Introduction

Female Body Image and the Politics of Appearance in Contemporary India

SRIRUPA CHATTERJEE

A scholarly commentary on female body image in contemporary Indian literature and culture is long overdue. Since the politics of feminine appearance (across ages, classes, geographic regions, castes, sexual identities, and physical abilities, among others) represented in literature and popular culture has hardly received the critical and intellectual attention it deserves, our edited collection attempts to initiate a theoretically informed conversation on female body image and self-identity within contemporary neoliberal India’s cultural paradigms.¹ In this book we therefore examine female body image vis-à-vis the politics of beauty, keeping in mind a few critical points. First, notwithstanding the biological essentialism associated with the term “female,” we use it because, as a category, it includes people from all ages, communities, classes, body types, and sexual orientations and expressions who identify themselves as female. Second, while the politics of an ideal body image in the present times affects all genders, it is the female gender across the global spectrum that continues to be the most vulnerable target of the politics of appearance. And finally, we believe that this book, even as it speaks of female body image in India, will open up possible discursive paradigms for addressing body image problems faced by other genders, ethnic groups, and communities that have hitherto not received sufficient critical attention.

Notably, body image scholarship in the early twentieth century belonged exclusively to the global West and to the domain of neuropathology, with a focus on victims of the world wars who suffered grave wounds (or other injuries) and developed body dysmorphic disorders. It was Paul Schilder who used his expertise in neurology to first discuss body image in the 1930s as a physiological and sociocultural phenomenon.² Since then, much progress has been made in this area, and as Thomas Cash and Linda Smolak point out in Body Image: A Handbook of Science, Practice, and Prevention, the 1990s proved to be the most significant decade in the development of body image studies across global cultures. Simply put, body image today refers to one’s own perceptions and beliefs toward one’s physical appearance and sexual attractiveness. These beliefs are in turn shaped by innumerous sociocultural forces, both local and global, that one grows up with. If contemporary psychologists and cognitive theorists view body image as an experience of embodiment that often induces insecurities and anxieties with regard to one’s appearance, feminists and body studies experts view it as a cultural imperative where “looking good” becomes an integral part of a woman’s social and aesthetic capital.³

Hence, for contemporary Indian women, being normatively “beautiful,” or having an ideal body image, largely refers to being young and able bodied, having a fair, tall, and curvaceous but slim and athletic form with sharp facial features and thick, lustrous hair. If this contemporary ideal developed largely as a result of colonial influences on twentieth-century India, it was massively augmented through the 1990s by Western forces of globalization and liberalization, the media and the Internet revolution, and a globally booming fitness, fashion, and aesthetic economy. Connecting the changing aesthetic contours of female embodiment to the opening up of the Indian market to global influences, Radhika Parameswaran aptly points out that “the tailoring of the government’s liberalization package to suit the interests of multinationals” since the 1990s has “resulted in a shift in the emphasis of national policies from socialist modernity . . . to capitalist modernity—promoting the urban middle-class as a lucrative market for the sale of global consumer culture.”⁴ Under such neoliberal paradigms, a purportedly well-groomed body that subscribes to an ideal body image carries with it connotations of upward social mobility, progress, and empowerment that are tellingly supplied by the growing market of beauty, health, fitness, and fashion products. Ideals of female body image in India today are therefore appropriately modeled on globally dominant Eurocentric physical parameters whose prescriptive requirements have left millions of women anxious, insecure, and uncomfortable in their own skin.⁵

Our book takes into account how the globally celebrated Eurocentric ideal of female body image has beleaguered Indian women since the beginning of the twentieth century, but most palpably over the last thirty-odd years. It also takes into account the fact that where Indian women and their embodiment is concerned, issues such as “purity,” virginity, sexual abuse, fertility, sexually transmitted diseases, menopause, aging, and malnutrition—to name a few—have garnered scholarly attention for supposedly being “serious” enough. However, when it comes to discourses of millions of women languishing under the everyday experience of beauty labor and the imperative of looking normatively beautiful, there hardly exists any substantial scholarly intervention. In fact, one of the most significant questions that inspires this project is why are there so many intellectual deliberations on Indian women’s embodied experiences of poverty, lack of health care, casteism, domestic violence, sexual threats, unemployment, and lack of sanitation in general but none on the appearance bias that daily impacts their lives and fates in powerful ways?⁶ It is for this reason that while this book deeply acknowledges and is informed by the contributions of many South Asian feminist intellectuals and theorists for engaging powerfully with women’s condition and their troubled experiences of embodiment,⁷ it aims to pick up from where most theoretical debates on Indian patriarchy, society, culture, economy, and politics leave off. More precisely, this book seeks to theorize issues of body image vis-à-vis Indian womanhood while connecting this to all other socioeconomic and cultural parameters.

Significantly, unlike Western intellectual traditions, where, since the advent of second-wave feminism, vastly diverse voices of feminist activists and writers ranging from Betty Friedan to Susie Orbach, from Naomi Wolf to Susan Bordo, from Esther D. Rothblum to Deborah L. Rhode, and from Sonya Renee Taylor to Nina Kullrich have compellingly debunked the beauty imperative propagated by the combined intersectional forces of patriarchy, racism, capitalism, consumer culture, and technology for enslaving women,⁸ in India there hardly exists a unified body of scholarship contesting the cultural hegemony of an ideal body image unleashes anxieties and trauma on women. Hence, while powerful voices of resistance against the beauty myth, fat shaming, body shaming, colorism, ageism, and ableism abound in Western intellectual and academic circles, such voices lack coherent and collective theorizing as well as support within India. If the present project is an earnest attempt at developing such a body of scholarship customized specifically for Indian women—who most definitely do not form a homogenous category—it is also an endeavor to draw upon and diversify the arguments put forth by Western scholars and theorists on women’s embodiment. Thus, even as this book is keenly mindful of the fact that Western feminist scholarship on body image speaks to women living under very different geographic, economic, and cultural specifications, it nonetheless draws upon these resistive voices because women’s vulnerability to discourses of beauty and desirability is largely universal and as old as civilization itself. It is this ubiquity and immutability of the beauty imperative that this book seeks to examine and deconstruct. In sum, while this book is indebted to scholars both from the global West and South Asia for vocalizing its take on Indian women’s embodiment, it is also driven by the ambition to outline the diverse, unique, and unheard voices of millions of women pining under discourses of normative feminine appearance.

