From Parvati to Pageant: The Rise of the Body Business in Capitalist India

Abstract

Prompted by the critically acclaimed documentary Bitches and Beauty Queens: The Making of Miss India, by the Fulbright scholar Minkie Spiro, this research intends to deconstruct the politics of beauty pageants and see them as events that commercializes the female body. Far from embodying the mythical values of Lakhsmi and Sita, the Indian beauty pageants theatricalize women as occasions for capital and revenue. Bitches and Beauty Queens, more than merely projecting the independent Indian woman, focuses on the machine that makes this product possible—‘beauty queens are not born, they are made’ says Meera Syal ,the voiceover for the documentary. This research hence view the body as a product of, what Adorno and Horkheimer call, the culture industry. The female body becomes ‘plastic’ inscribed with gender and cultural standards. It is this plasticity that, Susan Bordo argues, popular culture remoulds and reconstructs. Both Adorno and Bordo agree that postmodern patriarchal capitalism obscures the natural female body and substitutes it with a prototype of femininity. The outcome of this industrial process is a corporeal bizarreness. The body is eternally incarcerated in a state of lack called anorexia.