KOCHI:
A thought-provoking exploration into the expressions of the sharira (body) in the Indian cinematic tradition will inform an upcoming three-day film, reading and discussion package at the ongoing third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB).
Titled ‘Water Wets Sari, Sharira and Cinema Too: the Indian Cinerotica and the Sense of Saundarya
’, the package – curated by noted film scholar Amrit Gangar – will be built around a three-part film specially compiled using excerpts from nearly 50 films across various languages, paintings, texts among other reference material.
Divided into three roughly hour-length acts, the film will be screened as part of the Kochi Biennale Foundation’s ‘Artists’ Cinema’ series at 6.30 pm from January 26-28 at the Pavilion in Cabral Yard, Fort Kochi. The showings will be bookended by talks and readings that position Indian cinema’s unique sensual aesthetic among other expressions of the sharira within Indian literary and artistic traditions.
“Indian popular culture and cinema has been evoking the sensual in various ways through song, dance, dialogue, costume, gaze and sharira. Besides the epics, this culture has been drawing from the literatures of Kalidasa, Jayadeva, Vatsayayana, Sanskrit poets and dramatists, from folk songs and music, from sculptures and paintings, among other source,” Gangar said.
According to Gangar, this tradition is rooted in the ‘Saundarya Shastra’ – a theory on ‘sense of beauty’ and a discipline said to predate the Western conceptualisation of aesthetics. Within this framework, the Shringara Rasa (erotic or romantic love) encapsulates sensuous experience.
“It is the body that imbues cinema with its sensuality. The sari adds to this a certain grace – as has been captured in the paintings of artists like Ravi Varma and Heme
ndranath Mazumdar. The birth of Indian cinema was in tandem with the development of a unique aesthetic,” he said.
Over a century later, this aesthetic is a pan-Indian form – used in films across languages and industries, including Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Bengali and Hindi. Through his film, Gangar traces this line down from Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913) through to the recent Maithili-language feature Meet Hamar Janam Janam Ke (2016).
