Skip to main content

Contemporary Durgas


Durga Vahini, reportedly a women's wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, is objecting to the art exhibition going on at Delhi Art Gallery.  The current Durgas think that the paintings on display in the Gallery demean women.

Below is one of the paintings/sculptures exhibited at the gallery.



And below is one of the sculptures from Khajuraho temple.



When are the Durgas going to demolish the Khajuraho temple, the sculptures in Ajanta and Ellora caves, and many other works of art belonging to the country's past which is usually glorified in our history books?


Comments

  1. Lovely art!
    Nice post!
    Relevant question!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice artistic work. i agree with you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. When politics enters, art acquires many meanings which are not dreamt of by the artist!

      Delete
  3. A good thought with a meaningful question . Thanks for sharing .

    ReplyDelete
  4. I hope that these Indian talibans don't take it one day as their life's mission to destroy heritage of Khujaraho and Konark because "it is against Indian culture"!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is exactly what I fear too, Sunil ji. Perhaps, our country is getting a bit too religionised!

      Delete
  5. You do not need to go to exotic places to see erotic art in temples, Matheikal. You send the Durga Vahinis to Kanchipuram, that holy town not too far from Chennai and I will shock them. It should be the same in Madurai, Tiruchirapalli, Srirangam ... no temple artist was devoid of human urges to showcase his, what we call pornographic talents!

    I may be wrong, but the first photograph, I remember to have read or seen in an article about historic sculpture, recently found somewhere in Kerala.

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I too have seen such works of art in many temples.

      I'm really not a connoisseur of painting and sculpture. Sometimes I too wonder where lies the difference between art and pornography.

      What I find more detestable is when the so-called guardians of culture and religion choose to attack some and leave the others...

      The present art exhibition of the nude and the naked in the Delhi gallery has paintings and sculptures from olden periods too and from other places as well. Even Ravi Verma's paintings are there. So the present one must be the same as the one you're referring to. I took it from the website of the Delhi Art Gallery. I don't visit art exhibitions, in fact.

      Delete
  6. Very relevant question.. i don't know the answer.. but i don't like this hulla baloo created over such issues. most are politically motivated.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Every religion has such groups, unfortunately. Look at what they did to the 3 girls in Kashmir. Vishwaroopam. And now, Mani Ratnam's Kadal is facing the Christian ire...

      Delete
    2. Really.. this is sheer non sense. I wonder how much time people have got for these worthless activities. This world is strange.

      Delete
  7. I dont think there is any explicitly sexual depiction in Ajanta and Ellora caves!!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Apparently those people in those times were not so afraid of the body and the nature of humans as much as today society is. Sex is natural. Priest and people who denounce that art just taking the human mind away from what is natural and present everywhere. the more this is oppressed the more it will be in your face because its natural to be natural in the whole universe. Why don't they cover the statue of David since his penis is showing? You body is your spirits only vehicle, why would it want to hide it?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r