Selfhood and Symbolic Excess: On Bunu Dhungana’s Confrontations

Menstruation is a potent taboo in many South Asian communities—a biological imperative rendered “impure” by fact of its occurrence and visibility. The menstruating body is rendered "nacchuney," or untouchable; and for the period of its duration, they are debarred from the house and relegated to a small, dark room in relative isolation. This practice―prevalent largely in the Nepali Hindu community―affected artist Bunu Dhungana, who subsequently strove to leave her immediate habitat in adulthood. Growing up, she felt constrained by societal expectations of feminine attributes, as their absence or rejection would be strongly criticised as well as ridiculed within the community. Through a series of self-portraits, titled Confrontations, the artist explores her body against the entanglements of desire and violence as they manifest in the traditional markers of Nepali womanhood.

In one of her portraits, Dhungana’s face is covered with red bindis, which―along with a piercing gaze―serves to visibilise the taboo through a formal abundance. The sindur, kapaal baatne dhaago and ghumti populate the portraits as well, all of which are tied by the common colour of red; expulsion and celebration occupy the same epistemic space. The menstrual blood can then be seen as the first event of violence attendant to being born a girl, followed by singlehood―against which these material symbols are hoped to act as guarantee. The portraits assume the role of documentary evidence of items that decorate as much as they asphyxiate. Far from adorning her features, they are designed to disfigure and mutilate the artist’s face. Imbued thus with a criminal excess, the items are read beyond their aspirational role as signifiers of marital happiness and fertility. Here, the red is galvanised in its symbolic ubiquity to produce discomfort through a nonconformity of use.

A significant aspect of the series is also Dhungana’s complicated relationship with her mother. Having been raised and conditioned in heteronormative patriarchy, she was unable to come to terms with her daughter’s resistance to “norm” and “deviant” ways of being. Their views on womanhood and concomitant notions of feminine precarity are separated by a fundamental conflict in outlook. While the artist’s deliberate departure from societal expectations carries normative associations of failed Nepali motherhood on her parent's part, the portraits also create a space for empathy between the two figures in a subtle negotiation of shared trauma. One of the components of Confrontations is a letter that the artist had asked her mother to write to her. Tender and searing, the epistolary address materialises a deep perspectival schism between two generations. A lot has changed since then, says Dhungana, as the two women found themselves recovering together from Covid-19 in the confines of the same house over months. They rediscovered their bond through new registers of love, anger and care—that was only made possible in a self-sustaining pocket through mutual reliance in a state of vulnerability. There might be another letter soon, the artist teases.

All images by Bunu Dhungana. From the series Confrontations. Images courtesy of the artist.