One page response paper on Global Communication Article

Mapping Miss World in the News 1

Local Contestations over Globalization: News Representations of the Miss World Controversy

in India

On November 23, 1996 the live performance of the Miss World pageant was staged for an

audience of 16,000 at the state-owned Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, a cosmopolitan city in

South India. Beauty contestants from 89 nations, reputed folk and classical dancers and musicians,

and a parade of richly decorated “ethnic” elephants entertained reporters, celebrities from the

fashion and film industries, corporate business leaders, and the sea of ticketholders who had

gathered to witness the event. Welcoming the audience to Miss World’s first performance in South

Asia, host Ruby Bhatia Bali animatedly invoked India’s colonial history to hail the pageant as a

trope for new egalitarian partnerships in a global economy, “The 1996 Miss World in Bangalore

will convey the magic of the East and West coming together. Unlike the days of the British Raj

when India was subordinate, the West is now seeking India out as an equal global partner.” In

contrast to Bhatia’s optimism and the dazzling pantheon of multicultural femininity being displayed

on the illuminated stage, the hundreds of heavily armed guards patrolling the shrouded darkness of

the stadium grounds signaled the grim specter of the state’s masculinized power and authority.

Blurring the boundaries between private/public, capital/state, and leisure/work, the silent and

hypervisible bodies of the guards reminded the audience that unexpected violence could erupt at

any moment. Under the leadership of Bangalore’s police commissioner, over 12,500 law

enforcement personnel including Central Armed Reserve Force soldiers, seven divisions of the elite

Rapid Action Force, two all-women police platoons, and a bomb fighting squad created a thick

blanket of security for the pageant.

To unpack the puzzling question of why a formidable array of state security personnel

would be stationed at a seemingly banal entertainment event, media scholars would have to shift

their attention from the orchestrated order of Miss World’s rehearsed performances to the scenes of

disorder that exploded outside the walls of the stadium. Standing a few feet away from a statue of

Mahatma Gandhi, CNN correspondent Anita Pratap relayed news of impending suicide protests by

conservative women activists who had declared their intentions to sneak into the stadium and burn

themselves in order to sabotage Miss World. During the live staging of the contest, activists also

blocked traffic, deflated tires of state-owned buses, and threw stones at the doors of the stadium as

police fired teargas shells and used lathis (long wooden sticks) to restore order. Journalistic

accounts that chronicled these tense climactic moments in the history of Miss World’s arrival in

India were only a few pages in the closing chapter of a prolonged tale of debate and controversy

that unfolded over several months. Since August 1996, soon after the event management firm

Mapping Miss World in the News 2

Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Ltd. (ABCL) announced that Miss World would be held in India, a

host of special-interest groups hijacked the global contest as a conduit for disseminating narratives

of local opposition to global culture.

The transformation of Miss World from a mere beauty contest into a newsworthy spectacle

illustrated the creation of “media event space,” a chaotic cultural domain that emerges when

special-interest groups manipulate staged events and public figures to attract media attention

(McLaughlin, 1998). To the dismay of Indian organizers, who were eager to package Miss World as

a modern ritual of feminine achievement that would herald the nation’s endorsement of global

capitalism, activists, political parties, and trade unions seized the international contest as a forum to

generate public debates on moral decay, preservation of national traditions, economic imperialism,

and the Indian state’s recent collusion with the business interests of foreign multinationals. In

attempting to mobilize popular sentiment, both the rhetoric of support for and opposition against

Miss World focused sharply on the potential impact (empowering and damaging) of First World

consumer culture on Indian women’s bodies, behaviors, and sexual identities. Organizers’,

sponsors’, and protest groups’ mining of Miss World to promote their agendas in the public sphere

revealed the manner in which constructions of gender and sexuality are inextricable from discourses

of nation, tradition, and modernity in postcolonial India (Banet-Weiser, 1999; Fernanades, 2000;

Munshi, 1998; Oza, 2001).

The prominence of media images in the representational politics of capitalist democracies is

a key concern of recent cultural studies work that has examined the ways in which institutions and

activist groups harness media spectacles to disseminate narratives of race, gender, class, and nation

in the public sphere (Callahan, 1998; Hinds & Stacey, 2001; McLaughlin, 1998; Steiner, 1999).

Building on such recent discussions, this article examines visual and textual representations of Miss

World’s “media event space” in the Times of India, an English-language newspaper that is widely

recognized for its “reliability and reputation for balance and fairness” (Shah, 1994, p. 8).

Approaching news texts as portals into the larger political, social, and economic order in India’s

current context of globalization, my study seeks to unravel the symbolic meanings of gender,

nation, and consumer modernity that were embedded in the Times of India’s construction of the

Miss World controversy.1 How did the newspaper’s signification of pageant sponsors and

organizers, state officials, beauty contestants, and women activists legitimize or challenge

hegemonic regimes of gender and class? What selecting, ordering, and framing practices did the

Times of India employ in its discursive production of the voices that affirmed or questioned Miss

World’s credibility as an event that symbolized women’s empowerment and national progress?

Mapping Miss World in the News 3

Mapping the complexities of local reception to projects of globalization, whose interests—

global/domestic capital, state, or activist—did the newspaper’s representational strategies highlight,

eclipse, or exclude? What economic factors and historical legacies shaped the politics of Miss

World’s journalistic production in the Times of India? Addressing these questions, the ultimate

objective of my analysis is to offer intertextual readings that explore how the visual and linguistic

repertoire of journalism intersects with and operates in relation to the institutional contexts of

patriarchy, consumer culture, state authority, and the public policy process. Scrutinizing a select

sample of news texts, I argue that the semiotics of gender, nation, and modernity in the Times of

India’s composite narrative on Miss World privileged the moral claims of organizers, sponsors, and

the state, thus consolidating middle- and upper-class news consumers’ support for the classist

ideologies of globalization.

In examining journalistic texts as culturally articulated knowledge and as commodities that

circulate within India’s expanding consumer culture, this essay’s approach to news as a symbolic

system of representations contributes new insights to feminist cultural studies and interdisciplinary

debates on globalization. Politicizing the private sphere as a crucial site for studying the constitution

of gender, race, and class identities, feminist cultural studies critics have documented the ways in

which advertising discourse, soap operas, women’s magazines, television dramas, and romance

novels reflect, renew, and sometimes challenge patriarchal and capitalist structures of power.

Without diminishing the value of feminist research on “low-brow culture” and while borrowing

methodologically from existing work in cultural studies, this article’s interrogation of “middle-brow

culture” steps away from the disciplinary focus on fictional texts of entertainment and fantasy.

Deconstructing the politics of gender, class, and nation in the cultural accounts of journalism—an

institution that claims to foster citizenship rather than consumerism—is crucial to uncover the

architecture of “reality” and challenge the objectivist epistemology of news texts. Furthermore,

although the potential impact of globalization on the economies and cultures of Third World nations

has attracted much theoretical attention, few studies have empirically examined the complex and

heterogeneous strands of local responses to global rituals, products, and services. Charting the

discursive domain of global-local collaboration and conflict in the Times of India, this paper’s case

study of the Miss World controversy illustrates the process by which news media shape, translate,

and manufacture “truths” about globalization for local audiences.

The first section, which engages with recent work on globalization, gender, and beauty

pageants, has two goals. This section weaves together the political and economic context for the

article’s analysis of the Miss World controversy and describes the different protagonists ranging

Mapping Miss World in the News 4

from founders, organizers, sponsors, and protest groups who shaped Miss World’s media event

space. The second section details my theoretical and methodological approaches to news analysis

and outlines briefly the quantitative parameters of Miss World’s news coverage in the Times of

India. In the third and fourth analytical sections, I deconstruct photographic and textual

representations of Miss World in the Times of India to show that the constitutive relations between

structures of power and systems of representation reveal themselves with as much force within

news narratives as they do in the texts of popular culture. Finally, in the concluding section, I first

address the economic imperatives that guided the production of Miss World as news for the

growing middle-class markets of post-liberalized India. Historicizing the analysis, I then locate the

semiotics of gender and globalization in the Times of India within the cultural politics and

discursive inheritances of colonial modernity.

Globalization, gender, and consumer culture: Global pageants and local protests

In August 1996, when film actor Amitabh Bachchan announced that his media company had

won the contract to stage Miss World in India, prominent celebrities, business leaders, and

advertising agencies hailed the pageant as a historic event that would offer spectacular evidence of

India’s enthusiasm for and receptiveness to globalization. At the same time, a coalition of left-wing

politicians and feminists claimed that the pageant’s performance in Bangalore would signal India’s

capitulation to the interests of global multinational companies at the expense of the poor. Why did

two divergent groups—one representing domestic capital and the other activist opposition—view an

international beauty contest as a symbol of globalization?2

During the past decade, numerous scholars have debated the impact of globalization on the

economies and cultures of Third World nations (Ang, 1996; Appadurai, 1996; Grewal, 1999;

Tomlinson, 1996). While David Harvey (2000) notes that the business practices of globalization per

se are not new because international trade dates back to the 15th century, the increased mobility of

capital and the rapid circulation of goods, services, and images across geographic borders mark the

“complex, overlapping, and disjunctive order” of the global economy (Appadurai, 1996, p. 32).

Close collaboration among nation-states, global and domestic capital, and local culture industries

has spurred the steady incorporation of Third World countries into the global economic order. In the

case of India, the national government accelerated the arrival of globalization when it launched

economic reforms in the late eighties to dismantle inefficient state controls, promote a free-market

economy, and facilitate the entry of multinational companies (Dutt, 1997). The Indian government’s

economic liberalization package, which was designed primarily to attract foreign capital, resulted in

a shift in the emphasis of state economic policies from socialist modernity—encouraging

Mapping Miss World in the News 5

infrastructure development and the elimination of poverty—to capitalist modernity—promoting the

urban Indian middle-class as a lucrative market for the sale of global consumer culture (Varma,

1998). As Appadurai (1996) observes, the consuming potential of the “actual and potential” middle-

class, an audience that Indian market research firms pursue relentlessly, has become the basis for

much of India’s public culture formations (p. 7). Consumption, however, is not the only mode

through which India has gained visibility in the global economy. Participating in the production and

labor sectors, India’s English-speaking middle-classes have also become a much sought after

workforce in the global information and software industries.

