Let me state my proposition right off the bat – we Indians are the most racist people on earth! I was reminded of this stark truth when Sam Pitroda made that controversial statement regarding the physical characteristics of people from different parts of the country.
Pitroda belongs to that incorrigible species of individuals who refuse to abide by the tried and tested dictum that it is better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are a fool rather than open it and remove all doubt. Clearly lacking the acumen to anticipate that in this heated election season, even the most benign statements will be misconstrued by political opponents, Pitroda drew a simple racial, but certainly not racist, comparison among our people from different regions: “We could hold together a country as diverse as India – where people on East look like Chinese, people on West look like Arabs, people in North look like maybe white and people in South look like Africans. It doesn’t matter. We are all brothers and sisters.”
What he said was unexceptionable in substance and intent – that despite the country being a crucible of races with varying physiognomic differences, we were united. It was not his statement but the crude bigoted response of his critics that has reinforced my view that we lick everybody else as racists.
The ugliest racist reaction was that of the Prime Minister of the country who demonstrated the lowest common denominator of racist thinking with his denunciation of Pitroda for equating people from the South with the African. The self-proclaimed divine being/thespian/politician expressed thunderous outrage that the “Shehzada (Rahul)” and his Congress acolytes were “disrespecting our countrymen based on the colour of their skin. Modi will definitely not tolerate it”. By implication, he was insinuating that to be compared to the dark-skinned Africans amounted to disrespect of our countrymen. For Modi, black is not beautiful. And he further exposed his crude racism by accusing the Congress of not supporting Draupadi Murmu’s candidature for President because they thought she was African – “her skin is dark so she must be defeated”. Significantly, Modi seemed okay with the other comparisons drawn by Pitroda. To be associated with the Whites, or the Chinese or the Arabs is kosher but in Modi’s reckoning, to be linked to the Africans is an insult. How appallingly racist is that?
Such an obnoxious attitude to dark skin seems to run in the blood of the Sangh Parivar. One recalls that in 2017, Tarun Vijay, a former BJP member of parliament and one-time editor of the RSS weekly, Panchajanya, speaking in the wake of a series of attacks on Africans in Noida, defended India against charges of racism with this cynical and racist howler: “If we were racist, why would the entire South India which is….you know Tamil, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra….why do we live with them? We have blacks, black people around us!” Apart from the mindless bigotry implicit in the analogy, one cannot miss the even more absurd condescension of a light-skinned North Indian consenting to “live with” the “black” South Indian. As racists, we are as bad as they come!
On the issue of racism, we have a lot to be ashamed of. In her profoundly insightful book on racism titled Caste, Isabel Wilkerson describes the hierarchies of power that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the supposed inferiority of another, that harnesses race, class and colour to divide and subjugate people. We in India have the dubious distinction of not only providing the moniker for the book but being linked with Nazi Germany and America as the dominant locations that have bolstered the racist power structures and hierarchies that divide us today.
Wilkerson points to uncanny similarities between India and America. Both have adopted social hierarchies that reinforce the differences between the highest and the lowest, keeping the dominant castes separate, apart and above those deemed lower. Both exiled their indigenous people – the Adivasis in India, the Native Americans in the United States – to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society, apart from using terror and force to keep them there.
To put it bluntly, our centuries-old, iniquitous caste system is the mothership that has provided the inspiration for Nazi Germany and racist America. This egregious concept of social hierarchy goes back millennia and is thousands of years older than European racism and division by skin colour. But caste is not our only social deformity. Our racism is a many-coloured monster that goes beyond caste, embracing discrimination based on religion, on the colour of one’s skin and even one’s facial characteristics.
Toni Morrison, the great American writer, has pointed to the simple truth that “there is no such thing as race, none. There is only the human race – scientifically, anthropologically.” We in India are best placed to understand what she means. In so many ways, our society represents the rich diversity of the human race with its amazing variety of physical characteristics in facial features, hair texture and skin colours that range from white to jet black. Unfortunately, instead of celebrating our heterogeneous but common humanity, we dehumanise and oppress sections of our own people who are different.
