‘Fair and Lovely’ No More – Bollywood Star blasts Fairness Products
// August 27th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Desi-Indian, Racism, Videos
Accolades for Akki – Bollywood star Akshay Kumar slams ‘fairness products’ and endorsers of such products at a news conference.
Rani Mukerji, Priyanka Chopra, Bipasha Basu, Konkona Sen Sharma are all the dusky leading ladies of Bollywood that may have succumbed to the ‘Fair and Lovely’ fever at one time or another–even images of them found on the internet are substantially lighter in tone than their actual skin color.
While my mother in the United States of America is haggling me about my ’sun-burnt’ skintone wondering when it would get better and my 75-year-old grandmother ruins her face with yet another facial product in her efforts to lighten her skin color (‘fix’ her face as they put it in my family), thousands of other Indian mothers across the world buy fairness and beauty creams for their young daughters. Darkness is a curse in our culture–it is likened to ‘evil’ — one need not look further than Diwali, “Festival of Lights” — the victory of good over evil, light over dark. Even Hindu Gods are depicted as light-skinned contrary to texts that write about their androgyny and darker tones.
The persistent importance given to ‘lightness’ and ‘light-skin’ is not just Indian culture but across the world. The global economy of whiteness employs fairness creams that exacerbate and thrive on the kind of racism that privileges light skin over dark and you will even find them in markets across the Middle East and Northern Africa, in villages of Southern African countries and beyond.
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