11

Unpacking Compliances and Resistances in the Indian Yummy Mummy

SUCHARITA SARKAR

Introduction

In the introduction to her memoir, My Yummy Mummy Guide: From Getting Pregnant to Being a Successful Working Mother and Beyond, actor Karisma Kapoor writes, “The path from being a svelte Bollywood actress to a pregnant woman who had put on 24 kilos during her pregnancy and coming back to the thin me was more challenging than the role in Zubeidaa! I wanted to reveal my secrets to everyone.”¹ Kapoor’s confession that her “challenging” journey to becoming a yummy mummy is an achievement that she heroizes above her National Award–winning performance as an actor opens up two significant suggestions. First, it indicates how deeply women often internalize the patriarchal essentialization of motherhood: that maternity is the basis and culmination of female identity. Second, it reveals how body image—here manifested in the titular yummy mummy of Kapoor’s memoir-cum-guidebook—has become predominant in neoliberal maternal narratives of resilience. In this chapter, I aim to investigate the problematic body image of the yummy mummy in the context of contemporary Indian mothers, motherhood, and mothering. My theorizing is grounded in the central distinction proposed by motherhood studies: the distinction between motherhood as an oppressive institution and mothering as a choice and an experience that can be empowering and even feminist. This distinction can be deployed transculturally to examine the regulation and subjugation of mothers in patriarchal systems because the disciplinary strategies in Western and non-Western cultures often share multiple commonalities (as well as differences). Adrienne Rich distinguished between “two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential—and all women—shall remain under male control.”² Andrea O’Reilly further clarified this distinction by stating that “the term motherhood refers to the patriarchal institution of motherhood that is male-defined and controlled and is deeply oppressive to women, while the word mothering refers to women’s experiences of mothering that are female-defined and centered and potentially empowering to women.”³ Likewise viewing motherhood as a feminist issue, Indian scholars like Maithreyi Krishnaraj have analyzed how the “social construction”—the “meaning attached to the idea of motherhood, and the terms and conditions under which it is allowed to express itself”—makes mothers “vulnerable,” and not the “mere fact of motherhood/mothering.”⁴

In unpacking the meanings attached to the social construction of the yummy mummy—as evidenced in the opening quote from Kapoor—this concept can be read both as a neoliberal extension of patriarchal motherhood as well as a potentially empowering mothering choice. Significantly, in the traditional Indian imagination, the ideal mother is predominantly epitomized as self-sacrificing, sari clad, and sexless. During the nationalistic struggle, and especially in the postindependence period, such maternal constructs were disseminated through “popular cultural archives such as cinema, television, radio, spectacles, and the print medium,” and these coalesced to produce the “docile and homely figure of the idealized Bharatiya nari (traditional Indian woman).”⁵ Against this historical and cultural context, the regimes of self-care that becoming the yummy mummy necessitates may be considered as individualized resistances to Indian patriarchal motherhood, although in limited ways. I, however, argue that the borrowed and globalized construct of the yummy mummy coerces mothers—through a strategic marketized mix of celebrity endorsement and popular cultural enforcement—to discipline their bodies to conform to normative beauty and body standards. To explicate my contention, I study two sets of cultural and popular texts. First, I briefly look at cinematic and commercial representations of the patriarchal good mother. Second, I analyze visual and textual representations of the yummy mummy in the Indian context. Through the lens of motherhood studies, I also locate the complicated imbrications of compliance and resistance in the selected maternal images and narratives of being/becoming a yummy mummy. I conclude by indicating alternate possibilities of resistances to the stereotyping of the maternal body: possibilities that reject both the self-abnegating model of patriarchal motherhood as well as the self-disciplining and obedient model of the yummy mummy.

