Amma dolls in Navraathri, a throwback to Ibsen's A Doll's House

Chennai: Artisans from Thanjavur and other parts of Tamil Nadu have this year chosen to add to their repertoire of new dolls for the Navraathri festival with Amma dolls. They kind of seek to halo the memory of the late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, who less than a year of her demise, has joined the pantheon of similar colourful dolls of more remarkable political leaders alongside the Gods of our mythos.

On the surface, it may appear yet another instance of the artisans' creative urge for deification in constantly shaping new and pleasant forms that captures the popular imagination and something that vitalizes a society's cultural ethos.  To thus populate the Platonic world of Gods and Goddesses with new dolls, seem to go beyond just a marketing fancy in a world where forms captured in canvas or clay subconsciously drive the human unconscious to humanely relate to the other.

In the case of 'Amma' dolls, it has strangely coincided with the recent September 12 General Council of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) that she had headed close to three decades, elevating her to a more rarefied iconic realm by making the late leader their 'permanent General Secretary'. The less-than-ubiquitous poor artisans only sought to match that decree, perhaps even without being conscious of it.

However, the political sociology of the 'Amma' dolls unwittingly pans to other wider realms of art and literature, and one that immediately comes to one's mind is the great 19th century Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's acknowledged masterpiece in theatre, 'A Doll's House'. It comes both as a metaphor and language of the real in our times, though in the digital millennium one may seem to be far away from Ibsen's social milieu.

For what makes the case for its continued relevance even today was Ibsen's passionate concerns for enlarging the sphere of Women's rights and for human rights in general. Given Ms Jayalalithaa's fierce independence and courage in her political and public life, in retrospect, the last thing she might have wanted to be signified is in a form that places her on a pedestal, to be treated "like a doll, to be played with, admired and patronized".

That during her lifetime, her party men unleashed a series of larger-than-life cut-outs and banners of 'Amma' as part of their propaganda overreach as an instrumentality in politics in the Dravidian heartland, is an aspect not to be forgotten. Nonetheless, after her passing away, the hand-crafting of her persona into a traditional benign doll to be seen and revered in a gallery of nobler forms, seems a 'leap of faith', to use a memorable expression of the Danish philosopher-social critic Soren Kierkegaard.

And that is what brings Ibsen's classic play closer to our times in contemporary Tamil Nadu than one would otherwise feel initially. For the simple reason, Ibsen's protagonist in that play, Ms. Nora Helmer reflects the universal aspirations of modern womanhood, ideals with which Ms Jayalalithaa was sympathetic to. An exalted Mother Teresa coming calling on her at her Poes Garden residence in Chennai partly affirms this impression.

The protagonist of the play, Nora Helmer, wife of a banker, Torvald Helmer, is so brilliantly and subtly portrayed by Ibsen as an ostensibly underdetermined person who discovers her true persona in the last act of the play, when she finally walks out of the Helmer household "slamming the door behind her", to realize her true freedom. And Ibsen was known for letting socially sensitive issues - familial piety and authority versus individual freedom, patriarchal moral high ground and so on - have their full play. A mini-universe of human emotions unravels in Nora's "well furnished living room".

Nora has a 'secret' to keep in the interests of her husband's health, even as her former school friend Ms Kristine Linde walks in after long years, while another key character is Krogstad, a lower-level employee in the bank where Torvald works and who knows where Nora had erred in having to take a 'secret loan' to nurse her husband to health, besides the age-old ends versus means dilemma. They all play out within the play's unity.

From a position of a seeming naivety of a child, taking care of her family and children to finally standing up to an "oppressive situation", as a woman who deeply resented both her father and husband "stunting" her personality growth just to fall in line with society's "traditional expectations", Nora comes out in the play as the quintessential modern woman, who yearned to move out of the doll-like existence. In between, there are tangles to be sorted out, as her long-standing friend Linde helps her, but in disguise, even as the ostensibly evil-shaded Mr. Krogstad turns generous to help his lover Linde's friend.

Nora might have finally emancipated herself from the 'Doll's House', but the deeper implications of the play is that in her moment of self-overcoming, finding her true self, she emerged an icon at another level, typifying the struggles of many other women like her. The polarity of goodness stemming from human empathy, and bad faith moments informs Ibsen's metaphysics of theatre, but mercifully, there is no witch-hunting or mud-slinging up to the grave. There is, finally an implied reconciliation in the play, respecting the other's point of view and a person's self-respect.

Thankfully, souls go beyond their graves. The tumultuous life and times of a girl from a modest middle class Brahmin family becoming a famous star and then to go on to become one of the most popular leaders in the political landscape of Tamil Nadu and even beyond, as Ms Jayalalithaa's life had dramatically unfolded until her demise in December last year - notwithstanding a person's privacy which even the Supreme Court upheld recently - seems yet another Ibsenian calling to that liberal outlook as 'Amma dolls' now join the Navaraathri Kolu.