Conclusion

Womanhood and Body Positivity

Problems, Possibilities, and Promises

SHWETA RAO GARG

This edited volume is primarily a result of the editors’ instinctive response to the tyranny of beauty. Growing up in India in the 1990s and responding to subliminal messages stemming from the nation’s changing sociocultural forces deeply affected us as women. The conflict between the desire to fashion our bodies according to Western or globalized norms and our own inability—nay, genetic impossibility—informed our bodily choices, critical inquiries, and creative practices. As feminists and postcolonial scholars, we were later able to make connections between our lived experiences and the discourse of an ideal body image.

Like a majority of the women we know, we grew up being subjected to biases based on our looks—color, weight, age, sexuality, caste—and other aspects of appearance. We also witnessed women (and men) close to us being discriminated against because of their body types. We noted how comments disparaging a person based on appearance are routinely normalized in our culture. The discomfort we felt had been powerfully articulated by Western feminist scholars like Naomi Woolf, Laura Mulvey, and Susan Bordo, among others, who—as we encountered their works—gave us the initial vocabulary to examine the deep-rooted systemic problems of appearance bias, beauty politics, and an ideal body image. We also found that while a majority of contemporary Indian feminist scholarship deals with many urgent issues, beauty politics, body image, and body shaming have not been scrutinized enough. We, as editors, feel that these issues are deemed as relatively trivial even when they deeply affect women from all strata of Indian society. We are certain that the chapters in this collection have brought to fore the regulative tenacity of beauty norms and the oppression they cause in Indian women’s lives.

The chapters in this volume have come from an affective place, too. These selected chapters examine how the body image of women in India has been shaped through forces of capitalism and patriarchy after the economic liberalization of India. This volume is cognizant of the fact that the category “women” in India is highly stratified and diverse. Class, caste, disability, sexual expression, sexual orientation and gender, and age play a huge part in defining and objectifying women’s bodies. The role of popular culture in shaping these ideals has therefore been discussed in several chapters. Chapters that explore challenges faced by bodies that are alienated because of marginalized identities, alternate sexuality, or disability are covered in this volume. The beauty politics in popular Hindi and regional films has also been included in some chapters. Some chapters examine memoirs, advertisements, and media, magazines, or even blogs, all of which deal with complex discourses of female body image. While some scholars in the volume have laid bare the discriminations faced by nonnormative bodies, others have highlighted resistance against an oppressive ideal body image. In addition to the rich and diverse offerings in this volume, we would also like to briefly mention, in this conclusion, how the increasingly popular genre of Indian graphic narratives is presently delving into the problematic of gender, nationhood, and even body image. Furthermore, we note how many Indian social media influencers have been gradually but surely destigmatizing divergent bodies and creating online communities that foster body positivity. While outlining all of this, we conclude by looking at the possibilities and promises these resistive voices generate in deconstructing the beauty politics in India.

The timeline of this volume begins around the economic liberalization of India: 1991 was the year when India transformed its economic policies from the erstwhile License Raj, or the control economy. Crafted during the Second World War by the British colonial government, the control economy in India was dismantled because of the acute economic crises it engendered.¹ The Narasimha Rao government of the early 1990s, owing to some pressure from the International Monetary Fund, had to open up the economy at this point. Foreign direct investment brought new opportunities hitherto inaccessible to the people. It also flooded the market with consumer products never before available. This ushered in a new consumer culture by creating a financial surplus for some parts of the society. Since then, however, a vast section of the population has yet to benefit from these reforms. The economic inequality has only been exacerbated since.² Nonetheless, much has changed, too. Just a few decades ago, the government of India, to uphold austerity, used to look down upon and prevent manufacturing of “unnecessary luxury goods.”³ However, since 1991, a whole range of luxury goods have been made available in the Indian market. The cosmetics industry grew its consumer base, a trend that has only seen an upward trajectory ever since.⁴ Not surprisingly, an acute awareness of body image maintenance has been perceptible since this time. Increasingly, women began to undergo beauty services in the newly expanding beauty parlors, which since the 1990s have become an aesthetic imperative for a large majority of middle- and upper-middle-class women in urban and semiurban India. These parlors are spaces that empower semiskilled women workers, who, in turn, bank on the aspirations for lighter skin and purportedly prettier faces and bodies through bleaches, facial massages, hair removals, and other techniques.

