5

Future Forms

Female Body Image in Indian Dystopian Fiction

ANNIKA TANEJA

Introduction

The female body in contemporary India is a site of myriad discourses, debates, and negotiations. Since the nation first gained independence in 1947, the watchful eyes protecting Bharat Mata (“Mother India”) have expected women and girls across the country to conform to a series of external forces that have attempted to shape their bodies and identities in more ways than one. In their article entitled “Body, Gender and Sexuality: Politics of Being and Belonging,” Sabala and Meena Gopal trace the history of the complex and often conflicting ways the female body has been socially constructed in modern India:

Women have always received contradictory messages about their bodies. When expedient, it is glorified by ideal images of goddesses; honour of the nation/family/community and sometimes the same body is projected as shameful, embarrassing, vexatious, fearful and disgusting. . . . Through this comes the distorted picture of how we view our bodies. (Sabala and Gopal 2010, 44)

This “distorted picture,” in turn, affects women’s relationships with their own bodies. It does not simply impact their aesthetic choices but may also impact what they do, how they speak, where they go, and so forth. As Sabala and Gopal further explain, both the female body and female body image have become subservient to the anxieties of a patriarchal worldview that situates its culture and its morality in its women. From school uniforms and religious diktats to popular culture and mass media, there is a constant stream of information delivered to women on how they should appear. In other words, “the public gaze whether male or female is always speculating on women’s bodies, how next she will clothe her body or adorn it or maintain it or manipulate it or shape it to perfection” (Sabala and Gopal, 47–48). But what impact does such speculation have on women in India today, and how will it affect the generations of women to follow?

This chapter seeks an answer to this question in three works of science fiction (SF) by three Indian women writers: Harvest (1997) by Manjula Padmanabhan, The Lesson (2015) by Sowmya Rajendran, and Clone (2019) by Priya Sarukkai Chabria. It begins with a discussion on body image, both within academia and within India specifically; it then critically analyses female body image in the fictional futures of the three texts in order to unearth the social, cultural, and technological roots of women’s body aesthetics in present-day India. Finally, it examines the plotline of the three texts together to establish the significance of Indian women who dare to imagine and author alternative forms of embodiment while questioning and subverting the discourses that dominate female body image today.

Female Corporeality and the Body Image Discourse

The term “body image” has been notoriously nebulous since it first appeared in Paul Schilder’s seminal volume The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (1935). In 1988, building upon Schilder’s definition, Peter David Slade defined body image as “the picture we have in our minds of the size, shape and form of our bodies; and to our feelings concerning these characteristics and our constituent body parts” (Slade 1988, 20). By the 1990s, the definition of the term expanded to include both body image as well its affective attributes—that is, an individual’s relationship with her body image—and the focus of body image research markedly shifted toward those with “disturbed” or faulty models of self-perception, such as women with eating disorders or body dysmorphia.

In this manner, the body came to be considered a blank canvas upon which external forces exerted influence in order to make it adhere to certain aesthetic ideals. However, in the process, the several identities that mark the human body prior to its encounter with the external world were erased, with all bodies being considered equally susceptible to all influences. It was not until feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, and Elizabeth Grosz intervened that such a “neutral”—but, in fact, white, capitalistic, and patriarchal—conception of body image was challenged and corrected, shifting “the body from a purely biological form to an historical construction and medium of social control” (Bordo, 182). Sylvia K. Blood’s Body Work: The Social Construction of Women’s Body Image traces the history of these feminist discourses, which challenged psychology’s reduction of “women’s distressing experiences of their bodies” to simply “a concern about physical appearance” (2005, 3). Blood uses the social constructionist approach to question the assumption that “‘truths’ about individuals and their behavior can be obtained through the correct use of scientific methods,” advocating instead for an approach that allows space for investigating not simply disturbed body images but the norms and ideals that create them in the first place (29). The work of these feminist theorists thus shifted women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies from an individual experience to a broader systemic issue.

