You can confiscate money in hands;
Can you confiscate the body’s glory?
Or peel away every strip you wear,
But can you peel the Nothing, the Nakedness
that covers and veils?
To the shameless girl
Wearing the white Jasmine,
Lord’s light of morning
You fool,
Where is the need for cover and jewel?

This is just one of the poems Mahadevi Akka, the 12th Century Kannada mystic poet composed, eight hundred years before American women began burning their bras in public as an expression of rebellion against male-defined norms of female beauty. The very fact that Madhusree Dutta, who directed Scribbles on Akka, (SOA)has brought to light a precursor not only to the much-hyped women’s liberation movement but also to Freud himself, is by itself an achievement of no mean merit.

Other Articles

Review

Report

Mahadevi Akka informs Dutta "challenged social norms and discarded traditional notions of femininity in ways explosive enough to shock both men and women of her time. Why, she might have done the same had she lived today. Because, even now, we rarely find her kind of woman who is not afraid to live out, physically and spiritually, the courage of her convictions. She shocked the entire society of her time with her ideas and with her sensuous poems. Today she is a presiding deity and an icon for many women, both among the educated and among the less fortunate. From painters to papad makers, Akka inspires women with her rousing vachanas or poems, throwing a long rope bridge across centuries so they can climb across. Her ideas, her questions and her actions may just as well have come from a modern-day feminist."

Dutta defines almost a new genre in cinema through her SOA - the genre of the abstract docu-fiction - broadening the historical parameters of the film to throw it open to the subjective interpretation of different members of her audience - men and women. One might just accept it as a piece of pure fiction and find it exciting and interesting. Another may treat it as a biographical documentary that explores unknown areas of history within which lay the first seeds of a woman’s inner consciousness which rouses her to shed her clothes in search of God. A third person would perhaps, look at the film as a multi-layered piece of abstract art which, on face value, may mean nothing, or everything, depending on the way he/she interprets it. Journeying through the countryside of Udutadi in Karnataka with her cameramen (A. Mukul Kishore and R.V. Ramani), Dutta attempts to explore the meaning of Akka’s denial and her asceticism though the works of contemporary painters who have identified the poet through their personal creative work. Nilima Sheikh, a Baroda-based painter, for instance, paints Akka as a solitary naked figure against a stark red background on a huge canvas. She says (in the film) that even if Akka had not lived, "we would have invented her because Akka is the icon we needed."

Vaidehi, a contemporary poet concedes with admiration, "everything I write seems to have already been written by Akkamahadevi." As the film reaches Udutadi, Akkamahadevi’s native village, where the legendary poet’s birth anniversary was being celebrated with the usual pomp, music and loud colour and garishly lit processions, thick garlands of marigold - the holy flower, a video show held publicly to explain the legend of Akka to a devout audience, it succeeds in demystifying the popular religious icon to convert her into a flesh-and-blood character. "My desire was to understand religion as a popular culture where it binds people together rather than pulling them apart. I wanted to question the process of iconisation," says Dutta. "Akka has lived on in the lives of people through her multi-dimensional talent. Unlettered women are as drawn to her songs as are educated women. She wrote quite a few bawdy lyrics yet, remains a folk deity among locals and a model rebel among others. Her sustenance through the incredible time-span of nine hundred years is because of her plurality", informs Dutta.

Dutta has invested the film with several modes of the traditional documentary such as interviews with real-life devotees, poets and painters and married this to a fictitious character played by Seema Biswas who is more of a metaphor than a woman, blending within her, the facets of different women within her, each one a legend by herself. Once she is Charulata from the famous Tagore short story (later immortalised by Satyajit Ray through Charulata) swinging away as she fantasises about her strange attraction for her brother-in-law. She is also seen as an everyday commuter in the local train. Or, as a woman dicing vegetables. Or, as the woman poet reading pages from her work and then casting them in water - just like that - just because what she has written cannot be carried back home. Then, she is discovered at the temple for Akka built in the 1960s near her birthplace, Udutadi which has a squat shivling on its roof instead of the linga-shaped traditional one. "These are women who form a microcosm of a larger whole of women who find their own space and live within it in the most oppressive of situations", adds Dutta.

Dutta, like in her earlier film Sundari - An Actor Prepares (based on a play by Anuradha Kapoor on a turn-of-the-century Gujarati actor who played female roles), uses two actresses to personify the ‘concept’ and the ‘figure’ of Akka respectively. Veteran actress Savitri Heisnaam does a stylised, theatrical rendering of the Akka legend, striding across the Konkan terrain. Seema Biswas, on the other hand, reflects the various dimensions of Akka with a human face, shedding the iconic figure. The film sets out to explore the meaning of this denial - of family life on the one hand and of clothes on the other - through visual arts and literary works of contemporary artists. The fact that Seema Biswas is one of the most versatile and talented actresses Indian cinema has ever produced has been reinforced once again in Madhusree Dutta’s latest docu-feature, SOA. It also underscored the fact that hers is also one of the most underutilised talents going. Despite two brilliant performances in two very different films, Shekhar Kapur’s The Bandit Queen and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Khamoshi - the Musical, her career in films remains largely unexplored.

She reinforces our belief in her once again in the idealised roles representing the concretised form of Akka in the film. Shot in 35 mm with a running footage of 60 minutes, SOA explores the life and times of the 12th Century ascetic poet in Kannada, Mahadevi Akka. Her radical poems, written with the female body as a metaphor, have been composed by Illayaraja and picturised on the contemporary urban life. Mahadevi Akka, while leaving the private space of the home in search of God, also abandoned her clothes. The film sets out to explore the meaning of this denial - of family life on the one hand and of clothes on the other - through visual arts and literary works of contemporary artists. The film is in a manner of speaking, also about everyday women like us, who find aspiring and idealised identification with Akka because she represents the desire we all have at one time or another - to shed our clothes - metaphorically and literally speaking and because she has the courage we do not have. For Akka, the shedding of clothes and wandering around naked in search of Lord Shiva (Chennamallikarjuna in Kannada) was a mark of protest against the sexual claims made on her body by the local king who might or might not have been her husband.

"The film is a tribute to the small transgressions ordinary people make", says Dutta. The film raises Dutta herself from the level of being an ordinary activist-filmmaker to an extra-ordinary researcher in search of discovering local history of performing artists and poets and placing them for archival preservation through celluloid interpretations of her own. In Sundari, Dutta tries to discover, through the works of the Gujarati actor, whether language and creativity have gender-centric differences. If three out of her four films are any indication, Madhusree Dutta’s works, namely - Memories of Fear, Sundari - An Actor Prepares and SOAare definitely gender-centric. Her films, taken in their totality, define a new kind of thinking in investigating unusual facets of the human psyche, mainly its emotional essence, and the representation of the ‘spirit’ of the theme rather than a physical articulation of the theme itself.

-Shoma A. Chatterjiwhere