‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ Keats said famously with an innocence that we have long lost. We have now taken our politicisation of beauty to ridiculous lengths. As if it weren’t enough that beauty has been all messed up by a rampaging products industry and ubiquitous nose jobs, as if it weren’t made worse by the dirty politics of sexism, we now have the Tamil Nadu High Court wading in with a heavy oar by issuing a disturbing and puzzling interim directive that recommends that colleges and universities in the State ban beauty contests. The order follows a petition by the mother of a student who participated and won a beauty contest but was not given the promised prize money and gifts.
Now, if the mother had chosen to sue the college solely for breach of promise, one would have wholeheartedly supported her. Instead, she inserts a most annoying codicil. She alleges that the organisers, by asking participants to ‘do anything to entertain the crowd and seek attention’, have affronted her daughter’s dignity and compromised her moral values. Clearly, these moral values bravely suffered the onslaught till such time that the promised two-wheeler and smartphone did not fetch up.
When you muddy the waters of pure commercial interest — you promised me a set of wheels if I won, where is it now? — with moral mishmash, it takes on a wholly different hue. The judge, instead of simply directing the college to hand over the promised lolly, has chosen to side-step into quite different territory by asking how walking the ramp would benefit a student pursuing a course of engineering. We could ask the same question of practically all extra-curricular activities. Quizzing, for all its air of intellect, tests only a student’s memory. How does a game of cricket hone aeronautical skills? And when students play in collegiate rock bands, do they build better roads?
And if we are going to take the feminist route and say that beauty contests degrade women, the fact is most of these colleges have similar contests for both boys and girls and the judge wants them all banned. What we could argue about more pertinently is how to structure the contest so that the students who participate do so under transparent rules and are judged on fair grounds, that their dignity is not compromised, and that they do indeed get the prizes they are promised when they win.
Before we get all preachy, it’s also worth noting that beauty contests have been appropriated in a brilliant way by various other, sometimes disadvantaged, groups to make strong political and power statements — such as by men, by the transgender community, by plus-size people, landmine survivors, indigenous groups, and even prisoners. Breast cancer survivors have brought out calendars with pictures of their bodies to increase awareness of the disease. Often, it is the eye of the beholder that is all wrong. And we must ask why that is so.
The judgement reminds me that Tamil Nadu engineering colleges already ban male and female students from interacting on campus, with heavy punishments awarded if students of the opposite sex (or even lecturers) are caught talking to each other even on a pavement outside college. The message that such bans send out is scary. That boys and men will elope if they interact, that boys will rape if they talk to girls, that the sight of girls on a ramp will instantly excite immoral behaviour, that Indian men are so unable to control their baser instincts that the only answer is to hide the women away.
Talibanisation is hardly the solution we expect to see in a democratic, liberal and mature India. But what makes it much worse is that these rules are being passed in colleges and universities, the seats of higher learning, the places where one imagines that the furthest boundaries of thought are being explored, where we believe that the keenest minds are pushing the envelope on ideas and philosophies, and questioning all received wisdom.
It has been three decades since Pink Floyd wrote those angry words, and here we are still asking them to leave the kids alone.
