The Beauties of Miranda

By MADHU PURNIMA KISHWAR

Madhu Purnima Kishwar is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the founder-editor of Manushi. Here essay "When India “Missed” the Universe", first appeared in Manushi; excerpts from it are being published here by The Stop Ragging Campaign with her permission.

The winning of the Miss Universe crown by Sushmita Sen in 1994 and the Miss World crown by Aishwarya Rai later that year were celebrated by the Indian mass media and the urban elites as though they were momentous events in Indian history. Manpreet Brar’s qualifying as first runner-up this year in the Miss Universe contest has convinced many Indians that the winning of the earlier two crowns was not a fluke that India has indeed arrived on the international scene.

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The euphoria whirling around these Indian beauties brought back memories of the days in 1971 when, as president of the Miranda House Students Union, I worked very hard to get the Miss Miranda beauty contest abolished. In those days the Miss Miranda beauty contest had pretty much the same glamour among its more restricted audience as the Miss India contest. This time, when Sushmita won the Miss Universe contest for India and the country went ecstatic over it, I just could not react in the manner I did in the 1970s. This is not because I’ve changed my mind about the harmful effects of beauty contests, but because looking back on the fall-out of our campaign in the university, I am left with very ambivalent feelings.

When I joined Miranda House as a starry-eyed 16-year-old in the late 1960s, I got the first and most long lasting culture shock of my life one that played a substantial role in shaping my life and thinking in the years to come. In those days Miranda House was considered India’s premier institution for women’s education and attracted daughters of the bureaucratic and business elite in large numbers. The college population was divided into three distinct categories the westernised Mirandians who came from elite schools, the science types, and the Hindi-speaking bhenjis. Not everyone who came from an English speaking school qualified to be admitted into the first group. Ragging not only served the purpose of sifting the freshers into neat categories but also showed each group its place in the Miranda House scheme of things. Without any formal sanction, fairly strict and visible forms of segregation were practised routinely and viciously. The “real” Mirandians would never condescend to even rag a fresher if she did not come from the right background. You had to be from a school such as Welhelms, Loreto, Tara Hall or Convent of Jesus and Mary in order to qualify to be admitted to the charmed circle. Someone from Salwan school or Guru Harkishan Public School would be automatically ruled out, even if the school taught through the medium of English. Your father had to be a highly placed bureaucrat, preferably of the IFS or the IAS, or a senior army officer, or a top business executive for you to qualify to be ragged by the hep seniors. You had to be able to speak English with the right public school accent. If you were a day scholar, your parents would need to have a house in some prestigious South Delhi colony, unless you lived in the princely bureaucratic part of New Delhi. Often the seniors could tell from the way someone dressed if she belonged. Occasionally, a bhenji type dressed in ways resembling the elite would be summoned for ragging. But the first few questions would decide whether she was considered worthy of ragging or not. Your name, fresher? Where do you stay? What does your father do? Only if you had satisfactory answers to each of those qualifying queries did the select few condescend to rag you. If a fresher answered that she lived in Kamala Nagar or Shahadara or a trans-Yamuna colony or that her father owned a dry cleaners shop or was a postal clerk, she would be at once asked to get lost. Through this process, the seniors sifted and selected the freshers they considered worthy of notice and friendship. The ragging period ended on a celebratory note with the famous Miss Miranda beauty contest. Though entry to it was not formally forbidden to the bhenji types, it was well understood that the prestigious title could only go to the hep elite: the bhenjis hardly ever even dared to enter the contest.

A Hallowed Tradition?

The beauty contest set the tone for the whole institution. The college seemed to function more as a finishing school for a large number of young women, where they came to acquire airs rather than academic qualifications. Undoubtedly, there was a facade of selecting as Miss Miranda House someone who combined beauty with brains and good grooming. That usually amounted to asking a few questions like, What would you do if you found yourself on the moon? The fresher who managed a cheeky and funny answer usually was considered brainy enough to deserve the crown. All the intelligence required of you amounted to no more than being able to come up with an instant joke or a smart alec response.

