‘Dark versus fair': An ugly prejudice

India Today

30-04-2025

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated April 14, 2025)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'.advertisement
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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-coloured 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.Ironically, five years ago, Das was the face of Glow & Lovely, the new name for India's most famous skin-whitening cream brand, after worldwide protests, including the #BlackLivesMatter movement, saw Hindustan Unilever replace the word 'fair' with 'glow' in 2020. That change proved to be, well, cosmetic. The skin lightening business is a booming one in India, worth $1.3-1.5 billion (Rs 11,100-12,800 crore) currently, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 6.5-7.2 per cent over the next decade, according to a report on the subject by the Pune-based market research firm Future Market Insights. Fairness continues to be the ideal of beauty, with few dark-skinned role models in mainstream media or Hindi films, while social media is replete with visual representations of fairness as a marker of success and happiness.
Meanwhile, despite growing awareness, matrimonial advertisements continue to exhibit a preference for 'light-skinned' brides. A 2018 survey of such ads showed that over 60 per cent of the men wanted fair-skinned women. 'Women's bodies are their currency in the marriage market. For a dark-skinned man who is doing well financially, marrying a light-skinned normatively beautiful woman can be a trophy to further signal his status and power,' says Radhika Parameswaran, professor at The Media School, Indiana University, US, who has done extensive research on colourism in India. 'And as is the case in many different countries where physical appearance becomes an insidious factor in workplace success and mobility, it is not surprising that Indians, and especially women, worry that all things being equal, a light-skinned person could end up being favoured for work opportunities.'advertisement
(Photo: Hardik Chhabra)
(Getty Images)
INDIANS AND COLOURISMColourism, a term coined by the celebrated Black writer Alice Walker in 1982 to describe the prejudicial or preferential treatment meted out to people of the same race on the basis of colour, is an open secret in our country. Some scholars like Dr Vivek Kumar, a sociologist at the School of Social Sciences in Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, trace its origin to when the first fair-skinned Indo-Aryans encountered the dark-skinned Dravidians, original inhabitants of the land, and then began to rule over the people and designated themselves as nobility. 'Racial theory was constructed in sociological terms with the advent of the Aryans,' says Kumar. He, however, stops short of attributing colour discrimination to the caste system, saying it was in its infancy when skin colour began to be assigned value. It was organised more around the professions individuals practised than by birth, and became hereditary only much later, he hypothesises.advertisementKumar instead attributes the modern-day obsession with skin colour to the colonialists—the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch and, eventually, the British, who stayed the longest. 'Our gods—Vishnu, Shiva, Ram, Krishna—are all portrayed as dark-skinned. Draupadi—the beautiful queen of the Mahabharata—is explicitly dark-skinned,' he says. 'The association of beauty and aspiration with white skin is a gift of European colonial rulers.' British ethnographer Herbert Hope Risley, in fact, classified Indians into broad racial types in 1915, identifying Dravidians as dark-complexioned and the Indo-Aryans as fairer. This classification hewed close to India's own colour associations with caste, wherein Brahmins were regarded to be generally fair-skinned and lower castes and tribals believed to have darker skin, ideas that have survived well into the modern age.advertisement
By the time the British left, colourism had taken firm root in the Indian psyche. Women came to bear a disproportionate brunt of this unfair burden, as caste, patriarchy and economic status colluded to bestow a sense of inferiority on the less fair. Dark skin was seen as an abomination, from the time relatives in a family set eyes upon a child born dark. Names like Kali or Kaalia were perhaps as common and accepted as euphemisms like Shyam or Shyamolie. Taunts followed into childhood, none more familiar than 'Kaali kaluti, baingan looti', the colour purple, robbed off an aubergine. The prejudice was perpetuated in school and college, not just by other children but often even by the teachers. Worse was the 'internalised racism', or, as Parameswaran says, 'people at the receiving end of such discrimination turning around and denigrating those with darker skins'. There would be solicitous advice to use home-made remedies such as a haldi-malai ubatan or off-the-shelf salves like Vicco Turmeric or Fair & Lovely that promised to make the skin colour lighter.advertisementA 2023 study by researchers at the Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrck University, Germany, on colourism in the Indian subcontinent, confirmed these trends. It concluded that the 'various skin colour discriminating structures from birth and in all social settings invade the minds of anybody involved and thus structure the ways through which people affectively experience themselves and others. They work as affective scaffolds and tools that lead people to internalise norms and values that conform to superior-inferior parameters of the colour hierarchy. Eventually, people develop an orientation which prefers whiteness against their own best interests.'
