Pushp: Flower Svayambhu Kusum: Self born flower Chums Cheti Besi: Sitting apart Door Baithna: Sitting far Samurta: Becoming Mature Khapuspa: Mystic flower, menstrual blood of a virgin Period Cennir: Auspicious red water RaktaChandana: Red Sandalwood Sonita: A kind of water in the form of feeling Being Down Rajas: Passion Rajasvala: Menstruating/passionate woman Ras: Fluid/ Emotion from which Rajas rises, from which the embryo is formed Mahavari: The great cycle Mahina: Monthly Masik Dharm: monthly law The Curse.

Multiple names. Each name is a body. Each body is a text. Overlapping, often contradictory codes.

Patriarchal Hindu, Agrarian magical, British colonial, and Western medical simultaneously co-existent, permeable, and polyvalent. The voices of Brahmins and doctors, lawmakers and tantriks, anthropologists and worshippers. Voices, which proscribe, prescribe, conceal, bind, reveal, and celebrate.

I negotiate these multiple namings,
becoming the body-self-described by one and then the other.
Tensions, elisions, fusion, separation. These lines encircle my body. Turning in on themselves only to open out again, describe a new arc of yet another circle.

Circle, cycle, spiral. parabola – ribbons, rags, bonds, bandages.

This work maps the social construction of women’s bodies and sexuality in postcolonial India through the prism of discourse around menstruation. Photographs of the body are enmeshed with images, objects, and texts which gesture towards three dominant discourses: the Brahmanical attitudes of control and fear towards women’s sexuality based on ideas of purity/pollution; Shakta, rural and Tantric celebrations of fertility and female power (shakti) and western medical/colonial erasure of bodily processes through law and technology.

Whilst the texts are drawn from across the centuries, they are all extant, part of current knowledge and usage, as are the images. These layers reveal the instability of preconceived oppositions between the ancient and the modern, offering us multiple meanings, permeable sites, and temporal interplay. The photo sculpture becomes a site of reflection on plural readings of the female body in India.