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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  What great minds say about the armpit
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What great minds say about the armpit

About an unassuming part of the body, but capable of holding mystery

Actor Ankur Vikal in Motley’s stage production of Manto’s ‘Bu’.Premium
Actor Ankur Vikal in Motley’s stage production of Manto’s ‘Bu’.

The armpit occupies what my guru Khaled Ahmed would call a liminal space. It is not a body part of particularly sensual properties (what on earth could a lover do with one?). And yet it radiates eroticism enough to terrify India’s principals into insisting on no-sleeveless rules. This sentiment isn’t universal, and so far as I know doesn’t apply in the West, which leads one to wonder whether the seductive armpit is an Indian phenomenon.

Those who watch/observe our advertising would certainly pick out an obsession with the well-groomed female armpit. This aspect, it is true, is not just something that Indians alone fuss over and I can remember the trouble actor Julia Roberts got into a few years ago when she flashed some hair at a red-carpet event.

Writer Santosh Desai once described Punjabi bhangra as “dances-that-consist-of-armpit-exposure". I riffed on this theme and speculated that bhangra was popular because Punjabi culture was extroverted, and that in turn explained why it was exported to the rest of India. No other Indian dance exposed the armpit, I wrote.

When she reached this particular paragraph, Meru Gokhale of Random House, currently editing my next book, promptly sent me a photograph of a Bharatanatyam dancer with her hand demonstrating a mudra over her head.

That’s not what I was reaching for, of course. I meant, and actually Desai meant, a deliberate and studied exposure, as in bhangra.

To return to the subject, I always make notes when I come across something interesting while reading, and here is what I have on the subject from various books.

In Rammanohar Lohia’s collected works (nine volumes, 11,000 but worth it) is this 1960 letter from Lohia to publisher Roma Mitra:

“The armpits of women, even in an advertisement, have a strange fascination for me. Did I tell you of when I was about drowning in the Wandsee, the Berlin lake? Too proud to shout for being saved, the last bit that flashed across my mind was the thousands of glorious looking armpits and how I was going away prematurely without knowing more of them and even having had a full and good look at them."

I suppose that makes me a Lohiaite, then. Who knew?

Lohia continues: “I was then about 19 years (maybe 20) old. I don’t think I have quite got over that feeling for armpits. Is there something similar with the women? Does she feel churned up inside, after looking at something which does not belong to her own person?"

Lohia then asked Mitra (who was in Europe) to interview women like Simone de Beauvoir on the subject so that she could write an article for his organ, Mankind.

Aristotle, endlessly interested in such things, writes in Problemata: “Why has the armpit a stronger odour than any other part of the body? Is it because it is the least exposed to air? Such parts have a particularly unpleasant odour because putrefaction takes place in them owing to the stagnation of fat. Or is it because the armpit is not moved and exercised?"

He observes that “armpits perspire most readily and freely; for they are least subject to cooling". There is little exploration of the sensual aspect, but that is expected of Aristotle, who is not as playful as Plato often is.

Aristotle asks: “Why is it that a man bursts out laughing if one scratches the region of his armpits, though he does not do so when any other part is tickled?"

I don’t know either, and cannot remember reading about this in works by people like Robert Wright and Desmond Morris.

I was not surprised to read that V.S. Naipaul was an armpit obsessive. Patrick French’s biography of him, The World Is What It Is, reveals that Naipaul’s Argentine lover Margaret “promised to let her armpit hair grow thick and bushy in the way he liked, although while she was in BA (Buenos Aires) she really could not be expected to go around looking like what she laughingly called an Italian cook cum whore".

I will reserve my opinion on female underarm grooming but I think male armpits should be covered.

The man who wrote about the attractions of the armpit best was Saadat Hasan Manto. I recently read, for the first time, his story Bu (Odour) in the original Urdu. It is sensational. It hit me as hard as it did the first time when I read it as a pubescent boy. This was in the early 1980s in Surat when I saw it in my father’s copy of Debonair.

Naseeruddin Shah’s troupe Motley performs Bu, about Randhir, a man in Mumbai who is intoxicated by a peasant woman’s armpit odour. The play is a monologue, and Randhir is played by Surat’s Ankur Vikal, my roommate in college at Vadodara’s MS University (Rabindranath Tagore Hall, Room No.30).

Ankur is a first-rate actor (you may remember him as the man who spoons out the beggar boy’s eyes in Slumdog Millionaire) with a great body and cool, calm demeanour.

Manto describes Randhir in Bu as “fauji goron ke muqable mein kahin ziyadah muhazzab, taalim-yafta, sahat-mand aur khoobsurat". More civilized, literate, fit and beautiful than the British soldiers (who Manto writes took all of Bombay’s available girls during World War II). That description is true of Ankur also. He plays a lean and muscular Randhir in a vest. My friend Saeed Mirza and I saw Bu together, and Saeed, a good judge of acting if ever there was one, was totally taken with Ankur.

Anyway, Ankur once told me that when he does Bu, he notices that the audience gets uneasy. He can observe couples becoming hostile to one another as the narrative progresses. So powerful and sensual and uncomfortable is Manto when he toys with the subject of an armpit obsession. Such an unassuming part of the body, but capable of holding such mystery.

Also Read | Aakar’s previous Lounge columns

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Published: 26 Jul 2014, 12:04 AM IST
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