Like in most capitalist societies, the pattern in neoliberal India is quite clear—the beauty imperative is financially beneficial for the multinational cosmetic industries. Hindustan Unilever’s (formerly Hindustan Lever) Fair & Lovely, for example, has been the most popular face cream in India since 1975. The company renamed and rebranded the product into Glow & Lovely in 2020.⁵ Following the empowerment discourse, the online platform established by the company, Glow & Lovely Careers, enables women by vocationally training them free of cost. Ironically, their website echoes their advertisements: “We are changing with the times.”⁶ The company has established this center to show its commitment to change and to manage backlash against their promotion of colorism through blatant misogynist ads for years. Skin lightening, however, continues to be deeply associated with the brand. Despite the ad campaigns upholding narratives of how the face cream aids women’s empowerment, “glow” seems to be a thinly disguised euphemism for “fair.” It may take some more time for the brand’s image to transform and be recognized for enhancing skin health and not lightening skin tone.

Another significant change since the 1990s has been the winners and runners-up in global beauty pageants. From Madhu Sapre to Priyanka Chopra, Indian “beauties” and India as a nation were touted as the “new bonafide beauty superpower.”⁷ These women, Radhika E. Parameshwaran points out, were seen as heroic figures, rising up against the challenges of social and global inequality—no doubt including beauty pageants, with their apparent misogyny fetish for certain kind of bodies. Such blatant objectification of women in neoliberal India, however, has been seen as empowering. And the body perfections championed by the beauty queens continue to bolster concepts of an ideal body image in contemporary India.

With liberalization, Indians also got access to cable television in addition to the state-sponsored Doordarshan channels. These new channels (Zee TV, Channel [V], and STAR, among others) brought with them a novel visual culture that was previously not available to the Indian audience. American TV series dubbed in Hindi were aired to an audience who would have found the entire set-up unfamiliar. Along with global narratives on other issues, images of Caucasian bodies were being transmitted, too, and this had a huge impact on India’s beauty politics. It further reinforced the colonial legacy and the aspiration toward lighter skin and Caucasian body types. Global standards of beauty were now even easier for the audience to gaze at and desire. White, athletic, and nubile bodies were deemed as the epitome of beauty compared to brown, indigenous, earthier ones. Liberalization likewise brought a boom of ready-made retail clothes. A variety of Euro-American sartorial choices that were out of reach for urban middle-class Indians began to be available easily. This further created a pressure to regulate and fit the Indian female body into clothes created for very different body types. Thus, postliberalization, as the spending capacity of the middle-class increased, the pressure to live up to an imagined physical image also increased.

The late 1990s and early 2000s also saw the advent of the Internet and the rise of the information technology sector in India. Since then, the Internet has been a space for images of bodies to travel across borders. Interestingly, while it builds on the hegemonic and dominant notions of body ideals, the Internet also provides opportunities for these ideals to be subverted and undercut. The Web, with its predominance of the visual, gives currency to what is considered desirable and what is not. With an increasingly large number of users from Asia and Africa, there is indeed a growing diversity of representations. However, the bodies that align the most with Eurocentric beauty ideals are celebrated and circulated more. Any minor deviation from the picture-perfect image could trigger body shaming and slut shaming. Nishant Shah, through his study of shame and selfies, observes that slut shaming is not just about punishing female promiscuity, or any particular behavior, but is shaming for just appearing in public.⁸ Bodies in the present cultural climate, then, are shamed for being natural bodies. This is perhaps why even the most well-known former beauty queen and Bollywood actor, Aishwarya Rai, was subjected to brutal trolling when she was unable to shed weight after giving birth to her daughter in 2011.⁹ The very body that was put on a pedestal as the epitome of Indian beauty and a source of national pride had become a source of embarrassment for the actor and her sympathizers on the Internet. Rai was trolled as she resisted beauty labor immediately as soon as giving birth. Even her young daughter was the object of public scrutiny. Unfortunately, her daughter’s age did not deter the commenters from applying the same standards of appearance bias that they did for her mother.¹⁰ This episode reminds us that due to the participatory nature of platforms like Twitter, there can be multiplicity of voices, and the comments that shame certain celebrities also end up being critiqued. What remains fairly undiminished, however, is an all-pervasive beauty bias.

