In May 2022, I read about Google’s initiative to expand on Pixel’s Real Tone to accurately depict diverse skin tone colours and ensure a more comprehensive representation. Though this isn’t the first time, it is always heartening to see tech companies taking initiatives to overcome skin colour bias, but it may be a good moment to examine just how deeply embedded skin colour politics is in our everyday social lives and to examine its historical material basis and local-global connections. This is where Nina Kullrich’s book titled Skin Colour Politics: Whiteness and Beauty in India (published by Springer in 2022) come in handy. This text examines skin colour politics in urban north India by tracing the social meanings and consequences of skin colour and its modifications (through skin bleaching) for identity constructions, social mobility, stratification and exclusion. It combines ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi with textual analysis of fiction, religious scripts, advertising texts and media articles to produce a lucid account of ‘skin colour’ as discursively produced and illustrates how the desire for lighter skin (and the practice of skin bleaching) is entangled in the broader context of colonialism, nation-making and the wider political economy of global capitalist competition in India.
The book is organised into five chapters. Apart from the introduction and the concluding chapter, the remaining three chapters offer a chronological interrogation of skin colour politics in colonial, post-colonial and post-liberalisation, post-globalisation era. The introductory chapter situates the study’s objective within the wider global literature on skin colour and explains the theoretical framework and methodological approach adopted for the study.
Chapter 2, based on textual analysis, historicises fair skin preferences in pre-colonial India by examining how skin colour was reproduced as a category of social distinction, and the role it played in social stratification, strengthening caste identities and belonging. Chapter 3 traces fair skin preference in post-colonial India by showing how the fair female body has been central to the project of nation-making, both in the newly independent India marked by state-led capitalism and in contemporary post-liberalisation India aspiring for global citizenship. Even as the Indian nation was represented as upwardly mobile and cosmopolitan (with emphasis on ‘diversity’ and ‘modernity’) through women’s embodiment, this chapter illustrates how beauty norms and associated embodies practices also perpetuated social distinctions and power asymmetries, not only between genders but also amongst women belonging to upper, middle and lower classes, castes as well as urban and rural. Chapter 4, draws on fieldwork data to understand the diverse meanings of fairness and skin bleaching practices and how they relate to everyday materialities of life in terms of family, marriage and career aspirations to unravel the role skin shades play in negotiating social mobility, inclusion and exclusion. The final chapter offers concluding remarks.
As a scholar of gender, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Kullrich’s book. It is rich in textual and ethnographic insights and theoretically rigorous. It offers a fresh perspective on skin colour preference in India through two things. First, by historically embedding fairness in colonial rule, it successfully challenges the assumption that the desire for lighter skin is essentially a desire for whiteness. Secondly, it illustrates how the desire for lighter skin in India is to be understood as a locally embedded beauty norm which is produced in its intersection with other categories of social distinction in India. Recognizing my limited knowledge of beauty and colour studies, I have a few minor reflections to offer on the book.
Firstly, I felt that the book took for granted what is meant by ‘skin bleaching’ and thus did not attempt to explain anywhere what it means. Drawing on the narratives of the respondents, in some places skin bleaching is defined as ‘de-tanning’ (p.163) and in others as ‘aesthetic labour’ (p. 200), referring to the act of skin bleaching and who does it, but nowhere is the term defined as to what it implies. To some readers, this may be inconsequential, but for those unfamiliar with the practice of skin bleaching, it would have been helpful to explain this term.
Secondly, the book rightly recognises the criticality of fairness for women in the marriage market and the idealisation of lighter skin revealing the intersections between gender, beauty ideals, marriage and the market through multiple anecdotes and examples. In India, we have seen numerous examples of aggressive marketing aimed at disseminating fair skin as a desired feminine ideal and a critical “marriage capital” to the remotest parts of the country (see Chamikutty 2008 for details). However, the book misses out on how the premium on women’s fair skin in the marriage market is not an absolute but a negotiated terrain, particularly when it comes to marriage presentations and dowry. Dowry exchange, even though a crime in India, continues unabated. There is enough evidence to show how dark skin operates as a currency tradeable for more dowry demand and provision by families involved (Kodoth, 2008; Ramasubramanian and Jain, 2008) and yet some of these nuances were flattened out in the book.
Finally, Kullrich mentions early on in her book that this work is based on her doctoral dissertation. However, while reading it I felt that the manuscripts had not been sufficiently revised for publication as a book. At several places in the book, we find the use of the term ‘thesis’ instead of ‘book’, a problem that could have been easily avoided with careful copyediting and publishers need to take cognisance of it. Even in terms of citations and theorising, the book would have benefitted from simplification for non-specialised readers because the topic itself is likely to appeal to a wider audience.
Kullrich’s book is an important contribution to Critical Beauty Studies in India. It shows how skin whitening in India is both a colonial residue and has a character of its own enmeshed in local hierarchies of caste, class, gender, region and religion. On the one hand, it helps decenter ‘European’ whiteness in Beauty Studies to account for local discourses on skin whitening in India; on the other hand, it also illustrates how local ideas of fairness in India coexist and overlap with colonial and post-colonial conceptions of whiteness and how they restructure each other. This book will be of interest to scholars of social stratification, beauty/whiteness studies, and gender studies.
References:
Chamikutty, Preethi. (2008). Rural marketing programme for Fair & Lovely. Economic Times, 13 February.https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/rural-marketing-programme-for-fair-lovely/articleshow/2778197.cms.
Kodoth, P. (2008). Gender, caste and matchmaking in Kerala: A rationale for dowry. Development and Change, 39(2), 263-83.
Ramasubramanian S, Jain P. Gender stereotypes and normative heterosexuality in matrimonial ads from globalising India. Asian J Commun. 2008;19(3):253–69.
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Paro Mishra is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. Her core research interests include Gender, Technology, Migration and Kinship. Currently, she is examining intersections of Gender, Health and Digital Technologies with a focus on the emerging Femtech landscape in India (funded by IIITD-IITD MFIRP Scheme).