The transformation of the postcolonial Indian state’s protected economy into a burgeoning

location for global consumption and production has produced dramatic changes in urban

landscapes, forms of consumption, and media culture (Oza, 2001). Red and white Coca-Cola and

Pepsi logos painted on walls, store shutters, and street-side vendors’ stalls signal the competition

between multinationals vying for the attention of the Indian consumer. The high-rise buildings of

Euroamerican software companies adjoin modest middle-class homes in Chennai, Bangalore, Pune,

and Hyderabad. Supermarkets, shopping malls, and fast-food businesses sell consumer goods—

toilet paper, deodorants, Barbie dolls, and pizza—that were well beyond the reach of the middle-

classes a decade ago. Due to the privatization of television and satellite services, viewers who were

earlier resigned to dull and didactic programming on health, agriculture, and science on state-

controlled channels, now have the luxury of access to over 50 channels including CNN, MTV,

BBC, and STAR TV. Reflecting and creating the conditions of possibility for globalization in India,

television’s mesmerizing images have authorized the reworking of the nation from a quasi-socialist

state into a promising candidate for multinational capital (Khilnani, 1997). In India’s current climate

of consumption, the colorful experience of the visual thus embodies modernity as a “structure of

feeling,” a deeply felt sense of the quality of life that shapes a culture’s collective imagination

(Williams, 1975, p. 63).

Following the trajectories of consumer culture in industrialized nations, gendered forms of

representation and consumption, with implications for the construction of tradition and modernity,

mark the new field of global commodity culture in India. While advertisers mine images of young

Indian women to sell cars, computers, and cell phones, middle-class women themselves have also

become a much sought after market in the global economy. Analyzing popular culture’s symbolic

deployment of the feminine in India’s current phase of globalization, Sunder Rajan (1993) observes

that women’s displays of sartorial modesty, acceptance of arranged marriages, and performances of

domesticity including the preparation of fresh food for family and celebration of religious holidays

Mapping Miss World in the News 6

have become the embodied emblems of a feminized pan-Indian tradition. The signaling of

modernity takes place through representations of women in jeans, skirts and short dresses, mothers

buying packaged foods, and rebellious young women participating in dating and courtship practices.

The “New Indian Woman” in consumer advertising of post-liberalized India negotiates skillfully

her traditional roles as honorable and dutiful daughter, wife, and mother with her modern roles as an

entitled and educated consumer and worker in the capitalist economy (Munshi, 1998).

One expanding arena of Indian women’s global consumption that is also linked to Western

metropolitan modernity in the popular imagination is the beauty and cosmetics industry.

Mushrooming beauty parlors in cities and small towns and ubiquitous supermarket cosmetic

counters serviced by women attendants in white coats index the pervasive presence of beauty

culture. The loud voices of multinational cosmetic companies like Revlon, Oriflame, Avon,

L’Oreal, and Benckiser have begun to present a serious threat to the previous monopoly of Lakmé

and Ponds. With an investment of $1.7 billion and the highly publicized tours of supermodels

Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford in 1995, Revlon managed to secure 18% of the market share

in one year (Parihar & Raval, 1996). Embedded in this context of the booming cosmetics and

personal hygiene industries, beauty pageants and beauty queens have become symbols of Indian

women’s new visibility in the public sphere.

Challenging the simplistic equation of beauty pageants to kitschy low culture, recent

scholarly work approaches these contests as spectacles of gender, race, class, and nation that serve

the interests of various social, economic, and political forces (Banet-Weiser, 1999; Callahan, 1998;

Cohen, Wilk, & Stoeltje, 1996; Oza, 2001). For instance, Callahan traces the history of the Miss

Thailand contest from its early staging as a nationalist instrument of the state to a consumerist

institution that created audiences for the products advertised on television. In India, cosmetics,

fashion, food, and personal hygiene companies routinely sponsor beauty pageants at the school,

college, state, and national levels to build brand awareness and customer loyalty. Victorious beauty

queens on billboards and in advertisements promote soap, shampoos, skin-lightening cosmetics, and

bicycles. Femina, the largest circulation Indian women’s magazine, manages the national Miss

India contest and regularly features successful beauty queens on its covers. Indian women have won

Miss Universe and Miss World titles six times in the past decade and former international beauty

queens Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai have become celebrity film stars in the Hindi film

industry. The media-saturated world of beauty culture in India is thus a field of consumption and

production that is a “shifting array of texts and experiences, which constitute evolving contexts for

each other” (Appadurai & Breckenridge, 1995, p. 13).

Mapping Miss World in the News 7

Propelled by the momentum of these economic and cultural currents, the production of the

Miss World pageant in India, like other capitalist ventures of globalization, required cooperation

among global and local event managers, multinational and domestic commercial sponsors, and state

officials. As many global companies have discovered since their entry into India, success with

Indian markets has been contingent on the effective localization of their cultural products, a task

that has demanded strategic alliances with local Indian partners who have the cultural expertise to

translate the standard global into the customized local (Fernandes, 2000; Grewal, 1999). The British

founders of Miss World, Eric and Julia Morley, sought the assistance of the fledgling Amitabh

Bachchan Corporation Ltd. (ABCL) to organize and manage the pageant’s local incarnation in

India. Sponsored mainly by Godrej, one of India’s oldest producers of soaps, shampoos, and office

furniture, Miss World also owed its financial support to MasterCard, Citibank, Coca Cola, Euopcar,

Omega Watches, Modi Revlon, Lakmé Cosmetics, Air India, and Welcom Group of Hotels.

Linking Miss World to the compassionate mission of the state and local non-profit organizations,

ABCL decided that 10% of the profits obtained from the sales of tickets would be donated to the

Spastics Society of Karnataka, a respected association that offered free therapy, medical consulting,

and special education for disabled children from poor and low-income families. Eager to harness the

pageant for its potential to put Bangalore on the map of global tourism, government officials

promised to clean up the city, offer easy access to state property, and make public appearances at

major events. Along with Amitabh Bachchan, the chief minister of Karnataka, J. H. Patel, presided

over the inaugural news conference of Miss World, which was held at the Vidhana Soudha, the

colonial State Legislature Building. The state also permitted ABCL to hold the live performance of

Miss World at the open-air Chinnaswamy Cricket Stadium. Furthermore, when public protests in

Bangalore turned violent, the state police commissioner supervised massive security arrangements

on behalf of ABCL.

Examining the rhetoric of protests against Miss World, Oza (2001) writes, “The opposition

to the pageant emerged from many different political positions producing a complex discourse on

gender and sexuality in contemporary India” (p. 1071). In expressing their objections to Miss World

during strikes and demonstrations, spokespersons for the conservative political right, Premila

Nesargi, member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Kina Narayana Sashikala, leader of

Mahila Jagran, focused on the pageant’s “polluting” impact on traditions of Indian femininity that

emphasized women’s modesty and virtue. Mirroring the impulses of their previous campaigns to

outlaw obscenity in public culture (Fernandes, 2000), conservative activists filed a series of

petitions that requested the Karnataka High Court to charge ABCL for its use of state property and

Mapping Miss World in the News 8

services, ban Miss World’s swimsuit competition, restrict distribution of alcohol at charity dinners,

and enforce advance censorship of any proposed indecent exposure of women. In deference to the

court, ABCL agreed to pay the state for law and order services, shift the swimsuit competition to

Seychelles, and serve liquor only at private parties.

Progressive feminists, allied with the political left and the farmers’ group Karnataka Rajya

Raithu Sangha (KRRS), distanced themselves from the political right when they chose to oppose the

pageant as a symbol of the state’s classist policy-making machinery that favored the middle-classes

at the expense of fulfilling the basic needs of poor women. A consortium of women’s organizations

including Mahila Jagruthi, Vimochana, and the All India Democratic Women’s Association

(AIDWA) also argued that the pageant’s commodification of women signaled the state’s support for

multinationals. Protesting against the collusion of global/local capital and the state, Mahila Jagruthi

activists illegally entered an upscale Godrej showroom and smeared products with cowdung and tar.

Feminists’ coalition with the farmers’ group disintegrated soon after KRRS leader Nanjundaswamy

announced his support for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party.

Approaching news as cultural narrative: Meanings, myths, and textual analysis

Relying upon the qualitative methodology of textual analysis to explore the cultural politics

of gender, class, and nation in the Times of India, this study draws inspiration from a growing body

of qualitative media research that examines news as a symbolic regime of myths and narratives and

as a commodity in a political economy (Bird & Dardenne, 1988; Carey, 1986; Carter, Branston, &

Allan, 1998; Fair, 1996; Hartley, 1982; Polumbaum & Weiting, 1999; Rakow & Kranich, 1991;

Zelizer, 1992). Studying African women’s images in American television news stories on famine as

part of a history of colonial knowledge production on Africa, Fair (1996) writes that scholars must

use textual analysis to “explore more fully the relations among knowledge, organizational practice,

consciousness, experience, and cultural contexts in which news circulates” (p. 3). Similarly, in their

qualitative analysis of print and electronic news media coverage of Tiger Woods, Polumbaum and

Wieting (1999) contend that “mining sports stories for nuance, background, contradiction, and

complication” is a productive endeavor to understand the metaphoric ways in which the racial order

of a national community gets embodied and conveyed (p. 70). Arguing that the representational

limits of mass media offer clues to accepted knowledges about critical issues of the day, scholars

locating themselves within a tradition of qualitative studies of journalism have thus employed

textual analysis to reveal the ideological lenses through which news institutions filter discourses of

gender, race, class, and nation.

Mapping Miss World in the News 9

A small yet significant stream of qualitative and cultural studies research on Indian

newspapers situates the English-language news media within histories of British colonialism, local

structures of power, and institutions of elite authority. Although the readership of metropolitan

English-language newspapers represents a small fraction of India’s population, the Indian press

today is not just a “mediator between state and civil society, but an important part of the apparatus

of governance itself” (Dhawan, 1991, p. 33). State officials, legislators, activists, politicians, and

more recently, global and local corporations depend on the urban press to influence public opinion

among the educated middle and upper classes, key socioeconomic categories of deification in

current policy and corporate discourses on modernization (Shah, 1994). Summarizing the power of

the press as a source of cultural capital for the urban elite, Joseph and Sharma (1994) write:

The power of the English-language press is enhanced by its class composition…the press is

run by the same dominant group to which it primarily caters…traditional definitions of

news, accepted by the mainstream English-language press in India, conform to the generally

liberal, yet elitist values espoused by the relatively affluent, upwardly mobile, university

educated, upper caste urban male. (p. 17).

Using techniques of textual analysis that allowed him to investigate how the media “operate to

classify people, create meaning, establish parameters of debate, defend the status quo, and squelch

dissent,” Shah (1994) examines the Times of India’s coverage of elite students’ demonstrations

against a proposed state policy that sought to reserve a portion of government jobs for the lower

castes (p. 7). Shah’s qualitative analysis shows that the Times of India’s corpus of stories on upper-

caste student unrest enabled hegemonic forces of class and caste to gain public sympathy for their

cause and thus preserve the status quo.

