Pakistan’s Beauty, India’s Prize

SO FAR, choosing the reigning beauty queen of Pakistan was a task that had to be carried out as far away from Pakistan as possible. This year, organisers of the Miss Pakistan pageant, led by the fiery Sonia Ahmed (a 31-year-old Canadian-Pakistani), are defying all odds to bring the competition back to the subcontinent.

For the first time since 2002, the pageant — renamed now as the Face of the Year — will be held in Chandigarh in April, thereby opening up the contest to participants from both India and Pakistan. The key reason for choosing India as the venue for the pageant, Ahmed says, is to promote healthy competition between the neighbouring countries.

“We’ll see who will take the crown — India, a land known for beauty pageant wins, or Pakistan, the land where real beauty prevails!” she laughs.

But there is another coup involved in bringing the contest so close to home — in its past nine versions, the official Miss Pakistan pageant rarely saw Pakistani residents vie for the title. Most participants were either from Canada, the US or the UK. Ahmed refrains from saying how many resident Pakistanis are likely to participate in Face of the Year this year, but her reticence is unsurprising given the country’s conservative history.

Recently, speakers at the Difa-e-Pakistan Council rally vowed to “break the legs” of any “whore” who visited India to sing and act in Bollywood films.

The journey for prospective beauty queens in Pakistan has always been marred with controversy, given that it is a state where pageantry is still a new concept. In the past, Ahmed admitted to having faced tough resistance from the public, the government and the embassy (going as far as to state that the Pakistani government deliberately blocked visas of contestants who were to travel to Japan for the contest).

In 2003, Ahmed faced flak from Muslim conservatives in the Canadian community for her role in organising the pageant. In 2010, when Pakistan was hit by floods, she was reprimanded once again for holding the eighth version of the contest during the month of Ramadan. More recently, Ahmed’s support for controversial Pakistani actress Veena Malik’s nude cover shoot for FHM drew ire. Yet, when asked if she fears government interference this year, Ahmed firmly responds saying the contest has nothing to do with either nation’s governing bodies.

For the Toronto-based entrepreneur, the event has become something that rebels against both the government and religious clerics, within and outside Pakistan. “I myself was nothing like the chadar-clad Pakistani women. We need representation too. We want to show the world that Pakistani women are of various ideologies.”

IT IS considered likely that the opposition to Miss Pakistan will get tougher this year, because of the bikini round that has been introduced at the Chandigarh event. Ahmed, typically, fears no backlash — “The first Miss Pakistan Bikini was held in 2006, and the first ever Pakistan bikini shoot was held in 2007. Pakistan has other things to bother about.”

The fact that neither event was held in Pakistan itself, or even as close to home as India, leaves her unfazed. Oslo-based Attia Bano Qamar, 23, the second runner-up of Miss Pakistan World 2011, who was also crowned Miss Perfect Ten for her perfect proportions, says there was nothing ‘political’ about her decision to participate in the pageant. “I saw the website for Miss Pakistan World and it caught my interest. I always wanted to be in a pageant and so I filled the application and sent it off. My family in Oslo and back home in Pakistan are extremely proud of me. I know that as Miss Pakistan, I need to carry myself in a way that is acceptable for my country, and I also know that I can’t please everyone. I think as long as my actions don’t harm anyone, I have no reason to feel threatened by any Islamic group,” she says. Incidentally, Qamar is currently preparing to join the Indian film industry.

In a country where society is in a constant state of churning due to its different interpretations of Islam, largely administered by traditions of dominant loyalty to family, clan and religion, there also exists the counterpoint to Ahmed’s belief that the event is a kind of civil rights movement on an international runway. Certain Pakistani women (like their feminist counterparts across the world) agree that pageants are linked to the “beauty myth”, and are a part of patriarchal indoctrination.

In an email interview, Pakistani blogger and columnist Nabiha Meher Sheikh told TEHELKA that reducing women to “beautiful objects” is hardly empowering, especially in a society where the right to education, marriage and equal job opportunities are at stake.

“The right to have a beauty pageant isn’t something I’d waste my time campaigning for when marital rape isn’t even a crime. We need to get our priorities straight. We already have a powerful and utterly deluded fashion industry here. They totally think they can solve our terrorism problem by putting women in tank tops but no one with a mind knows that will work.”

For most of Pakistan’s beauty queens, the victory is one in name rather than one that ensures a full-fledged career, skating from endorsements to films, as with Miss Indias in the past. Qamar, for instance, has modelled and travelled across Norway, Germany, Canada and Albania but is yet to make an official visit to Pakistan. Given the possibility of not being received too warmly by the Pakistani awaam, the best option then seems to be to cross the border — following the footsteps of Pakistani actresses Meera, and now Veena Malik.

For Ahmed, though, the battle has just begun. “It is hard to represent a nation that is basically blamed for everything. In 10-15 years, we’ll be free from fundamentalists as well as the generation of the 1950s who would be too old to make any decisions for us!” she opines. Despite the odds, Ahmed hopes that in future, Miss Pakistan will return to her promised land.

http://old.tehelka.com/neighbours-beauty-indias-prize/