Muskan Sharma stood up to men who tried to bully her over her clothes – and went on to win hearts and a beauty pageant.
The 23-year-old, who was crowned Miss Rishikesh 2025 last week in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, told the BBC that even though it was a small local pageant, “it made me feel like Miss Universe”.
Sharma’s win has made headlines in India as it came after a viral video that showed her spiritedly arguing with a man who barged into their rehearsals just a day before the 4 October contest.
Sharma, who “wanted to be a model and participate in a pageant since I was in school”, said the intruders came in just as they broke for lunch.
“We were sitting around, chilling, having a laugh when they walked in,” she said.
The footage showed Raghavendra Bhatnagar, district head of a Hindu group called Rashtriya Hindu Shakti Sangathan, objecting to skirts and western dresses Sharma and other contestants were wearing.
“Modelling is over, go back home,” Bhatnagar is heard telling them. “This is against Uttarakhand’s culture.”
Sharma refuses to back down. “Why don’t you shut the shops which sell them [Western clothes]?”
She then tells him that he should expend his energies on things that are worse than women’s clothing – social evils such as drinking and smoking.
“There’s a shop right outside that sells cigarettes and alcohol. Why don’t you shut that down? First stop those things and I will stop wearing these clothes,” she says.
The man snaps at her saying “don’t tell me what to do”. Likewise, she retorts. “If you have the right to choose, then so do we. Our opinion matters as much as yours,” she says.
As the argument continues, Sharma is joined by some of the other contestants and organisers and Bhatnagar and his group, who threatened to stop the show, are finally escorted out by the hotel manager.
Sharma says her reaction to Bhatnagar was “spontaneous”.
“I could see my dreams shattering in front of me. The only question in my mind at the time was will the pageant go on? Will I be able to walk the ramp? Or will all my hard work go waste?” she says.
The next day, the event went on as planned and Sharma won the crown.
“For three seconds after I heard my name announced, I was shocked,” she said.
“But then I was happy that I stood up for myself and that I won. It felt like a double victory. It was a small pageant in a small place but it made me feel like Miss Universe,” she said.
Sharma says heckling of women for their clothing is unheard of in Rishikesh, a city in the Himalayan foothills on the banks of Ganges river. It’s known for its ashrams and meditation and yoga retreats and is considered a holy Hindu site that draws in large numbers of tourists and pilgrims.
The city is also sought out by fans of Beatles because the Fab Four had spent weeks at an ashram there in 1968.
“You see tourists dressed in western clothing here all the time and no-one bats an eyelid,” she adds.
Globally, beauty pageants have been criticised for objectifying women and reinforcing gender stereotypes.
But these contests have been hugely popular in India since 1994 – the year when Sushmita Sen won the Miss Universe crown and Aishwarya Rai brought home the Miss World trophy.
Both went on to become top Bollywood actresses and have inspired generations of young women since then to follow in their path.
Similar successes in later years of Priyanka Chopra, Diana Hayden and Lara Dutta have only reinforced the belief that beauty pageants can be a ticket to success, especially for young women in small-town India.
Sharma says her parents have always been very supportive of her decision to participate in the pageant. In the viral video, she’s even heard asking Bhatnagar: “Who are you to comment on my clothing if my parents allow me to to wear them?”
But the backlash to Western clothing in India is not new where what women wear routinely becomes a subject of debates. In a deeply patriarchal society, many link western clothing, especially jeans, to the “moral degradation” of young people.
Schools and colleges set dress codes for female students and sometimes village elders bar an entire community of girls from wearing jeans.
The BBC has reported a number of cases where girls and women have been singled out and humiliated for their clothes.
A few years ago, we wrote about a 19-year-old student in Assam who turned up in shorts to take an exam and was forced to wrap a curtain around her legs after the teacher objected.
In one extreme case, a teenager was allegedly murdered by her relatives for wearing jeans.
Namita Bhandare in her column in The Hindustan Times newspaper points out that there is no objection to the Mr Rishikesh contest where participants are barely dressed.
The objection to Sharma and other contestants’ clothing, she writes, is “barely a fig-leaf”.
“The issue is not clothes. The issue is freedom and aspiration. How dare these young women be on a stage that could springboard them to a larger global platform? How dare they cross lines of honour and shame that a patriarchal society has imposed on them?”
Bhandare writes that in India where there are not enough women MPs or judges, the pushback by young women from a small town is remarkable.