As empowering and informative as the World Wide Web has been, there are multiple studies that confirm the negative impact on young women from exposure to picture-perfect bodies on sites like the Instagram.¹¹ Indeed, some feminist content creators from South Asia have been intervening through body positive narratives on platforms such as these. And yet, despite creating content that is Instagram friendly, with filters and edits, they speak about many issues that stem from their own life experiences and their immediate surroundings. The curation of authenticity becomes their brand among their fans and followers. Many of these influencers create content, endorse products, and offer services to pander to different body types. A brief analysis of the Instagram accounts of some of these celebrities and influencers opens up interesting paradigms. One such influencer is Sameera Reddy. Though Reddy’s older sisters were actors and models, she herself was always overweight. After working on her body to shed weight, she became a model and actress herself, but subsequently her weight increased during pregnancy due to a hormone imbalance. As a result, Reddy was fat-shamed and trolled both online and offline. Her gray hair also caused people to make ageist comments against her. Reddy struggled and overcame her depression because of her naturally transformed body. Finally, she kick-started the #ImperfectlyPerfect campaign on social media as a way of celebrating bodies that are changed through birthing and motherhood.¹² In one of her public talks, Reddy revealed how she underwent postpartum depression and self-loathing for gaining 105 kilos that she could not lose.¹³ Reddy wanted to raise awareness about imperfect experiences during motherhood and about her own struggle with body image. Today Reddy shares her weight and calorie count regularly in an attempt to normalize the process of what she calls staying fit.

A second and significant example here is a less known celebrity named Falguni Vasavada, a professor of strategic marketing at MICA Ahmedabad, who creates content on fashion and raises awareness on body positivity. Vasavada usually endorses purportedly affordable products from lesser-known fashion houses and designers. With 110,000 followers,¹⁴ she featured in Hershey’s HERSHE campaign for the International Women’s Day in 2021.¹⁵ Her image on the chocolate wrapper is a validation of her growing presence and influence. Thankfully, Vasavada is by no means singular in her trajectory. There are a growing number of social media influencers whose content focuses on their own bodies and whose efforts are to destigmatize different types of nonnormative bodies. Another notable Instagram persona is Anwesa Chakraborty, the winner of Ms Plus Size India 2019. With 13,600 followers,¹⁶ Chakraborty spreads messages not only about body positivity and fashion but also about overcoming the stigma of widowhood and remarriage in India. One of the most well-recognized body positivity activists currently, however, is Harnaam Kaur.¹⁷ Born in England to a Punjabi family, Kaur suffered from polycystic ovaries and exhibited hirsutism. Tired of stigma, Kaur decided to embrace her condition and grow a beard. She is now an influencer, model, and even motivational speaker who talks about self-love in the face of depression, bullying, and body shaming.

It is worth noting here that most body positivity influencers interact with their followers. Occasionally, they also respond to messages that shame them in order to emphasize their own significance and justify the existence of their content. Many other online platforms, though not focused on body image exclusively, regularly raise awareness about it. Some of these are Feminism in India,¹⁸ SheThePeople.tv,¹⁹ and Agents of Ishq.²⁰ With increasing followership, these platforms showcase stories about different bodies, desires, sexualities, and so on. Although there are no statistics about the viewership of these channels, from the comments on these sites, it appears that the majority are women.

