Deepa Majumdar
Into this foray of somatic narcissism entered shy young Diana – utterly innocent of the role she was to play, both historically and politically. She seemed to fulfill all the Caucasian dreams and demands made of female body – that it can be desirable only if it is slim, beautiful, fashionable, flawless – but also virginal and maternal. Young Diana therefore managed to do the impossible – by combining the carnal with the maternal. Sometimes I wonder if the west really understood why she was beautiful. I do not think it was her carnal dimensions or natural grace or skin tone, but rather her inner beauty and the touching pathos of her facial expression – always tinged with sadness. She had, what we Bengalis call “lavanya” – a quality of grace and inner beauty that can never be severed from goodness. What was touchingly beautiful was also her innocent maternalism – in a strange age that upholds the professional woman above the mother – or the woman who emulates male professions, to women like Diana who expressed the deepest beauty of feminine nature. We profane this beauty when we coerce motherhood, but we consecrate it – when women like Diana express maternalism naturally and sincerely from the depth of their being – revealing motherhood as the radiant cosmic principle it actually is. Indeed the picture of the fun-loving young mother, Diana, with her two boys, are among the most touching ever.
The rape of the female body can happen in degrees, the most egregious being gang rape. Without diminishing the pain of survivors of horrific gang rapes, we might nevertheless assert that there are milder shades of rape – “soft rape” – that can also cause enormous suffering and milder expressions of the same damage. At the subtlest level, we might define rape as any carnal use of the body of one person by another – a rape more sinister when the victim is many years younger. Like the more egregious forms of rape, these insidious forms of rape too take their toll. All forms, shades, and degrees of rape kill the soul of the victim. Raised in a culture that prizes romantic love as the end all and be all for young women – a culture that has given us the whole saga of Mills & Boon novels – and recommended strongly by Queen Elizabeth for her son Charles, perhaps on account of her innocence (and implied virginity), Diana walked into a trap, as it were. That she bore two sons with an adulterous husband implies a degree of soft rape. Her eating disorders therefore strike me as characteristic of victims of sexual abuse. Like many survivors, Diana battled self-destructive bouts of bulimia – all the more after Charles called her “chubby.”
Self-destructiveness, I suspect, stalked her all the way to her death, expressing itself in dangerous escapades and ruinous relationships with men. Let us not forget that she did not wear a seat belt during that last fatal ride in Paris. Diana’s interest in astrology too strikes me as an expression of the despair of a rape survivor. Above all, I suspect her relationships with men, subsequent to Charles were characteristic of rape survivors – a seeming promiscuity usually misunderstood as lust. The rape survivor repeats the destructive experience by going from one man to another – expressing graphically the loss of self, self-esteem, and self-respect – aiming almost at reliving the primary traumatic experience. This is how I understand Diana’s “falling in love” with her bodyguard. The men who take advantage of such women are the ones to blame and chastise. If in harsh Islamist societies young female rape survivors are flogged publicly – sometimes to death – as punishment for what lustful imams mistake as female lust, then here in the west they are flogged emotionally, carnally, and spiritually. In Diana’s case, one might suggest that such flogging was orchestrated perhaps not only by an unsympathetic palace, but also by a voyeuristic media that hounded her all the way to the end – a media she teased with all the deftness of a destroyed, insecure child. The hysteria of the media and the western crowds that followed her every move, prove the emptiness of carnal beauty – as much as they prove the emptiness of fame, to which Diana sold herself – seeking the love she missed, through the phantom of fame. But Diana was also lucrative merchandize in the hands of beauty industry and the media, which sold her image again and again, evoking her protest of “face rape.” Like many white western women, Diana turned to non-western men like Dodi Fayed and Hasnat Khan. Naïve and needy, receiving wholesome affection perhaps at least from Khan – Diana seemed not to suspect the horrific realities of puritanical patriarchal attitudes towards white women in Islamist cultures. In the end, all she longed for perhaps was something not in the least glamorous – a loving home.
