Parmesh Shahani: All for Poonam Pandey's strip tease
In case you've been living under a rock for the last week, Poonam Pandey is the Mumbai model who says she will strip for the Indian cricket team if they bring home the World Cup.
In this, she seems to have been inspired by Paraguay’s Larissa Riquelme who attracted global fame last year by promising to run naked through the streets of Paraguay's capital if her country won.
Pandey has used a similar declaration to catapult herself to within the top ten most searched terms on the internet (from India) in the past two days, and the number one trending topic on Twitter in India, in the lead up to tomorrow's finals match in Mumbai.
I am intrigued by the Poona Pandey phenomenon on two counts.
Firstly, I think that brand Poonam should really be studied as a case in self-fashioning a transient fan culture.
I mean, she has managed, through sheer ingenuity to capture the nation’s attention instantly.
Where will she go next?
There are limitless possibilities, especially in this tech-mediated convergent world and wherever she goes, she will take her exponentially increasing fan base with her.
I predict reality shows, Bollywood item numbers, a full-fledged movie, brand endorsements, and all the trappings of success that come with more permanent fame.
As a fan, I can’t wait to follow her on this journey.
But ...
I am also intrigued by Poonam’s story because I’m seeing it in a timeline that’s much longer than Twitter. A timeline that includes women repeatedly being discriminated against whenever they have shown any sense of agency over their minds, bodies or decisions.
Think of the furor over Deepa Mehta’s film "Fire"? What was it about? The two characters being lesbian? Or the fact that they chose to leave their husbands and a conventional patriarchal idea of family to seek happiness with each other?
Story two: A salesgirl in a department store in small town India becomes the victim of a MMS sex scandal. The person she trusts films her in a moment of vulnerability.
Story three: A journalist teams up with an aspiring music video star to pull off a sleazy sting operation involving a popular singer.
Story two was more comfortable to digest. A poor girl victimized by media and then disappearing out of shame, is a story our society and our men (and these two are interchangeable, no? Men make society’s rules here don't they?) are comfortable with.
The two men who watch the girl on the store’s CCTV cameras comment that she is the dark-skin behenji type who you can 'patao' into having sex, and then dump. Poor girl. We know these things happen.
On the other hand story three was discomforting.
The girl there had agency over her own body. She complicated things. She wanted successes at any cost. She was an active participant in the sting, not a victim. That was a problem!
Agency for women in India is deeply discomforting.
"Bandit Queen"’s rape and stripping is discomforting. The long walk to the well is the most brutal scene I have ever watched. But it is, in a sense, also familiar. This is what happens to women in India, no? We read it in newspapers all the time. Women get raped. Period.
The problem is when they protest. So when Phoolan raises her gun and becomes a bandit, all of society has to rise in order to evict her from the ravines and have her lay down her gun in defeat.
In another true story, Sunitha Krishnan, herself a rape survivor, starts an institution in Hyderabad to oppose the practice of sex slavery. She helps secure the conviction of more than a dozen traffickers and rescues over two thousand women.
Since she started her crusade in 1991, Krishnan has been beaten up more than a dozen times. She can’t straighten her left arm or hear in her right ear. She’s had acid flung at her, survived poisoning attempts and a car that deliberately tried to crash into her.
In India, you see, abused women are supposed to disappear. Not fight back.
To me, the Poonam Pandey phenomenon is tapping into these undercurrents and anxieties and this is why is it getting so much airtime and net buzz.
When in India, for society as a whole, a women’s body is considered property to protect (by men, for men) and the act of stripping is considered the ultimate degradation for the woman and insult for those who are meant to protect her (think of Draupadi in the Mahabharata), Pandey’s decision to take agency into her own hands is a powerful step.
She's saying, It’s my body. I can do what I like.
Or in her words, from her Facebook status: "I am a New Generation Girl!!! Anything for my country to get home the World Cup. So INDIA cheer with me that we need 1983 World Cup BACK."
She's also saying, in an interview with Times of India that she's, ''going to take permission from the BCCI. I really
don't want to do anything that is against the law.''
Pandey's declaration in the video -- that her friends and family are supporting her -- is met with incredulity by the male interviewers. They cannot imagine such a thing in their worldview.
Am I reading the situation through a feminist lens? Perhaps.
But what's more important to note, after the shock factor dissapates, is whether our patriarchal Indian society will ‘allow’ Poonam Pandey to express herself.
This is the question, regardless of whether she actually bares all tomorrow or not.