Indian feminists have analyzed the limits, possibilities, and boundaries of journalistic

knowledge production on key events that have shaped the ideological trajectories of debates over

gender and citizenship in India’s political landscape. Examining public discourses of the state and

community elites during battles for the custody of Ameena, a 10-year old Muslim girl, who was

“rescued” from her impending marriage with an elderly Arab man, Mankekar (1997) demonstrates

that news texts are cultural narratives, and hence profoundly implicated in the turbulent politics of

gender, sexuality, and religion in postcolonial India. Focusing on media responses to feminist

activists’ public campaigns, some textual analyses have shown that newspapers can perform a dual

role in challenging and reinforcing the operation of patriarchal power in the private and public

sphere. The record of the Indian newspaper industry thus registers both sympathy and antipathy for

the goals of the women’s movement. Contrasting the regressive overtones of Indian television with

Mapping Miss World in the News 10

the more progressive historical legacy of print media before the arrival of globalization, Misra and

Roychowdhury (1997) argue that almost all legislative reforms and “major women’s rights

campaigns have been waged primarily” through the press (p. 248). For instance, the press mobilized

public support for legislative action against such gendered forms of violence as dowry deaths,

female infanticide, and domestic abuse; however, newspapers have also failed to provide adequate

context, critical analysis, and sustained coverage of these social problems (Balasubrahmanyan,

1988; Joseph & Sharma, 1994). Luthra’s research on the public framing of “female foeticide”

(selective abortion of female foetuses) discovered that the English-language press in Mumbai

accommodated some elements of the feminist campaign to pass a law banning sex determination

tests even as these reports muted simultaneously more radical feminist language that challenged

systemic discrimination against women (Luthra, 1999).

Borrowing conceptual and methodological insights and contextual cues on the Indian press

from qualitative analyses of news narratives, this study’s primary goal is to explore the latent

meanings of gender, class, and nation in the Times of India’s news stories on Miss World. The sheer

quantity and intensity of news on Miss World that saturated Bangalore’s public sphere in 1996

reflected the global pageant’s semiotic fertility and resilience as a media spectacle. Photographs and

stories of the pageant stayed on the front pages of English-language and vernacular newspapers for

over two months. The editorial sections of Bangalore’s newspapers expanded to accommodate the

hundred of letters that poured in from citizens, special-interest groups, and politicians opposing or

supporting the pageant. In an effort to organize and process the volatile politics that surrounded

Miss World, local versions of national newspapers like the Times of India, Deccan Herald, and the

Indian Express produced special weekend features to showcase and profile beauty contestants, well-

known columnists, and activist leaders. To compete with the frenzied pace of Miss World’s event

planners and protest groups’ daily demonstrations, two reporters and two photojournalists at the

Times of India were asked to abandon their routine beats (crime, courts, and lifestyle) so they could

assist their colleagues who covered city politics. The sample of Times of India news photographs

and reports that I examine in this study spans a ten-week period from September 18, 1996, the day

of the first large-scale public demonstration, to November 25, 1996, two days after the pageant’s

live performance.

During the ten weeks in 1996 that my analysis emphasizes, the Times of India carried 127

news photos related to Miss World—75 of these illustrated Miss World contestants and a range of

the pageant’s supporters while 57 supplemented news of protest activities.3 The newspaper carried

252 stories on Miss World, and 106 of these were front-page stories. Positive stories that described

Mapping Miss World in the News 11

and endorsed the staging of Miss World—features on contestants, pre-pageant events, plans for the

event, columns—outnumbered stories on local opposition to the pageant—marches, speeches, silent

vigils, columns—by approximately one and a half to one (113 to 76), and there were more front-

page stories that favored the pageant’s sponsors and organizers. Experts supporting the pageant

were more visible and frequent, and the newspaper cited a wider range of people (in twelve

categories) who expressed support and sympathy for the pageant’s organizers. Revealing the impact

of binary models of objectivity on the Times of India’s oscillations between consent for and dissent

against Miss World, the newspaper published twice as much material on conservative protests as

they did on feminist and left-wing opposition, and among activists, Kina Narayana Sashikala, the

conservative leader of Mahila Jagran Samiti captured maximum editorial space. Going beyond

counting stories and assessing their positive or negative tone, my textual analysis tracks the

contextual meanings and institutional genealogies of strategically chosen examples of news artifacts

and representational practices.

This paper’s exploration of Miss World in the Times of India is based on cultural historian

Robert Darnton’s premise “that the individual expression takes place within a general idiom, that

we learn to classify sensations and make sense of things by thinking within a framework provided

by our culture” (Darnton, 1984, p. 6). Approaching the Times of India’s photographs and reports on

Miss World as textual elements that intersected with a larger system of representations in post-

liberalization India’s popular domain, this article attempts to “tease meaning from the newspaper’s

content by engaging with the surrounding world of significance” (p. 6). To uncover the latent

meanings of gender, class, and nation in Miss World’s media event space, I explore the intertextual

relations among representations in the Times of India and those in other media including

newspapers like the Deccan Herald, Indian Express, and Hindu, magazines like Femina and India

Today, local television news on STAR TV, and marketing discourse. Through my emphasis on

intertextuality, I aim to show how the dominant meanings of journalism emerge, not from an

isolated story or photograph, but from an accumulation of aligned accounts that produce a particular

public record of an event (Carey, 1986).

My investigation of Miss World’s mediated zone of public debate in the Times of India’s

news photographs and reports elaborates recurring discourses and themes and probes the

hierarchical ordering of journalism’s representational techniques—size, placement, and

positioning—that signal prominence, newsworthiness, and legitimacy. In narrating the beginnings

of the first rough draft of Miss World’s history, whose side of the story did the Times of India’s

pictures privilege? Given the wider context of colorful visual modernity in post-liberalized India,

Mapping Miss World in the News 12

whose photographs did the newspaper choose to print in color? In the process of crafting the human

face of the Miss World controversy, who were the individuals featured in news images and how

were they shown? How did the captions to photographs contribute to the visual framing of

organizers, contestants, and activists? Addressing the deeper implications of media practices, the

analysis of news stories assesses the Times of India’s role as a mediator of public opinion on Miss

World. In what ways do specific textual practices of representation articulate the power of the state

and local/global capitalism? Foregrounding the rise of celebrity endorsement and corporate

philanthropy, I examine the implications of the Times of India’s news content on Miss World

organizers’ efforts to link the pageant with the charitable work of the Spastics Society of India.

Finally, complementing the textual analysis, I draw periodically on interview data to flesh out and

illuminate internal processes of news production and the institutional imperatives that shape the

content of newspapers. In 1998 and 1999, I conducted interviews with Indian newspaper, magazine,

television, and marketing professionals and key members of feminist organizations in Bangalore to

gain access to their memories of experiencing the 1996 Miss World controversy on the ground.

Animating modernity, disciplining dissent: The visual register of Miss World

Competing with global television’s mission to constitute the regime of the visual as the

quintessential discursive vehicle for consumer modernity, the textual terrain of Indian print culture

has shifted to privilege the semiotic power of images and illustrations. Polychromatic discourses of

visual titillation in the glossy new magazines that flooded the nineties’ market—India Today Plus,

Verve, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and New Woman—prepare the burgeoning Indian middle- and upper-

classes to become modern subjects by participating in the culture of commodity fetishism. Anxious

to soften their stodgy image and ensure their long-term economic viability in India’s new and robust

climate of visual modernity, major metropolitan newspapers have increased their allocation of

editorial space to images and doubled their investments over the past decade in the acquisition of

advanced technology and the services of professional photographers and cartoonists. Documenting

the design elements that indexed the emergence of an aesthetic of modernism and the simultaneous

rise of the market-oriented newspaper, Barnhust and Nerone (2001) write that the ascent of the

front-page photograph signaled both the consolidation of modern journalism’s empirical authority

and the “acceptance of photographers as partners in journalism instead of merely as artists” (p. 201).

Paying homage to the visual hegemony of global modernity, Times of India’s photographs of the

Miss World controversy represented a milestone for the newspaper’s record of illustrations for a

single story. Guiding the interpretive boundaries of Miss World’s media event space for the busy

Mapping Miss World in the News 13

and casual browser of the newspaper, the pageant’s field of images accounted for 40% of the

newspaper’s visual output in 1996.

The colors of globalization: Masculine capability, smiling femininity, and local hybridity

In the Times of India’s photojournalistic rhetoric, Miss World was dramatically anchored to

the kaleidoscopic hues and multicolored prosperity of the modern while local opposition was

consigned to the routine and drab world of gray, quotidian news. Mirroring the practices of

newspapers across the globe that move gradually towards a full integration into the world of color,

in 1996, the Times of India printed color photos only on the front pages of its different sections.

Within the newspaper’s intricate order of images and text that calibrated a hierarchy of

newsworthiness, both prominence and color coalesced around ABCL executives, founders, and

contestants. Although brief news reports of simmering resentment against the pageant coincided

with the publication of the pageant’s schedule of events, the Times of India’s first Miss World

photograph that appeared on the right corner of the front page (a prime location) linked the pageant

to the confident aura of masculine celebrity and the affirmative power of the state. Resplendent in

“patriotic garb,” actor Amitabh Bachchan and Bangalore chief minister J.H. Patel, who were

dressed in white khadi kurtas, long handspun cotton shirts that evoke nostalgic memories of

Mahatma Gandhi’s anti-colonial struggle, shook hands to signal the productive collaboration of

state and private enterprise in forging globalization projects. Accentuating the nationalistic flavor of

the two men’s white clothing, the Indian flag with its brilliant green, white, and orange colors

lingered in the periphery. Similarly, three front-page color photographs also renewed the vitality of

Miss World as a model project for fostering harmonious partnerships among the successful

masculine elite of the Indian state, local business, and multinational capital. Signifying India’s

newly resuscitated postcolonial relations with the West, these images revealed groups of men—

Bachchan, Miss World founder Morley, J.H. Patel, state tourism officials, and business executives

from Godrej, Revlon, and Citibank—arrayed on the stately green gardens of the Vidhana Soudha,

the palatial brick red building that houses the State Legislature.

Color photographs and illustrations that recorded preparations for Miss World on the front

pages of the business and entertainment sections wove the pageant into dynamic narratives of

architectural progress and achievement. Two large news photos of construction work on the stage at

Bangalore’s Chinnaswamy stadium showed several men suspended precariously on elaborate

scaffolding outlined clearly across the blue sky. One caption noted that the “magnificent spectacle”

of the 1996 Miss World would unfold on the 110ft x 60ft stage, a massive multi-level structure that

ensured “unprecedented excitement” for Miss World’s live audience in India unlike previous

Mapping Miss World in the News 14

performances of the pageant that had been packaged exclusively for television. In vivid contrast to

these images, the caption to another small photograph of the crumbling Qutub Minar, a historic

seventeenth century tower featured on the same page, drew the reader’s attention to the stagnant

backwardness of the Archaeological Society of India, which had “denied ABCL permission” to

shoot images of beauty contestants posed in front of the monument.

