Writing the Nation on the Beauty Queen's Body: Implications for a "Hindu" Nation

Year 2000 was the "crowning" glory for India. Miss Indias walked away with the triple honors of Miss World, Miss Universe, and Miss Asia-Pacific. Three young women did India proud, pronounced the arrival of India on the global stage, showing the world that India was a modern and progressive nation. India had recently liberalized through capitalism and consumerism, and now with these victories through culture and morality, India could stake a claim to the pie of transnationalism. India was a country to contend with. On the local/national/international scene, three young women were setting standards of womanhood and desirability for millions of young girls and women in India and the rest of Asia. A "collective" (comprising the political, social, and capitalist institutions) that was redefining femininity, woman's status, and women's identity was negotiating standards of modernity and values of acceptability, success, citizenship, and nationhood.

Miss Indias are nationally honored and make the front page of national dailies, sashayed and crowned, standing side by side with the beaming leaders of the country. They are in the same league as those "brave patriotic men" who gave their lives at Kargil (location of the Indo-Pak war in 1999). In fact, if the Kargil war had not delivered national pride as expected, the crowning of Indian women as Miss World and Miss Universe more than compensated for it. Beauty queens in India are given the same "respect" and glamorous coverage as Indian cricket players! For Indian women, the crowning of these queens reaffirms femininity and nationhood as sportsmen and military service reassert masculinity for men. Both sets of gendered behavior bring honor and recognition to the individual and their nation.

My focus is not only on the imaging of beauty queens as symbols of national pride but also on their contribution to the gendering of the Indian nation. In the wake of economic liberalization since the early 1990s India is being showcased internationally through advertised consumer products and beauty pageants. Beauty queens are used as symbols to "convince" the world at large that India has "arrived" on the global stage as a "modern" country on its path to "development." But with the emergence of a right-wing Hindu polity, beauty pageants are simultaneously condemned and a conservative ideology of "family values" is being perpetuated through sacrificing mothers and suffering wives in television serials. These portray traditional imaging of women for "local" consumption in an attempt to enforce a paradoxical role model for women in India. These are the positions of cultural hegemony that the government and dominant elite profess. For most Indian women, this polar idealized struggle does not represent their reality. They struggle to survive economically and locate themselves somewhere between these two discourses, bridging both modern and traditional ideals, despite the heightened rhetoric of preserving the "traditional," "moral," and "Indian" culture aimed mainly at women.

In this paper I am trying to discuss the representations of women, their bodies, and their imaging in the national rhetoric of India in the last decade. I am trying to unravel the oft contradictory stance taken by the government and government-supported media to understand who the "new" Indian woman is supposed to be. In this attempt, I will look at the nation's perceptions of women and the nation's projections of women through beauty pageants and television serials. While there seems to be a duality at work at the national level in terms of "acceptance and rejection" of certain notions of femininity—the issue is more complex and closely tied to international politics and globalization.

Beauty pageants are not a new phenomenon in India. They have been around since the 1950s, but what is new is the national attention they receive and the frequency with which Indian women are crowned at these pageants internationally. What is also new is how such pageants are...