My Recent Dreams

I saw eyes looking at me from each leaf of a tree that stood across the window of my studio. They were looking at me intently as if each eye was trying to tell me something. Astonished I got up and walked up to the window and opened it. A gentle breeze came and shook the eyes but regained their position in a moment. First, all of them looked at the left and I turned my eyes to that direction. I saw a white cat arguing with a white bearded man with a lot of balloons tied around his fingers. Then they turned their eyes from left to right and my eyes followed them. There I saw a peacock with all its feathers spread about to break into a dance. Then the eyes looked up to show me black clouds in the sky. Their downward look revealed a parched earth, which was absolutely unfamiliar to me. One by one the eyes closed. They became leaves once again. I woke up when the first drop of rain fell on my face.

I was in a metro coach. A young mother with three children entered. Seeing her and the mischief of the kids someone gave her seat. She sat. I saw her diminutive figure draped in a glittering cheap sari. The red lipstick on her lips was cheap. Everything about her was cheap except for her motherhood. She held it very proudly. Kids were making a lot of noise and moving around a steel pole. When their noise became unbearable she gave a tight slap to one of the kids. They froze in time. I averted my eyes only to see a long empty train lit in white light. Shivering I turned to see the mother and children. They were not there.

She had two faces; one over her neck and one over her belly. The faces looked identical. She was dressed up in an immaculate white sari. She spoke to me in a language which was absolutely unfamiliar to me yet I understood everything she spoke. She told me that one of my friends was on his death bed and he wanted to see me before he died. I walked behind her. I entered a hospital room where the man was breathing his last. To my shock I found he was an absolute stranger. I looked at her for misguiding me to this wretched place of disease and death. Then the belly face told me, ‘Look at him again. Can’t you see, it is you.’ And I did see myself there on the bed. I turned around to see the woman. She was gone and I was lying in the bed unable to get up.

A silent procession was coming to me. I was alone in the street. From a distance I could not see who were all in the crowd. Slowly I could see them one by one passing in front of me. They were all great people. Gandhiji, Tagore, Charlie Chaplin, Che Guvera, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosowa, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Raja Ravi Varma, Marx, Engles, Bruce Lee, Malcolm X, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Lord Shiva and many more great personalities. Then I saw people; just people. And by the end of the procession I saw a man walking and weeping. He was my father. I went to him, held his hands and joined the procession, silently.

A deserted hill in the middle of nowhere. I saw the silhouette of a man standing alone. I climbed the hill to see who he was. He was standing against the setting sun at the horizon. I walked around to see his face. He was me.

Looking at an Old Group Photo

(Photograph for illustration purpose only)

She takes out a group photo
Frozen by the flash of future

And smiles forced out by a command

They stand in a row like specimen dolls

From a vast land of imagination

A group photo is like a zoo

Of different species of animals

Yet to show the full potential of their genes;

Now they are feathered, puffed up and plump

Unseasoned by innocence

Innocence?, each one in the picture

Sends out a mocking smile

Animating themselves in a surreal turn

Can’t you see the exuding hopes

And the deepening pain in our eyes?

Decades long weathering would

Make some shine like gems

And some remain coal till

The miner called Time digs them up

From the innards of dark despair

An old group photograph is a chamber of

Uncertain possibilities; disparate desires,

A jumble of nicknames, poems and glances

Hark well, you could hear sighs and

The kisses that never left the lips

Time does not photoshop the features

Fame does not airbrush the roughness

Success does not add a pride on those cheeks

Till these animals come back one day

To defrost their wild memories, now matured and cold

Before her and my eyes, they leave one by one

From the frame of our conversations of past

And we remain, two people suddenly distanced by

The emptiness left by the young animals;

A huge wasteland of absent and forgotten people.

While Looking at a Picture

This photograph opens the flood gates of memories. The more I look at it the more it tells me how things have changed in life. How people and the surroundings have changed. I used to visit this library when I was thirteen years old. I had just given examinations for the eighth standard. In Kerala Summer vacation starts in March end and on 1^st of June schools reopen. Invariably on that day it rains. Children get wet in the first rain. Next day newspapers publish pictures of reluctant children going to school for the first time prodded by their parents and seasoned happy boys and girls getting drenched in the rain.

