Instagram feminism: Indian women's relationships with themselves

A personal photographic project that explored young women's body image has evolved into an empowering space for the traumatised

What are young Indian women’s relationships with their bodies? How do these relationships impact their ambitions?” Mumbai-based photographer Anushka Kelkar, 23, began grappling with these questions two years ago, when still a student at liberal arts institution, Ashoka University. Surrounded by women in their late teens and twenties, Kelkar saw diversity, not just in terms of where the women were from, but in the struggles they experienced. 

Curious to know more, she started an Instagram page called Brown Girl Gazing. The initiative explores Indian women’s relationships with themselves, capturing through photographs their different stories, insecurities, vulnerabilities and triumphs. Today, Kelkar’s page has about 10.8K followers, the visual stories striving to vanquish unachievable beauty standards and talk about issues such as domestic abuse.

“When I first reached out to women in my college to participate in this project, I was overwhelmed by the number of responses. On the very first day, I had close to 40 emails from women I knew and didn’t know,” says Kelkar. Her first few posts celebrated women’s bodies in their natural state — without make-up and free. In one post, two girls posed around an empty pool, playing, talking and laughing, as if the camera wasn’t there. But soon, Kelkar moved on to loaded topics.

One young woman, who chose to remain anonymous, made Kelkar photograph bruises on her body — all cruel evidence of paternal abuse. “This shoot took place within three months of my starting the project. It’s still one of the hardest shoots I have ever done,” recalls Kelkar. A more recent shoot involved a 30-year-old woman who had been made to feel worthless all her life by overly critical parents. “When she was 15 or 16 years old, her parents thought of getting her married because they didn’t think she was good for anything else. Even though she is doing well now, this trauma continues to haunt her,” says Kelkar.

The current 333 posts cover subjects ranging from fat shaming, the obsession with light-coloured skin, acne and other skin problems, body hair, breast sizes and stretch marks — all in an aesthetic manner and always accompanied with a personal note from the sender of these photographs.

Curious to know more, she started an Instagram page called Brown Girl Gazing.

“Initially, Brown Girl Gazing was more focused on quashing beauty standards. But with time, I have become interested in understanding and documenting ‘shame’,” says Kelkar. She has now begun conducting body-image workshops in schools and universities in Mumbai and the NCR region, and is in constant touch with psychologists and therapists for her ongoing research on the idea and practice of shame in the country. Studying the subject has allowed her to look at how eating disorders co-exist in a country that is burdened by high levels of malnutrition. “We don’t take disorders such as anorexia and bulimia seriously because we think it can’t exist in India. But they are taboo subjects that we need to be doing something about.”

“With time, this platform has turned into more of a community than a personal project. It is no longer mine, it is a project of the thousands of women who have found pieces of themselves in it. One of the most gratifying parts is getting messages from women who say something along the lines of, ‘I thought it was just me and used to feel so ashamed, but now that I know it’s a larger community I feel much stronger,’” reflects Kelkar.

Brown Girl Gazing accepts crowd-sourced stories as well, to maintain the diversity of issues and women. As a lot of women have begun sending her stories, Kelkar tries to pick stories that haven’t already been told on her page. “It’s a challenge to keep it diverse. I have a hard time selecting stories. But the impact needs to be felt,” she says. With each story, Kelkar has managed to empower women who took the plunge by putting themselves and their insecurities out for the world to see on her body-positive page. Each woman here has the other’s back, and feeling stronger for it.