India is proud Manushi Chhillar was awarded Miss World 2017, but do we really need beauty pageants?
On November 18, Manushi Chhillar was crowned Miss World 2017 - 17 years after an Indian woman last won the coveted title. Praise poured in from all corners, including from President Ram Nath Kovind, who said, “May this inspire every young woman in our country to achieve her dreams, in whichever field she chooses” and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who said: “India is proud of your accomplishment.”
With adulation came controversy. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, known for his eloquence, chose to turn Chhillar’s moment into a jibe against the ruling BJP government and its demonetisation drive; employing what he himself calls the lowest form of humour: puns. Tharoor tweeted, “What a mistake to demonetise our currency! BJP should have realised that Indian cash dominates the globe: look, even our Chhillar has become Miss World!”
The play on words here was the Miss World’s last name and the colloquially used Hindi word “chillar”, which means "loose change". Tharoor’s tweet received condemnation not just for using a woman’s achievement to further his own political narrative, but also for downplaying an accomplishment by comparing the winner to "loose change".
In fact, Tharoor’s inane tweet managed to earn the wrath of the National Commission for Women, whose official account tweeted, “He degraded the achievement of daughter of Haryana and India who got glory to the country. Will he call his own daughter chillar? He must apologise immediately.”
Both praise for Chhillar and the controversy surrounding her win seem to be centred on the notion of accomplishment. While a crown and international recognition bring glory to the country, does that automatically turn a beauty pageant into something worth celebrating? Perhaps no.
“[Beauty pageants] are essentially moneymaking machines fuelled by female insecurity and submission,” argued Author Courtney E Martin in her New York Times column, adding, “Beauty is an organic process, not a contest”.
Author and feminist writer Jessica Valenti in her Guardian column from 2015 wrote, “The most awkward moment of the Miss Universe pageant this week wasn’t host Steve Harvey naming the wrong winner on live television - it’s that in 2015, a pageant still exists that parades women around in bikinis for the honour of winning a sash and tiara. That’s the true embarrassment.”
Valenti’s arguments echo those of Martin; she says that beauty pageants are just another opportunity to ogle gorgeous, scantily-clad women and pit them against each other. If these pageants pretend to be anything more than a superficial contest, they are lies (as was successfully demonstrated by John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight.
They are nothing more than contests that judge women's looks based on antiquated and arbitrary notions of beauty.
A quick look at the eligibility criteria alone for Miss India will illustrate the underlying problems of a beauty pageant: contestants should be at least 5'5" tall. This is unscientific, because according to a research report from the Imperial College London, the average height of an Indian woman is now 152.6 centimetres (5 feet).
In their book Encyclopaedia of Women in Today’s World, authors Carol K Oyster, Jane Sloan, and Mary Zeiss Stange note: “As critical ‘race scholars’ argue, cultural ideals utilised for judging [beauty pageants] are white middle-class standards of beauty that exclude racial or ethnic minorities. Beauty queens still largely fit Western ideals of beauty… Pageants perpetuate a thin white ideal and put tremendous pressure on women to pursue an ‘unattainable beauty myth’.”
It doesn’t end there. Beauty pageant contestants are restricted by age. Does that imply that if someone is over the age of 26, they do not qualify as beautiful? The rules also state that the “applicant should be a natural born female”, only underlining the transphobic notion that nothing other than biological femininity qualifies as beautiful.
With so many glaring flaws in a contest limited to physical appearance — which overlooks diversity in every form — and the ideals peddled by beauty pageants, when citizens see Chhillar’s victory as a moment of pride for India, what exactly are we supposed to be proud of?
An archaic, Western, patriarchal standard of beauty? Or, the fact that it is 2017 and beauty pageants, despite our better understand of gender norms, have managed to remain as dated as ever?