The Image Becomes Her

As she walks in to the Imperial Hotel,in Delhi,ahead of her first exhibition in the country,Our Beautiful Daughters,organised by the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi,it’s difficult to separate the celebrity from the artist. At 78,her movements are studied,born of long practice — the coloured glasses perched on the nose,the fedora a contrast to the stark black of her outfit,her head atilt at an angle — as the cameras go off. When she finally speaks,the impression is that of a diva explaining her cult. She talks about peace and feminism,concepts she has made her idiom over her long career,and how being in India means being at the heart of the future. “China and India are poised to be the biggest economic powers,and it’s good to be here when India is waking up. The struggles for world peace and women power are exactly parallel now. Art is a very strong force and it’s part of the peace industry,so I feel it is a good medium to speak on violence and abuse,” she says.

Her first India trip,in the late Sixties,ended early. “The four boys (The Beatles) had so much fun during an earlier trip that John thought it would be a good idea to come back. We went up to the (Sathya) Sai Baba camp near Mumbai,but they wouldn’t let the men and women sit together. I like to be honest about everything. Perhaps,it was rude,but John and I insisted on being together,and he couldn’t keep his hands off me. In the end,they asked us to leave and we went back,” she says.

For someone so closely associated with peace movements over the decades (she famously took out a full-page ad in The New York Times after the attacks on the World Trade Center that read,“Imagine all the people living life in peace” ),Ono seems surprisingly noncommital about the wars that have taken place since. “What has to happen will happen. Sometimes,it’s a blessing in disguise,sometimes you don’t know how it would be just right. If we are miserable,it’s because we are not treating ourselves intelligently,” she says.

Her approach to life has been of a rebel seeking fame,and not acceptability,a narcissus in love with her own image. For someone who has had a childhood of contraries (Ono hails from a rich Japanese banking family on her mother’s side and from aristocracy on her father’s and had a privileged childhood,but faced a hard time during the second World War and its aftermath),being an outsider was never difficult. She admits it was one of the qualities that drew her to Lennon. “We both thought of ourselves as rebels. He was from Liverpool,and I was from Tokyo,but there was very little that we didn’t understand about each other,” she says.

So much of her existence is linked to Lennon,that despite her avant garde work,it’s taken practice to see her as a professional in her own right. Ono says it never made a difference to her. “I think of my work as organic,as something enhancing creativity. Besides,professional critics are mean anyway,” she says.

Did it hurt then,when she was accused of breaking up the hugely successful band? “It was difficult initially. The whole world suddenly hated me. There were so many hate mails that I used to get every day that I thought I could be killed. But then,I thought,how about utilising all this energy? So I turned all the negativity into love and sent it out into the world. You realise,at some point of time in your life,that for every individual who is not with you,there are several others who will be,” she says.

It’s a belief that has ensured that she doesn’t have any regrets when she looks back at her life. “I don’t long for anything. Life is what we make of it,not something that is gifted to us. I wanted mine to be this way,and that’s how it is,” she says.