INDIA and Australia are currently locked in a verbal duel over racial slurs between their cricketers. They are both multiracial countries and both have a history of underlying prejudices. Sometimes we can’t see or do not like to accept the most obvious examples of our bias.
Recently a Hindi movie called Saa’nwariya, a word that has come to be wrongly translated as sweetheart, did poorly at the box office. The hero was a scion of the lighter-skinned Peshawari clan of Prithvi Rajkapoor. Going by its Sanskrit origin, a truer meaning of saa’nwariya should be a black fellow, a dark-skinned lover. And here was a fairish Punjabi man cavorting and wooing his woman on the silver screen, pretending to be her saa’nwariya.
The title thus depicts a racial confusion in the minds of the average Indian. It is neatly forgotten, helped by a newfangled yuppie world view, that dark skin was once admired and romanticised in India. It’s not a coincidence that three of the most popular Hindu gods — Shankar, Ram and Krishna — were seen as closer to being black than brown or white, etc.
At the same time, according to the Ram Charitmanas, a poetic treatise in Awadhi written by Tulsidas in Emperor Akbar’s reign, Ram’s stepbrother the valiant Lakshman had a fair complexion. In a memorable line in the Charitmanas, during her exile in the forests with husband Ram and his brother Lakshman, Sita is asked by curious village women in lyrical Awadhi about the two men with her. She replies: “Saa’nwaro so preetam, gaud so dewarwa…” (The dark fellow is my sweetheart, the fair one my brother-in-law.) Krishna’s consort Radha too has been described in poetic treatises as a woman of fair complexion.
So what went wrong and why are Indians with a darker shade of skin put in the doghouse by their own fellow countrymen today? Understanding this phenomenon might help explain why Indians have got into a flap with dark-coloured local people abroad, be they from Fiji or any African country. It could also explain on the other hand why so many Indians have tended to join the ‘white man’ in faraway lands like South Africa to pummel the native blacks in their own countries.
In 2002, the All-India Democratic Women’s Association campaigned against what became known as Fair and Lovely’s “air hostess ad” in which a dark-skinned girl uses the cream to make her father happy by getting a well-paid job as an air hostess. The Fair and Lovely ideal, which equates light skin with social acceptance and sexual attractiveness in its advertising, is now also extending to men.
Unilever recently launched Fair and Handsome, targeted at the metrosexual, image-conscious man. Many women who wear veils in hot Middle Eastern countries are also big consumers of the commercial skin-lightening products that are widely available. I believe the phenomenon has not spared Pakistan either. The results are shown off in private.
The marketing message is always the same: being fair will make everyone beautiful, successful and desirable. It’s a powerful lure that now attracts men and women alike. We understand that popular western beauty brands such as Lancome, Yves Saint-Laurent, Clinique, Elizabeth Arden, Estee Lauder and Revlon are also getting in on the skin-lightening act, stocking their versions alongside tanning products. Mothers are known to tell their daughters not to play in the sun and to be sure to apply sunscreen when they go out because no man would want a dark bride.
The BBC quotes Jerry Pinto, the editor of men’s magazine Man’s World, as saying that most dark-skinned men are as insecure as women and go to equal lengths, albeit secretly, to achieve lighter skin. “I don’t think men share this notion of tall, dark and handsome,” he says.
Prof Shallini Bharat, a socio-psychologist with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, believes this complex is a result of the country’s history. “India’s rulers have always been fair, be it the Aryans in the early centuries or Europeans in later years. Fairness is equated with superiority, power and influence, therefore the preference for lighter skin.”
As for the India-Australia spat, the game of cricket has a colonial history and so do its players. We are all progeny of our colonial past with its attendant apartheid and the struggles against it. Some of us chose to fight colonialism, some colluded with it. But as we have noted, an entrenched kind of racism, courtesy the caste system, was practised in the subcontinent even before the arrival of colonialism.
Other South Asian countries, including Pakistan, are scarcely better off with their institutionalised discrimination against fellow human beings. Anyhow, India banned untouchability decades ago but unofficially it is still practised across the far reaches of the country. The scourge runs deep and there is no scalpel other than a major social upheaval to scoop it out from the root. It’s the same with Australia. Its own liberal and therefore more rational citizens have critiqued the way it has treated the Aborigines or the manner in which it has dealt with Asian migrants.This is the daunting reality we should discuss about racism, not one player calling the other a monkey. That’s not racism, that’s foolishness. I find it difficult to believe that an ass is any more agreeable a term to describe someone than a monkey.
The world of football has its own issues with ingrained national and social prejudices. Zinedine Zidane’s supporters say the then captain of the French team headbutted Marco Materazzi in last year’s World Cup final because the Italian made a “very serious” comment. Apparently Zidane was called a terrorist. In sports words are said in the heat of the moment that are not pleasant. Racism is a much bigger issue with a clear socio-political agenda. Both India and Australia are bound by international covenants to eliminate it but have only partly succeeded.
This is not to say that all is well in the world of cricket. It cannot be. The game is a by-product of years of colonial rule. Its recorded trouble began at least half a century ago when during England’s tour of the West Indies an unnamed player (some say it was Freddie Trueman) turned to an Indian diplomat during a dinner and asked: “Pass the salt, Gunga Din.”
In 1968 the England tour of South Africa was cancelled after the apartheid regime refused to allow Basil D’Oliveira, a Cape-coloured qualified for his adopted country, to play. The sporting boycott of South Africa began with that incident. As for Australia, in 2003 batsman Darren Lehmann became the first international cricketer to be banned for racial abuse for railing “black c…s” after a dismissal against Sri Lanka in Brisbane. Such examples are legion but accusing the other side of racism cannot change them. The need is to look within.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in New Delhi.
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