Is beauty the next frontier of Indian politics? The question popped up after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s latest googly was thrown generally in the direction of his political rivals. Consider it a footnote to his demand for a caste census. “I have checked the list of Miss India, which did not have any Dalit, Adivasi or Other Backward Class women,” he said. That invited the retort from BJP’s Kiren Rijiju that the opposition leader seemed to be wanting reservations for these social groups in beauty pageants.
The exchange raises philosophical questions. What is beauty? Who decides what’s beautiful? Does it change with time and space in an Einsteinian way? It would seem so. But, like the caste census idea that Rahul Gandhi often evokes these days, it has a few shades of grey. Black beauty and white aesthetics together make for some brainstorming.
There are academic papers that say the definition of beauty changes over time and is influenced by social trends and cultural shifts, leading people to pursue treatments and procedures to meet a socio-cultural idea of good looks, or a behaviour that goes with beauty. In India, we have seen demure, desi-ghee-nourished movie heroines as well as tall and bold size zero types echoing Parisian supermodel standards.
Long before Rahul Gandhi raised the question, the issue got politicised in India of the 1990s, when the country turned out one Miss Universe—Sushmita Sen—and as many as four Miss World title winners within a decade—Aishwarya Rai, Diana Hayden, Yukta Mookhey and Priyanka Chopra.
Conspiracy theorists were quick to link it to the economic liberalisation that started in 1991 and India’s burgeoning population to claim that multinational cosmetic companies were out to woo the country’s consumers by propping up iconic role models.
No way, you could argue. Long before these winners, India was the original ‘Fair & Lovely’ country that offered a hot market for fairness creams. Any change brought about by the liberalisation programme could be called cosmetic in a philosophical sense. Besides, how does one explain Reita Faria winning the Miss World title in 1966? Manushi Chhillar came much later in 2017, showing that social trends are not as easy to prove as Newton’s laws of physics.
I used to hear a caustic line attributed to India’s early software evangelist Dewang Mehta, who apparently said India could do well in two fields because there were no ministries running it: IT and beauty. (The ministry of information technology emerged after India became prominent in IT).
It’s all a matter of perception. You can reverse-swing it from the eyes of the perceiver. That explains the old college t-shirt slogan: “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beer holder.” One has to behold the concept of beholding to arrive somewhere near scientific answers to the profound questions on beauty.
We may think, for starters. that beauty is more about what is cast in our senses than a matter of caste. But Rahul Gandhi does have a point or two about the social issues linked to beauty. If the preference for fair skin is a social yardstick, a healthy appearance depends on access to nutritional food—something the less privileged may not have easily received over generations.
While the jury is forever out on what constitutes beauty, scientific studies correlate beauty with an evolutionary drive to reproduce. In turn, it links to nature as in genetics and nurture as in health partly reflected in more symmetrical physical features. In males, a symmetrical body is said to represent increased sperm count and health, while among females it is associated with increased fertility. Research also links beauty to feminine attributes such as warmth in emotional behaviour. That is as close to inner beauty as one can get in this debate.
There is also a thing called the golden ratio in aesthetic studies that points to a magic number—1.618—that is believed to indicate a proportion considered most aesthetically pleasing to human eyes in nature and art. Using the golden ratio, London-based cosmetic surgeon Julian De Silva said two years ago in a report that model Bella Hadid was the world’s most beautiful woman. Singer Beyoncé was ranked second.
Notably, Bella Hadid’s mother is a Dutch-born American and her father is a Palestinian American, while Beyoncé was born to an African American father and a mother identified as Louisiana Creole, someone who can be of European, African or mixed ancestry. Perhaps beauty is linked to hybrid vigour, as they say in literature, or a larger genetic pool, in the words of a scientist. Genomic diversity can indicate a population’s ability to withstand environmental challenges and survive—and that is evolution theory all over again.
All that has little to do with race or caste, but Rahul Gandhi may be on the money (or vote) if he links facial and body symmetry to racial or social discrimination that discourages large gene pools (such as caste-based endogamy) or malnutrition that may indicate poor health. Or there could be an argument that disadvantaged people lack the opportunities to make themselves appear good-looking.
It’s not all caste in stone, but there is evidently a science to beauty that cannot be ignored.
(Views are personal)
Madhavan Narayanan | Senior journalist