Amaaya Dasgupta

Queering Culture: Saree, Seva, Sajaavat

An exploration in displacing cultural objects from their cultural contexts, by stripping them of their regressive and archaic heteronormative connotations. Queering them merely by experiencing them as a queer body—in an unremarkable, ordinary way. In documenting the process of tying a saree, I stain the pieces with turmeric and henna, thus claiming various facets of south asian ‘womanhood’ for myself, as a non-female, non-binary, brown body. The series traces the tying of the ‘saree’ - a process that for me (and other brown afabs) comes with unsaid metamorphic implications. like when my mother stopped tying my saree for me, and i learnt to wear it myself - that is, when I—in a cultural framework—became a ‘woman’. ‘Seva’ meaning service, another aspect of South Asian womanhood that limits a woman to the kitchen as (one of) her domain(s) of servitude. ‘Sajaavat,’ meaning decoration, in this instance referring to the adornment of a woman’s palms and feet in mehndi (henna) on the day of her wedding—and the heteronormative symbolism that the varying patterns, richness, colour, etc of the mehndi represent. I claim these experiences—clothing, cooking, and adornment—as my own. I claim them as what connects me, as a queer, brown body, to my culture and my home. I do not claim them by doing anything exceptional, but by the quiet rebellion of my mere non-gendered experience, and of my mundane non-gendered existence. Being in a different cultural environment allows for the displacement of these cultural objects to take place, which is a necessity for my exploration.