Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture

Excerpt • Temple University Press Introduction: Beauty Matters On September 14, 2013, Nina Davuluri, a twenty-four-year-old Miss New York beauty-pageant queen, became the first Indian American to win the title of Miss America. Within minutes of Davuluri’s history-making win, Twitter was abuzz with racist tweets, some calling Davuluri a “terrorist” and a “member of Al Qaeda.” Others misidentified Davuluri, a Hindu whose family hails from South India, as both “Muslim” and “Arab,” reli- gious and geographic identities that, in the wake of a post-9/11 cultural backlash against Muslim, Arab, and South Asian populations and ram- pant Islamophobia, were intended to disqualify Davuluri from the title of Miss America—as one racist tweeter put it, “This is Miss America not Miss Muslim.” Yet, just as quickly, countertweets came pouring in to defend Davuluri, whose political platform for the pageant was “Celebrat- ing Diversity through Cultural Competency.” Rather predictably, these tweets appealed to the multicultural ethos of the Miss America pageant, citing Davuluri’s win as evidence of the US nation’s embrace of ethnically diverse ideals of “American beauty.” In the days that followed, South Asian American writers and blog- gers weighed in as well, many arguing that Davuluri’s Indian features productively challenged “euro-centric ideals of beauty” and contributed to “a broadening understanding of Americanness in a space that has historically taken a fairly narrow view of what qualifies as an accept- ably American appearance and background” (qtd. in Hafiz). Other South Asian Americans, who were more critical of the sexist structure of beauty pageants, sidelined the issue of Davuluri’s beauty and focused on 2 / introduction Excerpt • Temple University Press the cyber-racism that it incited. The writer Sanjena Sathian, for example, argued that even though Davuluri is neither Arab nor Muslim, even “if she were, people still have no right to racism” (qtd. in Hafiz). Others countered the racist backlash by heralding Davuluri’s achievement as yet another example of South Asian American “model minority” success and hard work. The journalist Sandip Roy jokingly referred to Davuluri’s beauty-pageant win as further evidence of a “South Asian stealth take- over of America—1) Subways 2) Motels 3) 7–11’s 4) Taxis 5) Tech Support 6) Spelling Bees 7) ER’s 8) #Miss America.” Yet even as Davuluri’s Miss America title adds to the list of ways that South Asians are visible in the US public sphere, it also remains distinct within the South Asian model minority narrative. As Ruchika Tulshyan, who wrote an article for Forbes magazine on Davuluri’s historic win and the controversy surrounding it, observed, “I wouldn’t be writing this if Nina had won a spelling bee or mathematics competition.” Implicit within Tulshyan’s comment is that, unlike South Asian educational, entrepreneurial, and professional-managerial success stories that reinforce popular repre- sentations of South Asians as highly successful minorities capable of achieving the American dream and yet as peripheral to dominant US national culture, and unlike even the culturally degraded labor of South Asian service-sector work that positions South Asians as undesirable and unskilled racial minorities, the crowning of an Indian woman as Miss America suggests that South Asian success in the cultural domain of beauty poses, at least for some people, a threat to American cultural identity. At the very least, it reveals an as yet unexplored facet of what the Latino writer Richard Rodriguez has called the “browning of America” (xiii). What Tulshyan’s comment reveals, in other words, is that despite being a seemingly superficial aspect of mass culture, beauty matters: it has the power to galvanize sentiment and incite passions about race, national identity, and cultural belonging. The debates that erupted over Davuluri’s Miss America win bring to the forefront one of Fashioning Diaspora’s central concerns: the capacity for Indian feminine beauty to animate the social. The backlash against and fascination with Davuluri had to do with how her beauty catalyzed debates about South Asian racial formation, citizenship, and belonging within the dominant US public sphere. Fashioning Diaspora builds on and expands the scope of these debates about beauty and belonging, focusing on Indian beauty’s socially animating capacities within diasporic cultural production. One of this book’s main objectives is to show how diasporic subjects engage with and respond to various encounters with subjects, objects, and practices introduction / 3 Excerpt • Temple University Press of Indian beauty and fashion and how such encounters produce embodied practices of citizenship and belonging. A second, related concern of Fashioning Diaspora played out in a dif- ferent but simultaneous debate around Davuluri’s Miss America win that was taking place within both Indian subcontinental and South Asian American communities and that situated Davuluri’s beauty within a transnational frame of analysis. Whereas some Indian nationals saw the US racist