As you climb to the top floor of the Jitendra Arya exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, you see a close-up of writer Shobhaa De, breathtakingly young and beautiful
An image from the exhibition
As you climb to the top floor of the Jitendra Arya exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, you see a close-up of writer Shobhaa De, breathtakingly young and beautiful. She is clearly lying down, her hair piled high, a thick halo ornately studded with jewels, her eyes densely outlined with kohl, looking straight through the photograph into yours, unblinking. My companion said to me, "The camera, the image, this making her into a sort of creature, is objectifying her, but the look in her eyes won't allow that objectification."
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Much of the exhilaration and palpable sexiness of this exhibition comes from this pleasant tension, this dance of gazing and allowing yourself to be gazed upon. Put together, this marvelous curation by Sabeen Gadhioke is, in some sense one big portrait of glamour.
Glamour is something we struggle to define. To me, glamour is essentially translucent — neither revealing everything, nor effortfully concealing it, simply suggesting there is a story, but not for the purpose of pinning down. You control the story. Glamour is not interested in artlessness and disingenuousness but celebrates the idea of 'artifice' as containing a human, sexual vitality. It acknowledges the self and the other as held in the meeting of eyes, for a minute, not forever, for in a minute, everything can change. It is confident enough in itself to submit to the fragility of another's gaze.
Jitendra Arya grew up in Nairobi in the 1940s and moved to London to pursue his dream of being a photographer, and to India in 1961. In the following decades his work at the Times of India created a dizzying archive of a nation's tryst with self-fashioning and modernity, exemplified by a wall of magazine covers in this show.
To see these photographs is to engage with our own recent history, not through the historic but through the iconic. If one tries to imagine the purpose of glamour perhaps it is that in being apparently purposeless, it compels us to think of ourselves outside social identities and even beauty norms, to arrive at a poetic conclusion of who we are as people, rooted in our bodies.
Even when pictures in the exhibition are candid, we feel that the subjects are aware of being looked at. They are comfortable with this, not so they become unbothered so much as relaxing into the gaze of approbation, which makes them glow. Ashok Kumar, signing autographs, the crinkles around his eyes fanning out like sunrays. Meena Kumari ensconced in her fan mail as if it were a quilt, or posing regally in her Pakeezah outfit, Raj Kapoor and Nargis looking at each other with lovers' intimacy — posed or real, hard to say, Dev Anand at his breakfast table. Feroz Khan, in very little except his body hair, Runa Laila, my childhood's first encounter with a certain buoyant glamour, arched pencil eyebrows and parted lips, Nafisa Ali with mouth and eyes a pitara of laughter, Soni Razdan in saree, Mohammed Rafi in an African shirt, Olga Tellis in a mini skirt — all exuding a bohemian quality of authority over the self. To see these photos is to understand how, while historical events and social roles shape us, but the stars of popular culture's firmament constantly suggest to us, other ways we can think of defining ourselves.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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