India In Denial
By Mike Marqusee
January
8, 2008
The Guardian
Harbhajan
Singh's three-Test ban from cricket for
his alleged on-field racist abuse of Australian
Andrew Symonds has elicited howls of outrage from
Indian cricketers, the Indian cricket board
(BCCI) and the Indian media. The story has been
the subject of banner headlines in newspapers
around the world. In the most recent development,
umpire Steve Bucknor has now been relieved of his
duties.
It's been
widely noted that the Australians are
no innocents when it comes to dishing out
hard-edged personal insults in the course of a
cricket match. Both Sunil Gavaskar and Tony
Greig, among others, have accused them of
double-standards, of turning from sledgers to
whingers as soon as the verbal fire is directed
back at them.
But as
the laws of cricket now recognise, racist
abuse is an offence of a special magnitude. If
Harbhajan did call Symonds a "monkey", then it
was absolutely necessary for Australian captain
Ricky Ponting to make a formal complaint, and for
International Cricket Council (ICC) referee Mike
Proctor to punish Harbhajan accordingly.
Racist
insults poison the game for players and
spectators alike. They demean not only the
opponent but an entire branch of the human
family. Crucially, they have repercussions beyond
the playing field. When one player abuses
another's racial or ethnic origins, he both
expresses and legitimises one of the most potent
anti-social toxins at work in the modern world.
The Board
of Control for Cricket in India's
(BCCI) statement on the Harbhajan ban read more
like an emotional defence of Indian cricket and
India as a whole than a considered response to
the referee's ruling.
"It
is an avowed policy of the Indian
government to fight racial discrimination at
every level and the India board has been at the
forefront to eradicate it from the game of
cricket. For the Indian board, anti-racial stance
is an article of faith as it is for the entire
nation which fought the apartheid policies. The
board has always fought the racist sledging of
players and spectators and it will continue to do
so."
It's true
that the Indian board acted promptly
and firmly in response to the monkey chants that
greeted Symonds at various Indian grounds when
Australia toured there last year, identifying and
expelling the perpetrators. But in the strident
Indian reaction to the Harbhajan-Symonds affair
there is a large element of nervous denial.
Racism, towards people of African origin and and
more broadly towards people with darker skins, is
commonplace and vivid in south Asia, yet rarely
acknowledged.
Back in
the 1990s, I heard West Indian players
harangued by loud, long, derogatory chants of
"Bhoot!" - meaning "ghost", a common derogatory
label for black-skinned people.
Visit Indian
offices and factories, hotels,
cricket grounds or airports, and the colour
hierarchy leaps out at you. The higher up the
managerial scale you go, the more likely you are
to find lighter-skinned people. As a
white-skinned visitor from the west, I can't
count how many times strangers have boasted to me
with pride of their offspring's fair complexion.
Children with darker skins are often teased as
"blackies". Matrimonial adverts frequently
emphasise fairness.
Skin lighteners
are sold in vast quantities.
Advertisements for "Fair and Lovely" skin
whitener adorn cricket grounds and intrude
endlessly on TV cricket coverage. In one of them,
an earnest, dusky-coloured young female cricket
fan is transformed by the application of skin
lightener into a star cricket commentator.
Colour
hierarchy in south Asia is rooted in the
history of caste and labour. (Incidentally, seven
of the 11 who played for India at Sydney were of
Brahmin background, though Brahmins make up only
about 7% of the Indian population.) Colonialism,
in which all Indians, however elite, found
themselves on the wrong side of the colour bar,
entrenched the value of whiteness and its
associations with power and privilege. As the US
shows, modernisation and GDP growth do not
necessarily dissolve colour distinctions, and in
their much-vaunted upward mobility, the Indian
middle classes do not appear to have abandoned
the old prejudices. Indeed, since so many now
prefer to identify with their western
counterparts rather than their impoverished
compatriots, these prejudices are likely to be
strengthened.
The value
attached to whiteness is a sickness in
south Asian society, which badly needs the
antidote of a "black is beautiful" movement.
There are precedents in the lower caste
insurgencies associated with Periyar (founder of
Dravidian movement in south India) and Ambedkar
(the Dalit, ie "untouchable" liberator). The skin
colour hierarchy can in the end only be uprooted
by a transformation in attitudes towards caste,
marriage, the female and male bodies, and social
stratification in general. But the first step has
to be breaching the widespread reluctance to
acknowledge or discuss the realities of racism in
Indian society. The Indian response to the
accusation against Harbhajan indicates that this
will be an uphill battle.