Our edited volume therefore attempts to highlight the fact that while Indian women face distinct physical and mental challenges and experiences during childhood, adolescence, menarche, turning sexually active, or entering motherhood, menopause, and aging, all these stages are also intrinsically tied to their appearance, which often defines their place in society. We primarily view normative beauty as a matter of social value in line with Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on capital to argue that a woman adhering to an ideal body image finds “credential” or “credit in the various senses of the word.” In India, we therefore claim, the “volume of the social capital possessed” by normatively good-looking women creates a “multiplier effect” and garners “symbolic profits” to convert such women into “a rare, prestigious group”⁹ such that the beauty ideology secures promises of social and economic benefits for them. While in no manner whatsoever do we claim that normatively beautiful women have it all or are free from the troubles experienced by their so-called unattractive counterparts, we definitely want to highlight the fact that every Indian woman, from the very moment of initiation into cultural codes, knows what beauty politics can do. They know that “beauty” refers to “biopower” and functions like “a discourse and concern about the vitality of the body . . . [and] the soul” and that it “can and does become an important site of signification, power, and knowledge about how to live.”¹⁰ As already discussed, while a number of psychologists, anthropologists, and medical practitioners have in the past examined how lived experiences of contemporary Indian women are governed by the beauty imperative,¹¹ a systematic study of this vexed issue as represented in contemporary Indian literature and culture is surprisingly missing.

Empirical and quantitative research (some of which is mentioned in endnote 11) demonstrates that many Indian women and girls continuously grapple with negative body perceptions owing to familial and sociocultural conditioning as well as the messages they receive from popular culture and mass media. Psychologists have recursively examined how a negative body image can lead to self-doubt and anxiety along with self-objectification and self-surveillance within an affected populace. In more serious cases, many women and girls develop eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, that can have fatal consequences. Empirical research also demonstrates that Indian women, depending upon their purchasing power, are increasingly and willingly undergoing invasive aesthetic procedures to obtain the ever-elusive body ideal. Liposuctions, tummy tucks, lip jobs, rhinoplasty procedures, breast augmentations, vaginal tightening, skin lightening, and laser hair removal, among several others, are fads cultivated by many Indian women today. These medical procedures have no doubt helped some women regain their physical abilities and self-esteem after accidents or illnesses altered their natural bodies. And yet, for many regular women and girls, procedures that promise achievable and everlasting beauty often go wrong, leading to devastating outcomes. In addition to youthful, heterosexual, and able-bodied women, queer and trans women, women with special physical abilities, and aging women are often the most vulnerable targets of this overwhelmingly growing market for health, fitness, and aesthetic procedures. Empirical data thus demonstrates that a large proportion of Indian women and girls are in the thrall of the contemporary aesthetic market, which, in turn, is bolstered by mass media, consumerist ideologies, and health industries that together manipulate female body anxieties to create a powerful customer base.

With a keen awareness of the fact that ethnographers, empiricists, and scientists have already addressed the reality of Indian women’s struggles with body image, this book attempts an analysis of body image as a cultural discourse and takes into account literary and popular culture representations of women across age groups, sexual identities, classes, castes, and bodily abilities, among others. This does not imply that the present volume is indifferent to the lived realities of Indian women; instead, it touches upon their experiences of embodiment by examining fictional and not-fictional accounts of both regular and nonnormative female bodies with the help of literary works, autobiographies, memoirs, interviews, films, advertisements, and popular magazines. The chapters in this book examine accounts of girls and women struggling with body anxieties, fears of fitting in, body shaming, body surveillance, eating disorders, medically transformed bodies, and colorism and weightism. Accordingly, this book—with the help of both fictional and factual narratives—addresses the pressures of beautification experienced by tomboys, aging women, queer women, trans women, regular as well as celebrity mothers, young girls, women with special abilities, and Dalit women, to name a few. And in doing so, this book channelizes empirical and quantitative conversations on female body image toward the realm of cultural and theoretical analysis. More important, if, like existing quantitative and empirical studies, this book views body image as a medical and psychological issue, it also substantiates body image as a socially constructed ideology that has profound personal, economic, and cultural repercussions on the lives of women and girls. While some of the bodily experiences discussed here are real and others fictionalized, all of them powerfully respond to and resist a culture that upholds normative beauty as a standard most Indian women are compelled to live up to. This book, then, interrogates the issue of female body image not simply as an empirical or medical construct but as a cultural discourse that both draws upon and undercuts many women’s lived experiences with the politics of beauty.

Where theoretically nuanced discussions on female body image in neoliberal India are concerned, there exist very few but rather significant voices. For instance, Radhika E. Parameswaran has addressed the beauty imperative in essays such as “Global Beauty Queens in Post-Liberalization India” (2006), “Immortal Comics, Epidermal Politics: Representations of Gender and Colorism in India” (2009), and “Shaming the Nation on Public Affairs Television: Barkha Dutt Tackles Colorism on We the People” (2015) to point out how a market-driven agenda defines women’s appearance in the present day. Shailendra Kumar Singh has published works such as “Destigmatization of the Fat Female Body” to discuss fat shaming and body positivity in Indian films and once again connect these to neoliberal conditions. Similarly, Jyotsna Vaid has a compelling take on skin lightness in “Fair Enough? Color and the Commodification of Self in Indian Matrimonials,” which was published in Evelyn Nakano Genn’s edited volume titled Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters (2012), and Catriona Mitchell brought out an edited volume entitled Walking Toward Ourselves: Indian Women Tell Their Stories (2016) that discusses, among various other topics, the multifarious ways lookism impacts contemporary Indian women. Very recently, Nina Kullrich, in Skin Colour Politics: Whiteness and Beauty in India (2022), presented a powerful take on the preference of whiteness in India while connecting this problem to the nation’s colonial past and its transnational present to finally claim that colorist biases in the country have deep-rooted indigenous and social significations. Finally, researcher Manisha Kalidas Kapadia’s dissertation, “Body Image in Indian Women as Influenced by the Indian Media,” is an example of research studies that focus on women’s body image and the influence of visual cultures on them. Such studies, however, have been both sparse and sporadic. This is true despite the fact that since the early 1990s, globalized beauty discourses that augment concepts of an ideal body image have powerfully dominated India’s aesthetic imagination. Parameswaran has investigated such cultural transformations by turning to Anita Anand’s The Beauty Game to claim that “from 1996 to 2000 . . . there was a 25 percent growth in the cosmetics and personal care sectors, and the size of the 2000 cosmetics market was estimated to be about $160 million.”¹² In the same essay, Parameswaran also adds that “Revlon, Maybelline, Oriflame, Avon, and L’Oreal have begun to compete for a share of the surplus income in middle-class Indian women’s purses.”¹³ Even with such facts in place, not many South Asian scholars have attempted to connect the beauty conundrum with India’s current socioeconomic status. Be that as it may, what cannot be denied is that the business of beauty and body image in neoliberal India has grown strong roots within both the nation’s cultural consciousness as well as its women’s psyches over the last three decades. Our collection therefore is a book-length intervention that not only augments academic discourses on female body image but also inaugurates a much-needed cultural debate on the injunctions of lookism, colorism, weightism, ableism, and ageism, among others, that in the present millennium beleaguer Indian women from various walks of life.

