So went an ad on Sun TV, a Tamil channel broadcast via satellite from Chennai, merrily spreading its message to thousands of Indian families around the world: Women with fair skin are prettier and more marriageable, and Unilever's cream, a great equalizer, would help anyone get that way.
I watched the ad with growing disgust and complained about it afterwards to my father, who was watching with me. "What?" he asked. "That's just the way Hindus are." He found nothing wrong with it, he said. Everyone in India knew that fair skin was the most beautiful kind.
I shouldn't have been surprised by the commercial's blatant racism, since it has long been abundantly clear to me, and obviously to Unilever as well, that Indians place a premium on fair skin. My cousin's fair complexion earned her the nickname "white crow," and family and friends often praise her solely for that reason. Prospective brides and grooms for other family members were routinely described as being attractive in spite of their dark skin-or worse, unattractive and dark to boot. My mother forever admonishes me to avoid the sun for fear that it will darken, and therefore ruin, my rather average (that is, medium-brown) skin tone.
This reaction to skin color has its roots in the caste system and the degree to which it has insinuated itself into Hindu culture-which is, to a large extent, indistinguishable from Indian culture. The caste system can be attributed in part to a verse from the Rig Veda, an ancient Hindu scripture, which describes the creation of the human race from the primal man, Purusha. From his head sprang the Brahmins, the priestly caste and the highest on the totem pole; from his arms the Kshatriyas, the warrior castes; from his thighs the Vaishyas, or merchant castes; and from his feet the Shudras, the servant or laborer castes. Within each of these castes are thousands of sub-castes, or jatis.
Outside of this system were the people that Gandhi labeled, in a well-intentioned but somewhat patronizing gesture, the Harijans, or people of God. Most Indians know them as Untouchables. The caste system's elaborate hierarchy was also reinforced by texts such as the Laws of Manu, a third- century code of social customs and rituals designed to keep Hindu society strictly segregated by caste, and to ensure that upper castes were protected from the lower castes' "pollution." It contains such pearls of wisdom as "One occupation only the lord prescribed to the Shudra, to serve meekly...these three castes."
