India’s Obsession With Fair Skin
India is really a unique nation with a lot of diversity, with so many languages, cuisines, and dances. This list is endless. One can include the diversity of cultural practices followed by majority Hindus in the list. But there is another aspect of the Indian way of life. Indians are obsessed with fair skin. Although this is bit ironic, given the fact that there are so many dark-skinned gods and goddesses in Indian culture.
Being a person, with a dark complexion, I have experienced this obsession on a day-to-day basis. Jokes about dark complexion are so common. I can recall so many incidents when people drew the conclusion about my academic ability and caste on the basis of skin color. In one incident, I was in a shop with my distant cousin, who happened to be fair skinned. An old man enquired about our board marks. There was a difference of 20% between me and my cousin. That old man’s first reaction was: From appearance, it looks like that your cousin will get more marks than you.
One of the most laughable things is that people draw conclusion about your caste on the basis of complexion. It happened to me so many times when people concluded that I am lower caste. Sad thing is that this is deeply rooted in the rural psyche. Even there are some Proverbs in our colloquial language too, which try to derive a relation between caste and complexion. For example, one such Proverb states:
करिया बाभन गोर चमार
इनसे रहो सदा होशियार
(“A dark Brahman and a fair Chamar(lower caste) are untrustworthy”)
Although from personal experiences, to draw a large scale conclusion about all of India, can be erroneous. But I think after traveling and meeting people across India, this conclusion is not far from the truth.
Now the question is: How does it affect? I don’t feel that It can restrict one’s chance of success in a professional field except in some obvious ones. I never felt discriminated. I was never at the receiving end because of my dark complexion. But yes, one can lose self-confidence. One can feel humiliated when in some family WhatsApp group, one’s relatives send jokes like ‘Langoor Ke Hath Lag Gya Angoor’, depicting some dark guy marrying a fair girl. Although as a free speech absolutist, I don’t have any problem with that depiction.
So that’s it. I wanted to write about this for a long time.
