As published in the Express Tribune
While I sat lazing one Sunday morning, I received a frantic
phone call from a friend, “my naani
thinks I will never be married!” she yelled. “She says I am 28 years old, and
dark complexioned to boot!” she exclaimed.
Fairness was central to the lives of our older generations (I
keep asking why that was, to no answers!). Even long before the British arrived
in the subcontinent, the fairer among the Indians were well received in social
settings and marriage markets. I remember my grandmother referring to her
grandmother as being “as white as snow” (and hence being immensely beautiful). Therefore, the subcontinent is an easy target
for the big cosmetic firms as they can further an existing cultural bias and
lure prospective customers into buying fairness products. Advertisemts in Sri
Lanka, Bangladesh
and Pakistan
compare little to the huge fairness market that India seems to posses.
There have been several commercials in India , over the decades, which have
spoken about how young men desire women who are fair, and how fairness in women
is a precondition to success. However, the ad that got the activists and social
commentators up-in-arms was the one on vaginal fairness. The ad
hit the screens early March, but the shock and distress that it caused to
bloggers and columnists alike is such that the matter is still kept alive on
the blogosphere and twitter. Adding insult to injury, the admaker justified it
in one of his columns
for a popular weekly: “The only reason I can offer for why people like
fairness, is this: if you have two beautiful girls, one of them fair and the
other dark, you see the fair girl’s features more clearly. This is because her
complexion reflects more light.”
Why am I still not angry with him?
I understand the psychology of a capitalistic society which
thrives on selling useless products to the masses. Such ads hold up a mirror to
our society, the adman and the like are only feeding on the fodder that the
society provides them with. Our responsibility as a generation that has
inherited a deep-rooted bias, is to ensure that colour of the skin becomes
nothing more than that – the colour of the skin, a biological factor that
differs from race to race. The minute we link it with societal structures like
caste and class, bifurcations of superiority and inferiority seep in.
While I was a student in New York , during our usual coffee table
talks, a White American friend whispered into my ear, “I hear men these days
want women looking fair all over! I have stopped wearing a bikini to the
beach!” she half-giggled.
This caught me by surprise as I had thought that people in
the West wanted a sexy layer of tan on their bodies. After a little bit of
searching around, I found, just like all capitalist-consumer products, virginal
whiteness is also a borrowed concept. The US has had virginal
and anal whitening creams for a few years now, and researchers are now
looking at their possible health risks.
Considering virginal whitening creams have just been
introduced in India ,
I guess, we know what to expect next.
