The Miss India Caste
A former emcee's experiences illuminate the complexities of the caste system.
“I’m sick of apologizing for India.”
—Vishal Dhar, brother-in-law
Kashmiri Brahmin
“India is your true home, James.”
—Ibid.
WE DON’T DO ARCH
A couple of weeks ago, I was lolling around in bed with Tristan, the man I’ve been seeing now and then for five years. An Australian-American of Scottish descent, he is properly speaking from my jaati, Hindi for ‘caste.’ An inch taller and lankier than I was at his age, even though I was the same weight, he has what AI image analysis would term “a symmetrical face,” like mine; physically, he’s more the laird, I’m more the burly caber-tosser at the Highland games.
I’m splitting hairs deliberately: we’re fundamentally “same-same,” as they say in India and other parts of Asia.
Tristan is from the L.A. area, so not my fellow NEEP, or Northeastern Establishment Protestant, my preferred word for the Flying Insect Caste. As I explained at length in a piece last year about Ralph Lauren’s admirably lucrative appropriation of my natal culture, ‘WASP’ was coined in 1965 as a pejorative to admonish those who had slipped into un-American European-style casteism — using that specific word — during the Gilded Age, which notably isn’t called a “golden age” because it was Trumpishly ostentatious, an embarrassingly comical, superficial imitation of aristocracy that flaked easily.
The Episcopal Church is the center of our culture. It eschews hierarchical terms such as “arch”; we simply have bishops. Even though we are defined as “the Anglican [Church of England] Communion in the United States,” the head of the church is the Presiding Bishop, not the British monarch or the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is also styled “my lord/lordship.”
I was confirmed at St. Paul’s Within the Walls, the first Protestant church allowed to be built in Rome, by the Presiding Bishop at the time, The Most Reverend John Allin — we will go so far as “most,” but no further. We haven’t used “very” since Mark Twain, who occasionally summered at The Park’s neighboring club, told us we shouldn’t.
The current Presiding Bishop is Michael Bruce Curry, a Black American, whose father switched from being a Baptist minister when he and his wife were allowed to drink from the same communion chalice as Whites at an Episcopalian church in racially segregated Ohio. Curry was installed in 2015, well before the current DEI era had us running around like fools trying to be inclusive when nobody feels comfortable in our world of igloos but us. Well-meaning to a fault, too many bought the arch-canard that we hadn’t “shared enough” of what we’ve accomplished with the rest of the world, as if the past century never happened.
Any pretension to aristocracy, or acknowledgment that it exists, is un-American and therefore un-aristocratic. It’s not something the vast majority of NEEPs even think about; we’re embarrassed by privilege, which is why disgust for it is so embedded in America’s national culture. While there is certainly jockeying for social position among NEEPs — to wit, the film director, and godson of the man who coined “WASP,” Whit Stillman’s obsession with Jane Austen — that’s ubiquitous in all societies, thus natural human behavior.
‘NEEP’ is also more onomatopoeic for the dizzy, dweeby birdwatchers most of us are, at least in my part of Yankeeshire, and Stillman’s by the looks of it.
Tristan is a private schoolteacher, a common profession in our caste that rejects casteism. Education and work are sacred; you’ll put yourself in hock for life to pay full whack at the right school for your kids. He’s planning to teach somewhere in the L.A. public school district.
Regardless of being born and raised three time zones west of Yankeeshire, it would take Tristan less than a week to understand the quirks and protocols specific to NEEPs — unlike my past romantic partners, he would never feel out of place. The familiarity of his Anglo phrasing is relaxing; I don’t have to adjust my speech or otherwise explain myself, as I have to do now and then out West when I’m asked what country I’m from.
