Vikram Johri: Fair and fairness

People defend their preference for light skin by claiming that it's a personal choice... It is a deeply sexualised preference which looks upon women as commodities

In September, the Food and Drug Administration ordered Torque Pharma to withdraw its fairness cream from the market. After the company claimed in an advertisement that the cream could achieve its aims with only one application a day, some dermatologists spoke up against the steroid base of the product.

By some estimates, the fairness cream market in India is worth Rs 3,000 crore, which puts it in the league of such bread-and butter FMCG categories as soap and deodorant. A slew of Bollywood celebs such as Shah Rukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra plug these products, riding on the massive advertising spends fairness creams command.
 

The ads are ubiquitous and always entirely predictable. Nearly every major star can be seen smiling into the camera as he or she builds upon an ostensibly inspirational story to hammer home the profound benefits of light skin. There are stomach-turning profile shots of the celeb becoming horrendously brighter with each successive application. Concomitantly, the quality of life improves, which is the whole point.

The extent of the hypocrisy around this product can be gauged from the fact that companies think nothing of pushing genuinely progressive agenda around the theme of a lighter skin tone. One Fair & Lovely ad from last year showcased a father trying to convince his daughter to meet a prospective match. The girl does not want to marry until she gets a job. But since she is not as white as a dove, the ad tells us, she does not have the confidence to tell her father this. Enter Yami Gautam, who gives her a Fair & Lovely tube, and voila, the girl starts beaming like a CFL.

And of course, she now tells her father she will marry in three years after getting a job and building a house and being equal, in general terms, to her husband-to-be. It's so brainless that it is actually passably funny. Fair skin will get her a dream job; no other qualifications needed. And a job that will pay her enough to build a house in three years! Well, why not? And the father buys it. That's one gullible bloke.

This is the trouble with fairness cream advertising in the country. It tries to be egalitarian when the very thing it is selling is discriminatory. Among all our stars, it was only Kangana Ranaut who kicked a Rs 2 crore offer and refused to sell fairness creams. She said: "Ever since I was a kid, I have never understood the concept of fairness. Especially, in such a case, as a celebrity, what kind of example would I be setting for younger people?"

She added: "I have no regrets about turning this offer down. As a public figure, I have responsibilities. My sister Rangoli is dusky, yet beautiful. If I go ahead and be a part of this campaign, then in a way I would be insulting her. If I can't do that to my sister, then how can I do it to an entire nation?"

Ranaut's stand is exemplary but its rarity reflects how much distance we as a society need to traverse before we can rid ourselves of our fascination with light skin. Remember it's not some trivial social evil that we can add to the list of things that we routinely and deliberately push under the carpet. Discrimination on the basis of skin colour poisons everything it touches.

Girls are valued not for their intelligence but for their beauty which itself becomes a measure of how fair they are. This culture of apportioning desirable traits to women, traits premised on their physical appearance, is Misogyny 101. Anything dark, by definition, becomes improper or unclean, a racist idea that continues to permeate our thinking. Even caste gets mixed up in this. It is not uncommon to see marital profiles written with an assumption of upper castes being light-skinned.

I have heard people defend their preference for light skin by claiming that it's a personal choice. An acquaintance once said to me: "How can I help it if I am not aroused by dark skin?" Fair enough, but this reflects another problem with our fascination with light skin. It is a deeply sexualised preference which looks upon women as commodities to be appreciated or condemned based on nothing more than their skin colour. Men do not have to go through this; in fact the situation for them is the very opposite, because of the social cachet that comes with being tall, dark and handsome.

And finally, the way we have turned fair skin into a national barometer of beauty is sickening. Since people from different parts of India have different skin tones, this large-scale and constant barrage from the media and Bollywood about the superiority of light skin also feeds into regionalism. Not only does it instil in us a non-existent, one-track standard of what "beautiful" is but it also showcases us as the highly neuroses-ridden society that we should hope not to be.

The FDA's action against Torque Pharma is a regulatory move rooted in medical data but if its action can begin a long-overdue debate leading to the possible ban of a shameful product category, the organisation may have achieved something truly wonderful after all.