The Parting Pelvis: Temporality, Sexuality, and Indian Womanhood in Chandralekha’s Sharira (2001)

The Jewel-Box

Tishani, when you open your legs, it must look like you’re opening a jewel-box. Do it slowly, slower, there must be some tension, a feeling of suspense . . .

(Chandralekha in Doshi 2010)

The powerful imagery evoked in the above words by Chandralekha (1928–2006), the late Indian choreographer, speaks on many levels. It can conjure troubling images of an objectified female body, presenting itself for voyeuristic consumption. But this would be a reductive reading of Chandralekha’s fundamentally feminist verve. In instructing her dancer Tishani Doshi to part her legs slowly in order to gradually expose what lies between them, Chandralekha reveals a glimpse of her unique choreographic sensibilities.¹ She manipulates the audience’s experience of time and heightens their awareness of the materiality of Doshi’s fleshliness, by forcing Doshi to slow down the parting of her legs to a point that organically generates an excruciating bodily tension. This tension is viscerally experienced by the audience and is intensified further in Doshi as she physically processes the trepidations of revealing her jewel-box, her most precious possession, to the world. Although one could problematize the metaphor of the “jewel-box” as the space between Doshi’s legs, it is more interesting to note that while most precious possessions are objects distinct from those who own them, Doshi and her jewel-box are inseparable. Thus to compartmentalize the significance of the space between Doshi’s parting pelvis would be misleading, as it constitutes an extension of Doshi herself. It is therefore more valuable to analyze Doshi’s parting pelvis as part of the same holistic entity that is her sharira, Sanskrit for the “unending and complete body.”

This article examines Chandralekha’s final work Sharira ² (2001), an intense, sensual, and provocative duet between a woman and a man, as a challenge to heteronormative codes of male dominance and female submissiveness that govern the performance of Indian sexuality³ There are two ways in which this challenge is relayed: first, through a haunting triangle motif that is evoked repeatedly through the controlled parting of Doshi’s legs. This bodily triangle is symbolic of the yoni hasta in yoga, a hand gesture that is created by joining the tips of the two index fingers and the thumbs to evoke the yoni, Sanskrit for life-source, the divine passage and the vagina. The choreographic echo of this triangle in and through Doshi’s body offers a constant visual reminder that her sharira is both a harbinger of life and a center of sexual agency. At the heart of my analysis, I therefore resolve to shift the perception of the Indian woman as an asexual bharat janani (Mother India) to a sexual jagat janani (World Mother). The second way in which the piece critiques heteronormativity is through an über-slowing down of time, which emphasizes the materiality of Doshi’s body and the extremes it can execute. This in turn allows her to embody an extended and heightened temporality that lies beyond real time, in order to challenge conventional constructions of her body and sexuality as passive. These two choreographic strategies are efficacious in subverting heteronormative codes surrounding Indian sexuality only because they work interdependently. As Doshi parts her legs in hyper-slow-motion, the evocations of her yoni move beyond the realm of an objectified, sexual body part that is to be occupied and consumed by a male partner. Instead it becomes a powerful emblem of her ability to contain and spawn sexual desire, as well as to create, sustain, and give birth to life. Chandralekha, for whom the body represents an important agent of sociocultural activism, confirms this: “Sharira depicts the secrets of creation, the secrets of life in a woman’s body. It is about the living body without compartments where sexuality, sensuality and spirituality exist together. The yoni hasta is crucial to it” (Chandralekha in Mattingly 2007).

In Chandralekha’s choreographic journey, Sharira is not unique in referencing this powerful visual symbol of female sexuality...