As we were lolling in bed, chatting in Anglo-Americanese, Tristan said he'd found a clip on YouTube of the most bizarre and wondrous thing I've ever done, emceeing the first televised Miss India pageant in 1993. Until now, I've been unable to find proof that I did it for the doubters over the years who've dismissed me as some latter-day Baron Munchausen fabulist spinning unlikely stories set in far-off locations to make himself seem more interesting. It could be that Tristan himself was motivated by similar doubts to look it up; then again, the framed portraits on the walls of my apartment speak to the exoticism of the path through life that I don’t perceive I’ve chosen because I had no other options.
We searched YouTube together and there it was, the final round of the contest, the crowning of Miss India Universe, Namratha Shirodkar. I’ve cut it down to the salient parts and inserted it at the end of this piece with explanations that relate to the story, so please stay with me and don’t jump ahead.
It’s just as well that it isn’t the full two hours of barely concealed chaos that was broadcast around Asia, the Middle East and Africa to hundreds of millions of people; even my sister saw it promoted in Hong Kong when she was there on a business trip — she forgot to watch.
The eight-minute clip on YouTube was a compilation slapped together by Namratha herself. An integral part of why the story was so bizarre is that she wasn’t the actual winner — the pageant was rigged in her favor because Daddy footed the bill as part of his strategy to advance the Bollywood careers of both his decidedly average daughters.
JUHU, BOMBAY — MARCH 18 - 21, 1993
During the days that led up to the taping, almost everyone who wasn't affiliated with the pageant's producers, The Times of India, told me that Namratha's win was assured. I refused to listen; as a New Yorker, I reflexively believed that any major democracy's leading news organization was unimpeachable, especially one known locally as simply “The Times”; sadly, these days New York's version is also ethically compromised.
It also seemed as absurd to me that anyone would want to rig a beauty pageant as someone would want to lie about emceeing it. It was tantamount to stealing Girl Scout cookies.
Even Simple Kapadia, sister of Bollywood's Number Two Heroine, Dimple Kapadia, shamed me when I was sitting opposite her in the living room of their family bungalow the eve of the performance, trembling for a hug, not even enjoying my Limca lemon-lime soda, and I really loved Limca.
“Why do you care so much?” Simple asked in the contemptuous tone she always used with me, as if I were an ex-husband chronically late with the child support. “It’s rigged, yaar.”
“It's not rigged, yaar,” I replied emphatically, for the 24th time in as many hours.
“Don't be stupid. Of course it is. That Marathi girl is going to win,” referring to Namratha by her ethnicity, subtextually reinforcing her point that, because we were in Bombay on the coast of the former Maratha Empire, it only made sense that a native of the region would be pre-selected via the generosity of her industrialist father to wear the crown and strut down the longest catwalk I'd ever seen, being built as we spoke in the shape of a Byzantine cross below the window of my hotel room. I thought of it as a symbol of my upcoming martyrdom.
Simple’s sister, Dimple, is barely known to Western audiences as having played the husky-voiced, wealthy Indian woman in Christopher Nolan's Tenet. Her lack of Western roles is unfortunate: she’s a great actress who should’ve crossed over to Hollywood years ago, maybe like Italian movie stars Sophia Lauren and Anna Magnani, had India not been so closed off from the rest of the world during the height of her career.
Dimple and I became close when she played the eponymous lead in my first script to go into production, Zooni. She also happened to be one of the pageant’s judges.
When we were on set in Kashmir five years earlier and I was still trying to navigate the complex tangle of caste and ethnicity in a country with 15 official languages that had as many distinct alphabets, whose parliament sat with headphones for translation, Dimple explained that her caste was “a mixture of Hindu and Muslim… hard to explain. The last name is from kapada, meaning ‘rag’ or ‘fabric.’”
Now that we have Google, it’s not as hard to explain, although hers is a mixture I’ve never encountered elsewhere. The Kapadias were Gujarati Baniya (merchant caste) Hindus who converted to Ismaili Shiism — referred to in an IG post about Dimple’s former-actress daughter, Twinkle, as “Upper Caste Muslim” — the sect headed by the Aga Khan that has a significant presence in Mumbai. The family practiced Hinduism while following the teachings of the Ismaili leader, whose devotees gave his weight in gold at a tithing ceremony every ten years “Indian standard time,” or flexibly set by permitting circumstances.
