Sherawat vs India

What happens when you point out India is regressive for women?

There are many rules for staying out of trouble for Indians in the public eye, but it appears that one of the most rigid is this: do not criticise India when abroad. At the Cannes film festival this year, India was supposed to be celebrated, be the flavour of the year and so on. As usual, this didn't extend to any particular excitement about Indian movies, but Indian media reports from the festival didn't quite care, with much breathless coverage of what various stars were wearing on the red carpet, and a matching degree of inattention to what the red carpet led to - i.e., an auditorium, showing movies. What mattered much more, of course, was that prickly Indian pride was satisfied by having Amitabh Bachchan open the festival with Leonardo di Caprio.

That pride was swiftly dealt something of a grievous blow when an interview of the actress Mallika Sherawat by Variety magazine went viral on the internet. Sherawat, when asked about her new movie - called Dirty Politics, and about the 2011 abduction and murder of Rajasthani nurse Bhanwari Devi - placed the movie in context by saying that "India is a hypocritical society, where women are at the bottom." She warmed to that theme, by adding that India is "regressive", and that "it is really depressing to see that as an independent woman". She added that was partly why she had "made a conscious decision to divide her time between Los Angeles and India".

Naturally, such insults could not be allowed to pass unchecked by the forces of Indian pride. Never mind that Sherawat's statements were largely unexceptionable - it is difficult indeed to argue that Indian society is anything but sexist and hierarchical, or that the overall social milieu is anything but regressive. There were protests around related issues not so long ago. But, apparently, you're not allowed to say so - or at least, not abroad and to a foreign interviewer. The most intriguing response came from Priyanka Chopra - a far more successful performer domestically than Sherawat, but equally unable to make a career for herself in the United States, though not for want of trying. Chopra declared that she was "highly offended" - thereby proving through a quickness to offence that she is, indeed, the holder of an Indian passport - and added firmly that India is in fact a progressive nation, one trying to work out how to go about "educating the girl child". She then came to the point: Sherawat was indulging in a "misrepresentation of our great nation on the world platform". Somehow Chopra imagines Sherawat's statements to be a greater misrepresentation of India than, say, the average Bollywood film.

The unfortunate thing is that many outraged Indians managed to prove Sherawat's point quite spectacularly in their response to her statements. Their disagreement with the substance of what the actress said was expressed, instead, in mockery of her accent, references to her Jat origins, and claims that she was overstating her status. In response to Sherawat's throwaway claim that she was the first to wear a bikini and kiss on-screen, and thus became "both a fallen woman and a superstar", rather than responding to the interesting fact that those two identities are indeed paired in a repressed sexual culture, her legions of critics checked Wikipedia instead, to discover who exactly wore a bikini first. (Sharmila Tagore, as it happens.) Why deal with the point being made when instead you can be offended, and mock the person making it? Sherawat should have pointed out that, not only is India a regressive culture, but it is also spectacularly bad at talking about itself.