Several striking images of male software professionals working on Miss World’s

technological production blended seamlessly with Bangalore’s coveted reputation as one of the

world’s leading suppliers of knowledge-based products and services. By the mid-nineties,

Bangalore was well recognized as a thriving technopolis and Third World “Silicon Plateau” of

cheap skilled labor for scores of multinational firms including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Structured by a masculine narrative of high technology, these Times of India images projected the

pageant’s potential to escalate the momentum of the city’s forward-moving urban energy. Three

young men dressed in blue jeans were huddled around a glowing computer screen that displayed a

brilliant orange graphic of the India map in one photograph while the caption noted that Bangalore’s

“seasoned software experts” were planning to project high-resolution images of the nation’s natural

and historic “treasures” on stage, an aesthetic innovation that was designed to lend a “patriotic

flavor” to Miss World’s visual spectacle. Hinting that the greatest uncertainties in staging large-

scale pageants hinged often on the unpredictable performances of women contestants, who turned

out to be fallible humans, the caption to one photograph of Richard Steinmetz (the white South

African host of Miss World’s live show) surrounded by blue electric generators and gray audio,

video, and lighting equipment claimed that Miss World’s combination of “spanking new”

technology and international talent dovetailed with the city’s prevailing goals to become the

“geographic pulse” of the global information economy.

Echoing the representational styles of fashion and lifestyle magazines, other large Times of

India color photographs that harnessed the allure of young, feminine beauty disturbed the fragile

boundaries that separate hard and soft news and photojournalism and commercial imagery. A series

of front-page color images in the main section that chronicled beauty contestants’ participation in

inaugural rituals invited the newspaper’s middle-class reader to momentarily enter the glamorous

world of the privileged Indian upper classes. Close-up and mid-shot photographs of beauty

contestants’ arrival at Bangalore’s airport and at Windsor Manor hotel’s ostentatious opening

reception emulated the visual aesthetic of soap operas and personal care advertisements that

encourage consumers’ intimate identification with their female characters. Dressed in form-fitting

bright purple and red clothing that flattered their slim and innocent beauty, two wide-eyed young

Mapping Miss World in the News 15

women from Holland and Ireland with long, flowing hair stared warmly into the camera as they

waved to their imaginary audiences. Posed Playboy-style pictures of young female contestants

clustering around an older man—alternately industrialist Vijay Mallya, South Indian actor

Rajanikanth, and Amitabh Bachchan—reproduced the gender/class/age asymmetries that structure

the discourses and practices of sexuality in entertainment culture where an older man’s intimate

proximity to multiple feminine trophies of beauty indexes masculine success and pornographic

desire. Creating a similar spectacle of feminized beauty, although with a radically different

representational technique of male worship that emphasized distance and inaccessibility, another

image showed Miss Aruba and Miss Israel, dressed in short skirts, sitting cross-legged in chairs on a

small stage as a crowd of eager male photojournalists operating their cameras circled the two

women.

The ubiquitous “lovely-to-see-you” pearly-white smile, a gendered bodily adornment and

welcome convention that evokes the “analogy of family warmth” to interpellate the viewing public,

rarely left the faces of beauty contestants in news photographs (Holland, 1998, pp. 26-27). Holland

(1998) argues that the fantastic excess of the pretty white woman’s relaxed, friendly smile, a

modern representational trope of middle-class femininity that pervaded the popular press of Britain

in the late sixties, indexed the dramatic softening of hard news through the assertion of the female

body as spectacle. Outnumbering front-page images in the Deccan Herald and the Hindu, fifty-five

Times of India color photographs that appeared over three weeks exhibited Miss World’s

participants attending welcome celebrations, charity dinners, and social events hosted by local

celebrities. In over ninety percent of these illustrations, well-groomed smiling young women,

colorful figures who typically saturate the semiotic world of Femina, the glossy magazine that has

reinvented itself as the training manual for aspiring global beauty queens, conveyed a feminized

“entertainment” rather than an “informational address” in the newspaper’s front pages. In the midst

of the growing protest against Miss World on the streets of Bangalore, one vivid mid-shot image

displayed a smiling Miss India and Miss Ireland “brimming with confidence despite the explosive

atmosphere created by protesters” on the lawns of the Maurya Sheraton hotel. An eye-catching

visual feast that covered the entire front page of a weekend special feature on Miss World contained

ten small images of Bangalore’s business and social elites accompanying beaming beauty

contestants. Claiming the inseparable combination of color and smiling women in visual images of

Miss World to be an instinctive and “common sense” technique of representation, one Times of

India photo editor remarked, “How else would you show modern and beautiful women?” Revealing

the epistemic force of the beauty codes that govern the realm of the feminine in India’s public

Mapping Miss World in the News 16

culture, Madhu Bhushan, a slim, young, and attractive feminist, noted that she, rather than several

older feminists who were also involved in the left-wing protest movement, received numerous

requests from journalists for posed photographs.

Traveling from the newspaper’s lifestyle pages into the front page, these smiling young

women in the Times of India’s premium editorial space are surrounded by a wider discursive regime

of media culture that persistently utilizes the trope of smiling femininity, combined with a

rebelliousness linked to unconstrained canons of dress, to signal India’s openness to the seductive

spell of First World modernity. Reaching out to the urban middle-classes, a key economic bloc

whose purchasing power fueled India’s receptiveness to globalization, most Internet versions of

Indian news magazines regularly feature a smiling young woman model or celebrity costumed in

Western clothing on the first page. The cover of the first issue of India Today Plus, an upscale

lifestyle publication (produced by the more serious news-focused India Today) that caters to the

affluent transnational class of Indian consumers, featured a smiling young woman with deep red

lips, dressed provocatively in a tight white tank top. Distilling in grand fashion the pleasures of

modern material abundance, this feminine mascot of Western modernity flaunted the boldness of

her exposed skin while seated in a flashy red and white classic Chevrolet car. Furthermore, as some

business publications have claimed, the exuberant feminine smile that circulates visibly in media

culture had to be harnessed as institutional practice if India wanted to become a modern capitalist

nation that appreciated First World standards of excellent service to the consumer. Sharing his

difficulties in training Indian service staff at airlines, five-star hotels, and retail outlets to be pleasant

and responsive, the director of Aditi Communications (formerly a TV anchor) lamented the

traditional obstacles that hindered the cultivation of a First World corporate culture in India, “Some

Indian women think it’s wrong to smile at strangers because that sends a sexual message, and the

men say it’s weak and womanly to smile all the time. I teach them the modern business meaning of

service with a smile.”

The Times of India’s smiling Miss World contestants’ signifying capacity emerges from the

larger cultural embodiment of cosmopolitan modernity that takes place through pervasive displays

of affluent, happy Indian women who are packaged within the transgressive sexual aesthetics of

“othered” Western femininity. Such metaphoric uses of women’s bodies in the news media to

symbolize cultural narratives of prosperity, progress, or poverty is indicative of the ways in which

women’s spectacular and silent hypervisibility in the public sphere can in fact underscore their

marginality (Schein, 2000). Deconstructing television news texts in the United States, for instance,

Fair (1996) writes that repetitive images of the horrors of the feminized “other”—the shriveled body

Mapping Miss World in the News 17

of the desexualized African woman with flaccid breasts—mapped the spectacle of famine in the

Third World even as African women’s voices and subjectivities were framed as peripheral

appendages in these stories. The cross-cultural process of classifying women’s “othered” bodies as

sexualized icons of consumerist euphoria or desexualized colonial artifacts of hunger in the news is

ultimately a form of powerful objectification that silences the interests of women.

Projecting a discourse of global modernity that was different from the images of smiling

contestants bathed in the aura of Hollywood-style evening glamour, another set of 15 Times of India

photographs showcased women’s bodies as canvases that illustrated the hybrid fusion of the

hegemonic Euroamerican global with trendy forms of local multiculturalism. Conveying the exotic

appeal of combining Western beauty with native sartorial practices, several photographs exhibited

young white women in Western clothing with red dots on their foreheads, sandalwood garlands

around their necks, and jasmine flowers in their braided hair attending traditional welcome rituals.

In one quarter-page photograph that appeared in mid-November, Miss Germany, Miss Sweden, and

three Bollywood film stars wearing short black dresses and traditional Indian jewelry stood in the

foyer of the Windsor Manor Hotel as twelve Indian bridal couples representing their “home” states

serenaded the guests with song and dance. Captioned “Miss World is welcomed Indian style,”

another image portrayed three European contestants in extravagant South Indian silk saris frozen in

traditional Indian dance poses. Forming a circular flame-shaped centerpiece on the first page of the

city section, a creatively designed collage of photos showed women dressed in different styles of

ethnic dress lighting oil-filled lamps to inaugurate the celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of

lights that commemorates the victory of the god Rama. News images of Julia Morley and reporter

Maya Sharma “trying on” glass bangles and shawls at a Miss World-sponsored handicrafts bazaar

gained maximum airtime on STAR TV’s evening news on November 20, 1996.

The Times of India’s prominent illustrations of Miss World contestants’ local incorporation

into the fabric of ethnic Indian culture demonstrates the successful harnessing of tradition and

difference to resonate with the local consumer fever for “ethnic chic.” Indian newspaper

representations of such feminized global multiculturalisms, that is, local manifestations of global

culture, resonates with a host of global products and services that have also had to go ethnic in order

to gain acceptance among Indian markets. The Indian visage of the white beauty contestant, part of

ABCL’s marketing strategy to sell the pageant as a hybrid ritual of East and West, echoed eerily

with yet another feminine tale of reincarnation in Asia—the ethnic transformation of the traveling

Barbie doll. When Mattel’s blond American Barbie doll first appeared in India in her standard

mode, she did not “take the Indian market by storm” (Grewal, 1999, p. 804). Soon after Barbie

Mapping Miss World in the News 18

donned a sari and Mattel’s advertising campaigns utilized the specificities of cultural practices in

India to translate Barbie, sales among the urban middle-classes improved. Just as the standard white

American femininity of Barbie had to be reworked to target local audiences, the Times of India’s

images of white women contestants partaking of staged traditions reformatted Miss World for the

new nationalist and cosmopolitan Indian consumer.

