Racism is one of the most prejudiced concepts which has grown into an idea of being a basis for qualified society or individual over the years in India. A fair metrics passed girl is more preferred to a dusky complexioned qualified doctor, also her family may have to ransom an immense dowry to groom’s family for doing them the favour of marrying their unwanted complexioned girl.
Bollywood — the world’s largest film industry in terms of the number of films produced by it worldwide and hence, there is no parameter more suitable to measure the extent of racism in present India. Here is a hint — it’s worse than ever. At present, you won’t be able to find a single, let alone dark, a dusky complexion actress if you tried in any of the Bollywood films. Let alone Bollywood, the same is the case with its sibling from the south where the majority of the population is dark-complexioned but their actress should be white. Enough about this, moving on, you may know this but it’s important to mention it here for the sake of article — India is one of the world’s largest consumer of fairness products, name a part of the body and a whiting product would be available for it, even for nipples, vaginas? Yes. Fairness in most of the Asian countries is associated with beauty, maybe people have grown colour blind, they just don’t seem to see dark people as people. And, all of this applies only to the female population, a guy can be as dark as the night itself and he would be acceptable but if it’s a girl she has to be white no matter the whole generation before she was not, she is blamed for her complexion, not the gene she got from her parents. I better end it here, don’t want to dive into deep-rooted patriarchal issues, another epidemic country is fighting with.
Where this all began?
Did racism prevail in India since ancient times? No. India is a country of non-white people except for a few northern states. Change in skin colour can be seen from white to dusky to dark moving from northern to southern parts of the country. All this was fine with us until Britisher decided to rule India considering themselves as the most superior and intelligent race on planet seeing India’s comparatively dark population as inferior and pollute its people’s minds with derogatory thinking that mere colour of skin can be used as a scale to measure intelligence, status in a job, and altogether level of humanity in you. This thought process was backed up by strategies such as — lighter skin-coloured Indians were given preference over their darker counterparts and hired more frequently for government jobs. Entry to restaurants and educational institutions was prohibited for “Black Indians” with entry boards clearly stating “Indians and dogs not allowed”. British individuals filled the higher administrative posts, and Indians were kept for doing menial jobs (e.g., Indians as Sepoys and British as officers). Skin tone prejudice was evident when the British Empire, ruling India at that time, kept light-skinned Indians as allies, and gave them extra advantages over the rest of the “blacks.” British segregation was clear from the time when East India Company, which operated in the late sixteen hundreds, named their Fort St. George settlement “White Town” and their Indian Settlement “Black Town
All this with time created a craving in people to be white and now more or less it is turning into a necessity.
We can’t say the young generation of this country is not trying to get rid of this unwanted legacy but it’s a hard try for them. No one wants to accept in the open that they have such backward thinking minds all the while looking for white brides and products to turn their daughters into white angels. Recently we have seen the first strong spark with the first-ever campaign, “Dark is Beautiful,” which was endorsed by Bollywood actress Nandita Das and her slogan, “Stay Unfair Stay Beautiful.”
A new society can’t be built on the old pillars of incompetency. Freedom is not just physical achievement, it has to be gained mentally as well.
Wake up society, DON’T BE COLOUR BLIND!!!
References : Here is a brilliant paper by Neha Mishra on India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1553&context=law_globalstudies
Originally published at https://kaalni.com.
