Miss (Third) World)

The Subcontinent buys into the beauty pageant myth, even as the West abandons it.

When, on 26 November, the vari cms Misses representing their countries cavort on the stage at Seychelles to be Miss World 1998, the event will be hard not to notice in South Asia and other parts of the developing world. In contrast, if you are living in Europe or North America, you probably will not even notice it is being held. Last year (1997) this nearly happened to this writer, living in England, when India´s Diana Hayden was crowned Miss World in the "tropical paradise islands" of the Seychelles. It was just by chance that I phoned friends in Shillong, Meghalaya, a few days before the pageant took place, and so realised that a whole year had rolled by and the event was coming up again.I had watched the contest live on TV while visiting these same friends in 1996. That was the year of Miss World in Bangalore. The passion and politics which surrounded this and the following Miss World, makes it perfectly clear that "Miss World" is now a bigger deal in the so-called "Third World" than in the "First World" where it all began.
While all of South Asia was glued to television screens watching the Hyderabad beauty Diana Hayden make away with the crown last year, it was quite difficult for an uninitiated Miss World buff in London to access the event. Having heard that the event was taking place, I perused the British TV guides and saw it was only being broadcast on the satellite channel Sky TV. No one in my family (comfortable English middle class) nor any of my immediate friends or acquaintances had a satellite dish to receive Sky TV After extensive phoning around, my nephew in the south of England (I live in the north) was finally able to get the programme recorded by a friend. He sent the videotape to me a couple of days later.

The lack of easily accessible programming demonstrates how the market for "Miss World" and other beauty pageants has shrunk in "the West", compared to "the East", "the South", or wherever you want to draw the line between the affluent and the developing nations. In South Asia, the current wave of beauty pageant fever, which has reached deep into the growing suburban middle-class strongholds of India in particular, can be traced to the success of Indian representatives Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen in the 1994 Miss World and Miss Universe contests, respectively. Bangladesh sent a representative to Miss World in 1996 (but not in 1997), while Nepal and Sri Lanka were both represented in 1997. Miss World, and the beauty pageants which feed into it around the region, is very much a current event in South Asia.