Keep those lemons away!
Keep those lemons away!
An Indian perspective on colorism and how the relationship of people has evolved over time with the burden of colonial hangover.
I was in fourth grade when I first realized the word kali, dark, and what it meant for me. My mother was slathering me in sunscreen. She believed it would stop me from tanning. Now, we know better. But it taught me something that stayed with me for a long time. Getting a darker skin tone was not desirable.
It was common to find the famous fair and lovely tubes in every relative’s home I visited, promising to make your shades lighter. It was normal for aunts and cousins exchanging homemade DIYs to lighten your skin, gushing over the results that made them look red in the face, and refusing to go out in the sun. Add to this, another euphemism about referring to fair skin as Saaf, clean, as if darker skin tones are somehow dirty. No wonder I thought the idea of a tanning bed was bizarre when I first saw it in a Final Destination movie (not a good promotion, anyway!)
But as I grew older, I saw the real mania around fairness. The darker actors were always the side characters, villains, or made the subject of ridicule in movies and shows, whereas the fair-skinned actors took the Centre stage. In addition to this, the dark-skinned actors were often the characters that belonged to lower castes, another aspect of Casteism in Indian society where the dark skin tone is generally related to disadvantaged sections of society.
Even the makeup industry is biased and I could only find two Indian brands that cater to various Indian skin tones, Kay Beauty by Katrina Kaif and Nykaa.
All this made me feel that I just was not fair enough. I gave in to trying everything I could. And the star of every homemade DIY was, you guessed it right, lemon. I soon gave up on trying to achieve that out of sheer exhaustion of making concoctions that smelled bad and then applying it all over. But it was something engrained in my psyche and everyone around me, ‘Fairer is better’
Yet, I didn’t know the name of this discriminatory practice until I wrote a story for Colorismhealing. Their guidelines define colorism as “the social marginalization and systemic oppression of people with darker skin tones and the privileging of people with lighter skin tones.” And this definition rang true for me. I knew about racism and xenophobia, but colorism as a separate word never crossed me, even with its presence in my life. It was a new concept for me that not only there is racial discrimination around the world, but it has also offset another beast that people endure.
Although my story, ‘Mama’s milk’ is not based on the Indian premises, the emotions and plot where the lighter-skinned daughter is preferred, marks the reality of many families where unfortunately, its onus falls on the girl child.
This practice is dominated by the ideology that the worth of a girl is valued by the lightness of her skin color, which also exposes the patriarchal need for a beautiful bride. The problem here lies in the fact that this is what we have taught our daughters from birth. It makes the learning curve not only steep, but almost impossible to climb over.
The Indian series Made in Heaven, in its first episode of Season 2, captures the essence of this, where the bride is willing to go through various treatments just for that one day. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly suggest you to check it out.
It not only exposes how it is closely related to racism in its catering to white supremacy but also perpetuated by various factions of the society even after independence from colonial rule.
It is no wonder that the whitening industry is worth over 9 billion and projected to grow exponentially over the next five years when the prejudice against darker skin is so deeply rooted in non-whites as much as whites. And the aspiration to be like them is juxtaposed with the exoticization of darker skin when brown is sexy.
The othering of the colonized people continues in this form of exclusivity and makes for a confusing state. On the one side, you see a public figure like Priyanka Chopra openly apologizing for endorsing brands that claim to make you ‘fairer’ as she recounts the colorism that she has faced in the industry while on the other hand, you see promotions of Glutathione treatments across the state and the skincare aisle filled with products that take up different names like tan removal, brightening serum, deep cleansing creams but are inherently promising the same thing.
No one wants to be accused of colorism today when you can be torn down in seconds by social media. And many Indian creators are embracing and empowering the darker brown skin tones like Monica Ravichandran and Prakriti Singh. They are proving every day to the little children out there that their skin tone also has a place in the world, and they don’t need to ascribe to a certain beauty standard. Yet the underside is that the same social media algorithm favors Eurocentric beauty and pushes it to the top.
Indian cinema has now resorted to painting the actors in darker color, a practice called brownface. They cast the same actors in the name of artistic liberty for the role that could have been taken by someone with that skin tone in real life. For example, Alia Bhatt was cast as a migrant girl and painted darker than her original skin tone in Udta Punjab.
But it also asks a larger question whether a talented actor should be looked over because of their color. The argument is a muddy ground no one wants to venture in.
So, what is the beauty standard now? Something that I have been taught from childhood? Or what the social media is telling me now? Because I am neither.
It has taken me a long time to accept the fact that I would never be the typical Indian beauty which is now projected worldwide, neither would I be the exact shade of skin tone that the Indian society prefers. And I know it would take a long time for the whole world to accept, including the Indian population that every shade is beautiful, not just the extremes.
We also have colorism in mainstream Thai society, but I suppose operating on a slightly different angle. I really must emphasise my use of the word ‘mainstream’, because Thai society (with the pushing forward of the younger generation over the past several years) has been changing at lightning speed from the bottom up; and there are now major shifts in the assigning of values. But, let’s say since the post-Vietnam War era (and I’d say the privileging of fair skin would have been brought in from the west over the course of the 60s and 70s, although I’d need further confirmation from historical records), the darker skin tones had been assigned to provincial people and hard labourers, especially those who worked in the outdoors. And fairer skin was assigned to those who were considered more economically secure perhaps, who worked in office buildings, considering the offices were sheltered from the elements, and the people working in them were more protected and privileged; hence, the label ‘sao office’ (สาวออฟฟิศ) which means ‘office girl’.
That being said, beginning from the late 90s onwards, Thai film and television began casting leading men with darker skin tones, not too dark, but categorised as fairly dark; men only, not women. The fashionable word used to describe these leading men in film and television was ‘kem’ (เข้ม) which may be translated as ‘intense and concentrated’, almost in an erotically intense kind of way; the word almost has poetic associations (dark chocolate, or milk chocolate, maybe?), or that’s the way I see it. But this way of value-assignment goes to show that the darker skin (popular) preference doesn’t apply to women; that, perhaps, it wasn’t quite socially acceptable for women to be seen as ‘intense and concentrated’.
I’ve never considered myself to be part of these mainstream trends. And I breathe a sigh of great relief every time I see a young Thai person put forward their critical thinking skills on the social media platforms. (And, by the way, I’m a little dark myself.)