Friends Association Library is situated in Kollampuzha, Attingal, the nearest town from my village, Vakkom. Between the Kollampuzha river and vast paddy fields, in a strip of land there stand the ruins of Attingal Palace, Srikrishna Temple and some other old edifices. In my childhood, a portion of the palace was converted into marriage hall. We, children used to go there for the marriages of relatives. When I see that palace once in a year when I visit my village, I remember marriage feasts and sleep afternoons. We wore fresh clothes for marriages. We returned to our respective homes with stained clothes and a lemon in hand. They gifted a lemon who attended the marriages. By the time we reached home the lemons were peeled half because they said the smell of lemon prevents vomiting. Most of the kids vomited after marriage feasts. The turmoil in bellies was caused by the smell of diesel. Most of the brides also vomited while going to their bridegrooms’ houses in white ambassador cars. They vomited for the same reason and the fear of an impending night of horror.

This building stands next to the then marriage hall and a temple. Shastra Sahitya Parishad (Science and Literature Commune) used to run vacation programs for orienting children into rational thinking. This was run by young men with Marxist leanings. I was sent to attend this orientation program that year. I was happy to go because I could travel by bus all alone. There they made us read, write and debate. Daily progress was supposed to be written down in a small note book and presented to the president of the Commune. They assessed the children’s progress in rational thinking and understanding literature. I remember bearded young men taking interest in grooming us. I pursued the program diligently. The classes were held in the library hall just above the grilled auditorium that you see in the photograph. After the classes, I played with other kids in the ground in front of the auditorium.

Looking back I find an interesting aspect of Kerala’s social fabric. The classes were conducted by young Marxists who generally did not believe in god or religion. The Friends’ Association Library was functioning within the premises of the famous Kollampuzha Temple. These same men participated in organizing temple festivals. There was no conflict. They did not teach us to hate religion or god. But they taught us to think rationally. Children from different religious background attended these classes. And they all played in the temple premises. Things have changed now. People look at each other and think about religion and caste. Facebook has prompted many youngsters proudly flaunt their caste groups as surnames. But the hope is not yet lost. I still hear news of children from Muslim families presenting Hindu devotional songs in temple festivals and Hindus participating in Muslim and Christian functions. A ray of hope is still there. But disturbing elements of caste and religion have already started tearing off the erstwhile egalitarian social fabric of Kerala. Technology and material progress have helped us to divide further into small islands of selfishness.

All Indian Women Should Wear Purdah

Here I am going to play the devil’s advocate. I want India to adopt a two tier sartorial code for all women, especially for those women who live in the mainland where global warming has facilitated the rise in day time temperature. During the summer months those women want to wear purdah should adopt that dress code irrespective of their religious beliefs. And during the clement climes of winter months they should wear whichever dress they want to wear. This sartorial adoption of women could rest two polemical issues; one, the demands of the cosmetic industry as well as popular culture on women to keep their skins fair for looking good in general and for male consumption in particular. Two, the complete covering of women’s body by purdahs would help our moral police to retire forever. With such a dress code in place in both the climatic conditions women’s bodies would remain fully clad. If at all any damage is rendered that would be on the cosmetic and fashion industry that ironically demand more protection for skin and at the same time its maximum exposure.

Don’t misunderstand me. I come from the same terrains that are familiar to you too. Just travel across Gujarat, which is considered to be the laboratory of Hindutva experiments with Narendra Modi, the most reviled fanatic administrator as the Chief Minister of the state, you will see most of the womenfolk irrespective of their age and religious affiliations wearing a very peculiar dress code. Whether they wear a pair of jeans and T-shirt or a salwar-kurta, they use an extended chunni/veil to cover their faces. The chunni is primarily tied around the head and the other end is brought around the face over the ears, leaving only exposing the part of eyes which is further covered with a pair of dark goggles. In Gujarat, maximum number of women uses two wheelers. They cover their hands with a pair of stockings long gloves that complete the dress code. I have seen women driving cars also wearing same kind of gloves. In short, each girl/woman in the street looks like a stereotypical terrorist in the worst sense and in the best sense completely veiled modest woman. Their faces and hands are exposed only when they go into the classrooms or workspaces. In the streets along with them you see Muslim women who are clad in black purdah with faces covered or exposed. This is the case with Rajasthan. Now a days I see in Delhi also girls covering themselves up in similar fashion.

