I wondered why Indian people cannot look at these paintings, given that there are such beautiful erotic nude sculptures in India . . .. And consider the Lambadas (the tribal class) that would pose for us in the art schools during our practice of sketching. They would walk around with backless blouses and showed no inhibitions. They would take baths in a public pond quite naked and led me to wonder whether it is the middle-class Indians educated in British tradition who had to be covered up, enclosed in taboos to talk about sex, nakedness . . . what then has happened to Kamasutra? I remember March of 1986; there was an incident that happened in Chandragutti, a village 85 kilometers from Shimoga in India, where every year, in March, men and women of all ages, in fulfillment of a vow offer naked worship to a goddess. In the river Varada they take a dip and wait to become possessed. Then they run up a hill that is located four or five kilometers away to worship the goddess Renukamba. This ritual was held every year with no particular attention to nudity. Yet, in 1986, with the encouragement of the social welfare department of the government, young men and women belonging to the radical rationalist organizations went there to plead with these “backward caste” worshippers that nude worship was “wrong” and “inhuman.”[1] This ritual, which was now questioned, received wide media attention. Journalists with cameras and pens in hand published articles attacking what for them seemed inhuman, immoral, superstitious practice. But they also aimed at increasing their circulation with nude pictures, suggesting that the population was, and the mass media were, “attracted” to this very nudity despite all moralizations. After all, even the moralizations that attempt to suppress this “nudity” are completely engaged in the attraction of this nudity.

Even the British style educated journalists and public were focusing on something which, purportedly, they were trying to hide, avoid, and be ashamed of. The encounter between the illiterate believers and the educated middle-class rationalists shows ruthlessly the rational modernization of India forgetting something positive in those nude worshippers, a feeling of cosmic awe that unfortunately we have lost. I must point out that the body without clothing is a way of being connected with the cosmos without barriers, without distance, where the “wind of cosmic forces” moves one to perform a cosmic dance, a ritual, a way of becoming dissolved in the ALL. A woman’s naked body is an erotic object for the modern radical Indian. It is neither aesthetic nor erotic for the worshippers. For the worshippers, the naked body is not objectified. Rather it is sacred for them, in the sense that one is a direct participant in the profundity of the play, of the freedom from self and other, a total positivity without bounding taboos, social constrictions, and metaphysically depicted, self-enclosed bodies. The worshippers were not ashamed of their nudity; they walked dressed in space, full of cosmic glory, they seemed like goddesses with flower garlands round their necks whose gestures sent favors and erotic ardor across the face and posture of all events. The feminist radicals, anthropologists, activists, the rationalists did not realize in their modern emancipatory enlightenment that these processionists were of “both sexes including children and that they walked naked not anywhere and not any time, but only in Chandragutti on a particular day rehearsing an event of the timeless past of India reverentially.” [2]

These two incidents played a great role in shaping my writing and my art creations. I began to reflect how the colonized began to be “dressed” in the political and moral rhetoric of the colonizer while attempting to dress down the cosmic aesthetic experience to a level of alluring, exotic, and solicitous bodies. My artwork, and writing captured the post-colonial India and how we have become more Victorian than the British and often portraying the hypocritical moralistic decency that we live in this worldly world. I questioned the taboos, the actions, the customs, that the Indians believed in or are made to believe in claiming that they are the Hindu traditional values.

Featuring an insight into gender, sex, identity, exoticism, judgments, values and contemporary culture, the prose, the art stages sneak-attacks on clichéd notions of colonizers and the colonized, deploys forays filled with exotica, devastating grace, and savvy sense of acuity and wit. Who speaks? Who is silent? Who is seen? What is seen? How is it seen? These questions are raised folding unfolding my work, portraying a passionate weaving of erotica, exotica, Otherness, bodyness, identity, sensuality, gender bending, lust, values, judgments, control, submission, possession, jealously, race, age, economics and politics, heightened by emotional and personal response. The artwork layers and discusses the challenges, ways of social values and the struggle of in-betweenity. The words and images narrate a vivid commentary, my voice augmenting a personal tone to heighten the experience, engaging the reader critically and emotionally, thoughtfully clarifying and interpreting the insatiable post-colonial walk.

The artworks that I have included here are from different phases of my life, growing up, the experiences, the various queries that I have faced, so the style has changed over the course of years. I have experimented with varied mediums, styles when I was studying in the art school in India. After my master’s degree in art history & criticism, working in India as a professor was a challenge in a patriarchal world of gender biases, and one can note my artworks portrayed this masculine power of hierarchy. Then when I arrived in the US, on a Fulbright, (and later continued on with my doctorate degree), landing here there was another language of the OTHER which I faced and I still do, even now working as a Professor of Art History, the scars still linger, the worldly world has not changed, the journey I am constantly engaged in, is the struggle of in-betweenity, treading, walking the post-colonial road.

I fear for my son
I am raising a brown child
He is only 11
What is his future?
How do I explain hate crimes?
To a 11-year-old
I thought he was growing up in a world of all colors
And every color matters
But he is growing up in a world of rage
When my son was asked is he American
He replied yes I was born here
But they said your skin is not white
My son who is brown
“Will be seen as suspect as foreign”*
“Just as black bodies are still seen as criminals”*
“Brown bodies are seen as illegal”*
“Trans bodies are seen as immoral”*
“Indigenous bodies are still seen as savage”*
“Women’s bodies still seen as a property to be used”*
I thought the colonial incarceration of black and white was erased
I still stand tall and hope the future is not dark
And I tell my son, yes you are born here, you are an American
There are many colors in America and every color matters as life is colorful.