let’ s talk about racism
Actors with dark skin find it tough to get leading roles and ‘fair is success’ has remained a redoubtable mantra
Racism is a constant and cruel reality in India. It is all around us — our movies, our art and culture, and our history. In a special series, Hindustan Times focuses sharp attention on why our skin prejudices lead us even to violence. In the fifth of an eight-part series, HT journalist, Dhrubo Jyoti on the everyday biases that fuel popular culture
Istarted associating skin colour with danger in school, when a parent asked me and my friends to stay away from “dark-coloured” strangers. Because I grew up in Andhra Pradesh, this meant an almost comical fear of even the most harmless people — the milkman, the postman and numerous school staff.
In those years, getting photographed was painful because the studio owner would insist on dabbing fistfuls of powder on my 13-year-old face to make it “beautiful”. When my mother protested, he assured her — with photographs of beautiful Telugu heroines, Tamannah and Kajal — that fair skin was not only beauty but also a highway to success. Years later, I realised he wasn’t joking.
Discussing racism is an annual cycle that is activated when news of violence breaks — when a Tanzanian woman is thrashed in Bengaluru, or groups of Nigerian students are attacked in Greater Noida. But India’s racist heart beats fastest in the periods of relative calm between these headlines, in the everyday biases that fuel popular culture, the loathing of dark skin and linking of blackness with evil.
The causes of this prejudice aren’t obscure. Our movies and television tell us that dark skin is not only ugly but also a sign of dereliction — the mindset that lets us use “kaala” as an all-weather insult.
Take Bollywood, where the best roles are reserved for fair-skinned artistes. Dark-skinned actors are either reduced to making jokes about their grotesque bodies, or they play detestable villains. Their female counterparts are either vamps or play the ‘friend’ or the ‘servant’ to the rose-tinted heroine.
One of Bollywood’s most iconic songs — Hum kale hai toh kya hua, hum dilwale hain — is a testament to this. Mehmood says he loves Helen because of her fair skin and golden tresses, attempting to convince her that despite his complexion, he wants to be the lover of a fair-skinned woman — the lyrics betraying the cinematic impossibility of such a union.
Roughly a decade later, India’s biggest blockbuster Sholay sealed the role of the dark-skinned villain with Kaaliya, his name a derivative of kaala. The trend then was repeated with Gainda Singh (Tiranga) and Gokul (Dushman) and Khokha Singh (Trimurti). Actors were even given a coat of make-up to make them suit the dark complexion expected of a villain (Anupam Kher in Karma).
Actresses with dark skin found it difficult to land leading roles — even the talented Smita Patil spoke out about it — and those who did, such as Kajol, transformed their complexions over the years. Despite actors such as Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Nandita Das speaking against it, ‘fair is success’ has remained a redoubtable mantra. This notion of beauty spilled over from Bollywood into other industries. In the south, heroes could be dark, such as Rajinikanth or Sivaji Ganesan, but heroines had to be fair, such as Jayalalithaa. Even now, southern films get fair- skinned actresses from the north, such as Hansika Motwani or Kajal Aggarwal.
The belief that dark skin is a proxy for ugliness was sustained by our television serials, in which all iconic roles — Shanti to Tulsi to Jassi — go to fair-skinned artistes. Our movies are often shot abroad but with no black people visible, even in multi-ethnic cities such as New York. Incredible India campaign spent billions to appeal to white people but not a word to dissuade people from calling Africans “habshi”. We play Rihanna and Beyonce on our iTunes but recoil at the hint of a black body on our street.
None of this is surprising or old. The supremacy of fair skin is deeply embedded in our aesthetics and perpetuated by our biggest cultural influences. The paintings of Raja Ravi Verma, often called the father of Indian art, portray goddesses and upper-caste folk with milky-white skin. The other influential British company school of painting depicted peasantry and poor people as decidedly dark, decrepit and insignificant.
This then trickled down into our homes in the most ubiquitous form of culture — calendar art — that almost universally depicted gods, goddesses and holy men with pearly white skin. These hung in our bedrooms and prayer halls, suggesting that the colour dark was one of evil, of Ravana, of demons and monsters.
Go back to your one-point source of mythology from your teenage years, Amar Chitra Katha, to see the same binary trope of black=evil/white=pure repeated. The impact has been such that in my home state of Bengal, Durga is now unimaginable as non-white. As a consequence, it has become difficult for darkskinned artistes to bag any leading role in performances based on myths and gods — fitting perfectly into the caste project of sanitising these forms.
This is also a thinly veiled, albeit erroneous, proxy for caste. The idea of purity — the cornerstone of caste — is assigned the colour white and upper-caste men and women are depicted as fair-skinned. Have a 10-minute conversation with your local uncle to see how the colour of skin is still wrongly pegged to one’s caste status.
After the Greater Noida violence, India rushed to deny any race link to it . But for many of us, the bias is obvious in everyday life, when we switch on the television, when we walk into a cinema, or look at a painting. This is why we aren’t outraged when the nadir of Priyanka Chopra’s character in Fashion is a night with a black man. Until this mindset changes, there is little hope of dispelling racism.