In Conversation: Maitree Muzumdar Part 1
Photo by: Boris Eldagsen (c) BOOTBLACK Maitree Muzumdar
From law to film, Ahmedabad to Goa, Maitree Muzumdar has her work cut out for her when it comes to shifting India’s traditional cultural norms accepting and embracing sexual politics in all its many forms. It’s a challenge she has accepted, and isn’t backing down.
While most of you spent Sunday morning making pancakes and poaching eggs, I had the immense pleasure of spending the morning in conversation with the feminist Indian artist about her work in the BDSM and hedonist world of Berlin.
Maitree’s more ‘mainstream’ work focuses on counter culture and bringing awareness to the systems in place that keep us complacent. In these times of pandemic, her Instagram profile is populated with cyberfeminist short videos that are a part of her digital series ‘UNMUTE’. The UNMUTE videos are made using open source, freely available graphics, photos and images, which Instagram and WhatsApp tactfully provide as a means to communicate, while also ensuring distance from any controversial or protest-friendly visuals. The idea behind UNMUTE is to surpass the censorship laws and use their own content to create protest-friendly socio-political material through a process she refers to as ‘digital manipulation’. As Maitree puts it, “India has been pushing for digitization even more furiously because of the lockdown. We must not forget the class-dividing material realities that under-ride a digital world. And to not mention, digitization today gives the right immense digital advantage to control and release information based on what suits their motives better.”
Her foray into the world of BDSM began innocently enough when houseguests from Germany introduced her to their work in fetish leather crafts. From there it’s a BDSM fairytale so-to-speak.
Maitree was connected with Simon Thaur and Kirsten Krüger of the infamous KitKatClub in Berlin and multiple other experienced and highly knowledgeable kink explorers. After saving enough money on her indie artist salary, she headed to Germany for 18 days to dive head-first into the land of hedonism and all things BDSM and kink. What she found surprised, delighted, and very much turned her on.
“As a third world country, India is still struggling with several hurdles because of its ingrained centuries-old class system. I see feminism as a subset of the class struggle, because we, the women, are the labour class too! In such a system, a woman putting her sexuality in the public domain becomes a political statement,” she tells me during our Sunday morning call.
“India is called the land of the Kamasutra and we keep citing it as the code of conduct on sexuality. What is it really? A text by upper-class elite men who were privileged to learn Sanskrit. It fits in the power dynamics of the Bhramanical patriarchy. A Shudra woman would have written differently. I was more interested in a new-age Indian archival on sexuality that had been created with awareness, keeping the ideas of consent, pleasure and feminist class struggle in mind. A documentation of individuals and communities exploring sexuality further and further in India. Constantly updating and constantly evolving. So I started working on BOOTBLACK, an archival of sexual journeys of forward-thinking people. I wanted to blend these newer, updated references on sexuality with the older references, slowly normalizing these.”
Maitree had not gone to Berlin with the intention of being on camera. However, to kickstart BOOTBLACK, it was important to her for an Indian body to be exploring the Berlin scene. With no other Indian with whom she was connected around in Berlin at that time, she felt that being in the film herself was the simplest solution. Or rather the toughest. “I wish I had documented more of my kink journey, but there was so much information to consume that several times I just went with the flow, deciding that I would come back again to document. That second trip remains pending still.”
Usually behind the camera, Maitree found herself on camera in two of Simon‘s music videos as well. “He creates what feels like genderless nude poetry,” she explains. In her Berlin explorations, several talented artists ever so kindly agreed support her - “like Boris Eldagsen with his camera and light work expertise, Tamandua for Kinbaku, CoCoKatsura for feminist discourses, Espectra Negra for introducing me to industrial sound and the punk scene, Luhmen D’Arc for much sexual explorations through intimacy with multiple bodies, and countless other artists, kinksters, theorists, prostitutes and comrades who influenced me.”
Performing under her own name without the creation of an alternative experimental alias allowed Maitree to claim and empower her own identity, while stripping away the compulsive identities that had been imposed onto hers. “Being naked in front of the camera made me feel powerful, not shameful. It really hits you - each aspect of conditioning that has gone into creating the identity you so proudly assume.”
