Before we rush to castigate Australia, we need to examine our own prejudices of region and colour
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Ask any African what it is like for him or her to be in India and you might perhaps think twice before calling Australia racist. It is indeed a very dark underbelly that India reveals when it comes to its treatment of the dark foreigner. Africans being called "kalia" or "habshi" is mild stuff. Bilyaminu Ibrahim, a Nigerian student at an engineering institute in Greater Noida, will tell you what it feels like to be spat on. Abdulmalik Ali Abdulmalik, another Nigerian student, will recount how much it hurts when one's beaten with cricket bats and wickets over a simple game. Across the country, landlords slam doors when they see a prospective African tenant but drool for money when a white walks in. Foreigners' Registration Offices cancel the visas of Africans arbitrarily and make paperwork easier for Americans and Europeans. Why, even in the film Fashion, Priyanka Chopra thinks she has hit rock-bottom because she finds herself sleeping with an African!
Of course, the Indian prejudice against the "shyam varna" is as old as Hindu mythology itself. "When Krishna literally means dark," says Mumbai-based mythology expert Devdutt Pattanaik, "why is he always portrayed in blue rather than in natural black?" Comics and TV serials routinely depict evil (the demons) as dark and good (the gods) as fair. "It just reinforces our prejudices," says Pattanaik.
The south Indian has long become accustomed to the northerner using the term 'Madrasi' as almost a pejorative for his darker skin tone. "There is a certain dominance of north Indian aesthetics," says Delhi-based sociologist Patricia Uberoi, "where feminine beauty values a fair skin contrasted with dark hair and combined with soft features and big eyes. This goes with the global aspect where Indians are being exposed to international television that celebrates East Asian beauty with fair skin and dark hair."
However, while the South may decry this attitude of the northerners, it is as guilty of placing a huge premium on fairness. Tamil cinema, in fact, is known for reinforcing the stigma against dark skin. Superhero Rajnikanth himself may be dark, but fair women all the way from Rajasthan are imported to star in Tamil films.
Indian advertising too for long has courted fairness. You will never find a dark woman or man selling you a cosmetic brand in the Indian media. Or for that matter anything. After all, who can look better than a John Abraham peddling Garnier's new fairness cream? And in case you were beginning to forget the importance of fairness, Vogue India reminded us of it blatantly with its inaugural cover in October 2007. It flashed pale Australian model Gemma Ward as its centrepiece with the relatively darker Indian beauties Bipasha Basu and Priyanka Chopra as her sidekicks.
Matrimonial ads, week after week, hammer this in unfailingly: dark is ugly, fair is lovely. The dark can sit on the marriage shelf, there is demand only for the fair or very fair. And it is not uncommon to find dark men marrying into poor families just so that they may have a fair bride.
For T.K. Oommen, emeritus professor of sociology at JNU, racism combines elements of "culturalism" and "ethnicism". So there is the broad, implicit and very prevalent idea that Africans are culturally and ethnically inferior to Indians. "Indians have always made such distinctions. Look at the Shiv Sena that targets non-Maharashtrians or the Lachit Sena that targeted non-Assamese," he says.