As a society, we are a brimming cesspool of squalid prejudices. Without belabouring our much-flogged deformities relating to caste and religious discrimination, I intend to consider those aspects of our racism which are ubiquitous and which we yet refuse to acknowledge – especially our crass attitude to people with dark skin. The widespread phenomenon of discrimination against people of dark skin is known as colourism in America, which is essentially racism by another name. Here too colourism is a social malady, but nothing is done about it because it is so normal and every day.
Significantly, unlike the age-old caste system, the social denigration of our fellow beings who are dark-complexioned, is NOT a legacy handed down as historical baggage from the distant past. On the contrary, millenniums before “black is beautiful” became an assertion of black beauty and pride, our country celebrated blackness as desirable. Our legendary heroes, the most powerful gods and goddesses were dusky, even ebony in colour. Lord Krishna, considered to be an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, had a very dark skin tone, as did Lord Ram. Kali – the goddess with destructive power over evil – was quite black. And Draupadi, the indomitable protagonist in the Mahabharata, is described as an extremely beautiful black woman.
Regrettably, somewhere along the way, we abandoned this enlightened attitude of being blind to colour in the best, most godly way. There is no doubt that the white man’s daunting presence on our soil for over two hundred years debased our sensibilities and some of their offensive cultural attitudes have rubbed off on us. The subjugated seem to have been brainwashed into believing that white skin not only represented power but superior intelligence, desirability and beauty too. Though the British have long since been booted out, we have not been able to shake off this revolting belief in the superiority of the light skin over the dark.
Those following European soccer would know that the sport is facing its moment of reckoning over racism. Black players, like the supremely gifted Vinicius Junior of Real Madrid, are relentlessly subjected to the most blatant racist remarks and gestures. There is a real fear that racism has been institutionalized in a sporting system underpinned by white hegemonic privilege.
But we dare not gloat as we are no better. Our cruel and condescending attitude toward people of African origin is as disgustingly racist as anywhere else in the world. A Barbadian friend who has lived and studied in Jodhpur for several years has hair-raising tales to tell of the everyday racism he has faced – about being hounded by groups of taunting youngsters, the words “habshi”and “bandhar” following him everywhere.
And we don’t spare our own who look different! Consider the terrible discrimination faced by the people of the North-Eastern States who are routinely greeted with shouts of “chinky” because of their mongoloid features. It is with a deep sense of shame that one recalls their mass exodus from Bangalore in 2012 and the severe harassment that they faced during the pandemic, the most hideous example being the case of the brute who spat on the face of a Manipuri woman and shrieked “Corona”!
The most oppressed victim of our sordid colourism is the Indian girl who is dark-skinned. In a vexatious – nay, sick – social setting that regards fair skin as an essential ingredient of physical beauty, the dark girl’s life is hell. At home, the poor girl’s face is plastered with turmeric, curd and sundry other concoctions as her family, with the best of intentions, reinforces her sense of inferiority. Outside, the billboards advertise creams to lighten skin, screaming the arrant nonsense that fair is beautiful. TV and cinema shore up this perverse and gross distortion of human comeliness. And have a look at our matrimonial ads across communities – easily the most shameless exhibition of our colour, caste and religious bigotry.
It’s said that personal experience is the best teacher and tells you what’s what! So let me conclude with my very first brush with colourism as a school kid in Rajasthan. I am a Malayali with a dark complexion which would become even darker during the kite-flying season. When I was barely eleven years old, four of my classmates – the archetypal bullies – began calling me kalia (blackie) which became my nickname in school. It stung badly and I felt a pariah. It crossed my mind then how unfair it was that the shame and odium were entirely attached to the victim whereas the cruel perpetrators strutted around, the cocks of the walk. I was alone in my misery, left to fend for myself. I hated school and often feigned illness to avoid my tormentors. As there was no” Fair and Lovely” cream in those days, I applied talcum powder on my face in a pathetic attempt to look lighter-skinned and ended up with a charcoal-grey complexion. I was glad when my father relocated to a different city.
More than six decades later, I hold on to the belief that racism is still prevalent everywhere, only more subtle than before. Its universality renders it normal. That makes all of us complicit in a cover-up of the greatest evil in our country today. We all need to heed Angela Davis’s exhortation: “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist.”
Mathew John is a former civil servant
