Showcasing India: gender, geography, and globalization.

Abstract

n a cool late November evening in Bangalore, India, a city held under siege by a 12,500-strong security contingent, Irene Skliva from Greece was crowned Miss World 1996. Since August of 1996, when it was announced that India was to host the Miss World Pageant, controversy and debate had surrounded the issue. Members of political parties and particular national and local women's organizations, farmers, students, and trade unions from various parts of the country demonstrated, wrote petitions, filed public interest litigations in court, and threatened to damage the venue of the pageant. Opposition to the pageant spanned a broad enough spectrum to accommodate an entire range of concerns. For instance, opposition to imperialism, resentment against the retreating role of the state, high inflation, threatened Indian culture, and an anxiety with the "foreign" all crystallized in response to the pageant. Conversely, for the state and domestic capital, the pageant provided an international opportunity to "showcase" new, liberalized India to the world. The pageant, therefore, was a site at which political protest and anxiety with "globalization" as well as the opportunity to showcase India to the world were articulated. It is in this tension between sentiments of proving national worth, on the one hand, and the protests against the pageant, on the other, that I examine the staging of discourses of gender, nation, sexuality, and place in this article. A month prior to the event, in the Times of India, a major Englishlanguage newspaper, an advertisement for the pageant read "the time has come for the world to see ... what real India is all about, Indian hospitality, Indian culture, Indian beauty, Indian capability."' What is striking about the advertisement is the statement that "real" India-its capability