Ram versus Ramani

So why did the VHP not fulminate about Fashion Week the way it once did over the filming of the film Water in Varanasi claiming that Hindu culture was being defiled? Precisely because Pravinbhai Togadia knows that nowadays the ramp is a line that he can’t afford to cross.

‘Fashion’ may look like it represents a ridiculous minority but it isn’t so. In a mass aspiration society as ours is, it is an avenue of massive upward mobility for hundreds. Small modeling agencies are proliferating in Meerut and Moradabad. Actress Mallika Sarawat, star of the film, Khwaish, (the one with the 17 kisses) says openly that she has no qualms about showing off her body because she didn’t escape from mofussil hell in Haryana simply to fade away in the front row of extras in Bollywood. The Gladrags Manhunt contest receives huge response in small towns. Listen to some of the newer models speak: Few are from elite backgrounds. Yukta Mookey comes from Mulund, a Mumbai suburb. Supermodel Jesse Randhawa is neither from Delhi or Mumbai but from Jaipur. Diana Hayden comes from a lower middle class family in Hyderabad, Malaika Arora Khan grew up in Thane. The Channel V hunt for a girl band was very popular outside the metros.

Valentine’s day brings scores of young people to the streets of Chandigarh. In UP, from Azamgarh to Barabanki, there are banners offering Special English Language classes as well as Modelling Courses. Schools in Rohini, a suburb of Delhi, are offering ramp training. Designers like Rohit Bal and Malini Ramani (with some assistance from the media) are fast becoming role models not just in Delhi and Mumbai but in Kalyani and Satna. Today, ‘Fashion’ is as much a ticket to social progress as Bollywood was for the Dharmendra generation. So for the Hindu warriors to try and take on the naked ladies of the ramp would be almost as silly as trying to take on Bollywood.

Yet the armies of Ramani are powerful cultural competitors to the armies of Ram. The armies of Ram (led by Togadia) seek to propagate social conservatism, the armies of Ramani kick off their clothes and party. The armies of Ram insist on cultural enemies, the armies of Ramani have no enemy except those preventing them from having a good time. The armies of Ram adhere to Golwalkar’s thundering dictum, that the life of a woman is basically a ‘‘call to motherhood’’. But the armies of Ramani insist that the life of a woman can also be a call to the ramp. The armies of Ram claim they are sons of the soil. The armies of Ramani can rightly claim that they are daughters of the soil. After all, the VHP may be big among the tribes of Gujarat, but fashion’s equally big in Bareilly.

So to protest against fashion is no longer a protest against the preoccupations of the elite. Instead such protests would run counter to the popular mood among the young and even not-so-young across the country. Judgemental old socialists and professional hand-wringers might pour scorn on the “brainless fashion brigade”, but in fact, the sexy no-brainers trotting up and down the ramp are well on their way to defeating Pravinbhai’s cultural agenda. Fashion may not make any money or be remotely relevant to the economy yet, amidst the epidemic of unemployment and surrounding gloom, it embodies mass aspiration and provides a means of escape from hardships. No wonder Pravinbhai has given up trying to defend bharatiya sanskriti and has fallen back on Ayodhya to drum up Hindu rage.

In any case, there’s nothing non-bharatiya about fashion or parties. The shastras talk of the four-fold objective of existence: dharma, artha, kama, moksha. And Kautilya writes that if you have artha, kama comes automatically, dharma follows and moksha looks after itself! Along with ascetism, there has always been a driving profit motive and a heightened “this worldly-ness” in our culture. The scholar-gentlemen of Bengal such as Jagannath Tarka Panchanan who even complied a digest of Hindu laws in the 18th century sat down to princely meals of 8,200 dishes — a historical precedent perhaps to the Five Star hotel.

Precisely because it is powered by popular energy, fashion might just defeat those trying to re-create an imagined Vedic punyabhumi in the 21st century. Even if the naked ladies haven’t yet realised their political potential, they, in their own crazy way, set up an idea of India which directly opposes Murli Manohar Joshi’s. After all, as the experience of the Taliban movement shows, the ‘free woman’, along with religious minorities, is always the main enemy of male-led militant traditionalist movements and if there’s anything that the fashion designers promote it is the democratic right of every woman to cast off the metaphorical burqa.

Of course there is also the argument that models and fashion designers might well be closet VHP supporters. Perhaps there are many models and designers who hate Muslims and secretly yearn for a mandir at Ayodhya even as they struggle into their G-strings. Yet the very nature of their profession, the need to unabashedly celebrate the undressed body, the use of English, their extremely (sometimes imitative) westernised behaviour places them on a collision course with the sangh parivar. Could there be a wittier subversion of Sushma Swaraj’s trademark sindoor than the manner in which it was emblazoned across the hair of muscular male models at Fashion Week? The armies of Ramani might well defeat the armies of Ram.

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