Last week Indian actress Tannishtha Chatterjee walked out of a television comedy show called Comedy Nights Bachao after the hosts repeatedly ridiculed her for her dark complexion. Chatterjee, who was on the show to promote her latest film Parched, along with co-star Radhika Apte and director Leena Yadav, had been told that it would be in the “roast” format, one where she would be made fun of. What she hadn’t bargained for was that the “fun” would consist exclusively of mocking her for her dark skin colour.
In a Facebook post after the incident, Chatterjee wrote: “The only thing they could roast about a dark-skinned actress was of course her dark skin. They could identify me only with that.”
Since then Colors (a decidedly unfortunate name in the present context), the Indian television channel which features the show, has apologised to Chatterjee. However, the so-called comedians helming the show continue to act as though they don’t know what the fuss is about.
The incident shows not just Comedy Nights Bachao’s pathetic notions of humour. It is also a stunning reminder of how pervasive and deep-rooted the bias against dark skin is in Indian society.
While the Indian entertainment industry would not dream of cracking insulting jokes about caste — the country’s centuries old system of institutionalising social inequities — skin colour shaming seems to be ‘fair’ game even now.
Does that mean India’s racist impulse is much more resistant to change than casteism is? It would appear so. Thanks to progressive legislation, Dalits, or the country’s backward castes, are now a huge, politically-empowered bloc.
Though instances of injustice and atrocity against them take place even today, Dalits are protected by a raft of laws and are fervently wooed by politicians for their votes. Making a caste-ist slur could get you prosecuted. Mocking a person for being dark can at best trigger some ephemeral social media outrage.
That Indians have an almost atavistic prejudice against the dark-skinned is well-known. We may be 50 shades of brown, but the lighter we are on the colour scale, the better we like ourselves. That is why the Indian skin lightening products industry is worth a staggering $450 million (Dh1.65 billion). Perhaps the colour stereotype is best summed up by the name of a popular Indian skin lightening brand — Fair & Lovely. It’s a triumph of nomenclature, explicit in its implication that the obverse is ‘Dark & Ugly’. Needless to say, the colour bias hits women the hardest, and though in recent years manufacturers have been selling the fairness dream to men as well, the pressure to be fair is primarily sexist — part of the impossible ideals of beauty that women are expected to live up to.
Not unique to India
Of course, the fair fixation is not unique to India. Skin-lightening products are immensely popular in most countries of Asia and Africa. Millions of women who battle low self-esteem because of their darker skin tone use these products with potentially harmful chemicals in their desperate desire to become a few shades lighter.
In 2014 Nigerian pop star Dencia came out with a product called Whitenicious, which reportedly sold out within hours of being launched.
The same year, Korean beauty brand Elisha Coy sparked a huge controversy after it put up a billboard in New York showing an extremely light-skinned Korean model. The billboard, which advertised a cream with skin-lightening properties, read: “Do you wanna be white?”
The colourism of Asian and African countries is obviously an odious relic of colonial times. It is patently racist, based as it is on the subconscious belief that the white-skinned race is superior to the darker variety. Its colonial association with power, hardwired into us over generations, has transmuted it into an aesthetic requirement as well.
In the case of India, though, the loathing for the dark-skinned is much more ancient, much more organic.
It is linked to the country’s age-old caste system, where the wealthier, more entitled upper castes are traditionally associated with a fair skin tone. In the country’s collective unconscious, a dark complexion is shorthand for persons of low caste — the ones historically forced to carry out menial jobs, out in the fields, out in the sun. It is not a coincidence that the Sanskrit name for caste is Varna, which also means “colour”.
Independent India has outlawed discrimination based on caste. But there is no law to dismantle the reflexive, colour-coded prejudice that has traditionally accompanied it.
Which is why the comics at Comedy Nights Bachao thought it would be perfectly kosher to skewer Tannishtha Chatterjee for her dusky complexion.
Yes, political correctness is a slayer of comedy. But poking vicious fun at someone for the pigment of her skin is not about being politically incorrect. It is racist, caste-ist and sexist — and there is nothing funny about that.
The casual social assumption that dark skin is inferior, fit to be denigrated and ridiculed, needs to be thrown out the window. Mass media and the entertainment industry could have a big role to play here, shaping as they do social attitudes and opinion.
Unfortunately, each time a Comedy Nights Bachao bursts into malicious glee at someone’s dark skin — and each time a TV commercial trumpets the desirability of a “radiant white” complexion — that goal is pushed back some more.
Shuma Raha is a senior journalist based in Delhi.