These twin cross-cutting currents of global-local consumption in Asia, as Schein (2000)

notes, reflects paradoxical impulses to, on the one hand, turn the gaze outward in pursuit of a

fetishized cosmopolitan West and, on the other hand, to also retreat inward in a nostalgic search for

authentic national culture. Schein’s observations on China’s “almost obsessive” consumption of the

West ranging from “dishwashers to divorce” hold true for urban India’s frenzied fascination for the

“emblematic riches” of Western commodity culture (p. 22). For postcolonial India’s urban elite,

who are haunted by histories of anti-colonial nationalism, such a compulsive “mimicry” of the

Occident can, however, also have the implicit effect of ranking India as stagnant and “humiliatingly

backward” on a global scale of progress (pp. 22-23). To assuage the inferiority that is implicated in

their adulation of the West, urban Indian elites have hence borrowed from and modified Orientalist

discourses and practices of colonial modernity that objectified India’s pre-modern folk and

traditional culture. Along with an insatiable appetite for all things American, an escalated boom in

domestic travel and consumption of traditional/folk products rivaling international tourism and

exports characterizes the changing landscape of Indian middle- and upper class lifestyle in the

nineties. As ethnic pride intersects with the logic of the market, traditional culture, which is

“isolated and cherished in the realm of feminine leisure” (clothing, home furnishings, jewelry,

cookbooks, toys, and cosmetics), is witnessing its “fragmentation into little bits that are suitable for

exchange” (Schein, 2000, p. 271).

The layout of local opposition: Retrograde rebels and dutiful police

Confined mostly to the outmoded grainy realm of black, white, and gray news, numerous

images of protesting women demonstrators in the Times of India elaborated stories of anger, chaos,

anonymity, and irrelevance. In contrast to the intimate close-up and mid-shot images of beauty

contestants, long-shot camera techniques crafted distant images of dark-skinned angry women in

saris with their mouths wide open and their arms and hands raised in mid-air. Pitting disruptive

women protesters in opposition to the model Bangalore citizen, a responsible, middle-class woman

who struggled everyday to negotiate her traditional (mother, wife) and modern (career) roles, a

front-page close-up image of an annoyed commuter’s face in the Times of India was positioned

immediately next to a large inchoate gathering of women holding banners and posters. Shown

Mapping Miss World in the News 19

sitting in her car waiting for protesters to finish crossing the street, this image of a busy woman

engaged in the routines of productive modernity was captioned “Bangalore’s working people try to

keep moving on in the midst of upheaval.” Portraying rural women as hapless and ignorant pawns

of opportunist male politicians, one photograph of women farmers from the Chitradurga village

silently listening to a member of parliament standing on a podium was captioned “Not the faintest

idea what Miss World is about.” Finally, with the exception of three photographs that clearly

identified the names of protest groups and organizations, generalized caption terms like “anti-

pageant protestors” and “demonstrators opposed to Miss World” that accompanied visual

documentation of street protest conflated the agendas of feminists, progressive male activists, and

conservative women’s groups.

Reinforcing readers’ morning encounters with the Times of India’s images of uncontrollable,

angry mobs, the representational techniques of television news also implicitly inserted women

activists into contrastive discourses of normal/disruptive, order/disorder, and

responsible/irresponsible. STAR TV showed routinely its young and sophisticated female reporter,

Maya Sharma, standing close to the camera, speaking in her impeccable British-accented English

(linked to cultural capital and class mobility) as scenes of women protesters shouting in Hindi and

Kannada (vernacular languages associated with the rural/traditional) unfolded on the streets in the

background. As an icon of civility surrounded by deviant and disorderly demonstrators, STAR TV’s

calm and composed news professional offered her English-speaking viewers a hegemonic

representation of middle-class normalcy. In a similar analysis of the semiotic relations between the

messengers of news and racialized subjects of crime in the Unites States, Campbell (1995) notes

that well-dressed Black anchors, who function as token symbols of orderly middle-class merit,

convey the message that individual Blacks with drive and ambition can rise above the relentless

visual stream of Black criminality.

Legitimizing corporate and state-sanctioned discourses of discipline and punishment, more

than a third of Times of India’s photographs of public protest in the vicinity of Bangalore elaborated

a well-worn tale of a heroic and besieged police force struggling to maintain law and order amidst

exploding hysteria. On the most benign level, several large photographs illustrating brief stories on

protest groups’ planned activities mapped out hectic police preparations that would ensure the

smooth operation of Miss World’s events and the minimum disruption of everyday public life in

Bangalore. The newspaper’s visual archive registered the arrival of special law enforcement forces

from New Delhi, the organization of emergency training sessions for Bangalore’s new police

recruits, top police officials’ inventory of weaponry, and soldiers’ early morning reconnaissance of

Mapping Miss World in the News 20

busy streets. One sympathetic human-interest image of fatigued and hardworking police officers on

the front page showed three men covered in blankets warming themselves around a campfire. In

another photograph, policemen from New Delhi stood in a line in the darkness of the night in front

of an illuminated telephone booth as they waited patiently for their turn to call their families. One

celebratory set of images simulated the “before” and “after” technique of miraculous transformation

that permeates visual representations of home improvement, cosmetic surgery, and weight-loss

programs in Indian women’s magazines. A photograph of a chaotic “Rasta Roko” (block the traffic)

protest campaign on the left was juxtaposed with an image on the right of cars and pedestrians on

the street outside the Chinnaswamy stadium that also showed the police commissioner and

Bachchan (founder of ABCL) congratulating uniformed men for successfully “shepherding traffic

while protesters went berserk.”

Perpetuating an axiomatic notion of causality, which implied that violent protesters

deserved censure and police brutality, the Times of India’s visual lens of identification irrevocably

meshed with the perspective of the powerful (the police, the Morleys, commercial sponsors, and

ABCL). Rendered as tasteless, deviant, and out of control, women protesters entered the public

sphere of the news as renegade citizens who lacked the willpower to comply with middle-class

codes of decency. The very same weekend supplement that showed Miss World contestants

expressing their enthusiastic appreciation for Indian culture also carried photographs from the

previous week of police reprimanding and hitting women protesters. The Times of India’s

November 3, 1996 issue carried one picture of dogs sniffing Mahila Jagruthi’s feminist protesters

and another of police frisking four women outside a Godrej showroom, which they had illegally

entered to vandalize electronic appliances. Another Times of India news photograph, which

occupied almost the entire top half of the page, generated a script that cast Miss World’s chief

sponsor, Godrej Company, as violated victim and law enforcement as the righteous agent of control.

This image showed a washing machine, dishwasher, and answering machine, objects widely

extolled in advertisements and lifestyle pages as coveted artifacts of modernity, smeared with tar

and oil, labeled and neatly arranged on the floor of a police station. Parlaying the disciplinary

effectiveness of the criminal justice system, a long-shot photograph of four women looking grim

and dejected as they stood in front of Bangalore city’s prison gates illustrated a story that was

headlined with the phrase “Arrested Mahila Jagruthi women sober after prison term.”

Unlike the colorful and empathetic imaging of business leaders and state officials, the most

vivid and prominent images of protest in the Times of India rarely revealed the personalities of

activist leaders or the hidden transcripts of peaceful demonstrators collaborating or working in their

Mapping Miss World in the News 21

homes and offices to coordinate campaigns. Other than three close-up photographs of

Nanjundaswamy, the male leader of the farmer’s group, and Sashikala, the female leader of the

conservative faction, the Times of India did not publish any close-up images of activists engaged in

“normal” life. Describing the excitement of working together, five feminists reported during

interviews that newspapers, despite repeated phone calls from activists, ignored news of the historic

alliance among Bangalore’s feminist organizations—Vimochana, Manasa, Manini, Shakti, and

Madhyam—that grew out of the 1996 anti-globalization campaign. The leader of Mahila Jagruthi,

another left-wing feminist group, also expressed disappointment because news media failed to cover

less violent forms of protest that included staging street skits, organizing panels at schools and

colleges, and distributing food to the poor.

As cultural studies critics of news have argued, journalism’s covert complicity with official

experts and state institutions of control can sustain the status quo by inscribing dissenting subjects

into mythologies of otherness and paradigms of delinquency (Fiske, 1996; Reeves & Campbell,

1994). Critiquing the disturbing convergence in reportorial and policing outlooks in their analysis of

television news on “crack houses” during the Reagan government’s “War against Drugs” campaign,

Reeves and Campbell (1994) argue, “In the routine, ritualized visual imagery of TV crack

coverage—the unstable, hand-held camera bounding from the back of police vans following gun-

toting authorities as they break down the door of yet another crack house—journalism became an

agent of the police, putting Americans, sitting in the comfort of their living rooms into the ‘shoes of

the police’” (p. 79). Recuperating discourses of consumer modernity and persistently refracting

narratives of dissent through activists’ hostile encounters with law enforcement, the Times of

India’s visual narrative of Miss World thus fortified the moral agendas and goals of the state and

global/local capital.

Perfect numbers, imperfect bodies: Miss World's textual archive

The emphasis of the Indian state’s current economic policy discourse has shifted from the

purportedly isolationist, anti-Western, and socialist-oriented rhetoric of development (heavy

industry, basic health, and universal literacy) to a new era of reconciliation with the West and

integration into the global economy. Historically speaking, the post-independence Indian state’s

modernization policies were linked to a grand discourse of scientific modernity in which large-scale

dams and steel plants “were the spectacular facades, luxurious in their very austerity, upon which

the nation watched expectantly as the image of its future was projected” (Khilnani, 1997, p. 62).

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister and architect of a new future of national liberation crafted

a euphoric vision of Indian citizens breaking the shackles of caste and religion so they could march

Mapping Miss World in the News 22

toward prosperity based in the wonders of Western industrialization (Varma, 1998, pp. 25-64).

Reformist rather than revolutionary in its tone, the Nehruvian paradigm of scientific modernity

imagined a socialist democratic state and a patriotic middle-class citizenry harnessing medicine,

research, and large-scale industry to achieve social justice and economic equality. In such early

visions of the nation, educated Indian middle-class bureaucrats and professionals had a right to seek

happiness and material comfort, but not at the expense of collective responsibility and welfare of

the poor (Varma, 1998, p. 32). Although Nehru’s extended political leadership (17 years) could not

erode the power of the elite English-speaking urban classes, an audible grammar of service, ethics,

and restrained materialism interrupted fifties and sixties public sphere debates on national progress.

Since the late eighties, however, the state policy machinery has changed gears from pressing

questions of economic inequality to open markets for information technology and global consumer

commodities (luxuries for a majority of India’s population) as the fuel to drive the engines of

economic reform. In the early nineties, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and finance minister

Manmohan Singh decided to dismantle inefficient state controls and closed-market regulations,

archaic obstacles that prevented India (unlike the prescient neighboring China) from enjoying the

benefits of globalization. Interpellated aggressively by new state liberalization policies as

consumers, rather than as producers of scientific knowledge and goods that would raise the quality

of life for the entire nation, the urban middle class found that its purchasing ability and consumerist

thirst had to be configured as objective knowledge to court the attention of First World economies.

