Katrina Kaif and the Relentless Scrutiny of Women's Bodies

The actor Katrina Kaif, who became a mother in November last year, has found herself at the centre of a fresh round of public commentary about her post-pregnancy appearance. The chatter has produced widely circulated images, intense scrutiny and endless debate, with members of the public apparently convinced they have a say in how another person's body should look.

She is hardly the first woman to face such judgment. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, a former Miss World, continues to be measured against how she looked when she won the title more than three decades ago. Swara Bhaskar, known for her sharp political views, finds that critics would rather pick apart her appearance than engage with her arguments. The pattern is old: women who decline to follow the rules of patriarchy are told they are too heavy, too old, too visible or too vocal.

The notion of an ideal body is neither fixed nor universal. Physiques once regarded as Rubenesque are now labelled overweight; proportions once considered pleasing are dismissed as unremarkable. In a country as diverse as India, where skin tones, eye colours and body types vary endlessly, the idea of a single national standard of good looks is difficult to sustain.

Salman Khan's attempt to redirect the conversation towards trolling about his own weight and hairline has not shifted the larger dynamic. Men are rarely subjected to the kind of vicious judgment reserved for women. They can use de-ageing filters on screen, gain weight for a role, or stand on stools to match taller co-stars. Women enjoy no such latitude.

The pressure is not merely a product of social media and the blurring of public and private life. Perfect bodies have become more accessible in the age of Ozempic. What once required a fictional magic potion, as in the 1992 film Death Becomes Her, has become a black-market drug in the 2024 horror film The Substance — easy to procure, easier to administer, consequences notwithstanding. Ozempic bodies and immobile faces are now commonplace, with the ravages of time camouflaged one injection and one procedure at a time.

The fantasy of cost-free perpetual youth is just that. Every era has extracted a price for beauty, from footbinding in China, practised for a thousand years into the early 20th century, to the corsets of Victorian England that restricted breathing.

The late Princess Diana, back in the news posthumously, offers a stark illustration. Beloved globally for her charm and looks, she battled bulimia and self-loathing during her years in the Palace. Her brother, Earl Spencer, writes in his memoir Swan Song: Diana, My Sister that days after the engagement announcement, Charles squeezed Diana's waist and remarked, "Oh, a bit chubby here, aren't we?" Spencer notes that her waist shrank from 29 to 23.5 inches between her engagement and her marriage.

If a woman who was once among the best-known figures in the world could suffer for her beauty, the pressure on everyone else is plain. The urge for eternal youth is not confined to those who treat their bodies as laboratories; it touches all of us to varying degrees. The writer Nora Ephron observed that faces are lies while necks tell the truth, noting that ageing women instinctively reach for turtlenecks, scarves and mandarin collars. In India, Rakhi Sawant was unusual among celebrities in openly acknowledging plastic surgery, even as the film industry, the ultimate arbiter of popular culture, remains a place where nearly everyone has gone under the knife.

The trajectory points towards something like Charlie Kaufman's dystopian animation Anomalisa (2015), in which everyone looks and sounds alike, driving its protagonist to the edge of a breakdown. The questions he confronts are worth confronting: what does it mean to be human, to ache, to be alive — and, most importantly, what makes us different?