Body Image Scholarship in India

Though Eurocentric ideas of female beauty might dominate the Indian imagination today, it is safe to assume that the Indian subcontinent’s long and complex history would have given rise to multiple ideals and manifestations of the female body over time. There is, however, scarce documentation of such ideals, and most can only be gleaned retrospectively by examining the representation of “desirable” women in the art, literature, and culture of the past.¹

The formal study of body image in India is a relatively recent phenomenon. For a while it was believed that body image issues were a “Western” problem, and few studies were conducted around the subject in the subcontinent. But with the entry of a global visual and media culture into the Indian consciousness—first as a result of economic liberalization and then as a result of the Internet boom—there has been an increase in research that examines prevailing beauty standards and their impact on women in different parts of India. There are now many emerging studies on body image “disturbances,” such as eating disorders, colorism, and diet culture, especially among young women and college students. Some examples include research conducted by Chakraborty and De (2014), Rajagopalan and Shejwal (2014), and Kapadia (2009). However, there remains a relative paucity of research on the larger forces and discourses that construct such body image ideals in contemporary India in the first place.²

Informed by such debates and concerns, this chapter—by examining female characters from works of Indian SF—aims to move beyond perceptual models of body image to speculate how the sociocultural ideals that render Indian women uncomfortable in their own skin today may operate in the future. It seeks to interrogate how—and, indeed, if—these long-held embodiment ideals might impact Indian women’s attitudes toward their bodies and how they present themselves in the years to come. Finally, it asks if it is indeed possible to unplug the Indian female body from dominant ideals of gender and sexuality and imagine it afresh. The three works of Indian feminist SF under consideration—written by women and featuring female protagonists—use the genre of dystopia to introduce precisely such fresh female forms into the consciousness of their readers.³ In The Lesson, Sowmya Rajendran extrapolates the patriarchal ideologies of contemporary Indian society into a living nightmare. Manjula Padmanabhan’s award-winning play, Harvest, written in 1997 and set in a then-unknown 2010, examines the idea of bodily autonomy in a world where the sale of organs is legalized. Finally, Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Clone, set in an autocratic, posthuman world, locates the seeds of revolution in one clone’s act of self-determination. In each of the texts, it is a woman whose disobedient and divergent body becomes the site of a power struggle between societal norms and individual desires and irrevocably alters how she perceives and ultimately uses her body. Read together, the three texts offer their readers a continuum of resistance to both patriarchal and techno-industrial constructions of women’s bodies and body image(s), embodying the uniquely transformative potential of feminist SF, which scholars of the genre have long championed.⁴

Object of Beauty/Object of Consumption: Female Bodies and Body Image in The Lesson

The first text under consideration, Sowmya Rajendran’s The Lesson, is a dystopian satire that foregrounds the structural and systemic violence Indian women face every day. The central narrative device—in which the names of all characters and institutions are their social or institutional roles—spotlights this violence by literalizing it. The Capital City of Rajendran’s undated future is ruled over by the President of an organization known as the Adjustment Bureau. The “adjustment” in question is the transition of human subjects into an orderly, “normal” existence as hetero-patriarchal families, and all legal and political institutions of this regime are dedicated to ensuring that the fabric of society remains unsullied. There is literally a Moral Police Force that patrols the city, keeping a sharp eye out for any occurrences of premarital sex, revealing clothing, or other “deviant” behaviors. At the lowest rung of this force are people like the Dupatta Inspector, whose job is to monitor the attire of college-going girls and ensure no cleavage is visible. At the top of the order is a man simply known as the Rapist, whose job is to teach disobedient women the proverbial and titular lesson. His victims, we are told, have committed a range of offences—“They wore short clothes. They went to pubs. They smoked. They were not virgins. They had several boyfriends” (Rajendran 2015, 2)—all of which are unpardonable.

On the one hand, then, the women of this world are expected to follow a strict set of rules and become—as well as raise—obedient wives, mothers, and daughters. They must not display cleavage, wear too much makeup, or be seen with a man who is not their husband. But on the other hand, these women must also live up to the prevailing standards of beauty, attractiveness, and desirability and in doing so remain enslaved to certain oppressive codes of thought and behavior. For example, Rajendran’s protagonist—a woman known simply as the Second Daughter—is pressured to fix her looks and join the heterosexual institution of marriage as soon as she comes of age, as the narrative reveals:

