Real live nudes

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Ranveer Singh's nangu photos had the Internet shook in a good way. His nakedness - brown, lean, fluid, needy, tactile - was beautiful indeed; beautiful in the eyes of the beholder and beautiful in the eyes of the beheld, a coincidence also known as joy. Since it was the Internet, fights immediately broke out.

First was the question of what would happen if a woman were to put out such pictures. Women's nudity and sexiness is usually acceptable when depicted by men. People throw around snoozeful words like tasteful. But should a woman display her own body of her own accord, it's all sarvanash of culture and slut-shaming.

If women admire masculine beauty in more explicitly sexual terms, some disgruntled Indian gents, will definitely pout, "Oh, if men speak of women like this you will accuse them of sexism." But it is different. Men have traditionally objectified women to exercise control, to not seeing them as whole people but limit their identity to appearance. Women have rarely expressed desire and when they do so, they trouble the traditional norms of who looks and who is looked at.

There was the inevitable conversation about tradition - to be Indian is to be fully clothed said sanskar-forward janta. But the shuddh desi Internet easily connected Ranveer's photographs with a long tradition of glorying in masculine physical beauty, quite unselfconsciously, as seen in photos of Shakti Kapoor, Sunny Deol, Jackie Shroff, Akshay Kumar, Dharmendra, Kabir Bedi, Feroze Khan and more - all in similar poses, all quite differently attractive. Elaborate descriptions, extolling the bodily beauty of Ram or Krishna can also be found in scriptures.

In fact a few days earlier, there had been more of this celebration when Rahul Khanna displayed himself near naked, but for shoes and socks, on an excellent duck's egg blue sofa, promising a big reveal (the reveal was a bit of a let-down, but I guess was in keeping with Mr Khanna's tongue-in-cheek mischief). While Ranveer offered madhoshi, Rahul offered maza. All nakedness is not the same, just as every kind of beauty is a little bit different.

Most conversations about beauty are about power, identity and respectability, not beauty. They either elevate beauty into a constricting norm - hence a kind of gender prison - or denigrate it, in the brains versus beauty dichotomy. It is either made too much of or too litte. But beauty, in itself is a rather fluid thing, touching our senses in myriad ways. In actual life, never mind the norms, we recognise and are transported by many different kinds of beauty. We understand effortlessly that beauty has an alchemy of physical attributes and something that animates the physical from within - if you like you can call it the spirit. In many Indian languages the gendered division of handsome and beautiful does not even operate strongly - the word sundar is gender agnostic. We go beyond admiration to enjoying and loving, several types of sundarta.

The text accompanying Ranveer's pictures was noisy with declarations of inner demons, depths and ironies, as if it did not trust beauty. But we, desi creatures of pleasure and love, didn't need it. In beauty's naked silence we could sense, rage, wound, emotion, self-belief, disclosure - sense a little of our own selves too. Beauty was quite marvelously enough.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com