India’s fascination with beauty contests seems to be connected to transformations wrought by globalization in a growing consumer society. For several decades now, beauty competitions have been staged with considerable pomp and pageantry at exclusive clubs, women’s colleges, and even high schools throughout the country. At the national level, Femina, India’s leading women’s magazine, organizes an annual Miss India contest whose winners go on to participate in international competitions like Miss World and Miss Universe. These events regularly draw protests across the ideological spectrum, ranging from conservative Hindu nationalist groups to progressive women’s groups. While some see the beauty contests as cultural threats to traditional values and religious sentiments, others feel that the pageants are sexist in their attitudes toward femininity and derogatory to women.
At the same time the contests have inspired significant outpourings of national pride, as evinced when Miss India, Sushmita Sen, won the Miss Universe title in Manila in 1994. National enthusiasm grew even more intense when, later that year, India’s Aishwarya Rai was crowned Miss World in Sun City. In both cases, numerous protests were drowned by a chorus of patriotic celebration that hailed this peculiar play of fate in the lives of two young women as an omen of India’s rise to global prominence. Hindustan Times, the widely circulated English daily captured this sentiment when it announced Rai’s stunning victory with a bold headline on its front page,’World’s envy, and India’s pride.
After Rai’s victory as Miss World, an overjoyed Sen exclaimed,’ We have conquered the world, an assessment that seemed to encapsulate this outpouring of national pride. The terms of this conquest were later explained by Sathya Saran, editor of Femina, who explained that India ‘is now more receptive to and more aware of the international look. We have adapted ourselves over the years and are now in tune with international standards. Vimala Patil, former editor of the same women’s magazine, claimed that India’s stunning feat on the global beauty stage was possible not only because ‘Indian girls … are better prepared but because India has been in the eyes of the world thanks to its economic reforms.
Over the years, many participants in beauty pageants, like Zeenat Aman in the 1970s and Juhi Chawla in the 1980s, have influenced the media exposure from these events into highly successful careers in the Indian film industry. When Sen and Rai won the Miss Universe and Miss World crowns respectively in 1994, they were flooded with offers from celebrated directors and producers, not to mention other lucrative opportunities like modeling and product endorsements.
More recently, the media coverage of beauty queens on the global stage has grown exponentially in India since the Miss World crown was brought home by Diana Hayden in 1997, Yukta Mookhey in 1999, and Priyanka Chopra in 2000, and the Miss Universe contest was won by Lara Datta in 2000.
Not surprisingly then, ‘the beauty business is anall-pervasive phenomenon’ in India that ‘starts off with a Miss Beautiful contest in High school, goes on to chick-charts for the 10 most beautiful women in college and ends up at the Miss India extravaganzas which bring in fame, money and glamour.’ Thus, Jain finds that ‘now every girl worth her Barbie doll has extended her horizons to the Miss Universe and Miss World pageants. Without falling prey to exaggeration, one must recognise that the success stories of contestants at Miss India and more recently Miss World and Miss Universe pageants have been few and far between. For every woman who triumphs at beauty pageants and rises to stardom in Indian films, there are millions of women whose dream is restricted to vicarious experience via tabloids and television. Consequently, the pervasive impact of this beauty economy is crucially attached to the media imagery it produces. Yet this same imagery, which is so significant to aspiring young women, is also passionately disturbing to other elements within Indian society who seek to resist the growing influence of the global beauty order.
An explicit link between beauty and business is often made when analyzing India’s recent rise to prominence in global competition. It is frequently pointed out that international sponsors are now flocking to the subcontinent in hopes of tapping into reputedly vast and growing Indian consumer markets. Dispensing beauty titles is a relatively inexpensive way for commercial sponsors to build brand recognition among the country’s growing consumer class, which is estimated to be somewhere between 150 and 485 million people, depending on the type of product being marketed. Calling India the ‘world’s largest emerging market,’ Noel V. Lateef, president of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, writes,’The pace at which India has adjusted to the transformative world market has surprised even the most cynical observers. Having made tough decisions to reform its economy, India is easily the most significant test case in the world for whether democracy and capitalism can triumph over mass poverty.’ Consequently, many have commented that the attraction of India’s emerging consumer markets goes hand-in-hand with the attraction of its women on the global beauty stage.
 
India, which had tried, for decades, to steer a non-aligned course by maintaining ties with both the first and second world powers in the west and east, respectively, now finds itself irresistibly drawn to the economic aid, investments, and development projects of the western bloc. Given such a shift in material conditions, it is not surprising then that popular attitudes about beauty contests should become a site of significant ideological struggle on the South Asian subcontinent. Many critics of globalization in India hope to resist what anthropologist Mary H. Moran sees as the basic logic of the international beauty order. ‘Beauty contests,’ she writes, ‘operate internationally and cross-culturally within a discourse of evolutionary change that includes a hierarchical understanding of the relationship between centre and periphery
Beauty contests are cast as part of the process by which rural areas overcome their isolation and backwardness. ‘This implicit evolutionary model, , ‘assumes that economic and infrastructural alterations in the countryside will inevitably result in lifestyle changes bringing rural populations into contact with national and global cultural practices. For a small locality, far from the national capital, the act of sponsoring beauty pageants signals the acceptance of a number of ‘foreign’ but recognizably ‘developed,’ ‘advanced,’ or ‘modern’ ideas, including putting women on public display, which may contradict local sentiments. From the most modest local competition to the ultimate global extravaganza under the watchful eye of global television, beauty pageants are engaged in ideological labour that under girds the presumptions of a global capitalist order.