This volume, then, is cognizant of the fact that although normative ideals of beauty and femininity have always shaped (and shamed) women’s bodies in India, it is in fact the liberalization of the 1990s that opened the floodgate of beauty expectations through the propagation of a consumer culture. Since the developed Western nations dominate economics and culture globally, and since many developing nations such as India have had a long history of colonial rule, such legacies, along with the contemporary forces of media and market, join hands to create an unshakable hegemony where beauty politics in India is concerned. Accordingly, a body ideal influenced by normative European and American constructs is upheld as the gold standard for Indian women as well. Since the 1990s, this image has been championed by international beauty, health, and fashion industries, which began to make inroads into India with globalization. Also since the 1990s, international beauty pageants won by Indian models (from Sushmita Sen to Manushi Chillar) altered the expectations of female beauty for large groups of indigenous people.¹⁴ The bodies of “beauty queens” became not only desirable but also seemingly attainable through rigorous disciplining and beautification according to the propaganda from mass media and the Internet. Furthermore, since the 1990s, the film industry, which had always played a huge role in creating and perpetuating the nation’s aesthetic ideals, started to uphold Eurocentric norms by casting female actors who were athletic, slim, and invariably fair and tall. With the coming of the new millennium, one increasingly encounters Bollywood film actresses who are tall, slim, and “Barbie doll” like while also being as close to the notorious “size zero” as possible. Over the years, then, Indian women, with their various shades of brown skin, genetically hardwired voluptuousness, and ethnically defined body heights, have been viewing this westernized body as an ideal one and often believe that in attaining it, they can find both acceptance and liberation.¹⁵

Since the genetic makeup of a vast majority of Indian women makes impossible the achievability of the ideal body that is constantly circulated and celebrated in various media, its scopophilic nature and impact makes more and more Indian women susceptible to self-scrutiny, body insecurity, and body anxiety today than ever before.¹⁶ In addition, obtaining the so-called right weight, the ideal skin color, or an overall “attractive” appearance remains a chimera for most women. This is because the purportedly feminine and beautiful Indian body may suddenly be stigmatized as an ugly one if it simply puts on weight, gets tanned, undergoes childbirth, grows old, or is maimed or disfigured by accidents or illness, in addition to many other natural changes that can occur through one’s lifetime. Parameters defining so-called attractive and unattractive bodies therefore do not function as a binary but work on an aesthetic continuum. And slight changes across the spectrum of acceptable and unacceptable appearance impact most women profoundly and can rob them of their confidence in a healthy self-image. It is this unsteady self-image—engendered by an omnipresent and ever-threatening beauty politics—among millions of Indian women that this book seeks to both reveal and reform.

While reading both literary narratives of the body, our volume is informed by the fact that twentieth-century literature ranging from Tagore’s The Home and the World to Manto’s “Bad-surati,” from Premchand’s “Sati” to Markandya’s Two Virgins, and from Karnad’s Hayavadana to Roys’s The God of Small Things have variously explored the constructions of normative female beauty within the Indian context. It needs to be remembered here that within the Indian imagination, normative bodily appearance has traditionally been backed by powerful cultural myths and legacies, and the writers mentioned here have recursively critiqued these norms even as they are deeply informed by them. Hence, if corpulence—even while being viewed as a marker of prosperity—has been a symbol of greed and laziness,¹⁷ dark skin tones have historically symbolized marginalized castes and classes and therefore are associated with moral/emotional flaws.¹⁸ A differently abled body, likewise, while drawing people’s pity, is seen as a karmic retribution for one’s sins,¹⁹ while an aging body, even as it is respected, is also rejected for its decay and infertility.²⁰ Notably, the highly acclaimed literary texts mentioned here insightfully underscore these values and the injustices of appearance bias in twentieth-century India while they speak of female embodiment. Adding to these voices, we note how a more contemporary group of popular Indian writers in English with their “chick lit” novels have taken to addressing beauty politics from a globalized and postmillennial vantage point. Names in this category include Vrushali Telang, Devapriya Roy, Suchi Singh Kalra, and Samah Visaria, whose Can’t Die for Size Zero (2010), The Weight Loss Club: The Curious Experiments of Nancy Housing Cooperative (2013), I Am Big. So What!? (2016), and Encounters of a Fat Bride (2017), respectively, have vigorously questioned normative definitions of “perfect” female bodies and a culturally constructed discourse of “wellness” and self-actualization by giving the center stage to their fat or purportedly unattractive female protagonists. While these novels—sometimes doubling up as self-help manuals—foreground matters of choice and freedom for the modern Indian woman, they also implicitly portray how dietary and exercise regimes, along with dictates from the fashion and cosmetic industry, undercut female agency and autonomy. More important, such works of fiction endorse resistance to body shaming and encourage body positivity by demonstrating how their big or so-called ugly women protagonists fight deep-rooted body biases prevalent both in the outside world and within their own minds.

Like literature, Indian films, too, have responded variously to the normative ideals of femininity, including body image. We note how many mainstream Hindi films of the twentieth century, ranging from Saudagar of the 1970s to Naseeb Apna Apna in the 1980s to Kuch Kuch Hota Hai of the late 1990s along with Vivah in early 2000s, have depicted how beauty politics and women’s body image issues are intertwined, where, if the purportedly ugly woman is shamed for her lack of aesthetic capital, the conventionally beautiful woman is often objectified and unduly sexualized for her so-called biopower. Ironically, then, these films depict women’s conflicted relation with bodily appearance, which even now continues to be one of the most significant parameters for judging the worth of many Indian women. While it keeps such cinematic narratives in mind, our project is also informed by cultural transformations that have happened in the recent past when the hegemony of the “perfect” body has been challenged by Hindi films such as Dum Laga Ke Haisha, Shaandaar, Ujda Chaman, and Bala and regional Indian cinema such as Shunyo e Bukey or Empty Canvas, Size Zero, Thamasha, Kakshi: Amminippilla, and Varane Avashyamund, among others. Presenting a fresh and subversive take on dominant ideals of body image, these new age films have variously attempted to overthrow the tyranny of body shaming and hailed female embodiment in its various natural manifestations.

Significantly, like films that provide a visual medium for their audiences, discourses on beauty politics, body shaming, and body positivity are recursively published by many Indian fashion and fitness magazines that, in turn, boast largely of a female reader base. Examples of these include Women’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Era, Women Fitness, and Health Care, whose cover stories and headlines, while apparently addressing themes of wellness and body maintenance, also implicitly market technologized strategies of looking “good” and therefore feeling “good.” The photoshopped and airbrushed images of men and women in these magazines uphold certain prescriptive norms of physical appearance and end up selling discourses on public health and consumption choices that convert many women (and men) into compliant consumers of products and services that promise them “good” looks and subsequently self-actualization. While this is true of many health and fashion magazines, it is also true that some publications, such as Vogue and Femina, have been variously promoting body positivity. These voices are interestingly being echoed by many Indian television serials, Internet series, advertisements, and social media posts that have both responded to and critiqued normative body image concepts by vigorously celebrating aging, nonnormative gender identities, various shades of skin color, and different body weights and shapes, among others, and therefore added to globally growing instances of body positivity and body acceptance.

