the fashion house was forced to admit their Indian origins<\/a> and sent a delegation to meet the artisans.<\/p>\nMandava, 26, said she initially had some hesitations prompted by the history of the Pirelli calendar and how it would work in India\u2019s more modest culture.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll be honest I wasn\u2019t very enthusiastic about the past eroticism of the Pirelli calendar and those associations,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I\u2019m so glad, they have actively made an effort for me to feel like I belong.\u201d<\/p>\n
She celebrated the decision by Pirelli to champion India\u2019s \u201cbeauty and diversity\u201d. But while she acknowledged a shift in the portrayal of Indian beauty in the west, she also cautioned against trying to make women such as herself \u201crepresentations\u201d of an entire country or race.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like to think my race isn\u2019t the most interesting thing about me,\u201d said Mandava. \u201cI\u2019m happy that whatever I\u2019m doing is providing representation but I also don\u2019t think about how I\u2019m representing India. That would just be too daunting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Padma Lakshmi features in the calendar. Photograph: Alessandro Scotti<\/p>\n
The project had initially been envisioned as a collaboration of two photographers, one of India\u2019s most famous, Raghu Rai, and the Norwegian photographer S\u00f8lve Sundsb\u00f8. Rai was seen as the pioneer of photojournalism in India and his photographs remain some of the most vivid representations of the country.<\/p>\n
But after Rai\u2019s death in April, his photographer daughter Avani Rai agreed to take on his part of the project. It was, she admitted, a difficult project to take on and follow in her father\u2019s footsteps.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father was always my audience,\u201d said Rai. \u201cAnd initially I thought: if he\u2019s not going to see these photos, then why should I shoot? But then I started talking to him in my head and he started showing up in divine spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n
Freida Pinto being photographed for the calendar by hanging pink blossom. Photograph: Alessandro Scotti<\/p>\n
Representing all of India\u2019s vastness and diversity was impossible, said Rai, and instead she focused on capturing an essence, the contradictions and \u201cmultiple coexisting universes\u201d. In homage to him, she decided to take the Pirelli calendar project back on to the streets, shooting scenes on the streets of Delhi\u2019s crumbling old city, its flower market, gullies and old cinemas.<\/p>\n
For Anoushka Shankar, whose genre-bending music has revolutionised how the traditional Indian sitar is perceived \u2013 and was featured in Gorillaz\u2019 latest album \u2013 India has \u201calways been about beauty and grace and sensuality, but outside of the country, there was often a deeply ignorant understanding of the culture\u201d.<\/p>\n
She will appear on the pages of Pirelli calendar with her sitar, something she said would have once felt unthinkable.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I think of how it felt for me as a teenager growing up in the UK or in the States, as a south Asian, we weren\u2019t thought of as the beautiful people,\u201d she said, \u201cI would feel a little bit self-conscious about being Indian when I walked into certain rooms. But watching the last decade or so, south Asian presence in mainstream global culture has really changed that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anoushka Shankar will appear on the pages of Pirelli calendar with her sitar, something she said would have once felt unthinkable. Photograph: Alessandro Scotti<\/p>\n
For Padma Lakshmi, the model and chef who was born in Tamil Nadu, returning to shoot the calendar in India \u2013 her second time featuring in it \u2013 felt particularly poignant. \u201cComing back to India to shoot this makes it feel, in a way, a lot more feminine,\u201d she said. \u201cI was raised in a house of Indian women, and I associate my earliest talisman of femininity with those women.\u201d<\/p>\n
At 55, she is among the oldest women who will feature in this year\u2019s calendar, and she celebrated the recognition that \u201cthe world is a very big place with lots of beauty\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor so long we saw only one kind of Indian beauty, manufactured to certain tastes or certain narrow stereotypes,\u201d said Lakshmi. \u201cBut this shows the many faces of what it means to be an Indian woman globally.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Against the ancient, weathered walls of Jaigarh fort, high on the hills above Jaipur, Bhavitha Mandava stood barefoot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":711886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-711885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/711886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}