All the while Maitree was confronted with the question, “Why the particular interest in alternative cultures?” From a young age women are told that their body and all its natural functions are against them. The ideas of consent, pleasure and communication remain in the dark. Sex tapes in India are used to manipulate and humiliate women and families. Virginity of a woman is associated with purity. Gender-based violence, marital rape, online harassment, child abuse and forced child marriage are some of the many other brutal realities in India. Bringing in aspects of religion, morality and familial pressure ensure strict creation of the woman the patriarchal society desires. Of men, for men, by men. The birth of a woman, de facto, is a glitch in the system! The subculture prides in being the glitch. Which is why I connected with it ever so smoothly and have been deeply interested in exploring further in this domain.”
In BOOTBLACK, Maitree explores several issues, “How can one create a panic situation in traditional hierarchical power pyramid structure? Can the aspects of dominance and submission in the BDSM world be used as a clever lens to understand power dynamics and create a disruption? Can topping from the bottom be a useful tactic? Can the theory of how dominance should be versus how dominance is supposed to be rethought? If one masters the kink of humiliation, can the patriarchal idea of punishment ever remain a punishment if they are actually getting pleasure out of it?”
“Exposure, or lack thereof, is what holds people back. Some of the films Simon is heavily infamous for are scat porn, where fecal waste is seen as a form of pleasure. From the outsider’s perspective it feels gross, dirty and disgusting. From the insider’s perspective, it is a revolutionary political statement. Who plays in garbage? The degenerate class. By playing in shit, your perspective changes. You question all the privileges you are born with. You become the degenerate. Especially as a woman, playing in dirt, disgust and gross aspects also keeps ‘em misogynists away. They want nothing to do with degenerates like me. It's a great filter system!”
In Berlin, Maitree was equally, if not more, interested in the philosophical and psychological aspects of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. She especially thrived when playing in the more feared and subversive fetishes. All these practices used to be a mode and tool to oppress at some time - like Kinbaku (rope tying), whipping, spanking, chains, golden shower, scat, etc. The alternative culture has managed to completely flip the power dynamics by introducing them as kinks, and by mandating consent, communication and pleasure. BDSM is not just a play of the bodies, but also the mind. Each form of play is constantly challenging the traditional norms of gender, class and power dynamics.
I had to ask, “Why not stay in Berlin?”
Maitree knows that even though she has found her community there in Berlin, staying wouldn’t allow her to bring the much-needed change back to India. The oppressed class in India is, in whatever means possible, pushing for a feminist revolution; in homes, on the streets, in relationships, at workplaces, in communities. “I have to do my part, here!” she declares.
And then we had to go there... this world, our world; it is defined through the man’s gaze. The real question for Maitree: “How do I find out what a woman's gaze is?”
She tells me, “All the books I have devoured, films I have watched, art that I have been influenced by, have been by men. So unfortunately, I believe even my gaze is still a male’s gaze based on the influences I had while growing up. But I’m more aware and conscious now. I feel that only when I can manage to strip away all the conditioning and look objectively at all the references I have had till now, can I find my gaze. It’s a long and continuous process. And a tough one. And often we slip and make mistakes, but each slip is just the stepping stone to reach the next level of awareness. Thankfully I work and live in a safe space in Goa with peers and friends who lovingly guide me. They have been a solid backbone for me.”
So you’re probably wondering like I was... given India’s closed attitude towards sexuality in general, what is the BDSM scene like there, or rather, is there even a scene there?
“In Berlin, kinksters are proud to openly proclaim themselves as kinksters; the same formula would not apply here. While I decided to blend kink into my work, I wouldn’t want to impose the same on the other individuals exploring here, because that means bringing in a form of colonization back from Berlin to India.” Says Maitree. She has managed to discover some amazing experimental people in Goa, Bangalore, Kolkata, Bombay, Delhi and Ahmedabad. She says that the form and process of kink play is different, but is moving fast. So what now? For Maitree, “The hunt is on to connect to kinksters in the other cities. I am especially interested in exploring the North Eastern states.”
We have faith the kinksters will come out to play where ever she goes.
Photo by: Boris Eldagsen (c) BOOTBLACK Maitree Muzumdar