Simple delivered that final smack to my ego about rigging after I'd slipped past hotel security incognito and trotted down the pathway adjoining the Juhu Centaur Hotel to the Kapadias. In reality, I was noticed by absolutely everyone; in those days, White guys in Bombay were either baba-cool junkies killing themselves with strychnine-laced brown sugar in flophouses in downtown Colaba, or Graham Greene characters stoking their melancholia by pickling their livers in consulate housing. That left me, the only American screenwriter in Bollywood by default, and Gregory Roberts, better known as Shantaram, the drug-dealing-memoirist who’d escaped prison in Australia and was hiding deep in the slums of Navy Nagar, fighting for the poor while working for a local mobster like a Dickens character.
The reason I had to slip past security is the entire Miss India production was in lockdown. Nine days before, Islamic terrorists had detonated 12 bombs in as many locations across Bombay, one of which had ripped out the entire ground floor on the left side of the hotel, barely known to Western audiences as the abandoned white building designed to look like a beached cruise ship in Slumdog Millionaire where Dev Patel's Dickensian character hides out after escaping mobsters in Dharavi, a different slum from Shantaram’s.
What triggered the lockdown itself was a death threat that I’d received via an anonymous phone call to my room just after I checked in four days before the show. By the time I was dashing furtively down the alleyway to Dimple and Simple’s — deluded that I’d eluded elite Black Cat commandos there to protect me, specifically — I’d been trapped for three days in a hotel with beauty pageant contestants and every single one of India’s models.
Why professional beauties at a beauty pageant? The Times decided to insert a fashion show featuring India’s rising star designers in the middle of the show for no good reason other than Indians at that specific time in their glorious history — the country was opening up to Westernization in slow motion, hampered by furious arguments in fifteen different languages with headphones for translation between “socialists” in parliament with vested interests in the country remaining isolated and champions of the sort of free-market capitalism that has led to India’s current boom — had become so enamored with a new concept called “fashion,” having sensibly worn the same willfully exotic, regional and caste-specific outfits and adornments for centuries, that runway shows had broken out like a plague across the nation. They were even popping up down the aisles of domestic flights once they'd reached cruising altitude.
It’s fair to say that by the time I’d furtively slipped into the Kapadia bungalow, noticed by everyone, I was somewhat hysterical, not in any frame of mind to enjoy my Limca soda much less accept the harsh reality from a woman named Simple that I was being made complicit in casual grand larceny in the most flagrant way possible in front a sizable swath of the world’s population.
By running away for an hour break from the Miss India circus, I was hoping to kvetch to a sympathetic ear about how I was bound to die on stage. I didn’t fear that I might be shot by the guy on the phone who told me I would be “a target the night of the performance” as much as I was convinced was bound to be terrible: I was the only person in the show who hadn’t had the benefit of a rehearsal and probably wouldn’t, yet I would be onstage for the entire four hours of taping. Even the fashion models got to rehearse.
I was a screenwriter, not an improv performer, much less the sort of A-plus-list stand-up comedian the producers had seen hosting awards shows beamed from America on new TV channels sprouting monthly. I mention that by way of explaining why I was doing it in the first place: they thought I looked like David Letterman and assumed I would be funny. (So racist.) Still, even Letterman got rehearsals.
Simple's logic, that because it was rigged I didn't need to rehearse a four-page, single-spaced script I’d written myself, much less familiarize myself with the stage before I emerged from the top of a 40-foot-tall wooden peacock down a spiral staircase in front of 4,000 audience members, wasn't uncommon among my friends in Bombay, a few of whom were walking in the fashion show interlude that would upstage the pageant contestants. India’s top male model, Milind Soman, was with me in my hotel room catching up when I got the death threat.
“Dimple's one of the judges, hain na?” Simple explained, her eyes bulging with irritation.
