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Originally an introverted game played in Britain and a few of her colonies, cricket has been commodified and marketed to the maximum possible extent, aided among other factors by technology and epitomised by its latest incarnation Twenty20, write Sanjukta Dasgupta, Dipankar Sinha, and Sudeshna Chakravarti in Media, Gender, and Popular Culture in India: Tracking change and continuity ( www.sagepublications.com ).
The authors note that cricket today is not just a game but a spectacle constructed by an aggressive visual regime, as a commodified ‘item’ of popular culture by virtue of being produced for the people who are basically perceived to be audience-cum-consumers. “At one stroke, it almost perfectly fits in the frame of popular culture when it expresses the aesthetic, hedonistic, spiritual, and symbolic values of a reasonably large segment of people.”
Gender equity
Citing the example of the television commercial of ‘a popular edible product’ – during the last Cricket World Cup – which would implore the viewers to live, dream, and eat cricket, the authors underline that, going far beyond ‘doing’ cricket and ‘talking’ cricket, it sought to deepen our involvement with cricket in everyday life. Seeing the mainstream media as a key factor in the process of making cricket a commodified item, an interesting point highlighted in the book is the ‘gender equity’ in often showing a fair number of women – especially, ‘vibrant and energetic young girls who are supposedly engrossed in the game’ – when panning the television camera to the spectators. “A careful look might reveal that the young girls are more of cheerleaders and less of intense followers of the game…”
And, moving from the gallery to the studio, the authors explore the ‘Mandira Bedi syndrome’ in Extraa Innings , based on deft and calculated incorporation of a smart, talkative, and provocatively-dressed (attire ranging from the Indian tricolour to noodle-strapped shoulder-revealing tops) sitting with less exuberant male commentators and discussing the nitty-gritty of the game with a lot of indulgence in trivialities.
Media role
In the authors’ view, the media is playing a decisive role in promoting a trend in the Indian public space – opening up vistas and public discourse on gender and popular culture with the subtle strategy of promoting ‘post-ideological lifestyle’ characterised by eclectic and fluid processes. An evidence of ‘print capitalism’ bowing to ‘electronic capitalism’ in promoting such a lifestyle is the discarding of broadsheet character and resorting to tabloidisation, the authors fret.
Reminiscing that the Page 3 culture (now an integral part of the newspapers in India) was never so in the earlier era because at that time information and entertainment could not be fused so easily and regularly, the authors quote a snatch about the fast-changing track of the news media – that with increasing competition, the rush for quick and easy bottomline enhancers has become particularly graceless. Also that, being enamoured by the fantasy woman, the media is ‘steadily turfing out the harassed Indian woman’ whom ‘we see in single-column, single-inch news reports, who hardly ever makes an appearance in magazines or supplements’ (Dev Sen).
Reinventing films
Talking about how films are reinventing themselves with the changing times, the authors mention Lagaan which goes temporarily backwards to the colonial times to take advantage of the popular cricket frenzy. On the gender front, going behind Hindi filmdom – ‘arguably the most influential carrier of popular culture in India’ – and digging deeper than ‘the astonishing gloss in terms of high-tech venture or the twisted storylines in place of the linear ones,’ the authors notice a change in the dominant representation of Indian women – from the quintessential mother (as Nargis in Mother India or Nirupa Roy in Deewar ) to ‘equal’ partner (as Kajol in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai ).
But, in most cases, the filmmakers seem to be harbouring a ‘thus far and no farther’ attitude, the authors point out. “Thus, be it Mallika Sherawat or Kangana Ranaut trying to seduce the hero or Bipasha Basu or Konkona Sen Sharma or Priyanka Chopra fighting it out in the bad world of corporate firms, print media, and the fashion industry in respective films of Madhur Bhandarkar, at the end of the day one finds them all being ‘victims’ of the male-dominated conspiracy.”
A distressing inference in the book is that the victimhood syndrome may still be ‘a safe bet’ for the Hindi mainstream filmmakers in their perception of popular culture and construction of gender.
Small screen
Studying the world of small screen, the authors make a positive reference to the mega serials like Rajni and Udaan, which ushered in the representation of the ‘new era’ Indian women on the television. “The screen character Rajni would make all sorts of tirades against the abuse of power, corruption, and wrongdoing faced in everyday life by the ordinary citizens. In Udaan the depiction of the struggle of a woman from the underprivileged class to become an Indian Police Service officer would definitely be offbeat.”
Disappointingly however, the point cannot be overstretched, the authors caution, because the above instances of ‘reversal of gender bias’ are more than balanced by the K-serials of Ekta Kapoor, which leave no stone unturned insofar as the perception of the stereotypical and patriarchal images and values are concerned. The authors bemoan also that, in reality television programmes based on ‘investigating’ real-life crimes, woman’s body as a locale of violence and abuse seems to have good market potential.
Plus, there are serials such as FIR, “in which Haryanvi police inspector Chandramukhi Chautala would lord over not only male criminals but also male colleagues,” with a screen role that has “a mix of ‘manliness,’ for instance, in frequent acts of slapping, and lot of ‘womanly traits’ in the skin-tight uniform….”
Research insights of value to media-watchers, on the continual social experiments in the domain of gender equity.
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