Lessons from the IPL

OVER THE PAST month commentators have been lamenting the commercialism of India’s cricketing scene, especially, the messy underbelly of a circus called Indian Premier League or the IPL. IPL’s tales of sleaze, match fixing, etc., are potboiler material, subplots in a larger saga about the thirst for quick money, political connivance, and corporate patronage. But—and this is the point of this article—the IPL’s rise despite all its sordidness, is not just a morality tale about the excesses of greed and power (which it is), but also about the tectonic cultural and attitudinal shifts that have occurred in India in just over two decades. The brashness of the IPL does not exist in a vacuum. The spectacle caters to a demanding consumer base with tastes akin to audiences of an NBA and European soccer leagues. But this is where things get tricky. The NFL, UEFA soccer leagues, etc. have emerged out of long sporting histories, and are embedded in consumer cultures dating back over a century. India, which has a different history of capitalist enterprise—with half-a-century of economic tepidity followed by rapid growth—is witnessing new patterns of cultural production and consumption which yet to be deciphered. What is clear is that this has resulted in the emergence of new social groups that are globally aware and employ new cultural vocabularies. It could be argued that these are the constituencies for whom the cheerleading culture is created in India. When viewed this way, the IPL is a punctuation mark. It is emblematic of the emergence of deeper cultural attitudes that have accompanied the rise of the Indian economy. India’s deeper transition is not just economic and institutional—at its core, attitudinal and cultural. For a variety of reasons associated with the character of the economic reform process initiated in 1991, the vanguard of many of these cultural changes is urban India, especially Indian metros, which have changed dramatically since India’s growth story began. Take Delhi. What was until the late-1980s a bustling administrative city still basking under a colonial hangover in a shroud of Punjabiyat is now a centre of business. Puppies (prosperous urban Punjabis) in Karol Bagh have slowly ceded ground to yuppies (young urban professionals). The city is witnessing new forms of enterprise and human ingenuity that were hiding behind the Licence Raj. Fueled by a construction boom, Delhi is now a nucleus of big business investments and an advertising industry that is aware of its newly-acquired importance. As a result, self-conscious displays of wealth have replaced the relatively unaffected forthrightness that earlier characterised Delhi-ite sensibilities. It is clear that such patterns are not limited to Delhi alone. With the exposure of India’s evolving middle-class to western consumer culture, the Internet, and the immediate accessibility of global brand names (with the clichés that these are associated with), mobile Indians are creating a whole new aesthetic and aspirational vocabulary. At its best, this vocabulary is liberal and progressive, with an active citizenry demanding inclusivity, transparency, and accountability. At its worst, however, it is spawning consumerist excess, and a cacophony of icons, all in the service of brands. When viewed through this lens, the IPL embodies the more pernicious elements of this new cultural vocabulary. How do we make sense of this vocabulary? In 1975, Italian intellectual Umberto Eco wrote an essay called Travels in Hyper-reality, a meditation on the American appropriation of icons, images, and symbols from Europe over the 20th Century. He commented on how these gestures hollowed-out the very qualities that had made these cultural forms objects of value in Europe. Leonardo de Vinci’s The Last Supper, when recreated in 3D by theme parks in the US and presented as an ‘improvement’ over the original is, for Eco, a destructive gesture because it is manipulative and fundamentally lazy. This is because those doing the imitating fail to develop forms of representation and practice that are an outgrowth of their own cultural constructs, values, and history; all in the pursuit of a thrill. Eco laments the structural logic of American capitalism because of the way it treats culture, recreating that which is more real than the real thing (hence hyper-real), and then mass-markets it for profit. Isn’t this the logic that drives the IPL? This machine, sustained by the BCCI’s oligarchs, employs the swagger of jingoistic nationalism, disingenuously invokes the loyalty of “India’s billion fans”, and uses cheerleaders drive the point home. The real point, as with the many sports leagues, is to fetishise celebrities, sell commodities, and create a consuming public. Like those it is imitating, the IPL engages in “hyperrealistic” practices all too visible in the ubiquitous presence of the sponsors, celebrities endorsing a variety of slick brands, and the decibel levels generated by the event managers. The cricket feels incidental to the whole production. Of course, slickness is no justification for the creation of enormous social pressures generated as a result of India’s attempt to squish the equivalent of a century of capitalist development into a few decades. It is clear that because of India’s distinctive history and cultural heterogeneity, its people will respond in different ways to the cultural churn that is accompanying its economic transformation. And as the IPL example demonstrates, the transplantation of socalled “American” and “European” business models of sports entertainment into the Indian context does not always bring out the best in us. Having embarked on the path to economic liberalisation, Indians must not lose sight of the socio-cultural implications of such a directional shift. For those basking in the prospects of India’s economic growth, it is vital that they look past their spreadsheets to better grasp the cultural implications of emerging prosperity. Tapping the potential of an economic ideology is all very well, but this potential also has social and attitudinal facets. What the IPL’s present state does is remind us, for better or worse, of their ubiquitous presence in our lives.