Living Death

In terms of time, we have travelled very far from that period which today we refer to as 8216;antiquity8217;, but in the sense of emotional evolution I wonder how much better we are as human beings. Time has moved on but we still find reasons to subject women to suffering, humiliation and pain. The attitude of the sixth century male is not much different from the male of the 21st century, despite society8217;s 8216;progress8217; and the many ways that it is 8216;modern8217;.

Turning my time machine around to the 19th century, I come across an appalling incident that personifies what society can do to a woman who is considered 8216;inconvenient8217;. Camille Claudel 1864-1943 was born into an ordinary middle class family that moved later to Paris. She was beautiful and immensely gifted. Camille was first the student and then the model and mistress of Auguste Rodin, the great French sculptor. But there was much about Camille that made people uncomfortable. Her middle class bourgeois family was embarrassed by her affair with Rodin, that she lived with him and conceived his child. Camille threatened the male bastion of sculpture and that too, of marble, bronze and the nude human figure. Sculpture and the human figure were male preserves, which no woman had ever dared to enter before. But Camille defied it and unfortunately, was 8216;a female genius in a world of men8217;. At a level, she disturbed Rodin because her work was so much like his and she was so scarily gifted.

There was so much that went against the frightened yet intense Camille, so many forces at work. She was eventually put into a lunatic asylum in 1943, there to stay until her death 30 years later. Her crime was that she was female, the wrong social class, talented and beautiful, unconventional and much ahead of her time.

And then, our times. Some weeks ago, I saw a film titled The Price of Insanity, which was a Tehelka exposeacute; of some amazing happenings in the Agra lunatic asylum. The doctor of this place had issued several false certificates for a sum of money to the husbands of some women who were no longer needed or loved.

The certificate of lunacy was to help these husbands remove their wives from their midst as they wanted to move on to other relationships. It was enough to get them certified as mad but not necessarily send their wives to the asylum.

Nothing has altered from the beginning of time. I cannot help thinking that somewhere in the male psyche, the female poses a threat and therefore he finds the need to crush her, humiliate her, rip her dignity from her being and leave her among the living dead.

Such things, hopefully, will not remain the same; such things, hopefully, will change. One day we will prove the French proverb wrong.

Rupika Chawla is on vacation.
Her column will resume after six months