Iterations of the Good Mother in Popular Indian Imagination

The most common pre-neoliberal visual representation of the good Indian mother is the Hindi filmic mother: devoted, sari clad, and usually plump, or at least unconcerned about her appearance. For instance, the maternal roles enacted by Nargis in Mother India (1957), by Nirupa Roy in numerous films like Deewar (1975) and Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), and by Rakhee in Ram Lakhan (1989) all perpetuate a maternal body image subliminally associated with selflessness and sexlessness.⁶ This popular stereotypical filmic/cultural maternal identity is deeply embedded in the notion of self-sacrifice, which, in turn, is integral to conventional Indian imagination. As film historian Jai Arjun Singh comments, “For much of her history, the Hindi-film mother has been a cipher—someone with no real personality of her own, existing mainly as the prism through which we view the male lead.”⁷ This code of self-sacrifice can be traced even in apparently self-caring traditional postpartum customs where new mothers stay in their natal homes after childbirth and where they are given an “unusually nutritious and fattening diet, and the compulsory rest for at least five weeks.”⁸ Such practices are partially intended to ensure an adequate supply of breastmilk for the child. The focal shift from matri-centric to child-centric practices builds familial and cultural expectations wherein the maternal body is primarily a vehicle for the sustenance of the child. This process concomitantly desexualizes the mother’s body, and such images have been visibilized and perpetuated through filmic maternal figures.

Over time, this filmic good mother spilled over into other areas of popular culture like advertisements. In the 1980s and early 1990s, one of the most popular mothers in television commercials was the matronly, prudent, sari-clad Lalitaji, featuring in a series of advertisements for Surf detergent. Although she appeared more assertive than the stereotypical filmic mother, she nonetheless embodied the self-discipline associated with the maternal figure. Another more domesticated maternal representation was found in the advertisements for Everest Spices that had the tagline “Taste mein best, Mummy aur Everest” (The best taste in food comes when it is cooked by mother, and with Everest; translation mine). The mothers in these advertisements mimicked the template of decorum and devotion expected from the good Indian mother, and they wore identifiably “Indian” clothes like the sari or salwar kameez. The sari, especially, has an “ancient heritage associated with tradition and so-called feminine virtues like shame, introversion, decorum and respectability,”⁹ and the Indian mom of the 1990s donned this garment in all its conventionality.

These visible markers of Indian-ness have constructed the Indian mother in conformity with a sanitized but oppressive Hindu patriarchal ideology of good motherhood. Historically, this docile, desexualized ideal of good motherhood can be traced to the religious culture of worshipping domesticated, nurturing, consort mother-goddesses like Lakshmi and Annapurna. A psychological reading of such images, however, reveals the repressed male desire for fetishizing the maternal body. Sudhir Kakar considers “Devi, the great goddess,” to be “the hegemonic narrative of Hindu culture,” especially in her “manifold expressions as mother in the inner world of the Hindu son,” and he discusses case histories that are “repeated again and again” to explain how Indian men “maintain an idealized relationship with the maternal body.”¹⁰ In alignment with Kakar’s psychoanalysis, it is expected that the good Indian mother will be self-sacrificing and will also sacrifice any desire to be visually or sexually attractive. Disobedient mothers who do not conform are usually blamed and shamed. The traditionalist discourse of the Hindu Right—for instance, Nari Ank and other enduringly popular publications from Gita Press—dissuaded women/mothers “from wearing Western clothes or using too much jewellery” and labeled those who dressed to “show-off in public” as displaying “corrupting characteristics.”¹¹ Strikingly, if such deglamorized and earthy traits have traditionally defined embodiment in Indian mothers, glamor and normative beauty are increasingly becoming traits that the nation’s neoliberal climate demands of its mommies.

Motherhood in Neoliberal India: Representations of the Yummy Mummy

The cover of Kapoor’s My Yummy Mummy Guide visibly defies the prescriptions of the ethnically marked, modest, good mother circulated by traditionalist publications and older popular media. The yummy mummy image is seemingly replacing the earlier icons of maternal decorum with one of maternal desirability, substituting the ideal of self-sacrifice with that of self-care. It is in the context of the earlier homogenized cultural expectation of maternal self-denial and the pervasive maternal body imagery reinforcing this prescriptive ideal of good motherhood that the neoliberal construct of the yummy mummy—with its imbricated potentials for deviance and compliance—needs to be located. The yummy mummy project promises the rewards of self-validation and approval from others. The rejection of the traditional model of plump, sari-clad motherhood by the yummy mummy opens up a potential space for valorizing maternal sexuality and self-making. Indeed, the subtitle of Kapoor’s book, From Getting Pregnant to Being a Successful Working Mom and Beyond, suggests such a celebratory arc of maternal empowerment.

