Spot The Indian!
There is a big, wide, glossy world out there benchpressing our idea of what it means to appear Indian. NISHA SUSAN maps its elaborate rulebook
IN DELHI, Anu Thomas (name changed), a mother of three children, was horrified when her five-year-old daughter, Meenal, came home from school one day and asked her, "When I grow up, will I have to be a maid?" Meenal's largely upmarket north Indian classmates had told her that day that someone who was her colour must be a streetchild and would grow up to work in someone's house. Thomas knew that there was no one in these children's lives who was dark, who was Meenal's colour and held a position of power. Neither were there figures in popular culture that her curly-haired daughter resembled or could look up to. If you imagined a globalising India would bring Meenal a greater range of rolemodels, you are wrong. Globalisation has only amplified many of the old biases in India, such as the one that values fair skin. It has also created an army of clones.
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RULE 3
All Indians are fair, except when they don't try
In the last few months, a photoshopped image of Barack Obama in a parodied Fair and Lovely ad became a popular internet meme. The milky white Obama was disorienting. While colour discrimination has been periodically debated in Indian media, the debates are getting quieter. "What about Bipasha? What about Konkona?" comes the quick response if one asks where the dark actors are. Actor Nandita Das says that 30 movies down the line, people still clumsily attempt to compliment her by saying, "I told my niece that she can also do movies. Doesn't matter that she is dark." Das says she has rarely been discussed in an article without a phrase addressing her colour.
Dusky is the word of choice, because dark would be pejorative. (It is similar to the American fashion business calling women curvy when they want to say fat. To have a sense of who has been called curvy lately, look up Jessica Alba.) Das is one of the few women in Bollywood who can actually be called dark. For the most part, any heroine darker than a hospital bed is called dusky. In recent times, Chitrangda Singh, Mugdha Godse, Deepika Padukone, Sonali Kulkarni have all been called dusky by the media, in gushing self-congratulatory appreciation of the sultry beauties 'breaking conventions.' A comparison to Smita Patil is also inevitable in most cases. If these pale girls are set up as the dark outsiders, where does it leave a young Indian girl whose inky black skin is a real and vital part of her, not a disease to be cured? She has no chance in the movies.
Baradwaj Rangan, film critic for the New Indian Express, points out, "Actors like Seema Biswas are always on the fringes simply because of their colouring. I am not saying that when I go to see a big Karan Johar film I want to see ordinary looking people. Bring on the beautiful people! But in movies where there is no such requirement, can't we have ordinary people? That Prachi Desai who plays Farhan Akthar's wife in Rock On!! — it is assumed that someone who looks like her would live in a penthouse. All fair people are rich and all dark people are only servants." Desai brings up Saat Phere, the hit television show whose protagonist Saloni's fatal flaw is that she is dark. "The idea that there is a story because she is dark is very strange in a country full of dark people," he points out
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