In India, prejudices are more than skin-deep

Actor Malavika Mohanan of Beyond the Clouds fame, posted a thought-provoking message on the racism that prevails in our society, even as protests against a similar mindset rages across USA in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

She recalled an unpleasant incident when she was a teenager. Malvika’s message read: “When I was 14 yrs old, one of my closest friends at that point told me that his mother never let him drink tea because she had this weird belief that drinking tea darkens one’s skin complexion, and when he asked for tea once, she told him (referring

to me) ‘If you drink tea, you will become dark like her’. He was a fair Maharashtrian boy and I was a wheat-ish skinned Malayalee girl.

The complexion dissimilarity we had had never even occurred to me up until that point. This left me perplexed because it was the first time somebody had made a comment like that with a mean undertone about my skin colour. So much casual racism and colourism exists in our own society.”

“Calling a dark-skinned person ‘kala’ is something we see on an everyday basis. The discriminatory behaviour against south Indians and North-East

Indians is also appalling. Dark skinned Indians are jokingly referred to as ‘Madrasis’ because for some strange reason these ignorant people think all South Indians are dark skinned,” she wrote.

“While we speak about global racism, we must also become aware about what’s happening around us, in our homes, our friend circles and our society, and do our part in thwarting the obvious as well as the subtle racism and colourism that exists all around us, in our everyday lives.”(sic)