The discursive production of the Indian “middle-class” in the arena of public policy, that is, the

transformation of a contingent, chaotic and fluid social formation into a knowable category of

classification thus began to demand authoritative modes of signification (Mukherjee, 2002).4

Numerical modernity and celebrity endorsement: Crafting surveys as objective knowledge

The public policy process that favored India’s incorporation into the political economy of

globalization has served as a fertile site for the creation of new national subjects. Supporting the

policy shift toward opening India’s markets, state and corporate knowledge institutions plunged into

the task of discovering, coding, and fixing middle-class consumer desire. Prime Minister Narasimha

Rao’s regime seized upon the science of polling as a key instrument to insert the unruly urban

Indian middle-class into the modern subjective space of the consumer. In 1995 and 1996, Indian

news and business media publicized with much fanfare the magical efficiency of the survey, a

somewhat low-profile research technique that had circulated largely in the musty halls of

development agencies and Indian academia. The front pages of reputable newspapers,

newsmagazines, and business publications announced the results of national surveys carried out by

Mapping Miss World in the News 23

the National Council on Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the Confederation of Indian

Industry (CFI). Exulting in their discovery of the Indian market’s ravenous appetite for consumer

durables including automobiles, fast food, and wrist watches, the NCAER survey’s “stunning

statistics” in Business Today’s cover story claimed to shatter the myth of a thrifty and

unsophisticated South Asian middle class. Importing the pedantic language of First World

marketing textbooks that devote entire chapters to the science of demographics and psychographics,

the Business Today article offered detailed numerical biographies of the “very rich, the consuming

classes, the social climbers, and the slow aspirants” (The new marketplace, 1996, p. 8). Feeding on

the frenzy for numbers and labels, Indian advertising discourse has also begun fusing the rational

flavor of polling data with heart-tugging emotional tales of nation, community, and family.

Inundating consumers with the language of numbers, charts summarizing food nutrient values and

fictitious technical experts spouting dense jargon on appliances’ cost-saving features interpellate the

successful modern Indian woman as a scientific manager of her domestic space (Munshi, 1998).

Demonstrating the osmotic manner in which freshly minted forms of numerical

representation in the public sphere shaped the boundaries of Miss World’s media event space, city

and state-wide surveys measuring the average woman’s positive attitudes became ABCL’s

“objective” weapons of defense to stem the tide of the protest movement’s momentum. In the last

week of October 1996, just as the Karnataka High Court was preparing to deliver verdicts in

petitions against ABCL’s free use of state police and state-owned property, the corporation

announced the results of its “womanist” poll, a survey carried out “by Indian women for Indian

women” that proclaimed Bangalore’s overwhelming support for beauty pageants and globalization.

Flaunting the credible reputation of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), a prestigious

academic establishment that was hired to carry out its research, ABCL invested in full-page

newspaper advertisements, local television commercials, and a lavish press conference at the

Windsor Manor hotel to persuade audiences to accept its encouraging survey results. Judiciously

erasing all traces of its self-serving origins, the first full-page ABCL advertisement in the Times of

India confirmed that a majority of the city’s population agreed with the statement “Hosting Miss

World will put the city and the state on the world map” and that “90% of Bangalore Votes for Miss

World 96.” A second, more ornate advertisement, which addressed Indian women readers,

borrowed its emotional tour de force from state-sponsored media campaigns that were designed to

forge nationalism among citizens divided by language, ethnicity, and religion. Evoking the patriotic

refrain of “unity in diversity,” the second ABCL advertisement contained randomly spliced portraits

of Indian women dressed in ethnic clothes from different regions. Embedded in the center of this

Mapping Miss World in the News 24

festive smorgasbord of multi-ethnic femininity, the text of the advertisement read “IIM Study: 89%

of Bangalore’s Women Say Yes to Miss World.” Bestowing its stamp of “unbiased approval” and

reinforcing these advertisements’ blatantly persuasive agenda, the Times of India reported ABCL’s

survey results on its front page. Mirroring the newspaper’s editorial ordering of importance, hard

news articles confirming IIM’s discovery of the astounding consensus in favor of Miss World

peppered the front pages of the Indian Express, Deccan Herald, and the Hindu.

In an unexpected turn of events, ABCL’s victory in the newly emergent discourse of

numerical modernity did not remain unchallenged for very long. Igniting a controversy that ensued

immediately after ABCL announced the results of Miss World: A Perception Study, the IIM accused

the corporation of fraudulently using the institute’s name on advertisements. Addressing reporters at

a press conference, the director of the institute, Dr. K. R. S. Murthy, disavowed any official

association with the survey and declared that the institute found ABCL’s practice of withholding its

name from advertisements unethical. It was at this juncture, just as the scaffolding of support for

Miss World began to disintegrate, that the Times of India decided to become an objective “third

party” vendor of public opinion for its readers. Shedding light on the ways in which news

rearticulates modes of knowledge production that emerge from corporate culture and the public

policy process, the editor of Times of India’s special weekend features argued, “It was a hot

moment to do a survey that readers could really believe. We had a duty to set the record straight.

What better way to intervene than invest time and money in our own scientific poll.” Promoted

widely on local television news as the “answer to the crisis facing the city,” anchors presented

Times of India’s survey as a prudent intervention that would restore the sanctity of public opinion in

a democracy. Promising to publish details of the survey process, the newspaper vowed to earn

readers’ trust by demystifying the complex science of polling.

Exactly six days after the IIM denounced ABCL’s poll, in the wake of a semiotically ripe

climate of controversy that propelled the mobilization of surveys as news, the Times of India’s

Sunday special feature revived the idea of modern subjectivity as a product of the rational science

of statistical enumeration. A dynamic composition of pictures, line drawings, text, and graphs on

the first entire page of Times of India’s feature organized synergistically the results of the

newspaper’s Miss World survey. Pictures of beauty contestants splashed the page with feminine

color and animated the cool and abstract quality of the numerical data. Perched above two bar

diagrams, a portrait of Rani Jeyraj, Bangalore’s well-known Indian representative in Miss World,

that was captioned “India’s hope” infused the page with local flavor. Numerical data that condensed

systematically a random sample’s responses to different questions documented consensus among

Mapping Miss World in the News 25

the city’s residents in favor of Miss World. Breaking down survey results by gender, the

newspaper’s numbers indicated that a majority of Bangalore’s women (like the men) expressed a

clear mandate against the protests when they agreed with the statement, “We’re proud that the city

is hosting the pageant.”

Dispersed in bits and pieces among credible signifiers of indisputable science, percentages

that crystallized citizens’ positive opinions of Miss World, protest activists’ and progressive

columnists’ voices in the Times of India seemed to reflect the shrill, arbitrary, and self-serving

interests of an outnumbered minority. In the graphic layout of the newspaper’s special Sunday

feature, interviews with protest leaders and activists’ columns were wedged between boxes of

“objective” survey data that resuscitated popular sentiments of support for Miss World. Interviews

with Prof. Nanjundaswamy of the farmer’s group, Sudha Sitaraman and N. Ramesh of the People’s

Democratic Forum, and Brinda Karat and Subashini Ali of the All India Democratic Women’s

Association, which offered critiques of Miss World as an elitist symbol of an economic process that

favored the aspirations of the middle-classes, seemed to clash impotently with the views of ordinary

citizens who had little time to squander on violent and uncouth protests. Measured against the

empiricist rhetoric of “transparent and neutral” quantitative data that projected the considerable

weight of the average woman’s consent, feminists’ writings (Ammu Joseph, Visa Ravindran, and

Kalpana Sharma) on the commodification of femininity, racist and classist beauty standards, and

eating disorders transmuted into futile activist propaganda.

Within the week, two other local newspapers also leaped into the public opinion arena with

their own survey research. Eager to distinguish their news product as different from the Times of

India’s poll of adult women’s attitudes, competing newspapers staked out their command of new

turf in the modern race for counting bodies and minds. The Indian Express brandished numbers that

showed surprising support for international pageants among older citizens and the Deccan Herald’s

arithmetic proved that young, college-age men and women did not empathize with left- or right-

wing protesters. Outdoing the Herald and the Express, the Times of India then returned with a much

more spectacular numerical strategy of news production. Claiming to be the first institution to

measure the impact of beauty culture on the modern Indian woman, the newspaper launched an

informal survey of women and men celebrities to discover their “educated and intelligent” opinions

on pageants, beauty salons, and exercise and fitness. Timed fortuitously, celebrity endorsement for

Miss World spilled into the Times of India’s editorial and front pages at the same time as news of

activists’ plans to intensify campaigns and the High Court’s decisions favoring opposition groups’

petitions against ABCL began to circulate in the public sphere.

Mapping Miss World in the News 26

Maneuvered into the semiotic fabric of celebrity culture in the Times of India’s front pages,

Miss World received positive certification from a riveting sample of the rich and the famous. A

contingent of carefully chosen local and national celebrities, who represented a spectrum of political

affiliations, modern professions, and traditional arts, testified that Miss World was a safe, healthy,

and harmless import to India. Former beauty queens (Sandhya Chib, Aishwarya Rai), magazine

editors and journalists (Ramjee Chandran, Sathya Saran, V. N. Subba Rao), classical artists and

performers (Suma Sudhindra, Vani Ganapathy, Gangubai Hangal, Mahesh Dattani), ethnic fashion

designers (Sujit Mukherjee, Prasad Bidappa), and film and television actors/creative professionals

(Suman Ranganathan, Shabana Azmi, Waheeda Rehman, Mohena Singh) defended the legitimacy

of Miss World. Attacking conservatives for labeling Miss World as a ritual of cultural imperialism,

some celebrities stitched global beauty pageants into the local tapestry of Indian history and

tradition. These interlocutors suggested that India’s artistic appreciation for the physical aspects of

feminine beauty was inscribed in Hindu myths and legends and etched into ancient cave and temple

sculptures, which were a sumptuous archive of idealized female bodies. Headlined as “A travesty

against Indian culture,” a front-page story on Roopa Sathyan indicated that the former Miss India

found the protests against Miss World to be a violation of “athithi seva,” long-standing traditions of

Indian hospitality that prescribed a courteous and effusive welcome for “guests” (founders and

contestants). Eclipsed by the objective patina of news on readers’ consensus for and celebrity

affirmation of Miss World, activists’ critiques morphed into messages that seemed to be

incompatible with the vicissitudes of progress.

