Of Taboos And Metaphors: How Fruits Step In For The Human Anatomy In Indian Media

In October 2024, a controversy surrounding Yuvraj Singh’s NGO, YouWeCan, and its breast cancer awareness campaign, reignited discussions about a long-standing issue in Indian media—the reluctance to speak openly about women’s bodies. The campaign’s poster featured a woman standing beside a basket of santara (oranges) with the tagline, “Check your oranges once a month. Early detection saves lives,” faced severe backlash from netizens, journalists, and health professionals. Many called the campaign “insensitive” and “embarrassing,” arguing that replacing the word breast with santara trivialised a serious health concern. Critics pointed out that breast cancer awareness requires clear and respectful language, yet the campaign chose to rely on metaphor instead of direct communication.

This controversy is not an isolated incident. Indian cinema, television, and advertisements have long relied on euphemisms, particularly fruit-based metaphors, to depict human anatomy. The reluctance to openly discuss women’s health and sexuality reflects deep-rooted cultural taboos that persist even in modern India. Rather than fostering an environment where health issues can be addressed with clarity and seriousness, Indian media often resorts to playful or humorous imagery, inadvertently undermining the gravity of important conversations.

The cultural origins of these euphemisms, their prevalence in Indian entertainment, and their impact on the public perception of women’s bodies make it evident that the sexualisation of fruits is not just a quirky linguistic trend but a reflection of India’s discomfort with direct discussions about female anatomy.

Beyond Indian media, fruits are imagined far from their object. In Call Me by Your Name (2017), the peach is a symbolic object and a physical substitute for the human body. It becomes a site of intimate exploration, embodying desire, vulnerability, and blurring boundaries between the sensual and the emotional. This moment reflects a broader cultural consciousness in which fruits often serve as metaphors for sexuality or as stand-ins for the human body—entities that can be touched, consumed, or engaged with erotically. Indian media takes this metaphor in a different direction, often detaching it from emotional depth and instead circulating fruit imagery in ways that objectify, commodify, or trivialize the female body through playful or suggestive representations.

The Sexualisation of Fruits in Indian Media

Fruits have long been used in Indian pop culture as symbols of human anatomy, particularly in ways that carry sexual connotations. Over time, specific fruits have become synonymous with different body parts—santara (oranges) representing breasts, bananas and eggplants symbolizing male genitalia, peaches referring to buttocks, and cucumbers carrying phallic symbolism. These coded references have become embedded in everyday communication, appearing in Bollywood lyrics, film dialogues, stand-up comedy, social media captions, and memes. I recently came across an Instagram reel featuring images of fruits like bananas, peaches, and oranges, alongside symbols like eggplants, rainbows, a clenched fist, and water droplets. The caption read: “Maturity is when you realize these aren’t just emojis.” The reel cunningly plays on the widely recognized symbolic meanings of these emojis, highlighting how they’ve become part of a shared cultural imagination and visual metaphor system of sexual connotation.

Many Indian condom commercials also use fruit imagery that carries layered meanings—on the surface, referencing flavors, but more subtly reinforcing the idea of women as easy-to-devour objects. In one notable advertisement for Manforce condoms, this metaphor is rendered visually and symbolically. The commercial opens with a close-up of actress Sunny Leone’s lips and eyes, accentuated with pink lipstick. The camera then cuts to a table with sliced strawberries, then a hand slowly crushes the fruit. This tactile and sensual imagery culminates in a scene where the hands of a heterosexual couple intertwine passionately beside these strawberries.

Here, the strawberry serves a dual purpose: it suggests the condom’s flavor while also symbolizing female sexuality—ripe, soft, and ultimately edible. By paralleling fruit with the female body and linking both to physical pleasure, the commercial reinforces a gendered narrative where the woman is positioned as an object of desire—something to be touched, tasted, and owned. This blending of food and femininity not only eroticizes the female body but also perpetuates a consumerist gaze, reducing women to sensual products designed for male gratification.

