Good girls stay away from fashion and films. So it is the duty of a solidly respectable girls’ school to protect its students from the dubious allure of the media and entertainment industries. And all this, for the sake of a “homely environment”. The principal of Alipore Multipurpose Government Girls’ High School in Calcutta would have allowed Ms Sampurna Lahiri to continue with her higher secondary studies in the school only if she had cancelled her contract for modelling in the pages of a women’s magazine. Ms Lahiri’s other disqualification — in spite of a first division in her secondary examinations, after studying for ten years in the school— was that she had participated in a beauty contest, which had led to the modelling contract. The principal feared that Ms Lahiri would distract the other girls in school from their academic goals and the “homeliness” befitting their sex. Hence, such a summary prohibition, which her parents, quite rightly, have not brooked, getting her admitted to another school without cancelling her contract with the magazine.

The puritanism directed at Ms Lahiri is the sort that unthinkingly associates the work of models and actors with sexual immorality and a kind of ‘bad’ commercialism. This mix of ignorance and prejudice, when it becomes part of the ethos of higher education, could severely constrain and complicate the personal and professional lives of young women, apart from perpetuating wrongheaded and damaging stereotypes regarding certain professions. And it is particularly dangerous when heads of educational institutions, wielding power and influence over the lives of young people, come to embody such attitudes without the slightest intention to re-examine them in the light of changing times. Women in a predominantly conservative society, which is also in transition, often have to bear the brunt of the uneasy conservatism. The regulation of their lives, through the control of their bodies and minds, in school and at home, often tries to pass itself off as well-intentioned concern and protectiveness. This is not to look away from the fact that beauty contests, reality shows, fashion and cinema could have their own ways of exploiting and damaging young women and men. But these can be addressed in specific and sensible ways, without being paranoid or arbitrary.