Do you want to get a sense of how obsessed we Indians are with fair skin? Read this. A video posted on Reddit by r/IndianDankMemes shows how some men flocked around an Australian woman named Celia Voivodich at the Gateway of India to get a selfie with her. Hilariously, Voivodich is soon seen charging one hundred rupees for each selfie she gets clicked.
“One hundred rupee per photo,” the Australian woman is seen saying in the video. She even posted an explanation on Facebook saying that the video was not staged and the men who approached her for a photo were not actors. If you have travelled to any tourists destinations in the country- this is a common sight. You'll find men and women mob tourists from foreign nations, especially those with white skin and ask them for selfies.
As proved by Voivodich people might even be willing to pay for it. what does this say about us as a society? Can we claim that Indians are not a colourist population today, that adds worth to individuals on the basis of their skin tone?
White woman charges money for selfie: what is this fair skin obsession?
One often wonders why is a country like India, which is predominantly dark-skinned, so obsessed with fair skin? Have we still not been able to come out of our colonial mindset, when white-skinned people ruled over us, never letting an opportunity go to make us understand that they were superior to us? Do we still think that white skin is superior to dark skin? Why do we let fair skin blind our judgement to an extent that we overlook any other qualities a person may have? How can a person just be glorified for the skin colour they are born with and not for the individualistic traits they acquire over time by going through life's experiences.
And this fascination with white skin is reflected in most Indian homes where the skin colour of a girl is enough to determine her destiny. Parents feel confident that their fair-skinned daughter would easily attract rich suitors and it will be easier to marry her off as compared to the dark-skinned one. The latter is often advised by the elderly women in families to apply various concoctions on her body to lighten her skin tone and make her parents' lives easier.
Is there a ray of hope? There have definitely been some positive developments in the recent past that aim to dismantle the mindset. For instance, a popular brand of skin lightening cream dropped the word ‘fair’ from its tradename some years ago, to get rid of the negative stereotypes that people associate dark skin with. Besides that, a prominent Indian matrimonial website also went ahead and removed the skin tone filter which was used by people to filter potential partners based on their skin colour. It will, however, take a long time for Indians to accept the fact that being lovely has nothing much to do with fairness and skin colour is just one of the traits that a person is born with. It doesn't make them more special or luckier than other people. It is we, who put fairer people on a pedestal, inevitably demeaning our own existence.
Views expressed are the author's own.
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