As Temba Bavuma held up the ICC Test Championship mace, I thought back to South Africa’s post-Apartheid cricket team visiting India in 1991. Notwithstanding the country’s talismanic Black president, it was an all-White team that took seven years to select a Black player, Makhaya Ntini, into the national team, and thirty-two to hand the captaincy to one, the one that has now erased South Africa’s stigma as ‘chokers’ in knockout matches of International Cricket Council tournaments. No high-octane celebration, no bending of the knee and raising of the arm for Bavuma, but, with a controlled gravitas, he helped author a defining moment for Blacks as well as for a nation striving to put its dark history past it.
But what about the country with which South Africa played its first international cricket after readmission? A few months ago, two telling things happened there. A top woman bureaucrat in Kerala, a senior member of the Indian Administrative Service, revealed publicly that she had been taunted many times over her dark skin. Around the same time, a senior politician fighting for a Lok Sabha seat taunted his woman opponent over her dark skin. And if you thought this was where this disgusting practice stopped, you would be sadly mistaken. Just over a year ago, a man in Andhra Pradesh poisoned his 18-month-old daughter to death, allegedly because of her dark skin colour. A year before that, a Karnataka man allegedly strangled his wife to death over her ‘dark complexion’. And a few years earlier, a young woman from Rajasthan allegedly killed herself because of constant harassment by her husband, and another, from Uttar Pradesh, set her husband on fire — both over the same issue, a ‘dark complexion’. Evidently, the scourge cuts across region and gender, and there is no limit to the brutality it can beget.
Different regions, different social and political contexts, but one single mindset — a ‘blacktape’ sticking plaster that’s hard to yank off today’s India. Its name is colourism, a term coined by the author, Alice Walker, in 1980 to mean prejudicial treatment of same-race people based solely on their skin colour. Not much different from racism, this remains a pervasive social issue here. While caste, class, and gender discrimination have received significant attention in contemporary discourse, colourism continues to thrive — sometimes silently, often insidiously — across different strata of Indian society.
Colourism in India predates colonial rule. Ancient Indian texts showed some preference for fair skin, often associating it with nobility and divinity, while dark skin was occasionally depicted as a marker of the demonic. Caste, stratifying society based on hereditary occupation and purity, contributed to that bias. Over centuries, the association between fair skin and social superiority was reinforced, especially during colonial rule, when the link between whiteness and power, intelligence, and superiority became entrenched in the Indian psyche, seeping into all aspects of everyday life, from marriage markets to employment and popular culture. The continuing legacy of this remains a big blot on the ‘decolonisation’ idea in India.
Even a cursory look at the engagement of some of our national icons with this issue turns up interesting findings, most of them well-known but not widely discussed. For people such as Nelson Mandela or Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi may have been an inspirational figure, but it bears remembering that, through his defining years in South Africa, Gandhi showed little interest in the rights and welfare of the Black African population. Indians, he thought, should enjoy the same rights as White citizens of the Empire, and not be reduced to the disenfranchised level of Black Africans (whom he often described as “kaffirs”). This has often led to him being described as a racist who accepted and promoted aspects of the segregation doctrine. That the rancour ran deep and long was indicated by the concerted and successful movement launched in 2018 by the faculty and students at the University of Ghana in Accra to remove a statue of Gandhi from the campus quadrangle.
Sometimes such entanglements could be more implicit or unselfconscious, though not unproblematic. One of Rabindranath Tagore’s most famous poems, composed in 1900 and sung hauntingly by several artists, began thus: “Krishnakali ami tarei boli/ Kalo tare boley gnayer lok” (“Krishnakali I have named her/ Village folks call her the dark one”), and followed, a few lines later, with this self-reflection: “A dark one? As dark as she may be/ Doe eyes so dusky I have seen”. The poet was evidently singing paeans to the beauty of a dark-skinned village belle, the beauty of whose eyes was fetching, notwithstanding the colour of her skin. This was complicated, to say the very least.
Satyajit Ray’s masterful 1970 film, Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), cast a fair-complexioned Simi Garewal in the role of a dark-skinned Santhal girl, for which the actress had to spend four hours to put on black body paint, and three more to remove it after the take. Such ‘blackface’ practice — involving wearing dark make-up to mimic the appearance of a dark-skinned person — was a very controversial tradition, particularly in the American entertainment industry, and went out of fashion in the 1940s after mounting charges of racism. Even holding back the charges of mimicry and caricature, there is little denying that Ray was undertaking a very complicated and fraught exercise of trying to ‘represent’ a tribal body.
Another type of representation permeated the paintings of mythological heroines like Damayanti, Shakuntala, Draupadi, and other Hindu goddesses by the nineteenth-century artist, Raja Ravi Varma. These created a prototype of fair-complexioned, full-figured women with ‘Aryan’ features, sharp noses, high cheekbones, and chiselled jawlines, that were in alignment with upper-caste notions of beauty. Indian calendar art and the Amar Chitra Katha series of comics books on Indian history and mythology merely perpetuated this beauty myth based on an obsessive concern with fairness. Arguably, till today, this paradigm of colourism continues to pervade the beauty industry and media representation, particularly cinema and advertising, where fair skin is often portrayed as the gold standard of beauty, success, and desirability.
Why is there an absence of a forceful movement in India to question and dismantle these prejudices? In recent years, there has been some backlash and push for change from activists, educators, and artists, especially through
social media campaigns like Nandita Das’s #DarkIsBeautiful (now called ‘India’s Got Colour’) and #UnfairAndLovely, which aim to redefine beauty standards and empower individuals to embrace their natural complexion. One, however, is not exactly sure how wide their impact is, and, without a shadow of doubt, they pale in
comparison to the Black Lives Matter movement.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the erstwhile skin lightening cream, Fair & Lovely, now re-branded — in what appears to be a tentative stab at mitigation — ‘Glow & Lovely’. In a 2011 survey, the matrimonial website, Shaadi.com, found that nearly half of the men wanted ‘fair and lovely’ brides. The search filters on the website traditionally included skin colour or tone preferences until they were taken off in 2020 under pressure exerted by a mass petition launched through the platform, Change.org. Around 2018-20, there were several such petition campaigns on Change.org that strongly condemned corporate brands engaging in colourism and urged matrimonial and dating websites to remove the skin colour filter forthwith. Although the response was fitfully positive, and a few film stars and supermodels even apologised for previously endorsing such products, it is somewhat anticlimactic to see recent campaigns on Change.org mellow down to less assertive, gentler initiatives with pledges such as ‘All Colours are Beautiful’.
When the curse is this reprehensible, it’s high time such kid-gloved niceties were chucked away. Can we muster some more serious rage, please?
Jayanta Sengupta is Director, Alipore Museum; jsengupt@gmail.com