Dark and prejudice

Perched on what could easily substitute as a gynaecologist’s chair — legs splayed, hands spread outwards against each arm rest, dress hitched high enough to barely cover my delicates — I suddenly encountered the extent of my darkness. It wasn’t the state of almost nakedness that prompted this unprecedented discovery. The two women on either side of my body made a fair contribution. The one on my right lifts the powder puff from its receptacle and rubs it over my ankle. The talc contrasts sharply against my skin, like a shock of whipped cream over a thick layer of caramel. “Arms pehle karte hain,” said the woman on my left. A firm strategy now in place, both women proceeded to first spread hot wax over my skin, after having sufficiently powdered it, and then rip it off with a white paper strip, removing, in the process, all the unwanted hair that had sprouted across its surface. At least two months had passed since I was last deforested, which meant there was a fair amount of hair to pull off. The women performed the procedure simultaneously; each one adopting one side of my body, and despite their dexterity, my cutaneous nerves smarted from each erasure. When the ordeal was finally over, the woman on my right wiped each of my limbs with a wet cloth before baptising me with astringent. My skin gleamed.

It was only later in the middle of a bath that I realised this was my most pleasant experience to date at a beauty parlour. As I revelled in the silken feel of my waxed body, I actually wore a smile. Apart from my epiphany about the density and extent of my darkness, there was nothing exceptional about this particular session, which is precisely what made it extraordinary. Perhaps the women were too eager to have lunch to be their usual inquisitive selves, or perhaps it was that they had mistaken me for a married woman (I was wearing a sari and a bindi when I had come in an hour before to make an appointment, something they asked me about later). Under normal circumstances, 10 minutes into being waxed, I am usually asked one of two things: to either bleach my face, or get a fairness-inducing facial. “Look at your skin, it’s all tanned,” one such “professional” once told me. “That’s the colour of my skin, you idiot,” is what I wanted to say. Instead, I placed one waxed arm against my face to show her the colours matched. “Your whole body is tanned,” she said, now alarmed. “We can make it lighter.”

Having put up with this manner of inane observation for most of my life, I know better than to let it get to me. The politically correct ‘dusky’ is an understatement when it comes to my skin tone. Mocha brown is more accurate. Its denseness makes me stand out wherever I go. If random bystanders do not call me “blackie,” “nigger,” “Kali,” “black beauty,” “negro” or “Kali Maa”, they ask me if I’m either from Kenya, South India, or Sri Lanka. Once, two women who were walking towards me on a street in Mumbai actually found themselves in a quandary. As they drew nearer, they noticed how my colour resembled a black cat and spent a fair amount of energy manoeuvring their gait so as to avoid my crossing their path. Like these superstitious women, no one knows what to make of a confident, self-aware dark-skinned woman.

A year ago, at a dinner at the Dhaka Art Summit, I recognised a French art dealer I’d met just a week before in Delhi. We were both standing in front of the bar at the poolside terrace at The Samdanis’ residence.

Me: I know you. I met you in Delhi.

He: Of course. I love your work.

Me: (Obviously flattered) Thanks. That’s very generous of you.

He: Don’t you also show in Paris?

Me: (Now clearly embarrassed) Oh. You’ve mistaken me for Mithu Sen.

He: Oh. I’m so sorry. You both look so alike.

“No we don’t, you half-blind twat,” is what I should have said. We just share the same skin tone.

His observation was as daft as saying Kareena Kapoor and Aishwarya Rai are doppelgangers, or that all black people look alike; it was racist, colourist, and stupid, revealing deep-seated predispositions to prejudice. Just like the recent comment by Union minister Giriraj Singh about Sonia Gandhi’s white-skin privilege that not only undermines everything she managed to independently accomplish as an outsider who adopted her husband’s country but also evangelises the cause of racial prejudice by targeting a nationality that has often been the victim of colourist aggression in India. It is no surprise that the Nigerian government feels insulted.

Hues and cry

Singh’s callous remark was a startling reminder that one’s inherited darkness becomes a characteristic; a trait; something one is identified by. It made me remember the many times people had come up to me to tell me I looked like either Nandita Das or Bipasha Basu, both of whom I bear absolutely no resemblance to whatsoever. It forced me to recall some of the other lessons I’ve learned as a black-skinned feminist: like how the conjunctive ‘but’ can be used as a compensatory word to stinging effect [“You’re beautiful, but dark” or “You’re dark, but you have great features”]. The otherwise simple act of accepting a compliment, I realised, continues to be fraught with anxiety, mostly the consequence of my mother’s conditioning. “You look so dark in this colour,” she often said if I wore anything non-pastel. “But people have told me I look nice in this [navy blue] dress,” I would say in my defence. “They’re just saying that, they don’t really mean it,” she would assure me. Multiply this conversation by a hundred such and what you’re left with is an inherent suspiciousness about any vocalised admiration — the side-effect of a now deep-seated insecurity about one’s appearance, which can make for highly stunted exchanges. So when a stranger makes the effort to seek me out in a room or a street to tell me I’m “beautiful,” my first instinct is to distrust them and guard my valuables. Beauty is something I don’t have the privilege of taking as a given. It seems to lie too disadvantageously in the eyes of beholders. The entire advertising industry profits from my being not acceptably beautiful, from my being anomalously dark. I’m their target consumer who refuses to buy in to their spiel. Ergo, I deserve all the humiliation I face at their expense, simply because I actually paid attention in science class when we learned about the properties of melanin.

