Skin Colour Politics: Whiteness and Beauty in India [1 ed.] 3662649217, 9783662649213

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Nina Kullrich

Skin Colour Politics Whiteness and Beauty in India

Skin Colour Politics

Nina Kullrich

Skin Colour Politics Whiteness and Beauty in India

Nina Kullrich Hamburg, Germany

This book was submitted as thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Bayreuth. ISBN 978-3-662-64921-3 ISBN 978-3-662-64922-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64922-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Responsible Editor: Marta Schmidt This J.B. Metzler imprint is published by the registered company Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin, Germany

Acknowledgements

This book was submitted as thesis entitled “‘Skin Colour’ Politics and Social Stratification in India—A Transdisciplinary and Intersectional Approach to Fairness Preference, Skin Lightening, and Hegemonic Whiteness” for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Bayreuth University in 2019 and successfully defended in 2020. I’m deeply indebted to my supervisors Prof. Dr. Susan Arndt and Prof. Dr. Ursula Rao for their guidance, criticism, advice and encouragement. I’d also like to extend my gratitude to the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung e.V. for awarding me a fulltime PhD scholarship as well as travel allowance for field research in Delhi. I would like to thank my guest supervisor in Delhi, Prof. Dr. Radhika Chopra, the Department of Sociology and the Ratan Tatan Library at Delhi University. I must also thank the Regional Office New Delhi of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, the autonomous feminist collective Saheli Women’s Resource Centre in Delhi, and the non-profit organisation Feminist Approach to Technology in Delhi. I had a great pleasure working with Rituparna Patgiri, who extended a great amount of assistance. I cannot begin to express my thanks to my interviewees from Delhi, who shared their time and stories with me. I am also grateful for the general discussions and constructive criticisms during the summer school “The Power of Colour” (Humboldt University of Berlin), the Workshop “Managing Racial Capital” (Freie Universität Berlin), and the Symposium “Beauty and the Norms” (Bayreuth University). Special thanks to Prof. Dr. Claudia Liebelt for her insightful suggestions and extensive knowledge, and to the editors of the “Palgrave Studies in Globalization and Embodiment” series. I very much appreciate the invaluable help of Omid Soltani. I also wish to thank Prof. Dr. Heinrich Detering and Prof. Dr. Torsten Hoffmann for encouriging me at the very beginning of my studies.

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Acknowledgements

Finally, I could not have completed this dissertation without the support and love of friends and family. I am extremely grateful to Imke Bredehöft, Lisa Carstensen, Katyayani Dalmia and her family, Lee Hielscher, Nikolai Huke, Gesa Husemann, Tim Köslich, my parents Manuela & Frank Kullrich, Oeendrila Lahiri, Anindita Majumdar, my children Mika & Jona, Julika Mücke, Ilka Müller-Patham, Jill Reich, Hannelore Rüther, Katya Schneider, David Templin, Olaf Tietje, Anton de Vries, the Wandalenweg Collective, and Sarover Zaidi.

Contents

1 “In This Country, Beauty is Defined by Fairness of Skin” . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introducing the Politics of ‘Skin Colour’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Research Design: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Colourism and Skin Bleaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Theoretical Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.1 An Intersectional Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.2 Critical Beauty Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.3 Colourism and Critical Whiteness Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Skin Bleaching—State of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Methodological Approach to Colourism and Skin Bleaching . . . 1.5.1 Producing the Fieldsite: Studying ‘Colourism’ in Delhi, India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.2 Collection and Introduction of the Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.3 Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.4 Self-Reflecting Research and Researcher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6 Structure of the Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 ‘Colourism’ in India Within and Beyond Colonialism: Historically tracing Fair Skin as a locally embedded, yet transnational, colonially re-shaped and subversively contested signifier of social status and norm of beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 ‘Skin Colour’ in Pre-Colonial India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ¯ 2.1.1 Early Migration and the ‘ Aryan’ Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 Fair Skin and Beauty in Ancient Hindu Scriptures . . . . . . 2.1.3 Caste and ‘Skin Colour’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 6 12 12 21 26 29 34 35 37 44 46 48

51 52 53 60 63

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Contents

2.2 Colour and Colonialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 ‘Skin Colour’ and the British Raj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 ‘Skin Colour’ and the (Hindu) Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Interim Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Beauty as Project, Fairness as Product: ‘Skin Colour’ Management and Fairness Consumption in Post-colonial India . . . . 3.1 The Story of Lakmé: ‘Patriotic Production’ and the Creation of a National Cosmetic Industry During State-Led Capitalist, Early Independent India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Hindustan Unilever Limited’s Fair & Lovely: Neoliberal Beauty as Aesthetic Entrepreneurship and Distinctive Body Practice in Post-Liberalisation India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 ‘Cosmopolitan Consumption’ and Body Confidence: Fairness for the Urban Middle Class Woman . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Creating the ‘Rural Entrepreneur’ and the ‘Subaltern Consumer’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Interim Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Shades of Fair, Shapes of Beauty, and Shifts of Status: Narrating and Practising Skin Bleaching in Contemporary Delhi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Shades of Fair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 The Practice of Skin Bleaching: Change of Shades, Not Colours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 The Fair Bride in the Bridal Fair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Desires for Fairness as Desires of the ‘Other’: Colour and Class Distinction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Skin Bleaching and (Aesthetic) Labour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Anti-Colourism and Neoliberal Subjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Interim Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 Conclusion and Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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“In This Country, Beauty is Defined by Fairness of Skin”

1.1

Introducing the Politics of ‘Skin Colour’

The sky which gives light is blue and my mother was not dark but she was a virtuous lady. [...] I thought this is an injustice with my body—my dark features were my due but had come to me by some misunderstanding. [...] In my childhood, I was familiar with the description of the Prince of the stories. But my husband’s face didn’t fit in the frame created in my mind. His complexion was same as mine. (Rabindranath Tagore 2009 [1916], 8–9)

The novel Ghare Baire (1916; Inside Outside, 2009) by the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) tells the story of a woman, Bimala, who is torn between participating enthusiastically in the Indian independence movement and rejecting growing nationalism. At the very beginning, Bimala starts telling her life story, first describing her mother’s complexion, then portraying her own darker skin tone, and finally characterising her husband’s. As early as the first page, she declares: “In this country, beauty is defined by fairness of skin”. Even today, a century after this novel was first published, Bimala’s observation seems to be more than accurate when one contemplates the images of normative beauty that dominate public media. The popular Indian actress Nandita Das, who is an ambassador of the awareness campaign ‘Dark is Beautiful’, goes so far as identifying an upward trend of ‘fair’ skin as a norm of beauty. On her weblog, she states: “I am shocked to see the rise in the number of fairness creams and dark actresses looking paler and paler with every film, magazines, hoardings and films and advertisements showing only fair women”. A pervasive preference for lighter complexions in India has become apparent, not least reflected in the increasing consumption of skin lightening products. In

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2022 N. Kullrich, Skin Colour Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64922-0_1

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this book, I elaborate on the politics of ‘skin colour’1 in contemporary, urban North India. Based on primary research conducted in Delhi, this book offers a new perspective on not only discursive (re)productions but also material conditions and social effects of fair skin preferences and skin bleaching practices. Applying a transdisciplinary and intersectional approach, this study depicts a complex picture of the interrelation between fair skin as a locally embedded beauty norm and whiteness as a global “cultural imperative” (López 2005). Drawing primarily on in-depth interviews, I show how ‘skin colour’ is understood and experienced in everyday living contexts, hence focussing on how colour intersects with and reproduces other categories of social distinction—primarily gender, class, caste,2 race, region and religion. Moreover, I historically embed fairness as an Indian, precolonial yet transnational ideal of beauty. Methodologically rooted in Cultural Studies, this work brings together ethnographic fieldwork with textual approaches (fiction, cultural myths, religious scripts, advertising texts, or newspaper articles). It asks how ‘skin colour’ is discursively produced, but also examines skin bleaching as performative practice. While focussing on social meanings and functions of skin shades and bleaching in everyday life, my study also reflects on structural conditions, aiming to unravel interrelations between colourism, (aesthetic) labour, (re)imaginations of the Indian nation, and changing (global) political economies. Thus framed, I show how skin becomes 1

Throughout this thesis, I find myself in conflict with the marked contradiction between arguing for an understanding of ‘skin colour’ as a social construct, on the one hand, and the necessity of working with precisely these categories to have a shared linguistic or conceptual basis for debates on colourism, at least to some extent, on the other. To point to this problem, I set ‘skin colours’ in single quotes troughout this study. Moreover, I would have liked to mark all colour categories appearing in this text—such as ‘gor¯a’, ‘fair’ or ‘white’— as socially constructed classifications of differentiation, not least to stress how these shades of colour are significantly co- and re-structured in and by my work. However, for the sake of better readability, I henceforth refrain from setting these terms in quotation marks. 2 Although the term ‘caste’ is an invention of the British colonizers, I use it in this study to refer to all the different scholarly interpretations and locally lived variations of varna and jati related processes ofgroup identification and differentiation. Whilst there are several thousand different j¯atis in contemporary India, with their own professions, rank orders, endogamous practices, dietary regulations, and purity laws; the varn.a system, on the other hand, is commonly associated with four hierarchically ranked categories: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Shudras (Gupta 2000, Oberlies 2008). This, however, is an idealised Brahmin interpretation of select Hindu scriptures; restructured by colonialism and orientalist scholars. In both practice and scholarship, the varn.a system is highly controversial, primarily in terms of amount, definition, and rank order of varn.as. Moreover, the religious texts are ambiguous and inconsistent with one another (cf. Ayyar and Khandare 2013). For an introduction to varna and jati, see 2.1.3.

1.1 Introducing the Politics of ‘Skin Colour’

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the site and interface for questions of local, national and global belonging and identity to be negotiated and differentiated. While restructuring and reinforcing precolonial and colonial stratifications, these processes are further entangled with and characterised by colonial continuities, global white3 supremacy discourses, capitalist hegemony, neoliberal subjectivity, and ‘post-racial’ and ‘post-feminist’ ideologies. Attentive to the oscillations of beauty practices between agency and subordination, this study investigates the sense(s) in which skin bleaching is understood and experienced: as both individual and collective empowerment; as a practice of decolonising the self; as a subversive, emancipatory strategy to withstand dominant beauty (and other) regimes; and as a strategy of discrimination that demarcates the self from the social others, and hence as a perpetuation of not only beauty but neoliberal regimes more generally. Whereas Indian beauty regimes are multiple and thus differ across its regions, recent research on the New Indian Woman4 —India’s internationally successful 3

The term white used by me in this thesis does not refer to any biological conception of ‘race’ or ‘colour’ but instead indicates a social position within a society that is ordered along a racialised hierarchy. Since the ‚Europeanisation of the earth‘ (Reinhard 1994) whites constitute themselves by producing a ‚other‘. Thereby whites—as the very producer of these hierarchising differences—present themselves as naturalised norm. In the so-called ‚postcolonial‘ era whites further tend to present themselves as colour-blind, albeit still inhabiting a privileged and dominant (power) position within a racialised order. Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) “evolved as an offshoot from Black Studies and Critical Race Theory in the late twentieth century mainly in U.S. academia” (Lauré al-Samurai and Piesche 2018, 16) and relocates—as a postcolonial broadening of perspectives—the academic focus from ‘objects’ effected by racism to the analyses, visualisation, and confrontation of white subjects, discourses, and structures. Blacks and People of Colour have turned their gazes towards whites and whiteness for centuries. For interventional and theoretical critical perspectives on whitness, Lauré al-Samurai and Piesche (2018 suggest to look into W.E.B. Du Bois (Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, 1920), James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time, 1963) and Toni Morrison (Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992). For the German speaking context, see: El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2005, „Vorwort“ und die „Konzeptionellen Überlegungen der Herausgeberinnen“. In: Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland. Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche und Susan Arndt (eds.). Münster: Unrast-Verlag. 2005. 7–10 and 11–13; Wollrad, Eske (2005): Weißsein im Widerspruch. Feministische Perspektiven auf Rassismus, Kultur und Religion. Königstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer. I would have liked to follow the editors of ‘Mythen, Masken and Subjekte’ in italicing the term white as I did in this footnote—however, the term white is applied in so many contexts by so many vioces in this thesis, that I would not want to anticipate upcoming debates. 4 The concept of ‘New Indian Woman’ encompasses both supposedly ‘Western’ as well as ‘Indian’ features: It demands that women be(come) ‘modern’, educated and working, while

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beauty queens and Bollywood cinema—has demonstrated that beauty standards celebrating whiteness have indeed become globally powerful imperatives, not despite, but precisely because they incorporate constructs of ‘diversity’ that are mostly defined in terms of their proximity to ‘European whiteness’ (e.g., Osuri 2008, Parameswaran 2005).5 Accordingly, scholarship on skin lightening has situated the practice of bleaching primarily within the context of (post)colonial racism (Hunter 2005, Castro Varela and Dhawan 2005) and a global discourse on ‘white supremacy’ (Mire 2001, Blay 2011). Thus framed, skin bleaching has been understood as a strategy of “mimicry” (Bhabha 1994) or “lactification” (Fanon 1967). Some scholars claim that the practice of skin bleaching reflects a “false consciousness” (Glenn 2009) or even “self-denigration” (Hall 2013).These notions, however, have been challenged and complicated by more recent literature on colourism: it is here understood as representation of “an anxious love for the ‘other’” (Nadeem 2014, 224f.), or even as a “decolonizing practice” (Tate 2016). Building upon these recent approaches, I offer a new understanding of colourism/skin bleaching in the specific local context of contemporary Delhi. In contrast to previous literature, I argue, in this book, that skin bleaching in Delhi is neither (exclusively) a result of internalised racism, nor (primarily) about destabilising racial categories. Rather than ‘talking back to the colonial centre’, skin bleaching reorganises and reinforces social distinctions in Indian societies, which are neither exclusively local nor global. Moving beyond the dualities of coloniser/colonised allows for complexities and contradictions to emerge. From

remaining ‘traditional’ and ‘Indian’ and retaining strong family values. This ideal image corresponds to the urban, Hindu, middle-class prototype, the so-called ‘Globo-Indian.’ The anti-colonial image of the New Indian Woman was constructed as a counterpart to ‘Western’ women, emphasising women’s purity and spirituality as well as their role as mothers. Since liberalisation, the desire for distinction from ‘common’ women has gained in importance, with Titzmann (2014), for instance, now seeing this figure in contrast to what political feminism in India stands for: weakening and silencing women and women’s movements in times of social and economic change. 5 Osuri (2008) explains that the “Euro-American discourses of diversity which are eager to embrace an approximation of whiteness in the form of Aishwarya Rai [Bollywood actress and former Miss World] as an assimilable marketable form of cultural difference […] Therefore, comments that describe Aishwarya Rai as a Greek goddess or the fact that she cannot be placed as Indian appear to make her a more attractive Indian celebrity” (Osuri 2008, 116–118). Likewise, Parameswaran (2005) hints to the fact that “Beauty and fashion experts quoted widely in the media argue that India’s beauty queens are the striking new alternatives to the mainstream because they represent the best of East and West. One entrepreneur in the beauty industry claims that Indian women have Caucasian features, but are ‘packaged in lovely shades of brown, olive, and cream’” (Parameswaran 2005, 425).

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this, we gain an insight into ‘whiteness’ not just as an inscribed perception associated with ‘race’ or ‘Europeanness’ but with caste and class also, and not only as a way to negotiate gendered norms but political economies and national imaginations as well. ‘skin colour’ (modifications) thus (re)makes and signifies social identities and relations. More precisely, in contemporary urban (North) India, skin bleaching can be understood as aiming for a ‘cosmopolitan’—while explicitly ‘Indian’ fairness. Moreover, my work contributes to an understanding of whiteness beyond ‘skin colour’. Just as skin bleaching does not necessarily aspire to (European) whiteness, whiteness is reproduced by other means than skin bleaching. The careful unravelling of how ‘skin colour’ as political signifier and whiteness as “cultural imperative” (López 2005) relate, not only helps to better understand social stratification in general but how whiteness enters new power alliances in particular. As previous studies on whiteness in India have shown, “the refashioning of whiteness by colonized subjects was […] more insistently attuned to the institutionalization of new differentiations internal to Indian society” (Chandra 2011, 133–134). Therefore, seeking to go beyond conventional postcolonial approaches, I propose to understand whiteness as a travelling and relational concept. Furthermore, in the Indian context, I analytically distinguish between the concepts of ‘Indian fair’ and ‘European white’, thereby pursuing a central objective of my project: to contribute to the decentralisation and decolonisation (Tate 2010) of whiteness within beauty studies. I argue that skin-bleachers in India seek to change shades, not colours. Above all, fair skin is linked to social capital and social mobility. It intensifies and represents social hierarchies in Indian societies, materialising, most clearly, in the marriage as well as the job market. Precisely because (pre)colonial patriarchal Brahmin claims to power interlace with neoliberal invocations of gendered “aesthetic labourers” (Elias et al. 2017), fairness continues to be a powerful social norm to this day. Moreover, narratives of colourism continue to produce new forms of distinction, not only within India but also in a more global context. Within India, aspirations to fairness become increasingly associated with a lower-class status and a rural, ‘backward’ mindset. Amidst capitalist competition on a global level, neo-orientalist narratives of skin bleaching in India reproduce India as ‘backward’. By the same token, colourism in India is closely covered by

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US mainstream media, for instance, presenting North America itself as a “postracial”6 society in order for it to maintain its economic dominance in a moment of imperial crisis (Shrestha 2013, 104). To sum up, this work challenges the idea that bleaching stems from Western ideals of beauty, hence destabilising established binaries of white versus brown (Chandra 2011), power versus resistance (Reddy 2005), coloniser versus colonised (see, e.g., Kolsky 2009). While this book explores how consumable fair beauty becomes a national project and export product, it lays primary focus on everyday practices and experiences that reproduce and contest social distinction and exploitation along the lines of gender, class, caste, region and religion in contemporary Delhi. It thus also contributes to the emerging literature on the particularly local yet transnational (bio-)politics of beauty (e.g., Jafar and Casanova 2013, Jafar and Casanova 2013b, Jarrín 2017, Elias et al. 2017, Liebelt et al. 2019).7 Following this overview, the remainder of this introductory chapter has five parts: I introduce my research design and position myself as a scholar of Cultural Studies in a disciplinary landscape (1.2). Next, I explore three relevant theoretical discourses framing my work: Intersectionality, Critical Beauty Studies, as well as theories on Colourism and Critical Whiteness (1.3). I then present a state of research on skin bleaching, including my own contribution to this emerging field of study (1.4). After that, I provide an overview of my methodological approach, introducing the data and the field (1.5). Finally, I render a brief overview of the structure of the book (1.6).

1.2

Research Design: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Colourism and Skin Bleaching

In this chapter, I lay out my research question and research design in more detail. Since my theoretical and methodological approaches mutually define each other, I discuss them in their intersection(s).

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“Color-blind ideology assumes a race-neutral context, and it promotes a racially assimilated society in which race is portrayed as irrelevant; thus, it serves to reinforce the current racial order” (Ebert 2004, 177). 7 For this introductory part, cf. Kullrich, Nina. 2019. ‘In This Country, Beauty Is Defined by Fairness of Skin’. ‘Skin Colour’ Politics and Social Stratification in India. In: Beauty and the Norm. Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance. Edited by Liebelt et al. Palgrave Macmillan. 245–281.

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My interest in studying skin bleaching in India emerged primarily from the context of my political activism. It was at a time when Critical Whiteness Studies slowly appeared as a controversial—albeit extensively discussed—intervention into anti-racist struggles and theories in Germany. Amidst debates ranging from ‘blackface’ to cultural appropriation—often concerned with hairstyles or other body modifications—I remembered the skin lightening advertisements I had encountered during my first visit to India as a student of Hindi. I wondered whether skin bleaching was the ultimate embodied practice in which global white supremacy manifested itself. However, I also wondered whether a critical perspective on whiteness must not rather and radically challenge any universal conceptions of whiteness. I was particularly interested in how whiteness, as colonial legacy, cultural imperative, and global beauty ideal would be imprinted on and affect a society like India—a country with its colonial histories and continuities, its rapid and profound political and economic changes, and its complex precolonial structures of social stratification. Soon I came to realise that the subject of skin bleaching would be too complex and ambiguous to allow for any ‘either/or’ type of questioning in the first place. To better understand how global white supremacy and fair skin preference in India were related, I set out to historicise and localise colourism in India, not only as a discursive but also a material and affective phenomenon (cf. Jarrìn 2017; Hook 2005, 2007; Erevelles 2011). I explored beauty (norms) as both discursively produced and experienced embodiment. Since subjects who make autonomous choices about ‘skin colour’ modifications are socially and culturally located (Gill 2008), I further had to consider the structural, political, social and economic frameworks that skin bleaching practices were embedded in. Therefore, I needed to develop a research design that would enable me to engage in the entangled local and global contexts of colourism, as well as analyse the intertwined macro and micro levels of skin bleaching practices. I thus adopted a transdisciplinary approach that permitted me to analyse the subject of colourism genealogically from as many different perspectives as possible. Applying a Cultural Studies approach, this work draws primarily on ethnography and literary studies. In terms of methodology, I make use of Discourse and Dispositive Analysis and adopt an intersectional perspective. In terms of theory, I combine approaches from Critical Whiteness Studies (focussing on power and structure), studies on Colourism (emphasis on economies of difference), as well as Critical Beauty Studies (engaging with beauty as affect and discourse). ‘Cultural Studies’ can generally be defined as “the [positioned] production of theoretical knowledge as a political practice” (Barker/Jane 2016 [2000], 5; see also Hall 2000; Marchart 2008). A transdisciplinary approach is imperative

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to understand ‘culture’ as “conjuncture”, as “an assemblage of practices […], an intersection of discourses, practices, technologies of power and everyday life” (Winter 2014, 247, refers to Grossberg 2005, 2010). ‘Culture’ can thus be grasped as an ensemble of social practices and commonly shared meanings, entangled with and negotiating current economic and political structures of a society. Rooted in Cultural Studies, my thesis generally scrutinizes the interplay of consent and power as well as the link between cultural practices and political economies, while paying special attention to the relations between reader and text, production and consumption, and researcher and ethnographic data, respectively (cf. Barker/Jane 2016 [2000]. In other words, my approach is “driven by the attempt to radically contextualize cultural processes” (Winter 2014, 247, refers to Grossberg 2010). Following an anti-positivist, anti-objectivist view (Winter 2014, 249), I stress the particularity of perspectives, following the notion that the knowledge gained is always localised socially and politically (Haraway 2004). Thus my Cultural Studies approach, driven by “positionality” and “reflexive performance” (Winter 2014, 250), strives for dialogue, reflexivity and self-understanding. Understanding ‘skin colour’ as a social position and critical category of analysis (see e.g., Arndt 2011, Seshadri-Crooks 2000, Thompson 2009), my work especially engages with the makings and negotiations of social identities. How identities are stabilised through distinction, and how distinction produces exclusion, domination and subordination—particularly in everyday practices and discourses—are core questions of Cultural Studies (Marchart 2008, 12–15). I understand ‘identity’ as a reflexive construction and, following McRobbie (1992), as a kind of guide to how people see themselves, not as class subjects, not as psychoanalytical subjects, not as subjects of ideology, not as textual subjects, but as active agents whose sense of self is projected onto and expressed in an expansive range of cultural practices, including texts, images, and commodities. (McRobbie 1992, 730; quoted by Ann Grey 2003, 33)

Since identities are generally “constructed through the intersection of multiple dimensions” (Crenshaw 1995, 377), this study applies an intersectional approach (see 1.3.1). Being a Cultural Studies scholar with a degree in Literary Studies, both the focus and the order of my research (privileging ethnography over textual approaches) call for some clarification: On the one hand, I follow Spivak (2003), who demands that literary studies be transformed into transdisciplinary and transnational cultural studies, insisting that it should focus on the multiple effects of (neo)colonialism (2003, see also Castro Varela/Dhawan 2015, 55). Yet, Spivak considers the analysis of fiction crucial since it “may give us ‘entry into

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the performativity of cultures as instantiated in narrative’”. On the other hand, however, I also agree with Gikandi, who points to the risk of equating literature with the kind of “evidence” that grounds empirical social sciences, or, in more extreme cases, leads to the danger of privileging literature within cultural studies. Speaking in the context of the African continent, he states: [S]ometimes also I’m worried that we over-privilege literature, because I think it is fair to say that it is not the dominant mode of cultural production in those places. It just happens to be a mode that is privileged because of where we are institutionally. (Gikandi 2006, n.p.)

The privileging of literature is also criticised by Brennan (2001), who stresses that “[c]lub or theatrical music, dance, and food—not oil painting and literature—are the cultural markers in most of the world” (2001, 49). Fictional texts are therefore just one access point to and one part of social worlds—which poses some problems to a research project that is primarily interested in an embodied social practice such as skin bleaching. I understand ‘embodiment’ as the subject experiencing ‘having’ a body (cf. Casanova/Jafar 2013, xxi), which is the reason why I decided to interact with people first—once again following Winter (2014), who maintains that Cultural Studies as “interaction or meeting between the different worlds should be performed” and that “dialogues between researchers and subjects should be possible” (Winter 2014, 257). Accordingly, I conducted a fivemonth fieldwork in Delhi in 2014, whereby, in accordance with the demands of Feminist Standpoint Theory (Dorothy Smith 1987, Sandra Harding 2004, Patricia Hill 1997), I began from the narrations of the interviewees, following their references to history, mythology and cultural as well as social phenomena. Thereafter, I looked for determinants and explanations in the larger context of the political, social and economic order, with particular attention to the matter of power. To do so, I also adopted Critical Discourse Analysis as a research perspective (Keller 2004, 8). Michel Foucault has defined ‘discourse’ as practices “that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 1972, 54), hence being both the instruments and the effects of the production of social realities and knowledge (cf. Völter and Rosenthal 2014 [2005], 229). A major concern in Foucault’s work was to uncover the power effects entangled with discursive formations. In his view, power is primarily gained when participating in processes eventually (re)defining what kind of knowledge is recognised as ‘truth’ or ‘reality’. Moreover, power relations create a multidimensional field of techniques, strategies and programmes, which consolidate in power-knowledge complexes and penetrate into the finest ramifications of social relations (Nicoll 2013, refers to Deppe 2003). I argue that these relations include and produce body and

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1 “In This Country, Beauty is Defined by Fairness of Skin”

beauty (work)—e.g., skin bleaching—as (micro) social and cultural practices. Social practices and (power) structures (re)produce each other: “Practices […] are not accomplices of structure. They reappropriate structured universes and change them in a process of adaptation” (Rao 2010, 150). As a performative practice, bleaching the skin is also a “citational act” (Nakassis 2016, refers to Butler and Bakhtin), hence its ability to stabilise or challenge hegemonic power structures and positions. I analyse fairness discourses primarily as created and represented by various forms of narratives. I understand ‘narrating’ as the performative act of constructing, accessing, processing and interpreting the world and the self8 by channelling experiences, ideas or events in a particular medium such as language, sound or imagery (Bal 1985), thereby adding “structures of human time” (Viehöfer 2014, 67). Whereas a ‘narration’9 is a specific discursive fragment (e.g., an interview, a Bollywood song, a campaign slogan), a ‘narrative’ is a specific form of ‘discourse’, thematically more focussed and not limited to one text (or image, commercial etc.): While the older interpretation of narrative was limited to that of a representational form, the new approaches define narrative and narrativity as concepts of social epistemology and social ontology. These concepts posit that it is through narrativity that we come to know, understand and make sense of the world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social identities. (Somers 1994, 606, original emphases)

The fairness discourse is thus (re)contextualised and historicised within a narrative field, in which different narrators, actors and actants (e.g., beauticians, the skin-lightning industry, family, peer group) can be identified. Making use of Siegfried Jäger’s (2012) categories of Critical Discourse Analysis, my examination is arranged as follows: ‘fairness’ will constitute the line of discourse, which will be analysed within the wider context of beauty in India; the discourse fragments consist of the interviews (other forms of narratives); the socioeconomic backgrounds of the interviewees (or other narrators/voices) define the discourse position; and the level of the discourse will have participants’ everyday life experiences (or other narrated events) as starting point. I further include bleaching products and bleaching performances as symbolic and material objectifications 8

“narrative identity” with Ricœur (1991, 73–81). Produced by the act of narrating, it entails a ‘story’ (events) and a ‘fabula’ (particular arrangement of events)—the latter is considered the main field for literary analysis; the arrangement of the four following elements is examined in detail: event(s), time(s), location(s) and actor(s) (Bal 1985).

9

1.2 Research Design: A Transdisciplinary Approach …

11

of the fairness dispositive in my analysis (Bührmann/Schneider 2008). Generally, I understand ‘dispositive analysis’ as examining the interrelations between (discursively produced) knowledge systems, their concrete practical effects within social exchanges between people, and the associated self-references as subjectivities (Bührmann/Schneider 2007, 1). I follow Schneider and Bührmann’s (2008) suggestion to analytically distinguish between ‘discourse’ and ‘dispositive’ (47f.). With regard to the subject of the present thesis, for instance, I understand ‘discourse’ as (non-)linguistic acts constructing knowledge about what is commonly recognised as ‘skin colour’(s). When I address the beauty ‘dispositive’, on the other hand, I explicitly refer to the ways in which everyday body norms and practices manifest themselves in and relate to the beauty industry, as well as how they are (re)negotiated among people and within their processes of self-making (subjectivities). The analytical distinction thus allows me to lay particular emphasis on effects, emotions and experiences (Schneider and Bührmann 2008, 50) of these everyday routines and embodied practices (even though I basically believe that social practices are likewise produced by and are mediating discourses (cf. Laclau 1981, 176). Fairness discourses permeate narratives (as and about social practices), which I recover through the technique of interviewing as well as the analysis of fictional texts and social media texts. I examine how fair complexion as a beauty norm is (re)produced by (linguistic) acts of performance (see, e.g., Butler 1990) and situate fairness aspirations within the social context of the people performing these acts (e.g., Craig 2006). This means that I ask how materialisations of these discourses become apparent within the interviewees’ narrations and actions, whereupon my discourse analysis merges with Bourdieu’s theories of distinction (colour as social/racial capital; see Hunter 2002/2011). I further focus on discourse materialisations within encounters and (service) work relations in beauty parlours, as well as discourse manifestations in the production, promotion and sales strategies of the bleaching industry. The latter are more closely examined with regard to practices of governance and control, wherein the selfentrepreneurial (see, e.g., Bröckling 2007) as mode of subjectification comes into focus. My research design allowed me to focus on both agency and structure, as well as put emphasis on individual actors, stories and situations, while equally paying attention to structural dominance and power. As Rao (2010) reminds us, text and context and the respective (p)layers are always intertwined (150). As for my analysis of (con)text, I consider it pertinent to deconstructing (post)colonial, orientalist binaries. As a result, it was crucial to me to distinguish analytically between ‘Indian fairness’ and ‘European whiteness’, as well as between the

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embodied practice of bleaching and whiteness as a global imperative. Lastly, I was required to constantly self-reflect regarding binaries underlying my own research perspective and process. I had to integrate the fact that my research was just as much about (my partaking in) white supremacy than about Indian beauty practices. Likewise, I co-constructed everyday effects and experiences of bleaching in and by the interviews, for instance; however, it is exactly based on these thresholds that I managed to gain new insights into how relations of and strategies for power are negotiated through employing and constructing the colour of skin.

1.3

Theoretical Framework

1.3.1

An Intersectional Perspective

In this paragraph, I outline my intersectional approach to colourism and skin bleaching practices. I briefly introduce my focus on capitalism and the body, discussing the social categories of race, caste, class and gender in their specific Indian context(s). I understand ‘skin colour’ as a social category that is interdependent and entangled with other categories of differentiation, and hence adopt an intersectional perspective to analyse the interrelations of social categories and disentangling power relations and social repertoires that reproduce social structures, practices and identities (Walgenbach 2012). My study builds on the legacy of Black Feminism and Critical Race Theory, from where intersection analysis originated.10 As for my analysis, an intersectional perspective intends to examine the meanings of the categories of difference on three levels: social structure, identity construction, and symbolic representation (cf. Degele and Winker 2011).11 Whereas social structure and identity construction were significant areas of the interviewees’ experiences, definitions and negotiations of colour, it was symbolic representation that was of particular importance when analysing bleaching industries and anti-colour campaigns—although I consider these levels as already intertwined and as getting further enmeshed in process of interpretation. The structural categories relevant to a better understanding of how ‘skin colour’ generates social inequality emerged out of my specific epistemic interest and research question (following Knapp 2008 and Winker and Degele 2009). 10 11

E.g., Crenshaw 1989, Chebout 2011, Hull, Scott and Smith 1982. Cf. their interview in: Langreiter, Nikola and Elisabeth Timm 2011, 55–76.

1.3 Theoretical Framework

13

Both while still on the field and later when going through my materials again and again, I found that colour was co-constituted by (many but predominantly) the following social categories: gender, class, caste, race, religion and region. Already the naming of these entangled categories seemed problematic12 since, emerging out of very specific contexts and conversations, they also needed to be understood and defined within these frames. In the general Indian context, categories such as race, ethnicity, nationality or migration are entangled and further dependent on the respective regional context, as evidenced by the works of the following scholars. McDuie-Ra (2015) has pointed out varying entanglements, situational meanings, and shifting effects of social categories such as race and ethnicity in India. His study is concerned with racism experienced by “indigenous and tribal communities from the northeast of India and eastern Himalayan borderland”, particularly when migrating to metropolitan Indian cities. He discusses how far (re)makings of social categories—with, e.g., Northeast communities becoming racial subjects—are bound up with negotiations of citizenship and nationality, with imaginations of cities, frontiers and fringes, as well as with governance and state-making13 (McDuie-Ra 2015, in particular, 3–4). What further complicates communications about social categories of stratification in India arises from debates on caste and casteism. The term ‘race’ is not only often discussed in works on colourism (cf. Harris 2009) but also when the aim is to understand the Indian caste system (cf. Robb 1995). These scholarly debates are challenged and transformed by political movements: Dalit14 activists, for instance, argue 12

This problem is also reflected in scholarly debates on intersectional theory. For some scholars, ‘skin colour’ and race constitute one and the same category, while race is separated from the category of ethnicity, etc. (cf. Lutz and Wenning 2001). 13 “While other communities experience discrimination, communities from the Northeast are the only category of citizens to be construed at the national level as a separate racial group with a dubious connection to the rest of the nation—‘mongoloids’, ‘chinkies’, ‘Chinese’. There are many non-citizens who experience ethnic, national, and even racial discrimination in India ranging from Afghani migrants to African students. However, the treatment of these groups does not raise the same questions around citizenship, nationalism, and belonging as Northeast communities. Indeed as will be seen in later chapters, one of the tactics for addressing racism against Northeast communities is to point out their status as Indian citizens and thus undeserving of poor treatment. […] Racism experienced by Northeast communities is framed as a problem of Indian cities, not of everyday life in the borderland occupied by the Indian armed forces and under a series of extraordinary laws and exceptional governance provisions. […] the violence of state-making that triggers migration into Indian cities and increased encounters at the heart of race debates fades further into the opaque and mysterious workings of parallel governance and extraordinary laws” (McDuie-Ra 2015, 3–4). 14 Dalit is a self-designation of social groups excluded by the caste system.

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that while castes are not to be equated with races, casteism is still comparable to racism: “assuming that ‘race’ does continue to exist as a social reality, the experiences associated with it are virtually indistinguishable from those produced by caste” (D. Reddy 2005, 558).15 Above all, these activists call ‘caste’ an inherently economic system of exploitation, comparing the exploitation of “slave, Third World, and immigrant labor” by the industrialised world with that of Dalit labour by upper-caste wealth (ibid). Hence, scholar Reedy (2005) suggests redefining ‘caste’ as an “ethnic category”.16 (Re)defining groups as constituting ‘races’ or ‘ethnicities’ serves different social and political interests, and it is exactly these kinds of shifts in social meanings and functions with which my work is concerned. My empirical material shows that conceptions of race, colour, ethnicity and caste are often understood as intersecting but rarely as congruent. Definitions of these terms not only differed from one interview to the other but, at times, in the course of the same conversation. Interviewee Jayani,17 for example, at first explained that calling someone ‘white’ would be an act of racial discrimination and hence her preference to use the term ‘fair’. Later on, however, she stated that calling someone ‘fair’ or ‘dark’ would be just as discriminatory because it would also refer to what she called “heredity”, with the label ‘dark’ marking

15

The activists supposed that caste discrimination, too, is “systemic and institutionalized, rests on ethnocentric theories of cultural superiority, results in social segregation, causes sometimes horrific violence and untold forms of social sufferings, has specific material consequences, comes attached to notions of purity and pollution” (Reddy 2005, 558). 16 In the course of a debate preceding the 2001 UN ‘World Conference Against Racism’ (WCAR), the question whether race and caste were comparable systems of oppression was controversially discussed in Durban, where the refusal of the Indian government to include ‘caste’ on the agenda led to a massive Dalit opposition campaign (Reedy 2005, 545). 17 Jayani is a 22-year-old student at Delhi University I met on campus. She identitified as Hindu and Khatriya, and was born and raised in Assam. She speaks Bengali, Assamese, Hindi, English and Marwari.

1.3 Theoretical Framework

15

lower-caste belonging.18 Another interviewee, Zahra,19 maintained that race and ‘skin colour’ were distinct but overlapping phenomena: I think they [racism and colourism] connect somewhere, but I think colourism is within the races also. I think this is how it’s different, you know. If you are in a certain race, there can be different discriminations based on colour, but when another race sees you as your race, then [this] can be also a differentiation and discrimination. (Interview with Zahra, 2014)

Explaining ‘colour’ as a category of differentiation “within the races” further demonstrates how closely linked colour and race are: Zahra first needed a concept of ‘race’ in order to then locate ‘colourism’ by distinguishing the two from each other. She thus stressed that colourism definitely exists in India and proceeded to compare the situation of an African migrant to that of a South Indian since both could be confronted with discrimination due to their ‘skin colour’s: “If you see an African in India, you see people actually questioning their colour, so, obviously, there is [colourism], and if you see South Indians in North India, obviously there are people that would say that South Indians are darker than North Indians and all that” (interview with Zahra, 2014). Zahra’s definition corresponds to theories on colourism (Glenn 2009) stressing that although colourism and racism do not coincide, they are intimately linked but can move independently of each other as well. Colourism can thus operate “sometimes to confound and sometimes to restructure racial hierarchy” (Harris

18

“‘white’ is now—since I study anthropology—like, a racial matlab [that means/meaning] discrimination among people. It’s not [only] because I study, but I know it’s not correct to use that term. Even ‘fair’ is not correct because you cannot say someone is fair or someone is good just by complexion; it’s not his or her fault [that he or she is] dark skinned or whiteskinned; that’s because of heredity that’s been followed from his part of the family, so it won’t be right to go just by the looks […]. You can say, like, ‘she is pretty, she is beautiful’; you can say that, but to say someone is fair or someone is dark means you are discriminating [against] the person only based on complexion—something like that—but when you say she is beautiful or something, you are lightly indicating that, yes, she is very beautiful but only by the looks, not [because of] his or her family side or heredity; no, you are not saying anything like ‘oh, that family is all from a dark side; that means they come from a lower caste system’” (interview with Jayani, 5 February 2014). 19 Zahra is a 29 years old PhD student from Kashmir. She identified as Syed and Muslim, is engaged and currently pursuing her doctorate in educational planning in Delhi. She speaks Kashmiri, Urdu, Hindi and English.

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2009, 1). Feminist activist interviewee Veena,20 for instance, felt that Northeastern Indians, even though read as ‘fair’, were not perceived as “desirable” but as “different”. She, at first, struggled with the term ‘race’ but finally brought it back into her narration because, as she put it, compared to looking like a ‘Punjabi’ or ‘South[ern] Indian’, people from Northeast India would look “particularly different, so there is some element of race”: People who live in the Northeast have somewhat different features from us; they have more Chinese, Mongolian, East Asian features, and they are not considered Indian— they may be fair, but they are not [Indians]. Those women are not necessarily desirable as spouses because they are different, so, in that sense, race comes in the picture; and I say ‘race’ here because, earlier, we talked about ‘she looks like a Punjabi, or she looks like a South[ern] Indian’, but beyond this, there is also the Northeast, which looks particularly different, so there is some element of race, but fairness is much more important for the society in general. (Veena, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014)

Keeping in mind the fluidity and relativity of categories such as race, colour, caste and ethnicity, my analysis concentrates on processes underpinning the construction of these categories, particularly in relation to their respective functions in understanding how ‘skin colour’ generates and perpetuates distinction and inequality. Whilst paying attention to how different narratives contradict, resemble, modify and/or complement each other in terms of their understandings and experiences of ‘skin colour’, I refrain from providing general definitions for all the entangled categories mentioned above in this introductory chapter. Therefore, I only outline how I understand and work with ‘colour’ as a category of analysis by situating my work within the current state of research on colourism (see 1.3.3 and 1.4). Moreover—since they turned out to be most crucial for my analysis—I briefly introduce my focus on ‘capitalism’ as well as on the social categories of ‘class’ and ‘gender’ in the following paragraphs. Following Winker and Degele (2009), I analyse capitalist practices to show how categories of gender, class, race and the body21 differentiate human beings, regulate access to the job market, justify the unequal distribution of wages and 20

I met Veena, Virmati and Shambu, all activists with the feminist collective Saheli in Delhi, for a group discussion. They were ranging from the early 40 s to mid 50 s when we met. Upon their request, no further demographic details will be given in this thesis. 21 Winker & Degele suggest analysing the categories gender, ‚race‘, class and body, albeit stressing that sensitivity and openness for other and different categories of discrimination are imperative in empirical research (2009, 59).

1.3 Theoretical Framework

17

salaries, and structure the preservation and restoration of labour power. I therefore investigate what functions colourist structures and practices have in concrete social contexts, asking what purposes they serve and whether these purposes conflict with profit maximisation and the accumulation of capital. Thus, apart from focussing on social meanings and effects of skin shades and norms in different living contexts—such as family, (pre)marriage, social life or career aspirations (micro level)—I also expand on another (macro) structural level, inquiring into the interrelations of ‘skin colour’ politics with neoliberal capitalism. In doing so, I examine India’s beauty industry amidst economic and political changes from its Independence to the ‘post-liberalisation’ and ‘post-globalisation’22 India of today. In the course of interpretation, I always refer to theory; therefore, generally following the notion that racialist ideologies lay at the very foundation of capitalism itself (Robinson 1983), I suggest understanding colour as commodity fetish (see chapter 3, cf. Young 2009, 9, cited by Erevelles 2011, 62). When discussing questions of beauty and ‘skin colour’ with interviewees in Delhi (2014), ‘class’ turned out to be of critical importance: Desires for fairness were linked to hope for class mobility and used as means of distinction. Although postcolonial studies commonly include race, gender and class in their analyses, the latter is frequently given far less priority than the other two categories (Hubel 2004): Unlike the other two, class largely remains an under-explored and, consequently, little understood category of experience and inquiry. I can say with certainty that this is true in my own field of postcolonial studies, with its subdiscipline of colonial discourse analysis. In part because of the politically justifiable emphasis on race in postcolonial research and theory (and only later, through feminist insistence, was that emphasis broadened to include gender), we have yet to develop as sustained, various, and subtle a critique of class as that which now exists for race and gender. (Hubel 2004, 227)

Taking these demands into consideration, I endeavour to consistently adhere to identifying and understanding ‘class’ as a category of social stratification throughout the analyses in this work. According to Brosius (2010), ‘class’ in 22

“Post-globalisation India has created an increase in the aesthetic labour that women are expected to perform on their bodies. It is no longer enough to be virtuous, one must also be sexually desirable—defined in increasingly narrow ways in body shapes and clothing—and even as one is expected to be articulate and ‘modern’ one must nevertheless not be feminist for that is undesirably strident” (Phadke 2017, 250). Phadke further refers to Talukdar and Linders (2013) who argued that “concerns about body shape and size are overwhelmingly located among those women for whom liberalisation had opened up career and other opportunities and for which the symbolic value of a fit, often read as healthy and active body, were a distinct advantage” (ibid.).

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contemporary urban India has gained importance and restructured other categories of social distinction such as ‘caste’. Regarding the spatial order of Delhi, she argues, divisions into gated communities are now mostly based on the factors of ‘class’ and ‘money’, while earlier, ‘religion’, ‘region’ and ‘caste’ were predominant (Brosius 2010, 101–103). In particular, the growing (new) middle class in India has lately gained scholarly attention (Brosius 2010, Donner 2011). The middle class in India is said to consist of more than half of the population, with a per person/per day income of two to ten US dollars. However, two thirds of this group belong to the lower middle classes, which include informal labourers such as maids and construction workers—that is, very vulnerable groups who constantly face the risk of social decline.23 Since the group of people cobbled together in the category of ‘middle classes’ is heterogeneous and stratified within—“distribution of wealth among the so-called middle class covers a very large range”24 (Alter 2011, 156)—scholars suggest making use of other characteristics to define class belonging. Baviskar and Ray (2011) suggest differentiating them in terms of consumption behaviour, aspiration to certain professions, and their demarcation strategies towards other classes (Abu-Er-Rub 2017). Alter emphasises “common interests and values”, which are rather “reflected in terms of anxieties and frustrations than in terms of goals, aspirations, and achievements” (Alter 2011, 156). Brosius (2010) makes a claim for studying “middle-class dynamic and complexity in and through its practices of distinctions and regimes of pleasure” (2010, 14). Jha (2016) hints at the fact that the neoliberal capitalist economy in India created new labour divisions, not only between the upper-layer and the lower social strata but also within the gendered middle classes, primarily benefiting upper-caste groups and upper-caste women in particular (Jha 2016, 60 refers to Fernandez and Heller 2006, 495 and to Jodhka and Prakash 2011). Given different scholarly approaches to class categorisations, I decided to primarily follow my interviewees in their self-definitions. Thus I ask precisely how 23

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41264072, last visited 20 April 2019. “[T]he distribution of wealth among the so-called middle class covers a very large range […]. According to the National Council of Applied Economic Research, middle-class incomes range from 35,000 rupees to 140,000 rupees and above per month, although a more calibrated range (Sengupta 1998 in Fernandez 2006, 76) delineates five segments within the middle class ranging from destitute (earning 16,000 rupees and less) to very rich (earning 215,000 rupees and above). Particularly at the lower end of the spectrum, there is an important distinction between the working class and the aspiring lower middle class; a distinction based on the kind of work being done as much as on income per se (Gooptu 2001)” (Alter 2011, 156).

24

1.3 Theoretical Framework

19

‘class’ belonging and boundaries are (re)produced, re-/un-named, and how its meanings and functions alter in our conversations. These processes were again relevant for my study, in that they led me to ask whether fairness helps defining, building and distinguishing class categories in the first place. If fairness is crucial for class distinction(s), is it of different significance for specific professional groups and certain ways of life? Apart from class, as it became known, ‘gender’ was also most central to the ways colour was constructed and embodied: “A preference for light skinned females is a global bias that affects all areas of human relationships, especially in marital mate selection” (Adelman and Jha 2009, 65). This introductory statement in a study on ‘skin colour’ preferences on Indian matrimonial and mate-seeking websites very well sums up what my interviewees also suggested: a particularly strong link between colour and gender as categories of social stratification. I thus focus on how colourism is structured by gender, and vice versa, how colourism structures gender. To do so, I follow Mary E. John’s criticism (1998) of North American and Western European researchers on the grounds that they often “[l]ook for categories rather than the forces that generate particular etymologies. They are equally caught up with the identification of results (i.e. the ‘product’) and do not devote their energies to understanding the dynamics/pathways (i.e. ‘processes’) of a relational world” (Fennel and Arnot 2009, 13). Thus building upon John’s approach to feminist research—focussing on constructions rather than constructs, on processes rather than products—I seek to pay special attention to the various social processes leading to different forms and ways of constructing ‘skin colour’. I point out John’s thoughts on recasting the relationship between Indian and Western feminism(s) (John 1998) because they offer a research perspective that takes into account the complex and interrelated modes of differently located feminist theories beyond dualistic thought patterns. According to John, Indian feminisms are affected by the “combined legacies of the colonial encounter, on the one hand, and the dominance of Western theories, on the other”. However, engaging with Western appropriation— i.e. critiquing an elitist, Westernised, homogenising and normative state (Madhu Kishwar 1991, 1994)—has often led to: unproductive ways of simply dismissing “the complex relationships between those most marginalized in our society and the emancipatory claims of western modernity”; uncritical reclamations of Indian ‘traditions’ or ‘diversity’; and thus, essentialist “productions of Indian womanhood as the guarantor of our cultural difference from the West” (John 1998, 197–200). In contrast, John suggests: 1) providing “a better picture of the meanings and social locations that attach to group identities, produced through

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histories of naming, renaming or misnaming, intertwined with processes of relative dominance or exclusion”; 2) integrating the cultural with the economic25 ; and 3) (re)conceptualising “power relations as such” and especially the “structures underpinning patriarchies” (207). I set out to meet these three requirements through a close reading of the interviewees’ colour descriptions (chapter 4), by analysing wider economic and political frames that ‘skin colour’ modifications are situated in (chapter 3), and by generally asking for local and global power relations and structures that colourism reinforces or challenges (chapter 5). When discussing relations of gender and colour, this study focusses on the interviewees’ experiences. Women* are more severely affected by rigid beauty norms, in general, and ‘skin colour’ discrimination in particular.26 Thus the relation between gender and colour—and my analysis thereof—is deeply entangled with (hetero-)normative and binary conceptions of gender, commonly used in everyday discourses (in most parts of the world). Whereas my entire material points to a prevalent preference for fair brides, different narrations unfold regarding different perceptions of female roles and are further varied in accordance with different social positioning. My analysis thus pays special attention to different social conditions and positions under which aspirations towards (or rejections of) fairness arise. I further focus on women’s agency and ask whether and how acts and thoughts on fairness are linked to ways of shifting or moving the gendered body and the self as well as ways of navigating through limits and boundaries set by social, hierarchical orders. Even though I argue for an understanding of ‘skin colour’ as a social construct, it needs to be acknowledged that endeavours for bleaching include desires for an accumulation of social capital—an expectation 25

Evoking Nancy Fraser, John explains: “Though India enjoys a rich legacy of political economic analysis, it is troubling that discussions of secularism and communalism, for instance, so rarely address the structural forms of marginalization that have gone into the making of the ‘Muslim’. Conversely, we know far too little about the reasons behind the successes of the upper castes in reproducing their hegemony in a world so remarkably different from the one which ostensibly gave us the caste system in the first place” (John 1998, 207, my emphasis). 26 When I speak of ‘women’ in this study, I mostly refer to people who are socially read as ‘female’. All the people who self-identify as ‘female’, irrespective of cultural interpretations of their outer appearance or the gender status they were assigned by birth, are thus not only excluded from the kind of ‘femininity’ that the fair skin norm (re)produces, but further from this study. I found Hijras (Hindi/Urdu for ‘non/binary’ or ‘third gender’) basically absent from or ‘extraordinary’ to beauty (as any other) mainstream discourses and society. Even though I tried to open up a space for talking about diversity in desires in my interviews, I mostly generated irritation and uncertainty among my interviewees. Only one participant referred to himself as homosexual—although not in the beginning—in the course of our conversation.

1.3 Theoretical Framework

21

that is materialised, up to a certain degree, for some bleachers. The fair fiction thus has an actual counterpart within the interviewees’ experienced reality. Moreover, deeply linked to notions of beauty is people’s relation to ‘skin colour’(s), which is highly affective and sensational. I especially address skin bleaching in the context of women’s labour exploitation, hence disentangling the ‘naturalised’ links between labour, gender and beauty, commonly presenting certain kinds of (mostly re-) productive labour as inherently ‘female’ (Mohanty 2003, referred to by Casanova 2011, 4) and beauty labour as not being labour at all (cf. “hidden labour”, see Black 2004). In this discussion, I bring together Niranjana’s theories on spatiality (“olage-horage” by Niranjana; 2001) with Kristeva’s theory of abjection (1982) and Federici’s work on body and labour power exploitation by the rising bourgeoisie in (early) capitalism (2002) (chapter 4). Moreover, deeply linked to notions of beauty, people’s relation to ‘skin colour’(s) is highly affective and sensational. I will discuss my approach to beauty—as discursive norm, and performative practice—in the following.

1.3.2

Critical Beauty Studies

I found skin bleaching as social practice predominantly performed within the context of beauty and body work,27 thus my analysis starts from the perspective of beauty. For my interviewees, bleaching the skin usually meant to bleach facial (and, sometimes, also body) hair, typically in a beauty parlour and often as part of a facial treatment. Additionally, the skin lightening market in India offers a wide range of over-the-counter products, including skin lightening facial cream and body lotion, fairness face wash, whitening/lightening cleanser, whitening scrub, whitening tonic, whitening massage cream or gel, whitening serum and whitening

27

Following Kang (2010, 20), I define ‘beauty labour’ as “commercialized exchanges in which service workers attend to the physical comfort and appearance of the customers, through direct contact with the body (such as touching, massaging, and manicuring) and by attending to the feelings involved with these practices” (for a similar approach, see also the concept of ‘holistic labour’; Jie Yang 2017, 117–132). Beauty work, on the other hand, is understood as beautification practices performed at and by the self, or collectively; treatments are either offered unpaid or given in exchange. Within this categorisation, skin lightening can be seen as an individual daily (care) routine work performed at home. Among the interviewees, its treatment was also offered as a gesture of friendship, or given in exchange for a haircut, mehandi, make-up or the like, especially when a visit to the beauty parlour was unaffordable (see section 4.5 on Skin bleaching and (Aesthetic) Labour).

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1 “In This Country, Beauty is Defined by Fairness of Skin”

mask or face pack. Moreover, whitening deodorants, fairness soaps, and whitening intimate wash are also available. The bleaching creams, however, are mostly applied by professional beauticians in a parlour; only very few respondents stated applying bleach at home. Thus beauty parlours and beauty labour became also part of my analysis. The widespread notion of “beauty is fair and fair is beauty”, as expressed by one interviewee,28 was echoed in most of the interviews I conducted in Delhi in 2014. Before looking more closely at how interrelations between fairness and beauty were narratively negotiated, I now briefly summarise my theoretical conceptions of and approaches to beauty. Generally, I follow Nina Degele (2004), who clearly distinguishes her conception of beauty from a) aesthetic judgments, b) attractiveness as applied by sociologies of the body, and c) socio-biological concepts of beauty (2004, 11). Accordingly, she defines beauty as a perception produced by mass media, which is relevant in everyday life as a hegemonic norm commonly contrasted with, in mediated public discourse, non-beauty, that is, ugliness’ (ibid., my translation). Although I aim to unravel shifting standards of beauty (i.e. what beauty is), I also follow Vanita Reddy (2011) who pursues “a mapping of beauty as an affective force (what beauty does)” (29). By and large, beauty performances are multiple, contradictory, intersecting and changing, having to be both conceptualised and localised. I understand ‘skin lightening’ as a beauty practice performed to achieve social acceptance and advancement, thus as a practice of beautification as defined by Degele (2004): “it is a medium of communication and serves the representation of one’s own external image in order to gain attention and to ensure one’s own identity” (Degele 2004, 7). I further consider the interviewees’ very narrations as processes of identification and as practices of social positioning. Within Beauty Studies, bodily expressions have often been understood as performative; in my view, however, skin bleaching itself is a performative beauty practice because it simultaneously presents and produces social arrangements, relations and hierarchies (see, e.g., Degele 2004 and Koppetsch 2000, who both make use of Harold Garfinkel 1976, Erving Goffman 1973 and Pierre Bourdieu 1976). Consequently, not only is it the practice of bleaching that is performative but also the act of speaking about these beauty practices. Taking Judith Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’ as another theoretical basis, social functions of skin lightening as well as of positioning the self towards it in narratives set the stage for a more thorough 28

Interview with 22-year-old student Jyoti, 7 February 2014. She referred to her religion as Sikh, to her caste as Bakshi, and described her family background as middle class.

1.3 Theoretical Framework

23

analysis of the shades of meaning of fair as well as the social effects of bleaching in contemporary Delhi. In my analysis of beauty as politics, I am particularly interested in four aspects: I pay attention to the social positions of the subjects who were speaking about their beauty perceptions and practices, instead of referring to a “racially unmarked, implicitly heterosexual woman,29 of unspecified class” (Craig 2006, 162). Further, I sort and unravel the complex, competing and complicated ‘glocal’ beauty standards that I encountered in Delhi in order to deconstruct the myth of any universal ‘West’ or ‘white’ beauty norm. I include voices of male socialised subjects in my data and debate against the tendency to focus predominantly on subjects socialised as ‘female’ when researching beauty—and to postulate a “singular beauty standard enforced by a unified male gaze” (Craig 2006, 159). Lastly, I turn my attention to the ambivalent relationship between understanding beauty practices as part of self-empowerment and agency, on the one hand, and as disciplinary regimes on the other, for, as Villa argues, “every self-empowering body practice [… is] always also a submission under social norms […]. We can do all kinds of things with our bodies but not everywhere is everything possible for everybody” (Villa 2008, 250–252). Craig thus calls on feminist theory to “conceive of fields in which differently located individuals and groups invest in and promote particular ways of seeing beauty, producing both penalties and pleasures in women’s lives” (Craig 2006, 159). Recent scholarship on the politics of beauty suggests that, within the context of “neoliberal and postfeminist governmentality and capitalism’s move to colonise all of life” (Elias et al. 2017, 33), social demands on (female) beauty and bodies have significantly increased, which, I argue, necessitates an analysis of 29

Initially, I would ask all participants about their sexual desire(s)/orientation(s), but later decided against it for the following reasons: 1) The question caused confusion, incomprehension, misunderstandings and was, at times, perceived as offensive. Even though I consider sexual desire/orientation an important factor within the fairness debate, I had the feeling that the answer to such a question would be given in accordance with the heterosexual norm, regardless of actual desires and sexual practices, due to the fact that this norm is powerful and ‘deviation’ from it is both socially taboo as well as punishable (again) by law: In 2013—the year before my research took place—the Indian Supreme Court ruled to uphold Sect. 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which considered homosexual practices as a punishable offence, and which had been disputed by the Delhi High Court in 2009—a decision, however, that was eventually overturned in 2018. There was only one interviewee who mentioned and openly talked about his homosexuality (see 1.5.2). Ultimately, even though I do not consider all the participants I talked to as having had (solely) heterosexual desires, I cannot say anything about their orientations with certainty; what I can do, nonetheless, is to analyse how the powerful, normative, heterosexual frame is dealt with as an important part of how the beauty matrix operates (cf. chapter 4).

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the interrelations between the politics of ‘skin colour’ and neoliberal capitalism. Contemporary consumers of skin bleaching practices and products are “aesthetic entrepreneur[s]” and “neoliberal subject[s]” whose beauty is “yet another project to be planned, managed, and regulated in a way that is calculative and seemingly self-directed” (ibid. 39). According to post-feminist narratives, in order to confront and overcome gender discrimination, each and every individual woman must gain more ‘confidence’, particularly in respect to her bodily self-image, so as to become a “better economic subject” (Banet-Weiser 2017; McRobbie 2009). Against this background, I ask the following questions: What potential for resistance lies in either performing or rejecting bleaching? How are questions of agency negotiated within the context of these omnipresent neoliberal discourses, celebrating body confidence, women’s empowerment, or beauty diversity? For example, cosmetics companies (which are active in the skin bleaching segment) now promote beauty as a “source of confidence, not anxiety” (Dove); celebrate “diversity” and “beauty for all” (L’Oréal); and promise to “empower a woman to change her destiny” (Fair & Lovely). Whereas all these beauty ideals and practices seem to be concerned with the body alone, ‘beauty’ can be used and understood as a ‘non-material matter’ as well—within the context of religious philosophies and practices, for instance. In this respect, beauty may relate to ‘transcendental’ values or intellectual quests for ‘truth’. Correspondingly, different concepts of ‘beauty’30 were communicated during my interviews. In most conversations, ‘beauty’ was readily understood as a form of social status that can be achieved by grooming the body; in many others, however, ‘beauty’ was perceived as a state of mind that cannot be acquired by body work (alone). Particularly at the beginning of the interviews, many research participants (beauticians in particular) were eager to emphasise how, for them, beauty was about the “inner heart”, “inner thoughts”, “feelings”, “personality”, “behaviour” and “beliefs”, while only later did they acknowledge the role of outer appearance. Other interviewees, however, admitted that “external beauty” was very important indeed, especially because “society” demanded it. They referred

30

The variety of concepts underlying the term ‘beauty’ is further apparent in the wide range of meanings within the Hindi language. The Hindi-English online dictionary Shabdkosh, for instance, lists twenty-five phrases under the entry ‘beauty’—one of which, ‘rup’, has itself forty-five different meanings, including, e.g., ‘look’, ‘figure’, ‘position’, ‘design’, ‘nature’ and ‘picture’ (https://www.shabdkosh.com/search-dictionary?e=beauty&lc=hi&sl= en&tl=hi, last visited 13 April 2019). A person looking beautiful is described as ‘sundar’, whereas a beautiful object is called ‘achha’. Beauty in terms of good character traits is also described as ‘accha’, while for beauty in terms of outer appearance ‘sundar’ is used.

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25

to what I suggest calling ‘the beauty matrix’ to grasp those (partly paradoxical) effects of the beauty discourses that individuals (re)produce and to which they react in their everyday lives, even when they are perfectly aware of the constructedness of beauty standards. When participants emphasised that beauty was about “inner thoughts” or leading a “simple life” while, on the other hand, associating fair skin with being “nice” and “good”, the intersections and overlapping of these supposedly distinct ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ qualities of beauty were made clearly visible. This paradox became distinctly apparent in a statement by 30-year-old fashion designer Deepika,31 who explained why she both endorsed and rejected being complimented on her ‘fair skin’: “I know this is all really bullshit, but at the same time, my childhood condition[ing] makes me feel good” (interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014). Thus, I further make use of Jarrín’s conception of “beauty as affect”: The unfortunate consequence in academia has been to analyze discourses of race, class and gender as neatly inscribed on the body, and to read the body as a ‘text’ to be deconstructed, rather than account for the ways in which individual bodies actively constitute themselves as racialized, gendered and classed bodies. Affect is a concept that attempts to restore agency not only to the subject, but also to the subject’s body by way of its sensations, thus undoing the mind/body dichotomy. (Jarrín 2010, 14)

Concerned with ways in which beauty norms are constructed and beauty practices performed, this study also aims to deconstruct common beauty myths. In Critical Beauty Studies, most popular may be the beauty myth as defined by Naomi Wolf (1991), who claims that beauty is an instrument of power, geared to divide, to ensure that female identities remain dependent on recognition from the outside, and to maintain hegemonic masculinities (Wolf 1991). In similar fashion, Degele (2004) identifies four “ideologies” of beautification: as private, as pleasure, as a superficial phenomenon, and as a women’s issue. The myth that Shirley Anne Tate seeks to deconstruct, however, is most crucial to my work: She speaks of “a myth which still circulates in feminist writing on beauty. That is, that all ‘Black women want to be white’” (2010, 195). Not only do I aim to affirm these approaches to identifying and dismantling beauty myths or ideologies, but to go beyond the myth of white beauty into that of an ‘original’, ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ Indian fairness, which is most crucial to my study.

31

Deepika is a 29 years old fashion designer from Delhi. She gave Hindu as her religion but stressed that she would describe herself as “spiritual”, and referred to her caste as Gupta. She had recently married. Her father was a charter accountant and her mother, a housewife. She speaks Hindi and English.

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1.3.3

Colourism and Critical Whiteness Studies

This subsection briefly explains my critical perspective on global racialised social orders, focussing on white subjects, discourses and structures by drawing on Critical Whiteness Studies. Further, I here introduce ‘skin colour’ as a social category distinct from but entangled with race, making a case for placing “economies of colours” (Harris 2009) at the centre of my analysis of skin bleaching. Studies on ‘skin colour’ discrimination and Critical Whiteness alike assume that complexions are socially constructed means of differentiation: One of the most powerful drawings of borderlines on the human body has been the classification of complexions, resulting in the distinction and categorisation of ‘skin colour’s’. Thus framed, over centuries a ‘regime of looking’ was fabricated that has led people to ‘believe in the factuality of difference [of ‘skin colour’s’, S.A.] in order to see it.’ (Arndt 2011, 30 quoting Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 5, original emphasis)

Not only the attribution of meaning or hierarchy but simply the act of seeing (socially relevant) shades of colours is a process of social learning. “Color matching and comparing, no matter the domain, takes training and skill, and is not a pre-given perceptual capability” (Thompson 2009, 132). Neither is the label ‘skin colour’ a given phenotypic attribute or even a biological category. What people learn to perceive is, firstly, “embedded in other ethnoracial marking systems such as hair, language, dress, age, gender, season, type of work, posture and so on” (132), and secondly, “complexly interwoven with transnational and historical signification” (133). Thus I rather understand ‘skin colour’ as a social position and a critical category of analysis (cf. Arndt 2011), with the same applying to the respective shades of colours.32 Critical Whiteness Studies prominently postulates that the term ‘white’ is to be understood as a social position within a society that is ordered according to racialised hierarchies. Offering a brief history of skin lightening, Tate (2016) states “that whiteness, far from being an aesthetic or racial given, has always been a racialized construction (Poitevin 2011) performatively brought into being through stylization” (Tate 2016, 5.) In that sense, the white ideal has always been an artificial condition, constructed as unattainable for all women (cf. Poitevin 32

Although the terms ‘Caucasian’ and ‘Caucasian whiteness’ are commonly used in studies on colourism, they will not be reproduced in this thesis. As Roth (2009) has pointed out, “[t]he term ‘Caucasian’, referring to the ‘White race’ and coined in 1795 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), an influential German scholar at the time, is a contested, troubling, and obsolete term of racial classification that is no longer recognized as having scientific validity (Painter 2003)” (Roth 2009, 133).

1.3 Theoretical Framework

27

2011, Black 2004, Tate 2016). Thus, bodies read as white also were bleached, powdered, painted, scrubbed and peeled to achieve or approximate the white beauty ideal (Tate 2016, 5).33 Even though the social category ‘white’ plays a major role in the present analysis of colourism, it is not the only frame of reference, as this study is primarily concerned with fairness, not whiteness of skin. Scholars have argued that Critical Whiteness Studies focusses primarily on colonial racism, hence often referring back to European traditions of racism (Amesberger and Halbmayr 2008). Thus, Amesberger and Halbmayr (2008) suggest following Rommelspacher’s concept of the “dominant culture” (1995), which is based upon the assumption that our entire way of life, our self-interpretations as well as images of ‘the other’––that we ourselves produce––are framed by categories of super- and subordination (1995, 22). According to Amesberger and Halbmayr (2008), dominance occurs when many sources of power combine and manage to enforce a claim to social distinction and superiority, when an association of the privileged prevents the excluded from accessing social, economic, political and cultural resources. Dominance culture is thus a network of various power dimensions that are closely interrelated.34 My work therefore adopts the shift in perspective developed by Critical Whiteness Studies, in the sense that it examines whiteness as “to some extent caught in the other’s gaze” (López 2005, 15) while remaining attentive to power formations other than ‘race’. ‘Colourism’ is commonly defined in literature as “the preference for lighter skin and social hierarchy based on skin tone” (Glenn 2009, 166), as a “social process that privileges light-skinned people of color over dark skinned people of color in areas such as income, education, criminal justice sentencing, housing, and the marriage market” (Hunter 2006, 247). Usually understood as built upon the histories and iterations of slavery, colonialism, institutional racism and white privilege (Hunter 2005, Bonilla-Silva 2006), colourism is explained in both relation to and distinction from racism: 33

Indeed, to be “truly beautiful [one had to be] rosier than pale skinned sisters and whiter than brown ones [such] perfect in-betweenness [was] achieved only through make-up [with] ground alabaster being used in early modern skin whiteners” (Tate 2016, 5, quoting Poitevin 2011, 70–72). 34 Processes of identity formation include reflections upon one’s own position within a given social context and one’s relations to other people—a ‘we-group’ is constructed and defined, the ‘other’ thereby devalued and excluded. Certain aspects of one’s own identity such as fears or desires are projected onto the ‘other’ and some constructed external characteristics—colour of the eye, clothing, or social behaviour, for instance—facilitate and simplify group classifications. When differentiation is accompanied by devaluation, dominance occurs (Rommelspacher 1995; Amesberger and Halbmayr 2008).

28

1 “In This Country, Beauty is Defined by Fairness of Skin” Unlike race, which is based on the idea of mutually exclusive categories, ‘skin color’ is arrayed along a continuum that crosscuts racial categories. [...] When skin tone is taken into account, there are significant correlations among skin tone, socioeconomic status, and achievement, with lighter skinned members of racial minorities enjoying higher average levels of education, income, and occupational status than darker skinned members. […] Thus, colorism is as much an issue for intragroup inequality as it is for intergroup inequality. (Glenn 2009, 166)

When discussing colour in relation to race, it needs to be asked what concept of race colour is compared to in the first place. Commonly, in postcolonial studies, racist practices and their pseudo-biological justifications are understood as distinct products of European colonialism. Therefore, both the origin and the definition of ‘racism’ are often traced back to Occidental dualistic thinking, and Christianity in particular.35 Even though colonial racism must be understood as the continuation of the “European project of modernity” (Gilroy 1995), I also agree with Kapil Raj (2007), who emphasises that race theories are rooted in colonial entanglement. Race and racism in the Indian context are discussed in terms of (British) colonialism as well as in works engaging with the Indian caste system (e.g., Ghurye 2011 [1932]; Robb 1995; Trautmann 2005; Gupta 2000; and Ayyar and Khandare 2013). I abstain from declaring an ‘indigenous’ Indian concept of race, since I am not concerned with historical analysis and chronology but rather interested in the different social meanings and functions of terms such as ‘race’ and ‘colour’ in recent literature and contemporary practices. A distinction between ‘colourism’ and ‘racism’ is also made in literature directly concerned with India. Examining a “desire for whiteness” from a specific economic and juridical perspective, Bhattacharya defines ‘colourism’ as a crucial element of racism that also constitutes a specific phenomenon in itself as it occurs both “inter-” and “intra-racial[ly]” (Bhattacharya 2012, 123f.). Nazia Hussein (2010), on the other hand, while basing her study of skin lightening in South Asia upon the concept of “intra-group racism”, refuses to follow Hunter (2002) in using the term ‘colourism’, fearing that it could “reduce the seriousness 35

Wollrad (2005) describes how, in 1449, the catholic councillors of Toledo adopted a new law excluding all citizens of Jewish origin who had been forcibly converted in the course of the Reconquista, introducing the concept of “limpieza de sangre” which became a legal force throughout Spain under Charles I (V) in 1539: The segregation of the so-called ‘conversos’ showed how identity was no longer solely constructed upon shared religious beliefs but on a ‘common ancestry category’, hence laying the foundation for the “first racialisation project within Europe History” (Wollrad 2005, 56–58). For the relation between Christianity and ‘skin colour’ in the Indian context, see Thomas on Syrian Christians in Kerala in Thomas, Sonja (2018). Privileged Minorities. Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India. University of Washington Press.

