The Fairness Fixation: Being Beautiful in India (and Asia)

The truth is, I’m still an outsider to Bangalore and India, so I don’t know how relevant this is (to today’s reality, to certain age or social groups, etc.). I’m just writing from my observations and some research. If anyone can enlighten me further on the realities of beauty, please, let’s have a conversation.

…

Cast your eyes upwards in Bangalore and gazing back at you, larger than life, is Aishwarya Rai’s milky-white countenance inviting you to buy L’Oreal Crème. Drive another block, there’s Kareena Kapoor’s fair complexion ornamented with Malabar gold and diamonds. A pale-skinned Caucasian beauty modeling the new Levi’s. It’s as if these serene, seductive billboard faces high above the city have attained some sort of heavenly status.

And unfortunately, this may not be too far from the truth. In India, it seems that whether it comes to hiring practices, matrimonial prospects, or the entertainment industry, a preference for fair skin prevails. Scanning the matrimonial ads in The Hindu, skin color is described amongst other details such as family background, academic degree, and horoscope. Looking at the first hundred ads, about one-third either sought a fair bride, or self-identified as fair, reflecting its importance in the marriage market.

Bollywood also has a serious lack of darker-skinned actresses. Nandita Das, the current spokeswoman of the Dark is Beautiful campaign (launched originally by Women of Worth in 2009), reveals that directors suggest that makeup artists lighten her skin tone if her role is an educated, middle- or upper-class woman, reflecting the bias against those with darker complexions. She says that even darker-skinned actresses will eventually alter their skin tone to look lighter as they spend more time in the industry.

“Dark and dusky” Nandita Das

India’s fashion industry is seeing a growing number of Caucasian models from Eastern Europe. In addition to being a reflection of a globalizing economy, this also reveals the preference for fair skin perpetuated by a globalizing media presence, in which western features and fairness are linked with the ability to attain “the good life” in terms of beauty and affluence. I’ve seen brands such as Woodland, People, Reliance Trends, and Megamart in Bangalore all featuring Caucasian models on their billboards.

Indian editions of international fashion magazines also feature Caucasian women in Indian-style clothing. The fashion features editor of Vogue India admits:

When we put the white model in Indian clothes, it is a cultural exchange. It shows India’s economic self-confidence […] Of course, it also caters to the general feeling that ‘fair’ and ‘beautiful’ go together. For a rickshaw-puller who earns $2 a day, seeing a fair-skinned woman is an escape, a fantasy.

Preference for paleness across Asia

The preference for fair skin is not limited to India, but exists as part of a trend that appears across the continent of Asia. A 2004 study by Synovate revealed that 38% of women in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan used skin whitening products. In India, the fairness cream market has surpassed $400 million a year, and people spend more on skin lightening products than on Coca-Cola and tea. In Asia, people spend about $18 billion a year to appear lighter. And with the introduction of products such as Fair and Handsome, the target audience is no longer just women.

Now, take a look at this advertisement for Unilever’s Fair and Lovely:

Every Fair and Lovely ad features a segment where a despondent, darker-skinned woman is transformed into a beaming, pale-skinned version of herself. Fair and Lovely sells the procurement of social capital (via fairer skin) through the use of its product.

Skin whitening, however, can be dangerous. There are many creams that are not regulated by any government entity, and these products can include dangerous chemicals such as mercury, hydroquinone, and/or corticosteroids. In 2002, for example, two whitener creams in Hong Kong contained mercury levels that were between 9,000 and 65,000 times above the permissible dose, causing a toxic outbreak that affected over 1,000 people. However, there seems be no indication that these creams will lose their popularity any time soon.

The fairness fixation and colorism

So why this fixation? Colorism is an important factor to consider. It is discrimination that occurs within a population of people of color, in which people who are darker-skinned are considered inferior in various ways. Colorism, among other “-isms,” is a systemic issue, spanning across economic, political, and cultural systems. Ruby Hamad explains it well:

Colourism is oppression within oppression within oppression. This internalisation of white as the beauty ideal, as the most intelligent and desirable form of humanity, has led to communities (which many outsiders would presume are united), facing their own battles with discrimination and alienation in a bid to access the few privileges white society is willing to grant them.