It troubles me that during her days of pain no senior member of her family (on either side) sheltered young Diana or healed her – with mature affection, wisdom, validation and understanding. I am horrified that no family elder saw through her self-destructive relations with men to cherish, protect, and heal her. To think that Charles’ adultery was tolerated by Buckingham Palace and British society, with his own father saying he could return to his mistress Camilla, if marriage with Diana did not work out – is shocking. That Charles and Diana turned out incompatible proves that physical appearance, power, and privilege, being only skin-deep, can never be the foundation of marriage understood as a lifelong friendship. That the British public forgave all when Charles married Camilla, showed how desperate modern man is for love – but also how much the public still neglects feminist causes. It reminds me of Trump voters who chose to overlook his utter crudeness and violence towards women. In the light of his subtle rape and usage of Diana’s body, Charles is not fit to be king – if the monarchy is to have a shred of even symbolic historical meaning.
When she asserted her desire to be a Queen of Hearts – displaying her innate wisdom, which always elevated her far above political ideologies – it was perhaps Diana, more than Elizabeth II, who turned out to be the secular essence of the British people. For Diana was more a humanitarian than an angry revolutionary. She did not use her legitimate anger to fight political causes, but to soothe, comfort and bring succor to the dying, the destitute, and those in pain. She was thereby a subtle revolutionary. Without any conscious intentions to espouse feminism, Diana served feminism in the most radical way possible – not only by upholding motherhood, but by debunking the most pernicious of all sexist myths of white culture – that marrying a prince and becoming a queen confer upon a young girl, earthly felicity, meaning, and existential fulfillment. Often used subliminally to denigrate non-white women through colonial feminism, this myth is drilled into the souls of white girls. It has no place in the Indian psyche. Young Indian girls are raised to be wives and mothers – not princesses with fairy-tale weddings. That these noble ideals are often desecrated through coerced, greedy, dowry-laden marriages is another matter altogether.
I admire Princess Diana for the courage she displayed when she turned her life around – by transcending petty romantic love, to ascend to the higher universal love – offered with humility to those human beings usually rejected by society – people who did not look or smell nice. I admire her whole-heartedly because she taught her two sons humility – to reach out and touch suffering humanity. It is indeed a didactic irony of history that Princess Diana and Mother Teresa sometimes worked together – the first a secular essence of British people (especially women) and the second, a religious saint. I can understand why Diana evoked jealousy in members of the British royal family. She succeeded far more in expressing the main purpose of their mummified existence – which is to be a secular essence for the British people. Indeed it was touching to see pictures of Diana, dressed in all her finery, bending low to touch and care for those in pain. It was touching to see her hold dark children on her lap, with no hint of the showmanship so endemic to this Age of Advertisement.
In the end I admire Princess Diana because in the most innocent way possible – by overcoming her own sorrows by serving others in greater sorrow – and without directly intending to – she brought about a great political revolution. She overcame western pity and colonial snobbery and hatred through her simple gestures of affection and love. She was, in the end, a philosopher of love. Although regarded as beautiful in the somatic sense, Princess Diana proved by her life’s work of charity and humanitarianism, that the body is, in the end, no more than what Shankaracharya called a “khosha” or outer-most covering (or peel) of the sheathed, universal Self. Above all, I love Princess Diana because she felt “creeped out” when Donald Trump stalked her with bouquets of flowers, seeing her as the ultimate trophy wife. This goes to show that although hurt in marriage Diana was indomitable in the inmost fire of her being.
When I saw millions mourn Diana after she died tragically, I could not help but contrast her end with those of great savants who choose to die alone, celebrating death, thwarting all mourning – finding freedom in the release from the body. That millions mourned Diana showed that God answered her prayer and made her a Queen of Hearts – but retained her in the cycle of reincarnation, so she can return to earth to progress further towards the Divine. Regardless of the length of a life span, perhaps the same milestones are distributed within every life. In Diana’s case, these milestones had to be crammed – because her life span was a brief flare in the universe.
(The author teaches at Purdue University, US)