What would be your self-portrait?
A few weeks ago, my colleague and I were in conversation with an organisation working on feminist education. And the question they were discussing is what’s the future they saw — they could write, draw, or describe what it was, their dreams for the morrow. One person said she remembered an artist, Chitra Ganesh’s rendering of Sultana’s Dream, this one image, and she showed it to us. Sultana’s Dream, a zany sci-fi story, is by Begum Rokeya, and was published in 1905.
https://mag.rochester.edu/exhibitions/sultanas-dream-digital-exhibition/
It shows a woman in repose, all sorts of images cooking inside of her, and even the stars seem to be align in a way to mirror her musings. The person said that this is what her vision was for her future, and that image burrowed inside my folds, like a promise and a possibility.
A lot of people I know have Dokra statues of women reading; I do too. The first time I saw this statue, I was enchanted — a woman on a charpai in a state of utter languor with a book. That’s what I feel like when I am curled up with a novel, I thought, and every time I see her, I smile — it is as if we share a common secret. Then I discovered, a lot of people have the very same statue. Booklove is a common ‘nasha’ as Paromita Vohra described it, and the statue acts as a sort of totem of this kinship across lines.
What is it about certain kinds of art work, images and sculptures, that makes us think, this is me? A story is different — you can recognise layers and contradictions and refuse certain parts. On the other hand, a snapshot, which is what an image is or a sculpture is a certain scene from the story, and the resonance feels immediate, as if the song is the same, our harmonies teasing out different levels.
[ Random aside:
Of course, this isn’t about a static idea of the self. Are you the same person you were yesterday? Physiologically, a lot has changed; the entire bacteria in your gut have transformed. What if every time you looked at a tree, you thought of it as a different tree? (The framing of the question itself is wonky because as soon as you say ‘a tree’, you have made it static.) That’s the idea behind Borges’ story ‘Funes the Memorious’ — every time Funes sees that tree, they see a different tree, for all the leaves and branches are anew.
End of random aside]
The book that started off this question is Jennifer Higgie’s ‘The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resistance: 500 years of women’s self portraits’. Yes, it is about Western art. And in some spurt of excitement, I went ahead and bought the book, and now reading it, I keep wondering about such inadvisable spurts and what’s a good prophylactic for it. The preface was a little tiring to read; too much exposition and at times a bit banal.
The trivia is nice, though. According to Higgie, the first full figure nude self portrait of a woman in Western Art was this.
Apparently, the artist Paula was not pregnant, but she imagined herself to be. And that is intriguing, for a self-portrait, unlike a selfie can be about what could be. The selfie is a literal work of art. Of course, the placement and the angling all speak in a vocabulary of aspiration — how you wish the world to see you, and yet is rooted in what is there, here and now. In the self-portrait though, you could let loose and play with reality — an older woman cooking her dreams up or a wanderer in abandoned MRTS buildings, or someone asleep (I have always been miffed at the fact that you can never see yourself sleeping.)
ps: This choppy letter was a long-time in the making. Hope the next one is more coherent, unlike life at the moment.