By hitting out at the IPL cheerleaders, Maharashtra’s MLAs seem to have sparked off yet another instalment in our long-running debate on public morality and culture. Are cheerleaders offensive? They may well be and public response suggests that there are many who share this perception. But there is such a ring of déjà vu to the question. We have been there before where self-styled conservatives arrogate to themselves the right to define Indian culture — almost always as a notion of how women should behave and what women should watch. It is the undertone of chauvinism in the assumption that doesn’t allow most such debates to reach a conclusion. But if this narrow definition of Indian culture were to be resisted, would it be possible to discuss the issue of cheerleaders or of live entertainment at events in general as an issue not of gender but of culture in a wider sense?

It would not be far from the truth to say that on any given day there must be at least a dozen professionally managed public events taking place in every city and town of India. Awards nights, product launches, professional conventions, trade fairs, press conferences, sports dos, promotional events, openings, shows, school functions and more. Event management and the provision of

live entertainment is a booming, thriving business. And, so far, no critical attention has been given to the cultural aspect of the phenomenon.

In fact, the very suggestion would probably seem inappropriate, as if the subject is not deserving of such attention. But if one were to consider the scale of the phenomenon, the fact that the concept of event management has percolated to every small town, that live entertainment professionally organised and provided by event managers has become an essential part of such occasions, that a whole infrastructure of decorators, designers, performers and technicians has come up around it and that its reach, multiplied several times over by television and press coverage, makes it one of the most influential cultural agencies of our time, then one might perceive it as a phenomenon worth studying.

In that light, if one were to cast a look at the elements that make up the typical event — allowing for differences of budget and scale — what would one see?

Backlit banners, smoke machines, mounted vinyl, coloured lights, balloons, confetti, thermacol cut outs, trap doors, pyrotechnics, laser shows, stunts, fire-acts, loud pulsating music, young girls and boys performing a mix of jazz, hip hop and Bollywood moves in outlandish assembly line costumes, models walking ramps, riding horses, draping themselves over cars and motorcycles, hostesses in black dresses slit to the thigh, compères hard put to form a decent sentence in any language, lucky dips, Rakhi Sawant/Mallika Sherawat in cabaret costumes, vintage cars, white skinned women in bikinis, so on and so forth.

If two things come across in this mélange of elements they are tackiness and a sense of displacement. Why, one wonders, with a wealth of classical, folk and local popular traditions in the performing arts, do event managers subject us consistently to derivative gyrations? Why with a range of textiles to choose from do they clothe performers in tinsel? Why do matters like voice and beauty of articulation count for nothing in their choice of announcers? Why are gimmickry and stunts considered the only way to thrill the viewer? Why is titillation considered such an essential part of the mix? Why does foreignness have such cachet? Why do most events look and sound exactly the same? Is it because this is all that India’s contemporary cultural impresarios — the tribe of event producers, choreographers, entertainment managers and so on — are capable of envisioning? Or is it because this is what we, the Indian people, want?

Speaking on the cheerleaders issue, Shatrughan Sinha in a TV interview asked why unemployed bar girls should not be hired in place of imported “cheer girls”. Despite the intended facetiousness, his comment makes some significant points. One, that titillation is being used to sell cricket; two, that it is hypocritical to allow some to flaunt their sexuality and not others; and three, that foreign cheerleaders have a level of acceptability that local bar dancers would not. All these say something about the assumptions the live entertainment industry holds about Indian audiences. Rather than debate the suitability of cheerleaders to Indian culture it may be time now to talk about Indian culture itself and what it has become.

Shah is the author of ‘Hype, Hypocrisy and Television in Urban India’

amritareach@gmail.com