How did the Times of India’s inclusionary myths of democratic and objective surveys mask

the exclusionary practices of class and gender that were at the heart of feminists’ arguments against

Miss World? Madhu Bhushan, an activist from the feminist organization Vimochana, remarked that

the Times of India’s decision to juxtapose activist interviews and essays with survey data took them

by surprise, “If we had known well ahead about these grand surveys that would overwhelm our

voices, we might have exposed the serious problems that underlie the media’s recent obsession with

polling.” Inspired by economist Vinod Vyasulu’s writings, feminists’ publicity materials elaborated

the disadvantages of globalization for the state’s lower middle-class, working-class and poor

women whose interests had been pushed to the periphery by recent policy changes. One Vimochana

press release examined the “open” arena of Bangalore’s high-tech industry, a modern global

business whose leaders had vowed to nourish a qualified meritocracy by exorcising the hierarchical

ghosts of caste, religion, and nepotism. The release argued that upper-caste men and women

continued to occupy managerial, design, and creative positions in the information industries while

Mapping Miss World in the News 27

lower-caste women worked predominantly as data entry operators and programmers. Another

feminist’s unpublished essay detailed inequalities in the beauty industry where scores of urban

middle-class women entrepreneurs manage beauty parlors in their homes while migrant rural

women, flocking to the city with aspirations of gaining class mobility in the beauty industry, find

themselves trapped and exploited as low-paid beauty workers (along the axis of gender, both classes

of women bear the burden of childcare and domesticity). Scrutinizing the media’s use of surveys to

perpetuate a classist notion of normativity, the feminist leader of Mahila Jagruthi commented,

“English-language surveys executed on the telephone, a luxury in a nation where thousands struggle

for basic needs and less than 10 percent of the population can speak and write fluently in English is

no less than a mockery of the democratic process.” In the midst of deafening silence in the

mainstream public sphere on the implications of globalization for India’s poor (Varma, 1998), the

commodification of the average citizen’s voice in the news media illustrates the hegemonic

“emptiness of the concept of opinion,” that is, the deployment of ill-informed consent by dominant

forces as a “prophylactic against moral accountability” (Stabile, 2001, p. 265).

Corporate compassion, feminine redemption: Global philanthropy as news of local salvation

Not all media advocates for women’s causes suffered the punishment of marginality in the

Times of India’s news on Miss World. Noted left-leaning Bollywood film actor and anti-poverty

activist Shabana Azmi, who had spearheaded campaigns against real estate developers’ plans to

displace Mumbai’s poor and homeless, made the front page of the newspaper in late October 1996

for her candid assessment of protests against Miss World. Visiting Bangalore, soon after she

received a Chicago Film Festival Award, Azmi distinguished her brand of committed activism from

the embarrassingly violent “outbursts” in Bangalore that did not “augur well for a country that calls

itself a mature democracy” (Rao, 1996, p. 1). Registering a shift in her perceptions of beauty

pageants, Azmi declared that she no longer held the view that pageants were symbols of elitist

frivolity because the international beauty queen, who embraced her role as global ambassador for

charitable causes, professed a “deep commitment towards society.” After dismissing women

protesters as unlikely to “qualify for even the first round of a beauty contest” in his weekly Times of

India column, Business World editor Dillip Thakore argued that Miss World’s sponsorship of the

Spastics Society elevated the pageant from a sexist display of women’s bodies to an event that

could impart lessons to Indian business leaders on how to inculcate a First World corporate culture

of social responsibility.

Publicized as “Beauty with a purpose,” not just “Beauty, skin deep” in ABCL’s press

releases, Miss World was presented to the news media as a compelling example of the capacity of

Mapping Miss World in the News 28

modern private enterprise (unlike the slow-paced Indian state bureaucracy) to hasten the reduction

of gender and class inequality in South Asia. Miss World’s sponsorship of the Spastics Society of

India was an illustration of “strategic philanthropy,” a capitalist model of “pragmatic altruism” that

is designed to “cultivate name recognition among consumers, increase employee morale and

productivity, and build reputation by stimulating positive media coverage” (Mullen, 1997).

Corporations seek out strategic philanthropy as a means to inoculate consumers from journalists'

and activists’ charges of labor exploitation and other less than savory business practices that stress

the bottom line (Stabile, 2000). Maximizing a return on corporate investment in philanthropy,

however, demands the shrewd mobilization of public sympathy for uncontroversial causes of

redemption that can tap the sympathies of large existing and potential consumer markets. Hence,

sponsorship of a social ill or charity has to hold the promise of generating media images that can

insert corporations into spectacles of national pride, wholesome family, mythic individualism, and

therapeutic motifs of healing and recovery. Corporate support for domestic violence in the United

States, a feminist poster problem that Revlon, Lifetime TV, and Johnson & Johnson have adopted

for its images of fragile femininity, besieged motherhood, and deranged masculinity, is one example

of such populist philanthropy. Viewed in the context of pragmatic altruism, widespread global

corporate endorsement of local children’s causes must be seen as more than a merely harmonious,

reciprocal relationship between business and community. Emulating the global Mattel Corporation

whose recipient of charity is the girl child (Grewal, 1999), a captivating subject of concern in

missionary and United Nations’ discourses, Miss World’s founders decided that the 1996 pageant’s

social cause would be the “poor and handicapped Indian child.” ABCL’s publicity materials

represented Miss World’s alliance with the Spastics Society of India as a timely and hygienic

alternative to a myopic and corrupt state’s failures to rehabilitate India’s disabled children.

The Times of India’s front pages and STAR TV’s evening news plugged Miss World into

voyeuristic spectacles of salvation that evoked sympathy for the hypervulnerable body of the

disabled Indian child. Simultaneously as news of college students’ sympathy for feminist opposition

and film star Rajkumar’s rejection of Bachchan’s invitation to be a judge in Miss World began to

trickle in, stories with extravagant headlines of praise for ABCL and the Morleys—“Indian

cricketers applaud Miss World for support of Spastics Society,” “Nobody argues about value of

children: Eric Morley,” and “Amina Hassan, Director of Spastics Society thanks Bachchan,

Morleys”—scattered the front pages. Drawing on the color-blind and race-effacing “feel good”

logic of First World discourses of rainbow multiculturalism (Mukherjee, 2002), Miss World

founder Eric Morley’s voice in the Times of India argued for the universal value of the world’s

Mapping Miss World in the News 29

fragile “brown, blue or purple” children whose lives could not be held ransom to the fickle interests

of transitory political parties. Gaining tailored forms of positive visibility in the Times of India

while undermining feminists’ critiques of global capitalism’s invisible forms of exploitation, the

Indian child’s poverty and disability became outer garments that cloaked Miss World in the rhetoric

of child empowerment and human rights.

Times of India articles inserting Miss World into the genre of hard news on the conditions of

disabled children offered an informational counterpoint to soft news photos that fixed beauty

contestants in nurturing poses of concern and affection. Front-page news on Miss World that was

reminiscent of public health discourse summarized ongoing medical research on cerebral palsy and

described resources available for disabled children’s parents, outreach programs, and hospice care.

Five large newspaper images portrayed young, beautiful women bending down toward, gazing into

the eyes of, and gently smiling at disabled children who were seated in wheelchairs. Maya Sharma

of STAR TV led the evening news on November 11, 1996 with a feature “Blitz of glitz for

Bangalore’s kids" that broadcasted Miss World contestants’ arrival at a children’s party where the

proceeds from selling their international gifts to invited Indian celebrities was intended to benefit

the Spastics Society. A feature news story on poor Indian citizens’ deplorable access to mental

health services contained a visual prop of a smiling Miss World founder Julia Morley holding a

disabled child in her lap.

The Times of India’s moving templates of the global beauty queen’s maternal devotion for

the indigent Third World child illustrate the discursive production of globality as a symbolic regime

that absorbs and reworks nationalist and feminist politics. Disputing the thesis that processes of

globalization mark the demise of the nation as a territorial and semiotic entity, feminists have

argued that the representational trajectory of the global in India’s media and consumer culture

resuscitates signs, symbols, and idioms of the nation to gain a foothold in the public imagination

(Grewal, 1999; Fernandes, 2000). Journalistic productions of endangered childhood or “media

juvenation,” as Hartley (1998) defines it, have become newsworthy public spaces for a host of

moral entrepreneurs to assert the links between the governance of children and the maintenance of

healthy and democratic nations. The Times of India’s news narratives on Miss World’s founders,

sponsors, and contestants as protectors of India’s innocent children rearticulated elements of the

nationalist media rhetoric that erupted in 1991 when state officials, activists, and religious leaders

constructed the rehabilitation of Ameena, a young Muslim girl who was rescued from a “foreign”

Arab man, as a quintessential crisis of redemption for the postcolonial nation (Mankekar, 1997).

Media accounts of empowered globe-trotting women changing the world also serve as signifying

Mapping Miss World in the News 30

resources for the creation of new icons of popular feminisms that negotiate the tensions between

femininity/feminism and selfish individualism/selfless public service (Banet-Weiser, 1999; Hinds &

Stacey, 2001). Repressing a more insidious subtext, the Times of India’s imaging of Miss World’s

vision of caring feminine empowerment in India, the “jewel in the crown” of Britain’s former

empire, concealed the neocolonial logic of the pageant’s strategic philanthropy. Spectacles of

beautiful queens, symbols of modern corporate aristocracies, tending to unfortunate local citizens

draw from earlier colonial discourses of benevolent white women saving the sick, elderly, and poor

in the colonies (Stoler, 2002). Finally, replacing religious myths of miraculous healing with stories

of secular beauty queens “touching” the afflicted, the Times of India’s representations disavowed

the ultimate paradox of a beauty contest that accords a high status to the groomed “perfect” body

becoming a pious human rights advocate for the disabled Third World child. The virus of spectacle

fever, however, can also infect the politics of activist opposition—soon after Miss World sponsors

declared their compassion for the Spastics Society of India, the Akhil Bharathiya Vidya Parishad

(students’ union) organized a protest march led by disabled children in wheelchairs holding anti-

Miss World banners.

Spectacles of gendered modernity in the news: Market metaphors and colonial cadavers

Questioning the exuberance of corporate, state, and national elites’ discourses on the

promises of global modernity, Bauman (1998) points out that the term “globalization” has become a

“fad word fast turning into a shibboleth, a magic incantation, a pass-key meant to unlock the gates

to all present and future mysteries” (p. 1). As my textual analysis of Miss World’s media event

space in the Times of India demonstrates, journalistic images and texts can function as key sites for

manufacturing and distributing the misty smog of progress and empowerment that envelops

globalization. Gaining further insight into the factors that guided the Times of India’s positive

representations of Miss World—smiling beauty queens, celebrity women’s endorsements, and

middle-class readers’ enthusiasm for the rituals and commodities of beauty culture—requires a

careful consideration of the institutional and economic contexts of newspaper ownership, market-

driven goals of increasing circulation, and Indian journalists’ professional training.

The Times of India’s corporate association with a well-established women’s magazine that

plays a key role in sustaining India’s beauty and cosmetics industries may have influenced the

trajectory of the newspaper’s representations of Miss World. Founded in 1838, the Times of India is

a subsidiary of Bennett Coleman & Co., a leading chain publisher of newspapers and magazines

that controls almost 10% of India’s entire newspaper circulation, and has an estimated annual

turnover of over Rs. 400 crores (approx. $120 million) (Jeffrey, 2000). Bennett Coleman & Co. also

Mapping Miss World in the News 31

produces Femina, an upscale women’s publication whose editorial and advertising content thrives

on India’s expanding global fashion and beauty industries. Apart from managing the annual Miss

India contest whose winners participate routinely in the Miss World and Miss Universe contests,

Femina magazine’s staple fare includes beauty queens’ testimonials of success, advice columns

authored by managers/owners of beauty schools and salons, and pictorial features of social events

attended by Mumbai’s business and entertainment celebrities.

