Caught Between East and West, A Tale of India's Growing Pains

I have found that India is truly a place of extremes; extreme temperatures, extreme population, extreme poverty, extreme wealth, extreme beauty, extreme devastation. As India finds herself moving at warp speed from a third-world country to a global super-power, a good deal of conflict can be found between those people on the leading edge of "Westernization" and those who cherish the India of old. I feel that India is struggling to find its voice in the global community and is trying very hard to earn the respect of the "Western World", trying to win a seat at the global table, if you will. One of the most obvious ways that I have noticed India trying to break onto the world stage is through sport. I have recently seen commercials airing with the ultra-famous Bollywood star Sharukh Khan (complete with rippling abs) rallying the citizenry around India's new Formula One team, Force India. There isn't much controversy surrounding this sport endeavor (except to me, why are Indians racing sports cars while the roads in the country are a disaster? And doesn't learning to drive in India give drivers an unfair advantage, I mean really, if you can drive in India and survive to your 20th birthday without either killing yourself or being killed on the roads isn't that equivalent to steroid use? Both give equally unfair advantages.). Unfortunately the Indian female athlete is not as lucky as her male counterparts.


First of all, I guess that I should say that "the Indian female athlete" is something of an oxymoron, Indian female and athlete are almost utterly contradictory. It is in fact so contradictory that when you do a Google search for "Indian female athlete" the first few articles that show up are about an Indian "female" athlete who won a silver medal in the 2006 Asian Games failing a "gender test".* No joke, check the link if you don't believe me. Though it is quite common to see boys and men outdoors playing the ubiquitous cricket, I have never once seen a girl included. Nor have I seen groups of girls playing anything at all. I feel that some of the potential reasons for this are the standard reasons that would apply to any culture, but India's culture also throws up a few more roadblocks to any potential female athlete. For instance, girls (and especially women) are expected to dress in a very "modest" way. Legs are not meant to be exposed and even bare shoulders can be considered scandalous. Imagine any female athlete; now put her in long pants and a loose sleeved shirt, what sports' uniform is that? None that I can think of. In combination with modesty, girls are also taught from a very young age that fair is beautiful and great care is taken to stay out of the sun for fear of darkening the skin. This compels them to stay inside and not participate in sport.


Despite these obstacles some Indian women have had the opportunities to participate in a sport, and a few have made it nearly to the top of their sport. Sania Mirza is a 21 year-old female tennis star who is currently ranked 31st in the singles category and 18th in the doubles category and hails from Mumbai. Unfortunately she has been plagued by scandal throughout her career for a variety of different reasons. As a tennis player she wears the typical women's tennis uniform, ie. short skirts or shorts and sleeveless shirts. This has caused a great deal of controversy and in 2005 a group of Muslim clerics (Mirza is a muslim herself) issued a dictate that she cover up while playing tennis otherwise she would be a "corrupting influence" on young Indian women. In January another scandal involving Mirza erupted when a photgraph was taken of her resting her feet near a small Indian flag. A private citizen pressed charges under the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act. She has also been in trouble for shooting a commercial near a mosque as well as for stating at a leadership conference that "whether before or after marriage, the most important matter is that sex is safe" by which she obviously meant that pre-marital sex is hunkey-dorey (at least that is how a number of her countrymen interpreted it and responded by protesting and burning effigies of her).


The unfortunate consequence of all of this scandal is that Mirza has decided to no longer compete in any tournament held in India in order to avoid conflicts and has even considered quitting tennis altogether. If India wants to be a player on the world stage, it will have to figure out how to do so in a way that is acceptable to all of its billion citizens, a task that has so far been impossible to achieve.


*How stupid do you have to be to fail a gender test, a geometry test I can understand, but a gender test???


PS-Yee ha to Title IX!!!