They started off by sending them [the girl’s family] reminders in the form of well-meaning uncles and aunts who patted her head kindly and asked her when she was getting married and if she knew how to make sabudana vada. She could lose some weight, straighten her hair, go to a good photo studio and take some portrait pictures—had she done any of that? (23)

The Second Daughter is constantly reminded that she must fashion her body and her body image well within the sanctions of society—she must be shapely but not too skinny or overweight, she must be attractive and confident but not sexy or obscene, she must have long tresses but no body hair, and so forth. Throughout the course of the novel, the metric of beauty and morality keeps shifting arbitrarily, moving along a sliding scale of what is acceptable and what is punishable. The Dupatta Inspector, for example, makes up many of his rules as he goes along. Across each page, however, the underlying belief remains the same—that any unbridled expression of female freedom and sexuality is antithetical to the larger interest of society.

Rajendran’s language echoes the familiar lexicons of body shaming, moral policing, and gender-based violence that continue to shape women’s relationships with their bodies in contemporary India, where morality and sexuality (or, indeed, any kind of uninhibited self-expression) are often seen as mutually exclusive domains. These politics of perception define and redefine what sociologist Smitha Radhakrishnan terms as “respectable femininity,” under which an Indian woman is conditioned to locate herself “within the terms of a larger Indian cultural landscape that she feels unable to escape” (2009, 206). This larger landscape is dictated by the tenuous and constantly shifting middle ground between traditional Indian mores and morals and modern, transnational neoliberalism, with its emphasis on beauty and material success. The female body becomes the site of such negotiation, and a woman’s body image becomes inextricably implicated in this double bind. Radhakrishnan elaborates:

The important thread running through all the narratives women articulate is the idea of the “right” amount of freedom—not as much as abroad, where your sexual and leisure behaviors might indicate a rejection of family, and thus, a loss of culture, but not so little freedom as in either an earlier Indian generation, or, implicitly, those less educated and less well-off Indians who cannot exercise these freedoms. (207)

For most of the novel, the unnamed protagonist is struggling to toe this fine line. She tries to be educated, but not too educated. She tries to be attractive, but not too attractive. When she first goes to the Bureau to file a divorce, she makes sure to don the uniform of the good Indian woman: a “blue starched sari she’d carefully picked out” (Rajendran 2015, 152). But after her plea for divorce from her abusive husband is rejected, she rebels, and the President assigns her to the Rapist. To buy herself time, she feigns a pregnancy, hoping that if the President believes that she is a mother-to-be, he will no longer consider her a threat. We are told the following:

The Rapist did not know if he should proceed with the President’s request in the altered circumstances. It could be the problem had resolved itself. The woman would go back to being a dutiful wife for the sake of the child. (94)

But her plan backfires, and once her ruse is discovered, the Council decides to televise her rape as a lesson to society at large. Because it is still illegal to publicly disclose the identity of a rape victim, the Council instructs the Second Daughter to wear a mask during her rape. On the day of the broadcast, however, she decides to remove her mask on live TV, revealing her face to millions of viewers. Through this simple act, she reclaims her individual body from the state yet also opens herself up to an extremely unjust and unprecedented judgment. The President had hoped to punish her by equating her body with who she is and using the sexually violent act of rape to break her spirit. But instead of allowing such a conflation of her vagina and her will, the Second Daughter embraces her “deviant” body and mind, demanding her right to exist outside the holy trinity of daughter, wife, and mother, despite the many risks.

Rajendran chooses to end her novel at this point, denying both the audience within and the audience without (her readers) the comfort of closure. This refusal leaves the reader in a lurch, as once the Second Daughter successfully strips herself of the lexicon of the world Rajendran has built, her future literally becomes a blank page. Her new, “monstrous” body exists outside the language of Capital City, its Moral Police, and its judgmental gaze. This “filling in” of the blank, however, becomes a crucial, material intervention in deliberating what constitutes a “desirable” versus an “undesirable” female body in contemporary India. The women reading the novel are forced to reckon with the difficult questions the narrative raises: Is the female body desirable and beautiful only as long as it is also pliable and palatable to a patriarchal and capitalistic agenda? Can the forces that control how Indian women look be divorced from the forces that control how they live? In her landmark work on female body image, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf asserts that beauty is “always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance” (Wolf [1991] 2002, 43). By exposing the many misogynistic ideas that circulate through Indian society in the guise of aesthetic ideals, Rajendran compels her reader to reexamine her own environment and how its yet-unwritten rules impact her own relationship with her body.

