Not Just a Mannequin: An Excerpt

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 13:06:27 +0000

As glamour was being packaged and sold to Indian women by ingenious magazine editors and feminist groups were protesting the ‘integration of India into a highly exploitative international market’, something important was happening unnoticed. A new class of working women was being formed. Girls were coming from across social classes, plotting to be part of this new workforce that seemed to offer a shot at something big. They were scouring satellite TV, poring over glossies, to learn how to read the signposts to this highway of social mobility, sending off awkward photos of themselves in shiny jackets and pants in neighborhood photo studios to beauty pageant organizers. They were readying to plunge into this exciting new winning field where there seemed to be no English-speaking, passport-demanding guards at the gate preventing entry. And where women seemed to be on top. They were disappointed, of course. What seemed like a global, modern profession (which it was, in terms of the time period and context in which it came into prominence in the West) based on merit and impersonal, professional relationships turned out to be not free of conservatism. It was strongly influenced by existing Indian models of patronage and networks of personal alliances where transactions were made usually on the basis of friendships amongst class peers.