It goes without saying that the life narratives of body positivity influencers are almost always inextricably linked to their bodies. With the focus on their bodies on Instagram, these influencers also try to situate themselves within the larger discussion on society, feminism, and the online community of women. On Instagram alone, there are more than ten million followers of #bodypositivity. Just after a cursory glance, however, it is clear that the bodies depicted there belong to “plus size” white women, mostly in beach wear. While the message on the dignity and acceptability of nonnormative bodies is clear, one does wonder if a globally growing body positive movement is yet another instance of how colluding forces of Eurocentrism, capitalism, and patriarchy elide India’s feminist agenda on body inclusivity through blatant commodification.

While speaking of resistive voices against appearance discrimination, it is worth turning to the steadily growing popularity of graphic novels in India. As mentioned earlier, graphic novels complicate discourses on space, nation, identity, gender, sexuality, and body in many ways. One of the earliest Indian graphic novels published was Kari by Amruta Patil. It is the story of a young advertising professional who traverses life in Mumbai. The protagonist is homosexual and struggles with body dysmorphia. When a friend points out that she is “Chow Yun Fat with boobs,” she is shocked and responds, “Sure enough, I’d grown boobs. I fought them all evening.”²¹ Earlier in the book, we are shown Kari and her female roommates enjoying a lunch together. We notice how these straight cis women with conventionally beautiful and feminine bodies make passes at Kari jokingly. We are told in confidence, “Make no mistake—there is nothing like a fully straight woman.”²² Just a page later, Kari is shown bare chested, staring into the mirror. She confesses that she does not hate mirrors but “just [does not] know what they are trying to tell [her].”²³ She says that while her friends wonder why Kari does not wear kohl, she herself wonders “why I amn’t [sic] looking like Sean Penn.”²⁴ The contrast of Kari’s body image versus the normative female body aligns with the images drawn by Amruta Patil in this graphic narrative. Despite Kari’s struggles, we note how visual and textual images come together to construct a body that is beautiful and erotic despite not falling within the parameters of heteronormative appearance for an Indian woman in her twenties.

Zubaan, one of the oldest feminist presses in the country, published a series of graphical anthologies as a response to the Nirbhaya rape case in 2012.²⁵ One of these books is Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back, and it has a number of narratives on the crisis of female body image. The book has illustrated stories born out of the lives of illustrators and story writers. It opens with Harini Kannan’s graphical story, “That’s Not Fair.”²⁶ Kannan narrates the tale from the point of view of a female fetus, who responds to people expressing their desire for a light-skinned child to her dark-skinned mother. Deepani Seth’s “The Walk”²⁷ is a narrative of a woman working in a beauty parlor in a small town in India. The story, more through images than through the text, creates the elusive, temporary intimacy between the beautician and her clients. Within the bubble that these spaces provide, women can come together away from the male gaze and yet are compelled to “beautify” themselves and others to be accepted and appreciated by the world at large.

Another story in this collection that brings colorism to the fore is “Melanin” by Bhavana Singh.²⁸ Singh anthropomorphizes the pigment melanin and draws various funny and absurd episodes around it. Singh also subverts the fourteen-day shade card popularized by Fair & Lovely, calling it a “scale” promoting “self-loathing,” by creating images of Melanin in two weeks’ time. It shows the character Melanin indulging in various outdoor activities for fourteen days and getting tonally darker. Melanin, in one of the Kafkaesque episodes, transforms into a bug in what is called “Melanin in Morphosis.” Melanin also interacts with UV rays in “Supermel & Yooviji in Entitlement.” In “Melanin in Skinteresting Facts,” Singh gives us infographics taken from several sources. For instance, she quotes the Economic Times from April 14, 2014, to argue that the pigment Melanin is responsible for annually bringing a business of 3,000 crores to India. With this, Singh compellingly deconstructs the fetish for light skin in India, which for her evokes complete hopelessness and “bewilderment.” Singh’s narrative ends with a mandala-inspired drawing of Melanin in “Melanin in Infinite Wonder” where the pigment revels in almost goddess-like assurance, persisting despite all the skin-whitening and skin-bleaching products.

