Social monitor Cultural invasion by alien icons Usha Bande
"BUT why a Barbie, and not one of our Indian dolls?" I queried when my niece demanded a Barbie from Canada. "O, Barbie, she’s so cute," lisped the little niece. I noted the pronoun ‘she’ instead of the usual ‘it’ for dolls but little did I realise then that Barbie would soon be a part of my education in Canada.	Frivolity, fun and festivity associated with Barbie deliver a wrong message to young girls

Spirit of enterprise
When fitness makes you fit to face life
Renu Manish Sinha
IF looks could fool, then Kiran Chadda (46) is one person who will befool you completely. Her petite and diminutive frame gives no inkling of the rock solid determination and spirit to fight that lies underneath. This diminutive dynamo is a doting mother, businesswoman, fitness instructor and yoga expert all rolled into one.

Celebration of senses and sensuality
Kanchan Mehta
THE sexist image of women has been sanctified by mythology and literature for so long that it appears relentless and definite. Images of women are images of myths, stories and folklore conveyed down the generations. The spiritual heritage of India, in particular, denies feminine pleasures and sensations.

Social monitor
Cultural invasion by alien icons

BARBIE, her boyfriend Ken and the American symbols of war and violence — G-I Joe, He-Man, etc — have put our culture of peace, non-violence and co-existence under strain. Cultural invasion is dreaded much more than the swamping power of colonialism because it is like a leafy tree which prevents us from seeing our own sky and stars, says Usha Bande

"BUT why a Barbie, and not one of our Indian dolls?" I queried when my niece demanded a Barbie from Canada. "O, Barbie, she’s so cute," lisped the little niece. I noted the pronoun ‘she’ instead of the usual ‘it’ for dolls but little did I realise then that Barbie would soon be a part of my education in Canada. That was the time when Barbie dolls were not readily available in India. I was surprised to experience Barbie’s power as an icon.

Barbie culture travelled to the Asian and African countries — in fact the world over — with globalisation. Barbie ceased to be a doll (an inanimate being, dressed in some fashionable dress), and assumed a personality. Today, Barbies of all descriptions, representing different countries and various professions are available. There are American Barbies, Hispanic or British Barbies, astronaut and army Barbies, doctor Barbies, Coke Barbies and innumerable others. They are made of plastic as also of porcelain. Then there are Barbie talks, Barbie rooms, the Barbie community and a monthly magazine titled Barbie Bazaar. Interestingly, the magazine is doing very well with 20,000 subscribers in 25 countries. She is the "sweetheart" for numerous girls. Barbie clubs and Barbie museums have sprung up in many countries and reasearch in Barbie culture has shown the stunning fact that about a quarter of a million people worldwide collect this fashion doll.

We in India have had a strong doll culture, so to say. Our indigenous dolls from different parts of the country have an amazing variety. A visit to any doll museum is sufficient to illustrate the unique feature of unity in diversity. Dresses, features, and complexion of our doll tell tales of the states they belong to. Their dresses worn during weddings and other festive occasions, the myths and legends of the areas they represent are eloquently expressed. Even our puppetry is a grand doll show of our folk culture and tradition.

Barbie has now swamped ordinary households in big cities and the metropolises. Expensive as they are, only a certain class or let us say the growing upper-middle class parents can afford it. To own a Barbie is a status symbol. The usual stainless steel kitchen wares of the Indian dolls have now been replaced by the more modern, urban gadgets with a kitchen equipped with a tiny fridge, gas stove with a tiny cylinder, exhaust fans and cooking ranges, replicas of mixies and microwave ovens and so on. And of the Barbie wardrobe, the less said the better. Her craze for make-up and fancy dresses is inordinate — a clear indication of consumerism. There seems no point of satiation, far less of satisfaction or contentment.

What intrigues one in the recent Barbie culture is the paradox it has come to say with. While the feminists cry hoarse about male chauvinism, anti-female stance of society and gender bias, Barbie herself sports a typically feminine ethos. She is the perfect female in her dress, her looks, even in the "side-long glances" she dart and above all in her perfect feminine figure every girl aspires to maintain. She is not a male hater; she has a boyfriend Ken who is as popular among the Barbie collectors. So, there is complete feminine world despite the feminists.

