D Tejaszuini Niranjana ally fuzzy, and keeps shifting in focus and content. Feminists who use the term would have to work on deploying it with greater precision if it is to have any political value as a rallying point and as providing the ground for a critical engagement. Much of the furore over the beauty contest seemed to be inspired by the idea that women's bodies were being made the target of globalization and cultural imperialism. Clearly, 7 these processes—however one might choose to describe them—do not solely target women, nor are they inscribed only on women's bodies. It seemed, then, that the opponents of the contest were objecting to the exposure in India and to the world of the normed upper class female body. Earlier the contests seemed to be outside everyday spaces, confined to a small elite live audience. Liberalization of course has changed this. Televising in particular has radically expanded the audience for events such as the beauty contest, which are now also watched by what most Indian languages refer to as the "public" (the word can perhaps be substituted sometimes by the English word "masses")—with its connotations of being composed of those from certain non-elite caste-class backgrounds. The opponents of the beauty contest often seemed to echo elite arguments about the need for cinema censorship—the masses need to be protected, and taught what culture is. Culture means refinement and this (the beauty contest) is not culture. As the BJP Mahila Morcha's president said: "mana ammayilu" (our girls) are at risk— because there is no longer a difference in cinematic portrayal between the clothing and behaviour of the vamp as opposed to the heroine. Obscene cinema, therefore, signals the sexual availability of "our women" to lower class men. In the beauty contest, for instance, the critique of globalization is implicitly endorsed by the fact that the hitherto normative female body is being exposed to the "public's" gaze. One of the reasons why feminist criticism of the beauty contest was "muted" (to borrow Janaki Nair's description) was perhaps the lack of consensus within the movement regarding the forms and vocabulary of critique. I would read this as a positive sign instead of as an indicator that "the BJP and rightwing in general have appropriated our modes of protest" including the language of objectification and commodification. What the situation revealed was the inadequacy of our existing political vocabulary in dealing with what are clearly new kinds of phenomena, new sorts of crises. Instead of falling back on unreflective forms of protest which only makes us sound both repetitive and helpless, we should be focussing our energies on the fashioning of new political languages, new strategies. Towards this end, we hope the articles in this special issue ofJAI, whether or not they foreground gender issues, will help initiate some fresh discussion. Some of the presentations made at thel997 workshop have not, for various reasons, been written up for publication. A couple of oth^r articles were specially commissioned for this issue of JAI. S.V.Srinivas's article on the Alluda Majaka controversy investigates the question of obscenity in cinema, arguing for a theory of spectatorship which will help account for both the structure of the cinematic text and the diverse responses of viewers. Ajanta Sircar's piece on Numbers 32-33