Rag doll: Why Barbie failed to make a real impression on India

Barbie has done well for herself since she debuted at a toy fair in New York in 1959 in a black and white zebra-striped swimsuit. She makes more than a billion dollars in sales every year in over 150 countries with three dolls sold every second. The brand has ventured into books, video games and movies. She has over 300 Facebook pages, is active on Twitter and LinkedIn, where she boasts of 150-plus careers, including an astronaut (she beat Neil Armstrong by four years). She has also been president of the US.

After such an eventful life, however, Barbie is having to change. In January, she shed her impossibly slender figure that has been derided for three different body types – tall, petite and curvy – with seven skin tones, 22 eye colours and 24 hairstyles, throwing the world into a debate of whether it’s “too little, too late”.

Mattel, the makers of the doll, announced the new line with a story in Time headlined “Now can we stop talking about my body?”

“Barbie is an idea,” said Seema Chawla, the head of marketing of Mattel in India, where the new line is slated to arrive in April. “Her popularity was proof of the fact that she allowed girls to imagine what they could be. She was a fashionista, a family woman, a princess and the president. They wanted to be like her.”

That was where the trouble began: the need for girls to emulate Barbie’s lifestyle.

Female body image

Priti Nemani, an attorney at law who wrote a paper in 2011 titled "A Case Study on the Failure of the Barbie Doll in the Indian Market", said, “One of the biggest criticisms Barbie faced is her hyper-sexualized physique.”

Researchers from Finland’s University Central Hospital estimated that if Barbie were a real woman she would tower at 5 feet 9 inches and have vital statistics of 36 inches (chest), 18 inches (waist) and 33 inches (hips). The researchers said she lacked the essential 17% to 22% body fat required to menstruate.

One Barbie set came with a booklet titled, How to Lose Weight. Its advice: "Don’t eat". The weighing scale that accompanied the toy was fixed at 110 pounds. Teen Talk Barbie chirped out phrases such as “Will we ever have enough clothes?” and “Math class is tough." An African-American Barbie called Oreo Barbie was called out for being racist. A Barbie computer engineer showed her mostly infecting the system with viruses and asking her male colleagues for help.

Barbie’s journey into India was not easy. “Mattel entered the Indian market in 1986-1987, but the foreign trade laws did not favour the presence of a multinational company like Mattel or its Barbie brand,” Nemani writes.

There was a closed trade regime and licensing system, so Mattel entered into a joint venture with the company Blow Plast Inc. Barbie was finally launched in India in 1991-’92.

At that time, she was inarguably American. “Indian Barbie had the exact same physique as the standard blonde Barbie with the same height and circumferential measurements,” Nemani explained. “The doll’s pigmentation was deepened only by a slight degree, and her eyes were made hazel rather than blue. Yet Indian Barbie shared the same pink lips, coy smile, shining eyes, and fictitious physique as the American Barbie.”

However, Chawla points out that Barbie was never meant to be an Indian Barbie. “It was a part of an International series of what would happen if Barbie went to India. It was meant more as a souvenir for NRIs and tourists.”

Adapting to the market

It was only in 1996 that “Mattel made its first genuine attempt to create an authentic Indian Barbie, a move that sought to redeem Mattel’s original Indian Barbie,” Nemani said. The information on the early boxes of Barbie was, however, shockingly stereotypical. The boxes informed children that Indian ate with their hands and not knives and forks. It read, “(Box) Includes ‘passport’ country stickers, monkey friend and brush."

A year later, the company rolled out the Expressions of India Collection in which Barbie’s dress and jewellery were altered to introduce the Roopvati Rajasthani, Mystical Manipuri and Sohni Punjab Di dolls.

Along the journey, people made their own versions of Barbie. Hima Sailaja, an Indian fashion designer, draped a teenage doll in different styles: there’s a Jhansi Lakshmi Bai doll, one that wears loose dungarees and another that goes to work in a simple salwar kameez. Twenty-four-year-old Haneefah Adam recently came out with Hijarbie, a Barbie in a hijab, for Muslim girls to have a stylish role model. The Middle East offers the Fulla, a conservatively dressed Barbie, Pullip is the rage in Korea, and the Sara and Dara dolls promote Persian culture.

In India, Barbie’s lifestyle, with her attraction to glamour and her relationship with her on-off boyfriend Ken, did not initially fit into the idea of a conventional Indian upbringing, says Nemani. “It is precisely the sexualised fiction of Barbie’s body that the Indian public repudiated. In India, hyper-sexualised depictions of females are often perceived to be obscene and are subject to censorship.”

But Chawla seems to disagree. “Which child looks at a Barbie and sees it as vulgar or sexy? Kids don’t think about that. They think of the possibilities of being a beautiful and confident grown-up.”

Ashvini Toley, a clinical child psychologist, wonders whether the Barbie syndrome (the desire to love Barbie’s lifestyle) has entered the lives of Indian girls. “When I see a seven year old wearing heels, I wonder what we’re teaching our girls to focus on," she said. "Is it healthy to hand a girl a Barbie? Well, there’s an equally dolled-up Deepika and Kareena to look at too. So why should the girl not play with a doll?”