[Reader-list] The Beauties of Miranda

[Shivam Vij]

Here is a small extract from a very long article by
the famous Madhu Kishwar, editor of Manushi. This
extract proves my point that ragging, faar from giving
way to a closely knit college/hostel community, is in
fact a divisive strategy.


  When India "Missed" the Universe
   
  By Madhu Kishwar
  Manushi 
 
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/sawweb/sawnet/beauty.html


[I have left the first six paras and I begin from the
second section, which, along with the third,
tangentially deals with ragging.]


The Beauties of Miranda

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

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


A Hallowed Tradition? 

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

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

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

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

Therefore, when I got elected as president of the
Union in the following year, the two issues we began
the year with were: 

* An end to nasty and often obscene ragging of
freshers by the seniors. 
* An end to the beauty contest. 

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

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

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

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

I remember reacting with a great deal of annoyance at
being labelled a feminist and being called the Kate
Millet of India for spearheading the campaign against
the Miranda House beauty contest. My response was to
reject such parallels because, until then, I had
practically no knowledge of the western feminist
movement, nor the issues it had raised. In those days
I saw western society mainly though the Marxist prism
as a decadent bourgeois society and wanted as little
to do with it as possible. Indian papers in the early
70s carried very little information about other
countries. What little trickled though carried with it
the stereotyping and biases of the western media on
womens issues. Books by feminist authors had not yet
invaded the Indian market as they came to do in later
years. 

Interestingly, it was not just my response which was
based on sheer ignorance. The hep elite of Miranda
House ended up by taking such a hostile stand against
our efforts to abolish the beauty contest and indulged
in a vicious hate campaign against us because they too
seemed unaware that the beauty contests were being
similarly challenged by a newly emerging womens
movement. In the West, beauty contests were on their
way to becoming unfashionable, at least among the
intellectual elite. In those days there was a much
larger time lag in ideas and technology from the West
to third world countries like India, unlike today,
when Star TV, CNN and BBC are able to bridge the
information gap almost instantaneously. 

[Read the full article at
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/sawweb/sawnet/beauty.html
]

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