Despite growing voices that celebrate inclusivity, body image discourses in neoliberal and globalized India have taken a disturbingly complex form that affects many women in deeply personal ways. As mentioned previously, this problem is gradually but surely being opposed from various sensitized social segments within the nation. The beauty narrative, however, continues to control the nation’s popular imagination, and an all-pervasive appearance bias impacts millions of women even today. The fact therefore remains that in India, there exists a beauty parlor and a gym in every nook and corner, and one constantly comes across billboards and advertisements for invasive/medical procedures that can help one look “good.” No doubt these avenues provide sustenance and employment to many, and yet they also end up bolstering the ever-elusive construct of an ideal body image. Predictably, many women—depending upon their socioeconomic capacities—are increasingly engaging in invasive and expensive beauty and fitness procedures in their real and virtual lives to live up to prescriptive body expectations. From finding acceptance within their own family and community to negotiating the marriage market, and very often while entering the job market, women hailing from diverse classes, castes, and communities are expected to check certain boxes where their height, weight, physical features, and skin color, among others, are concerned. Unfortunately, as existing research demonstrates, these problems have not been analyzed as grave cultural issues and the sporadically existing movements of resistance against them have not been clearly vocalized, especially within scholarly debates.

Informed by such cultural and economic paradigms, this edited volume focuses on globalized India by arguing that liberalization—which was a watershed moment of consumer culture—accentuated the nation’s obsession with physical appearance. This collection identifies and investigates various cultural sites that have disseminated, perpetuated, and also undercut the discourse of an ideal female body image in India, such as literature, popular literature, print media, magazines, mainstream Bollywood, regional cinema, the Internet, advertisements, and social media, among others. Further, it locates the multiple jeopardies that variously marginalize women, especially with regard to embodiment, and appropriately engages with the beauty politics that is faced by Dalit women, women with alternate sexual identities, and women with differently abled bodies to demonstrate how these women are compelled to fight perceptions, discrimination, prejudice, and violence while navigating through the ideals of a normative heterosexual body image on a daily basis. While most of the chapters in this volume underscore how Indian women suffer under normative and prescriptive ideas of body and beauty, some hinge toward the discourse of body positivity in cultural texts and contexts as well.

This book is thematically divided into five sections, each of which addresses the problem of female body image through a specific critical lens. The first section of this book initiates a narrative analysis of bodies purportedly inhabiting societal margins and then moves on to examine representations of as well as resistances to the construction of the body beautiful by contemporary Indian women authors. The next section dwells on how female bodies that have been variously disabled, disfigured, or maimed are treated within Indian culture and how media such as literature and films respond to the crisis-ridden embodiment of women with special abilities or alternate body types. The project then moves on to a section on cinematic discourses surrounding female body image, and by underscoring the popular appeal of cinema vis-à-vis depiction of female bodies, it demonstrates how the injustices of appearance discrimination define the hegemonic beauty norms for women, both on screen and in real life. Carrying forward the discussion on female body image and its ramifications within popular culture, the final section in this book examines both case studies and real-life narratives of women’s embodied experiences generated by advertisement, media, celebrity guidebooks, and even tomboys, who together represent the complex amalgam of forces that at the same time reinstate and resist the celebratory rhetoric surrounding an ideal female body image. In conclusion, this project both outlines and examines the various problems that impede the development of a body positive movement in India while also focusing on how such enabling movements are gradually gaining strength and popularity in both real and virtual platforms across the nation.

The first section of this book, titled “Bodies on the Margins: ‘Othering,’ Hegemonic Beauty Norms, and Female Bodies,” contains two chapters, one by Nishat Haider and one by Tanupriya and Aratrika Bose. If Haider’s “Imag(in)ing the Dalit Woman: Body Image and Identity in Bama’s Sangati” dwells upon the novel Sangati (2005) by Faustina Mary Fatima Rani, a.k.a. Bama, to foreground Tamil Dalit women’s struggle with body image and their relationship with the “lived body” by drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s discussion on embodied consciousness, it also harnesses the sensual spirit and the oral and textual traditions that define issues such as beauty, sexuality, menarche, and aging for Dalit women. Haider evaluates how body image can be a feminist project to highlight the troubled embodied experiences of Dalit women wherein physical appearance gets entwined with psychology, economics, and issues of class and caste. With the help of body and gender studies experts, Haider examines how memory and experience are fused within the materiality of Dalit female bodies and how gender, bodily appearance, and skin color together relegate such bodies to societal margins. Likewise, Tanupriya and Aratrika Bose, in “Bodies at Surveillance: Appearance, Social Control, and Female Body Image in India’s Postmillennial Lesbian and Trans Narratives,” focus on works such as Manju Kapoor’s A Married Woman (2002), Abha Dawesar’s Babyji (2005), A. Revathi’s The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story (2010), and Manobi Bandyopadhyay’s A Gift of Goddess Laxmi (2017) to address the problem of body image for women inhabiting societal margins, such as lesbians and those with transgender bodies. The authors of this chapter examine how women with nonnormative bodies negotiate survival within conditions obsessed with heteronormative female bodies and ideals of beauty. By drawing upon psychologists, queer theorists, and body studies scholars, Tanupriya and Bose argue that “not feminine enough” bodies of lesbian and trans women experience anxiety, in between-ness, and dissonance while also becoming traumatized sites of political control. Finally, if this chapter, with the help of both fiction and autobiography, explains how homophobia and transphobia govern the bodies and self-image of many Indian women with nonnormative sexual identities, it also presents a clarion call toward body positivity through a collective acceptance of lesbian and trans bodies with all their distinct attributes.

The second section of this book is titled “Reflections on Beauty Politics: Gender and Body Image in the Works of Contemporary Indian Women Writers.” Developing on the fiction and nonfiction examined in the first section, this section offers a close reading of works by Indian women writers and intellectuals who, over the last few decades, have powerfully critiqued a pressing need among women to appear normatively beautiful. This section therefore begins with Swatie’s “Writing Woman / Woman Writing: Shashi Deshpande and the Aesthetics of the Female Body,” which engages with Shashi Deshpande’s short stories, such as “Why a Robin?,” “The First Lady,” and “The Intrusion,” with a specific focus on female body image. Delving deep into the complexities of mother-daughter relations, aging bodies, and domestic violence, this chapter connects women’s appearance with their self-identity, social acceptability, sexual desirability, and marital relationships to ultimately uncover how a commodity culture creates and governs female embodiment. If Swatie, in this chapter, presents Deshpande as an intellectual responding to India’s neoliberal experiences, she also presents the writer’s feminist sentiments as precursors to the female body image discourse that globally gained momentum through the 1990s. The next chapter in this section is Shubhra Ray’s “Manjula Padmanabhan and the Question of Problematizing Embodied Gender Identity: A Reading of Getting There.” By arguing that the body is not just a biological reality but also a discursive construct, Ray deploys theories on body image to claim that in neoliberal and globalized India, women are expected to adhere to prescriptive norms of appearance, failing which they experience painful instances of body shaming. Ray connects these assertions with Padmanabhan’s memoir, where the writer grapples with her own so-called physical inadequacies, her body weight, and her distaste for the institution of marriage, which, in turn, puts a heavy burden on women to look conventionally beautiful. Ray highlights the contemporaneity and relevance of Getting There for addressing how the embodied subjectivity of Indian women often inhibits them from unconditionally accepting their natural bodily selves. The final chapter in this section is Annika Taneja’s “Future Forms: Female Body Image in Indian Dystopian Fiction,” which examines three works of Indian science fiction, namely, Harvest (1997) by Manjula Padmanabhan, The Lesson (2015) by Sowmya Rajendran, and Clone (2019) by Priya S. Chabria. Taneja’s chapter begins by outlining globally prevalent debates on female body image and how Indian women, too, are subject to dictates of prescriptive beauty. Taneja then proceeds to examine women’s corporeality within fictional futures where she demonstrates how socioeconomic and transnational forces governing embodiment merge with technology to remodel women’s bodily aesthetics. By delving into fictional dystopias that variously symbolize present-day India in the three novels, Taneja finally celebrates women who reclaim their bodies from the clutches of an overarching beauty myth to craft alternate and empowering forms of embodiment.

