Fair, But Not So Lovely: India’s Obsession With Skin Whitening
By: Neha Dixit
Tags: Beauty, Race, Brightest, Features, India

DDuring a trip to a north Indian village, an old woman walked up to me to say, “Every morning, at 5 a.m., you should drink half a cup of fresh, non-boiled cow milk. The complexion of your child-to-be will be fair.” I plastered a smile on my face. I was not even pregnant. But colorism runs so deep that this was the best advice she thought to offer me.

Women have passed on similar age old “wisdom” to attain fairness for generations. “Apply gram flour, milk, and turmeric on her face daily,” my mother was told when I was a kid, so I “would not look like a Madrasan anymore.” Madrasan refers to a person from the southern city of Madras, now Chennai. North Indians are typically lighter skinned than South Indians, who live in a hotter climate. Colorism exacerbates this geographical divide.

Colorism also has a pervasive impact on job and marriage opportunities. Fair people are perceived as more presentable. In 2008, the state of Maharashtra sponsored 100 dark-skinned tribal girls to train as flight attendants. Only eight of them were eventually recruited, that too as ground staff — likely in part due to their complexion. Similarly, the description of women in the arranged marriage market often includes skin tone shorthand like: f = fair, vf = very fair, and vvf = very very fair. (This practice is not as rampant for prospective grooms.)

Ratna Soren, a 24-year-old anthropology student from Hazaribagh, a small district in the eastern state of Jharkhand, is seen as a misfit in her family because she is still single. All her younger cousins are married. She has used Fair & Lovely since she was 4 years old. “It still hasn’t changed my complexion,” she says. This has elicited incessant rejections from prospective grooms. “I am seen as a burden on my family. A girl with dark complexion must have more dowry to offer if she wants to get married in India,” she says, getting emotional. “My parents cannot afford it.”

In some extreme cases, colorism has even taken lives. In 2014, a woman in a posh suburb of Delhi hanged herself because her husband abused her for being dark-skinned. The same year, a schoolteacher named Brototi Das set herself on fire, fed up with the constant humiliation she suffered from her family for her dark complexion. Yet another woman poisoned the food during a family function, killing five, allegedly tired of her family’s taunts over her skin color. All of these women were under the age of 25.

Their ages are notable. Though colorism is often considered a colonial relic, young Indians can be just as guilty of perpetuating it. In a 2015 essay, author Neha Mishra cited a survey that asked Indians between the ages of 20–25 to describe “pretty.” 71 percent of those surveyed used words such as “fair” or “light.” The survey also revealed that the pressure to look fair is much higher on Indian women than men.

Color discrimination has also played a huge role in the world’s most prodigious film industry. Bollywood films often feature songs that glorify fair skin and deride darker skin shades. For instance, in the 1990s film “Suhaag,” the male protagonist lusts after women with fair skin and dark sunglasses. A more recent song talks about how the two lead actors’ hearts start beating fast upon seeing “white white faces.”

Most actors who have dominated India’s film industry have been fair-skinned, particularly the women, from Madhubala in the 1960s to Kareena Kapoor and Katrina Kaif today. To make matters worse, some of these actors also make extra income by endorsing “fairness” products, further perpetuating the notion that when it comes to complexion, lighter is simply better.