Deepa Majumdar
PART I
It is hard to believe that twenty years have already gone by since Diana, Princess of Wales, a young mother of two, died untimely at age 36, in a tragic car crash on Aug 31, 1997– five days before Mother Teresa. To appreciate Princess Diana is not quite respectable in academic circles, which dismiss her as part of a sentimental popular culture too shallow to merit research. But I have always liked her. I found her humanity touching. I admired her strength. I also felt deep disgust for the way the British royal family treated her – especially her former husband, Charles, Prince of Wales. That he did not have filial feelings for Diana, despite being 13 years older– was troubling. That his feelings were perhaps more carnal and instrumental – using her body to get the heir and spare for the British throne, calling an insecure, young Diana “chubby,” with what seemed like calculated sadism – was chilling. Even more troubling was his moral confusion about the ethics of marriage – that it is wrong to sever friendship from the carnal act, that such severance is the inception of lust – above all that it is wrong to continue a prior, carnally-oriented furtive friendship, while married to somebody else.
The difference in their respective responses to the question, were they in love, asked at a post-engagement 1981interview of Charles and Diana, was telling. His philosophical response, “whatever ‘in love’ means” – proves perhaps that although 33, Charles was not mature enough to understand that being “in love” – if it is to have any truth-value at all – presupposes faithfulness and friendship. Her response – “of course [we are in love]” – stands perhaps as an omen of her understandable need for affection and family (typical of children from broken families),her essential hominess, and romantic unrealism – traits that trailed her brief life as part of the psychological baggage she carried from the trauma of her parents’ divorce. This difference in their responses proves as well perhaps that a large age gulf never bodes well in marriage. Perhaps more troubling was the conduct of Charles’ present wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, who is ayear older than Charles. That she had neither filial feelings for young Diana – despite being 14 years older – nor feminist feelings of sisterhood – enough to control herself and stay away from Charles – was disconcerting. Of the two women, Diana certainly came across as more maternal.
The British royal family has always left me perplexed. I understand that unredeemed human nature will come with inherent proclivities towards hierarchies – that human nature, in essence, is sectarian. I understand as well that all spiritually meaningless hierarchies express the will-to-power – not the will-to-goodness. While family lineage is utterly meaningful in a moral-spiritual sense, it becomes empty snobbish sectarianism when based on wealth, power, aristocracy, etc. The Law of Karma mandates family lineages based on moral-spiritual grounds. There is, in this special sense, no accident of birth. We are born exactly to those parents, who fulfill the karmic purposes of our birth. But lineage based on historical privilege – having nothing to do with its own innate moral-spiritual worth – has everything to do with worldly power.
The British love for history and their preservation of their royal family always struck me as odd, existentially delusional, and narcissistic. I admire the vigor, discipline, and spirit of duty of the British royal family. But given their unquestioning immersion in the tinsel glory of aristocratic lineage, and the consequent gulf they have always maintainedbetween themselves and the commoner – I am convinced they have replaced conscience byprotocol. The Queen may appear like a secular essence of the soul of Britain – adeity citizens turn to in times of historical crises. But like all delusions, this one too is troubling. How can one expect stellar virtues – like compassion, empathy, and inspiration – from the historically privileged, who haveno knowledge of the travails of theordinary life? Indeed, one may expect all these consoling virtues from a genuine theocratic leader and param sevak like HH, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who does serve as the heart and essence of the Tibetan people. To compare his Holiness to Queen Elizabeth II, is unfair to the latter. That she nevertheless serves as some sort of secular essence of the British people goes to show the mindset of her subjects – that they crave for what she represents – wealth, historical privilege, unearned worldly power. We are, after all, defined by what we admire and rely upon.
