Photographer Sharmishtha Dutta will never forget the time she spent with the widows of Vrindavan. When she travelled to the holy city in 2013, she paid a chance visit to a shelter for abandoned women. “It opened my eyes to their bleak world,” says Dutta, an advertising professional-turned-photographer, whose most prominent project ‘Durga - Dynamics of power, gender bias and a story of widows in India’, is being displayed here at Wandering Artist till October 15.
It was a dark dingy room, she remembers, filled with these sad-eyed women looking completely lost. She sat down to talk to them. “A few refused to look at me but there were a couple who seemed cheerful enough,” recalls Dutta, adding that the experience left her deeply shaken. And so she decided to tell their story.
What really struck her was the dualism with which a society viewed its women. On one hand, as in the case of a goddess, she was venerated and idolised. Take, for instance, the Goddess Durga who is believed to be an epitome of woman power, a power created by the holy trinity and depicted as having eyes that can drain the strength of demons and 10 hands that brandish multiple weapons. “This is how she’s celebrated even today, in India and all over the world,” says Dutta.
But the everyday woman is not so lucky. Her voice is deliberately muffled; she is often molested, abandoned and ignored; she is discriminated against and humiliated. And one of the biggest cases of social injustice, to this day, is the plight of India’s widows. “I was trying to highlight the hypocrisy in the minds of our society when it came to this,” she says, referring to the distinct polarity between the treatments accorded to women.
Embodiment of power
Durga flits in and out of the pictures that line the staircase wall at Wandering Artist. The striking model with long, wild hair is draped in a plush silk sari worn Bengali-style, and wears plenty of jewellery. Her tip-tilted eyes are lined with kohl, a deep red bindi gleams from between them while another “third eye” spreads across the centre of her forehead. In one frame she carefully picks her way through river ghats; in another, she inhabits an opulent home, that also houses an effigy of the goddess; in a third, she takes a cycle rickshaw through a labyrinthine-looking Kolkata. In an attempt to capture the goddess’ omnipresence, “I shot Durga as a common woman,” says Dutta.
The lives of widows
From the life of this almost-mythological figure, the story segues into the pitiful existence of the widows of Vrindavan and Varanasi, pieced together through pictures taken over numerous visits to these sacred places. Shot almost like a documentary, the photographs offer you gritty details of their lives, their despair, and in some places, the faintest glimmer of animation and hope.
Gaining access to these shelters were easier than she imagined, admits Dutta since, “I had the full support of Sulabh International Social Service Organisation and its founder-director, Bindeshwar Pathak,” she says, talking about the organisation that has done extensive work with the widows of these regions. Not only do they attempt to provide support, vocational training and stipends to them, they have also begun organising small events for them to mark festivals. In fact, there is an image here that captures one such festival. A bunch of white-clad women clustered at the ghats, share sparklers and set lit diyas on a still patch of water — Deepavali obviously
Bringing it all together
In some shots, the twain does indeed meet. A stunning shot of Durga whirling amidst a group of widows, is one, for instance while a poignant frame that contains wistful portraits of both Durga and a widow is another. “I wanted to show that they are essentially the same people,” she says, adding that versions of Durga exist in every woman, “whether she is the well-educated lady from the upper echelons of society, the quintessential middle-class working woman, the village simpleton or the old and abandoned widow in Vrindavan.”
