Fair skin covers seven flaws

Fair skin covers seven flaws

 Lot of brouhaha over a BJP leader’s statement about how we in India will follow the command of a white skinned  person and not a dark skinned one. Which brought back attention to the eternal “Fair and Lovely” debate. Chetan Bhagat added his two bits with an article in TOI Sunday about how it is important to recognise beauty in the dark skinned. Precious words from someone who married a very fair doe eyed Tamilian beauty.

My reaction has little to do with Giriraj’s rant against Sonia Gandhi. That, according to me, is a little trick history played on the world in general and India in particular. Had the Africans been colonisers and had ruled over us for 200 years, we would be accustomed to accepting their supremacy. As it turned out, the coloniser was the white man and hence the world over, is still accorded a differential status. But I don’t think our obsession with fair skin has anything to do with that. If anything, it probably traces its origins to the Aryan-Dravidian race conflict. But I am no historian or anthropologist or whatever else one needs to be to comment on suchlike things. I am a dark skinned Andhra woman who was brought up in a (then) small town called Dehra Dun, among fair skinned Punjabi and Garhwali class mates, where my skin colour was by and large an aberration in the general scheme of fair things. The “kali Madrasi ladki” was my identity.

 What’s worse, I was born to a fair skinned Andhra woman, who rued the fact that her first born daughter had taken after her dark skinned husband and not her. The second born took after her, which in some measure, was a saving grace. My mother often said in Telugu “Telepu edu vankarlu kapputundi” which in English loosely translates to “Fair skin covers seven flaws”. I believed that and for years felt that there would never be any romance in my life. It is only much later in youth that I realised that the other assets I was blessed with far outweighed the supposed liability of my skin colour. Something which Yo Yo Honey Singh sang in his “Kudiyanu tere brown rang de…”!

Fair Bheem with dark Kaalia

 But enough about me. What I wanted to really talk of was the all - pervasive bias against the dark colour in general and dark skin in particular. It is amazing - the subtle ways in which the stereotype gets reinforced. Why should the White pieces in Chess play first? Why do the White coins in Carrom get 10 points each and the Black get 2 each? Yes Rama and Krishna are both dark Gods, but why are their consorts lily white? Have you seen Chota Bheem, with its third rate animation and terrible story lines that millions of Indian kids (including mine) love watching? Why is Bheem who is the smart, talented hero, fair skinned and his nemesis and the villain of the piece, the dark skinned over weight Kaalia (why, even the name is not subtle!) Again and again, the dark Kaalia gets beaten into pulp and trashed while the fair Chota Bheem emerges victorious.

Light coloured Simba fighting the dark Scar

What about Hollywood's Lion King, with its awesome story line, dialogues, music score and animation? Why are Simba and Mufasa (the heroes, the legitimate Lion Kings) of a lighter shade and Scar, the villain (who should NOT be King) of a darker shade? And in all the animation movies involving animals I have seen so far, the female is always, always a few shades lighter than the male. So not only do you have to be fair to be the Hero, you have to be fairer if you want the Hero!

The conditioning is subtle (sometimes not even that) but is all pervasive. Fair is beautiful and the dark, at best, is an also ran. The whole talk of inner beauty makes me nauseous, since it is accepting the fact that dark skin will always be beaten by fair skin in any outward beauty competition. As long as we continue to refer to Freida Pinto, Chitrangada Singh, Susmita Sen as dark “but” beautiful, we will continue this bias. There’s no getting away from it. After all, we do believe that “Fair skin covers seven flaws”.