Melanistic and Majestic - Revisited
One of the first ads I ever remember seeing in my life went like this:
Girl gets engaged to guy. People who come to see the girl, i.e., the bride-to-be, do a double-take, look at the guy, and then back at her again and tell her "LUCKY girl!" with an emphasis on the word lucky. As more and more people start doing it, girl starts to look disappointed and a little embarrassed. Girl goes back home and with newfound determination, applies Fair and Lovely rigorously. Days go by and she's now fair and "stunning". The same people who come back for the ... wedding? reception? some other event I didn't quite understand? now look at the couple and go "LUCKY boy!" to the guy.
I remember seeing that ad between six and eight years old and thinking to myself that would be me in 20 years.
I don’t remember struggling with my dark skin per se in my life. But I do know I’ve just always known I’m dark the way I’ve always known the sun rises and then sets. And one of the earliest dissonances I remember is whenever I went out with my fair-skinned mum. People who see us would say, “Oh! You must take after your dad then!” Which, I do. But it didn’t take me long to realise this comparison had nothing to do with our features.
The first chink in this fragile awareness I had of being dark was when I watched Kannathil Muthamittal at the age of ten or eleven. It was the story of a Sri Lankan Tamil child, Amutha, adopted by Indian Tamil parents. Everything would be fine in her life until her dad tells her on her ninth birthday that she was adopted. Despite her mum’s insistence that Amutha is nonetheless her daughter, Amutha would insist she wasn’t. And point to their skin and say how her dad, mum, and her brothers are all fair. Amutha was the only one who was dark. My dad, mum, and sister are fair. I’m the only one who’s dark. Something about watching this movie play out magnified the insecurities in my mind with the awareness I already had about appearing different from my family. Birthing the question, “Was I adopted?” I wondered, but kept to myself.
The second chink was a year or two later when we went to Tekka Market in Little India. We were browsing the Punjabi suits in a shop while the shopkeeper stared us down. At this age, I was used to it. Being Indian Tamils, we stood out in the way we dressed and spoke Tamil among Singaporean Tamils. This made some from the latter group show some hostility towards us – because that’s what humans are wired to thrive on. Differences and the possibility of conflict. After a while and feeling like I had enough of the lady staring at me, I gave up and made eye contact with her. Direct eye contact, I had learned, made some people uncomfortable.
“நீ எடுத்து வளர்த்த புள்ளை தானே?” (You’re an adopted child, aren’t you?) She claimed.
“No?” I said, speaking more forcefully than I usually do. Shocked. But a trickle of fear ran down my back.
She insisted I looked different, going on to point out their skin colours and mine as the basis for her deduction. I don’t remember her exact words here because I was actively blocking her out and on survival mode. But I can never forget the abrupt and pointed nature of her first question.
I walked away, but the question didn’t leave my mind. Unable to handle it, I outrightly asked my mum if I was adopted one day. She got offended and upset. Which felt fair. So I never did again. But I refused to shop in Tekka Market the next few times we went there.
Another year or two passed before I actually did. I believe I was fourteen or fifteen. Some shops later, we ended up in the same shop. Same lady. I hardly forget faces, so I knew who I was looking at. Guess what? The same events repeated. The same lady, with the same tact as a year or two ago, repeated the same question.
It was not her place, and it should have been easy for me to brush off her remarks as that of an aunty putting her nose where it doesn’t belong. But it’s hard to when you have the very same insecurity eating away at you, one that you carefully compartmentalised and didn’t share with your parents (anymore) or with anyone else. “What is her PROBLEM?!” got buried under “Does she have a point? Why else would she ask the same question after all this while?” Because by this time, I had been made to feel too dark to truly feel like I was part of many communities – Chinese kids, Indian Tamil kids, Singaporean Tamil kids, the Tamil teacher community we were part of here. I was seventeen before I made peace with the niggling question of whether I had been adopted simply because I was darker than my family. But it took another five years or so before I stepped foot in Tekka Market again.
From the ages of seventeen to twenty, girls around me had crushes, boyfriends, and sex. For me, it was all simply something that would happen later in life. When I had lost some weight and was fairer. I knew just as much. Somehow, to my pleasant surprise, and motivated significantly by The Mindy Project and consequently, Mindy Kaling, I went on a journey of self-love and discovery at the age of twenty-one. If Mindy Kaling can wear a yellow dress with a fucking adorable bow, well so can I. If Mindy Kaling can carry a small circle shoulder bag, so can I. If Mindy Kaling can do blonde highlights, so can I. And if Mindy Kaling/ Lahiri can find love, well, SO. CAN. I. Mindy Kaling was the elder melanistic sister I never had. I just needed to have a bit more self-confidence and then no one would bother me 90% of the time. Just like Mindy (uncertain on whether Lahiri or Kaling at this point).
And I did. So, with newfound confidence, about 30% more than what I had previously had (0%), I entered the deprecating world of online dating at the age of twenty-three. Where your beauty is transactional and your dark skin is a fetish. Guys I don’t respond to on dating sites used “dark” as an insult to express they weren’t that interested in me anyway. I was only shocked guys my age would even say things like that. After all, this was the time I had expected to find love. I had lost weight and everything. I also had a second round of puberty around this time that had changed my face shape and dried my skin out. Reduced oil meant I appeared “fairer” (actually, brighter) than I did in my teens.
