Patriarchy and Beauty: The Power Over Indian Women

Abstract

Bourdieu says that the individual’s education and skills are the cultural capital and believe it as the modality for the individuals in the upper classes to dominate and alienate the individuals of the lower rungs in the class hierarchy. His concept is important here to understand how beauty power discourse as cultural capital is used for oppressing Indian women though he thought that this particular power discourse cannot be applied to countries like India. And, this article analyses the limitations in the application of his definition of the concept ‘cultural capital’ to the Indian state and the established connection of body image and skin tone to the ideology of power and status, and how it has become a need for Indian women to achieve those desirable attributes of beauty to enable them to be celebrated and to wield cultural and economic power in their field.