The Gori Truth About Miss India

 





The "Miss India" crown always goes to a woman who fulfills the Indian ideal of beauty, which actually means just one thing: fairness.



Navneet Kaur Dhillon, Miss India 2013

Not a single finalist is ever dark-skinned. The contest is co-sponsored by Ponds, which competes to sell fairness creams (a $432-million market in 2010, according to A.C. Nielsen, and growing by 18 percent annually). The minimum height required for a "girl" (as contest rules describe its 18- to 23-year-old applicants) to even be considered for the pink crown is 5 feet 6 inches, while the average height of an Indian woman is 5 feet.

In India, women who are considered beautiful commonly get described as milk-skinned or chanda si gori (white as the moon). You may not be too bad looking if your complexion can pass as being wheat-skinned.

 Give me a beauty contest where along with the milky and wheaten bodies on parade are women that are coffee-skinned, tea-skinned, clove-skinned, pepper-skinned, coal-skinned, women who can haul bricks on their head yet walk divinely straight-necked. These are the strong, beautiful women you see on the streets of India.

We know that an Indian citizen as dark as Nina Davuluri, Miss America 2013, might just make the Miss India contest criteria for being an inch taller than the minimum, but would never breach its color preference.

Nina Davuluri, Miss America 2013

 What would happen, now, if Miss India Navneet Kaur Dhillon were to face off against the darker Ms. Davuluri in an international contest?