Poverty, Technology, and Female Body Image in Harvest

In Manjula Padmanabhan’s play, Harvest, the forces that control the protagonist’s life are both traditional and technological. Written in 1997 and set in 2010, it tells the story of Jaya, a woman who lives in a slum in Mumbai with her husband, Om, and his family. After being laid off from his job, Om decides to sell his body to InterPlanta Services, a corporation that connects Third World organ donors with First World patients. From the beginning, the narrative makes a malignant connection between the bodies of the developed world and those of the “developing” world, intensifying this nightmarish scenario as its Indian protagonists increasingly suffer under the Eurocentric dictates of an ideal body image. As the play progresses, InterPlanta’s technology drives itself deeper and deeper into the family’s lives until the border between the human and the machine are completely dissolved.

Padmanabhan has described her play as an exploration of “what it means to have agency over one’s personal container” (2017, xiii), or one’s body. But for most of the play, Jaya appears to lack precisely that. From the moment we meet her, her relationship with her body is controlled by the punishingly patriarchal setup of her marital home. Her husband, Om, rejects her sexually by never expressing any desire to be intimate, leading her to seek comfort in the arms of her brother-in-law, Jeetu. But while it is evident that Jeetu does care for Jaya, he cannot offer her more than a few stolen moments of pleasure. Her mother-in-law, meanwhile, is unwilling to acknowledge any flaws in her son and blames Jaya for the absence of a grandchild. For most of the play, she verbally abuses and body shames Jaya, comparing her to various animals and declaring her to be inferior.

Living in crippling poverty, Jaya is left to languish both physically and emotionally, with any instance of being liked and desired reduced to a distant dream. The breaking point is when her husband signs his body over to InterPlanta, taking away her only chance at having a child and curbing her desire to experience motherhood. Once InterPlanta enters the picture, Jaya, her husband, and her mother-in-law lose the right to their bodies: they must now live under the corporation’s surveillance, eat its food, and follow its schedule. At the center of this trade is Virginia, or Ginni, the ailing, American organ receiver for whose sake Om must maintain his health. To ensure that her rules are being followed, Ginni video calls the family daily, using a device called the Contact Module, and interrogates them about their day.

The body politics of Harvest lies in the visual contrast between Jaya, an impoverished, brown woman from the developing world, and Ginni, who only appears on stage in the form of a hologram via the Contact Module. The latter is presented to us as the epitome of a beautiful white woman—she has fair and radiant skin, blue eyes, blonde hair, and a sweet voice. She even floats above the family like an angelic apparition, leaving them with no choice but to look up to her. On the other end of the scale is Jaya, whose beauty and youth, we are told, have faded under the hardships of her daily life:

Thin and haggard, she looks older than her nineteen years. Her bright cotton sari has faded with repeated washing, to a meek pink. . . . She wears glass bangles, a tiny nose-ring, ear studs, a slender chain around her neck. No make-up aside from the kohl around her eyes and the red bindi on her forehead (the colour indicates she is married). (1)

Evidently, Jaya’s is a world where her brown body is destined to be at the service of its white counterpart, in addition to being exploited by her own patriarchal environment. This politics of this intersection of economy, colorism, and technology run throughout Padmanabhan’s play. As the scholar Radhika Parameswaran writes in her thesis on the color divide that also divides the developed and developing parts of the globe, “fairness” acts as an “[agent] of remedy, salvation, and upward mobility” in an “India that is caught up in the neoliberal rhetoric of its own transformation, from occupying marginal ‘third world’ status to becoming a lucrative ‘emerging market’ and ‘rising global power’” (2015, 681). Thus, in every way, Jaya’s life is in sharp contrast to Ginni’s, with the former occupying an impoverished world within which poverty, colorism, body image, and gender come together to oppress her.