Again, the Bhojpuri song “Aam Ke Swad” by Khesari Lal Yadav and Shilpi Raj offers a vivid example of how fruit, specifically mangoes, is used as a metaphor for the female body and sexual desire. Written by Abhinav Pratap Singh, the lyrics are layered with double meanings, a hallmark of Bhojpuri popular music, where everyday objects like fruits are frequently employed to suggest deeper, often erotic, connotations.

The video features a woman pushing a cart laden with ripe green and yellow mangoes, dressed in a provocative green outfit and wearing sunglasses. Her repeated line, “Aam le lo, aam le lo, bechataani sareyaam le lo” (Take mangoes, take mangoes, I’m selling them openly), operates on two levels. While it appears to advertise fruit, the phrasing and context imply a metaphorical offering of her own body, equating the act of selling mangoes with the commodification of female sexuality.

Male characters in the video respond with flirtatious enthusiasm, singing lines like “Your mangoes have a tangy taste, but they’re something special,” further blurring the line between literal fruit and the woman’s perceived desirability. Throughout the song, the imagery of mangoes becomes a symbolic stand-in for the female body—ripe, consumable, and purchasable—reinforcing a narrative where women, like fruit, are objects of male consumption and desire.

This representation reflects a broader pattern in regional popular culture, where overtly sexualized content circulates through such songs. In such a context, fruit becomes a socially permissible yet deeply gendered metaphor—one that simultaneously eroticizes and objectifies the female body. The widespread acceptance of such metaphors raises an important question: why do they persist? In part, the use of euphemisms can be traced to societal taboos around discussing human anatomy, especially women’s bodies. Direct references to breasts, genitalia, and sexuality remain stigmatised in India, leading to the creation of indirect, humorous, or symbolic language. These metaphors allow for discussing subjects that might otherwise be considered inappropriate. Still, they also reinforce a culture where women’s bodies are seen as objects of amusement or desire rather than as natural, biological realities that deserve serious conversation.

The normalisation of these euphemisms in entertainment and everyday discourse reflects and reinforces a larger problem—the discomfort of discussing women’s health openly and respectfully. The YouWeCan campaign’s choice to use santara instead of breasts mirrors a broader trend in Indian society where indirect language is preferred over direct acknowledgment, even in matters of life and death.

Bollywood and the Popularising of Fruit-Based Metaphors

Bollywood has played a crucial role in embedding fruit-based body metaphors into mainstream consciousness. Many hit songs use suggestive lyrics that allude to female anatomy without explicitly naming body parts. A recent example is the song “Param Sundari” from Mimi (2021), which features the line “Santre Ki Tokri” (Basket of Oranges). The phrase carries an unmistakable subtext, likening a woman’s body to a commodity meant for admiration and consumption. In colloquial and lyrical usage, fruits like oranges (santre) are sometimes used as metaphors for roundness or fullness, making it possible that the phrase is being used suggestively (of a woman’s prominent breast). The broader lyrics, “Ae Bikaneri Chhokri, Santre Ki Tokri, Ghar Toh Chhudwaya, Ab Kya Chhudayegi Naukri,” reinforce the objectification of women, positioning them as objects within a stereotyped male gaze.

This is far from an isolated instance. Bollywood’s history is filled with songs that use metaphors and double meanings to describe the female body. From “Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai” to “Dhak Dhak Karne Laga,” these lyrics have long relied on indirect references to navigate censorship while still appealing to popular sensibilities. Food imagery—whether fruits, sweets, or spices—has been a consistent theme in these songs, subtly encoding sexual meaning while maintaining plausible deniability.

Beyond music, Bollywood has also relied on visual humor to reinforce these associations. The 2006 film Apna Sapna Money Money features a scene in which Riteish Deshmukh, dressed as a woman, panics when a female character jokingly says, “Aunty, aapka santra.” His immediate reaction—clutching his chest to check if the “oranges” (stuffed into his blouse) have slipped out—is a joke precisely because the audience already understands the santara metaphor.

