Every Woman's Heritage

Words: 3289
Pages: 14
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Katie Blank
June 10, 2015
Beauty is Every Woman’s Heritage: Advertising, Whiteness, and Indian Womanhood in Femina Magazine
“Beauty is Every Woman’s Heritage,” reads an ad for “style classes” in a 1970 issue of Femina magazine, one of the leading women’s magazines in India both then and today. But what is “beauty” in the context of Indian advertising and how did it contribute towards a sense of heritage, tradition, and history? By looking at advertisements in Femina magazine in the early 1970s, a distinct sense of the nationalist narratives present in Indian print culture at the time come through. In a sense, what is presented “ideal Indian woman” clashes with the reality of many (if not most) Indian women’s experiences. Advertisements in …show more content…
Stoler’s article (and later, book) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power investigates the domestic relationships amongst colonial families and in the process, uncovers the ways in which anxieties about proximity to different races played out in everyday life. Like Ballhatchet and Hyam but unlike McClintock, Stoler is less concerned with specific aspects of sexuality and more concerned with the restriction of it. Here, Stoler is adamant about the power of comparison (in this context, amongst colonies) and really draws about Foucault with regards to her complicating of different categories. This is one book that really emphasized comparison and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. Like Ballhatchet, Hyam, and McClintock, Stoler also investigated anxieties about racial mixing in the colonies. Much like McClintock, Stoler is very interested in the production of sentiments- either ideas of race, power, or sexuality. But instead of trying to ascertain peoples’ underlying motives using material sources and psychoanalysis, Stoler uses the colonial archive. Instead of trying to piece together someone’s thoughts from item, Stoler argues that the colonial archive and its categories tells you more about the producer of the archive than the subject. McClintock brought up the issue …show more content…
Why does it make its way into these advertisements? Part of the reason might be rooted in the historical prioritization of north Indian language and culture, and part due to north India’s contemporary political importance. During the East India Company rule into the Raj period, various north Indian cities were the political and economic centers. Both in the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, British officials systematically sought out to understand Indian culture and languages, particularly in north India. Because Persian and Hindustani (and Bengali, to some extent) were there languages of the Mughal bureaucracy, East India Company officials taught these languages to their officials. South Indian languages were not completely ignored, but they were definitely sidelined because they were perceived as being less useful in the control and management of the Company. However, the British recognized that understanding the languages of the Mughal court (Persian and Urdu) and bureaucracy were of political importance. This carried on even after the exile of Bahadur Shah Jafar after the 1857 Uprising, when the British continued to use Urdu as the official language of the bureaucracy. This importance of North India in the political and economic life of the Raj increased in the early twentieth century when the British moved the capital to Delhi. This
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