Colour Obsession

Gayatri Rangpi *

India has been the vocal voice against the racial slur. Still the obsession for lighter skin in India is alarming and this is evident from the increasing trend of Caucasian model serenading in the Hindi movies or the matrimonial ads highlighting the benchmark for brides essentially to be fair skinned even if not educated.

One hardly finds matrimonial advertisements looking for brides with lovely dark skinned and curly haired Tamil descent or brown coloured, bright bronzed characteristics. Undoubtedly, the obsession is gender lopsided offshoot of the Indian patriarchy which 'commodifies' woman given the consumer capitalism endowed by the free economy.

In down south, larger than life actor Rajnikant is photoshopped to entertain the melanin endowed people. Shahrukh Khan, nevertheless satirically, once defined power in terms of a man converting from a "Black Boy to a White Lady" in a popular award ceremony (He was referring to Michael Jackson).

With the advent of satellite television and the reach-out of the pirated versions of the popular Hindi movies to the rural hinterland, the fairness giants are leaving no stone unturned to cater to the untapped market there. A recent article in The Hindu explained how in a village of Bihar, a malnourished class I drop out girl was taught the digit eight so that she could rub a fairness cream in her forehead in the shape of eight.

When the private industries are ought to be hands in gloves with the government in nation building, the relentless effort of the fairness cream industries to tell the rural girls to look fairer is catalysing a reversible psychological equation where the girls are fallaciously misled about a better tomorrow with fair skin.

Even the advent of the education and literacy could not shape the disastrous social thinking as the 'money making media' comes with them as an off-shoot. Indian beauties garnering acclaim in the international beauty pageants after 1991 could not be a coincidence. India opened its market in 1991. Three years later, in 1994 Indian beauties Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai grasped the Miss Universe and Miss World titles respectively.

The last time India won such award was in 1967 (!). The reason is quite fiscal. Through Rai and Sen the cosmetic industry opened the door to the huge untapped Indian market which was already fair skinned obsessed. Moreover, the twosome were 'iconised' in terms of national pride.

As a result the Indian beauty pageants have undergone a paradigm shift. The judges are instructed to go for 'international standards' in selecting the winners by, of course, the sponsoring cosmetic giants. Subsequently, a massive model hunt has followed in every nooks and crannies of the country for extraordinarily tall, fair, sharp nosed, big eyed, straight haired girl who, in no way represents India's ethnic origin.

So, a split is widely opened for the dark, curly haired, high cheekboned south Indian girls or the East Asian featured Northeast Indian hilly girls with snub nose and stretched eyes. Aishwarya Rai became the benchmark of beauty and her creamy, translucent colour became the path to success not only in the fashion industry but also in the 'wedding markets.'

All these things attribute to the explosion of the fairness cream industry. However, in other countries like - Nigeria, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, and among those darker citizens of the US, Canada, and Europe, lighter skin is a constant goal for which people are willing to pay.

But, perhaps nowhere has big business seen and seized the enormous potential for profit in this disturbing but real collective yearning than in India. Our state is also not free from such racial slur in the societal level. A lower caste with white skin is deemed highly cunning in our society. If not the colour of the skin, general terminologies like agnisarma and phakidas bear the testimony of caste based discrimination.

Here the western cultural imperialism and the economic hegemony play the jugalbandi with the age-old Indian patriarchy. Nirod C Chaudhary has explained in his autobiographical sketch how the probable brides' face in erstwhile Bengal was rubbed with wet towel by the groom's family just to check if she is not camouflaging by applying some white layers around her face.

Moreover, the colonial hangover is playing a prominent role here. Therefore, the belief still persists that 'fair' and 'beautiful' go together and the brands with international faces are of better quality. The fashion features editor of Vogue's Indian edition, Bandana Tiwari says, "When we put the white model in Indian clothes, it is a cultural exchange. It shows India's economic self-confidence.

Of course, it also caters to the general feeling that 'fair' and 'beautiful' go together. For a rickshaw-puller who earns $2 a day, seeing a fair-skinned woman is an escape, a fantasy." The colour obsession has generated an immense space for the advertising industry which is a 'mass cheat' in its approach.

Such commercials go like this - a dark skinned, 'preferably' a girl is in despair with the failures in her life and suddenly she gets a fairness cream which within no time turns her skin into a translucent, creamy white. Subsequently, there comes all the success to her life. The simple human understanding and societal ethos that success has nothing to do with the colour of the skin has been grossly violated by such advertisers.

A survey by the Business Standard reveals that in 2007 the highest number of advertisement broadcasted in the Television were of fairness creams'. It all started with the advent of the Hindustan Unilever's (then Hindustan Lever) "Fair and Lovely" in India in 1976.

Keeping in mind the demand, the "Fair & Lovely has extended its reach beyond India — today it is marketed in over 38 countries and has become the largest-selling skin lightening cream in the world — but its biggest customer concentration remains in South Asia itself. Now, the fairness cream industry has an average turn over of whopping Rs 1,000 crore.

Male users of fairness creams is estimated to be 40 percent, which has prompted the HUL to come up with Fair & Handsome. In India, 60-65 percent women use such fairness cream on daily basis. The obsession for certain features of human body is not very uncommon.

In the United Kingdom also the obsession for breast is prominent. One of the popular newspapers of UK – The Sun publishes photographs of topless woman in the Page 3 section of the newspaper everyday. Ironically, the newspaper is not considered only for adults in the country.

Also, majority of the readers of the newspaper are women. Moreover, a huge medical industry of plastic surgery dealing with breast enlargement is functional in the erstwhile colonial country of India. If racism is a misnomer for the aforementioned phenomena, given the fact that in India we don't have any reservation, be it educational institution, government job, public transport and the likes on the basis of the colour of the skin, the alarming situation could not be undermined.

The prevailing bigotry and the mentality to harness political mileage in the country can at no time convert the whole phenomena into a nation-wide epidemic.