Dr. Radhika Parameswaran, from the Cultural and India studies program at Indiana University, explains that for girls and women, colorism manifests itself in a multitude of ways in everyday life: being teased at school for their complexion, difficulty finding an office job or a partner, causing them to feel deficient and marginalized.

Looking back: Origins of the preference for paleness

Although we may look at the fairness phenomenon in the current day through the lens of colorism, it doesn’t quite explain how this trend began. As I tried to gain a clearer understanding of the origins of why pale skin was desired, I found various theories that at times competed or curiously intersected as to why the preference exists in Asia.

In some countries, such as China and Japan, it may have stemmed from their agriculture-based economies, in which pale skin meant that a person belonged to an aristocratic class and did not have to labor in the fields. There is even an old saying that states: “A fair complexion hides seven flaws.”

Among the articles I read concerning the preference for fairness in India, The Atlantic made the claim that, “While racism runs deep in India’s history, its roots intertwined with caste and colonialism, in today’s India, it finds expression in consumer behavior and corporate advertising.”

While I do agree that colorism may be propagated in the present day by the media and other sociocultural institutions, I found it problematic that the majority of articles simply referred to the caste system as the origin of colorism. I didn’t have enough of an understanding of the caste system, so I decided to investigate, and I was surprised by what I found…

Complex relations: Caste, colonialism, and color

Looking into the relationship between these three topics, I was astounded by the amount of misinformation and conflicting data that I found from so-called reputable sources. An article by Justice Markandey Katju of the Supreme Court of India touted the “racial origins” of the caste system by referring to the Hindu term for social classes, varna vyayastha, and how varna in the initial Sanskrit meant color. He also employed the Aryan invasion theory as a contributing factor to the dominance of white skin: that lighter-skinned Aryan invaders from the northwest conquered the darker-skinned native Dravidians inhabiting India.

Unfortunately, it seems like explanations like these are an oversimplification. For example, varna does not merely mean color. The root of the word is derived from the Sanskrit vr, meaning “to cover, to envelop,” and the full meaning includes “outward appearance, exterior, form, figure, shape, and color” (thank you Wiki). Furthermore, the Encyclopedia Britannica’s page on race ideologies also asserts that the caste system was not based primarily on color or a concept of race, which is something that is also backed by Murali Balaji, Director of Education and Curriculum Reform for the Hindu American Foundation, who cites that there is absolutely no archaeological or scientific evidence that any such Aryan invaders came to conquer darker-skinned indigenous groups and put a “colorist” or racist system into place.

Therefore, it does not make sense to equate or correlate caste with color, and use them as a simple base for explaining present-day social discrimination. Even looking at a single family unit, there exists a spectrum of hues, making a caste system based on skin tones hard to imagine. However, although color was not inherent in the caste system, it is possible that similar to Japan and China, those with higher status and not involved in manual labor could avoid darkening their natural skin tones by staying out of the sun.

I do believe though, that the long history of colonialism (especially by the British) did significantly contribute to an intertwining of color and status. Colonial conquerors tend to favor those who are similar to themselves, i.e. those with fairer complexions, and would hire them more readily and perhaps even include them in circles of power, therefore linking fairness to the possibilities of affluence, influence, and wealth.

Of course, there are many more subtleties in relation to this topic, and I know this is just the tip of the iceberg, but I felt it was important to understand the origins of the phenomenon of skin whitening beyond the plain legacy of “caste and colonialism.” Although Nandita Das says: “I don’t believe we have to keep going back into history […] We’re not just a product of our traditions: we’re also part of the globalized world. Today, the fact that such discrimination continues to exist is a function of consumerism. The market is waiting to cash in on people’s hidden aspirations,” I did feel the need to go back in time and attempt to disentangle some of the reasons why this fixation developed. Sometimes, it’s important to look back, at least briefly, to understand how to move forward.