1.4 Skin Bleaching—State of Research

29

of the power play involved in racist behavior within an ethnic group” (408). My study, on the contrary, prefers speaking of ‘colourism’ and ‘shadeism’, assuming that ‘colour’ as a hierarchical category in India does not work along the lines of racial differences alone, in that it is too deeply intertwined with categories of caste, class and gender for that sort of treatment (Ahmad 1995, 36).36 In that sense, I follow Angela P. Harris (2009), who identifies three approaches taken by contemporary scholars on racism: the “prejudice” approach (treating racism as interpersonal); second, the “white supremacy” approach (treating racism as institutional); and finally, the attempt to analyse the constitution of racism through “economies of difference” or, more specifically, “economies of colours” (Harris 2009, 1). According to her, the latter is based on the assumption that colourism and racism do not coincide, that they can move independently of each other while remaining intimately linked. Colourism can thus operate “sometimes to confound and sometimes to restructure racial hierarchy” (ibid.). Having laid out the theoretical and conceptual basis of my study, I now provide an overview of the state of research on skin bleaching.

1.4

Skin Bleaching—State of Research

Most research on ‘colourism’ and ‘skin bleaching’ engage with Africa and the Americas,37 which especially situate the practice of skin bleaching in relation to “the social and political concept of white supremacist culture” (Mire 2001, 1). Moreover, the white body as ideal of beauty is traced back to colonial aesthetics and representations with simultaneous devaluation of the black body. Mire (2001) refers to Western, colonial representation of the white body as “the most virtuous and aesthetically most appealing”, as opposed to the dark body as “the least virtuous and aesthetically least appealing” (1). She further argues evoking Dyer 36

I agree with Aijaz Ahmad (1995) who used to emphasise more generally that, in histories of gender, caste and class in India, the precolonial, the colonial and the postcolonial would be too deeply intertwined “to treat the social and cultural consequences of colonialism as discrete and sui generis” (Ahmad 1995, 36). 37 As an overview: there are transnational approaches (Russell-Cole, Wilson and Hall 2013 [1992]; Blay 2011; Glenn 2009), Tate’s study on the Black Atlantic Zone (2016), but also studies engaging with specific regions as varied as Mexico (Moreno Figueroa 2012; Sue 2009); Nicaragua (Lancaster 2003); Brazil (Telles 2004); the Surinamese Society (Menke 2012); Jamaica (Charles 2009); the Indo-Caribbean diaspora (Khan 2009); the Latin Americans (Bonilla-Silva/Dietrich 2009, Hunter 2005), African Americans (Dorman 2011) and South Asians in the US (Mazumdar 1989); Zimbabwe (Gwaravanda 2011), the Filipinos (Rondilla 2009); and Japan (Ashikari 2005).

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(1997) that “the image of the ‘fair’, ‘pure’, ‘translucent’ woman is the hallmark of the western visual aesthetic representation of white femininity” (5). As a consequence, skin bleaching is understood as desire for imitating or approximating the white beauty standard. Yaba Amgborale Blay (2011), who primarily focusses on Africa and African diasporas, states that “[s]kin bleaching then represents one attempt to approximate the White ideal and consequently gain access to both the humanity and social status historically reserved for Whites” (2011, 5). Similarly, Margaret L. Hunter (2005), having African American and Mexican American women in the United States in mind, argues that “beauty is a hegemonic ideology and its existence serves the interests of whites in that it maintains white privilege”. She also explicitly mentions Fanon’s assertion that the motive for people to bleach their skin stemmed from “a sense of self-hatred that was ingrained from centuries of French colonial rule” (Hunter 2005, 89), further explaining: This is an example of how hegemony works. The subjugated people rule themselves according to the laws of the powerful. Whites need no longer police the boundaries of race and status, because people of color have internalized their racial hierarchies. (Hunter 2005, 90)

Along the same lines, some scholars investigating the global skin-whitening trade have also concluded that skin-bleachers are plagued by “false consciousness” (Glenn 2009, 187): [A] close examination of the global circuits of skin lightening provides a unique lens through which to view the workings of the Western-dominated global system as it simultaneously promulgates a ‘white is right’ ideology, while also promoting the desire for and consumption of Western culture and products. […] The yearning for lightness evident in the widespread and growing use of skin bleaching around the globe can rightfully be seen as a legacy of colonialism, a manifestation of ‘false consciousness’, and the internationalization of ‘white is right’ values by people of color, especially women. (Glenn 2009, 187)

Further, since skin-bleachers are assigned feelings of inferiority and selfdenigration, the practice of bleaching is referred to as “pathological” (Hall 2013) and even symptomatic of a “psychological disorder” (Lowu/Ogunlade 201338 ):

38

“Before diagnosing a psychological disorder, clinicians must study the themes, also known as abnormalities, within psychological disorders. The most prominent themes consist of deviance, distress, dysfunction, and danger. These themes are known as the 4Ds, which define abnormality (University of Wisconsin [UWC] 2011). We shall see how the skin bleachers conform to the 4Ds” (Olowu and Ogunlade 2013, 40).

1.4 Skin Bleaching—State of Research

31

The Bleaching Syndrome is the conscious and systematic process of self-denigration and aspiring to assimilation on the basis of alien ideals, resulting from colonial domination. The ultimate objective is a desired quality of life that can only be realized by acceptance into the dominant mainstream population—the Eurocentric Western ideal. (Hall 2013, 3)

These notions have been further complicated but also severely criticised by recent literature on colourism. Rather than interpreting bleaching as “a manifestation of ‘false consciousness’” (Glenn 2009, 187), Nadeem suggests understanding it as a representation of “an anxious love for the ‘other’” (2014, 224f.). Dedicated to a decolonisation of bleaching and Beauty Studies, Shirley Anne Tate criticises the reproduction of black women “as possessors of damaged psyches” (Tate 2010) and argues for an interpretation of skin lightening beyond “‘self hate’ and ‘low self-esteem’” (Tate 2016, 1). While the roots of bleaching as beauty practice are often traced back to the Occident and “the Elizabethan age of powder and paint” (Blay 2011, referring to Blay 2009a; Peiss 1998 and Williams 1957), “in its current manifestations”, skin bleaching is seen as being “practiced disproportionately within communities ‘of color’” (Blay 2011). Whereas I find it crucial to note that techniques of skin lightening were and are also practised in ‘the West’ and on ‘white’ bodies (Mire 2001; Tate 2016),39 it should also be acknowledged that there exists a non-Western/precolonial history of skin lightening practices. An example of carefully examining fair skin ideals beyond ‘black and white’ binaries is provided by L. Ayu Saraswati (2010), who, in her study of medial representation of fairness in Indonesia and within the Indonesian diaspora in the US, demonstrates how the ideal of fair skin cannot be thought of as a merely ‘colonial import’. She thereby makes an extremely valuable reference to the formation of beauty ideals when depicting them as historically “transnational”, even at times when Indonesia has/had not yet been—especially from a “western scholar’s perspective”—colonised or globalised. With allusion to the Indian and Indonesian versions of the Ramayana, wherein “beautiful women are described as having white shining faces, like the full moon” (19), Saraswati suggests that, firstly, “preference for light-skinned women in Indonesia predates European colonialism”, and secondly, that “the light-skinned beauty standard in 39

“To reiterate, this ignores the fact that the practice is enabled by a multibilliondollar global pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry—parts of which are based in Europe and the United States—and that bleaching is transracial and transnational in scope (Mire 2001). Furthermore, it fails to recognise the fact that white bodies are also bleached/lightened/toned and, most importantly, that the aim of black people who engage in skin bleaching/lightening/toning is decidedly not to be white” (Tate 2016, 10).

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pre-colonial Indonesia should not be read as merely a ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ construction” (19). I propose the same being true for the Indian context: First, there have been pieces of textual evidence for a light-skin preference predating British colonialism, not only in the Ramayana but also in the Puranas (see chapter 2). Secondly, beauty ideal formations, too, have been historically transnational due to migration, trade, invasion, wars and other forms of (violent) cultural encounters preceding the British Raj.40 Only a handful of studies argue along these lines: Parameswaran and Cardoza (2009), for instance, maintain that skin lightening in India is not about becoming a “white racial other”, hence their claim to. Modify studies of whiteness that have asserted its racial supremacy or its universal appeal to argue that practices of skin lightening and their commercial discourses do not necessarily imply Indian women’s desire to erase their ethnic identities and become the ‘superior’ white racial other. (Parameswaran and Cardoza 2009, 217)

Similarly, Ayyar and Khandare (2013) have pointed out the fact that “the trajectory of color discrimination in India”—whilst also “relatively understudied”—has been too often “simplistically understood as a consequence of colonial domination”: [T]his explanation appears to be one-dimensional and problematic as it abbreviates this as a postcolonial phenomenon. In mapping color and caste discrimination enshrined in ritual texts and colonial discourse pertaining to race theory, we suggest there are deeper linkages of color discrimination converging with Aryan supremacist theory. This chapter argues to consider color discrimination practiced in Indian society as precolonial and emerging from mythical Aryan/racial theory propagated by the ‘upper castes’ and not emerged as a consequence of colonization. (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 71)

However, both the origins and continuities of fair skin preference in India are controversially discussed. It is argued not only that “white complexion was not always the most popular and the most admired one among the Hindus” (Cox 1948, 95) but also that “among Indian Hindus exists a prejudice against darker skinned Indians [and that] light skinned spouses are preferred” (Edwards et al. 2004, 69). On the one hand, the meaning and significance of fairness in India has to be observed in the continuity of economic and political power asymmetries that started during colonial rule: “whiteness was valued in colonial India because whites had privileges that native Indians did not. In short, whiteness had 40

This is apparent in Greco-Buddhist art (fourth century BC—seventh century AD) or in the formation of the Urdu language (since 1300), for instance.

1.4 Skin Bleaching—State of Research

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value. It was exclusively possessed and, therefore, it was desired” (Bhattacharya 2012, 120). On the other hand, the proposition that “the color problem on any larger scale in India started with the opening of the trade routes” (Adinaryayan 1964, 63) misjudges the social realities of a (precolonial) Indian history: “[E]arly conceptions of color played an important role in setting the stage for modern attitudes towards colorism” (Bhattacharya 2012, 124). Most scholars at least acknowledge that, “in the Indian context, as in many national contexts, skin-color discrimination has a local history” (Jha 2016, 9). Considering India’s diversity in terms of religion, ethnicity and language, Parameswaran and Cardoza (2009) stress that. interpretations of the terms ‘fair’ and ‘fair skinned’ vary tremendously in India’s diverse multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-linguistic population. The normative palette of idealized light skin color in India may be anchored to a flexible and complex process of racial and ethnic coding that fluctuates within a crisscrossing matrix of global influences (travel and media consumption) and local social formations (region, ethnicity, class, family, education, religion). The precise shades of ‘fair’ skin that Indian women may aspire to possess can thus range from the white skin color associated with Northern European Caucasians to olive skin color associated with Southern European Caucasians and the North Indian Punjabi community. (2009, 217–218)

Moreover, Janaki Abraham (2006) has shown that, in the context of caste policy, the perception of white kinship is not always to be interpreted as what Lionel Caplan calls the “Anglo-Indian ‘fixation with claiming kinship with the rulers’” (Abraham 2006, 149; refers to Caplan 2000, 867). Investigating how matrilineal Thiyya families in Kerala remembered their liaisons with European men, Abraham found that many women who had liaisons with British or French men were excommunicated by their caste, which was why “a white connection” became a stain and kinship with the white man was denied or shrouded (ibid.)41 Studies concerned with colourism in India are conducted predominantly within the fields of Beauty and Media Studies. Scholarly works engage with “white beauty” as represented by Indian (global) beauty queens and contests (Osuri 2008), beauty geographies and ‘skin colour’ in Indian women and fashion magazines (V. Reddy 2006), and cultural politics of gender, nation, beauty and ‘skin colour’ in Indian magazine advertisements and television commercials for fairness cosmetics (Parameswaren and Cardoza 2009). They further engage with fair 41

“In contrast to what Lionel Caplan calls the Anglo-Indian ‘fixation with claiming kinship with the rulers’ (Caplan 2000, 867), for Thiyyas with a white connection, reclaiming the white man as a relative is not as much about claiming an affinity to British society as it is, I believe, about resisting the stain and stigma imposed by caste society” (Abraham 2006, 149).

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skin preference in the Indian (diaspora) marriage market (Adelman and Jha 2009, Vaid 2009), based on analyses of matrimonial advertisements. I found only one article asking for the impact of colourism on the career aspirations and opportunities of women in India (Sims and Hirudayaraj 2016), which was however from a resource development perspective. The way skin bleaching in India is depicted by a part of ‘the West’, i.e. the mainstream US media, is examined by Shrestha (2013). Her study shows how desires for fair skin in India are represented in the mainstream US media in an orientalist, neocolonial style, depicting Indian women as victims who should know better, thereby making use of “orientalist colonial tropes of Indian primitiveness, traditionalism, and gendered difference”. Thus, so she argues, the US is presented as a “post-racial” society in order to “disassociate American Consumers from an Indian consuming public” and to ultimately maintain their economic dominance in a moment of imperial crisis (Shrestha 2013, 104). My work intends to contribute to these debates on colourism within and outside India, aiming to make an intervention into previous literature on skin bleaching by challenging the idea that fair preference stems from Western ideals of beauty. It intends to make a powerful case in showing that desires for fairness have historical roots in precolonial India and that, in contemporary India, the desire for fairness is not the same as the desire for European whiteness. It therefore follows works that have already complicated the notions of skin bleaching practices as “mimicry” (Bhabha 1994) or “lactification” (Fanon 1967), “false consciousness” (Glenn 2009) or “self-denigration” (Hall 2013). In doing so, this study moves beyond recent analyses of discourses and representations as (re)narrated by media and advertisement, and also asks for material conditions and effects of the fair skin ideal. It provides comprehensive empirical material and has an important contribution to make in terms of the rich descriptions of various shades of ‘skin colour’ and desires for social mobility. Ultimately, this study provides new insights into social meanings and effects of fair skin preference and skin bleaching in everyday experiences as well as in neoliberal and national state-making narratives.

1.5

Methodological Approach to Colourism and Skin Bleaching

This chapter comprises four parts: First, I introduce (the makings of) my fieldsite (1.5.1). In the second part, I provide an overview of my data: presenting all

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the different types of material used in this study; giving details about the indepth interviews; explaining where, when and how I conducted the interviews; and finally sharing some demographic basics of my empirical data (1.5.2). In the third part, I explain how I analyse the interviews (1.5.3). Lastly, I briefly reflect on my research process and personal position (1.5.4).

1.5.1

Producing the Fieldsite: Studying ‘Colourism’ in Delhi, India

I decided to conduct the research in Delhi because, as a melting pot of very different social strata with diverse districts harbouring migration from within and outside India, I could safely assume to find interview participants with multifarious social backgrounds from all parts of the country. That diversity would allow me to observe urban, (upper-) middle-class lifestyles while also gaining insights into those of poorer communities and peripheral neighbourhoods. As India’s capital, Delhi would further render a reliable sample of the whole Republic of India, mediating between the nation-state and the rest of the world. As such, this city is also considered to be the main hub of the Indian beauty, fashion and design scene (cf. Abu-Er-Rub 2017). As India’s second largest megacity after Mumbai, it most vividly reflects and reproduces “India’s transformation from being a Third World Country to a First World Country” (Brosius 2010, 41). While Delhi seeks to transform itself into a “global city” (ibid. 35) in order to draw capital and audiences from several places, it simultaneously restricts access to select groups of people, thereby creating “‘First Class’ citizens, and consequently, ‘Third class citizens’” (ibid. 41). This “global city” is influenced by old imperial maps, colonial politics, socialist government planning, bureaucracies and American town planning (Brosius 2010, referring to Menon 1997). Last but not least, I wanted to do research in a Hindi-speaking part of India because I had learnt the language during the previous phase of my studies. Even though my Hindi was—and still is—not fluent at all, I considered it important to have at least a basic understanding of the language that all my respondents spoke, a language that surrounded me—both in its spoken and written forms—while I did my research in the city. Methodological questions prominently discussed within anthropology pertain to the makings, beginnings and borders of fieldsites, especially since the notion prevails that fields are created by researchers, not simply ‘discovered’ (cf., e.g., Hage 2005; Falzon 2009). Due to increasing globalisation processes, not only

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have the scope and the subject of anthropology changed (see, e.g., HauserSchäublin and Braukämper 2002) but—and more importantly—the discipline itself (cf., e.g., the term ‘multi-sited ethnography’, coined by Marcus (1995). India was invoked in my study in different ways: First and foremost, it was the social world where my interlocutors experienced their daily lives, and hence the starting and reference point of the narratives created by them, my translator and me. In that sense, India was not only the geographic location where I actually met my informants and where their stories were produced; most importantly, it was the space within which the interviewees contextualised their stories and to which they related their notions and experiences. As such, India constitutes the social context of the skin bleaching practices and narratives that I analysed. In our conversations, for instance, that kind of embeddedness became especially apparent in phrases such as “we in India”, “the Indian society”, “outside of India”, and “the Indian skin”, being co-created precisely due to my presence and enquiries as an outsider, German, white researcher claiming interest in ‘Indian’ beauty practices. The spatial borders most commonly drawn within our conversations were between urban and rural as well as inside and outside India. These distinctions entailed different imaginaries of social worlds—for instance, ‘rural India’ could be envisaged as ‘backward’, and ‘living abroad’ could be equated with being ‘modern’ (cf. chapter 4). India is thus evoked as a cultural context with a specific local history: Both the interviewees and the literature I reviewed historically traced fair skin prefer¯ ence to Hinduism, caste, the ‘Aryan myth’ and British colonialism (chapter 2). Moreover, India is evoked in my study as a nation-state with specific political and economic interests; put more precisely, I focus on the role the female body and cosmetic consumption play for national imaginaries related to political and economic developments in the postcolonial Republic of India (chapter 3). Following Falzon (2009), I, as a researcher, not only had to be aware of but take responsibility for (co)producing the fieldsite. This applied even more to the kind of ‘knowledge’ I would generate in conducting my research, which necessitated constant self-reflection on my own role and position throughout the process. For example, I was at the risk of perpetuating the image of Delhi as the ‘centre of the periphery’, or of defining ‘skin lightening’ as an exclusively Indian practice. I thus emphasise, at several points within this book, that I understand ‘skin bleaching’ as neither an exclusively local nor global beauty practice, that I recognise ‘skin colour’ and ‘fairness’ as relational and travelling categories and therefore analyse colourism neither as an exclusively colonial legacy nor as a particular phenomenon of the Indian culture (cf. John 1998; D. Reddy 2005; Chakrabarty 2002, 2000). Rather, I focus on the intersecting politics of ‘skin colour’ and its

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particular localisations in Delhi by aiming to understand the various shades of meaning of ‘skin colour’ and the different social functions of skin bleaching in precolonial, British and contemporary (North) India. To conclude this section, I want to stress that “the locus of study is not the object of study” (Geertz 1973, 22, referred to by Nadai/Maeder 2005). The focus of my study is skin bleaching as a social practice performed, narrated and contextualised in Delhi. However, skin bleaching is practised globally, amidst multiple asymmetries of global power; it has distinctive and changing local characteristics and histories. In that sense, it is the subject—the practice—that I consider “multisited” rather than the place where I conducted the fieldwork—where I started my research. To sum up, my subject of study is inherently “multi-sited” (Marcus 1995) and my ‘field’ of research is “fuzzy”42 (Nadai/Maeder 2005). Therefore, I refer to my interview material as ‘snapshot narratives from Delhi’ in order to point out their fleeting character as well as the concrete local setting in which they were created and to which they were related. To better understand the role ‘skin colour’ plays in India, I consider it imperative to have at least a basic understanding of the (various) ways marriage and families are made and lived within Indian societies. Furthermore, I believe it is essential to know about India’s colonial history and continuity as well as the Indian caste system. However, instead of providing a rather isolated overview of these complex notions here, I introduce them later on when dealing directly with the entanglements of ‘skin colour’ and gender in the context of marriage (chapter 4) as well as with the British Raj and the caste system (chapter 2).

1.5.2

Collection and Introduction of the Data

In this chapter, I first present an overview of the different materials included in this study. After that, I introduce my empirical data in more detail. I then explain

42

“Sociological ethnography has to deal with what we call ‘fuzzy fields’, that is fields without clear boundaries with regard to many dimensions. From a symbolic interactionist vantage point, we conceive of ethnographic fields as ‘social worlds’ and these are formed by ‘sets of common or joint activities or concerns bound together by a network of communications’ (Kling and Gerson, cited in Strauss 1984, 123). They are formed by a set of actors focused on a common concern and acting on the basis of a minimal working consensus (Clarke 1991, Strübing 1997). Social worlds are contexts for certain processes, actions and ideas and their protagonists, which are the actual object of an ethnographic study” (Nadai and Maeder 2005, n.p.).

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my approach to the field, the interview settings, and lastly, introduce the people I talked with. My primary material is constituted by the thirty explorative interviews that I conducted in different parts of Delhi, both with individuals and in groups, from January to May 2014. I analyse these as ‘snapshot narratives’ of everyday experiences; of conceivable, made-up and/or memorable ‘events’ turned into narratives of different lengths and forms, which were created during the actual encounter between the interviewee(s), the researcher and, occasionally, the translator43 at a specific time and place. My empirical material also includes debates and observations regarding skin bleaching practices and products, which, when referenced by the interviewees, led me to additional discourse fragments. That is to say it was the interviewees who guided my focus by producing the links, whether explicitly or implicitly, between the original and additional materials. I believe that these ‘cultural snippets’—consisting of literary texts, religious scripts, cultural myths or legends, Bollywood movies and social media posts—enrich my literature-based analyses in this book exploring the structural and macro levels of colourism (chapters 2 and 3). Further research focus emerged from my fieldwork observations concerning the ubiquity of skin bleaching products in parlours and shops, which piqued my interest in the history and policies of the (trans)national cosmetic industry. Therefore, I also collected material on the main player(s) in the skin bleaching industry, namely Lakmé and Hindustan Unilever Limited (the latter’s Fair & Lovely line in particular). I examined the sales and marketing strategies of these companies and their corporate responsibility projects by analysing texts (e.g., self-portrayals and product descriptions), TV advertisements for their skin bleaching products, and journalistic articles about these companies, all obtained from the Internet (chapter 3). I further looked at campaigns, manifestoes and (legal) actions of groups and organisations fighting the fair skin ideal (chapter 4). This data corpus may seem

43

Since my Hindi was not fluent, I worked with a translator, Rituparna—a 24-year-old student of sociology in the final year of her MA studies at Delhi University with a main research interest in gender studies—with whom I had a cordial yet professional relationship. A translation always affords a whole other level of interpretation, which is why I consider the translated material as having been co-created by yet another ‘inside’ perspective. Within the interview settings, Rituparna’s presence and social interactions further fulfilled an important ‘mediation role’: She was addressed as an ‘insider’, not only because she spoke the interviewees’ mother tongue but because she was also familiar with local particularities, especially beauty-parlour services.

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extensive in terms of the variety of different materials, but the amount of discourse fragments in each category varies considerably: Whereas the number of analysed interviews amounts to thirty, only one ad for a skin bleaching product is closely read. Also, the length of the interviews significantly varies: While some interviewees could only spare a few minutes, others were able to make time in advance for a one- to two-hour conversation. Ultimately, all these lines of enquiry vitally contribute to my genealogy and mapping of colourism in India. Together they form a complex picture of how fair skin is discursively produced at different times and how it is experienced within various living contexts. The ‘fuzziness’ of the field described above does not only apply to place but to time as well—that is, whenever the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of my fieldwork is blurred. I had already started to approach ‘the field’ when I was still Germany, where I researched and contacted all kinds of eligible collaborators (but received very little response); furthermore, I continued to observe anti-colourism campaigns on social media after I returned from India. When I arrived in Delhi, I soon began going on extensive walks through the city to observe bleaching where it was commonly practiced: local beauty parlours. I could approach people who would sell and perform practices of skin bleaching (i.e. beauticians and salon managers) as well as those demanding hair or skin treatments (clients).44 In addition, I approached potential interviewees outside the beauty parlours because a discussion of beauty was thus less likely to be predetermined by spatial context. I also spoke with informants at the campus and dormitories of Delhi University, with which my project was affiliated. Even though these interviewees shared part(s) of my own student background, my data gradually diversified regarding class, caste and region, despite the greater effort needed to contact less socially privileged interlocutors. Thus, in order to bring more heterogeneity to my data on social backdrops, I talked to people on the street and at local markets, for instance. Moreover, I contacted two local NGOs concerned with economically and socially disadvantaged communities in Lajpat Nagar II, with empowering projects for residents of the informal settlement

44

With regard to both beauty parlours and other interview settings, I was determined to cover diverse districts of Delhi: I visited beauty parlours in Kamla Nagar, Kalkaji, Alaknanda, Lajpat Nagar, Model Town, Green Park, Khan Market, Kathputli Colony (Shadipur), another informal settlement located between Tughlaqabad and Okhla Industrial Area, and lastly, a home-integrated beauty salon in Faridabad—which does not belong to the City of Delhi (NCT) but is part of the wider National Capital Region (NCR). Most of the salons were “women only”, some were run as “unisex”, and only a few as “men only”.

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of Kathputli Colony45 in Shadipur Depot, West Delhi. Additionally, to look at colourism from the point of view of political activism, I arranged a group discussion with an autonomous feminist collective based in Defence Colony. Procuring a minimum of diversity regarding class and educational background, religion and caste belonging, family status, age and gender of respondents required talking to people who were, at least to some extent, socialised differently. I consider data diversity crucial because I am particularly interested in how different social positions shape experiences with colourism. Although my research interest lay in individual narratives, their diverse voices allowed me to explore different social contexts that singular notions and experiences were embedded in, which led to a more thorough understanding of the colour phenomenon. I do not believe in ‘ends’ of research: the more the narratives, the more the ways people negotiate ‘skin colour’; however, the relative saturation achieved was due to circles of interpretation rather than the number of interviews. After several months, I had the feeling I had collected ‘too much’ material already to analyse thoroughly and in detail. Moreover, I had detected some recurring (yet variously expressed) themes in our conversations,46 hence my decision to leave Delhi after five months. Although, I must confess, had time and financial resources not been limited, I would have returned. The interviews were partly guided and followed an open procedure. To enable diverse approaches to the subject suiting different people and situations, I conducted interviews with both individuals and groups (of two to five people). In order to provide yet another visual basis for discussing skin shades, I further included pictures and TV ads for skin bleaching products in our discussions (Kolb 2008). In an attempt to not set fairness as the dominant or predefined topic already at the beginning of the interviews, my initial question(s) were usually related to beauty in general. That means, I deferred my main research questions at the beginning and tried to generate longer (autobiographical) narratives; however, more often than not, respondents replied rather succinctly to these questions, which required supplementary questions to be asked. Consequently, the resulted

45

The Colony is named after the marionette theatres native to Rajasthan and was, until recently, home to almost three thousand itinerant street performance families of magicians, acrobats, singers, dancers, musicians and especially puppeteers or Kathputli performers from Rajasthan. At the moment, the Colony is undergoing a redevelopment plan by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) of the Government of Delhi, amid a wide range of protests and resistance by its inhabitants. 46 These ‘citations’ entailed the notion of the making of ‘skin colour’s, distinctions between ‘fairness’ and ‘whiteness’, as well as the fact that bleaching was highly gendered and classed.

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texts are as widely varied, both in form and length, as the interviewees themselves were: Whilst some interviews contain detailed autobiographical narratives, others consist primary of laconic and monosyllabic statements. I would like to briefly elaborate on why I did not describe or categorise the ‘skin colour’s of my participants, and why I also prevented them from selfdescribing along the same lines: Firstly, I did not want to make anybody feel uncomfortable in the interview situation, for by asking them directly to specify their skin tones, I ran the risk of contributing to the reproduction of colour as a physical trait visible to the eye, a fixed attribute that people ‘possess’, as a universal category everybody (or at least, the interviewee(s) and myself) would understand the same way. Moreover, I did not know what to do with information of this sort: Would it not have prompted me to draw conclusions based solely on what I (have been taught to) see, or to put the interviewee’s descriptions or categories in comparison with my ‘own’ colour system? Thus, to gain insights into the linguistic spectrum available for discussing skin shades, I decided to work with the pictures that I and my research assistant, R., had collected randomly from the Internet. We were resolved to make sure of our collection’s diversity with regard to appearances selected to represent as many regions of the world as possible.47 To learn about how people situated themselves within the colour hierarchy, I was attentive to what would come up in the course and context of the interviews, since shades also changed with the shift in observer, life status, or social occasion within one’s own biography/story. From other research concerned with fair skin preference on matrimonial websites—with their own distinctive skin colour categorisation systems, ranging from ‘very fair’ to ‘dark, dark brown’—I learnt about reasons for and ways of presenting oneself with respect to the requested or desired effect. Since most men on these platforms desire fair brides, Adelman and Jha (2009) have argued that matrimonial websites would enhance exclusions of darker-skinned women from the marriage market: “In India, where marriage is critical for lifelong security and economic stability, discriminatory practices may disenfranchise a significant segment of the female population” (Adelman and Jha 2009, 78). However, it should be noted that matrimonial websites may also offer new possibilities for women to simply define and describe themselves as fair, or to edit the photographs they upload to the websites. 47

Since our preselection limited and predetermined the debate significantly, I would have preferred to have the respondents bring their own pictures to the interviews; however, this procedure was simply impractical in the field, primarily due to spontaneity of meetings. I still learnt from the interviewees’ interpretations of these pictures nonetheless.

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Moreover, it needs to be taken into account that simply presenting oneself as ‘fair’ seems to be common practice in the ‘offline’ market also: Interviewee Deepika, for instance, told us how her mother had planned on sending her biodata, in which she was going to describe her daughter as “very fair”, whereupon Deepika insisted on writing what she considered as the true description: “dusky”. In the Indian documentary A Darker Side of Fair, a woman sharing her difficulties in finding a groom due to her dark skin, displays a photograph taken to be shown to potential grooms. She explains all the steps taken to make her appear several shades lighter—including strong lighting, careful selection of the right colour to wear, and heavy application of powder—only to finally admit: “the skin tone does not look like mine”.48 For my research, therefore, I decided to look for processes such as these, to listen to people’s narrations on becoming and doing colour rather than troubling them with the task of categorising themselves. In total, I talked to fifty-five Indian women and men between sixteen and fifty years of age from different social, religious, caste and class backgrounds, living both at the centre of India’s capital and on its outskirts and in informal settlements. To gain some basic information on my respondents’ social backgrounds, I asked for their name, places of birth and residence, age, marital status49 and number of children, gender, sexual desire/orientation,50 caste, religion, spoken languages, occupation, and lastly, their parents’ professions (with no response options given). 48

She also talked about how people had spoken to her about her skin tone: “You are very black so you will not get married, and even if you do get married, you will have a horrible husband.” Interview from Fair? A documentary about ‘skin colour’ in India (3:27). http:// www.etherealauraspa.com/blog/eastern-whitening-vs-western-tanning, last visited 13 April 2019. 49 I am aware of the fact that asking this question reinforces heteronormativity. The question was always predicated upon the presupposed heterosexuality of the respondents, especially in a country were not only same-sex marriage is illegal but where, until very recently, homosexuality itself was grounds for persecution and prosecution. Furthermore, gender dichotomy was firmly adhered to, as well as certain social beliefs about values and order. Yet marriage is such an important social structure in India (and most of the world) that I wanted to include it as a category. 50 My question about ‘desire’ or ‘sexual preference’ usually generated irritation and uncertainty among my interviewees. Since I had the impression that a socially accepted ‘heterosexual’ (or in some interviewees’ vocabulary, “normal”) orientation was the only answer I would receive, I finally refrained from asking about it at all. Only one participant referred to himself as homosexual—albeit not in the beginning but in the course of our conversation. Therefore, I cannot make statements about all respondents’ sexual desires; however, preferences were often disclosed in the course of the interviews, when they would state, for instance, that they were looking for a fair bride, or pointing to the importance of men noticing them.

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Although all participants were, at that time, living in the greater area of Delhi (NCT, with the exception of the beauty parlour in Faridabad), they indicated their origins as sundry as Assam, Kashmir, Punjab, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Haryana, Bihar, Arunachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and, in one case, Nepal. The majority stated Hinduism as their religion, but a few named Islam, Sikhism and Christianity as well. One interviewee stressed that she did “not believe in any religion”; another one referred to herself as “spiritual”, while another described his belief as “tribal” and “Nature”. They identified themselves as belonging to more than thirty different castes, including the so-called “scheduled castes”,51 with again one of them referring to himself as “tribal”. A slight majority of people I talked to were (still) unmarried; one woman was engaged; and another one stated that she was “abandoned by her husband”. The majority did not have any children (yet); as for those who did, the given number varied from two to six. All participants, without exception, spoke Hindi, and about half of them had a (fluent to basic) command of English, too; in addition, most spoke (up to three) Indian languages or Hindi dialects, such as Urdu, Bengali, Assamese, Panjabi, Rajasthani or Kashmiri. With regard to occupation, most interviewees either worked as beauticians or attended a school or college. Of the (predominantly female) clients who were visiting the different parlours, many described themselves as “housewives”. Job descriptions other than ‘housewife’ included very different activities, ranging from “fashion designer” to “domestic worker”. Occupations of their parents allowed more insights into their class backgrounds: As for their fathers, the job descriptions ranged from “lawyer” to “electronic engineer”, “construction worker” and “rickshaw v¯al¯a/puller”. The vast majority designated their mothers as “housewife”. If they were engaged in wage labour, their job was predominantly in low-paid sectors, such as “farming” or “agricultural work”, but occasionally, there were some who worked as “school teacher” or “at the hospital” (with no further job specification). Regarding class-belonging, as I did not ask for any selfclassifications, I can only make rough categorisations upon a variety of facts and 51

After the legal prohibition of caste discrimination was established in the constitution of the Republic of India 1950 the government made further attempts to introduce a comprehensive legal framework enabling discrimination to be combated. They set up a Commission in 1953 with the main task to identify ‘scheduled castes’ (SC), ‘scheduled tribes’ (ST) and ‘other backward castes’ (OBC)—the implementation of a reservation or quota system followed. Although affirmative action created opportunities for discriminated groups to find employment in civil service it also lead to a reinforcement and further cementation of the discriminatory system as such—due to the general binary distinction made between ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ castes.

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assumptions on the interviewees’ family background, current place of residence, education level, profession, command of English, estimated income, beauty services they could afford, the way they dressed, the place we met, or any related statements made during the interviews. Based on the factors above, I assume a majority of the people I talked with belonged to the large and heterogeneous middle classes, but many also came from lower classes (a few beauticians, the girls at the centre for socially disadvantaged communities, street workers and slum dwellers). Others belonged to the upper classes (some students and salon managers) and the elite (mostly fashion designers).

1.5.3

Data Analysis

First, I want to provide a few considerations on the ‘makings’ of the ‘snapshot narratives’. Taken seriously the idea that the interviewees, the translator and I produced the data together, one is led to the question whether analysing the data afterwards was a ‘one-woman businesses’. To prevent this, I followed up on the interviewee’s narratives by incorporating their responses regarding their perspectives and experiences into subsequent interviews. Further, I discussed every interview with my research assistant and ‘insider’, R., and I shared preliminary thesis with the interviewees, friends and my guest supervisor at DU in order to allow my interpretations to be reinterpreted while still on the field. Furthermore, the interviewees provided links between their narratives and additional material (novels, lyrics)—hence, it was them reading, interpreting and framing the respective material, not me selecting them at my writing desk. To evaluate the interviews, I applied a mix of methods: Following an open/inductive procedure, I began to develop my preliminary thesis out of my interview material while still at the fieldwork stage. Although I did not start with transcribing the interviews until after I returned home, I recorded almost all of them,52 taking notes during, after and in-between the sessions. The responses entered the interviews that followed, generating new questions or turning my attention to aspects I had not considered relevant before, hence shaping not only what I would subsequently ask others but also what I was able to hear. After ‘physically’ returning from the field, I produced transcripts of the interviews: I revisited the narratives first by drawing a handwritten ‘map’ of each single conversation so as to discern and visualise the themes and arguments that had come up. The main purpose was to envisage relations and references between 52

Except in cases when the interviewee(s) did not feel comfortable being recorded.

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these themes and arguments as they were manifested within one single narration. I then re-read all transcripts closely to elicit overall themes/codes while further establishing second-order categories as well as assigning a social frame/context to each collected statement/fragment. Whilst the number of codes and frames initially outlined was rather large, many of them could be grouped into more general categories over time. To ensure my sound analysis of all codes and frames in their interrelations, I re-read all texts, this time through the lens of the collected frames, gathering all kinds of statements and fragments concerned with the respective frames. Ultimately, the (multiple) categorised samples/quotes were examined again more closely in relation to the respective full-length interview as well as quotes/samples from the others. While working my way through the transcripts again and again, I developed theses and theories, following an inductive procedure53 as a heuristic instrument (Miles et al. 2014, 71f. and Bernard 2000, 437–471). A close reading of the rich descriptions of ‘skin colour’ allowed for an initial understanding of the phenomenon. From these findings, I developed the analytical distinction between ‘fair’ and ‘white’, which became more and more central to my study, precisely when set in relation to previous literature on the subject. Likewise, from comparing the different narratives on skin bleaching practices, I developed the analytical distinction between ‘colour’ and ‘shade’. As further research showed, it was exactly whenever these analytical distinctions blurred in practice that a deeper understanding of colourism as a phenomenon was enabled. From the coding and framing emerged the centrality of ‘class’ and ‘gender’. Further, it became visible that most of the issues framed as ‘gender’ were further negotiated in the context of marriage. On metalevel, an analysis of colourism furnishes us with new insights into how social stratification in India is (re)organised. Moreover, it helps to better understand how global white supremacy (re)acts locally. Since my research aims not necessarily to produce results whose validity would depend on whether they are ‘transferable’ to other local contexts (cf. Clarke 2005, referred to by Miles et al. 2014), I rather stress the importance of localising and historicising the complex and site-specific makings and doings of ‘skin colour’. Yet, comparing my findings to studies concerned with skin bleaching in other regional contexts made visible what was absent from the colour discourse in Delhi, and thus also enhanced understanding of my data: it turned out, for instance, that questions on ‘ethnic authenticity’ or

53

“Codes are labels that assign symbolic meaning to the descriptive or inferential information compiled during a study […]. Codes are prompts or triggers for deeper reflection on the data’s meanings” (Miles et al. 2014, 71–72).

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1 “In This Country, Beauty is Defined by Fairness of Skin”

‘ethnic legitimacy’ were less relevant for my interlocutors than for the AfricanAmerican and Mexican–American diaspora women interviewed by Hunter (2005, 93–110).

1.5.4

Self-Reflecting Research and Researcher

In this part, I want to share some of my (self)reflections underpinning the research process: I constantly grappled with critiques on the general process of data collection and fieldwork in the Global South as issued by Spivak (1990), who has called it “information retrieval” (59)—an alternative form of imperialism that turns the subaltern (women, specifically) into a source of “cultural difference”. She claims that scholars turn raw material into stories, and data into knowledge. Thus, so long as the experiences of the subaltern and the theories of scholars are not organically intertwined, discontinuities between theory and practice remain irreconciled (cf. Spivak 1990 and 1993 and Kappor 2008, 47; referred to by Castro Varela/ Dhawan 2015, 2nd ed., 166). The only measure taken by scholarship to respond to this critique is self-reflection: In the forms of critical auto-ethnography, Winter (2014) argues, self-reflection helps researchers examine what events and social discourses might have defined their experiences (Winter 2014, 257; refers to Bochner and Ellis, 2002). As Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) reminds us, “truths” are not only partial but also positioned. I thus follow Said (1989), who demands anthropologists to acknowledge and reflect upon imperial power relations and to further question ontological understandings of culture. Schramm (2005) refers to the idea developed by Lavie and Swedenburg (1996) to supplement fieldwork with “homework”. To her, this kind of homework could include the following steps for researchers with a white subject position: First, white researchers should allow their own hegemonic subject position to be challenged from the outside; second, they should turn their analytical gaze towards their own society of origin; and lastly, they should critically reflect upon the images that anthropology mediates. That is to say they are to deconstruct stereotypes and engage in political debates, not “in the name of the other” but with regard to a critical reflection on the white self (Schramm 2005, 470 f.) That is precisely what this subchapter aims to do: to reflect upon my own white subject position in the research process. Before I started fieldwork, my greatest concern was coming to Delhi as a ‘white supremacist outsider’. An Indian postgraduate student researching beauty work in Delhi, however, saw my problem from a different perspective: She disclosed her own difficulties in approaching beauty workers in terms of class, the urban/rural contrast and other local social contexts that would complicate her

1.5 Methodological Approach to Colourism and Skin Bleaching

47

encounters. She thus assumed that being an outsider could in fact be an advantage, in the sense that I was precisely read as non-Indian, hence as being outside local social hierarchies, despite, of course, being positioned and privileged by global ones. At least to an extent, she was right: I was not confronted with “outright refusal” (Pal 2017, 92) when I began approaching the field; however, coming from the Global North studying skin bleaching in the Global South was even more problematic from several aspects: Considering what complex interrelations exist between European colonialism, racial capitalism and global white privilege, coming to India as a white German researcher seeking to study local beauty practices was the most significant challenge not only for me personally but the project on the whole. Generally, as a “[b]earer of whiteness”, I “benefit from discriminatory categories of difference which have been implemented as an increasingly globalized matrix of domination and norm/alization” (Piesche/AlSamarai 2018). This applies, especially, to a postcolonial space such as India, not least because ‘post-racial eras’ are lately proclaimed everywhere. Thus my main concern was: (how) can I, as a bearer of whiteness and an outsider, take a responsible approach to the study of ‘skin colour’ discrimination in India? On the one hand, I had to be attentive to the (non)possibility of (not) (re)producing white privilege during my research encounters; on the other hand, I also had to balance the risk of overestimating my own role, of placing myself and/or whiteness in the centre (again). By and large, this problem could not be resolved; however, I reflected upon these problems and asked myself constantly how they influenced the processes and outcomes of my research: There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity. Raced people can’t do that—they can only speak for their race. But non-raced people can, for they do not represent the interests of a race. (Dyer 1997, 1–2; cited by Abu-Er-Rub 2017, 107)

Nevertheless, white skin in India is not an unnamed norm; it stands out, and so did I. During the whole research process, I felt highly uncomfortable in my position of being part of white supremacy. Although I did know how to reflect on privileges of mine, it took me quite some time to realise that, at the very least, I should apply the analytical distinctions that I had developed for my subject of study upon myself as well. Despite my position of privilege and power in terms of whiteness, I soon found that I did not embody the ideal shade for all the skinbleachers I met (chapter 4). I rather had to carefully distinguish light skin as a beauty norm in India from the privileges I encountered there (and elsewhere), which stemmed from different but entangled positions of my social whiteness. In the beginning of my fieldwork, I was afraid that structural and discursive

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embeddedness in racism was what would set me apart from the interviewees.54 Finally, it can be concluded that the embodied power structures framing and shaping our encounters varied widely from one meeting to another, depending on the interviewee’s social status. I want to close this section with a critique uttered by Sachidanandan (2007), who, evoking Arun P. Mukherjee (1996), argues that a considerable part of postcolonial theory uses standardised terminologies such as “the oppressed”, “the colonised people” or “the indigenous”. However, ignoring internal hierarchies and differences in postcolonial societies, the whole “postcolonial world” would be given a “‘subaltern’ status” (Satchidanandan 2007, 32). Applied to my research, that means to stress that there was a network of power asymmetries at work, varying highly from one encounter to another, which necessitated (yet another) reflection beyond the duality of ‘black and white’. What I could do, nevertheless, was be attentive to and reflective about hegemonic whiteness and my own white positioning and offer a critical scholarly account that would seek to decentralise whiteness in my fields of study. I had to be most careful that my arguments on the specifics of the Indian context would never relativise the global power of whiteness as a social category and cultural imperative. That ultimately means that my work is as concerned with gathering new insights into how social stratification in India is (re)organised—through a dialogue on skin bleaching/colourism in India—as it is an “anthropology of western hegemony” (Asad 1973). I assume that whiteness transforms and enters varying power alliances at different times and places. Critical research should keep track of these changes to be able to challenge hegemonic whiteness.

1.6

Structure of the Thesis

This book examines the politics of ‘skin colour’ in urban, post-liberalisation and post-globalisation (North) India. It traces the social meanings and effects of ‘skin colour’ (modifications) as embedded in a concrete local and temporal setting, asking how identity constructions, social difference, mobility and exclusions are negotiated in relation to ‘skin colour’ (norms). It is further concerned with the question whether and how desires for lighter skin relate to ‘whiteness’ as colonial legacy, global cultural imperative and hegemonic power position. To do so, 54

See personal reflection of Kija Bergen on living as white woman in Cambodia, where skin bleaching is also common practice: Most days I’m beautiful: A reflection on skin and body hair in Cambodia. In: Jafar/Casanova 2013, 83–88.

1.6 Structure of the Thesis

49

this work brings together analyses of skin bleaching as narrated, everyday social practice with wider political and economic processes such as nation-making, colonialism and global capitalist competition. Considering these practices and processes as restructuring and reproducing each other, in order to fully grasp how exactly they are entangled, I need to approach the subject of colourism from multiple perspectives. Therefore, I generally apply a chronological framework: I first ask whether colourism has precolonial roots in India; then, I enquire as to what role(s) ‘skin colour’ played during colonialism, before turning to colourism in postcolonial India. In Chapter 2, I localise and historicise fair skin preferences in precolonial and colonial India. More precisely, I examine how desires for fairness relate to ancient migration and assimilation processes, colonial whiteness, Hinduism, (farright Hindu) nationalism and the caste system. This chapter is based on literature review as well as textual analyses of ‘cultural snippets’, such as ancient Hindu scripts, Indian fiction and cultural myths that my interviewees in Delhi referred to. I trace fair skin preferences in postcolonial India (Chapter 3) and examine the growing (trans)national bleaching industry amidst political and economic changes since the Independence. I intend to find out what role the (fair) body played for processes of transformation in both state-led, capitalist, early postcolonial India as well as for the contemporary, post-liberalisation Indian nation. In other words, I show how contemporary desires for consumable fairness (re)make national imaginations, in general, and the so-called ‘New Indian Woman’ in particular. In that context, I ask whether desires for national or ‘global’ citizenship and new middleor ‘world-’ class belonging draw on notions of ‘Indian fairness’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and/or ‘transnational whiteness.’ Moreover, I pose the following questions: what kind and amount of body labour needs to be performed in order for one to become beautiful? What kind of beauty is required to enter the growing service sector in India? In this context, I look again for the various ways social identities and differences are negotiated and mediated as well as the kinds of exclusion produced. Finally, I address how political participation and social inclusion are thought of in terms of fairness consumption. Understanding colour as a commodity fetish, I ask how far fairness products serve to preserve the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity in an era of crisis and social calamity, as McClintock (1995) argues with regard to 19th-century colonial commodity racism. Methodologically, this chapter draws primarily on textual analyses of the beauty industry and beauty products, focussing on symbolic and material objectifications of the fairness dispositive. It further contains ethnographic analyses as well as literature review.

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In Chapter 4, I finally zoom in on the individual narratives and everyday social practices from/in Delhi in 2014. I analyse, in detail, what the fair skin norm and skin bleaching practices signify and do; how ‘fairy tales’ materialise in everyday lives—e.g., family, (pre)marriage, social life or career aspirations. I carve out how ‘skin colour’ is defined, described, desired and rejected. Further, I (again) investigate how social mobility, difference and exclusion are (re)negotiated and (re)produced on the basis of skin shades. In doing so, I also focus on how ‘skin colour’ interacts and intersects with other categories of social stratification. Whereas the interviewees made their autonomous choices about (not) bleaching, they did so as socially and culturally located subjects, which is why wider political, social and economic frameworks carved out before will re-enter this discussion. I ask, yet again, for the relation between what I analytically differentiate as ‘Indian fairness’ and ‘European whiteness’: How far are social relations and distinctions based on ‘skin colour’ linked to notions of ‘race’? How does skin bleaching relate to other practices of beautification such as skin-tanning and/or facial/body hair removal? Whereas in chapter 3, I develop a basis for understanding bleaching as aesthetic labour, in chapter 4, I ask who actually performs this labour and under what conditions. I further explore general linkages between colour discrimination, social exclusion and labour exploitation. Lastly, I investigate the progressive and transformative potential of anti-colourism campaigns in India. This chapter draws mainly on empirical material I gathered during my fieldwork in Delhi 2014 as well as related literature review. In Chapter 5, I provide a summary and outlook of my analyses and discussions.

2

‘Colourism’ in India Within and Beyond Colonialism: Historically tracing Fair Skin as a locally embedded, yet transnational, colonially re-shaped and subversively contested signifier of social status and norm of beauty ‘Skin colour’ discrimination in India develops against the backdrop of locally embedded (beauty) norms that can be traced to pre-colonial as well as colonial socio-political relations. To disentangle the different narratives culminating in contemporary understandings of Indian fairness, informing beauty standards as well as the more general practices of social distinction, a historical genealogy of colourism in India becomes necessary. Over time, this genealogy shows, the fairness discourse is continuously reconstituted within a narrative field, in which different social groups, embedded in evolving systems of race, caste, classand gender-based social stratification interact. Categories such as race, colour, or ethnicity, as it becomes visible, are characterised by fluent and relative understandings that stretch beyond the ‘black and white’ binary. In what follows, I keep in mind that colonial and postcolonial writings on light skin preference “may themselves have been influenced by European notions of caste, culture, and race” (Glenn 2009, 176). Moreover, I emphasise that in histories of gender, caste and class in India the pre-colonial, the colonial and the postcolonial are too deeply intertwined “to treat the social and cultural consequences of colonialism as discrete and sui generis” (Ahmad 1995, 36). This chapter consists of two sections. In the first, I ask what – if any – role ‘skin color’ played within processes of social stratification in pre-colonial India. ¯ To that end, I primarily focus on the so-called ‘ Aryan’ (invasion) myth that continues to play a crucial role in the (re)making of ‘Indian’ identities today (2.1.1). Next, I examine representations of ‘skin colours’ in ancient Hindu scriptures, or more precisely, depictions of the Hindu goddesses Parvati and Radha (2.1.2). Last, I analyse how ‘skin colour’ preferences and (per)forming caste identities and belongings relate (2.1.3). In the second section, I trace how ‘skin colour’ is (re-) produced as a category of social distinction by and during the British Raj (2.2.1). Finally, I ask whether © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2022 N. Kullrich, Skin Colour Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64922-0_2

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‘colourism’ was crucial for various forms of anti-colonial nationalism and, in particular, Hindu ‘nation-state narratives’ (2.2.2). Although mainly consisting of literature review, the present chapter also includes analyses of religious, fictional and mythical narratives. In accordance with my methodological approach introduced earlier (1.5.2), I mostly follow references made by my interviewees in Delhi in 2014.

2.1

‘Skin Colour’ in Pre-Colonial India

I am now well advanced on the road to becoming a person of color. It’s not exactly that I thought I was white before, but as an anglophone academic born in India and teaching in the Ivy League, I was certainly hanging out in the field of dreams, and had no cause to think myself black. As a child brought up with a profound sense of color in a Brahmin household in Bombay, I was always aware of the bad marriage prospects of my darker female relatives, of the glorious ‘milky’ skin of my father’s dead father, of the horrible ‘blue’ blackness that my mother swore I acquired when I played in the mid-day sun in Bombay. So even though I was as hip as the next person to the fact that black was beautiful, I preferred to stay brown myself. (Arjun Appadurai 1993, 80)

When cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai (1993) tells the story about his “becoming a person of color” in the 1990s, he indicates the different shades of colour as well as the several shades of meaning this process entails: his current teaching in elite universities all over the world gave him no reason to think of himself as “black”. Growing up in a colour-conscious household in Bombay, where his mother had complained about his “horrible ‘blue’ blackness” he began to selfidentify with the term “brown”, realising his ‘non-whiteness’ but also rejecting the description “black” – despite “the fact that black was beautiful”. Appadurai’s brief narrative shows how, for him, the (re)appropriation of colours has been an ongoing process shaped by global colour hierarchies in which ‘black’ is assigned the lowest and ‘white’ the highest social position, as well as by a colour hierarchy adhered to by his Brahmin family ranging from “horrible ‘blue’ blackness” to “the glorious ‘milky’” colour. For this study, the following questions arise: does Appadurai’s Brahmin family’s colour-consciousness merely reflect a colonial and postcolonial bias? What role did ‘skin colour’ play in pre-British India? These questions are addressed next.

2.1 ‘Skin Colour’ in Pre-Colonial India

2.1.1

53

¯ Early Migration and the ‘ Aryan’ Debate

Scholarship has developed various theories on the multiple waves of migra¯ tion to and within the Indian subcontinent. The ‘ Aryan’ myth holds that early Indian society was divided into two racialised groups: the lighter-skinned and ¯ supremacist Aryans, and the darker-skinned and inferior Dasa or Dayas (Ayyar and Khandare 2013). Even though this myth has long been refuted by scholarship,1 it continues to be controversially discussed with regard to constructions ¯ of (Hindu) national identities. The Aryan myth – or North/South divide – also came up in several interviews during my 2014 fieldwork in Delhi. That is, in my ethnographic data, I found a prevailing notion that, generally, Indians from ‘the North’ would be deemed ‘fair skinned’, while people from ‘the South’ would be considered ‘dark skinned’. Further, when describing and defining ‘skin colours’, ¯ the term ‘Aryan’ was occasionally used (cf. chapter 4). I also found references ¯ in the literature to binary distinctions between “fair skinned Aryans” and “a 2 darker indigenous population, the Dasyus ” (Brockington 1995, 97). Hence, in ¯ this section, I focus on processes of social stratification since “Indo- Aryan speaking pastoralists” (Thapar 1971) migrated to India around 2000 BCE. That means, ¯ in the following, I trace the makings of ‘fair Aryans’ and ‘dark Dravidians’. Whereas in the literature, colourism in India is often traced back to early migration, “there is very little recorded history of colour prejudice in the deal¯ ings between these two groups [Aryans and Dravidians]” (Adin¯aryayan 1964). “Prejudices, dislikes and contempt did undoubtedly exist but they were due more to attitudes incidental to political and cultural dominance than to colour” (1964, 63). Ambedkar (1990), Trautmann (1964), and Thapar (2008) have stressed that ¯ Aryan supremacy is a myth, especially “its association with physical embodiment” (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 77). Yet, as Ayyar and Khandare (2013) show, ¯ “in popular imagination, the theory of the Aryan race as conquerors was viewed as foundational to Indian history” (2013, 78, refer to Thapar 2008, 33). Moreover, ¯ “the insistence of ‘upper caste’ in asserting that they are Aryans has remained consistent” (Ibid., 77, refers to Leopold 1974). Historian Romila Thapar (1971) has thoroughly examined processes of distinc¯ tion and assimilation between the “Indo-Aryan speaking nomadic pastoralists”3

1

Ayyar and Khandare 2013, referring to Ambedkar (1990), Trautmann (1964), and Thapar (2008). 2 ‘Dasya/Dasa’ is Sanskrit, means, e.g., servant, foreigner, enemy. 3 who arrived in northern India in the 2nd millennium BCE.

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and the “indigenous4 populations” (408). She states that it is “doubtful that the term a¯ rya was ever used in an ethnic5 sense” (411, her emphasis). Diverse groups were rather differentiated on the basis of linguistics, territory, and ritual purity (408–412). Among these categories of differentiation, language was the chief component. The nomadic migrants who came to the subcontinent around 2000 ¯ BCE. spoke Sanskrit, which was both “crucial to the notion of being an Aryan”, and also to the “efficacy of the ritual hymns” (411). The indigenous groups spoke an “alien language”, probably “Dravidian and Munda”, which is most ¯ likely the reason why they were called “mleccha”6 (408–410) by the Aryanspeaking immigrants. The controversial meanings of the term ‘mleccha’ did not entail any reference to ‘skin colour’. Yet, the word has a “significant association with copper and copper-coloured” (Thapar 1971, 410). However, “this may have ¯ had some connection with the Aryan speakers introducing iron to Indian cultures 4

“possibly the remnants of the urban civilization of the Indus”, Thapar 1971, 408. The category ‘ethnicity’ as commonly used in contemporary anthropology, refers to a community, who shares e.g. religious beliefs, customs, or language. The relativity and relationality of the category is emphasised. However, I assume that Thapar, who contrasts ethnicity with language or religion as group identity markers, uses ethnicity here in a sense that would rather point to a form of inter/intra-racial group belonging. 6 “Attempts have been made to derive the etymology of the word from the root v¯ ac speech, hence one is not familiar with the known speech or is of alien speech. This also provides a clue to the early distinction being made based on speech which fact is stressed in late works as well. The etymology however is false as mleccha represents a cultural event rather than a linguistic fact. It has been suggested that mleccha may have been derived from Me-luh-ha, the Sumerian name for an eastern land with which the Sumerians had trading relations, possibly the people of the Indus civilization. The P¯ali word for mleccha is milakkha, which relates even more closely in phonetics to the Sumerian version. Buddhist sources explain milakkha ¯ ¯ as referring to the non-Aryan people, the Andhra, Tamil etc. This is further substantiated by the Dharma´sa¯ stra of Jaimini in which he mentions certain mleccha words which are Sanskritized versions of words occurring in the Dravidian languages. Thus the etymology of mleccha would relate it to the indigenous inhabitants of northern India at the time of the arrival of ¯ the Aryan-speaking peoples, a far more plausible derivation than the earlier one. Another attempt derives mleccha from the proto-Tibetan mltse meaning ‘tongue’ and the Kukish mlei. ¯ This would associate the early use of the word with the non-Aryan speaking peoples living close to the Tibeto-Burman area. The verb mlech means ‘to speak indistinctly’. It may have been an onomatopoeic sound imitating the harshness of an alien tongue. Retroflex conso¯ nants are believed to have been assimilated into Indo-Aryan from Dravidian. The earliest of the better-known grammarians, P¯an.ini, gives a form of the word mlis.t.a as ‘that which is spoken indistinctly or barbarously’ and treats it in its noun form as indistinct speech or a foreign language. Used as a noun, the word also has the rather significant association with copper and ¯ copper-coloured. This may have had some connection with the Aryan speakers introducing iron to Indian cultures erstwhile based on copper technology. From the early centuries A.D. onwards the adjectival use of mleccha becomes quite frequent.” Thapar 1971, 409–410. 5

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erstwhile based on copper technology” (ibid.). Interestingly, the term ‘mleccha’ was not at all restricted to the indigenous people but was also used to describe the Greeks, Chinese, Turks, or Arabs who came to India at a later time (430). In turn, some indigenous inhabitants of southern India assigned it to other indigenous groups, such as the Vadukar or Malavar, who could not speak Tamil and ¯ who were geographically separating them from the Aryan-speakers in the north. In certain Tamil lexicons, ‘mleccha’ is even given as a synonym for ‘¯arya’, which otherwise often merely meant “the northerner” from a southern perspective (412). Distinctions in terms of territory meant primarily to identify land where the s´r¯addha ceremony was carried out and the laws of the varn.a were followed. ¯ Regions where Aryan-speaking pastoralists lived were thus called “¯arya-varta”. Accordingly, “mleccha-de´sa” was land where people spoke an “alien language” and “did not perform the correct rituals”, thus regarded as “ritually ¯ impure” (ibid.). Aryan-speakers who travelled to “mleccha-de´sa”7 had to perform “prayascitta” or expiatory rites before returning (ibid.). The dichotomy ¯ purity/impurity became increasingly important for the social order: Aryanspeakers established a network of exogamous and endogamous kinship relations from which the ‘mlecchas’ were excluded. Thus the latter formed their own ¯ “mleccha j¯atis” (412), that is, their own (sub-)community orders. The Aryanspeaking communities were formed along different occupations – hierarchically ordered from “clean” to “polluting” – which defined one’s ritual status. Ritual status again was expressed by the notion of the ‘varn.a’, with its four categories ‘br¯ahman’, ‘ks.atriya’, ‘vai´sya’ and ‘´su¯ dras’. The ‘mlecchas’, being technically inferior (e.g. use of copper instead of iron technology, ox-drawn carts instead of horse chariots, etc.) had low occupations and therefore low ritual status also (412). Generally, however, the varn.a status did not necessarily have to coincide with the actual socio-economic status. The fourth essential that went into the making of a caste society was the association of each group with a geographical location (412). The R.gveda – the most ancient collection of Hindu scriptures composed in Vedic Sanskrit, with its oldest hymns estimated to date back to 1700 BCE8 – is said to contain references to ‘d¯asa’ or ‘dasyu’. They are described as being black-skinned (“k.r.sn.a-tvach”) and “snub-nosed”, as well as being compared to

7

Meaning ‘land of the mleccha’. Since the hymns originated in literary oral tradition, no precise date can be ascribed to the composition of the four Vedas. Estimations range between 1700 for the oldest (Rigveda) and 1000 BCE for the youngest collection (cf. Kulke/Rothermund 1982; Oberlies 1998).

8

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“demons”; it is further said that they would practice “black magic” and “not perform the required sacrifices” (410). Kosambi (1965) states that the terms ‘d¯asa’ ¯ or ‘dasyu’ in the R.gveda originally applied to hostile non-Aryan people, who had the special color (varn.a), namely black (k.r.sn.a), which refers to their darker complexion (Kosambi 1965, 81). Thomas Trautmann (2005), however, claims that it would be “obvious that language and religion were more salient signs of differ¯ ence than complexion to the ancient Aryans” (xxxii). According to him, textual evidence in the R.gveda of the “existence of dark skinned, broad-nosed enemy ¯ population to the Aryans” was more often than not over- or mis-interpretations.9 ¯ Generally, the two main opposing interpretations of the Aryan migration10 provide insight into the political agendas of the two camps (Thapar 2005, 106–109), that is, fighting or defending Brahmin hegemony. The fact that certain upper castes imagined themselves as particularly fair skinned, primarily served the purpose of (re)enforcing a dominant social status, not only in pre-colonial but, as shown in 2.2, in colonial and post-colonial India also. Most prominently, social and political activist B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) ¯ studied Hindu scriptures for evidences of the Aryan race theory. He claimed ¯ that the Vedas did not speak of any ‘Aryan’ race conquering ‘Dasas/Daysus’ supposedly native to India, from whom they are distinct in colour: ¯ (1) The Vedas do not know any such race as the Aryan race; (2) There is no evidence ¯ in the Vedas of any invasion of India by the Aryan race and its having conquered the Dasas and Dasyus, supposed to be natives of India; (3) There is no evidence to show ¯ that the distinction between Aryans, Dasas and Dasyus was a racial distinction; (4) ¯ The Vedas do not support the contention that the Aryans were different in color from the Dasas and Dasyus. (Ambedkar 1990, 85, quoted by Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 84)

Hence, various social groups did not distinguish one another on the grounds of racialised constructions, but rather in terms of language or ritual purity. In practice, however, society hardly ever functioned in strict accordance with these rules, as Thapar points out: Though “much of religious brahmanical literature tries to conform to the theory, the non-brahmanic literature, particularly secular literature, and epigraphic evidence provides pointers to the actual situation” (Thapar 1971, 413). For instance, the early mentioning of a king named Divod¯asa11 in the R.gveda would prove that there must have been “some recombination between 9

Albeit without providing more precise proof for his notion at this point. That is, the Dalit version pioneered by Jyotiba Phule, and the Hindutva one pioneered by Veer Savarkar. 11 The suffix -dasa refers to Dravidian kings. 10

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¯ ¯ Aryans and Non-Aryans soon after 1500 B.C.” (Kosambi 1956). In that sense, practices of differentiation were handled with flexibility. The indeed inevitable amalgamations of existing local cultures led to the problem that, from the per¯ spective of the Aryan-speaking migrants, not all social groups could be given a precise varn.a status. Thus, mixed castes (sank¯ιrn.a j¯ati) were admitted, given the rank of s´u¯ dras (the lowest of the four varn.a), and many of them were described as “mlecchas” (Thapar 1971, 413). A new problem arose with the arrival of the ´ Greeks, the Sakas and the Kus.a¯ n.as. Among them, powerful rulers migrated to the subcontinent, started to patronise and use Sanskrit, and inter-married into local ¯ ruling families. Aryan-speakers responded to that development by the invention and approval of a new ranking position: the ‘degenerate ks.atriya’ (vr¯atyaks.atriya). ¯ That means the migrated, powerful, non-Aryan-speaking groups were accepted as “ks.atriyas” by origin, albeit deemed “degenerate” due to their not performing the sacred rites (419). Another ‘crisis’ emerged with the incursion of ‘mleccha’ rulers into ‘¯arya-varta’, as in the case of the Yavanas, who had come into the GangaYamuna Doab, or with the invasion of the Huns (h¯un.as). To prevent “the pure land” from being turned into “mleccha land”, the varn.a laws were introduced into the respective regions, since only then would they be “fit for the performance of sacrifices” (425). Furthermore, the system of making land grants to Br¯ahmans and secular officials forced the indigenous people of Central India to adjust to the population movements from the north and to agrarian economy. A ¯ process started that was called ‘Aryanising’/’Sanskitising’: it included an accordance of ks.atriya status, ‘overlooking’ ‘mleccha’ antecedents especially in areas, where ‘mleccha’ rulers were powerful.12 Moreover, the formation of “marriage alliances broke the kinship barrier and mleccha rulers became patrons of Sanskrit learning and culture” (429). However, assimilation was not a one-way process: there were also norms of the sub-culture adopted by the cultural mainstream, such as the incorporation of cults and cult priests of the indigenous mleccha into the religious beliefs of the ¯ Aryans, or the importation of foreign fashion in (sculpture) art or music (431– 434). Thapar points out that, in comparison to the concept of the ‘barbarian’ in ancient Greek, Roman, and European history, one aspect was missing from the Indian concept: “the notion of the pagan” (435). However, it was later introduced by the Muslims to label all non-Muslim inhabitants of India (435). With the first Arab traders who came to India in the seventh century CE, processes of 12 For example, whereas Sakas ´ and Yavanas remained “vr¯atya” ks.atriyas and the Andhras even continued to be mlecchas; ks.atriya rank was willingly granted to Gonds or Gurjaras (Thapar 1971, 428).

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mutual cultural amalgamation continued. Islamic historiography brought its own highly developed philosophy of the past. As “Islamic laws demand an egalitarian society”, they could not conform to the laws of varn.a, but again gradually and over time, Muslim social organisation began to “approximate that of the Hindus in that various castes evolved and became similar to Hindu castes” (435). Depending on the respective individual ruling the later Mogul Empire, there was, on the one hand, high appreciation for Indian philosophies and customs to be found. Akbar (1556–1605) issued, for instance, a ban on cow slaughter, a permission to reconvert to Hinduism without facing the death penalty, and an abolition of the ‘Jizya’ taxes for non-Muslims. On the other hand, however, forced conversations to Islam, destruction of Hindu temples, and (re)imposition of the ‘Jizya’ were the order of the day under the rule of Aurangzeb (1658 – 1707).13 ¯ Until today, debating Aryan-identity is more often than not about defending or fighting upper castes’ hegemony (Thapar 2005). Thus, it was upper castes who legitimated their “natural supremacy” (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 82) by ¯ inventing and/or supporting the ‘Aryan myth’. Moreover, the far-right Hindu ¯ nationalists even claimed that ‘Aryans’ originated in India, for the migration theory posed a severe threat to their belief that Hindu culture originated in India (see further below, 2.2.2). Therefore, the Hindu Right regarded historian Tha¯ par’s well-argued refutation of the Aryan race theory as intimidating. They thus “viewed her articulation as detrimental to the image of ‘upper caste’ Hindus, who held themselves as biologically superior” (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 78; refer to ¯ Frontline 2003). Whereas the Far Right claimed the Aryan migration theory was a product of the British colonisers to denigrate the Hindus, certain upper castes had also tried to convince the colonisers of their own higher status, courting the colonisers’ favour “to be treated as ‘exclusive, special, and better’ than the other ¯ ‘lowly non-Aryan races’” (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 79; refer to Leopold 1974). As I will show in more detail further below (2.2.1), the colonisers themselves – and other orientalist scholars – also established racialised caste discourses. In ¯ these, “fair complexion communities were regarded as of Aryan lineage, whereas

13

Cf.: Behr, Hans-Georg: Die Moguln: Macht und Pracht der indischen Kaiser von 1369– 1857, Wien und Düsseldorf: 1979; Burke, S.M.: Akbar. The Greatest Mogul. Munshiram Manoharlal. New Delhi: 1989; Hottinger, Arnold: Akbar der Große. Herrscher über Indien durch Versöhnung der Religionen. Zürich: 1998; Richards, John. F. The Mughal Empire. In: The New Cambridge History of India, 7th ed., Cambridge University Press. Cambridge: 2004; Rizvi, S.A.A. The wonder that was India. Voll.II: A survey of the history and culture of the Indian sub-continent from coming of the Muslims to the British conquest 1200–1700. Sidgwick/Jackson. London: 1987.

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¯ the dark skinned communities were classified as non-Aryans” (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, refer to Dirks 2001). In that sense, claims to power by the colonisers met with the power interests of some upper-caste Hindus. From this brief glance on how social orders were established in precolonial Indian societies, it can be concluded that systems of social stratification were mainly based on territory, language and notions of religious purity. The ¯ Aryan-speaking migrants distinguished themselves from the indigenous communities – and also other migrating groups – by classifying these ‘others’ as ¯ non-Aryan-speakers. They further considered these ‘others’ as being ‘ritually ¯ impure’ but not as ‘pagans’. Whereas the Aryan-speaking groups excluded all ‘other’ groups from their varn.a system at first, social boundaries were soon extended and transformed whenever the opportunity for expansion of territory and power arose. That became apparent in the concept of ‘degenerate ks.atriya’ or ¯ the general process of ‘Aryanizing’/’Sansritication’. That is, in practice, mutual cultural and social assimilation took place. Both the indigenous groups called ‘mlecchas’ and the later migrated Muslims formed their own social systems similar to the Hindu social order. A ‘racialisation’ of castes, however, only happened during the colonial encounter. It was then propagated by the British and supported by the upper castes. By (re)producing fair skin as an upper caste signifier, upper-caste groups sought alliance with white supremacy, in both colonial and post-colonial India, to establish and maintain a hegemonic status (cf. further below, 2.1.3 and 2.2.1). Whereas ‘skin colour’ is mentioned in ancient Hindu scriptures like the ¯ R.gveda, when depicting non-Aryan-speaking groups/Dravidian speakers as dark ¯ skinned, interpretations of these texts remain ambiguous. In contrast to the Aryan myth, the R.gveda does not draw a consistent picture of the ‘dark skinned’ indigenous Dravidian population. Above all, the different interpretations of these texts reflect different ideological interests. Even though ‘skin colour’ was not a necessary and consistent criterion for group constructions in early India, it was already a marker of (particularly female) beauty. Ancient Hindu scripts entail descriptions of the ‘fair’ and ‘golden’ half of the Hindu goddess Parvati, for instance. In the next section, I look more closely at representations of the Hindu goddesses Radha and Parvati in order to demonstrate that not only fair and dark was a binary concept, but that it has also been ambiguously narrated in Hindu scriptures.

