I know a woman who sets me afire like a rocket on the Fourth of July. She makes me feel like an overripe peach in a blender. She's smoother than cherry wine and cooler than Indian Standard Time. She's in control and she slam-dunks my soul.
Is she a supermodel? No. Is she elegant? Not really. Is she rich? Famous? A star? No, no, not particularly so.
This woman can wonk policy.
Last year, Arati Prabhakar was appointed director of the National Institute for Standards & Technology. Prabhakar is the first female NIST director ever, and the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech. She oversees a $500 million budget, tripling in three years to $1.4 billion. Her mission: to help American high-tech companies regain their international competitiveness. Meanwhile, teenager Sushmita Sen won Miss Universe.
Who is more respected in the Indian American community--the director or the debutante? The bureaucrat or the beauty queen?
I hit this year's Mr. & Miss San Francisco-India beauty pageant to find out. (I know, I know, it's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.) It was a distinctly desi pageant, running on Indian Standard Time. Parents brawled over whose daughter was prettier. Male contestants strutted around pumping iron in public while imbibing backstage. Tall, skinny, long-haired and light-skinned women stressed about their talent routines. It was no surprise that the women took the pageant more seriously than the men. After all, beauty pageants exemplify South Asian gender roles.
Indian American culture is far too focused on gender. Like our gendered languages, we lead gendered lives in which every step, every option is determined by an accident of birth. In the same way that we politicize our culture by calling people "un-Indian" or "whitewashed," we also genderize it by telling them to act like "good Indian girls" and "good Indian boys." We pressure people to fit the female/male gender roles of orthodox Indian culture, which are limiting to both sexes and grossly unfair to women. These same gender roles interfere with understanding and communication between IA men and women. This has created a chasm of cross-cultural communication--in essence, a gender gap.
Physical beauty is an important ideal in Indian femininity. Recently, my parents were looking at photos from the S.F. beauty pageant and, like the judges, explicitly picked out the most innocent-looking women. It's no coincidence that my parents concurred with the judges. What was really surprising was how traditional the women finalists seemed. The women who won sang bhajans (religious songs) or danced to Hindi film songs. Some wore nose-rings and dressed as barefoot village women carrying waterpots. Others put flowers in their hair and carried plates laden with prashad and deep (food and ceremonial candles). Missing from the top five were the tightly-clad women who performed a hip-hop routine and a risque "Choli ke peechhe" sequence. By displaying a hint of sexuality in their routines, these contestants had overstepped their traditional Indian female roles. Parents in the audience muttered mutinously that the contestants weren't "acting Indian."
The female beauty pageant winner wore a pure white sari as she was crowned. The image invoked the asexuality of Indian widowhood, a fitting reminder of the sexual double standard between IA men and women. In stark contrast, the male winner recited a poem called "Why I'm Not a Good Indian Boy." No woman could have won after reciting such a poem. Beauty pageants place women on a pedestal, traditional, idealized--and limited. Traditional Indian women, pageants make clear, should be be
