A pious Hindu lady, Amita Sachdeva, a Delhi-based advocate has kicked up a fuss by demanding an FIR against Delhi Art Gallery for displaying paintings of the famous artist, the late M.F. Husain. She found these paintings ‘offensive’ and accused him of ‘deliberate and malicious acts’, intended to outrage religious feelings.’ (Re: THE HINDU, January 24, 2025). Husain’s fault was that he had depicted Hindu deities in the nude. One of his sketches showed the goddess Saraswati lifting up her bare breasts. Now, may I remind Amita Sachdeva of the opening Sanskrit verse that is recited by Hindu devotees while praying to the Goddess of Learning , Saraswati ? It begins with these lines celebrating the beauty of the pair of her well-rounded heavy breasts :
“Om, …shubhrakantih, kucha bharono mitangi…” (fair and slim, with the weight of your breasts ..)
In fact, nudity had never been an object of shame or despise in Hindu scriptures and practices. To start with, both Hindu men and women continue to worship the god Shiva represented in the form of a naked erect phallus, known as Shivaling ! (As an aside, may I raise the query – why is the object of worship represented in the shape of an erectile male limb that is otherwise associated with love-making and child-breeding ? Is it to draw more and more devotees who would be fascinated by its erotic associations that are deeply embedded in their psyche ? ) Similarly, the Shakta devotees among Hindus, worship a stone image representing the female organ – known as Yoni. Then again, the goddess Kali is shown as a naked woman with dangling breasts trampling upon the supine Shiva, with one foot pressed upon his dormant penis ! This image of hers adorns every festive exhibition in Bengal during Kali Puja – the time when she is worshiped with a fanfare of cracker outbursts.
The famous sculptures that adorn the ancient temples in Konarak, Puri and Khajuraho among other sites, depict pairs of Hindu gods and goddesses (like Shiva and Durga, or Krishna and Radha) frolicking in reckless abandon without clothes. The nude body – both male and female – for ages had been celebrated all over the world as an icon of aesthetic admiration and religious worship. The ancient Greek sculptures of the gods Apollo and David, the later European Renaissance paintings of the nude Venus by Raphael and Leonardo Da Vinci are eternal tributes to the beauty of the human body.
But then, the present disciples of the ancient Hindu gods and goddesses want to sanitize them by covering them up with the clothes of Hindutva, tailored and coloured in saffron by the Hindu Sangh Parivar.
Gandhi’s attitude towards nudity and practice of brahmacharya
However, while condemning the Parivar’s recent attempts to censor free expression of eroticism (by modern artists like M.F. Husain ), we should also remember that such censorship has a long tradition – which can be traced back even to Gandhi’s similar puritanical campaign. In fact, today’s Parivar vigilantes can claim to derive inspiration from Gandhi, who at one time wanted the cementing up of the artistic erotic sculptures in Hindu temples of Puri in Orissa, which he described as “embarrassing and indecent” on the eve of a session of the Indian National Congress that was going to be held there. It was only because of the intervention of the famous artist Nandalal Bose, that such an horrendous act was prevented.
As a reminder, let me recount Gandhi’s personal attitude towards nudity. All through his political career he moved around in a semi-nude attire – a langoti (underwear) to cover his nether parts while leaving bare the other parts of his body, occasionally wrapped by a khadi scarf. By adopting this sartorial style he wanted to project himself as a representative of the Indian poor who were compelled to wear it due to their poverty which barred them access to better clothing. Gandhi can thus be described as a political transvestite, masquerading as a representative of the poor by dressing up himself in a semi-nude attire, while at the same time, without sharing their distressful diurnal life, he spent days and nights in comfortable shelters provided by Indian industrialists. In fact, it was not in a poor slum, but in the well-protected premises of one such industrial patron who hosted him there, Birla House in New Delhi that Gandhi was assassinated. Is it not an ironical twist to the end of the life of a self-proclaimed leader of the poor ?
In his personal life, towards the end, his treatment of nudity underwent a curious change. He used nudity as an experiment which he called prayog. He asked his women pupils to share his bed in the nude, to ascertain if any sexual feeling had been evoked within himself or his female companions. He wanted to test the purity of his own brahmacharya – to find out whether he had been able totally purge himself of sexual desires. One of his objects of experiment was his niece Manu Gandhi. Objecting to such experimental practices, Gandhi’s long-time secretary, the famous anthropologist Nirmal Kumar Bose expressed his misgivings raising an important issue in a letter that he wrote to his two friends Nathji, Swami Anand and Kedar : “Whatever may be the value of the prayog in Gandhiji’s own case, it does leave a mark of injury on the personality of the others who are not of the same moral stature as he himself is, and for whom sharing in Gandhiji’s experiment is no spiritual necessity.” Patna. 16-3-1947. (Re: Nirmal Kumar Bose – MY DAYS WITH GANDHI. Pp. 150-51. Orient Longman. Hyderabad. 1974).