The apparent choice to embrace maternal sexuality and focus on “me time” is, at one level, a defiance of traditional motherhood roles, and, expectedly, the yummy mummy has sometimes been the target of maternal shaming. While the infotainment industry usually glamorizes the yummy mummy, some traditionalist media reports accuse the yummy mummy of prioritizing “gyms, slimming centres, liposuction options” and neglecting “her children’s whereabouts, her husband’s work,” and her caregiving duties toward the older family members, and she is often compared unfavorably with good mothers who do not “wear sleeveless clothes” but perform their maternal duties devotedly.¹² Yet the overall reception of the yummy mummy image is not just accusatory and derogatory. The multiplying saturation of images and narratives indicates how the yummy mummy embodies and generates complex responses. To unpack the matrix of deviance and compliance, we need to interrogate the product and process of becoming a yummy mummy.

The cover of Kapoor’s book has a large color photograph of a slim, smiling Kapoor in a red, sleeveless Western dress without any visible sign of motherhood (for instance, she is not carrying a child). Superimposed on the glossy photograph are white, chalklike outline drawings of objects associated with childcare: a feeding bottle, a rattle, a pair of booties, a pacifier, and a teddy bear. The cover image subliminally conveys the message of the book: if the right prescription is obediently followed, then motherhood is a manageable performance that allows a (privileged) mother ample opportunity—and time—to look like a celebrity yummy mummy. According to Western feminist scholars, neoliberal capitalism made new “technologies” of “postfeminist femininity” available to women: these technologies appear to grant capacity and freedom of choice even as they lock women into “new constraining forms of gender power.”¹³ Angela McRobbie lists some of these technologies, like “the glamorous working mother, the so-called yummy mummy, the city high-flyer who is also a mother,” referring to the allied construct of the “supermom” who seemingly balances work and home and looking good with ease.¹⁴ Whereas the term “yummy mummy” is restricted to postpartum maternal bodies, feminist critic Imogen Tyler uses the broader phrase “pregnant beauty” to designate various representations of the commodified maternal body, from the pregnant to postpartum to lactating stages. Tyler analyzes “pregnant beauty” as a “particular neoliberal amalgam of maternity and femininity” that is “highly spectacular and contradictory,” combining “signifiers of (sexual) freedom, consumption, choice, agency and futurity in a powerful and seductive post-feminist cultural ideal.”¹⁵ Pregnant beauty or yummy mummy makeovers are constituted of multiple and continuing consumer practices—like fitness and diet regimens, beauty-care routines, photo shoots (or selfie taking), and clothing and accessory upgrades—that are channeled into the aspirational narrative of self-transformation. These consumer practices offer sites of choice and agency while controlling women through strictly regulated and gendered norms. Originating in the Euro-American celebrity culture of the 1990s, hypermediated pregnant beauty and yummy mummy icons deny the lived realities and fluid boundaries of the maternal body.

An analysis of the media-circulated representations and narratives of celebrity actor-mothers like Shilpa Shetty, Aishwarya Rai, and Karisma Kapoor (along with others like Karisma’s sister, Kareena Kapoor, and their friend Malaika Arora, who are not discussed in this chapter) reveals how Indian celebrity culture endorses and enforces the yummy mummy construct upon noncelebrity mother consumers while simultaneously enforcing a pervasive and public scrutiny of these celebrity mothers. Predictably, the yummy mummy cult is coded in the language of self-care and resilience. Actor Shilpa Shetty was featured in the January 2014 issue of HiBlitz—a fashion/celebrity magazine—which described her as “completely mommylicious.” The maternal body is refigured here—in its yummy mummy iconicity—as an object of aspirational consumption. According to Shetty, the process of becoming “mommylicious” is “very difficult,” but the rewards it offers are “more than just looking good”; she claims that it also allows mothers to feel good about themselves.¹⁶ Similarly, Kapoor’s motivational language focuses on individual agency, authority, and empowerment. Kapoor urges the individual reader to dress and stay fit for self-motivation: “I won’t be frumpy—I’ll be fabulous. . . . I will take time out to fix myself for myself.”¹⁷ Arguably, such “discourses of choice, freedom and empowerment . . . are complicit with, rather than critical of, postfeminism and neoliberalism.”¹⁸