The 2011 film Damadam starring Himesh Reshammiya has a song titled ‘Mango’ that equates women to mango:

Jab tum jaati ho, jaldi nahi aati ho,

I miss you, baby, like mango.

Oh ho… like mango.

Tere intezaar mein, tere intezaar mein,

Na apples, na tango… mango.

Mango… mango… you’re my mango. Yeah…

The song uses “mango” as a fun and cheeky way to describe a woman’s appeal—sweet, juicy, and hard to resist. This song follows a common Bollywood trend where fruits, especially mangoes, are used to describe a woman’s beauty or charm in a teasing or flirtatious way. However, this casual use of fruit as a metaphor for women can also contribute to the objectification of their bodies, turning them into something to be consumed, owned, or experienced like a product. It reinforces the idea that a woman’s value lies in her physical appeal and how desirable she is to others.

It is this kind of humor across Bollywood films and television comedy, where women’s anatomy is often reduced to an object of amusement. That, though framed as harmless entertainment, contributes to a larger culture that fails to acknowledge women’s bodies as more than just visual symbols or comedic props.

Comedy/Reality Shows and Cultural Resistance

The objectification of women’s bodies through euphemisms extends beyond Bollywood and into television comedy and reality shows. Popular programs like The Kapil Sharma Show and Comedy Circus have frequently used fruit-based metaphors and exaggerated physical humor to generate laughs. Male comedians, including Krushna Abhishek, Kiku Sharda, and Sunil Grover, often dress as women, exaggerating their appearances with stuffed chests resembling santara. While they may not always use santara, they cleverly add humor to their act by occasionally referencing it with lines like “Tumhara santara gir gaya” and similar playful remarks. These props sometimes “accidentally” fall off, triggering uproarious laughter from the audience.

While such moments are framed as light-hearted humor, they may reinforce the idea that women’s bodies exist primarily for amusement. When anatomy is treated as a joke, it becomes even more challenging to create spaces for serious discussions about women’s health, self-image, and bodily autonomy.

This pattern extends to advertising and branding as well. Companies, aware of the viral potential of fruit-based metaphors, have used them in marketing campaigns to attract attention. The strategy is simple: humor, innuendo, and shock value increase engagement, making a product or message more memorable. However, this approach often comes at the cost of sensitivity, as seen in the YouWeCan controversy. When even breast cancer awareness campaigns resort to euphemisms, it raises the question: what message does this send about our ability to address women’s health issues openly and respectfully?

The persistence of fruit-based metaphors reflects a broader societal discomfort with discussing human anatomy, particularly women’s bodies, openly and directly. Even in modern urban settings, hesitation remains. A revealing example comes from Season 3 of Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives (Netflix, 2024), in which Maheep Kapoor casually uses the word “vagina,” prompting immediate shock and visible discomfort from her friends. Neelam Kothari reacts with hesitation and mild embarrassment, and to ease the tension, Maheep jokingly suggests calling it a “flower in the garden” instead.

This seemingly trivial moment encapsulates a much larger issue: the cultural resistance to using anatomically correct language. While euphemisms may be intended to make conversations more comfortable, they reinforce the very taboos they seek to navigate. By avoiding direct discussion of the female body, society continues to sideline crucial conversations about women’s health, sexuality, and bodily autonomy.

The YouWeCan controversy is not just about one campaign- it reflects deeply ingrained cultural norms. The campaign did not introduce the idea of associating santara with breasts; it simply followed a formula that Bollywood, television, and digital media have long popularized. However, the backlash against the campaign signals a shift in public awareness as more people question the messages embedded in popular culture.

If the use of santara in a cancer awareness campaign sparked outrage, perhaps it is time to re-examine why the same metaphor has been laughed at, sung about, and celebrated in pop culture for years. Moving forward, Indian media may need to abandon euphemisms and embrace clear, respectful, and direct conversations about women’s bodies and health.

Akishe L. Jakha is a Film and Media scholar from Nagaland, specializing in popular cinema and regional cinematic culture.