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  • Future Entanglements:Beauty, Fashion, and (Anti-) Black Aesthetics in India
  • Brian A. Horton (bio)

In the days following George Floyd's murder, Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra-Jonas was one of many celebrities to tweet #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd. In response, South Asian Twitter came after her for her hypocrisy for not talking about atrocities against Dalits and Muslims in India as well as her endorsement of skin-whitening creams. Amid the furor levied at Chopra-Jonas's blind spots to violence in the subcontinent, was a subtler elision: no one was talking about her deeply racist work in Bollywood, namely her role in the 2008 film Fashion.1 The film, one of Bollywood filmmaker Madhur Bhandarkar's most celebrated and successful (winning multiple National Film Awards),2 was his fourth to center on a realistic and gritty depiction of a strong female protagonist climbing the ranks of a tough industry. Fashion stars Chopra-Jonas as Meghna, a smalltown girl who moves to Mumbai to make it as a model in the cutthroat fashion industry. The film traces Meghna's rise, fall, and return to the ranks of fashion's most coveted position of top model. The title also hints at the film's critical object: fashion—here not merely an industry for garments, but also a mode of future aspiration that enables various forms of social mobility in India, or an "entrée into flexible global citizenship."3 Both Fashion and "fashion" entangle mobility and the future as anchored in the idea of beauty as a pathway to future success. In thinking with Fashion as a cinematic text and "fashion" as ordinary, aspirational technologies of self-cultivation, I consider how both link beauty, social mobility, and aspirational futures together through refusals of Blackness. Reading between Fashion's racist climax and the ongoing violence against African migrants in India, I suggest that Blackness often emerges as an aesthetic [End Page 146] problem in India, one that threatens to derail the future aspirations of ingenues like Meghna and the larger projects of the nation and its logics of moral and cultural ascendancy.4

Fashion's object lessons about race and aesthetics are made apparent in its troubling climax. In an especially maudlin moment, Meghna ends up at a packed nightclub full of sexy, young patrons. She slinks across the dance floor, moving with the music, knocking back glasses of vodka, and taking bumps of cocaine with her friend. The camera paces between closeup shots of Meghna's mascara caked eyes—now sunken in the intoxications of drugs, alcohol, and music—and blurry shots of the club's dance floor, which come to stand in for Meghna's gaze. Stumbling through the crowds of people, she makes her way over to a random man and begins to dance with him. Caressing his face, kissing him, and grabbing him by the collar of his shirt, her dance becomes intimate, passionate, and sexual.

The camera cuts to a hotel room littered with lingerie, bottles of alcohol, and cigarette butts. Meghna rises from the bedsheets with the pangs of a hangover. As she clutches her head in the aches of coming to consciousness, she looks over. Subtle violin music in the background score intensifies as the camera fixes upon the back of a Black man lying face down asleep, next to a distraught Meghna clutching the white bedsheet over her body in panic. The camera cuts back and forth between Meghna's horrified face and the sinews of her fast-asleep lover from the club. She hastily gathers her things and stumbles out of the hotel, barefoot. The music crescendos in its intensity, cuing the viewer to Meghna's steady unravelling. Another cut and we are back at her apartment, where she studies herself in the mirror in disgust. The intensity of her gaze makes it seem as if she no longer recognizes herself. Finally, she fully breaks down, crying to her mirrored self, while vigorously scrubbing the makeup off of her face as if she is tearing away at a false exterior. Meghna has hit rock bottom and Fashion has reached its dramatic climax.

Fashion, although frequently praised for its "realistic" portrayals of women's struggles in a...

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