Coloring the Women: India Edition

An article in ABC News Online a few weeks ago began: "To see the effects of racism based on skin color most clearly, one should go to the developing world. In richer countries people are increasingly comfortable, and successful, regardless of their natural skin color, but in many African countries like Senegal, trying to change one's skin color is still seen as a way to get ahead." One could easily critique a lot of the assumptions undergirding those statements, specifically whether the effects of racism are "most clearly" visible in the "developing world," or if indeed there are few barriers to success in "richer countries." However, it does cover a topic that gets little international attention: the phenomenon of "bleaching" the skin among darker skinned women, popular in many countries.

Both in India, where I grew up, and in Indonesia, where I lived for two years, "fairness" in women is prized by many. In India, the complexion-lightening industry is worth a staggering US$200 million, increasing at the rate of 15-20 per cent every year. If you look at some of the advertisements from the major companies, the general narrative is: a woman cannot find a husband or employment because she is dark complexioned, and after a few weeks of applying a particular fairness cream, Voilà!, she becomes fair...and snags a husband or the coveted dream job.

You don't have to understand the (Indian) language dialog in the ads below to get a sense of the insidiousness of the message:





Back in 2003, HLL, one of the biggest manufacturers of cosmetic products in India, was forced after months of lobbying by the All India Democratic Women's Association to take two highly offensive TV ads for Fair and Lovely off the air. Many have argued that these creams "perpetuate racial, caste and gender stereotypes and are either ineffective or harmful"; yet the market for these continues to thrive. The advertisements haven't changed much since then; they continue to (re)enforce stereotypes and advance impossible claims. Last week, frustrated with these tall claims, the Indian Health Minister demanded "that manufacturers should produce scientific evidence to back advertising claims." I think he is referring to whether the chemicals "work," not whether the fairness can get one the prized husband or the job.

These fairness creams (re)inscribe through these ads, on a daily basis, how Indian women (and now men) should think about their skin color: that fair complexion is the panacea for all ills, and dark complexion: well, we hope you are ready to spend your life alone, living your life out in a really bad job. It's not as if this kind of thinking is triggered by these ads; these perceptions run deep in our society, and hark back to colonial times. And it's particularly tied to the "marriage market." As one blogger notes, on shaadi.com, the world's biggest matrimonial site, "One of the key pieces of information you must provide is your complexion, which can range from very fair to wheatish to dark." And a brief glance at newspaper matrimonial classifieds reveals just how deeply ingrained this way of thinking is in our society.

These texts and images-the cream ads, the forms on Shaadi.com, the matrimonial ads in newspapers-not only reinforce stereotypes, they reflect the ones we "own" as a society. It's not enough to walk away from them; we have to look within ourselves and ask how they are produced, and why.

Slumdog Millionaire: A Perspective

The last thing I wanted to do on a cold, rainy, windy night was to venture out for a late-night movie experience. But a Brazilian friend's rather last minute invitation to watch the critically acclaimed movie "Slumdog Millionaire" was too compelling. As we rushed over to Emeryville for the last show of the night, I kept telling myself to keep an open mind. I'd been given too much feedback: from friends who decried the raw violence, others who loved the rags-to-riches narrative, still others who thought it was just "okay" (my parents, in India, belonged to this last group). My friend's somewhat to-hell-with-caution driving and the fact that the car's headlights didn't work only mildly distracted me from my reservations about watching the film, and what I would take out of it.  

We got there just in time, and, soon after we had settled in separate spots in the conspicuously empty hall-he likes to sit by the aisle, and I like to sit in the center (this point is only important insofar as this movie is quite violent, and watching it while feeling marooned in an empty hall is quite something)-the movie began.  

[Spoiler alert!] The movie itself felt more familiar than I had expected it to be, given that it is a British production. The early sequences of police brutality are very common in Indian films, and reported frequently in the media, and while I cringed inwardly several times, there was no element of shock in my reaction. The beloved game of cricket rang another familiar note, though it was contextualized with brutal violence: policemen trying to beat up slum kids, an abusive ganglord forcing his mistress to submission. People dangerously perched on top of (moving) trains to avoid paying the fare struck another familiar note. And little kids who have been kidnapped and forcibly blinded or amputated so they can collect more money while begging-that story is painfully common. What surprised me most was how familiar the slums felt. While I grew up in a campus in the rather privileged and closed-in setting of South Delhi (India), slums circled the campus like little satellite villages; they are a familiar, an "integrated" part of the Indian landscape, though I didn't realize until yesterday just how much I consider them a part of my imagining of India, just how much the slums are in some way home. During my trip to New Delhi last month, I had occasion to visit several times the school that the orphans I am working with attend, and it's bang in the middle of a nearby slum. The scenes from Slumdog paralleled everything I saw there: the open drains, the stench of which almost make it through the screen; the piles of discarded plastic and garbage everywhere; the human and animal excreta you have to watch for every step you take; the tremendous foot traffic through the narrow lanes; the loud devotional and filmy music blaring from old tape-run stereos and radios; and the spirit, the indomitable spirit of the people who live in conditions that are too horrific to describe, and impossible to capture in words or moving images. And yet millions of people make their lives there.  