“I see what you’re saying: she can insist they give me rehearsal time. Great idea!”
“No, you fool! She's a judge. It's rigged. So who cares?”
I told myself that Dimple couldn’t possibly know as much as I did about the rigging, trapped as I’d been for three days in lockdown with the entire production. I chose to believe The Times, the organization that had also assured me I would be well-rehearsed.
“The judges will be entering their scores on computers linked to a teleprompter in my podium,” I reasoned with Simple. “I’ll see them in real-time, yaar.”
50 SHADES OF BEIGE
It would take feedback from tens of thousands of irate Indians after the show aired to make the producers understand a fundamental problem that I brought up in a production meeting shortly after I received the death threat in my hotel room: this was an Indian pageant; even if I could pronounce the girls’ names properly — my ADHD-neurodivergent linguistic abilities, combined with being raised bilingual in Italian, gave me the ability to mimic unique Indic consonant blends and long Indo-European vowels — it was nonetheless problematic for a NEEP, the socio-cultural group that invented political correctness and, well, America in general, to replace an Indian who, as it turned out, had been hosting the untelevised version of the pageant for years, something I didn’t know until we were already in lockdown.
The lead producer, Pradeep Gua, believed the former emcee was the anonymous caller, understandably upset that I’d supplanted him and stripped him of a major honor that was no doubt central to his identity and standing in his family and community. Whereas emceeing the Miss India Pageant was a lark for me, an adventure, a future main-course dinner-table story, which is exactly what it became.
The fact I was a filmmaker brought Hollywood into the conversation. Most of the English-speaking elite of India who watched the show already knew that I’d become the only American screenwriter in Bollywood after revered director Muzzafar Ali imported me from New York, the capital of the world, to write his as-yet-unfinished Zooni, starring India’s Number Two Heroine, Simple Kapadia’s sister, Dimple.
At that point in life, I was only vaguely aware of a critical yet universally ignored factor that I believe distorts the antiracism movement’s assumptions about White privilege and similar bogus threat-elevation constructs: colorism, or social ranking by skin tone, with paler skin at the top of the pyramid and darker at the bottom.
The uproar after the pageant made it clear that many believed that racial insecurities were at play in my casting. I put it out of my mind from the start; honestly, I was so enamored with India that I wanted to be Indian. I’d woken up one morning a couple of years before the pageant from a weeklong bender convinced that I’d become Indian, only to look in the bathroom mirror to find bland, caste-less, ragged ol’ Whitey staring back at me.
Colorism is easier to see clearly in our neighboring Latin American countries; most of Mexico’s political and economic elite, for instance, are “Hispanic Whites.” At the bottom of the ladder, from Ciudad Juárez just over our southern border to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina, are the native Indios, what the Indian Government would call “Scheduled Tribes” or Adivasi.
Having wandered this earth for a long time now, immersing myself into many different cultures to the point that for months on end I never saw another White person or even spoke English, I can say with certainty that Whites are the only race that doesn’t have colorism.
I first learned about it reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X at Wesleyan. He describes marriage prospects among Black Americans as being judged according to “the brown-paper-bag test” — if your skin tone was darker than a paper bag, you ranked lower than those whose tone was lighter.
Whites perceive good health in ruddy skin, and tend to see pallor as a sign of illness, at best a “heroin chic” look that goes in and out of fashion. Ginger-haired people are considered uglier because they also often have ghostly skin and freckles.
We are also the only race that uses tanning beds. I searched Delhi high and low for one before my wedding reception in 2001 to make myself more attractive to myself by being darker. I had to settle for doing it naturally, lying by my white-skinned Brahmin sister-in-law’s pool while my wife clucked disapprovingly about skin cancer, and the staff looked at me sideways like I was insane. My wife’s entire family is as fair as Northern Italians.
But there was no way I could bring up the suspicions I was suppressing about the real reason I was being asked to emcee the pageant at my first and only production meeting with the Times of India team.
