Last week, a gargantuan crisis exploded. Deepika Padukone and Shah Rukh Khan supposedly committed grave offences. She wore an orange bikini, and SRK, a green shirt in a movie song.
Did I hear you ask, “How could colours possibly offend anyone?” It appears, they can. Members of the imaginary Department of India’s Cancel Culture (DICC), which comprises faceless people with the barest of IQs, are the ones who are ever ready to raise issues, claiming to be experts in bigotry in their attempt to cancel things. Are these disgruntled complainants trying to upset the Pathaan cart, in revenge for Deepika’s past appearance at a university named after our erstwhile legendary PM?
Colours, like language, do not have a religion or faith. As Rumi once said, “The colour of the sky does not discriminate between the clouds.” Should orange juice packets be coloured purple? Or should we start growing blue-coloured pumpkins? Or, the insides of mangoes genetically modified to be brown? Should Hindus stop eating palak paneer and sarson da saag because it is green? Of course, colours have been politicised and often used symbolically to represent an ideology.
Recently, there was an uproar by the saffron units against the Kalaburagi Junction railway station being painted green, forcing the authorities to opt for the neutral white. BR Ambedkar is known to have introduced the blue Mahar’s Flag because it represents the non-discriminatory sky. So in 2018, when the vandalised statue of Ambedkar in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, got a makeover with a saffron sherwani, replacing the trademark blue suit, it was seen as “one colour is washing off all the colours—the colours of secularism, the colours of unity in diversity, the colours of communal harmony,” according to Beena Pallical, national coordinator of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights. In a secular, liberal, and developed country like India, it’s surprising to see this latest Bikini Gate hullabaloo being allowed to be given air-time.
The India of a thousand years ago was progressive enough to sculpt women on Hindu and Jain temple walls, in a variety of rather evolved and complicated positions of sexual union. A thousand years later, we have regressed, and more.
Shouldn’t the brouhaha instead be about the song sounding similar to Makeba by the French artist Jain (will she be banned next as her name sounds like the religion)? Or, how the tune is a lift of Bhupinder Singh and Asha Bhosle’s Kisi nazar ko tera intezaar from Aitbaar?
Aren’t there more pressing issues to stress about? Climate change, income inequality, racial injustice, crimes against women, illiteracy, will India qualify for the 2030 FIFA World Cup, who will win Bigg Boss or how do you like to eat your mangoes? Now don’t tell me mangoes are Hindu and sitaphal is Muslim, and a pink dragonfruit will lead to breast cancer, and a rainbow cassata cake is meant only to be eaten by the LGBTQ community. Let us not be blinded by colours.
Anirban Bhattacharyya
Author, actor and standup comic
anirbanauthor@gmail.com