In yet another graphic novel, entitled The Elephant in the Room: Women Draw Their World, Priya Kuriyan’s “Ebony and Ivory”²⁹ talks about the author’s grandmother. In the course of the story, we are told that the grandmother was pained by the dark skin of one of her granddaughters. She gives some “pocket money” to the child’s mother and asks her to buy some Fair & Lovely for the child. In this story, Kuriyan tries to understand the conditions that made her grandmother become the woman she was. For Kuriyan, her grandmother’s blatant colorism was one of her flaws, as was her thrift. The grandmother, due to her own skin tone, is called “Ivory,” and her grandfather, a seemingly flashy and likable person, is supposedly “Ebony.” Strikingly, this contrast highlights the imbalance of power and acceptability where bodies and skin tones of Indian men and women are concerned. “My Secret Crop,” by Kaveri Gopalakrishnan,³⁰ is another graphic short story in the collection, and it is her tribute to body hair. In an abstractionist style, Gopalkrishnan records the growth of hair, panel after panel. Interestingly, the corresponding speech bubbles have statements related to body shaming and body-hair shaming. The juxtaposition of hair patterns with disparaging comments is a subtle way to get across the message of body love. Beauty standards and conventions are not absolute. Women with body hair are deemed repulsive, but by aestheticizing hair mass in her drawings, Gopalkrishnan astutely subverts the hairless body imperative for women.

Significantly, some graphical works also try to bring about gender sensitivity and awareness of feminist issues among children and young adults. Priya’s Shakti,³¹ a comic and augmented reality venture by Ram Devineni and others, was a response to the Nirbhaya rape case, like Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back. The second installment, Priya’s Mirror,³² was co­written by Paromita Vohra (a filmmaker and the founder of Agents of Ishq) and Ram Devineni and illustrated by Dan Goldman. The story uses tropes from Indian mythology as an entry point into issues faced by survivors of acid attacks. An acid attack is a particular form of violence against women, especially in South Asia. It is usually perpetrated by a toxic man to punish a woman by destroying her face in the most violent way possible and rendering her disfigured for life. In the comic, Priya, a superhero who is herself a gang-rape survivor, comes across a group of acid-attack survivors. The survivors live an isolated life, away from society. Priya is gifted the mirror of love by the goddess to empower the survivors. She shows the mirror to the women, who initially react by calling Priya insensitive for showing a mirror to acid survivors. Priya persists, and one after another, the women begin to “see” themselves. The readers could have expected Priya’s mirror to reflect the survivors’ faces completely healed, but the mirror only reflects their current faces, which remain disfigured because of acid and restorative surgeries. The mirror goes beyond that and makes them see their inner selves, leading them to accept their appearance. The realization that their bodily disfigurement has nothing to do with who they really are brings about their transformation and “frees” them. In the process, the narrative also engenders a powerful critique of India’s toxic masculinity and patriarchy, which together violate and shame women’s bodies at will.

On similar lines, Orijit Sen, the first graphic novelist from India, created Comixense, a collaborative comic quarterly for young adults. The recently launched magazine covers stories that build critical and analytical understanding in readers. One of the issues in this quarterly carried a story titled “The Tyranny of Beauty,” written and illustrated by Priyanka Paul. In this story, Paul directly addresses the young readers and shares her thoughts about beauty.³³ “Sitara Devi,”³⁴ written by Rupleena Bose and illustrated by Nayna Yadav, is about a female star from West Bengal coming to terms with her aging body after living indoors for years. The back cover features a graphically illustrated picture of Harnaam Kaur, the body positive influencer discussed earlier. Clearly, the graphical works mentioned here are some attempts aimed at both young adult and other readers to make them understand that beauty is a social construct. These stories encourage them to question and dismantle the overarching power of heteronormative beauty and body ideals.

While body positive discourses are gaining ground in India, it is also true that mainstream television, Web series, and print media continue to air programs and advertisements that enhance body insecurities among women. Nonetheless, and in contrast, Instagram and Facebook are platforms where conscientious, small-scale, and exclusive companies advertise for an intimate audience base. Tailor & Circus is one among many such body-conscious brands. In addition to creating undergarments with a comfortable fit and soft fabric, they call themselves and their customer base a “body positivity circus.”³⁵ Their advertisements feature models without makeup and with diverse skin tones and sizes, and they often display body hair, stretch marks, or vitiligo or other skin conditions. Some models flaunt their underwear from wheelchairs. They include people of all genders, too. We are aware of neither their profit and growth rate nor how their brand image helps them create their client base, but we know that Tailor & Circus resists using commodified, picture-perfect bodies and displays a genuine interest in practicing body positivity.

