BEAUTY
AND SKIN COLOUR
Dr.
Rammanohar Lohia
The colour of the skin is no criterion of beauty or any
other type of superiority. And yet the fair of colour and the beautiful are
words of similar meaning not alone in the white lands of Europe but more so in
the sultrier climes of Asia or the Americas. On merit, this distortion of
aesthetics is inexplicable.
The dark of colour have not always been treated with
neglect, at least not in India. To Sanskrit literature, the dark one, Shyama,
is the beautiful one. She need not actually have been dark of colour, but if
she was young and beautiful, and the young and the beautiful often tend to be
synonymous, she was called Shyama. The perplexed cloud asks as to how he would
recognise the damsel to whom the message was to be delivered and Kalidas
describes the Shyama of slender waist and of step languorous with the weight of
hips, of a lower lip red and full, of eyes that belong to an astonished deer
and similar treasure. The male incarnations of god-head, Ram and Krishna, were
dark of colour.
The greatest woman of Indian myth was dark. Draupadi also
called Krishna has suffered neglect, probably because current male vanity
cannot reconcile itself to her five husbands and a platonic affairs or two in
addition. Savitri and Seeta, the chaste and also the fair of colour, represent
India’s womanhood, not entirely without reason, but unreason ensures when other
representatives are excluded. Krishna, the dark female, and Krishna the dark
male, are however the two peerless flowers of India’s myth-making with the
utmost beauty and fragrance.
Draupadi is perhaps the one woman of myth or history in
the wide world, who was wiser and wittier than all the men of her time. The
question of comparing her with Krishna should never arise, for this woman of
ready wit and deep wisdom was his friend, the companion, the heroine and the
occasion of his years of duty as Radha was of those of delight, and Krishna and
Krishna are the two heroes of Mahabharat of equal merit, companions without a
shadow of conflict. This Draupadi was dark of skin.
Are not then the
fair of skin beautiful? To say that they are not would again be untrue. In
fact, one of the finest poems on woman’s beauty describes the visible forehead
surrounded by the darkness of the hair as the incomplete moon of the 8th day.
Such a forehead must necessarily be fair and this exceedingly delicate poem
also belongs to Sanskrit literate. Ancient India had probably succeeded in
separating beauty from colour of complexion and was ready to discover the
beautiful wherever it was located. It had presumably at least during certain
periods been able to rid itself of prejudices in favour of the dark or of the
fair in appraisals of beauty. Succeeding generations have squandered this great
maturity of aesthetic judgment.
From such rites of beauty contests as are revealed to the
world, it would appear that the measurements of chest, waist and hip are among
the deciding qualities. No dark beauty, however, has so far been elected. A
Japanese Miss Universe succeeded in gate-crashing after what must have been
nearly half a century of beauty contests. Japanese women must, of course, have
been beautiful even before one of them was crowned as the queen of the world,
and it is not as though they are more beautiful today than before. The change
is not in them but in the eyes of the beauty judges of California. The turn for
the dark skins of Africa and Asia may yet to come.
The eyes of the
beholder have so patently deceived not only over weeks or decades but also over
tens of centuries, for they see what the mind has taught them to. Assam is the
fabled land of feminine magic and also of feminine charm. Visiting strangers
extol the beauty of its females, most of them because of ceremony and without
knowing what they are Beauty and Skin Colour | 123 124 | Essential Lohia
talking about. Is it the soft melting beauty of the fair skinned which they
praise or the celestial shapes of the dark skinned for which their eyes are
beholden? Assam is indeed a land of female beauty, but they could hardly know
it who confuse beauty with fair skin. The tea woman, or at least some of them,
predominantly of Chattisgarh and Oriya extraction arrest the eye with the shape
of their body and the lustre of their visage and hold it captive for ever and
these labouring women are dark-skinned. Not many hit upon this truth of beauty
residing in dark as well as fair skin ever in their life. Some do, but when
their youth has passed. Myth also makes Radha the fair-skinned companion of the
youthful Krishna, while Krishna who is dark of skin is his companion in the
period of statecraft and middle age. As one grows in years, one begins to
prefer the south to the north and also those who are dark of skin.