On a slightly different note, the language shifts in the movie were a little jarring. I find it impossible not to read subtitles if they are provided, and so even through Mumbai Hindi I understood (the language of the first third of the film), I found myself reading the English translations. The transition from Hindi to English is unexplained in the film, and what results is what one critic, Mukul Kesavan, called "a hybrid so odd." He further went on to say, ""the transition from child actors who in real life are slum children to young actors who are, just as clearly, middle-class anglophones is so abrupt and inexplicable that it subverts the "realism" of the brilliantly shot squalor in which their lives play out." This interferes, as he goes on to say, with the suspension of disbelief necessary for enjoying the film's narrative. I totally agree.  

There's much talk about whether this movie is "Indian" in sentiment and feel. That's too big a question for me to tackle here. What I walked away with was overpowering homesickness. Was it the narrative? The Indian people? The Hindi? Not so much. It was strangely the moving images of the slumscape that took me home.

A Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women

Bitter culture wars played out over Valentine’s Day in India, as the New York Times reported. Sri Ram Sena, the über-religious right-wing Indian political outfit, had announced their intentions to “disrupt Valentine's Day celebration as it is against Indian culture.” The disruption, they said, would be targeted against schools and colleges, restaurants and gift/card shops where people were found to be celebrating the event. The chief of the Sena, Pramod Muthalik, only recently made bail after being jailed for having spearheaded an attack on some women visiting a pub in Mangalore, Karnataka, a southern state. See video of the attack here: News media reported him saying: "Valentine's day, Friendship Day... all these are international conspiracies against our culture. They are exploiting the girls by calling it as lover's day. Love cannot be for a single day. This is a conspiracy by the Christians." There were many in India who were not going to take this lying down. A Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women, a Facebook group, was established on February 5 of this year to protest the “moral policing,” and as of today boasts 44,252 members. The group members exhorted members and young women to send pink chaddhis (underwear)-as a symbolic gesture-to Muthalik (the Sena office has been flooded with parcels containing them). It’s too early to call anything a victory, but the show of solidarity for women and the right to celebrate Valentine’s Day certainly sent a loud and clear signal that progressive women and lovers are not going to be easily oppressed. It angers me that these people are called Hindu fundamentalists: there is nothing essentially “Hindu” about this kind of persecution. It’s evil, narrow-minded, sexist and insular mentality which should not have any role in the secular politics and culture that should define our nation. Secular not in the sense of drowning out plural voices, but secular in the sense of embracing of of religious plurality. [The question of how "Christian" an event Valentine's Day really is, is another blog post.] It angers me that women in particular are singled out for retribution: why? Simply because they are viewed as “soft targets”? And these people-who viciously beat up women for “daring” to enter a pub-are crying out against women’s exploitation? And why, when Eid (a Muslim holiday), Christmas (a Christian holiday), Mahavir Jayanti (a Jain holiday) are celebrated as national holidays, in the spirit of diversity, can Valentine’s Day not be celebrated? It’s not like Hindu festivals are not observed: they are marked with tremendous feasts and celebrations nationwide. I’d like to say I am shocked by these events. I am not. What I am really surprised about is that the counter-movement took off from Facebook. I always thought Indians were bigger Orkut users.

Out of Africa...

I just came away from the most prolonged and intense filmic experience of my life at the Pacific Film Archive.

As a part of the African Film Festival, they first screened a short, Coffee Colored Children (Ngozi Onwurah, U.K., 1988). The film traces two siblings who navigate lives as mixed children of a white mother and an absent Nigerian father. Two scenes, one in which a little girl is powdering herself with Vim to become white, and the boy is scrubbing himself almost to the point of bleeding to "cast off" his color, are remarkably difficult to watch.

