Sex Appeal and Cultural Liberty: A Feminist Inquiry into MTV India

Frontiers, 2004 by Cullity, Jocelyn, Younger, Prakash

Most commonly, MTV India portrays women as dancers. Like props on the steps of a ghat or on a beach, women dancers often surround the male artist while he sings or plays an instrument. An ad calling for television developers illustrates a general sense of the male as intellectually dominant. The camera pans across a group of male clones and then focuses on one man who is forcing open an animated box around him. A graphic with "find your space" dances above his head. The ad is for jobs at MTV India.

Male Fantasy

The implicit male spectator of music video fantasies is evident in the many images of women "waiting" in bedrooms, or laid out on beds, while, in contrast, we view the active male artist, who is the object of identification, singing on his motorbike. A classic example of such fantasies is the Indian male artist surrounded by cooing women in a pool. One video storyline follows two older Indian men who get up in the middle of the night, leaving their fat, middle-aged wives asleep while they take turns peeping through a telescope at girls splashing about in a pool. The fat wives wake up and catch their husbands, chastising the two now forlorn-looking men. This portrayal of older, fat women as a negative-a familiar-enough image in Western popular culture-is a decidedly new female image in India.

Even with images that make for the strongest cases of empowerment, visual stylistics and storylines do not stray outside a patriarchal framework. Women may be represented as "free," but only to a certain extent. Between-the-legs shots reduce and make vulnerable the strong female artist, while men ultimately win "the battle of the sexes" narratives featured in music videos. For instance, the female artist may be depicted as an independent woman driving a car by herself, but by the end of the song she will have found her mate, and he will be driving a motorcycle, she happily behind him, her arms wrapped around his waist. While the editing of Indian videos and Hindi film clips is perhaps not as aggressively exploitative as it can be in both Western videos and films, the diminishment of the female as a full person, as subject rather than object, is nonetheless similar.

In contrast to this image-ghetto within which the Indian woman is generally contained, the Indian male is often empowered on a global scale through his acquisition of an international array of women. In one instance, an exotic crowd of women of all nationalities dressed in short-shorts surround a male singer on a palm-fringed beach. In another example, a male Indian jumps out a bedroom window to get away from a white father with a gun who has found out his whereabouts. And in an ad for CDs, a male voice-over sings: "I gotta girl in Rome, I gotta girl at home."

THE PRIMACY OF THE LOCAL RECEPTION: MTV INDIA AS A STRATEGIC CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY

The above interpretation of MTV India images stem from conventional Western feminist textual analysis. However, there is a vast difference between this account and that of our Indian informants. Feminist activists, scholars, television producers, and women students alike firmly resisted such a reading. They instead saw the images as presenting new and vital spaces for women, noting that in the past images of women were generally limited to portrayals of wives, mothers, and father's wives. They emphasized the need to add voices and imaginative options and not to begin subtracting them. "It's a broadcast media," Ranjan Bakshi at Zee Network said, "not a narrowcast band."29