Toronto-based professional Ruchika Arora is an aspiring non-fiction writer with a particular interest in examining contemporary issues through a social-political lens. Her primary job is teaching at the school-level where she commits much energy and focus to raising social consciousness in her young charges.
She blogs at: ohwomynwandering.blogspot.ca.
By Ruchika Arora
Toronto, Canada – “Is she fair?” “Yes, she is.” An innocent exchange, one might think. But let me provide the/a social context: the topic is marriage, the inquirer is a matchmaker and the respondent is an Indian mother. Obviously pleased, the matchmaker, nodding emphatically, states, “Ok, good.”
Still an innocent line of inquiry?
Given that Guyana is home to a large Indian diaspora, I suspect Stabroek News readers have caught my drift: light skin is a highly valuable commodity on the South Asian marriage market (commercial terms deliberately used). We can thus agree that, in this fictional exchange, had the mother instead answered, “No, she isn’t fair,” any prospect of marriage would most likely have been lost. What’s worse, the Indian mother would probably have quietly accepted that the groom in question, of course, deserved a fair and lovely bride. The underlying cultural message for those of us who broadly identify as ‘South Asian’ is that, literally, the lighter our skin colour, the easier our access to certain social privileges and contracts, like marriage. Granted, social class is another marker of difference, so let me clarify that in this article I am referring to the educated middle-classes who, while not a homogenous group, are seeking similar ends.
I am a single, 30-something first generation Indian-Canadian raised in Montreal by progressive, middle-class Punjabi Hindu parents. My primary job is public school teaching in Toronto but occasionally I venture abroad to ‘stretch myself,’ metaphorically speaking. Most recently, I taught at an elite international school in Dhaka, Bangladesh. While living there, I was exposed to a regular stream of “Fair & Lovely” television ads on regional networks that got right ‘under my skin,’ in spite of my own fair skin ‘status.’ So, I openly acknowledge that as a result of forming strong views on the matter the thoughts and opinions expressed here are biased.
On its website, Unilever, Fair and Lovely’s parent company, states that the
“key [to our success] remains anticipating the aspirations
of our customers and consumers and then providing
products, which meet their present and emerging needs.”
With “Fair & Lovely” creams, female customers can address their ‘need’ for convenient, cost-effective skin lighteners. For the males, there’s now a complementary product by Emami Ltd. that will produce similar results and it’s called, “Fair & amp; Handsome.” Becoming better looking today just couldn’t be any easier for middle class South Asians. The infallible Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) – who incidentally stars in print and t.v. campaigns for “Fair and Handsome” products – would seem to agree.
Regularly endorsed by Bollywood celebrities, like Asin and SRK, skin whitening products are positioned as a viable solution to your social problems. That’s right: you’ve got problems. But, from the comfort of your own bathroom, you can step into the skin you’ve always desired and utterly transform your life! That’s one loaded sales pitch; yet both Unilever and Emami operate from the premise that your dark skin adversely affects your chances of long-standing social success in most spheres, especially in your personal life. The two companies hope that you agree.
Broadcast regularly on Bangladeshi and Indian television, “F & L” and “F & H” commercials pitch specifically to the burgeoning middle-classes, who, let’s not forget, are comprised of future brides and grooms. And who, no matter the GDP of their respective countries, can still be fairly retrograde in their social views. For in a region where weddings are considered the penultimate experience, and marriage the most enviable of social contracts, a “lovely” bride or “handsome” groom is an absolute must. If you’re brown, you’re all too aware of this dangerously shallow perception that the loveliest and most handsome are also the fairest. However, this doesn’t sound fair at all.
So ‘race’ doesn’t just headline North American newspapers and talk-radio programs, it’s a hot-button issue in South Asia too. Except in India and Bangladesh (similarly, I suspect, in other parts of the sub-continent) there’s no real race debate, just an age-old tradition of racial discrimination that has yet to become politicized. Issues related to caste, gendercide (the deliberate killing of female fetuses and/or newborns, which has totally skewed the sex ratio in India) child brides and dowry have long become political as much as social issues. As far as I’ve observed, this isn’t the case with racial prejudice among and within the so-called educated class.
Undoubtedly, the region is overburdened with social problems, like the ones mentioned above along with illiteracy, urban poverty, ecological degradations, sadly, the list is endless. Perhaps it’s for this reason that the matter of internal racism among the middle classes seems, well, insignificant and therefore goes unexamined by news media outlets, which, let’s face it, also have a vested (i.e., monetary) interest in promoting their own society’s ideals of beauty. We’re all too aware that today corporations and television broadcasting companies are conveniently wedded to one another: Unilever PLC, Emami Ltd., Zee, Star, all are complicit in presenting a simplified version of our ever-complex world.
Now that I’ve left South Asia, ‘whitening’ is something I associate more with teeth than skin – it’s all about social context, isn’t it? As for ‘dark skin’? Well, interestingly, a quick browse through Unilever Canada’s website would have you believe that ‘up here,’ women most desire sunkissed – or golden brown – skin all year round. Personally, I can vouch for the popularity of cosmetic bronzers; moreover, I’ve used them myself. I guess the company really does try to please its global customer base with the “right” products. Or, it’s less about the actual product and more about perpetrating a given society’s mainstream cultural values that serve to ‘commodify’ beauty and so make beauty products necessary. Well, that’s my opinion at least
It’s no quip that “Fair & Lovely” and SRK’s ads got right ‘under my skin’ during my year-long stay in Bangladesh. As a teacher-activist, mainstream media’s propagation of societal prejudices would obviously trouble me, while as a progressive Indo-Canadian female, I would be deeply offended by the concept of skin lightening for beautification purposes.
How did we get to such an unenlightened point in our human development? Now that’s a loaded question that will, I’m afraid, be treated superficially in this concluding paragraph. It’s important to begin by stating that our obsession with light anything has much to do with ideals of cleanliness and purity or, seen another way, of hygiene and morality: couplings that simply aren’t natural. But, through various discourses, they evolved over time, crossing cultural and geographical boundaries, and finally rooting themselves in your mind and my own. Thus, the strong divisions emerged which facilitated obscene historical events from the slave trade to the eugenics movement, ghettoes and camps to apartheid systems of government. In each of these instances, race as a social marker was employed in ways that deliberately limited the life chances of whole groups of people. We cannot divorce skin lightening (or skin bleaching as it is more commonly referred to in the Caribbean) from this wider context. In their own rather deliberate coupling of ‘fair and lovely’ and ‘fair and handsome,’ certain brands and their parent companies seem to be pursuing a similar agenda in their corner of the world. Ironically, the way out of an oppressive social situation that they promise to provide, turns out to be the problem.