In the future Padmanabhan imagines, skin tones continue to color how people perceive each other and themselves, continuing South Asia’s long history of color bias. Despite the fact that Ginni intends to harvest Om’s organs, his mother still perceives her as a benevolent and angelic presence simply because of her fair skin and First World breeding. Significantly, this association of outer beauty with inner beauty is not limited to the world Padmanabhan creates on stage. Even before the Indian subcontinent was colonized and racial discourses came into play, colorism was a part of the vocabulary of South Asian society. Under the caste system, fairer skin tones were typically believed to be an embodiment of the “purity” and “superiority” of the Brahmins, while dark skin was believed to be a mark of the “inferiority” of lower or laboring castes.⁵ This colorist social hierarchy carried over to independent India, where it was adapted to speak the language of institutions such as popular culture, the beauty industry, and the matrimonial market, to name a few, with the correlation between fair skin and a better life continuing to have a stronghold on the Indian imagination. A result of this are the many fairness creams and skin-lightening products that are sold and used in the subcontinent. The advertisements for these products often depict a darker-skinned woman struggling to get a job or a romantic match until she uses the product in question, after which all attention lands on her and she achieves everything she wants. Thus, it is not simply a question of skin tone and beauty, as the success of this colorist ideal hinges on the idea that fair skin grants access to a set of experiences and relationships that dark skin cannot. As Natasha Shevde argues in her paper “All’s Fair in Love and Cream: A Cultural Case Study of Fair & Lovely in India”:

In truth, the power of [fairness creams] transcends the mere desire to look beautiful and instead embodies an Indian woman’s dreams, hopes, and aspirations. While “normal” cosmetics, such as foundation creams, could provide similar results in terms of making one appear fair, the prolonged outcome of fairness derived from creams such as Fair & Lovely is the strength of the product’s promise in societies like India. In sum, given that “fairness equals godliness” is ingrained in the female Indian population and that most girls are brought up believing that fair skin is their key to success (whether in their careers or personal lives), the overwhelming demand for Fair & Lovely comes as no surprise. (2008, 10)

Alongside the strong color biases that exist within the world of Harvest, beauty, health, and particularly hygiene also become commodities that are sold to residents of the developing world, by a white woman, in exchange for access to their bodies. In many ways, this invasive demand parallels the civilizing projects that were often undertaken to justify acts of colonization. As Sri­rupa Prasad writes in her book, Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940, “The phrase ‘sanitary awakening’ not only referred to a state of governance within which the cause of sanitation was given a fresh lease of colonial urgency, but also to a new form of ‘consciousness,’ a new moral-political realization, which could bring about a very different order of social transformation and become another element of the civilizing mission” (2015, 4). Here, too, the larger end goal—harvesting the body parts of these same residents—is eclipsed by the fairness of Ginni’s skin, which is read as a direct reflection of the fairness of her actions. While the specter of repayment literally hangs over Om and his family in the form of Ginni and her watchful gaze, it is offset by the fact that she grants them access not simply to necessities such as water and shoes but to luxuries such as television and makeup. The bodies on the stage, enveloped by Ginni’s world, transform into healthier and wealthier bodies, while Jeetu—who has spurned the InterPlanta way of life and continues to work as a prostitute—is covered in sores, bruises, and lice. The largely cosmetic changes to the characters’ lives (they have more material comfort but continue to live in a slum and occupy a low rung of the socioeconomic ladder) are perceived to be fundamental changes thanks to the redemptive promise of beauty Ginni symbolizes. In her 1997 edition of the play, Padmanabhan emphasizes these transformative effects through Jaya’s body, describing her as a changed woman in the opening of the second act: “JAYA is sitting on the sofa and doing her nails. She looks overdressed, her face is heavily made-up, jewelry winking from her ears, wrists, ankles and throat” (1997, 37). The means of this transformation, of course, is the white and First World woman, Ginni, who epitomizes both an ideal body and an ideal life.