THE CONSEQUENCES OF COLOURISMLittle wonder, entire generations of young children grow up believing they are not good enough because of the colour of their skin, buying into the narrative whole-heartedly. Everywhere they look—on cinema screens, covers of magazines, advertisements—they have fair faces staring back at them. Hema Malini, Shabana Azmi, Rekha or Smita Patil were the exceptions, not the rule. The Hindi film hero serenaded the fair maiden with songs that went 'Yeh kaali kaali aankhein, yeh gore gore gaal' (these black eyes, fair cheeks) or 'Gore gore mukhde pe kala kala chashma' (dark glasses on a fair face). If there was any consolation, it was in the words 'Hum kaale hain toh kya hua, dilwale hain' (so what if we are dark, we are big of heart). It was in the world of ramp modelling that dusky beauty found recognition and a Laxmi Menon became a standard of beauty in her own right. It did little though for the dark-skinned girl in the marriage market. Wedding website shaadi.com even had a Fitzpatrick scale of sorts for Indian skin tones, till universal outrage forced them to take it down.Marriage is not the end of that discrimination. A 2021 study in Sage Journals by Reena Kukreja of Queens University in Canada surveyed 57 villages across four Indian states—Haryana, Rajasthan, Odisha and West Bengal—to find out if the skin tone affected the married life of people from 'darker' states who married those from the 'fairer' northern states. Of the 100-plus women who were interviewed, half reported colourism, or frequently being called 'kala kauwwa' (black crow) or 'kaali nagin' (black serpent). The families they married into attributed their skin colour to being from the 'inferior' castes, even impure. Some of them even reported being barred from eating with the family, or even cooking for them.
Colourism spilled into work spaces too, the bias most visible in appearance-focused industries such as tourism and hospitality, aviation, retail, media and entertainment. Indian films are replete with examples of dark-skinned women being cast in tertiary, stereotypical roles, seldom the leads (see Fifty Shades of Prejudice). The world of classical arts is not immune to the malaise either. Last year, classical dancer Kalamandalam Sathyabhama drew widespread criticism for making derogatory remarks against Mohiniyattam dancer R.L.V. Ramakrishnan, who was from a Dalit background. Comparing his complexion to that of a crow, she deemed him unfit for that graceful genre of dance saying only 'fair-skinned, good-looking men' are eligible to perform it. Ramakrishnan was later appointed assistant professor at the Kerala Kalamandalam.People who experience colourism or racism, a 2019 study in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science points out, are more likely to develop hypertension, psychological distress and are more prone to health-related issues. Consistent negative messaging and incidents in their life lead to their internalising shame, anxiety and fear, which may manifest in cognitive or physical stress. 'With so much pressure to conform to a certain 'idea' of what is beautiful, young children really struggle to fit in and socialise, with those who don't conform getting subjected to typecasting, ostracisation and bullying for being different,' says psychologist Upasana Chaddha.Biases that have only intensified in the past two decades, according to Parameswaran. Blame it on social media, whose algorithm-laden bubbles prioritise glossy images that exude perfection. Many a young, impressionistic mind thinks nothing of using a filter or an AI tool to project a picture of how they would wish to look rather than how they actually are. And no one has profited more from this insecurity than the beauty industry.
