Flip through the channels on your TV, or browse through the pages of local women’s magazines, and you might notice a certain lack of... cocoa. There are wheat, beige, and olive puffs... but where, shall I say, are the cocoa puffs?
For as long as I’ve been alive, I’ve always understood Indians to reside somewhere on the periphery of the common Malaysian discourse. The Indian female, somehow, seems to be at the particular fringes of society – hanging by a thread off of a cliff’s edge, actually. So it seems even more perplexing that for close to 30 years, there really hasn’t been a tangible change in how Indian women have been portrayed in mass-market advertising. In other words, we’re still largely invisible.
Some of you might wonder: why make a fuss about it at all? Malaysia suffers enough from racially-divisive politics. We, the people, should be making an effort to get past race by not harping on the race issue. Well, for the most part, “not having to think about race” is a privileged position. Typically, the ones who usually lament the excessive focus on race generally belong to the racial group (and gender, I would venture to say) that enjoys the widest representation.
The fact of the matter is we get past race issues (if we ever do) by acknowledging that they exist. And if race is not an issue, why are there so few representations of Indian women in local advertisements?
A cursory glance through Female, CLEO, and the Malaysian editions of Harper’s Bazaar and Women’s Weekly showed the typical prevalence of fair-skinned and typically Chinese, Malay, or the ubiquitous Pan-Asian model for virtually every ad. (Interestingly enough, Female’s editor-in-chief is an Indian woman, but do let me know when was the last time they had an Indian woman on the cover; I actually can’t remember.) For a selection of some of these ads, have a look at this photo set on Flickr.
Even an advertisement by an education group to promote a Nurses’ Award in conjunction with World Nurses’ Day 2010 Celebration features nurses of a certain stripe (or colour, shall we say). Raise your hands every one of you who has been to a hospital, both public and private, and seen an Indian nurse. Well, the creators of this ad clearly haven’t:
But is there a more alarming reason, and by extension, consequence, of this disappearing Indian female?
Now that hyper-capitalist consumer culture has subsumed every damn thing into its system, one wonders if the lack of representation of Indian females in Malaysian advertisements should be taken as a compliment, or an insult. Do we want the Capitalist Fat Cats to ignore us, or pander to our “needs and wants”? To borrow the words of Frantz Fanon (and use it in a different context) no one really wants to rush out to be just “another object in a world of objects.”
But taken plainly, what message is local advertising sending out to its consumers when it projects a world that is largely – er, non-Indian – is that Indian women don’t have purchasing power and aren’t economically autonomous enough to be considered important. One can conclude from these advertisements that Indian women are largely irrelevant – both undesirable enough to incite desire in others (as that what advertising aims to do), and poor enough to be of any use (as far as advertising aims to sell). The message seems to be “well, you’re around and some of you have the money to buy our stuff, but we don’t really want you.”
Which is not to say that this stops the many well-off urban Indian women from happily shelling-out and buying into the status quo, as evident in the many similarly-sculpted, similarly-thin, and similarly-attired young Indian women you’re bound to find in any KL nightclub these days, or indeed in any KL beauty pageant. (In fact, last year’s Miss Malaysia winner was Thanuja Ananthan, and one would think that it would be reason enough to see her face plastered everywhere, but nope.) For instance, if there are Indian females representing the Malaysian dream – in any way – as in Deborah Henry in the ridiculous MYEG ad, they are typically females with a touch of Indian ancestry nicely-diluted with non-Indian ancestry as well. So what you see is essentially a very muhibbah, Malaysian face. Because Indian women in Malaysia obviously can’t represent that... a very Indian face is not muhibbah Malaysia, it’s just India. A very Malay face is undoubtedly Malaysian, while a very Chinese face is KA-CHING! MONEY POURING FROM THE HEAVENS!
There is always the sense of the “Indian female”, if she’s anywhere at all, being included as the token Indian female. She seems to be thrown in or allowed in somewhere to remind ourselves that Malaysia is a country that consists of 3 main races: Malays, Chinese, and Indians, and a host of lain-lains, please do come and visit us, we are truly Asia.
There is a proliferation of *only* Chinese, Malay, and exotic “Pan-Asian” women everywhere on TV, radio, and in the newspapers and magazines, which is in direct contrast to *actual* life in Malaysia, where Indian women, along with other women of every stripe, ethnicity, and colour, are everywhere. The real world is Cocoa Puffs and Rice Krispies and Honey Stars. But the media still wants us to believe that the world of Wheat Puffs is the only desirable one.
Advertisements sell products, and they also sell desire. The people and the faces used in advertisements don’t only tell you what you should get for your breakfast cereal, or what car to buy, or what mascara best lengthens your lashes – they also promote the idea of a desired lifestyle. These faces are meant to embody that desire. These advertisements, in fact, CREATE desire.
Regardless of our objection to marketing and advertisements, it’s a facet of modern capitalism that maps out the economies of both desire and power. A negative representation can be redressed, refuted, and discussed. A non-representation presents a gaping hole that is harder to get around, for one doesn’t even notice the hole. How can one theorise about an invisible problem, or bring into discourse an invisible group of people? One really can’t. One just continues to walk around the gaping hole; what’s missing can’t really be missed.
