We await a cream to cleanse our soul
Ironies are ‘dark’, and a ‘fair’ trial is a good one … politics colours the very marrow of our language. So we must dip our hands into that bleeding heart of darkness—our unconscious mind—to reach at how we are, before we can change it. Before ‘seeking a fair bride’ is seen to be what it is—a hideous act of self-loathing by Indians.
The Pandava queen Panchali may not have got a fair trial in her moment of humiliation, her public disrobing, but her unparalleled beauty was perhaps the source of most of the unfairness meted to her. Including by the dark-skinned Krishna, who later argued that war could not only be to avenge her humiliation alone.
That she was dark did not dim her beauty—perhaps was the source of it. But B R Chopra, Bollywood director-turned-kitschy television bard, whitewashed both characters: with dulcet-toned actors. Himself a dark man, he perhaps couldn’t rise above his Punjabi sensibility, where ‘wheatish’ skin is the idealised norm.
Dark irony, anyone? Or maybe he bowed to our mass self-illusion—a deep curse upon the self, partly sui generis, partly mediated by colonial humiliation. Hindi cinema was dotted with dusky beauties, but they were mostly air-brushed to a talcum shade. What we lost in our quest for the ‘fair and lovely’ is the whole range of lovely shades that abound in India, west to east, north to south.
The George Floyd killing and the anti-racist surge in the West seem to have come as a moment of reckoning, if not awakening, with Unilever dropping the word ‘fair’ from the name of its whitening cream. But a rose by any other name ...? Will a Rs 3,000 crore business model change? Of exploiting India’s seemingly endless desire to sport a lighter shade as some sort of passage to another world? Will this be that life-transforming moment? Maybe not. We await a cream to cleanse our soul.