Laughter the best medicine?

How does one fight this societal predisposition to be characterised first as black? By seeking refuge in humour? When I first decided to adopt this subversive policy, I did so at my own expense. I laughed at myself. It was the only way I could participate in the joke I was seen to be. So if some eager friend wanted to take a photograph of me after sunset, I’d laugh it off and tell them I would get camouflaged by the night sky. “You need a very strong flash,” I’d say. Or if I’d arranged to meet an acquaintance that had yet to meet me in the flesh, I’d tip him or her off by telling them to look for a tall and dark girl. Or I’d invent a story about how some Goan ancestor of mine must have had an affair with an African slave. Granted it was self-deprecating, to say the least, but as long as I was in charge of the narrative, it couldn’t damage me.

Years later, I still haven’t forgiven myself for being so flippant in my self-deprecation throughout my girlhood. I hadn’t realised then how self-destructive self-deprecation could be. As I approached womanhood, as I amassed enough experience with being the subject of desire, I realised my only redemption against this deep-seated, nationwide prejudice was to embrace my blackness. That society continued to see the world in shades of black and white was the failure of humanity. And I, too, was implicated, because I had inadvertently subscribed to that hegemony by never questioning it, by allowing it to reduce me, by permitting it to affect my otherwise equanimous state of being. However, if I embraced my “unfortunate,” “inferior,” “undesirable” skin tone, I could let the light in.

The lightness of being

We all aspire to beauty, without adequately questioning its parameters. What constitutes an object/subject’s beauty? Is it its context? Is it the zeitgeist of its time-bound existence? Is it subject to the vagaries of trends and shifting tastes? Is it its transience? Or its apparent translucency or opacity? Is it its relation to truth, as Keats would have it? Is it subterranean, perceivable only to sagacious eyes? Does it lie at the cusp between vanity and humility? Must beauty only be defined by the beholder? Or can it possibly be something more inherent. Can something be beautiful if there is no one to admire its beauty? Can it be lived as well as felt? Is beauty a function of light?

For years I’ve battled with the aphorism, “Beauty is only skin deep.” The world as it exists will not allow us the luxury of entertaining such a profound belief. A perfunctory glance at the matrimonials is testimony to the fact that all prospective brides, grooms, and mothers-in-law prefer a fair-skinned alliance to duskier counterparts. For dark-skinned women to stand any chance in the marriage bazaar, they must disguise their darkness. Fair equals beautiful. Dark equals a hefty dowry.

Our biggest misconception is that we associate whiteness as synonymous with lightness. What we have lost, in our ignorance, is the metaphysical connotations inherent in the word ‘light’. What we have forgotten are the mystical inferences redolent in the word ‘black’. In our Aryan-Dravidian hegemony, we have completely suppressed the mythical significance of words like kali or the Tamil word karuppu.

“Is it difficult to photograph dark skin?” I asked a photographer friend. “It’s a question of compensating the exposure,” he told me, an answer that was in sync with the reading I had done online. It depends also on the light, he explained, the midday sun, for instance, would be unflattering to a cricketer from the West Indies playing a test match. “Either you’d bleach out the white of his uniform or you’d darken his face. You have to compensate the exposure,” he reiterated. His advice had all the gravitas of a maxim.

So much of how we see what we see is governed by unfiltered prejudice. So much of how we experience our own beauty and appeal is determined by how we process external validations or their lack thereof. We either err on the side of vanity, or we indulge in excessive humility. We expose ourselves to unforgiving eyes and treat their assessments of us as truth. Or we under-expose, believing we are not worthy of platitudes.

If you’re dark-skinned you teach yourself to disregard beauty entirely before you begin to think of it as light. “Light that shines through from within,” the same photographer friend once said.

As a dark-skinned woman writer and a fellow seeker of eternal truths, I’ve begun to think more and more of light and its corollaries. I’m slowly giving up the vain pursuit of beauty. I’m looking for wisdom instead.

Rosalyn d’mello is a Delhi-based writer, editor

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