Though in India, Barbie collectors are not as passionate as in the West, it cannot be denied that the doll has gripped the fancy of our urban higher middle-class girls. Dr Akka Rammnan, a child psychologist, approves of the girl child’s interaction with Barbie and opines that "in the nuclear families of today, children feel isolated when parents are not about or are busy. Talking to Barbies relieves them of much of their tension." Why Barbie alone? Because, she says, Barbie has a personality and a gender. She is not just a doll. She is a friend. And girls find it easier to identify with her. However, some psychologists and psychiatrists believe that living in the world of fantasy could be damaging to the girls in later life. "Such a female child would not be able to come to grips with the realities of existence that is often harsh and protean," Dr Adhikari counters.

Some educational and social researchers, undertaking projects to study the effect of Barbie on the children, have revealed stunning facts. They are skeptical about the Barbie culture. They argue that the frivolity, fun and festivity associated with Barbie deliver a wrong message to young girls and women; that consumerism can be a remedy for loneliness, boredom, anxiety and self-loathing is myth; that in countries like India and other Third World countries the children who can afford to get a Barbie remain unaware of and unconcerned for their peers who are less privileged. Another objection is that the gender-typed toys like the all-feminine Barbie for girls and the representatives of violence and war-like G-I Joe, or the military tanks and guns for boys create a gender gap, and perpetuate gender violence. Boys, they find, usually hate Barbies and are cruel to them. In later life, they follow the same pattern in treating women. This observation, however, appears too far-fetched. After all, Barbie is a doll, and to assign it metaphorical and radical motives is to create an avoidable bogie.

What one of the feminist thinkers Naomi Wolf observes in this matter appears balanced. According to her, the images created around Barbie are not harmful in themselves but the fact that they are generating paradoxes is a matter of concern. In the image of Barbie the message is of femininity and extra-domestic competence but when competence in the job field as required in real-life situations is pitted against it, there is usually tension. "The harm of these images is not that they exist, but that they proliferate at the expense of most other images and stories of female heroines, role models, villains, eccentrics, buffoons, visionaries, sex goddesses, and pranksters," is a matter of distress, Wolf maintains.

Barbie as an icon of postmodernism stands for lightness of being. Postmodernism,Chris Rojeck claims in his Ways of Escape — Modern Transformation in Leisure and Travel, "associates modernity with the heaviness of being, that is, a psychology dominated by responsibility, morality and guilt. Postmodernism claims that postmodernity is associated with the lightness of being. It recognises play, change and anomaly as the province of humankind. It urges many of us to live without guilt." Barbie’s colourful and fun-loving personality represents the change from modernity to postmodernity.

The fact, however, remains that Barbie is an icon and no icon can be an entity in itself. An icon speaks to the surprises, contradictions and paradoxes we live with daily in our modern/postmodern existence.

Barbie, her boyfriend Ken and the American symbols of war and violence — G-I Joe, He-man, etc — have put our culture of peace, non-violence and co-existence under strain. Cultural invasion is dreaded much more than the swamping power of colonialism because it is like a leafy tree which prevents us from seeing our own sky and stars. The problem with us now is how to return to the vision of our own sky?

Spirit of enterprise
When fitness makes you fit to face life
Renu Manish Sinha

IF looks could fool, then Kiran Chadda (46) is one person who will befool you completely. Her petite and diminutive frame gives no inkling of the rock solid determination and spirit to fight that lies underneath. This diminutive dynamo is a doting mother, businesswoman, fitness instructor and yoga expert all rolled into one. The lady does not believe in waiting for things to happen, she makes things happen. Why! She started a gym in Chandigarh when she could not find one of her own liking.

While looking after her father’s factory in Mohali eight years ago, she felt the need to utilise her energy in a constructive manner. So Kiran, who is a qualified and certified aerobics instructor from the USA, did a recce of the gyms in Chandigarh. Most of the gyms where she went were nothing but places having just exercises machines, hardly any qualified instructors, no safety measures. So she went ahead and opened a gym for herself and other like-minded people, especially women, as most of the city-based gyms were male-centric.

That is how Planet Fitness was born eight years ago, bringing a whiff of fresh air into the city’s fitness scene. Kiran proudly claims that all her instructors are Reebok trained and safety measures that are followed in her gym here match international standards. For, Kiran doesn’t believe in playing with people’'s health.

Planet was also the first gym to be owned and run by a woman.

The true meaning of multi tasking becomes clear when you hear her outlining her activities. Kiran, who comes from an industrial background and had also looked after her family business in the past, is a qualified aerobics instructor. She did a certified course in aerobics from the International Dance and Exercise Association (IDEA), USA, in 1987. After that, she taught aerobics in Delhi. She also has a fitness studio in Delhi.