Can you differentiate between a Muslim woman and a Hindu woman from amongst these completely hijab-ed women? Suppose Salwar-kurta wearing girls can be categorized as Hindus and hijab-ed girls as Muslims, what is the qualitative difference when both the parties are completely covered up? Even in Metro coaches which are excessively air cooled during summer days, a lot of young women identically mummified in clothes. And interestingly, they do not attach any religious values to it for feel ashamed of it. On the contrary, they feel a bit special when they are seen completely covered amongst those hapless women who do not have either time or mind to cover themselves up so.

(Madhavikkutty)

Scholars who have studied the origin of purdah system, carefully point out that veil has been introduced amongst the Muslim women as way to keep themselves protected from the vandalism of the climatic conditions. The religious angle came along with the patriarchal interpretations of their holy text. In fact both the men and women who live in the Arabian countries wear such clothes that adequately cover them up from head to toe. Men are not showing themselves off either. In humid climates people wear loin clothes and amply air their private parts openly. If you look at the traditional dress code of Kerala, both men and women wore cotton clothes that permitted enough air circulation. Even today you could see men walking half nude in the streets of Kerala. But where dry heat is prevalent people cover themselves up with clothes. Only in Bollywood movies, especially those are shot in Mumbai with Mumbai as the milieu of the story, you see the actors wearing three piece suit or tweed coats even on a regular day.

Now the choice is between a good skin and bad skin. If you ask a contemporary woman nourished by the staple food of commercials without knowing that this is how patriarchy finds consumers for its business empires, whether she would like to have a good skin and freedom, she would prefer a good skin over freedom and to gain that good skin besides using number of cosmetic products she would definitely go for a purdah provided she gets enough chances to flaunt her good skin to the world.

As a person living in Delhi I would say that we all should wear purdahs and for the summer Purdah should be our national dress the way Hindi is our national language. We should not attach any notions of religion or freedom with this hijab. It is a good thing. Recently a Moroccan writer came out of her hijab and it had created a lot of controversy in her country. But she decided to do so when she went to live in the US where summer feels like Indian winter. Take African countries (sub-Saharan nations) both men and women wear long body covering clothes. They are all not necessarily the followers of Islam. So once again I demand that all women in India should adopt a two tier dress code; purdah for summer and any other clothes for winter and we are sure that in winter only college girls and boys in love would dare to bare resulting into long spells of cold and cough that prevent their respective love interests away for a long time.

Purdah system zindabad.

Reading Literature Versus Reading Art

(William Shakespeare)

What could be the difference between visual arts (as in paintings, sculptures, photography and so on) and literature? I always ask myself this question whenever I look at a work of art or read a good piece of literature. Both involves reading; a sort of decoding the authorial intentions first of all, then looking for the subtexts depending on the cultural make up of my mind. While the former happens with a huge investment of textual analysis that simultaneously happens during the process of reading, the latter happens through projections and associations. Same thing happens when someone confronts a work of art hung on the walls of a gallery, a home interior or a public space. The people who get enamoured by the visual effect of a work of art or the textual flourish of a piece of literature are swimmers in shallow waters. They are like those people who exclaim at the wonderful nature of cinematography when asked about their opinion about a movie which has not made any impact on them. What I understand is that in both cases, swimming in shallow waters or scuba diving into the textual depths, a fair amount of ‘reading’ is involved. And the difference between the experiences of confronting a text and a visual piece should be sought in the impact of reading.

For me, the difference lies exactly where the sense of emulation originates in the mind of the readers. And I have experienced it, like many others in the world; the moment of that emulation, that euphoric juncture where one loses one’s subjectivity and assumes the nature of the text or the protagonist in the text. This sense of loss of subjectivity is not a bad investment as far as reading is concerned. Philosophers say that it is empathy, which could be short lived on the one hand if the text is ‘moving’ and long lasting if it causes a sort of ‘sinking in’ feeling. They say it is cathartic. For me, cathartic nature of textual experience and empathy are temporal. Such experiences enter into heart and from there to brain, stimulate certain faculties and leave you high and then dry once you close the text. But the real texts are those that make you live in the characters or the total experience for a long time. It could come back at odd moments facilitating nostalgia and déjà vu moments or even deep felt melancholy and euphoria as wells. A text read in your school times could come back to you with the same intensity on your fiftieth day and you could pine for it for the whole day and rest of your life.

