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So, the Femina Miss India entry forms are out. Does anyone without an active hankering for all things ‘90s nostalgia’ (think: Aishwarya Rai bouffants and the jackfruit trees in your grandmother’s backyard) care anymore? We’re not sure, but here’s what a certain section of this online portal looks like:
Criterion 1: Height (5'5" and above) and 18-25 of age (25 as of 31st December 2017).
Sure. We get it. You want to adhere to international norms. Perhaps, channel a Miss USA or a Miss Great Britain and prop up (excuse the pun) the chances of an Indian contestant when juxtaposed to an obviously too-tall non-Indian participant on a global stage?
But, here’s the catch.
A recent study by the Imperial College, London found that the average height of Indian men and women over the last century (between 1914 and 2014) had grown substantially – but really, not enough. Therefore, an average Indian woman still stands far shorter than the average for women for most other nationalities – at 5 feet 1 inch or 153 cm. In fact, Indian women currently stand at 192 among the 200 countries studied in the survey!
Still think it’s fair to club them with their taller model counterparts?
Forget mere height; Indian body types are vastly different from the Western ideal – a far, far cry from the Twiggy-Barbie stereotype that even Western surveys have bemoaned. In a chapter entitled ‘Beauty Pageants’ in their book Encyclopedia of Women in Today’s World, Strange, Oyster and Sloan remark:
In an interview to the Times of India a few years back, Chairwoman of the Miss World Organisation, Julia Morley, appeared to be confounded by the phenomenon –
In a chapter entitled ‘Structural Adjustments and International Standards’ in her book Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India, author Susan Dewey writes evocatively of her experiences back-stage during the 2003 Femina Miss India pageant.
In one paragraph – as she describes the hullabaloo before the selections – Dewey writes of how “after a six twenty AM flight from Mumbai, Miss India officials measured the young women in order to determine that they met the height requirement of five feet six inches tall” (the criterion at the time).
“...The process of an individual woman’s body to be moulded into a Miss Universe...”
For more than half a century (since 1952), India has been actively participating in the Miss Universe pageant; it began to partake in the Miss World pageant soon after too, in 1959.
But as India participates in a global economy that is ever-developing, is it also running the risk of letting international beauty standards shape and influence its own outdated perceptions of women?
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)
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