Besharam: Of Love and Other Bad Behaviours by Priya Alika Elias is a guidebook about what it means to young Indian women and how actually to be one. The author writes it from her perspective of having lived across various countries and how multiple locations for an Indian woman actually don’t simplify the expectations around her. The book has been divided into eight sections demarcated over sex, ugliness, love, hurt, culture, failure, judgement and independence. Through these themes, Priya describes the negative relationship between Indian women and sexuality. She writes, ‘maybe this is the saddest thing about being a woman: attaining womanhood means learning what we are forbidden to do. Attaining manhood means learning what you are capable of.’ The varied metaphoric expressions add to the narrative, as the account races through coming to terms with sexuality. Through anecdotal references about masturbation and consent, Priya tries to weave how sexuality innately empowers men to violate bodies of women. She also brings in issues of skin colour, featural appropriation, body shaming and how society inflicts this on women. She uses the example of the Indian actress Kajol as not a particularly thin woman and how popular culture then was not promoting skinny women in particular. In hindsight, she misses out the fact that popular culture was always catering to demands of fashion cycles, which in this case were having a particularly curvy structure. In one of her interviews, the popular Indian actress Rekha mentioned that body awareness in the 1980s and 1990s was limited as compared to now. As a result experiments were carried out on female actresses. In one instance for retaining a particular weight and structure for a certain role, the poor actress was fed only baby cereal for months together.
August 2019, volume 43, No 8