Diane Negra notes that “one of the most distinctive features of the postfeminist era has been the spectacular emergence of the underfed, over-exercised female body” and that these “contemporary beautification discourses place strong stress on the achieved self.”¹⁹ For Kapoor, it is not enough to reduce the postnatal maternal body from size extra-large (XL) to “a medium size”; yummy mummies must “never give up” until they go back to size small (S)²⁰ Kapoor uses the term “boot camp” to designate periods of rigorous exercise when “regular exercise fails” to transform mothers into yummy mummies, exposing the punishing regimen that the pursuit of the yummy mummy body entails.²¹ She projects the reward of becoming a yummy mummy as worth the relentless labor and claims: “I will not give up when I’m almost at the end. My mom hasn’t given me the genes to be fat. . . . I choose to maintain my ideal weight. I will feel so much better when I succeed.”²² Although Kapoor reiteratively projects the yummy mummy pursuit as primarily motivated by self-satisfaction, it is ironic that the prescribed yummy mummy contours and issues of ideal weight are mostly dictated by marketized standards of the ideal female body size and shape. Amid this, there is predictably an implied disapproval of nonnormative mothers through the repeated use of derogatory terms like “frumpy” and “fat.” The prescriptive yummy mummy standards stigmatize and exclude all noncompliant mothers—for instance, those who are genetically obese or even those who are “medium size.” When Kapoor affirms that “I will experiment till I get it right. I will be confident of who I am, irrespective of how people see me,” there is an underlying contradiction.²³ If the right or fabulous body is only dependent on each mother’s own sense of self-worth and not on “how people see” them, then why does Kapoor insist on and manipulate mothers to labor for a standardized size S body?²⁴ Her heroic narrative of self-achievement and self-transformation into the yummy mummy conceals how agency of the maternal body is circumscribed and how it reinforces media-distributed normative images of feminine desirability that are constructed through—and dependent upon—a hegemonic social gaze.

The yummy mummy body—in fact, any maternal body—is subjected to relentless and often invasive public scrutiny. Unlike Kapoor, when other celebrity mothers refuse to conform to dominant prescriptions of the perfect postpartum body, they are ridiculed, censured, and ultimately pressurized to conform. For instance, actor Aishwarya Rai’s “shocking weight gain” when she appeared at the Cannes Film Festival after her daughter’s birth was intensely policed on social media: videos body-shaming and lampooning her, “complete with elephant sound effects,” have been repeatedly viewed and circulated.²⁵ In an interview, Rai makes her personal choice political: “I didn’t set out on any mission except being myself. . . . In the mirror . . . I could see the weight gain. And I still chose to come out like this. And I am seeing all around, and even in showbiz, it has brought about a lot of change and I am glad.”²⁶ Rai inserts her fat maternal body as a point of resistance in the regulatory yummy mummy discourse and exposes the pressure celebrity mothers are subjected to. This pressure coerces such women to conform to the new mother image that is institutionalized through cultures of mediatization. Significantly, in spite of her initial insubordination, Rai later conforms to the demands of celebrity maternal perfection: her most recent visits to Cannes showcase her as the ideal, glamorous yummy mummy, accompanied by her young daughter in color-coordinated outfits. The arc of Rai’s yummy mummy story—from resistance to compliance—indicates how deeply pressurizing neoliberal constructs of embodiment are for mothers.

The scrutiny-driven pressures and self-focused discipline integral to the process of becoming a yummy mummy are further complicated by obsessive anxiety, self-surveillance, and even body dysmorphia. For Shilpa Shetty, the state of being “mommylicious” is marked by a strong revulsion for and denial of the earlier pregnant/fat self. Shetty reveals, “I was as fat as a cow. I was a size 14 for the first time in my life! It made me feel strange because it didn’t feel like me—and I just wanted to be me.”²⁷ Diane Negra defines the postfeminist woman or mother as “a self-surveilling subject whose concepts of body and behavior are driven by status anxiety.”²⁸ This perpetual status anxiety is evidenced in a secret that Kapoor shares with her readers, which, according to her, is “the most important tip to lose weight,” and she writes, “take a photo of yourself at the beginning of every month after delivery along with a record of your measurements and weight. . . . Look at it when you go out to eat, look at it when you’re tempted to bunk your workout. . . . Before-and-after pictures of yourself will inspire you.”²⁹ This reveals an obsessive self-scrutiny and a pathologizing of one’s past non–yummy mummy body. Here, not only does the yummy mummy stigmatize other nonconforming maternal bodies, she also otherizes and disowns her own past self as monstrous. Further, the desire to lose weight is impelled by a dysmorphic self-hate. Kapoor prescribes a month-by-month documentation of, and dissatisfaction with, one’s own body: this foregrounds the inherent precarity and body dysmorphic disorder of the yummy mummy project. By continuously looking at before-and-after self-images, mothers harshly partition their own lives and bodies into an undesirable past and a yet-to-be-achieved future, with the present body always in an unstable stage that requires further disciplining and correction. Shetty’s interview emphasizes the continuous effort required in this project: one has to “keep at it” to obtain and maintain the yummy mummy body.³⁰ Becoming yummy mummy necessitates an endless amount of body work, “continuous aesthetic labour to produce ‘perfect’ selves.”³¹ The yummy mummy is, thus, a corrective, self-fragmenting project of becoming rather than being, where any satisfaction is always undercut by anxiety and guilt.