The third section of this volume, titled “Alternate Beauties? Disabled and Disfigured Female Bodies in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture,” borrows from feminist theory, body image scholarship, and disability studies to discuss how women with special abilities and alternate corporeal identities are often marginalized and stigmatized in India. It contains two chapters, one by Anurima Chanda and one by Samrita Sinha, that together problematize and conflate discourses of ableism and an ideal body image to underscore the vexed experiences of women with alternate abilities, body deformities, or bodies altered by disease and/or accident. Chanda’s chapter is titled “Fitting In When Your Body Does Not: Young Girl Characters with Disabilities in Contemporary Indian English Fiction for Children” and examines two contemporary young adult Indian English novels—Leela Gour Broome’s Flute in the Forest (2010) and Devika Rangachari’s Queen of Ice (2014)—that portray girl characters with alternate physical abilities. Chanda’s chapter argues that hegemonic discourses surrounding women’s beauty and sexual desirability have serious and detrimental effects on differently abled girl children who inevitably grow up with a sense of shame toward their bodies, which, in turn, become the primary site of their identity formation. Chanda hails these novels for unapologetically celebrating impaired bodies, a strategy that, she argues, undercuts dominant beauty standards by generating an “oppositional gaze” that instead of focusing on the deformity highlights the functionality and appeal of differently abled bodies. Like Chanda, Sinha, in her chapter entitled “Pathologies of ‘Body Fictions’: A Comparative Study of Margarita with a Straw and Kuch Bheege Alfaaz,” treats two cinematic narratives on alternately abled and nonnormative female bodies as counterdiscourses to dominant beauty norms. Informed by body image scholarship and psychoanalytic theories, Sinha discusses how women with disabilities or disfigurements are labeled abhorrent and dysfunctional and are systemically marginalized by society. Hence, Sinha examines how a queer young woman suffering from cerebral palsy in Margarita with a Straw and a young vivacious woman grappling with leukoderma in Kuch Bheege Alfaaz suffer body dysmorphic disorders and eventually subvert body ideals that celebrate ableist discourses of body aesthetics. In sum, if Sinha’s chapter demonstrates how films as a visual media are powerful means to sensitize the larger culture about issues of aesthetics vis-à-vis disability, it also sets the stage for the next section, which powerfully captures the power of cinema in generating cultural messages on beauty politics.

The fourth section of this book, titled “Scopophilic Cultures: Female Body Image in Contemporary Indian Cinema,” contains two chapters by Shailendra Kumar Singh that deal with Indian mainstream as well as regional cinema and its engagement with women’s bodily aesthetics. A scholar of feminist body studies and media studies, Singh aptly challenges the various appearance-based injustices both practiced and propagated by commercial Indian cinema. In his chapter titled “Unjust Gradations of Fairness: Gender, Looks, and Colorism in Postmillennial Hindi Cinema,” Singh examines India’s fascination with and privileging of light skin tones by demonstrating how dark skin, which was earlier attributed to villains and vamps in Hindi cinema, has gradually come to be linked with the urban underclass and rural populace, symbolizing a lack of progress and opportunity. In this chapter, Singh examines two postmillennial Hindi films, namely, Udta Punjab (2016) and Bala (2019), where the dark-skinned female protagonist is either made to represent an impoverished rural India or within urban settings is made to fight a humiliating battle toward self-acceptance. In all, by proving how dark-skinned Indian women suffer enormous body shaming and social discrimination both on screen and in real life, this chapter highlights how contemporary Hindi cinema—even with its sporadic attempts at body positivity—is often guilty of failing to attribute cultural goodness and sexual desirability to dark skin. Singh’s second chapter in this section, titled “Fetishism, Scopophilia, and the Fat Actresses of Bhojpuri Cinema,” investigates regional Indian cinema to claim how representations of the fat female body engender an eroticized and disparaging ideology of embodiment while catering to certain types of audiences. Singh argues that in no way is the fat female body represented in Bhojpuri cinema a rebellion against the weightism that dominates Bollywood but instead is a vulgar fetish consumed voraciously by the voyeuristic male gaze of the regional audience. Bemoaning the misuse of the subversive potential of regional cinema in countering fat shaming, Singh claims that commercially successful Bhojpuri films, instead of creating enabling body discourses, end up pathologically eroticizing fat female corporeality.