In the present day, the Internet is a space that arbitrates discourse on bodies. The inherent contradiction of this space is that while it can propagate the mainstream, patriarchal, and capitalist discourse, it also provides a platform for individuals and groups who want to critique these values. Amid this massive amalgamation of cultural and economic forces, it is clear that some accounts that initiate discussions on body positivity end up as neoliberal marketing ploys. Despite that, we conclude that visual practices on the Internet and elsewhere show that there are possibilities of resistance against a hegemonic and prescriptive body image and that the discursive nature of these platforms will enable the promises of inclusivity to be realized, at least to a certain extent. With changing discourses across India’s cultural sectors, we hope to see more such possibilities and promises that accommodate women’s embodiment in all its diversity in the future. It is with this hope that we conclude this project.

NOTES

1. Mohan in his introductory essay, “The Road to the 1991 Industrial Policy Reforms and Beyond: A Personalized Narrative from the Trenches,” writes on this matter from the point of view of the policymaker.

2. Researchers have critiqued the role of economic liberalization in creating inequality in the country. See Jha, “Reducing Poverty,” and Kannan and Raveendran, “Growth sans Employment.”

3. Industrial Licensing Policy Inquiry Committee of 1969, quoted in Mohan, “The Road,” 12.

4. See GlobeNewswire, “India Cosmetics Market Report 2021.”

5. See Jain, Greenfield, and Cavale, “Unilever’s ‘Fair & Lovely.’”

6. Glow & Lovely, “About Glow & Lovely Careers.”

7. Parameshwaran, “Global Beauty Queens,” 347.

8. Shah, “The Selfie and the Slut,” 91.

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

10. Nijhara, “Aishwarya’s Daughter.”

11. See Brown and Tiggemann, “Attractive Celebrity.” Also see Kleemans et al., “Picture Perfect,” and Tiggemann and Anderberg, “Social Media Is Not Real.”

12. TNN, “Sameera Reddy Speaks.”

13. Reddy, “Embracing Originality.”

14. See Vasavada’s Instagram.

15. Rathod, “Hershey’s HERSHE Bars.”

16. See Chakraborty’s Instagram.

17. To know more about Harnaam Kaur, see her website.

18. The Feminism in India: Intersectional Feminism Desi Style podcast, founded by Japleen Pasricha, is an online portal that creates popular, accessible content on Indian feminism.

19. SheThePeople.tv is an online channel that is committed to circulating positive stories of women from all walks of life.

20. Agents of Ishq is the first online resource of this kind and the brainchild of filmmaker Paromita Vohra. The website is a sex-positive portal focusing on “sex, love and desire in India.”

21. Patil, Kari, 85.

22. Patil, 58.

23. Patil, 59.

24. Patil, 60.

25. The Nirbhaya case refers to a brutal gang rape of a twenty-three-year-old student in New Delhi in December 2012. The brutality of crime created uproar and widespread protests. It was instrumental in bringing some amendments in India’s rape laws. For more, see McLoughlin, “India’s Nirbhaya Movement.”

26. Kannan, “That’s Not Fair.”

27. Seth, “The Walk.”

28. Singh, “Melanin.”

29. Kuriyan, “Ebony and Ivory.”

30. Gopalakrishnan, “My Secret Crop.”

31. Priya’s Shakti is a story of a young woman who survives rape. The goddess empowers her to fight against her perpetrators and spread awareness about sexual violence. The comic book is also an augmented reality project. See Devineni, Goldman, and Menon, Priya’s Shakti.

32. See Paromita, Devineni, and Goldman, Priya’s Mirror.

33. Paul, “The Tyranny of Beauty,” 14–16.

34. Bose and Yadav, “Sitara Devi.”

35. See “Body Positive Circus.”

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