Kiran finished her schooling from Welhams school, Dehra Dun, in 1972 and graduation from Government College for Girls, Sector 11, Chandigarh. Immediately after her graduation, Kiran got married and moved to Mumbai. It was in Mumbai, that Kiran took to learning aerobics. She liked it so much that she decided to become an instructor. But the perfectionist she is, she did not start teaching before she became a certified instructor from IDEA in 1987.

Kiran moved to Delhi and started teaching aerobics after her divorce. She taught there for sometime before shifting to Chandigarh and opened a fitness studio here.

For Kiran, a fitness lover, the urge to explore other forms of fitness never wanes. So she started learning yoga four years back. During that period there were some emotional upheavals in her life as well. Yoga seemed a good recourse to heal body and mind together.

After one session of yoga, she says, "It felt like coming home." There was a lot of anger in her. But yoga changed her life totally. For yoga, as the ancient gurus said, corrects the imbalances of body which arise in the mind.

Kiran, after having been exposed to various forms of yoga through yoga teachers in her fitness studio in Delhi, finally settled for the Krishanamacharya form of yoga. This she learnt from a guru in Chennai and explains that this form customises yoga to suit individual needs.

With another two months of training in Chennai under Guru Desikichar, Kiran will become a qualified teacher who will be able to treat patients. On the anvil is a fitness studio in London, teaching aerobics and yoga. The multi-faceted personality that she is, Kiran is also into business. She imports nightwear and lingerie and sells it here.

When asked from where she gets so much of energy to plunge her fingers in so many pies, Kiran says with a twinkle in her eye, "May be because I am single and independent. Perhaps not having a man in my life gives me so much of energy and focus to do so many things simultaneously.’’

Talking about Indian women Kiran says that they have long been conditioned to subjugation. She recommends yoga to be an ideal way of breaking free from these chains. ‘‘For yoga gives one complete control not only over your body but also over your mind. Once the energy is focussed the circumstances cannot control you but you can be in charge of the situation’’.

Celebration of senses and sensuality
Kanchan Mehta

Dress in sarees, be girl,
Be wife, they said
Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quareller with servants. Fit in,
Oh, Belong, cried the categorisers.
— Kamala Das, An Introduction

THE sexist image of women has been sanctified by mythology and literature for so long that it appears relentless and definite. Images of women are images of myths, stories and folklore conveyed down the generations. The spiritual heritage of India, in particular, denies feminine pleasures and sensations. The woman’s body becomes useful to the extent it satiates urges of the man. Female sexuality is still considered to be ‘profane’ and ‘vulgar’. This legacy still holds.

Men are entitled to sexual freedom while with women the sexual experience, if not endorsed by moral law and custom, becomes an eyesore, a fall, a depravity and the antithesis of femininity.

While the epithets ‘strong’ and ‘potent’ celebrate the gigantic erotic capacity of a man, the words ‘cold’ and ‘frigid’ regulate the passivity of the female body.

The modern women poets protest against de-sexing of women. They frown upon the conventional notion of Indian womanhood. For them, poetry reveals the quintessential woman. Their trump card is an exposition of female sexuality. They take the reader into labyrinth of body/sexual experiences and depict feminine psyche.

According to Virginia Woolf, an eminent feminist writer and critic, a professional woman writer ought to dare "telling the truth about her own experiences as a body". French feminist critics strongly advocate writing about the body. Helen Cixous and Roman Seldon say:

"Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then all the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. There is no universal mind: On the contrary, the female imagination is infinite and beautiful. Since writing is the place where subversive thought can germinate, it is especially shameful that the phallocentric tradition has succeeded in not giving women their say. Women must uncensor herself, recover her goods, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal. She must throw off her guilt (for being too hot or too frigid, too motherly or too unmaternal, etc.)."

Contemporary Indian women poets have accepted the challenging task of sharing their bodily experiences. The body is central metaphor in their confessional poetry. Foregrounding sexuality, they redefine themselves and are credited with having effectively displaced norms of male domination.

Through an unbridled exposition of their sexuality, they interrogate cultural bonds and patriarchal notions. Through uninhibited verse, they dramatise feminine sensibility. True love is the most sought after and most cherished experience in a woman’s life.

Kamala Das, pioneer in modern feminist poetry, speaks of her "endless female hungers" in her iconoclastic poetry. Das has exhibited a unique courage and frankness in exposing the urges of flesh in her poetry and prose. Confession of her sexual experiences displays her candidness in being true to herself and denying masks.

