From Goddess to Pin-Up
Icons of Femininity in Indian
Calendar Art

Curated by
Patricia Uberoi and Pooja Sood

This exhibition presents a sociologist's-eye view of a rather neglected genre of Indian popular culture, 'calendar art', focusing in particular on the representation of women.

Holding such an exhibition is obviously a political gesture in the sense that it aspires to bring into the art gallery decorative and ritual objects of mass production and consumption, without pausing to ask whether these objects can legitimately be viewed as 'art'. And it is a feminist gesture because it seeks not only to present, but also to critically interrogate, the imagery that these calendars offer. In this interrogation one needs to consider the distinctive history of the medium as a product of the Anglo-Indian colonial encounter, its present location in an economy of increasingly globalised images where tradition is also seeking to reassert itself, its religious, decorative and product-promotional functions in everyday life, its cognitive, aesthetic and stylistic interrelationship with other contemporary media (cinema, TV, photography, advertising, billboards, cut-outs, pageants, electioneering iconography, comic books, pop music and video culture, etc.), and its distinctive mode of production and distribution. All these are factors relevant to interpreting the message that this medium ultimately purveys and the images of Indian womanhood that it projects. Sellers of calendar art characteristically classify their wares into four main types: the dharmic or religious icons, which serve as objects of devotion and worship; patriotic calendars, celebrating national heroes, political leaders and patriotic themes; the 'filmi' calendars, pin-ups of beauties, film-stars and sports-stars; and 'sceneries', decorative pieces without human figures that can nonetheless be recycled as symbolically condensed backdrops for divine or human activities. There are also pictures of bonny babies and precocious children, which seem to be perennially in demand, and modern-style 'posters', aimed at the teenage market, many of them unabashedly plagiarised from foreign models. Encompassed within the same medium, subject to the same aesthetic, produced through the same processes and distributed and marketed through the same channels, this genre is defined both by its multiplicity of forms and functions, and by their interpenetration at the level of the symbolic.

Images of women feature very prominently in the archive of calendar art -- whether in the religious calendars, as goddesses, in the patriotic calendars, as representatives of community and nation, or in the 'filmi' calendars as pin-ups and objects of desire. Despite these distinct types and functions, however, there is also a sense in which each type evokes the others in a complex interplay and continuum of feminine imagery. Take, for instance, the calendar which we have chosen to represent this exhibition. Purchased in north India in the mid-70s, it belongs in a sub-series of images of 'peasant' or 'peasant-tribal' women, expressing at once the innocence and the bountifulness of rural life. (The theme has been prominent in popular cinema, too.) The calendar is dominated by a curvaceous female figure, holding aloft in one hand a sickle, and in the other, cut stalks of grain. Our beauty is, of course, a pin-up, frontally constructed as an object of the male gaze, which she modestly but unflinchingly returns. Her sari pallu has fallen from her shoulders to reveal a full bosom and rounded belly, the curves of hips and thighs accentuated by the folds of her garments.

As an object of male desire, the background against which this figure is rather inappositely set might appear coincidental, irrelevant, opportunistic: just a backdrop for the display of the female form. But the fact that the village 'belle' is a consistent type through the archive of calendar art commends a closer attention to its detail. In the foreground we see a basket of fruit and harvest produce, a huge pile of coarse grain pods, some sheaves of grain and two neat bags conveniently labelled 'Fertiliser'. Further back is a series of lovingly constructed scenes of agricultural activity, and in the distance a cluster of neat village houses, framed against snowy peaks and a luminous sky. Judging by her features, hairstyle and jewellery, our peasant girl is a recognisably south Indian beauty of the Vyjantimala type. The southern ambience is further affirmed by the basket of Pongal festival tribute and the style of costume (some informants identify it as 'Maharashtrian'). But as one's sight moves upward, one finds oneself in the expansive fields of Green Revolution Punjab, signified by a tractor and conspicuously electrified tube-well, the snow-capped Himalayas rising behind. This background not only maps a sacred territorial space (from the Himalayas to Kanya Kumari, as it were), but also charts the annual cycle of agricultural seasons -- from ploughing to reaping, threshing and winnowing, to the celebration of the harvest's bounty. In this idyllic rural scene, the old and the new merge seamlessly together: the introduction of fertilizer, tractor, electricity and tube-well does not seem to rupture the serenity of rural life but rather enhances its pleasures and augments its plenitude. The calendar pin-up who presides over this imagined scene of new India's rural prosperity is not simply an object of desire, but simultaneously an evocation of the auspiciousness of the Goddess Lakshmi, symbol of prosperity and fertility, whose image is often associated with sheaves of grain.

This single calendar, then, discloses several of the features of the calendar art representation of women that this exhibition seeks to highlight. The first is the complex interplay of sacred and secular imagery which we have sought to illustrate in the organization of exhibits by simply juxtaposing images from these otherwise separate domains. Secondly, as is obvious, is the process of 'objectification', whereby the woman's body is made available to the male gaze as an object of visual attraction. In the case of our village belle, as with other 'genre' types (fisher-girl, tribal beauty, etc.), this appropriation entails also a refashioning of the figure to bourgeois, perhaps also to north Indian, tastes; or else a theatrical 'othering' of the woman as seductress or 'vamp', with all the insignia of that wicked role. Thirdly is the process that I have referred to elsewhere as 'iconicization'. Here, the woman stands as an icon of the community and nation -- in this case a nation rooted in the rustic simplicity and innocence of its villages, but now moving forward resolutely along the road of green revolution. Additionally one sees in many calendars, if not especially in this one, a distinct 'commodification' of women by virtue of their consistent association with a range of consumer products. Many of these are the typical dowry items that go along with a woman in marriage. At this point, calendar art melds imperceptibly with the medium of commercial advertising in which the woman is deployed to sell not only the product, but also herself.

While emphasising this interplay of sacred and secular in the symbolic construction of the figure of the woman, this exhibition also seeks to highlight the multiplicity of feminine imagery that the Hindu pantheon and India's plural religious traditions provide. There is thus no single archetype of the feminine, but a range of archetypes with contrasting roles and attributes, some of which appear as oppressive and constraining, others as enabling and empowering. Here, anthropological insights into the conceptual structure of the Hindu pantheon are useful in suggesting some of the operative dimensions of contrast: between consort goddesses or forms of the goddess, linked with and subordinate to a male godhead, and goddesses who stand alone, autonomous; between benign and benevolent mother figures and the fierce mother goddesses who can be both protective and destructive; between the auspicious goddesses, conferring blessing, and the ferocious female forms that demand appeasement. These divine exemplars provide contrasting models for mortal women: the faithful wife, the auspicious suhagin (married woman), the gentle and loving mother, the heroic and protective mother, the seductress and the vamp. Transcending the divide of sacred and secular, the calendar images authorize the subordination of wives to husbands (the Sati-Savitri image), the passion of divine and mortal lovers, the ecstasy of the devotee, the vulnerability of the male to female seductiveness, the sacred and asexual bond between brother and sister, the fusion and unity of the sexes in a higher form of the godhead. And every calendar year produces a lurid and graphic portrayal of the wages of sin and passion, weighed on the scales of divine justice.

Foregrounding women -- women as goddesses and goddess-like women -- these calendars are objects both of worship and of decoration. They express the widespread popular nostalgia for an idyllic imagined past, the quest for an authentic national identity, the engagement with the power of a globalised economy, and the resistance of an older tradition, forever renewed and re-imagined for present times through the iconic female form.

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