His wife Sita had been abducted and now found herself at the mercy of a tyrant from elsewhere: Ram rescued her and brought her ‘home’. Dilip Menon pointedly asks: ‘who is exercising their fundamental rights here?’ 1 Did Ram’s recovery of Sita illustrate the fundamental rights of the aggrieved husband, or those of Sita? Any agency in this case was obviously masculine and belonged to Ram. This might at first glance appear an unusual choice unless understood in the context of the Partition of 1947. When asked to provide illustrations encapsulating the spirit of the Indian Constitution in 1950, the artist Nandalal Bose chose to depict the scene of Ram recovering Sita from Lanka for the passage on Fundamental Rights.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |