The fairness cream industry valued at around Rs. 3000 crores will finally see a change in positioning its product of not harping on the ability to make a consumer fair with the latest guidelines from ASCI that took note of the ‘Dark is Beautiful’ campaign of Nandita Das recently. The new rules propose to refrain from showing dark-skinned people as depressed, unhappy or rejected by society while fair is always propagated to be better at getting you opportunities in career, marriage and societal acceptance. The fact is that it really had to be imposed upon by a regulating body to refrain from promoting only fair skin as beautiful. While we waited for a very long time for this day to come, it is time that we re-evaluated a skewed portrayal of the ideal dream girl in cinema too. Fairness as a concept is being brewed in our mindset at every stage of our lives. Right from the conception stage of an expecting mother being advised to add saffron in her diet to the blatant requirement of fair girls in matrimonial classified ads for a higher chance of a fairer progeny, the cycle endlessly goes on. While there are many factors and forces that add on to this unhealthy perception, cinema has a huge responsibility in portraying its leading women who’re lauded by the heroes in songs and dialogues for their fair skin and immediately qualifying them to be their dream girl.
While there are exceptions to a handful of films with directors who’ve deliberately avoided the hackneyed casting, a little bit of generalization is required to bring a certain perspective. A film set in a rural milieu will probably have a dark-skinned damsel or even dark make-up painted on her original complexion reducing their real dusky beauty with ordinary costumes, oiled hair and an absolutely timid nature to complete her personality. A film set in an urban background in most cases would feature a fair complexioned well-styled woman with hair breezing in the air and oozing with all the oomph and confidence. You can find the opposites in both cases be it in a village or a city in real life but the fact remains that more directors will have to be bold enough to tread an unbiased path based only on the beauty of their individualities than skin colour. This is a call for the entire bunch of influencers and opinion-makers (that includes directors, producers, heroes and comedians) on the silver screen to steer clear of colour bias in portraying/addressing their female artists. They have to take a stand of not projecting only fair toned ladies in their most stylish avatar while isolating the darker complexioned beauties to struggling saleswomen roles and village belle characters that amounts to subjugating a woman’s beauty to say the least. There’s an uneasy depiction of economically backward person as dark skinned or a privileged upmarket girl as fair-skinned person in films that clearly needs to be avoided.
If a celebrity willingly chooses to go for a skin lightening melanin surgery without much fanfare, we can still rule it out as a personal choice. For every Bipasha, Chitrangada and Nandita Das in Bollywood, there’s a Priyamani, Nayantara or Amala Paul in the South who’ve tasted fame in their own right. For every Kareena, Katrina and Alia, there is a Tammannah, Hansika and Jyotika here as well. Talent and natural features with the right opportunity/ suitable script should be the deciding factor to determine the chance of roping in our beauties rather than their skin tone as a criterion. There is a place for all skin tones right through the decades gone by in Tamizh cinema be it the extremely photogenic stars like Bhanupriya, Madhavi, Radhika or the equally welcomed Revathi, Amala Akkineni and Khushbu. But with time, the industry has been inadvertently treading a lop-sided path of defining beauty based on skin colour predominantly in the lyrics of the songs or comments of the heroes or his sidekicks.
Heroes (who flaunt their dark skin as a macho thing) should equally support in the casting of their leading ladies whose beauty is not glorified in songs owing to their skin colour. They could choose to not endorse fairness cream products and take a moral standing of the prejudice against dark skin. Comedians have an equal responsibility to discourage dialogues that classify attractive women who are purportedly ‘maidaa maavu’ colour and refrain from degrading the darker skinned women in the name of comedy. There are umpteen number of facets to describing the beauty of a woman and heroes when given colour-based descriptions of their co-star to woo her in a song or describe her as elumicham colour to his best friend, should firmly refuse to put them in such colour silos. Tamizh as a language has such an envious repository of diction for beauty that lyricists can definitely do better in churning their creative juices in penning the song lyrics to extol a woman’s beauty than by mere description of her skin colour or comparison to the colour of fruits and dough!
Progressive cinema is not in just using the most advanced technology in its production but in breaking away from the shackles of such societal clichés disturbingly in-built in creating misconceptions of true beauty. Little things make a big difference and can go a long way in showing zero tolerance towards a colour-biased acceptance to beauty.
Inner beauty apart, in a profession that demands physical beauty and the pressure for female artists to live up to a high standard of fashion sense or even be a diva, beauty is to a large extent skin deep. We need a society that doesn’t give merit because of being fair or offers sympathy because of being dark and cinema needs to back that stance. The British have long gone and we still are holding on to the pantones of skin in deciding who gets to be what in the degree of social ladder or slot them in film roles. We need more Balu Mahendras & Bharathirajas who have shot wheat-complexioned ladies in their most stunning avatar in every frame of their films. Marketers will continue to push their products for commercial reasons and promise the perfect radiance in 15 minutes, whitening magic and spotless complexion. But without getting trapped in a quagmire of an unfair obsession, we as an audience need to raise our voices and eyebrows in films promoting discrimination based on colour and also look inwards to bring about the most important change: The colour of our mindset.