THE FAIRNESS BOOMYou may not call them fairness creams any more in these politically-correct times, but the 'skin lightening' business has not gone anywhere. It is expected to cross $2.4 billion (Rs 20,500 crore, at current exchange rates) by 2030, propelled primarily by urban and semi-urban areas, lured as they are by the spread of online beauty retail, an increased availability of brands and the massive social media buzz around skin health.And it's not just women who are buying into the spiel, men are too. 'I have been doing facials and blackhead removals for a few years now. I see nothing wrong with it,' says 17-year-old Arjun Mehta (name changed) from a prominent Delhi school. A 2020 research paper in the journal Open Linguistics traced how television commercials at the turn of the 21st century began to push male skin lightening products. In a departure from the 'tall, dark and handsome' trope of the West, Fair and Handsome, as a male fairness cream was called, was promoted as a desirable attribute, a fundamental trait for male attractiveness.Fairness creams of yore are passe, a whole range of specialised serums, masks and body products now promise an even skin tone, reduction of hyperpigmentation, even reversing your age. Beauty parlours now offer not just plain fruit facials and bleaches, they have become 'clinics' now, offering laser and chemical solutions to your skin 'problems' (see The Beauty Bazaar). Fairness is also no longer about the face, there are also whitening options for even the armpits and the vagina.
TOWARDS SKIN POSITIVITYSo where do we go from here? The needle may be moving, even if ever so slightly. 'Certainly, activism around beauty norms and how they stigmatise people and damage them psychologically has resulted in a welcome expansion of beauty-related products and services globally,' says Parameswaran. Inclusion has become a buzzword in the beauty lexicon, the catwalks have become exemplars of diversity. Barbie now has darker-skinned versions in an attempt to normalise dark skin, while theatre and cinema are finding roles and a place for Black and brown actors. Dark is now divine and brown is beautiful. Pivoting to the new reality, companies have come up with exclusive make-up for the darker Indian skin tone. Ghazal Alagh, co-founder & Chief Innovation Officer of Honasa Consumer, which has brands like Mamaearth, The Derma Co. and Bblunt as part of its portfolio, says, 'When we started Mamaearth, we made a conscious decision to not create or market products that promise fairness. Instead, we focused on healthy, well-nourished skin. Inclusivity also meant challenging the visual representation in beauty advertising. From day one, we ensured we featured real, diverse Indian skin tones in our campaigns.' At FAE Beauty, there is a strict policy against filters and Photoshop. 'We don't want to propagate unrealistic body standards and want consumers to see things just as they are. Our content is raw, unfiltered,' says their founder Karishma Kewalramani.There is still some way to go, though. 'Campaigns by celebrities can only be on the surface and a start,' says Parameswaran, 'they have not gone deep into the caste and class consciousness of the Indian psyche.' She believes sensitisation to social and workplace discrimination based on colourism and sexism needs to start early, in elementary school perhaps, 'not in a chance workshop after you are an adult and have weathered much trauma.' Brands, says an expert from the beauty and personal care industry who does not want to be named, need to do more than just pay lip service to inclusion. They may have a model with a dark skin tone in their promotions, but that inclusion is not visible in their product range. Even today, they may launch 15 light to medium foundations but have just four in the deep to tan skin tones.Others are even advocating 'skin neutrality', or treating the skin as just another organ and not drawing attention to it at all. Many celebrities, from Selena Gomez to Shanaya Kapoor and Alia Bhatt, have been posting selfies free of make-up, filters and touch-ups to show that they too have blemishes and not so perfect skins. Of course one can still have negative thoughts about their skin colour, particularly if they have been subjected to colourism. But it is a step towards not hating yourself for your skin colour, rather making your peace with it, and celebrating it.—with Sonal KhetarpalCase study | 'Women's empowerment on TV is garbage'Poulomi Das | 29 | Model-actress
