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Sumana R. Ghosh
Department of English, Darjeeling Government College
'Back to Back: The Spectator's Spectacles on the Woman's Back'
My paper, in constructing a cultural discourse of the woman's back, resorts to the Spivakian 'inter-literary' in using popular culture of the Indian subcontinent. The back is the front's other; the woman's front, with its devices of othering and mothering, is the male's lack. The back is everything that the front is not. With its apparent unisexuality (there are no visible differences between a man and a woman's back) unlike the front with its identifiable politics of difference, the back appears as the most unlikely of places for 'provocation'. With a flatness that is generally deemed unattractive, and contours that elide difference, the back is a leveling and leveled ground as an indicator of physical difference.
In India, specifically, however (it might be true of other cultures as well), the contours, the colour of the back and, therefore, the allied topos of the cut of the draping fabric have a significatory value that often defies analysis. In popular culture, especially in Hindi films, this becomes visibly revelatory. Even a passionate Madhuri Dixit cooing 'Dhak Dhak karne laga…'('Dhak Dhak goes my heart'), 'dhak dhak' being the aural mimicry of a heart in passionate turmoil, shows her back to the audience. With its outward thrusts, an apparent visible mimicry of the beating heart, the back, therefore, becomes a proxy parody of what cannot be seen and what, significantly, cannot be shown. The back, then, becomes the uncovered 'hidden' front, and in the ensuing politics of representation, becomes the camera's ally at voyeurism.
Another point of attraction about the back is its ability, as a space, to dissolve all boundaries. Unlike the front with its divided limits of breasts, stomach, navel, the pelvis and below, the back becomes a postmodern trope for de-segregation for one cannot specify where the back begins, ends or the waist begins. The camera's affair with the woman's back is also evident in the immensely popular picturisation of the Hindi film song 'Didi Tera Dewar Deewana. . .' ('Sister, your brother-in-law is crazy') where the song begins with the entire screenscape - a blank presence/an absence - full of the back's presence. As the camera moves away, the lady's beauti/ful-fied back is hit by a stone from an unseen slingshot, from the un-shown hands of the crazy brother-in-law who, having been denied entry to an all-woman's pregnancy celebration party, finds this the only means of 'touching' her. In exploring the politics of this representation, my paper also uses more 'obscene/vulgar' choreography, like the 'Choli ke peeche kya hai ?'('what is there beneath/behind your blouse?'), asks one woman of another for the 'benefit' of a group of drinking gangsters), where the male camera, being denied entry into that zone of 'behind and beneath the blouse' has to be contented with the outward thrusts of the pectoral muscles of the back.
In trying to chart out this attendant grammar of 'looking' at the back in contrast to the frontal grammatology of 'peeking', I also show how the bra - not a new concept in India's tradition of dressing - becomes the semiotic of the 'control' the back exerts in the corporeal grids of power. After all, in an axiological analogy of distribution of attire-power-control, the bra becomes the qualisign of the back holding the front (the strap and cups equation), a garment threaded with the discourse of masculine fantasy, for a garment of this genre is totally missing in the man's wardrobe. The different cuts of the choli, the Indian form of the halter neck, and the use of henna (a temporary vegetable dye used for body art) to paint the canvas of the back, are all pointers to the space of the back as one of negotiation between an imposing patriarchal scopophilia and an un/willing feminine erotics of control.
Closeness blurs; distance, ironically, grants scatological perspective, for the vocabulary of the back demands that it be seen in its entirety rather than as a fragment. Significantly, the biological discourse of the back is such that it is a space that is beyond touch, a touch of the hands or other organs; reduced to a zone of non-touch, it has been forced to self-construct an alphabet of sight.
Much as the other parts of the body (hair/ face/ eyes/ lips/ legs) have been glorified in songs (even ghazals), there is hardly any - or none that I know of - singing about/ of the back, whose Hindi /Bangla equivalent 'peeth' sounds too unpoetic for the ears. The back, therefore, can only be spoken by the unspoken; words have to give way to the vocabulary of looking. The popular actress Kareena Kapoor is seen in an advertisement commercial for Pepsi, asking the Indian cricket team to do well, and not worry about winning the trophy. After she has cooed the words, she turns her back to the audience, who see the outline of the world cup scooped out from the back of the dress.
In conclusion, I construct a counter-discourse of the man's back and show that, if at all, the camera is engaged in a relationship with the man's back, it does not use the grammar of eroticism. Rather its vocabulary is one of machismo and masculinity. In stark directional contradistinction of loci, the site of eroticism in the male is not the back, but the hairy (often waxed) chest.
And though body theorists might feel that seeing the shape of the back as a magnification of the vagina as outrageous, it does not seem too far-fetched if one analyses the sub-cultural discourse prevalent in the subcontinent.
Bio: Sumana Roy Ghosh is currently teaching at the Department of English, Darjeeling Government College, for the West the Bengal Education Service. She has also taught in Diploma in Communicative English, within the Department of Adult and Continuing Education, and in Post Colonial Literature within the Department of English, both at the University of North Bengal. Her puplished papers include: 'Deconstructing Dishes: reconstructing history', ed. Chris Thomson, Ingestation, University of Maine, Portland, 2003; Jayant Mahapatra's 'Lost': A Poem about the Making of a Poem' (accepted for publication) Poetcrit, January, 2002; 'Fusion of Horizons' in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Critical Practice, January, 2001; 'Alien Space, or what we did last summer,' Rethinking English, ed. Nila Shah, 2003; 'The Text as Rizhome: Amit Chaudhuri's theory of fiction,' Of Narratives and Narratology Ed. Rajul Bhargava (Rawat Publications, Jaipur, 2003); 'Aalap: In conversation with Amit Chaudhuri,' The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri, ed. SB Shukla, Swarup and Sons, New Delhi, 2003; 'The Metonymised Body: The semiotic of the body in the fiction of Amit Chaudhuri,' Indian English Novels: 1980-2000, ed. Ranjan Ghosh, 2003; and 'Jhumpa Lahiri's Sexy: A map of misreading,' Indian English short Stories, ed. Kamal Mehta, Creative Books, 2003.
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