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2.1.2

Fair Skin and Beauty in Ancient Hindu Scriptures

Once again, the idea to look for and into depictions of Hindu goddesses was derived from my interlocutors. When interviewee Deepika explained that skin tone was a gendered category, she referred to the representation of Hindu deities: “even in our temples; you walk in, you will see Krishna being dark; but Radha is really fair; you will see Shiva blue, black; but Parvati is fair, so there is not one Indian goddess that’s dark” (interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014). Ancient Hindu myths are said to entail a complex play on colours, as in the Skanda Purana, for instance (“blackness, moonlight, snow, ash, gold, bluelotus”14 ). Furthermore, ‘skin colour’ is regarded significant in so far as the mythic heroes and heroines are often depicted as “fair”, whereas villains are described as “dark and tawny” (Robb 1995, 8). Yet color was not “unambiguously related to merit or status” (Robb 1995, refereeing to Wendy O’Flaherty 1975, 8). To find out more about the roles ‘skin colour’ plays in ancient Hindu scriptures, I now examine two text fragments in more detail. The first example illustrates how ‘fair’/ ‘dark’ is a constructed binary, and the other one demonstrates how both terms are connoted ambiguously. The first example originates from the Padma Purana, the English translation of which reads as follows: One day the god Shiva teased his wife, the goddess Parvati, about her dark skin; he called her ‘Blackie’ (Kali) and said that her dark body against his white body was like a black snake coiled around a pale sandalwood tree. When she responded angrily, they began to argue and to hurl insults at one another. Furious, she went away to generate inner heat in order to obtain a fair, golden skin.15

In this paragraph, the rather negative connotation of dark skin becomes apparent from a number of facts: first, calling Parvati “Blackie” is described as “teas[ing]”; second, an opposition between a “black snake” and a “pale sandalwood tree” is constructed; and lastly, Parvati’s anger and fury are caused by the name-calling. In the interviews I conducted in Delhi in 2014, ‘kalu’, ‘kali’ or ‘kaliya’ were also reported to be used as swearwords (chapter 4). The image created by Shiva to illustrate the name-calling is a binary construct: Sandalwood, on the one hand, is a tree with heavy, yellow, fine-grained wood that retains its highly valued fragrance for decades and is one of the most frequently used holy elements in Hinduism and Ayurveda. A snake, on the other hand, even though generally worshipped in India, 14

Robb 1995, 8. Wendy Doniger (2009) states this story of Shiva and Parvati is narrated in several Puranas, of which the earliest is the Matsya Purana (250–500 CE), and is reproduced with variations in the later Padma and Skanda Puranas (Doniger 2009, 396). 15

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can evoke negative associations (with insincerity or insidiousness), since snakes are mythologically known for their ability to take on forms of different beings at any time. There is one description of snakes made by Wendy Doniger (2009) with a reference to the Mahabharata. The epos tells the story of how King Jamamejaya tries to kill all the snakes in the world to avenge his father’s death by snakebite. Doniger interprets his vengeance as an “inverted horse sacrifice” (2009, 266). According to her, the horse was a “creature of light, the sky, fire, flying through the air” (ibid.); but a snake was a “creature of darkness, the underworld, water, cold, sliding under the ground” (ibid.), hence the wrong animal to sacrifice in a Vedic ceremony. Thus, a rather binary concept of ‘light’ and ‘dark’ is created by the “pale sandalwood” and the “black snake” imagery, whereby the former gets a positive connotation, the latter a negative association. The cited paragraph about Parvati and Shiva then continues with Parvati splitting herself in two halves – “Brahma granted her wish to have a golden body and to become half of Shiva’s body in the form of the androgyne” (Doniger 2009, 397); she “reveals her golden inner form” and is named Gauri (the fair, the golden, ibid.). She “sloughed off her black outer sheath” or “sloughed off from her body a dark woman named the goddess Kali” (who rode a lion of anger and had to leave to live in the Vindhaya Mountain from then on, Doniger 2009, 397). Thus, darkness gets associated with negative characteristics and becomes something that can be ‘sloughed off’ and banished, whereas fairness is described as the ‘inner form’.16 The property “golden” is consistent with ancient concepts of female beauty as shown by Pramod Kumar (2002): “The appearance of a good-looking woman is described by comparing with the beautiful creations of God: […] the whole body compared to a beautiful gold stick (Kanak Chhari Si Kamini), fair skin color with the color of camphor” (P. Kumar 2002, 262). I want to emphasise that the colour constructed as beautiful and opposing ‘kali’ ranges from yellow (colour of sandalwood) to golden, on one end, to ‘transparent’ or ‘white’ in P. Kumar’s study (as characteristic of camphor), on the other. The ambivalence of how dark (‘k¯al¯a’) and fair (‘gor¯a’) are connoted differently becomes evident in the following ‘Bhajan’. In this Hindu devotional song, the little Lord Krishna asks his (foster) mother (ya´somat¯ı maiy¯a) why he has a dark complexion and why his beloved Radha is fair. This example is given in Hindi17 : 16

This idea echoes the cosmetic commercial ads for skin bleaching products that claim “to bring back the healthy, fair skin you always had”, as if aspiring to ‘restore’ a hidden ‘Indian’ beauty lying underneath (cf. chapters 3 and 4). 17 http://bhajansangita.org, since the website was not available anymore when I last checked on 21 April 2019, see: e.g., http://sapthaswaras.blogspot.de/2011/12/yashomati-maiya-sebole-nandalala.html. English translation of the Bhajan: Little Krishna asks mother Yashoda,

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Krishna’s (foster) mother, Ya´soda, offers two different (but potentially interrelated) explanations, one after the other. Without taking any context(s) into account, Krishna’s way of asking is not revealing of any colour prioritszation or evaluation; literally translated, it simply reads as “why is Radha fair; why am I dark?” The first explanation given by his mother refers to the moment when Krishna was born and to the flute that he used to play: his time of birth was at a “Why is Radha fair while I am dark?” Mother Yashoda smiled and told little Krishna, “You were born on a dark, stormy midnight. My beloved little Krishna has a black flute. Hence he is dark”. Little Krishna asks his mother Yashoda, “Why is Radha fair while I am dark?” Mother Yashoda smiled and said, “listen my dear, the fair Radha has dark eyes. The darkeyed one has bewitched you hence you are dark” (cf. http://sapthaswaras.blogspot.de/2011/ 12/yashomati-maiya-se-bole-nandalala.html).

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“dark and stormy midnight”; and the colour of his flute was also “dark”. Therefore, his mother concludes, Krishna is dark. Her son, however, asks again the same question: why is Radha fair; why am I dark? Whether Krishna is not satisfied by his mother’s explanations for his darkness or whether he wants to insist on hearing other reasons for Radha’s fairness cannot be answered here. His mother, in any case, again addresses only the second part of Krishna’s question: “Listen, my dear”, she starts, the “fair fair Radha has black eyes, the dark-eyed one, the dark-eyed one has bewitched you; that is why you are dark”. Thus, Ya´soda provides her little son with another explanation for his darkness, again without elaborating at all on the first part of his question. Instead, she refers to Radha as the cause of his darkness, making her part of the answer to the second part of Krishna’s question. She focusses not on their difference in colour, but on the relation between the two. In Hindu mythology, Krishna and Radha are considered to be the divine but personified representations of love and passion, transgressing all kinds of social and earthly boundaries. The name ‘Krishna’ means black, dark, dark blue; ‘Radha’ is described as ‘Gaurangi’, the ‘one of golden colour’. Thus, fair and dark seem to be regarded as complementary, interacting colours rather than diametrically opposed in uniquely and invariant definitions. Even though ‘skin colour’ was not a necessary and consistent criterion for group constructions in early India, as shown above, it was already a marker of (particularly female) beauty. Reading representations of the Hindu goddesses Radha and Kali, I demonstrated how ‘fair’ and ‘dark’ was not only binary but also ambiguously narrated. In both cases, the desired fair ideal is not (only) described as ‘white’ but rather as ‘golden’. I look more closely at social meanings and political implications of the construction of ‘gold’ as ‘skin colour’ in chapter 3 and chapter 4.

2.1.3

Caste and ‘Skin Colour’

In this subchapter, I ask whether and how colour, j¯ati, and the varn.a system interrelate. The reason for looking closer at their relation(s) to colour is twofold; first and foremost, it was the interview participants in Delhi who generally associated ‘skin colour’ with a high-caste status. 29-year-old PhD student Zahra, for instance, explained:

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2 ‘Colourism’ in India Within and Beyond Colonialism: … They say Brahmans are fairer, you know; if you know about the Hindu mythology, Brahmans are the uppermost part of the body,18 so Brahmans are expected to have a certain tone, certain skin colour or certain mannerism[s], which will define their identity. (Interview with Zahra, 9 February 2014)

Moreover, the Sanskrit term ‘varn.a’19 also translates as ‘colour’. In the Mahabharata, varn.as are described as colour-based: Brahmins are assigned white, Kshatriyas red, Vaishyas yellow, and Shudras black (Ambedkar 1979b, 199; referred to by Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 75). Before asking how colour and caste relate, I briefly explain how I understand the categories ‘caste’, ‘varn.a’, and ‘j¯ati’. Varn.a categorisation and j¯ati organisation – commonly subsumed under the colonial term ‘caste’ – have been crucial for social stratification from ancient India to this day. Not only was it Hindus who organised social structures according to their notions of different castes, but Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Jews, as well. Various ruling elites have transformed Indian castes since medieval India, primarily during the Mogul Empire and the British Raj. The latter invented the designation ‘caste’. Moreover, the British colonisers not only re-defined but also re-structured the varn.a system to make it fit their claims to power and control. On the other hand, the caste system and especially Brahminism20 was also challenged by various social movements throughout Indian history. In contemporary India, there are approximately 2000 to 2500 different j¯atis, with their own professions, rank orders, endogamous practices, dietary regulations, and purity laws (Oberlies 2008). The varn.a system, on the other hand, is commonly associated with four hierarchically ranked categories: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Shudras. This, however, is an idealised Brahmin interpretation of select Hindu scriptures. In both practice and scholarship, the varn.a system is highly controversial, primarily in terms of amount, definition, and rank order of varn.as. Moreover, the religious texts are ambiguous and inconsistent with one another (cf. Ayyar and Khandare 2013).21 18

In one verse of the R.gveda, it is claimed that the four varn.as were created from different parts of the body of the divinity Purusha. Today, scholarship doubts the originality of this verse and assumes that it must have been added to the ancient texts much later (cf. Jabbar, Naheem. 2011. Historiography and Writing Postcolonial India, London and New York: Routledge). 19 The Sanskrit ‘varna’ is considered equal to the British invention ‘caste’. . 20 ‘Brahminism’ means dominance of the Brahmins. 21 In the Vedas, when Purusha is divided into four parts, the Brahmins form the mouth, the Kshatriyas the arms, the Vaishyas the heights, and Shudras the feet. The Manusmriti classifies the varn.as according to labour differentiation: priests and scholars, warriors and

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In scholarship, there are two main interpretations of ‘caste’: the first version is associated with Louis Dumont (1911–1998), who described caste as hierarchical, religious and varn.a-centred. The second approach emphasises j¯ati and understanding caste as fluid, as a matter of political and material relations defined by kinship, service and duty (Robb 1995). Nicholas Dirks supported the latter by citing the relatively low status of Brahmins in some areas and showing how constructions of caste differed from actual practices (2001). Similarly, Dipankar Gupta (2000) argues that “there is no agreement over who should occupy which position in the [caste] hierarchy. It is not as if the Brahmans are universally acknowledged in Hindu India to be the most superior community” (2000, 35). Moreover, no caste group would actually want to merge with or be part of any (orthodox) ‘higher’ caste, but would rather (re)place its own group above the other(s). Whereas within racialised social orders the phenomenon of ‘passing’22 is known, Gupta claims that “’[p]assing’ is an unacceptable option in the caste system. No matter how disprivileged a j¯ati might be, it would not like to pass off as any other existing j¯ati” (2000, 93). He gives examples of certain castes claiming descent from Brahmins (73–74.) or who consider themselves superior to Brahmins (75). Moreover, in the case of food regulations,23 for instance, the Koiris and Kumharas24 would be as rigid in their cooking taboos as the Brahmins; and the Telis25 would be even more orthodox than the Brahmins. The same would be true if one were to ask, according to which one ideology, whom would be regarded as untouchable by whom: “Though a Dobhi is higher than a Bhangi26 by orthodox valuations, sixteen castes will not touch a Dhobi but only eleven castes will avoid touching a Bhangi (Gupta 2000, 78, citing Blunt 1969, 102).

rulers, agriculturalists and merchants, and lastly, labourers and service providers. In the Dharma´sa¯ stras, varn.a division is rather based on character, moral intent and ritual behaviour. 22 ‘Passing’ means that part(s) of a person’s social identity of is not ‘recognized’ by others (e.g., in terms of class, gender, or ‘race’). As a result, the respective person is not subject to respective social expectations, discriminations, norms or rights usually associated with this particular part of one’s social identity. In racialised societies, ‘passing’ typically refers to a light(er)-skinned Black subject, who ‘passes’ for white and is thus treated as a ‘white’ person. 23 “kachcha” and “pacca food” (Gupta 2000, 78). 24 The ‘Koiris’ are cultivators largely found in Bihar; Kumharas are potters, given Other Backward Castes/Scheduled Caste status today. 25 The ‘Telis’ are known for the ‘pressing of oil’; they are classified as Extremely Backward Class in Bihar today. 26 A ‘Dobhi’ is a washer woman/man; a ‘Bhangi’ a scavenger or sweeper.

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Ayyar and Khandare (2013) also stress that there was no agreement on the meanings and classifications of varn.a. However, they found linkages on “element[s] of color description” intrinsic to the different approaches to caste: [T]he articulation of division of Indian society on varn.a remains severely contested. Interestingly, there are some of these linkages which have been intrinsic to the various standpoints and theorization. These linkages reveal association of hierarchical division, association of supremacy, and element[s] of color description. (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 75)

Yet scholarship discusses the significance of (skin) colour for the caste system equally controversially. Whereas some scholars refer to colour associations in Hindu scriptures, others ascribe the assignment of colours to colonialist (re)definitions of caste. Among the first are scholars who explicitly challenge the common explanation of colourism as a colonial legacy, arguing for the consideration of “color discrimination practiced in Indian society as precolonial and ¯ emerging from mythical Aryan/racial theory propagated by the ‘upper castes’” (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 71). Accordingly, Indian sociologist André Béteille (1967) argues: The caste system has given birth to a variety of stereotypes that have a bearing on social conduct, although their influence on it is less marked now than in the past. Some of these stereotypes dwell on the physical features of the different castes, the upper castes being always represented as fair and the lower castes as dark. Further, a reversal of the assumed correlation is viewed as not only unusual but sinister. A Kannada proverb cautions, ‘Trust not a dark Brahmin or a fair Holeya’; a North Indian proverb maintains, ‘A dark Brahmin, a fair Chuhra, a woman with a beard – These three are contrary to nature’; and another North Indian proverb runs, ‘Do not cross a river with a black Brahmin or a fair Chamar.’ (Béteille 1967, 45227 )

All these proverbs contain imaginations of upper-caste Brahmins being usually fair, whereas Dalits28 – Holeya, Chuhra, or a Chamar – are imagined as normally not fair. Any exception to this rule – that is, a dark Brahmin or a fair Dali – is highly suspicious. Among the most prominent elite castes in (Western) Indian history rank the Chitpavan Brahmins: “The Chitpavan Brahmins of Maharashtra […] have not only light skins but occasionally light eyes as well (Béteille 1967, 450). Mythical accounts of the origins of Chitpavan Brahmins are said to contain descriptions 27

Refers to Risley, Herbert: The people of India, Calcutta 1915. xxviii. Self-designation of excluded non-caste groups, ‘untouchables’, or today, ‘scheduled castes’.

28

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of their fair complexion (Johnson 1970, 98). To this day, Chitpavan Brahmins self-portray thus: “Many Chitpavans have grey-blue eyes and majority of them are quite fair. Their features distinguish them!”29 Particularly with regard to their prominent role in Indian history and mythology as both fair complexioned and ‘powerful’ (in political as well as economical terms) the Chitpavans constitute an important subject of examination with respect to the question of whether and how ‘skin colour’ and status (used to) correlate. The Chitpavans’ religious and social status escalated with the rise of the Maratha Empire in the late 17th Century. The Chitpavan Brahmins were present in all branches of the government under the Peshwar Balaji Vishvanath Bhat in the eighteenth century. During colonialism, the British also recognised “the importance of Brahmins as moral and intellectual guardians of Hindu society” (Johnson 1970, 101); therefore, they sought alliances with powerful Brahmin groups such as the Chitpavans. With the advent of administrative reforms and the creation of new educational and professional opportunities by the British Raj, the Chitpavans’ economic power may have had increased even further, as Johnson suggests (1970). However, different political ambitions and the quest for self-rule led to conflict and competition between strict orthodox and anti-British Brahmins (e.g., Tilak, 1856 – 1920) on the one hand, and social reformers and constitutional politicians (Gokhale, 1866 – 1915), on the other. At the end of the nineteenth century, groups of non-Brahmins made an effort to also exploit the advantages of British rule by attempting to break the power of Brahmins in their region Maharashtra (e.g., Phule, 1818 – 1890) (cf. Johnson 1970). There exists a popular legend of a beautiful, fair skinned ‘dancing girl’ named Mastani, who had become the second wife of the Peshwa Baji Rao I (1700– 1740). One of my interviewees referred to this myth when we were discussing the origins of fair skin preferences: I think [fair skin preferences go] even further back; because I come from Maharashtra, from Pune, I’m reminded of a story [about] the Peshwas in Maharashtra in Pune…[the] Peshwa [ruler of the Maratha Empire] was really infatuated with a woman who was very very fair, this was pre-colonial, so at least that story I know, the woman is called Mastani and […] she belonged to a different area […] obviously though she came from a good background […] but still, not a Brahmin, so no marriage [was] possible […]; so this was not really colonial influence that shaped our desire

29

http://www.chitpavan.net/html/Kobra.html [not available anymore, checked on 14 April 2019). Thus, see paper from Arun Joglekar: Chipavan Brahmin Origin and History [no year] on academia, downloaded 21 April 2019; or the article “The Chitpavan” by Linda Cox (http:// www.kokanastha.com/research/weekly01.htm).

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2 ‘Colourism’ in India Within and Beyond Colonialism: … for white skin, fair people; I’m sure it is there from much time before then. (Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014)

There are several books and films about the Mastani myth. A recently published fiction by Kusum Chopra (2012)30 deals with the conflict that derived from the marriage between the Peshwa Baji Rao I – “a true-blue Chitpavan Brahmin” (7) – and Mastani. Mastani was the daughter of a Rajput, Maharaja Chhatrasal of Bundelkhand, and a Persian Muslim, Ruhaani Bai. There is a scene in the novel, in which Peshwa’s mother is outrageous about the marriage, referring to the Chitpavan Brahmins’ myth of origin: “We have heard that Rajputs…yes, Rajputs, they marry Musulmaans, but Brahmins? No, and especially not us Chitpavan Brahmins. Have you forgotten our history, our purification by fire? You want to degrade that”? (72) She then continues to re-narrate the legend of the Chitpavan Brahmins which also includes ‘skin colour’ as distinctive feature: “we boast our Chitpavan fair skin, strangely grey eyes […] white-skinned, blue-eyed, and fair to look upon” (73–74). Throughout the book, fair skin is repeatedly mentioned as signifying Chitpavan Brahmin lineage. However, it is also fair skin that defines the beauty of the Rajput-Muslim woman Mastani. It is suggested that she is even fairer than the Chitpavan women in the zenanas.31 Peshwa’s first wife Kashibai is described as having “rosy-cheeked, light-eyed, fair skinned Chitpavan good looks” (24). However, when Kashibai met Mastani for the first time, she “baulked as she approached the waiting couple […] For all the bright colours she wore, including the big red tikka on her forehead, Kashibai was still duller than Mastani’s sensuous beauty” (24, original emphasis). Similarly, when the Peshwa saw Mastani for the first time, he compared her appearance to the Hindu goddess Parvati, who is commonly depicted as light/golden-skinned (cf. 2.1.2 above): “All he could see was this ravishing beauty dancing like the Goddess Parvati. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself as Shivaji, and this was Parvati dancing for him and him alone” (9). From the role ‘skin colour’ plays in this contemporary fiction dealing with a popular myth from the first half of the eighteenth century – signifying both Chitpavan Brahmin lineage, but also a Rajput-Muslim’s extraordinary beauty – ambivalence and intersections of fairness become apparent. In this narration, fair skin becomes part of a certain caste’s body norm and part of a caste’s myth of origin. However, fair skin is also a marker for female beauty, valid for all women, independently of their religious or regional (group) belonging. The social rules created within this narrated world find some correspondences in contemporary 30 31

Chopra, Kusum. 2012. Mastani. Delhi, Rupa Publications India. A ‘zenana’ is the women’s quarter of a Hindu or Muslim household.

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society. Béteille (1967), for instance, emphasises that, when it comes to ‘skin colour’, caste, regional differences, and religious categories cut across each other: “a Moslem bride, however fair, would not normally be acceptable in a Hindu household. Likewise, a Kashmiri bride would not be acceptable in a Tamil Brahmin household in spite of her very light complexion.” (Béteille 1967, 453)

He thus concludes that social categories are applied and re-defined according to shifting power interests and alliances (Béteille 1967, 461). Thus emerge questions as to when, why and by whom categories such as ‘skin colour’ or ‘race’ are evoked in the context of caste. In the following, I focus on how upper castes, British colonisers, and anti-caste movements conceptualised caste as a ‘racialised’ category. The category ‘caste’ is (re) produced as a ‘race’-like category from different political perspectives. It appears that otherwise widely separated positions converged in the question whether or not racism and casteism were comparable systems of stratificationt. As I discussed in the introductory chapter, scholarship usually understands colourism as built on histories and presences of slavery, colonialism, institutional racism and white privilege (Hunter 2005, Bonilla-Silva 2006), which is why colourism is commonly explained in relation to racism (Glenn 2009, 166). There, I also stressed that, even though colonial racism must indeed be understood as the continuation of the “European project of modernity” (Gilroy 1995), I also agree with Kapil Raj (2007), who emphasises that race theories are not only ‘Western’ theories but rather a result of the colonial entanglement itself. Race and racism in the Indian context are not only discussed with regard to (British) colonialism, but also in works engaging with the Indian caste system (e.g., Ghurye 2011 [1932], Robb 1995, Trautmann 2005, Gupta 2000, or Ayyar and Khandare 2013). Hence, I here want to briefly introduce some voices from the debates on caste and race as comparable systems of stratification. Yet I do not seek to answer the question whether and how exactly caste and ‘race’ differ or overlap, but rather, to trace the changing meanings and usages of the terms ‘race’ and ‘colour’, by focussing on colonial orientalists’ and Dalit activists’ descriptions and interpretations. Comparing caste in India to race in the US, Indian historian Dipankar Gupta (2000) rejects some European scholars’ interpretations of caste, which he deems wrong, and is able to draw a more complex picture of how caste works in India. To do so, he sets out to compare the caste system in India with racist hierarchy in the US, as a “cognate phenomenon” (86). He refers to a rather static conception of race/racism (which I do not share, cf. introduction, 1.3) to show that caste is a

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closed system of stratification containing multiple hierarchies.32 His distinctions made between open and closed systems of stratification, as well as between hierarchy and difference, are to be understood as analytical; Gupta emphasises that “no one system of stratification exists in a pure form” (43). Challenging Louis Dumont’s (1911–1998) concept of the caste system as a “true hierarchy” (65), Gupta argues that, in India, “there is no agreement over who should occupy which position in the [caste] hierarchy.” (2000, 35, cf. above). He carves out the following analytical characteristics of variables, upon which societies could generally be ordered: they would be gradational or relational; qualitative or quantitative; rankable or unrankable; and commensurable or incommensurable. Whereas Gupta stresses that the caste system is not solely based on the binary distinction between purity and pollution, he indeed considers racism as based on a black/white binary (86f). Although I do not agree with his rather static concept of ‘race’, I find his remarks on the visibility of variables insightful, for he writes: Except in rare instances, it is hard to distinguish between castes in the same fashion through appearance or skin color. The belief that caste status varies inversely with the breadth of the nose is clearly an untenable proposition. (Gupta 2000, 87)

Gupta’s allusion to the “breadth of the nose” refers to a ‘theory’ on caste distinction, developed by the British colonial administrator and ethnographer Herbert Risley (1851–1911). Risley considered castes as rank-ordered according to the shape of one’s nose: the upper castes were narrow-nosed, while the lower castes were broad-nosed (Béteille 1967, 451). As I show further below (2.2.1), the British Raj conducted massive “anthropological” data-gathering, a move toward the creation of an “ethnographic state” for controlling the colonized (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 81, refer to Dirks 2001). Not only did the colonisers create racialised subjects, but they also declared the caste systems racist. This, interpreting caste as a system resembling European racism by colonial scholars was criticized, e.g., by Chandrasekhar (1946). He even referred to European and North American fascist interpretations and appropriations of caste: Some European and American scholars have tried to explain the Hindu caste system as the outcome of the contact and conflict between the alien light-skinned Indo¯ Aryans and the Dravidians, the original and older inhabitants of India. This might 32

Gupta (2000) proposes to understand ‘caste’ primarily as a closed system of stratification of discrete communities, containing multiple hierarchies and ideologies, whereas ‘racism’ could largely be defined as a continuous hierarchy of colour gradations, rank-ordered from dark to light skin tones.

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have been expected from Nazi Indologists who can explain institutions they do not comprehend only in the light of race problems based on color. Is there any basis for this comfortable myth of certain Western scholars whose preoccupation in this regard seems to be the pigment of the skin? [...] The castes in India, therefore, do not represent 4,000 or 5,000 different biotypes with as many shades of color beginning with black and ending with almost blond. Caste is not physical and is not and was never based on color. (Chandrasekhar 1946, 156)

In fact, research on India not only served colonial exploitations but also consolidated Europe’s anti-Semitism (e.g. Voltaire 1885) and, particularly, German Fascism in the nineteenth and twentieth century (e.g., Rosenberg 1930). The ¯ ‘ Aryan Myth’ functioned as legitimization to discriminate, persecute and systematically kill Jews in Europe.33 Paradoxically, European research on India adjudges ¯ at the same time, that the ‘Indian Aryan Race’ had lost its “purity, physical beauty, and moral essence” over time through contacts with “aborigines” (Gobineau 1983, 495). With his conception of ‘racial decline’, along with the Hegelian idea on history and development, the subjugation of India – even though imagined as the lost, utopian past of Europe (Thapar 2002) – was ideologically justified. On the other hand, comparisons between caste and race were mobilised with a very different political agenda by Dalit activists. I find their considerations of racism and casteism as comparable systems of discrimination useful, because these orient towards political practices involving re-definitions of caste systems and racism ‘from below’. These resistant (re)appropriations of caste-colour-race references by activists are further picked up by scholarship. Thus, Deepa Reddy (2005) develops an understanding of caste as an “ethnic category”, whereby she also compares casteism with racism. Her intention is not to trace back the history of caste to any European or Indian concepts of ‘race’, but rather to re-define it for political reasons. Therefore, her study focusses on the effects both discriminatory systems create on people’s actual living conditions rather than different ideologies or characteristics of ‘race’. In the course of a debate preceding the UN’s 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban – where the refusal of the Indian government to include caste on the agenda led to a massive Dalit opposition campaign – the question whether race and caste were comparable systems of oppression was controversially discussed (D. Reddy 2005, 545). Many Dalit activists argued that, while castes were indeed not to be equated with races 33

Dorothy M. Figueira (2002) argues that Voltaire’s employment with India allowed him to “challenge the historical importance of the Jewish people” (Figueira 2002, 11; Hawley 1974, 139–40). Voltaire claimed that „the Jews stole what was of worth in their religion from the Aryans “ – according to his ‘research’, the Aryans ‚invented ‘ the immortality of the soul, the ‘Fall of the Man’, the characters Adam and Eve (Figueira 2002, 17; 11–17).

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(as biologically defined), casteism was still comparable to racism, “assuming that ‘race’ does continue to exist as a social reality, the experiences associated with it are virtually indistinguishable from those produced by caste” (558). Hence they suppose that caste discrimination, too, is. systemic and institutionalized, rests on ethnocentric theories of cultural superiority, results in social segregation, causes sometimes horrific violence and untold forms of social sufferings, has specific material consequences, [and] comes attached to notions of purity and pollution”. (D. Reddy 2005, 558)

Above all, however, they call caste an inherently economically exploitative system, comparing the exploitation of “slave, Third World, and immigrant labor” by the industrialised world with the exploitation of Dalit labour by upper-caste wealth (ibid.). Among their primary concerns ranks their refusal of the general view of caste as an essential part of ‘Indian-ness’ and thus an ‘exotic’ phenomenon both culturally inherited and geographically limited to the Indian Subcontinent. The WCAR’s refusal to accept the fact that casteism and racism are at least “both comparable forms of human rights violation” (D. Reddy 2005, 561), would only reveal that “the framing of the issue of race [is] ‘Eurocentric’” (ibid, refers to Pinto 2001) and that racism is solely “defined from the western paradigm” (D. Reddy 2005, 561; cites Louis 2001, 46). In accordance with these statements, Human Rights Watch issued a report in 2001, “Caste Discrimination: A Global Concern”, treating “discrimination based on work and descent as synonymous with caste discrimination” (D. Reddy 2005, 565, my emphases), and grouping “Sri Lankan Rodiya, Japanese Burakumin, Nigerian Osu and Igbo, Senegalese Wolof and several other African tribes” among the Indian Dalits (565), all sharing experiences of discrimination “justified on the basis of caste” (565) – an important attempt to ‘de-localise’ casteism. The report also “emphasizes birth over faith”, treating caste as “social institution” rather than as religious system (566), hence also trying to ‘secularise’ casteism. Racism, as D. Reddy quotes Chakrabarty, “is thought of as something that the white people do to us. What Indians do to one another is variously described as communalism, regionalism, and casteism, but never as racism…[F]or me, the popular word racism has the advantage of not making India look peculiar” (D. Reddy 2005, 570 quotes Chakrabarty 2002, 82, emphases and ellipsis original). Put bluntly, the British definition of caste as essentially Indian and socially ‘backward’ serves as the very basis for oppressing and exploiting India on racial grounds, and even makes this paradoxical act look like a civilised mission of a ‘developed’ state. Hence, ultimately, depending on contexts and perspectives,

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to equate caste with race is Eurocentric, and serves to legitimate colonial exploitation. On the other hand, to equate race and caste aims at de-localizing caste, and de-centring of Europe. Thus, D. Reddy introduces the term ‘ethnicity’ into the debate not only to highlight the main focusses of the Dalit discourse but also to avoid having India be regarded as peculiar (cf. 571). Within the Dalit movement emerged different interests. Among them was a Marxist group called ‘Dalit Panthers’, which was founded in 1972 in Maharashtra. Their work focussed more on a transnational anti-bourgeois than a local anti-Brahmin critique: The Dalit is no longer merely an untouchable outside the village walls and the scriptures. He is an untouchable, and he is a Dalit, but he is also a worker, a landless labourer, a proletarian. And unless we strengthen this growing revolutionary unity of the many with all our efforts, our existence has no future (“Dalit Panthers’ Manifesto”, Satyanarayana and Tharu 2013)

They understood caste primarily as a system of economic exploitation. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), on the other hand – which was established in Uttar Pradesh in 1984 – fought against Brahmin hegemony and concentrated less on class or caste structures (D. Reddy, 551–552). I find it revealing that Dalits, who called themselves “proletarian” and understood their struggle as more anti-bourgeoisie than anti-Brahmin, related to the Black Panthers’ Party, identified with a revolutionary movement of African Americans in the US, and chose a black panther as their symbol. The Dalits of the BSP, on the other hand, who concentrated more on the Brahmin hegemony, chose an elephant as symbol, which was of specific significance within Hindu mythology (e.g., Airavata, Ganesha), and blue as their party’s colour.34 In my view, these varying practices show how group identities were redefined in accordance with varying political struggles: it was either thought necessary to create feelings of solidarity with transnational (anti-capitalist and anti-racist) movements – and to thereby transcend the limits of locally defined categories of discrimination such as ‘caste’ – or to identify with ‘Dalit’ as a category defined by specific local upper castes, in order to fight Brahmin hegemony. In the first case, identification with and empowerment of dark skin as political category took place: Dalit Panther activists identified with the reinterpreted and self-attributed version of the former coloniser’s invention of ‘black’, which was used to classify (or rather, to 34

With BSP becoming a key player in Uttar Pradesh, “the little blue status of Ambedkar” became a major feature of the local Dalit movement, for example (Jaoul, Nicolas. 2006. Learning the use of symbolic means: Dalits, Ambedkar statues and the state in Uday Pradesh. Contributions to Indian Sociology. 40 (2). 175–207. 178.

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distinguish among) all Indians (cf. 2.2.1). Similar to Dalit activists, the so-called ‘Dravidian Movement’ re-appropriated racialised categorisations for their political struggles. They constituted themselves as a “distinct aboriginal race” (Ayyar and ¯ Khandare 2013, 82–83) to fight what they perceived as ‘Ayran’ domination. The ¯ prominent anti-caste activist Jotiba Phule also spoke of Brahmins as “Aryan race” (ibid.) in order to fight Brahmin supremacy. Béteille (1967) explains accordingly, that: Fundamental categories such as race or j¯ati are often inherently ambiguous. This ambiguity enables people to use the idea to invoke different – even conflicting – loyalties in different situations. Thus, it may be invoked to unite Bengali Hindus and Moslems against the Assamese, and, in a different historical context, to divide Hindus from Moslems in Bengal. (Béteille 1967, 461).

This ambiguity is further emphasised by Ayyar and Khandare (2013), who refer to cases when fair skin is attached to Dalits, or dark skin is re-defined as marker of “caste purity”: It may be debated that all the“ex-untouchables” are not homogenous categories and certain excommunicated castes all over India have lighter skin color and in appearance similar to the upper castes. In addition, there are several myths constructed among the ¯ “ex-untouchable” castes that have lighter skin color who trace their lineage to Aryan or Brahmins. Conversely, narratives in Marathi Dalit literature describe elements of physicality particularly of the dark skin tone as marker of “caste purity” (versus Brahmanical notion of purity) and indigenousness. (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 87, refer to Bhosale 2003).

Hence, at times, references to race and/or ‘skin colour’ constructs seem to have been an integral part of fighting social hierarchies and unequal power relations based on caste, class and race. However, questions of skin or hair, body or beauty were not as explicitly addressed by anti-caste movements as they were by African or African diaspora political movements since the 1960s (Black is beautiful’, see 2.2.2). In summary, for the interrelations between colour and caste, it can be noted that ‘skin colour’ played a crucial part in the way caste distinctions were imagined. In these imaginations, fair skin was commonly associated with upper-caste status, and dark skin with lower or outer castes. Not only was complexion of particular importance for racialised versions of varn.a and j¯ati categorisations and organizations – as constructed in upper-caste as well as colonialist representat¯ tions of an ‘Aryan race theory’ – but for anti-caste movements also (e.g., the Dravidian Movement, Dalit activists). Moreover, fair skin became a marker of distinction for specific groups of Brahmins, especially the Chitpavan Brahmins.

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To conclude this section, it can be stated that it is the ambiguity inherent to ‘skin colour’/fairness that makes it transformable due to changing power interests. Colour as category of distinction and exclusion could be re-defined and re-mobilised by groups with contradicting ambitions. Upper castes who seek to maintain Brahmin hegemony make use of fair skin as marker of distinction, while lower castes either re-define dark as marker of caste purity or adopt the fair/dark hierarchy in order to fight the whole varn.a system from below.

2.2

Colour and Colonialism

2.2.1 ‘Skin Colour’ and the British Raj This section traces how ‘skin colour’, and ‘whiteness’ in particular, was (re)produced as a category of social distinction during the British Raj. ‘White’ is a relative or relational concept: relevant research has rendered concepts of “colonial whiteness” (Fischer-Tiné), “postcolonial whiteness” (López 2005), “cosmopolitan whiteness” (Saraswati) or “transnational whiteness” (Osuri 2008), all demonstrating that ‘white’ is a political and social category that changes with respect to different contexts and shifting claims to power (cf. Ignatiev 1995, Brodkin 1998). Bhattach¯arya states that “whiteness was valued in colonial India because whites had privileges that native Indians did not. In short, whiteness had value. It was exclusively possessed and, therefore, it was desired” (2012, 120). However, it seems as if ‘colonial whiteness’ was not always and everywhere regarded as desirable: in contrast to Fanon’s (1967) concept of “lactification” – “[t]o dream of a form of salvation that consists of magically turning white” (1957, 44) – the perception of white kinship, for instance, has shifted over time, not least in the context of caste policy. Janaki Abraham (2006) has investigated how matrilineal Thiyya families in Kerala remembered their liaisons with European men and found out that many women who had liaisons with British or French men were excommunicated by their caste, which is why “a white connection” became a stain and kinship with the white man was denied or shrouded: In contrast to what Lionel Caplan calls the Anglo-Indian ‘fixation with claiming kinship with the rulers’ (Caplan 2000, 867), for Thiyyas with a white connection, reclaiming the white man as a relative is not as much about claiming an affinity to British society as it is, I believe, about resisting the stain and stigma imposed by caste society (Abraham 2006, 149).

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Whereas associations between ‘skin colour’ and social status often refer to actual power hierarchies (see above), racial and class boundaries have not always been congruent during colonial rule; and neither has ‘white’ always been synonymous with being privileged and empowered (Fischer-Tiné 2009, 2). Harald FischerTiné (2009) has questioned the widespread notion that (European) ‘whites’ in India formed a homogenous privileged elite. He examines and reconstructs the social and cultural history of “white non-elite groups” such as European sailors, vagrants, criminals and sex workers in British India from 1780 to 1914. His approach is based on the notion that previous research on colonial power relations in South Asia has worked with a reductionist model of binary oppositions – metropolitan powerful elite versus peripheral subjugated subalterns – which “fails to recognize the complex levels of interaction and mutual influence involved in the colonial encounter” (6). According to Fischer-Tiné, both British Imperialist historiography and Indian Nationalist historiography supported the “myth of the homogenous ‘ruling elite’”, which claimed that the colonisers consisted mostly of civil servants, military officers and soldiers (5). Conversely, Fischer-Tiné emphasises that poor whites formed almost 50 per cent of the European population in India in the last decades of the 19th Century. He agrees with Satoshi Mizutani (2006) that whiteness “brought its own hierarchies from metropolitan society” (3) and that a closer examination of the lower class of white colonial society has escaped previous scholarly attention (4).35

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Mizutani’s study argues for an understanding of colonial power relations beyond a fixed ‘white over black’ contestation and, instead for a fluid understanding of categories like ‘racial identity’ or ‘colonial whiteness’. He aims to show the similarities of discourses and practices of ‘civilizing the Indians’ and of ‘disciplining the lower class at home’. FischerTiné criticises that within the Subaltern Studies’ approach to South Asian history “efforts to reconstruct the voices of the ‘subalterns’ have been confined to the colonised whilst the colonisers have not received the same attention” (Fischer-Tiné, 2009, 6). They would appear either in “their traditional role as ruling elite” or disappear behind “‘texts of power’ and an all-pervading ‘colonial discourse’” (ibid.) – he therefore introduces the term ‘white subalternity’. It is without doubt important to deconstruct the myth of homogeneity of the colonial power elite to examine more thoroughly how far categories other than race were effectively constructed to legitimate British rule and to detect the reasons why the poor whites were regarded as a latent threat to the British ‘civilising mission’ in order to understand how power was established and maintained. The question for me, however, is not only whether the white lower class too was subject to oppression and disciplining, how they too were made invisible by the ruling elite in order to present an imaginary group of ideal white sahibs, but also whether the lower-class whites were still regarded as ranking higher than the Indian working class within social stratification systems due to their ‘skin colour’ or European ancestry alone; and what multiple discourses framed the construction or challenge of social

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Fischer-Tiné stresses that hierarchies during colonialism were “multiple” (374) and shows how racial hierarchies could sometimes be overridden by ‘class’ or ‘gender’. However, even though the ‘civilising mission’ could demand the social exclusion of a ‘white’ criminal and paying court to an adjusted ‘Indian’ civil servant, the colour line always came back in when differentiations within one category of stratification were made: one might speculate, then, that, as long as there was a direct ‘native’ frame of reference, attempts to ostensibly demonstrate racial solidarity were undertaken which, in turn, resulted in a more lenient treatment of the wayward Europeans. (Fischer-Tiné 2009, 375)

Thus, even though Fischer-Tiné focusses on class-based hierarchies, he regards the poor as being further stratified along colour or race (and patriarchal) divides: “they [the poor whites (my remark)] continued to be privileged vis à vis the Indian population of comparable social standing and sometimes even towards those of superior status” (370, my emphases). Moreover, he refers to discrimination based on color or/and race within different occupational groups he has examined. Regarding the “European sailors ashore in British India”, he stated that. In their instance, acts of inclusion into the body of ‘respectable whites’ and exclusion from the ‘pale of civilization’ followed one another within a period of few months [...] Once excluded from the privileges of ‘full whiteness’ in the discourse strategies of othering and actual practices of ‘reclamation’ put the ‘children of the sea’ almost on a par with ‘uncivilized natives’ When they happened to be imprisoned, however, the situation could, equally rapidly, change for the better again: given the differential treatment accorded to European and ‘native’ prisoners respectively [...] (ibid. 374-375).

He also found a rigid system of internal stratification among sex workers privileging European women: “The members of the small ‘sex-working-class aristocracy’ hierarchies. If other than racial factors determined the position of poor whites in social hierarchy, did that not happen precisely because they did not fulfil the requirements that white rulers demanded from a ‘master race’? Does the fact that poor whites existed in the colonies actually scrutinise the importance of the category ‘race’, or does it only prove its constructive nature once again? For me, an undeniable fact remains that whites, if they would have behaved according to the elite’s rules, could have (re-)joined the ‘club’ and benefitted from (even more) white colonial privilege, whereas (even elite parts of the) Indian population only obtained access to power circles if they supported the foreign regime that systematically exploited their ‘own’ people. In my view, endorsing the colonial ideology cannot possibly be the same from the coloniser’s perspective and that of the colonised.

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were privileged in terms of their age, physical features, religion and nationality (‘Western-Europeanness’ and Christianity being valuable assets in addition to mere ‘whiteness’)” (375). In summary, I consider the differences Fischer-Tiné has carved out to be important, since the popular strategy to ‘divide and rule’ always worked on various levels: apart from differentiating the ‘coloniser’ from the ‘colonised’ and playing off colonised groups against one another (as the British Raj did with Muslims and Hindus, for instance), colonial elites further divided the white lower classes from (joining forces with) the colonised (to avoid an uprising of a transnational proletariat). Thus, in order to maintain their sovereignty, the colonial elite tried to make the poor whites invisible but reproduced them as ‘whites’ at the same time when different treatments of ‘white poor’ and ‘Indian proletariat’ had to be justified: in order to maintain the white myth, colonial officials argued contra the “public flogging of white delinquents” (375), for instance. Hence, most importantly, Fischer-Tiné’s study shows that the symbolic power inscribed in the construct of whiteness had very real, negative social effects on the lives of both (lower-class) colonisers and the colonised since joining forces against dominant suppressive regimes became increasingly difficult. Just as the image of ‘white(s)’ had been (re) constructed depending on varying political-power purposes, the subjugated Indians also were (re) defined as ¯ Aryan, coloured, or black by the British Raj in accordance with changing power interests. On the one hand, in the course of the ‘scientific’ quest for the ‘proto (Indo-European) language’ and the ‘universal prehistory of mankind’, a com¯ mon past and racial heritage (the ‘Aryan race’) was constructed and glorified in order to create and demonstrate the West’s own superior history. On the other hand, it was equally important for the colonisers to interpret India’s present as uncivilised, degenerated, backwardly, apolitical, and irrational – and therefore inferior to present Western societies – in order to legitimate colonisation. Thus, when German orientalist Max Müller (1883) claimed that “it is here [in India] that we can learn what man is, by seeing once more what man has been” (1903, 138) it was not necessarily seen as a contradiction but rather as the flip side of the same coin of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stating that “Indian culture is prehistorical” and “presents no political action” (Hegel 1861, 148). Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) describes this double standard as follows: “The European colonizer of the nineteenth century both preached his Enlightenment humanism at the colonized and denied it in practice” (Chakrabarty 2000, 4). To further consolidate colonial rule, the construction of a power and control structure ought to be erected upon local Indian traditions if it is to be particularly effective – thus, this context also formed the research base for British colonial

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officials. They worked with rather standardised and idealised versions of Indian traditions, privileging Hinduism and Brahmin scriptures. The colonisers acknowledged the production of Sanskrit and the Vedas, but at the same time, they needed to draw a clear line between themselves as ‘white’ and the others as ‘being under white domination’: the colonised Indians should have become “almost the same ¯ but not white” (Homi Bhabha 1994). Therefore, the category ‘Aryan’ was applied merely to a certain former elite – allowing’ for a common past with ‘Western ¯ civilisation’ – but the colonised either had to be denied ‘Aryan’ status or could ¯ only remain ‘Aryan’ if the concept did not coincide with the category ‘white’ in the first place: ¯ [T]hey are not ‘white’, they are ‘Aryan’, they are ‘Caucasian’, they are ‘Asiatic’. ¯ Caucasian/Aryan/Asiatic are associated with Brahmanical (that is, high-culture) Hin¯ duism […]. Aryan would arise in discussion about ancient religious and linguistic history. (Khan 2009, 107, 110)

¯ In this orientalist context, I understand Aryan as synonymous with ‘European past’ and ‘white’ as symbolizing ‘present Europeanness’. Recent studies on colourism consider ‘Europeanness’ as an integral part of ‘whiteness’: We must understand that colorism – much like the notion of race itself – is historically contingent on supremacist assumptions. In the United States, color preferences are typically measured against putative European (i.e., White) standards. […] For centuries, African Americans with European features have been exalted above those with dark or black complexions. (Herring 2004, 3)

According to Peter Robb (1995), the British had distinguished between “the race ¯ purity of the Aryans” (which had to be preserved) and the “the ‘primitive’ Indians” (who had to be controlled) (Robb 1995, 31). To controll the colonised subject, massive ‘anthropological’ data was produced by colonial administrators – a move toward the creation of an “ethnographic state”: “Colonial administration maintained racial details, and fair complexion communities were regarded as ¯ of Aryan lineage, whereas the dark skinned communities were classified as ¯ non-Aryans” (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 81, refer to Dirks 2001). Whereas ¯ the upper-caste were given high rank positions, “Non-Aryan races” were either socially excluded or recruited for military service by the British (Ibid. 81–82). ¯ Thus, since ‘Aryanness’ was selectively granted to the (imagined) past of the colonised upper castes, whereas ‘whiteness’ (as ‘Europeanness’) had to be preserved as rigorously as possible, I conclude that both categories may have been intersecting at times but have never been congruent, at least, from the coloniser’s perspective. Moreover, it can be stated that some Indians “whose vested interests

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¯ lay in British colonial rule relied on Aryanist ideology for their own advantage” (Khan 2009, 105). Marking the colonised as ‘non-white’ meant not to ‘colour’ them as ‘homogeneously black’, either. To find out more about how shades of colours were constructed and reconstructed during colonialism, I take a closer look at the “force[s] of the image” and the power of words “in empire-building and selfmaking” (Sumati Ramaswami 2014, 2),36 namely at examples of British colonial writing and painting. Nupur Chaudhuri (1994) provides an illustrative example of how not all Indians were made ‘black’ during British colonialism. She examines relations between Memsahibs37 and their servants in nineteenth-century India and finds British women describing Indians (Indian domestic servants in particular) using the ‘n-word’. She states that “in popular British magazines some memsahibs labeled dark skinned Indians as ‘niggers’” (Chaudhuri 1994, 553),38 and also emphasises how the Indian rebellion (in addition to Social Darwinism already promoting a hierarchical racial order) “popularized the term ‘niggers’”(Chaudhuri 1994, 557)39 for the indigenous Indian population amongst the colonisers. She cites British author Florence Marryat,40 who wrote: “The gentleman […] by way of propitiating the natives, issued invitations to a lot of niggers (I know they are not really ‘niggers’ but I liked to call them so) to attend […].” Chaudhuri further shows how in the 1860s and 1870s, “memsahibs for the first time referred to the Indians as ‘monkeys’, reflecting the influence of Social Darwinism on their discourse”: Mrs Gutherie described her ayah41 as very small, and very black, and as she sat in her low chair, or on the ground, with her skinny arms round the fair child, she looked exactly like a monkey wrapped up in white muslin.42 Another memsahib wrote that a great majority of Indian merchants have arms, legs, and body bare, and squat upon their shopboards or their doorsteps in attitudes strongly reminding one of the monkey 36 Ramaswami (2014) here refers to Laura Ann Stoler. 2009. Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press. 37 The term ‘Memsahib’ was used as a polite form to address the female colonisers in British India. 38 F. Marryat or Mrs. Ross Church (1867) Gup, Temple Bar: London magazine for town and country readers, 19, March, 178 ff., E. J. (1878) Indian servants, Queen, 2 February. 39 Hall, Catherine.1992. White, Male and Middle Class: explorations in feminism and history. Cambridge: Polity Press. 275. 40 Marryat 1867, 180; see also 178; cited by Chaudhuri 1994, 558. 41 ‘ayah’ meaning nursemaid/maidservant. 42 Guthrie, Katherine Blanche. 1877. My Year in an Indian Fort. London: Hurst. 244.

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tribes.43 By presenting the Indians as subhuman, memsahibs not only justified their claims to rule but also echoed the basic tenets of Social Darwinism (Chaudhuri 1994, 558).44

In these examples, it becomes evidently clear how distinctions between ‘rulers’ and ‘servants’ involved a ‘colouring of the other’. By referring to their (domestic) servants as ‘n-word’ or ‘monkeys’, British women not only dehumanised the colonised but might have also (re) established class or other social boundaries – because they primarily applied the term to lower-class servants or sellers (there is no evidence they applied them to employees in civil service or big landowners, for instance). Since not only colour but also “arms, legs and body bare” made one likely to belong to “monkey tribes”, and not all colours were perceived as dark – it is noted that only ‘dark skinned Indians’ were described as the ‘n-word’ – one may assume that differentiations made by the British included variations in terms of constructs of colour categories (shades) as well as factors crosscutting and contextualising colour (clothing, sitting posture, or general attitudes). Moreover, there is ambiguity and arbitrariness expressed when the term ‘[n-] word’ is applied with the restriction “I know they are not really niggers but I liked to call them so” (Marryat 1867, 180; cited by Chaudhuri 1994, 558). In this statement, Indians are constructed as being similar to and yet different from people usually designated by the ‘n-word’ (supposedly, Florence Marryat here refers to Black Africans and/or Black Atlantic diasporas). The fact, however, that the Indian rebellion of 1857–1859 led to an increase in calling Indians ‘the nword’ shows how ‘colouring’ the other was not a ‘top-down’ process, nor was it resulted from individual arbitrariness (“I like to call them so”) but rooted in equivocal and changing relations of control and resistance. Another revealing relation of ‘(skin) colouring’ and colonial power interests is reflected in British colonial painting. As was the case with colonial literature, painting also played a crucial role in presenting and producing racial and colour discourses. To depict the colonised Indians on canvas, British painters used a pigment called ‘Indian yellow’. Also known as purree, piuri, or jaune indien, Indian yellow was a popular and controversial component of the “Imperial Palette” (Bailkin 2014 [2005], 91). The pigment ‘Indian yellow’ became particularly popular among British artists for depicting a wider range of ‘skin colour’s in 43

A.U. 1873. Overland, Inland and Upland: a lady’s notes of personal observation and adventure. London: Seeley, Jackson & Halliday. 44. 44 For more information on ‘memsahibs’ and their knowledge of Social Darwinism, Chaudhuri (1994) recommends: N. L. Paxton (1992): English women’s auto biography under the Raj, in: S. Smith and J. Watson (eds.): De/colonizing the Subject: the politics of gender in women’s autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 402.

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early nineteenth century – “especially in the darker shades” (Bailkin 2014, 91). Even though visual aesthetics were an integral part of “the planned epistemic violence of the imperialist project” (Spivak 1985, 251), depicting Indian ‘skin colours’ on canvas soon came into conflict with controlling Indians politically, as its production conditions clashed with the colonisers’ fear of independence movements. Bailkin (2014) shows that the representation of ‘skin colours’ in colonial painting was controversially discussed in artist circles. “European painters approached the subject of ‘skin colour’ with a considerable degree of flexibility” in the eighteenth century; and a century later, “skin color and ‘savagery’ continued to not correspond in any simple, straightforward way” (94). To depict skin as ‘dark’ was considered “optional” (for example, there was a greater agreement in painting the colonised nude), it was only from the 1860s onwards that art teachers began to offer ‘skin colour’ charts and proposals to standardise colour terminology, “especially dusky, swarthy and pale” (94). At the peak of Indian yellow’s popularity, the desire to visually represent the colonised on canvas clashed with the desire to rule them. After Trailokya Nath Mukharji’s report (1883) on the origin of Indian yellow revealed that puree was produced from cow urine, the production of the celebrated pigment was banned by the British. Mukharji found out that – to achieve the special urine colour – the cows’ diet was limited to mango leaves, which led to severe malnutrition and rapid death of the cows. From 1880s, the cow protection movements and the progressing Swadeshi movement began to destabilise the British Raj: Lord Lansdowne regarded especially the cow movement as the “greatest threat to the British government since the ‘mutiny’” (101). In accordance with this assessment, the ban on Indian yellow closely followed a general boycott of British goods in Bihar (in the same part of Bihar where puree was produced). Thus, the ban can be understood as an effort by the British to (re)gain control (101). ‘Colour drawing’, literally, was hence indirectly opposed by the anti-colonial rebels, and the British artists had to refrain from depicting Indian ‘skin colour’ using ‘Indian yellow’ due to these rebellions. From these last two examples, not only can one see how the visual arts and literature played key roles in the creation and presentation of the colonial racial discourse, but also how these practices were affected by political resistance. The first Indian rebellion as well as the subsequent independent movements pressured the British Raj to either reinforce their oppressive language (‘the n-word’) or to withdraw from their most ‘successful’ way of depicting Indian ‘skin colours’ on canvas. I come back to arguing how attempts at defining, describing and depicting “skin colours’ were crucial to struggles for power in contemporary India in chapter 3.

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One last example of how identity in terms of colour is negotiated is provided by the case of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, wherein indentured labourers (‘coolie’ or ‘kuli’) were shipped from India to work on Caribbean sugar plantations. Aisha Khan (2009) shows how, under colonial rule, the Trinidadian society was divided into the dominant elite “whites” (British, Spanish and French), the “suspect whites” (French-Creole and Trinidadian-Whites), followed by the “browns” (middle-class Afro-Trinidadians) and finally the “blacks” (lower-class Afro-Trinidadians) as the lowest strata of society. Indo-Trinidadians, however, were excluded from this ‘white-brown-black’ stratification system, despite being “part of the Afro-European race and color hierarchy” (100) – a phenomenon Khan calls “absent presence” (Ibid.). For example, no local ‘race’ or colour lexicon existed for Indo-Europeans and only one term (“dougla”) for Indo-Africans (Khan 2009, 98). With India as point of reference, they were described as ¯ ‘Aryan’ or ‘Caucasian’ (but not ‘white’); in Trinidad, their identity was primarily defined by their status as ‘labourer’, hence their designation as either ‘coolie’ or ‘black’. In post-independence Trinidad, Indo-Trinidadians were further marginalized; whereas ‘browns’ consisted of the Afro- and Euro-Trinidadians middle class reclaiming authenticity and power, the term ‘black’ labelled the ‘working class’, which also included the Indo-Trinidadians (Khan 2009, 106–111). Although the ‘brown’ middle class intelligentsia in Trinidad lay emphasis on “Afro-Trinidadian traditional heritage”, the Indo-Trinidadians were marginalised as “black”, “dark” and “uncivilized” (108) and remained excluded from “the racial equitation of Trinidadian nationalism” (100). To sum up, regarding the era of colonialism, I argued that ascribing the label ¯ ‘ Aryan’ was rather connected to an imagined ‘European past’ than to any kind of ‘European whiteness’; that the label ‘black’ ascribed to subjugated Indians was not applied homogenously, and neither was the term ‘white’ for British sahibs (even if they attempted to present themselves as the consistent elite). Moreover, I demonstrated that white kinship could also be disguised due to caste rules. Looking more closely at the ways in which Indians were depicted in colonial paintings or described in British fiction, I showed how inventing, applying and depicting ‘skin colours’ by the colonialists varied in ‘shades’ (ranging from black to yellow) and depending on political power contexts (their aims to claim and reclaim power). Whereas subjugated Indians were constructed as ‘non-white’, the most decisive factor was maintaining the power to define them at all. When travelling beyond India, these terms changed again: I showed, invoking Khan (2009), that the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, mainly consisting of indentured labourers, was excluded from the local colour hierarchy in colonial Trinidad. These labourers were commonly referred to as ‘coolie/kuli’ within Trinidad, but their origin in

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¯ India was ‘Aryan’. In post-independence Trinidad, they became ‘black’, but their status was still defined by their working-class belonging. In the next chapter, I ask whether ‘skin colours’ played a role within anti-colonial movements, especially regarding identity constructions in Hindu nationalism.

2.2.2 ‘Skin Colour’ and the (Hindu) Nation Indian nationalism constitutes another crucial background against which identity formations are negotiated. The (re-) construction of collective cultural identities is a powerful source of counter-identification in (post)colonial societies, which have experienced subjugation to dominant regimes of representation (Stuart Hall 1994, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 1988). Therefore, I now ask whether ‘skin color’ played a critical role within constructions of collective ‘Indian’ or ‘Hindu’ identities. First, it needs to be noted that nationalism in India is a rather recent phenomenon that only emerged with the rise of independence movements. Tanika Sarkar (2009) argues that, in “pre-modern times, popular political loyalty was expected to be directed towards the sovereign and his realm, not towards a land and a people”, so that individuals had strong ties to their personal (familial) history, property and space,45 but no sense of “subcontinental belonging” (Sarkar 2009, 39). The invention that was India, however, could not solely be carried on the unifying but relatively recent freedom movement experience, thus a single, shared, continuous history to “appear as an enduring organism” (Sarkar 2009, 39) was urgently required. But lived linguistic traditions and cultural customs as well as styles of worship in India have always been plural, different from one another, and in some cases, mutually incomprehensible or simply unknown among one another (Sarkar 2009, 38). More widely spread languages like Sanskrit and Persian were only used by the elite, the circulation of commodities and traders was restricted to specific groups, and pilgrimage, too, was specific to a particular community or sect (Ibid.). In search for a nation-state narrative, many Hindus claimed they themselves would, firstly, constitute the most numerous group of people living in India, and secondly, be able to provide the most ancient continuous history, thus intending to justify why only Hinduism could fulfil the required ingredients of patriotism 45

“the Ramayana had declared that the mother and the birthplace are superior to heaven” (Sarkar 2009, 39).

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(Ibid.).46 However, as Hindus themselves were, and continue to be, stratified “by divisions of caste, region, language and sect”, and since a great number of “very old and extremely populous non-Hindu communities” (Sarkar 2009, 40) were excluded by designating India as ‘Hindu nation’, providing a breeding ground for Indian patriotism was never homogenous or consensual to begin with. This means, firstly, that in pre-colonial India, no singular ‘Hindu culture’ existed. Secondly, the development of Hinduism in nineteenth century India has, to a large extent, occurred in response to Western influences. European missionaries attacked certain Hindu practices and images, propagating that “idolatry and fetishism indicated barbarity” (Robb 1995, 37). Robb mentions Vivekananda, who inverted Western racism into “a kind of race pride of being a Hindu” (40). Thus, the question arises whether there were any essentialist concepts of ‘authentic Indian-ness’, or ‘Hindutva’, that entailed the category ‘skin colour’. As shown by invoking Sarkar (2009) above, Hinduism was primarily (made) available to fulfil an important identity-forming function within the quest for self-rule and anti-colonial struggles. In the struggle for independence and decolonisation emerged, in many former colonies, a need to construct an ideal society, across regional and national borders, based upon the shared experiences of colonialism. For instance, in the 1930s, an anti-colonial nationalism was expressed in the form of ‘Négritude’ – an alternative concept to the ‘Western’ concept of ‚blackness’. According to Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), ‘Négritude’ meant “awareness, defense and development of African cultural values” (John 2000, 79), yet it was also criticised for upholding binary oppositions as well as nostalgic and mythical conceptions of ‘blackness’.47 In India, too, a national ideology developed during the last phase of colonial rule. Despite starting off as a secular movement against the political economy of colonialism, it gradually became – under the ‘anti-colonial’ guise – ever more apparent as a pro-imperialistic, religious and racist “communalism”48 (cf. Ahmad 2004 [2002]). The far-right Hindu-nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak 46

“geographical integrity, historical continuity and cultural unity” (Sarkar 2009, 38). Cf. Mc Leod, John. 2000. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester University Press. 81–83. 48 According to Ahmad, ‘communalism’ is a fictional, ethno-religious, political ideology, which denies the centrality of differences (regarding social gender, regional or linguistic difference, caste or class hierarchies) between people grouped into one religious identity. Cultural differences are deemed absolute whereas the extent to which different religious systems have influenced and modified each other is minimized or negated. Moreover, it is assumed that religious groups will always be in conflict with each other. This extreme form of ‘communalism’ practised by the RSS re-defines nationalism as anti-muslim, anti-communist; it is hostile towards the legacy of secular national movements; and devoted to a re-definition 47

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Sangh (RSS)49 still evokes to periods of foreign rules by the Muslims and the British, and derives its own legitimacy from the racist views of the colonisers.50 However, at the same time, the RSS grants the British the right to rule – criticised are not the suppressers, but the oppressed: A weak man has to hide himself from a stronger one, or when trapped by the strong he has to accept slavery under the strong. There is no use blaming the stronger. Who inspires the strong to be aggressive? It is the weak society. To be weak is a sin [...]. The weak lose the right to exist on the earth (Chitkara 2004, x-xi).

The RSS thereby elicits an ideology from the colonial experience that shall legitimate the enforcement of the interests of one simulated ‘group’ (defined according to religion) by the degradation and annihilation of constructed ‘enemies’. However, the use of force is not only presented as legitimating the enforcement of their own interests but also as a necessary reaction to the aggressions of the ‘other’: “Of course the organization, which RSS has developed, is not meant for attacking others […] the aim is to make an organization, which would put an end to the unjust, aggressive tendencies of others” (Chitkara 2004, x). The ‘National Steering Committee on Textbook Evaluation’ reviewed reports by the ‘National Council for Educational Research and Training’ (NCERT) on schoolbooks used in different Indian states as well as textbooks used in RSS-founded ‘Saraswati Shishu Mandir’ and ‘Vidya Bharati Schools’. The evaluation of the ¯ latter revealed a clear picture of the Hindutva version of ‘Aryan origin’ which I introduced above:

of nationalism by „a hysterical kind of religiosity “, instead (cf. Ahmad 2004, xxiii-xxxiii and 1–61; in particular xxiv, xxvi and 25). 49 The ‚Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ‘(RSS) is a militant Hindu nationalist organisation. It was founded in Nagpur in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar with the intent to establish a Hindu state. Today, the political wing of the RSS is the BJP (1951–1980 Jana Sangh Party), other sub-organisations such as the ‘Vishva Hindu Parishad’ (VHP) are responsible for the dissemination of Hindutva ideology in social life; they are subsumed under the name ‘Sangh Pariva’. 50 “They [the British] preached – that in fact, Bharat had never been a nation, and that it was hereafter to be initiated into the path of civilization in the footsteps of the white man. All such pretensions such as the white man’s rule being a ‘divine dispensation’, or a ‘White Man’s burden’ or their pet theories like ‘Aryans came to India from outside’ or that we are a ‘nation-in-making’ or that the Hindus had always been slaves either to the one or the other, or they are a ‘dying race’ were gulped down by the English-educated as pristine gospel truths.” (Chitkara, M.G. 2004. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. National Upsurge. New Delhi: S.B. Nangia. A.P.H Publishing Corporation. xi.).

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[I]n order to argue that Muslims and Christians are foreigners, it was necessary to ¯ argue that the ‘Aryans’, whom the RSS acknowledge as the true Indians, did not migrate from outside India but originated in India (and that they predated the Harappan civilisation) even if it meant that another RSS guru, Golwalkar, had to argue, ¯ doing considerable violence to history and geography, that the Aryans may have come from the North Pole, but the North Pole was originally in India, in the region of ¯ today’s Bihar and Orissa, and while the Aryans remained in India the North Pole later zigzagged its way up to its current location! (Mukherjee et al 2008, 30-31).

Referring to Susan Bayly (1995), Robb (1995) states that Hinduism became a ‘national faith’, evolving in confrontation with Muslims and Westernisers, which “spread beyond belief and worship to create identity” (41). Debates evolved ¯ around a Hindu “race pride” (Robb 1995, 40), religious purity and ‘Aryan’ origin. According to Christophe Jaffrelot (1995), Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s (1883–1966) idea of a “pure race”, was mainly based upon territorial and cultural ¯ ¯ criteria, supposedly including ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ people. Moreover, communalist pamphlets circulated, in which Muslims were asked to join the Hindu community (“Come on brothers, become Kshatriyas “, cited from “Great Danger to the Hindus”, 1938).51 Thus, even though Hindu identity constructions are primarily based on differentiations from the ‘British’ and the ‘Muslims’, Hindu nationalism evidently consists of diverse currents, and the lines of differentiations vary accordingly. Moreover, contradictions are intrinsic to communalist ideologies, e.g., simultaneously rejecting ‘white supremacy’ for being racist while also developing racist ideas based on the very model of race supremacy. A novel by Rabindranath Tagore from 1907 called Gora draws from entangled social meanings and functions of ‘skin colour’ when it unfolds amidst the anti-colonial movements in Bengal. Different ‘nationalist projects’ emerged: on the one hand, there was a rather ‘liberal movement’ aimed at reforming Hinduism (led by the Brahmo sect), and on the other hand, there was a rather ‘conservative movement’ (led by orthodox Hindus).Whereas both movements were anti-British, the novel “lends greater prominence to Hindu-Brahmo tensions” (Radha Chakravarty 2014 [2009], vii). The young protagonist is called ‘Gora’, the fair skinned one. Even though he is repeatedly depicted as strikingly fair (“His complexion was rather blatantly fair, not softened by the slightest hint of yellow”, 8), his ‘skin colour’ gives no reason to question his ‘Indian identity’

51

Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1995. The ideas of the Hindu race in the writings of Hindu nationalist ideologues in the 1920s and 1930s: A concept between two cultures. In: The Concept of Race in South Asia. Peter Robb (ed.) Delhi: Oxford University Press. 327–354. See 346, footnote 73.

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throughout the novel. He is an enthusiastic follower of orthodox Hindu nationalism, what leads to inner struggles when he falls in love with Sucharita, a Brahmo girl. Gora does not know that he was adopted by his Indian Brahmin family: his biological Irish parents were killed during the Indian rebellion of 1857. Gora’s adoptive parents only worry about his non-Brahmin-status, not about his ‘white European ancestry’. Although Gora was initiated “into Brahmanism with the poité ceremony” as a baby (31), his foster father now declares to his wife that he “can’t let him marry according to Hindu rites into a Brahman family” (32). It is only towards the end of the novel that Gora finds out about the adoption. After discovering his Irish parentage, Gora’s reference points for identification waver: if his identity is no longer defined by his Brahmin ancestry and the pride of his caste, what kind of anti-colonial nationalist can he now be? Chakravarty (2014) explains that “[i]ronically, it is in losing everything that had previously marked his [Gora’s] sense of identity – nation, caste, religion, parentage – that Gora becomes free to claim his identity as a true Indian, Bharatvarshiya” (ix). Tanika Sarkar (2009) refers to the double meaning of the protagonist’s name and the book’s title: “In fact, the naming is significant. The word [‘gora’] means white and signifies both the white race as well as the beloved Vai´snav saint of early modern Bengal, the great Chaitanya who was also called Gouranga or Gora” (Sarkar 2009, 44). Thus, on the one hand, the name refers to Gora’s Irish parents, who are also referred to as “white men” by Gora’s foster mother (31). But the name also refers to a supposedly ‘fair skinned’ saint (1486–1534), who founded the Gaudiya Vaishnavism and was a proponent of the Vaishnava school of Bhakti Yoga. Just as the story’s general focus on Hindu-Brahmo conflicts points beyond the “simple opposition of British and Indian, colonizer and colonized” (viii), the ambiguity of the name ‘Gora’ goes beyond a binary hierarchy between ‘white’ and ‘coloured’. Gora’s fair skin marks the ‘white foreigner’ as well as the uppercaste, orthodox Hindu nationalist. In that sense, the novel generally questions “the myth of fixed origins (Chakravarty xii, referring to Nair 59). As for ‘the moral of the story’, a scholar concludes that, to negotiate identity, religion and freedom in this novel, “[c]olour does not matter […] but culture and character do” (Chakravarty 2014 [2009], xii referring to Nair 2002, 60). Apparently, within multiple Indian national movements, questions of skin or hair were not as explicitly addressed as they were by anti-colonial African or African diaspora movements. Starting in the 1960s in the US, the cultural movement ‘Black is beautiful’ dispelled racist, white-supremacist devaluations of black bodies, and particularly encouraged blacks to not bleach their skin and straighten their hair (Craig 2002). In India, I found that slogans such as ‘Dark is beautiful’

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have only recently entered public debates. Moreover, these contemporary anticolourism campaigns seem to be less embedded in broader political and social struggles (as I show in chapter 4). Yet, Hindu nationalists, too, considered the more general questions of beauty and body crucial. Whereas women and women’s politics were predominantly marginalised within anti-colonial, Indian-nationalist movements, it was women’s embodiments that become central to the processes of nation-making – e.g., when symbolising “the true repository of purity, sacredness and honour” (Thapan 2009, 11) – or when the cultural identity of the community and the nation was staked on a specific notion of “womanhood” (Butalia 1996).52 Thus, questions of politicoeconomic developments or cultural identities were heavily intertwined with and negotiated on the basis of women’s bodies and beauty. Hence, the anti-colonial image of women was constructed as counterpart to that of ‘Western’ women, emphasising women’s purity, spirituality, and the worshiping of women as mother or goddess – especially in Hindu nationalist’ ideology, the nation was constructed as goddess, as the embodiment of Shakti (the elemental female power of the universe) and as Bharat Mata (Mother India). In the 19th-century discourses on the ‘New Indian Woman’, her “authencitiy and cultural superiority […] lay in her difference vis-à-vis both ‘Westernized’ women and the ‘common’ woman of the lower castes and classes”(Mankekar 1999, 157). As I show in chapter 3, with economic liberalisation, this desire to demarcate oneself from ‘traditional’ and ‘common’ Indian women gained in importance: an elite discourse emerged where high- and middle-class as well as upper-caste women distinguished themselves from the lower strata of society. The then emerging ideal image of the ‘New Indian Woman’ was meant to encompass both the presumably ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ features. On the one hand, women were supposed to be ‘modern’, educated and working, and on the other hand, they were expected to be ‘traditional’ and ‘Indian’, representing strong ‘family values’. In that sense, Titzmann (2014) concludes, ‘The New Indian Woman’ in both colonial and post-colonial era functioned as counterpart to what political feminism in India stood for: it became a “harmonization project”, invented

52

“Normally relegated to the margins, at times of nationalist struggle women come to symbolize the honour and virtue of the nation. They become the icons, the mother-figures for whom men are willing to lay down their lives. It is on this notion of womanhood that the cultural identity of the community and the nation is staked. Throughout the freedom movement in India, nationalists portrayed the country in feminine terms. India was ‘the motherland’” (Butalia, Urvashi. 1996. Mother India. In: New Internationalist Magazine, Issue 227, 03/1996, https://newint.org/features/1996/03/05/mother/ (accessed online 31 May 2017)).