Adding to debates on visual media surrounding womanhood and beauty politics as discussed in the fourth section, the fifth and final section of this book, entitled “Neoliberal Cultures and Female Body Image in Indian Advertisements and Popular Media,” focuses on different kinds of visual cultures, such as advertisements and celebrity guidebooks as well as films and real-life case studies, to examine the problem of female body image in contemporary India. It begins with “Gender, Body Image, and the Aspirational Middle-Class Imaginary of Indian Advertising” by Kavita Daiya, Sukshma Vedere, and Turni Chakrabarti, who investigate female body image in contemporary Indian advertising produced between 2010 and 2020. Daiya et al. begin with a critically informed analysis of the advertising of skin-care products since the 1990s to argue that discourses on body normativity are propagated by the many Indian commercials that in turn are influenced by colorist and racist biases. The authors then turn their attention to jewelry commercials from the present millennium to demonstrate that while these ads no longer focus on conventions of familial prosperity and instead try to highlight the bride’s individuality, they still remain trapped within heteronormative patriarchal values where issues of women’s appearance and career choice/mobility are concerned. In the final section of this chapter, Daiya et al. examine matrimonial advertisements in Hindi digital media. By drawing upon the works of South Asian feminist scholars, the authors explore problems of body image and colorism in wedding advertisements to claim that while these ads superficially endorse women’s empowerment and nuclear families, in truth they remain trapped within conventional paradigms of appearance and gender power politics. In the hope to augment feminist voices and activism, Daiya et al. conclude their chapter by stating that capital, technology, and gender oppressions come together in Indian commercials to bespeak the injustices propagated by the hegemony of an ideal body image that needs to be vocally countered. The next chapter in this section furthers the critique of normative embodiment by taking into account Indian women celebrities as well as other women who struggle hard to live up to the beauty imperative as they go through various phases of life, including motherhood. In “Unpacking Compliances and Resistances in the Indian Yummy Mummy,” Sucha­rita Sarkar makes a compelling argument on the globally celebrated, media-generated, and disturbingly problematic construct of the “yummy mummy,” with a focus on Indian mothers and their caregiving practices. Reading the construct of the yummy mummy as both a neoliberal extension of patriarchal motherhood as well as a globally hailed discourse on empowered mothering, Sarkar claims that this construct—endorsed by both celebrities and popular culture—compels many mothers to discipline and control their bodies to live up to normative beauty standards that have come to define motherhood. Deploying tropes of self-improvement, claims Sarkar, the yummy mummy concept in reality pushes many Indian women to suffer body dysmorphic disorders, anxiety, and fatphobia upon entering motherhood. As a result, adds Sarkar, such women undertake harmful body and beauty regimes and even surgical procedures hoping to achieve makeovers that apparently promise a more fulfilling and glamorous life. Simply put, Sarkar’s chapter adds to the much-needed debate on mothering practices and maternal bodies that remain in thrall to an ideal body image in contemporary India. The third and final chapter in this section is “‘Hey! She’s a Bro!’: Tomboys, Body Image, and Desire in India” by Ketaki Chowkhani. Delving into real-life case studies of women with nonnormative bodies, Chowkhani argues that for diverging from heteronormative female embodiment and its conventional aesthetics, tomboys in India make a marginalized category and suffer both discrimination and humiliation, especially with regard to social acceptance and romantic relationships. By drawing upon autoethnographies of tomboys, Bollywood cinema, and popular culture, Chowkhani argues that tomboys—or, more specifically, heterosexual tomboys—powerfully undercut contemporary hegemonic discourses on femininity, body image, sexual desire, and heteronormativity. In sum, Chowkhani’s chapter adds to categories of women’s nonnormative corporeality and their experiences of body anxieties and hence provides a fitting closure to this book’s discussions on Indian women vis-à-vis beauty politics.

With the twelve chapters outlined so far, this book initiates a critical conversation on the politics of appearance that defines the lives of many Indian women in the present. More important, while this book attempts to address female embodiment across class, caste, communities, body types, age groups, and sexual identities, among others, it by no means claims to encompass Indian womanhood and its embodied experiences in all their various forms and guises. Instead, this book concludes with the hope that more debates and discussions will emerge to address women’s embodiment from the point it leaves off and that these debates will go a long way with both academics and activists, who can together sensitize a larger culture toward body inclusivity. We also hope that these debates will grow in mass and momentum over the years so that it is not only the female body image that gains attention but also that the body image issues that plague men, adolescents, older adults, people with alternate sexual identities, and people with alternate physical abilities, among others, find the acknowledgment they rightfully deserve. That said, this book is also mindful of the body positive movement that is globally gaining recognition and hence concludes with a note on how body inclusivity is gradually taking shape in India. The fact that appearance discrimination and beauty politics are not going unquestioned but are being identified, examined, and challenged by certain quarters, however small and sporadic, is a welcome change, and this book aspires to add to such voices.

To sum up: given the significance of the body image discourse in contemporary India, and given the fact that it affects women at almost visceral levels, our edited collection brings together contributions from experts on literary analysis, film analysis, gender and sexuality studies, young adult literature, disability studies, caste scholarship, motherhood studies, gerontology, and body image studies with a focus on Indian literature and popular culture. Further, by viewing how fair skin, slimness, and tallness along with youthfulness, able-bodiedness, and agility are all viewed as desirable physical traits for Indian women, and how these traits affect the self-image of women across all age groups, castes, classes, and sexual and physical orientations, this volume seeks to initiate a debate on the appearance bias that is deeply entrenched in India’s cultural consciousness. In addition, we hope that the book’s intervention on popular culture depictions of technically advanced aesthetic procedures that many Indians are increasingly investing in—sometimes at the cost of their own physical and mental well-being—goes on to sensitize readers toward concepts of choice and autonomy as they think of body styling and alterations. All in all, this volume aspires to critique the hegemony of a “perfect” body that drives many women not just toward insecurity but also often toward self-harm. In conclusion, then, this book hopes to generate sensitivity and awareness toward body positivity that endorses healthy and happy bodies and minds while also rejecting the tyranny of a globally accepted prescriptive body image. As editors, we firmly believe that it is high time such a volume was published to not only add to body image scholarship but also to promote awareness and advocacy toward body positivity and body inclusivity in India.

NOTES

1. C. P. Chandrasekhar describes the advent of Indian neoliberalism in the following words: “India’s tryst with neoliberalism—the economic framework that preaches market fundamentalism but uses the state to engineer a redistribution of income and assets in favour of finance capital and big business—is routinely traced to 1991.” See Chandrasekhar, “Indian Neoliberalism.”

2. For more details, see the introduction by Cash and Smolak in Body Image.

3. Lookism, beauty norms, and appearance-based discrimination when viewed as outcomes of Bourdieu’s cultural and social capital (as discussed later in this introduction) provide deep and insightful paradigms of female embodiment. See also Chakravarty, “Reflections on the Body Beautiful”; Hakim, “Erotic Capital”; Anderson et al., “Aesthetic Capital”; and Hamermesh and Biddle, “Beauty and the Labor Market,” for discussion on similar lines.

4. Parameswaran, “Global Queens, National Celebrities,” 348.

5. See how effects of globally dominant discourses on embodiment affect women in Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity.” Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1997); and Liebelt, Böllinger, and Vierke, eds., Beauty and the Norm. In contrast with these arguments, Nancy Etcoff presents a persuasive hypothesis while defending the beauty ideal in Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (2000) to claim that humans are biologically hardwired and culturally conditioned to be attracted to certain bodily attributes, which is why the beauty ideal continues to define human worth in profound and immutable ways. Positions such as Etcoff’s have predictably been problematized and contested by feminists who want women’s bodies to be accepted and cherished for their naturalness and not be subject to patriarchal and consumerist interventions.

6. This book draws the concept of appearance or beauty bias from Deborah L. Rhode, The Beauty Bias, where the writer demands that discrimination based on one’s appearance be treated as a social as well as legal offence. Rhode points out that “most people believe that bias based on beauty is inconsequential, inevitable, or unobjectionable” (2). Existing across cultures in a globalized albeit unequal world, “prevailing beauty standards,” explains Rhode, “privilege those with white-European features and the time and money to invest in their appearance,” and she further argues that “women face greater pressures than men to look attractive and pay greater penalties for falling short” (7). We view appearance bias or beauty bias as a bias against women who do not befit prescriptive definitions of beauty and attractiveness, specifications of which have been discussed previously in this introduction.

7. This book is broadly informed by theoretical works of South Asian scholars, including Mankekar, Screening Culture; Chaudhuri, Refashioning India; Munshi, ed., Images of the “Modern” Woman; Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity; Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist; Thapan, Living the Body; Ghosh, Impaired Bodies; and Sangari and Vaid, eds., Recasting Women, among many others, to substantiate its claims on the intersectionality of oppressive and delimiting forces that beleaguer Indian women and their embodiment.