The Miranda House hostel

This crowning event was followed by a series of parties organised by the boys of the St. Stephen’s College. The senior Mirandians would take the Miranda House freshers along in order to facilitate pairing off with the Stephanians. The height of a Mirandian’s ambition was to get a boyfriend from among the Stephanians, preferably someone with a car who could take you out to fancy disco and parties every weekend. In all the years that I studied in that supposedly premier institution, I heard very few of my fellow classmates discuss books or ideas except to borrow each other’s notes for examination preparation. Most of their time and energy was spent on talking of boyfriends, shopping trips, dressing up, and planning for parties and outings. In that sense, the beauty contest was not an isolated event in which a few participated for fun. It set the tone and cultural milieu for the hep Mirandians all year round. The message was clear: Your body shape, waist and bust size, the way you dressed, the accent in which you spoke English (reflecting the social, economic status of your family), and the kind of male attention you were able to attract were far more important than any other qualities you might have. For instance, while Miss Miranda was considered the celebrated heroine of the campus, very few students knew who topped the university in various subjects or won medals in debating or various sporting events. The beauty contest promoted vicious elitism and low-level competitiveness among women at the cost of talent and other human qualities.

Ironically enough, these contests and fashion parades were organised by the college Students Union which, until then, was monopolised by the same beauty culture elite. This Union hardly ever concerned itself with academic issues or various legitimate problems faced by the students. The president and the secretary of the Union sat as judges in the beauty contest along with former beauty queens of Miranda House.

In 1969, Akhila Ramachandran took over as president of the Union. I was vice-president of the Union that year. We tried to transform the Union into the voice of organised student opinion on various issues relating to the university, as well as the general society and polity. When our elected team tried to raise the issue of abolishing the beauty contest, we met with vigorous opposition from the dominant elite of the college. Akhila worked out a compromise and tried to tone down the beauty-cutie part of the contest by asking a few intelligent questions of the contestants and selecting someone who was not beautiful in the conventional sense. I personally was not satisfied with this beauty-cum-brain contest idea because it kept the basic derogatory message intact while bowdlerising the notion of intelligence in women.

Therefore, when I got elected as president of the Union in the following year, the two issues we began the year with were: An end to nasty and often obscene ragging of freshers by the seniors. And an end to the beauty contest.

We began our campaign by calling a General Body meeting to discuss the issue. At the end of it, when we called for a vote, an overwhelming majority of the college students voted against the beauty contest and in favour of a freshers week of cultural activities. It was decided that the emphasis should be shifted from competition to exposing first year students to various extra academic aspects of university life, and encouraging more and more students to take part.

The hep elite were clearly in a tiny minority, but they were so used to having their writ obeyed all these years, that they could not stomach the idea that the college bhenjis, who they considered riff-raff, could dare vote out one of their most sacred rituals, one that affirmed the superiority of their way of life in the college. Even though the function was supposed to be organised under the aegis of the Students Union and more than 90 percent of the student body had voted against it, the beauties and cuties were not willing to accept this verdict. This unleashed a virtual civil war in the college.

They sought and got the support of the college administration for holding the beauty contest.

In those days, the English department, along with a sprinkling of faculty from the History and Economics departments, used to dominate college affairs in pretty much the same way as the hep English speaking elite dominated the student body. The college principal, along with a group of influential teachers, declared their support for the beauty contest, defending it as one of the hallowed traditions of Miranda House. On our side, we began a vigorous signature campaign in the college, going from class to class, holding long discussions with small clusters of students and, thereby, successfully mobilising a very large body of determined opinion against the beauty contest. Since we were accused of manipulating a majority vote in the general body by rabble rousing, we asked for a secret ballot, a sort of referendum on the desirability of holding the controversial contest. A day was fixed for it. But the beauty contest lobby felt insecure knowing that they were a helpless minority, and therefore, with the help of the then college principal and a few supportive teachers, they decided to hold the contest surreptitiously, a couple of days before the agreed date of the secret ballot. As soon as we got to know of it, we were able to organise, at short notice, a massive dharna at the proposed venue and pre-empt the holding of the contest. The beauties in all their fineries trooped out of the college and held a contest in a private apartment on the outskirts of the University. They had the satisfaction of having held the contest anyway. We were satisfied it could not be called the Miss Miranda beauty contest any more. That was the last beauty contest in Miranda House.

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