"The darker-skinned a person is, the higher the chances of facing blatant discrimination — in school, college and at the workplace" | Shobaa De 💜

On Entrenched Colourism – II | Shobhaa De’s Solidarity with Sarada

#newspaperinlearning #Sunday

30th March 2025

Apropos Sarada Muralidaran’s bold stance ahead of her retirement on entrenched colourism in civil society, Shobhaa De, a well-known Indian novelist and columnist, has expressed her solidarity with Sarada on the issue of entrenched colourism, in her weekly column featured in today’s Sunday Times.

“When you are a dark-skinned woman, you are invisible,’’ wrote Sarada Muraleedharan on Facebook.

Her post, which hit the headlines recently, talked about how an unnamed visitor to her office commented that her stewardship as Kerala’s chief secretary was “as black” as her husband’s “was white”.

Sarada succeeded her husband V Venu after he retired. Interestingly, this was the first time since the formation of the state in 1956 that an IAS couple had become chief secretaries in an unbroken sequence.

Given this, it’s awful to even think about the toxicity of the comment.

The offender should be named and shamed. But it’s Sarada’s eloquent and evolved response that has won the lady (who retires next month) global support.

“I am a woman… I am dark… I need to own my blackness,” Sarada retorted, saying, “Why should black be vilified? Black is the all-pervasive truth of the universe. Black is…the most powerful pulse of energy known to humankind. It is the colour that works on everyone, the dress code for office, the lustre of evening wear, the essence of kajol, the promise of rain….”

What a classy and classic putdown.

The reason why her post and subsequent interviews attracted so much attention is because the issue resonated deeply with millions of women (perhaps many men, too) who, like Sarada, were made to feel ‘lesser’ for not being fair-skinned. “I have lived for over 50 years buried under that narrative of not being a colour that was good enough. And buying into that narrative,” she wrote.

Who in our fair-skin-obsessed society has not been victimised for not being of the required skin tone? The darker-skinned a person is, the higher the chances of facing blatant discrimination — in school, college and at the workplace. Sarada confesses that as a four-year-old, she had pleaded with her mother to “put me back in her womb and bring me out again, all white and pretty”.

In India, skin colour boils down to one’s caste, she points out. And rightly so.

Caste is India’s shame — an ugly, unacknowledged secret that colours virtually every aspect of life — emotional, personal and professional. It’s the pecking order we pretend not to notice, no matter how prevalent it is. With Sarada, it was her skin tone that led to confusion as people bluntly told her, “You do not look like a high-caste person.”

But her husband does. Guess why? Obviously, because his skin colour is noticeably lighter.

Thank God for the couple’s sensible children who told their mother to ignore colourism and embrace the colour black.

“Who thought that black was awesome. Who helped me see. That black is beautiful. That black is gorgeousness. That I dig black,” she wrote.

Sarada has the strength to write — and live — her own impassioned counter-narrative after decades of fighting entrenched hostility in a society that equates fair skin with privilege and dark skin with poverty. But a dark complexion is still treated like a blight in Indian families, who struggle to find bridegrooms for their ‘savli’ (dusky) daughters and are forced to pay a higher dowry as ‘compensation’.

The birth of fair-skinned infants is celebrated in our country, while darker babies are shunned and frequently abandoned. Fair-skinned orphans stand a far better chance of finding desi adoptive parents than their dark-skinned peers.

In the glamour industry, being fair is considered a natural advantage as lighter-skinned models /actors bag the more coveted assignments. Some of Bollywood’s biggest stars spend fortunes on skin-lightening treatments, thinking of them as wise investments to get ahead in a highly competitive industry.

Even corporate leaders have succumbed to this lure, hiring image consultants who will photoshop their images on social media accounts and project them as ten shades fairer. A recent advertisement featuring a high-powered panel of industry leaders showed all of them looking pasty-faced and whiter than white folks. It is the same stereotype at work — success equals fairness.

Will the next generation be colour-blind? Not unless we, as a society, collectively turn a blind eye to the ‘fairness factor’ and look at one another as we should — a vivid and fabulously multi-toned people. Fifty shades of fair? No, thank you. We proudly own the entire colour palette,

signs off Shobhaa for Sarada!

Well, for more on the concept of colourism –

Alice Walker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is credited with coining the term ‘colourism’ in her 1983 book, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, defining it as ‘prejudicial or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their colour’. 

Colourism has become a global phenomenon that affects people of colour – a social stigma - where lighter skin tones are often preferred to darker ones.

While ‘colourism’ is the term most commonly used, other terms have also been used to describe this phenomenon, such as ‘entrenched colourism’, ‘skin tone bias’, ‘chromatism, ‘pigmentocracy’, and ‘shadeism’.