Artist’s illustrations break stereotypes about the hijab

The hijab, abaya, niqab, have come to connote fear, mistrust and resentment and are even viewed as diminutive. Since 2009, France has had a burqa-ban as then-president Nicolas Sarkozy felt it was a ‘sign of subservience’ and ‘in our country, we can’t accept women prisoners behind a screen’. At Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, male police officers fined a woman for wearing a burkini (swimwear burqa) and made her remove it while sunbathers jeered.

A similar tale is that of 20-year-old Sarah, a Syrian refugee, shamed for wearing a hijab while awaiting her train in Hamburg last year. A man screamed at her for ‘murdering people’, and ‘because of Islam we have a lot of problems’ and tried to take off her hijab. Fortunately for Sarah, passers-by wiped her tears, adjusted her hijab, and told her ‘you’re very strong’, ‘you’re awesome’, ‘don’t listen to him’, ‘no religion says ‘kill’, ‘this is your dignity’.

That incident gave Sarah a life-lesson —‘don’t hate what is strange’; that she passed on to Deepak Ramola, Founder and artistic Director of Project FUEL (Forward Understanding of Every Life lesson). Ramola collects epiphanies from people across the globe in one-two lines and converts them into interactive workshops for individuals who’d benefit the most.

“When Sarah spoke about the attack, it hit me that here was a young girl in a new country, struggling with language, who has lost her family, country, and identity, and the one thing she chooses to carry — her hijab — to remind her of roots is not accepted.”

This irked Ramola, who on the flight to India, happened to read an article on how young minds are being morphed into forming biases against the hijab. On this flight in October 2016, the #UnderTheHijab series was birthed as Ramola, who felt compelled to rid the negativity around the Muslim headscarf, painted the first hijabi using the art supplies he always carries. A co-passenger, who had draped her floral  stole like a hijab, became his muse. A week later he asked his friends — Poornima Sukumar, an artist, and Sadhna Prasad, a freelance illustrator and animator, both Bangalore-based — to artistically interpret the hijab and complete the captioned tag line ‘#UnderTheHijab is...’, and kick-start on Facebook an entire series by tagging friends to contribute their artworks.

Unveiling identity

Sukumar, whose painting of flowers embracing a hijabi woman, says it was her curiosity whether everyone faces racism. “To me, flowers mean you are beautiful just the way you are. You don’t have to bloom to impress anybody,” Sukumar says,

Ramola spoke about the series in his Ted Ex Gateway talk. Sarah’s message became a life lesson for management students at SP Jain College, Mumbai to break biases in their professional dealings.

A man in Iran told him that when he showed his wife the #UnderTheHijab series, she immediately took a couple of print-outs and pasted it on the office soft-board. “She wanted colleagues to know she is much more than her hijab,”Ramola says.