Aishwarya Gets Into Racist Controversy Due To Kalyan Jewellers Ad
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Thursday, 23rd April 2015, 5:07 PM IST In one of the recent ads of Kalyan Jewellers, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is seen as a royal princess and behind her is a black kid holding an umbrella for her. Well, this print ad has not gone down well with a few people. And they have sent out an open letter to the actress. The open letter states: Dear Mrs Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, We write to draw your attention to a full-page advertisement for Kalyan Jewellers in which you feature that appeared in The Hindu (Delhi edition) on April 17, 2015. In the advertisement you appear to be representing aristocracy from a bygone era – bejewelled, poised and relaxing while an obviously underage slave-child, very dark and emaciated, struggles to hold an oversize umbrella over your head. We wish to convey our dismay at the concept of this advertisement, and that you have, perhaps unthinkingly, associated with such a regressive portrayal of a child to sell a product. While advertisers routinely use fantasy images to sell products, they must surely desist from using images that condone, legitimise, normalise, or build desirable fantasy around slavery or servitude of any kind, including child slavery or child servitude. Further, the extremely fair colour of your skin (as projected in the advertisement) contrasted with the black skin of the slave-boy is obviously a deliberate "creative" juxtaposition by the advertising agency, and insidiously racist. The genealogy of this image can be traced back to 17th and 18th century colonial European portraits of white aristocracy, depicting women being waited upon by their black "servants". Today, many national and international movements are struggling to change at least the public culture that normalises child labour, a struggle that the Nobel committee has also recognised. We, therefore, hope you agree that this sort of advertisement – a romaticisation of child servitude to feed into elite fantasies – is extremely objectionable and avoidable. To this open letter Ash’s team replied: Dear Farah Naqvi, Nisha Agrawal, Enakshi Ganguly , Bharti Ali, Madhu Mehra, Shantha Sinha, Harsh Mander and Mridula Bajaj, On the onset we would like to thank you on drawing our attention to the observation of the perception of the advertisement. Here is an attachment of the shot taken by somebody during the shoot. The final layout of the ad is entirely the prerogative of the creative team for a brand. However shall forward your article as a viewpoint that can be taken into consideration by the creative team of professional working on the brand visual communication. Thank you once again.... Aishwarya is making a comeback with Sanjay Gupta’s ‘Jazbaa’ and the director feels that the open letter is dumb. He tweeted, “Get a life guys. Sure you have more to do than write these dumb open letters.” Now you can enjoy ad-free experience by downloading India’sfirst Box Office mobile app from here –Android: http://bit.ly/BOCapsuleMobileApp and iOS: bit.ly/BOCapsuleiOSApp |