"Fairly" Awful: Growing up dark-skinned in India

On colourism, vaginal whitening and Megan Markle

Buying make up in India and in Spain is an interesting study in contrast.

When I was last in India, I found myself seated at a shop counter trying to decide between two shades of foundation. An assistant nudged me towards the lighter shade. The darker one, which was a truer match with my skin colour, had her frowning. “You don’t get a ‘glow’ with this one,” she’d said euphemistically. She’d meant, “This one doesn’t make you look whiter,” the presumed aim of foundation in India.

More recently, I had a similar, foundation-choosing encounter with a shop assistant in Madrid. She was insistent on the darker of the two shades I’d picked out. “This one is better,” she’d said. “It gives you a summer glow.” She’d meant, “This one makes you look tanned,” the presumed aim of foundation, in beach season, in Spain.

The fact that women everywhere feel the need to spend non-trivial portions of our financial resources on foundation is an indictment of social mores. It would be great if we could roll out of bed, slap some water on our faces, and be ready to face the day confident in our inner beauty. But that’s another article.

This one is about the validation a dark-skinned person, like me, feels in “white” Europe, after having spent years in China/Japan/Indonesia and India.

Asian women and the sun

Everywhere in Asia, girls live in mortal fear of the sun. My female university students in China would carry parasols with them in the summer months, busting them open even inside buses to block out the solar gaze that threatened to darken their epidermis through the windows.

 In Japan, female joggers looked like they were bee catchers complete with elbow-length gloves, leggings under their shorts and floppy hats, all in the service of preserving their skin from tanning. In Indonesia it could be very difficult to find a shower gel at the supermarket that didn’t insist on whitening the user, with visible results guaranteed in 4 weeks.

But it was in India where parsing skin colour, determining its value, categorizing it into a dizzying taxonomy – dusky, wheatish, creamy -, had reached its zenith.

When Megan Markle, actress and princess, revealed in a televised interview that a member of the British royal family had obliquely speculated about the possible skin colour of her child, viewers across the world drew in a sharp breath of disbelieve and distaste in syc with Oprah Winfry.

 But not in India. Indians were like, “Yes, it could have gone so wrong, but thanks to God the baby is fair. Like his dad.”

Vaginal whitening (its a thing)

In India, babies are ciphers. They are decoded by random family member in an effort to discern their future colour. For minute differences in skin shade will determine their future spouse, social approval, and even potential income.  

We know this because we are reminded of it every day. Switch on the TV and our Caucasian-look-alike Bollywood actors and actresses appear in a succession of advertisements for products that promise to whiten your face, arm pits, even your vaginal area, so that you too can be beautiful, successful, lucky in love and the thing that makes all of this possible: fair.

I went to school in New Delhi. In my final year, I was dance club president. This was a position that usually translated automatically into playing the lead role in the school’s annual dance drama. But I was baldly told by the dance teacher that I was too dark to play a princess, that year’s lead character.

The tribal and the princess

Instead, a role was invented for me – that of an untouchable, tribal girl. The girl saves the princess’ life and as reward is given a drink of water directly from the princess’ hands. To the non-Indian this might seem like an underwhelming prize, but its significance lay in the princess putting aside social strictures against physical contact between “untouchables” and higher castes. The dance drama, it transpired, was supposed to be an indictment of the caste system.

It was all so horribly ironic and twisted that I just accepted it, danced the part of the tribal girl, and moved on. Soon, I moved on right out of the country and on to pasty-skinned England, where I managed to find academic success, romantic love and self-belief, all without the “help” of fairness creams. Who’d have thunk it?

The three Cs

Colourism exists, in varying degrees, everywhere. But it is particularly insidious in India thanks to the three Cs: caste, colonialism and class. Dark skin there is associated with lower caste and class, compounded by the self-hatred that being ruled by white skinned racists for two hundred years generates.

But blaming our, Indian, colour obsession on the Brits is doing a disservice to our indigenous talent for colourism.  Our embrace of the idea that dark= bad, fair=good is far deeper than even the British royal family’s. Megan Markle should have married a Punjabi boy to truly learn to feel shit about herself.

So, there you have it, friends. I’m not claiming that there is no racism in Europe. Far from it. But in India it’s the colour-based discrimination within our own “race” that is quite uniquely horrible. There have been many campaigns addressing this scourge recently, including the sterling, “dark is beautiful” campaign, which I encourage you to support.

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I’ll be taking a week off next week (my first since starting The Global Jigsaw in February), since I’ll be traveling along with southern coast of Spain with my family. I got my second Pfizer jab a week ago and can’t wait to do fun stuff with less apprehension.

Until week after next

Xo

Pallavi