Indian notions of skin color and beauty

Something else has crept into the Indian lexicon since I've been gone. Increasingly, I find Indians referring to certain other Indians as "white", when in fact they are merely lighter-skinned than other Indians, and rather brown when compared to Caucasians. Usually, this is done in an admiring tone, as if the person in question excelled in some intellectual contest and grabbed "whiteness" as a prize. Not for nothing is India's top-selling skin-lightening cream(which I suspect is nothing but a high-SPF product) called Fair and Lovely. So I've been paying attention to Indian attitudes toward color, and the standards for beauty. It's a hot topic, and Indians bridle at any overt references to racism, which is really what it amounts to when it forms the basis for social and professional discrimination.

 That Indians have an obsession with light skin, I have long been aware. After all, Bollywood(before it conferred that nickname on itself) set the tone many decades earlier by all but refusing to consider dark-skinned actors for leading roles(Rekha was one major exception). In other regional cinema, too, the same prejudice prevailed. Notable exceptions which come to my mind are the Bengali actors Mithun Chakraborty and the strikingly attractive Nandita Das, both of whom also have Caucasian features, which apparently compensates for their dark skin. When I was a child, you could bet that if anyone was regarded as having "film-star looks", the #1 attribute was light skin. Indians do have more aquiline noses, generally speaking, than Arabs, for example, but they tend to have weaker chins and less prominent cheekbones. So having strong chins and prominent cheekbones, considered Caucasian or "Aryan" attributes, have also figured into the Indian appreciation of what constitutes good looks along with, certainly, light skin and light eyes.

Nandita Das, a Bengali actress, director and producer

 A long-standing, and annoying, habit of people from the north of India is to refer to south Indians as dark-skinned or even "blackies"("kala log" or "kallu"), a term the British used for Indians during the Raj. Generally speaking, the bulk of north Indians have similar skin tone to the bulk of south Indians, the difference being that north India has a greater percentage of lighter-skinned people than the south. There are plenty of South Indians who are lighter-skinned than the majority of North Indians, and this generally invokes consternation when a North Indian meets them("Are you an Anglo?", "Are your parents from the north?"). There is, of course, a historical reason behind the genetics, but it is something that is generally played down, because of religious reasons for propaganda. There is a tendency to decry Muslims as illegitimate progeny of Arab invaders, in order to portray them as being un-Indian and thus "foreign", "alien" and unpatriotic. In reality, while a fair number of Muslims probably do have some degree of Arab blood in them, the amount of foreign blood in them is likely quite a bit less than non-Muslim Indians who are light-skinned. The overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims I have encountered are dark-skinned.

In the centuries before the Arab Muslim conquests of large parts of India, areas of the north were subjected to repeated invasions by peoples to the north, west and even north-east(Mongolians) of India. These invasions predictably left behind more than mere destruction, desolation and, occasionally, architectural, linguistic and epicurean influence. Frequently, they left behind genetic stamps on the local population. It is delusional to think or believe that such co-mingling was entirely or even mostly consensual. But the descendants of such relationships tend to look upon their altered and more Caucasian features with pride, oblivious to the probability that those very features were the outcome of less than chivalrous unions with alien invaders, something usually only portrayed for Indian Muslims.

In the south and east of India, European features are also the outcome of the migration of mixed peoples from the north and northwest,  as well as offspring of Arab and other West Asian and southern European traders and of course European cohabitation over the past four hundred years. But all over India, dating way back to some period of unrecorded history, the acquisition of lighter skin and/or Caucasian features has also often carried with it a social reward: higher status in India's caste system, which is so pervasive that it has enfolded alien cultures which came to India as well. All except for the Zoroastrians(or Parsis), who avoided casteism by excluding the progeny of mixed-marriages and forbidding conversion into their religion, and to a lesser extent, the Jews who similarly discouraged conversions but permitted a degree of intermarriage. Zoroastrians still very much retain the skin color and features of their Persian ancestors.

The role of skin color in caste is hotly debated in India, with those disagreeing pointing to the fact that some South Indian Brahmins, for example, are darker-skinned than North Indian farmers of the Vysya caste. I think that argument is akin to claiming that the French are not Caucasian because the Scandinavians have fairer skin. Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that in India, dark skin is to this day associated with a lower caste status and is subject to overt and covert discrimination. Regardless of what some may claim, a simple walk around talking to people on the streets and in the villages will confirm this perception. Interestingly, there is a community in Karnataka, as also in some other parts of India, known as Siddis, composed entirely of the descendants of African slaves. They are still distinctly identifiable as African, despite a degree of co-mingling, and they remain outside the mainstream, not necessarily socially ostracized, but definitely excluded from greater integration, to put it delicately, even with the most discriminated-against local Indian castes.

Siddi farmers in Karnataka

The reason I thought of writing on this topic is because I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that this obsession with light skin and notions of beauty based on the Caucasian standard is behind the apathy, disdain and even outright contempt that Indians seem to have for their fellow Indians, even if most are not consciously aware of their own attitude. This contempt is probably the primary reason behind India's failure to modernize its systems and procedures to go along with increasing prosperity for some of its people. There is an endemic attitude- which elsewhere would be clearly seen as racism- that somehow the poor, who usually look less Caucasian than the rich, exist to serve those "above" them, and that any change in that relationship is undesirable even though some collateral spillover does happen. I call it "shades-of-brown racism". That attitude manifests itself in a reluctance to improve conditions outside one's own home, lest it should have the inadvertent effect of improving the living conditions of the unworthy. There are luxurious private social clubs in India which charge an absolute fortune for membership, and yet I find that immediately outside their high walls is almost always a picture of neglect and decrepitude. I have referred to this in another post as the "local" mindset, which values anything foreign above its Indian counterpart, sometimes with reason, often without. Anything foreign, that is, with one notable exception: African products, including art, music and manufactures, are generally dismissed as inferior, as are Africans themselves. I think it is well worth pondering why that is so.