The crowning of Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai as the world’s most beautiful women in the same year dissolved the stigma around the glamour industry and sparked the ‘beauty parlour revolution’
Thirty years ago, on May 21, 1994 — when Indian economy had only recently been liberalized — the country was greeted with the wondrous news of a young Indian girl, all of 18, winning the world’s most important beauty pageant. That was Sushmita Sen, who became the first Indian to win the Miss Universe contest, held that year in Pasay City, the Philippines. Six months later, on November 19, 1994, Aishwarya Rai was crowned Miss World in Sun City, South Africa.
Indian girls winning the top two beauty pageants in the same calendar year — India remains the only country to have achieved that feat twice over, doing it again in 2000 — signaled the arrival of a massive market on the capitalist platform of the global economy. In 1994, and for several years later, it didn’t appear as simple as that; or at least, a majority of Indian women didn’t want to believe that those two fabulous wins were only a consequence of India restructuring its economy and opening the floodgates of its humongous market to the retailers of the world.
Economics could have played a part, true, but Indian women are, indeed, beautiful, isn’t it? That was the sentiment that the common Indian women then held close to their hearts, for the crowning of Sen and Rai as the world’s most beautiful women was an acknowledgment of the latent beauty of the average Indian woman.
The Confidence Boost
Thirty years since those landmark moments, it all sounds so simplistic, naïve, and ingenuous. But it was a weighty moment in time because, unsuspectingly, those two global victories ushered in a paradigm shift in the confidence of the average Indian woman, not just in her capabilities but also in the way she could stride with confidence in her own skin.
Vandana Jayakumar, who was a teenager then and is now a digital marketing specialist based in Hyderabad, remembers: “It was an exhilarating moment for girls at that time and I remember the feeling of empowerment it imbued us all with. For the first time, the concept of ‘beauty with brains’ gained currency and it felt as if Indian women were not a shade less than anybody else in the world. That overpowering glamour would wear off eventually, but the sense of empowerment got rooted in the psyche of my generation.”
Usha Singh of the same generation, who grew up in Bhopal and is now a Pharmaceutical Regulatory Affairs professional based in Toronto, echoes the sentiment. She says: “These victories instilled great sense of pride among Indian women, and marked a significant cultural shift, encouraging Indian women to embrace their beauty and identity. The stigma, traditionally associated with the glamour industry, also began to dissolve, making it an aspirational career path. These wins empowered girls to challenge societal and patriarchal barriers, to pursue their own unique paths with greater confidence and autonomy. The ripple effects of these victories continue to resonate, as women of Indian origin worldwide find inspiration to be independent and self-fulfilled. The celebration sparked by these wins has become a lasting movement, promoting the empowerment of Indian women everywhere.”
The ‘Beauty Parlour’ Revolution
Sen and Rai as title holders strode the world like regular Hollywood celebrities, opening an altogether new dimension of possibility for Indian women, who were involuntarily yet willingly pushed to wake up to the concept of body beautiful, taking their first steps in what will eventually become the beauty and personal care industry.
The immediate impact was a rush to become ‘Miss India’ with the aspiration percolating to the masses right up till villages that were slowly getting connected to the world through cable television then. The emotional euphoria was caught for posterity by numerous entertainment creatives, such as the Hindi pop song Banungi Main Miss India (1996) by Mehnaz Hoosein (it also appeared in the soundtrack of the Deepa Mehta’s Fire the same year), and the television series, Main Banoongi Miss India (DD National, 2004-07), among scores of others.
The empowering trait of this realisation had been driven home and fueled the ‘beauty parlour revolution’ that too had only recently been set in motion in the country. Within no time, ‘beauty parlours’ — now known with more ‘upmarket’ terms such as style salon/ studio — mushroomed in every single lane of every residential colony of the country. After all, even without any aspiration to participate in a beauty pageant, every woman was beginning to pay attention to her appearance like never before. With looks that made her feel happy about herself, the average Indian woman developed unprecedented confidence. Of course, the flipside was that scores of women inadvertently fell prey to trying to achieve unnatural beauty standards and started pursuing cosmetic products blindly that claimed to make a woman beautiful like a film star. This contraposition notwithstanding, Indian women dived deep into the concept of self-care. It was not just women aiming at the marriage market or those hoping to become air hostesses that wanted to take care of themselves; regular mamas discovered that they had a legitimate right to feel good about themselves.
