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Paromita Vohra: Rakhi bandhan

Updated on: 14 August,2016 06:34 AM IST  | 
Paromita Vohra | paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

Rakhi Sawant, who's been awfully quiet since her brush with politics and her love for Ramdev Baba, is back, with a new episode of Rakhi Does Anything She Wants

Paromita Vohra: Rakhi bandhan

Rakhi Sawant sporting the Modi-dress

Rakhi Sawant, who's been awfully quiet since her brush with politics and her love for Ramdev Baba, is back, with a new episode of Rakhi Does Anything She Wants. In this episode, she attended a pre-Independence Day event in Chicago wearing a black vinyl dress covered with images of our Prime Minister, some a little strategically placed. Being so visually arresting, it immediately generated both media response and critical comments about vulgarity, disrespect and even poor upbringing.


Rakhi Sawant sporting the Modi-dress
Rakhi Sawant sporting the Modi-dress


Ms Sawant would care only if that didn't happen. She is a pioneer of the dominant vernacular of our times: personalities curated for media, gaining validity through reach, likes, shares and if god is kind, trending. This is not about wanting to say something, but creating cyclical episodes made up of disconnected high points. Outrage, sensation, sex, violence are to this media language what MSG is to Chinese dhaba food. She hit several trending hashtags with her accompanying interview. "I Love Modiji", "I am India's Daughter", "I love my country", "I am going to auction this dress for poor orphans and those who have cancer". What's left?


What should we make of Rakhi Sawant? Is she just another almost-was-greedy-for-the-limelight-at-any-cost? Or, is she an agent provocateur confounding our pieties with her stunts? Perhaps she is both. Rakhi's performances fall within the aesthetic termed Camp. Its hallmarks as Susan Sontag describes in her essay Notes on Camp, are a wholly artificial, exaggerated vulgar, ribald style, which has no moral or instructive aims. Camp completely undermines pomposity and self-seriousness, not through forms like intentional irony and satire – which echo today's reality too much to be anything but banal – but, through flamboyant theatricality which highlights the absurdity in reality.

This might be malicious if intentional. But Rakhi is Pure Camp — that which is entirely sincere and naïve and interested in its own performance, not in attacking or disrespecting anyone. Consequently, if you take the absurdity in her show seriously, you are the one who looks ridiculous. For instance, Rakhi declared that those who objected to her dress could check with Mr Modi and Rajnath Singh, as they had given her permission for the dress. Even if you are one of the hard-core habitually offended can you imagine asking such a question of the Prime Minister and Home Minister of India? You would end up trivialising their office, not censuring Rakhi.

At the same time, her declarations of patriotism, social commitment and her avowed loyalties, mean that Rakhi also does not serve the interests of those who love baiting Right-wing extremists. To use Rakhi exposes such baiting as trivial. Rakhi's symbolic dexterousness owes much to her immersion in the absurd which becomes a mirror to the absurdity present in reality.

Most of all, Rakhi shows this mirror to the very media she uses to promote herself; which draws validity from being a teller of truth, and uses this to serve moralising and polarising agendas. In a post-script video message Rakhi asked media and the moral police to chill. When there are farmer suicides, child sex abuse and poverty to discuss, what kind of people get their knickers in a twist about my dress? asked she.

Try answering that with a simple yes or no.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com

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