adminMUMBAI. – “I can be naked in front of a thousand people . . . It’s just that they get uncomfortable,” Bollywood star Ranveer Singh told the Paper magazine recently.
That is exactly what happened when Singh recently posed nude for a photo spread in the same magazine.
Social media exploded with both appreciation and indignation — but mostly the latter. Memes and jokes making fun of the pictures abounded; and many accused the actor of denigrating men.
If this was not enough, a police complaint was lodged against him for “hurting the sentiments of women”.
Singh is not your traditional male star.
He’s endlessly energetic, flamboyant and embraces a frothy fashion style – velvet pants, sequin turtlenecks, jewellery – that Vogue magazine calls a “positive nod to the non-binary fluidity that fashion today is embracing”.
In other words, says Paper, Singh has “challenged practically every stereotype of masculinity in a still-traditionalist Indian society”.
“He has an ideal kind of male body. But he dresses on the border of androgyny. He is not rigid and openly talks about sex.
“He doesn’t fit in the notion of masculinity in India. That is causing a lot of anxiety, and also making a lot of men uncomfortable,” says Rahul Sen, who’s doing his doctoral dissertation on literature and sexuality at Tufts University.
The differing reactions to Singh are illustrative of what some call India’s “wild moral confusion”, where people harbour a strange mix of conservative and liberal attitudes. The most graphic examples of erotic temple art can be found in many small-town shrines.
One of the world’s oldest textbooks of erotic love, Kama Sutra, is from India.
Model and dancer Protima Bedi streaked on a Mumbai beach in 1974 for a film magazine cover.
Nudity is not uncommon: thousands of ash-smeared Hindu holy men belonging to a cult turn up naked at religious festivals like the Kumbh Mela.
Instagram and TikTok are full of Indian men in “tiny posing trunks showcasing their bodies in erotically suggestive ways,” says Michiel Baas, author of the book, Muscular India.
“Some of them have tens of thousands to even more than a million followers. Some of their pictures may elicit lewd reactions but in general people respond to them with emoticons expressing wows, power and being impressed,” he says.
Also, most Bollywood stars have taken off their shirts for action scenes.
But, Baas says, when Indian men like Singh deviate from more standard and accepted ways of showcasing their bodies – he finds the star’s pictures naked in a “vulnerable kind of way” with a hint of a 1970s aesthetic – it “often results in the kind of mocking that underscores how unusual it is for men to show their softer, perhaps more feminine side”.
Some find the controversy futile.
“I don’t get this debate. Nangapan (nudity in Hindi) is not new to India. In Ranveer Singh’s case: (it’s) his body, his choice,” says Shobhaa De, one of India’s most popular writers.
Yet leading artists like MF Husain and Akbar Padamsee were attacked for paintings which depicted a naked deity and a man’s hand on a woman’s breast.
Film sets and plays have been trashed for depicting nudity.
In fact, Singh is not even the first actor to pose in the buff.
In 1995, Milind Soman and Madhu Sapre posed in the nude with a python wrapped around them for a shoe advert.
A case of obscenity against the models crawled in the courts for 14 years.
By the time the two were acquitted, “Sapre had left India, the shoe brand had folded up, and who knows what happened to the python”, says Ambi Parameswaran, a brand strategist. – BBC.
Online Reporter