I have not yet made clear the difference between a textual reading and visual reading. When you read a work of art which is ocular you tend to identify with the author/painter than the actual narrative or form or formlessness of that visual. There is a direct connect between the author and the experience. When you are an artist and you double up as a viewer and stand in front of a work of art, your training and experience as an artist might goad you to look for the structural integrity, grammar, tonal variations, strokes and then the overall feel imparted by a work of art. But when you are just a viewer, not an artist, you feel like identifying more with the author/artist. You imagine yourself as the author. If you look at a work of art by Vincent Vangogh, it is not that the sunflowers that depicted there cause you tremors, but the collective memory of the artist and his oeuvre. You project your collective knowledge, cultural grounding on to the work of art and the biography of the artist makes you think like him, feel a sort of insane greatness and all what comes along with it. You may ask, if the work of art you see is done by a new artist, comparatively unknown then where do you look for the artist in the work. My answer is that still you look for the artist in the work of art before you project your own associations and meanings on to the work.

However, when you read a piece of literature, you don’t see the author there. In these days of social net working and mediatised realities, authors are very much present in our society. Take the popular examples of Chetan Bhagat or Amish or even Dan Brown, when you read their works they hardly occur in these texts. You do not project their physical or mental pictures on to the characters in the narrative. Even if you try, even if you know that the narrative involves a lot of autobiographical elements of the author, you always do not see as your guiding principle. I remember reading Arvind Adiga’s ‘Last Man in the Tower’ or even his ‘White Tiger’. You do not see Adiga there. As an informed reader you must be knowing a bit about Adiga. You have read a lot about him. But still you do not look for him. I remember myself falling into the state of that old man in the tower hopelessly trying to hold the fort for the rights he believes in. When you read Jerry Pinto’s ‘Em and the Big Hoom’, though the promotional literature of the book says that it is quite autobiographical you do not see Jerry moving around in a state of limbo between a mad mother and a helpless sister. You tend to identify yourself with the protagonist or the mother herself. When you read Mother by Maxim Gorky, irrespective of your gender you identify with the Mother not with Gorky or Pavel. When you read any work of Orwell, especially 1984 you instantly identify with the Winston Smith and Julia and even the omnipresent and omniscient Big Brother.

Literature is big business. Often the writers do not get paid in a big way unless one becomes too huge to get hefty commissioning from international publishing houses. But the impact the literature and the authors leave on us, like the film protagonists and directors is so lasting that it cannot be erased by the quickies by the new entrants. Whereas in the case of art, an old artist could be replaced by a new artist. Speculative prices could bring a dead and gone artist back to mainstream art market. In the case of literature bad literature cannot be brought back through hagiographic airbrushing of the author dead or alive. I find this imbalance quite intriguing though I appreciate it considerably. Why only in art market, the author’s biography becomes very important to the work of art. Why in literature, author’s biography becomes important only when his/her creative product is worth pursuing? Is it because literature has textual values and could be assessed by the reader who share the same linguistic structure and in art there is no grammar and the meaning production is hugely abstract? I think it is the case. In visual art meanings extraneous to the ‘text’ could be attributed depending on the imagination of the critic and the seller. But in the case of literature however the critical mediation are possible and extraneous meanings could be found and unintentional metaphors could be brought in place, the total effect of the text lacks in all what has been said by the mediators, the text will fall flat.

(Raja Ravi Varma)

I have grown up with both visuals and texts. Both remain vivid in my mind. But whenever I talk about Ravi, the protagonist of ‘the Legends of Khasak’ by O.V.Vijayan, the author does not come to my mind. The author comes after I speak volumes about Ravi. When I think about Hamlet, Shakespeare does not come in front of me though recent research has found out that Shakespeare himself is a sign of a collective signifiers, the Bard of Globe Theatre does not mediate his protagonists to me. I have grown up with characters from literature; they have haunted my mind during the growing up years. And even now, at the age of forty four also, when I read Ramachandra Guha I become our national leaders, when I read Thackaray by someone I become Thackaray, when I read Mohsin Hamid I become his protagonists, I want to make it big in a big bad city. I want to rewind my life again, come back to a big city again, struggle and make it big. William Dalrymple never make me dream about him but his historical characters, Oscar Wild or O.Henry or Maupassant do not ask me to think about them, but all those young men who walked the streets with burning hearts and heads.

