“औरत के मुख़्तलिफ़ चेहरे - The Good Woman”

Who is a Good Woman? Who defined her? Who put her into these moulds and made her this one homogenised, essentialist entity that is either this or nothing? “औरत के मुख़्तलिफ़ चेहरे - The Good Woman” is a multidisciplinary series that I started working on towards the end of 2023. A tumultuous year that led to many transitions in my life. A year, that took me back to my home in Jaipur, India, where I spent the last three months opening trunks, closets and drawers that held painful recollections of an abusive childhood. This series is a single act of my recalcitrance to archive the unarchived narratives of the everyday, the family lives, the stories that passed on from mothers to daughters... the erasure daily spoken word of the mundane, quiet, willing and complicit violence between women and girls... the moment when gender becomes a social construct through casual utterances and the constantly re-enacted linguistic violence.

BTS of the months spent creating these masks using the 42 steps that go into creating a blue pottery piece (grateful to Garima and Ramgopal Sainiji from Ramgopal Saini Blue Pottery in Jaipur for. helping me learn this beautiful art form and opening up their studio for me to work.) It starts from making the structure with clay and then pouring plaster of Paris over it to make the mould. Then in the mould goes a "chapati" made of the dough of quartz stone powder, powdered glass, fuller's earth, borax, gum and water. Once that chapati has taken the shape of the mould it is taken out by a special method and then left out in sun to dry. I missed a few steps after that in which the basic mask structure is then rubbed with sand paper to make it smooth. I wanted the masks to hold the scars of rusting cultural foundation. Then the mask is quoted with a base layer to fully smoothen it before painting starts but I left that step out as well. I went straight to the writing part. After several months of research in which I went through copious amounts of newspaper archives, read several books, spoke with women from all walks of life and chronicled spoken words that have passed through generations, studied folk lores, religious texts, went through my own personal family archives, resorted to popular media, films , songs from Bollywood films... I then sat down to write my findings on these masks... creating an alternative history of an Indian Woman. The hitherto unarchived history. The lost voices in the sheer everydayness of their existence... that made them so normal... that they became unworthy of being archived. Yet how very important are these everyday narratives in understanding the foundation of womanhood in the context of India.