Skin

There is an exquisitely rich range of skin color in India: ebony black, tawny brown, olive, honey gold, wheat, pale tan, golden copper, almost-white.

Sadly, the skin color that is valued the most is white.

While in the U.S. it's tanning salons and creams that are big business, here it's "fair and lovely" soaps and "return to whiteness" skin-lightening creams.
  __________

"If the skin is white, it is love at first sight."
  --Ancient Indian proverb
  __________

Light color symbolizes status and success. The majority of the ads in the Brides Wanted section of the newspaper are looking for "fair" or "wheatish" brides. 
  __________

To me, my pale skin sometimes feels more like a detriment, which elicits stares and a "skin tax" from unscrupulous vendors.
  __________

I walk into a home where a sweet-looking dark-skinned little boy is standing. He stares at me for a moment and then runs to his mother, pointing at me and saying something in Tamil. "I want a complexion like hers," someone translates for me, and I feel sad that this beautiful child has already learned to feel ashamed of his skin.

Comments

[Dale B.]

This is really fascinating, isn't it? I had noticed the various skin shades in your previous photos, and wondered if there were social patterns and biases as there are in so many other countries, but felt it politically incorrect to ask. Now that the topic has been brought up, I'd like to ask further questions-- are the untouchables all dark-skinned? Do dark/light individuals have known ancestoral backgrounds that are different?

I had heard about the popularity of skin bleaching in Africa, and was amazed. I don't know of any culture anywhere that is prejudiced in the opposite direction, favoring dark over light--do you? How strange. Nature or nurture?

[Denise]

This is a wonderful photo collage.

[Basia]

Thanks Denise~

[Deb]

Replying to Dale ->

There's no social pattern or bias whatsoever that relates the skin colour to untouchable / lower castes. Yes it's a fact that FMCG companies thrive upon the "Fairness" factor favourably but may be [just hypothesizing] this hankering for fairness can be remotely linked to
1. Aryan invasion a couple of thousand years back from near the Urals / Volga.
2. Initial Aryan [Sanskrit] texts favouring them over the local dark skinned inhabitants [Asura - that's how they were called]

Hence, the ruled-upon localites were made to believe that "fairness of skin" resembles higher stature and pls understand this process lasted for several millennia. Though, in parallel, there had been gradual adoption of the dark skinned local novelty within the mainstream Aryan / Sanskrit texts [ read adoption of Kali / Shiva in his recent incarnation into the Puranas and holy scribes], the initial obsession regarding fairness still rules :-( and the market hypes it even more !!

[Svaha]

American Colors: The Spin on Skin
The United States is uniquely ignorant in its obsession with race. All societies have institutionalised prejudice in one form or another; older societies have gone through many cycles of creating and dismantling hierarchies as various coalitions wrestled with the economic and social spoils available.
The idea here is to consider the American case as an anthropological absurdity rather than a comparative assessment of its moral status vis-a-vis related prejudice.
The first thing that struck me as absurd about American popular and institutional notions on race is its conscious connectivity with skin color. In reading through anthropological texts, the orthodoxy suggests that genetic differentiation intra-species was superficial (in terms of nose bridge structure/hair texture/skin color) and that the quasi-science of race nevertheless was defined in some non-superficial matrix : Austric, Caucasian, Mongoloid, etc., based on climatic and other adaptive contexts.
In the US, the census and many employment documents show a pervasive sense of politically/socially defined race categories exclusively and ignorantly based on skin color! So racial categories are white/black/yellow, etc. The sense of self/other is eurocentrically derived...so, the polite phraseology for blacks is african-american, whereas for whites, it is not european-american. So people from the Indian subcontinent who may be Caucasian or Mongoloid are called Asians (race category!). Thankfully I have not seen a category of "brown/yellow" in census documents; perhaps a young society cannot think in a less simplistic dimension than black/white in formulating prejudice hierarchies.
There is a definition of freedom and equality that seems inconsistent with the above, but is savagely upheld as being true despite the commonality of superficial race discourse across American society. A typical American is quite content to comment negatively on European or Asian (old society) class and caste hierarchies as laughably sophisticated prejudice in opposition to his/her own sense of freedom/equality in American society. The next moment, that same naive citizen will speak in the most ignorant manner about race categories in terms of skin color. This is ingrained at all levels in language, media, government, and in personal lives. A society founded on the massacre of native populations, and the systematic enslavement of other human beings must naturally be racist, but what is amazing about American racism is its focus on skin color as a defining characteristic of race, in defiance of all scientific and anthropological evidence.

[Basia]

Svaha: Ummmmmm...I'd reply, but I'm not sure what is the point you are trying to make here. I never mention race in my blog entry, only skin color. You're the one who is bringing race into it. Are you saying that American obsession with skin color is worse in some way than Indian obsession with skin color, because Americans make it race-based? Or that I have no right to even bring up the issue of skin color in India, being one of those "naive stupid racist Americans" that you seem to loathe so much? Or did you just decide I would be a suitable target for some vicious American-bashing? You have a very large vocabulary and sound very clever indeed, but for the life of me, I have no idea what your point is, and why you seem to think this is the place to air it.

[Ganesh.R]

' I feel sad that this beautiful child has already learned to feel ashamed of his skin' this is a great line

[Vik]

Skin color based prejudice is deeply set in our society, I am a guy brought up in a upper middle-class family in Mumbai, said to be the most socially advanced city in our country, but always felt that having lighter skin was better. It wasnt until I read articles like these that I realized how foolish that was.
But I have to disagree with the assertion that "the skin color that is valued the most is white". Indians might treat white people as novelty (or a source of money), but this is mostly because they come from a society that is so different from ours.

[Shanmugam]

Its worthy to note that the Indian god of love Kama is black in color. Also is Krishna. In fact the name Krishna itself means 'the black colored one'. The obsession towards white probably started after the British rule when being white meant being powerful. In olden days the Yavana (Greeks) and Milecha (refers to some Europeans) were considered as low caste in India (you can refer works such as Mahabharata for this). I personally donot agree with the Aryan invasion/migration theory. There is nothing to denote in Indian literature that a particular class of people invaded India in prehistoric times. The first notable wave of invasion of India was by the muslims and this finds mention in most of the literature.

[Bhaskar Bhagawati]

Your collection is good but it only included people from South India,that is Dravidian people.
You can also include people from North India,that is Indo - Aryans which accounts for 70% approx. population of the country,and also other peoples from India.