I am talking from the angle of the male and about female
beauty. There is no implication that I hold woman to be a thing of beauty and
no more. If that in fact were my perspective, I would never have been able to
discern Draupadi’s beauty, of which her unexcelled wisdom seems to be a source,
or that of Assam’s tea women, with whom labour, independence and good looks
would be difficult to disentangle. If I were a female, I would probably have
looked at the question of male beauty much from the same angle. In the first
place, the male has not suffered the same amount of depreciation because of the
colour of the skin, and secondly, the female has so far been busy evaluating
her own beauty as much as his. Should beauty ever become a mark of man to the
extent that it is today of woman, which I very much doubt, the proposition about
the colour of the skin would hold just as well if not more.
Meenakshi the fish eyed has her abode in Madura, now the
chief city of the river Vygeyi, which at one time nurtured the great Pandyan
kingdom. This great goddess who presides all by herself over what must be one
of the largest temples of India, is not the only fish eyed one. All women of
the Vygeyi share in her beauty. To judge between the fish eyed and the deer
eyed would be at all time difficult, for the Mediterranean eyes speak just a
little bit more to the senses, while those of the Vygeyi speak that bit more to
the soul. The fish eyes seem to possess a little extra of the quality of
sympathy and mercy. These Vygeyi women of the fish eyes are dark-skinned, as
are most women of Tamilnad, India’s true south.
Tamilnad makes its own films in Tamil language, though
Hindustani films are also popular. A most curious fact stands out that, though
male heroes of these films are generally Tamils, Andhra and Malayali women are
just as generally cast in the role of film heroines. There may be many reasons
for this, but I would like to mention one. I had occasion to see Tambaram
Lalita, a Tamilian woman, play in a minor role, and I looked intently at her
for a possible clue to the behaviour of Tamil films. The thick coat of paint
and powder made her face look different from her arm, whose true colour showed
through a coating that was not as liberal. Lest one should put it down to the
failure of technique, it is only fair to wonder whether all parts of a heroine’s
body which a film has to show can be effectively covered with such thick coats
of paint and powder.
I found Lalita
just as beautiful as any other woman cast in the major roles of that film. A
dark-skinned Meenakshi of shapely body would of course be peerless. But the
dark-skinned Tamilians evidently do not think so and they prefer to see the
Malayali and Andhra women of lighter skin in their films. A friend completed my
observation and told me that, before the beauty judgments of film audiences
could come into play, the dark-skinned beauty would have to pass muster at the
hands of the producer or the director. The coat of paint and powder may charm
the audience, but the producer would be a little too close for that.
This distortion of
aesthetic judgement must be ascribed to political influences. The fair-skinned
peoples of Europe have dominated the world for over three centuries. For the
most Beauty and Skin Colour | 125 126 | Essential Lohia part, they conquered
and ruled, but, in any event, they have possessed power and prosperity, which
the coloured peoples have not. If the Negroes of Africa and ruled the world in
the manner of the whites of Europe, standards of woman’s beauty would
undoubtedly have been different. Poets and essayists would have spoken of the
soft satin of the Negro skin and its ennobling feel and sight; their aesthetic
construction of the beautiful lip or elegant nose would have tended to be on
the side of fullness. Politics influence aesthetics; power also looks
beautiful, particularly unequalled power.
The worldwide conjunction of fair skin with overwhelming
power has received great reinforcement from a specific Indian situation. Those
fair of skin or at least less dark have generally belonged to the higher caste.
The Hindustani word for cast is ‘Varna’, which probably means colour. The
‘Rigveda’ has named white as the Aryan colour. Against the background of bright
colours of nature and sky in India, the fully white but unstarched raiment
probably makes the beholding eye happy and accentuates the beauty of the
wearer. But that has nothing to do with the colour of the skin. Nevertheless,
the conjunction of worldwide domination with the speciality of India’s caste
has given to fair skin its formidable prestige and made it a thing of beauty in
itself almost without other accompaniments.