Neoliberal Anxieties and the Mommy Beautiful

Clearly, celebrity yummy mummy narratives underplay the constant anxiety, extreme labor, and underlying self-revulsion and instead highlight a triumphalist narrative that superficially conflates the reshaping of the maternal body with maternal self-making. This actually signals the “deeper commodification of maternity under neoliberalism.”³² Fitness is allied to a culture of consumerism through a sustained endorsement of the fashion-and-beauty complex. Even while working out, it is deemed necessary to be fashionable. Kapoor shares her “workout secrets” and claims, “I bought bright workout gear and wore that for my walks. You don’t need to look cool for anyone else—you just need to feel slightly stylish for yourself, to keep yourself motivated.”³³ In such cases, bodily fitness by itself is a necessary but not sufficient goal: the perfect yummy mummy body should be commodified and exhibited through stylish apparel and accessories. Feeling motivated and good about oneself is predicated upon looking cool. Acquisition of fashion and beauty commodities is an anodyne for the anxieties of becoming yummy mummy. Strikingly, in this project the conversion of emotional, internal values into purchasable, external capital is a key feature of neoliberalism that is governed by the strategies of market exchange. The deep commodification of all values and experiences under neoliberalism—that is visible in yummy mummy narratives—is accompanied by “a mobile, calculated technology for governing subjects who are constituted as self-managing, autonomous and enterprising.”³⁴ The projection of the yummy mummy as autonomous and enterprising misdirects the extent to which she is dependent on externals—commodities or the gaze of others—for self-validation. Using the neoliberal trope of individual self-improvement, the yummy mummy construct fetishizes the female body, excludes a range of nonnormative maternal bodies, and becomes a compliant tool for capitalist market regimes.

Another misdirection that Kapoor’s book and other yummy mummy narratives reinforce is the false equivalence of maternal beauty with maternal health. Although Kapoor writes of “fitness after pregnancy,” she charts a plan for size and weight reduction from size XL to size S.³⁵ The integrated combination of physical and emotional maternal health—which is necessary to undertake the challenges of maternal work and selfhood—is shifted to the outermost boundaries of the maternal body. A few decades back, Naomi Wolf critiqued the cosmetic surgery industry for “manipulating ideas of health and sickness” and overturning “the feminist redefinition of health as beauty” into the perverted “notion of beauty as health.”³⁶ The yummy mummy construct is complicit with this pernicious and disabling agenda. The slippages of signification in Kapoor’s text (fitness being equated with size) erase those mothers who are physically and emotionally healthy but not slim (size S) or normatively beautiful. Thus, the construct of the yummy mummy or pregnant beauty offers women a plastic and manufactured figuration of maternity that is “abstracted from the turbulent and messy realities,” the “radical bodily changes” and “extraordinary emotional physical demands that accompany” lived experiences of mothering.³⁷ As indicated by the cover page and the subsequent narrative, Kapoor’s yummy mummy guide is based on a promise that the visible signs of maternal experience can be erased from the maternal body and that this erasure is not only achievable but also desirable because it is (falsely) equated to maternal health.

