Whose Body Is It?

By: Dr. Neha Lohamaror (PhD)
Founder & Director, Kosh Foundation
“Does my body belong to me or to the people?”
This question arose in my mind while observing the controversy surrounding Kriti Sanon’s neckline in GIVA’s Raksha Bandhan advertisement. In response to the ensuing debate on tradition, culture, and the alleged decorum of the female body, Sanon gave a direct reply: “Traditions are in the heart, not the neckline.”
Yet, this controversy sparked an uncomfortable self-reflection within me. I believe in feminism, I understand bodily autonomy, and I maintain that clothing does not define character. Even so, when I considered sharing a photograph of myself where my neckline was visible, I paused. Anticipation of my family’s discomfort and the prospect of having to explain myself held me back. I could not bring myself to post that photograph. Was I lacking courage, or was I failing to live up to my own principles?
This very discomfort is where we must begin an honest conversation about the body, nudity, and shame.
Nudity simply means the absence of clothing. A human body can be unclothed and entirely non-sexual—such as a newborn infant, a patient under medical care, someone bathing, a classical sculpture, or a swimmer cutting through water. There is no inherent sexuality in bare skin; it is constructed through context, intent, and perception. Despite this, the female body is routinely viewed exclusively through a sexualized lens.
Anxieties around visually shading or recontextualizing the four-thousand-year-old bronze “Dancing Girl” of Mohenjo-daro before schoolchildren reflect this very social conditioning. In the Rehana Fathima case, the Kerala High Court also observed that a woman’s unclothed body is not automatically obscene. The court articulated the critical distinction between nudity and vulgarity:
Nudity ≠ sexuality.
Sexuality ≠ consent.
Visibility ≠ availability.
Society constantly erases these distinctions, treating visibility as a sexual cue, a cue as an invitation, and an invitation as availability. Consequently, a woman loses control over both her body and the narrative surrounding it.
A woman’s body is frequently treated as shared territory: family dictates respectability, community dictates modesty, the male gaze dictates appeal, advertisers dictate commercial value, and institutions dictate propriety. Trapped in this framework, a woman is perpetually compelled to seek permission.
This mindset turns most punitive under the pretext of “honour” and family prestige. When society ties its collective pride to a woman’s modesty, sexual violence ceases to be treated solely as a heinous crime against the survivor, transforming instead into a family “disgrace.” This same logic is deployed to oppose women in combat roles in the armed forces, arguing that enemy capture and violation would wound “national honour.” Yet how can an adversary’s savagery become the survivor’s shame or a nation’s stain? When protection strips away the right to self-determination, it ceases to protect and becomes an instrument of confinement.
Children do not enter this world burdened with shame about their bodies; they are taught it. Educating children on safety and privacy is vital, but teaching them that their own bodies are inherently disgraceful is self-defeating. For girls, this conditioning eventually hardens into chronic self-surveillance. They internalize rigid rules about how to sit, how to cover themselves, and how to prevent others from feeling uncomfortable.
My own hesitation stemmed from this exact mechanism. Despite being intellectually clear that my neckline bore no relation to my character, I pre-emptively regulated myself out of concern for social reaction. Feminism does not erase lifelong social conditioning overnight; its true worth lies in giving us the clarity to recognize patriarchy even when it operates quietly within ourselves.
Capitalism compounds this duplicity: society orders the body into concealment because it is deemed dangerous, while the market demands its display because it sells. Contemporary advertising presents women as assertive and independent, yet simultaneously binds them to exhausting, commercialized beauty standards and self-surveillance.
Even “traditional Indian modesty” is neither uniform nor static. The temple sculptures of Khajuraho demonstrate that pre-modern India understood the body across multiple dimensions—sacred, aesthetic, ordinary, and erotic. Colonial Victorian moralism suppressed this intuitive understanding, imposing rigid doctrines. Conversely, the historical Channar revolt in Travancore reminds us that for lower-caste women, the right to cover their upper bodies was once an arduous battle for self-respect and dignity. Neither covering nor uncovering is inherently liberating; what matters is who holds the autonomy to decide.
The vicious cycle is clear: hyper-sexualization invites surveillance, surveillance legitimizes control, and control deepens sexualization. Breaking this cycle does not require everyone to be unclothed or everyone to be veiled; it requires stripping artificial shame away from human skin.
So, whose body is it?
The answer is simple: her body is hers. A woman must not feel pressured to expose her body to prove ownership, nor forced to conceal it to prove respectability. Her dignity does not depend on external approval. Genuine freedom begins when we cease treating the human body as a frontier of family honour or a site of collective surveillance, and recognize it as an individual sanctuary belonging entirely to the person who inhabits it.