8. See studies like Wolf, The Beauty Myth; Bordo, Unbearable Weight; Brumberg, The Body Project; Peiss, Hope in a Jar; Huberman, Through Thick & Thin; and Jones, Beauty Imagined, for detailed and historicized discussions on how science, technology, and health care have, over time, merged with market forces to craft a powerful culture of body maintenance and enhancement, especially for women.

9. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 249.

10. Nguyen, “The Biopower of Beauty,” 364.

11. See, for example, Shroff and Thompson, “Body Image and Eating Disturbance”; Gupta et al., “Weight-Related Body Image Concerns”; Rekha and Maran, “Advertisement Pressure”; Mendhekar et al., “Anorexia Nervosa”; Nagar and Virk, “The Struggle”; Vaidyanathan, Kuppili, and Menon, “Eating Disorders”; Garbett et al., “Cultural Adaptation”; and Lewis-Smith et al., “Evaluating a Body Image,” as examples of psychological, medical, and empirical research on how real women are affected by the beauty ideal.

12. Parameswaran, “Global Beauty Queens,” 420.

13. Parameswaran, “Global Beauty Queens,” 420.

14. See Chatterjee and Rastogi, “The Changing Politics” and “Television Culture” for discussion on how beauty labor in neoliberal India has changed and how these changes are especially visible with the popular media of films and television.

15. See the general impact of globalization on women in neoliberal India in Chatterjee, “Feminism, the False Consciousness”; and Pathak, “Presentable,” 314–329.

16. Body image discourses and appearance bias that have existed in India over centuries and have been examined by scholars are briefly touched upon in this introduction. Significantly, however, most other works on this subject mainly take into account an empirical and quantitative perspective with some inputs from philosophy and phenomenology while examining matters of embodiment. In addition, an important book on this matter is Dehejia and Paranjape, eds., Saundarya, but this book also focuses primarily on Indian aesthetics and the concept of beauty in art rather than the issue of body image as we understand it today.

17. See Praween Agrawal et al., “The Psychosocial Factors.”

18. See Parameswaran and Cardoza, “Immortal Comics”; and Kullrich, “In This Country.”

19. Gupta, “How Hindus Cope.”

20. For stigma associated with the aging body, see Nussbaum’s “Ageing, Stigma, and Disgust.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agrawal, Praween, Kamla Gupta, Vinod Mishra, and Sutapa Agrawal. “The Psychosocial Factors Related to Obesity: A Study among Overweight, Obese, and Morbidly Obese Women in India.” Women and Health 55, no. 6 (2015): 623–645.

Anand, Anita. The Beauty Game. Delhi: Penguin, 2002.

Anderson, Tammy L., Catherine Grunert, Arielle Katz, and Samantha Lovascio. “Aesthetic Capital: A Research Review on Beauty Perks and Penalties.” Sociology Compass 4 (2010): 564–575.

Ayyathan, Dinjith, dir. Kakshi: Amminippilla. Featuring Asif Ali, Ahamed Siddique, and Fara Shibla. Zarah Films, Kerala, 2019.

Bahl, Vikas, dir. Shaandaar. Featuring Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, and Pankaj Kapur. Phantom Films and Dharma Productions, Mumbai, 2015.

Barjatya, Sooraj R. dir. Vivah. Featuring Shahid Kapoor, Amrita Rao, and Anupam Kher. Rajshri Productions, Mumbai, 2006.

Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Feminism and Foucault, Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, 29–44. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1988.

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Brumberg, Joan Jacob. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. New York: Vintage, 2010.

Cash, Thomas F., and Linda Smolak, eds. Body Image: A Handbook of Science, Practice, and Prevention. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2012.

Chakravarty, Sumita S. “Reflections on the Body Beautiful in Indian Popular Culture.” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011): 395–416.

Chandrasekhar, C. P. “Indian Neoliberalism: A Toxic Gift from Global Finance.” Frontline, September 24, 2021. Available at https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/indian-neoliberalism-economic-reforms-at-30-a-toxic-gift-from-global-finance/article36290562.ece.

Chatterjee, Ipsita. “Feminism, the False Consciousness of Neoliberal Capitalism? Informalization, Fundamentalism, and Women in an Indian City.” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 19, no. 6 (2012): 790–809.

Chatterjee, Srirupa, and Shreya Rastogi. “The Changing Politics of Beauty Labour in Indian Cinema.” South Asian Popular Culture 18, no. 3 (2020): 271–282.

———. “Television Culture and the Beauty Bias Problem: An Analysis of India’s Postmillennial Television Serials.” Media Asia 49, no. 3 (December 2021): 213–234.

Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. Refashioning India: Gender, Media, and a Transformed Public Discourse. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2017.

Dehejia, Harsha V., and Makarand Paranjape, eds. Saundarya: The Perception and Practice of Beauty in India. New Delhi: Samvad India Foundation, 2003.

Etcoff, Nancy. Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. 2nd ed. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. 1957. Reprint, London: Penguin, 2010.

Ganguly, Kaushik, dir. Shunyo E Buke or Empty Canvas. Featuring Churni Ganguly, Kaushik Sen, and Kharaj Mukherjee. Forthright Media and Entertainment, Kolkata, 2005.

Garbett, Kirsty M., Helena Lewis-Smith, Anshula Chaudhry, Nora Uglik-Marucha, Silia Vitoratou, Hemal Shroff, Megha Dhillon, and Phillippa C. Diedrichs. “Cultural Adaptation and Validation of the Body Esteem Scale for Adults and Adolescents for Use in English among Adolescents in Urban India.” Body Image 37 (June 2021): 246–254.

Ghosh, Nandini. Impaired Bodies, Gendered Lives: Everyday Realities of Disabled Women. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016.

Gupta, Madhulika A., Santosh K. Chaturvedi, Praful C. Chandarana, and Andrew M. Johnson. “Weight-Related Body Image Concerns among 18–24-Year-Old Women in Canada and India: An Empirical Comparative Study.” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 50, no. 4 (April 2001): 193–198. Available at https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-3999(00)00221-X.

Gupta, Vidya Bhushan. “How Hindus Cope with Disability.” Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health 15, no. 1 (2011): 72–78.

Hakim, Catherine. “Erotic Capital.” European Sociological Review 26, no. 5 (2010): 499–518.

Hamermesh, Daniel S., and Jeff E. Biddle. “Beauty and the Labour Market.” American Economic Review 84, no. 5 (1994): 1174–1194. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2117767.

Hamza, Ashraf, dir. Thamasha. Featuring Vinay Forrt, Chinnu Chandni Nair, and Navas Vallikkunnu. Happy Hours Entertainment, Kerala, 2019.

Huberman, Warren L. Through Thick & Thin: The Emotional Journey of Weight Loss Surgery. New York: Graphite Press, 2012.

Johar, Karan, dir. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Featuring Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol Devgan, and Rani Mukherjee. Dharma Productions, Mumbai, 1998.

Jones, Geoffrey. Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Kalra, Suchi Singh. I Am Big. So What!? New Delhi: Prakash Books, 2016.

