Media Events and Gendered Identities in South Asia

Abstract

In November 1996 the South Indian metropolis Bangalore hosted the annual Miss World pageant show. The live event and its televisualization, produced for the first time in India, became a “key moment” in the ongoing transformation of India's media landscape. Not only does the glamorous beauty contest qualify as the single most controversial television programme in India since the arrival of transnational television in 1991, but the televised event also became discursively embedded in the broader ideological and political struggles over competing definitions of the Indian nation state and Indian culture unfolding over the past decade. As I will try to show, the 1996 pageant has spelled out these discursive struggles — which were shaping both the final “textual” construction of the show and the public controversy that accompanied the televised event — in a nutshell. However, I will argue that the new audio-visual services, in general, and particular media events like the Bangalore Miss World pageant, were not only the object of public debate and textually framed by the discourses employed in them, but have also constituted an increasingly important and prominent, mass mediated “platform” for Indian society to actively reflect upon its contemporary modernization. In this sense, the new structures and forms of television emerging from 1991 onward, in addition to symbolizing and imagining India's globalized modernization, have created a crucial communicative space for the discursive construction and exploration of the very notion, meanings and problematic of this socio-historic change.

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