Not that this was ever a big, fat secret, but it is important to remind ourselves all the time: IPL is just one part cricket. The rest is an expensive, real-life remake of events that usually lead up to a big Punjabi wedding in a Yash Raj film.
So you'll spot men in shiny blazers, women with mid-riffs running into miles, parties, crowded bars only lit up by blinking phone screens, the works. So it's imperative that the glamour spills over on to the field too.
Despite Shikhar Dhawan's moustache and Virat Kohli's love affair, the cricketers in general can't help much here, what with their uniforms in colours of biscuit wrappers, printed all over with logos and looking like walls in a poll-bound Indian city. The Bollywood brigade too, is mostly shrouded in those hideous team jerseys and sunglasses the size of China. So, how to 'glam up' the matches? The answer lies in a shuddh, desi Bollywood song and lots of dancing girls, preferably white.
Right on formula, therefore, the cheerleading girls are out on field, match after match - smiling, giggling, dancing and waving their pompoms. Some of us (like this writer), who has watched every deeply motivational Hollywood film about the underdog becoming the head cheerleader and bagging the football team captain for a boyfriend, would perhaps be dissatisfied with the routines. But to give credit where it's due, they are not half-bad if you have to consider the sultriness of the Indian summer, the plastic-y costumes that the girls wear and underwhelming 'team songs' probably manufactured out of rejected scores meant originally for films.
However, there is one glaring problem. Websites and news publications have been quick to compile slideshows of the 'hottest' and the 'sexiest' IPL cheerleaders this year - chances are you will not spot a single Indian face in any of these. This time around, in the eighth season of IPL, the cheerleading squad is predominantly white.
When the IPL kicked off, with its NBA and NFL inspired on-field entertainment model, there were a fair number of Caucasian girls as cheerleaders. But there were a handful of Indian girls too in the cheerleading teams.
Fast forward to 2009 - a much-hyped cheerleader hunt was conducted on television for the Kolkata Knight Riders. Every girl who had not made it yet to the dance reality shows in India, queued up and six girls were chosen for the team amid much television and print media fan fare. Cheerleading, back in the IPL toddler days, was suddenly as legitimate a pursuit as wanting to be a playback singer. You can blame TV programmers - who showed anxious mothers armed with juice, make-up, paper fans accompanying aspiring cheerleaders to auditions - for completely Indianising cheerleading for us.
In 2013, the BCCI sought to ban cheerleaders from the matches after the spot-fixing scandal broke out. That carried the tell-tale signs of a knee-jerk reaction to two entirely unrelated aspects of the game. In the process they laid bare India's moral inadequacy that had led to a gross misunderstanding of what cheerleading ideally stood for.
In the United States, cheerleaders are clubbed with most other categories of entertainers. Their sex appeal is of importance, yes, but with their elaborate dance routines and gymnastic moves, cheerleading is a coveted vocation with its own championships and awards. Violation of their rights as women and performers also don't always go unnoticed as this Slate article points out how a group of NFL cheerleaders filed a lawsuit against their team for sloppy treatment.
By cracking down on cheerleading during their clean-up drive, the BCCI let the truth slip out - for them, cheerleaders were merely sexualised props. And not just that, they were immediately made to look like unnecessary distraction and were made to be the scapegoat for all the other shadiness that our cricketers were accused of.
Given that huge majority of Indians find it fit to trivialise women in the entertainment industry even in this century, it is not surprising that a cheerleader will be slotted in the same category as item girls rampantly are - nothing more than women who willingly offer themselves up for objectification rather than as professionals just like the players.
Considering IPL is anyway supposed to be a Bollywood awards function with some cricket thrown in, the decision to ban cheerleading never amounted to much. What's Bollywood without item numbers and IPL without cheerleaders? The girls are back on the field as usual - they are hot, and they are white. And from the looks of it, the organisers are done spending time and money to come up with desi cheerleading routines - like ones that had girls stuffed in Bharatnatyam costumes, melting in the heat and dancing to traditional Indian music every time someone hit a four.
A blog that surfaced on my Facebook timeline, written by Bikram Vohra, suggested that the reason why the IPL organisers have largely done away with Indian girls as cheerleaders is because they find it convenient to serve up white girls to Indian audiences to be objectified. By doing that they, albeit hypocritically, avoid the moral dilemma of treating our own girls are sexual objects even though Indian films and ads do that routinely anyway.
But the whitewashing of cheerleading squads actually points to another old, deep-rooted malaise. And that is the popular Indian obsession with fair/white skin.
The seeds of a all-white cheerleading squad have been sown long back, right at the birth of IPL. While there were some Indian girls in the squads, they were mostly led by the Caucasian dancers. In fact, non-Indian but non-white girls too were rejected from the squads or benched. In 2008, two British cheerleaders, both of African origin, had complained that they were prevented from performing at a match in Mohali because they were black. A Telegraph report quoted one of the girls as saying, "An organiser pulled us away. He said the people here don’t want to see dark people.". In the frenzy around a newly-minted Indian Premier League, their story got buried.
Then again, despite spending lakhs on a television programme, the Indian girls who were chosen to be KKR's 'angels', were mostly made to sit around and hardly ever got to perform in South Africa in 2009. While some local rules made it necessary for the organisers to only employ local girls, the Indian girls were not invited to cheerlead in the consequent seasons of the IPL which took place in India.
The unspoken reason is staring right back at us: in the IPL's scheme of things, beauty is directly proportional to the whiteness of your skin.
It is the same reason why dozens of Caucasian girls are seen crowding behind the leading man in Bollywood songs which seek to emphasise how desirable the hero is. The alpha-ness of the Indian hero has to be underscored by a gaggle of women directed to cavort at him. But his male ego gets a turbo boost if that gaggle is white-skinned.
It is perhaps safe to say that as long as Bollywood's preferred back-up dancers are white, the IPL cheerleaders too will be white-skinned. And the reason why cheerleaders and back-up dancers in big-budget Hindi films are predominantly white, is also the reason why fairness creams make for a thriving industry in the country. It's anything but fair but fits right into the organisers' skewed understanding of cheerleading.
No comments:
Post a Comment