backlash against Davuluri as an example of American cultural backwardness, others used it to claim Davuluri as a diasporic daughter of the Indian nation. India’s leading newspaper, the Times of India, for example, responded to the racist tweets with the front-page headline, “Racist Remarks Sour Indian Girl’s Miss America Moment” (qtd. in S. Roy). In another Times article celebrating Davuluri’s historic victory for Indians, the journalist Chidanand Rajghatta erroneously cited India as Davuluri’s “country of origin” (Davuluri was born in the United States, though she was raised in India by her grandparents during her early childhood years). He even went so far as to argue that it was Davuluri’s Indianness that “breathed new life” into the Miss America pageant, an American institution whose popularity has been flagging over the past two decades but received the highest ratings in nine years for the 2013 competition. Davuluri also received numerous requests from Indian officials for public appearances in India. Indians’ desire to claim Davu- luri—and the Indianness that she represented—as their own undoubt- edly had to do with India’s own recent cultural history as an epicenter of global beauty and fashion. This is a history that, by all accounts, began with the crowning of two Miss India pageant queens, Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai, as Miss Universe and Miss World, respectively, in the 1990s. Sen’s and Rai’s titles, along with the liberalization of India’s econ- omy in 1991, helped to globalize and professionalize the Indian fashion and beauty industries, a phenomenon that I discuss in more detail later in this introduction and in chapter 2. These conversations within Indian and diasporic publics thus linked Davuluri’s beauty to the globalization of Indian beauty on the subcontinent. Yet even as some Indian media hailed Davuluri as an example of the ever-expanding model minority success of Indians abroad, other Indian and diasporic media analysts argued that Davuluri would not have had even a glimmer of a hope of winning the title of Miss India—precisely the title that Rai and Sen secured before going on to win international pageants—because she would have been considered too dark-skinned. These writers almost universally invoked the global success of fair-skinned 4 / introduction Excerpt • Temple University Press Indian beauty—such as that embodied by Rai and Sen—as the national standard against which Davuluri’s ethnically Indian beauty simply failed to measure up. (These observations take on an ironic hue in light of Davu- luri’s claims that Rai is also one of her role models.) South Asian Ameri- cans, for their part, agreed with their Indian counterparts on this point; but some took the claiming of Davuluri as an “Indian girl” (rather than an American one) as an occasion to then vituperate Indians for promot- ing a fair-skinned beauty ideal. Asha Rangappa, the associate dean of Yale Law School, observed that while the racist backlash against Davuluri and its pushback by South Asian and non–South Asian Americans as well as subcontinental Indians was intended to “shame” America by revealing the racist underbelly of a liberal democratic nation, such public shaming actu- ally “misses what ought to be the real shame target—India. After all, despite being a country of almost a billion people, India has left it to America to crown the first Indian beauty queen who looks . well, Indian.” Rangappa here implies that the Indian light-skinned beauty ideal effectively denies dark skin as a more realistic and democratic Indian ideal.1 Rangappa thus counters Indians’ finger-pointing at the US racist backlash against Davu- luri’s brownness with her own finger-pointing at India’s colorism against the majority of its dark-skinned citizens. What I find noteworthy about these conversations between and among Indian and diasporic publics is the way that Davuluri’s beauty invites an engagement with definitions of Indianness (and not just the American- ness that her win “officially” represents). Her beauty both dissolves and at the same time delineates a distinction between the categories Indian and Indian American, between nation and diaspora: Davuluri’s beauty is an Indian accomplishment and yet insufficient to the task of represent- ing Indian beauty; it is definitively diasporic and yet in need of Indian beauty as either its foil or counterpart; and if we take seriously Rangappa’s point about skin color, diasporic beauty is more authentically Indian than Indian beauty itself. This constellation of discourses about Indian beauty reveals its transnational dimensions—the way that it occupies a symbolic field that travels between diaspora and nation and the “tense and tender ties”2 through which these itineraries of beauty subtend one another, diverge, and converge. These differing opinions about how to frame Davu- luri’s success within the cultural domain of beauty thus highlight a second concern of this book—the way that diasporic beauty is marked by, appre- hended within, and engages with transnational flows of Indian beauty.

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