Fair and lovely

Contrary to the image we like to portray, I belong to a very racist country. Racism comes so naturally to us Indians that at times we do not even realise we are being racist. 

Grandmothers casually talk about the colour of the newborn baby’s skin while notifying everyone of its arrival. If the baby is fair, it is called good-looking but if the poor sod is of a slightly darker shade, they say the baby is healthy and stop at that. They then, immediately take the newborn into their own hands — literally and figuratively — and massage it with all kinds of whitening agents like milk and cream and chickpea flour and sour yoghurt and the rest of it, and wait for its colour to turn.

In the matrimonial section of any newspaper, and we have thousands of them, everyone is seeking a fair complexioned bride. The grooms use extensive poetic licence while describing themselves. Dark brown and black skin tone is passed off as being “wheatish” in colour, and the light brown ones simply call themselves “fair and handsome”.

Believe me, it’s true. I’m not making it up. In fact we also have a face-cream for men that is manufactured in India, called “fair and handsome”. It was to counter the “fair and lovely” cream for women, which I’m told is the biggest selling product that a particular company ever made. Shahrukh Khan, one of our highest paid Bollywood actors, endorses this invention. 

In the advertisement there is a young man who watches the superstar shoot for a film and wishes that he can be like him. Khan turns to the dark skinned youngster and says even if you cannot be a film star, you can at least be handsome by applying this whitening cream and then hands him a tube of “fair and handsome”. After a few days, the guy emerges in his whitened avatar and has a bevvy of young girls swooning over him crooning, “hi handsome, hi handsome!”

When one drives past small villages in India and stops for tea at a tiny shack by the roadside, it is pathetically funny to observe that in such remote areas too, they sell tiny tubes of this whitening cream. The phobia runs so deep that in some places, the poorest of the poor, substitute it with turmeric powder. They make a paste of it with water and smear it lavishly on their faces. To them even looking yellow is better than being seen in their naturally dark skin tone. 

My own grandmother was so colour conscious that if I tanned a bit in the sun she would call me “kali”, which means “blackie”. For the next several days she would not let me step outdoors in the afternoon and also make me drink milk instead of the usual tea. According to her, “you are what you eat”, and she preferred my skin to be milky-hued rather than tea stained. 

I met an Indian family recently where the brand-0new daughter-in-law was sulking and not talking to the groom’s parents. They seemed pretty bewildered. 

“We only tried to help,” the aged lady told me in confidence. 

“How”, I asked. 

“The bride has a wheatish complexion,” the elderly gentleman whispered. 

“So? She is beautiful,” I insisted. 

“We thought she will appreciate what we did,” the lady said. 

“What did you do?’ I was curious. 

“We gifted her 12 tubes of ‘fair and lovely’ cream,” they said in unison.