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Rreleased just as festival season kicks off across India, it looks like your average commercial for party wear. The model poses, majestic in red and gold, showing off Fabindia’s latest collection which is said to “respect Indian culture”.
However, in just a matter of hours, the poster had rocked India. A boycott was launched of Fabindia, the country’s staple brand, and the ad was eventually removed after it was deemed offensive to Hinduism by members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and the Hindu right. group.
A strong objection to Fabindia’s advert was a direct response to the collection’s name, “Jashn-e-Riwaaz”, a phrase which means “celebration of tradition” in Urdu.
According to BJP figures, far-right commentators and Hindu groups, the use of Urdu in advertisements for clothing collections related to Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, is “culturally inappropriate” and offensive to Hinduism.
Urdu is a language that originates from India. It is recognized in the constitution as one of the official languages of the country and is part of some of India’s most famous poems and love songs written. But in recent years its use has become increasingly politicized in the public sphere, often denounced as the “Muslim” language of India’s rival, Pakistan’s Islamic neighbour.
Tejasvi Surya, a BJP MP, tweeted: “Deepavali is not Jash-e-Riwaaz. This deliberate abrahamization of the Hindu holiday, which depicts the model without traditional Hindu clothing, must be removed.” His call for an economic boycott of Fabindia quickly gained traction online.
Objections and trolling have escalated due to outrage that the women in Fabindia’s commercials were not wearing the bindi, the colored decorative dot that Hindu women often wear on their foreheads, and the hashtag #NoBindiNoBusiness next started trending on Twitter.
Rohit Chopra, a communications professor at Santa Clara University who studies Indian media, described objections to the use of “Jashn-e-Riwaaz” in the Fabindia advertisement as “absolutely bizarre”.
“This is part of the BJP’s imperative to purify Hinduism, to have a model of Hinduism that is completely detached, and clean of any Islamic or Muslim influence,” Chopra said. “But it’s fake. Language does not map religion; just as Hindi does not belong exclusively to Hinduism, Urdu does not belong to Islam.”
Fabindia later clarified that the collection was not a Diwali collection to be released later, but chose to take down the ad anyway. “We at Fabindia have always supported Indian celebrations with a myriad of traditions in all colours. Our Diwali collection called ‘Jhilmil is Diwali’ has not yet been launched,” said a company spokesperson.
‘Teaching Muslims a lesson’
It was not the only ad this week to face accusations of religious offenses against India’s Hindu majority. On Friday, an advertisement by a tire company featuring one of Bollywood’s biggest actors, Aamir Khan, was accused by BJP MP Ananthkumar Hegde of creating “unrest among Hindus”. The ad featured Khan, who is a Muslim, advising people not to burn polluting firecrackers during Diwali.
According to Hedge’s letter of complaint, apart from the insensitivity to Hinduism, the real problem the ad should have addressed was the “distraction” caused by roadblocks during Friday prayers and “other important holidays by Muslims” and the “great inconvenience” caused by mosques. a mosque that gives the call to prayer.
For Chopra, there are similarities between the “sectarian targeting” of an ad starring Khan, a prominent Muslim actor who in the past has condemned rising religious intolerance in India, and the ongoing story involving the son of another big Bollywood Muslim star, Shah Rukh. . Khan, who was recently arrested on drug charges and denied bail, in a case where the credibility of the case has been questioned and many have condemned him as politically motivated.
“It’s all about teaching Muslims, especially prominent Muslims, a lesson: that even the big names in Bollywood are not protected from the Modi government,” Chopra said.
Incidents are not isolated. Since the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, came to power in 2014 led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusations of such insensitivity to Hinduism have been increasingly leveled in films, television series and now commercials, as popular culture and media has been increasingly seen. through the prism of religion in India.
Last year, an advertisement for a jewelry company, Tanishq, depicting a Hindu woman married to a Muslim family had to be removed after causing its shops to be attacked, the company being savagely controlled online and calling for the company to be boycotted.
Similarly, in 2018, Close Up toothpaste withdrew their #FreeToLove ad featuring a Hindu Muslim couple after being the target of a vicious online hate campaign.
Chopra points out that this is a relatively recent development, and while India’s commercials feature mostly upper-caste Hindu families, it also has a “very secular and inclusive” history and often depicts Hindu-Muslim unity.
Notable examples include the popular 1989 television commercial for Bajaj . scooters, which shows people of all faiths in India happily driving their two-wheelers, some advertisements for Red Label tea featuring Hindus and Muslims drink chai together, 2016 ads by Surf washing power released for Ramadan, and 2017 Benetton Color Unity Ad who plays on stereotypes of communal violence to show a picture of Muslim-Hindu harmony on the cricket pitch.
While Chopra said objections to such advertisements were not new, “they used to come from fringe extreme individuals and organizations who were laid off almost instantly”.
“Now it’s the BJP’s leading voice legitimizing these extreme views,” Chopra said. “Dictating what ‘India’ is, what ‘Hindu’ is and what ‘Muslim’ is, and making it mainstream.”
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Sources 2/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/26/completely-bizarre-india-clothes-ad-taken-down-after-critics-say-urdu-use-offensive-to-hindus-fabindia The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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