Barbie Indian Doll (styles may vary)

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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.” 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.”

Since people were so desperate to see desi celebs as Barbies, online fashion police Diet Sabya curated a list of female Indian celebs as Barbies and gave a funny twist to their characters. Priyanka Chopra’s Barbie is “Girl don’t yell, we are here for love.” Image Source Deepika Padukone’s Barbie is “Patchouli Pathaan.” Image Source Alia Bhatt’s Barbie is “Screaming Shivaaaaaa.” Image Source Katrina Kaif’s Barbie is “A Bhabhi.” Image Source Anushka Sharma’s Barbie is “Causing a traffic jam.” Image Source Sonam Kapoor’s Barbie is “OG fashion gworl.” Image Source Kareena Kapoor Khan’s Barbie is “A Bandra wali.” Image Source Natasha Poonawalla’s Barbie is “Mrs. Vaccine.” Image Source Kangana Ranaut’s Barbie is against “Bhikari movie mafia.” Image Source Urvashi Rautela’s Barbie is “Youngest human citizen universe winner.” Don’t get me wrong. Margot Robbie is no slouch as what the movie calls “Stereotypical Barbie” — the blond bombshell that kids in Mattel focus groups point to when presented with diverse Barbie dolls and asked, “Which one is Barbie?” Stereotypical Barbie starts the movie as a confident woman who knows exactly who she is, and doesn’t ever want anything to change. She lives in Barbieland, a fantasy realm conjured by Mattel that’s powered by the imaginations of kids who play with Barbie dolls. It’s a world ruled by Barbies, and unashamed of traditional feminine tropes. The president is a Barbie (played by Issa Rae, in a pink silk “President” sash). The Supreme Court is all Barbie. And every Nobel Prize winner in history is — you guessed it — a Barbie. Every pink-washed DreamHouse mansion in Barbieland is owned by a woman who makes her own money and spends her free time indulging in “girls’ nights” where everybody shares a glorious communal wardrobe. 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.”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. 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.” Arya, who played with the Sindy and Barbie dolls herself as a child growing up, never thought she would play the character on screen. According to her, the power of the toy combined with the reach of TV and films that have long formed an inextricable part of the everyday cultural experience—with families coming together at the end of a day to identify with their on-screen counterparts—could be a gateway to inspire conversation and even question societal norms. “TV-watching is how I grew up, coming to terms with my Indian identity in England’s Guildford,” she explains of her experience watching the British-Asian sketch comedy show Goodness Gracious Me. “For the first time, we saw South Asians, our family homes, stories about them, that allowed us to just poke fun at ourselves. It was brilliant.” Her cousins and her, inspired by the tales of the TV show, wrote their own kids’ version, building character arcs and facets. “I guess I felt seen from that. Films contribute massively to shifting culture. It should inspire conversation. I especially think young audiences will be encouraged to question societal norms and develop a more progressive and inclusive mindset on beauty and self-worth after watching Barbie.” Screen Time

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. 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 Barbie stays one step ahead of that thought, because it’s all leading up to an expert commentary on how little girls will always realize, sooner or later, that the real world is run by men, and that its Kens have more power than its Barbies. And once Gosling’s Ken makes it to Reality, he realizes this too, and he goes full men’s rights activist, transitioning from Barbie’s placeholder boyfriend into one of the most fascinating antagonists in modern pop cinema. Someone thought that Kareena Kapoor Khan’s character ‘Pooh’ from ‘Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham’ and Rani’s character ‘Tina Malhotra’ in ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ can also be added to the list of desi Barbies.

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

If you love playing new and old Barbie games, then you’ll probably like many of the games in these categories: Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. She is the author of the poetry collections Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), which New York Times reviewer Eric McHenry described as an “ambitious … beautiful book.” Her other honors and awards include the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.I did not expect Barbie to be a movie about Ken — and more importantly, a movie Ryan Gosling steals with such glorious aplomb that I can’t even be that mad at him for it.