Neerja Shah, a friend who was a Times employee who had roped me into it, was at the meeting. I came up with what I thought was a clever excuse to deflect attention from the uncomfortable oddness of a foreigner hosting something of great national pride — Miss Indias did extremely well at the international competitions.
India is barely even represented at worldwide competitions; count how many athletes represent India at the opening ceremony of this year’s Paris Olympics, bearing in mind that it’s a country of 1.4 billion. In 1993, it was maybe two dozen.
“I think the audience and viewers might find it easier to understand my accent if I have an Indian co-host I can banter with",” I said. “Neerja, why don’t you do it with me?”
A business-caste Gujarati divorcée who married within her caste, but for love, not by arrangement — tsk, tsk — whose skin was “wheatish,” the middle tone between fair and dark, Neeja glowered at me furiously after Pradeep Gua said, “Great idea!”
All of my Indian friends are either fair or wheatish, as were all of the Miss India contestants and the models.
You can hear Neerja in portions of the clip from the pageant below, and vaguely make her out in the shadows to the side of me. After we’d both emerged from either side at the top of the peacock and descended mirroring spiral staircases, Neerja mostly stood to the side in the shadows, popping in for a line or two, deliberately keeping the spotlight on me. True, she’s introverted, and I’m the opposite — it was painful for her. I’d put her on the spot, but look where she put me.
“Don’t worry, there will be elite Black Cat commando snipers stationed at five-meter intervals along the roof,” Pradeep assured me when I mentioned that I would be entirely exposed on all sides. “And there’ll be one every tenth audience member.”
JUHU, BOMBAY — MARCH 22, 1993
Just before I ascended the scaffolding backstage to take my position atop the 40-foot peacock, Pradeep scooted up to me and handed me a printout of my script.
“Bad news,” he said. “We’re having technical difficulties with the judges’ computers. Your teleprompter isn’t working, either.”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Pradeep? I haven’t had a rehearsal and now I have to read —”
“Don’t worry,” he said over his shoulder as he dashed away. “Just go out there and be funny!”
Jesus, Simple. You’re right, it’s rigged.
So what, yaar? Drink your Limca and go back to bed, American.
It must’ve been obvious from my pacing back and forth in tight circles atop the scaffolding, waiting for the show to start, going, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” that outrage was causing my stage fright to bubble over. Below me, the contestants were in a holding area to my left, the models to my right.
I was barely aware of the fact I’d received a death threat about being “a target the night of the performance,” and was out in the open, flanked on three sides by the hulking beached-cruise-ship hotel. I’d already breezed through a couple of death threats on set in Kashmir in the months before I was evacuated in January of 1990, the production’s drivers were staging AK-47s for delivery to terrorists in my house, and on and on.
I had snipers up there somewhere in the dark guarding me. Maybe. That’s probably bullshit, too. Fuck it. I’m going to die one day anyway, and this is a memorable way to go.
From the left side below, one of the contestants shouted, “James! Why are you so nervous?”
“Because he’s gay!” a model shouted across the courtyard. The most beautiful people in South Asia howled with laughter at me.
And that’s how I was outed in India.
Once I’d settled in as emcee, I became hypnotized by the scene I was leading. The longest, widest catwalk I’d ever seen stretched out over the Olympic-sized pool and beyond toward kala pani, the “black waters” of the Arabian Sea. The clip shows contestants struggling with their hair buffed by the warm breeze. This was the farthest anyone could be from a corny Miss America hoedown in Vegas.
During the evening wear portion, the full force of percussive traditional music, the kind that could pummel tears from a stone, reached into the cosmos and drew the Goddess into the mix. Devi-mata weaved amidst the thoroughbred contestants, all of them on the catwalk at once — haughty, undulating, desirable even to me — chiffon and sari pallus wafted by the breeze. And those kala pani waves of hair, the finest in the world…
“Ladies and gentlemen, the 1993 Femina Miss India Contest!”
