Chiitra Neogy - The Perfumed Garden
10 videos • 267 views • by Anastasia Walker This LP, released in 1968, is supremely a product of its time. On its face, it seems like a piece of soft porn wrapped in the eastern exotica that was then so fashionable. But there's more going on here. Neogy was no adult film actress, but a serious artist. She had a small part the year before in the Sidney Poitier film "To Sir With Love," and went on to become "a filmmaker, director, poet, actress, professor and author," as her bio on her production company's website says (https://wolfwomanproductions.org/about/.) For an in-depth list of her accomplishments, see her page on the website of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she's an adjunct professor: https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory.... By the same token, "The Perfumed Garden," from which the tracks on this LP were drawn, is a 15th century Arabic work, and its most famous English translator is Sir Richard Burton, who also gave the anglophone world "The 1,001 Nights" (aka "The Arabian Nights"). Indeed, it is Burton's translation that has been adapted for this LP. At the same time, there is a whiff of kitschiness to the proceedings. Neogy's performances are occasionally over the top (viz. "The Encouragement of the Lusty Wife"), and the muted musical accompaniment on much of the LP evokes an interstellar brothel scene in an episode of "Star Trek." More problematic, I think, is the mashup of Arabian and Indian cultures on the LP. Though "The Perfumed Garden" is Arabian, the music is performed on traditional Indian instruments, Neogy herself is of Indian descent, and the first and last selections on side 2 of the LP (tracks B1 and B4) are Bengali poems of the same vintage as "The Perfumed Garden." I suspect this decision was driven in part by crass economic considerations, India being then very much in fashion with the counterculture and the hipper parts of the intelligentsia who were the target audience for the LP. But the mashup is also tacitly based on older racial stereotypes of "Orientals," according to which everyone inhabiting the enormous land mass extending from the Middle East to the Korean peninsula shared the same core non-Western "racial" traits. And prominent among these supposed traits was sensuality. According to this way of thinking, erotic literature from the Arab speaking world was in its essentials of a piece with that of India, China, etc. etc. As the liner notes on the back of the LP jacket express it, the two Bengali poems were included because they were felt to be "especially harmonious with the Arab feeling of the 'Perfumed Garden'." There is additionally the shadow of Burton, himself a staunch Victorian imperialist, looming over the project. How much these problematic aspects will get in the way of enjoying this LP will be a matter of personal principles and/or taste. (Squeamishness about frank avowals of sexual desire is a separate matter.) To my mind, the beauty of the language, and Neogy's frank, impassioned renderings of most of these selections make the LP a worthwhile listen, the aforementioned problems notwithstanding. NB: I don't own a copy of this record. I took this recording from a cassette dub I obtained from a record dealer back in the late 1980s or the '90s.