Selling Beauty Queens and Fairness Creams
By Priya Lal, PopMatters
January 2, 2004
Their huge, glowing faces smile down from billboards on the mere mortal residents of big cities like Mumbai and Delhi. Each tooth in their wide grins gleams with perfect whiteness; each strand of their shiny hair lies smoothed flawlessly into place.
Their likenesses plaster the covers of women’s magazines and the scores of advertisement pages within. Turn on the television, and you’ll be sure to encounter at least one of them expounding on the virtues of the latest shampoo or beauty product. A quick glance at the front page of some of India’s biggest newspapers on any given day will yield another glimpse of their tall, toned figures or their playfully pouting faces gracing wide expanses of space below some bold headline announcing their latest accomplishment.
They star in the biggest Bollywood movies, they shake hands with the most famous public officials, and their names are foreign only to those denizens of the most remote villages.
Welcome to 2004 in India, where these women have become some of the country’s most celebrated public figures and symbols of national pride.