The simultaneously changing social mores, kickstarted with the turning of the wheel of economic liberalization initiated in 1991 by then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, changed the contours of every aspect of life in India. With more economic opportunities, social changes became more discernible, and more women than ever before started entering the workforce. Freedom of choice, to work and buy as one pleases changed the Indian woman forever.
Analyzing the social landscape in India of the Nineties, Dilip Cherian, image and communications consultant, and founder of Perfect Relations, says: “Modern cosmetic marketing, indeed, got a fillip at that time. Simultaneously, the hesitation to flaunt their own ‘body beautiful’ among young Indian women came crashing down. The middle class was soon also having disposable income to spend on cosmetics for the first time. Duties were down and products, in turn, had to be priced in a manner that they would become accessible to more of the masses. These trends got simultaneously played out through Bollywood. Another major factor kicked in soon. Increased urbanization in the country coupled with more women joining the workforce in non-adjunct jobs provided the stimulus for the changing scenario.”
Sen and Rai as title holders strode the world like regular Hollywood celebrities, opening an altogether new dimension of possibility for Indian women
The Big Business of Beauty
Eighteen-twenty-year-olds today — the age group Sen and Rai belonged to when they won their crowns — would find it hard to fathom the life of an average Indian woman before economic liberalization in the department of personal care. The young girl of today would be shocked to know that less than half a century ago, the beauty kit of an average Indian girl comprised a comb (known as hairbrush post-liberalisation!), talcum powder, and if she were a little a la mode, then a lipstick and some ‘foundation’. That was all that the girl next door then required to dress up for her ‘farewell party’ at school or college, friend’s wedding, or an interview for a job, if she hailed from an ‘advanced’ family that allowed her to aspire for one. Modern shampoos redolent with European fragrances were a luxury that average Indians were only getting introduced to.
With a strong push by global market forces, the beauty queens and the empowered average Indian woman helped create the big business of beauty in this country. According to www.statista.com, India’s beauty and personal care market is expected to generate $31.51 billion in 2024 (approx. Rs 2.6 lakh crore) and witness an annual growth rate of 3%. It is still under-penetrated in India as per capita spend on beauty and personal care products is approximately $14 compared to $313 in the US and $38 in China, as per a report on the subject by Redseer Strategy Consultants and Peak XV, launched in September 2023. Till the early 1990s, there were only a handful of players in the business such as Lakme, Ponds, and Shahnaz Hussain. Now, the list of brands is endless, and the mode of their business too has evolved into a complex ecosystem of brick and mortar and online stores, reaching into the nook and crannies of the country where the appetite for cosmetics is as strong as those in the metros.
The Irrelevance of Beauty Pageants
The rise of the popularity of beauty pageants in India was meteoric, even capturing the attention of the entire nation as in 1994; even though there had been other notable wins such as Reita Faria’s Miss World crown in 1966 and Zeenat Aman’s Miss Asia Pacific International in 1970, the euphoria of 1994 was novel and extraordinary. But the pageants slid down the charts as quickly. Bollywood icon Zeenat Aman, who was the first runner-up at the 1970 Femina Miss India, wrote in an Instagram post in January this year, “I’m not quite sure if there's a place for beauty pageants in this world anymore.”
It is evident in the less-than-lukewarm response from the general population at large that the Miss World 2024 pageant elicited when it was held in Mumbai on March 9, returning to India after 28 years; the first time India hosted this glitzy pageant was in 1996 in Bangalore, organized by megastar Amitabh Bachchan’s company, ABCL. Names of Miss India winners nowadays are no longer common knowledge as it was in the 1990s. The glitter of the pageants has not worn off one bit, it’s just that the aspirations of the common Indian woman, that were unleashed with the winning of the crowns in 1994, have gone far beyond what a beauty pageant can offer. In the years since, Indian women have broken glass ceilings in you-name-it domains, and most recently, are also flying Indian air force planes as combat pilots.
So, it’s not just the fizzling out of excitement but also about changing notions of beauty and the questioning of the whole idea of parading a woman in front of an audience on a ramp and judging her for her shapely body. The beauty pageants definitely do not have any place in a world ruled by social media where the herd can get up in arms at any hint of body shaming.
It’s important to pay attention to a few lines of the Mehnaz song, Banungi Main Miss India: Dil sachcha hai mera dekho to mujhko hai poora yakeen…, kuch karne ke liye zaroori to nahi ki sar pe koi taj rahey… (My heart is true and I strongly believe… A crown on one’s head is not necessary to achieve something big). That’s the legacy of the 1994 Miss Universe and Miss World titles that came India’s way.