More than anything else the pageants make sense of everyday life in this global order by creating common categories of difference. At the local level, contestants are often judged by community standards, which may include recognition of the ways that a contestant observes local mores. A young woman, who cares for her elderly grandmother, maintains the family shrine, participates in harvest rituals, or observes local guidelines for courtship may be recognized for these behaviors since they symbolizes local attitudes about community life and social obligations. At this level, a play exists between local and global a standard, which is often commented upon by participants and spectators. But as the contestant moves to the next level of competition, local qualities decline in significance and other, more cosmopolitan standards, become more prominent. Within a given round of competition, a similar process of abstraction is often at work. For example, while conducting field work at the national competition in Belize he noted, ‘Contestants enter and are introduced wearing ‘ethnic’ costumes, often quite fanciful (sometimes from a group other than their own). But as the pageant goes on, ethnicity disappears and nationality asserts itself. First the contestants are symbolically shorn of ethnic identity in the swimsuit competition; ethnicity is metaphorically superseded by sexuality. Next they reappear transformed, as in a rite of passage, in cosmopolitan and expensive formal wear, to perform and then to answer questions on an explicitly nationalized theme. Thus the country is subordinated to the city, the agrarian to the modern, the ethnic to the national and ultimately to the global.
Beauty pageants, do not homogenize but rather they organize differences.’ They take the full universe of possible contrasts between nations, groups, locales, factions, families, political parties, and economic classes, and they systematically narrow our gaze to particular kinds of difference.’ They then measure, quantify and evaluate these differences in a putatively objective manner. This process draws ‘systemic connections between disparate parts of the world. These common frames bring previously separated groups into a new arena of competition, consisting of global structures that organize diversity and turn it into common difference.
Although local contests may still affirm community values, spectators each year become more aware of international standards. One can, therefore, observe a double movement in the logic of beauty contests that works both to produce a set of common differences and to help naturalize these standards at the most quotidian levels of personal and community life. Movement upward in the competition is dependent upon the internalization of global values at the local level. Yet even if one were not to move upward, the activity of participating or spectating helps one understand the value of the common set of differences upon which the competitions are based. Furthermore, one’s place in the transnational order is reaffirmed by regular participation in this global/local ritual. One might apply Victor Turner’s wisdom to this situation by observing that values and norms are thereby aesthetics and imbued with emotion.
Thus, like the introduction of a local money economy, once a beauty contest is organized at the local or national level, it invariably is pressured to integrate with the global order. ‘Protest’ then seems confined to a handful of options: One’s community may discontinue the contest; it may continue to compete according to its own principles (ever condemned to the status of an’ underperforming’ contestant); or it may seek to maintain community standards while also coordinating its competition with the global event in hopes of having its’ difference’ recognized as valuable. The third option seems to be the path most commonly taken as national communities attempt to mediate the tensions between the global and the local. But despite all the popular discussion that commonly swirls about beauty competitions at all levels, most public deliberation is inevitably framed in relation to the standards on display at the global event. The global not only assigns abstract value to the local, it also structures local deliberation and/or protest.
The predicament of the women’s groups protesting the Miss World pageant brings to attention the problematic politics and tactics of feminism in India when women’s activists are forced to align with conservative right-wing parties like the BJP to ensure the momentum of their movement. In this strategic alliance, what were initially cast as women’s issues became increasingly articulated to popular resentments against economic liberalization and transnational corporate influences. Not unlike earlier protest movements in India, the struggle over the status of women was subsumed by a struggle over nationalist identity and cultural autonomy. Instead of giving voice to the feminist critique of Miss World, public deliberation and media coverage increasingly focused on the Hindutva movement’s characterizations of the struggle as an attempt to defend a distinctively Hindu/Indian concept of femininity against the profane values of invasion of ‘foreigners.’
On the other hand, international organizers of the Miss World contest seemed to take the challenge in stride. Despite the impassioned demonstrations in the streets of Bangalore, the Miss World contest now finds itself doubly legitimized in countries like India through the visible success of the global media event and the apparent exhaustion of the protest movement against it. On the other hand, the failure of the protest is characterized as being symptomatic of a larger problem of feminism.
In the final analysis, neither global media events like Miss World nor the protest movements against such beauty pageants seem to be adequate sites for challenging the worldwide hegemony of patriarchal traditions, and/or capitalist social relations. Yet it would be a folly to construe all media events within capitalism and patriarchy as irredeemably co-portative or to assume that protest against their globalization is a ‘failure.’ If a powerful convergence of global, national, and local forces at the Miss World contest seemed to deform the political organizing efforts of progressive feminist groups protesting the media event, then so too can the disseminative power of satellite television provide openings for challenging the traditional norms and social relations in Indian society.
As the passionate debates over the 1996 Miss World contest suggest, the re-definition of femininity in India is now very much an ideological necessity, thus making the critical re-examination of gender relations a cultural imperative of everyday life. Protests against such events may prove futile for feminist groups in part because the events so effectively interpellate their contestants and spectators, many of whom aspire to transcend repressive gender conventions. But perhaps more importantly, protests against beauty contests may prove counterproductive because the criticisms leveled at the events so often expand into a broad-based assault on consumer culture and the fashion industry. While indeed one must be critical of the profit-oriented ambitions of the businesses that sponsor beauty pageants, one must remember that many of them achieve their successes in countries like India by being pioneering institutions of the modernizing era to address the fantasies and aspirations of Indian women. In such a context, the very act of transgressing the dichotomy of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ notions of feminine desire has subversive implications that need to be explored with greater care.
BY AISHWARYA IYER
the article is nyc but pretty long and boring becuz it contains less pic