One of the things that excited me most about visiting India earlier this year was being in a world filled with people of my skin color. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I go through my days in America with slitted eyes, constantly on guard for racial wrongdoings. I don’t. But sometimes you get tired of having to pronounce your name every time you meet someone. A 21-hour flight from Boston to Kolkata and suddenly I wasn’t the person your eyes went to but merely a ripple in a boisterous tide of fellow browns.
But what I didn’t count on (and what made me feel naive about things when I did) was the realization that in a world where everyone’s the same color, it’s all about shades. Nowhere is this more true than in film and television. Bollywood stars, men and women, are almost without exception fair-skinned, while darker-skinned actors are usually relegated to the roles of villain and comic relief. The divide is especially egregious when you turn on the television and see these same Bollywood stars (including mega-star Shahrukh Khan) hawking “skin lightening” creams such as Fair & Handsome and Garnier PowerLight, questionable mixtures designed to reduce and/or block melanin production. My personal favorite shows a young woman who achieves her dream of being a cricket commentator once her skin’s been lightened up a few shades:
Ad for Fair & Lovely Skin Whitening Cream
What is going on here? There’s the theory that the influence of Western media has supplanted Indian ideals of beauty and replaced them with Pamela Anderson running in a bikini. There’s the theory that this is merely a holdover from the caste system, a social hierarchy dating back thousands of years where Brahmins, the whitest of Indians, enjoyed the fat of the land while dark-skinned “untouchables” cremated bodies, handled garbage, and placed shopping lists with cash by the entrance to general stores so the shopkeep wouldn’t be sullied by actually touching their hands.
While these seem like perfectly reasonable explanations, actually spending time in the country makes them difficult to believe. Because it’s not just about how light-skinned you are, but how Western. Fair-skinned Indians on film and television wear Western clothes while their darker counterparts opt for the dhoti (loincloth). Their conversation is peppered with English phrases while darker-skinned Indians suck air through their teeth and speak in embarrassingly strong accents. In a country where white people are few and far between, the fair-skinned operate as stand-ins for the real thing. This really struck home when my aunts in Kolkata decided to play dress-up with my Irish-German-Lithuanian wife. Halfway around the world, they couldn’t attend our wedding, so this was their chance to see what she looked like as a traditional Hindu bride. After nearly 3 hours, this was the end result:
Now, my wife is a looker, but this is just ridiculous. Erin was the first to admit, upon catching a glance of herself in the mirror, that she looked like something that belonged during the final frames of a horror movie than a woman about to be wed. And yet the aunties cooed and cawed. They snapped pictures and fed us sweets. And once in a while, they whispered to each other how her complexion made the sari look prettier. How she didn’t need makeup with that skin, because she had nothing to cover up. It was as though her whiteness had removed any objectivity. She would be equally beautiful in anything. Which was touching, but also incredibly depressing.
250 years since the British subjugated the country, 60 years after they left it with over 50% poverty and an economy in tatters, well-to-do Indians have High Tea at 4 o’clock. They play cricket. And, in the absence of their former masters, they employ fair-skinned stand-ins to continue a longstanding tradition of inferiority and subservience. There’s a quote from Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things that sums it up:
“Our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that had made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”
This post was written by
Anish Majumdar – who has written 22 posts on DashAmerican.com.
Anish Majumdar is the creator of DashAmerican.com, a site devoted to insights at the intersection of cultures. He is of Bengali descent, raised in Canada, and currently living with his Irish-German-Lithuanian wife in upstate NY. His work has received Independent Press Association Awards and a Pushcart Prize nomination.
