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Remember grandma's trunk of ceremonial clothes neatly folded in tissue paper, wrapped in unbleached cotton and stored with dry neem leaves and mothballs for safety? The camphor chest is the portable attic of the Indian mind. It is a hallowed space, where in a pre-electronic era you could spend an enervated afternoon sorting through the bric-a-brac trying on costumes much as, Geeti Sen reminds us in this backward glancing book, the young Indira Gandhi did playing at being Joan of Arc.

FEMININE FABLES: IMAGING THE INDIAN WOMAN IN PAINTING, PHOTOGRAPHY AND CINEMA By Geeti Sen Mapin Price: Rs 2,000 Pages: 208

In a series of five major essays that are intended to trace the image of the Indian woman as she has been portrayed through art, photography and cinema from the late l9th century through the 20th century, Sen presides over a camphor chest of fairly large dimensions. She could not be better qualified. As art historian, former editor of the IIC Quarterly and head of publications at the India International Centre, Delhi, author of four books on art and artists, which, as the blurb tells us, "seek to interpret art with an interdisciplinary approach", frequent guest speaker and participant at seminars and educational institutions around the world, Sen has been in every sense of the word, "a cultural ambassador" for her country. Moreover she has an eye for sumptuous detail. Every item that she pulls out of her trunk is empurpled with the gorgeousness of an Amrita Sher-Gil trying on her gold-bordered saris, or of artists Arpita Singh and Kanchan Chander emblazoning their women's bodies with textured embroidery or glittering sequins, or a description of Meena Kumari in the l963 film, Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, slowly putting on her jewels to seduce her wayward husband.

Sen makes it clear from the beginning that she is more concerned here with the oral and visual imagery of the Indian woman. She warns us early on in her preface that it is not going to be a catalogue of sundry rapes, sexual abuse, dowry death and the decline of the female to male ratio in infants. She is going to be shaking the Shakti tree for all its worth to celebrate the arrival of the Indian woman. As a guide both to herself and to the reader who might lose track in the sudden shifts of the trail that leaps from one medium to the other (each chapter is self-contained with its own copious notes at the end), Sen includes an apercu from Richard Lannoy who observes, "The Indian woman is looked upon in turn with idealization, desire and alarm."

WOMAN ON TOP: Kali, 1990, by Manjit Bawa

The colour red forms a recurring motif in the text combining both desire and alarm in equal quantities. It stamps itself most insistently in the first chapter "Bharat Mata, Woman or Goddess", where Sen is at her interdisciplinary best. She marshals her talents to produce a finely observed, passionately argued case that illustrates how the ideas of womanhood and the Indian nation have been merged to create images of limpid beauty that have been transformed and appropriated by the forces of obscurantism to become in turns a violent aggressive force or a bland submissive one.

Sen's idealised view of the body probed, analysed, schematised, inventoried through the lens of the artist, the camera and historian and finally re-united with the idea of an earth Mother, or Shakti, is highly seductive. Therein lies the unease. Sen has created her feminine fables using icons of such predetermined value that there is nothing that she can tell us about them which will come as a surprise, let alone raise questions or be regarded as even mildly subversive. By raising the spectres of Sher-Gil, Indira Gandhi, Ma Anandamayi and the rest of the highly visible actors, artists and activists on which she lavishes so much attention, she seems to be revisiting a territory so familiar that one can only see her as a purveyor of glamorous icons, for whom culture itself has become a consumable item to be packaged in red-the colour of sensuality, of the female rampant as she is billed in the more overt images of modern advertising and the tired, over trumpeted mystique of the feminist movement of the 1960s, the Mother Goddess.