The feminine shakti was there and everywhere, basking in her moment, finally allowed on TV, allowed a swimsuit contest, finally — but no kissing onscreen.
India, meri jaan-e jaan, heart of my heart, you are this and so much-much aur: life raw and unfettered, bound by constellations of rituals, superstitions and etiquettes, owning and reveling in your exoticism — now proud, then humble — swaying head, empress of spices, showered with fearless colors. Look at you, Hindustan, your silks flowing as the Ganga, gliding with your wedding drums, festooned with a hundred million temple bells, cruel yet compassionate. Look at you as you rise with the vermillion sun to greet every improbable day with that poise, that same generous smile come monsoon, this paradise ocean breeze or scorching drought. Never let us from the Lands of Same-Same tell you who to be.
That moment is suspended in a hovering glowing orb in the archives of my memories, as vivid as if I’d just turned back to the podium. I had never experienced anything as intensely beautiful and glorious before and haven’t since. I doubt I ever will.
“Time of your life, kid,” I muttered to myself. Why I would quote Tom Cruise’s breakout film, Risky Business, at a moment like that is weird. But I did.
At the end of the third round, with ten women left, I was handed a list with the three finalists. The woman I and everyone else thought should win, Mehr Bhasin, was on it. Much to my shock, Namratha Shirodkar wasn’t on it.
See, Simple!
I called out the names and the three chosen ones stepped from the lineup. Namratha, who’d been smirking for four days, her confident smugness an insult to the other contestants, looked like she’d stared Medusa in the eyes and been turned to stone.
Then Pradeep’s assistant, Deepak, pulled me to the side of the stage. “You read the wrong list.”
“Say what?”
“We’re doing it over. Read these names instead.” It was three different girls. No Mehr. Namratha’s name was on it.
It was like the entire performance had capsized into a befuddling chaos. For a moment, I considered going out and announcing that the show was rigged and I was quitting. But this was the Times of India, the scandal would be huge; my visa could easily be revoked and I’d be declared persona non grata, like Steven Spielberg after he showed Kali-worshipping upper-caste Hindus eating monkeys’ brains in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
I did as I was told. As the contestants walked off again, I went up to Deepak and stated the obvious, “It is rigged, Deepak.”
“So what?” he said. “You’re doing a great job. Keep going.”
This clip shows the final round. I’ll explain what’s actually going on below it:
Germane to Part 2 of this piece regarding the realities of the caste system, note the height differential between Namratha in the middle and the more typical Miss India contestants, Pooja and Karminder, flanking her. I’m 6’3”, but I don’t dwarf the typical contestants like I do Namratha.
01:50 — I’m too furious to acknowledge Namratha’s response. The real winners are backstage sobbing. But I smile and laugh at the responses from the other two. The last is clearly the best.
02:10 — I look dejected as I walk back. I hold the mic defensively for a moment. Ordinarily, I walk ramrod straight, as if I graduated top in Deportment at finishing school, “Like you own the world,” as a Persian friend once noted. Here I’m stooping.
02:13 — Dimple is on the right of the three judges behind their useless computers, which were always meant to be props to make the tabulation seem legit to viewers.
02:49 — A live mic picks up my voice saying, “Unfortunately, I’m leaving… again tomorrow,” in response to Deepak’s question about whether I’m sticking around. Hell, no.
I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to handle the fallout of what just happened in front of 4,000 people. I know the redo of the elimination in the third round will be kept out of the final broadcast, but a scandal of this magnitude won’t be contained — too many witnesses, and one freshly outed foreigner who makes no secret of his recreational drug use… Not good. The Indian press can be savage. Miss India is a valuable, prestigious asset — all those Fair & Lovely skin-whitening ads — that is owned by the top dog of the national press.
I’m lying to Deepak: I’ve made up my mind to furtively dash from the hotel, noticed by everyone, and take the 1 AM Air India flight to Delhi, where I will pack up my belongings and hightail it to the foothills of the Himalayas to lie low for 6 months, try to write a book and finally learn Hindi at a language school until it blows over.
