Gender roles carved in stone
This hyper- visibility of women in ancient art does not, in Bawa’s analysis, imply an equality of power but rather an insidious visual rhetoric in which ‘ unequal gender relationships are fixed and legitimised’
Art historian Seema Bawa’s coffee- table book Gods, Men and Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Indian Art , is a wonderfully detailed overview of the sculptural art of the Indian subcontinent from 181 BCE to CE 320, the time of the Kushana, Satavahana and Sungha dynasties in India. Photographic plates illustrate almost all of the sculptural work Bawa refers to, and there is exhaustive textual analysis of each of these. Bawa writes that she has chosen to focus on these five centuries because they were a period of turmoil, after the end of the Mauryan empire, in which competing ideologies about gender, and the archetypes of religious iconography were constructed and fixed: a period during which texts such as the Kamasutra, the Bhagavad Gita , and the Manusmriti were written. Given recent public debates around these issues in India, this is a timely work: it traces a continuum of patriarchy and misogyny in Indian society over two millennia.
In this study, Bawa is necessarily reading into the silences that all art historians must grapple with — Who or what was being sculpted and why? Who was looking at this art, who was paying for it? The answers are speculative: we can never know for sure, and any study must inevitably reflect the politics of its time. Bawa argues that no analysis is politically neutral, and locates her own study within feminist politics, invoking Judith Butler’s analysis of gender as construction and performance, rather than corresponding to biological sex at birth. There are nods to other — by now — classic readings, such as John Berger’s analysis of the male gaze being directed at the female body. Of her own work, Bawa writes it is “a socio- cultural study of histories of power, of patriarchal dominance inscribed on monuments and sculptures”.
At first glance it appears that the book is hampered by an overwhelming presence of the female body in the sculptural art, even though she writes that “it is not enough to study female/ femininity in isolation; rather one should view these in comparison to the male/ masculinity, because gender identities are relational”. Yet her book focuses mostly on the female form: the essential, reproductive woman, mother figures, lovers, married couples, wives, nuns, prostitutes, yaksis, apsaras and ogresses.
However, this dominance of the female turns out to be not a bias of the author but a statistical fact. Everywhere you might look, in temples, on gateways, pillars and stupas, one sees — mostly — women in various poses of shringara, eroticism or deity. This hyper- visibility of women in ancient art does not, in Bawa’s analysis, imply an equality of power but rather an insidious visual rhetoric in which “unequal gender relationships are fixed and legitimised”. The female form is connected to an ornamented, sexualised and reproductive body, while the male represents the less physical and “higher” virtues of intellect and spirit. To analyse the relative nudity of the female body represented, the eroticisation of feminine signifiers like breasts and pudenda, the posture, the ornamentation depicted and so on, Bawa turns to contemporary texts of the period, such as the Natyasastra, the kavyas of Asvaghosa, and the Therigathas ( psalms by Buddhist nuns). She posits that these texts and the visual arts belonged to a common cultural matrix, and unsurprisingly finds a thread of patriarchy and misogyny running through texts from different Hindu, Jain and Buddhist traditions.
So we see that Mayadevi, Buddha’s birth mother — being elevated to the status of respectable motherhood — is well clad, and seldom depicted in an eroticised way in Buddhist art. But there are innumerable other eroticised depictions of the feminine. The natural graces attributed to women by Natyasastra, for example, are depressingly similar to the ones still highlighted by Bollywood heroines today: woman as seductress, temptress, wanton lover; or woman as spouse, mother and goddess.
However, there has probably never been a society or culture without its marginalised renegades and transgressive personas. And it is these that add to the interest of this book, especially the chapter on depictions of women who can be called the “non- wives”: women who existed outside the structure of patriarchal society — nuns and prostitutes. In the case of nuns, Bawa points out that they have seldom been represented or shown in art, even though there are surviving records of them having commissioned it.
Their near total erasure from visual history is worthy of a study in itself, considering how prolific Buddhist art is. In this absence one can read an entire history of misogynistic Buddhism, starting from the moment that Buddha refused to let his foster mother into the sangha, and the eventual low status of nuns in the sangha. In the same chapter Bawa traces a fascinating conflation between the figure of the nun and the prostitute. Many prostitutes eventually became nuns, and it is these who do find visual representation, if for no other reason than to emphasise how virtuous and ascetic males resisted them.
There are also echoes of ancient and primitive animist religions in the chapter on yaksis: these are beautiful but relatively less eroticised female representations of dryadic spirits, and in looking at the their photographs one can see another kind of powerful female representation, one that’s not entirely subsumed by the hierarchies of a patriarchal religion.
However, given that Bawa is aware of the power of the marginal, her not including even a brief chapter on the multiplicity of sexualities and genders is disappointing. She offers a caveat in her introduction, writing that her work “does not take into account issues related to alternative sexualities such as trans- sexuality and androgyny, which can largely be seen within philosophical and theological discourse rather than being based on socio- sexual constructs.” Given our contemporary contexts, it would be hard to argue that trans- sexuality and androgyny do not have a socio- sexual life, and I found the omission of these identities from this study an oversight.
In conclusion, however, this book should prove to be an invaluable visual resource for anyone interested in issues of gender and sexuality in India, not only scholars of the field. While the tone of the prose is sometimes a little too dry and academic for lay readers, the encyclopaedic and well- mounted illustrations are delightful in themselves and an aid to understanding. It is especially enlightening for us in India today to look closely at a period in which narrow strictures began to dictate ideas about gender and sexuality in our society.