20 years since I saw that Fair and Lovely ad, my parents put me on a matrimony site. “Looking for fair brides” helmed most of the description boxes. Often stating nothing beyond just that. 20 years since I saw the Fair and Lovely ad, it was exactly how I was and am still treated. How lucky for me that a guy’s family has come with this proposition! Someone wants to marry me! A dark-skinned girl! The bravery! The generosity! Any guy we reject, how dare they. They should be lucky someone even looked in my direction. Don’t get me wrong, there are loads of dark-skinned women out there who are able to find love and get married. Yet, when I am unable to, well, surely, it must be because of the dark skin. Not that it’s just not my time. (Or let’s be honest, I’m too “ambitious” and “set in my ways” for most of the people there.)
With June, it will be 5 years since my parents put my profile on tamilmatrimony.com. 5 years of people knowing my parents are looking for me. 5 years of asking our expectations to be managed because I’m dark. And within these 5 years, I’ve had my skin tone underscored to me more than I have in my entire lifetime. Particularly by people I thought who loved me. Calls often end at “பொண்ணு மாநிறங்களா?” (Is the girl dark?). Meanwhile, I heard Vijay Sethupathy gets to act in a movie titled “Karuppan” (black guy) with a fair-skinned actress as the heroine and have a loyal fan base for doing things that are different from the average hero. While “karuppi” (black girl) is still a fresh wound and a term that taunted me while growing up. In Singapore and in India.
The underlying note about being dark-skinned is that, growing up in Singapore, Indians are often portrayed as dark, are teased about disappearing when the lights are switched off, used as "scary" objects to punish Chinese (often, fair-skinned) children into obedience and are treated as “dirty”. So I never felt welcomed or like I belonged here. Meanwhile, within our culture, there was no room for dark skin to be accepted. No room to be seen, valued, or treated as a person beyond the sheer colour of your skin. And seeing the same in the marriage community, it makes me wonder if I’ll ever get to be the “lucky girl” and my significant other the “lucky guy” because we were lucky to find each other and have a love straight out of a rom-com. Partly. Mostly it just makes me wonder if I’ll ever feel like I truly belong. Anywhere.
I don’t know what went wrong with our culture. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realised how oppressive so much of our words and actions are. How colourist they are. It just seemed to be life, as is. But the more aware I became of it, the more confused I got. Clearly, Tamil people revelled in dark skin once upon a time. We built temples and idols with black granite and black marble. And clearly, this wasn’t an issue about availability, we would have found ways to paint or use materials that were of fairer colours if we believed so. But we sang praises about Karumai nira Kanna. The current day Vishnu/ Perumal, was the dark-skinned Maayon Tamil people who lived millenniums ago knew. Yet, somewhere along the road, the dark-skinned Krishna became a blue-skinned Krishna (and it’s important to note here that Krishna means Black in Sanskrit). Even Murugan, hailed as the God of Tamils, didn’t escape the whitewashing. A fair, childlike figure. Yet, there are idols of Murguan in temples as dark-skinned, with a moustache, no different than those who know of deity Gods such as Veeran out there. Karuppusami (literally translated, Black God) is a male deity who is black in colour and gets to enjoy sacrifices of black-feathered chickens and black-coloured goats. Karumariamman (a Goddess) meanwhile is still debated on whether “karu” refers to black, womb, or sugarcane.
I will never stop being proud of my Tamil identity but three years since my last post, movies and TV shows have grown exponentially in the number of fair girls and colourist jokes. Three years since my last post, Fair and Lovely is now Glow and Lovely. I want to know if a woman is allowed to be anything but “lovely” but I suppose that would be a conversation for another day. Also, Glow and Lovely’s first ad, to no one's surprise, featured a stunningly fair-skinned girl. This evolution has sparked heavier conversation than there already was surrounding Tamil cinema and colourism. I often see comments along the lines of “If anything, dark skin is MORE beautiful than fair skin!" peppered in such conversations. Which is upsetting in its own way because one, it feels like an overcompensation and two, we are still pitting one form of beauty against another. Shouldn’t the conversation be that some people are dark and some people are fair? Neither is superior nor inferior. Everyone is beautiful in their own way. Shouldn’t that be the end of this conversation?
These conversations also point to the focus on colourism being the result of colonisation. Yet the damage runs deeper than the age of the Tamil culture. Compared to the Tamil culture that’s old by a couple of millenniums at the least, the “freedom of India” (because there was no India prior to the British) and colonisation are merely the blink of an eye. A culture that clearly, prior to these, did not limit people to the colour of their skin. Yet, what prevails is a garbage classification. I mean, sure it’s vexing to talk about the damage, and yeah, I can choose to be the change I want to see in the world instead of spouting off about this. So, sure, I can be conscious of the words I use around girls younger than me. Girls I might raise one day. Give them a sense of confidence, worth, and beauty that doesn’t have to match the colour of their skin.
But is that enough? When you have to send them out into the world where people my age, continue to perpetuate these classifications? Where fair-skinned women do so to maintain a sense of superiority, and the fairer of two or more girls do so, so that she doesn’t become the butt of the jokes? I can pick her up each time, I can offer comfort, words of compassion, a hug, a shared tear. But is that enough? Because what if she manages to internalise that being dark makes her ugly? That being dark precludes her from being a human and instead makes her more of an object? That being dark excludes her from the community she grows up in? From the Tamil community? From her family? What if she wonders if she was adopted? If she watches an ad and understands that fair is beautiful? Will it be enough to dig up material from millenniums ago and show her the “true” Tamil culture and teach her the effects of colonisation?
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