The fallout will be bad, but I’ll keep my mouth shut — it won’t be too bad. I will indeed be blamed for the scandal preemptively; they’ll claim I tried to sabotage the will of the judges by reading out the winners I wanted in the third round. There will be a discussion on Bollywood nepo baby Pooja Bhatt’s prime-time talk show, the highest rated in the country, with the subject, “If James Killough hates India so much, why does he live here?”
Master-ji, my tailor in Khan Market, will be extremely upset with me over the Pooja Bhatt roasting. I’ll have to pinch my throat and say, “Maa kasam,” to swear by my mother that I’m as in love with India and faithful to her as ever.
“Nobody fucks with my tailor,” I will tell the emissary from the Times of India in response to his insistence that “it wasn’t rigged” when I meet him three months later at Taipan, the Chinese restaurant at the Oberoi, New Delhi, and he hands me my fee in cash under the table.03:18 — When I returned to the podium after hearing the contestants’ chicken-or-egg answers, I found another note: “James, these are the real winners. Please read them out.” It was the same three I called in the third round who were replaced by Daddies’ Girls. It was signed, “The Judges.”
Then Pradeep handed me another list of real winners.
I say, “Okay… The Miss… India…” I’m hesitating. Should I read out the note claiming to be from the judges? But is it really from them? I want to believe it’s Dimple’s handwriting; she wrote me chitti notes now and then when we were on location in Kashmir and sent them with an assistant, usually asking for me to come to her suite to run lines with her while Simple snarled at me.
I can’t be sure. Neerja is standing beside me and she’s on Team It’s Not Rigged. I do as I’m told.05:03 — I get my dig in, “Aren’t they lovely, ladies and gentlemen? They certainly deserve it.”
I’m being sarcastic. Nobody will notice.
Thanks for reading. If you liked this piece, please don’t forget to click the heart thingy.
The second half of this series, ‘That Unmentionable Taboo Practiced by Almost Everyone,’ will dive deeper into my interpretation of the caste system, eugenics, the modern antiracism’ movement’s shameless appropriation of Untouchability, and why judging India’s culture, history and circumstances from an Americanized perspective is unfair and hypocritical.
Namaste.
* An explanation of the photo of Dimple applying her makeup in the mirror:
The day my friend Ben Ingham took that photograph was as memorable as this story. We were in a cottage in the forest of Dachigam, a private wildlife preserve guarded by the military. My pageant co-host, Neerja Shah, was there with a news crew doing a 60 Minutes-style story about our unusual international co-production. That’s how we met; five years later, she cast me as the pageant’s emcee.
Kashmir was descending into a civil war stoked by Pakistan and the Taliban. Dimple’s uncle had been shot by Kalistani Sikh separatists in Punjab a few weeks before. We suddenly found ourselves surrounded by as many young Kashmiri boys and men as you can see on all sides of the cottage. Kashmiris wear pheran ponchos in the winter with kangri coal baskets underneath for warmth; it would be easy to slip a gun in there. The crowd became restless, the police lathi-charged them with bamboo poles, and they started pelting the house with stones, windows were smashed, etc.
After Kashmiri production coordinator Anjum Sadiq negotiated with the crowd, Dimple came out to greet everyone and apply her makeup, as directed by Ben. Then she did something truly extraordinary… Let’s just say that Dimple gave new meaning to the word “heroine” that day.
The rest is for the memoirs.
FURTHER READING:
More about being NEEP:
Ralph Lauren Makes Billions From Appropriation. Good for Him.
All threat-elevation devices are just blah-blah-blah.
A post from 2011 about the pageant, when I had no record of it to jog my mind, might have a few inconsistencies. I haven’t checked so as not to trigger my perfectionism — let there be flaws:
Rigging Miss India
Read full story
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Wow…this is an incredible read, James. When is the book coming out?