The increasing circulation of celebrity yummy mummy spectacles pressurizes other mothers to conformity and/or anxiety. In digitized economies, this circulation occurs through intermeshed networks connecting print media, audiovisual media, social media, and individual consumers. The consumption of celebrity yummy mummy images by noncelebrity mothers, for instance, is often via the conduit of social networking sites, like mom blogs. Mom-blogger Mansi Zaveri of Kids Stop Press includes Karisma Kapoor in her list of “Supermoms of Bollywood,” applauding her for achieving “the perfect work-life balance and [making] it even look easy.”³⁸ In a blog post on “16 Fittest Moms of Bollywood,” another popular mom blogger, Sangeetha Menon, celebrates the “dedication and hard work” of Bollywood yummy mummies, eulogizing Karisma Kapoor as “a fit celebrity mom” who “looks beautiful.”³⁹ These representative blog posts insist that the journey or goal of becoming a yummy mummy is a liberating choice for mothers that ensures maternal self-care, fitness, health, and beauty. Yet, if we unpack the endorsement, we can find evidence of the scrutiny and mimicry that the cult of celebrity yummy mummy generates, both in mainstream as well as in social media.

Sangeetha Menon herself emulates the celebrity yummy mummy narrative of resilience and transformation that she disseminates through her blog. Like other yummy mummy narratives, Menon’s embodied self-project is also fraught with self-shaming and body image anxiety. In a blog post about her “tummy story post-baby,” Menon remembers how she had a “feel of consciousness and shame” when her manager intrusively body-shamed her by saying that her “tummy has bulged out” after her Caesarean delivery.⁴⁰ Menon narrates her “weight loss journey” in one of her most popular blog posts, which has over thirty comments by mothers requesting weight-loss advice, indicating a pervasive and widespread anxiety in mothers about their bodies: Menon both fuels this anxiety and promises a solution by posting before and after (pre- and post-weight-loss) photographs of herself.⁴¹ In the way she has been inspired by celebrity yummy mummies, Menon hopes that her “weight loss journey inspires one mom or two.”⁴² By focusing only on the process of physical transformation, by invisibilizing those mothers who bodies defy regulatory yummy mummy standards, and by refusing to address the systemic causes that make mothers body-shame themselves (for instance, the male gaze and public scrutiny of female bodies that is evident in her own manager), Menon is complicit with—as well as victimized by—the neoliberal construct of the yummy mummy. As evident in the narratives of Kapoor, Shetty, and Menon—all labeling themselves as working mothers—the yummy mummy is constructed as an obedient mother-worker, a biological reproducer as well as an economic producer necessary for the functioning of both the patriarchal family and the neoliberal economy.

Menon, in spite of her overt aspiration of becoming a yummy mummy, is careful to situate herself within a framework of Indian values and visuals. From the initial introductory blog post itself, she strategically projects herself as a successful working professional with a manifest Indian identity. In this introductory post, Menon inserts two photographs of herself: one with her newborn daughter, where she is traditionally dressed in a sari with a garland in her hair, and the other a solo photograph where she is in Western attire sitting at a computer terminal.⁴³ These contrasting photographs visually reinforce a hybridized identity of a traditionally rooted mother who is also a technology-enabled professional. Kapoor, like Menon, also seemingly endorses a traditional Indian ethics of prudence, common sense, and frugality. While advocating pregnancy fashion, Kapoor is careful to emphasize that there is no “need to overspend to get stylish pregnancy clothes”; she also shares tips on mixing, matching, and re-tailoring “maternity wear into regular wear.”⁴⁴ Even for achieving yummy mummy body dimensions, Kapoor suggests that mothers who cannot “head to the gym or get a personal trainer” do not “need any of that as long as you have determination.”⁴⁵ Shetty has written a dietary and weight-loss guidebook titled The Great Indian Diet, wherein she urges the mother-reader to adopt an ethnically marked diet as well as “techniques and tips” like yoga and meditation, which are “part of Indian history.”⁴⁶

It is worth noting here that India’s neoliberal economy is characterized by this confusion of Indian/traditional and global/modern value systems, including the clashing coexistence of consumerism and frugality. Contextualized thus, it is clear how the Indian neoliberal yummy mummy combines the glamor of the Western yummy mummy with a rootedness in Indian ethics and, sometimes, aesthetics. Rupal Oza’s critique of neoliberalism in India explicates how “the Indian woman was carefully crafted within public cultural discourses to be modern, representing globalizing India, yet ‘Indian’ by being anchored in ‘core’ values.”⁴⁷ In their careful and sustained imbrication of traditional Indian motherhood and modern neoliberal professionalism, embedded within the marketized, triumphalist construct of the yummy mummy, Kapoor, Shetty, and Menon reproduce this dominant discourse of the ideal Indian neoliberal female/maternal subject. They reveal the anxieties generated by the conflict of Indian and Western values but gloss over the contradictions instead of interrogating or critiquing them.

