Updating national images
By Manohar Malgonkar

THE importance that women are given in a nation’s affairs is said to show its level of enlightenment. A Sanskrit proverb makes that statement much more crisply: Yatra naryastu poojyante/Ramante tatra devatah. Where women are held in high esteem, gods dwell there.

America, England and France can be cited as examples. All three are held to be highly advanced countries: they all have women as some sort of a national symbol. America, its Statue of Liberty, England, its Britannia, France her Marianne.

The Statue of Liberty stands guard at the nation’s shore; a gigantic woman figure holding up the flame of Liberty. Britannia, squatting alongside a shield draped with the Union Jack and holding a sword in her hand, is the very personification of Great Britain. Marianne’s pictures hang in public offices all over France and her face is etched on French currency notes and postage stamps.

In this coterie of advanced nations, India holds a special place. Here the country’s predominant religion, Hinduism, not only holds women in high esteem, it even worships their images. Among Hindustan’s countless gods and goddesses, perhaps the most prominent are Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and Saraswati, that of learning and the fine arts.

All these images are as familiar to the citizens of these various nations as the women of their own household. It is difficult to think of a citizen of America who is not aware of the Statue of Liberty and what it looks like, and, above all, what it is meant to represent. And the same is true of the other feminine images. Each represents the predominant concerns and impulses of the country at the time of its creation. For the Americans their Statue of Liberty celebrates the nation’s independent spirit. Like ourselves, the Americans too were ruled by the British. The winning of independence was a seminal event in America’s history. The Statue of Liberty is both a celebration of that victory and a declaration of independence.

Britannia, the spirit of Britain is also a goddess of war: she represents the nation marching to conquer the world, the words and music of Rule Britannia the crash of drums and boots; the frenzy of Britain’s empire-building, and the sunburnt sahib’s White Man’s Burden, if not his jingoism, too.

The French for their part, created their national image, Marianne, as an embodiment of their revolution: of the triumph of the common man and common woman — over the villains of France’s traditional nobility. She is the woman who sat knitting, and breaking into ecstatic chuckles as the guillotine dropped.

In short, not the sort of ladies that one would care to encounter in a lonely street after dark; female images with their femininity de-emphasised to make them project the national aspirations of the times: In the case of Great Britain, a lust for warfare; that of France, a commemoration of the blood-bath of the revolution; of America, a gung-ho celebration of independence.

All three ladies would look more at home in a football team than in a chorus line. As is well-known, a Statue of Liberty was cast in France and presented to the Americans as a gift, which suggests that it must represent a French concept of the idealised female image. But no Frenchwoman is likely to feel flattered to be told that she resembles the Statue of Liberty.

Or even that she looks like France’s own national image, Marianne, for she, too is more like a battle-axe than a companionable woman. And as to Britain’s Britannia, she may have been a brainchild of Rudyard Kipling; for she looks more like the figurehead of a medieval sailing ship than a Gainsborough beauty.

But both in Britain and France there has been some rethinking over their national images. And the British have, without any fanfare and almost surreptitiously, updated Britannia to make her conform to changing ideals and national preoccupations. That was about two years ago. And now France too is about to do precisely that: Give their Marianne a new face, a slimmer outline.

America’s Statue of Liberty is rather like Kim Ir Sung’s statues in North Korea, a King-Kong-sized figure, made of metal. There is no way that they can alter it and make it look — well, less forbidding. But the British have quietly — even somewhat underhandedly — substituted a slimmer, less warlike version of Britannia on their coins and currency. The French, for their part, took their time over the issue. They have only just announced their verdict as to whom their new Marianne should resemble.

The British have always had a flair for making adjustments without too much fanfare. Instead of searching for just the right Englishwoman whom the British public would accept as a national image, they carefully chose a British artist who might be trusted to give them such an image. Luckily, the artist happens to be married to a woman who obviously conforms to his ideas of what Britannia should look like. He chose her as his model. He made her assume the pose of the traditional Britannia, gave her a sword to hold and a shield over which he draped the Union Jack. The finished portrait became the new Britannia, unencumbered by the cares of an empire, less warlike and slim; more like Princess Diana than Queen Victoria.

The French were more thorough, possibly mindful of the fact that the first Marianne was chosen in somewhat of a hurry, at a time of national euphoria, more than 200 years earlier. It seems that the mayors of towns all over France were invited to decide the issue of just which Frenchwomen should be the model for the new avatar of Marianne who, this time, was not required to look stern and fearsome or even represent the spirit of the revolution, but "soildarity, openness and tolerance." Their near unanimous choice was a model and actress, Letitia Casta; slim, dark, vivacious, young, and unarguably beautiful. Vive la France!

So how do we, in India rate in this trend for updating feminine images held in high esteem or venerated? Here any suggestion that goddesses should resemble screen actresses would raise a howl of protest. At that, in the case of our Lakshmi and Saraswati, we just don’t have to do any updating. Take away those extra arms and the adornments of divinity such as gold headdresses, and both goddesses emerge as beautiful women according to the norms of hundred years ago. The fact that they should look like twin sisters is not at all surprising because the model for both Lakshmi and Saraswati was the same lady, a Mumbai housewife who was also a talented classical singer, Sumitra Moolgavkar. Ravi Varma the country’s most sought-after portrait painter of the turn of the last century chose her as the model for both goddesses. It is the reproductions of these Ravi Varma paintings that are accepted as the images of Lakshmi and Saraswati in countless Hindu households all over India.

We, or, on our behalf, Ravi Varma, made the right choice a hundred years ago; we don’t need to update our goddess images in a hurry, and maybe the British and the French are not following our example.