'Prick the viewers' nerves'

By Elizabeth Blunt

The images are graphic, the ideas challenging, and the art created to mark India's Year of the Girl Child. The British-based Indian artist Jeroo Roy has put together a collection of paintings under the title What Honour, Whose Honour.

The Art of Jeroo Roy

In pictures

Jeroo Roy's powerful, painful paintings are not the usual thing to find in a smart Mayfair gallery.

The delicately hennaed hands of an Indian bride, consumed in flame, with a whole alphabet of injustice and hatred - abuse, barren, control. Burning, childless, dowry. Kerosene, lust, misery - behind the flames.

In another painting, more hands - bloody hands this time - smash their way out of captivity.

Unlikely tribute

A child prostitute plays hopscotch while waiting for a customer.

Rows of jars hold the aborted foetuses of girl babies, beside them a list of what they might have become: midwife, housewife, actress, artist, rich woman, poor woman, beggar woman, thief.

Jeroo Roy, whose work is now on show at the Nehru Centre, the cultural wing of the Indian High Commission in London, says the obsession with the violence practiced against women came to her late in life, after she read the account of a bride in Delhi who called off her wedding at the last minute and reported her future in-laws to the police for harassing her family over the dowry.

Before she saw that newspaper article, she says, she had been largely oblivious, busy working as an illustrator and then running her own business as a building contractor.

But now curiosity set in, and the obsession with the cruelty inflicted on women, especially on girls and young women, took over her mind and her work.

"The subject," she says, "suddenly seemed to choose me, instead of me doing the choosing."

She travelled to Calcutta, and met organisations working with prostitutes and other desperate women.

Not commercial

There, she heard about women trapped in abusive marriages, or driven to suicide by their in-laws' incessant demands, and the pressure to produce sons rather than daughters.

Portrait with the artist

And she heard stories of dowry deaths - the mysterious deaths, usually in accidents involving cooking stoves, of brides whose dowries had proved disappointing to their husbands' families.

The images Roy has produced are disturbing, and are not the sort of art which buyers can comfortably hang on their living room walls.

The fact that the exhibition is unlikely to be a commercial success doesn't faze Roy. She would rather it was kept together for a time as a touring exhibition, so it can - as she puts it - "prick the viewers' nerves", so they can be instrumental in stopping these atrocities being repeated.

She says she would welcome the chance to show the paintings in India, but warns that cruelty to women and girls happens everywhere.

Dowry problems may be particular to Indian and Pakistani culture, but no women, she says, can consider herself immune from violence, wherever she happens to live.