Dear You, 

Saint Lucia, the patron of the blind, can be seen in hundreds of paintings smiling subserviently with her eyes gouged out, served on a plate. They did that because they did not see eye to eye to the way she viewed herself.

They are still here.

They - the believers, the vigilantes, the God-men, the custodians of art and culture. Just to avoid confusion, I want to say it aloud, by ‘they’ I don’t mean him(s). They are not always hims, there are plenty of hers too. Just like the male gaze is not necessarily male and the female gaze not an equal and opposite antithesis of it. 

Coming back to the they….. and now….ad-libbing John Berger, “they painted a woman naked because they enjoyed looking at her. And, then they would put a mirror in her hand and call the painting ‘Vanity’, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness was depicted for their own pleasure.”  

They, also, carefully crafted Jesus. Gave Him whiter skin and lotus pink lips and put him up on the cross of immortality. To be treasured, to be looked upon. Just as they did with the ‘nautch girls’. 

They - the colonial and the postcolonial - both exoticised the courtesan. Portrayed her as the femme fatale, the sex diva, the not-human in the larger than life films. She was used and abused, and continues to be commodified, even after her death.

Aren’t you doing the same, you ask?
I smile and reply, perhaps yes, metoo.

Yours faithfully, Me