‘Bruised goddesses’ hurt Indian feminists
Campaign that used images of battered Hindu goddesses to highlight crime against women is denounced as cheap tokenism.
It is the time of the year in the Hindu calendar when celebration of female deities and worship of feminine energy begins in earnest in India.
The onset of the festival season this year though has been marked by high decibel debates on social media on whether India’s obsessive worship and deification of women as goddesses is outdated.
The reason is the award-winning campaign by Mumbai-based ad film agency Taproot India.
The advertisements present images of the Trinity or three primary goddesses of Hindu mythology – Durga, the goddess of valour, Saraswati, the goddess of learning, and Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, in their silks, jewels and crowns.
However welts, bruises and gashes mark the faces of these iconic deities.
The copy for the ad read, “Pray that we never see this day. Today more than 68 percent of women in India are victims of domestic violence. Tomorrow it seems like no woman shall be spared. Not even the ones we pray too.”
If the mission of the campaign was to grab eyeballs, it did. The campaign went viral and many found the advertisements meaningful and powerful in its imagery.
But the campaign has courted controversy as well. Rajan Zed, a US-based Hindu activist of the Universal Society of Hinduism, accused the campaign of “trivialisation of highly revered goddesses”.
Even feminists and gender activists in India saw these as a form of cheap tokenism.
Many felt the ad walked a thin line. It addressed domestic violence. Then again it pigeon-holed women into the ideal female as a goddess figure.
“I would have preferred an everyday image with a black eye. That would have been just as powerful,” says Nisha Susan a senior commissioning editor for Yahoo! India and the women’s zine theladiesfinger.com.