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to ease conflicts eventually arising in times of social and economic change, to weaken and silence women and women’s movements. During British colonialism and in early post-colonial India, no local industrial production of decorative cosmetics existed. These products were only available abroad, and only affordable for affluent elites. Furthermore, decorative make-up was seen as inconsistent with the necessity of controlling women’s sexuality.53 This conception of women’s ‘purity’ became an essential part of the anti-colonial image of the ‘Indian woman’, whereas, in fact, this idea had been very much promoted by the Victorian moral codes (Abu-Er-Rub 2017). When “patriotic production” (Deshpande 1993) increased during ‘Nehruvian Socialism’ – or rather, state-led capitalism (Ebenau and Schmalz 2011) – India’s first cosmetic company ‘Lakmé’ emerged in the 1950s. The local production of cosmetics was meant to strengthen the domestic economy. The new “patriotic production” of beauty (products) aimed at encompassing different social strata unified as the ‘exploited poor’ by the British Raj, or more generally, the ‘West’. However, it mainly created a national beauty market for middle class Indian women (see chapter 3). With the rise of “Hindu majoritanism after the 1980s” medial representation of women by state television (Doordarshan programs), for instance, “was invariably Hindu […], middle-class, upper-caste (and often, North Indian)” (Mankekar 1999, 161; refered to by Titzmann 2014, 227). The emerging far-right version of Hindu nationalism – that is, Hindutva ideology and its organisations such as the RSS, VHP and the BJP – also shape beauty regimes. Questions of female beauty are ambivalently assessed by Hindu nationalists. On the one hand, “[t]he Hindu Right opposes beauty pageants as well as print media, film and television representations of the ‘body beautiful’ on the grounds that these are corrupting ‘foreign’ influences that threaten to destroy the fabric of ‘Hindu’ culture and traditional ‘Indian’ values” (Munshi 2004, 172, reference to Ghosh 1999, Sundaram 1998). Whereas some Hindu nationalists (re)claim a specific ‘anti-modern’ Indian-ness, others represent an ‘authentic’ Indian-ness plus ‘modernity’ (cf. Dimeo 2004). Hence, the Hindu Right objects to beauty pageants and media representations of women based “on a desire to protect the modesty and ‘Indian-ness’ of women with reference to a glorious Hindu past” (Munshi 2004, 172, reference to Kapur and Cossmann 1996). However, the RSS, for instance, is “eager to promote a version of Indian-ness that emphasized modernity and mobilization” (Dimeo 2004, 46). Signifying both cultural authenticity and modernity, the ideal of the ‘New Indian Woman’ seems partly compatible with demands by the Far-Right. One 53

With the exception of kajal, which has not only a decorative, but also a religious, ritual and medical function in India. (cf. Abu-Er-Rub 2017, 157, referring to Chandra 1973, 181f.).

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important characteristic of the ‘New Indian Woman’, in general, and the global Indian beauty queen, in particular, is her ‘fair skin’ (Osuri 2008, Parameswaran 2005, V. Reddy 2006). Moreover, both beauty contests and nationalist organisations require a certain amount of self-discipline, physical fitness, and training. For example, the work of the RSS-related Bharatiya Yog Sansthan (BYS) focusses on the “disciplined body” (Alter 2004, 29).54 Furthermore, “those who prepare the [beauty] contestants talk of the importance of ‘a Vedic lifestyle, replete with yoga, mantras and meditation’” (Munshi 2004, 175): In a sense, Indian beauty pageant contestants are also warrior-bodies and athletebodies, representing the nation in the world of nations in ways that are not fundamentally dissimilar from those of soldiers and cricketers. All are highly disciplined, inherently narcissistic, and shaped by demands of transnational encounters, but they are also culturally authenticated and charged with that mixture of envy, assertiveness and exhilaration that Liah Greenfeld calls ressentiment. Like the athletic bodies that were created by colonial schools and the imperial experience of an earlier era, the body of the ‘new’ Indian woman is susceptible to cosmopolitanism and multiple citizenship, and this alluring diffusion of allegiance cannot always be controlled. This is why the ‘Hindu Right’ is ambivalent, but not uniformly hostile, towards the cult of the beauty pageant, much as earlier generations of Indian nationalist were unsure about ‘brown’ men who played ‘white’ sports. (Mills and Sen 2004, 10, original emphasis)

Lastly, since contemporary fairness – as I show in the following chapters – is a beauty norm (re)defined as ‘naturally Indian’, it does not generally contradict the Hindu nationalists’ notion of the ‘traditional’ woman who opposes the ‘white’ woman. On the contrary, the global-national construction of ‘Indian fairness’ (cf. chapter 4) is rather consistent with the RSS’s quest for ‘modern Indianness’. Since women have become politically more active and visible in Hindu nationalist organisations (e.g., Shiv Sena’s ‘Mahila Aghadi’ or the Rashtra Sevika Samiti), relations between bodily appearances and the performance of female Hindu identity might also become more central in the future (cf. Kalyani Devaki Menon 2010, Amrita Basu 1999, Sikata Banerjee 1995 and 2003, and Tanika Sarkar 2001).

54

“Also inspired by certain elements of RSS ideology (see Alter 1997), the BYS has evolved into an organization that is more concerned with a particular form of class struggle with modernity, and with health, that with nationalism per se” (Alter 2011, 163). The RSS itself “has a rather ambivalent attitude toward the practice of yoga and the embodiment of biomorality, being much more concerned with clearly articulated forms of masculinity in sports and martial arts.” (ibid).

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As I hope to have shown in this brief section, for various Indian national movements, ‘skin colour’ did not play a prominent role; it was rather subordinated to, but also entangled with, other categories of social stratification. Most ¯ commonly, Hindu nationalists made use of the categories ‘Hindu’ and ‘Aryan’. The latter was of particular importance to the far-right nationalists, who further ¯ based their identity narratives on the notion that the ‘Aryans’ originated in India. Within anti-colonial movements, debates over the body and beauty became most crucial with regard to women, or rather, women’s embodiments. Concerning female bodies – as representations of ‘the nation’ or certain interpretations of ‘Hinduism’ – questions about the ‘appropriate’ appearance, including fashion and make-up, were ideologically charged and differed accordingly. Hence, even farright communalism could support the emerging ideal of the ‘New Indian Woman’, encompassing features signalling not only ‘modernity’ but also ‘tradition’. As I show in more detail in chapters 3 and 4, the kind of ‘Indian fairness’ that was most desired by my research participants was situated exactly within this national narrative; hence, fair skinned women represent a cosmopolitan, but distinctive ‘Indian’ nation.

2.3

Interim Conclusions

From the different approaches to the entangled systems of social stratification in pre-colonial and colonial India touched upon above, several conclusions for the social category ‘colour’ can now be drawn. Generally, I showed that the category ‘skin colour’ was (re)drawn throughout various episodes of Indian history, visible in paintings, religious scripts, oral narrations, or fictional literature. ‘Fair skin’, in particular, was (re)mobilised as a distinction marker by various social groups struggling for power. Thus, colour categories and especially fairness of skin were predominantly (re)produced by powerful ruling elites, such as certain upper castes, far-right Hindu nationalists, Mogul rulers, and the British Raj, respectively. Especially during the British Raj, ‘skin colour’ became a category that made the divide in rulers and oppressed justified through European race theory visibly clear. ‘Skin colour’ was (re)mobilized not only when white supremacy sought to legitimize itself, but also when first attempts were made to construct ‘caste’ as a ‘racialised’ category and system. It also demonstrates the ruling elites’ power of defining when Indians were to be marked, simultaneously; as ¯ ‘Aryan ancestors’ (thus providing the colonisers with an intellectual past) and

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¯ ‘blacks’ (thereby legitimating colonial exploitation). Yet, the ‘Aryan race theory’ was not only propagated by the British but also by upper-caste Indians who sought to maintain and naturalise Brahmin hegemony, and thus also entered alliances with ‘white supremacy’. These ascriptions, however, never remained unchallenged; political movements not only led to changes in colonial literary descriptions (increased use of the n-word) or visual representations (ban on the production of ‘Indian yellow’), but also to anti-colonial re-adoptions of ‘black’ (e.g., Dalit Panthers). However, unlike is fundamental role in black anti-colonial movements, re-definitions of terms like ‘dark’ (as beautiful) seem to be a rather recent phenomenon in India (chapter 4). In early pre-colonial India, however, systems of social distinction were mainly based on territory, language, religious rituals, and knowledge/technical skills (Thapar (1971). Social boundaries erected upon these categories were extended and transformed by the ruling elite whenever the opportunity for expansion of territory and power arose. This became apparent in the concept of ‘degenerate ¯ ks.atriya’ or the general process of ‘Aryanizing’/’Sancritisation’. Hence, in the ¯ literature, there was no evidence for the thesis that the term ‘Aryan’ was used in ¯ an “ethnic sense” (Thapar 1971). Further contrasting to the ‘Aryan’ myth was the ¯ literature showing that the indigenous non-Aryan-speakers were not consistently depicted and described as ‘dark skinned’ in ancient Hindu scriptures such as the R.gveda. Even though ‘skin colour’ was not a necessary and consistent criterion for group constructions in early India, it was already a marker of (particularly female) beauty. Representations of the Hindu goddesses Radha and Kali illustrate how fair and dark was at times binary, but also ambiguously narrated. In both cases, the desired fair ideal is not (only) described as being ‘white’ but rather as having a ‘golden’ tone. In the following two chapters, I look more closely at the ‘makings’ of light skin as ‘golden’ (“India Shining”, Chapter 3). To sum up, it appeared that the desire for fair skin was neither a phenomenon that was locally limited (but rather transnational), nor a mere consequence of colonialism (but rather predated the British Raj). However, there were also evidences suggesting that fairness was not always and everywhere regarded as desirable – for instance, within the context of (post)colonialism and caste politics, among the Thiyya in Kerala (Abraham 2006). Nevertheless, for the upper castes in Maharashtra, fair skin played a significant role in identity- and groupformation processes (e.g., Chitpavan Brahmins). Generally, I showed that ‘skin colour’ was not only a marker of difference between Hindus and non-Hindus, but rather seemed to be required for differentiations among Hindus themselves. That was the case not only when Brahmin hegemony was to be maintained, but also

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when lower castes fought against caste discrimination (e.g., Dalits identifying as the ‘Black Untouchables of India’). Now, how do these shifting power interests, changes in social orders as well as post-colonial, political and economic developments continue to inform and reshape fair skin as a beauty standard and social distinction marker? Having traced the history of ‘fair skin’ in India as a locally embedded yet transnational, colonially re-shaped and subversively re-defined signifier of social status and norm of beauty, I next turn to more contemporary constructions of fair skin. That means, I next analyse fair skin as a form of commodity and aesthetic labour (focussing on relations among colourism, nation-making processes, capitalist hegemony, neoliberal subjectivity, and ‘post-racial’ and ‘post-feminist’ ideologies, Chapter 3) as well as everyday experiences of colourism (chapter 4).

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Beauty as Project, Fairness as Product: ‘Skin Colour’ Management and Fairness Consumption in Post-colonial India

India has been […] undergoing very rapid economic changes over the last 30 years; offshoot of that has been that women are much more visible in employment, and much more active in the economy. Obviously, the economy is also pushing women to join the work force, and pushing women to join skin labour […]. But in the case of advertisement, fairness is also becoming attached to this idea of upward mobility, to…success. (Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014)

The political campaign slogan ‘India Shining’, which was popularised by the right-wing communalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the run-up to the national elections 2004, strikingly corresponds to trends set by India’s beauty and fashion industry. Spreading all over Indian TV channels and newspapers, ‘India Shining’ soon became a buzzword for India’s economic success,1 propagating an excessive optimism about the ongoing market reforms. Critical voices in the media, however, stressed that ‘India Shining’, conjures up glittering malls, multiplexes, flashy cars and clothes, discotheques and holidays abroad. It conjures up a world where consumption [...] drives economic growth. [...] It’s one in which the new middle class, which now solidly supports it, will drive the country to prosperity by indulging its appetite fully.2

Similarly, India’s first national cosmetic company, Lakmé, launched a product range in 2001 called ‘Shimmer, Shine, and Sparkle’. That name echoed exactly what Abu-Er-Rub (2017) has identified as a key narrative for beauty and national 1

This ‘economic success’ primarily meant high growth rates and high levels of foreign investment. 2 http://india.eu.org/920.html. Not so shining, really. Prem Shankar Jha. Monday, 2 February 2014. Outlook India. Last visited 18 December 2018. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2022 N. Kullrich, Skin Colour Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64922-0_3

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identities in neoliberal India: visual representations of gold, glow, shine and shimmer, she argues, are used by industry, media and government (‘nation branding’) to mediate visually between what is considered ‘Indian tradition’ or ‘authenticity’, on the one hand, and the increasing commercialisation of a ‘modern national identity’ on the other, so as to encourage urban (upper-) middle-class consumption and to secure India’s growing economic power (cf. Abu-Er-Rub 2017). This chapter tells the story of how the making of ‘India Shining’ is reflected in and entangled with the making of the fair, female Indian body. Generally following the notion that racialist ideologies lie at the very foundation of capitalism itself (Robinson 1983, Davis 1981, Joseph 19813 ), and considering that female embodiments are central to projects of nation-making (and, more recently, nation branding), I argue that the fair female body has been key to processes of political transformation in both the state-led, capitalist, early postcolonial Indian nation as well as the contemporary, neoliberal, post-liberalisation India, and vice versa. Within these processes, female beauty has become a mode of consumption and further representative of an Indian nation striving for economic power. Not only has the increase in the production and consumption of beauty products meant to strengthen the Indian economy, but beauty norms and their embodied practices have further perpetuated and restructured power asymmetries and social distinctions in times of crisis, especially amidst such formally ‘equal’ societies as post-colonial India since 1950.4 ‘Skin colour’ politics in contemporary, urban North India, so I argue, reinforce distinction not only between genders but also between the (upper) middle and lower classes and castes as well as between rural and urban women. At the same time, it is through women’s embodiment that the Indian nation is represented as socially mobile and cosmopolitan, combining what is called ‘tradition’ or ‘diversity’ with ‘development’ and ‘modernity’. Building upon the reconstruction of precolonial and colonial conceptions of colourism and fairness that have not been necessarily ‘local’ but rather transnational and interlaced with ‘Western’ beauty standards (chapter 2), this chapter 3

“Black feminist thinkers such as Angela Davis (Davis 1981) and Gloria Joseph have shown ‘why racism must be addressed specifically and consistently as an integral part of any theory of feminism and Marxism’ (Joseph 1981, 93).” (Nicola Lauré al-Samarai and Peggy Piesche 2018. Whiteness. In: Marx from the Margins. Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy Issue 2, 2018. 4 Cf. the Constitution of India, Part III, Articles 12–35. The Constitution of India basically formulates equality in terms of “prohibition” of discrimination (namely, on grounds of religion, caste, race, sex, and place of birth, Art. 15), or in terms of “protection” of minorities’ interests (see esp. Art. 29). (https://www.india.gov.in/sites/upload_files/npi/files/coi_ contents.pdf, last visited 18 December 2018).

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shows how ‘skin colour’ became a commodity fetish5 (cf. Young 2009, 9, cited by Erevelles 2011, 62) in the years since the Independence, and how it persists in contemporary, post-liberalisation, post-globalisation India. “Fetish ritual”, argues McClintock (1995) in her study of commodity racism during 19th -century colonialism, served particularly well in an era of crisis and social calamity to preserve the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity. This chapter elaborates on how that also applies to contemporary India. In the second epigraph to this chapter, feminist activist Virmati6 describes how recent economic changes in India have pushed women to join the workforce and skin labour. Elaborating further on the increase of women’s labour exploitation, Virmati provides a perspective that contradicts the neoliberal common-sense assumption promising ‘prosperity for all’ through economic growth. On the contrary, writes Jha (2016), the neoliberal capitalist economy in India created new labour divisions, not only between the upper layer and lower social strata but also within the gendered middle classes: [T]he rise of the middle class has not resulted in economic democratization for the majority, as even within middle-class jobs women are often paid less than men and are directed to more causal and insecure jobs like secretarial work. The new capitalist economy has benefited upper-caste groups and the women in these groups due to the expansion of private-sector, multinational corporate, and white collar jobs, whereas poorer groups from lower castes that are much more reliant on state resources and reservations in jobs and university seats have lost out, creating stratification within the middle class. Working class women’s labour is exploited by multinational firms paying lower wages for causal work, and this results in a new division of labour. (Jha 2016, 60 refers to Ferandnes and Heller 2006, 495 and to Jodhka and Prakash 2011)

Against this background, my interlocutor Virmati emphasised the fact that it is women, often already precarious workers, who additionally engage in skin labour. Virmati thus disentangled the ‘naturalised’ links between labour, gender 5

I adopt the concept of ‘commodity fetish’ to refer to what Karl Marx has called the ‘mysteriousness’ of the shape of commodities, which presents the societal character of people’s labour activities, products and relations as an objective and natural characteristic inherent to labour products (MEW 23, 86). Within racialised capitalist societies, ‘skin colour’ embodies a commodity value that disguises ‘naturalised’ ways labour and race get interlinked (cf. “fetishistic representation”, White, draft under review for Social Dynamics, a special issue on race and capital forthcoming in 2020, 19; downloaded from https://www.academia.edu/373 74097/How_is_Capitalism_Racial_Fanon_and_Critical_Theory_draft_-_under_review_). 6 I met Virmati, Veena and Shambu, all activists with the feminist collective Saheli in Delhi, for a group discussion. They were ranging from the early 40 s to mid 50 s when we met. Upon their request, no further demographic details will be given in this thesis.

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and beauty. These myths commonly present certain kinds of (mostly re) productive labour as inherently ‘female’ (Mohanty 2003, referred to by Casanova 2011, 4) and beauty labour as not being labour at all (cf. “hidden labour”, see Black 2004). Based on the assumption that fairness is a necessity for women to successfully enter both the job and the marriage markets (chapter 4), I examine, in this chapter, how the beauty industry invocates socially differently positioned women in multifarious ways. By looking closely at the various ways fairness is defined, promoted and made available by the beauty industry, we learn a lot about how social distinctions, subjectivities, states, and economies are (re-) made. Through the production, promotion and selling of commodities, the bleaching industry co-creates affects touching upon the daily life of (potential) skin bleachers, who again try to manoeuvre their selves and shades within a highly stratified society (chapter 4). How these processes of identification and belonging are negotiated by means of beauty work and consumption is vividly explained by Anil Chopra, former CEO of Lakmé Cosmetics, when interviewed by Abu-Er-Rub at the 2012 Lakmé Fashion Week in Mumbai: What’s happening is that a lot of people wanted to look Western and not be identified as an Indian stereotype because India itself manifested poverty and not a successful country […]. Until fifteen years ago, the [Indians] who were in Europe or even in [the] UK, which has the largest Indian population, were cleaners at airports or doing menial jobs. Today the richest people in the UK and a lot of places in the world are Indians, the big bankers are Indians. So there is this huge pride, and that’s reflecting itself in our appearance. I want to be identified and seen as an Indian and that’s reflecting itself in fashion again. So, I see this resurgence of pride and our history. […] The designers are now trying to look Indian, but not the traditional old Indian. Still a modernity, but with a very strong Indian identity. (Interview with Anil Chopra by Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Mumbai, 5 March 2012).

Following Anil Chopra’s observations about the Indian fashion industry, I examine how the makings of post-colonial, post-liberalisation Indian identities relate to ‘skin colour’ politics, how the national image of ‘India Shining’ corresponds to the fair skin norm, which is not only ‘naturally’, ‘originally’ and ‘normally’ Indian, but is also extraordinarily ‘shining’ and ‘glowing’ (chapter 4). Drawing on textual analyses of the beauty industry and beauty products, in this chapter, I concentrate on symbolic and material objectifications of the fairness dispositive. These are further examined with regard to practices of governance and control: here, the self-entrepreneurial (e.g., Bröckling 2007) as mode of subjectification comes into focus (cf. chapter 1). The chapter is comprised of three sections. The first section briefly traces the creation of a national cosmetic industry during early post-colonial, state-led

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capitalism. To do so, I analyse a story exemplary of how India’s first national cosmetic company, Lakmé, was established in the 1950s. The story points to the general significance of women’s embodiment for nation-making processes, and elaborates on how social demands on female beauty and bodies began to increase within the context of “neoliberal and postfeminist governmentality and capitalism’s move to colonise all of life” (Elias et al. 2017, 33). Against this background, this section finally outlines the development from “patriotic” to “cosmopolitan” (beauty) consumption (Deshpande 1993). In the second section, I show how the beauty industry’s sales and promotion strategies make use of neoliberal concepts of empowerment, and neoliberal subjectivities more generally, targeting and creating what I call ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘subaltern7 ’ consumers. This section is based on an analysis of advertisement, corporate responsibility, as well as marketing and sales strategies of the multinational consumer goods company, Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL).8 HUL manufactures the most popular and profitable fairness product line in India, Fair & Lovely (F&L). First, I show how HUL makes use of the concept of (body) confidence, advertised as a basic requirement for the urban (upper) middle class women for entering into the growing service sector in India, or into “glitzi looking offices”, as one interviewee put it (group interview with the feminist collective Saheli collective, 22 February 2014). Secondly, this section enlarges upon the latest sales strategies of HUL for expanding to the more rural areas, exploring their approach for selling to—but primarily governing—the poor. To do so, HUL has introduced affordable tiny “sachets” of skin lightening creams to low-income households, and has further offered the direct selling of fairness products as job opportunities to “village women”, along with other charitable projects promising ‘inclusion’ into what Prahalad and Hammond (2004) call a “democratized market”. Lastly, I examine the skin bleaching industry in India amidst transnational trades, colonial continuities, and global white supremacy. By comparing skin bleaching creams to commodity racism in nineteenth century colonialism 7

Following Ranajit Guha (1982, 1988), under ‘subaltern’ I understand the “‘demographic difference’ between the elites and the rest of the Indian population” (Roy Chowdhuri 2016); a space within a colonized territory that is isolated from all forms of mobility (Dhawan/Castro Varela 2015, 155). 8 Until 2007, HUL was known as Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL); before 1965, it was Lever Brothers (established in 1933). In 1931, Unilever set up its first Indian subsidiary, Hindustan Vanaspati Manufacturing Company followed by Lever Brothers India Limited (1933) and United Traders Limited (1935). All three merged into HLL in 1965. https://www.hul.co.in/ about/who-we-are/our-history/last visited 5 December 2018.

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(McClintock 1995), I finally draw a more complex picture of how fair skin can be understood as a specific ‘colour commodity’ in post-colonial, post-liberalisation India.

3.1

The Story of Lakmé: ‘Patriotic Production’ and the Creation of a National Cosmetic Industry During State-Led Capitalist, Early Independent India

This section traces how the national Indian beauty market came into being. It demonstrates that (re)locating fairness within the national Indian beauty narrative was linked to wider nation-building processes. As I showed in the previous chapter, during British colonialism and in early postcolonial India, no local industrial production of decorative cosmetics existed. These products were only available abroad, and only affordable for the affluent elite. When “patriotic production” (Deshpande 1993) increased during postcolonial ‘Nehruvian Socialism’—or rather, state-lad capitalism (cf. Ebenau and Schmalz 2011)—India’s first cosmetic company, Lakmé, was established in the 1950s on behalf of the Indian government. With the state initiating national cosmetic production, beauty became a national concern. In its origin, a local production of cosmetics was meant to strengthen the domestic economy. On the whole, in early independent India, “patriotic production” aimed at encompassing different social strata, unified as the ‘exploited poor’ by the British Raj, or ‘the West’, more generally (Deshpande 1993). However, in the case of the national beauty market, only (upper-) middle-class Indian women were targeted. Within this process, ‘Indian’ beauty norms were created and beauty standards were set. In that sense, access to affordable beauty products was formulated as a ‘right’ of the (upper) middle classes from the beginning. Irrespective of the varieties of beauty work actually practised throughout India, from the perspective of the state and industry, beauty was thereby conceptualised as a distinct class performance. “Patriotic Production” Since India gained independence in 1947, postcolonial state-developing strategies first aimed at establishing a mixed, relatively autonomous economy, which was primarily based on state planning, state intervention, import subvention, industrial modernisation, and a relative autarky of the national economy (cf. Ebenau/Schmalz 2011, 81 and 88). This state-led capitalist strategy, although often described as ‘(Nehruvian) socialism’ or ‘socialist pattern of development’, actually had greater focus on technical progress than on egalitarian values (Ebenau/Schmalz 2011, 87,

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refers to Nilsen 2008, 306 f.). Already during the independence movement evolved a (small, at first, but growing) national bourgeoisie demanding capitalist modernisations. Initially, the ruling Congress Party (Indian National Congress, INC) succeeded in rhetorically integrating the subaltern classes into their modernisation project, which was thus also described as “Nehruvian Consensus” (Ebenau/Schmalz 2011, 87, refers to Menon/Nigam 2007, 3). ‘Nehruvian socialism’ strived to establish a national economy that was able to ‘catch up’ with ‘Western’ industry and technology yet remained largely independent of the ‘West’ nonetheless. Already under the British Raj, the ‘Swadeshi’ movement had promoted indigenous production and a boycott of foreign goods but was confronted with both the “glamour of the imported commodity”9 and “the mystique of western technology” (Deshpande 1993, 18): “We preferred the imported combs to the hand-made wooden ones […], Pears and Vinolia soap to the home-boiled Desi soap” (Tandon [1961] 1968, 111). Whereas Gandhian economics objected to modern technology and industry,10 other parts of the Swadeshi movement aimed to catch up with Western industry and technology11 —both approaches, however, orientated towards what Deshpande calls “patriotic production”: this politically charged mode of production focused on commodities allegedly affecting the daily life of ‘every’ Indian across the country, such as salt or cloth: “the Swadeshi movement invested commodities—mundane articles of everyday use—with a new ideological charge” (Deshpande 1993, 16, reference to Sarkar 1973). The ‘New Indian Woman’ Against this economic background, negotiations of cultural identity, often ranging from ‘tradition/spirituality’ to ‘modernity/materialism’, also shaped discourses on the female body and female beauty. Hence, the anti-colonial image of femininity was constructed as counterpart to ‘Western’ women, emphasising women’s purity, spirituality, and the worship of women as mother or goddess—especially in Hindu 9

“The goods were usually British or German, and many of the brands had become household names. […] One could buy knives, scissors, buttons, cotton and silk thread, mirrors, soaps, bottled hair oils, razors, socks, woolen and cotton knitwear, etc. These imported things always held more glamour for us than the local ones. We preferred the imported combs to the hand-made wooden ones […], Pears and Vinolia soap to the home-boiled desi soap, and the shining coloured buttons to the simple cloth ones” (Tandon [1961] 1968, 110–111, cited by Deshpande 1993, 18). 10 Because they generally rejected exchange value in favour of use value as well as commodity relations in favour of social relations. (Deshpande 1993, 20). 11 In order to combine a supposedly superior material culture with an already superior spiritual Indian culture—e.g., Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s concept of “Anusilan” (Partha Chatterjee 1986, cited by Satish Deshpande 1993, 19.).

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nationalists’ ideology, the nation was constructed as goddess, as the embodiment of ‘Shakti’ (the elemental female power of the universe) and as ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India). With economic liberalisation, the desire to demarcate oneself from ‘overcome traditions’ and ‘common’ Indian women gained in importance; an elite discourse emerged, where high- and middle-class as well as upper caste women distinguished themselves from the lower strata of society. The ideal image of the ‘New Indian Woman’ was supposed to encompass both the presumably ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ features. On the one hand, women were supposed to be ‘modern’, educated and working, and on the other hand, they were expected to be also ‘traditional’ and ‘Indian’, represent strong ‘family values’. In that sense, Titzmann (2014) concludes, ‘the New Indian Woman’ also functioned as counterpart to what political feminism in India stood for: she became a “harmonization project”, invented to ease conflicts eventually arising in times of social and economic change, to weaken and silence women and women’s movements. Whereas women and women’s politics were predominantly marginalised within anti-colonial, Indian-nationalist movements, it was women’s embodiments that became central to the processes of nation-making. That was the case when women symbolised “the true repository of purity, sacredness and honour” (Thapan 2009, 11), or when the cultural identity of the community and the nation was staked on a specific notion of “womanhood” (Butalia 1996).12 Thus, questions of politico-economic developments or cultural identities were heavily intertwined with and negotiated on the basis of women’s bodies and beauty. An upper-middle-class Indian woman of the 1950s, who had already begun to consume ‘foreign’ beauty products, was turned into a ‘national consumer’, buying from the “patriotic producer” (Deshpande 1993); whereas, a woman who was using home remedies13 or no beauty products at all, was encouraged to start buying industrially produced cosmetics—explicitly developed for “the needs of the Indian skin and colour”.14 12

“Normally relegated to the margins, at times of nationalist struggle, women come to symbolize the honour and virtue of the nation. They become the icons, the mother-figures for whom men are willing to lay down their lives. It is on this notion of womanhood that the cultural identity of the community and the nation is staked. Throughout the freedom movement in India, nationalists portrayed the country in feminine terms. India was ‘the motherland’.” Urvashi Butalia. 1996. Mother India. In: New Internationalist Magazine, Issue 227, 03/1996, n.p. https://newint.org/features/1996/03/05/mother/ (accessed online 31 May 2017). 13 “I used besan and turmeric and cream—that’s the milk cream—and that’s how we used to clean our faces…people used to do that, but now creams have come to the market” (Group Interview with Usha et.al., Kathputli Colony, 22 April 2014). 14 https://www.rediff.com/getahead/report/career-how-dabur-lakme-and-rooh-afza-were-sta rted/20150127.htm, last visited 24 April 2019.

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The Story of Lakmé The corporate history of India’s supposedly first cosmetic company, Lakmé, exemplarily illustrates how economic and political power interests involved the construction and control of female bodies in early post-colonial, ‘Nehru-socialist’ Indian nationalism. While my Delhi interlocutors referred to a long tradition of skin lightening practices and home remedies preceding the invention of chemical products,15 the fact that Lakmé came up with large-scale research, development, production and sale of cosmetics on behalf of the state, clearly shows how aspirations for ‘catching up with the West’ on the level of technology intersected with national desires to create and define Indian female beauty. On the Internet circulates a brief journalist article about how Lakmé was founded: in the early 1950s, the first prime minister of postcolonial India, Jawaharlal Nehru, personally approached the entrepreneur J. R. D. Tata with a particular ‘challenge’ to solve the ‘problem’ of “upper-middleclass women spending valuable foreign exchange on western cosmetics”. Another ‘concern’ was that middle-class women had no access at all to quality makeup due to their non availability on the Indian market. Thus Tata embarked on the mission of ‘rescuing’, on the one hand, India’s middle-class women by providing them with affordable quality products, and the Indian market, on the other, by making an important contribution to the country’s ‘shaky’ economy. Anil Chopra, former CEO of Lakmé Cosmetics, also remembers the Prime Minister’s inquiry, although, as Abu-Er-Rub (2017) has pointed out, there is no reliable scholarly source that could verify this account: [The] Tatas were only into trucks, steel, coal, cement, but you don’t say no to the prime minister, especially in the young independent nation. So he called his brothers Ratan Tata and Naval Tata and said ‘look, we have a request from the prime minister— we’ve gotta do it. Find out a way of doing it’. But they knew nothing about cosmetics. (Interview with Anil Chopra by Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Mumbai, 5 March 2012).

According to Anil Chopra, the Tata brothers sent a delegation to Paris in order to gain some expertise in cosmetics from the perfume producer Renoir. They negotiated a cooperation treaty with Renoir and within this process; the perfume company came up with the name ‘Lakmé’, which was the title of a French opera on the Paris stage at the time. The opera was written by Léo Delibes and was based on orientalist travelogues.16 It narrates the unfortunate love story between Lakmé, a Brahmin’s daughter, 15

As home remedies for skin lightening, interviews mentioned various combinations of the following ingredients: tomato, potato, banana, orange, papaya, besan, ubtan, aloe vera, turmeric powder, multani mitti, haldi, lotus, cucumber, curd, lemon, sugar, honey, rose water, sandalwood powder and milk. 16 Written by Théodore Pavie (1811–1896).

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and a British soldier. The protagonist’s name, Lakmé, was a French adaption of ‘Lakshmi’, the Indian goddess and symbol of happiness, wealth, health and beauty. In Indian iconography, her ‘skin colour’ is usually depicted as fair or golden.17 The company name Lakmé thus combines references to Indian ‘tradition/culture’ with what was then considered ‘the West/modernity’. Lakmé started with the production of perfume, followed by a small range of other cosmetic products. It was not until Naval Tata’s second wife, Simone, entered the business that the commercialisation of India’s cosmetic industry began. So far goes the narration of Anil Chopra, who joined Lakmé in 1975 and took over Simone Tata’s position 21 years later (cf. AbuEr-Rub 2017). When Lakmé started as a 100%-subsidiary of Tata Oil Mills in 1952, the Indian economy was predominantly state-capitalistically planned. Ponds and Lakmé dominated the bleaching segment of the cosmetics market until 1975, when HUL—subsidiary of Unilever based in the UK and the Netherlands—introduced its Fair & Lovely skin lightening cream, which has since become the most successful product on the market. After the first deregulations had led to full liberalisation of the economy (from 1991 onwards), Lakmé was sold to HUL (Amarnath and Gosh 2005, 214). In accordance with the transformation from a national to a global beauty market, Tata sold Lakmé, claiming “that a dedicated FMGC company would be able to do better justice to the brand”. Even though HUL is a huge Anglo-Dutch multinational consumer goods company, Lakmé is still considered a national brand. An article on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s (BJP) ‘Make in India’ campaign, published in India Today, 20 February 2015, profiles Lakmé among the “10 Indian brands that are giving tough competition to the foreign ones”.18 Until HUL introduced India’s most popular fairness cream, Fair & Lovely, to the market, the skin lightening sector was dominated by Lakmé and Ponds, but both have been since bought up by HUL (Anand 2002, 127). In the following, I take a closer look at how exactly the events of company-making are presented in the article.19 The story of Lakmé is introduced by its author, Shruti Chakraborty, who claims its dating back from a time before “venture capitalists”, “the word start-up”, or even “the nation existed”. “There was a time”, so he writes, “when single individuals, without any resources so to speak of, created empires” (my emphasis). Among two more stories (about Dabur and Rooh Afza), the legend of Lakmé unfolds as follows: 17

“Her most identifiable physical characteristic is her radiance; she manifests as golden light” (Rhodes 2010, 64). Furthermore, Laksmi is most prominently worshipped on Divali, the festival of lights (ibid., 33). 18 https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/make-in-india-10-ind ian-brands-at-par-with-foreign-brand-241281-2015-02-20, last visited 12 June 2018. 19 The story was published by rediff.com, a popular Indian web portal, on 27 January 2015.

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It was the early 1950’s. India had just won her freedom and the economy was shaky. Upper-middle-class women were spending valuable foreign exchange on Western cosmetics, while the more middle class women had no access to quality makeup because of non-availability in the Indian market. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru approached JRD Tata to come up with a solution. Tata, the always hungry entrepreneur, took on the challenge ecstatically. The biggest difficulty was coming up with a brand identity that appealed to both classes of women. He settled on Lakmé, taking the name from the French opera of the same name. Funnily the name is a Western take on the Indian goddess of wealth Lakshmi. But, as this article puts it, Lakshmi lipstick or Lakshmi kajal would never have worked with the Indian ladies who were used to buying foreign cosmetics. This being the first time an Indian cosmetic company was being founded, extensive market research went into determining the needs of the Indian skin and colour. Experts were hired from every field. In 1952, Lakmé started as a 100 per cent subsidiary of Tata Oil Mills. Simone Tata, the French wife of Naval H. Tata, joined as managing director in 1961 and rose to become its chairman in 1982. Being a Western-born woman who had made India her home, she understood the core formula of the brand and was instrumental in shaping Lakmé into the household name that it became. She was appointed to the board of Tata Industries in 1989. Observing the rapid growth in the retail sector, Tata sold Lakmé to Hindustan Unilever in 1996 for Rs 200 crore. They imagined that a dedicated FMGC company would be able to do better justice to the brand.20

This exemplary success story of Indian entrepreneurship contains several aspects of the making of Indian women and, the making of Indian skin and colour as well as political and commercial interests in women’s bodies. At the beginning, the potential reader is presented with some introductory information on the historical background of the story: it takes place in the early 1950s postcolonial India, which is constructed as a ‘female’ nation-state facing difficult circumstances; ‘she’ has only recently gained ‘her’ political independence from the British Raj, and ‘her’ economy is unstable (“shaky”). Next, the text introduces the industry’s target audience, making a distinction between two groups of women: “upper-middle-classes” and “more middle-classes”. The groups are defined by their cosmetic-consumption behaviour: the first group is said to spend “valuable foreign exchange on Western cosmetics”, whereas the latter is defined by their lack of “access to quality makeup” due to “non-availability in the Indian market”. The lower classes are thereby excluded from the outset (in fact, they have only recently been discovered as consumers by the cosmetic companies, as will be shown in 3.2.2). Two powerful men are introduced as ‘saviours’ of the constructed ‘problem’: none other than India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru himself, takes care of this ‘dilemma’ and seeks support from J. R. D. Tata, “the always hungry entrepreneur”. Tata creates the 20

http://www.rediff.com/getahead/report/career-how-dabur-lakme-and-rooh-afza-were-sta rted/20150127.html, last visited 24 April 2019.

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beauty brand Lakmé, a product he supposes would be appealing to both groups of women: the ones with no access to foreign beauty products could identify with the Indian goddess of wealth (Lakshmi), and the ones accustomed to buying foreign cosmetics could identify with the French opera of the same name (since, “funnily”, the reader is informed, the Opera’s name, Lakmé, is a “Western take on the Indian goddess of wealth”). However, the naming is neither ‘fun’ nor coincidental, but a very telling instance of French “Orientalism trying to define and comprehend the culture of the colonized in European terms” (Thapar 2000 [1999], 201), re-imported for consumption purposes. Back in India, it serves and creates demands for ‘Western’ modernity (“glamour of the imported commodity”) and for ‘traditional’ Indian-ness (“patriotic production”). Thus, the “upper-middle-class women” are constructed as orientating towards ‘Western’ brands and a rather ‘modern’ lifestyle, whereas the other “middle-class women” are associated with ‘Indian’ products and a rather ‘traditional’ lifestyle. The allegedly first Indian cosmetic company started with “extensive market research”, hired “experts” from “every field” and thus created (“determined”) the “needs of the Indian skin and color”. The fact that ‘colour’ is mentioned as the specific object of investigation, and not as one skin characteristic among others, demonstrates the significant role the colour category has had—or been assigned, precisely by texts like these. A crucial role in brand-marketing was played by Simone Tata, the “French” wife of Naval Tata, who “joined as managing director in 1961 and rose to become its chairman in 1982”. Her ‘identity’ which is labelled as ‘halfWestern’ and ‘half-Indian’ (“Being a Western-born woman who has made India her home”) is considered to play a central role in the brand’s success. Judging by the wording, Simone Tata’s accomplishments are not traced back to her own skills as sales and marking expert; she is rather described as having intuitively penetrated the product: “she understood the core formula of the brand” (my emphasis). This expression highlights her emotional instead of her intellectual approach to or proficiency in the business. Thus, as the company’s figurehead, by promoting the brand, she has (been) promoted herself. Having met the central requirements for embodying ‘New Indian Woman’ (half-Indian, half-Western), she has become the perfect ambassador of a brand that was created to appeal to both upper-middle-class Indian women, defined by their consumption of ‘Western cosmetics’, and middle-class women defined by their preference for local Indian products. The (re)productions of difference between women is further practised by another cosmetic company, which I address in the following chapter.

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Hindustan Unilever Limited’s Fair & Lovely: Neoliberal Beauty as Aesthetic Entrepreneurship and Distinctive Body Practice in Post-Liberalisation India

In this chapter, I first provide a brief overview of neoliberal restructuring of the Indian economy since the late 1980s. Amidst these developments, a growing commercialisation of the gendered body has unfolded, turning primarily women into “aesthetic entrepreneurs” (Elias et al. 2017): beauty work has become an additional shift for urban middle-class women entering the public working sphere. Female beauty, in particular, has been got increasingly shaped and framed by neoliberal subjectivity. In this urban middle-class context, conceptions of and desires for ‘cosmopolitan whiteness’ and ‘Indian fairness’ have been blurred and merged with aspirations for national belonging and world citizenship. Liberalisation of the Indian Economy When structural problems of India’s state-led capitalism began to increase in the 1970s, the political consensus surrounding the model began to crumble, and economic libertarian critique of such developing strategies began to be voiced. In the 1980s, the government under Rajiv Gandhi (INC) hesitantly initiated the first liberalizing reforms. In the following years, neoliberal transformation included a de facto abolishment of the complex industrial licencing system, the opening of many state monopoly sectors, and significant restrictions of state price controls (cf. Ebenau/Schmalz 2011, 92 f. refer to Dutt/Rao 2000, 1). Simultaneously, the rightwing fractions within the Congress Party began to prevail, while new social movements and trade unions withdrew their support for the INC, and the power elites of the (often rural, propertied) upper and middle castes joined forces in the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP became the most important party political (not economic) adversary of the Congress (Cf. Ebenau/Schmalz 2011, 92). But it was not until globalisation of the economy with India becoming a (reluctant) member of the WTO in 1995, that a significant structural change took place.21 From the late 1990s onwards, the Indian economy achieved record growth rates, while at the same time, simultaneously, precarious working and living conditions among broad sections of the population have intensified (Ebenau/Schmalz 2011, 96 f., refer to R. Jha 2007, 16 f. and Al-Taher/Ebenau 2009). Although social balance has been characterized by both regional and sectoral disparities, the Indian government has 21

For a more detailed account on the individual measures of the neoliberal transformation of the Indian economy, see Ebenau/Schmalz 2011, 93.

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continued to consolidate the neoliberal developing model during times of crisis (cf. Ebenau/Schmalz 2011, 81).22 This process of neoliberal restructuring has been accompanied by the following phenomena, which I consider important for discussions on beauty (norms): a significant growth of the middle classes; a rise in visual representations (e.g., the introduction of satellite TV in 1991); and a privatisation of public spaces in favour of the (upper) middle classes (e.g., construction of gated communities, shopping malls). Moreover, already since the mid-1980s, an elitist Brahmin Hindu culture begun to increasingly occupy the Indian public sphere (cf. Abu-Er-Rub 2017; for the Hindu nationalist approach to female beauty, see section 2.2.2). This chapter’s emphasis on beauty as project and fairness as product fits into these developments: it was the middle classes for whom fairness products and procedures were made available and affordable at first. Further, the rise of visual spectacle prioritised the body’s’ appearance over other forms of beauty, particularly affecting bodies marked as female: it was women who were increasingly moving into public (working) spaces and who were generally defined as embodiments of the moral values of ‘the’ Indian nation.23 The increasing social inequalities accompanying India’s economic growth also augmented desires for (visible) demarcation strategies from the deprived, excluded and marginalised ‘other(s)’. Neoliberal Subjectivity I here use ‘neoliberalism’ to refer specifically to “the extension of market principles into all areas of life” (Elias, Scharff, and Gill 2017, 23, referring to Brown 2015, Dardot and Laval 2013, Mudge 2008, Shamir 2008, Springer et al. 2016), thus meaning an all-encompassing power system, in which certain discourses make capitalism appear as ‘natural’ or ‘without alternative’ and, hence, dominant: Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world. (Harvey 2007 [2005], 3)

For peripheral nations, neoliberalism offers the promise of development via complete integration into the world market (Candeias 2004, 124). Whereas several 22

On the one hand, the neoliberal strategy of development has supported an extremely dynamic economic growth in India. On the other, however, it created exclusion and marginalisation of large parts of the society; and a series of serious social crises (Ebenau/Schmalz, 2011, 25; my translation). 23 Abu-Er-Rub 2017, 67; she refers to Radhakrishnan 2011, Gilbertson 2014, and Liechty 2003.

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elements—growth of the middle classes, break with feudal structures, etc.—could attract fundamental approval of large parts of populations in the peripheries, hegemonial effects would be articulated through a disciplinary and crisis-mediating neoliberalism rather than consent (Candeias 2004, 124, referring to Gill). In fact, neoliberal ideologies in India emerged among a small elite first but never attained hegemonial positions on the level of civil society (Ebenau and Schmalz 2011, 88; referring to Desai 2008, 163–164). However, a neoliberal consent emerged on a party political level from 1989 onwards, finally reaching a dominant position in the media and cultural industry as well as in many of the sciences: Debates on more egalitarian social objectives were increasingly dismissed as antiquated phrases of a ‘socialist’ past era [...]. They were superseded by slogans such as ‘India Shining’ or ‘Incredible India’, advancing from election campaign slogans and tourist advertisements to key statements of a new self-confidence of the political and economic elites and aspirational middle classes. (Ebenau/Schmalz 2011, 95 f, referring to Desai 2008, 161–162., my translation)

Following Foucault, I argue that power relations create a multidimensional field of techniques, strategies and programmes that consolidate in power/knowledge complexes and penetrate into the finest ramifications of social relations (Nicoll 2013, refers to Deppe 2003, my translation). These relations include and produce body and beauty (work) as (micro) social and cultural practices (cf. Foucault 2002 [1969]; 1995 [1975]; Hall 1994). As in all other areas of life, the neoliberal imperative of ‘self-management’ (Bröckling 2007) plays a crucial role when it comes to beauty work and consumption (Elias et al. 2017). Standardisations and modifications of body and skin can thus be understood as means of (liberal) governance and social distinction. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has already pointed out that beauty labour is fundamentally classed and gendered, acknowledging that beauty has acquired a value on the labour market (Ruck 2018, 11, refers to Bourdieu 1984, 206; 152–153). ‘Cosmopolitan Whiteness’ and ‘Indian Fairness’ In the early 1990s, in the course of economic liberalisation, the global beauty industry witnessed an unprecedented growth in India (Anand 2002). Moreover, the middle- and upper-middle-class Indian women, for whom the national beauty market had been created in the 1950s, were now turned into what Deshpande (1993) calls “cosmopolitan consumers”. Whereas “patriotic production” was meant to encompass different social strata unified as the ‘exploited poor’ by the British Raj, or the West more generally, the then emerging cosmopolitan consumer solely consisted of the urban middle and upper middle classes (Deshpande 1993). These (upper) middleclass women desired to become “citizens of the world” (Deshpande 1993, 28) and

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aspired to “world class status” (Brosius 2010) rather than ‘national belonging’. Thus, these cosmopolitan consumers may indeed strive for what scholars have identified as “transnational whiteness” (Osuri 2008) or “cosmopolitan whiteness” (Saraswati 2010). My empiric material, however, suggests that these aspirations for cosmopolitanism are also linked to desires for a specific “Indian fairness” (chapter 4). The most desired shade of fair was defined as “naturally Indian” by my interlocutors. Accordingly, the practice of bleaching was explained as bringing back the skin’s “original” tone, to make visible its hidden fairness again, to undo the tanned skin. Accordingly, bleaching removes “dark patches” and “marks”, making the skin look “clear”, “healthy”, “even”, “shining” and “glowing”. Dark skin, on the other hand, was described as “dull” and “dusky”, as “polluted” and a “problem” (cf. Kullrich 2019). These findings correspond to Reddy’s analysis of the nationalization of the global Indian woman. Reading depictions of fairness within the popular, Englishlanguage, Indian women magazine Femina (2006), she concludes that “fairness is naturalized, re-situated within the familiar nationalist narrative of ‘natural Indian beauty’” (Reddy 2006, 72 f.). Not only is fairness reimagined as ‘Indian’ but the Indian nation also is represented as ‘shining’. It is the fair skinned woman—and above all, the exported, global, Indian beauty queen—who embodies a distinctly cosmopolitan Indian nation, where beauty and social mobility are available for all. That corresponds to how an “Indian postcolonial identity” is seen as being shaped by “neoliberal values of the American dream (rags to riches through hard work)” (Jha 2016, 55). Accordingly, Meeta Rani Jha (2016) suggests interpreting ‘colourism’ as part of the Indian nation-state’s post-liberalisation “soft power” to secure and extend its authority: The Indian state and the transnationally mobile business elite deploy the idea of beauty nationalism in Bollywood films and celebrity discourse as an aspect of its soft power to construct its success on the world economic stage and seek valorization by US capitalism of its rags-to-riches narrative, which resonates with the Americandream ideology. (Jha 2016, 54, her emphasis)

In that sense, the intense promotion of fairness and the Indian nation-state’s striving for power are depicted as closely linked processes. That has been increasingly so since a shift took place “from nation building to nation branding” (Kaur 2012, 603): Advertising’s intense promotion of light-skinned beauty’s power to change Indian women’s bodies and lives at this historic moment ‘operates within and reinforces’ the public significations of a changing nation that is striving to secure greater power in the global economy (Reddy 2006, 78; referred to by Parameswaran/Cardoza 2009, 264)

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Moreover, this ‘flawless Indian-ness’—though allegedly natural and not artificially produced (Reddy 2006)—has to, nevertheless, be made in “shining India”. With regard to HUL’s brand Fair & Lovely, Reddy (2006) states that “[f]airness thus becomes a feature of Indian beauty through a multinational company that has transformed itself into a distinctly ‘Indian’ company” (Reddy 2006, 72 f.). That again corresponds to the latest Indian branding campaign, ‘Make in India’, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September 2014 and invented to primarily attract foreign direct investment. The campaign makers presented the initiative as follows: The Make in India initiative was launched by [the] Prime Minister in September 2014 as part of a wider set of nation-building initiatives. Devised to transform India into a global design and manufacturing hub, Make in India was a timely response to a critical situation: by 2013, the much-hyped emerging markets bubble had burst, and India’s growth rate had fallen to its lowest level in a decade. […] Make in India was launched by [the] Prime Minister against the backdrop of this crisis […] It was a powerful, galvanising call to action to India’s citizens and business leaders, and an invitation to potential partners and investors around the world. But, Make in India is much more than an inspiring slogan. […] Most importantly, it represents a complete change of the Government’s mindset—a shift from issuing authority to business partner, in keeping with [the] Prime Minister’s tenet of ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’. […] Make in India is opening investment doors. Multiple enterprises are adopting its mantra. The world’s largest democracy is well on its way to becoming the world’s most powerful economy. (About ‘Make in India’. Self-portrayal on the campaign’s homepage www.makeinindia.com, visited 10 September 2018)

The guiding principle of the Modi regime—“Minimum Government, Maximum Governance”—follows the World Bank’s mission of ‘good governance’ and can roughly be summarised as “withdrawal of the state in favor of the market.”24 India’s citizens and business leaders, as well as international investors and business partners, are asked to support transforming India into “the world’s most powerful economy”. Accordingly, these nation branding campaigns reflect and create part of the new selfconfidence that Anil Chopra referred to above: “I want to be identified and seen as an Indian […]. Still a modernity but with a very strong Indian identity”).25 Though linked to ‘modernity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, it is a ‘national’ confidence that is closely linked to an increasingly neoliberal common sense. Hence, performing and consuming bleaching has become part of an assimilation strategy towards global

24

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-g-sampath-on-modi-governmentwhy-everyone-loves-good-governance/article7389373.ece (last visited 17 April 2019). 25 Interview with Anil Chopra by Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Mumbai, 5 March 2012, in: Abu-ErRub 2017, 18–19.

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elites, on the one hand, and a social demarcation strategy towards local subalterns on the other hand. After the post-liberalisation Indian economy orientated itself towards integration into the world market, ‘Indian beauty’ became a global export success—in the form of ‘Indian beauty queens’, celebrated by the international press as the embodiment of “the best of East and West” and “not quite Asian and not quite Caucasian” (Parameswaran 2006, 425).26 Furthermore, “many media reports constructed the middle-class, Indian beauty queen as a struggling individual who manages to scale the ladder of class mobility to become a national hero” (Parameswaran 2006, 422). Thus, the common concept of ‘Indian beauty’ presents India as cosmopolitan and social mobility as available for all (i.e. hard-working individuals). The non-stop victories of Indian global beauty queens are further “an integral part of India’s transformation from a protected quasi-socialist economy into a burgeoning location for the production and sale of global commodities”. (Parameswaran 2006, 421): Simultaneously, even as Indian beauty queens claimed international trophies, the beauty industry—products, pageants, and parlors—has witnessed an unprecedented growth that follows in the wake of the Indian government’s rapid implementation of economic liberalization policies in the early nineties. From 1996 to 2000, according to Anita Anand in her book, The Beauty Game, there was a 25 percent growth in the cosmetics and personal care sectors, and the size of the 2000 cosmetics market was estimated to be about $160 million. Revlon, Maybelline, Oriflame, Avon, and L’Oreal have begun to compete for a share of the surplus income in middleclass Indian women’s purses. Oriflame, the Swedish giant, established Mumbai as its regional Asian hub because Indian consumers represented the third largest export market following Russia and Poland. Oriflame’s sales for the year 2000 in South Asia were $650 million and the company’s Indian subsidiary projected a 60 percent growth in 2001, according to Anand. (Parameswaran 2006, 420)

Within this growing beauty business, HUL plays a special role in the skin bleaching segment. 26

“Using the language of nationalism, some media reports idolize the Indian beauty queen for setting innovative global standards for ideal femininity. Beauty and fashion experts quoted widely in the media argue that India’s beauty queens are the striking new alternatives to the mainstream because they represent the best of East and West. One entrepreneur in the beauty industry claims that Indian women have Caucasian features, but are ‘packaged in lovely shades of brown, olive, and cream.’ Others opine that Indian women’s beauty is the ‘racial cocktail’ of the future because people could identify these beauty queens as South American, Mediterranean, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, or North African. One newspaper classifies Chopra’s face as the exotic beauty for these times: ‘Not quite Asian and not quite Caucasian, Chopra has the exotic look. She is like a Venezuelan beauty with a more soft face and graceful body’” (Parameswaran 2006, 425).

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Hindustan Unilever Limited’s Fair & Lovely From my experiences during fieldwork, HUL’s brand Fair & Lovely (F&L) seems to be the most widely distributed and best-known skin lightening cream in Delhi indeed. Even in small villages and urban informal settlements, shops had these products in stock, and households without TV connection were familiar with its ads: Yeah, the cream is very famous, and ads have been going on since we were born … and we’ve seen it [for] quite some time, the ads; they have ads for other fairness creams also, but somehow, the people, everybody has chosen Fair and Lovely (Shruti, group interview in Kathputli Colony, 19 April 2014)

HUL is the largest manufacturer of cosmetics and toiletries in India (Anand 2002, 50). Ever since HUL27 launched F&L in 1975 the brand has been leading the fairness segment. F&L was rated 12th most trusted brand by the leading research company AC Nielson ORG–MARG, and the Confederation of Indian Industries ranked it among the top ten brands in India in 2005 (Karnani 2007, 4). Until 1999, F&L owned 90 per cent of the skin whitening market and, since then, has been holding up to 70 per centof the market share. In the financial year 2013–2014, HUL stated its annual turnover to reach as high as INR 27,408 crores.28 HUL’s share of market generated by F&L is about $60 million annually. F&L’s two closest rival brands are produced by local Indian firms: CavinKare’s Fairever (fairness cream), introduced in 1998, and Godrej’s FairGlow (fairness soap), launched in 1999 (Anand 2002). HUL followed Godrej and introduced Lux Sunscreen Soap to the market and advertised it as “[t]an-preventing soap” (Anand 2002, 127). Competitor Fairever grabbed 15 per cent market share in its first two years. HUL filed a lawsuit in January 2000, claiming that CavinKare Ltd. had copied its formula. The companies reached an out-of-court settlement, and CavinKare “reportedly admitted to copying and agreed to withdraw all stocks of its product by September 2000” (Anand 2002, 127). Emami, another India-based company, market tested “Herbal Fairness Talc” in South India and then introduced the Naturally

27

HUL’s parent company, Unilever, holds 67.25 perccent of HUL shares and consolidates 35 further brands such as Axe, Surf Excel, Rin, Wheel, or Knorr; spanning 20 distinct categories such as skin care, tea, packaged food, ice cream, and water purifiers. Apart from Fair & Lovely, HUL further accommodates the skin care brands Pond’s, Dove, and Lakmé. 28 ‘Crores’ is a numeral commonly used in South Asia, meaning ‘ten million’.

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fair brand to the market, gaining 6 per cent market share.29 F&L followed suit and added the “Ayurvedic Care” fairness cream to its product range.30 Whereas HUL claims “that its special patented formulation safely and gently controls the dispersion of melanin in the skin without the use of harmful chemicals frequently found in other skin lightening products” (Karnani 2007, 5) a study by the Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment (CSE)31 from 2014 detected mercury32 in two products of fair&lovely: f&l Ayurvedic care (0,10 ppm) und in f&l anti marks (0,73 ppm). Furthermore, another HUL brand, Pond’s white beauty, also contained mercury 1, 36 ppm. Whereas in some countries the control of the circulation of bleaching products became a government concern (cf. Tate on Jamaica), for India, no such political intentions are foreseeable, even though several common ingredients of bleaching products are now well-known for their potential health risks: one of these chemicals is mercury, a neurotoxin. Inorganic mercury, that is present in many fairness creams, can lead to nephritic syndrome, inflammation of the liver, kidneys and urine tract; and may cause allergic reactions, skin irritations including rashes, discoloration and scarring; neurotic manifestations, anxiety, depression, psychosis and peripheral 29

The cream is promoted as 100 percent herbal: “Real pearls and liquorice disperse melanin and provide sunscreen. Other rare herbs nourish the skin and protect against environmental pollutants. Result, a fairer, younger you with a pinkish, glowing skin.” How it works: Melanin Disperses: pearl & saffron; Oxygenators: comfrey & coconut; Conditioners: rose & sandal; Sunscreen: aloe vera & liquorice; Moisturizers: chamomile & milk; Nourishers: wheatgerm & cucumber (http://www.emamiltd.in/brands/96/197/emami-naturally-fairherbal-fairness-cream.php, last visited 17 April 2019). 30 “Fair & Lovely Ayurvedic care has a unique blend of 16 natural ingredients that work to give your skin an Ayurvedic Golden Glow Treatment” (https://www.fairandlovely.com.bd/ products/ayurvedic-care?repeat=w3tc, last visited 17 April 2019). 31 The ‘Centre for Science and Environment’ (CSE), a public interest, nongovernmental and non-profit research and advocacy organization based in New Delhi, conducted a study on cosmetics available in the Delhi market regarding safety and toxins. The results were published in January 2014 (https://www.cseindia.org/fact-sheet-4-mercury-in-cosmetics-5284; https:// www.cseindia.org/heavy-metals-in-cosmetics-7937; last accessed 17 April 2019). 32 The WHO rates mercury one of the top ten chemicals or group of chemicals of major public health concern and published a report on mercury in skin whitening products and health risks in 2011. Inorganic mercury, that is present in many fairness creams, can lead to nephritic syndrome, inflammation of the liver, kidneys and urine tract; and may cause allergic reactions, skin irritations including rashes, discoloration and scarring; neurotic manifestations, anxiety, depression, psychosis and peripheral neuropathy. Furthermore, children who were exposed to mercury in-utero have been documented to suffer from developmental issues, wide range of symptoms including motor difficulties, sensory problems and mental retardation. http://www.who.int/ipcs/assessment/public_health/mercury_flyer.pdf (last accessed 17 April 2019).

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neuropathy. Furthermore, children who were exposed to mercury in-utero have been documented to suffer from developmental issues, wide range of symptoms including motor difficulties, sensory problems and mental retardation. Apart from expanding its product ranges and increasing its advertisement budget (Anand 2002), HUL tries out new sales strategies as well. In 1999, it launched the beauty and skin-care brand Aviance to enter the rapidly growing, direct selling market. This strategy targeted upper- income urban women and was based on personal consultancy and beauty parties (Anand 2002, 52). In the following two sub-chapters, I give a brief example of how neoliberal aesthetic entrepreneurship interrelates with social stratification in Indian society. First, I show how HUL’s advertisements for its F&L skin lightening cream conceptualise beauty as a competitive market advantage while embedding it within patriarchal norms of societal relations. Fair skin is linked to confidence and empowerment, which the aspiring urban career women could achieve via consumption. Second, I argue—again referring to HUL’s F&L promotion strategies – that rural poor women are conceptualised as not only lacking in beauty but as further ‘in need’ of charity interventions into all areas of life, be that agriculture, health or technology. Via ‘sachet packaging’ and ‘Shakti projects’, HUL sets out to conquer skins and minds of the global poor. Thirdly, I suggest understanding ‘fairness’ in the Indian case as a distinct colour commodity.

3.2.1 ‘Cosmopolitan Consumption’ and Body Confidence: Fairness for the Urban Middle Class Woman Fairness as Confidence With the following text, HUL introduces its skin bleaching brand F&L, on their website, as an advocate of women’s rights. F&L acknowledges that, even today, gender equality is far from achieved and that society restricts women’s roles; however, the given reasons are women’s “own hesitations and fears”. To remedy that, F&L offers encouragement and support by providing women with the missing “confidence”: Fair & Lovely has reflected a [sic] Women’s Dreams for the past 40 years. This is a brand, which has championed the deepest ambitions and desires of women. Throughout its history, Fair & Lovely has inspired women to go for their dreams, even if they were at odds with what society expected them to do. In the 80’s, when society expected women to marry mostly via arranged marriages, Fair & Lovely gave them hope that women could marry by choice. In the 90 s, when women desired not just marriage but also an equal partnership, Fair & Lovely inspired them to believe

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that this was possible. In the 2000s, when society believed that a woman’s place was at home, Fair & Lovely encouraged her to choose her own career. And today, when despite much progress, women still don’t get equal opportunities and society continues to impose barriers for women, Fair & Lovely will give women the confidence to overcome their own hesitations & fears to achieve their true potential.33 Within critical beauty studies, ‘confidence’ is identified as a key theme for neoliberal imperatives, reducing structural gender discrimination to a personal problem that needs to be solved through working on the body. By ‘helping’ women to gain more confidence, both corporate companies and non-profit organisations aim to ‘empower’ them: [T]he ‘confidence gap’ is a signifier of what is understood as a general emergence (since the 1990s) of a particular ‘crisis in girls’ (Banet Weiser 2015; Hains 2012; Gill and Orgad 2015). […] So, alongside the efforts to empower girls through external mechanisms such as policy and education, there has also been a mandate to ‘empower oneself’. Empowering oneself as an individual is a key logic within neoliberal capitalism, which privileges the individual entrepreneur as a primary subjectivity (Cruikshank 1999; McRobbie 2009). This neoliberal focus on the individual is the crux of efforts to build confidence in girls and women […] In response to the confidence gap, a range of cultural organisations and corporate and non-profit campaigns have emerged with the goal of encouraging girls to be more confident in their bodies and self-image. (Banet-Weiser 2017, 267–268)

Skin bleaching became a contested practice, vacillating between demarcation and affiliation strategy as well as between emancipatory and neoliberal understandings of empowerment. Aesthetic labour can be located within “confidence chic regimes” (Favaro 2017) or “confidence and empowerment movements”: The early twenty first century has given rise to an ongoing girls’ ‘confidence movement’ (Gill and Orgad 2015). This movement is decentralised, taking place in nonprofit organisations, state-funded initiatives, advertising campaigns, marketing, and social media. Hundreds of organisations have emerged globally that focus on the empowerment of girls and women (Banet-Weiser 2015). Corporate culture has also joined the empowerment conversation, creating a slew of campaigns and advertisements shown on television and social media. (Banet-Weiser 2017, 265)

During my interview with a group of feminist activists, it was also ‘confidence’ that was identified as what fairness actually sells. In that context, Virmati also sarcastically commented on the attempts made by F&L to adapt to changing female stereotypes. Whereas, initially, fairness was linked to beauty and to the

33

https://www.fairandlovely.pk/our-story, last visited 17 April 2019.

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idea of attracting the opposite sex, it soon became further attached to the notion of ‘confidence equals success’ in the competitive job market: Most often, it’s confidence, right? I mean, the idea is that being fair equals being more beautiful equals more confidence equals more success. So, I mean, I think this is a change that has come in my lifetime. Like, earlier, being fair was just about being beautiful, and maybe winning an award for being beautiful, or, you know, the man who would not notice you before noticing you now. But in my time, I’ve seen it change to ‘you’re more fair, therefore, you’re more beautiful’ and, therefore, in an interview, you would be more confident and radiant, and the same people who […] thought you were dull and lifeless-looking with your dark colour, now they [would] think you’re fair and beautiful, and because you think you are better-looking, you’re more confident and you get the job; and I know you are successful in life, congratulations, and it all came because of your Fair and Lovely cream. (Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 2 February 2014)

Similar thoughts were shared by Veena, who also considered ‘confidence’ and ‘presentability’ as what skin lightening products eventually promote. However, she also expressed serious concerns about the growing material effects that colourism has, especially since it expands from the context of marriage to the public and working spheres, which women are increasingly moving into. In that contest, ‘fairness’ became a competitive market advantage, added on top of other required qualities, such as being smart, skilled and competent: [T]he idea is that, now, the desirable thing for women is to have a successful career, and the fairness cream, which should really have nothing to do with it, is now not only about making yourself more attractive but making yourself more presentable or more confident in your work place, in the sense that it gives you an added advantage, on top of being whatever, you know? Assuming the best of these women—they are very skilled; they are very competent; they’re all very smart people—the added advantage is that they are also beautiful; they know that they are beautiful; and it gives them confidence. So, again, the same ideas [are] operating that [imply] ‘fair equals beautiful’. And I think it’s even worse, really, because now it’s entering into the workplace, and the idea is that women who are beautiful in the workplace will have an advantage; and it’s true: women who are beautiful do have an advantage, but, you know, now it’s being sold. (Veena, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 2 February 2014)

Hence, demands on female beauty have changed: first, the demand for ‘beauty’ has shifted from supposedly ‘private’ to ‘public’ spaces; and second, the beauty advantage has moved from ‘assigned at birth’ into the realm of consumption. Veena’s indication that beauty, as a kind of ‘advantage’ for women, ultimately works to their own disadvantage, corresponds to Naomi Wolf’s conception of ‘beauty work’ as a “third shift”. Wolf (1991) argues that, apart from women’s expected double role

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as wage-earners and homemakers (the “second shift”), society now lays additional demands on women’s outer appearance in order to prevent them from participating in a political, social and cultural public sphere (“backlash against women’s rising”). However, whereas the concept of ‘the aesthetic entrepreneur’ puts emphasis on an “‘economic’ subject” that “works upon itself in order to better itself” (du Gay 1996, 124, Elias et al. 39), it needs to be considered that it is not always the ‘self’ that takes care of itself. Kang’s (2010) study on beauty service work in the US has impressively shown that much of beauty work is rather passed on to a less privileged and predominantly female (and in her case, Asian migrant) ‘other’. Thus, it will be important to define and distinguish different forms of beauty work and labour, and to be further attentive to ways in which social relations are (re) negotiated during encounters in beauty parlours (for this discussion, see 4.5). Primarily, the growing service sector is identified by Marxist feminists as a place where femininity as embodied cultural capital has become a competitive market advantage (Lovell 2000). In that sense, “hidden” aesthetic labour (Black 2004) has become a form of reproductive labour required in the service sector (Ruck 2018). Moreover, market fundamentalism has commercialised the management of bodies’ appearances. Thus, management is “broadly understood as modes of organization that are geared towards efficiency and control and which rely on systems of classification and standardization” (cf. Verlinden/Gabriel 2017). Within the context of “neoliberal and postfeminist governmentality” (Elias et al. 2017, 33), social demands on (particularly female) beauty and bodies have significantly increased34 and intensified.35 Against this background has emerged what Elias et al. (2017) have conceptualised as “aesthetic entrepreneur”: a “neoliberal subject” whose ‘beauty’ is “yet another project to be planned, managed, and regulated in a way that is calculative and seemingly self-directed” (Elias et al. 2017, 39). To confront and overcome gender discrimination, in the workplace and elsewhere, women are further urged to gain more ‘confidence’, particularly in terms of body and self-image. Accordingly, feminist themes of empowerment are employed to market products, “directing consumerism’s focus on individual consumption as a primary source of identity” (Jha 2016, 62, cf. “consumer feminism”). To the urban (upper-) middle-class women, who are constructed as only ‘lacking’ in confidence, ‘fairness’ is sold as a form of ‘neoliberal empowerment’: consuming fairness helps overcome all kinds of social 34

“So, beauty is very much important; it’s a demand of people right now. 10 years [ago], people didn’t even bother about it; even at that time, not [many] housewives did even the eyebrows, but right now, even the housewives, even the housemaids are very conscious about this, everybody is conscious about beauty.” (Interview with Preeti, 21 February 2014). 35 On the “intensification” and “extensification of beauty pressures”, see Elias et al. 2017, 26–30.

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barriers and opens the path to the “shining” economy, as one interviewee put it (chapter 4). Ultimately, with the help of beauty work and products, “better economic subjects” (Banet-Weiser 2017; Angela McRobbie 2009) are created, and bodies are turned into “projects” (Posch 2009). Moreover, (body) standardisations and (beauty) norms become increasingly powerful in systems of formal equality (Foucault 1995 [1975], 184).36 That applies, in particular, to fair skin as beauty norm in a postcolonial society that formally and constitutionally guarantees ‘equality’ to its citizens, amidst globally ‘post-racial’ or ‘colour-blind’ times, “in which race is portrayed as irrelevant” and thus reinforces “the current racial order” in formerly colonizing and enslaving states (Ebert 2004, 177, see also Herring, Keith, and Horton 2004, cf. Introduction, 6). Fair & Lovely Advertisement The link between fair skin and social mobility is (re)produced in the usual F&L advertisement. On their website, F&L presents a selection of their TV commercials, broadcasted over the years.37 Usually, the events unfolding in the ads include a female protagonist struggling over a certain problem and/or with her bodily appearance. She then lightens up her skin tone with one of the F&L cream varieties, which always solves the initially presented problem(s). All of these ads make use of gender stereotypes, and since these stereotypes tend to change, F&L offers different stories for different target groups. One of the ads on their website, for instance, presents skin lightening as the means to getting the man of your dreams (this ad is called ‘story of the prince’), and another one promotes fairness as the solution to the problem of landing your dream job (this ad is called ‘cricket commentator’). One of my interlocutors in Delhi drew my attention to the fact that, in the latter, fairness is required for a job in which the body is not even visible to the public: “very stupid”, my interviewee concluded, “kyoki cricket commentator dekha thi 36

“For the marks that once indicated status, privilege and affiliation were increasingly replaced—or at least supplemented—by a whole range of degrees of normality indicating membership of a homogenous social body but also playing part in classification, hierarchization and the distribution of rank. I a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another. It is easy to understand how the power of the norm functions within a system of formal equality, since within a homogeneity that is the rule, the norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual differences” (Foucault 1995 [1975], 184). 37 When I last checked the website on 28th December 2018, I found these ads superseded by two other ads, one is called ‘winter fairness’, the other one ‘Parlour like Clean up’ (https:// www.fairandlovely.com.bd/our-story).