While whole-heartedly agreeing with Nirmal Bose’s critique of Gandhi’s selfish behavior at the cost of others, let me also try to explain that behavior by adding another dimension – the age factor. Gandhi at that time was 78 years old – the age when men usually undergo a decline in libidinous capacities. On a facile and blasphemous note, may I sp.eculate that the Mahatma during those experiments of prayag, was perhaps trying to find out whether he was still capable of performing in bed ! After all, he was also a human being who may have wanted to escape occasionally from that prison of divinity within which he was enshrined by his followers. Thank to his age-related sexual incapacity, he could not do any harm to his grand-niece Manu Gandhi, with whom he slept in the nude. So, he made a virtue of necessity by parading that incapacity as an act of his brahmacharya !
Politics of nudity under the Narendra Modi regime
What had been hitherto kept under the wraps in the politics and administration of past hypocritical rulers (whether Congress or other parties), has now come out in the open in all its political and administrative nudity. While in the former times, skeletons of the past used to stumble out from the cupboard, now we find living leaders proudly flashing their political nudity through open bribing of voters and threats against them. Narendra Modi and his followers are shedding the old attire of `secularism’ and `socialism,’ and are engaged in a strip-tease dance to titillate the Indian masses. They are arousing their base instincts against Muslim minorities and political parties and human rights group who are opposing Modi’s naked demonstration of power.
But then, behind this public platform of Modi’s politically titillating dance performance, in his backyard there loom large stark naked figures of rising unemployment, displacement of rural people due to occupation of their lands by unscrupulous industrial houses, and of poor living conditions and inadequate shelter in the cities where these rural poor seek refuge. This contrast between Modi’s global publicity campaign projecting India as Vishwaguru on the one hand, and his pitiable performance as a Bharatguru within his domestic sphere on the other, gives an interesting dimension to the politics of nudity. When invited abroad at global fora, the Modi government’s foreign minister Jaishankar dresses up his rhetoric in the latest attire of polite diplomacy, cunningly trying to hide the numerous naked figures that loom large back in his country – widespread poverty, rising unemployment, increasing religious communal and casteist conflicts, that have drawn condemnation from international human rights organizations. Like a fashion model, Jaishankar struts across the ramps of global conferences, dancing with the stiletto heels of a foreign policy cobbled up by his guru Narendra Modi. He gets admired by his sycophants in India, while laughed at by political observers abroad.
In order to hide his failure to solve these domestic problems, Modi tries to dress up India as an attractive damsel, inviting suitors from abroad to invest here, by organizing meetings of industrialists in Delhi, where she is made to strut around. The latest attire that he has tailored for her is named Viksit Bharat (India developed), in which apparel India is walking along the ramp of global economic fashion display. But the backyard remains as naked as ever. There is a Bengali slang which sums up the paradox – `Mathaye ghomta, ponde nangta.’ (While the head is covered under an expensive veil, the arse is kept naked).
Waiting for the child to scream: `India has no clothes.’
There is an urgent need to strip the Modi regime of its glamorous attire that hides the economic and social problems that stare at us in all their stark nakedness. Watching the present situation, we are reminded of an old tale by the 19th century Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. It is about an emperor conned by two swindlers, who persuaded him to undress, and pretended to put their tailored clothes on him saying that they were invisible – a unique tailoring invention ! Thorougly convinced by their pep talk, he walked out in public view. His subjects, afraid of offending him by speaking the truth, kept on applauding him on his `new dress.’ It was only an innocent little child who laughed out, screaming: “But the emperor has no clothes !”
Here in our India, Bharat Mata has been disrobed by the Modi regime which has stripped her of all her rights and privileges, and diverted them instead to the coffers of Modi’s political and business house cronies who are dressing themselves up in the attire of unbridled power. Her children – the vast Indian masses – remain blind to her naked plight, their eyes hypnotized by Modi’s propaganda that she is attired in the robes of Viksit Bharat, which however remain invisible. We are awaiting the emergence of another child – a new generation of young Indians – to wake up the sleeping masses by shouting into their ears: “Your mother has no clothes” !
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).