At the end of the play, however, the family are in for a rude shock: the angelic Ginni is in fact an elderly American man named Virgil, who created a female avatar in order to grow closer to Om and his family. Virgil, it is suggested, possesses an understanding of the colorism at work in the world of the play and uses it to his advantage. One way he gains access to these biases is by listening in on all the family’s conversations, which includes Om’s and his mother’s—and, ultimately even Jeetu’s—many exaltations of Ginni. These exaltations are inextricably tied to her whiteness and her appearance. As a result, throughout the play, any critique of their benefactor put forth by Jaya is ignored and misinterpreted as an expression of her insecurity now that a more “beautiful” woman is a part of Om’s life:

For Virgil/Ginni, however, the bodies of Om and his family exist only to be exploited. In the third act of the play, Virgil also reveals that his intention has not been to simply secure either Om’s or Jeetu’s body for himself but also to impregnate Jaya and further his bloodline—an ability the residents of the First World, we are told, have lost forever. Jaya’s own opinion is of little concern to Virgil, as he believes that the material and financial wealth he can offer her in return will suffice. Her reproductive capabilities become a commodity that can be bought for a sum through the machinery of InterPlanta. To seduce her into agreeing, in the final scene Virgil appears in front of her not as a white man, but in Jeetu’s body. However, by this time the stage has been emptied of Om and his mother—two powerful influences on Jaya’s body and her body image. Furthermore, her suspicions about Virgil/Ginni’s intentions have been confirmed, and she no longer trusts her holographic benefactor. Thus, despite Virgil’s appeals and manipulations—which include a claim that he has fallen in love with her and wants to raise a child with her—Jaya is able to wrestle her body from the clutches of both Western technology and Indian patriarchy for the first time since we met her.

Read within such a framework, Harvest offers a strong critique of the long-standing colorism that affects Indians’ assessments of their own bodies and the bodies of those around them. By the end, the illusion of the superiority of fair skin stands shattered by the material evidence of Virgil’s exploitative agenda and the implosion of the traditional Indian family unit. For the first time, the audience hears Jaya’s thoughts, uninterrupted by her mother-in-law. Once she destroys the Contact Module, severing Virgil’s line of contact as well, Jaya sets the stage to assess her own body on her own terms—not as a brown body in contrast to a white body, but as an autonomous being with a mind of her own, free to forge her own relationship with her body.

Of Corporeal Manipulations: The Body (Un)natural and Body Image in Clone

While Harvest contrasts two versions and visions of femininity, Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Clone problematizes the female body in an entirely different manner: not through extreme difference, but through extreme similarity. Clone is a dystopian novel set in the twenty-fourth century, a time when the Indian nation-state is replaced by a geographically and demographically smaller territory known simply as the Global Community. This Community functions on a hierarchy that in turn lies at an intersection of biological and technological determinism. At the very top are the Originals, a small group of human beings who provide the genetic blueprints for the other three species—the Firehearts, the Zombies, and the Clones. Each of these artificially created species has been genetically enhanced or weakened in order to fulfill specific socioeconomic roles.

In this bleak future, the human body has been homogenized into a population of standardized subjects in order to achieve social and economic stability. Furthermore, these un-Original species are interchangeable and devoid of individuality by design. Our protagonist, Clone 14, is herself just one of a larger batch of fifty-four, all of whom are identical to their unnamed Original. Our narrator, Clone 14, describes it as follows:

All of us wore brown size 6 ankle boots, our voices were of the same pitch, our eyes brown-black, our hair cut in pageboy style, the widow’s peak on our foreheads dipping exactly. (Chabria 2019, 25)

In Chabria’s dystopia, the bodily standards enforced by modern humanity reach their nightmarish zenith. Clones must not simply aspire to look like their Originals, they must resemble them down to the last gene. The process of creation is artificial and technological, expunged from the bodies of women and the biological process of reproduction, except when fresh Originals need to be produced. In such cases, we are told, “The colony of Originals is kept segregated for the purpose so that fresh Originals and their blueprints are available for societal betterment. Their Matings are brief and pre-selected to give optimum results” (6).

