Devil’s Advocate is a rolling column that sees the world differently and argues for unpopular opinions of the day. This column, the writer acknowledges, can also be viewed as a race to get yourself cancelled. But like pineapple on pizza, he is willing to see the lighter side of it.
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Allow me to first declare I love Shark Tank. Not just the Indian version but the very concept of the show that is a marked improvement on the gratifying ills of reality TV that have preceded its arrival in India.
Nothing could be more ironic than Rannvijay Singha having to import his silly reality TV credibility to a show that frankly makes him look the nail sorely sticking out. The show will certainly embroider the notion of entrepreneurship and doing your own thing, in a country that has persistently romanticised the surrender of employment, rather than the control of creation.
Over the course of its first season, though, a question has gnawed at me prompted perhaps by the rear-guard mutiny of what has obviously become a blissful hour of television. Will the Sharks, and by extension the show itself, identify caste or privilege when it walks through the door I have found myself asking. The answer, so far, has been no.
About a week ago, Haroon Bijli, an acquaintance on the networking platform Linkedin, posted an empirical caste-based census of the people who had, by episode 20, pitched their ideas on Shark Tank India.
Other than the 33 percent that Bijli could not determine by way of the last name, a telling only 1 percent (out of 90 pitchers) were Dalit. Notwithstanding the benefit of doubt, it is a number that is by no means surprising, and alludes to the deterministic nature of reality TV in general. This is by no means to say that Shark Tank India should append morality and social critique to an already challenging feat of entertaining and educating. This is simply to point out that on the most illuminating of stages, or maybe especially on them, light assumes the function of a blinding eraser that obscures the blots of history to the eye of every viewer happy to absorb the world through the assemblage of summaries.
The American version of Shark Tank has made it a point to accommodate a minority race on its panel. Most African Americans, Latinos or people with Indian heritage who walk through the door are acknowledged not for their ability to disappear into the mainstream but for surviving it with their culture baggage intact; their identities unwashed by the sudden upheaval a reality they might be conferred with.
On Shark Tank India, religious and caste minorities are bottled together with their traditional oppressors, as one homogenised chunk that smells collectively, and therefore interchangeably, of hunger and aspiration. But really, has every Indian hungered and aspired the same as the other?
Can equality really become the lens, without the frames of equity to sport it?
Caste is not the only blind spot that Shark Tank India risks enlarging with its clandestine, disengagement of privilege. Every time person A or person B has claimed, "I left my father’s business to do this," people in the chair have moaned romantically, as if floored by the feat of a radical withdrawal. Though Shark Tank India has done a far better job of retaining the ‘reality’ in reality TV, it has unfortunately borrowed Indian television’s sinful habit of mining the impoverished for tears and emotion. Their stories of rags-to-some-better-rags are carefully placed to elicit the humbled gratitude of the elite who treat all stories the same, because it is at the end of the day, business. Therein lies the perfect example of the whitewashing abilities of success that paints even systemic handicaps as mere hurdles that anyone can and should cross, purely because irrespective of proportions, someone has.
This obviously feels like a party pooping moment to exhibit a side of a popular show that though liberating and empowering in context, also practices erasure by teasing a universally accessible path to success. Access to the show itself, however, is never contextualised. An agricultural census conducted in 2015-2016 reported that Dalits owned only nine percent of the country’s farmlands. Everything, even the gestation of a whimsical idea, requires capital. Landless by nature, Dalits obviously cannot mortgage that which they do not own. Ascension, even aspiration then, depends on provisions put in place by the system. Or else in most communities, Dalits turn to private lenders, the Sharks of their own private tanks of unconstitutional prejudice. The rest of the story is a vicious cycle of debt and discrimination that most Dalits do well to survive, let alone bend to their will and turn into something a Shark Tank India would consider worthy of its time [as long as the narrative juice has some pulp].
There are obviously exceptions to every narrative. And it is these exceptions that reality TV uses to decorative effect, creating a fictional land of equity and equality that no ceiling can seemingly cage for long enough. Naturally, Shark Tank India almost feels like the unshackling of a rigid system that can be broken by simplistic hacks like talent, will, and curiosity. It is exactly the reason why talent shows and reality TV in general eulogise the ‘fairness’ of competition, and its implications as a cultural reform, rather than the historic impediments that have rigged and awarded the game long ago.
These underdog stories have been created to allow us to evade guilt for as long as even one of them, any one, finds a victorious end. Shark Tank India, therefore, in its race to establish its advantageousness, may also end up obscuring the disadvantaged.
Shark Tank India is streaming on SonyLIV.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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