But all this is part of the pageantry endemic to the celebrity culture of the west – a culture that prohibits the spiritually extraordinary individual, even as it grovelsidolatrously before the most worldly of all individuals – the lost souls who serve as celebrities –pop singers, movie stars, millionaires, and other exemplars of western Maya. We may add to all thisthe colonial shadow cast by the British royal family. The west has always regarded them as somehow superior to royal families from the former colonies. Let us not forget the prime aesthetic fallout of colonialism and post-colonialism still prevalent today – namely,the tenacious conviction that white is right, all else being ugly– a racist sense of physical beauty. Although now questioned and somewhat resisted in the west, this subjective sense of western colonial aesthetics often lingers more virulently in the former colonies in Asia and Latin America, where persons of African descent can face ugly discrimination – not from the white man, but the brown man.
This racialized Carnal Gaze – a primefallout of colonialism – is insidious, because it comes with a false universality. True universals tend to draw from objectivity. False universals are not only subjective, but draw their fake omnipresence through populism. The notion that white is beautiful – and in Princess Diana’s case, that flawless skin, proportionate features, and height are beautiful – all this is highly subjective (and therefore individuated) – yet universal – because the multitude share such populist perspectives, despite their rank subjectivity. How does this happen without consultation or agreements? How do millions reach the same aesthetic conclusions, independent of each other? Through the mob-like collective eye that craves sensuous beauty. Therefore, the irony of the matter is this. Although such notions of beauty lie entirely in the eye of the beholder – implying thereby sheer individuation, heightened subjectivity, and delusion – nevertheless, such false universals are gleaned from the mob-like multitude who share the same power-driven creeds of carnal beauty. Thus, tall, blonde, slim, and blue-eyed constitute aspects of the man-made physical beauty carved by the carnal gaze of the white male, which constitutes a specific shade of masculinist subjectivity.That white is beautiful, all else being ugly, therefore becomes a collective decree of colonial mob-aesthetics – a highly subjective judgment nevertheless shared by themob-multitude.
Such colonial aesthetics has perhaps a more terrifying fallout on the psyche of the objectified white woman, who can no longer distinguish between love and lust – than it has on the brown or black woman, or the non-white man. For it degrades and harms with immediacy, the white woman more than anyone else. The carnal eye, so pervasive in the west today,no longer distinguishes between puritanism and true chastity. Eating disorders that afflict western women, the terror of gaining weight and of aging, and the conviction that their partners will no longer love them, once they age – these constitute the ghastly fallout of a body-obsessed materialism. This homogenized aesthetic standard for the white woman has become a diffused somatic template, destroying wholly, the unique individuality of the body, which is a temple for the soul –through the homogenizing carnal gaze of the white male – a gaze that seeks to mass-produce all female bodies in the same template. For western man mass-produces and titillates desire itself and the objects of desire. After all, nothing can be sadder than to conflate sexual attention with love, friendship and affection. Etched deep in the psyche of vulnerable white women – this carnal conflation demands that matter (body) rule over mind, rather than mind over matter (body).
Despite the terrifying denigration of motherhood by western sexists and feminists alike, there is in the western psyche a hidden longing for the traditional wife and mother. The sum result of the carnal conflation of love to the carnal act is extreme insecurity in heterosexual white women, who feel unloved when carnal attention is lacking. A more insidious result perhaps is thisself-contradictory dream of the white male – a dream that carves out the female psyche more surely than any pornographic dictates. For the white masculine eye desires, on the one hand, women who are virginal, virtuous, and maternal – yet, on the other hand, clothed somatically in pre-sculpted desirable forms. Even as he pats himself on the back for not veiling his women – like the crude Islamist – the white male longs to see his woman shrouded in an aphrodisiacal veil. In Diana’s case, this veil was her natural charming shyness. The west usually pities the brown and black woman through insidious forms of colonial feminism. But the misogynistic western carnal eye has so ravaged the white woman that it has sculpted not only her body, but also her soul in accordance with masculine fancy. In this context, it is almost a relief to be a brown or black woman ostracized from this sadistic carnal ambit. To be convinced that the acme and purpose of a woman’s human existence lies in falling in love with a man – and this alone – has to be the most foolish take on human existence ever. The purpose of our human birth can never be mere romance gleaned at the bridal altar, but rather, the sublime gift of Nirvanic self-realization received at the Altar of the Divine.
(The author teaches at Purdue University, US)