India’s obsession on fair skin needs no introduction. More than anything else, our matrimonial advertisements stand testimony to this. Prospective brides and grooms are as concerned with their future spouse’s skin colour as they are with their other essential characteristics and worldly assets. There are spinster stories where eligible young women are overlooked by grooms just because their skin colour is not fair. The inherent guilt on one’s dark complexion finds its way into one’s personality, especially among young women, as this guilt is greatly aided by fairness cosmetics and their ‘not so fair’ advertisements. But artistes are a rare exception when it comes to dark skin. It has often been a matter of muse for them. They elaborate the distinctive beauty of dark skin at length through their poems, prose, songs and stories, with readers too reciprocating this adulation, though the ground reality tells us otherwise.
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Ayush Kejriwal, a London-based Indian designer, made a bold statement by showcasing his collection through dark-skinned models. By this he broke the general belief that dark-skinned people need to watch what they wear. Kejriwal’s models looked flamboyant in his unusual, colourful collection. As he uploaded the photos on Instagram, instantly they went viral and received very many positive responses.
Earlier in 2009 an NGO headed by Kavitha Emmanuel launched the ‘Dark is Beautiful’ campaign, with the tagline ‘Stay Unfair, Stay Beautiful’, to express their solidarity against colour bias and fairness products. Nandita Das, known for being vocal about such issues, always stood against discrimination in the name of skin colour. Artistes like Konkona Sen Sharma and Tannishtha Chatterjee, also supported this campaign. We may not know that actors like Kangana Ranaut had turned down offers to endorse fairness creams.
Ayush Kejriwal says that he wanted to do something out of the ordinary and thus the idea of featuring dark-skinned models came up. He admits that it initially started out as a marketing idea, however, the response he got for the campaign and its out-of-the-box designs and models encouraged him to do more socially relevant designs. “The kind of responses I got were overwhelming. Women appreciated my designs because they helped them gain confidence and hence, beauty,” he says.
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But Arundhati B, a research scholar at the University of Hyderabad, throws light on a few aspects on the ‘glorifying dark skin’ campaigns fail to address. She is of the view that the notion of ‘dark beauty’ also revolves around female body, ultimately selling it as a commodity. Such campaigns being campaigns of the ‘elite dark-skinned people’, fail to connect with the common people. “Most importantly, colour is only one component in the structure of inequality. Caste and class discriminations are more deep-rooted,” she says.
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