Suman K Sharma
Sometimes it is good to sit back and view life as it is, trying to find a meaning of the heat and flurry of the world. Recently, I watched on Netflix an old Bollywood movie, ‘Amrapali’, directed by Lekh Tandon. It is based on the life story of a courtesan of the ancient republic of Vaishali. She with her ethereal beauty, uncommon wisdom and spirituality transformed a blood-thirsty war-monger, King Ajatshatru of the Magadh empire, to a peace-seeking follower of the Buddha.
In the film, however, I hardly saw the Buddha or his followers. There was Vyjayanthimala exuding sheer sensuousness in the role of Amrapali, and there was Sunil Dutt as Ajatshatru, his thirsty eyes lapping every square-inch of her luscious body. A spaghetti-strapped tight choli showed off her full bosom against her slim, dusky arms. Being 30, the heroine of yesteryears was at the peak of her sexual maturity when the film was made in 1966. There was that scene in which Amrapali is shown dressing Ajatshatru’s chest wounds without knowing his true identity. What with the facial expressions of the leading pair and the angle at which the camera hovers suggestively over them, it looks more like an intimate Vyjayanthimala-Sunil Dutt bedroom scene than an honest depiction of an act of compassion on the part of a pious woman towards a nameless wounded soldier.
One should be chary of saying that those connected with the film had had any prurient intentions. Perhaps the storyline demanded to show how a young woman won over a deadly enemy by virtue of her physical charms. Could the director have achieved the same effect in the film with a differently attired leading lady? Maybe not. Amrapali’s alluring femininity needed to be evoked through Vyjayanthimala’s artfully draped fulsome roundness. I have been an ardent fan of the Bollywood films ever since the late 1960s. What confounded me then was why would women-actors, more often than not, dance and prance about in skimpy sleeveless blouses in the icy hill locales; while their male companions sang paeans to their beauty, clad from head to toe in warm woollens. It was a woman’s shapely arms, set off by her bosom, that the audience desired to watch. That was the answer that came to me much later. In hindsight, I don’t blame the Bollywood. Fascination for such womanly attractions has been a universal trait. To quote just two instances, dear old Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) speaks of ‘the round bare arms’ of his protagonist in ‘Tess of d’Urbervilles’. Closer home, Fredrick Drews (1836-1891) in his memoirs ‘The Territories of Jummoo and Kashmir’ applauds the shapely arms of women dancers in the Dogra durbar.
But what of men? Wasn’t Sunil Dutt, Vyjayanthimala’s opposite in ‘Amrapali’, also required to display his manly charms? No, the audience of those times might have been turned off by his muscular – and probably hairy – limbs and torso. The fascination for men’s six packs and bulging biceps was to come much later, with the filmy peccadillos of Salman Khan, the shirtless. As it happens, men with bare tummies are in trend all over again, showing how lean and fit they are. Unlike women in fashion, they lay more emphasis today on their physical fitness than mere aesthetics. That was not always the case though. It may come as a surprise to some of us that once upon a time, men too experimented with decking up their private parts during the Renaissance period in Europe. If modern women wear bra to shape and support their bosoms, those European men wore codpiece to cover their pelvic region. That began as a necessity for them.
The tight-fitting hose which they wore covered each of their legs separately upto thighs, leaving their pubis and buttocks naked before the elements and the lustful eyes of sodomists. With time, the fashion-conscious males thought of giving the ‘cod’ (a contemporary jargon for scrotum) a more prominent shape to advertise their masculinity. Codpieces – the bigger the better – became the rage of the day. In 1549, Ferdinand, Emperor of the Holy Empire commissioned a portrait of himself, proudly showing off his accessory to one and all. Henry VIII, that macho monarch if ever there was one, had himself cast in bronze. His oversized codpiece got more side glances than any other part of his physiognomy. But as someone has said, what goes up, must come down. Codpieces vanished altogether with the onset of the seventeenth century. The male half of the European society got more occupied with exploring the wide world than flaunting its potency, real or assumed.
Society has designs on all of us. Nature gave us our bodies. The society then hastened to fashion how each one of us should look and comport ourselves.
Follow our WhatsApp channel