This narrative of ideal neoliberal motherhood—visibilized in the glamorized but restrained Indian yummy mummy icon—also permeates the consumerist domain of advertisements in magazines and on television. Oza’s study of several Indian television and print commercials reveals how women in advertisements are “represented as modern, yet aware of their intrinsic roles as mother and wife.”⁴⁸ The new Indian woman—a wider category that includes the Indian yummy mummy—cannot be unruly or challenging, despite her exposure to modernity and Western culture. Obedience to patriarchal norms continues to be a marker of the good Indian mother, and this obedience is imposed insidiously through circulated mass media like films, television serials, and advertisements. Further, in spite of some emerging, modern, transgressive maternal representations, mainstream Hindi films continue to depict the “highly-valued ideal of the self-sacrificing mother,” who obediently performs the role of the “perfect home builder and the perfect nurturer,” although she may appear in “updated” yummy mummy avatars.⁴⁹ Despite the yummy quotient that resexualizes the Indian mother, the essentializing mummy role ensures that the practices of cosmetic self-care and financial self-sufficiency do not subvert the core ideology of obedient, devoted, and patriarchal good motherhood.

It is also this core of obedience and the observed boundaries of Indian ethics/aesthetics that lock the Indian yummy mummy within a framework of male approval and within new forms of gendered power inequities. Because it is depoliticized, the constrained resexualization and self-care regimes of the Indian yummy mummy—in fact, of all yummy mummy embodiments—never become challenging enough to insist on structural changes in Indian patriarchal systems. The Indian yummy mummy thus embodies a “cultural politics of disarticulation” that is typical of postfeminism.⁵⁰ McRobbie explains postfeminism as a “double movement” of “disarticulation and displacement, accompanied by replacement and substitution,” that operates through “a wide range of social and cultural spaces,” generates the assumption that feminist action is no longer needed, and typecasts feminists as unfeminine and hostile to men.⁵¹ In a neoliberal, postfeminist society, feminist ideology is disarticulated by patriarchal institutions of the state, the media, and the market, which offer substitutes through individualized discourse of choice and achievement—like the project of becoming a yummy mummy—while invalidating any collective or radical feminist agenda of self-making or social change.

Conclusion: Need for Alternative Maternal Body Images

To contest this invalidation, I finally look at other possibilities of resistances to the stereotyping of the maternal body: possibilities that reject both the self-abnegating model of patriarchal motherhood and the self-punishing model of the yummy mummy. In her interview, Aishwarya Rai emphasizes the significance of the concept of being myself: this may be contrasted with Shilpa Shetty’s and Karisma Kapoor’s project of fixing myself. Notably, this difference between being myself and fixing myself indicates a space for alternative possibilities for mothering and self-care, although these are difficult choices for mothers in a terrain saturated with disciplinary yummy mummy images and expectations. One choice may be to embody a more deviant, more overtly desiring and desirable, and more Western Indian yummy mummy—like actor Neena Gupta, for instance, who had her daughter out of wedlock—although this can perhaps escalate moral panic. Including such rebellious yummy mummies, however, can pluralize the predominantly heteronormative domain where most Indian yummy mummies locate themselves. Another option can be to reject the rushed demands to become yummy mummy after delivery. Rai—initially at least—chooses to love herself as she is, resisting the pressures of public gaze and market expectations. Mothers can choose to have confidence and pleasure in their as-is maternal body and reshape their body at a self-selected pace like Rai, and to self-selected fitness standards, rather than immersing themselves in a panic-driven pursuit of perfect yummy mummy beauty dimensions.

