Editorial: Hyderabad's misguided Miss World

The government of Telangana dearly wishes Hyderabad to be seen as a fashionable city at the forefront of culture and other nice things, but it is showing itself to be tone-deaf by hosting the widely disparaged and anachronistic Miss World pageant.

Scheduled to run from May 7 to May 31, 2025, the event will bring together over 120 contestants from around the world. Alongside the pageant itself, the state is rolling out a month-long itinerary of ceremonies, tours, and cultural showcases, all apparently aimed at positioning Telangana as a “global destination”.

Much as the organisers might position it as ‘beauty with purpose’ and the government might crow about this “great tourism opportunity”, Miss World, despite its frequent rebranding, continues to carry the baggage of promoting a blonde and blue-eyed ideal of beauty and packaging it for the needs of the consumer-entertainment industrial complex.

Originating in the 1950s as a bikini contest, Miss World earned fame by playing to a male and Western gaze. It’s a taint that lingers despite the pageant — and other variants of it, like Miss Universe — claiming to have aligned itself with contemporary sensibilities. Contestants no longer have to be virginal, unmarried, and proportionate, but these spectacles continue to offer to the public a curated, controlled, and commercialised vision of womanhood.

By choosing to host Miss World and believing it to be a Beauty Olympics that will burnish Hyderabad’s global image, the ambitious public servants steering this sorry caper are only highlighting just how out of touch the city’s cultural ambitions really are.

Hyderabad is not only late to the party, it has only the dregs to enjoy. Although still headquartered in London, Miss World is yesterday’s story in the West. The BBC and ITV notice the pageant only when there are protests against it, as frequently there are. In the past 10 years, the owners of the franchise have had to take the circus to places such as San Juan in Puerto Rico, Ordos city in Inner Mongolia and Sanya in China. Even these peregrinations have been fraught with difficulties. The pageant could not be held in three years out of the last five. In 2013, the show had to be moved to Bali when Islamist protests erupted in Indonesia.

So many controversies and scandals have dogged Miss World and Miss Universe that it’s a miracle that the brand has even survived. In 2022, when Miss World took its show to Nigeria, protests by Islamic groups flared up over a flippant remark about Prophet Mohammed by a journalist. More than 250 people were killed in the clashes, and the contestants had to be flown to safety in a desperate chartered flight.

Defenders of beauty pageants say they have always been sensitive to progressive concerns. The first black winner was crowned in 1971, and non-Eurocentric body types began to be accepted in greater numbers in the 1990s. Miss World raised the age bar to 28. Miss Universe now allows married women to take part. Some contests now allow plus-sized or differently-abled contestants, even trans people. Miss World eliminated its bikini round in 2014.

But audiences have fallen away all the same. Which gives us an insight into what it’s all about: When beauty pageants drop all that made them popular once, there's nothing left to them. Hyderabad should have known better than to pin its 'global ambitions' on a relic phenomenon from the 1950s.