Indian newspapers’ fascination for numerical forms of news representations and the Times

of India’s colorful images of business executives and beautiful young women are thickly implicated

in the competitive challenges of increasing and retaining newspaper circulation in the midst of

globalization. Charting the ways in which Indian print news has reinvented its mission in the

nineties’ context of consumer culture, Jeffrey (2000) observes that the place of capitalism in the

news business was explicitly illustrated through a series of “markets wars” for readers and

advertisers that were fought as openly as Coke and Pepsi’s bitter media battles for winning the

Indian consumer’s loyalty. The nineties has been a boom time for the Indian advertising industry,

which grew by an average of 30% a year from 1991 to 1997, with the highest increase being a 50%

growth from 1994 to 1995 (Jeffrey, 2000, pp. 58-63). By the mid-nineties the total billings of

leading Indian advertising agencies was Rs.4000 crores (approx. $1 billion dollars). Narrating their

corporate identities through objectivist paradigms of numerical signification (bar diagrams, pie

charts, and percentages) to attract the interest of advertisers, scores of newspapers have begun

brandishing self-serving statistics from national and corporate readership surveys in premier

advertising trade journals.

Awakening to the possibilities of carving out bigger slices of the lucrative advertising pie,

newspapers have also increased their investments in marketing campaigns to boost their readership,

the ultimate commodity for sale to advertisers. Representing its own history in relation to histories

of transnational capital, a series of Times of India advertisements in 1995 measured the newspaper’s

enduring success through the aesthetic of the global commodity (Fernandes, 2000, p. 619). One

such advertisement showed an elderly middle-class man standing outdoors reading the Times of

India against the backdrop of small stores sporting large Pepsi signs—the caption above the image

read “Pepsi, born in 1896, Times of India, born in 1838.” Furthermore, in seeking out new markets

in South India, the Times of India has recently launched local editions of the newspaper in

Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai, cities that already boasted of two or three existing English-

language newspapers. As the newest resident in Bangalore’s news block, the newspaper’s upper-

management had decided that the best competitive strategy to build circulation was to focus on

Mapping Miss World in the News 32

younger readers, a vulnerable market whose brand loyalties were more easily maneuverable than

older audiences whose established reading preferences may be difficult to dislodge. Citing market

research, the newspaper’s editor argued that Bangalore’s local media had not yet plumbed the

purchasing power of the city’s growing middle-class youth and professional markets, the TV-

addicted generations who were raised on a robust diet of visual images. Aligned with the marketing

mission of the newspaper’s daily lifestyle supplement on entertainment and beauty culture, the

Times of India’s consumerist representations of Miss World may have been crafted to reach out to

younger readers.

The Times of India’s fewer and less than flattering portrayals of local opposition against

Miss World speaks to Indian journalists’ potential susceptibility to the influence of the corporate

public relations industry, an indispensable companion of global/local capital that has received far

less attention in media studies than advertising. Explaining the new challenges that Indian reporters

face in the context of economic liberalization, Parvathi Menon, a seasoned journalist, remarked,

“We know how to be vigilant about government corruption, but we’re not trained on how to treat

new kinds of corporate speak. We’re very wary of advertising pressure, but the flurry of PR

materials has caught us off guard.” Reinforcing Menon’s observations on journalists’ lack of

experience in handling the products of the public relations machinery, a 1994 issue of Sunday

magazine described a recent phenomenon that was puzzling to many Indian reporters—well-

dressed, smiling visitors (not the lowly poor “office boy”) who circulated announcements about

upcoming events and treated reporters with great respect. Since the late eighties, with the arrival of

multinationals “wishing to cultivate good feelings among the locals” and the incursions of

numerous global affiliates and local agencies like Ketchum, Ogilvy and Mather, Good Relations,

Genesis PR, and Mudra Diverisfied, industry insiders claim that the “Indian PR industry is on the

threshold of a major explosion” (Greenberg, 1996). During the height of anti-globalization protest

in Bangalore in October and November 1996, over 200 ABCL press releases reached Times of

India, Hindu, and Deccan Herald reporters’ news desks. In contrast to feminist activists’ sporadic

and typewritten essays photocopied on dull and coarse yellow paper, ABCL’s slick releases, crafted

by Clia Public Relations, were produced on thick, white expensive paper that displayed Miss

World’s attractive logo, a bold yellow, blue, and green image of an apsara (heavenly dancer).

ABCL’s releases were also short and frequently hand-delivered in embossed folders that contained

tips for stories, photographs, and lists of newsworthy candidates for media interviews.

Shifting the interpretive lens from institutional factors to the historical realm of cultural

politics illuminates the ways in which the discursive inheritances of colonial modernity seep into

Mapping Miss World in the News 33

contemporary public debates on progress, gender, and the West in postcolonial India. Surveys of

women citizens, images of women embracing hybrid culture, and narratives of feminine

compassion, which permeated Miss World’s media event space in the Times of India, indicate the

enduring cultural purchase of the feminine in constituting the semiotics of nation in the public

sphere. Nineteenth century debates over modernity and tradition that were waged in Europe’s

colonies also harnessed womanhood as an ideological vehicle to advocate for and argue against the

progressive promises of Western imperialism. Countering British colonizers’ charges of “horrific”

patriarchal native traditions that oppressed Indian women, elite Indian male social reformers began

to fashion a nationalist discourse of superior morality that was based in the glorification of the

devoted and chaste Indian wife, mother, and citizen (Grewal, 1996, Kandiyoti, 1991; Mani, 1991).

Although my analysis of the Times of India shows that the range of meanings assigned to the

feminine in tandem with the nation have broadened to include cosmopolitan consumer culture,

classist economic policies, moral pollution, and corporate philanthropy, these representations

suggest that women’s bodies and imagined subjectivities continue to serve as fertile ground for

cultural bargaining in the midst of the West’s new invasion of India.

The constrained and sporadic presence of the feminist campaign against Miss World in the

Times of India’s media event space offers clues into the ideological resilience of nationalist

paradigms of women’s equality that were crafted during the height of colonialism. Analyzing Indian

newspapers’ positive coverage of the feminist campaign against sex-selective abortion, Luthra

(1999) writes that the Indian press accommodated the feminist framework with relative ease

because poor and illiterate Indian women’s termination of female fetuses was a social problem that

remained well within the boundaries of “liberal middle- and upper-class welfarist definitions of

women’s upliftment, without challenging caste or class divisions directly, and without questioning

the role of the state in women’s lives” (p. 18). Luthra observes that news reports amplified

feminists’ critiques of “primitive” Hindu traditions that fueled poor citizens’ sexist reproductive

practices, but the same reports also attenuated activists’ indictment of capitalism and consumer

modernity as equally culpable agents in contributing to the rise of female foeticide. During my

interviews with news professionals, several reporters and editors expressed their frustration in

making sense of feminists’ news releases and essays that explained the invisible manner in which

the classist nexus between global/local capital, state forces, and elite middle-class consumers

disenfranchised poor Third World women.

On the one hand, feminists’ Miss World protest materials probably did not evoke the more

captivating mythology of linear narratives of women’s empowerment that feature visibly abused

Mapping Miss World in the News 34

victims (poor burned or physically battered women and murdered girl babies) who need immediate

rescue from ignorant and callous villains (patriarchal, lower-class men and opportunistic male

politicians). On the other hand, Indian newspapers’ crusading zeal against dowry deaths, rape, and

female infanticide, rather than patriarchy or modern capitalism, enables the industry to perform its

role as a progressive “watchdog” without threatening the systemic hierarchies that reproduce

inequality. Middle-class news professionals’ inability to understand new forms of less visible

oppression perpetrated by capitalism evokes and reproduces the hegemonic limits of nineteenth

century Indian nationalists’ models of women’s liberation. Joining hands with British architects of

colonial modernity in their project of civilization for the colonies, upper-caste Hindu male

reformers fought tirelessly to outlaw widow burning, child marriage, and polygamy, however, the

impulse to eradicate such spectacular practices of women’s horrific oppression left intact the

structural hierarchies of caste, class, and gender that produce discrimination in the first place

(Kandiyoti, 1991).

Finally, the ascent of polling as news strategy in India’s current economic context echoes the

historical deployment of surveys by the British administration to domesticate and translate the vast

heterogeneity of India into a language that would be amenable to the priorities of empire building.

Tracking the purportedly irreversible course of consumer modernity and its ability to erase local

barriers of region and caste, the survey as a methodology of news production continues to project

the economic and classificatory power of neocolonial regimes of global/local capital. Following the

Times of India’s public opinion survey on Miss World in 1996, the March 12, 1998 issue of the

Telegraph newspaper published a survey headlined “Who am I, women speak out,” which claimed

to index the progressiveness of Indian cities by measuring women’s positions on careers, marriage,

and childcare. Announcing that women in Calcutta scored the highest points, unlike Chennai’s

backward women, the survey claimed that some Indian women, who were more willing to wear

skirts and buy packaged foods, were racing toward modernity at a quicker pace than others.

Charting the genealogy of the number in the administrative arena of the colonial bureaucracy,

Appadurai (1996) outlines the imaginative and practical role that “numbers, measurement, and

quantification” played in the exercise of imperial power over the colonies. Confounded by the vast

landscape of India’s “exotic” peoples, detailed surveys documenting India’s cultural and geographic

diversity in digestible categories aided the transformation of the colonial experience into terms

“graspable in the metropolis” (p. 126). Emphasizing the colonial crafting of the survey as an

instrument of discipline and surveillance rather than a mere utilitarian tool of data collection,

Appadurai writes that “by the end of the eighteenth century, number, like landscape, heritage, and

Mapping Miss World in the News 35

the people had become part of the language of the British political imagination, and the idea had

become firmly implanted that a powerful state could not survive without making enumeration a

central technique of social control” (p. 117).

1 My approach to news as a “portal” into the moral order is borrowed from Polumbaum & Weiting (1999) who develop a hybrid interdisciplinary approach to sports news in their analysis of news representations of golf celebrity Tiger Woods. 2 I am indebted to Oza (2001) for the organization of this section and the secondary sources cited. 3 My presentation of the quantitative dimensions of Miss World’s media event space follows closely Shah’s brief quantitative analysis of the Times of India’s coverage of the Mandal Commission controversy (Shah, 1994). 4 Please see Mukherjee (2002) for an excellent Foucauldian discussion of the intersections between public policy discourses and mass media texts in the realm of affirmative action. References Ang, I. (1996). Living room wars: Rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world. London:

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Banet-Weiser, S. (1999). The most beautiful girl in the world: Beauty pageants and national identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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