Confined Wisdom

The summer heat can reach to over 40°C in the afternoons here in Dubai, and on one such afternoon, I made my way to the office from the car park, which is about a 7 minute walk. Halfway through, I was joined by a co-worker, a young Pakistani girl who was a summer intern. Her laptop bag and handbag were large enough for her nimble shoulders, when I saw that she was carrying two folders clasped in the palm of one hand and an umbrella raised above her head in the other.

An umbrella.

“Heard the wrong city’s weather report this morning?” I asked, with a hint of sarcasm.

“I’m getting married,” she replied, “this December.”

How is that the answer to my question?

This isn’t Greek to me, however. I know exactly what she was getting at. The summer heat will tan her skin, and she wants to remain light-skinned for her husband, come December. Browning of any sort is unacceptable. And it’s not just her. The need for women to be light-skinned, or gora has been an obsession with the desis for the longest time. It used to be just the women. Lately, it’s men too!

It’s sad that for a region where the largest part of the population is some shade of brown, a major factor that determines beauty is lightness of skin. The older women are looking for a fair-skinned lass for their sons, the men themselves show a preference for the lighter-shaded breed and worse of all, the women obsess over methods to make their skin lighter. And then there’s the fear of giving birth to a dark baby. The fair-skinned babies get all the adulation, while the dark-skinned ones have to go through various homemade procedures to lighten their skins, more so when they are girls, because otherwise they would be stuck on the shelves of the marriage market for the longest time. There are numerous instances of  girls being rejected at the spot when the prospective groom’s family visits her home to check her out.

Flip through desi TV channels and the women that mostly grace our screens have been whitened to highlight their beauty. A foreigner watching these channels could not be blamed for thinking that people with brown skin do not exist there. Beauty salons and manufacturers of skincare products have all gotten in on the bandwagon to offer these people a whiteness solution like no other. And with that comes advertising. Whether it’s girls worried about being able to get attention from a boy at college, to being worried about the how the prospective groom’s parents would react to her skin, to (and this is the latest) a girl realizing that she can land her dream job (of an air hostess, many times!) if only her skin were lighter. It just boils down to confidence. Having lighter skin means you are more beautiful, therefore you have more confidence. A rather preposterous claim, I would say. This kind of advertising not only feeds a need for a stereotype that doesn’t exist, but also reinforces a prejudice against the more common, darker skinned species of the region.

The darker skinned are shown as ugly, unsuccessful and in all aspects, just not good enough. This is an underlying problem in the entire society as it aims to alter the perception and the representation of this society. It becomes very easy to blame the advertising and the media industries for instilling (albeit subconsciously) these ideas into our heads. However, manufacturers of products that lighten skin argue that these products are available in response to a need in this society for the women to lighten their skin colors.

For centuries, this sub-continent region of India and Pakistan had been colonized by various civilizations. It’s safe to say that many generations of the original inhabitants of this region have spent most or all of their lives as slaves, or at least under foreign rule. Whether the lighter skinned Aryans ruling over the Dravidians, the beautiful Mughals with light hair and green eyes taking over the Rajputana empires, or the final blow that came from the British colonizing pre-partition India and turning her people into slaves, the oppressor, or more powerful one in all cases has been the lighter skinned breed. It is for this reason that the people of this region, and those of other societies that have had oppression from the white man, tend to idolize the lighter skinned ones amongst us, and elevate them to a degree that they may not necessarily deserve.

Lighter skinned people are associated with beauty, royalty and wealth, while the darker skinned people are seen as labor-class, who spend a lot of time working in the sun. Taking a glance at newspaper and online matrimonial columns, one can notice how the requirement for a light-skinned bride is one of the top priorities for would-be grooms, and it is held in high esteem along with family values and education. Having a light-skinned new bride would be a matter of prestige for the family, as it shows that she comes from a wealthy family, and therefore would have brought with her immense amounts in dowry.

Whatever the roots of the problem, it is one that needs to be resolved. A tough ask. The obsession with fairness has gone to such an extreme that it has filtered into the male market as well. Modern-day heterosexual males from the sub-continent, along with other products of vanity, are being exposed to the need for fairer skin, again using the all-encompassing tangent of “confidence” to boost sales. Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan (no less!) has been seen promoting the use of a product called “Fair and Handsome” a spin-off of “Fair and Lovely” it’s female market equivalent. The advertising focuses on getting better jobs, being noticed more and a general self image-raising exercise that can be induced by the use of this product.

Even with these examples, India has slowly begun to realize that darker, more tanned skin is not such a bad thing. Recent trophies in various beauty pageants has led to “Brand India” becoming an exotic land of tanned beauties. Surprisingly, when selling themselves to the outside world, the look that is maintained is held as close to the overall perception of the “Indian look” as possible. On a national level, though, India still seems to be fighting to sell the dark-skinned variety of females as beautiful. In contrast, in Pakistan, the perception of light-skinned being beautiful remains a major player in all notions about a woman. Except for those from the North, most Pakistani women also have a complexion that is slightly tanned, but they seem to be just as obsessed with skin-lightening techniques, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Light skinned women are becoming the face of Pakistan, when in reality they are not. Black never was beautiful, and it never will be. Girls are kept out of the sun for fear of them becoming kali. Products like Stillman’s Skin Bleach Cream, which, by the way sounds lethal, blatantly promise a skin whitening solution to young Pakistani girls, and gets sold like hot cakes. There’s still a long way to go before the Pakistani mind set is changed to realize that the definition of beauty does not begin with whiteness. Until then, way to go Tibet Snow!