(Vincent Van Gogh)

But when I look at the works of Raja Ravi Varma or K.C.S.Panicker or Bhupen Khakar or Jitish Kallat, I think more about them than their works. Their works become a point of argument for me both as ‘reader’ and as a ‘critic’. That does not mean that when I read a good piece of literature I just want to become the characters only. I do want to become the author, identify with him/her, travel all over the world, attend book reading, live the life of Rushdie as Joseph Anton and so on. It is so exciting. But let me tell you that happens only when you have imbibed the feel of piece of literature you have just read or read long back. The more you go deep into that feeling, the more you want to become an author. And reading itself is becoming an author. But if you ask me whether I would like to hang out with a writer my answer would be an emphatic NO. Because late M.Krishnan Nair, whose literary columns had initiated me into world literature, used to tell his readers that it was futile and disappointing to meet an author as a person in a private space. Authors too are human beings and they also have feet of clay.

You Are not Alone

In your silence I could hear

The hissing of a pressure cooker

Shrieking of onions, potatoes and garlic

Sizzling of mustard in the boiling oil

A creative ensemble breaks into pieces

By the clattering of utensils in a hollow wash basin.

Each finger of yours is sliced by a memory

Each strand of hair split by a reasoning

Each pore of your body thrives in rebellion

But in silence you smother them into oblivion

While you walk to the station for a bus

That never comes and takes to you a place

Where nobody resides except hopes and dreams,

Ties of love beckon you back to the slavery of home.

The tip of your saree puffs up in pride as the wind blows

Like a lonely protestor leads a pack of spirits

Along a street that burns in asphalt hell

Still you walk into the scenes painted by clouds

When you sit alone tired and harassed

By work, time, thoughts and the utter loneliness

In the corner of a metro coach

Between your eyelids and dreams

There flutters the wings of a butterfly

That could explode a volcano of change

But you don’t wish to explode

You scramble through your vanity bag

Find out your comb, clips and tickets

With trained movements you tie up your hair

Like a dancer does her choreographed moves

You come back to a world where you don’t belong

Into the deafening noise of disparage and hate

Go back to your desk, to your dishes to the unwashed clothes

And finally to the starched and ironed hopes of tomorrow.

Before the fingers of hatred touch you

You surrender to sleep, to the lullabies of night

And in sleep you play with a host of angels

Whom you had left eons back in the middle of a school ground

And one day you would realize

When you do the dishes, listen to the harangues

When you cook, when you cut vegetables

When you stare back at the gazes of idlers

When the burners burn not for cooking

You would realize the time has come to move

And when you come down you would see

That you are not alone

And the volcanoes have erupted all along. 

Rape of Yoko Ono and Retaped Rape of Fiona Rukschcio

(Rape (1969)- A still of shooting the film by Yoko Ono and John Lennon

Not too many people in the art scene, at least in India, remember a 1969 film titled ‘Rape’ by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, two legends of conceptual art and music respectively. During 1960s Yoko Ono had written a few scripts to produce movies. Out of those scripts, Ono finally chose to produce ‘Rape’. Funded by her husband, John Lennon, she hired four film technicians and asked to follow a girl and record her day’s activities, importantly without her permission. The seventy five minute long film when released had generated heated discussions amongst the art loving public and critics who accused the artists-duo of violating the privacy of a hapless individual and subjecting her to the same tribulations against which the film was intended to produce effects. The girl who was followed by the filming team was Eva Majlata, an Austrian girl whose work permit in London had been over by the time the filming was taking place. The girl was set up for the shooting in agreement with her sister who had even given access to the filming team to Majlata’s rented room in London.

(Eva Majlata first becoming aware of the camera men following her)

