05 April,2023 07:07 AM IST | Mumbai | Mayank Shekhar
Mohabano Mody-Kotwal
In 2004, shortly before Jane Fonda, Marisa Tomei, Eve Ensler and Mahabano Mody-Kotwal were to board a flight from Delhi to Chennai, to perform Ensler's play, The Vagina Monologues - they got a call from the Chennai police commissioner to say their show had been banned.
Mahabano tells me, in many cities, the frickin' police commissioner is supposed to read a script, before he can allow a play up on stage.
Whether or not this top-cop had read The Vagina Monologues, he evidently saw a potential law-and-order issue in Chennai, if the deeply feminist manifesto was performed, in particular, by Hollywood legends Jane and Marisa. Something he never foresaw with violent and misogynist Tamil pix screened in the same city, every day.
Mahabano was telling this Chennai story to a packed crowd at Mumbai's Prithvi Theatre, in what's the 20th year of her staging The Vagina Monologues, starting March-end, 2003 - including several times in Chennai since!
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She holds exclusive Indian rights to Ensler's 1996 play. Which is based on interviews with over 200 women across the world, resulting in a series of monologues about the vagina, as both the centre of shame, and male conquest.
Wherein the woman's sexual desire/pleasure is perceived as dangerous/potent enough to be invisibilised altogether. The episodic play is a fine cross between fiction, and non-fiction.
Basically, four actors, seated, turning pages after pages of individual testimonies, on stage. Think of it as someone performing this column; only written much better - also, simultaneously poignant, playful, profound, and provocative.
The latter bit pretty much emanates from the fact that in a hall full of strangers, the actors are seriously crying out loud about sex, from an altogether uninhibited female perspective.
An obvious point to clap is when a performer breaks into categorising, imitating several types of moaning sounds of the female orgasm. Actor Swati Das totally aced this bit in the show that I saw at Prithvi!
Normally, The Vagina Monologues would be what millennials and late GenZ will now call sex/body positive. And that's a complete genre on consensual Internet sites, dating apps, and Instagram, for sure.
Namely, blowing the lid of shame from the female form, and sex, in general. Including Instagram influencer Leeza Mangaldas's smartly written, basic primer on carnal pleasures, The Sex Book, that I'd recommend to both the young, and the old, as a quick, bathroom/flight-read.
In some cases, just so they can tell between a urethra and vagina; cis men, women, and non-binary; or that that the proverbial hymen, like the G-spot, is a physical myth!
Leeza deals with pleasure in a breezy, sincere and centred way - instead of sniggering through sex-education that men of my vintage did, screwing their Std VIII, ogling at their unattainable biology teacher instead!
They carried that "haw" shame around sex all through their adult life thereafter. Eventually even perpetuating patriarchal values. Such that many, including women, still deem feminism - equal opportunities for men, women; naturally so in bed as well - as an urbane, upper-class fad.
The Vagina Monologues opens with women talking about never having intently looked at their own vagina/vulva, ever. Which is also what a seemingly liberated Leeza writes in her book - that she hadn't observed her own essential, sexual organ, up until she was 25!
Never mind that above the vagina is the clitoris, as Ensler's play also points out - that it is the sole human organ with sexual pleasure being its only purpose! This tells you all that you wanna know about nature valuing pleasure for the female form.
And that humans have historically looked down upon the vagina. Therefore, its individual owners have not looked at it at all, or actively looked away!
Which is still different from the short for Richard, or the first syllable of country, being the insults, we hurl at people, because getting associated with human genitalia is the worst thing a person can be!
I watched The Vagina Monologues in Hindi, that Mahabano rightly tells me, in comparison: "It's dynamite!" Ensler's field of study was primarily the West. Parts of India, the land of Kamasutra - that no Indian I know has ever read - is another planet on a scale of gender/sex/desire still.
Do we even use the non-slang equivalent of the vagina in Hindi? Even the actual word has been invisibilised! Yoni is the V-word, that "sounds like mahamari (pandemic)!" For daily vocabulary, even sex has to be transplanted from English - does anybody call it "yawn sambhog"?
The Hindi Vagina Monologues is titled Kissa Yoni Ka. It's a pun on the title of a controversial, political movie, Kissa Kursi Ka. There is Bollywood masala strewn all over - film songs in the interludes, references to Atul Kulkarni, Simi Garewal, Manish Malhotra. It's playfully translated by Ritu Bhatia and Jaydeep Sarkar (my college dost!).
Mahabano has been staging this Hindi version, approved by Ensler, since 2007. Barring a stray show here or there, it has not had a run anywhere outside Mumbai! Why?
You need sponsors for outstation shows. Nobody wants to pay to hear about yoni, yawn/sex, in Hindi! A few years ago, though, then Mumbai police commissioner Rakesh Maria invited Mahabano to perform especially for the city's female cops. I guess there are two Indias, hence two types of police commissioners!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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