasping artistic critique by
placing the same in a highly structural system. The physics here is working on
so many levels, not only mechanical but also on micro and macro social systems.
Perhaps
Duchamp knew of its value as a literal prototype too well. The systems of control
in his work are named as Amorous Pursuit (that rests with the Bride); Capillary
tubes, The Fate Machine, Chocolate Grinder, the big Scissors, Mandala and
Eyewitnesses. All of the latter constitute the bachelors of the Bride. Between
the Bride and the Bachelors lies a ‘Horizon’, which Duchamp explains is the
garment or the threshold of the Bride. It is rather interesting how the
‘Horizon of contention’ with Radhe Maa’s Bachelors too is the very choice of
her garments and her outlook.
One
would realize slowly that the genius of this work lies in its structural
specifications and the naming of the units. Although diagrammatic and well
referenced with handy notes, It is fixed in its functions. Yet the catch is in
the event of darting bachelor’s “shots” across the ‘Horizon’ towards the Bride.
This event is explained as being random and haphazard, thanks to the giant
scissors, but capable of drilling a hole in the seemingly objective mechanized world of beliefs we live in, the Bride, the damsel systems, etc.
Moreover,
Duchamp also includes the mention of Bride’s divine Halo representing all of
what she dreams and thinks of, all her desires and all her fears and all her
aspirations. Radhe Maa’s halo is present but kept unknown and unseen, unknown
because we chose to not know of her desires, her dreams and her fears, Unseen
because we refuse to see who is behind the making of her stature. Who was the
person behind the camera while Sukhwinder Kaur got her pictures shot? The
intestines are truly overworked!
Witch-hunt revisited
The
hysteric mob shall not rest it’s entrails until it has eliminated the bride,
the witch the damsel out of the system. The insecurity develops because the
projected image of a god-woman cannot be allowed to be sexual, neither submissively
nor overtly. The god-woman as such is not a threat, but her random,
uncontrolled, ambiguous sexuality is. The commoner’s rationality is baffled by
the ambiguity in damsel systems and this moral-hysteria drives the lynch mob on
witch hunt. The dowry case leveled against Radhe Maa, the decision on which
remains to be seen, is a self justifying pedestal on which the which-hunting
mob and it’s righteous morality stands. The popular media calls her a
“self-styled god-woman”, which she rightly is. Sadly, there is nothing self-styled
about our finger-pointing and fisting moralists, both religious believers and
radical atheists, who are too busy contesting for the lynch fest bandwagon.