The film ‘Rape’ opens with Majlata getting caught by the film crew at cemetery where she goes to spend her idle time. Initially she is very flattered. Though she knows that she is not a film star or a celebrity, the sudden appearance of the filming crew before her makes her a bit elated. She plays up to the situation acting quite casually while trying to tell them that she is not a star. She does not speak English. Her working English fails after a few minutes of them following her with the camera. Slowly the tension mounts. Her elation gives way to anxiety and then to fear. She walks fast, hides and whenever the crew reappears before her she tries to reason with the men in French, German and a little bit of Italian. But the crew is determined to follow. The scene grows eerie as the viewers see not many people around in the locality. The cemetery is completely abandoned. Majlata searches for some names on the plaques and collects some flowers to hide her embarrassment and fear. But she is not able to do that. The stalking becomes relentless and the presence of camera though we are not privy to see the people behind the camera, becomes quite apparent. At one stage to make a deal with the filming crew she asks for light for her cigarette. They give light to her. Some people appear in the scene looks at her and the team with a fair amount of coldness and walk off. She walks out of the cemetery and hits the road. The gaze of camera follows her. She jumps into a taxi and reaches her apartment and even there she sees the filming crew behind her. She is now visibly tired and horrified. She makes a phone call to her sister and finally coils herself up and moves into the corner of her living room. The film ends there.

(a still from Rape)

Laura Mulvey in her pivotal essay titled ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ which became a bench mark for film criticism of the 20^th century, says that cinema is basically a medium of male gaze. In the darkness of a movie hall, each person becomes a peeping Tom and possesses the male gaze. Even when there are other people around, the darkness and the visual engagement with the projected visuals and narrative makes the person identify with the male subject who holds the ‘perspective’ of that narrative. The female subjection and turning them into the objects of desire exclude the women audience from the dominant male gaze and render them uncomfortable. Going by Mulvey’s theorizing on male gaze and cinema, one could clearly see how Yoko Ono intends to collapse by highlighting the omnipresence of the male gaze in her film ‘Rape’. The initial pleasure of becoming an object of desire and attention by a male or female gaze turns into horror and violence as the object under scrutiny becomes absolutely helpless in that visual exchange and engagement. Though Yoko Ono if a female subject, her tools of filming (including the crew members) are male subjects. The power is absolutely in their hands as they decide how to ‘track’ this young woman down, capture her in her unguarded moments and subject her under the might of the camera, the male gaze.

(a harassed Majlata making a call to her sister from her room- still from Rape)

Feminists have disputed the artistic intention of Yoko Ono’s ‘Rape’. March Richardson in his essay, ‘You Say You Want a Revolution: How Yoko Ono’s Rape Could Have Changed the World’, says that Majlata has been rendered absolutely helpless like a rape victim as she is not only confronted by four men but also with cameras and recording equipment. Women were still not liberated in 1960s England. Majlata knows for sure that her current status is that of an illegal migrant and with camera being a very powerful medium of the state the very engagement brings her in direct confrontation with the state. The filming them becomes an interrogation from which she flees with all her might. She uses her femininity in the beginning as she charms the camera crew with smiles and darting of eyes. But she knows that her position is that of a migrant with invalid papers who is supposed to evade the eyes of the state. Her status as an illegal migrant is immediately collapsed into her gender status. Hence she becomes doubly ill equipped to handle the situation. What she could do at this moment is to flee. But the more she flees the aggression of the pursuers becomes intense. They leave no space for her to stand and breathe or take a proper decision.

(Yoko Ono and John Lennon)

One could ask a question: had she been a migrant with valid papers and work permit to live in London, would she have reacted like a victim? The possible answer could be that still her gender would have made her to flee from the camera men. If she was intelligent enough she would have sought the help of the policemen or the people around. Or if she was arrogant and bold she would have smashed the camera and beaten up the men who were following her. She does not do either. Instead she flees from the spot as if her gender and social status were two crimes committed by her. Even in her illegal migrant status she could use her gender position to counter these camera men. But she fears that her gender itself is detrimental for her as it could bring her stringent punishment from the authorities. Yoko Ono calls the film, quite succinctly and metaphorically, Rape. In her film the protagonist is ensnared by the camera, the male gaze and is raped by it till she resigns to her fate of utter surrender.

(The peace people- Ono and Lennon)

The film is thrilling like any stalker film. Notwithstanding the critique of feminists, the film underlines how the male gaze (even if it is scripted by a woman) visually rapes a woman who is not in a position to react. It happens even today in party circuits. Someone who is familiar with a woman in the party or becomes friends with a woman by chance, utters something that is offensive to that woman who in a guarded moment would have reacted to such utterance violently. But she is rendered helpless and shocked, bruised and scarred by the male utterances. This kind of flashing by males is quite rampant in public and private spaces to which most of the women fail to react aggressively not because they are afraid of the consequences but because of the momentary stunning of reflexive faculties. It is like a shock treatment given to violent protestors and hysteric people. They are subjected by the shock given in a flash. Here in Rape, Majlata too is subjected to continuous flashing of gaze which makes her a victim devoid of reactive faculties and reflexes. Initially she believes that she could respond positively as she is curious about their intentions like any other young woman would do in a public space. Admiration could be through a soft gaze (of the camera) but here the filming happens without her permission and her level of accepting such intrusion is raised by her illegal migrant status. She tolerates it for a while though she feels it a bit odd. But then the real aggression happens in the stalking.

