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Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India (Gender and Globalization) ReviewMaking Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power and the Nation in Postliberalization India. Susan Dewey. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. 224 pp.
Susan Dewey's Making Miss India Miss World is an engaging ethnography of the Miss India pageant in the context of a changing, globalizing India. The book follows the 2003 pageant from beginning to end. It also considers the larger history of pageants and the effects of India's 1991 implementation of structural adjustment policies on the Miss India pageant and on surrounding issues of gender and national image. Dewey conducted four months of participant-observation in the pageant process, mostly in Mumbai, but also at the day-long auditions in Delhi and Bangalore. She interviewed pageant organizers, judges, and participants in the 2003 pageant and examined all submission materials. She also interviewed former participants and winners of Miss India, Miss Universe, and Miss World. The book is a unique contribution to the study of gender and globalization, examining both the "exploitative, classist, and sexist nature of pageants" (222) and the agency and social mobility possible for women involved in them.
The book consists of seven chapters, including an introduction and three sections, on "The Power of the Gaze," "Gender" and "Globalization," each considering different aspects of the making of Miss India and the larger goal of making this Miss India into a viable Miss Universe. This thematic rather than chronological organization makes for some repetition of material. The forty-eight page introductory chapter, in particular, introduces themes in great detail that are repeated in the later chapters. Nevertheless, an ethnographically rich description of the entire process of the 2003 pageant -- from initial submissions to the day-long final selection of three separate Miss Indias bound for Miss Universe, Miss World, and Miss Earth pageants - emerges in this highly readable book.
In the chapters on "gaze," Dewey draws on Foucault's theory of the panopticon to discuss how pageant participants as well as the larger middle class society "are so closely monitored that they begin to monitor themselves" (99). Here, she introduces the twenty-six women out of 332 valid applicants who qualify for an intensive month-long training and preparation for the final pageant. Dewey is careful to note the narrow reaches of the Miss India contest's definition of "international standards" (99) of beauty that limit opportunities to participate to a small, privileged minority, who must alter their bodies and self-presentation to be competitive. Dewey argues successfully that the image of India presented to the larger world is stereotypically North Indian, even as the pageant organizers make efforts to remove names and other identifying features from applications during early selection. Yet in some places - most strikingly when she refers to the large metropolis of Chennai (formerly Madras) as a "small town" (80) - Dewey herself seems to have fallen sway to the pageant's misapprehension of South India.
The sections on gender and globalization devote considerable critical attention to the complex processes that produce feelings of inadequacy among women who cannot fit the mold or the proportions of an idealized Miss India. This despite rigorous counseling, dieting, fitness programs, skin bleaching and vitamins designed to lighten skin and shape women into ideal internationally competitive proportions. Yet, in a sensitive ethnographic style, Dewey puts forward a nuanced reading of the pageant centered on the words and experiences of the individual participants, arguing that femininity is always a "cultural performance" (135). She watches as each woman manipulates her performance of by-design vacuous answers to questions in front of a variety of judges, "altering key elements of her personality ... to suit each judge's view of gender-appropriate behavior" (178). Here, she demonstrates a central argument of the book: despite the structural oppression of pageant ideology, women of a particular, privileged location in the English-speaking middle-class are able to negotiate this world to achieve success and gain access to the otherwise elusive film and entertainment industry.
Dewey is mindful of the extreme disparity between the concerns and stakes of the pageant population and that of the majority of Indian citizens living with poverty and illiteracy. Dewey also points to the way that class impacts notions of the ideal body-type, observing that women and men who labor outside the five-star hotel in Mumbai where the pageant takes place are considered unhealthily thin, even as women inside nearly starve to meet the rigorous standards of the pageant. One of the sharpest examples of the contrast of worlds appears in an excerpt of an interview with an Editor at Femina, the Times of India magazine that sponsors Miss India. Sathya Saran comments that India as a country, is "in desperate need of... fashion consciousness," a point which Dewey calls "almost offensive in the context of real social problems," but which she says also demonstrates "the cultural framework in which Miss India operates" (209-210).
Light on theory, this book is accessible for non-specialist audiences, including undergraduates. It would fit nicely into a syllabus on gender and globalization or contemporary India. Given Dewey's extensive discussion of the impact of ethnicity and class on constructions of beauty, it would also make a great addition to courses on race and ethnicity, and particularly the gendered aspects of these. The subject matter and accessible writing style would likely appeal to a variety of readers.
Laurah E. Klepinger-Mathew
Syracuse University
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