Mother India

Annu Palakunnathu Matthews, a Professor of photography at Rhode Island University, has a creative way of critiquing sexism in Indian popular culture, a.k.a. Bollywood.

In a project called Bollywood satirized, Matthews uses digital technology to make changes on Indian movie posters and make a commentary, in turn, on Indian gender norms and stereotypes.

Ms. Matthews recalls being the victim of sexist attitudes as a young girl growing up in India and says she felt very angry at the tiresomely repetitive posters that inevitably showed women in various postures and moods of subordination to the men. They were shown to either cry, or laugh (because they were in love) or sing, or rescued from a dangerous situation by a sturdy male figure.

The poster above is not an alteration of an existing movie, but a representation of a real incident--that of the recent gang rape in India's capital of New Delhi, in which a young woman and her male companion was brutalized in a moving bus. The woman went on to die.

There were myriads of responses to the incident and the most terrifying one's were from the officialdom and the politicians of India. Abhijit Mukherjee, Member of the Indian Parliament and son of Pranab Mukherjee, some Minister or the other in his career of acute sycophancy in the Indian Congress hierarchy, said that women ought not to wear anything but "long overcoats" when they venture out in the streets after dark. By "long overcoats" Mr. Mukherjee clearly didn't mean a fashionable Burberry, but some sort of a loose overall like a bloated top of a salwar kameez, is my guess.

The poster above is a meaningful recreation of the anachronistic-ness of Indian male politicians where women and modernity is concerned.