Why bra-panties are not bombs
Malini Nair| TNN | Feb 5, 2017, 10.00 AM IST
A college play was at the centre of a controversy recently for using the two words that denote women's underwear. Sunday Times looks at our long tradition of squeamishness
Halfway through 36 Chowringhee Lane, Aparna Sen's classic work, there was a fleeting but memorable scene: the ageing and lonely Violet Stoneham (Jennifer Kendall) has offered the use of her drawing room to a young poet who is looking for some intimacy with his girlfriend. As she readies to leave home for work, Violet asks to be excused, quickly goes to the clothesline and pulls off her bra and panty and shoves it into a laundry bag.
We had laughed in the darkened hall then; it was a greying, granny bra and panty and Violet was too old to play coy, but we understood. Some strong social code that we absorbed from our mothers, grandmother and aunts was deeply chiselled deep into our sensibility - women's underclothes cannot be publicly visible or talked about, certainly not in mixed company.
Remember Lucille Ball once asking her daughter: "Where is my B-R-A?" looking pointedly at her son who tells her poker-faced: "It is hanging on the L-I-N-E mom."
Decades down the line, the squeamishness appears to be still in place. The panel judging a university theatre festival hosted by Delhi government's Sahitya Kala Parishad reportedly threw out a play produced by Kamala Nehru College for using the words bra and panty along with "other cuss words". And this at a time when the world is celebrating Beyonce's already-iconic baby bump photo in burgundy bra and ruffled panties (mismatched, please note).
The sarkari decision, which smacked of the whole "haw, hai" attitude to any mention of women's underthings, was rolled back after widespread condemnation. As the spirited response from the girls pointed out, if you said banian and chaddi instead you wouldn't be asked to wash out your mouth with soap.
Spunky theatre actor Mallika Taneja, who is a product of college dramatics, has gone beyond saying bra and panty on stage — she actually appears on stage stripped down to her underwear in her scathingly funny 10-minute act, Thoda Dhyan Se, and proceeds to swaddle herself in a suffocating shroud of clothes to "stay safe" on streets. The play is a resounding hit especially in women's colleges where it is always greeted with howls of laughter and support.
"I find it embarrassing that the judges are embarrassed. We put a panty on the stage for our play on incest more than a decade ago when I was in college, for heaven's sake. University theatre is a place for bold experiments that challenge all kinds of stereotypes. This is just another episode in the increasing clampdown that all arts are facing," she says.\
It is clear where the horror of having the two words thrown at you comes from. There are some unwritten, accepted social conventions around all things intimately feminine. But to start with the bra and panty. First, they can't be openly hung on an open clothesline, you have to shroud them with a towel. Because who knows what kind of idea they could give people about you by implying unmentionable body parts?
If you carried your washing, you picked the farthest, darkest corner to hang your underthings. If there were men around you left them damp in the bathroom till the coast was clear. Considerate men would look away. None of these shifty rigours applied to the janghia, langot that could wave breezily in the sun.
Recall too the cringe-worthy experience of shopping in the callow Libertina years before the word lingerie came to be widely used, before women in uniforms sold you multinational stuff at malls and before online shopping made bra shopping a breeze. Usually it was some benign uncleji who sold undergarments in the generic "Ladies Fashion Shop" alongside bindi, bangles and safety pins. Some would have a woman assistant, others would do the deed themselves. "Size?" he would ask matter-of-factly, half the eye looking you in the face and the other half gliding down to assess for himself. And you grabbed whatever you got and ran for your life to get over the embarrassment of it all.
It is not just the small clothes that make us squirm. There are other things that are firmly marked Ladies Only - these are all too femininely mysterious and icky for common consumption.
One of the funniest scenes in the 50s classic Chalti ka Naam Gaadi involved Anoop Kumar, painfully shy of women, picking up Madhubala's lipstick by mistake, leaping up in horror as realises what it is and screaming 'Kartooooos!' The ordinary sanitary napkin is one such kartoos for the general population.
As Twinkle Khanna pointed out in her Sunday Times column , sanitary pads are treated like radioactive isotopes at shops, to be packaged first in newspapers and then handed out in a black plastic bag in case anyone saw it and figured that you bled once every month. The other "kartoos" is all mention of blood in periods - recall the online spoofs last year on the clean blue "blood" in all sanitary napkin ads? Then there is vagina, lactation...the list is a long one.
Responding to the masculine revulsion that greeted the graphic ads for her company's period panties, US entrepreneur Miki Agarwal had this to say: "We were talking about what happens to half the world's population here." Indeed, half the world's population uses, washes and changes you-know-what and you-know-what every day. Get used to it.
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