Structural resistances to coercive maternal body images are only possible through radical and/or collective feminist action. Although lack of space disallows a discussion here on collective maternal action, one form of individual action is to engage in feminist mothering, which enables mothers to have agency over their bodies and to create a feminist maternal legacy of empowered and informed body choices for their daughters. Feminist mothering is “constructed as a negation of patriarchal motherhood. . . . It may refer to any practice of mothering that seeks to challenge and change various aspects of patriarchal motherhood that cause mothering to be limiting or oppressive to women.”⁵² Choosing feminist mothering would equip mothers to dismantle and contest seductive yet coercive stereotypes like the yummy mummy.

Indian academics like Shilpa Phadke have recently engaged with the risks and rewards of feminist mothering in India, especially in the practice of mothering daughters in the context of societal expectations and moral panic about women’s sexuality. Considering feminist mothering as a commitment to the “larger women’s movement,” Phadke offers no easy solutions.⁵³ Instead, she and the feminist mothers she interviews focus on practicing and passing on a mothering politics wherein they and their daughters would be comfortable in their nonconformity. Caught as we are between subjugating constructs of self-sacrificing motherhood and self-disciplining yummy mummy—a predicament deepened by pervasive saturation of these images and invasive scrutiny of all maternal bodies—the commitment to not become a yummy mummy is perhaps the most radical self-validation women can perform, as mothers and daughters, individually and collectively. By unpacking and refusing the yummy mummy—and by raising feminist consciousness in our daughters to enable them to critically understand such spectacular images and pernicious ideologies—we perform a feminist mothering that interrupts hegemonic motherhood discourses and supports maternal choices and bodies who choose to not conform.

NOTES

1. Kapoor, Yummy Mummy. Kapoor is an Indian actor and celebrity who has acted in several popular Hindi films and has won several acting awards, including a National Film award. She is also a mother of two.

2. Rich, Of Woman Born, 13, emphasis in original.

3. O’Reilly, Feminist Mothering, 3.

4. Krishnaraj, “Motherhood,” 22.

5. Oza, Making of Neoliberal India, 22.

6. Khan, Mother India; Chopra, Deewar; Desai, Amar Akbar Anthony; Ghai, Ram Lakhan.

7. Singh, “Milky Ways,” 37.

8. Kosambi, Crossing Thresholds, 135.

9. Sarkar, “Cultural Construction,” 278.

10. Kakar, Intimate Relations, 131–134.

11. Mukul, Gita Press, 381.

12. India TV News, “How Relevant Is Yummy Mummy.”

13. McRobbie, The Aftermath, 1, 7.

14. McRobbie, 80.

15. Tyler, “Pregnant Beauty,” 22–23.

16. Dadyburjor, “Lights,” 77.

17. Kapoor, Yummy Mummy, 132.

18. Gill and Scharff, New Femininities, 7.

19. Negra, What a Girl, 119.

20. Kapoor, Yummy Mummy, 95.

21. Kapoor, 107.

22. Kapoor, 119.

23. Kapoor, 143.

24. Kapoor, 143.

25. Manzoor, “Aishwarya Rai’s Post-Baby Body.”

26. Chopra, “The Front Row.”

27. Dadyburjor, “Lights,” 77.

28. Negra, What a Girl, 153.

29. Kapoor, Yummy Mummy, 102.

30. Dadyburjor, “Lights,” 77.

31. Phadke, “How to Do Feminist Mothering,” 251.

32. Tyler, “Pregnant Beauty,” 23.

33. Kapoor, Yummy Mummy, 89.

34. Gill and Scharff, New Femininities, 5.

35. Kapoor, Yummy Mummy, 94.

36. Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 220–224.

37. Tyler, “Pregnant Beauty,” 30.

38. Zaveri, “The Supermoms of Bollywood,” para. 8.

39. Menon, “16 Fittest Moms,” paras. 1, 17.

40. Menon, “15 Amazing Ways,” para. 3.

41. Menon, “From Flab to Fab.”

42. Menon, para. 8.

43. Menon, “About Me.”

44. Kapoor, Yummy Mummy, 127, 131.

45. Kapoor, 118.

46. Kundra and Coutinho, Great Indian Diet, 169.

47. Oza, Making of Neoliberal India, 22.

48. Oza, 35.

49. Riaz, “Selfless to Selfish,” 173.

50. McRobbie, The Aftermath, 35.

51. McRobbie, 26.

52. O’Reilly, Feminist Mothering, 4.

53. Phadke, “How to Do Feminist Mothering,” 260.

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