(Fiona Rukschcio filming Retaped Rape)

The backlashes that Rape had amassed while screening and later on were shrill and strong mainly because the critics thought that Yoko Ono was subjecting herself to the male ideology pertaining to gaze. She was letting the males to follow Majlata. Had it been Ono herself would things have been different is a worth pondering question. But during the debates that ensued the screening of this movie Ono took an aggressive stance and cancelled most of the criticism as ideological rubbish. To save the artistic merit of the movie or for not getting into the feminist debates, she said the film should have been seen as an artistic output and its ideological merit should have been seen in the context of artistic intention. Almost four decades later another artist from Austria, Fiona Rukschcio, decided to revisit the film, Rape and do what Yoko Ono did not want to do: to become the gaze itself.

Fiona Rukschcio makes the revisit of Rape in her project called ‘Retaped Rape’. Once she came to know that the woman, Majlata was an Austrian citizen, Fiona decided to go to the same places the Rape filming had happened. She contacted the camera man who filmed Ono’s Rape and asked whether he could do it for her again. But he refused. Fiona also contacted the Majlata’s sister who had set up Majlata as the protagonist of Ono’s Cinema Verite experiment. Majlata’s sister helped Fiona to find the locations. In Retaped Rape what Fiona does is simulating the camera movements of the original Rape. But here the difference is Fiona does not position a woman in front of her camera. She follows an invisible person who could have been the erstwhile Majlata. Fiona follows an erasure and absence, which in fact had been registered by four male member camera crew decades back under the insistence of a powerful artist like Yoko Ono. Besides, Fiona herself handles the camera. So the gaze in Retaped Rape is that of a woman and this woman’s gaze is re-enacting the gaze of four men/one camera without subjecting anyone into the status of a victim.

(Fiona reaches Majlata's flat)

The whole film, Retaped Rape is a re-reading of the original. It is a narrative re-written with locations in place but without its protagonists and characters. The very absence of Majlata in Fiona’s movie evokes the kind of violence that the male gaze had generated in Rape. The absence then becomes more than a presence as Fiona intercuts her narrative back to the original film clippings and comes back to the actual locations again and again. The project Retaped Rape as an exhibition consists of the stills of Fiona making Retaped Rape and the locations from where Fiona’s presence has been erased. Fiona underlines two absences, one the decimation of Majlata’s subjectivity in the actual Rape through powerful male gaze and two, the absence of Fiona herself from the frames. There is a rupture between these two absences and it is in this rupture the meaning of Retape Rape exists. This rupture is created by the replacing of male gaze by female gaze. The simulation of male gaze works in the plane of residual memories; the memories of a film that had subjected a woman to male gaze. And each time the viewer is tend to ask about Majlata in Retaped Rape and she occupies the maximum space as she keeps looking back at the viewers through memories and remembrance and pushes the dominant gaze out of the narrative. Hence, Fiona’s film becomes a counter gaze at the movie Rape.

(From Retaped Rape project exhibition at Secession 2012)

As a conclusion of this essay I would like to quote Doris Krumpl, a cultural critic from Vienna. In the catalogue for the project Retaped Rape Krumps writes: “The beauty and innocence of the woman stalked in Rape exert a spell over the viewer, who, captivated and turning increasingly into an accomplice, follows the camera that follows the woman right up until her breakdown. The public ‘ravishing’ of celebrities culminated in the antics of a Britney Spears, the tantrums thrown by Amy Winehouse and the death in a car accident of Lady Diana, another goddess of hunt. To what extent are the consumers of such stories themselves the victims of their accompliceship? This is precisely where Fiona Ruckschcio’s intervention gets its purchase from; by eliminating the attractive object of the hunt she brings about a reversal of roles, sacrificing on her media altar the viewers participating in this increasingly frustrating hunt for clues. A belated act or reparation.”