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nahi hota” (because you did not even see the cricket commentator, interview with Shambu,38 activist with the Saheli collective, 22 February 2014). The latest ad presented on the website narrates the story of a woman who is pursuing her own career before marrying (this ad is called ‘equal equal’).39 According to the F&L’s ‘beauty mission’ quoted at the beginning of this subchapter, this last ad suits the brand’s latest concept to encouraging ‘the New Indian woman’ “to choose her own career” and to strive for “equal opportunities”. Despite the brand’s changing understanding of women’s empowerment through fairness consumption, all ads resemble one another in that they embed the ‘fair skin’ norm in patriarchal and heteronormative contexts. Given the similarities, I only examine one of these TV commercials in more detail here. Available online under the heading “the air hostess”, it was highly criticised by women’s organisations and finally taken down when the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) had brought an action against it to the National Human Rights Commission. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting then declared the campaign to be in violation of the Cable and Television Network Act of 1995. Provisions in the act state that no advertisement shall be permitted that “derides any race, caste, color, creed and nationality” and, further, that “women must not be portrayed in a manner that emphasize[s passive, submissive qualities and encourages them to play a subordinate secondary role in the family and society.”40 Before this ad was banned, HUL published an official statement, stressing that its ceasing the ad had nothing to do with the complaints: “This ad had already been withdrawn by us, as it had run its campaign period […]. All the other ads for Fair And Lovely are all on air.”41 Moreover, HUL officially declared that “the protests of women’s activist groups bear no relationship to the popularity of fair & lovely, the bestselling brand [in India’s skin whitening market]” (HaP 15, Luce and Merchant 2003). Soon after the ban, HUL announced their Fair & Lovely Foundation to the public. The ad’s story unfolds as follows: in the first scene, a middle aged man is shown sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and reading a newspaper. In the background we see a woman, probably his wife, working at the stove. The man asks her for another cup of tea, but the woman replies that there is no more milk left. There is a 38

I met Shambu, Virmati and Veena, all activists with the feminist collective Saheli in Delhi, for a group discussion. They were ranging from the early 40 s to mid 50 s when we met. Upon their request, no further demographic details will be given in this thesis. 39 https://www.fairandlovely.in/our-story, last visited 10 September 2018. 40 See rule 7 (2), (iv) of The Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995. (The Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995. Delhi: Universal Law Publishing Co.Pvt.Ltd. 2011, 17). 41 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3089495.stm, last visited 17 April 2019.

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sudden cut to a young woman, travelling through the city on a crowded bus. Her face is glistening with sweat; her expression and posture are indicative of tiredness and exhaustion. Whereas the women sitting next to her are chatting with each other, she seems to be lost in thought. Back in the kitchen, the man sighs and says he wishes he had a son instead of a daughter. In the meanwhile, his daughter has reached home and overheard what he was saying. She breaks into tears, runs into another room, and immediately starts looking through job advertisements in a newspaper. She marks an ad by British Airways for an air hostess but—looking at herself in the mirror and touching her face—doubtfully and desperately, she whispers to herself “air hostess?” Precisely at this moment, a TV set in the back of the room switches itself on and an ad promoting the F&L skin lightening cream catches the girl’s attention. A female voice explains the “four-step action” of the advertised cream.42 After her skin is renewed, the young woman confidently enters the British Airways office through automatically opening glass doors. Two men and a woman are awaiting her, all sitting in a row, looking very serious, formally dressed, presumably members of the human-resources department of British Airways. When the applicant enters, they all look up astonished. A third man passing by and dressed like a pilot, gazes admiringly at her. All members of the selection committee nod their heads at each other approvingly, while only the oldest man on the committee talks to the applicant, who nods and looks very concentrated and grateful but also obedient. In the next scene, the young woman rushes into her parents’ kitchen—where we see the same characters in the same positions as in the beginning of the ad. Her father stares at her in complete surprise; she approaches him and reaches for his hands. In the last scene, the young woman leads her parents to an expensive-looking restaurant (which is either very large or located within a shopping mall). They all sit down and her father jokingly asks his daughter if he could have a cup of tea, whereupon they all burst out laughing. In the following, I look at the ad’s plotlines as well as the ways they are presented more closely. Generally, the ad’s narrative ‘genre’ can be described as a sort of ‘fairy tale’: it offers the possibility of identification with a protagonist in a

42

The first “step” consists of the protection from sunlight, which is transcribed in the ad as golden-yellow rays from top left only to bounce a depicted protective screen drawn around the woman’s face. The second “step” is said to remove black patches; blemishes are depicted as dark spots that get magically extracted from the face. In the third step, one can see the face from the front and watch how the whole face becomes lighter. The fourth step includes overnight-lightening, one sees the woman’s head bedded on a cushion with her eyes closed; and a bright shine falls on her face like a raindrop, from there spreading over the whole of her face.

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difficult situation, it aims to elicit affects, it allows the viewer to witness the heroine’s transformation from ‘dark/ugly’ to ‘fair/beautiful’, and hence, her ‘ascent from poverty’; it blurs boundaries separating what are presented as reality and surrealism; and ultimately, it provides the audience with a ‘happy ending’. The initial problem, or conflict, consists of a young woman who is apparently poor—either bad paid or unemployed—unmarried and dark skinned. She cannot provide for her family and is therefore also unable to make her father proud The solution to the young woman’s problems is presented to her by a non-diegetic voice from an inter-diegetic TV that fades in and announces the F&L fairness cream. From this moment, the extra- and inter-diegetic narrations merge: in a miraculous way, the heroine watching the spot becomes its protagonist; or maybe, the ad integrates into her real life. The situation becomes further ‘magical’, when the F&L product alters the young woman’s ‘skin colour’ from ‘dark’ to ‘fair’ in an instant—and it is not only her ‘skin colour’ that changes: her clothing turns from a dark red sari to a bright pink Salwa Kamiz; (in the latest version, she even wears a light pink business suit with a short skirt), her hair is not tied disorderly anymore but now shining, groomed, straight, and worn loose. What is most striking is the fact that even the colour of her eyes seems to have changed from dark brown to light blue or green. Altogether, the desperate woman is transformed by F&L into a fair, beautiful, confident and successful British Airway’s air hostess. Not only is she a responsible young woman in the eyes of her parents but is also courted by men. Thus, she is very much a representative of ‘the New Indian Woman’: although pursuing a career and moving confidently in public, she nevertheless upholds family values and responsibilities, as she continuing to live with and care for her parents—at least until marriage, what lies well within the realm of possibilities now. What is also central to the narrative is the great symbolic significance of the ‘missing milk’, which, at first sight, is clearly used here to imply all other basic food items that the family cannot afford as a symbol for elementary food the family cannot afford—in Indian cuisine, milk is not only needed for tea or coffee; but also for preparing Raita, Ghee, Paneer, Dahi and other dishes. Furthermore, in many parts of India, cow’s milk (and other cow products as well as cow labour) provides people’s livelihood, health care, ritual purification and, more generally, symbolises material wealth.43 Thus, when the woman’s father makes a joke, in the last scene, about ordering coffee, it most likely stands for being able to financially afford coffee with milk, thought it may also symbolise the newly gained social status more broadly. Moreover, milk brightens up the colour of coffee (and chai) when added, which hints to the lightening of the protagonist’s skin tone that we witness. Actually, milk (in 43

cf. Nina Kullrich (2013) and Ira Stubbe-Diarra (1995).

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its various manifestations and in different mixtures, such as ubtan or curd) is one of the many traditional home remedies for skin lightening, as my Delhi interviewees mentioned to me. They also described a desired shade of fairness as ‘milky colour’ (chapter 4). Fairness and Sexism The sujets actually underlying this narrative, however, may be summarised as follows. First, the story is told from a patriarchal perspective; throughout the ad, men are the ones defining the young woman’s position: the father defines her position at home (insufficient, disappointing, and lacking at first; dutiful, caring, beautiful later); the pilot’s gaze defines her as sexually desirable and available (and thereby assigns her a ‘place’ as a woman within a heteronormative society—the status of ‘future wife’), the male British Airways employee presiding over the selection committee is the one in charge of weighing her chances and deciding whether or not she can join the company. What further characterises the ad is sexism and lookism: the father openly voices his son preference, thus implying that only men can play the breadwinner role. The ad further intimates that women can find a well paid, respected job due to their ‘good looks’ alone (not due to their intelligence, education, skills, or personality). The last sujet I have identified is neoliberal subjectivity: the ad tells a sort of ‘from rags to riches’ story, insinuating that everybody can get a slice of the cake, if disciplined and hard-working. In this case, discipline and hard work primarily apply to the woman’s own body, or more precisely, to what I suggest calling ‘skin management’. The ad thus propagates that a situation symptomatised by structural poverty, gender and colour discrimination can be turned around by modifying one’s own (in this case: female) body; and by consuming skin lightening products as a necessary tool for this ‘transformation’. What was captured from the interviews about the family as the central location for the learning and doing of colourism (chapter 4) becomes also very clear in this ad’s narrative: the pressures, demands and rejections that the protagonist is exposed to are experienced, first and foremost, at home. It is only after the woman has transformed into the fair ‘princess’ that she moves in public more freely. She now seems to take up room, whereas before, she seemed rather dominated (or burdened) by her environment, i.e. by others’ expectations (e.g., by the hassle of public transport, or even at home, where she would seek shelter in her room, hiding from her parents’ eyes and voices). On closer inspection, though, the space she later moves through is not entirely ‘public’; in fact, she moves through a building of a large international company and a fancy, expensive restaurant and/or shopping mall—most probably, places she had not even had access to prior to her ‘transformation’. Moreover, becoming fair and beautiful only opens doors to socially expected paths: one the

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one hand, she takes ‘her’ place in the growing economy; on the other hand, her place is at home with her parents, or alternatively, at the side of a potential husband. This bottom line shows how fairness intersects with and mediates other social norms. It also demonstrates how neoliberal understandings of empowerment rather enshrine than reshape social stratification. What is striking about this otherwise very predictable story is the fact that associations of dark skin with ugliness, social exclusion and poverty, on the one hand, and of fair skin with social mobility, attractiveness and professional success, on the other, do not have to be constructed through the ad. The story does not need to explain why fairness equals beauty, but only how the advertised product enables women to become fair. To the heroine, as well as the audience, it seems obvious that by becoming fair, one’s life changes automatically for the better—this is an important presupposition of the ad’s creation. According to Jäger (2012 [1999]), presuppositions are fundamental to the advertiser’s conception of its target audience. In the case presented here, the viewer has to identify with a character from a presumably urban lower-(middle-) class family with traditional values, and be also familiar with stereotypical gender roles. Since these stereotypes tend to change, F&L has developed different story lines for different target groups (cf. section on F & L advertisement above). Urban Careers and Sexist Backlashes Despite slight differences, most of the F&L ads focus on urban women and their urban career opportunities. The commercials’ story lines rarely show rural women pursuing feasible dreams within their own living environment. As interviewee Virmati sarcastically pointed out, the fair skin products’ slogans never read “be fair; be a better peasant woman” (Virmati, interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014). Thus, the success that fair skin is associated with—apart from accomplishments in the marriage market—is solely linked to urban careers, leaving rural life contexts and professions aside. According to other interviewees from the feminist collective, it is the urban woman who is increasingly encouraged to become part of the “vibrant shining economy”, to join both the “workforce” and “skin labour”. The interviewee associates these “urban based careers” with a “glitzylooking office with some glass doors”—an image that evokes the British Airways office depicted in the F&L ad. More generally, it reminds one of the growing number of “representational” jobs in the expanding service sector, in which female beauty becomes a competitive market advantage (Ruck 2018, 11, refers to Bourdieu 1984, 152–153):

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I mean, now that we are talking about urban [vs.] rural, one should also mention that the ads that we see are all urban, all of them are urban-based careers, whether it is an interview or some glitzy-looking office with some glass doors, or…you remember there was a cricket commentator-vala44 ad; this girl who wanted to be a cricket commentator, who gets to be there because she is fair […] so these are all very much urban professions that women [are] interviewing for, auditioning for, or whatever. It’s never like, you know, ‘be fair; be a better peasant woman’ [laughs] … all these aspirations are very much tied up with each other … and economically resurgent India […] if you want your place […] in this, with the vibrant shining economy, these are the things that you should do…(Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 2 February 2014)

Virmati here is pointing to the fact that places within this ‘shining economy’ are not for free, limited and contested; to claim “your” place, she concludes, you have to engage in aesthetic labour. Among the three interviewees, the discussion on the confident, urban, career woman further led to the question whether there was a violent patriarchal backlash. The activists put two recent cases of sexual violence and femicide in the context of women’s uprising. Hence, according to their interpretation, women need to perform additional (“hidden”) labour before they get to enter public working spaces, and once in, they are further exploited by low wages and contract labour. Moreover, when standing on the threshold of “a better career or life”—by receiving a solid education, for instance—women of any caste or class, both rural and urban alike, potentially face deadly resistance by threatened patriarchal power. Therefore, the Saheli activists also place the advertised fairness in the wider context of upward mobility, beauty labour, female labour exploitation, and sexualised violence against women. Veena remembers the gang rape, brutal torture and execution of a young woman in Delhi in 2012: Not that any advertisement company would ever say this; they would not want to link it with sexual harassment or…anything of that kind, but […] the rape that happened here, December 2012, […] that young physiotherapist girl was really badly treated and she died […]; the four rapists, the four or five rapists, stemmed also from a lower class and this young girl who is…(Interview with Veena, 22 February 2014)

“on her way to a better career or life”, her colleague Virmati interjects, who then continues:

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-vala is a very common suffix in Hindi. When attached to a noun, it is usually used as an agentive suffix. For example, when attached to ‘vegetable’, it means veggie-dealer, when attached to ‘car’, it means ‘car-driver’, and so on. In this case, it means something along the lines of ‘the one who comments on cricket’.

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See, India has been, like, undergoing very rapid economic changes over the last 30 years; offshoot of that has been that women are much more visible in employment, and much more active in the economy. Obviously, the economy is also pushing women to join the workforce and pushing women to join skin labour; and obviously, this exploitation is happening on a different level altogether. Women’s wages are not equal still; women’s benefits in employment are not there anymore; contract labour is becoming the norm of the day, which is even more hurtful for women. But in the case of the advertisement, fairness is also becoming attached to this idea of upward mobility, to…success. And the flipside of that has been, of course, that social tensions have been simmering. I mean—to take an example […] that is a little bit unrelated to this—the fact that women are more visible in the public sphere now […] I’m thinking about the state of Haryana in this … just north of Delhi, where Dalit women have been going to schools in … larger numbers than ever, and recently we’ve been hearing horrible … over the last 2– 3 years, we’re getting horrible reports of Dalit girls, going to school, being raped by upper-caste men: so see, the target is very much women who are asserting themselves; they are on their way to school, and they are obviously on their way to bigger things than what the caste hierarchy would permit or want. It’s obviously quite dangerous to say these things, to say that lower-class men target upper-class women for aspirational and any reasons, because, you know, [that might be interpret as legitimization for] the security measures that are coming now, [that] are basically [meant] to protect upper-class women [from] lower-class men, but, you know, we can’t [accept this binary explanation…] (Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014)

The activists explain that the case of the young woman who was to become a physiotherapist but was attacked on her way home from the cinema by lower-caste men, and the case of the Dalit girls going to school and been attacked by upper-caste men, are two sides of the same coin, likely to happen in both “small places” and also “in the cities”. By placing skin lightening into the context of caste and patriarchal power structures and violence against women, the activists implicate structural problems actually experienced by parts of the advertisements’ target audience. On the one hand, my interlocutors understand “skin labour” as an additional requirement for women to climb up the social ladder, to either become a fair bride and/or a career woman. On the other hand, so they argue, may women who are actually climbing up the social ladder be targeted by extremely violent physical assaults. Hence, the promoted and desired fairness as social mobility is complexly interwoven with the discourses and experiences of the beautiful, sensual, empowered, managed, disciplined, exploited, and/or maltreated female body. I now want to turn my focus back to the skin bleaching industry’s approachinng the ‘village’ and the ‘urban career’ woman in paternalistic albeit different ways. In the next subchapter, I trace HUL’s strategies of selling to and governing rural poor women.

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Creating the ‘Rural Entrepreneur’ and the ‘Subaltern Consumer’

In part, lack of choice is what being poor is all about. In India, a young woman working as a sweeper outdoors in the hot sun recently expressed pride in being able to use a fashion product—Fair and Lovely cream, which is part sunscreen, part moisturizer, and part skin-lightener—because, she says, her hard labor will take less of a toll on her skin than it did on her parents’. She has a choice and feels empowered because of an affordable consumer product formulated for her needs. (Hammond and Prahalad 2004, n.p.)

Sachet Packaging During my fieldwork in Delhi 2014, I found a customary-size tube of F&L (usually sold in 50 g or 80 g tubes) retailing at about INR 70 and 140, respectively. Since the cream is hardly affordable to the majority of the poor with an income of less than INR 5,000 per month/household,45 many small (street) shops also offer tiny sachets of INR 10, 5 or even 2 each—the same ‘single-use sachets’ that detergents, shampoos or toothpastes are usually sold in. Sachet packaging is offered by food and consumer goods giants like Unilever in several countries of the Global South46 to make their brands affordable to low-income communities, to gain market share and profit.47 As Jha (2016) shows, with the sale of skin lightening creams in five-rupee sachets, cosmetic companies claim to “democratize access to beauty products for poorer women” (Jha 2016, 68, my emphasis). The high level of competition for this lowprice segment of the market is exemplified by the case provided below, recounting how F&L (HUL) was overtaken by market challenger Chik Fairee (CavinKare) in the southern state of Tamil Nadu and parts of the western state of Maharashtra: For instance, last year, Chik Fairee, a fairness cream developed by CavinKare for the economy segment at Rs 2, was test-marketed in Tamil Nadu and upcountry Maharashtra and did well—despite the visibility and trade support for HUL’s Rs. 5 pack of

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For more details on the category ‘class’ in India, see introduction, 1.3.1. Unilever recently announced to introduce sachet packaging to Greece and Spain affected by unemployment and shrinking disposable income: http://articles.economictimes.ind iatimes.com/2012-09-28/news/34148327_1_unilever-spokesperson-d-e-markets-unilev er-ceo (accessed 6 May 2016, not available anymore last time I checked on 17 April 2019). 47 http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/sachet-packaging-low-income-com munities-waste-nightmare (6 May 2016). 46

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Fair & Lovely. It wasn’t until HUL hit back with a Rs. 2 SKU of Fair & Lovely; that Fairee’s initial gains tapered off.48

During a group interview in the informal settlement of Kathputli Colony, one of the participants confirmed the overall availability of F&L in both tubes and sachets: We have seen the F&L ads, and actually, most people use F&L sachets and tubes; they may not have any mak- up kit, but they do have F&L, most of the people we know. (Raveena, group interview in Kathputli Colony, 19 April 2014)

Living under very poor and precarious condition, Raveena’s home in Kathputli is located within and tied to the megacity of Delhi. For the poor, living in more isolated, rural parts of India, HUL had to develop yet another sales strategy. Hence, apart from financial affordability, HUL faced the problem of accessibility of potential consumers in rural areas. In a brochure called “Project Shakti—creating rural entrepreneurs in India (2005)”, the company elaborated on their ‘problematic’ situation of not reaching “millions of potential users” in about 500,000 villages with smaller populations. The challenge was to expand the market “in more remote parts of the country”, where no retail distribution network, advertising coverage and well-developed infrastructures existed: The company generates around half its business from India’s towns and cities and half from rural areas, where its products are sold in some 100,000 villages with populations of 2,000 or more. By the end of the 1990s, however, the company realized that to increase its market share it had to expand the market. The challenge was how to reach the 500,000 villages with smaller populations in more remote parts of the country, where there are millions of potential consumers but no retail distribution network, no advertising coverage and poor roads and transport.49

Therefore, HUL set out to ‘solve’ this ‘problem’ by establishing ‘Shakti Projects’ in villages with populations less than 2,000. Shakti Projects The first project they initiated was called Shakti Ammas,50 which may be translated as ‘mothers of strength’. It aimed to encourage village women to become “direct-toconsumer sale distributors”, who would then be trained by HUL in sales, commercial 48

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2003-06-25/news/27555044_1_sachet-sha mpoo-market-price-equation (not available anymore last time I checked on 17 April 2019). 49 https://www.unilever.com/Images/es_project_shakti_tcm13-387473_tcm244-409741_en. pdf, last visited 17 April 2019, could not be displayed correctly). 50 shakti means ‘strength’ in Sanskrit, amma means ‘mother’.

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knowledge, and book-keeping. If a woman chose to become a Shakti distributor, she would have to invest INR 10,000 to 15,000 first.51 According to HUL, those interested would make arrangements to provide that ammount with women’s selfhelp groups in the villages or HUL’s “noncompetitive partners”, such as ICICI Bank, “which specialises in micro-loans”. Microcredits or microloans have been subject to substantial criticism in the literature (e.g., Karim 2008, Mader and Klas 2014), as research could hardly detect any positive effect on people’s actual living conditions. On the contrary, microcredits have been shown to lead to high debts, additional work, new dependencies, social pressures and exclusion. Moreover, local social structures are often destroyed, the poor get increasingly disciplined, and particularly women are further discriminated against. Conversely, to really empower the poor, scholars call for strengthening the public sector, guaranteeing food sovereignty, and ensuring income supplements. Furthermore, scholars point to the necessity of fighting for fair trade policies in solidarity and on an equal footing.52 For HUL, the strategy paid off; Kedar Lele, head of the Shakti project, told the newspaper Business Today that the new distribution system was worth the effort: “In the 1990s, we could reach out to just 40 per cent of the population, as our traditional distribution system didn’t work in the hinterland. Therefore, creating a self-sustaining model of micro-entrepreneurs in these areas made sense”.53 Direct selling, argues Erynn Masi de Casanova (2011) in her ethnography on the multinational cosmetic company Yanbal in Ecuador, is shaped by cultural norms and material conditions. She has found that, amidst neoliberal globalisation, growing structural inequalities and restraints on individual choices, women who became direct sellers had to “manage” both productive and reproductive work, “to bear the brunt of economic crisis by ‘multiplying themselves’” (175). Corresponding to HUL’s promoting ‘beauty for all’54 and presenting itself as an expert and advocate of ‘women’s dreams’, Yanbal introduces itself as follows: “Yanbal International is 51

HLL’s broschure on shakti projects (https://www.unilever-fima.com/Images/es_project_s hakti_tcm1344-417255_pt.pdf, downloaded 22 April 2019. 52 Cf. Klas, G.: Die Mikrofinanz-Industrie: Die große Illusion oder das Geschäft mit der Armut. Assoziation A, Berlin 2011; Mader, P.: Making the Poor Pay for Public Goods via Microfinance: Economic and Political Pitfalls in the Case of Water and Sanitation. MPIfG Discussion Paper 11/14. Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Köln 2011; Klas, Gerhard (Hg.)/Mader, Philip (Hg.): Rendite machen und Gutes tun? Mikrokredite und die Folgen neoliberaler Entwicklungspolitik 2014. 53 http://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/special/project-shakti-helped-thousands-ofwomen-and-also-men/story/195911.html, last visited 17 April 2019. 54 “Mission” of HUL’s subsidiary cosmetic company L’Oréal (http://www.loreal.com/group/ diversity, last visited 17 April 2019).

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a global multi-level corporation expert in cosmetics and jewelry, whose mission is to change the lives of all women and their families through beauty and inspiration to fulfill their dreams. It operates under the principle of ‘prosperity for all’.55 In the meanwhile, HUL has launched further projects in the rural regions, mainly with the aim of providing the poor with various forms of education. Their i-shakti project is an information technology initiative, designed to provide rural villagers and organisations with communication and information access. HUL explains in a brochure that its content: has been specially developed by institutions and NGOs with experts in these fields, including the Azim Premji Foundation for children’s education, the Tata Consultancy Services’ Adult Literacy Programme and ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics).56

Additionally, i-Shakti offers an interactive service in which villagers can send questions to a “panel of experts” and receive a response within 24 h. Sharat Dhall, HUL’s business head for the Shakti initiative, has praised the advantages of the interactive service, stating: “farmers find a quick solution to pest problems with their crops […]”. Thus, of vital importance is what kind of information people can access via i-Shakti, and who is going to provide them with the required information. The NGO experts that HUL refers to include: the TATA group, an industrial conglomerate; the foundation of Azim Premji, chairman of Western Indian Palm Refined Oil (Wipro) Limited; and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). The latter has been highly criticised for gradually discarding or marginalising its initial holistic focus on local-level farming systems, watersheds and village economics in addition to crops, and for developing a general, inclusive, market-oriented development thinking instead (cf. Bhutani 201457 ). The Deccan Development Society (DDS), for instance, published an open letter in 2005, accusing the ICRISAT of focussing on biotechnology rather than on biodiversity as well as of creating gene banks for corporate profit and working with the private sector rather than with local famers on an equal footing (Bhutani 2014, 52–53). Thus, it seems as if all of these ‘experts’ share similar (profit) interests when providing education to the villagers. 55 https://www.directsellingnews.com/company-profiles/yanbal-international/, last accessed 20 December 2018. 56 https://www.hul.co.in/Images/es_project_shakti_tcm1255-417255_en.pdf, last visited 17 April 2019. 57 Cf. Bhutani, S. (2014): ICRISAT and Co. The CGIAR Centre in India, IIED, London, esp. p. 35–37, downloaded from https://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/G03769.pdf.

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Another HUL project, Shakti Virmati,58 was established to train rural women as multipliers on health care—that is, to educate “villagers about basic health practices, such as good hygiene, disease prevention and pre- and post-natal care.” Thus, beside training distributors and controlling the flow of products into rural areas, HUL also provides villagers with expert ‘knowledge’ and creates multipliers for further transferring that same knowledge. HUL thus not only creates a ‘primitive’ subject lacking knowledge (here, the ‘villager’), and a ‘superior’ or ‘civilised’ subject (here, the international cosmetic company) possessing knowledge; but uses both the Shakti Ammas and the Shakti Vanis as intermediaries for profit-winning. The core of these sales strategies intersects with what is called ‘epistemic violence’ or ‘epistemic authority’ by anti-colonial activists and researchers working on ‘de-colonising the mind’ (e.g., Fanon 1965, 1967; Memmi, 1967, 2006; Freie 2004; Hotep 2008). HUL hence functions as a ‘teacher’ who “presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence” (Freie 2004, 72). Similar critique was voiced by Spivak (2000) at the rhetoric used by the UNO. The United Nations, argues Spivak, understands access to telecommunication and microfinance programs as empowerment instead of trying to change infrastructural conditions which produce the economic impoverishment in the first place. HUL itself subsumes its business policy with the slogan “doing well by doing good”.59 In management literature, the global poor are defined as the largest socioeconomic group (“the bottom of the pyramid”), who would constitute a profitable consumer base. Providing the global poor with goods and services shall increase profit and eradicate poverty, claims Prahalad (2004). He advises multinational companies (MNCs) to commit “to a more inclusive capitalism” that would enable them “to prosper and share their prosperity with those who are less fortunate” (Prahalad and Hart 2002, n.p.). Hence, he proposes to see the “world’s four billion poor people” not as “victims” but “consumers”: [L]ow-income households collectively possess most of the buying power in many developing countries, including such emerging economies as China and India. If businesses ignore the bottom of the economic pyramid, they miss most of the market. Another myth is that the poor resist new products and services, when in truth poor consumers are rarely offered products designed for their lifestyles and circumstances, leaving them unable to interact with the global economy. Perhaps the greatest

58

Virmati means ‚voice ‘. https://www.hul.co.in/Images/hul_75years_special_issue__tcm1255-447470_en.pdf, last visited 18 April 2019. 59

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misperception of all is that selling to the poor is not profitable or, worse yet, exploitative. Selling to the world’s poorest people can be very lucrative and a key source of growth for global companies, even while this interaction benefits and empowers poor consumers (Hammond and Prahalad 2004, n.p.)

For India, Hammond and Prahalad (2004) speak of 171 million poor households with a combined US-Dollar 378 billion annual income. They admit that several multinational corporations attempting to generate new markets in the countries of the Global South are guilty of what they have been criticised for. These companies are accused of “preaching the gospel of consumer culture to the poor”, “exploiting the poor as cheap labor”, and “extracting and despoiling natural resources without fairly compensating locals”. Yet, Hammond and Prahalad feel that “the private sector may do more harm by ignoring poor consumers than by engaging them. After all, if the poor can’t participate in global markets, they can’t benefit from them either.” In order to underline their argument, they refer to HUL’s F&L as a positive example: In part, lack of choice is what being poor is all about. In India, a young woman working as a sweeper outdoors in the hot sun recently expressed pride in being able to use a fashion product—Fair and Lovely cream, which is part sunscreen, part moisturizer, and part skin-lightener—because, she says, her hard labor will take less of a toll on her skin than it did on her parents’. She has a choice and feels empowered because of an affordable consumer product formulated for her needs. (Hammond and Prahalad 2004, n.p.)

Thus, for Hammond and Prahalad, the ‘poor’ young woman is empowered when given the choice of consumption—the consumption of a product that is both “affordable” and suiting “her needs”. The woman’s need is conceptualised as follows: her skin requires sun protection as her complexion does lightening. Just as the advertised product allegedly protects her skin against the sun while working outdoors, the cream also promises to make her hard work less visible on her skin. Thus, by lightening up the woman’s skin, the F&L cream simultaneously obscures the reasons for her precarious working and living conditions, namely, multilayered discrimination she is subject to as low caste, low class and as a woman. It becomes apparent, once again, how questions of beauty, body, gender, labour, inequality and exploitation are linked. As an interim summary, it can be concluded that the “inclusive capitalism” that HUL aspires to characterised by two strategies with regard to its skin bleaching products: for the urban career woman, consuming fairness means becoming body confident. With the help of aesthetic labour, the woman is urged to pursue her dreams, mainly to have a successful career. As elaborated above, the representative Indian woman can, paradoxically, bleach but be already fair. The urban poor woman, on

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the other hand, is rather encouraged to hide herself. Her prospect of empowerment is rather passively defined via consumption choices and charity needs. Fairness as Colour Commodity Through HUL’s corporate strategies, neocolonial thought patterns—keeping the consumers collectively ‘needy’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘dependent’—emerge alongside neoliberal ones—encouraging the confident, autonomous and “self-propelling individual” (Chaudhuri 2005, 226)—based on which social strata are targeted. Since HUL is a transnational company, its sales strategies need to be further examined, as they are embedded in a wider global frame. In the case of the global skin whitening trade, Glenn (2009) has argued that: [A] close examination of the global circuits of skin lightening provides a unique lens through which to view the workings of the Western-dominated global system as it simultaneously promulgates a ‘white is right’ ideology, while also promoting the desire for and consumption of Western culture and products […] The yearning for lightness evident in the widespread and growing use of skin bleaching around the globe can rightfully be seen as a legacy of colonialism, a manifestation of ‘false consciousness’, and the internationalization of ‘white is right’ values by people of color, especially women. (Glenn 2009, 187)

In the specific Indian context, however, I am hesitant to agree: given that I have tried to develop an understanding of skin bleaching beyond interpreting it as a strategy of “lactification” (Fanon 1967), I would not follow the course of reducing bleaching to “a manifestation of ‘false consciousness’” (Glenn 2009). On the contrary, as I elaborated on in the introduction, my study intervenes into previous literature on skin bleaching by challenging the idea that fair preference stems from Western ideals of beauty (cf. 1.4). I showed that desires for fairness have historical roots in precolonial India (cf. 2.1). Yet, even though bleaching is also a locally rooted practice, global power asymmetries must not be overlooked. Quite the contrary, global inequalities and exploitations precisely manifest in and are mediated through colourism. Therefore, the intense promotion of skin lighteners by a Europe-based cosmetic company in a postcolonial nation-state like India, indeed has to be examined against the background of a global dominance of “western whiteness” (Jha 2016). For instance, postcolonial power hierarchies are found to be reinstated when looking at cosmetic production and trade conditions that transnational companies are subject to in India, as compared to legal situations in Europe or the US (e.g., regarding the use of mercury in cosmetics). Considering the crucial role that cartography played in the establishment of colonial empires, a recent research project initiated by L’Oréal, another subsidiary

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of HUL, evokes colonial strategies of governing the body. L’Oréal ‘explores’ beauty practices and rituals all over the world in order to both increase their market shares and create new markets. Their project, called “geocosmetics”, is introduced online as follows: How many minutes does a Chinese woman devote to her morning beauty ritual? How do people wash their hair in Bangkok? How many brush strokes does a Japanese woman or a French woman use to apply mascara? These beauty routines, repeated thousands of times, are inherently cultural. Passed on by tradition, influenced by climate and by local living conditions, they strive to achieve an ideal of perfection that is different from one country and from one continent to the next. They provide an incredibly rich source of information for L’Oréal Research. Behind these routines, there are physiological realities: fine, straight and short eyelashes cannot be made-up the same way as thick, curled and long lashes. [...] In the main evaluation centers all over the world, ‘bathroom laboratories’ equipped with cameras enable its teams to study consumer behavior from around the world. These teams also supplement this information by going to meet consumers in their homes.60

L’Oréal presents its industry-oriented research as essential to “unearth[ing] rich treasuries” of local knowledge, as if this knowledge was non-existent before being ‘discovered’ by (and ultimately for) an international company based in France. A subproject of “geocosmetics” concentrates solely on the making of ‘skin colours’. Under the slogan “A New Geography of skin colour”, L’Oréal introduces its work on skin care products suiting various ‘skin colours’, thereby contributing considerably to maintaining and reproducing colourism: One of the studies carried out focuses on the actual color and the perceived color of skin. L’Oréal’s researchers assessed the skin color of women from every part of the world, along with interviews that enabled women to match their skin tone to a color chart with 66 shades, and an instrumental approach using the ‘chromosphere®’, an instrument patented by L’Oréal to measure color. In this manner they were able to establish a veritable geography of skin colors around the world. Based on objective elements, this mapping makes it possible to adapt cosmetic products to the expectations of different consumers, for example in the different foundation shades available, or in evaluating the effectiveness of skin care products that target radiance or uneven skin tone.61

60

http://www.loreal.com/research-and-innovation/when-the-diversity-of-types-of-beautyinspires-science/a-world-wide-approach-to-beauty-rituals, last visited 18 April 2019. 61 https://www.loreal.com/research-and-innovation/when-the-diversity-of-types-of-beautyinspires-science/expert-in-skin-and-hair-types-around-the-world, last visited 18 April 2019.

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Furthermore, with its “L’Oréal ethics” programme and the “Disability and me” project, L’Oréal stages itself as an advocate of diversity.62 On its website, it declares that its “ambition to win over one billion new consumers is therefore intrinsically linked” to its “desire to become one of the world leaders in the management of diversity” (emphasis original).63 Managing diversity has become part of mainstream management long ago—and it has been criticised for e.g., reproducing essential attributions along ethnical or national as well as gender dimensions; depoliticising issues of equality; and demanding that employees put all their resources at the service of the enterprise (Kubisch 2003,1–8). These strategies of L’Oréal (and likewise of Dove, another subsidiary of HUL) resemble F&L Shakti projects, in that they also include claims to educate, to define the concept of beauty, to ‘empower’ women,64 to present themselves as ‘preachers’ of diversity and ‘prosecutors’ of (colour, gender, age) discrimination and universal beauty norms, while actually propagating the myth that it is the endless self-optimisation of the body that ultimately leads to upward social mobility. It is this global framing of colonial continuities that evokes McClintock’s (1995) popular theory on nineteenth century “commodity racism”. McClintock examines the capacity of “commodity racism” to expand beyond the literate, propertied elite through the marketing of commodity spectacle, to create and fill a spectacular gap in the domestic market and to mediate the Victorian poetics of racial hygiene and imperial progress in the colonies. In short, she argues that “commodity racism” made possible the mass marketing of the empire as an organised system of images and attitudes. If one transfers her analysis to the twenty-first century, could one not possibly claim that ‘bleaching cream’ replaces ‘soap’ as an allegory of imperial progress in the late nineteenth century? Furthermore, as McClintock emphasises, the soap trade did not flourish when imperial ebullience was at its peak, but rather served in an era of crisis and social calamity to preserve the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity through fetish ritual. Today, the ongoing crisis of capitalism requires no less from neoliberal strategies securing capitalism’s survival, definitely creating a need for an aggressive promotion of “commodity kitsch” in general.

62

https://www.loreal.com/media/press-releases/2015/dec/loreals-1st-worldwide-diversityreport, last visited 18 April 2019. 63 https://www.loreal.com/group/diversity/, last visited 22 April 2019. 64 “Only 1 in 10 Indian girls appear to have high self-esteem and that’s where our SelfEsteem Project comes in. Through online guides, workshops and events, we’re helping the next generation of women to see beauty as a source of confidence.” (https://www.dove.com/ in/stories/campaigns/lets-break-the-rules-of-beauty.html, last visited 18 April 2019).

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Whereas McClintock speaks about the domestic market, on one side, and the colonies on the other, I would rather start from the perspective of Elizabeth Kolsky (2009), who has argued that the division between the metropolitan or imperial centre and the colonial margin or periphery “does not provide adequate space to explain or understand what happened on the fringes within the colonial world, on the fringes of the margin itself” (quoted by McDuie-Ra 2015, 9–10). Moreover, one must also reflect on how phenomena like “third world nationalism” (Ahmad 1992) or “world citizenship” (Deshpande 1993) further complicate these rather binary categories. Thus, I agree with Ahmad who suggests “we should speak not so much of colonialism or postcolonialism but of capitalist modernity, which takes the colonial form in particular places and at particular times” (Ahmad 1995). Moreover, regarding the divide in production (as domestic) and consumption (as colony), as I mentioned earlier, techniques of skin lightening were and are also practised in ‘the West’ and for ‘white’ bodies (Mire 2001, Tate 2016), and there is a non-Western/precolonial history of skin lightening practices as well. Hence, I ask: what role does bleaching play, as social practice and consumer product, for (the imaginations of) the Indian nation/communities (Anderson 1983) within a global capitalist modernity? Since “a nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in certain social practices” (Žižek 1992), do bleaching practices and products contribute to the perpetuation or the potential endangerment of the dominant neoliberal common sense in India? The perspectives offered by Kolsky and by Ahmad allow for an approach that takes fringes within India as well as the ‘fringe’ India into account. I have already pointed out that ‘skin colour’ is not (only) an aspect of racism but can also move independently, thus confounding or restructuring racial hierarchy (see 1.3.4). In that sense, “economies of colors constitute, and are constituted by, economies of race” (Harris 2009, 2–5). For the general Indian context, as I argued earlier, categories such as race, ethnicity or nationality are already entangled and further dependent on the respective regional and temporal contexts to a large extent (for my intersectional approach to ‘colour’, see 1.3.1). It was not only during colonialist capitalism that ‘civilization’ was preached at the colonised but denied in practice (Chakrabarty 2000, 4). While racism (still) legitimised ruling over and exploiting the colonies and the colonised, ‘Western’ nations now present themselves as post-racial (Harris 2009) and thus ascribe racism to ‘orientalised’ others, yet for the very exploitation of this same ‘other’. This strategy becomes exemplarily apparent in the way skin bleaching in India is represented in the US mainstream media. In the United States, both racism and colorism continue as very powerful markers of social distinction and exploitation (cf. “color classism”, Russell-Cole, Wilson and E. Hall 2013 [1992]), but are ascribed to other nations

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or societies amidst growing capitalist competition. In the US media, skin bleaching in India is thus represented in an oriental, neo-colonial style, depicting Indian women as victims who should know better (Shrestha 2013). The media make use of “orientalist colonial tropes of Indian primitiveness, traditionalism, and gendered difference” to ultimately present the US as a “post-racial” society, to “disassociate American Consumers from an Indian consuming public” and to ultimately maintain their economic dominance in a moment of imperial crisis (Shrestha 2013, 104). In a way, skin bleaching agents paradoxically and simultaneously de- and renaturalise ‘skin colour’ discourses by transforming ‘fairness by birth’ into ‘fairness for sale’. McClintock has shown how ‘soap’ functioned as a powerful symbol transporting the ideology of cleanness, pureness and other characteristics of the “civilization project”, legitimating white supremacy and putting the “unwashed” in their place. According to colonial ideology, blacks should try to become more ‘clean’ and ‘civilised’, but they never can—nor should—literally wash away their blackness. Fairness cream, on the other hand, is both symbol and agent at the same time; thanks to technical evolution and development, it actually changes ‘skin colour’ and thereupon, allegedly, people’s fates. Since status hierarchy and consumer capitalism are increasingly linked, fairness is sold with the promise of individually transcending oppressive systems via beauty consumption/body modification. Thus, I here identify yet another ‘myth’ of beauty. As discussed earlier, powerful social ‘myths’ transfigure beauty practices as private, pleasurable, superficial, a women’s issue, and as universally white (cf. 1.3.2). With this chapter’s analysis, we can add the ‘myth of beauty as social elevator’ to this list, since, as the example of skin bleaching shows, colourism generally constitutes and is constituted by neoliberal common sense and subjectivity. That is, the message changed from ‘you deserve to serve at the bottom of the pyramid’ to ‘everybody can change their colour, future, destiny’, which ultimately creates the illusion that everyone can overcome social and economic boundaries, whereas at the same time, these exact boundaries are maintained and perpetuated. Hence, athough I understand fair skin as social capital, within a global frame of white supremacy and privileges, it must also be taken into consideration that, first, even though “we can do all kinds of things with our bodies […] not everywhere is everything possible for everybody” (Villa 2008, 250–252), and secondly, “‘white’ skin alone does not make one white” (Lopéz 2005, 156). Accordingly, Shefali Chandra (2011) suggests changing perspectives in South Asian postcolonial research from focussing exclusively on European racial and colonial binaries towards. the very majoritarian, caste, and patriarchal cultures that have regularly shaped novel alliances with other forms of supremacy and yet have, for that very reason, remained

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buried beneath a discourse of colonial power versus Indian cultural nationalism […]. Focusing on racial regimes that propelled (or questioned) European power—in other words, by fore grounding the white/brown binary—South Asian postcolonial studies has diverted our attention away from the multiplicity of racial formations that proliferated through the colonial encounter and spawned new regimes of power beyond the colonial impetus. (Chandra 2011, 148, 150)

Apart from patriarchal Brahmin hegemony entering alliances with white supremacy to maintain local hegemony (2011), Chandra also analyses how Hindu India is created by US pop culture to re-make North American imperial power/female imperial whiteness (Chandra 2015): “In the post-9/11 world, Hindu India serves as a primary conduit for transnational whiteness” (Chandra 2015, 508). Her studies provide examples of how white supremacy is renewed in different global localities with regard to India. Above all, Chandra shows that non-white groups who make use of whiteness to maintain/re-claim power do not need to get involved in skin modifications at all. Just as Chandra emphasises that both India’s economic liberalisation and the aftermath of 9/11 intensified the relationship between India and the US, primarily against Pakistan/Islam, a similar case is made by Choudhuri: We, who live in India in homes and forests, sometimes even on the pavements of the roads of metropolitan cities are being asked and goaded to want to be living in this [global] village as world citizen primarily for two reasons: 1. We matter as a potential market [...] 2. We are now asked to be partners in the war with terror started by USA after 9/11 [...] (Choudhuri 2007, 115).

Thus, as I will go on to argue, even though fairness as a commodity and global white supremacy are deeply interwoven, they are far from operating continually in congruence with each other. In the next chapter, I look more closely at the various shades of meanings and social functions of light skin preferences as narrated by my interlocutors in Delhi. Whether and how far fairy tales actually materialise in people’s everyday experiences and relate to white supremacy and other power structures will be addressed trough my ethnographic data.

3.3

Interim Conclusions

In contemporary India, I have argued in this chapter, ‘skin colour’ has become a commodity like (and intersecting with) race, although with an increasingly neoliberal ‘outlook’. During state-led capitalism, a national beauty industry developed

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that has since been transformed during the neoliberal period. Women’s embodiments have been key to the nation-making processes. A particularly ‘Indian’ norm of fairness has been (re-)situated within a national beauty narrative by nation-making and nation-branding processes. Based on a textual analysis of the making of India’s first cosmetic company, Lakmé, I showed how middleand upper-middle-class women were turned into ‘patriotic’ consumers, strengthening the domestic economy, embodying a beauty and an imagination of the nation that was particularly ‘Indian’. Fashionable proximity to ‘the West’ was no longer denied, as long as it was combined with a particular ‘Indian-ness’. This ‘New Indian Woman’ stands in contrast to political feminism in India, weakening and silencing women and women’s movements in times of social and economic change. Social demands on female beauty and bodies have since increased within the context of neoliberal governmentality in post-liberalisation India. Visual representations of gold, glow, shine and shimmer are used by industry, media and government (‘nation branding’) to situate this conception within the ‘Indian tradition’ and create ‘authenticity’. Previous precolonial and colonial conceptions of colourism and fairness have been integrated into and reshaped within the new representations to create the specific conception of ‘Indian fairness’. ‘Patriotic’ consumption was substituted by ‘cosmopolitan’ consumption for urban middle classes and elites, on the one hand, and ‘developmental’ consumption for poor rural consumers on the other. Neoliberal concepts of (women’s) empowerment and neoliberal subjectivities have been key to this transformation. For urban (upper-) middle-class women, fairness is sold by the beauty industry as the point of entry into the growing ‘shining’ economy. HUL’s beauty missions promote ‘empowerment’ by ‘confidence’ to its female consumers. Since the 1980s, the desire for distinction from ‘common’ women has gained importance for the growing middle class. Orientating towards ‘global citizenship’ and “world class status” (Brosius 2010), beauty practices no longer serve to distinguish between constructs of ‘East’ and ‘West’, but rather re-articulate borders towards the local rural, lower classes and castes. For the rural poor women, however, fairness is primarily offered as a consumption choice. The subaltern, who are, to a great extent, socially excluded, are offered participation in the beauty industry as neoliberal form of empowerment in a “democratised” market (cf. Prahalad and Hammond 2004). Yet, the rural poor women are not only ‘in need’ of wider consumption choices, but are subject to charity interventions into all areas of their lives. Thus, beauty politics towards the poor also correspond to an increasingly neoliberal nation-state that imagines its lower strata as ‘needy’ and ‘lacking’ yet, notably, personally responsible for their

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adverse social situation. These arguments were developed by looking closer at HUL’s changing sales and marketing strategies amidst India’s development from state-led to neoliberal capitalism. To do so, I first introduced the F&L foundation, offering financial support for poor women’s education. Second, I looked more closely on F&L targeting the rural poor via ‘sachet packaging’ and the establishment of their Shakti projects. Colour as commodity and social capital only promises individual bodily strategies for transcending structural social boundaries and exploitative systems. As I demonstrate in the next chapter, interventions by anti-colourism campaigns also offer little help, in that they are likewise permeated with neoliberal subjectivity. My empirical data further suggest that, with the lower strata increasingly buying skin lightening products, fairness itself might (have) become devalued by the upper classes. I approached the transnational skin whitening trade trough a comparison with the ‘soap’, which McClintock has read as an allegory and a mediator of imperial progress in nineteenth century colonialism. It can be claimed that commodity colourism also serves to preserve the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity through fetish ritual. However, I also identified differences: whereas ‘soap’ was said to mediate “Victorian poetics of racial hygiene and imperial progress”, ‘fairness cream’ in India rather mediates and represents modernity, cosmopolitanism and the neoliberal myth of equality/social mobility for all (hardworking) aesthetic entrepreneurs. I conclude that race and colour commodity are closely linked and work in very similar ways, but that colour has been assigned an increasingly neoliberal ‘status’—particularly amidst the globally proclaimed arrival of post-racial and post-feminist eras—which ultimately reinforces white supremacy. An illustrative example of this was provided by Shrestha (2013), who has shown how the US mainstream media’s representation of skin bleaching in India ultimately depicts the US as a “post-racial” society in order to ultimately maintain the latter’s economic dominance in a moment of imperial crisis (104). How do these findings relate to ways respondents locate and define their bleaching practices within these power complexes? One approach to interpreting skin bleaching as potentially transforming (postcolonial) colour hierarchies is offered by S. A. Tate. She asks whether, in the Black Atlantic context, skin bleaching could also be understood as a “decolonizing practice”: [I]f we think of skin bleaching as decolonizing practice we decentre whiteness and tropes of authentic Blackness in terms of skin. Instead, as decolonizing practice bleaching reinstates Black skin multiplicity as normative and as achievable cosmetically. (Tate 2016, 31)

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On the other hand, “nonwhite actors” as well can make use of whiteness to “cement a range of social inequities beyond the purview of colonizer/colonized, white/nonwhite, Europe/Other” (Chandra 2011, 133): “I stress continually that the refashioning of whiteness by colonized subjects was invested less in speaking back to colonial power and more insistently attuned to the institutionalization of new differentiations internal to Indian society” (Chandra 2011, 134). While it has become clear, that the practice of skin bleaching is closely interrelated with white privilege and global white supremacy, an understanding of fair skin preference in India has to go beyond interpreting it as an internalized (post)colonial racism. First, fair skin preferences need to be further contextualised within precolonial social and cultural norms; these norms are not necessarily ‘local’ but rather transnational and are interlaced with ‘Western’ beauty standards. Second, the different shades of meanings and social functions of bleaching have specific local and contemporary contexts. In the following chapter, I analyse social meanings and functions of fair skin preference in their intersecting relations to other social categories of distinction and differentiation, being at intersection while also at variance with white supremacy.

4

Shades of Fair, Shapes of Beauty, and Shifts of Status: Narrating and Practising Skin Bleaching in Contemporary Delhi

After historically embedding fair skin as an Indian ideal of beauty (chapter 2) and tracing the (re)makings of fair skin consumers and aesthetic labourers from early Independence to contemporary, post-liberalisation India (chapter 3), I now enlarge upon the social meanings of fairness and the social functions of practising skin bleaching in contemporary Delhi. As argued further above, not only is a historical reading of ‘skin colour’ modifications essential, but so is a consideration of their concrete material contexts (cf. Erevelles 2011, 26). In that sense, I aim to more fully understand colourism as a discursive as well as a material and affective phenomenon (cf. Hook 2005, 2007). To approach the shades of meanings and social functions of bleaching in a specific local and contemporary context, this chapter draws primarily on in-depth interviews conducted in Delhi from January to May 20141 . While it has become clear that the practice of skin bleaching is closely interrelated with white privilege and global white supremacy, an understanding of fair skin preference in India has to go beyond an interpretation of it as internalised (post-) colonial racism. Fair skin preferences are also embedded in pre-colonial social and cultural norms, which are not necessarily ‘local’ but rather transnational and interlaced with ‘Western’ beauty standards (cf. chapter 2). Hence, even though the social colour category ‘white’ plays a major role in this analysis— signifying (global) white supremacy within and beyond the postcolonial Indian nation-state—it is not the only shade and frame of reference. Therefore, in this chapter, I first look closely at what (other) shades of colours people learn to perceive, distinguish and (dis)value. Generally, I here focus on how skin shades are negotiated in different living contexts—such as family, (pre-)marriage, social life and career aspirations—thus 1

cf. section on methodology in chapter 1.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2022 N. Kullrich, Skin Colour Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64922-0_4

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proposing to understand fairness as a relative or relational category of social stratification. This approach notwithstanding, a certain beauty geography was evoked in the interviews, whereby my interlocutors commonly associated lighter skin shades with the Indian north, the upper castes and classes, certain religious affiliations (namely Sikh and Muslim), as well as with modernity and cosmopolitanism, whereas darker shades were attributed to southern India, the lower castes, working migrants and rural Indians. Focussing on constructions rather than constructs, on processes rather than products (Mary E. John 2004), I seek, on the whole, to draw attention to the different social processes leading to different forms of constructions of ‘skin colour’. Whether and how fair skin is desired or rejected has to do with different social contexts and positions2 . Generally speaking, both performances of and attitudes towards skin bleaching provide avenues for navigating the self through a system of social stratification and thus striving for social acceptance and mobility. This finding relates to Hunter’s argument (2002) about fair skin as social capital. Even though I argue for an understanding of ‘skin colour’ as a social construct, it should be realised that what I call ‘fair fiction’ has an actual counterpart in the interviewees’ experienced reality: During the interviews, fair skin was predominantly associated with gaining an advantage in both the marriage and job markets3 . As a (micro) social and cultural practice (Foucault 1972, Hall 1994), I analyse skin bleaching in the context in which it was situated by my interlocutors: beauty work. Throughout this chapter, my attention will be on the ambivalent relationship between understanding beauty practices as part of self-empowerment and agency, on the one hand, and as disciplinary regimes on the other, because, as Villa argues, “every self-empowering body practice [… is] always also a submission under social norms […] we can do all kinds of things with our bodies but not everywhere is everything possible for everybody” (Villa 2008, 250–252). I thus follow Craig’s demanding feminist theory to “conceive of fields in which differently located individuals and groups invest in and promote particular ways of seeing beauty, producing both penalties and pleasures in women’s lives” (Craig 2006, 159). My aim is not only to examine how fair complexion as beauty norm 2

For more on demographic details, cf. Introduction. The structural categories ‘gender’, ‘class’, ‘race’, and ‘the body’ differentiate and regulate the access to the employment market, the unequal distribution of wages and salaries, as well as the preservation and restoration of labour power. Transferred to my research design, Winkler/Degele (2011) would ask: What functions do colourist structures and practices have in concrete social contexts? What purposes do they serve, and are these purposes conflicting with profit maximisation and accumulation of capital?

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is (re)produced by (linguistic) acts of performances (Butler 1990) but also to situate fairness aspirations within the social context of the people performing these acts (e.g., Craig 2006). How ‘skin colour’ generates social inequality can be grasped most adequately when attention is paid to “the intersection of multiple dimensions” (Crenshaw 1995, 377) that constructs (group) identities in India. The interview material suggested considering gender, class, caste, race, religion and space as structural categories for better understanding colourism (Winkler/Degele 2009, Knapp 2008)4 . However, as pointed out in the Introduction, already the naming of these entangled categories proves problematic in many respects. Emerging out of very specific contexts and conversations, they also need to be understood and defined within these frames.5 Thus, when analysing the interviews in the following chapters, I concentrate on the specific constructive processes of these categories, regarding their respective function for understanding how ‘skin colour’ generates and perpetuates distinction and inequality. But I do not only focus on how colourism is structured by, for instance, gender but also how colourism structures gender, for I believe these processes operate inseparably, are mutually conditioned, and intensify reciprocally. Ultimately, I propose to understand narrations on and practices of skin lightening in contemporary, urban North India as a political signifier and embodied materiality of entangled social—primarily class and gender but also caste—relations6 . This chapter consists of seven parts: First, I provide an overview of the rich descriptions of skin shades made by my interlocutors. I further focus on how lighter skin tones are defined and desired, arguing that skin-bleachers aim at a specific Indian fairness, not European whiteness. Additionally, I briefly address the socially learnt act of seeing colours, asking where this ‘learning and doing of colours’ is to be located (4.1). Next, I ask what kind of results and effects bleacher and beautician aspire to. I postulate that bleaching is about changing shades, not colours (4.2). In the following paragraph, I analyse ‘skin colour’ negotiations in the context of gender, ‘love’ and marriage (4.3). Ultimately, I examine fairness as desire of the ‘other’. I look at how class distinctions are negotiated and 4

The structural categories I considered crucial emerged out of my specific epistemic interest and research question (following Kapp 2008 and Winkler/Degele 2009; cf. introduction.). 5 In the general Indian context, categories such as race, ethnicity, nation or migration are already entangled and further dependent on the respective regional context, to such an extent that any understanding of these categories is particularly fluent and relative (cf. introduction, 1.3.1). 6 See brief introductions to gender and class in India in 1.3.1; and introduction to caste in section 2.1.3.

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reinforced through ‘skin colour’ aspirations (4.4). I then address skin bleaching performances as skin labour, exploring links between colour discrimination, social exclusion, and labour exploitation by bringing together Niranjana’s theories of spatiality (“olage-horage” by Niranjana 2001) with Kristeva’s theory of abjection (1982) and Federici’s work on body and labour-power exploitation by the rising bourgeoisie in (early) capitalism (2002) (4.5). Last, I examine what progressive potential anti-colourism campaigns have to offer (4.6). To conclude this chapter, I provide a brief summary of my results (4.7).7

4.1

Shades of Fair

(Re/Un)Naming Skin Shades Not only the attribution of meaning or hierarchy to ‘skin colour’s but simply the act of seeing (socially relevant) shades is a process of social learning. What people learn to perceive is, firstly, “embedded in other ethnoracial marking systems such as hair, language, dress, age, gender, season, type of work, posture and so on” and, secondly, “complexly interwoven with transnational and historical signification” (Thompson 2009, 132–133). This means that I understand ‘skin colour’ as a social position and critical category of analysis (cf. Arndt 2011). In further following John’s (1998) calling on feminists to “provide a better picture of the meanings and social locations that attach to group identities, produced through histories of naming, renaming or misnaming, intertwined with processes of relative dominance or exclusion” (206, original emphasis), I here look more closely at what ‘skin colours’ my interlocutors perceived, experienced, described, categorised and (dis)valued. Generally, ‘skin colour’ as such was experienced differently, but the interviewees mostly felt that their colour was flexible, changeable, modifiable, ambiguous, heterogeneous and/or temporary. Since my interlocutors could ‘upgrade’ their tones a few shades, their ‘skin colour’ depended on what they did and/or did not do. These activities not only included skin bleaching but also eating certain foods, cleaning the skin, using make-up and avoiding sun exposure. However, there were also limits of what could be achieved by these measures. Furthermore, ‘skin colour’ was experienced as changing with other people’s judgments, thus it also depended on what others did and/or did not do. Here, it was crucial to locate the respective views of skins: Usually, my interlocutors distinguished between experiences ‘within’ and 7

For part 4.1, 4.2 and 4.4 cf. Kullrich, Nina. 2019. ‘In this country, beauty is defined by fairness of skin’. ‘skin colour’ Politics of Social Stratification in India. 2019. In: Beauty and the Norm. Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance. Liebelt et al. (eds.). Plagrave Macmillan. 245–281.

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‘outside’ India; therefore, for them, doing colour was an ongoing discursive process, in which ‘skin colour’ was constantly (re)produced and (re)presented in the interviewees’ everyday lives—primarily, within their families. The most vivid example of the learning and doing of ‘skin colours’ was given by interviewee Deepika, a 29-year-old fashion designer, who explained to me how she was (re)made fair and dark within different situations in life: I was always told by my mother—not by my father so much but by my mother—that I was born very fair and, you know, my father is very dark-complexion[ed], like a very dark brown complexion, and everyone would question my mother about my skin colour and they would all refer to me as beautiful because I was fair, and that’s everything I’ve heard in stories, that my neighbours liked to play with me because I was a fair baby […]. The second memory I have is [of] my boyfriend from high school. Now, he was Muslim, so he had that Persian-European skin tone—he was an Indian, but he had that skin tone—and he would always call me a black, and that was the first time, you know? There was no family members or neighbours admiring me for being fair or whatever, but there was this boy, and he was calling me dark, and first I couldn’t understand why he is calling me dark, because in my family, I’m fair and now he is changing the whole perspective of things, and I felt less all the time trying to cope with how to make him feel that I am not dark, you know? I would probably feel ‘maybe I should wash my face more’, you know, it was really very abstract in my mind. (Interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014)

It becomes clear, through her/these words, how Deepika’s feelings and attitudes towards her skin and her ‘self’ changed depending on what others said and did. Her status within colour hierarchy altered with changing contexts and benchmarks determined by intimate others’ gazes: Deepika grew up as a ‘fair girl’ until one of her boyfriends brought up a new standard of fairness. Hence, it took her “some time to understand” that her ex-boyfriend was not only ‘fairer’ than her, but that his fairness transformed her own colour (status). Her ex-boyfriend’s redefinition of ‘skin colour’ for Deepika “changed the whole perspective”: In her family, she was still fair, while being with her boyfriend made her “dark” and “black”. Thus, Deepika’s narration most clearly shows how colourism originates and operates by one’s learning and doing colour8 . Similarly, within an autobiographical story on skin bleaching, published in an English-language Indian magazine’s special edition on colourism, the author claimed that she “didn’t even realize [she] was dusky until [she] was seven and called ‘kali kalooti’ in school”9 . Her language reveals again that colourism was not only experienced as discrimination but was about becoming aware 8

Cf.: West, Candace and Zimmermann, Don: Doing Gender. Gender & Society, June 1987, vol. 1, no. 2, 125–151. 9 Pande, Juhi: “Life is a bleach”, Motherland, New Delhi 2014, 56–58.

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of ‘skin colour’ as social category in the first place. Fair skin was often imagined as the status that the interviewees inhabited as babies and children, a status they would commonly lose when growing up. Interviewee Arjun10 , a 20-year-old student whom I met on the DU campus, disclosed to me how his mother used to tell him that “he was good-looking in his childhood, and that he lost his fairness by playing in the sun” (interview with Arjun, 18 April 2014). The time period in which shades shift could also be very brief, as 23-year-old student Jyoti11 noted: Even when we become dark, after many days, if people see us, they say you have grown fatter, you have grown darker, they would say that when first meeting. Even when I come back from vacations, everyone [would point out to] me, ‘you have grown very fair’. (Interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014)

She not only disclosed how shades of colours were in flux—hence her gradually “becom[ing] dark” or “grow[ing] fair”—but that these nuances were immediately noticed and commented on, or rather, co-constructed by the people surrounding her. Her statement further suggests that ‘fair’ may also signify a certain mental or bodily state—in her case, seeming relaxed and refreshed after returning from the holidays. When the interview participants talked about beauty (ideals), it became evident that fair skin was commonly referred to as a hegemonic beauty norm; it became equally clear that fairness did not exist as a unified concept but a multifarious notion. Therefore, I will not speak of fairness as a singular beauty norm, or even as a fixed shade or colour, but rather as the different shades of fairness that people learn to perceive and subscribe to. This means understanding fairness as relative and relational regarding different social positions and contexts. Many of the people I spoke with favoured a skin tone they identified as “natural fair”, “Indian fair”, “middle complexioned” or “wheatish colour”, and some of them explicitly dismissed a ‘skin colour’ they described as “too fair” or “European white”. This led to the assumption that although some participants indeed talked about wanting to become fair(er), a desire for ‘European whiteness’ was not overtly pervasive. In accordance with that, the terms ‘fair’ and ‘white’ seemed not always to fall within the same (skin) tone category. During the interviews, people used a wide range of (additional) adjectives to describe or specify skin tones they themselves identified as ‘fair’. These detailed specifications included further gradations and shades of colour (as in yellow, pink, red, white, savla, mixed, gor¯a or gor¯a chitta), 10

Arjun is a 20-year-old student. He was born in Delhi, and identifies as Hindu and Thakur. His father works as ‘property dealer’, and his mother as ‘teacher’. He speaks Hindi, Panjabi, English, and a ‘little French’. 11 Jyoti is a 22-year-old student, who referred to herself as “upper middle class”, and identified as Sikh and Bakshi. She speaks Hindi, Panjabi, and English.

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¯ allusions to region or origin (as in Persian, Indian, British or Aryan), binary concepts of the ‘other’ (as in ‘foreign’) and the ‘self’ (as in ‘normal’ or ‘natural’), food metaphoric comparisons (as in ‘milky’ or ‘wheatish’), connections to hair colours (blonde-white), and general designations of brightness (light, glow)—all indicating how colour perceptions and descriptions vary for the study participants, not to mention the wide range of different social positions that were associated with fair, such as regional belonging or religious, class or caste status. Whether the interviews were conducted in Hindi or English, both the English terms ‘fair’ and ‘white’ as well as the Hindi word ‘gor¯a’12 13 were used, whereas ‘safed’14 —the Hindi word for ‘white’—was never evoked within the context of skin, body or beauty. The etymological origin of the Hindi term ‘gor¯a’ is the Sanskrit ¯ ‘gaura’. In Turner’s Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages, the given source is the R.gveda, in which its meanings cover the spectrum “white, yellowish, pale red” It is usually translated as ‘fair’ or ‘light-skinned’. The female ‘gori’ is translated as ‘fair complexioned woman’, a ‘beautiful woman’, or a ‘Caucasion woman’ (The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary). In a group interview with a feminist collective in Delhi, three activists stressed that the word ‘gori’ could also function as a placeholder or synonym for the feminine in general, most often in songs and

12

The etymological origin of the Hindi term ‘gora’ (female ‘gori’) is the Sanskrit ‘gaura’. In ¯ Turner’s Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages, the given source is the Rgveda, in which its meanings cover the spectrum ‘white, yellowish, pale red’. The dictionary fur¯ ther provides a list of other Indo-Aryan languages and dialects with variants of the term ‘gaura’ and their respective semantic ranges, which include: white, yellow, brown, grey, fair, pale, red (of cattle), light-coloured (of soil), self-coloured, beautiful, lovely. (cf. Turner, R. L. (1962–1966, incl. supplements published 1969–1985). (http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionar ies/soas/, last accessed 23 April 2019). In the Hindi-German Dictionary by Gatzlaff-Hälsig (2002) gora is translated as ‘light (skinned)’, ‘beautiful’, ‘light skinned person’, a ‘European’ or ‘American’. As this thesis shows, ‘gaura’ was not (only) used to describe people from Europe or America. Moreover, the designation ‘American’ primarily reveals assumptions made by the book’s editor, who obviously imagines America as ‘white’ in the first place. In the Oxford Hindi-English dictionary, ‘gora’ is translated as 1. fair-complexioned; attractive, 2. light-skinned, 3. Caucasian. 13 Although I do not provide a consistent transliteration from the Devanagari into the Roman script in this work, I seeked to provide a correct transliteration for the Hindi words ‘gor¯a’ and ‘k¯al¯a’ to emphasis their local (language) histories, which cannot entirely be covered by translations/representations of the English ‘fair’ and ‘dark’. Likewise, I adopted a spelling of ¯ the term ‘ Aryan’ that signifies beyond Europe and beyond British colonialism. 14 The Hindi term ‘safed’ for ‘white’ rather refers to objects, not people. The Oxford HindiEnglish Dictionary further gives ‘grey’ (the hair); pale-coloured (as dawn light, or chalky soil); clean (as light-coloured clothing; blank (paper).

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movies.15 Similarly, ‘fair’ in British English (from Old English ‘fægere’) usually meant not only “pleasing to the sight of persons and body features” but “also of objects, places, etc”.16 Thus, the expression ‘fair lady’ could refer to a woman of fair complexion as well as a beautiful woman more broadly. In early 15th-century English, ‘fair’ was also used as a noun simply meaning ‘woman’—this corresponds to what my interlocutors said about ‘gori’ referring to a woman in general in Hindi. These implicit assumptions, already imagining a woman as light-skinned, reveals exactly how powerful ‘fair’ is as a gendered beauty norm, especially since the link between fair and female does not have to be made explicit.17 15

Activist Veena referred to the lyrics of a Hindi song: “It’s funny, like, you talked about movies and songs and sometimes it’s not only them using ‘gori’ to describe ‘skin color’ as such; it’s just, you know, ‘you pretty girls’, ‘you fairy girl’, or whatever, so it doesn’t even have to do with the color of the skin at all. I mean, you know, there is this song called ‘gori teri aankhein kahein’; it has nothing to do with the fact that she is beautiful or anything; it’s just him saying: ‘girl, your eyes tell me that you haven’t slept all night, that you have been crying all night and that you’re sad about something’, so it has nothing to do with her physical appearance at all, except that he is addressing her as ‘gori’”. Her colleague, Virmati, objected, assuming that by describing a woman as ‘gori’, it would already be implied that she is beautiful, and thus, fair: “But you can interpret it differently, saying that everybody thinks everybody should be fair; it’s the idealised form. Like, if you’re going to address a romantic song, a romantic woman could be a gori. So it doesn’t even have to do with describing someone’s beauty or whatever; it’s just saying ‘crying all night’, but the idea is that she is beautiful and therefore gori” (Veena, group interview the Saheli collective, 22 February 2014). 16 Old English ‘fæger’: “pleasing to the sight (of persons and body features, also of objects, places, etc.), beautiful, handsome, attractive”; of weather, “bright, clear, pleasant, not rainy”; also in late Old English: “morally good”, from Proto-Germanic *fagraz (cognates: Old Saxon ‘fagar’, Old Norse ‘fagr’, Swedish ‘fager’, Old High German ‘fagar’, “beautiful” Gothic fagrs “fit”), perhaps from PIE *pek- (1) “to make pretty” (cognates: Lithuanian puošiu “I decorate”). The meaning in reference to weather preserves the oldest sense “suitable, agreeable” (opposed to “foul” (adj.)). Of the main modern senses of the word, that of “light of complexion or color of hair and eyes, not dusky or sallow” (of persons) is from c. 1200, faire, contrasted to browne and reflecting tastes in beauty. From early 13c. as “according with propriety; according with justice”, hence “equitable, impartial, just, free from bias” (mid-14c.). Of wind, “not excessive; favorable for a ship’s passage”, from late 14c. Of handwriting from 1690s. From c. 1300 as “promising good fortune, auspicious”. Also from c. 1300 as “above average, considerable, sizable”. From 1860 as “comparatively good”. The sporting senses (fair ball, fair catch, etc.) began to appear in 1856. Fair play is from 1590s but not originally in sports. Fair-haired in the figurative sense of “darling, favorite” is from 1909. First record of fair-weather friends is from 1736 (in a letter from Pope published that year, written in 1730). The fair sex “women” is from 1660s, from the “beautiful” sense (fair as a noun meaning “a woman” is from early 15c.). Fair game “legitimate target” is from 1776, from hunting (http:// etymonline.com/, visited on 2nd of November 2015). 17 I turn to gendered aspects of the fairness discourse in subchapter 4.3.

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Moreover, the Hindi term ‘sãvl¯a’ (‘savla’ from now on) was regularly used. The translation that I found in Gatzlaff-Hälsig’s dictionary (2002) is given as dark, brown (-skinned). The English term ‘brown’, however, was hardly ever used to describe the skin but rather head hair colours. The interviewees translated ‘savla’ for me as ‘mixed complexion’. In an online Hindi-to-Hindi dictionary ‘savla’ was defined as ‘halk¯a k¯al¯a rang’, which can be literally translated as ‘light dark colour’.18 Another shade lying between dark and fair was ‘wheatish’, which was also usually defined as ‘middle complexion’. Abu-Er-Rub (2017) stated that her interviewees used the terms “wheatish” and “dusky” for darker shades, distancing themselves thereby from the tones ‘k¯al¯a’ or ‘black’ (Abu-Er-Rub 2017, 109). Similarly, a study on fair skin preference in Indian matrimonial websites (Adelman and Jha 2009) claimed: “the default status was ‘wheatish’, which seems to serve as a catch-all phrase, whereas the category of ‘dark’ is a loaded, often stigmatized and culturallycharged term with a negative valence” (74). Hence, ‘wheatish’ here meant to disguise, upgrade, or transform darker skin tones into more acceptable, desired, or simply more ambiguous categories of colour:19 This assumption corresponds to an autobiographical narration that I found published on a blog of the anti-colourism campaign ‘Dark is Beautiful’. The author disclosed a similar function for the term ‘wheatish’ in her ‘offline’ mate-seeking process: According to most of my relatives, we had to enlist me in a matrimonial services provider, so we went to a suitable one and I filled in a host of forms. On each form, after the basics, there was a slot for ‘skin colour’. I went ahead and ticked the box that said ‘dark-complexioned.’ The person in charge read the form and made a funny face at me, as though I had made a stupid mistake. She pointed at the ‘skin colour’ box and said, ‘Please change that to ‘wheat-complexioned.” I asked why, and she rolled her eyes at me and said in Tamil that it was standard procedure for any girl of my ‘karuppu’ skin to tick ‘wheat-complexioned’ to boost my chances of ‘catching’ a groom. Holding back both anger and laughter, I asked the million-dollar question, ‘What will they say when they see me in person?’ She replied, ‘Just get a facial bleach done before they come to see you, or tell them you tanned over the summer.’ I smiled

18

http://www.hindi2dictionary.com, last visited 23 April 2019. Jha and Adelman (2009) base this conclusion on a detailed examination of how these standardised skin colour coding systems were used by mate-seekers. These coding systems ranged “from ‘very fair’ to ‘dark dark brown’”. Mate-seekers who registered with these websites were asked to self-identify with one of these shades of colour. Even though the predetermined categorisations on these websites offered such a wide range of colours, the researchers found that none of the seekers declared ‘dark’ or ‘very dark’ as self-description.

