Whatever happened to Her, She of that civilisational burden and cultural heritage? Though the questions have the vacuous resonance of a Bollywood script, seeking an answer from Pooja Bhatt is unfair.

But what is fair in the world of media-friendly causes sustained by a million absurdities and inhabited by Bharatmata's last loyal legatees? The latest from its bulletin is dangerously funny: the stardust of Pooja Bhatt has stripped the Bharatiyanari of her cultural fabric.

Really? Standing naked, culturally and intellectually, are those sloganeering czarinas of the Akhil Bharatiya Agnishikha Manch (ha, the Sanskritic purity of its semantics). Wish they had clanging chastity belts to match their sanctimonious rubbish.

For the perceived half-nudity of Pooja Bhatt, a manifestation of cybervoyeurism, is less perversive than the stinking nudity of cultural pretence. And persecuting an actress for a pornographer's fantasy, that too in the name of the endangered Indian woman, is not only a vulgar display of desperation in the age of diminishing causes. It is also an unsolicited assault on Indian culture which continues to outlive the dark prophecies of its self-elected guardians.

Remember the disrobed Goddess in an erotic canvas? The controversy it generated was certainly not a case of the divinity of art versus the sanctity of the divine. It was almost a double whammy for both art and faith and the Goddess, throughout the silly riot in the mind, lay safely outside the canvas outside the slogans as well. Also, remember the Bangalore beauty pageant? Long legs and swim suits somehow failed to deform the eternal beauty of Indian womanhood, despite the Save-Her feminist pageant on the street. The accidental victimhood of Pooja Bhatt is only the latest chapter in this saga of misplaced salvation authored by the mentally impoverished militia of cultural orthodoxy. True, virtual pornography is a repulsive progression in the cyber-age; but the primitive methods of the culture police are something India can afford to live without in the same age.

Perhaps there is something terribly wrong about the grammar of cultural protest in India. Feminism in this part of the world has already seceded from the intellect. It is, sadly, activism and nothing more; and its occasional displays of laboured polemic are pathologically independent of any intellectual vigour. If it is not bride-burning, then it is nubile nudity. Equally ancient is the anguish of the religious right. Given a chance, it will banish Indian womanhood into a veiled world of cultural sanctity. How different is it then from purdah-prone Khomeinism? As the cultural inquisitor's wrath overwhelms an innocent Pooja Bhatt, culture begs sanity and reason. McLuhan's global village has already upgraded itself into Bill Gate's cyber-republic. The personal tragedy of Pooja Bhatt is a little price for that progress. But her tormentors are a reminder of the backwardness of cultural or moral protest. A free Pooja Bhatt is a happy diversion. The overclothed Pooja-bashers are a cultural derision.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.