Is the colour of
the skin then no part of beauty. When the element of novelty tickles the
beholder, all fair skin looks like soothing marble and, I guess, by the same
token, all dark skin, ochre or wheat-like, looks like the immaculate trunk of
the plantain tree. After the novelty has passed, the blotches of the white will
show themselves same as the monotone of the dark. The colour of the skin is
certainly no criterion of beauty. If any quality of the skin goes into beauty,
that certainly is its texture, a soft, unbroken and even texture, that is some
times seen perhaps at its best in China or among the ochre or wheat-like women
of Africa, India and similar lands. I have perhaps tilted the balance somewhat
in the other direction, and that often happens when an earlier tilt is being
corrected. A soft, unbroken and even texture may be found, though more rarely,
among the fairer skin, which may cause madness to rage in the blood just as
much as its darker skin.
While it makes no sense to prefer between the dark and
the fair, some subjective impressions may be noted. All women are beautiful.
Some are more so than the other. Among the more beautiful ones of fair skin are
such as ooze frankness and innocence and pleasing beauty like the clear
rippling brook or better still the transparent depths of rivers in the hills
and the light of the moon. Among the more beautiful ones of dark skin are such
as evoke the mystery of life and creation, the quickening that gives to fish
its eyes, to the she-elephant its languorous step, to twilight its pregnant
repose and all such things where deep calls unto deep.
Beauty and sexuality are allies. Darker women have in
fact attracted the sexuality of the dominant male, but only in nights clubs or
on the sly. India’s system of castes erects further hurdles. Not only are the
ways of life and speech and conduct different, but the modes dictate a
segregation, at least outward, between the sexes of the higher and the lower
castes. The dark skinned women of the lower castes, when genuinely in love,
would perhaps neither relish nor be able to practise the ruses of the higher
castes. There is, however, no love without sexuality and no beauty without
love. The woman who loves and is loved radiates the beauty of the starlit sky,
whether she is dark or fair. The darker women have in the recent past been
denied such love, at least by those who speak or sing of beauty. Hurdles made
out of different ways of life and erected among India’s castes or between the
dark and the fair in all the world may take time to remove. The greatest hurdle
of them all is built upon a sheer error, which attributes beauty to fair skin.
The tyranny of colour is among the great oppressions of
the world. All women are oppressed and mankind is the poorer for lack of
adequate expression to their talents or gifts. Coloured women, who are more
numerous, suffer greater oppression. Beauty and Skin Colour | 127 128 |
Essential Lohia They are reared on a diet of anxiety and inferiority. Even as a
little child, the dark girl, who may be sister to a fairer girl in the same
family, has to accustom herself to neglect and treatment reserved for citizens
of the second grade. The female child suffers lack of opportunities for growth
in comparison to the male child, and on top of that, the coloured girl
experiences an additional portion of shame, at least the burdens of an inferior
position. The coloured male is also not wholly free of such burdens.
Soaps and creams and lotions and the latest is injections,
as might change the skin to lighter hue, are very much in demand by the
coloured youth, both male and female. In land where a minority of whites and a
mass of coloured people live together, as in South America, and where the white
dominates, the accepted tyranny of colour can be seen in its most accentuated
forms. All the world suffers this tyranny of skin’s colour, a tyranny made
worse because the tyrants do not practise it as much as the slaves, who inflict
upon themselves.
Most tyrannies are built upon error and so is this
largest and widest tyranny, that of colour. How coloured humanity has come to
willing and eager acceptance of standards of beauty laid down by those of fair
skin is probably a greater marvel than any. The key to the marvel is the same
as in the case of the tyranny of the rich over the poor, the high caste over
the low caste, the foreign-tongued over the native-tongued, the select over the
mass. Between dark and fair as between rich and poor lie myriad gradations. The
dark can be the black of coal or the yellow of pearl with many intermediate
wheats and browns and ochres and chocolates, so that the fair who dominate
aesthetic judgments are able to win substantial followers in the dark-skinned
camp. The distance between dark and fair as between rich and poor is covered by
innumerable intermediate points, so that the restoration of a valid aesthetic
judgment has become as difficult as that of a proper economic or moral
standard. When would the beautiful women of dark skin assert their supremacy or
at least their rights of equality or, perhaps, the revolution in this as in
other matters will be paved by the tyrants themselves. An aesthetic revolution
in the evaluation of beauty and its relation to the colour of the skin will
blow the air of freedom and inner peace over all the world almost as much as
any political or economic revolutions.
[March 1960]
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