19

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politely, told her I’d rather not lie, and re-ticked ‘dark’. She shook her head ever so disapprovingly. And that was just a regular Tuesday for the unmarried dark girl.20

Accordingly, during my interviews, several shades lying between ‘fair’ and ‘dark’ were perceived, but they received very little attention when beauty was discussed. Desired skin shades were predominantly described as ‘gor¯a’, ‘fair’, and/or ‘white’. In contrast to what Jeffrey (2017) assumed about wheatish being the “ideal skin” in India21 , for my interlocutors from Delhi, definitions differed. On the one hand, wheatish was used to specify a desired shade of ‘fair’. When emphasising that a “natural”, “normal”, “original” or “Indian” shade of fairness was meant, it was described as “wheatish fair”. Yet, in cases where ‘wheatish’ was used for covering all kinds of shades between ‘fair’ and ‘dark’, it was not explicitly desired. To describe darker shades of colour, the interviewees commonly used the English terms “dark”, “dusky”, or “dull”. They also used the Hindi term ‘k¯al¯a’22 , meaning ‘dark’ or ‘black’. Variances of ‘k¯al¯a’, such as ‘kali’ or ‘kaula’ or ‘k¯al¯a-kal¯ut.a¯ 23 , were said to be frequently used to insult people, hence, as swearwords. The English term ‘black’ was hardly ever used. As a derogatory term, ‘k¯al¯a’ had also been adopted by the British to designate the colonised, in addition to other devaluations such as “black”, “the n-word”, and “ape” (cf. chapter 2). The etymological origins of the term ‘k¯al¯a’ in India indicate that it entailed ‘negative’ semantic fields before the expansion of Christian crusades, and that its meanings were very ambivalent. In Hinduism, for instance, the goddess Kali is worshipped as the destroyer of demons and thus stands rather in opposition to the ordinary pejorative description of ‘k¯ali larki’ for a dark skinned girl. Throughout the interviews, dark skin was never declared beautiful. However, this negative valence was differently expressed, as the interviewees commonly referred 20

http://www.darkisbeautiful.in/discrimination/surviving-discrimination-the-aj-franklinstory/, last visited 18 April 2019. 21 Jeffrey 2017, 413 refers to Prakash Tandon. 1961. Punjabi Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 163–164. 22 The Hindi ‘k¯ al¯a’ stems from the Sanskrit root word ‘k¯al’ meaning ‘darkness’ or ‘the god ¯ of death’. The Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages lists ‘k¯al¯a’ with ‘black, dark, blue’ and gives the Mahabharata as source; for Hindi, it gives both ‘k¯al¯a’ as ‘black’ as well as ‘k¯aliya’ as ‘black complexioned’. Many semantic changes and extensions of meaning occurred, but all contained connotations linked to darkness, night, death, evil, or ugliness— such as ‘k¯al¯a-ratri’ for ‘night of death’ or ‘night of the apocalypse’ or ‘k¯alikh’/‘k¯alima’ for ‘disgrace’—as well as expressions that are linked to conceptions of time. The Oxford HindiEnglish Dictionary translates ‘k¯al¯a’ as 1. black, 2. wicked, 3. fearful, dire; and as masculine noun, it is a title of Krishna. 23 translated as 1. jet-/pitch-/ deep black, 2. pitch-dark, 3. repulsive (ugly) by Gatzlaff-Hälsig (2002).

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to a general Indian beauty matrix that ‘simply’ disvalued dark skin. Moreover, ‘skin colour’ discrimination was usually ascribed to (rural, lower-class and -caste) others. Whenever remembering incidents of one’s own biography, they were limited to childhood memories. Thus experiences of colour discrimination were narratively separated from the self, present, adulthood, and also, urban living environment24 . For example, Jatinder and Pradeep25 , 18-year-old students and friends who I interviewed together on the art faculty campus, remembered incidents of ‘skin colour’ discrimination from their childhoods. They both grew up in lower-class families in rural Uttar Pradesh: In our neighbourhood also, there was this small guy who was teased as kalu and kaliya because he was dark and he was a small kid, so his mother was hurt and fought with other people who were calling her kid that, but still, they continued doing it. Sometimes, [this happens] between parents also: one of them may be fairer and one a little darker, so their kids may be half fair and half dark, so the parents treat them unequally. (Interview with Jatinder and Pradeep, 18 April 2014)

Pradeep here explains that kalu and kaliya26 are “common names” ascribed to “dark people” or to “people who are a little dark”. At no point did either of them feel the need to explain this kind of name-calling to me as an outsider. Whatever prejudices might be commonly associated with ‘dark’ skin, they do not have to be pronounced. Apart from these cases of rather ‘normalised’, everyday colour discriminations, the interviewees also revealed resentments about dark skin in more subtle and indirect ways. Sita27 , a 50-year-old housewife and client of Lucy’s beauty parlour in Lajpat Nagar II, told me that she had already married off two of her daughters, yet stressing that ‘fair skin’ did not play a significant role in her family’s mate selections: Fairness doesn’t matter if the girl is not well-mannered; she should be well-educated; she should respect her family; otherwise, it doesn’t matter whatever skin colour it is; even dusky skin is beautiful. Like my eldest daughter; her skin tone is like man’s [her

24

This point will be further enlarged upon in 4.4. Jatinder, a 18 years old student, grew up in a working-class family in Uttar Pradesh (UP). His father worked in “sweet production” and his mother as “domestic worker”. He identified as Hindu and Mathur. I interviewed him together with his friend, Pradeep, a sophomore also from UP, whose father worked as “rikshavala” and whose mother as a housewife. Pradeep is 18 years old and identified as Hindu and Kashyap. Both preferred to be interviewed in Hindi. 26 Kalu/kaliya can be translated as ‘the dark one’, ‘the black-complexioned one’. 27 Sita, a 50 years old housewife, married, two children. She identified as Hindu and did not state her caste. She was born in Delhi, her father worked for ‘Dalmia Cement’ and her mother was a housewife. She speaks Hindi and Panjabi. 25

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husband’s] only, but she has natural beauty in her […] face. These features matter, not only fair skin. (Interview with Sita, 1 March 2014)

Already at the beginning of our conversation, Sita had claimed that fairness had never been an issue for her family. However, the use of such words as “even”, “but” and “only”, if not betraying some measure of unconscious bias, at least gives an insight into the influence of the social environment and its implied demands that she aimed to meet. The same seemed to be true for 29-year-old mehandi artist, Rajesh28 , who had uttered that “even if people have a medium complexion or a dark complexion, they still might look good” (interview with Rajesh, 1 March 2014). Nevertheless, he needed no fewer than three modifiers (“even”, “still” and “might”) to concede that medium or dark complexion could “look good”. Having briefly introduced the most common shades that my interlocutors referred to, I now turn my attention to the lighter shades of colour to see how they are defined and desired. Shades of Fair, Norms of Beauty Even though the participants reported perceiving, distinguishing and preferring various lighter shades of colours and used different terms like ‘white’, ‘gor¯a’ and ‘fair’ to draw distinctions among colour concepts, they also used these terms interchangeably when talking about different concepts. When I was interviewing beautician Preeti29 in a beauty parlour in Kamla Nagar II, I showed her a selection of twenty-three photographs to provide yet another visual basis for discussing skin shades. I had collected them randomly from the Internet, together with my research assistant R. We had tried to collect diverse appearances, associated with different regions of the world. The women and men in the pictures were of different ages and were showing their face and parts of the upper body, different facial expressions and body postures, but their figure remained invisible. They were wearing all sorts of fashions, body jewellery, headgears, head ornaments, haircuts and hairstyles. Moreover, they were meant to present different shades of skin, eye and hair colours and structures. I first asked Preeti to show me the most beautiful woman/women of the selection, and secondly, the one (or several) embodying the kind of fairness that skin-bleachers would 28

Rajesh is a 29-year-old Mehandi Artist from Uttar Pradesh. His parents were both agricultural workers (“farmers”). Rajesh is married and has two children. He identifies as Hindu and Kumhar caste (status of ‘Other Backward Classes’); and speaks Hindi and Bhojpuri. 29 25-year-old Preeti started her training as a beautician at a very young age to support her parents. Her father was a police officer, who later became incapacitated for work, and her mother was a housewife. Preeti, who had roots in Manipur, stated her caste as Kanojia and her religion as Hindu. She speaks Manipuri (Meitei), Hindi and English. When we met, she ran a beauty parlour in Kamla Nagar II, together with her husband.

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try to achieve. When I prompted her to describe what she saw, Preeti explained to me: “This is white … this is fairer. I like the second one; this is white, this is the simple beauty, the face structures, the eyes, the colour of the eyes, it looks good. I like the white-pinkish skin tone, and this is wheatish, which is fair” (interview with Preeti, 21 February 2014). Later, she further specified: “this one has a pinkish tone complexion; it’s a yellow complexion; and this one is a pale complexion yellow”. She thus differentiated between pinkish and yellow shades and showed preference for a “white-pinkish” tone. Although she further described ‘fair’ as “wheatish”, she also used ‘white’ and ‘fair’ interchangeably. Whereas relations between signifier and signified are always socially constructed, learnt and performed, the ambiguity points to the variety of meanings and definitions available and speakable in Indian colour discourses. Hence, it was impossible to always clearly assign the terms that the interviewees would use to the concepts they would referred to. Therefore, it is crucial to note that the distinction between ‘Indian fair’ and ‘European white’, which I proposed to make here, is a rather analytical one: In (language) practice, these distinctions are never strict, clear or unambiguous to begin with and vary widely from one interviewee to another. When the interviewees would use the term ‘white’, they might not refer to ‘European whiteness’, while when using the term ‘fair’, they might just as well do. Thus, to invoke Barthes (1964), the linguistic sign (significant/signifier) adopts different concepts (significat/signified): In the primary semiological system (signum 1), the sign refers to a certain colour, and in the secondary semiological system (signum 2), the sign refers to a social concept of categorisation. Whereas, in signum 1, a wide range of shades exists, signum 2 primarily alternates between two ‘regional’ poles, i.e. ‘Indian’ and ‘foreign/European’. Keeping this in mind, I was able to carefully examine when and how ‘white’ and ‘fair’ would be used differently by the interviewees according to different contexts. When looking again at the situation in which specified descriptions were used, it can be noted that ‘milky’, ‘mixed’, ‘Indian’, ‘glowing’, ‘Persian’, ‘savla’, ‘normal’, ‘natural’ and ‘wheatish’ would ¯ be used when explicitly referring to ‘Indian fairness’, whereas ‘British’, ‘Aryan’, ‘blonde-white’ and ‘foreign’ were rather used to designate ‘European whiteness’— even though the interviewees could simultaneously classify all these tones as ‘fair’ and ‘gor¯a’. Differentiating ‘fair’/‘gor¯a’ and ‘white’ The interviewees distinguished between ‘fair’/‘gor¯a’ and ‘white’ for several reasons and in different ways. When I talked with 22-year-old student Jyoti, she made an attempt to explain to me how she differentiated between ‘fair’ and ‘white’: She used ‘fair’ to describe her own current skin tone (what, according to her, would also be

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the tone that was to be found throughout India), whereas ‘white’ referred to an ideal (and for her, desirable) ‘foreign’ skin tone: In my context, fair is what I am, and I want to be more whiter [sic] [laughs]. So you will find fairer girls in India, but not that white. See, I want to be like a foreigner; they do have the whitest skin. I want […] the glowing, the whiter skin, they have. We have foreigners here who come for, like, having fun here, and even I, if I see a more whiter girl, I’m, like, ‘come on, she must be a foreigner; that’s why she has that skin; otherwise, I’m not too bad’ [laughs]. But yes, white and fair both are different terms in my thinking. (Interview with Jyoti, 7 February, 2014)

Jyoti explicitly desired a ‘foreign whiteness’ and thus specified that “foreigners” do have the “whitest skin”, although she assessed this kind of ‘white’ as a rather unreachable ideal. Therefore, she did not actually compare her own tone with that of a foreigner’s ‘skin colour’, but when identifying a girl as “more whiter” because she suspected her to be a foreigner, she could reassure herself, thinking “I’m not too bad”. Her impression that white foreigners came to India for “having fun” hinted at some awareness on her part of unequal, global power relations and labour distributions, in which (some) white people have money, leisure time, and passport privileges at their disposal to travel long distances just for “having fun”. The kind of fun white foreigners had seemed to be differentiated here from the fun that black foreigners or brown Indians could possibly have when also travelling through India. In fact, I was told, many times, that tourists, expats or migrants who were perceived as ‘white’ would benefit from priority treatment and privileged access, whereas a particular kind of anti-black racism was widely present throughout India. Generally, Jyoti’s association of “white” with “foreign” was very common in the interviewees’ narratives and, for most, that association had positive connotations. 29-year-old fashion designer Deepika, for instance, whom I met for an interview in Shahpur Jat, explained how complimenting a person on her or his outer appearance was often done by referring to her or him as “foreign” or “foreigner”. During our conversation, Deepika did not use the term ‘white’ but alternated between “gori” and “fair”. To her, both ‘foreigners’ and ‘Indians’ were fair, but foreigners were somewhat fairer. Thus, they both would be attributed the same colour category, with distinctions only in terms of shades: It’s actually not a bad thing when people refer to foreigners as ‘gori’ or ‘gora’. ‘Gori’ actually means fair, because that’s the main difference between a foreigner and an Indian, that they are fairer than us, so it really doesn’t mean anything. I think if you call an Indian ‘gori’ or ‘gora’, it’s really a compliment to an extent that, in contemporary poetry, a lot of songs are written with the word ‘gori’. [When] you talk about

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someone being beautiful and you call them ‘gori’, it’s a compliment. (Interview with Deepika, 1 February, 2014)

It struck me as noteworthy how Deepika meant to explain the meaning of the compliment ‘gor¯a’/‘gor¯ı’30 but then ended up saying “it doesn’t mean anything” when a foreigner is called ‘gor¯a’ or ‘gori’. When applied to an Indian, however, ‘gor¯a’ or’gor¯ı’ was to be equated with ‘beautiful’. Thus the same term was used rather descriptively in the first case and rather qualitatively in the second. Here, not the term but the context signifies a difference, referring to the ‘ordinary’ (a ‘foreigner’ is always gor¯a) and the ‘extra-ordinary’ (an ‘Indian’ is exclusively gor¯a). Her conception of ‘gor¯a’ is thus consistent with other exclusive imperatives of beauty regimes. As a beauty norm, ‘gor¯a’ is to be desired by everyone, but, simultaneously, it can only be selectively granted; otherwise, it would lose its power as social capital. However, Deepika’s conception of beauty was not about imitating Western standards; as will be shown further below, she had rather dialectical notions of ‘fairness’ and ‘exoticism’. Other participants stated that they differentiated between both terms and concepts. Jayani, a 22-year-old student I interviewed at one of the women’s hostels of Delhi University, explained how she understood and used the terms ‘fair’ and ‘white’ differently. According to her, calling someone ‘fair’ would not only mark their ‘skin colour’ but entail further assumptions about other physical features or personal characteristics, whereas ‘white’ referred to complexion alone: When you use ‘white’, you would be saying that this person is only a fairer complexion, but when a person says she is very fair, then basically, no, you will think that she has everything nice in her, starting from her head to her eyes to her nose, everything is good in her. But when you say she is very white, you will come to know that, yes, that means she is only talking about her complexion, nothing related to the other physical features. (Interview with Jayani, 5 February 2014)

A similar notion was expressed by Rajesh, a 29-year-old mehandi31 artist, whom I met at his workplace, a small section of a sidewalk near the Lajpat Nagar market. When I asked him what he meant by the term ‘fair’, he explicated: “they [fair women] are good-looking; they are sweet and they are achhe32 […]”. Thus, he also indicated that being fair is not only about a person’s complexion or outer appearance but also included personality features. Furthermore, pointing out my complexion, he stated that it is “not what you are but it’s a white”, implying that fairness is either another 30

‘Gori’ is the female form of ‘gora’. ‘Mehandi’ or ‘mehndi’ is an artistic henna design drawn on the body. 32 Hindi for ‘good’. 31

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spectrum of, or a colour similar to, white—in any case, a skin tone he differentiated from the kind of white that he assigned to me. In one case, after I prompted her to show me the fairest women in my selection of photographs, interviewee Aditi33 —beautician and manager of a Chinese beauty parlour in Khan Market—turned the interview process on its head, asking me: “What do you mean by fair? White?” When she asked me that question, she had already gone through all of the photographs and described many of the depicted women, using such phrases as “they must have used bleach”, “some people don’t groom themselves at all, besides their natural birth skin”, “having a skin as dark as that lady has …, but she is so well groomed; it is not bleach”, “they are fair but not groomed”, etc. She finally chose two pictures (“I think they are the best”), specifying them further ¯ with the attributes “Aryan, more white” and “British”. Thus, before asking about my definition of fair, she had already used a wide range of skin-tone descriptions: ¯ natural, bleached, fair, dark, white, Aryan and British. Whereas ‘British’ clearly refers to a shade of colour linked to notions of origin, region, or even ‘race’, as it ¯ has been shown in 2.1, the term ‘Aryan’ entails a wide variety of meanings, ranging from ‘original’ inhabitants of India/‘authentic’ Indian to outsider or colonialist. What was most revealing about her question, however, was her assumption that different conceptions of fairness exist, and that she was unsure whether the two of us shared the same notion. ‘White’ thus seemed to be one (out of several possible) interpretation(s) of fairness, whether the one she thought of herself as or the one she assumed I would be talking about. Another spectrum of ‘fair’ was introduced to me by 31-year-old fashion designer Kapil34 —whom I met in his studio in Jhahpur Jat—an Adivasi35 , who grew up in a small village in Arunachal Pradesh. Being a successful and popular designer in Delhi, he explained to me not only the beauty ideals prevailing in the fashion and modelling business in the metropolis, but also the differences in ‘skin colour’ preferences in rural areas as well as cosmopolitan cities. In that context, he elaborated on how, in India, the word ‘gor¯a’ is used to describe a fair skinned person and ‘gor¯a chitta’ for an even lighter shade: This is fair, I mean gora; when it is more whiter [sic] than white, we call it ‘gora chitta’. I mean, you see lots of Indian girls that are very milky-coloured; they’re very 33

Aditi is a beautician in her fifties who ran a “Chinese beauty salon” with her sisters near Khan market. 34 Kapil is a 31-year-old fashion designer from Arunachal Pradesh. He defined his caste and religion as “tribal” and “nature”, and his sexual orientation as ‘homosexual’. His father was a politician and his mother, a farmer. He speaks Hindi and English. 35 ‘Adivasi’ is a self-designation of indigenous groups in India.

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white actually—not like your white but equally—they must be white like this, lots of them, like people from Kashmir. Also, there are very white people from Punjabi, from Pak; they’re also very fair; they have the same [shade] like the foreigner white. There are people like that. (Interview with Kapil, 9 May, 2014)

Apparently, Kapil also perceived many different shades of fair. He used the terms ‘white’ and ‘fair’ interchangeably—as he called people from Kashmir “very fair” and “very white”—but categorically differentiated between “your white” [pointing to me] and a “milky white” of “Indian girls”, although emphasising how similar they appeared, since the latter would look “like the foreigner white”. He also stressed how fair is translated as ‘gor¯a’ in Hindi and that there would be another Hindi term for a very light white: “gor¯a chitta”. Hence, he indicated that a wide range of light skin tones existed that were not sufficiently described by the term ‘white’ alone (“more whiter than white”). His additional description, ‘milky’, is loaded with culture-referential meanings in Hinduism. Even though Kapil himself described his religion as “tribal” and “nature”, his language might still reflect his living in a Hindu-dominated society. Hence, the description “milky colour” could reveal further positive associations with ‘fair’. First and foremost, there is soma (cow’s milk), which is both ritually and materially significant: In many parts of India, cow’s milk (and other bovine products as well as bovine labour) provides people’s livelihood. In addition, milk is used for healthcare, ritual purification and in beauty treatments. As part of the latter, milk (in its various manifestations and in different mixtures, such as ubtan or curd) is, as the interviewees mentioned to me, one of the many traditional home remedies for skin lightening. In relation to women, the description ‘milky’ can further be seen in the context of patriarchal social constructions of a ‘good’ woman—domesticated, married and childbearing (cf. Titzmann 2014, 223– 225). For this patriarchal construct of the ideal woman, breast milk is a central component, as opposed to vaginal secretion and menstrual bleeding, which are considered impure in orthodox Hinduism: As Anuradha Kumar (2002) explains in her essay on adolescence and sexuality in the Rajasthani context, menstruating women must adhere to certain restrictions: They cannot enter a temple or a kitchen and are not allowed to touch anyone except their own children until after they have had a ritual cleansing bath (62)36 . Apart from comparing skin to milk in terms of colour, the conception of ‘milky white’ or ‘milky colour’ potentially includes these extremely positive associations with the ‘good’, ‘pure’ and ‘valuable’ woman. This is consistent with the definitions given by Rajesh and Jayani above, both of whom

36

A. Kumar (2000) also stressed the fact that many women would welcome the “brief vacation” from their daily chores.

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characterised ‘fair’ as ‘achhe’37 , ‘nice’ or ‘sweet’. In her study of colourism in rural Bangladesh, Rozario (2002) also links the distinction between “pure” and “shameful” women with “fair and “dark” skins, finally arguing that fair skin could even outweigh a lack of purity when it comes to women’s ‘marriageability’. Desiring and Naturalising ‘Indian’ Fairness The interviewees quite often differentiated between beautiful and fair. Sita, for instance, selected some of the pictures and categorised them into three groups: “this is beautiful, but this is fair […] these are gora […] they are fair, this is fair, but this is beauty with fair”. Padma, a beautician from Model Town, stated: “we Indians don’t like very fair colour”. 17-year-old Veena38 , whom I interviewed within a group of five other school girls at an NGO concerned with economically and socially disadvantaged communities in Lajpat Nagar II, claimed: “too much fairness is also not goodlooking, and this one, she looks like a witch; there was a movie where a ghost looked like her”. The comparison or equation of a white-skinned woman with a “witch” and “ghost” most clearly contradicts the widespread assumption of ‘white’ (skin) being a universal beauty ideal. When I asked the girls to show me the fairest women of the presented pictures, they unanimously selected two of them as ‘the most beautiful ones’, and two others as the ‘fairest ones’. Although the ‘beautiful’ women were also of a rather light complexion, the rule of ‘the fairer the prettier’ apparently did not fit. But taking the perspective of the majority of India’s population into account, the girls assumed that the woman they singled out as fairest, although not most beautiful, “in India, will be number one”. Additionally, they explained that, generally speaking, there was a preference for “fair” and “pink” skin in India. Another group of five school girls, whom I met at the same NGO in Lajpat Nagar II, argued along the same lines. After selecting a woman—of whom they assumed “people want to be fair like that”—they maintained that, personally, they favoured a fairness they identified as “natural colour: it is more like wheatish fair, not red”. Another group of seven Rajasthan-Bhatt women between 16 and 40 years, whom I met in Kathputli Colony, emphasised, during a group discussion, that their personal beauty ideal was “skin wheatish colour: not too fair, not too dark, wheatish colour”.

37

Hindi for ‘good’. Veena is a 17 years old school girl from Delhi. She identified as Hindu and Valmiki. Her father is retired and her mother a housewife. Veena speaks Hindi. I interviewed her within a group of five other school girls at an NGO concerned with economically and socially disadvantaged communities in Lajpat Nagar II.

38

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Interviewee Chayanika39 , a 22-year-old beautician working in a small ‘women only’ beauty parlour in Kamla Nagar I, provided initial insights into the field. Her perspective on fair preference changed and shaped my research question already at the beginning of my fieldwork. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Chayanika to show me, with the help of the selected photographs, what exactly she understood by the term ‘fair’. She first picked three pictures but later argued that she had selected “European whites”. If I had asked for the “normal fair”, she would have chosen differently, as that was what “Indians” would prefer: a “mixed complexion”. In many interviews following this, ‘Indian fairness’ or ‘mixed complexion’ was explicitly desired and ‘European whiteness’ rejected. Interviewee Sita also selected pictures of fair skinned women from the photographs, stating that “Indians would go for this natural fairness”. She explicitly excluded all photographs depicting women whom my research assistant R. and I assumed would embody rather ‘European looks’. Jyoti explained to me: “In India, basically, there is a mixture of it—not too black, not too white, but the mixture— everybody wants to have that glowing skin”. Dhwani40 , a 23-year-old beautician and manager of a beauty parlour in Model Town, also stressed that people would not like “too much fairness” and would rather prefer “the normal skin type”. Another group of five socially underprivileged school girls aged 15 to 22 years, whom I also met in Lajpat Nagar II, clarified that discussions on ‘skin colour’ were never “only about black and white”. One of the girls, Amita41 , specified, on the basis of the presented photographs: “this one is wheatish; this is savla, which is mixed complexion, ye dono black hai42 ; this is brown; this is yellow; this is white.” When I asked Rajesh to describe the skin tone of a photograph, he said: “she is too fair, and her hair is short […] gora hai, but it’s too fair, and her nose is not good, and her hair is short, so she doesn’t look good”. To conclude this section, it can be stated that the interviewees perceived a whole range of different shades of colours, stretching beyond any binary divisions of ‘black 39

Chayanika is a 22 years old beautician from Delhi. She identifies as Hindu and refers to her caste as Rajput. Her father “works in a shop” and her mother as housewife. Chayanika worked in a beauty parlour in Kamla Nagar. She speaks Hindi. 40 Dhwani is a 23 years old beautician from Delhi. She identified as Hindu and Rajput. Her father worked in the “tent house business”, and her mother was a housewife. She speaks Hindi, Punjabi and English. When we met, she was salon manager of a beauty parlour in Model Town. 41 Amita is 22 years old; she was an intern at the social centre where we met. She is from Ranchi, Jharkhand; identified as Christian and Munda. She speaks Hindi and Munda. Her father works in a “corporation” and her mother in a hospital. 42 Hindi meaning ‘These two are black.’

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and white’ or “white verses brown” (Chandra 2011, 132). The interviewees broadly differentiated between colour conceptions that I have analytically categorised as ‘Indian fair’ and ‘European white’. It was further shown that seeing ‘skin colours’ is a process of social learning, located primarily within the family. Accordingly, shades (and hence, status within the colour hierarchy) are in flux and change due to (mostly intimate) others’ gaze as well as to food intakes and environmental issues. While ‘gor¯a’/‘fair skin’ was commonly perceived as a norm of beauty, the interviewees also differentiated between ‘fair’ and ‘beautiful’. Further, calling someone ‘fair’ could entail more general statements about her or his current status of mind or body (“relaxed”), as well as about a person’s character or personality (“nice” and “sweet”). The term ‘k¯al¯a’/‘dark’ was used in a general derogatory way, even when expressed indirectly. The shade ‘wheatish’ played a mediating role in between, either dissociating the self from darkness or further specifying one’s fairness as ‘Indian’. ‘Indian fairness’ was commonly imagined as ‘natural’, ‘original’ and ‘normal’, and turned out to be most desired. Hence, in the next paragraph, I look closer at what exactly skin-bleachers aspire to. (How) can ‘natural’ fairness be realised by a practice commonly deemed artificial?

4.2

The Practice of Skin Bleaching: Change of Shades, Not Colours

Having elaborated on the range of skin tones perceived and desired, I now turn to the practice of skin bleaching. Looking at the effects to which bleachers aspire, I argue that skin bleaching can be understood as a means to change shades, not colours. Even though I neither do nor would equate skin bleaching with skin-tanning, I take the interviewees’ comparisons of these two practices as my starting point. In most conversations, skin-tanning was referred to as a beauty routine practised outside India, predominantly in order to explain skin bleaching as beauty practice performed within it. Tanned skin was neither brought up as an Indian ideal of beauty, nor was the practice of tanning among the services offered in the parlours I visited. As a beauty trend, it came up just once in an interview that I conducted in one of the most expensive, popular and fashionable beauty parlours I visited during my stay in Delhi: “You know, some people want dusky skin. Some people are very fair, but they want some tanning all over the body, so they go for the tanning or to the beach; they apply a lot of oil all over their body,

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and they will tan their body” (Interview with Shalini, beauty parlour in Model Town, 14 February 2014). On another occasion, a white German female friend of mine who had migrated to India disclosed that some of her upper-class acquaintances in Pune would desire a tan to show they had spent their holidays on Goa’s beaches. When tanning was otherwise mentioned, it usually had the function of ‘normalising’ and ‘ranking’ bleaching as just another beauty practice among others. During the interviews, the practice of bleaching was often defined as ‘de-tanning’, and bleaching and skin lightening creams were compared to tanning and to tanning lotions. For instance, Aditi, the owner of a beauty parlour in Khan Market, understood both bleaching and tanning as different ways to attaining the same goal: feeling beautiful. Jyoti also reflected on how the desire to be or to be seen as beautiful leads to different kinds of beauty work in different parts of the world. Whereas, in India, a ‘fair’ skin is desired, in New York City, to which her sister had moved, people would aspire to become ‘tanned’ and to possess an ‘Indian skin’: “They go for skin-tanning on the beaches [laughs]; they like the Indian skin; they tan their skin, but here [in Delhi], the ultimate is, of course, the beauty that lies in fairness” (interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014). Bleaching as De-Tanning: Restoring One’s ‘Original’ Skin Tone Shalini, the manager of a small beauty parlour in Lajpat Nagar I, described bleaching as follows: “It is a chemical that removes tanning; people use it to look more beautiful and fair” (interview with Shalini, 14 February 2014). Poonam, a beautician who runs her own salon in Faridabad, also defined bleaching as ‘de-tanning’ and explained that, after the treatment, the (facial or body) hair would become the same colour as the skin (interview with Poonam, 3 April 2014). Aditi, a beautician from a beauty parlour in Khan Market, likewise emphasised that, through bleaching, “facial hair becomes brown” (interview with Aditi, 14 April 2014). She further stated that bleaching is “good for dark blemishes and patches”. Sarover, an employee in a beauty parlour in Model Town, specified that, by bleaching, ‘de-tanning’ is ‘possible’, but “you have your own ‘skin colour’; nobody can change that” (interview with Sarover, 29 March 2014). Kavita43 , a beautician in a beauty parlour in Lajpat Nagar II, described the effect of skin bleaching as “not a very big change: the tanning is gone and the hair looks golden” (interview with Kavita, 14 February 2014). 43

Kavita worked as a beautician at Mohit’s beauty parlour in Lajpat Nagar. Mohit had invited her to join our conversation, because she knew how a bleach was applied. Kavita just stayed with us for a very short time, thus, no more personal information was shared.

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Beautician Chayanika, for instance, explained that, in her beauty parlour in Kamla Nagar I, they offered different treatments such as bleaching or massages to “remove the dusky, polluted complexion” and “to get a glow”. Dhwani, another beautician from a salon in Model Town stated that bleaching would bring a “shine” and “glow” to people whose faces looked “ugly”, “dusky” and “dull” before. Mohit44 , the owner of a beauty parlour in Lajpat Nagar, defined ‘beauty’ as follows: “generally, your face, your skin, how it is glowing; generally, in India, we think fair girls, fair colour is beauty, and beauty is all about skin, hair, everything, the full body. We do treatments for skin-glowing and skin lightening”. Through these descriptions, it became apparent that changing one’s complexion is not the (only) objective of bleaching; it is also about making the dark facial or body hair less visible (‘brown’), invisible (‘same colour as the skin’) or lighter (‘golden’), as well as about making the complexion and the overall appearance of the skin bright(er) or (more) ‘glowing’. This emphasis on gold, glow and shine can be further linked to what Laila AbuEr-Rub (2017) has identified as a central element of female beauty in neoliberal India, especially within the Indian fashion industry. Gold, she argues, marks the very essence of Indian aesthetics. Historically, gold has played a significant role in Hinduism in Indian rites of passage or festivities, being not only associated with status and prestige but also serving as material security for the lower classes. Today, gold is used in industry as well as by the media and the government (‘nation branding’) to mediate visually between what is considered Indian tradition or authenticity, on the one hand, and the increasing commercialisation of a ‘modern national identity’, on the other, to encourage urban (upper-) middle-class consumption and to secure India’s growing economic power (cf. Abu-Er-Rub 2017). In contrast to the standard of bleaching both facial and body hair, head hair is virtually never bleached or dyed blonde. Here, dark colours are preferred over lighter tones. As one interviewee put it, “yeah, they do get colour for the streaks and all, but not as much as they prefer their blackness. They use mehandi henna, but not as much; they don’t go for the blonde colour” (interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014). It is apparent that the politics of skin and hair are deeply intertwined, for, in a place where dark skin is unwanted, facial or body hair is equally unwelcome. Consequently, the skin bleaching procedure, as performed in the beauty parlours I visited, always included the removal or dyeing of facial or body hair. Just as is the case with skin, so are head, facial, body and pubic hairs culturally read. Those who do not conform to dominant beauty norms are “seen as anomalous 44

Mohit was the male manager of a unisex beauty parlour in Lajpat Nagar, in his forties. He did not share any more personal information with us.

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beings by another, often dominant, segment of the social order” (Obeyesekere 1998, xiii). Thus, bleaching often seems to be understood as a practice of ‘normalisation’ rather than of ‘beautification’ (cf. Davis 1995, Gimlin 2002). Here, I understand ‘normalisation’ not as opposed to ‘beautification’ but rather as a particular form that beautification can adopt: Whereas the latter describes compliance with, dissent from, or the transformation of dominant beauty norms, normalisation describes an adaptive modification that is not experienced as being beauty work at all. Nevertheless, I define skin bleaching as (hidden, made invisible; Black 2004) beauty labour (cf. 4.5). Lastly, the definition of bleaching as de-tanning in the statements quoted above resembles the beauty industry’s advertisement narratives. While suntan lotions and solariums in Europe usually promote a summer complexion (e.g., the German product ‘Nivea Visage Sommer Teint’45 , a ‘facial summer complexion lotion’), fairness cream commercials in India promote winter fairness (e.g., ‘Fair & Lovely Winter Fairness’ cream). The reference to seasonal change may be another indicator of how bleaching practices are not aimed at changing consumers’ ‘skin colours’, but rather at not letting one’s skin tone be changed by the season or the climate. Thus, detanning is a cosmetic practice with the aim of preserving the supposedly ‘original’ or ‘natural’ tone. The range of bleaching products available in shops and beauty parlours also points to desired shades beyond white, such as ‘gold’, ‘saffron’ or ‘chocolate’ bleach. Bleaching is often defined as a means to repair skin ‘damage’ and to restore the skin’s ‘original condition’. However, this is not the case for bridal treatments, which clearly stand out from daily beauty routines. The specific standing of (pre-) bridal treatments becomes evident from the menus in beauty parlours. Every beauty parlour I visited offered a wide range of beauty treatments, but all included a particular bridal beauty package, comprised of waxing, body-polishing, threading the eyebrows, manicure, pedicure, facial, make-up, hair colour/cut/style/spa, etc. A beautician from Lajpat Nagar I, explained that, for a wedding, they would offer special treatments only “if they [the clients] have a hair or a skin problem”: If they have no problem, we don’t do anything, just the normal [...]. Like ‘normal’ in the sense of what we do, of what we call ‘pre-bridal’. In the pre-bridal, we do hair-cutting, all-body bleach, facial, manicure, pedicure, and that’s it. Everything from head to toes. (Interview with Shalini, 14 February 2014) 45

https://www.amazon.de/Nivea-Visage-Sommer-Teint-Tagespflege/dp/B005135B0K. This product was no longer available last time I checked (8 April 2019). Nivea now offers a lotion called ‘Nivea Sun Touch’, as well as a product called ‘Schutz und Bräune’ (‘Protection and Tan’). https://www.nivea.de/shop/sonne/ (8 April 2019).

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The expression “normal” is opposed here to having a particular (beauty) “problem”. If there is no such thing as a “problem”, then the “normal” procedure will follow. Whereas a “normal” bodily state entails “not do[ing] anything”, a “problem” leads to a special wedding treatment. “Not do[ing] anything,” however, turns out to constitute many different beauty practices, such as “hair-cutting”, “all-body bleach” or a “facial”—in fact, “[e]verything from head to toes”. Describing the ‘normal procedure’ simultaneously as “not do[ing] anything” and “[doing] everything” indicates that a lot of beauty work is required even to attain or sustain ‘normality’. Hence, naturally grown facial or body hair is not considered ‘normal’ and has to be bleached, threaded or waxed, i.e. either removed or made less visible. In accordance with what is defined as ‘normal’, special bridal treatments have to offer more than simply ‘rebuilding normality’. Obviously, the beauty industry takes care of that as well: A beauty worker from Lajpat Nagar II told me that “every brand has a bridal facial, and they put some extra products for extra glow or instant glow and long-lasting glow, because, again, they are putting extra products; those facials or treatments are expensive” (interview with Kavita, 14 February 2014). Through this statement, it becomes more than apparent how all these (pre-)bridal products present themselves in superlatives (“extra”, “instant”, “long-lasting”) and how their priority effect lies in lighting up the skin. Whereas everyday life already demands taking care of one’s fairness, wedding celebration days require a fairness even brighter and more intense, radiant and luminous, presumably matching the importance accorded to marriage, by society, as an ‘event’ in a woman’s life (cf. Dube 2008), but actually corresponding to a pressure on women and the female body that increases within the context of marriage. Not only are special, bridal face kits offered in beauty parlours, but there are also particular wedding make-ups contributing to the lightening of skin. A beautician from Khan Market explained that “the bride needs to match with the groom” and that “make-up can lighten your skin colour up to five shades”. Sara Ahmad (1998) describes tanning as a way white bodies could “flirt with ‘Blackness’ as a signifier of sex without becoming Black” (61, original emphases). Applying her theory to the skin lightening phenomenon, the common reference point is dark skin discrimination/anti-black racism: Whilst white people tanning their skin do not want to become black, dark people bleaching their skin do not want to stay dark. However, to get a tan without “becoming Black” is regarded as an advantage and white privilege by Ahmad. How does that relate to skin-bleachers who become fair but not white? Could it equally be regarded as a disadvantage that de-tanning or bleaching the skin does not transform the social self into the political category of ‘European white’, either? I suggest considering the possibility that becoming ‘European white’ is not the aim of all the people bleaching their skin in the first

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place. The desire to climb up the social ladder through de-tanning or bleaching might as well refer to one’s own local community. In that sense, skin-bleachers might not mind “stay[ing] brown” (Appadurai 1993) on a more global scale of things. Moreover, if differentiation the strategists’ aim for power makes use of whiteness, they do not need to involve skin modifications at all. A vivid example of how whiteness can be applied is given by Shafali Chandra (2011), who has shown how heteronormative Brahmin culture makes use of whiteness to differentiate itself from other castes and non-Hindu religions in order to (re)claim their dominant status. Chandra (2011) stresses that “the refashioning of whiteness by colonized subjects was invested less in speaking back to colonial power and more insistently attuned to the institutionalization of new differentiations internal to Indian society” (Chandra 2011, 134). She further explains: [T]he fact that self-consciously nonwhite people indexed whiteness through its sexual practices to foment privileges and exclusions internal to colonial society should be regarded as an important aspect of the history of whiteness itself [...]. Moreover, whiteness can be reproduced by non-white people. As the sources I examine here reveal, patriarchal Brahman culture was locked in a supportive relationship with white power. Upper-caste power emerged as universal and exceptional, normative and particular: monogamous conjugality was the fulcrum for this exchange. (Chandra 2011, 133)

To conclude this section, it can be stated that bleaching the skin is not only and necessarily performed to comply with racialised hierarchies but also to restructure precolonial forms of social stratification. I here struggle with Chandra’s conception of differentiations being “internal to Indian society”, since I believe that stratification categories are never merely ‘local’ but travel and change to some extent. I am not satisfied with the term ‘precolonial’ either, since it again divides history along the lines of colonialism. As Ahmad (1995) has pointed out, in Indian histories of gender, caste and class, the precolonial, the colonial and the postcolonial would be too deeply intertwined “to treat the social and cultural consequences of colonialism as discrete and sui generis” (1995, 36). Yet I generally follow Chandra making a case for Transcultural Studies to look beyond the usual dichotomies/dualities of “white verses brown, European verses native” (Chandra 2011, 132). Accordingly, the stated aim of beauty salon customers I spoke with was not (always) to obtain or even approximate a white ‘skin colour’—which was commonly perceived as ‘foreign’—but rather to reclaim a supposedly ‘original’ and ‘natural’ skin tone, irrespective of whether such a tone ever existed in the first place. As the imagined ideal, however, it was often mediated by parents and linked to one’s childhood. These constructions of fairness as natural are further reproduced

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by the cosmetic industry’s advertisements for bleaching products, wherein they proclaim that such cosmetics ‘bring back the healthy, fair skin you always had’. Hence, even though skin bleaching produces fair skin, it is simultaneously and paradoxically imagined as ‘natural’. Moreover, fairness is presented as specifically ‘Indian’, and “re-situated within the familiar nationalist narrative of ‘natural Indian beauty’” (Reddy 2006, 72f.). Fairness is further a highly gendered category of stratification that peaks within the context of marriage negotiations. Almost all interview participants came to speak about matrimony sooner or later. Moreover, “monogamous conjugality” has not only been referred to by Chandra (2011, 133) but also deemed crucial for studies on colourism in India: “A preference for light skinned females is a global bias that affects all areas of human relationships, especially in marital mate selection” (Adelman and Jha 2009). The next paragraph thus enlarges upon the entanglements of beauty, gender, and ‘skin colour’ with a focus on marriage.

4.3

The Fair Bride in the Bridal Fair

In this chapter, I examine how ‘skin colour’ intersects with and reinforces gender as a category of social stratification in the context of the Indian marriage market. Generally, marriage and the family were always referred to by the interviewees when talking about learning, experiencing and the passing on of colourism— whether by a mother constantly worried about marrying off her supposedly dark skinned daughter, or a husband not letting his wife play golf in the sun, fearing she might tan. A feminist activist whom I interviewed claimed, accordingly, that “any discussion on skin-whitening will be within the framework of marriage” (interview with Virmati, 22 February 2014). When looking closer at how fairness is negotiated in relation to gender and marriage, I consider different social conditions and positions reinforcing or minimising the significance of fairness. I discuss whether and how acts and thoughts concerning fairness are linked to ways of shifting or moving the (gendered) body and the self as well as navigating through bodily limits and social boundaries. On the one hand, the interviewees talked about acting in correspondence to stereotypical roles assigned to them by society (becoming a particular type of ‘bride’ or ‘career woman’), and about breaking away from these roles (‘becoming a boy’, ‘playing outside’) on the other.

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“Women should always be fairer than men” The participants explained that women46 had to be fairer than usual on their wedding days, but most importantly, that the bride had to be fairer than the groom—or “more good [sic] complexion-wise”, as interviewee Jyoti put it. This means that female beauty is not only defined in relation to other women (as in Hunter’s “beauty queue”, rank ordering “women from lightest to darkest” skin tone, Hunter 2005, 69–92) but also—and primarily so—in terms of men’s shades. More precisely, a woman is compared to the man she is dating or married to, which not only makes the man the ultimate point of reference but evaluates women’s bodies as already set in a heteronormative and gender-binary, hegemonic position: A woman is always already the potential (heterosexual) bride or wife of a (heterosexual) man. According to the interviewees, it is rare to see a fair man dating a darker-skinned woman. In the exceptional cases in which the woman is considered darker than the man, other people would feel the need to point out that they have married “despite her or his colour”. Most likely, they would be at least commented on (group interview with feminist activists, 2014). Thus, the notion that a woman’s skin tone is evaluated and rated in comparison to her husband’s, especially in the context of weddings, exemplifies that fair skin is a highly gendered norm: The whole Indian ideology [dictates] that a woman should be fairer than a man, you know? [...] It is very rare to see a couple where the man is really, really fair and the woman is dark—I’m talking about a very average Indian couple—it’s usually the other way around. Really, where do you get all these fair women from? What happens to all the dark women? (Interview with Radhika, 1 February 2014)

Respondents of all genders stressed that women were more severely affected by rigid beauty norms and ‘skin colour’ discrimination: Whereas, in regard to men, other status factors such as income, employment or education could easily outweigh a

46

Since my use of the term ‘woman’ follows what the interviewees referred to, I, likewise, only refer to persons who are socially read as ‘women’. All persons who self-identify as ‘female’, irrespective of cultural interpretations of their outer appearance or the gender status they have been assigned by birth, are excluded from the kind of ‘femininity’ that the fair skin norm (re)produces. Therefore, I have not used the asterisk (*) for the term ‘women’ throughout this book. However, not referring to diversity in sex, gender and desire here at all would mean reinforcing gender dichotomy and heterosexual normativity, especially since India, historically and legally, recognises three gender identities. Yet Hijras are basically absent from or ‘extraordinary’ to beauty (as any other) mainstream discourses and society. (on Hijras, see e.g., Gayatri Reddy (2005) With Respect to Sex. Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. The University of Chicago Press.

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lack of fairness, in the case of women, beauty pressures would come on top of other social demands: The other day, you were talking about this matrimonial site, where are all the women are really fair, but it is in India; that’s not possible, and it’s really sad, you know? I know if my cousin has to get married, who is dark skinned, that her parents would set any guy a business to get their daughter married. So it’s really, like, okay, if you are not improving our gene pool, you are improving our financial standing, you know, so it really comes down to that. (Interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014)

At the end of this statement, Deepika reveals a way in which her family tried to solve ‘the problem’ of marrying off her supposedly “dark skinned” cousin: Since they could not offer a ‘fair skinned’ girl to another family, they would have to compensate by supplying the prospective groom with financial resources. The woman is thus completely reduced to her economic utility here, whether in the form of material goods (“set[ting] any guy a business”) or with respect to biological reproduction (“improving our gene pool”). Deepika’s narrative clearly shows that fair skin can have a material countervalue on the marriage market. The interviewees told me that, for men, fairness is less significant in the mateseeking process. Fashion designer Kapil explained that other characteristics are equally or even more important than “looking good” or “hav[ing] fair skin”. He said that there is a whole range of possibilities for men to compensate for their supposed ‘lack’ of fairness and beauty. Since, he assumed, women would want to marry rich boys, wealth could easily outweigh fairness. Only if a man is neither rich nor smart, “then obviously, you have to look good”. Hence, he assumed that men would have to be either rich, smart or beautiful, whereas women have to be many things at the same time. The interviewees expected brides to have an overall good personality and a good education; they should further be caretaking, represent family values, manage the family, and give birth to beautiful babies. To “have a good job”, “to earn well”, or to be “independent” would only be demanded of men. For women, pursuing a “career” would be mentioned rather as an alternative life concept to marriage. To outweigh a lack of fairness with money is not expected of a woman: In contrast to Kapil’s narrative, in which it was the groom himself who had a job or who earned the money to compensate for his darker skin tone, in Deepika’s narrative further above, it was the woman’s parents who offered money and business on her behalf. These observations correspond to what Indian sociologist Béteille (1967) observed almost half a century ago:

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Fair skin color has, for instance, much greater weight in choosing a bride than a groom. In the case of the latter, other qualities such as wealth, occupation, and education play an important part. A dark skinned son is not so much of a liability to a middle-class family as a dark skinned daughter, for he can more easily acquire other socially desirable qualities. (Béteille1967, 453)

One of the feminist activists I spoke with explained that the widespread preference for fair brides runs across all social classes, independent of people’s religious affiliation, caste status or financial standing:“I think that everyone wants a fair woman as a bride—that goes beyond doubt—whether Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Brahmins, underprivileged, Dalits. This desire is across [wealth], across religion, so, in a sense, that is the one feature desirable across them all, right?” (Veena, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014). Her comrade, Virmati, agreed, telling me that fair bride preference was an allencompassing desire but could operate in different ways. On the one hand, it could affect people’s marital choices in the subtlest ways—a phenomenon she called “tacit acceptance”; on the other hand, fair skin preference could be an openly announced “guiding factor”: In some communities, it is maybe not so much pronounced; in some communities, it is very much like a guiding factor in fixing up marriages or deciding what the norm is—the beauty norm—but nobody would say no to it, you know what I mean? Like, there is a tacit acceptance. They may not write in the matrimonial ‘we only want fair skinned women’ or whatever, but there is a tacit sort of fair that is anyway better than not not fair. I think there are different fair spectres with each caste and community, because marriage in India is so very, very homogenous; it is always within one’s community, within one’s religion, within one’s subcommunity, subcaste that there is a valuable and fluent understanding of what fair is. (Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014)

In this statement, Virmati further points out that fairness is always partial, that its meanings differ with the change of setting. Although fluid and relative, the variety in conceptions of fairness may ultimately strengthen rather than weaken its overall appeal. As Virmati emphasised, marriage usually happens in very homogenous contexts, which means that even though there is variety in desired shades across different communities, the ideals within each social group can still be consistently strong. Moreover, despite acknowledging that a bride’s fair skin is “the one feature desirable across them all”, there are other categories of stratification, intersecting with ‘skin colour’ yet moving independently of it—as Virmati mentioned, “gender, class and caste”. These social categories can be equally (or even more) important for matchmaking processes. Again, this observation reflects what Béteille (1967) has described:

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In certain parts of North India, Moslem women are often very light skinned and have features that are positively valued. Nevertheless, a Moslem bride, however fair, would not normally be acceptable in a Hindu household. Likewise, a Kashmiri bride would not be acceptable in a Tamil Brahmin household in spite of her very light complexion. Thus, physical features of a particular kind are only marginally important, other things (or, at least, certain other things) being equal. (Béteille1967, 453)

Similarly, colourism in matrimony was reported to be outweighed by racism, as illustrated by an example given by interviewee Veena, who felt that Northeastern Indians, even though read as “fair”, were not perceived as “desirable” but “different”. She, at first, struggled with the term ‘race’ but finally brought it back in because, as she put it, compared to looking like a “Punjabi” or “South[ern] Indian”, people from Northeast India look “particularly different, so there is some element of race”: People who live in the Northeast have somewhat different features from us; they have more Chinese, Mongolian, East Asian features, and they are not considered Indian— they may be fair, but they are not [Indians]. Those women are not necessarily desirable as spouses because they are different, so, in that sense, race comes in the picture; and I say ‘race’ here because, earlier, we talked about ‘she looks like a Punjabi, or she looks like a South[ern] Indian’, but beyond this, there is also the Northeast, which looks particularly different, so there is some element of race, but fairness is much more important for the society in general. (Veena, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014)

What is further insightful about Veena’s narrative is how the beauty of a woman is defined by her ‘desirability’. According to activists of the feminist collective, the way women are desired by men further differs depending on whether one is looking for a future wife or a girlfriend. Although fair skin seems to matter in both cases, it mediates different characteristics in each: For a future wife, the activists assumed, women should primarily be “pretty”, “quiet”, “homey” and “sober”; a girlfriend, on the other hand, could also be “hot” and have her “own personality”. With regard to men, however, the interviewees made no distinctions between being inside or outside marriage, and the terms ‘husband’ and ‘boyfriend’ were used rather interchangeably. Since preferences for fair brides are interwoven with colonial racial discourses as well as with locally embedded beauty ideals, it would be interesting to examine whether these preferences are reinforced or become less important among Indians living in a predominantly white racialised society. This question has been examined by Jyotsna Vaid (2009), who asked what role ‘skin colour’ played in marriage negotiations in South Asian diaspora communities in North America, as “visible minorities in the context of a predominantly white-majority host culture” (Vaid 2009, 150). In her study, she compares matrimonial advertisements placed by members of

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the South Asian diaspora with ads placed by their counterparts living in South Asia to detect whether fairness preferences operated differently in each case (Vaid 2005, 151). Despite the fact that her findings give no reason to expect the importance of ‘skin colour’ to have diminished in the diaspora context, there is no evidence either to support her initial thesis that “the persistence and possible increase in mention of fair skin color over time [could be] a signal that ‘fair’ has taken on added value because of its racial significance for members of visible minorities” (165). She ultimately concludes that ‘skin colour’ may be “used more as a marker of (female) beauty than anything else” (165), thus rejecting some of her initial hypotheses about fair skin enhancing its appeal in a racist environment, as well as the assumption that fair skin may be less strongly weighed because the influence of traditional values might be waning among second-generation migrants. Hence, Vaid’s findings match my theses in this book. ‘Love’ and Modernity The emerging global ideal of ‘romantic love’ has recently been criticised for disguising—among others—gender inequality, creating new interdependencies and pressures (Donner 2012). Moreover, it was interpreted as a “ritual” of global consumerist culture in India (Brosius 2012). Although often viewed as a global signifier for modernity, Donner (2012) argues that romantic courtship and companionate marriage are not social givens that appear with modernisation, but […] they present narratives which situate social actors in relation to modernity through the discourse on what is ‘traditional’ and what is ‘modern’. As Ahearn suggests, contrary to the linear story presented by some scholars writing about intimate loves and social change, the discourse on traditional and modern practices is not a sign of ‘modernisation’ but a narrative about modernity (Donner 2012, n.p.)

Looking closer at the issue of marriage, it turned out that ‘love’ in this context was understood by my interlocutors either as emphasising an ‘individual choice’ or, rather, a ‘universal ideal’. Interpreted as narrations on modernities (Donner 2012), ‘love’ stories included two different assumptions about the future developments of fair preference: On the one hand, it was presumed that a change towards ‘individual preferences’ within the mate-seeking process would increase the value of physical attractiveness and thus enhance demands for fair skin. On the other hand, it was suspected that fairness would become less important because of the increasing value of ‘true’ emotions that were indifferent to social (beauty) standards. Jyoti shared the experience of a friend of hers (“really fair”), falling in love with a girl of darker complexion (“not so fair”). She remembered how her friend’s parents had no problem with the “love marriage” but with the fact that the girl was “not fair too much”.

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However, she expected the desire for fair brides to diminish in the near future. Her explanation for that was twofold: First, she believed that love marriages are commonly becoming more and more accepted, and secondly, she assumed that if love were the only reason for marrying someone, fairness could not be as mandatory as when a marriage is arranged. Her assumption corresponds to my finding that the learning and doing of colourism is primarily experienced within families. Jyoti stated that it is “the mentality” that is changing and ascribed this development (at least partly) to the increase in education: Now the mentality is getting different, as you study more and you open up your mind. I have friends who […] the boy is really fair and married to a not so fair girl—their parents have problems with this only, not with the love marriage—but they have a problem with how she is not fair too much. But now it’s changing; they are getting married; they don’t have illusions as much. If you’re arranging, then yes, you will search, but if you are truly in love, then no one can stop [you]. (Interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014)

Jyoti assumes fairness would become less important because people “study more”, “open up [their] minds” and fall “truly in love”. In this case, fair preference is attributed to an (imagined) past rather than seen as a ‘signifier of modernity’. When another interviewee, Sita, was talking about her daughter’s marriage, she stated that “she is attractive; that’s why she had a love marriage”. The causal link she made here means that her daughter is beautiful enough to have a love marriage— which, judged by the tone of her voice, Sita was rather proud of. However, in the case of her youngest daughter, Sita had a quite clear picture of what the groom should be like (“if marriage proposals come for her, she is tall, so we also want a groom who is tall like her so that they match, and he should be independent and earn well and he should have an educated family”). For her nephew’s bride, Sita and her sister were also involved in the decision-making process. Whereas Sita considered beauty an important factor to ‘fall in love’, she did not mention ‘fair skin’ as a particular requirement. She rather understood fairness as an arbitrarily selected criterion, among others, that was of no importance to her: “we looked at her [her sister’s daughter-in-law’s] height, her overall personality, her education, her manners; and if people say ‘skin colour’ is important, that is their choice.” Interpreted simply, this means that fair preference would only affect people who have already chosen to be affected by it—a view that clearly requires further investigation. Sita’s own narrative, however, already seems to suggest otherwise: Fairness doesn’t matter if the girl is not well mannered; she should be well educated; she should respect her family; otherwise, it doesn’t matter whatever skin colour it is,

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even dusky skin is beautiful. Like, my elder daughter, her skin tone is like her husband’s only, but she has natural beauty in her; in the elder daughters, face and the features matter, not only fair skin. (Interview with Sita, 1 March 2014)

Her declaration reveals that Sita has adopted fair skin as, at least, part of the beauty norm. This can be concluded from her expressions containing contrasting modifiers as well as conditional markers, such as “even dusky skin is beautiful”, “not only fair skin”, or “fairness doesn’t matter if (…)”. What participants discussed more often than different conceptions of ‘marriage’, however, was an antagonism between ‘marriage’ and ‘career’ as possible life concepts that a woman could follow. Hence, I next ask about the role ‘skin colour’ plays within these debates. Differentiating Women Whereas my entire material pointed to a prevalent preference for fair brides, different narrations unfolded regarding the contexts of marriage and career. Pursuing a career was often understood as an alternative life concept to marriage—but only for women, not for men. Thereby, two conflicting views evolved: Some believed that fairness was important for a ‘career woman’, whereas others found it less important for a woman’s ‘marriageability’. Believing that ‘true love’ would be an increasingly decisive factor in marriage matching, some interviewees assumed that fairness would be less crucial compared to when a marriage is arranged by parents. Another differentiation was made between educated, urban middle-class women and women from rural areas and lower classes. On the one hand, the “office girl” was associated with doing beauty work and contrasted to the ungroomed “village lady”; on the other hand, it was assumed that “really educated people” would not need to dedicate their time to beauty work, although “even the housemaids” had picked up beauty work by then. Visible beauty work could thus signify not only middle- or upper-class status but also lower-class or rural identity. When Deepika wondered about “the whole Indian ideology” determining that the woman should always be fairer than the man, she asked: “Really, where do you get all these fair women from? What happens to all the dark women?”, and finally wondering: “Are they not getting married? Are they just studying to become doctors?” Thus, at the very end of her statement, she pointed out an interesting question, which was tackled by other interviewees, too: Deepika understood embarking upon a career as an alternative life concept to marriage, assuming that fairness might be less required in the first case. Experiences and opinions within this field differ: Jyoti, who said that women consider themselves beautiful when they have fair skin, felt that “every girl is now passionate about her future”, whereas earlier, women were mostly “sitting at home”, mainly occupied with housework: “Before, they would,

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like, sit at home and use household things, housewife kind of things, but now, they move out, everybody. They used to be at home, but now, of course, everybody is changing their thinking” (interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014). Although she admitted that beauty was given more importance by women entering the public working sphere, there seemed to be a difference, depending on the respective field of work, that became evident when she said: “[A] teacher may have skin problems but not time to do something about it; really educated people don’t think about what skin they have” (interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014). Thus, the increasing importance of fairness did not, in her opinion, apply to “really educated” women, who would neither have the time to do something about “skin problems”, nor worry about the condition of their skin in the first place. On the other hand, many people referred to professions such as acting or modelling, for which bodily appearance and fairness were increasingly important; others felt that beauty generally gained in significance across supposedly ‘private’ and ‘public spaces’. As interviewee Preeti put it: “Beauty is very much important; it’s a demand of people right now. ten years ago, people didn’t even bother about it; at that time, many housewives did not even do the eyebrows, but right now, even the housemaids are very conscious about this. Everybody is conscious about beauty” (Preeti, 21 February 2014). Preeti thus not only differentiates between career women and housewives but housemaids—presumably the group least expected to be concerned with beauty work. Like other interviewees, she further distinguished between ‘modern’/‘urban’ and ‘traditional’/‘rural’ female identities. As she went through the photographs I had brought along, she described what she saw as follows: These are nomad tribe people; no, they don’t know anything about beauty, but the jewellery they wear, and shaving their heads, it’s a kind of beauty to them. And this is a village woman; I think she is trying to look her best with jewellery and tikka and hairdo with sari; in the picture, she looks a little old, but she doesn’t like to reveal that she is looking old, so she is in tip-top condition [laughs]. (Interview with Preeti, 21 February 2014)

Aditi, a beauty manager running a ‘women only’ parlour together with her sisters in the posh area of Khan Market, also differentiated between “someone look[ing] like an office girl [and someone] look[ing] like a village lady”. Moreover, she stressed that “if you are in show business, if you are presenting yourself in public, you need to look, you know, groomed”. Accordingly, she would only recommend bleaching to her clients when there was a “need” for it, defining “the need” as follows: The need is the main thing. At the moment, we are doing that lady’s bleach; we have applied one bleach; this is the latest bleach in the market. Yeah, I already told you that

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we don’t really recommend bleaching until you really need it; the need is the main part for doing something like this. When do people need most? First thing is for their profession, if they need to do it, or some occasion in your life, if a girl wants to get married and all, she likes to look extremely stunning. (Interview with Aditi, 14 April 2014)

In her narration, Aditi presented bleaching as a job’s (or wedding’s) requirements, to fulfil which, her beauty parlour offered the respective services. She gave two main reasons for recommending bleaching to their clients: one’s profession, and special occasions in one’s life such as getting married. Regarding the professional matters, she only stated that “they need to do it”; for marriage, she explicated: “she [the bride] likes to look extremely stunning”. In the first case, Aditi explicitly spoke about “presenting yourself in public”, whereas with regard to the latter, the “public” was not mentioned. During marriage festivities, however, the girl may also be ‘presented’—even if ‘only’ in a supposedly ‘private’ sphere—before her husband, relatives, in-laws and friends. Yet, while the phrase “they need to” implies an external obligation, “she likes to” suggests acting upon individual choice or taste. A ‘need’ is usually understood as rather the opposite of an ‘individual taste’, a designation usually referred to when beauty norms may be disguised as temporary trends that people freely choose to follow. Aditi first derived the ‘need’ from the assumed demands of society, but later defined it also from her own personal perspective as a beauty expert, when linking fairness to “clean” and “healthy” skin: “We usually don’t recommend bleach, but sometimes it is good. When you have black blemishes and black patches, it lightens that down, so your skin looks a little clearer. It helps make your skin look very clean and healthy” (interview with Aditi, 14 April 2014). Thus, it seems, discussions on fairness and beauty practices can negotiate women’s social positions and movements. However, women also take active parts in these negotiations, (re)shifting skin shades and social selves, as shown in the following paragraphs. Women’s Agency When Seemanthini Niranjana (2001) rethinks gender theory through the lenses of spatiality and the body in rural Karnataka, she introduces the concept of ‘olagehorage’, which refers to the “inside-outside” matrix, the “axes along which their [women’s] world is ordered”. This “spatial register” is a matrix continually shifting: Boundaries are defined and mediated by the community according to a complex interplay of caste, kinship, ritual and gender, although they are constantly challenged and transformed, particularly by women themselves. Thus, Niranjana does not understand ‘olage-horage’ as fixed binary categories. Hence, the term ‘inside’ is not assigned fixed meanings, such as ‘private’ or ‘female’, and ‘outside’ does not

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simply translate to ‘public’ or ‘male’. The reference point remains rather relational, in that working ‘outside’ on the field is considered as working ‘inside’, and it is women who, being in control of the ‘borders’ of their homes, are responsible for compliance with caste rules. An illustrative example of the negotiation of boundaries that Niranjana provides is the case of a village woman called Siddamma, whose husband had a socially illegitimate involvement with another woman: [Her] strategy in dealing with the situation seems to be to let others know about her husband’s affair, so that gossip will control his behaviour .... She prefers this to seeking justice at the panchayat47 , for (this) would enable her husband to take her to task later for having made domestic concerns ‘public’. (2001, 94)

Niranjana’s study exemplifies a process-oriented approach—as demanded by Mary E. John (cf. Introduction)—as she reconceptualised and re-signified categories of her analysis during her research process. Further, it demonstrates the necessity to localise theoretical concepts, since ‘inside-outside’ might have different (ruling) histories, involve different practices of resistance or be part of different debates. Ways of generating and negotiating shifting boundaries of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ will also be central to my analysis of ‘skin colour’. After all, it is the skin that is generally regarded as constituting the border between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ of the individual, while also constituting borders between one individual and another (cf. Ahmed 1998, 45). An example of negotiating gender, space and beauty was provided during a group interview I conducted in the informal settlement of Kathputli Colony, in Shadipur Depot—a residential and industrial area in West Delhi—where I met with seven women aged between 16 and 40 from a Rajasthan-Bhatt community. The women told me about different ways they dealt with what they perceived as a strict patriarchally structured community. They felt restricted in their freedom of movement or in their choices of clothing, for instance. At the time, they were fighting for their right to visit a hospital when delivering their babies; however, they had already found small ways to get around some rules. One day, they had organised a women only group trip to Vrindavan. On this trip, they all wore jeans, in secrecy, instead of the traditional Rajasthani dress. They not only tried to overcome barriers set by their husbands but also general financial dependencies. When I met them in the aftermath of these struggles, they had recently opened their own beauty parlour and beautician training centre in the Colony with the help of an NGO.

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‘Panchayat’ literally means ‘assembly of five’ and refers to local self-government, particularly common in India, Pakistan and Nepal.

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For the women I talked to, the beauty training course was a possibility to do work they enjoyed, to earn (their own) money and to create a space where beauty treatments would be affordable for all inhabitants of the Colony. Therefore, their relationship towards fairness (cf. above) might have been particularly ambivalent due to their restrictive living conditions in the Colony. The interviewees told me that, back in Rajasthan, previous generations of women were not allowed to move beyond village boundaries either. However, their mothers and grandmothers had their daily lives well organised, carefully reordering social spaces to suit their own needs. Having migrated to Delhi and living in a slum area under very different conditions now, the interviewees were confronted with totally new challenges. Hence, Ghotli emphasised the independence they had gained from starting both the beauty parlour and the beauty training centre. Before they opened up their own parlour, they had to go to a salon in Pandav Nagar, but they were not able or allowed to go there by themselves; it was considered too “risky”. Moreover, the beauty services offered there were too expensive: There is a beauty parlour in Pandav Nagar; it’s nearby, but we would never go alone; we would always go together, with other people, because it is risky. But then we realised, it was too costly, so we would only do eyebrows and facials [there] once in a while, only on special occasions. But now we do it at home, and that’s why the NGO helped us open a beauty parlour and learn the beauty course. The course lasts for six months—manicure, pedicure, facial, bleach, hair style, bridal make-up, haircutting, waxing, eyebrow. Before, we didn’t know about all these make-up and beauty services, but after looking at films and this beauty parlour started opening up, we came to know about it, so now we get a bride ready amongst ourselves only, without taking help from anybody else. (Interview with Ghotli, 22 April 2014)

From Ghotli’s narrative, the increase of autonomy within certain aspects of their lives becomes apparent: What was difficult to reach and afford earlier could now be done “at home”. The newly acquired knowledge made the women capable of “get[ting] a bride ready amongst [them]selves only, without taking help from anybody else”. Thus, starting their own beauty business translated to ways for bypassing and transforming boundaries set by intersections of patriarchal social norms and poor economic status. For the Kathputli women, beauty work neither meant mere individual ‘pleasure’ nor social ‘pressure’ but was experienced as a means of dealing with gendered spaces divided into the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the colony, to assert (some of) their interests and needs. Thus, not only were the women able to perform bleaching, but via bleaching, they also managed to gain male privileges. As interviewee Usha put it, via fairness, “the girl can become a boy” (Usha, group interview, 22 April 2014).

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On the one hand, the interviewees talked about their desire for fairness as the desire to adhere to stereotypical gender roles assigned to them by society, by becoming a particular type of ‘bride’ or ‘urban career woman’. On the other hand, they talked about breaking away from these roles. The social meaning and function of fairness further depended on how the interviewees were socially positioned. For the group of lower-class women from the migrated Rajasthan-Bhatt community in Kathputli, who had worked as housewives, dancers or seamstresses (“stitching”) prior to their beautician training, fairness meant the possibility to find a job or to move freely beyond the geographical confines of the neighbourhood, commonly regarded as a male privilege (see above). For a female student I met on the Delhi University campus, who self-identified as Sikh, Bakshi48 and middle class, it meant attaining a status of equality in the mate-seeking process—for example, achieving a position from which a woman could also demand fairness in a prospective groom (interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014). She explained: [Before] if a fairer girl was going to get married to any coloured man, that was not a problem, but nowadays they do want to get married to a very handsome boy. Five or ten years ago, I think, they also launched Fair & Lovely for men, so, now, my [male] friends ask me ‘should I apply multani mitti? Just please, tell me—you have that skin. Or should I go for that healthy, you know, gramflour? Tell me some homemade things to do’ [laughs]. Nowadays, everyone wants to look attractive—whether it’s a man or a girl—but yes, for a girl, it’s more complicated if they are not so fair, because there are more critics; they criticise girls more than boys. But boys, too, have their Fair & Handsome in their bags; they do use more moisturiser than the girls, I guess, now [laughs]. For the girl with fairer complexion, it is easier to get a groom; being on the darker side, even the more educated ones have difficulties to find a groom. A girl has to be more good [sic] complexion-wise than boys, but if the girl looks fairer, the girl might also want to have a handsome-looking guy, and handsome means fair. Even me, I don’t want a blacky looking boy, of course, I want a fairer one, surely [laughs]. My friend once said ‘I will go for a fairer one and then I don’t get a child of a black origin’. (Interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014)

What is interesting about Jyoti’s narrative is the perspective from which questions about reproduction and parturition are negotiated. Whereas bearing a ‘fair child’ is commonly understood as the responsibility of the ‘fair bride’, Jyoti’s friend turns that argument on its head by demanding a fair boy so as to avoid getting “a child of a black origin”. Jyoti also reports here how her male friends, who might have not “give[n] a damn about this before”, now seek beauty advice from her and depend on her knowledge of beauty practices. Thus her friends do not primarily observe (and judge) her skin (“you have that skin”) with the intent of possessing her or her body, 48

Presumably Punjabi Jat Sikh, since Jyoti spoke Punjabi (in addition to Hindi and English).

