A tiny dot. Both epic and microscopic in nature. Epic, in its fabled capacity to house the third eye. And microscopic, for being what it is - a tiny ornamental dot on the female body.
The delicate bindi is undergoing a renaissance of sorts – it is becoming bohemian. Approved and embraced by India’s style bloggers. This breed of independent style bloggers wants to merge style with tradition, pinning its cultural identity onto a fashion forward skeleton. Women are only more eager to join, remodeling the ceremonial badge of bindi into something more conceptual.
In one of their collections, designers Abraham and Thakore, known for presenting traditional garments in a modernist fashion, chose to keep the garments understated, and let the bindi take centerstage.
Why now, but? We are becoming more and more confident of ourselves. There is greater ownership of our identity.
Cultural confidence
The more we are blending in, the more we are standing out. We are culturally becoming confident. We are proudly becoming the achaars we eat, the paani puris we pop, the thumkas we gyrate to – and the bindis we wear. We are self exploring. We are claiming our identity – taking stronger ownership of it. But not at the cost of progress.
At the risk of sounding dramatic – we are preserving the vestiges of the traditional – this crazed, millenial generation of ours.
Our culture is ours alone. And we are twisting it into a beautiful duality.
Dual Identity
How about wearing a crop top and ripped jeans with a bindi? Stylists say it makes the look exciting – giving it a dual identity. A traditional and modern mashup is precisely what we are about at the moment – a confluence of cultures.
Karishma Rajani, style blogger and writer at Cosmopolitan India, is a self proclaimed bindi fan. She says she sees tremendous aesthetic and philosophical value in a bindi.
“The Bindi is not just a dot anymore,” says Karishma.
“I love the idea of juxtaposing something very traditional on a very contemporary ensemble”.
Dot Spot: Social Media
The hashtag bindi has 1,32,553 posts on Instagram. Other than that, there are multiple hashtags with the root bindi – bindibabe (1272 posts) , bindilove (1123 posts), bindiswag (844 posts), bindian.. even bindisandbowties!
Who would have thought this 5000 year old, oft forgotten accessory will be so dominantly popular on a 21st century photo app.
The bindi is becoming a global accessory. But whose bindi is it anyway?
Is it a White Thing or a Brown Thing?
Gwen Stefani wore it, Madonna wore it, Selena Gomez wore it, Vanessa Hudgens wore it.
Bindi has been popularised and stamped ‘hip’ by the celebs adorning it. But some are not too pleased with the trend going global.
Indians are divided over the issue. Some say it dilutes the religious and cultural currency of bindi. Others even use the word Cultural Appropriation.
However, it is the teeka, or kumkum that was part of our tradition. Not bright, embellished bindis. Those, and vinyl stick-on bindis have anyway commercialised it. And made them disposable. And anything commercialised is free to be used by anyone.
Actor- singer Monica Dogra, who’s born to Dogra parents, and was brought up in Maryland, USA, is a regular bindi wearer. Monica, who has shifted base to Mumbai now, says, ‘Bindi is a language on its own without constriction.’
When asked what is it about bindi that so attracts her, the actor says, “The Bindi is sort of a ritualistic thing for me. I feel like I’m joining a thousand year old tradition of decorating the third eye in homage and reminder.”
Bindis: fascinating or frivolous?
But isn’t a bindi just what it is, then - a tiny dot?
It is difficult to fathom – laughable even, how something so small can represent something meaningful.
Bharti Kher, a big name in the Indian art scene, and wife of Subodh Gupta, attempted just that. The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own, her sculpture, shows an elephant helplessly strewn on the floor, in the last vestiges of his being. His skin is made of bindis – lots and lots of them. The installation was sold at approximately 7 crore rupees at a Sotheby’s auction in London, 2010.
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Bharti likes to aggrandize the mass produced bindi into a symbolic piece of art. The bindi, she says, has provided her with an artistic language.
Small is indeed powerful, then.
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