AN UGLY PREJUDICE

THE 'DARK VERSUS FAIR' DEBATE REIGNITES, EXPOSING THE PERSISTENT BIAS AGAINST DARKER SKIN AMONG INDIANS

- MANISHA SAROOP, JUMANA SHAH & SONALI ACHARJEE

IN 21st century India, it does not matter that you are a woman who has broken the glass ceiling. Just a stray, unfeeling comment can transport you back to a place of insecurity that you thought you had left far behind. A time when the darker shade of your skin put you in the shadows, unseen, unheard and unwanted. Sarada Muraleedharan was in that place recently. Courtesy a careless remark thrown at her about her tenure as Kerala chief secretary being as black as her husband’s was white, the black labelling bearing “the quiet subtext of being a woman”. Long inured to the casual colourism she had encountered all her life, Sarada decided to “call this one out” on a Facebook post simply because of the speaker’s implied equivalence of black with “the ne’er do good, black the malaise, the cold despotism, the heart of darkness”.

The eloquent post reopened an old wound as it were and reignited the debate about the ugly, unfair prejudice Indians continue to harbour against someone dark of skin. A whole sea of condemnation erupted on mainstream and social media in response to Sarada’s post, with hashtags like #Unfair&Lovely beginning to trend widely, challenging the norm, and celebrating darker skin tones. The actress Kani Kusruti, who left a lasting impression with her performance in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, the first Indian film to win a Grand Prix award at Cannes, wrote an impassioned column in a leading daily, talking of how, even as a child, her relatives asked her to wear only light-colored clothes because “if you wear black or any other dark shade, we can’t see you”. There is a hierarchy of colour, she went on to add, especially for women and girls, and therefore of beauty. Model actress Poulomi Das recounted how she was on the verge of bagging a lead role in a television show only to learn that the channel rejected her on grounds of skin colour.