The Women I Could Be

Amazingly off-beat, feisty, fashionable, fun-loving and self-assured in every possible situation… meet the women in young artist Sangita Jogi’s mind. “My women are modern,” she says. “A modern woman thinks differently. She’s not just going to do housework, she won’t get married until she’s pursued her own desires. She’s fashionable, she enjoys going to parties, and she likes to look beautiful. But it’s not easy to be modern.” The images she conjures up are astonishing, in the light of the limited sphere of her own life. Sangita, with little formal schooling, was married into a labouring family when she was very young. She lives in Rajasthan, in a very traditional patriarchal set-up, where her role as a young daughter-in-law is strict and restrained. And yet she snatches time to draw whenever she can, her confident lines dreaming up endless possibilities—where desire, play and exploration make up enchanted alternative worlds that are as alive to her as her own.