India in denial
The Guardian, Comment is Free
8 January
Harbhajan Singh’s three match-ban from Test 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. This morning the story is in banner headlines on the front page of every newspaper in the country.
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 Gsvaksar 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 match 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 Indian board’s 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 90s, I heard West Indian players harangued by loud, long, derogatory chants of “Bhoot!” – meaning “ghost”, a common 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 USA 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, i.e. “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.
