Are beauty pageants dying?

Quiz question - who is Aditi Arya? Don't know? Alright then, who is the reigning Miss India? Yes, 20-year-old Aditi Arya of Delhi was crowned Miss India on March 28 this year. But hardly anyone remembers her name, or knows what she looks like. Ditto with her predecessor Koyal Rana, who made it to the top 10 in the Miss World pageant. Quite unlike how it used to be in the mid 1990s and early 2000s when our girls were winning internationally and making a splash with all the films that they'd signed on.

What has happened to the Miss India contest? The pageant, India's oldest and most established, may be alive and kicking, but popular interest has clearly waned. Look at the falling viewership of Miss India telecasts - according to TAM Media Research, the two-hour Miss India telecast on April 2015 got a TVT (television viewership in thousands) of 1671, a sharp drop from the TVT of 2561 registered by the earlier year's broadcast. In contrast, TVTs of Comedy Nights With Kapil on the same channel, Colors, are in the range of 6000-plus.

Why is this so?

"Earlier, the Miss India pageant on TV was a novelty. Now there are so many programmes in which you see the same Bollywood stars, beautiful young girls, and song and dance," says Chitra Bhattacharjee, a resident of Baroda who still remembers watching with pride and rapt attention when Sushmita Sen became Miss India.
"There are just too many of them now," says Ritika Ramtri, who runs The Tiara Pageant and Model Training Studio in Pune, the only one of its kind in the country where aspirants turn up from all parts of the country.

At the national level alone, there's the Miss India Worldwide contest since 1990, Gladrags Megamodel since 1994 and Mrs India since 2001. To these were added Indian Princess in 2010, India World Miss University (held intermittently since 1990), the I AM She pageant, organised by Sushmita Sen from 2010 to 2012, and, the latest to join the bandwagon, Glamanand Supermodel India. Even Femina has been doing a separate pageant called Miss Diva, whose winners compete in the Miss Universe contest. Add to these all the regional, local and seasonal contests - the Miss, Mr and Mrs Western India, Miss Mumbai, Miss Navy Queen, etc - and there seems to be a full calendar of pageants all year round, says Ramtri.

Anoop Chauhan has been associated with the Miss North India Princess pageant for some years now and travelled everywhere from Delhi to Rae Bareli, conducting auditions. "The enthusiasm of the girls has not gone down, but yes, there's been a 10-15% drop in numbers. Also, the 'level' of the participants has gone down, says Chauhan."

We have indeed come a long way from 1994, when the nation was all agog at Sushmita Sen winning the Miss Universe and Aishwarya Rai becoming Miss World. That news, along with the winners' beauteous mouths pursed into an 'O' of disbelief and happiness, was splashed all across the front pages of newspapers, catapulting both girls to celebrityhood and a career in the glamour industry.
Santosh Desai, columnist and veteran advertising professional, feels the declining interest is the fallout of Indians not winning on the global platform. "Sushmita and Aishwarya were role models, inspiring figures for legions of girls from all across the country. The hype surrounding them at a time there was an increasing buzz around India and the potential of its newly liberalising market, made many, even parents, believe that they could make it on the world stage," he adds.
The beauty pageant craze reached its acme in 2000, when all three Miss India winners won their respective international pageants - Lara Dutta (Miss Universe), Priyanka Chopra (Miss World) and Dia Mirza (Miss Asia Pacific). Since that peak, however, there's been a sharp drop in how our girls have fared on the international stage. The best performance since has been that of Vanya Mishra, Miss India in 2012, who made it to the top seven of the Miss World contest. Last year, Asha Bhatt, one of the winners of the Miss Diva contest, was adjudged Miss Supranational, a young, six-year-old international pageant.
"Winning or losing on the international stage are determined by a lot of factors," says Prasad Bidappa, the Bangalore-based choreographer who's credited with discovering the likes of Lara Dutta, Deepika Padukone and Anushka Sharma. "It's not all a reflection of how good or bad our contestants are."

International pageant wins, of course, are not the only factors that help to keep beauty pageant winners in the news. There's Bollywood. There had been the odd beauty queen earlier, such as Zeenat Aman and Meenakshi Seshadri, who had successful careers in Hindi films, but post Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Sen, the floodgates of Miss Indias in tinsel town had opened wide. There's Lara Dutta, Dia Mirza, Neha Dhupia, Gul Panag, Yukta Mookhey, Tanushree Dutta, Sayali Bhagat, Sarah Jane Dias, Esha Gupta. But barring Priyanka Chopra, none has been able to translate her spectacular success in pageants on the silver screen.

"Until even a few years ago, film producers were very keen to sign beauty queens," says Mukesh Chhabra, one of Bollywood's top casting agents who worked on recent hit films like Gangs of Wasseypur and Kai Po Che. "But that is no longer so. The main reason for that our films have changed and become more complex, especially the women characters. It is not enough now just to be a pretty face. You have to be able to act. Which is why you see many Miss Indias now enroll in acting classes," he adds.

"The kind of training that the Miss India pageant gives you and the kind of skills required to succeed in films are very different. When you are acting you have to be able to laugh at will, or cry when asked. You need to be uninhibited," he says.

Is that why one doesn't hear of too many Miss Indias bagging big banner films these days? How many remember Jo Hum Chahein, starring 2008 Miss India Universe Simran Kaur Mundi, or Hide & Seek with Amruta Patki, Miss India in 2006?

Ramtri, who has been training Miss India aspirants for more than a decade, says the motivations of the girls have changed as well. "The glamour industry is not everyone's goal. I had a girl who was a missile engineer and working with a leading weapons MNC train with me. She wanted to participate in the Miss India pageant for the experience of it, as a kind of finishing school."

That's true of several winners. Koyal Rana, who won Miss India World in 2014, was one of the co-founders of Moksha Foundation, an NGO that works with underprivileged sections of society in the areas like green energy, legal and medical aid and awareness building. Vanya Mishra, the 2012 winner, is an electrical engineer and is now looking to turn tech-entrepreneur.

Vanya was just two years old when the beauty pageant boom began with the Sushmita-Aishwarya victories, but she grew up wanting to emulate their success. "It was, for me, a way to bring glory to the country," says the 23-year-old, who credits her mother's encouragement and defence services background for her ambition to contest in beauty contests. "I was not thinking about films or modelling. A few offers came my way after I won, but I turned them down," says Vanya, who has now shifted base to Gurgaon where she is developing a social media app that will be focussed on events.

"The Miss India pageant was a very important platform for me to acquire skills that will help me in all other spheres. It gave me a forum to present my views and the causes I represent to the world. I was not looking for a career in films. The recognition that it has brought, however, helps me to reach out to many more people than I would otherwise been able to," says Vanya, who also models for several brands.

"Beauty pageants are a relic of an earlier era when patriarchy had a firmer hold on society, when the concept of beauty was static and fixed. These norms are changing fast today. Young women too don't want to be fixed in that plastic image," says Desai. This is reflected in many parts of the globe. In fact, there was just one applicant to a regional heat of the Miss Great Britain pageant this year.

Miss India here, though, is far from reaching that fate.