Exploitation Blurs The Line Between Nude Art Models And Sex Workers

When Parisian artist Edouard Manet painted the famed nude painting ‘Olympia’ in 1863, he may have known that he was creating history. It is currently one prized acquisitions of the Musee d’Orsay but at the time it was created the painting raised the hackles of the Parisian elite for not only did the artwork depict a black maid in the unconventional settings of a Parisian bordello, but his protagonist was a high-class call girl looking disdainfully away from the flowers her ‘suitor’ sent her. Among the several tired depictions of Venus in the nude that dominated the art scene in the 18th century, Olympia stuck out because she was real and not some allegorized beauty.

There is also something very real about the women who pose in the nude in art classes where art students, both male and female put down the likeness of the model in furtive or confidant strokes. Whether it is the Delhi College of Art, the J J School of Art in Mumbai, or the Maharaja Sayaji Rao University in Baroda (Vadodara) all art schools follow the European/British pedagogy of painting nudes from real life. The belief is that once a student commits to memory the tensions and weight of real-life muscle and fat, then his/her work would acquire a certain mastery over form.

While the sentiment behind the Nude Study is really a noble one, in India it is almost impossible to be a nude model without attracting a fair deal of stigma. In fact some nude models, that some of my friends from art school have spoken to, indicate that they actually prefer nude modeling over sex-work. That the two are linked together is unfortunate but perhaps unavoidable although they are not really the same thing.

“I never take up any offers for sex-work (dhandha) that may be given to me, because even though nude modeling pays me less, there is some dignity (izzat) in it, I become a work of art,” says 20-year-old Savita, from Mumbai, who despite her young age is one of the main breadwinners of her family.

Savita’s father is bedridden and her mother does not earn enough as a domestic worker to run the family. Sometimes Savita gets a request from a group of eager students who are willing to pay a little extra for her to sit a little longer

Besides the stigma, what the two also share in common, because of the clandestine nature of nude study, is that they both are poorly paid professions. An average nude model gets paid a measly Rs 500 per hour. And while there has been a major movement, championed by both students and teachers of the arts faculty to pay the models around Rs 1000, that is hardly enough to run the house, and some of them take up private work which is more risky and often dovetails with propositions for sex –work.

While Savita is young and hopes to make something of her life, older nude models like Kanku Ben are at the end of their tether and do not make any distinction between sex-work, begging and nude modeling. An artist friend, Megha Joshi, often regaled me with tales of how Kanku Ben would come to the nude modeling class, take off her clothes in a matter-of-fact way and then fall promptly asleep, often snoring and making the whole class burst out in nervous giggles. While it served her well to rest and catch her forty winks in a place that required her to stay still for several hours, the pathos of the situation often hit even the most nonchalant of the students.