Ranveer photo row, a trivial pursuit
Unemployment, inflation, climate change, communalism or gender and caste inequities. Any of these pressing issues might be top of the mind for most people in India today, firing them up to demand better. Yet, the hot button topic of the week was that an actor had flaunted his unclad posterior in a photo shoot with an American publication.
In what can only be described as surrealist high-farce, a lawyer, who had filed an FIR against Bollywood star Ranveer Singh for his nude photo shoot, said with a shockingly straight face that Singh’s bum was a “national issue”. Elsewhere, a “scandalised” outfit performed the yeoman’s service of printing out posters of the images of Singh in the altogether, displaying them publicly to run a “clothes donation drive” for the actor, ostensibly while showing the uninformed masses the pictures so they could be rightly horrified.
One could wheel out the done-to-death argument that India has a fine tradition of celebrating nude bodies in art, but surely those mortally offended by Singh’s nude photoshoot know this. Think of the children on the internet; they cry! Think of the women whose modesty is outraged by the images these moralists have helpfully printed and put up on street corners.
Yet two things are worth a more critical examination. First, why does male nudity, in the form that invites an objectifying gaze, bother us more than any amount of objectification of the cis-female form? The latter is but part and parcel of popular culture. The discomfort that the patriarchy experiences when the gaze is reversed on to men should force us to ask why, and if the act of objectification is problematic due to its dehumanising effect, should we not question our comfort with the ceaseless objectification of women?
Second is the more prosaic question of why police in India, overworked as they are to the point they have been known to put off complainants of serious crimes, especially the marginalised, continue to accept and register FIRs in cases such as this. On the bright side, the entire kerfuffle might best be enjoyed as another showcase for India’s talented meme-masters, who have created monuments of hilarity on the back of Ranveer Singh’s exposed behind.