Dear Brown Daughter Of Mine, It’s Time To Buy You Some Brown Dolls

The Indian obsession for white skin is no news. Nor am I the first Indian woman who has grown up being insecure about her brownness. But when my daughter was born brown, the Farida Jalal of DDLJ rose up in me and I vowed, ‘Meri beti insecure nahi banegi’.

I prohibited the talk of skin colour or complexion in our house. Started shielding her from people I thought had a colourist bent of mind. I scrutinized all her story and rhyme books for any callous references to skin colour. I remember striking out a popular nursery rhyme from one of her books. It went like this:

“Chubby cheeks, dimpled chin,
Rosy lips, teeth within,
Curly hair, 
Very fair,
Eyes so blue, lovely too,
Teacher's pet, is that you?”

Thankfully, TV for kids was now different, with Netflix, Hotstar, and what have you. I found some TV shows for kids which were sensitive about differences among people. Yes, most of them were not Indian shows and were removed from the local culture. But I was relieved that my daughter was not hearing slang based on skin colour. It seemed like I had won the battle. My daughter was 5 years old and showed no sign of being insecure about herself.

The Bubble Bursts

And then one day, she told me she didn’t like her skin colour! When I asked her the reason, she said, “It is brown and not white like that photograph from your wedding we have in the room!” I cursed my make-up artist in my head for the n-th time. I told my daughter that I didn’t like that photograph because it was not me. Told her that people used to believe earlier that painting their faces white would make them look better. But now they were realising how this was a myth. I made her compare her skin to mine and see that we were the same shade of brown. She heard me, but I wasn’t sure if she believed me. But I didn’t want to press the subject further.

It came up again anyway. Once again, she expressed her dislike for her skin. This time, because the girl in the picture on her cushion, which someone had gifted to her, was white. This time, I assured her that we found her beautiful the way she was. And that she had no reason to compare herself to anyone or anything. She was quiet again. I felt helpless. I and my husband wondered how she got this idea in her head when we had gone to such lengths to prevent this.

The Question That Showed Me The Answer

One night, while sitting with me, she was flipping through a book with stories of inspiring women. I came upon the portrait of a coloured woman in the book. Her name was Alek Wek, and she was a Sudanese supermodel working in London. I immediately asked my daughter to read the story. When she finished, I told her to note that Alek did not have white skin, but was a famous model. She asked me the meaning of the word ‘model’. I explained ‘models’ to her as people who pose for pictures that she sees in the newspapers. Then, she asked, “Why don’t we see Alek in our newspaper?”

I could have told her that Alek did not work in India, but I knew that was beside the point. What she meant to ask me was why she doesn’t get to see brown-skinned people like herself in local media. With her question, my daughter had unearthed the answer I was looking for. The source of her sense of inferiority for her skin colour was her visual environment. I had not paid attention to this aspect so far, but now I saw it all.

Not Enough Brown Around Us

I picked up the day’s newspaper. It did not carry a single advertisement with a brown model. Though all the models were Indian, they were all white/fair-complexioned. The front page had a huge advertisement for ‘Fair and Lovely’ face cream being renamed as ‘Glow and Lovely’. But the model was the same fair-skinned woman as earlier.

So here lay the problem. As a society, we had grown aware of colourism. We knew now that glorifying ‘fair’ or ridiculing ‘dark’ was not politically correct. The language of our discourse had, thus, changed. But our mentalities had not. The proof was in the fact that the ‘Glow and Lovely’ ad-team still didn’t find a model glowing brown, lovely enough for its ad. The proof was also in the fact that Priyanka Chopra had to move to America to be comfortable in her own (dusky) skin. And that actresses working in India still had to undergo skin lightening, and then deny the same.

The majority of the population in America is white. Isn’t it ironic then that the country is ahead of us in giving ‘brown’ too a representation in its cultural environment? And representation in media clearly matters. Especially in the age of visual information we now live in. I can hardly blame my child for thinking of the models in advertisements as ideals. The word ‘model’ means a person or thing that is a good example to copy! When we choose only a certain kind of model to sell our products, we choose to set them up as the ideal to achieve. Likewise, when our kids see toy stores full of blonde, white dolls, they learn that the ideal for them is not like them.

Time To Paint The Billboards Brown

Maybe our ancestors too learned to see white as their ideal when they were ruled by the British. And we inherited their thought. Or maybe they learned it even earlier when their rulers lived in forts and peasants worked out in the sun. Either way, the thought is outdated now. The British rulers and the princely states are gone. We are an independent and democratic country. It might be a good time to leave all colonial and feudal vestiges behind, and accept that our ideals can be more like us. The majority of Indians are brown in colour. It would only help our kids to see more brown dolls and models around them.