Miss World going deshi

 

In November 1996 the South Indian metropolis Bangalore hosted the annual Miss World show. The live event and its televisualisation became a prominent symbol for the India's economic liberalisation and for the immanent globalizing dimensions of this development. As such, the highly prestigious media event was predestined to play a central role in the public contestation of the meanings of India's unfolding c&s revolution. The glamorous beauty contest show qualifies easily as the single most controversial television programme since the arrival of CNN and pan-Asian Star TV in 1991. Arguably, the pageant's contestation, which gave rise to a series of vehement protests and a broad public debate about the country's cultural alienation, marked a crucial point in time and trend towards the (re)localisation of the Indian television landscape. In consequence, the 1996 Miss World show and its televisualisation provides a most illustrative case to explore the processes of hybridisation which are at the heart of India's ongoing media glocalisation.

             In my paper I will seek to demonstrate how this media/live event has been drawn into a broader ideological struggle about notions of gender and national identity; a struggle which has engaged Indian society with renewed vigour, following the ideological and political rise of the Hindu cultural nationalists. Based on particular gendered conceptualizations of ‘modern India', antagonistic social groups and political factions have tried to impose their vision and politics of gender, nation and modernity on the larger Indian public, over the last two decades. Engaging the Indian population increasingly by way of the new electronic, c&s distributed media, competing discourses of gender and sexuality were projected, basically as a necessary, effective and promising way to mediate the social, cultural and economic disjunctures of India's globalizing transformation. In consequence, particular version of an ideal Indian womanhood came to symbolize particular visions of Indian modernity and development