The Hierarchy of Skin Color in South Asia

Zainab Hamid

Back when I used to live in Bangladesh, I would always visit my relatives almost every other Friday. In one of these particular visits, I remember dressing up in a beautiful pink dress with beautiful intricate flower patterns on it. When the time came to meet my first, second, or third cousins (as a Bengali-American, I will attest to the fact that we have a disturbingly large family tree), seven year old me was expecting everyone’s attention to be on me and my dress. And sure enough, my dress got a lot of compliments.

But along with the compliments came very peculiar comments about my skin. More specifically, how “dark” my skin color is and how everyone felt bad for my parents for giving birth to such a dark child. I mean, afterall, my brother is very fair and handsome while I am pretty but dark. My mother would immediately brush off these comments and say things like “oh, she is just a child, her skin color doesn’t matter” or something along those lines.

I knew that my relatives loved me and they still do but even with the comments that might’ve been made with good intentions, I still felt annoyed and bothered by what they said

Now, keep in mind that even though these comments bothered me, they never deterred me and led me to “loathe” my color- all of that insecurity was instead channeled through the battle of the emergence of acne starting puberty. Even with this insecurity, I was still facing the one about my skin. Why is it a bad thing for me to be “ too dark”? What’s wrong with it? Why can’t dark be beautiful? What even is “too dark”? 

See, now this is where we dive into the complex culture of skin in South Asian communities. 

Pointing out the obvious, Asia is a ginormous continent. And each region has its own general culture. Within each region, there are sub-cultures from different nationalities, tribes, and communities. Bangladesh is located in the tiny crevice between India and Pakistan in the Indian Subcontinent. As a result, every country located within this subcontinent follows the same “desi” culture. 

Besides the beautiful sarees, bangles, and jhumkas, the elaborate dance styles, the twenty different wedding ceremonies that invites over 1,000 of your relatives that you have never even heard of before, and the rich and savory food with flavors that hit every taste bud just right, unfortunately there is a dark stain. This is the stain that ends up dictating the beauty norms and the way desi society treats dark skinned people- especially girls.

Colorism is the prejudice and discrimination against individuals based on their skin color. According to the dictionary.com definition, colorism is the act of praising “lighter skin tone and mistreatment or exclusion of those with a darker skin tone, typically among those of the same racial group or ethnicity”.

Colorism affects a facet of cultures and communities- as a matter of fact, it isn’t exclusively a desi experience. Shankar Vedantam writes in a New York Times opinion piece, “Lighter-skinned Latinos in the United States make $5,000 more on average than darker-skinned Latinos. The education test-score gap between light-skinned and dark-skinned African-Americans is nearly as large as the gap between whites and blacks” (Vedantam).
He deems this problem to be both intraracial and interracial. People within and outside of different races and communities discriminate and often unconsciously live up to colorist ideologies. 

In one of VICE News videos, “Why India's Fair Skin Business Is Booming”, Gianna Toboni travels to Mumbai, India to observe the colorist factors that affect the elite movie industry, Bollywood. 

The skin-lightening industry in India booms up to $500 milion dollars with constant advertisements and promotions from celebrities and actors alike. 

The video opens with Toboni observing a photoshoot for a saree advertisement. The models are tall, beautiful, fair-skinned women who are adorned in bold makeup and brightly-colored metallic lined sarees. Upon asking the models where they are from, they reveal that they are, in fact, from Ukraine.

Interestingly enough, the saree advertisements that will be put on catalogs, posters, and even billboards never contain Indian models- even though the sarees are advertised for Indians. 

One of the models expresses how she thinks that the Indian models are very beautiful and they work in Paris and New York but they never work in India.

“Everything is about skin,” she says.

As mentioned before, the skin-lightening business in India is a staggeringly booming industry. Products like Fair & Lovely and L’Oreal White Perfect, to name a few, are all western companies that aid with skin bleaching. 

Actors and actresses can be seen in TV ads saying things like “You can be Fair and Lovely” or for the male equivalent “You can be Fair and Handsome”. 

Later in the video, Toboni visits Kailash Surendranath, a director of the biggest skin bleaching advertisements. Surendranath addresses colorism head-on by stating that it is “psychological” embedded and that it has ties to the British rule of India, known as the British Raj at the time of colonization. 

“Generally, a fair complexion is looked up [to] but the dark complexion was not so looked up [to]”, says Surendranath.
The video dives more into the complex and unfair handling of fairness and darkness. But what I want to address is the somewhat hypocrisy that I witness in pop culture from the actors and actresses of Bollywood.

In the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter Movement was at its height and the U.S. was on center stage for all of the world to see. This also included Indian actresses and actors voicing their opinions and supports for Black Lives Matter. Quickly, South Asian social media goers were quick to point out the irony behind all of these celebrities standing up for a movement while they themselves were promoting skin bleaching products.

It is true, colorism is not the same thing as racism. However, it is my belief that the two are ultimately intertwined in a blob of hot mess. Sentiments of colorism leads to an anti-black ideology- light is praised and dark is berated- and anti-blackness can later lead to racist ideolgies.

In recent times, the Indian Subcontinent has come to address these situations with many debates, social media posts, and even the infamous Fair & Lovely product by Unilever changing their name to Glow & Lovely. But will a name change really help with a deep rooted issue that traces generations back to colonial times? Will darkness finally be considered as beautiful? Can skin just remain skin?