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but because they want that kind of skin for themselves; their striving after beauty includes their own bodies after all. However, Jyoti emphasises that the struggle for beauty still affects women more than men: If a girl is not fair, she will have many more “critics” than a boy. Moreover, Jyoti refers explicitly to problems related to marriage, stressing that, for a girl with fairer complexion, it would be easier to find a groom. Here, she points out an important constraint on women who demand beauty and thus fairness in men: She states that girls generally have to be “more good complexion-wise” than boys, but only “if the girl looks fairer” she “might also want to have a handsome-looking guy, and handsome means fair.” Thus, based on that line of thought, it follows that a woman has to fulfil the beauty (fairness) expectations imposed upon her first, before she is allowed to demand beauty (fairness) in a man. Other participants (of all genders) talked about rules of conduct enforced upon them by parents or spouses who would not allow them to play or exercise outside, fearing they might tan. In that context, tanning or not bleaching could become acts of resistance. That could further apply to other beauty requirements, leading particularly parents to complain about girls who go to the market with uncombed hair, or who prefer sleeping or playing over beauty labour: “you feel like sleeping the whole day; otherwise, you would be playing games with your brother” (interview with Jayani, 5 February 2014). To not bleach, and hence to self-identify as “dusky”, especially within the mate-seeking process, became acts of resistance within Deepika’s biography. She remembered that when we actually came back from our honeymoon—and we were more than brown, fried brown—I met so many people who were, like, ‘you should go for a special spa, a special fairness spa, something to remove all the tan’. But I found my tan very nice; I was enjoying it. And then a lot of them would tell me ‘no, this is not you; you don’t look pretty anymore!’ And I was, like, ‘no, I have the same features, the same face, how can I not look pretty just because I am tanned?’ (Interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014)

In this situation, Deepika was confronted not only with people who perceived and condemned her ‘becom[ing] darker’ but who questioned her status of beauty and who understood fairness as a characteristic that defined her whole self. Deepika had to, therefore, redefine her tan as something enjoyable and generally deconstruct it as an essential category. Another memory that Deepika disclosed contained a “really rich guy’s family”, who had phoned her parents one day, stating that they were looking for a “beautiful, fair skinned girl”. Her mother wanted to send Deepika’s résumé and planned to describe her skin tone as “very fair”. Deepika, however, intervened:

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I was, like, ‘fine, I would send it only when you write that I am dusky’, and she was, like, ‘why would you do that?’ and I said: ‘because I am dusky, you know, you can write light dusky, but I am dusky, and I really like that about myself, I am not going to let you write that she is really fair, you know? (Interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014)

Thus Deepika ultimately succeeded in resisting her mother’s definitions and intentions by reclaiming her body as ‘dusky’; nevertheless, as Deepika told me, her ‘skin colour’ remained a controversial discussion point within her family. In most interviews, narrations on fairness were related to spatial, bodily and social conceptions of ‘inside-outside’ (cf. Niranjana above). ‘Mapping’ the different social fields that debates on fairness (re)create, it became apparent how both social boundaries and movement capacities were (re)negotiated via skin. Generally, differentiations were made between an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ form of beauty, between skin as surface and skin as reflection of the ‘inside’ of a person. Moreover, motives for bleaching were either defined as demands by society (in public) or explained by individual taste (in private). The most desired shade of fair was identified as ‘Indian’, whereas the highest compliment to a woman on her skin tone was said to compare her to a foreigner, to “someone out of this country” (interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014). Bleaching was primarily considered as work against external effects on the skin (weather, climate), since the ‘original’ skin ‘underneath’ was already imagined as ‘fair’. Further, beauty work was practised ‘inside’ but with the aim of looking presentable in ‘public’. On the whole, staying inside (or covered under clothes, parasols, sun protection) meant avoiding being tanned, while being outside (and showing off bare skin) meant sun exposure and ‘risking’ a tan. For women, beauty expectations differed depending on whether one was categorised as ‘wife’ (inside marriage) or as ‘girlfriend’ (outside marriage). In social contexts, ‘fair’ functioned as a marker for membership in a ‘social club’, whereas ‘dark’ signified social exclusion. Furthermore, ‘fair’ was recognised as required for reproduction work within the family (bearing fair babies), while also demanded on the job market and when moving in public spaces. As all these examples show, ‘skin colour’ negotiations move around and within all kinds of spatial, bodily and social boundaries. Although these boundaries seem to appear in rather binary forms—that is, inside vs. outside—they remain neither fixed nor unchallenged. What I want to emphasise here is the fact that bleaching is a process; growing or becoming fair means to constantly move or shift the body and the self. The direction thereof, however. would depend on the respective perspective: It is either about ‘getting in’ (employment, marriage, social group membership, cultural event), or ‘getting out’ (moving beyond community boundaries, escaping social stigmas), or about maintaining a certain status (clearly, to paddle on spot is

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not the same as a standstill). The fair skin imperative seems not (only) to be at work in both supposedly ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres; it further functions as yet another means of fundamentally (re)constructing and (re)negotiating these binary divisions. In any case, it is a movement that never comes to an end and keeps people constantly at work on their bodies. Thus, it is through bodily appearance that structural social inequalities are not only legitimised (cf. Kristeva and Federici in 4.5) but dealt with as well. This also means that skin labour happens within a wider social and political framework that is primarily determined by neoliberal and postfeminist subjectivity (Gill 2008). Therefore, I placed bleaching—as a (micro) social and cultural practice—in the context of a neoliberal common sense49 and examined ‘skin colour’ as commodity fetish (Young 2009, Robinson 1983, Hook 2005 and 2007) in chapter 3. At this point, however, I only want to emphasise that the choices women make regarding their skins—the ‘needs’ that decisions on bleaching are based upon—are embedded in social structures that allow for redefining or overcoming social boundaries in very different ways for differently positioned women (cf. Villa 2008, 250–252). This also means that social inequalities, exclusions and exploitations are negotiated via (predominantly female) beauty and body work as well as via fairness consumption: “the burgeoning market in products designed to lighten, brighten, and whiten speaks to corporate capital’s desire to sell us the dream that we can individually transcend oppressive systems” (Harris in Glenn 2009, 2, referring to Glenn and Thomas in the same volume). Next, I continue by looking at how ‘skin colour’ constructs gender and vice versa, focussing on the making of (fair) men and women. Gendering Beauty and Fairness Both fair preference and the practice of skin bleaching do not only affect women but also have a growing impact on men (and even children). This observation was also reflected in the increasing number of unisex or all-male beauty parlours I found in Delhi. Yet beauty was commonly thought of as shaped by and for the male gaze by interviewees of all genders. When I would talk with male socialised interviewees about beauty, they would mostly turn their focus, automatically, on women’s outer appearance rather than turning their gaze on their own bodies. However, to define beauty from the perspective of men or male desires was also common among women. For instance, when a group of feminist activists were discussing beauty and fairness on the basis of the selection of pictures I had brought along, one of them finally stated that all their opinions were “only our imagination because we are not men, 49

Today, the common sense, stability reserve of the ruling classes, is largely neoliberal (Prinz 2002, 4; my translation).

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ham log admi to nahi hai50 ” (Shambu, group interview with Saheli, 22 February 2014), as if only men were able to determine (female) beauty. Thus, it can be stated that definitions of beauty underlying the interviewees’ narratives followed cis-male and heterosexual standards, which are reproduced by all genders. When male socialised participants would talk about beauty, a perspective focussing on female bodies would not always be revealed at the beginning, nor did it appear to be a position that people would adopt consciously. When talking with the postgraduate students Anand and Prakash on the DU campus51 , Anand set out to explain the importance of beauty by speaking of “individuals”, “our lives”, “he or she” and “people”. He considered beauty as a factor that “play[ed] a very major role”, as it generally served to “attract others” and to “decide your position in a society”. Thus, at first, it seemed as if, for him, all genders were equally concerned with beauty questions: It’s very important for an individual to have that [beauty] as essence; I mean, it plays a very major role in our lives. Majorly, for an individual, if he or she is able to carry her or himself in a way which attracts others, it leaves an impression. Moreover, it is very important; beauty is one of the major things that decide your position in a society, and people are becoming beauty conscious, health conscious, these days; they go to the gym and health spas, and specifically, they are very conscious about the skin because, after adolescence, they, you know, most of them, have faced acne problems or other problems of the skin. So I believe that they’re very much aware of it nowadays, and they want to take care of themselves, healthwise, and otherwise as well, so it plays a very major role. (Anand, interview with Anand and Prakash, 18 April 2014)

Later on, however, when it came to the negative effects on both men and women caused by beauty expectations, and particularly colourism, Anand and Prakash switched to speaking solely of women. Prakash thus declared how being born dark skinned would lead to more challenges and difficulties in life: A baby that is born dark skinned is going to face a lot of problems, from her school days till the day she gets married, so, yeah, there is a discrimination, you know. There are old ideologies—you can say images—in the roots of the society, [whilst] India is progressively [developing, it is only slowly overcoming] a tradition [of] very low illiteracy. (Prakash, interview with Anand and Prakash, 18 April 2014) 50

“Ham log admi to nahi hai” literarally means “we (people) are not men”. Anand is 26 years old Parmar and Hindu, born in Delhi. He was unemployed when we met; both his parents worked as schoolteachers. He speaks Hindi, English and a little Spanish. His friend, Prakash, was 26 years old PhD student, who identified as Zamindar and Hindu. He was born in Delhi; his father worked in a “business” and his mother, as a housewife. He speaks Hindi, English and Bhojpuri.

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It is illuminating how Prakash began by speaking of “a baby” as gender–neutral but shifted, rather naturally, to the personal pronoun “she”. Moreover, he directly linked colourism to a ‘traditional’ and ‘illiterate’ India, thus revealing how gender and colour are further intersected with class and rural-versus-urban distinctions. Likewise, Anand explained that it’s about the personality, right, but in India, in the society, the kind of society we live in […], there is a little bit of discrimination, at places where people are not very educated, but that discrimination disappears when the level of education increases, I guess, so if you go to rural parts of India, you will find […] a lot of racial discrimination, especially [toward] women. (Anand, interview with Anand and Prakash, 18 April 2014)

It is interesting how Anand hesitated when speaking about colour discrimination in his personal environment (“the kind of society we live in”), stating that there is only “a little bit of discrimination”, yet detected “racial discrimination” in places where “people are not very educated”. Within these places, Anand believes, colourism would “disappear” as soon as “education increases”; meanwhile that happens, however, there is “a lot of racial discrimination” in “rural parts”, especially affecting “women”. Similarly, Prakash stated that, when it comes to inter-caste marriage, there are restrictions on women—dark women in particular would have “to struggle” more to lead a good life: Inter-caste marriages are very common, so there are a lot of restrictions a girl has to face. And, you know, the common perception is that a fair looking girl is more beautiful—that’s the general perception people have—so if a girl is born with dark skin, she has to struggle to get a good life. But then, you know, a few women have proved that being born fair is not an issue for their sex. For example, there is this Bengali actress, called Bipasha Basu, and another one, called Sushmita Sen, who were not very fair, but they displayed confidence and acting skills. In India, the society is built up in a way that men have been given more freedom than women, so even if they [men] are dark, maybe they will also face a little bit of discrimination in their own community [of men], you could say. But, on the other hand, if you compare it, I guess women’s lives become more difficult, competitive. (Prakash, interview with Anand and Prakash, 18 April 2014)

What is also striking here is how, for Prakash, “a few women”—two, actually— have been able to ‘prove’ that “being born fair” is not determinant for their gender identity. Their way of dealing with colour discrimination consists of being “confident” and “display[ing]” their “acting skills”. A few general assumptions seem to be lying underneath these assertions: First, Prakash ascribes the responsibility to fight colourism to the ones most affected by it—the “not very fair” women—instead of

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those parts of the society that benefit most from unequal power relations. Second, Prakash seems to assume that women need some kind of ‘currency’ to outweigh their dark skin, to ‘prove’ their worth (here, their talent and confidence). Moreover, he seems to imply that if two dark skinned women have successful careers, all women could easily follow their example—thereby disguising the fact that darkerskinned women start off from very different positions under increasingly difficult conditions. The latter is a fact that he himself acknowledges a few lines later when explaining that the Indian society structurally discriminates against women while privileging men (“if they [men] are dark, maybe they will also face a little bit of [colour] discrimination”), as a consequence of which, “women’s lives become more difficult, competitive”. What I found particularly noteworthy was how he felt that dark skinned women were perceived as less beautiful by the “common” and “general perception people have”, whereas men might (“maybe”) find “a little bit of [colour] discrimination” only within their own gender homogenous groups (“their own community [of men]”), the mere possibility of men being judged on their beauty by women not even occurring to him. Not only is the importance of fairness for women and men valued differently, but so is the general meaning of ‘fairness’, and ‘beauty’ more generally. When male socialised interviewees talked about beauty in relation to themselves, they usually defined it with reference to their occupational skills, business expertise or artistic talents. In relation to women, however, beauty was constantly and intimately linked to the body. Upon being asked to define beauty, Mohit, manager of a (unisex) beauty parlour in Lajpat Nagar II, started off by talking about bodily appearance in general, but mentioned “girls” already in the very first sentence: “general[ly], your face, your skin, how it’s glowing; generally in India, we think fair girls, fair colour is beauty— and beauty is all about skin, hair, everything, full body. We do treatments for skinglowing and skin-lightning, so there is a whole part in this segment”. Later on, when asked for details about the bleaching procedure, he had to refer to his female employees; only they had the special knowledge. He, however, suggested that “we should feel like a god; we are changing people” (my emphases). Even though he probably meant that ironically—because he later took parts of it back, saying “we don’t pretend that actually we are changing people’s lives with beauty services”— the association between beauty work and feeling like “a god” has to be examined more closely. On the one hand, Mohit showed off his powerful position as head and manager of the beauty parlour when he asked one of his employees to join us to explain the technique of bleaching, although he kept a close eye on her, repeatedly interrupted her and pretended he knew everything better all along. On the other hand, Mohit stated that he personally was not interested in the beauty industry at all

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but realised that it was a profitable business in this area, hence presenting himself as a business expert, not a beauty specialist. Only towards the end did he suddenly begin talking about his own outer appearance—how he was too short, not handsome enough—ultimately linking beauty to success: “your confidence is always higher when you are good-looking and your success is always higher”. Thus, his narrative continually oscillated between carrying himself as a businessman with no interest in beauty, and a man lacking in self-confidence, who indeed liked to be associated with a certain kind of power that he himself ascribed to beauty and beauty work. When Rajesh, the 29-year-old mehandi artist, was sharing his thoughts on beauty, he said what would normally come to his mind was “a good and beautiful girl”. On being asked what exactly he thought about when thinking about ‘beautiful girls’, he replied with a demand: “she should be gora, matlab fair”. Only when explicitly asked whether his own outer appearance played any role in his life did he finally refer to himself—although, interestingly, without turning his gaze towards his own body. Instead of describing his bodily appearance, he simply declared: “I look good. I’m also an artist, so I do something, some work, some art, so of course I look good”. Whereas women’s bodies were externally described (“long hair, face fair”) and concrete demands were expressed (“she should be gora”), when it came to himself, he swiftly made a positive value judgment (“I look good”) that did not seem to him to merit any further specifications regarding outer appearance, other than a passing reference to his professional activities. In his view, he became beautiful by mastering and performing special skills (precisely, the art of mehandi), whereas, for women, beauty was intrinsic to the body and could be ascribed from the outside (and by men in particular). There were only two male socialised interviewees who actually turned their gazes towards their own bodies and who shared with me their own desires for fair skin. Arjun, the 20-year-old student on the DU campus, claimed, right at the beginning of our conversation, that “everybody wants to look better; I also want, but I’m not very comfortable with my look—for example, my hairs, my face—and I’m not comfortable with … I’m not satisfied”. Thus, he started narrating from his own perspective on and relation to beauty, and also referred to his own body instead of defining beauty as ‘women’s matter’. He confessed to being constantly worried about his looks, about not being fair anymore. Fairness played a decisive role in his well-being and self-esteem: In my childhood, I looked good; now, I’m not in my childhood. I was very fair, but in school, I used most of the time playing cricket in the sun, so it darkened my colour, my skin. When I was a child, my face colour was like this, but playing cricket in the sun again and again, 4–5 hours, it darkened my skin, even this side was darkened and

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this side was not. In winter, skin colour becomes little better, but when summer comes again, it goes back. (Interview with Arjun, 18 April 2014)

According to Arjun, the desire for fairness was widespread amongst men in general—he felt that “mostly boys are more worried than girls”: “they want to look better; they want people to notice them, get attracted by them”. He further felt that fairness was most important at special occasions and festivities as well as when indulging in hobbies, but also for job interviews: “[It’s about] our personality level. If I go for an interview and if I don’t look good, the person who is taking my interview would feel uncomfortable with me. If I’m dirty, you’re not comfortable anymore” (interview with Arjun, 18 April 2014). When talking about the significance of beauty, Arjun seemed to almost equate ‘looking good’ with “personality”, on the one hand, and ‘not looking good’ with being “dirty” on the other, worrying that other people might feel “uncomfortable” being around him if he did not “look good”. Even though Arjun discussed beauty on the basis of bodily appearance (during which he often referred to ‘skin colour’), he steered the debate towards questions of morality and ethics at the same time. His notions on beauty were deeply entangled with his value systems: Afraid of disappointing and discomforting people by his looks, he revealed feelings of shame or guilt for who he was, or rather, who he had become. To Arjun, losing his fairness as a child meant an irretrievable loss. In contrast to other interviewees’ notion that fairness can be (artificially) made, his fair skin seemed an original condition that, once lost, could not be restored. Arjun had used many skin lightening beauty products but had never gone to a beauty parlour. However, he and his friends constantly talked about wanting to go if they just had the money: “yes, yes, my friend always says that, after studying, he will do this and do this, because now, I don’t have much money that I can spend on myself”. Thus, Arjun and his friends gave beauty a high priority in their lives, but their aspirations were limited by their economic situation. So, contrary to what the beauty industry suggests (cf. chapter 3), beauty is definitely not attainable for all. The second male socialised interviewee who spoke about his own body, his own experiences with beauty regimes and colourism, was 31-year-old fashion designer Kapil. He experienced bodily beauty as a major advantage within social relations, since good looks could easily outweigh other negative characteristics (e.g., being “dumb”): When growing up, I experienced that people always wanted to be with good-looking people—good-looking or beautiful or whatever—so I think being good-looking or being beautiful is always a very good advantage; as they always say, first impression is very important. I’ve seen also that people can ignore lots of other [bad] qualities in a

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good-looking person, you know. You can be, like, dumb; I mean, that’s alright, as long as you’re good-looking, you know. People always want to be with good-looking people; that’s why you see everybody wants to, like, dress up well; everybody wants to, like, groom themselves, you know. I think that’s why there are so many beauty products there, too. Being good-looking is a very important thing, you know? (Interview with Kapil, 9 May 2014)

He also talked about desire for fairness as a social demand but named these as male desires—as his male friends’ desire—and finally, as his own desire: See, that’s the thing; especially in India, people don’t really like the dark complexion. I mean, for example, there are lots of dark people who say we like dark skin, but I’m sure, like, they—not all but most of them—would want to have a fairer skin, you know. Personally, even I like to be fair; I’m lucky that I’m not dark, but otherwise, like I said, even I’ve gone through so much torture through my childhood. But, you know, maybe my feeling of wanting to be fair [clashed with] my not wanting to go through the same torture that I saw my friend go through, maybe that’s why. So I think it’s very important for boys because I know [it’s] not only me but many or all of my friends who also want to be fair, you know—they won’t admit it, but they want to. Some of them do openly admit they are, like, ‘I use these products and all those things’, so, I think, it’s very important for men also. Maybe some men don’t want that, but out of hundreds, I assume 80 percent want to be [fair]. Maybe 20 percent don’t mind, but 80 percent of the people want this thing. I know many friends who openly exhibit it— many don’t openly exhibit, but you can figure it out, like, you know [laughs]—so I think it’s equally important for men also. I’ve bleached myself many times—I mean, I won’t deny it. You go to the beauty parlour and you will see many men, like, bleaching them [...] I tell you my experience, now it’s been, I think, 7–8 years that I haven’t done the bleaching because I realised that it burns the skin, it’s not really good, but before [I realized] that I’ve done [the bleaching] many times, in school days, college time, I’ve done endless numbers of that (Interview with Kapil, 9 May 2014)

Although Kapil self-identified as “not dark”, he still wanted to become fair(er), and he explained this desire with reference to an Indian beauty matrix disvaluing dark complexions as well as to “so much torture” that he and his friends had experienced in their childhood. He assumed that, even though fairness was “equally important” to men, the consumption of fairness products was not always “openly exhibit[ed]” among his male friends. However, he disclosed a tacit knowledge about who was bleaching their skin (“you can figure it out, like, you know”). Kapil finally stated that he himself had gone for the bleach “many times, endless numbers” when growing up. Both the temporal distance he put between bleaching and the present, and his insistence on not denying the fact that he himself had bleached suggest that, in his experience, bleaching is practised rather secretly by men. Respondents of all genders agreed that, even though fairness is increasingly expected by/of men, colourism affects women and men very differently. For

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instance, Deepika could not imagine that a “really, really dark guy” be rejected as a groom just because of his skin tone. She further assumed that female desires for fair skin were linked to their “conditioning”, whereas male desires were more about a “trend” or an individual “choice”, so that men could choose to conform to it or not, without encountering any major problems in their lives. Accordingly, she believed that the cosmetic industry might have simply jumped on a bandwagon with their product lines for men after achieving such high sales figures with women’s products, interpreting it as a “marketing gimmick”. Deepika based her assumptions upon what she perceived as the general role of men in society and in marriage: “a man in Indian society is only supposed to provide for the home and that’s his first criteria [sic]”. A man would be appreciated for looking fairer than usual on his wedding day because he would then fit the stereotype of being the “prince again”. This, however, is highly contrasted by the expectations that Deepika feels women have to deal with, for they are not compared to their own usual appearance as well as that of other women’s in a contrived game of mate selection, on this one day alone; they are compared to men all through their lives: “women should always be fairer than men, period. There is no question about that”: I’m pretty sure they [men] are using fairness creams, but if or how much that’s improving their chances to get married, I don’t know; you can’t really compare it to anything close to women. This is a very new trend in men that we should be fair as well; it’s more of a marketing gimmick than a conditioning—though it doesn’t come out of conditioning; it’s more, like, ‘okay, we [the cosmetic industry] realise that we’re doing really well in India with women products; let’s now try our hands at men’s’, and they got Shah Rukh Khan—cause all the men want to look like Shah Rukh Khan—so this is more like a marketing thing. Like, if Garnier comes up with this tanning lotion, and all the women go ‘wow’, then they launch a product for men. But I’m not sure how much sales they’re making from it, or if a really, really dark guy would be rejected— maybe not—because of his skin tone; maybe because of his looks, because he would not be pleasant-looking or something, and you would be dark on top of it, but just by looks, I don’t think people would reject or like someone. Though, I would say, it’s more of a trend for fair men, it’s more of a person’s choice. Like, my sister likes darker men, but I don’t have a preference in that—not because of anything; I never thought about a man being fair or something. My mom was really fair—really fair in Indian context, [but] again, she is [considered] dusky—and my father was really, really dark, but it didn’t affect her. A man in the Indian society is only supposed to provide for the home, and that’s his first criteria [sic]. On the day of the wedding, if he looks fairer than usual, [that’s] really good because, you know, he looks like [a] prince again, but I don’t think it affects anybody’s decision. Women [in any case] should always be fairer than men, period. There is no question about that. (Interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014)

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In addition to Deepika’s assumptions about the fairness industry only recently ‘discovering’ men as a target group, Kapil told me that he actually used to apply fairness creams designed for women before the gents’ lines were introduced to the market. He supposed that the cosmetic industry had realised that guys were secretly using women’s fairness creams before launching men’s products. At least Kapil himself had felt uncomfortable using girl’s fairness products before: Yeah, it’s like I said; men also definitely want to be fair. I mean, it’s very obvious from how many men’s fairness creams are there now. Suddenly in these past, like, 4– 5 years, there is a whole lot more men’s whitening creams; I think they [the cosmetic industry] realised that guys are using women’s fairness creams, so now they come up with their, you know, men’s creams. As children, we also used to use fairness cream, but those were, like, for girls, you know. But it’s not very comfortable to use girls’ fairness creams, you know? I know many people who must be doing it, and I know many of my friends who also used to do it, but it’s very, like, big, this thing. So you don’t want to really show, ‘yeah, I’m using this thing’. So maybe now they understand people’s mind, and they come out with lots of these things. I see lots of models— especially men models—[who] many of them also use it, many of them. You see kids, like, fairness cream is definitely there. Yeah, so it’s there, as I said, it’s very important, that thing. (Interview with Kapil, 9 May 2014)

When launching the first fairness cream for men (Fair and Handsome) on the Indian market in 2005, the Indian FMCG company, Emami52 , indeed declared that approximately 30% of the consumers of fairness creams designed for women were male. Moreover, Emami promoted its skin bleaching products in accordance with the exact fear that Kapil talked about: The first promotional video53 for F&H featured Shah Rukh Kahn, the most popular Bollywood actor. In it, he asks the ad’s protagonist: “Why are you secretly using creams made for girls? You’re a man, but you’re using girls’ creams?” In the course of the ad, Shah Rukh Kahn even slaps the protagonist on the back of his head, asking whether he does not understand that his skin is different from women’s—whereas the latter is “soft”, men’s skin is “rough and tough”—and thus, clearly in need of care products developed for their specific needs. Relaunching the product in 2013, the slogan read: “for men who want zyada (more)”, primarily telling the story of how to become as successful in life as Shah Rukh Kahn. The ad thus propagates the message that “anyone can be handsome”, 52

Emami is an Indian public limited company, founded in 1974 and headquartered in Kolkata, West Bengal. It produces fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and is engaged in the personal care/cosmetics and healthcare businesses. http://www.emamiltd.in/ (visited 3rd April 2017). 53 Emami’s Fair and Handsome advertising (1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI4 BFAsgo_c (watched on 30rd of March 2017).

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linking fairness to success. Towards the end of the ad, Shah Rukh Kahn again urges the viewers: “But never use girls’ creams!” Emami claimed that the ad focussed on “urban male[s] in the age group of 15–35 years, who are ambitious, socially active—both online and offline—want to look good and [are] brand conscious”54 . The beauty industry gave another insight as to the gendered aspects of the fairness discourse. The increasing coverage of different body parts by the bleaching industry primarily and initially focussed on facial skin; then body lotions were made available, followed by products for specific body parts (such as armpits). These ‘conquests’ of the body recently extended to the female genitalia: In 2011, MidasCare Pharmaceuticals Pvt. Ltd. introduced its “Clean and Dry Intimate Range” to the Indian market. The product line consists of a tube of cream (launched in 2011), a bottle of powder, a bottle of wash (launched in 2012) and a can of foam wash (no launch date). On the designated C&D website, the following description of the C&D Intimate Wash is given: This first of its kind, FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approved feminine intimate wash is our newest innovation. Launched in 2012. Clean and Dry Wash is part of a revolutionary range of products for feminine hygiene. Its natural formula has vitamins and aloe vera gel extracts. It protects and cleanses the vaginal area while maintaining the necessary pH balance. It restores discoloured skin, giving it a fair, glowing look. The gentle wash keeps away itching, irritation and other infections, giving all day freshness and confidence.55

Within this brief description, one finds specific demands that the brand formulates with regard to feminine hygiene: The vaginal area shall be ‘protected’ and ‘clean’. Stating that the vaginal area is in need of ‘protection’ and ‘cleansing’ implies that its original condition is ‘dirty’ and ‘exposed to (undisclosed) dangers’. Additionally, the intimate wash promises ‘freshness’ and ‘confidence’, implying that women could feel ‘stinky’ and ‘self-conscious’ without a specific (or this specific) intimate wash. The brief text further explicitly marks dark ‘skin colour’ as a problem that needs solving: The intimate wash would restore ‘discoloured’ skin, giving it a “fair” and “glowing look”. Similar to what was shown above, it is again implied that the skin has lost its ‘original’ fairness. However, the vagina’s skin is nowhere explicitly described as ‘dark’ but only indirectly as ‘lacking fairness’. Whereas, usually, sun exposure is given as a reason for darkened skin, with regard to the vagina, the causes and circumstances behind loss of fairness remain unspoken. It is precisely 54

http://www.emamiltd.in/images/presspdf/20160830045416.pdf, last visited 3rd of April 2017. 55 Product description from http://www.midas-care.com/brands_healthcare.php, last visited 18 April 2019.

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this silence that (re)marks the vagina as a place of shame, especially when presumed to have lost its imagined ‘original’ fair status. What is most telling about vagina-whitening, however, is the fact that an equivalent practice/product for men only exists in the realm of satire. During my stay in India, a parody ad for scrotum-whitening went viral, not only making fun of (genital) skin lightening but also inverting parts of the skin lightening industry’s sexist messages. Since these ads usually narrate the story of a woman desperately looking for a groom (or a job, in more recent iterations), the parody shows a man desperate to find a wife. The satirical ad called “Gore Gote”—what can be translated as “fair balls”—was launched by an Indian comedian who “wanted to make a comment on how India was obsessed with fairness creams”.56 In it, the protagonist—star comedian Varun Thakur—is unable to find a wife because his scrotum is too dark. After using “Gore Gote”, however, his genital skin become lighter and he finally finds a bride—a bride who is not only pleased by the sight of his fair genitalia but even has to put on sunglasses to protect her eyes when he starts undressing himself. The ad ends with the slogan “Use ‘white balls’ and become the king of romance”, delivered by a Shah Rukh Khan lookalike. The conception of the ‘fair man’ as “king” resembles Deepika’s association of the ‘fair groom’ with the “prince”. A similar image came up during a group interview with family and friends of Shruti’s, a 23-year-old domestic worker57 , whom I met in their one-room stone cottage in an informal settlement near Tughlaqabad. They told me that they perceived a general difference between boys and girls desiring and imitating beauty and fashion trends. They felt that, for boys, it was mostly about imitating Bollywood heroes, whilst girls would try to keep up with the latest trends in general, primarily by observing fashion shows and channels as well as TV soaps: For boys, it’s different; they want to imitate the heroes—their beard style, the fashion style—so for them, beauty is imitating the heroes [they point to their little brother, who has also styled his hair]; it means Bollywood heroes. Like, Zahran Khan started wearing rings, so the boys also started wearing rings. Girls don’t imitate heroines that much; they look at fashion shows and channels, and they want to keep up with the

56

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/gore-gote-spoof-testicular-cream-advert-mocks-indias-skin lightening-craze-1441309, last visited 18 April 2018. 57 Shruti is a 23 years old domestic worker. Her parents worked as “rikshapuller” and “domestic worker”. Her husband had abandoned her and their three little children. Shruti and her family are Hindus and belong to the Jatav, part of the Chamas, who are considered Dalits, or classified as a “scheduled caste” by the Indian government. We had a group discussion at her home, a stone cottage consisting of only one small room, with four of her relatives and friends: Laxmi (40), Meera (30), Arti (22) and Raveena (23). Shruti speaks Hindi.

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trend; they look at soaps and then they do all of those, but they don’t imitate heroines. (Group interview with Shruti, Laxmi, Mira, Arti and Raveena, 19 April 2014)

In the case of boys, imitating their “heroes” seemed to imply, more clearly, the desire to attract attention, because they would identify with an individual idol instead of “keeping up” with a rather anonymous group of people (at least the gathered women called their little brother’s hero by name; the girls’ favourite character(s) in soaps or shows remain(s) unnamed). Moreover, the term ‘hero’ often describes characteristics rather than simply outer appearance. Commonly, being a hero also implies having a particular kind of strength, power or courage. Also, a ‘hero’ customarily needs a story in which he (in this case) can act like a hero in the first place. A fashion show, on the contrary, typically focusses on certain ways of (re)presenting bodily styles (fashion, hair styles, make-up) for consumption; adventures and actions do not normally constitute focal points there. Nevertheless, when it comes to beauty pageants, the media also stage the global beauty queens as ‘heroes’. More precisely, a beauty queen is depicted as a “struggling individual who manages to scale the ladder of class mobility to become a national hero” (Parameswaran 2005, 422). In these media narratives, the “emotional and material distance” between the beauty queen’s past and present is emphasised; she is described as a “meritorious achiever” and an “obedient disciple” (421); and her success is linked to her “hard work” of grooming rather than to any “natural beauty” (422). Thus, there clearly is a story, one of success and social mobility: Working on the body does not only change your outer appearance; it can change your whole life. Thus, in the end, a fashion model may embody just as many life-changing dreams as would the Bollywood hero Shah Rukh Khan. Similar to the abovementioned relations between beauty and heroism, interviewee Yashwant58 linked beauty to nationalism as well. The male beauty ideal, he declared, entailed “having an approach for the lovement59 [sic] of the nation, a developed mind, and a decent appearance”. About “decent appearance”, he specified: “something like decent: not too much Western, or too much Indian; it means, like, the latest people [trends] have a mixture of these things, Indian plus Western”. His statement sounds very much like the concept of the ‘New Indian Woman’, especially since he had previously pointed out that values and attitudes contribute to male beauty. The required mindset consists of a love for the “nation” and has to be “developed”. Both of these terms, “nation” and “development”, are loaded with references in the context 58

Yashwant is a 25 year old student from Panipat, Haryana. His father works as lawyer and his mother as housewife. He identified as Hindu and Jat. He speaks Hindi and English. 59 “Lovement” is possibly a neologism created in accordance with Hindi grammar, with the suffix ‘ment’ attached to turn the verb ‘love’ into a noun.

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of postcolonial theory, global neoliberal politics, the contemporary Indian government, and the BJP in particular. Whilst it is true that women’s embodiments became primarily central to processes of nation-making (Butalia 1996, Thapan 2009), I find it striking that men are excluded from most debates about fashion and beauty in India from the outset. Scholarship hence becomes complicit in perpetuating the sexist notions that, first, female bodies are the only objects within beauty regimes, and secondly, that female bodies are only objects—as shown above, women also turn the gaze on men and obtain male privileges through beauty practices. Moreover, the male body plays a crucial role in the ideology of far-right Hindu communalists, particularly in terms of body work and discipline (cf. chapter 3). Thus, I argue, fair skin has become increasingly important for the ‘New Indian Man’. Despite the fact that beauty and fairness have become increasingly significant for men, they do not affect men to the same extent as women. Even though fair skin is a male beauty ideal, my interlocutors agreed that men could outweigh a lack of fairness more easily than women. Hence, fair skin was often seen as an additional advantage for men, whereas for women, it was mostly experienced as an additional burden. Accordingly, male socialised interlocutors usually defined beauty as a women’s issue. Moreover, female beauty was more readily linked to the body. If men considered beauty relevant to their own life at all, it was expressed in rather indirect or implicit ways, usually towards the end of the interview or after repeated enquiries. Fair skin was of particular importance only to male socialised interviewees of very low-caste and -class background, of South East or rural origin, and, in one case, with homosexual desires/orientation. On wedding days, the groom may be expected to be fairer than usual, but in contrast to women, his skin tone is not evaluated in comparison to either other men’s or the bride’s. Furthermore, the groom is commonly not held responsible for the task of ‘improving a family’s gene pool’ and for bearing ‘fair babies’. To conclude this section, it can be stated that fair skin is a beauty norm affecting gendered subjects differently, but also one that restructures binary gender conceptions. Even though the fairness discourse (re)produces fair princes and heroes, as well as struggling, unmarriageable, dependent dark women, for all gendered subjects, fairness seems to be linked to individual social mobility. Elaborating on fair skin preference in the framework of marriage, this chapter provided some insights into the gendered aspects of colourism. Since my interviews suggested that both colour and gender intersect with class in a particular way, I next focus on links between fair skin preference and classism.

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Desires for Fairness as Desires of the ‘Other’: Colour and Class Distinction

In her study on colourism in South Asia, Hussain (2010) argues that “young girls with darker skin in villages and lower and middle-class families are also called many names with negative connotations within and outside their families in South Asia” (412; cf. Rozario 2002). Yet I wondered whether this kind of ‘name-calling’ could also occur in urban contexts and upper-class families. At least that was what one of my interlocutors emphasised: “‘Kalu’ and ‘kaliya’ are like common names that get attached to dark people in India; it’s very common across all regions. Even in Assam or even in Delhi, people who are a little dark are called ‘kalu’ and ‘kaliya’” (interview with Pradeep and Jatinder, 18 April 2014). In my interviews, most people I talked to emphasised that ‘skin colour’ did not play any role in their own personal life or their own community. At the same time, however, they were very much aware of the problem itself or knew about the effects that colourism had on other people. Thus, they would rather talk about their observations or experiences of other people than about their personal views or feelings. Although people did notice colourism, they ascribed it to “the society”, or a specific part of society that usually did not include themselves. These ‘boundaries’ between self and other were mostly drawn along the lines of region (towards “the villages”), time (past–present) and class (“uneducated” or “backward” people). Such a tendency became apparent in statements like those made by interviewee Jyoti, who said: “yes, there was a lot [of colour discrimination], but now, I don’t think in India, only in the villages or small towns but not in the cities anymore”. 29-year-old fashion designer, Deepika, renarrated a media debate on colour discrimination between a journalist and a Bollywood actress. The story she told me gave crucial insights into the ways colourism was ascribed, criticised and legitimised. In short, there was an outcry in the media because the popular Indian actress Deepika Padukone was called “from the village” by a journalist, who was “not fair” herself. Deepika remembered: A very, very educated journalist—a lady journalist, not fair—called Deepika Padukone ‘from the village’: ‘this girl looks like she is from a village; how can she be an actress?’ And there was a lot of outcry in the media about it, that you [the journalist] called a dark skinned girl—just because she is dark skinned—‘from the village’; you, an educated woman of today, who is dark skinned and successful and living in a metro[polis], travelling the world, if you cannot accept her, how can, you

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know, the masses accept dark skinned beauties? I think it’s gonna take a lot of time for this conditioning in Indians to change. (Interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014)

It is interesting how, first, Padukone was called “from the village” because she was identified as dark skinned by a journalist; secondly, how “from the village” was completely negatively connotated; thirdly, how the media condemned the journalist’s discriminatory statement considering the ‘fact’ that she was dark skinned herself; and fourthly, that the outrage seems to have had only intensified by the facts that the journalist was “very, very educated”, a “woman of today”, “successful”, “living in a metro[polis]” and “travelling the world”. It follows not only that fairness is associated with a kind of ‘urbanism’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’, but also that colour discrimination is seen as inconsistent with the image of an educated urban woman, while aspiring to fairness is associated with rural life, immobility and lack of education. This was a widespread assumption that I found about the ‘village’: You wouldn’t find this [preference for fair skin] in Delhi; you will find this only if you go to some very, very remote places. There are still people who believe that a fairer girl is always beautiful and all these men would be dark; they think like that. So, yes, you still find that in India; in fact, when people come to see for a bride, they come to see the girl, they always prefer a faircomplexioned girl; they will not prefer a dark-complexioned girl. (Interview with Jayani, 5 February 2014)

It is important to note that preferences for fairness were disclaimed, not only by interviewees living in the centre of the city but also by those living on its outskirts or informal settlements. As Shruti, a 23-year-old domestic worker living in an informal settlement located between Tughlaqabad and the Okhla Industrial Area, put it: “[there is] no exclusion, envy, jealousy amongst us, no differentiation on the basis of beauty, no preference for ‘skin colour’; others might prefer fairness” (interview with Shruti, 19 April 2014). Whereas she accentuated, throughout the interview, that inside her own community, questions of beauty or complexion would not be an issue, she revealed a general notion about different skin tones leading to different behaviours amongst other people: “because [one kid’s] skin is fairer, everybody, you know, pampers it, but people call the darker kids names like ‘kaliya’ and ‘kalu’, so, yeah, we don’t do anything, but other people do”. Thus, one may conclude that colourism is commonly defined as a ‘problem of the other’—that is, a problem of both others and other places. Being modern and preferring fairness were often seen as being mutually exclusive, a fact that can also be attributed to a need to emphasise exceptions. Interviewee Deepika, for instance, stated that her cousin still suffered from earlier discriminatory childhood experiences despite being a “modern” adult now:

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We didn’t understand the complexities of dark skin colour in the Indian context, but as I grew up, I understood that she [Deepika’s cousin] was not getting married until she was 30, and there were guys coming over seeing her day in, day out, and to all of us, she was really beautiful. She was the eldest one; she started wearing make-up before any of us; she wore kajal before all of us; she wore a beautiful sari and we thought ‘wow, she is really pretty’. Then we would hear our parents speak to each other: ‘okay, she is dark; she is not getting married; she is not beautiful’, [although] she was truly really beautiful and had beautiful eyes and lips and everything. But she was dark, and she went through a lot of rejections for that, and to an extent that, I think, whenever you speak with her now, I see some holding back, some of that, of course, you can’t totally dis[regard?]. She is very modern; she was working in Singapore, but now she is back in India with a child, but you can always see her hold back something from her childhood memories. (Interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014)

Here, ‘modernity’ is associated with ‘working abroad’. The same idea—that it is unlikely for ‘modern’ people to desire ‘fairness’—was made by Deepika when talking about her own marriage. She called her husband “open-minded” because he was “a golfer”, “very well-travelled” and because he had dated both “Indian girls” and “white women”. However, despite being “open-minded”, his actions seemed inconsistent to her when he himself enjoyed his honeymoon sunbath but would not let her play golf in the sun, fearing that she would tan. Yet Deepika did not see in the prohibition an attack on her autonomy and talked about it as “a really, really funny, recent thing”, explaining his behaviour with the fact that her husband was just as conditioned as herself and everybody else: You know, there’s a really, really funny, recent thing: My husband is very welltravelled; he has dated white women; he has dated Indian girls; he is a golfer; he is so open-minded, but then again, he would not let me play golf because he thought I would tan. I don’t know if it’s a notion in his head, if it’s his conditioning—because we are all conditioned—I can’t say that I am conditioned but he is not, because I know where he is coming from, even though when we went for honeymoon, we both got really tanned, and he didn’t stop me from anything, but maybe that one incident came out of a certain conditioning. (Interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014)

In contrast to the assessments cited above, in which fair preference was linked to less educated people from rural areas, other interviewees explained to me that the fairness discourse affects all sorts of people, independent of their level of education and place of origin or living. Virmati stated, for instance: This has nothing to do with education or anything; even as you go up the social ladder, and as you are a good scientific[ally] educated or rational-thinking educated [person], I think it doesn’t change. Even if you are more urban and you are more exposed to these things, it doesn’t change. I have an aunt who just returned from the US [where] she lives; she just had a baby, and the baby is fortunately—according to her—‘fair’,

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and she says things like: ‘oh, you know, if it had been born darker, I don’t know what I would have done!’ And I’m, like, ‘you would have loved the baby less?’ [laughs]. And this is someone who has worked; she is someone who is very well-educated; she is in the US; and she is not, like, a housebank. She is out and she is about, so even someone like her can hold these ideas. So it’s not, like, fairness loses its appeal or fairness loses some kind of prestige, even if you get more aware of Indian realities and so on. (Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014)

In this statement, being “scientific[ally] educated” and “rational-thinking”, “urban” and “living in the US” are juxtaposed as if they would all fall into the same category. Moreover, they are all opposed to the life of a housewife—which is disparagingly referred to as “housebank”—who, according to Virmati’s argument, would be more likely to think or act based on colour discrimination. Virmati highlights that colourism develops independent of people’s level of education or social status. When referring to ‘Indian realities’, it seems as if Virmati is locating colourism within Indian society. Thus, she implies that even living abroad (in the US) could not change her aunt’s conditioning. That her aunt’s thinking was not reduced but maybe even reinforced, perhaps precisely because she was presumably exposed to a predominantly light-skinned majority population (or because she wanted her child to ‘pass’ within this society), does not even cross her mind. Deepika also told us that she experienced colour discrimination only in India, whereas in New York, she was feeling so confident (“beautiful” and “exotic”) that she forgot the whole idea of fair preference (“absolutely no notions left of fairness”) until she had to come “back into the colour discrimination”. Thus, colourism is not only associated with certain people living in rural parts of India but with India as such. It remains unclear what ideas or associations the term ‘India’ stands for, wherein lies also a strategy for distancing oneself from negatively connotated images of India (such as ‘Third World country’), or again from its people, the ones who neither travel nor work abroad, who do not (manage to) cultivate a ‘cosmopolitan lifestyle’: My next experience was going to New York, where I found myself so beautiful and so exotic to most of the foreigners that, I think, by then, I had absolutely no notions left of fairness. But when I came back to India again, it was always about fair, not fair, who is the fairest sister in the house, and who is more beautiful because she is fair, you know? So, after coming back from New York, really, I realised I was back into the colour discrimination within the society. (Interview with Deepika, 1 February 2014)

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Fair skin thus also functions as an identifying narrative, especially when fairness as an ideal of beauty is associated with an (upper-) middle-class, urban, cosmopolitan lifestyle. In contrast, aspirations towards fairness function as narratives of social distinction, particularly when equated with backwardness, underdevelopment or rural life. Thus, fair aspirations are ascribed to an imagined other—what I interpret as yet another strategy for further demarcation from the ‘lower classes’—and, above all, lower-class women. This aspect became quite evident in a comment made by the popular Indian actress, Roopa Ganguly, who declared, in a documentary on preference for fair skin, that “the product Fair & Lovely is only bought by domestic help[ers], those kinds of products […]. I would never want to do something so stupid”. Thus, on the one hand, colourism is linked to some kind of ignorance, leading interviewee Anand to conclude that “[skin colour] discrimination disappears when the level of education increases” (interview with Anand and Prakash, 18 April 2014). However, I found fair preferences also widespread among the educated, urban (upper) middle classes. On the other hand, ascribing the use of skin-lighteners to a lack of knowledge ignores the fact that the choices women make also relate to very different social positions. Despite that, even campaigns against colourism usually are geared towards changing individual attitudes alone. The Indian awareness campaign, Dark is Beautiful, for instance, claims: “We aim to educate and empower consumers to make wise choices”. These interventions do not generate critical discussions of the concepts and contents of education or on the social and economic conditions that impact people’s lives, nor do they address global political systems, (trans)national markets, local governments or social groups that profit from the maintenance of social inequalities and further spread the powerful narrative of the ‘neoliberal subject’, who is held accountable for his or her exclusion from social participation and economic resources.

4.5

Skin Bleaching and (Aesthetic) Labour

Colour Lines and Labour Divisions So far, I have shown that skin bleaching is linked to notions of uplifting skin shades and social selves with primary regard to improving one’s socio-economic situation within competitive marriage and job markets. Hence, I argued that desires for fair skin are linked to desires for social mobility. I now approach the subject from another angle and turn my focus to symbolic and material relations between dark skin, social exclusion and exploitation of (body) labour. Moreover, skin bleaching itself has to be understood as a form of aesthetic labour. Particularly for women

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moving into the new “vibrant shining economy” (Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 2 February 2014), skin bleaching can be defined as “a form of reproductive labor required in the service sector” (Ruck 2018). Therefore, I ask whether skin bleaching has become an outsourced ‘third shift’ (Wolf 2002 [1990]) passed onto the shoulders of less privileged women and, thus, has further reinforced boundaries between women of different social positions (Kang 2010). Up to this point, I have argued, using the “olage-horage” theory by Niranjana (2001) above, that skin lightening has been a way for gendered subjects to shift shades and selves in order to navigate through social fields, both pre- and restructured in ‘inside-outside’ categories. Additionally, I have hinted at the fact that it is the skin that is generally regarded as constituting the border between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of an individual, whereas it also constitutes the border between one individual and another (cf. Ahmad, 1998, see in particular 45). Cultural anthropological theories of the body have been particularly engaged with concepts of the body image (Anzieu 1985; Butler 1990, 1993; Lacan 1949; Haneberg 1995; Schilder 1935). Speaking of the rejection of cultural inscriptions on one’s own body, I find it particularly interesting to examine whether and how far the “‘dusky’ vs. ‘fair’ binary” could be understood as a conflict of “clean and proper” vs. “improper and dirty”, in terms of Kristeva’s theory of abjection (1982). Kristeva defines ‘abjection’ as a reaction to a breakdown of meaning caused by the loss of a clear distinction between the object and the subject, the self and the other (an effect usually caused by seeing corpses, open wounds or faeces, for instances). For her, the development of a stable self is based upon the repression or exclusion of the improper, unclean and asocial elements. As the subject distinguishes between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, abjection destroys identity, system and order, crossing (or violating) social boundaries required by the symbolic (order). The skin, being the most visible boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ represents the limits of the body and the subject, functioning, at the same time, as an access point to the world of objects; it demonstrates the instability of the self and is thus a sign of its own mortality. Kristeva states that “by the way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder” (1982, 12–13). Dark ‘skin colour’ as a marker of socially lower ‘others’ seems to be linked to notions of what is deemed ‘improper’ or ‘dirty’. At least that is what was reflected in my interlocutors’ language: Whilst fair was described as “clear”, “healthy”, “even”, “shining”, “glowing” and, most importantly, “normal” and “naturally” Indian, dark skin was everything but; it was described as “dull” and “dusky”, “polluted” and a “problem”. Accordingly, dark skin cannot embody what fairness supposedly does: a

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modern but natural ‘Indian-ness’ (chapter 3). Hence, in the interviewees’ experience, being, becoming and growing fair entailed social acceptance, belonging and upward mobility, whereas being, becoming and staying dark was associated with experiences of social exclusion and exploitation: If you are very good-looking, if you have fairer skin, you get many opportunities; people will really approach you to tell you they help you; they will do lots of things for you. But yes, on the other side, if you have dull skin, seriously, they move far away from you. Some people, because of their own dull skin and their feeling less beautiful, their confidence level gets low. They want to go out, but something, usually the skin colour—and, at times, problems on the skin—stops them. Even the social life of fairer girls is really nice: They have more of a social club; they have good friends; they get into what they want; nothing stops them, I guess. But yes, people with a more black complexion are mostly shy: They don’t approach others to make friends; they don’t go out much. And it’s not only the older ones who have these problems; the youngsters are also like this: ‘this is a hot girl’ or ‘this chick; she is fairer. I want to have a friend like her; I will propose to her just because she is fairer, even if she is dumb’. (Interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014)

In her essay, “Autobiography of Black”, Rosalyn D’Mello (2014) writes about her experiences with colourism in India, disclosing feelings of insecurity and shame regarding her ‘dark’ ‘skin colour’: I understood beauty as a form of escape. If I was beautiful, that is, not dark, I would no longer have to suffer the jibes from strangers reminding me of my unfortunate colour, I wouldn’t have to contend with a persistently dwindling self-esteem, or to be forced to wear clothes that didn’t enhance my black skin. If I were beautiful, I wouldn’t be such a misfit. I was tired of derision. I wanted to be desired. (D’Mello 2014, 8)

Interviewee Arjun also told me about his “dwindling self-esteem” due to not feeling beautiful. He claimed to have lost his fairness as a child when playing cricket in the sun. Although he had tried out many fairness products (“Fair and Handsome [by Emami], one by Garnier [PowerLight], Fair & Lovely, Men Active Light [by VLCC]”), he had come to realise his loss of fairness as irretrievable. He equated not being beautiful with being “dirty”: Our personality level, if you are going for an interview and if you’re not looking good, the person who is taking your interview would also not be able to be more comfortable with you. If I look better, the person I’m talking with would feel more comfortable with me. If I don’t look better, if I’m dirty, you’re not comfortable anymore. (Interview with Arjun, 18 April 2014)

The (highly gendered) links between darkness, dirt and impurity in relation to one’s own body have become most apparent through the practice of vagina-whitening.

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As shown above, the C&D Intimate Wash promises that it “restores discoloured skin, giving it a fair, glowing look. The gentle wash keeps away itching, irritation and other infections, giving all day freshness and confidence.” The female genitalia, (indirectly) presupposed as dark and dull, as an impure and shameful part of the body, has not only to be washed and cleaned but also whitened in order to be (re)integrated into the body/self. Making use of Ahmad’s notion of skin-tanning and Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I argue that the fair skin that my interlocutors aspired to functioned to stabilise the self, both internally and externally. Thus “dull” and “dusky” skin became the embodiment of the ‘other’. As the interviews showed, this ‘other’ usually included the rural poor, the lower castes and the lower classes. Moreover, as demonstrated further above, not only does the one embodying darkness become the ‘other’, but also the one striving for fairness. Hence, in a seemingly paradoxical way, the practice of ‘othering’ is further assigned to the same ‘other’: to the rural poor as the counterproject of the ‘modern’ and ‘urban’, upper-class and upper-caste Indian. This division between ‘inside’ (constructed as ‘reason’) and ‘outside’ (constructed as ‘the body’ with ‘lower instincts’), “the battle against the body”, is deemed vitally important by Silvia Federici (2002), who examines the relation between controlling regimes of the body and the demands on labour power by the rising bourgeoisie in (early) capitalism: While the individual was increasingly dissociated from body, the latter became an object of constant observation, as if it were an enemy. The body was beginning to inspire fear and repugnance. […] Particularly repugnant were those bodily functions that directly confronted with their ‘animality’, witness the case of Cotton Mather who, in his Diary, confessed how humiliated he felt when, one day, urinating against the wall, he saw a dog doing the same in front of him […]. Also the great medical passion of the time, the analysis of excrements—from which manifold deductions were drawn on the psychological tendencies of the individual (vices, virtues) (Hunt 1970: 143–146)—is to be traced back to this conception of the body as a receptacle of filth and hidden dangers. Clearly, this obsession with human excrements reflected in part the disgust that the middle class was beginning to feel for the non-productive aspects of the body—a disgust inevitably accentuated in an urban environment where excrements posed a logistic problem, in addition to appearing as pure waste. (Federici 2002, 21)

Federici here understands the body as increasingly politicised in the process of rationalising human nature, “whose powers had to be rechanneled and subordinated to the development and formation of labor-power, in the sense that it was denaturalized and redefined as the ‘other’, the outer limit of social discipline.” Thus, she concludes that “the birth of the body in the 17th century also marked its end; the concept of the

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body no longer defining a specific organic reality, but becoming, instead, a political signifier of class relations, and of the shifting, continuously redrawn boundaries which these relations produce in the map of human exploitation” (Federici 2002, 23). These approaches to the body and the skin by Federici and Kristeva can provide a theoretical base from where to examine the social meanings and functions of dark more closely. For instance, they might help to better understand the continuing significance of ‘skin colour’ in the context of casteism. The skin in particular is of vital importance for the conception of so-called ‘untouchability’: According to orthodox Hindu elites, the distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ can only be upheld by spatial separation. Thus, upper-caste hegemony denies certain collectives social participation and access to resources. Yet collectives marked as ‘untouchable’ are needed for specific works and hence have to be allowed to move among the different castes. Regulation of food preparation and intake as well as intercourse and marriage rules shall keep the bodies and borders in place—and the (‘taboo’ to) ‘touch’ ultimately refers to the final border of the body, i.e. the skin. The skin not only both marks and maintains various social boundaries but also indicates and performs border crossings. Accordingly, darker skin signifies lower class and caste, thus legitimising exclusion and exploitation. Particularly ‘dirty’ work can be passed on to a dark(er) ‘impure’ other. Several key figures of anti-caste movements— most prominently, B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956)—understood the caste system primarily as a strategy for the division of labourers (Ambedkar 1979a, refered to by Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 76). In the context of colonialism, links between dark skin and menial labour were further reinforced, which becomes apparent in the general context of colonial slave labour, or more specifically, “the deployment of indentured labour from colonial India in plantation colonies across the globe” (Mahmud 2013, 216, see also Varma 2017). This becomes even more clear in the ¯ explicit recruiting of “dark skinned communities” (classified as “Non-Aryan races” by colonial administration) for British military service (Ayyar and Khandare 2013, 81–82). In this context, the Hindi term k¯al¯a-p¯ani, translated as ‘forced labour’, is a particularly interesting case, given the association between darkness (k¯al¯a), the abandoned classes, and menial work. On the one hand, the term k¯al¯a-p¯ani (literally translated as ‘black water’) refers to a group of islands in the Andaman, which served as a penal colony during the British Raj: The British began to exile (and often execute) Indian Independence activists to the islands in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1857, proceeding to construct the later infamous ‘Cellular Jail’ for political prisoners in 1896. Thus the meaning of k¯al¯a-p¯ani is directly linked to colonial history. On the

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other hand, the association between ‘k¯al¯a’ and ‘labour’ is also implied by the conception of Dalits as ‘untouchables’ or ‘outcasts’: Because they are usually depicted as particularly dark skinned and forced to do supposedly ‘impure’ work—such as slaughtering animals, tanning leather, removing waste and animal carcasses, sweeping the streets, or cleaning private and public latrines—the link between ‘dark’ and forced labour is also implicit here. The general association between dark skin and lower castes was also made by my interlocutors. Pradeep and Jatinder, for instance, explained: “It [beauty] actually creates hierarchy because somebody is shown to be superior, somebody inferior. It can also be related to caste; it says how somebody is high, somebody is low; whoever is fair is higher, whoever is kala is lower” (interview with Pradeep and Jatinder, 18 April 2014). That dark skin is associated with lower caste further became apparent when looking at the Bollywood film industry. The popular Indian actress, Isha Koppikar, for instance, was cosmetically made dark when she played the lead in “Shabri” (2011), a movie about a lower-caste slum dweller who supposedly becomes the first female ‘gangster’ in Mumbai.60 Similarly, the popular novel Untouchable (1935) by Mulk Raj Anand, which narrates the story of a sweeper and latrine-cleaner named Bakha, depicts its Dalit protagonists as dark skinned. The young Dalit Bakha himself links his low social status directly to the kind of labour he was forced to do by birth: “They think we are mere dirt because we clean their dirt” (79). How colourism and classism enforce each other, with ‘dark’ becoming a signifier for the migrating working classes, was made apparent during a conversation with 29-year-old PhD student, Zahra, who talked about her childhood in Kashmir: You have labourers from Bengal and Bihar in some parts of India; they are there in Kashmir, so obviously they are all eponymously known as Biharis, even if they are from other parts of India. They [other children] would tell me they [Biharis] have left you here; that’s why you have a darker complexion than we have. (Interview with Zahra, 9 February 2014)

Moreover, the link between region and ‘skin colour’ in Indian beauty geography— imagining the North as fair, the South as dark(er)—was also perceived as being related to labour exploitation in another interview: “If you come to north India, the whites61 would not treat the blacks as equal to them; they [the blacks] will be 60

“Oiled hair, sans makeup, tanned skin, filthy get-up” (http://www.indiaglitz.com/eeshasraw-side-in-shabri-hindi-news-69149.html, last visited 18 April 2019). 61 It turned out that, even though Yashwant used the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’, he would, in Hindi, use the terms ‘gora’ and ‘kala’, which I usually translate in this work—if at all—to ‘fair’ and ‘dark’.

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given—apart from their [the whites’] society—petty works in the house and the farm or things like that” (interview with Yashwant, 18 April 2014). Looking closely at when and where fairness is expected from women, one finds that these are, again, inseparably linked to various forms of labour. In the context of marriage, procreation labour is primarily linked to fair skin. That is most visible in the widespread desire for fair babies: When there is a fair baby born, the idea is always ‘oh look, s/he is lucky because s/he doesn’t look like us; s/he looks like someone who is higher in the social hierarchy than us, so this person will be lucky, will be of upper caste, will be richer than us’, and so on. So those are the kinds of associations with caste that I find in my [community]. (Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014)

To pursue urban careers, however, fairness was also declared as a necessity for women. Since women became much more active and visible in the ‘shining economy’ (chapter 3), exploitation of their workforce and body labour have also increased (group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 2 February 2014). Nowadays, many women of the expanding middle classes find employment in the growing Indian service sector (Mohapatra 2012), which increasingly requires “services and products of the beauty industry, as well as a considerable amount of beauty labour carried out by employees” (Ruck 2018, 11). Pierre Bourdieu (1984) not only pointed out that aesthetic labour is fundamentally classed and gendered, but he further assigned beauty an increasing value on the labour market, particularly in the context of rather new professions with “‘representational and “hosting” functions’ which rely on traditional notions of femininity and had led to a market for certain physical attributes” (Ruck 2018, 11, refers to Bourdieu 1984, 152–153). It was in that context that Paula Black (2004) hinted at the often hidden, unrecognised aesthetic labour behind the desired, “supposedly natural femininity”, that had become an embodied cultural capital within the service sector. Therefore, Nora Ruck defined ‘aesthetic labour’ as “a form of reproductive labour required in the service sector” (Ruck 2018, 11, referring to Black 2004, 126; and Lovell 2000, 25). Hence, bleaching the skin—imagining fair skin as ‘naturally’ but simultaneously ‘modern’ Indian—allows for the growing Indian middle classes to reproduce their selves as stable (Kristeva), to perform their identity as upper caste and class (Federici) and, also, to legitimate their place in what interviewee Virmati referred to as the “shining economy” above. Ahmed-Ghosh (2003) thus argues: A rapidly globalizing Indian middle class, partly the result of the Indian government’s economic policy of ‘liberalization’, has strengthened the coding of the upper-caste Hindu as the secular-modern self, defined by ‘modern’ woman as transcending caste,

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class, and religion, and hence legitimizing her participation in the global agenda of international politics and consumerism. (Ahmed-Ghosh 2003, 218)

In addition, skin bleaching itself has to be understood as a form of aesthetic labour. Even interviewee Jyoti, who self-identified as already ‘fair’, continued working on her skin to become “more fair”. She attributed her skin problems to sun exposure and skin-tanning and went for bleaching and laser treatments for facial hair removal. Moreover, she explained that people would generally link fairness to upper-class status because it is assumed that it is the latter who would have the time and money to go to the spas, afford a good diet, and visit the parlours for regular facials. Thus, whereas she had previously linked fairness to religious identities as well as regional belonging—claiming that Sikh, Muslim and North Indian women would be particularly fair—she also understood fairness as a status that can be produced and worked on. In that sense, fairness represents a purchasable ideal. Thus, whether a person is able to go for ‘permanent’ or only ‘temporary’ fairness says something about her/his economic status. Jyoti explained that she belonged to a middle-class family and thus could only afford a visit to the beauty parlour “once in a while, like before some marriage or function”: ‘She is beautiful because she is fairer; she doesn’t have any spots on her skin; she must be from a rich family’. They have [this association] on their mind that if someone is more glorious, like glowing, she must have a proper diet, she must always have juices, must be going to the spa, she must be going to the beauty parlours, because the rich can have this, but the poorer ones or the middle class, they hardly do this, maybe once in a while, like before some marriage or function; they do it, but not every time. But the rich, they take care of their skins: they go for regular spas and everything. I belong to a middle-class family; I don’t do this on a regular note, I do this because, like, the function is approaching. I’ll do this thing, I’ll get my facial done, but otherwise, I’m studying, what’s the need? (Interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014)

Hence, Jyoti here hints at the fact that fairness can be made—as long as one has the time and money. Following Miliann Kang (2010), I next ask whether women who can afford these services pass what Naomi Wolf calls the “third shift”62 (Wolf 2002 [1990]) onto the shoulders of less privileged women. To do so, I first provide an overview about the beauty parlours and different kinds of beauty labour I found during my research in Delhi. I very roughly make a distinction between ‘pampering’ 62

Kang (2010) refers to Naomi Wolf’s concept of beauty work as “third shift”: The latter claims that apart from women’s expected double role as wage earners and homemakers (“second shift”) society now lays additional demands on women’s outer appearance in order to prevent them from participating in a political, social and cultural public sphere (“backlash against women’s rising”).

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beauty labour, ‘result-orientated’ beauty labour and ‘beauty work’. As a study by Mohapatra (2012) shows, beauticians in Delhi work predominantly in the informal sector63 and belong to the most vulnerable group of women workers in general. Thus, I also consider the female beauticians’ perspectives on their jobs. Skin Bleaching as Aesthetic Labour When I visited several parlours in varying parts of the city, I noticed how they differed in terms of skin consultations, bleaching procedures, product ranges, costumers/target groups, completed beauty trainings, salon equipment, and overall service. Following Miliann Kang (2010), I roughly divide the beauty labour performed in these salons into two groups: I call the first ‘pampering beauty labour’, and the second, ‘result-orientated beauty labour’. Both of these forms of beauty labour have to be distinguished from what I call beauty work: whereas the former designates wage labour in the service industry, the latter means reproductive, unpaid labour. This classification helps to better understand the conditions and objectives of bleaching as beauty service and care work, showing that the social stratifications that intersect in the fairness discourse (chapter 2, 3 and above) further materialise in beauty labour/work relations. The present section thus also harks back to my more thorough analysis of what I called ‘skin colour’ management in an urban, cosmopolitan, neoliberal North Indian context (chapter 3). To classify the beauty parlours, an observation made by Narois64 , a 27-year-old beautician, was essential. She claimed that clients would come to her beauty parlour in Kathputli Colony for immediate results, whereas to another salon located in Patel Nagar, where she used to work, people would go primarily for relaxation: “Yeah, people here, they ask for fairness, and they in fact tell me how much bleach to apply so that they become fair instantly, but in Patel Nagar, when people did it [bleaching], they did it to relax” (interview with Narois, 24 April 2014). Generally, and following Kang65 , I define ‘beauty labour’ as commercialised, embodied and emotional exchanges, reproducing and/or disrupting social positions 63

90 percent of all labourers in India work in the informal sector; only 4 percent are unionised. 64 Narois is a 27 years old beautician from Delhi. She was married and had three children. She identified as Muslim and Zahrani. She speaks Hindi. Her father was a carpenter, her mother a housewife. She ran a small beauty parlour in Kathputli Colony, together with her husband. 65 Kang, who speaks of body labour, not beauty labour defines it as commercialised exchanges in which service workers attend to the physical comfort and appearance of the customers, through direct contact with the body (such as touching, massaging and manicuring) and by attending to the feelings involved with these practices (Kang 2010, 20).

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and relations hierarchically structured by gender, class, colour and caste.66 On the one hand, Kang emphasises that service workers have to manage their own feelings as well as the feelings of their customers. On the other hand, she stresses that body labour “entails extensive physical labour in which the body serves as the vehicle for performing service work, but it also incorporates the body as the site or object upon which services are performed” (Kang 2010, 20–21, original emphases). I encountered the first group of beauty labour—pampering beauty labour—in beauty parlours serving mostly upper- and upper-middle-class women. These salons were often spacious and bright, most of them having several floors and various rooms for different treatments. The most expensive parlours had attached bathrooms, a reception desk, comfortable waiting areas, and overall deluxe equipment. The interior design aimed at providing privacy, peace and luxury. It was also these luxurious parlours that were most frequently run as “unisex”, which I interpret as having to do with their modern and fashionable outlook. Some of these parlours belonged to larger franchises owned by a company or a single holder, who would employ both shop managers and beauticians. Thus, one may at least assume that their beauty work was formal wage labour. The second group of beauty labour—result-oriented beauty labour—I found to be conducted in parlours serving mostly middle- and lower-middle-class women. Such parlours customarily consisted of a single room—often large yet, at times, rather small and dark—simply furnished with no or little decoration and almost no products on display. Typically, there was a separated area for changing clothes; therefore, the people who were waiting for their turns as well as those already receiving treatments were usually located in the same room. Although the tightness of space meant less privacy and peace, it also allowed for chatting and observing what was happening. Beauticians in these salons addressed, more directly, the “results” that the clients were asking for and usually listed the most required services: facial, bleaching, waxing and hair treatments. Despite the prices for services and products being lower than they were in the first category of parlours, I found just as many (price) disparities within this category; thus, the category ‘result-orientated’ could be subdivided in countless further subgroups. For example, when beautician Narois told me about offering “gold bleaches”, she also gave an example of the different price politics in Patel Nagar and Kathputli Colony. She explains: “these are the varieties in gold facial, and they all have different prices in this place; this kit costs 65 Rs., but the same kit in Patel Nagar costs 1500 Rs., because Patel Nagar is a 66

To adequately explore the question “who is bleaching whom?” would have gone beyond the scope of this study, which is why I did not conduct sufficient research on “substandard working conditions, unequal power relations, and complex emotional lives of the women who provide these services” as raised by Kang (2010, 16).

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posher area.” Apart from price differences, the perspectives on and the practices of beauty work also varied widely from one parlour to another. In a parlour in Kalkaji, for instance, a beautician described her range of hair treatments by enumerating the numerous services offered, such as “haircut”, “hair style” and “colouring”, whereas in another salon in Lajpat Nagar, the beautician preferred calling her hair treatments “hair spa”. The term ‘spa’ points beyond the mere activity of ‘cutting’ or ‘dying’, invoking further associations with wellness, recovery and relaxation. In contrast to the first category, in several parlours of the “instant result” group, the salon owner and manager turned out to be the same person; in other words, the salon runners were self-employed. Apart from that, they also trained and employed beauticians. Whether these beauty workers were actually formally employed is debatable (cf. Mohapatra 2012). In a few parlours, relatives—usually husband and wife but, in one case, also a group of sisters—were working together. In the case of family businesses, one may assume that, on the one hand, beauty work was less hierarchically organised, yet with equal shares in responsibility and incomes; on the other hand, however, the work relation may just as well reflect family hierarchies constituted by, for instance, age or gender, which may possibly even result in increased unpaid and involuntary work. As distinguished from beauty labour, the category ‘beauty work’ includes all kinds of grooming activities conducted outside of the beauty service industry: It is called ‘work’, not ‘labour’, because it is usually unpaid. Under this category falls skin lightening as a daily (care) routine work for oneself. Moreover, it designates a bleaching session offered to one’s relatives or friends, which are either unpaid or given in exchange for another beauty treatment, such as haircut, mehandi, make-up and the like. If offered to another person, it is mostly done by and for people who are familiar with one another, and by/among people who, as they told me, could not (afford to) go to a parlour regularly. This kind of beauty work is not to be understood as or confused with at-home, professional, beauty service work that some salons would offer. Thus, people who could not afford beauty service work were also the ones who would not be paid for their beauty work. Doing beauty work on one’s self, individually or collectively, was also experienced as empowering by a marginalised group of women I interviewed, because it led to more independence from parts of the society that they were mostly excluded from anyway (cf. group interview at Kathputli Colony, 22 April 2014). Acquisition and transfer of knowledge also differed with the change in the status of beauty parlours. After completing the beautician training, most beauticians I talked to were regularly supervised and trained regarding new bleaching products on

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the market, changing trends, and application techniques. These trainings or supervisions, however, were not offered by private or state beautician trainers or schools but by cosmetic companies. As beautician Poonam67 from Faridabad explained: – In the [beauty] training, we do basic things. After that, these products come on the market and these beauty parlours that have membership in the companies hold seminars and classes; we have to take these one-day classes. – So, you learn how to apply these products on different kinds of skin from people working for these companies? – Yeah, in these seminars. Whoever is in this business cannot afford to relax after one year of training; we have to always know what is happening and what is on the market, all the new products. (Interview with Poonam, 3 April 2014)

However, when I asked Narois about these seminars offered by the companies, she told me she would not receive training by them: The companies do not train us, but the shops where we [buy] the products do. They are very busy; they just sell us, so it’s our own knowledge how to apply. I learnt it when I worked in Patel Nagar—that was my first time—so that’s how I got the experience, but I’m confident now, and people like my work. (Interview with Narois, 24 April 2014)

Apparently, cosmetic companies had not covered all parlours yet, at least not the one in Kathputli Colony. However, obtaining all knowledge about bleaching products and practices from her local distributors did not turn out to be a better alternative. Narois showed me one of her bleaching creams (the “gold bleach”) and explained to me that, in contrast to the other products she had on display, it only contained natural ingredients. When I read the ingredients written on the package, however, I was convinced of the opposite: Names of the ingredients were written in English only, which Narois did not speak, and the cream contained the exact same bleaching chemicals as most of the other products she was using in her parlour. When I asked her how the “gold bleach” worked, she replied: “we are told by the people we buy from that this doesn’t have chemicals, so we don’t check whether it has or not, because we don’t know much, but this has, like, a beautiful glow” (interview with Narois, 24 April 2014). Hence, information access on health risks about bleaching products and practices (cf. introduction) also seems to be a matter of class. For consumers, it may generally be a concern that information on quantity or percentage of potentially harmful 67

Poonam is a 42-year-old beautician from Calcutta. She was married and had two children. She identified as Hindu and Kayastha. Her father had a “business” and her mother was a housewife. She speaks Hindi, English and Bengali. She ran her own home-integrated beauty parlour in Faridabad.

