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After winning Miss America, Nina Davuluri was attacked by racists on Twitter.
What should give us pause, however, is the debate in India that has followed Davuluri’s American coronation. This is set out at some length in a column by Lakshmi Chaudhry, who makes the polemical (and paradoxical) point that our Miss America is “too Indian” to stand a chance of being Miss India.
In a nutshell, what Indians are saying (many openly and some with chagrin) is that Davuluri is too dark, too dusky, for the conventional standards of Indian beauty. In India a light skin—“fair” is the word most Indians deploy in the vocabulary of beauty—is prized in women, and lightness of skin is elevated above all other facial features as a signifier of beauty. It matters not one whit that Davuluri’s physiognomy is immensely pleasing to the eye, that her smile could light up a small cricket stadium, that her lustrous hair is a thing to marvel at, because her epidermis is far too many shades removed from “fairness” for her to be considered beautiful. This matter is, in the Indian dialectic of beauty, nonnegotiable. In matters of pigment, Indians can be as dogmatic as party chieftains once were in Stalin’s Moscow.
What should give us pause, however, is the debate in India that has followed Davuluri’s American coronation. This is set out at some length in a column by Lakshmi Chaudhry, who makes the polemical (and paradoxical) point that our Miss America is “too Indian” to stand a chance of being Miss India.
In a nutshell, what Indians are saying (many openly and some with chagrin) is that Davuluri is too dark, too dusky, for the conventional standards of Indian beauty. In India a light skin—“fair” is the word most Indians deploy in the vocabulary of beauty—is prized in women, and lightness of skin is elevated above all other facial features as a signifier of beauty. It matters not one whit that Davuluri’s physiognomy is immensely pleasing to the eye, that her smile could light up a small cricket stadium, that her lustrous hair is a thing to marvel at, because her epidermis is far too many shades removed from “fairness” for her to be considered beautiful. This matter is, in the Indian dialectic of beauty, nonnegotiable. In matters of pigment, Indians can be as dogmatic as party chieftains once were in Stalin’s Moscow.
@ TG
Das why mi spell ie wid ongle wan "S". All dem odda people whe keep tinking dem is White, getting ah reality check.
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