Kapadia, Manisha Kalidas. Body Image in Indian Women as Influenced by the Indian Media. Ph.D. diss., Texas Women’s University, 2009. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.

Karnad, Girish. Hayavadana. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Katariya, Sharad, dir. Dum Laga Ke Haisha. Featuring Sanjay Mishra, Ayushmann Khurrana, and Bhumi Pednekar. Yash Raj Films, Mumbai, 2015.

Kaushik, Amar, dir. Bala. Featuring Ayushmann Khurrana, Bhumi Pednekar, and Yami Gautam. Maddock Films, Mumbai, 2019.

Kovelamudi, Prakash, dir. Size Zero. Featuring Arya, Anushka Shetty, and Sonal Chauhan. PVP Cinema, 2015.

Kullrich, Nina. “‘In This Country Beauty Is Defined by Fairness of Skin’: Skin Colour Politics and Social Stratification in India.” In Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance, edited by Claudia Liebelt, Sarah Böllinger, and Ulf Vierke, 245–297. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

———. Skin Colour Politics: Whiteness and Beauty in India. Berlin: Springer, 2022.

Lewis-Smith, Helena, Kirsty May Garbett, Anshula Chaudhry, Megha Dhillon, Hemal Shroff, Paul White, and Phillippa Claire Diedrichs. “Evaluating a Body Image School-Based Intervention in India: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Body Image 44 (March 2023): 148–156.

Liebelt, Claudia, Sarah Böllinger, and Ulf Vierke, eds. Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Majumdar, Rochona. Marriage and Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Mankekar, Purnima. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Manto, Sadat Hasan. “Bad-surati.” Rekhta. Accessed October 25, 2017. Available at https://www.rekhta.org/manto/bad-surati-saadat-hasan-manto-manto?lang=hi.

Markandaya, Kamala. Two Virgins. Delhi: Penguin, 1973.

Mendhekar, D. N., K. Arora, D. Lohia, A. Agarwal, and R. C. Jiloha. “Anorexia Nervosa: An Indian Perspective.” National Medical Journal of India 22, no. 4 (2009): 181–182. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41396435.

Menon, Nivedita. Seeing Like a Feminist. Delhi: Penguin, 2012.

Mitchell, Catriona, ed. Walking toward Ourselves: Indian Women Tell Their Stories. Noida: Harper Collins, 2016.

Munshi, Shoma, ed. Images of the “Modern” Woman in Asia: Global Media, Local Meanings. Surrey: Curzon, 2001.

Nagar, Ishita, and Rukhsana Virk. “The Struggle between the Real and Ideal: Impact of Acute Media Exposure on Body Image of Young Indian Women.” Sage Open 7, no. 1 (2017). Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244017691327.

Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror.” Signs 36, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 359–383. Available at https://doi.org/10.1086/655914.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Ageing, Stigma, and Disgust.” In The Empire of Disgust: Prejudice, Discrimination, and Policy in India and the US, edited by Zoya Hasan, Aziz Z. Huq, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Vidhu Verma, 146–163. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Orbach, Susie. Fat Is a Feminist Issue. London: Arrow Books, 1978.

Parameswaran, Radhika E. “Global Beauty Queens in Post-Liberalization India.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 17, no. 4 (2005): 419–426. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/10402650500374702.

———. “Global Queens, National Celebrities: Tales of Feminine Triumph in Post‐Liberalization India.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 4 (2004): 346–370. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/0739318042000245363.

———. “Shaming the Nation on Public Affairs Television: Barkha Dutt Tackles Colorism on We the People.” Journalism Studies 16, no. 5 (2015): 680–691. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2015.1054175.

Parameswaran, Radhika E., and Kavitha Cardoza. “Immortal Comics, Epidermal Politics.” Journal of Children and Media 3, no. 1 (2009): 19–34. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/17482790802576956.

Pathak, Abhishek, dir. Ujda Chaman. Featuring Sunny Singh Nijjar, Maanvi Gagroo, and Saurabh Shukla. Panorama Studios, Mumbai, 2019.

Pathak, Gauri. “‘Presentable’: The Body and Neoliberal Subjecthood in Contemporary India.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture 20, no. 4–5 (2014): 314–329.

Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Premchand, Munshi. “Sati.” Originally published 1927. Translated by Bharti Arora. In Premchand: The Complete Short Stories, edited by M. Asaduddin, 3:120–127. Delhi: Penguin Books, 2017.

Rao, T. Rama, dir. Naseeb Apna Apna. Featuring Farah Naaz, Radhika Sarathkumar, and Rishi Kapoor. Pen Studios: Mumbai, 1986.

Rekha V, Sasi, and K. Maran. “Advertisement Pressure and Its Impact on Body Dissatisfaction and Body Image Perception of Women in India.” Global Media Journal, Indian edition 3, no. 1 (June 2012): 1–9. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255173411.

Rhode, Deborah L. The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Rothblum, Esther D., and Laura Brown. Overcoming Fear of Fat. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Rothblum, Esther D., and Sondra Solovay. The Fat Studies Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Delhi: Penguin, 1997.

Roy, Devapriya. The Weight Loss Club: The Curious Experiments of Nancy Housing Cooperative. Delhi: Rupa, 2013.

Roy, Sudhendu, dir. Saudagar. Featuring Amitabh Bachchan, Nutan Bhel, and Padma Khanna. Rajshri Productions, Mumbai, 1973.

Sangari, Kumkum, and Sudesh Vaid, eds. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi: Zubaan, 1984.

Sathyan, Anoop, dir. Varane Avashyamund. Featuring Shobana, Suresh Gopi, and Kalyani Priyadarshan. M Star Satellite Communications and Wayfarer Films, Kerela, 2020.

Shroff, Hemal, and J. Kevin Thompson. “Body Image and Eating Disturbance in India: Media and Interpersonal Influences.” International Journal of Eating Disorders 35, no. 2 (March 2004): 198–203. Available at https://doi.org/10.1002/eat.10229.

Singh, Shailendra Kumar. “Destigmatization of the Fat Female Body in Size Zero and Dum Laga ke Haisha.” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society 7, no. 3 (2018): 247–263. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2018.1424411.

Tagore, Rabindranath. The Home and the World. 1919. Reprint, Delhi: Penguin, 2005.

Taylor, Sonya Renee. The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love. Oakland: Berrett Koehler Publishers, 2018.

Telang, Vrushali. Can’t Die for Size Zero. Delhi: Rupa, 2010.

Thapan, Meenakshi. Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Sage, 2009.

Vaid, Jyotsna. “Fair Enough? Color and the Commodification of Self in Indian Matrimonials.” Shades of Difference: Why Skin Color Matters, edited by Evelyn Nakano Genn, 148–165. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Vaidyanathan, Sivapriya, Pooja Patnaik Kuppili, and Vikas Menon. 2019. “Eating Disorders: An Overview of Indian Research.” Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine 41, no. 4 (2019): 311–317.

Visaria, Samah. Encounters of a Fat Bride. Delhi: Random House, 2017.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. 1991. Reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.