White girls as human tables: The Indian shaadi getting ugly?

So you are rich. Filthy rich. And there’s a wedding in the family. If you’re an Indian and if my wedding show-watching has been of any consequence, I can guess what all you’ll have for the wedding to prove that you are rich, filthy rich. A Tarun Tahiliani lehenga that defies every principle that geometry is based on. Given SRK doesn’t need to do this after the KKR win, you might have to settle for Fardeen Khan or Zaid Khan dancing - the lads are easy on the eyes after a few drinks I’m sure. And if I am to believe my latest feminist icon Megan Lambert - you’ll also have a Caucasian girl doubling up as a ‘human table’ to make your wine, paneer pakoda and chicken skewers that much more awesome. I mean, what could be better, than picking food off a woman’s skirt? Especially when it looks like a table and has a pretty woman lugging it around?

Lambert, in an article in Vice , opens our eyes to the deeply misogynistic, sexist, white-ist, everything puerile-ist society that we live in. Though she doesn’t quite say how she ended up there, or whether a group of evil Indian men just ambushed her while she was drinking coffee and reading a book in a quiet cafe in Delhi, Lambert was offered money to play a human table for a night. And she admits fairly good money because as she says, “Now there is a new trend growing among India’s middle classes. They’ve started to employ white Western girls to hang out at weddings, doing various weird things purely because they—we—are white and Western. Jobs can include anything from greeting guests while dressed as a London Beefeater, to leading the bride and groom’s wedding procession on the back of a horse, to being a human statue.”

By the way, this is your cue to roll your eyes, throw up your hands and say, “Bloody Indians. Bloody, rich Indians. Bloody rich misogynist Indians. Blood rich misogynist racist Indians.”

However, what Lambert doesn’t point out anywhere in the article, titled, ‘I WORK AS A ‘HUMAN TABLE’ AT INDIAN WEDDINGS BECAUSE I’M A WHITE GIRL’, is that if a handful of Indian weddings do in fact resort to such obscene displays wealth, they are just keeping up with the rest of the world. Now does that absolve Indians, who hire girls to wear table skirts and play the exotic showpiece in their functions, of sheer bad taste, misogyny and low respect for human labour? Obviously not. But neither does it make them unique in their vulgar taste and sexism.

A simple Google search, which Lambert obviously decided to skip while writing the blog, reveals that the absurd, ridiculously pompous practice is a rage across the world, including United States, United Kingdom and Australia. In fact, most countries seem to have organised agencies, with websites like the corporate entertainment professionals in the United Kingdom, advertising the ’theme table girls’. One agency in the United States call these girls “magically surreal yet functional way to present hors d’oeuvres, desserts, place cards, or party favors”. And it’s not just tables. You can get tree girls and peacock girls as well as a run-of-the-mill Geisha Girl.

Lambert, anyway, goes ahead and observes, “It is impossible to ignore the uncomfortable racial and post-colonial undertones at play in my situation. For whatever reason, affluent Indians seem to place a premium on pale skin, and anyone rich enough to pay for ethnically white people to work as living furniture at their weddings is seen as kind of a big deal.”

The writer’s outrage, curiously, seems to stem less from the very literal objectification of a woman’s body, and more from the curious turn of fortunes which has turned the imperialist paradigm on its head. She does note in one sentence that there are several Indian girls who are hired to do the same job and are paid much less than their ‘white’ counterparts. That imbalance is probably more symptomatic of the infuriating fascination that Indians have for ‘fair skin’ but Lambert refuses to dwell on that, because, she is too busy moping over the plight of the ‘white’ girl serving at a ‘brown’ wedding.

She wonders aloud, how times have changed and roles have reversed for Indians and ‘imperialists’. “From snake charmers to sitar players, imperialists loved to surround themselves with what, to them, seemed exotic. Today, the roles have been reversed—an irony I mulled over as I stood there, laden with drinks,” she says in the blog. She mentions that a fellow ’table’ she met mentioned ‘working her ass off’ at Oxford only to have ended up playing a table at an Indian wedding. Actually that might say more about the value of some Oxford degrees than it does about decadent Indian weddings.

Mind you, Lambert makes no mention of misbehavior or harassment at the hands of her hosts or their guests. Yes, she had to carry empty glasses around, but so do stewards. In fact, they carry empty glasses, bring you fresh glasses, carry food, ask you if you want this starter or that and even carry back the toothpicks you used to pick up the kebabs. Of course they don’t crib about it - they signed up for it, some of them even trained for it and they are professionals.

Lambert doesn’t quite say so, but one can hear resentment dripping from her sentences. For example, she mentions having to be in the same room as some ‘Punjabi rappers’ in a tone that makes the said rappers seem like bloodsucking aliens. She writes: “While this process was going on, we were showered with the attentions of some Punjabi rappers. ‘They live in Canada,’ we were assured on a number of occasions. ‘They are very famous.’”

Doesn’t look like the said rappers subjected them to their ‘Punjabi munda’ version Jay-Z tracks, but their very presence is enough for a lot of eye-rolling.

It is pointless to even question the fact that women, from their bodies to their personalities, are relentlessly objectified, reduced to regressive stereotypes that are then celebrated with shocking pomp in our popular culture. However, that’s a travesty that cultures, irrespective of geography, are faced with. An article like Lambert’s, which comes on the back of news of rapes and sexual harassment in the country, just manages to homogenise sexism and misogyny into some kind of Made in the New India horror. And that can’t be right.