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materials is not given with the list of ingredients, and traces are not indicated at all. Moreover, many elements are extremely difficult to recognise by non-experts because chemical names, components and constitutions are complex and varying. What makes hazard recognition even more challenging is the fact that the ingredients are mostly given in English, and people who are illiterate and/or non-English speakers (after all, that applies to almost ninety per cent of the Indian population) are not able to scan the products for harmful ingredients at all, having to instead rely on either the beautician or the salesperson, respectively. Moreover, since ‘chemicals’ were usually preferred for achieving “immediate results”, ‘natural’ products were more commonly used in ‘pampering’ salons: “if you need instant results, chemicals are used; if herbals are used it’s a long process, so chemicals can also have side effects, but they do give instant results” (interview with Poonam, 3 April 2014). Beauty work is often defined as a voluntarily self-optimisation and promoted as “girly fun” (Lazar 2017)—so is beauty labour. Many beauticians referred to their work as a personal “passion” (interview with Sarover68 , 29 March 2014). The objective of beauty labour is further not only understood as the mere grooming of bodies but as providing customers with self-confidence. Beautician Shalini69 , for instance, defined the aim of her service as follows: “to make somebody beautiful and confident” (interview with Shalini, 14 February 2014). Similarly, beautician Aditi explained her labour with the brief statement “the beauty parlour helps” (interview with Aditi, 14 April 2014). Another beautician from Kalkaji defined beauty labour as a means “to look beautiful, sundar70 , to look smart, [to be] good-looking, confident” (interview with Kamla, 14 February 2014). She further set beauty as a resource for confidence in the context of competition: “the idea of beauty is very important; everybody wants to look better than the other ones; they want to look better than others in a friends circle, or a kitty party, or a women’s gathering; they want to look smart, to show off” (interview with Kamla71 , 14 February 2014). Similarly, beautician Shalini claimed that

68

Sarover is 24-year-old beautician from Delhi. She currently worked as beauty salon manager in Model Twon. She was engaged, and identified as Sikh and Wason.Her father was running a business, her mother was a housewife. Sarover speaks Hindi and English. 69 Shalini is a 30-year-old beautician from the Punjab. She identified as Hindu and Khatry. Her father worked in a “business” and her mother as housewife. She speaks Hindi and English. When we met, she worked in a beauty parlour in Lajpat Nagar. 70 Hindi for ‘pretty’, ‘handsome’. 71 Kamla was a beautician who worked in a beauty parlour in Kalkaji. No further personal information was given.

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the Indian mentality wants everything [all laugh]: they want beautiful hair; they want beautiful skin also; they want everything. They want to be qualified, educated also, the mentality is like that. The Indian mentality is to show off: they don’t want internal beauty; they want outer beauty. They show off—the people—that’s why they want outer beauty. They say ‘we don’t want outer beauty’, but they exactly want outer beauty. (Interview with Shalini, 14 February 2014)

In the perception of beauty salon manager Mohit, a parlour does not help the costumer alone but even renders a service to the community, as beautiful-looking people generate positive feelings, thoughts, and even good social behaviour among others around them: I think beautiful people can make a beautiful society. If you look beautiful, people have a good feeling about you; if you look good, it’s a general thing. If someone looks ugly, people have a very different [way of] thinking about them. If you look good, people give you a good smile and [behave] good towards you, so that’s why beauty is very important. (Interview with Mohit, 14 February 2014)

Given the generally positive valuation of beauty and bodily appearance, beauty labour can bring a certain amount of social recognition to beauty service workers. Therefore, some interviewees, like Rajesh, claimed that beauty work made the beauty labourers themselves beautiful. He thus linked his work to art and family tradition: I think that I look good. I’m also an artist; I do something, some work, some art, so of course I look good. It’s permanent [sic] from the family: my brother and my sister-inlaw also used to do the same thing. Yeah, it’s a beautiful work because people think it is beautiful, and that’s why they apply it; it’s an art and it looks beautiful. The works that are beautiful are like what a beautician does, what a make-up artist does, what happens in a boutique. (Interview with Rajesh, 1 March 2014)

Rajesh, who grew up in a family of farmers that belonged to the scheduled Kumhar caste in a village in Uttar Pradesh, needed to support, at least, his nuclear fourmember (if not extended) family with his low-paid and informal job. Yet he spoke about his profession with both great pride and self-esteem. The same pride was expressed by Narois, who belonged to the Muslim Nai/Zahrani caste, which has been accorded the “Other Backward Classes” status by the Indian government72 . Despite her family’s poor living conditions, she proudly referred to her caste, whose members traditionally worked as barbers.

72

http://ncbc.nic.in/User_Panel/GazetteResolution.aspx?Value=mPICjsL1aLvYWWarIfsJp AU09izbLPYElcezG29yU0iGiE06dFe%2f6LJkoytsMWec, visited 7 November 2018.

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Assuming that people generally accumulate social capital by doing beauty work on their own bodies, it is comprehensible that beauticians as providers of these services are also valued for the knowledge and services they offer. However, independent of how much a profession is valued by society, the individual experiences on both sides of the beauty salon chair—customer or beautician—remain fundamentally different. Therefore, Miliann Kang (2010) unequivocally rejects narrations presenting commercialised exchanges in a beauty parlour (or, in her study, a nail salon) as an empowering experience among women, particularly when expressed from perspectives of (in her context, white) middle-class customers. By way of an example, she refers to a piece written by a popular, white, middle-class US citizen and feminist73 , objectifying a Korean immigrant performing her manicure for $6 in a nail salon in New York (Kang 2010, 12 f.). Kang emphasises that “certain women benefit from the intimate body and emotional labor of other women at great cost to both those who serve them and the goal of more egalitarian relations—not just between women and men but between women across multiple boundaries of race, class, immigration, and citizenship” (Kang 2010, 13). Thus it is crucial to ask who is offering the beauty service work. Historically and generally, beauty work74 in Hindu South Asia has been conducted by the lower castes: “Cutting and dressing hair are, of course, low caste occupations” (Hiltebeitel 1981, 95; cited by Thompson 1998, 234). Virginia Smith (2007) has pursued historical origins of “personal hygiene and purity” and determined that, for India, bodily secretions were marked as dirt in Vedic theocracy. Therefore, the degree of adherence to Vedic toilet rules determined people’s religious status, defining barbers who offered “shaving, hair-cutting, manicures, pedicures, nose- and ear-cleaning” as “especially impure”: The flesh rubbers, kohl pots, rouge pots, lipsticks, razors, and mirrors found in the great water tank and temple courtyard at Mohenjo-Daro (2500 BCE) are evidence of the very early religious grooming traditions in the Indus valley, a thousand years before the incoming Indo-Aryans re-established a Vedic theocracy which abhorred body dirt. In Vedic theology, any touch or sight of the prohibited bodily secretions— such as sweat, saliva, hair and nail clippings, vomit, urine, blood, sperm, faeces, and afterbirth—was closely monitored, and the Vedic toilette rules were laid down for all classes as a religious duty; their thoroughness (or lack of it) served as an indicator of religious status. Washermen and barbers were especially impure, but played a vital role as the polluted intermediary in all purification ceremonies, including the 73

Jennifer Baumgardner, “widely recognized as a feminist author and leader in the Third Wave feminist movement”, Kang 2010, 12 f. 74 In contrast to body labour, including non-commercial efforts directed at maintaining or improving health or appearance of one’s own or another body (cf. Kang 2010).

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personal toilette. Public outdoor barber’s [sic] shop services that provided shaving, hair-cutting, manicures, pedicures, nose- and ear-cleaning, existed in ancient India as the same time as public tonsors flourished in ancient Rome. They are still observable on the pavements of Indian cities, or near the religious bathing places (ghats) along the holy River Ganges, where barbers provide traditional grooming to accompany the client’s lustral dip: shampooing (massage) sitting on special shampooing stools; ‘frictions’ (scraping) using the stone columns and walls; hot baths, shaving (designs on the stomach hair a specialty), flower garlands, and every type of face paint and body powder. (Smith 2007, 56–57)

Regarding the transformations of social relations in contemporary Kathmandu beauty service industry, Thompson has made an important observation: the “transition from caste obligations to cash agreements” (Thompson 1998, 236) and from “caste-based relations to cash-based ones” (234). As there is no actual welfare system in India75 , caste hierarchies are still closely connected to generational advantages, family inheritance and social networks (Jha 2016, Jodhka and Prakash 2011). Moreover, in India, it is generally the low castes that have to deal with others’ pollution through occupational activities such as midwifery, disposal of dirt, or washing dirty clothes (Dube 2008, 470). After capitalist, free-market, economic reforms, cash and caste relations seem to have adversely affected each other: Whereas the expanding middle classes find employment in the growing service sector and form India’s consumer base, it is the lower classes, castes and migrants from rural parts of the country who work in the informal sector of India, as ragpickers, domestic workers, vendors—or beauticians. A large number of beauty parlours in India fall under the unorganised sector and are thus characterised by informal employment (Mohapatra 2012): [T]he rise of the middle class has not resulted in economic democratization for the majority, as even within middle-class jobs women are often paid less than men and are directed to more casual and insecure jobs like secretarial work. The new capitalist economy has benefited upper-caste groups and the women in these groups due to the expansion of private-sector, multinational corporate, and white-collar jobs, whereas poorer groups from lower castes that are much more reliant on state resources and reservations in jobs and university seats have lost out, creating stratification within the middle class. Working-class women’s labor is exploited by multinational firms paying lower wages for casual work, and this results in a new division of labor. (Jha 2016, 60 refers to Ferandnes and Heller 2006, 495 and to Jodhka and Prakash 2011)

Mohapatra (2012) provides/offers an overview of beauticians’ reasons for their particular employment, their priority issues concerning working conditions, wages and organising challenges. They give the following reasons for working in the beauty 75

Although there are some state poverty-alleviation programmes, cf. Jha 2016, 60.

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industry: “Find[ing] the pride of being self-employed, helping hand to husband, savings for children’s higher education”. Among their priority issues with working conditions, they indicated: “excessive overtime, lack of institutional support”. Regarding their wages, they stated: “uncertain, net profit basis”. As for organising challenges, they stressed “lack of time, child care and home care, health issues” (Mohapatra 2012, 201). Informal work is diverse and precarious: Women work “as piece rate workers, as self-employed workers, as paid workers in informal enterprises, unpaid workers in family business, casual workers without fixed employers, or sub-contract workers limited to formal enterprises” (199). Mohapatra has thus classified the various occupational groups within the informal sector from “vulnerable” to “more vulnerable” to “most vulnerable”. According to the results of his survey, regarding poor living and working conditions as well as health effects, women working as beauticians are the only ones belonging predominantly to the “vulnerable” group. This finding might point to some of the reasons why many women pursue careers as beauty workers, even despite poor working conditions. The beauticians I talked to, however, never mentioned any difficulties with or disadvantages regarding their work, the majority rather emphasising how much they enjoyed it. Nevertheless, why no complaints were uttered at all might have been due to the fact that the interviews took place inside the parlours, where the managers were often present, observing our conservations. The initial situations and possibilities from which the respondents could choose their occupations, as well as the experiences at their work place, naturally differed according to their social backgrounds. For example, Mohit—male manager of a unisex beauty parlour classified as providing ‘pampering beauty labour’—explained that he entered the beauty business because he was looking for “profitable business opportunities” in a specific area of Delhi. A female beautician—who worked in a small salon together with her husband in Kamla Nagar categorised as offering ‘result-oriented beauty labour’—on the other hand, spoke at length about the financial problems within her family: She had started the beautician training to provide for her parents at a very young age (interview with Preeti, 21 February 2014). Yet another beautician—who worked in an upper-class, pampering parlour in Model Town—told me that her job brought with it prestige and honour. A beautician in Kathputli Colony referred to her ‘barber caste’ and emphasised that beauty work had a notable tradition within her family for several generations. Other inhabitants of Kathputli Colony, who had recently opened their own beauty parlour as well as their own beautician training centre with the help of a local NGO, emphasised the independence they gained from having done so. As shown earlier, for the female inhabitants of Kathputli Colony, beauty and body work was experienced neither as mere individual ‘pleasure’ nor social ‘pressure’, but as a means of dealing with gendered spaces divided into ‘the

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home’/‘the colony’ and ‘outside’/‘the city’, to assert (some of) their interests and needs. Another positively valued, and highly gendered, aspect of beauty labour mentioned during the interviews was safety for women. Beautician Chayanika, for instance, who worked in a small salon in Kamla Nagar I, referred to her job as “ladies’ work” and to the parlour as a “safe place to work” (interview with Chayanika, 21 February 2014). The association between beauty work and safety for women is also made in the study by Julia J. Thompson (1998) on beauty work in Kathmandu, Nepal. When tracing back the history of beauty parlours, Thompson discovered that early “westernized” beauty salons were intricately intertwined with the house (“ghar”) and the domestic. In her study, she presents the case of hairdresser Shrijana Rana, who supposedly established the first “westernized beauty salon” in Kathmandu in 1985. Shrijana had been trained in Calcutta, but her permission to open her own salon back home was denied by her father-in-law. However, she finally convinced him to open the salon on the family property, thus responding to his main concerns about “her potential unsupervised contact with nonkinsmen and […] the common devaluation of manual labor among many elites” (Thompson 1998, 229). By offering beauty services within her family’s home, not only did Shrijana profit herself—earning her own money while doing the activities she enjoyed—but it also allowed her clients an escape from their families’ supervision: The lure of having a professional hairdresser cut their hair in a safe female place outside the home allowed many women to push at the limits of acceptable behavior and appearance at this time. Because the salon was physically connected to Shrijana’s family compound, Shrijana was able to create a place to exercise small freedoms, earn some money, and affect the lives of other women in small ways. (Thompson 1998, 231)

Even later on, beauty parlours continued to be regarded as a safe space for women, where both workers and costumers were protected from contact with non-kinsmen and, thus, “unsanctioned sexual relations” (Thompson 1998, 232). Referring to a conversation with an Indian classmate of hers, Thompson states that “the beauty parlour was one of the few outings women of particular social class were allowed in her [the classmate’s] hometown of Delhi because it was clearly believed to be an extension of women’s domestic space” (Thompson 1998, 231, my emphasis). It hence follows that the discourse on ‘women’s safety’ is also entangled with ‘women’s freedom’. Accordingly, Brosius (2010) also maintains:

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For many women, the classical local beauty parlour serves as a social centre too, where they gather and exchange news, where they are among themselves, in a familyfree space, where weddings can be envisaged and criticized, husbands and mothersin-law cribbed about, and so forth. (Brosius 2010, 309–310)

Thus, by creating new spaces, both beauticians and clients redefined gendered norms regarding mobility, labour and—of course—bodies. In a way, they were particularly transforming the meanings of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, extending their autonomy, as my interview participants in Kathputli Colony and in Niranjana’s study cited above. Furthermore, as is visible in the quote about Thompson’s friend, the space where beauty work is performed is not only shaped by gender but also by class, caste and colour stratifications. To conclude this section, it can be stated that, on the one hand, beauty work has been indeed passed onto the shoulders of other women. On the other hand, however, the beauty work sector—although characterised by informal labour—has offered opportunities for women to earn their own money within a space considered both ‘safe’ and socially valued.

4.6

Anti-Colourism and Neoliberal Subjectivity

Among my interviewees, debates on bleaching revolved primarily around interpretations of ‘need’ and/or ‘choice’. For example, interviewee Sita, a client of Lucy’s beauty parlour—who rejected bleaching but whose narratives disclosed bias towards fair skin (cf. 4.1)—claimed that: “if people say that fair skin is important, that is their choice”. Presenting desires for fair skin as a matter of choice emphasises individual taste and agency, while giving little attention to the social contexts and circumstances shaping the individual’s decisions. Hence, critical beauty scholars have argued that women’s “use of beauty work is too embedded within structures of inequality to be characterized as acts of resistance or liberation” (Craig 2006, 167). On the other hand, it is “the ability to buy and use them [cosmetic products] that appears to boost women’s self-esteem, selfconfidence and well-being” (Anand 2002). In a context that normalises fair skin and problematises dark skin amidst an increasingly neoliberal common sense focussing on self-management, and that understands the body as project and beauty as product, it is via beauty work and consumption that ‘normality’ can be achieved. As interviewee Jyoti put it: “so I wanted that facial growth to be normal; I started working on my body and got that laser done for my facial skin. Then I felt more secure about my body” (interview with Jyoti, 7 February 2014).

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With neoliberal narratives presenting beauty and social mobility as available to all, consumers are encouraged to manage their skin in order to deal with increasingly competitive—and often increasingly precarious—living conditions. Against this background, discussions on how to confront colourism often likewise draw on neoliberal subjectivity. In such debates among my interviewees, education was the most commonly suggested instrument. Interviewee Anand provided an illustrative example of this argument: In our country, there is a little bit of discrimination at places where people are not very educated, but that discrimination disappears when the level of education increases. So, if you go to rural parts of India, you will find people [among whom] there is a lot of racial discrimination, especially [against] women. (Interview with Anand, 18 April 2014)

Although this argument was frequently made, it rarely considered the fact that education, too, can be neocolonial, or guided in favour of corporate interests. Interviewee Zahra also demanded “more consciousness in schools and colleges about it [colourism], about the definitions of beauty”. However, she was talking about a more emancipatory conception of education: You have to have that inclusivity, that acceptability in your school, in you college. I mean, the initial thing starts from questioning the concepts, so it has to come from a certain education, because if you’re not aware, you think that everything is right, you know? If you are not aware of the inclusivity, if you don’t ever get to talk to a Brahman, if you don’t ever get to talk to a Christian, if you don’t ever get to talk to a person from another country or something, you have your own notions and you think they are right. (Interview with Zahra, 9 February 2014)

Here, Zahra is referring to a particular conception of education, one that challenges dominant ideologies and aims to enable people to form their own opinions. The common ‘education argument’, however, is conventionally based on the assumption that people should ‘know better’ than to aspire to fair skin or to discriminate darker shades. Nevertheless, my empirical material suggests that colourism operates independent of people’s educational background. Rather, ascribing colourism exclusively to rural, poor and less (school-) educated people could be identified as another strategy for social demarcation. Furthermore, that colour-blind thinking is a social privilege could also be identified in my empirical material, as when, for instance, an interviewee insisted that colour discrimination did not exist because equality was guaranteed by the Indian constitution: No, no, no, no, nothing; no kind of privilege is given on the basis of colour; our constitution treats everyone as equal. There can’t be any discrimination in India, like, in

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a legal way, or in a governmental function, or in education[al] institutions, not on the basis of colour. (Interview with Yashwant, 18 April 2014)

That Yashwant does not acknowledge colourism at the beginning of our conversation, not only does not diminish but rather increases the potential that ‘skin colour’ has for social distinction. At least, that is what is suggested by Yashwant himself: Firstly, he ascribes colourism to an ‘Other’—“blacks”, “South Indians”, rural and lower classes—insisting that colourism is not be found “in the North”, “our area”, “my society”, “my place”, “where I did my schooling”, “my birthplace”—in short, “in those developed places”.76 On the other hand, the actual consequences of colourism experienced by darker-skinned South Indians migrating to the North came up only hesitantly and towards the end of our conversation: “Like, if you come to North India, the whites don’t treat the blacks as equal to them; they [the blacks] will be given petty works in the house and on their farm or something”.77 The fact that Yashwant himself spoke from a socially privileged position may contribute to his varying perceptions of colourism as non-existent, as being only maintained by others, and as only affecting others. His views bring to mind scholarly debates on ‘colour-blindness’. Whereas “some researchers doubt the continuation of racial discrimination” (Herring, Keith, and Horton 2004, 10), others state that colour-blindness has emerged as the dominant ideology in the post-Civil Rights era. (Ebert 2004, 174–196). Colour-blindness puts all responsibility for social inequality on the individual’s shoulder. Respondent Prakash, for instance, blamed his cousin for suffering from colourism rather than the society—or more precisely, his own family—which discriminates on the basis of ‘skin colour’. Instead, Prakash was convinced that his cousin could expect non-discriminatory behaviour from others only if he himself overcame his own feelings of insecurity and inferiority first: 76

“In North India, people generally don’t discriminate on the basis of colour. What, I think, our area has, what people of our area do, they don’t discriminate on the basis of colour. Like, almost all the people in North India have the same kind [of mentality?]. But the people get to know, from their colour, like, ‘he is from South India’, or ‘he is from that area’, but they don’t discriminate on the basis of ‘skin colour’—no discrimination. I find, in my society, no discrimination; like, the place where I was born, I did my schooling, in those developed places, you don’t find [discrimination], but if you consider India at large, then you will find [it] in India. But my place [sic], my birthplace, where I did my schooling, there was no discrimination on the basis of colour” (interview with Yashwant, 18 April 2014). 77 He used the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ when talking about the Northern and Southern population. Towards the end of the interview, I asked him about the Hindi vocabulary; he responded that he would translate ‘white’ to gori/gora.

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What I see, you know, from my family, yeah, there is some kind of [discrimination]. My cousin, who is dark skinned has shared with me that he has been discriminated [against]. The first thing that is important is that the person—he himself—has to realise that being dark is not inferior; he has to come out first; he has to come out of that and then he can expect from [other] people. (Prakash, interview with Prakash and Anand, 18 April 2014)

At this point, Prakash’s friend, Anand, added his own thoughts on the role of society at large and talked about the pressures that families put on their daughters with regard to their ‘skin colours’ and marriage perspectives. However, Anand also suggested confronting colour discrimination on an individual level, not by challenging social norms but by focussing on what are called ‘New Thought’ and ‘Positive Thinking’. He referred to Louise Hay, a North-American motivational author, who has published widely on ‘New Thought’ as a self-help strategy and spiritual life philosophy. Prakash’s rather individual-centred views became also apparent when he explained that the career of two presumably darker skinned women in the Bollywood film industry would “prove” that the colour hierarchy could easily be overcome by any woman (cf. above). Similarly, NGOs protesting against colourism also draws on neoliberal subjectivity. The Indian NGO ‘Women of Worth’ (WOW) confronts the fair skin norm on three levels: public awareness, change of individual attitudes, and legal approaches. Just as cosmetic companies promote the fair skin ideal and define empowerment as a consumption choice, the colour awareness campaign ‘Dark is Beautiful’ (DiB), launched in 2009, also focusses on individual changes of attitude, “aim[ing] to educate and empower consumers to make wise choices.” Whilst the Indian state makes no attempt at prohibiting productions or imports, or providing people with more information on harmful bleaching agents (cf. chapter 1), there are a few NGOs that have set off to combat the fair skin norm/distribution of skin bleaching products. Not only do their campaigns direct cosmetic companies and advertisement strategies; they launch ‘awareness’ campaigns aiming to change people’s attitudes as well. For example, WOW’s78 introduction of DiB on its website reads: Dark is Beautiful is an awareness campaign that seeks to draw attention to the unjust effects of skin color bias as well as to celebrate the beauty and diversity of all skin tones. Launched in 2009 by Women of Worth, the campaign challenges the belief that the value and beauty of an Indian woman is determined by the fairness of her skin. This belief—shaped by societal attitudes and reinforced by media messages—is corroding the self-worth of countless girls and women. While it would appear that skin 78

http://womenofworth.in/, last visited 18 April 2019.

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color is an issue that affects women, our campaign has drawn a strong response from men, too. The campaign that [sic] aims to instigate and inspire change in traditional attitudes, perceptions and definitions of beauty. Amidst a global craze for fairness products and careless advertising, we aim to educate and empower consumers to make wise choices by conducting Media Literacy workshops and Life Skills training.79

WOW is also pursuing a “mission”: “to empower women across cultures and ethnicities to stand up for justice, equality and change in all facets of life and society, in both local and global contexts.” WOW specifies that it wants to empower women to “celebrate who they are”, to “anticipate and give expression to changes that are still needed for women”, to “participate in social action that will continue empowering women” and to “redefine beauty” as being “beyond skin color, shape or size”. Their DiB campaign is supported by the popular Indian actress and filmmaker Nandita Das, who has stated that, throughout her career, she has been asked to alter her dark skin when portraying an “educated upper-middle-class character”: When I am on a film set playing an educated upper-middle-class character, the crew will tell me, ‘I know you don’t like to wear makeup to lighten your skin, but this is an educated girl you are playing, so it would be appropriate for you to look fair’. But what does that say about me? I’m educated and I’m dark. It is as if filmmakers cannot wrap their heads around the possibility that dark skin can be associated with success, even when it is embodied for them in the very person with whom they are speaking.80

Das highlights the effects of the campaign regarding prohibitions of discriminating advertisement and, supposedly, the decline of whitening products and their sales, thus: If you are playing a Dalit or a slum woman or a maid or whatever, then it is fine, but the minute your class raises, you are supposed to look lighter. So, you know, we keep reinforcing stereotypes, especially in that kind of space. So, I am very glad that the campaign has garnered the kind of attention it has. It has actually made a tangible difference. The regulation body for advertisements have really cracked down on some of these ads and they have formed stricter guidelines that need to be followed, and where the color of the skin is equated with self-esteem, with success or with finding a job or a lover or whatever, those kinds of ads have been banned. So, that is a really good thing. I believe the whitening products and their sales have actually decreased. I am happy because it has been doing a lot of harm to young girls, losing their confidence

79

https://darkisbeautiful.blogspot.de/p/about-us.html, last visited 18 April 2019. Nandita Das, interview in: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/canadvertising-change-indias-obsession-with-fair-skin/278367/, last visited 18 April 2019.

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and was made to feel small and worthless, just because of the color of the skin in a country where 90 percent looks like us.81

Das is featured in various advertisement posters for the DiB campaign, all of which consist of a photograph of her and a short slogan, marked as a quotation by Das. In addition, the logos of DiB and WOW as well as links to websites containing further information about the campaign are printed on the posters. One of these ads, specially designed for the 2013 International Women’s Day, criticises the increasing pressure that fair skin norms put on women: I’m shocked to see the rise in the number of fairness creams and dark actresses looking paler and paler with every film, magazines, hoardings and films and advertisements showing only fair women. Stay Unfair, Stay Beautiful.

Another ad addresses beauty pressures and product lines for men: Look anywhere and everywhere, there are blatant and subtle reinforcements that only fair is lovely. The men have also joined the race with equal number of fairness products for them. Such pressure and so little public debate around it! Stay Unfair. Stay Beautiful.

Yet another one calls upon the people who are raising children to be more sensitive about colourism, while further asking cosmetic industries to change the messages in their products’ advertisements. Instead of promoting fairness, the ad proposes, they should promote “beauty beyond color”: Our youth and children must be encouraged to be comfortable in their skin and not to hate it. Advertisements should promote ‘beauty beyond color’ rather than endorse the age-old stereotypical belief that only fair is beautiful. We welcome the progressive and courageous stand that ASCI82 is taking.

As shown above, large cosmetic companies are already working hard on creating and promoting ‘beauty beyond color’, even if they do so to improve their own image and increase their sales. As was previously argued, confidence is a key theme in neoliberal narratives reducing structural gender discrimination to a personal problem that needs to be solved ‘individually’. To ‘help’ girls and

81

http://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2014/09/30/even-within-independent-cinemakind-populist-independent-cinema-nandita-das, last visited 18 April 2019. 82 Advertising Standard Council of India (http://www.ascionline.org/, last visited 18 April 2019.

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women gain more confidence, both corporate companies and non-profit organisations aim to ‘empower’ women to overcome gender discrimination (Banet-Weiser 2017, 267–268). Individual attitudes is what public health campaigns in Jamaica and Ghana also focus on when requesting people to ‘not kill’ their skin, to ‘love’ their natural skin and to ‘say no’ to skin bleaching, as Shirley Anne Tate has shown: Jamaica launched its anti-skin bleaching campaign, ‘Don’t kill the skin’, in 2007, and since then, controlling the circulation of bleaching products and public education has been a government concern. The public health campaign did not acknowledge the social and political implications of light skin in Jamaica and had very little effect, as it was based solely on changing people’s attitudes (Hope, 2009; Hunter, 2011; Charles, 2009b; Brown-Glaude, 2007). Ghana’s campaign ‘Love your natural skin tone—say no to skin bleaching and toning’ began in July 2014 and was again based on changing attitudes, rather than looking at what structural and economic issues drive bleaching. (Tate 2016, 9)

Whereas posters of the DiB campaign have been widely shared on social media, Das fears they will never be as visible as the ads for fairness creams bombarding the Indian population in magazines, billboards, web banners and on television.83 In my interviews, similar concerns about the effectiveness of such campaigns were uttered. Zahra, for instance, assumed that they would only reach a certain class, while the majority of the people would be far more influenced by the mainstream media. In particular, Bollywood actors and actresses starring in skin lightening advertisements are such important role models that most people would rather believe the Bollywood hero Shah Rukh Khan than any activist campaign: I think the media is a big influence; activist campaigns don’t have much influence; they [the people] all see [the ads]; the actors are their role models also. So when they are on TV—big actors like Shah Rukh Khan—in all these advertisements, people will believe them rather than, you know, the shouting activists. (Interview with Zahra, 9 February 2014)

The popular Indian actor, Shah Rukh Khan, indeed has been heavily criticised for starring in several skin lightening ads for Emami’s F&H. WOW, for instance, set up an online petition on change.org, demanding Emami to remove the advertisement and urging Shah Rukh Khan to stop promoting skin lightening products 83

“I have doubts about whether this interest will be sustained or whether the campaign will have a significant impact. But at the same time, I want to believe that every little drop fills the ocean. At the very least, this campaign is triggering some thought.” Nandita Das, interview in: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/can-advert ising-change-indias-obsession-with-fair-skin/278367/, visited 21.10.14).

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in general. Similarly, the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) fights against advertisements for skin lightening products. As shown in chapter 3, AIDWA initiated a protest campaign against TV advertisements of Fair & Lovely. An anti-colourism youth movement based in Bangalore, called Brown n’ Proud 84 , “aims to create a pride movement that challenges dark skin stigma among young people in schools, colleges, and universities” (Jha 2016, 69f.). They engage in social media education, legal action, community outreach in schools and college campuses, workshops and education, training young women and men to challenge inferiority complexes and self-hatred (Jha 2016, 70). However, social media do not merely provide them with an important space for discourse intervention: On Facebook, for example, one finds several groups and pages with names like “not fair, still lovely” and “not fair, very lovely”, all alluding to the most popular fairness cream in India. These ironised versions of the brand’s actual name not only reject fairness as beauty norm but also emphasise that loveliness is not inextricably linked to fairness. Members of these groups share pictures and stories, celebrate darker skin shades, support each other, condemn colourism and other forms of body-shaming. By insisting on being lovely, their approach to colourism slightly differs from the DiB campaign: While Das calls on people to ‘stay unfair’—what can also mean to be unjust, to not play according to the rules, to be unpleasant, non-conformist, or rebellious even—thus rather challenging social norms altogether, the slogan ‘not fair, still lovely’ demands social adaption or assimilation. A link between rejecting fairness and nonconforming to other social norms was also made by some of my interviewees. When talking about the pressures of beauty, Jasyashree spoke about what is deemed ‘proper’ behaviour for girls to display, stating, for example, that people would expect her to smile more and to shout less often. However, she refused to behave accordingly: I don’t smile, actually; why should I smile like a mad person on the road and go hihihi like this, ha? I always have a very serious look and, actually, I have very rough looks; everyone is scared to talk to me. I have a habit of yelling—yelling matlab85 I like calling my friends by shouting when they are on the other side of the [road]. Ultimately, the rest of the people, what do they say? ‘You are a girl, do you remember?’ ‘I remember, why?’ ‘You should not yell!’ ‘I was not yelling; I was calling her!’ ‘It looked as if you would kill that person, if that person doesn’t turn now!’ Okay, I understood then, but in the next moment, I would do that [again]. (Interview with Jayani, 5 February 2014) 84 85

https://www.facebook.com/bebrownandproud, last visited 18 April 2019. ‘Matlab’ can be translated as meaning/that means.

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The cited examples show once more how closely interrelated colourism is with other categories of social stratification. Moreover, they point to how attempts at confronting colourism likewise draw from neoliberal subjectivity. Thus their approaches remain partly limited to individual changes of attitude without paying attention to the structural power complexes that fairness constitutes and is constituted by, on which I elaborated earlier in this chapter.

4.7

Interim Conclusions

This chapter showed how discussions on skin bleaching are embedded in specific local and contemporary contexts, which necessitate looking beyond any simple black-white binary, or the coloniser/colonised divide. I therefore considered a wide range of shades, descriptions and social meanings of ‘skin colours’ that my interlocutors referred to. When interview participants talked about beauty (ideals), it became known that fair skin was generally referred to as a hegemonic beauty norm. It was equally evident that there exists no singular concept of fairness, but many. I hence set out to understand ‘fairness’ as a relative category and travelling concept of social stratification. The prevalent beauty norm was usually defined as ‘original’ or ‘natural’ ‘Indian’ fairness, whereas ‘foreign’ or ‘European’ whiteness, although often unreservedly desired, was occasionally also disvalued, for which reason I also proposed to analytically distinguish between the concepts of ‘Indian fairness’ and ‘European whiteness’. As well was the practice of skin bleaching rather understood as aiming to change skin shades, not colours. The bleached skin was thus described as ‘originally’ fair, de-tanned and ‘glowing’. Skin shades were perceived as changing temporarily, seasonally, partially and gradually. Fair skin was not only achievable through skin bleaching but also, for example, regular spas, a particular diet, change of domicile and/or weather/climate. Moreover, shades of colour were determined and redefined by the other’s gaze and actions. Thus, the mere act of ‘seeing’ colours was understood as a process of doing and learning, primarily localised within the family of origin, by my interlocutors. Respondents of all genders stressed that women were more severely affected by rigid beauty norms in general and ‘skin colour’ discrimination in particular. In terms of gender differentiations, colourism found its peak in the context of marriage (negotiations). Participants explained that women have to be fairer than usual on their wedding days, but most importantly, the bride has to be fairer than the groom. Hence, colourism not only affects women more severely, but it further intersects with and reproduces heteronormativity and gender-binary. When

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pursuing a career—which is often interpreted as an ‘alternative’ to marriage for women—fairness was regarded as being no less relevant. Fairbride preferences in marriage did not seem to vanish, neither in diasporic contexts nor when a marriage was defined as not arranged. However, in the context of the latter, differing views were uttered: Some interviewees assumed that fairness would become less crucial when ‘love’ is involved. That notion hints at the point that, in the context of marriage, fair skin is not a “signifier of modernity” (Donner 2012). Whereas, in regard to men, other status factors such as income, employment or education could easily outweigh lack of fairness, to women, beauty pressures came on top of other social demands. For men, lighter skin was of particular importance when already experiencing discrimination due to, e.g., low-caste and -class background, regional origin and, in one case, homosexual orientation. Even though social demands for fair skin seemed to increase for the ‘New Indian Man’, they operated differently due to the general sexist matrix: Fairness was rather viewed as an additional advantage; it was more exclusively linked to upward mobility in terms of professional careers rather than to any procreative activities; and skin bleaching was not as openly practised. Entangled with gender differentiations, both desiring and rejecting fairness also functioned as signifiers for class distinction: Whereas fair skin itself was associated with modernity, cosmopolitanism, upper-class and -caste status, desiring fairness was ascribed to rural, uneducated lower classes and castes. Thus, in Delhi, bleaching can be understood as a form of demarcation from social others rather than destabilising racial hierarchies (as it is the case with skin bleaching in the Black Atlantic, for instance). After examining how gender and class distinctions were enmeshed in desires for (and rejections of) fair skin, I also looked more closely at how dark skin, on the other hand, is linked to social exclusion and exploitation. To do so, I brought together Niranjana’s theories of gender and spatiality (“olage-horage” by Niranjana; 2001) with Kristeva’s theory of abjection (1982) and Federici’s work on body and labour power exploitation (2004). I thereby showed that social meanings of colour strongly relate to regulations, divisions and exploitations of labour. As such, colourism increasingly affects ‘status shifter’: that is, women who are moving into (earlier male dominated) public spheres; or lower classes and castes climbing up the social ladder. Generally, fair skin was understood as enabling opportunities for what the political activist Virmati described as “urban-based careers” (interview with Virmati, 22 February 2014), hence my defining skin bleaching as ‘aesthetic labour’ (Elias et al. 2017). Following Ruck (2018), I further classified bleaching as “a

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form of reproductive labor required in the service sector”. As any other reproductive work, bleaching often becomes an outsourced ‘third shift,’ further reinforcing boundaries between women of different social positions (cf. Wolf 2002[1990], Kang 2010). However, I found that experiences of beauty labour again depended on the beauticians’ different social positions and situations: On the one hand, they experienced beauty labour in terms of an increase in freedom and autonomy. Accordingly, beauticians described their jobs as “safe work” and “women’s work”, stressing how their skills were valued by their clients. Moreover, the beautician training made them independent in that, whenever social occasions arose that demanded certain beauty treatments, they no longer needed to visit high-priced salons as clients. On the other hand, however, being a beautician is also known for particularly precarious working conditions (Mohapatra 2012). Historically, the barbers—who not only provided shaving and haircutting, manicures and pedicures, nose- and ear-cleaning, but also applied face paint and body powder—have been regarded as “especially impure” due to caste rules (Smith 2007). Even if there were a shift from caste to cash relations in beauty service work in Delhi (as Thompson (1998) has postulated for the case of Kathmandu), with informal labour becoming the norm of the day (Mohapatra 2012), labour exploitation in beauty work has not ceased to exist. Also, service encounters in the salons generally reproduce and reinforce social hierarchies (Kang 2010). The amount of ‘pampering’ a bleaching treatment contains, or the accessibility of information on hazardous ingredients of bleaching products, again often depends on the consumer’s class. In addition, when looking at cosmetic production and trade conditions that transnational companies are subject to in India, as compared to legal situations in Europe or the US (e.g., use of mercury in cosmetics; cf. Introduction), postcolonial power hierarchies were found to have been reinstalled. Ultimately, I argue that both narrating and practising skin bleaching is not, first and foremost, aimed at destabilising racial hierarchies or talking back at the colonial centre; rather, fair skin in contemporary Delhi functions as a political signifier and embodied materiality of entangled social—primarily class and gender but also caste—relations. In desires for fair skin, “the institutionalization of new differentiations internal to Indian society” (Chandra 2011, 134) interlace with “the multiplicity of racial formations that proliferated through the colonial encounter and spawned new regimes of power beyond the colonial impetus” (ibid. 150). Such desires thus reflect and reinforce patriarchal upper-caste claims for hegemony, as well as the new (upper-) middle-class striving for ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘world citizenship’, both differentiating themselves from lower classes and castes. Hence, fairness of skin is a locally embedded yet transnational norm of

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beauty, interwoven with ‘Western’ beauty standards (cf. chapter 2). In that sense, bleaching the skin means not only to shift the shade but also to (re)position the self within a highly stratified society.

5

Conclusion and Outlook

A Geography of ‘Skin Colour(s)’ in India This study set out to map a geography of ‘skin colour(s)’. As an intersectional category, ‘skin colour’ structures and is structured by other categories of social differentiation. In the Indian context, these intersecting categories are caste, class, gender, religion and region. ‘Skin colour’, which is further deeply entangled with, while remaining distinct from, the construct ‘race’, rather contextually reinforces or restructures racist categories. In the Indian ‘skin colour’ hierarchy, fair skin (‘gor¯a’) is socially privileged, whereas dark(er) shades (‘k¯al¯a’) are stigmatised. More precisely, fair skin is associated with North India, upper castes and classes as well as with modernity and cosmopolitanism, whereas darker shades are attributed to South India, lower castes, working migrants and rural Indians. Moreover, fair skin is the most crucial marker of female beauty: Linguistically, the terms ‘fair’ and ‘beautiful’ are used interchangeably, while dark(er) shades are problematised. Above all, fair skin is linked to social capital and social mobility: It generally remakes social hierarchies and is evinced most clearly in marriage and job markets. Generally, a wide variety of skin shades is discursively available: The most prominent categories lying in-between the ‘dark’ and ‘fair’ hierarchy are the Hindi ‘savla’ and the English ‘wheatish’. The latter seems to be a catch-all term, often used to disguise, upgrade or transform (self-) ascribed darker skin tones into more acceptable, desired or simply more ambiguous categories of colour. Whilst black and white skin are commonly located outside the local colour hierarchy, white privilege and anti-black racism prevail. Desiring Indian fairness is often articulated as being discrepant from striving for ‘European’ whiteness; however, conceptions of Indian fairness as well as colonial and postcolonial whiteness coexist and overlap, restructuring each other and intensifying reciprocally. While particularly (upper-) middle classes aspire to “cosmopolitan whiteness” or “transnational whiteness”, an implicit desire for a specific ‘Indian fairness’ also abounds. This idea of ‘Indian © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2022 N. Kullrich, Skin Colour Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64922-0_5

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fairness’, which is highly entangled with notions of ‘normality’ and ‘naturalness’, is imagined as already1 cosmopolitan or modern. In order to achieve the ‘natural Indian beauty’ ideal, bleaching the skin was found to be an acceptable action, unlike in other regional contexts where the practice of skin bleaching is seen as inconsistent with “ethnic authenticity” and group belonging (Hunter 2005, 104). My thesis challenged the idea that bleaching stems from Western ideals of beauty, making a case for considering that not all postcolonised skin bleachers talk back to the (white) colonial centre. I showed that desires for fairness have historical roots in precolonial India and that, in contemporary India, the desire for fairness is not the same as the desire for European whiteness. Despite the fact that white supremacy did not cease to exist after India officially gained Independence in 1947, understanding skin bleaching as the ultimate embodied practice in which global white supremacy manifests itself would have run the risk of turning into yet another white-centric view that would eventually reinforce white supremacy again. Therefore, I rather postulated that Indian fairness is a locally embedded, precolonial yet transnational norm of beauty: As a concept, it travels, and as a category of social stratification, it is relational. Thus, colourism creates different effects and affects in socially differently positioned agents. Precisely because (pre)colonial patriarchal Brahmin claims to power are interlaced with neoliberal invocations of gendered (aesthetic) labourers, fair skin preference persists today as a particularly powerful social norm. Historicising and Localising ‘Skin Colour’ Discrimination Having emerged over time, fair skin preferences are embedded in multifarious and entangled struggles for political power. Caste, patriarchy, Hinduism, the Mogul Empire, colonialism and far-right Hindu nationalism intersect to create a specific Indian colour geography. Whereas current literature on early migration and assimilation processes in of female beauty already in early Hinduism and the Mogul Empire. As a signifier of social distinction, ‘skin colour’ was used by certain uppercaste groups, such as the Chitpavan Brahmins, who had made fair skin part of their group characteristic and myth of origin. It was not until British colonisation that a hierarchy based on a black/white binary was established. In practice, however, this binary was never fixed or stable but rather flexible and relative, dependent upon changing political agendas. Hence, colonial whiteness was, on the one hand, desired for social privilege, while it was rejected, on the other hand, when conflicting with caste rules of purity 1

By stating ‘already’ modern, I intend to counter what Chakrabarty (2000) problematises as ‘not modern yet’ (2000, 8, 14 f.), meaning when ‘Western’ scholarship ascribes to the ‘Third World’ the label ‘modernity’ as a signifier of ‘development’.

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or local notions of beauty. Likewise, no homogenous white ruling elite existed, and not all colonised Indians were depicted as ‘homogeneously black’ by the colonisers. In addition, the ways and means whereby colonial fiction and painting renamed and displayed Indian ‘skin colours’ were further effectively challenged by anticolonial and anti-caste movements. Apart from the myth of the ‘white man’s burden’, the British Raj (and European orientalists) reinterpreted and restructured complex Indian social orders, which were based on the notions of ‘varn.a’ and ‘j¯ati’2 , into a ‘racialized’ caste system. Since upper-caste groups sought alliance with the white ¯ rulers, they both made use of the Aryan race theory to legitimate their respective claims to power. Already within anti-colonial struggles, women’s embodiments had become crucial for national imaginations: the Indian woman constructed as the counter-image to the ‘Western’ woman. What mostly restructured and reinforced colourism after the Independence was the fact that female beauty became a mode of consumption, and fair ‘skin colour’ became a commodity (fetish). These developments reflect (and produce) political transformations in both the state-led, capitalist, early postcolonial Indian nation as well as contemporary, neoliberal, post-liberalisation India. I showed how the making of ‘India Shining’ is reflected in and entangled with the making of the fair, female, Indian body. The way India’s national beauty industry was established shows how beauty became a ‘national project’, primarily seen as a strategy of differentiation between the Indian nation/the ‘West’, despite having been created for (upper-) middle-class women only. Amidst post-liberalisation processes emerged the ‘New Indian Woman’, the hallmark of a ‘shining’ Indian nation, representing India as a cosmopolitan yet traditional global player striving for economic power. Parallel to the rise of the middle classes and the growth of the service sector, beauty labour and consumption emerged as an additional shift for women moving into public working spheres. Beauty thus no longer marked national belonging but world citizenship, becoming a differentiation practice towards the lower strata. Shaping and being shaped by both macro-structural economic and political developments, as well as by people’s everyday negotiations, the ‘skin colour’ geography briefly outlined thus far, is dynamic and open. Whereas only future research will show how colourism in India develops, my material slightly points to the possibility that skin-tanning could become a beauty trend for the elite/upper castes and classes. This prediction is based on three findings: First, skin bleaching is increasingly adopted by the lower strata and thus ascribed to the rural poor, often disparagingly. Second, darker-skinned models are already preferred over fair ones in the urban elite fashion scene. Lastly, tanned skin was mentioned as beauty marker only twice 2

For an introduction to ‘jati’ and ‘varna’, see 2.1.3.

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by elite members of the society3 . Given the fact that skin-tanning is a widespread beauty ideal in Europe and the US, in a seemingly paradoxical way, skin-tanning could again mean approximating whiteness. The Makings of ‘Skin Colour’ in Everyday Life The makings of ‘skin colour’ happen on highly entangled discursive, affective and material levels. This means that colourism, or the discrimination based on ‘skin colour’, is (re)articulated by an assortment of (trans)national cultural flows represented in all forms of images, texts and/or sounds. Colourism is further learnt and performed in/by people’s everyday experiences, primarily within families. Moreover, it clearly manifests itself within people’s everyday lives and leads to verifiable forms of discrimination. A skin shade is perceived as a relative and flexible status that changes temporarily, seasonally, partially, gradually and contextually. Additionally, fairness is not only achieved through the practice of skin bleaching but also by regular visits to spas, following a particular diet, change of domicile and climate, etc. Fairness is further read as reflecting a certain status of the mind (‘relaxed’), the body (‘healthy’) or a general character trait (‘nice’). Negotiations and modifications of ‘skin colour’ primarily happen within the context of beauty discourses and practices. The practice of skin bleaching in contemporary India is understood as a beautification (or even normalisation) practice geared toward social mobility and distinction. Moreover, since bleaching is predominantly performed with the objective of changing shades, not colours, in mind—hence often defined as ‘de-tanning’—following my interviewees, I suggested analytically differentiating between ‘Indian fairness’ and ‘European whiteness’. I did not only want to ‘list’ what other social categories colour intersects with but rather examine how these categories shape each other as well as what they do to and with another. Thus I analysed the ways these categories were entangled in each individual case and story. While these close examinations allowed for more general conclusions, to provide an overview necessitated order and relation, which further led to the privileging of categories and to the neglecting of relations. Simultaneity and mutuality can hardly be represented in a text; however, since I had to start somewhere, I began with ‘gender’ because it seemed most crucial to colour in general, even though its entanglements with colour differed with regard to the social position of a gendered subject. 3

Skin-tanning was mentioned by a white German friend referring to her elite Indian acquaintances in Poona in an informal conversation, as well as by an Indian beautician in Delhi, whom I interviewed, who worked in the most prestigious and expensive beauty salon chain I visited during my whole research stay.

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Within most of my interviews, colour as a gendered category (re)made woman* as heterosexual and cisgender, co-determining her social roles and status to a large extent: her ‘skin colour’ was read as marker of her marriageability, her moral standing, or her career abilities. Depending on social status and living context, fair skin was found to be capable of (hyper-) feminising women while bringing them ‘male privilege’ as well (chapter 4). A woman could thus make use of skin lightening to either determine or challenge gendered stereotypes. Generally, colourism reinforces inequality between (binary) genders, affecting women more rigidly. That becomes particularly apparent in two ways: First, a woman is always expected to be fairer than a man; second, men can usually outweigh a lack of fairness more easily, by means of high income or education, for instance. However, further research must be conducted to explore what fairness does in a non-hetero, non-binary setting. Whether fairness improved a woman’s beauty status—usually understood as making her more attractive to the male sex—depended on other categories, too. Muslim women in particular were commonly instanced as being specially fair. What struck me, however, was their complete absence in any discussion on beauty in my interviews: Though perceived as very fair, none of the interviewees ever referred to Muslim women as beautiful. Fairness was never explicitly linked to Hinduism either but to the nation of ‘India’ instead. Yet, implicitly, India may thus stand in for Hindu India (chapter 4). The ‘beautification’ effect of fair skin was also shaped by region (of origin). Fair skin has become most ineffective for women of South East Indian origin, who despite being commonly perceived as very light-skinned, were explicitly referred to as not desirable. Here, the ‘skin colour’ discourse most clearly took a racialised turn. (Upper-) middle classes and upper-caste women are encouraged to consume fairness by the most popular actors of the (trans)national beauty industry. Their advertisement strategy corresponds to common post-feminist, neoliberal narratives. An increase of body confidence, so these narratives go, is needed by (the socially privileged) woman to overcome social boundaries and to achieve her dream job or dream husband, respectively. Moreover, it is the urban, (upper-) middle-class and upper-caste Hindu woman who has become the embodiment of the Indian nationstate (imaginations), whether as the (transnational) beauty queen, the hard-working member of the “shining economy”, or the bearer of “fair babies”. The rural lower classes and castes, however, are not encouraged by media, industry and politics to become part of “India Shining”. Although recently they are also addressed as consumers, their engagement with skin labour is not promoted as a means to remove social barriers, as my analysis of the industry’s ‘empowerment’ projects for the rural poor women showed (chapter 3). Rather, to the subaltern woman, the industry only promises to make her hard work less visible on her skin. Thus, by lightening up

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the woman’s skin, the Fair & Lovely cream, for instance, simultaneously obscures the actual reasons for her precarious working and living conditions—being multiply discriminated against as a (supposedly) dark skinned, low-caste and low-class sweeper woman (chapter 3). The empowerment of the subaltern was solely defined as ‘market participation’, and the market was thereby rebranded as “democratized” (cf. Hammond and Prahalad 2004, n. p.), by which means two classes of consumers have been created: the subaltern and the cosmopolitan (chapter 3). For women of all social strata, however, bleaching was found to be part of generally additional and ‘hidden’ aesthetic labour. In contemporary, urban, postliberalisation India, bleaching practices are increasingly informed by neoliberal capitalism and subjectivities, which is why I spoke of skin bleaching as skin management and aesthetic (skin) labour. That kind of labour was linked by a feminist collective to women’s increasing labour exploitations (see interview with Virmati, 22 February 2014, chapter 3). For (upper-) middle-class women, additional beauty labour is required in the growing service sector, for instance. Whereas passing on this work enhances their status, the case is totally different for lower-class and lowercaste women. To a group of women from a migrated Rajasthan-Bhatt community I met in Kathputli Colony, for instance, beautician training offered by an NGO meant doing the type of work they enjoyed, earning (their own) money and creating a space where beauty treatments would be affordable for all inhabitants of the Colony. From their narrations, the increase of autonomy within certain aspects of their lives became apparent. Thus, especially starting their own beauty business translated into ways to circumnavigate and transform boundaries set by intersections of patriarchal social norms and poor economic status. For the Kathputli women, beauty work neither meant mere individual ‘pleasure’ nor social ‘pressure’ but was experienced as a means of dealing with gendered spaces divided into ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the Colony to assert (some of) their interests and needs (chapter 4). Colour is further closely entangled with class and labour. Associating dark skin with a certain region of India became most discriminatorily affective in cases linked to migrant labour coming to the North from South India or Bihar (chapter 4). Fairness was imagined as increasing one’s chances of getting a ‘good’ job, whereas darkness legitimised being assigned menial work. Even when leaving class and caste belonging apart, claims Thomas (2018), low-status jobs are “seen better suited to perceived dark bodies” (84). Hence, looking at desires for fairness as desires to escape dark(er) skin (stigmas), it soon turned out that ‘skin colour’ strongly relates to the regulations, divisions and exploitations of labour (chapter 4). In the interviews, it became further apparent that while fairness is associated with upper castes and classes, modernity and cosmopolitanism, the practice of bleaching is assigned to the poor and rural women, who are then discriminated against not

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only due to the perceived darkness of their skin but further, and precisely, because of their very struggle to erase that stigma from their body. Hence, skin bleaching was also associated with rural “backwardness”, “illiteracy”, even “stupidity”. Since privileged groups imagine and deploy skin shade as a social signifier, in order to maintain their status, they have to remake themselves constantly as fair, while making sure that others remain dark. Accordingly, when bleaching by poor rural women is disparately remarked, one’s own investments in bleaching are made less visible. In any case, as many interviewees stressed, they only de-tan to revert to the ‘normal’ and ‘original’ fairness they once inhabited. It is therefore far more difficult for the excluded strata to use bleaching in a way that enables social advancement (chapter 4). Hence, I argued that bleaching the skin and reimaging fair skin as ‘naturally’ but simultaneously ‘modern’ Indian, allows for the growing Indian middle classes to reproduce their selves as stable (Kristeva 1982), to perform their identity as upper caste and class (Federici 2004), and also, to legitimate their place in what interviewee Virmati referred to as the “shining economy” (Virmati, group interview with the feminist collective Saheli, 22 February 2014). Not only did the upper stratum of society deride about and distinguish themselves from lower classes and castes who bleach. The general aspirations of lower classes and castes for a better life (via bleaching or other means) were occasionally sanctioned by patriarchal upper-caste hegemony, as exemplified in chapter 4. I suggest that these misogynist and anti-Dalit backlashes must be looked at as most extreme forms of securing one’s hold to power and reproduce one’s own self as stable. Ultimately, colourism increasingly affects ‘self-shifters’—that is, (upper-) middle-class and upper-caste women moving into public (working) spheres previously dominated by males, as well as mainly lower-class and lower-caste women trying to overcome social boundaries through education, for instance (see the case of upper-caste men raping Dalit school girls in chapter 3.) To sum up, this study showed that skin-bleachers not only cross or blur but also redraw social boundaries; they challenge and reproduce social norms. Their room for manoeuvre, choice, agency and empowerment through body/skin labour as well as for fairness consumption, respectively, highly differs with regard to the social position and assigned identity of the person aspiring to fairness. Skin bleaching appears not only as colonial legacy but is practised—and ‘othered’—to gain or maintain multiple social differences, primarily towards the lower classes and castes—among women and between (binary) genders.

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Entangled Power Structures: Whiteness as Empire, Whiteness after Empire, and the Global Beauty Regime During the early stages of my research, I browsed the Internet for skin bleaching practices and products. I found journalistic articles, advertisements, advisory pages, beauty blogs, YouTube tutorials, and forum discussions. A blog that I happened upon, for instance, provided a link to—according to the blogger—a “horrible” skin bleaching website, under which other users had commented on skin bleaching. The majority condemned it, describing bleaching as “crazy”, “bad”, “terrible” and “nasty”. Skin-bleachers, so most of the arguments went, probably hated themselves and felt inferior to others. One of the bloggers wondered: Yes, that is really crazy... Ok, I am white. But I am white because I am German. But I don’t understand why some people want to be different from how they are... Some whites want to get tanned and go under the tanning bed... Some blacks want to be white... Some blondes want to be brunette, some red-haired [sic] want to be blonde...4

This statement is practically a condensed version of what I heard from people with whom I talked about the topic of my research over the years. A few assumptions presented in this very brief narrative became perennial to my research project over time. In her comment, the blogger takes a relativistic standpoint regarding standards of beauty; appears rather ignorant of her own privileged position as a white person in a globally racialised society; adopts a morally superior standpoint from where she labels skin-bleachers as “crazy”; and imagines bleaching as only concerning nonwhite people. Thus this post displays a typical white supremacist attitude. My thesis set out to deconstruct such attitudes by localising, historicising and contextualising fair skin norms and skin lightening practices. Yet, debates on skin bleaching are always shaped and framed by postcolonial discourses, particularly judging or condemning the practice ethically, which reflects colonial continuities. Therefore, in this concluding discussion, I finally bring colourism in India back onto the global stage, (re)addressing the question of how Indian fairness and whiteness as cultural imperatives relate. Anti-colonial revolutions have in fact never turned out to be “a total, complete, and absolute substitution” (Fanon 1963, 35): white subjects, institutions, languages, and cultural norms continue to exist—as they have in India. Thus, invoking López (2005), I ask a question that has been marginalised in various areas of postcolonial studies: What exactly happens to whiteness after the Empire? López argues

4

https://www.nairaland.com/6417/horrible-skin-bleaching-website, last visited 28 January 2022.

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that scholarship overlooks the key role of non-white colonial elites in consolidating (neo)colonial power. Further, he claims that the relation between the erstwhile colonised and colonisers as fellow citizens of today in a post-independence state is characterised by dependence and complicity with the ideology of whiteness/Western superiority. Thus, postcolonial studies hardly address “whiteness as a subject position” because of the “race-based meta opposition” that closely associates ‘white’ with colonising/the colonial, and ‘non-white’ with being colonised/the postcolonial (López 2005, 3–6). López further explains that “the colonizing process displace[s] or ‘bleach[es]’ the precolonial past and replace[s] it with its own cultural imperatives” (López 2005, 5). Accordingly, he also calls part of the decolonisation process a “repigmentation” or “unbleaching” of suppressed cultural histories (López 2001, 89, referred to by Hawley 2005, 66). His wording illustrates exactly what skin bleaching practices are commonly associated with. Used in this figurative sense, bleaching one’s skin would mean to erase or conceal one’s past/identity and to override it with the colonisers’. That same understanding of skin bleaching contributed to cultural movements such as ‘Black is Beautiful’ which became an essential part of anti-colonial African or African-diaspora political engagements in the 1960s (chapter 2). Unlike among black anti-colonial movements, redefinitions/re-adoptions of terms like ‘dark’ (as beautiful) seem to be a rather recent phenomenon in India (chapter 4). Depending on time and space, the politics of beauty have always been experienced and thus negotiated variably by differently positioned and affected subjects—mostly women*. In the US of 1968, the 48th (white) Miss America contest held in Atlantic City was accompanied by two acts of protest: white feminist activists of Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) fought against beauty contests per se, while at the same time, “the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) staged the first Miss Black America pageant as a ‘positive protest’ against the exclusion of black women from the Miss America title” (Craig 2002, 3). These protestations illustrate how white feminist and anti-racist activists fought beauty regimes in very diverse ways and from multiple stances. In contemporary India, the tremendous transnational success of Indian beauty queens plays a crucial role in the construction of Indian self-images and national identities. Similarly, women’s embodiments are central to current white supremacist discourses. When Indian-American Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America in 2014, a racist debate emerged on (social) media: How could a “Muslim”, “Arab” and “terrorist” be elected most beautiful, especially after 9/11? On the other hand, the victory of Davuluri was celebrated as proof for the defeat of racism in the US. The (social) media coverage shows how anti-Muslim racism and colour-blind ideology are two interconnected aspects of beauty regimes. Thus, the most powerful

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myth propagated by beauty regimes seems to be one that declares beauty as trivial, personal, in the eye of the beholder, or a purely subjective matter of taste, while it is, in fact, highly racialised, ableist, classed and gendered. Nowadays, beauty narratives mostly emanate from a neoliberal discourse of individual achievement and self-improvement, promoting beauty labour and consumption as an individual solution to structural problems. That also applies to the skin bleaching industry in India. Thus, even though skin bleaching is a locally rooted practice, global power asymmetries must not be overlooked. The intense promotion of skin-lighteners in a postcolonial nation-state such as India—particularly by a Europe-based cosmetic company such as Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL)—indeed has to be examined against the background of a global dominance of “western whiteness” (Jha 2016). I showed that the contemporary global trade with fairness creams ideologically follows upon the global trade with soap in 19th-century colonialism (Chapter 3). ‘Pears’ soap’ was read by McClintock (1995) as allegory for and mediator of imperial progress, serving to preserve the uncertain boundaries of class, gender and race identity through fetish ritual in an era of imperial crisis. Commodity racism and colour commodity are closely linked and work in very similar ways, whilst colour has an increasingly neoliberal ‘outlook’, particularly amidst the globally proclaimed arrivals of post-racial and post-feminist eras. Concurrent with increasing global capitalist competition, skin bleaching practised in India is ‘neo-orientalised/othered’ outside/abroad, not only to ‘whitewash’ the racist and colourist society that is doing the othering, but to also distract attention from neocolonial economic relations between India and the Global North. For instance, colourism in India is portrayed by US mainstream media in a neo-orientalist style to ultimately “disassociate American Consumers from an Indian consuming public” and to thereby maintain their economic dominance in a moment of imperial crisis (Shrestha 2013, 104). Neocolonial power hierarchies can be further found regarding cosmetic production and trade conditions that transnational companies are subject to in India, as compared to legal situations in Europe or the US (e.g., the use of mercury in cosmetics). It is through these neocolonial double standards that white supremacy (re)acts in the skin bleaching business. ‘Skin colour’ discrimination is thus enforced by an industry that makes profit with dual messages: On the one hand, Didier Villanueva, manager for L’Oreal India, explains that cultural imperialism or postcolonial effects have nothing to do with skin bleaching: “It’s as old as India”, he replies, and “deeply rooted in the culture”.5 On the other hand, Ashok Venkatramani, who works for HUL, 5

https://jezebel.com/indian-women-whiten-their-skin-fight-the-patriarchy-264396, last visited 20 April 2019.

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explains that “Taking offense at the [skin bleaching] products is ‘a very Western way of looking at the world’”6 . These statements by actors of the beauty industry turn skin bleaching into an essentialist Indian practice in order to not only defend but enhance their corporate image. The same goal of profit-making is pursued by the market strategy to acknowledge—or even create7 —different skin shades and to celebrate and embrace diversity (chapter 3). Economies of colour, my thesis shows, draw exactly from the intersection of white supremacy with local social hierarchy, of global (neo)colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. What is further essential to bear in mind is the fact that non-white groups, who make use of whiteness in order to (re)gain power, do not need to engage in skin modifications at all. Vivid examples of how whiteness is applied in contemporary India is given by Shefali Chandra (2011), who shows how heteronormative, patriarchal Brahmin culture makes use of white sexuality to differentiate itself from other castes and non-Hindu religions to ultimately (re)claim its own dominant status. Moreover, through contemporary US pop culture, imperial whiteness makes use of neo-orientalist images of ‘India’ to remake—and ‘whitewash’—its hegemonic position. Chandra further argues that the increasing political alliance between US imperial whiteness and India is largely based upon post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism (Chandra 2015). Contribution to Knowledge: Shedding New Light on Skin Lightening Studies, and Related Fields of Research Whilst ‘skin colour’ plays a crucial role in social stratification processes in India, it has largely been overlooked as a critical category of analysis by scholarship so far. This study, however, places ‘skin colour’ in its very centre: By exploring, in depth, how ‘skin colours’ are perceived, applied, categorised, experienced, negotiated, consumed, modified and marketed, this thesis sheds new light on the makings of social distinction and hierarchies in India (and beyond). It also adds a new perspective on the practice of skin bleaching by looking beyond previous understandings of bleaching as internalisation of racial hierarchies. By arguing that skin-bleachers aim for ‘Indian fairness’ rather than ‘European whiteness’, and that they de-tan shades rather than change colours, my study contributes to a paradigm shift in a field of study engaged with ‘skin colour’ discrimination and modification. 6

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/business/media/30adco.html?_r=1&ref=business& oref=slogin, last visited 20 April 2019. 7 A subproject of L’Oreal’s “geocosmetics” concentrates solely on the making of ‘skin colours’. Under the slogan “A New Geography of Skin Color”, L’Oreal introduces their work on skincare products suiting various ‘skin colours’, thus contributing considerably to maintaining and reproducing colourism (see chapter 3).

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To some extent, white privilege is just as much subject of this project as Indian fairness. It became know that even though beauty and body practices are locally rooted, they are further entangled with white supremacy in various ways. By showing the minor or even subordinated role whiteness occasionally plays in everyday beauty routines in Delhi, my work contributes to the decentralisation of whiteness in Beauty Studies: not by overlooking or marginalising whiteness but precisely by asking when and where whiteness becomes powerful as a political category. Thus, we could see that, on the one hand, whiteness enters new power alliances and reinforces ‘local’ hierarchies; on the other hand, imperial whiteness may label skin bleaching as essentially ‘Indian’ to ultimately reinforce its hegemonic status. Thus, my work also contributes to the field of Critical Whiteness Studies by aiming to understand how ‘white supremacy’ works precisely when stretching beyond fixed and binary ‘skin colour’ categories. In doing so, I more generally destabilise established binaries of white versus brown (Chandra 2011), power versus resistance (G. Reddy 2005), and coloniser versus colonised (e.g., Kolsky 2009). Not only did my argument draw on studies on colourism emphasising how colour lines reflect internalised racial hierarchies (Blay 2011; Mire 2001; Hunter 2005; Glenn 2009), but it also moved beyond these approaches. My study clearly breaks with scholarship that reproduces blacks/PoCs “as possessors of damaged psyches” (Tate 2010) and argues for an interpretation of skin lightening beyond “‘self hate’ and ‘low self-esteem’” (Tate 2016, 1). Applying the “economies of colours” approach (Harris 2009) allowed me to explore what else informs colourism beyond colonial racism. The little body of research on colourism in India engages with media representation, such as advertisement, magazines, fiction, etc. (V. Reddy 2006; Parameswaran and Cardoza 2009; Ayyar and Khandare 2013). Thus, my thesis closes a gap in research by applying a qualitative approach to the subject and by placing the practice and practitioners of skin bleaching under focus. Moreover, by linking research on fair skin preference in India with whiteness studies, my research breaks new ground. To do so, I engaged with literature on colonial whiteness (Fisher-Tiné 2009), postcolonial whiteness (Lopéz 2005), transnational whiteness (Osuri 2008), cosmopolitan whiteness (Saraswati 2010), and imperial whiteness (Chandra 2011). Not only does this work contribute to Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) and Critical Beauty Studies, but it further shows how bringing both perspectives together helps extend the boundaries of what we already know about the coloured body. In short, CWS is mainly driven by the aim to detect and deconstruct macro-structural levels of discrimination, colonial legacy and continuity as well as white capital, myths and powers. Although studies on racism often revolve around the (gendered, ableist, classed) body, racial structures are not ‘inscribed’ on the body alone; rather,

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bodies constitute themselves individually and actively as racialised bodies (Jarrín 2010, 14). Emphasising affect and agency, Critical Beauty Studies particularly addresses these ambivalences of beauty regimes. Depending on social context, position and situation, beauty can be experienced as a resource, shelter, obligation, pleasure, right, alienation, empowerment, burden, or possibility. Precisely by looking beyond the myth of the superficiality of beauty, colourism can be grasped as ‘skin deep’. This perspective allows us to see the bleached body not only as representation, internalisation and embodiment of colonial legacies, but as an active (and thus, potentially resistant) part of localising and negotiating social status within multiple and complex beauty regimes, which are always racialised but not unchallenged, always hegemonic but never homogenous. What allowed me to see skin bleaching in a new light was not only my intersectional and theoretical perspective but also my transdisciplinary methodological approach. Within my heterogeneous mix of materials, I mainly focussed on my empirical data to draw on “embodied experience” rather than “disembodied knowledge” as the key basis for my theorisations (cf. G. Reddy 2005). That means, in this thesis, I zoomed in and out of everyday bleaching discourses and practices as well as the shifting political and economic contexts framing and reproducing these practices. Thus, to constantly move between micro and macro levels of colourism, to look beyond the dualities of agency and structure, was particularly helpful for understanding that beauty practices were never trivial. My transdisciplinary and intersectional approach allowed for a multiple-level analysis, offering the possibility to look simultaneously at identity constructions, symbolic representations, social (routine) practices as well as political and economic contexts. Thus, I could trace some of the elements informing the fairness discourse that appeared in the interviews by exploring literature/‘cultural snippets’. I was further able to explore which elements that made up the discourse (in literature) actually reflect, manifest in and (re)produce everyday social life. This approach allowed for the geography of colours to emerge in its complexities. By doing so, my study makes a contribution to what Knapp (2006) identified as future task for intersectionally orientated research: to bring together large-framed social power relations, historic power dispositives, institutional arrangements and styles of governance on a meso-level, with analyses of interaction between individuals and groups, including symbolic processes of representation, legitimatisation and interpretation (Knapp 2006, 1733).8 By studying “the historical and contextual specificit[ies] that distinguishes the mechanisms that produce inequality by different categorical divisions” (Risman 2004, 443), my 8

Referring to Dill, Nettles, and Weber (2001).

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work ultimately offers a critical whiteness approach to beauty; that not only enables a deeper understanding of colourism, but also destabilize binaries in theories and pushes disciplinary boundaries. My empirical focus on ‘fairness’ and ‘beauty’ in India necessitates future research that explicitly studies ‘imperial whiteness’ empirically, to engage with how whiteness as cultural imperative relates to local social structures in India. It would add to my research to pursue whiteness not only in other everyday sociocultural contexts close to beauty (e.g., fashion, plastic surgery) but also in other fields of everyday negotiations, such as food (“white dining culture”)9 or leisure activities, as well. Moreover, it would be revealing to ask how imperial whiteness relates to Hindu-Nationalist India (since my fieldwork ended when the BJP came to power in 2014). In addition, to explore how Indian colourism travels globally, empirical research on South Asian diaspora communities could be useful10 . Likewise, it could be explored how ‘skin colour’ is negotiated by diaspora communities within India (e.g., the Indian African Siddi Community in Hyderabad11 ). As for this thesis, I hope it contributes to a better understanding of social stratification in India and helps to develop a critical perspective on imperial whiteness that would allow for challenging white supremacy in India and beyond.

9

Natermann (2018), for instance, pursues ‘racial’ and ‘cultural’ whiteness in the colonies of the Congo Free State and German East Africa. Her study examines how ‘white identities’ are (re)made in everyday contexts; with a focus on practices and symbols relating to food, friendship, and gender. 10 Vijay Prashad argues in The Karma of Brown Folk (2000) that South Asian Americans would be used by a North American white supremacy to further exclude and oppress Black and Latino working classes with a rhetoric that presents Asians as people embracing capitalist modernity and its neoliberal values with silent gratitude, whereas blacks are described as generally abusing social benefits, voicing their criticism on daily and structural discrimination, and thus to blame for their own misery. 11 Ababu Minda (2004) examines formation, maintenance and change of identity of the Siddi or Habshi (African Indian) communities in Hyderabad. He argues that even though there has been extensive research on the African diaspora in the Americas and in Europe as well as on the Atlantic slave trade and Western slavery, slavery in Oriental societies and the Eastern slave trade have been neglected for the most part (Minda 2004, 10 f.) What is most interesting about Minda’s study with regard to the topic at hand is that identity amongst the Siddis is (at least partly) also constructed along colour categories: “The Siddi of Somali origin prefer to call themselves Somali rather than Africans. They differentiate between a Siddi of Somali origin and a Siddi whose origin is of another African country. They consider the latter as ‘blacks’, a category in which they do not see themselves” (xii).

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