The Colour Complex

I've always been aware of the South Asian fetish for fair skin, growing up watching Fair & Lovely ads, but today it really hit me. While browsing through a random cricket forum, someone linked an article from a semi-popular Indian filmi portal called Glamsham.com. I was shocked. Down in the fifth paragraph Rimi Sen has the audacity to state: "Rohit Shetty is amazing as a director. He can make even a black African look pretty". Its not just the statement that offends me - its also the fact that Glamsham saw it appropriate enough to print, and to my knowledge no retraction has been offered on part of Rimi or Glamsham. Worse, a simple Google search shows that the remark only raised outrage in a handful of media outlets - that too from internet outlets radiosargam.com, but the rest are syndicated from it too, such as the Himalayan Times and Sulekha.com

Its really shouldn't be that surprising - a simple look through various matrimonial sites confirms that fair skin is a considered a superior quality in the South Asian marriage market. I'm sure a fair(sic)number of us have heard the issue come up in our own lives whether through relatives or family friends. The recent arranged marriage lawsuit filed in Massachusetts partly charges that the bride-to-be was assured to be "equally beautiful with fair complexion" and turned out to be "ugly with dark complexion". The sad fact is that that the plaintiff is a retired environmental engineer who has been living in North America for the past 30 years. The same attitude prevails across religious lines, and even the level of education, and its far too common - for my liking atleast.

So where does it come from? At this point I'm just going to throw some wild ideas. One can take a full-blown historical approach and use the controversial (and now debunked?) Aryan Invasion theory to make a hypothesis: The Aryans came to India, and setup the caste system basing it on skin colour to retain their dominance over their Dravidian subjects, with the recent colonial experience reinforcing it. Ketan Mehta alludes to this in Lagaan, if I recall correctly, when Kachra the untouchable is rejected by the team, and Aamir Khan inserts skin colour into the caste argument in his dialogue. Or you could just blame it on the English, but I'm sure it can be documented prior to their arrival - please correct me if I'm wrong. Another theory could be that the various invasions of South Asia have historically come from the fairer-skinned inhabitants from the North and the West, and the feudals had formed a habit of colluding with them, and often adapting their customs and ideologies in the process. Muslims aren't off the hook either - an examination of Pakistani's subjugation of East Pakistan/Bangladesh shows that the West Pakistani elite often rationalized their behaviour on their own particular brand of race theory. In Emma Duncan's brilliant book Breaking the Curfew - A Political Journey through Pakistan (unfortunately no longer in print), she describes how the West Pakistanis saw their darker Bengali Muslim counterparts as contaminated with Indian blood, as opposed to their own fairer Persian and Arab lineages.

However, this is a complex topic, and there are also unanswered questions from my side - Is this just a North Indian phenomenon, or is skin colour a commodity in South India as well? Is it prevalent or practised in minority communities like Christians, Sikhs and Parsis as well? Has the problem been exacerbated by skin lightening creams and the media's propensity to prop up fair-skinned beauties, or is just a reflection of public demand and perception? How is the preference for fair skin in South Asia related to similar issues in other societies like Arabia, Africa and Latin America - are they all the products of different historical legacies, or essentially borne of Eurocentric standards from the colonial era? Additionally, I'd love if someone could point to some academic research in this area, so the discussion can proceed on concrete ground, rather than my own whacky hypotheses.

All I have to say is that I'll take Nandita Das over most (if not all) fair-skinned Bollywood actresses any day.