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Book Review - Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture

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Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg, ed. Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture. Temple University Press, 2024


Book review by Debadrita Saha, Ashoka University


The economic liberalisation of India in 1991 “transformed its economic policies from the erstwhile License Raj, or the control economy”, to embrace laissez-faire capitalism (Garg 234). Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, edited by Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg, examines how this transformation unleashed Eurocentric beauty standards among Indian women. Through twelve essays analysing literature, cinema, advertisements, and media from the 1990s onward, the volume addresses how “millions of women languishing under the everyday experience of beauty labor” have been erased from academic discourse (Chatterjee 3).

 

Srirupa Chatterjee, Associate Professor of English, Gender Studies, and Body Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, and Shweta Rao Garg, a Baltimore-based artist and academic, formerly an Associate Professor of English at DA-IICT Gandhinagar, frame their intervention around a critical gap: while issues like ‘ “purity”, virginity, sexual abuse, fertility’ receive scholarly attention, appearance-based discrimination that impacts the daily lives of Indian women remains unexamined (Chatterjee 2, 3). For non-South Asian readers, they explain how the global economic and cultural dominance of Western nations, combined with India’s colonial history, creates hegemonic beauty norms that privilege a certain archetype of fair skin, tallness, slimness, and able-bodiedness. These specifications are genetically unattainable for most South Asian women.

 

The collection’s strength lies in documenting the explosive growth of the cosmetics industry in India, post-liberalisation. The editors note that between 1996 and 2000, the cosmetics and personal care sectors grew by 25 per cent, with multinational corporations like Revlon, Maybelline, Oriflame, Avon, and L’Oréal entering the Indian market to target middle-class women consumers (Chatterjee 6). The editors connect this beauty boom to what Nishat Haider terms within the collection the “Brahminization of female corporeal aesthetics” (29), explaining how upper-caste Hindu beauty norms merged with globalised conventions through beauty pageants that fundamentally shifted indigenous beauty expectations.

 

The five-part structure of the collection centres marginalised bodies, literary resistance, disability, cinema and popular media. Haider’s chapter on Dalit (oppressed) women-India’s historically marginalised outcasts within the Hindu caste hierarchy, formerly labelled as “untouchables”-reveals how darker skin has symbolised lower caste status and has been associated with moral degeneration. Tanupriya and Aratrika Bose examine how lesbian and transwomen’s bodies become sites of anxiety, ambiguity, and political control. The chapters focused on Indian women’s literary narratives show how these writers have resisted the tyranny of beauty. In Part II, Swatie’s chapter on the novelist Shashi Deshpande and Shubhra Ray’s analysis of Manjula Padmanabhan’s memoir Getting There, critique commodity cultures and the embodied subjectivities of Indian women, which foster in them body dysmorphia, and hinder them from realising their full potential. These chapters make sophisticated feminist theory accessible while grounding abstract concepts in lived Indian experiences.

 

The book’s treatment of Bollywood, India’s dominant Hindi-language film industry, and regional cinema proves particularly illuminating for non-South Asian readers. Shailendra Kumar Singh’s dual chapters on colourism in Hindi cinema, and “fat fetishism” in Bhojpuri (regional cinema from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh in India) expose contradictions in Indian visual culture in which, despite the surface-level body positivity messages, the persistent practices of “blackfacing” of fair-skinned Indian actresses (as seen in Bala, 2019) and the scopophilic eroticisation of visceral fat in women’s bodies reveal class dimensions often overlooked in Western body studies scholarship. Part III’s focus on disability offers a crucial intersectional lens. Anurima Chanda examines young adult novels with girls who have been conditioned to bodyshame themselves, while Samrita Sinha’s comparative gaze at the films Margarita with a Straw and Kuch Bheege Alfaaz reveals how women with cerebral palsy and leukoderma navigate Indian societies’ ableist beauty culture. Kavita Daiya, Sukshma Vedere, and Turni Chakrabarti’s combined critique of the advertising industry demonstrates how jewellery commercials claiming to champion cultural diversities actually reproduce “body normativity” by featuring only “young, able-bodied, conventionally attractive models with less-pigmented skin” (Daiya et al. 191). However, the chapter also offers some hope by documenting activist successes in bringing transformation, such as Muna Beatty’s #ColourMeRight campaign that pressured the jewellery brand Tanishq to commit to diverse representation of Indian brides.

 

The editors have acknowledged the limitations of their project’s scope and ambitions with admirable candour. The conclusion acknowledges that despite growing voices celebrating body inclusivity in India, the “all-pervasive beauty bias” is still unmitigated. One might observe that while powerfully critiquing Eurocentric beauty standards, the theoretical framework relies heavily on Western feminist scholars like Betty Friedan, Naomi Wolf and Susan Bordo, with comparatively fewer South Asian theorists, beyond Radhika Parameswaran, being featured. Furthermore, the conclusion’s optimistic turn towards body positivity movements led by Instagram influencer-activists like Harnaam Kaur feels somewhat rushed after twelve chapters documenting systematic oppression. The hopeful note on body positivity gaining traction in India perhaps underestimates the entrenched nature of beauty norms that the preceding chapters document so thoroughly.

 

However, in spite of the obvious limitations, the pedagogical value of this collection cannot be challenged. For classroom use, this collection proves invaluable across multiple disciplines. Graduate seminars in gender studies, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies and cultural studies would benefit from including this volume in secondary reading lists. Through pertinent examples, the contributors have made complex theoretical concepts like Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and Foucauldian biopower comprehensible without risking oversimplification. Scholars of global feminisms will find essential correctives to Westernised scholarship on body image, while practitioners of public health, advertising and media will gain empirically grounded insights on how their occupational sectors perpetuate discriminatory standards. Female Body Image and Beauty Politics thus represents a significant contribution to South Asian feminist scholarship on understudied topics. Its documentation of how neoliberal capitalism and patriarchal culture converge on women’s bodies fills an important gap in existing scholarship while raising questions about whose oppression receives intellectual concern. Despite the obvious geopolitical limitations in scope, the collection demonstrates how culturally specific critique can illuminate broader patterns of gendered oppression while opening productive directions for future research, perhaps with a much more expanded scope.


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