Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India

Review of Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India by Susan Dewey, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 2008. If we have learned anything from three decades' worth of third-wave feminist theory, it is the fact that gender inevitably articulates with other dimensions of human difference, including class, race, ethnicity, religion, national identity, age, and history. A corollary to the paradigm shift that this recognition has engendered is the fact that issues that appeared straightforward in the good old days no longer seem to be so. Such is the case of beauty pageants: Once easily dismissed as retrograde patriarchal celebrations that reduce women to commodities, beauty pageants have become in recent years the focus of sophisticated work that has sought to demonstrate that "things are not as simple as they look at the first glance. " Based on a hands-on ethnographic engagement by an anthropologist armed with an intimate understanding of Indian society and culture, Susan Dewey's exploration of how changing conceptions of femininity and the rise of consumption, nationalism, and class all articulate with one another in the Miss India beauty pageant is an excellent addition to this growing corpus. The first Miss India pageant was held in 1959, a decade after India's independence. The early contests were primarily designed to showcase Indian textiles, potent symbols of the Gandhian struggle against colonialism and for economic self-sufficiency. While the early contests also sought to promote India's image in the international pageant circuit, Miss India did not begin to capture the national imagination until 1994, when two Indian beauty queens simultaneously became Miss World and Miss Universe. This pivotal moment coincided with India's turn to economic neo-liberalism, following International Monetary Fund-controlled "structural readjustment" in 1991. From this turn to neo-liberalism emerged a privileged urban middle class and an increasingly widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the hitherto austere economy was quickly transformed into a consumption-oriented, corporatedriven, and media-saturated landscape. Not surprisingly, the pageants are today dominated by corporate sponsors and media figures, and have become a vehicle for the marketing of beauty products and magazines to urban middle class Indian women, as well as a gateway to media careers for the contestants. Pageant officials and sponsors, as well as some contestants, assert insistently, "anyone can be Miss India" (p. 128). In practice, "anyone" is confined to wealthy urban elites of the politically dominant Northern India, where people tend to have, more than in the Dravidianspeaking South, the fair skin tones that are sine qua non to success in both the national contest and international pageants. In blatant as well as subtler ways, the pageant is designed to address and circumscribe urban elites' privileges and priorities, while at the same time saturating them with consumption, principally focused on such essential items as commercial beauty products. The pageant remains largely illegible to the country's vast rural and underclass population, most visibly represented by the beggars killing time outside its luxury venues. But the Great Unwashed is not only excluded from the pageant, its consumer products, and its elite grounding. …