At its core, however, Chabria’s novel is not simply a cautionary tale about technologies of cloning, it is a rejection of all technologies of similarity that attempt at crafting a homogenized body for all. The fictional erasure of bodily difference and diversity in the Global Community can be read as a critique of the real and rigid standards of beauty that have circulated across cultural and national barriers as a result of neoliberal globalization as well as technologies such as the Internet.⁶ The latter, particularly in the form of social media, has driven the mass production and dissemination of standardized images of beauty as well as desirability for women in the twenty-first century to the point that identical ideals of beauty have formed across national and cultural barriers. For instance, American journalist Jia Tolentino (2019) coined the phrase “Instagram Face” to describe the “single, cyborgian face” that has been birthed by social media’s “algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits.” The mass dissemination of photo modification technologies such as FaceTune and filters has only served to encourage women across different ages, races, cultures, and nationalities to reimage themselves to fit the norm.⁷

Trapped in a world dictated by sameness, our protagonist, Clone 14, whose body and its image are mirrored back to her manifold in the form of the other Clones of her Original, spends the majority of the narrative trying to find a sense of self in a society that denies her any marker of individual identity, including gender. Though her Original was a female, and she possesses the same physiology, Clone 14’s body itself has been regulated to a point of absolute neutrality through a pill known as The Drug, a type of hormone blocker that halts the menstrual cycle and the growth of body hair. The biological tailoring of her body, in turn, corrects Clone 14’s body image—or, rather, her lack of one. She has no conception of herself beyond her Original, an “ideal form” she must not simply aspire to but faithfully and unerringly duplicate. The turning point in the novel arrives once Clone 14 starts questioning the life she has led thus far and, encouraged by other rebel Clones, ceases taking The Drug, prompting her body to mutate. She grows moles and body hair and eventually starts her period. Her nonconformist physical form, however, is a liability in the world she occupies. Desperate to hide these changes from the Community, she begins to shave to maintain the neutral, nonbinary appearance required from each Clone. The labor of conforming to the regularized norms of the Community, and the effort and maintenance it takes to be an acceptable (let alone beautiful) body, echo the myriad activities that have been normalized in our own world. In the twenty-first century, multiple industries—makeup, fitness, and fashion, to name a few—covertly or overtly body-shame women into conforming to both local and global conceptions of beauty. The anxieties created by these cultural institutions ensure that the labor of beauty and conformity becomes an essential part of women’s everyday lives, as bodies that are different, deviant, or disabled carry the risk of being met with judgment, ridicule, or even violence. Naomi Wolf notes the consequences of this:

Because “beauty” lives so deep in the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem, and since it has been usefully defined as something that is continually bestowed from the outside and can always be taken away, to tell a woman she is ugly can make her feel ugly, act ugly, and, as far as her experience is concerned, be ugly, in the place where feeling beautiful keeps her whole. ([1991] 2002, 36)

Within the Global Community, the consequences for nonconformity are far more dire—Clones who disobey the rules are disposed of altogether. As disobedient and, more unacceptably, different bodies, they carry the threat of destroying the tenuous social fabric of the Community altogether. A group of rebels with precisely this goal takes Clone 14 under its wing. However, her cover gets blown, and the Community leaders soon realize that she is undergoing a transformation. She is transported to the city of the Originals, where they can keep a closer eye on her. Unlike the city of the Clones, this is a world where identity is embodied through hair, makeup, and clothing—in other words, through self-presentation. Clone 14 is given a makeover and a full-length mirror, in which she sees the complete, unfragmented image of her body and, consequently, herself for the first time.

But even then, Clone 14 remains an aberration, not simply because her body is different but because she is aware of its differences. Over time, her perception of her body—its capabilities, its functions, its strength—has mutated and expanded as well. This transformative, and almost dangerous, potential of body image is a thread that runs throughout her journey from a laboring body to a body in labor (at the end of the novel, she is able to get pregnant). Aided by her fellow rebels, Clone 14 is finally able to escape from the watchdogs of the Community and begin asking the forbidden questions regarding what lies beneath one’s flesh and form:

What are we made of? Are we only what is seen, and known? What of the spaces of thought and emotion, and that something else that makes us human, that something else that makes us grieve with others? (Chabria 2019, 278)

This ability to reimagine and reimage one’s body, differently from how society has constructed it, is a turning point that occurs in Clone, as well as the two other works under consideration. The climactic moment when each of the three protagonists cast off society’s reading of their body as unnatural, undesirable, and untenable precipitates a resurgence and a reclamation of their physical self, as well as their identity. It is a paradox that such a moment of reckoning comes at the cusp of an uncertain future, one all three may or may not live to see. However, the incompleteness of these narratives serves a far greater purpose: making the reader try and answer what lies ahead for Indian women who dare to demand self-determination.