Love and sexual cravings are the pervasive themes with Indian women writers from the time of the Vedas. There is no denying the fact that Das’s treatment of these issues surpasses that of her predecessors and contemporaries. Das, with candour and unflinching honesty, deals with various facets of love. Like the medieval Sahaja poets, she advocates free love/sex as an instrument of self discovery. Das declares sex as the only plausible substitute for real love. Her hypothesis is that woman’s craving for real love can be fulfilled in physical union with a man. She say blatantly:

Das had a purely physical relationship with her husband. Her emotional incompatibility with her spouse resulted in a series of sexual liaisons. Appetite for genuine emotional attachment metamorphoses into physicality. The pollution of her body resulted in the purity of her soul. In her autobiography, she says, "That it was necessary for my body to defile itself in many ways, so that the soul turned humble for a change".

Das blames a lack of total involvement for absence of love in the man-woman relationship. Hence she stresses the woman’s complete surrender to her partner in a sexual union. She exhorts the woman to abandon herself fully to the man in the following lines;

Das’s notion of the woman’s total absorption in love-making is corroborated by Simone de Beauvoir, an eminent feminist writer. Beauvoir writes: "The act of love requires of woman profound self-abandonment; she bathes in passive languor; with closed eyes, anonymous, lost, she feels as if borne by waves, swept, away in storm, shrouded in darkness; darkness of flesh, of the womb, of the grave. Annihilated, she becomes one with the whole, her ego is abolished." (The Second Sex).

In her poem Woman, Jytosna Milan, who writes in Gujrati and Hindi, pays a rich tribute to female eroticism which bring her a state of euphoria, where woman feels one with the universe. The poem reads:

The poem is a beautiful expression of the profundity of female experience during physical union with a man. . The poem gives poetic expression to Beauvoir’s belief that "the sexuality of the woman in love is tinged with mysticism".

Feminine erotic impulses find forthright and appearing expression in the impressive lyrical poetry of Gauri Deshpande:

Deshpande celebrates feminine sensibility. The woman’s carnal desires are manifested in her verses.

Imitaz Dharkar, a forceful new voice in women’s poetry, finds repression of female sexuality the bane of the woman’s life. Patriarchal order has used the female body as a potent weapon to suppress the woman. Moral regulations, through a sense of guilt and shame, silence women’s voices. Dharkar strongly reacts to the de-sexing of woman. In the poems collected in Purdah, she uses purdah as a metaphor for the shame women are taught quite early in their life:

— Purdah II

Only by shedding the sense of shame about their bodies and sensual urges can women be true to themselves.

Sunitie Namjoshi, known for her explicit lesbian writings, does not care a fig about representing the female body with modesty. She transgresses all limits and censors in depicting feminine sexual urges. Probably the female persona in her poetry has turned to homosexuality having experienced frustration and disappointment in heterosexual relationship.

Sujata Bhatt, winner of several prestigious awards and honours, has made an unabashed exploration of female sexuality in her poems. Her better known poem, White asparagus describes poetically the irresistible urge of a pregnant woman for sexual mating.

Tara Patel is an emerging new voice in Indian English poetry. She toes the line of earlier women poets in being free and open about sexual matters. She cherishes eroticism as a doorway to man’s heart:

In Single Woman (1991), a volume of poems, Patel maps the psychology of a single woman. A "single woman’s mind is replete with contradictions, humiliations and defeats." The single woman is attracted by the security provided by husband and family. The casual encounters with a married man, "another women’s man",gratifies her sexual urges to some extent.

The momentary sexual gratification results in mental agony. The consciousness of his being "another women’s man" and lack of fullness of love haunts the single woman. She is left with a terrible sense of pain and desolation. Patel gives a touching expression to single woman’s state of mind:

Miller observes that when one is an object not a subject, all of one’s own physical and sexual impulses and interests are presumed not to exist independently. Through an aggressive expression of their own sexuality, the contemporary woman poets question their marginality and assert their individuality. Body-centred poetry and femininity restore individuality to the woman.

Adrienne Rich asserts:

— Tear Gas

Female sexuality is a profound emotion. One cannot hope to express the whole truth. The more one discovers, the more remains unsaid. Indian women poets have dared to verbalise their personal experience of sexuality in a blatant manner. And when the readers identify themselves with the poet’s experience, it becomes a universal/human experience. The expression of human feelings symbolises social change.