Two months ago, Poulomi Das was on the verge of bagging a lead role in a TV show only to learn that the channel rejected her on grounds of her skin colour. 'I got to know from friends at the channel that they didn't take me because 'she is too dark, she should look like an MD' (Managing Director),' Poulomi recounts. 'These channels which show women empowerment, they are bullsh***ing. If you look into their minds, it's full of garbage and outdated ideas. In India, none of us is white. It's 200 years of British colonisation and the prejudiced mindset which still persists.'Naysayers and bullies don't deter Poulomi who proudly goes as 'The Brown Queen' on Instagram. She has learned to give it back to colourists, be it on Bigg Boss OTT (2024), where a fellow contestant made a derogatory remark on her complexion, or online trolls. 'They can't tamp down my aura because they think I am not good enough. When they said you don't look like a lead, I was like 'In my life story, I am the lead',' she says, having appeared in shows like Suhani Si Ek Ladki and Kartik Purnima.In 2020-21, Poulomi would become the face of Hindustan Lever's Glow & Lovely, a feat she's proud of since it involved the brand changing its strategy from being a fairness to a BB cream. 'If they are owning their mistake and changing their motive and doing justice to my skin tone, then why shouldn't I support them? We all need to evolve,' she says. Enjoying a vacation in Kerala, she says she was going to come back 10 times darker than she is. 'I'm loving it.'—Suhani SinghCase study | 'When kicked out of dance group, I thought I was ugly'Snigdha Nair | 25 | Assistant film director
(Photo: Mandar Deodhar)
She was just two and a half years old when she had come home from playschool and put her hand next to her mother's and pronounced: 'Kikka (Snigdha's pet name) kaali, mama gori'—I'm black, mamma is fair. 'My mother was heartbroken,' she recalls, 'and went to the nursery that very day to ask what was said in school.' For Snigdha, the episode demonstrates how discrimination against dark skin begins early, even before a child can string a sentence together.In school, she'd be called 'kaali saand' (black bull), and in Class 10 she would find herself kicked out of the dance group because her complexion did not suit the composition of the rest of the group. 'That's when it struck me hard, that may be I'm ugly,' recounts Snigdha. By the time Covid-19 kicked in, holed up at home, her insecurities peaked to a degree that she began seeking brightening products to 'fix' herself. The experience compelled her to shoot a short titled 'You', documenting the melancholia of a young insecure woman.Now a part of the film industry, Snigdha says it's routine to see 'fair-skinned' as a requisite for female parts in casting calls. But she has now evolved enough to realise that her skin tone is not something that needs 'acceptance'. 'It's not a deformity, it's normal.'—Suhani SinghCase study | 'I was told though you're dark, you're beautiful inside'Preeti Das | 48 | Actor, stand-up performer and story-teller
My dark skin has always been a source of curiosity and a lot of resentment. As a teenager, I was turned down by two elite boutiques saying we don't have clothes that will suit your skin colour, please try elsewhere. The jibes cut as deep today. As an actor, only a few stereotyped roles come your way. But the terminology that industry employs is even more shocking: make-up artists are often briefed to apply 'Dalit' or 'tribal' make-up—both insinuating 'burn her skin'. Once, after a stand-up performance, amidst applause, a light-skinned lady came up to me and said, 'Brilliantthough you are dark-skinned, you are beautiful inside.'There are many jokes I laugh at, though they are not funny. My husband happens to be light-skinned and the 'joke' at the time of our marriage was our children will be like a chessboard. In my interactions with children, I see a perpetuation of those biases. Dark-skinned girls have tears in their eyes when I talk of discrimination in my stories; yet, an evil or negative character will only always be dark.—as told to Jumana ShahCase study | 'I was called Blackie, African'Ritika Anil Kumar | 28 | Communications manager, Creatnet Education, Delhi
(Photo: Mandar Deodhar)
When Ritika speaks about the prejudice she endured due to her dark skin, her amused chuckle masks years of navigating societal biases that began in early childhood. During her formative years at a Christian school in Tiruvalla, Kerala, classmates taunted her with derogatory nicknames like 'Blackie', 'Black Beauty' and 'African'.Even at the tender age of six, Ritika sensed something was 'not right' about her skin tone, a perception reinforced by relatives who frequently compared her to her lighter-skinned brother. Well-intentioned but harmful 'treatments' suggested by her grandmother further cemented the notion that her dark complexion was somehow undesirable.The unwavering support from her physician parents helped Ritika develop resilience against colourist remarks. Her mother's wisdom—'your outside does not determine what is inside you'—became Ritika's emotional armour, making her thick-skinned to cope with the bias.—Bandeep SinghSubscribe to India Today Magazine