By Kollengode S Venkataraman (written in 1999)
Indian mythology romanticizes darker shades of skin tones. Shama in Sanskrit means dark hued. Out of this word came a whole bunch of descriptive names for our gods and goddesses. One of Krishna’s descriptive names is Neela Megh Shyamala in Sanskrit or Kaar Mugil Vannan in Tamil, literally mean, he who is black as dark blue clouds. Shyam Sunder and Shyam Sundari, common names in India, literally mean a dark, handsome man and a dark, gorgeous woman. Shyamala and Shyamali are common names for women. Shyama Shastri, literally a black learned man, is a legendary 18th century music composer in South India. The Indian Bhakthi literature describes Rama, Arjuna, Saraswati, and Parvathy in luscious darker hues of skin tones. Deities in South Indian temples are carved out of black granite. Krishna also means dark.
Forget our mythology and come to real life. Haven’t we all seen countless handsome, smart dark young men and charmingly beautiful, intelligent, dark women inside and outside India?
“What’s the point, dummy?” you are thinking. Aren’t you?
The point is, despite what is in our mythology and literature, in reality, for a variety of interlocking reasons — the recent European colonization is only one of them — we are obsessed with light skin. The coded word for lighter skin tones in our matrimonial discussions is fair complexion. The euphemistically apologetic term for the opposite is medium complexion. Never dark complexion.
Till Jaya Bhaduri and Rekha came on the Indian screen. All Indian film heroines were surface-treated with peroxides to look fair-complexioned. And even in the makeup for Bharatanatyam, instead of bringing out the beauty of the dancers’ natural skin tones, often our charming young women are made to look like light skinned. Off stage, these dancers in their makeup remind me of the Japanese kabuki dancers who, in their traditional makeup, dust their faces with white rice powder.
Sophisticated Indians, both in India and outside, want to project India, particularly to the West, as tolerant and liberal, notwithstanding violent incidents based on religions and castes.
A few months back, this Indian upper crust was embarrassed. And if it were light-skinned, it would have become red-faced by an incident that received wide coverage in the Indian press.
According to the story in Bombay, oops Mumbai, two Black flight attendants of a foreign airline were badly treated in a posh restaurant in Bandra, an exclusive Bombay suburb where love the wealthy and the widely travelled Brown sahebs and the filmy type. These black women protested that the humiliation they suffered was entirely on account of their black identity. Black identity.
That this happened during the 50th anniversary of India’s independence from the white colonial masters was bad enough. As if adding insult to injury, these women were from South Africa. Yes folks, the same South Africa where the Father of the Nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, while travelling first class as a young London educated barrister, suffered the indignity of getting thrown out of the train by a white train conductor because he was a Hindu and a Sammy.
Incidentally, the indentured farm labourers in South Africa, mostly from South India, called their superior Sami, which is a South Indian modification of the Sanskrit word swami. In the weird world of apartheid, sami, a term used out of respect by the immigrant labourers, became a pejorative epithet to derogatorily refer to all Indians.
As expected, the press in India raised hell over the restaurant incident, and government held an inquiry. The restaurant provided an explanation that satisfied none. Incidents like these always make us squirm. Because they bring to the surface our own latent prejudices. The first instinct was to brush it aside under the carpet and pretend that this was in an isolated event.
But unfortunately, many Indian commentators who understand people’s psyche candidly said that the incident only brought to focus the widely prevalent attitude even among the educated masses in India. Instead of blaming the lowly restaurant employee for the incident, and making him a scapegoat, and living in denial, these commentators said we are better off acknowledging the problem.
If, in psychiatry the most difficult step in therapy is to make the person recognise the problem, in sociology it is to make society do the same. As in psychiatry, the recognition is only the beginning in the long road to change the attitude towards our fellow human beings. Without this recognition, it is a lost cause. With this recognition, though, there is hope that in due course of time and with sensitization, there may be noticeable shifts in our attitude. There is hope now because the problem is recognised. ∎