Conclusion

In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), the theorist Darko Suvin coins the term “feedback oscillation” to describe one of the central narrative devices employed by dystopian fiction—the manner in which it draws its inspiration from contemporary circumstances and exaggerates and extrapolates upon these to deliver a warning about the future. He argues that as the reader uncovers the tensions, contradictions, and failings of such dystopian worlds, she stands to discover critical strategies that apply just as seamlessly to her own (Suvin 1979, 71). When this connection comes full circle, it forms what he calls a feedback loop, allowing the reader to see her context through the lens of the text and begin recognizing the systemic issues of her own world. Thus, as literary critic Tom Moylan stresses in his discussion of Suvin’s theories, it is not simply the work of dystopia, but the way that it is read, that lends the literary form its historic transformative potential. Moylan asserts:

A refusal of an engaged, cognitive reading process risks committing discursive violence to the text and further risks the perpetuation, or at least acceptance, of that ignorance and violence, injustice and domination, that rages in the world outside the text, in that everyday life to which we all return upon turning the last page and closing the book. (2000, 25)

The three works under consideration in this chapter employ precisely such feedback loops to challenge the prevailing bodily norms of the worlds occupied by both their characters and their readers. This metatextuality manifests in the slow breakdown of the protagonists’ illusions about their own bodies and the manner in which they have been trained to view themselves. The tools that these fictional women employ to deconstruct and challenge their environments offer the reader a way to decode and dismantle dominant constructions of the female body in the world she occupies. As SF theorist Marleen Barr puts it:

SF writers who create feminist metafiction magnify institutionalized—and therefore difficult to view—examples of sexism. These writers seem to peer into metaphorical microscopes while playing at being scientists—artful practitioners of soft sciences who expand women’s psyche and unearth an archaeology of new feminist knowledge. They refresh embattled feminists by using language artistically to create power fantasies and to play (sometimes vengefully) with patriarchy. (188)

By embracing newer, often unprecedented versions of their bodies, the Second Daughter, Jaya, and Clone 14 destabilize the cultural norms that form the bedrock of beauty in their respective contexts. These experiments with form transcend the boundaries of these texts and spill into the reader’s reality by equipping and encouraging her to interrogate what constitutes an acceptable body in her own world. What begins as a mode of questioning carries within it the power to transform into a mode of resistance and, ultimately, a way of rewriting one’s relationship with one’s body. Such a transformation, according to Naomi Wolf, is at its core a form of empowerment:

A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn’t grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. ([1991] 2002, 145)

At a time when body image discourse in India remains preoccupied with conversations around weight, color, and clothing, The Lesson, Harvest, and Clone serve to disrobe the complex historical and social discourses that form the foundation of these aesthetic ideals and the sexism that lies at their heart. By forcing their readers to confront the consequences of a rampant culture of body policing and body shaming rooted in misogyny, they precipitate a critical reading of contemporary constructions of female body image in India, particularly the tenuous link drawn between a woman’s anatomy and her autonomy. Instead of replicating patriarchal femininity rooted in deep-seated cultural ideals, the authors of the three novels deploy the trope of futuristic dystopia to envision how an Indian woman might look if she had the freedom to determine her own image—a year, a decade, or even centuries from now.

NOTES

1. For a detailed discussion, see Wujastyk (2009).

2. A notable exception is Meenakshi Thapan’s (1997) article titled, “Femininity and Its Discontents: The Woman’s Body in Intimate Relationships.” However, it focuses on body image and shame as a tool of oppression within the domestic sphere, rather than within society as a whole. For a more detailed discussion of the same, see Thapan (2009).

3. Here, I use Lyman Tower Sargent’s definition of dystopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived” (Sargent 1994, 9).

4. For a detailed discussion of science fiction by Indian women authors, see Kuhad (2021).

5. The precise history of colorism remains disputed, with some scholars tracing its root to the varna within the caste system, while others argue for a more diverse set of causes, including regional diversities and class divisions. For a detailed discussion, see Mishra (2015).

6. For a detailed discussion, see Liebelt, Böllinger, and Vierke (2019).

7. For a detailed discussion, see Mills et al. (2018).

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