On screen India: enough with the stereotypes already?
Ayeshea Perera -
Friday, September 04, 2009 4:17 PM
The television show 'Paul Merton in India' is quite old, but being a sporadic television viewer at best; I saw it just yesterday on Fox History channel. That days episode was on Delhi, so I suppressed my natural urge to switch channels and decided to watch instead. The first shot was of Paul Merton travelling through the narrow, crowded streets of Old Delhi on a cycle rickshaw, explaining that he had landed two hours ago and that it had been a long ride to the city - obviously insinuating that the cycle rickshaw had been his ONLY mode of transport from the airport. As he gave a little more background on the city, the visuals were overwhelmingly of Old Delhi with a few stock shots of commercial area Connaught Place thrown in.
Merton, it seemed, was on a mission to find unusual (read: weird) things about the city to talk about. One of these was a 'finishing school' where he wanted to learn proper Indian etiquette. His school teacherly instructor, had him burp, put marbles in his mouth to reduce his accent and sit cross legged on a chair before his "very important meeting the next day" that he had to develop etiquette for. As the show progressed, I lost interest but I did watch a weird meeting with a man who was trying to establish a guinness record for withstanding the most number of kicks to the groin. The concept of course, was meant to be whacky, but in some places I felt that it lost the plot, ending up teetering on the realm of the offensive instead. In lots of instances, it seemed, Merton was just saying "look - here is one big freakshow". Maybe it was a show meant to laugh at stereotypes, and goodness yes, OF COURSE these people exist, but the fact that the show was being shown on a Fox channel, especially when you consider its global audience, meant that it was also reaffirming those same stereotypes for a lot of people.
Of course Merton does say this is "my" India. But his India was by and large, no different to the portrayals of Indians as stereotypical tiger fighting, sabre weilding, turbaned barebodied males, that you see everywhere. (Read Krish Raghav's article on the portayal of India in video games HERE). But the question is, how much should this matter? Should there be outrage at these portayals? A cursory Google search showed opinion split down the middle on whether the show was funny or offensive. My initial reaction was "this is ridiculous" but really, maybe India should not even care anymore. What do you think?