Dulux skin colour charts?
The issue of skin colour arose in my story several times and in different ways. It is perplexing that even in India today, a forward-looking country officially, with a top tier of impressive, highly educated, globally successful players. An economy booming for top and middle class Indians. An education system that is free for all – in theory – and yet… and yet…a fair skin colour still gets listed as one of the most desirable qualities in a marriage partner.
It’s called ‘wheaten’ these days, most often seen in the ‘Marriage’ columns in newspapers, where people list the desirable attributes in a potential partner, usually including such variables as age, education, height. Plus wheaten skin: it’s as if the image of a field of glowing wheat, rippling in the breeze, can somehow ameliorate the inherent racism, or certainly colour-ism, of the desire for paler skin. And while paleskins around the world still love to get a tan, and their shop shelves are groaning with tanning lotions, Indian (and other Asian) shelves are groaning with whitening products. I’ve even seen underarm whitening deodorant! Would we list this as a cultural difference? I suppose it’s more than skin deep…
The wife of one of our Indian friends here in Australia was expecting a baby. She was a very attractive Indian woman. He was a very nice man but not at all good-looking. In fact one could say he was a bit unattractive-looking. But the families on both sides were heard to say that they hoped the child would look like his father. Why? Because he had paler skin than his wife.
In my book ‘A Touch of India’ here are the examples of skin-colour issues, and not all pushing in one direction:
My mother grew up in Bombay, as it was then called, in the later years of the British Raj. Her father was half Indian. The derogatory term for mixed blood women like her was ‘Chutney Mary’.
When my mother applied to migrate from England, where she lived after she married my British father, to Australia in 1954, she was deemed to have too much Indian blood to qualify as a Ten Pound Pom. It was the White Australia policy. An official actually came to inspect her (and her two daughters - in case we were throwbacks).
In a facetious line in my book I pondered whether the official had a colour chart up his sleeve. At the launch of my book by a former Australian High Commissioner to India I was interested to hear him mention that, in his early days in a diplomatic posting when he had to handle immigration matters, the word ‘pigment’ and the need to look out for ‘correct’ acceptable skin tones appeared in official briefing notes. In the end my mother was allowed to come to Australia, but only if she paid full fare.
As a freelance writer in Australia, one of her regular jobs was for a federal Government body called The News and Information Bureau. She was commissioned to interview and write stories about successful Colombo Plan students who went on to live and work in Australia. All of them sporting various shades of dark skin! As they were mostly from Colombo, and mostly Tamils, their skins might have been especially dark. How ironic.
When I applied belatedly to be a ‘naturalised’ Australian in the 1980s, I was interviewed by a dark-skinned Indian official at the Australian Department of Immigration office in Melbourne. We exchanged pleasant commentary about life in his native city Mumbai. How times had changed.
Later in life, visiting India every year for a small business, to see friends and to research family, I tried to get the Indian Government to accept me as a Person of Indian Origin or an Overseas Citizen of India. The official website guidelines stipulated that an applicant must have a parent or grandparent born and raised in India. My mother was born and raised in India and I produced multiple bits of paper to prove it, including birth certificate, baptism certificate, annual school reports, marriage certificate. I even brandished a small World War 2 ration card, only ever issued to Indian citizens.
But they knocked me back – at first because I wasn’t Indian enough. ‘Your mother might have been a resident Britisher’, they said. ‘There is no evidence of your Indian ancestor’, they said. It is true that there was no birth certificate for my full-Indian great grandmother. No official paperwork. Just family photos where she sat looking serious, and very dark-skinned, with her very pale British husband and their four dark-ish children, one of whom was my grandfather. Later they claimed it was because I was applying too late, beyond some cut-off date that belatedly appeared and got them off the hook. Or, rather, it cut me off from the hook.
So – we started with my mother being too Indian and ended with me not being Indian enough, and all connected to skin colour. Had my mother looked a bit paler in 1954 and had I looked a bit darker in 2014 would it have helped? Who knows. But it illustrates the hoops of migration, the arbitrary, yet subjective, application of guidelines. And the sad fact that one way or another, the colour of one’s skin can significantly influence outcomes in life.
In a current twist, the Spanish postal service has whipped up a skin-colour storm. In an effort to illustrate the discriminatory burden of darker skin it has issued a new range of skin-tone postage stamps with the lightest being the most valuable. ‘The darker the stamp, the less value it will have’…reflecting ‘the inequality created by racism’, the accompanying press release proudly announced, failing to grasp just how racist was their message, even if unintentional.
Accidental racism, inadvertent racism, or colourism, is much more persistent, and pernicious, than our white-dominated societies realise. Teaching insiders (those in the mainstream of any group or society or nation) what it’s like to be outsiders is like “asking the fish to notice the water in which they swim” (Stivers, 1996).