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

Frontiers, 2004 by Cullity, Jocelyn, Younger, Prakash

Informants linked a perceived increase in dating and premarital sex for both young adult men and women to images of sexual relationships. Sandeep Bindra, owner of Moet's Restaurant, one of the first "pub ventures" in Delhi that now attracts middle-class youth, said the most significant change between his generation and the younger generation is that young women today are "more free. They don't mind they're with one boy today; tomorrow with another boy. They don't mind being seen."45 Over 90 percent of women students surveyed, as well as the young women we spoke to informally, felt that new television shows had increased dating.46 MTV India's Cyrus Oshidar expressed a similar view as other informants on this topic:

Dating is good-to help break down the barriers you get in arranged marriages. It's a positive, independent, young person's thing. You defy a lot of tradition to do it. If this country's going to go anywhere, the young people have to be involved. They have to have a point of view. Even if it starts with getting laid, dating, mating. At least it's empowerment. At least it's a fucking point of view."47

Twenty-eight-year-old Vijaya Nidadavolu equated MTV images with a need to start giving space to women in their late teens and twenties in "pubs and clubs where a lot of young women smoke and drink, wear sleeveless shirts in the street, and don't give a damn if people are looking at them."48 While informants did not necessarily glorify these activities in themselves, they clearly valued them as a legitimate means of asserting the freedom of the female individual in the teeth of constricting moral ideologies.

The images in question also provide a means for women to affirm participation in a new social development in local-global intermingling. Young, middle-class women feel a part of the vitalized middle-class community nurtured and reflected in MTV programming, a community dolled with new Indian musicians and other artists. The placement of women in foreign locales as they sing or dance represents a claim to international mobility and the freedom to choose one's destination. The global claim is inherent in these portrayals of women as cosmopolitan and fluid, switching back and forth between values of a bigger world and those of the desi, or Indian world. As well, fashion decisions, that more often now include jeans and spaghetti-strap tops, generally seem to symbolize a new freedom to hypothetically choose whatever she wants. Strikingly, over two-thirds of women surveyed saw jeans as an "Indian" style, as opposed to a "Western" style. But Vijaya Nidadavolu put it this way:

The twenty-one-year-old is not seeing the image of the independent type as Western-or Western clothes as Western. They're something for herself, as her life, her reality. She can choose who to be. She doesn't think she's Indian, American, European by her dress or attitudes. Young, Indian women fit in anywhere in the Diaspora. They fit into India, England, America. . . . TV is a huge influence on this. Essentially I'm Indian but somewhere my values are identifiable across the world. When I wear these clothes I'm still Indian. But I wear them because I choose to. It's me. If a girl takes on an attitude or way to be it's what she's comfortable with, rather than rooting it to a particular culture. . . . It's about choice. It's about deciding for yourself."49