MUMBAI: Looking to find a husband, make friends, and get ahead at work? Then you need to have lighter skin. That’s the all-pervasive message in India, and it’s something that one actress is fighting to overturn.
The new poster girl of the “Dark is Beautiful” campaign, Nandita Das, has called out India’s obsession with fair skin — a prejudice she says has driven some young women to the brink of suicide.
“Magazines, TV, cinema — everywhere being fair is synonymous with being beautiful,” Das told.
Described as having “dusky” skin as opposed to a fair complexion, the 43-year-old is well used to Indian preoccupations with colour, and not just in the film industry, where she has refused requests to lighten her skin for roles.
“How can you be so confident despite being so dark?” is a question regularly asked of Das, who has preferred to star in unconventional, issue-based films but says she would struggle to get ahead in mainstream Bollywood movies.
Probably in the majority of the cases it is in fact not the prospective groom or bride who are insisting on the ‘fair’ partner, but rather the family. I know of one such case where the groom, an Indian Brahmin, was so fed-up with his family insisting on a ‘fair’ bride that he married the blackest Antiguan (Caribbean) lady he could find. Jointly they opened a business and lived happily ever after …