In this World Cup season, a Myntra Game Changers advertisement chronicles the distance women sports presenters have travelled on TV, from cricket presentation to cricket representation. It showsMandira Bedi laughing at the “national chaos” caused by “half centimetre straps” and Mayanti Langer saying what she wanted to emulate was “Mandira’s fearless attitude and never say die spirit”.
Mandira Bedi had actually changed the game for women in sports.
Isa Guha, part of the 2009 Women’s World Cup-winning England team, now shares space with the big boys in the ICC official commentators’ box, as one of admittedly paltry three women out of 24 World Cup commentators. ICC’s Digital Insider Ridhima Pathak perches on a sofa with Virat Kohli to ask him about his favourite player from an opposing team. Mayanti Langer, Star Sports’ star anchor for World Cup 2019, gives an interview where she refuses to be stereotyped as a “woman presenter in a man’s world” calling it an “outdated way of looking at things”.
Star Sports, which bought the global broadcast rights for all ICC events between 2015-2023, including World Cup 2019, even has a hashtag for what it is doing – ‘feminising’ a supposedly male sport by bringing together a panel of women presenters with #WomenInFront. No one, except the dark recesses of the Internet which has a great fascination for Langer’s physicality, has had anything to say about what these women were wearing.
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The entry of Mandira Bedi
Contrast the reception of women in sports commentary now with the apoplectic fits generated by Mandira Bedi’s presence on Sony Max’s Extraa Innings during the 2003 World Cup.
“No offence intended but she only brings an unwanted, undesired, unneeded glamour to cricket coverage. She adds misplaced sex appeal to some serious talk on cricket at the biggest-ever cricketing extravaganza,” huffed The Hindu, in a story headlined ‘This Clearly Is Not Cricket’. It went on in the same vein: “On the first day of the tournament, she came dressed in an off-shoulder costume that would have been just ideal for the Miss India pageant. The camera focused on her top, almost but ignored her ‘attire’. The little girl sitting on my lap and watching her first World Cup cried out in all innocence: ‘Shame, shame!’ She obviously thought that the lady on TV had forgotten her clothes before she came on the screen.”
Even India Today wrote sniffily: “It was impossible to suppose that cricket will ever be the same again after the excesses of 2003. If the one-day game is called pyjama cricket, the World Cup was tamasha cricket, loaded with girls and gimmickry.” It added: “Ask any man – man, mind – on the street to name a panellist from the telecast and Mandira Bedi would be top of the mind. Backed by a battalion of babes, who asked the Australian team to name their favourite flavour of ice cream, and the ice-cool tarot reader Ma Prem Usha, Bedi went from being small-time TV star to a modern-day cult er… figure.”
Bedi made it to the cover of newsmagazine Outlook, a picture of her in a sky blue sari, the so-called “noodle strap” blouse and her trademark tricolour bangles, under the headline: ‘Ladies First! The Cricket-Crazy in India are Undergoing a Sex Change’, with the subhead: ‘46% of the total World Cup audience are now women’.
Mid-Day carried a daily Mandirameter based on what she was wearing. And her habit of clutching fellow anchor Charu Sharma’s hand and calling former England captain Tony Greig ”Greggy” became the subject of water-cooler and dining table conversations.
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Time for change
Clearly, 16 years is a long time. The intervening years may have seen their share of sleaze with IPL cheerleader scandals and drug use by players, but cricket, both on and off the field, seems to have become too serious a business for objectification.
The rise of the #MeToo movement worldwide has certainly made men more wary of what they are saying. Tony Greig could earlier get away with comparing Bedi to a trampoline (like the typical Indian cricket fan, “sometimes down, sometimes up, never in the middle”), now other men must think twice, as they should.
Much of that sexism made an exit after the first decade of IPL, when it was presented and televised by Sony Max, which became as this article notes, a “platform for well-respected ex-cricketers to display their deeply problematic behaviour”. An example: Rameez Raja reviewing Isa Guha’s outfit on Extraa Innings, saying she looked as if she had just bolted from prison, with her chains and her handcuff-type bangles.
As Parth Pandya writes, when the broadcast rights for the IPL changed hands in 2018, Star Sports scrapped Extraa Innings and replaced it with Dugout – a show fully run by cricket experts elucidating the finer technical aspects of the game. It also had Langer hosting several pre- and post-match shows, without subjecting her to the rampant sexism that had become routine on Sony.
As a result, sports journalist Pradeep Magazine told ThePrint: ”Commentators such as former Indian cricketer Anjum Chopra, Manyati Langer, Isa Guha who played for England, are all extremely articulate, understand the game, speak with authority and maintain a high degree of professionalism. To survive in a man’s world is not easy. These women are not only surviving but are as good as they can get.”
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In analysing the “Mandira experiment” in her paper, ‘Fleshing Out Mandira: Hemming in the Women’s Constituency in Cricket, 2009’, historian Sudeshna Banerjee had placed it within the reiteration of the gender stereotype of the woman who passionately supports the home team but does not understand cricket.
This, argues Banerjee, not only limited the space for women in the world of cricket in a way that did not disturb the essential masculinity of the game, supposedly invested only in direct cricketing action and the cerebral appreciation of the game, but also silenced the narratives of Indian women who were players and experts.
Indeed, as she usually wears no-fuss pant-suits/skirt-suits. No noodle straps and sarees for her.
In leading with women like Guha, Star Sports has corrected, at least to a certain extent, that old dichotomy of the superior male intellect and the inferior female sex-specific body. Now, if it could only put a stop to all the fansites dedicated to Langer, which do what comes naturally to most regressive men: mute her voice and focus on her figure.
The author is a senior journalist. Views are personal.
You can’t change a male gaze, can you? Yes, what you can wish for is that men would keep their sexist thoughts, assessments and judgements to themselves. When any serious male cricket fan listens to Isa Guha commentating, the result can only be non-sexist appreciation. And if he takes one step forward to check her profile, it can only be respect. Neuroscientist and an authoritative sports commentator, Isa Guha is a great example for youngsters (male and female) on having a solid skill base as a back-up if pursuit of passion fails for some reason. It is another thing that she has excelled both in academics and sport.