The main feature, En attendant les hommes (Awaiting for Men) by Katy Lena Ndiaye (Belgium, 2007) is set in Oualata, Mauritania, and traces, through the voices of three remarkable women, what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, in the Sahara. The women's wall art, realized through viscous blood-red textures and grainy sand, provides a rich textual and artistic backdrop to the film.

The next offering was another short Les Maîtres fous (The Mad Priests) by Jean Rouch (France, 1955). The short captures a West African "possession ritual" of the Hauka sect (formed in 1925). This short left me deeply troubled about issues of representation: the foaming mouths of the men possessed (by the colonial masters, we are told), the dog being eaten raw, the shivering, blood-stained clothes that were all too vibrant in color. What are we seeing? How? The camera never wavers, following the rituals unfolding "faithfully," and I was strangely fascinated even as the viewing was difficult. The narration added another problematic layer to the representation; Rouch plays multiple roles, as if he is a part of the ritual (in a ciné-trance, as it were), yet it is troublingly also the voice of an Other, speaking to an Other. His final analysis seems to hinge on this idea that the possession ritual has a cathartic effect, and is a means of agentive "purging" of colonial oppression, though I found the film too brief, too short on a broader context for the argument to be entirely convincing. Decide for yourself (embedded below is the original French version. For the English version, click here-part one of three).

Les maîtres fou
Uploaded by zohilof

The final offering was the film Chef! (Chief!) by Jean-Marie Teno (Cameroon, 1999). The slow, languid French offers a sobering commentary on the state of Cameroon. There was a point in the film where vigilantes form a mob and almost kill a young thief over stealing one hen and four chicks, and I couldn't stop thinking about how familiar the story was. The nuptial laws, inherited exactly from those imposed by the French first in 1804, send women a single message: you belong to the husband; the husband is the chief. Another narrative revolves around a journalist who's imprisoned for daring to question the President's health. While the narratives wander, and hopelessness seems to swathe the film in tragedy, Teno ends on an optimistic note: “To me we’re all chiefs."

What a night.

25 Random (Language-Related) Things About Me...

After being gently prodded to do a "post" on this, rather than simply offer an "aside," I thought I'd write up "25 Language-Related Random Things" about me, inspired by the Facebook phenomenon taking the Internet by storm.

1. Sometimes when I am writing quickly in Bengali, I use Hindi letters.
2. When I was two years old, I used to spend a lot of time with neighbors from the state of Orissa, and apparently started speaking Oriya almost exclusively for a while, to my parents' amusement.
3. I went to preschool in Holland. The only Dutch I remember is the word "Dag."
4. The first word I learnt in Bahasa Indonesia was the word "gila" (crazy).
5. The moment I arrive in Delhi, India, my hometown, I dispense with the "word-initial aspirated [p]" rule (pot, paper).
6. I once contemplated a career as a French-English interpreter.
7. My parents and I use basic Sanskrit at home some times. For laughs.
8. I once started a Spanish course in India, but had to stop after the course ended abruptly: my instructor eloped with another instructor.
9. I started the Spanish course to rebel against my father, who wanted me to enroll in Portuguese (we were living in Goa, a former Portuguese colony, at the time).
10. I find it very difficult to read cursive Bengali. My mother has to write out letters in print for me.
11. I took tutorials in writing Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script (thanks, Aftab ji!), but gave up and continue to write it using Devanagari.
12. I am fascinated by some of the similarities among Indo-European languages. I first discovered a passion for this when I was gifted "History of the English Language" by Albert C. Baugh at the age of 12. I fell in love with the book so much, I scribbled in "This book belongs to Mrs. Baugh" in the first page.
13. I regret never having learnt Russian from my father. My father did his post-doc in Moscow, and our home is still full of hundreds of technical books in Russian.
14. I don't understand my own French poetry anymore.
15. I came up with my own "language" at the age of 9. I still have a "text" floating around somewhere back home.
16. I had a collection of Coke cans in different languages including Arabic, French, Bahasa Indonesia, and Finnish.
17. One of the most fascinating things about talk in my family is that in 43 years of marriage, my mother has only called my father "Are you [formal] listening?" (Bengali, "Shunchho") and my father has only called my mother "O go" (untranslatable-"O you?"). In letters they just start off without a salutary preface, and end with "from-" or "yours." This is not unusual among Bengali couples. As a child I used to call my father "Shunchho," thinking that was his name.
18. I drive my German friends crazy sometimes by adding "-en" to English verbs and using them in German sentences.
19. I consider myself a native speaker of Bengali, Hindi, and English. They are languages I feel in, and that's enough for me to compartmentalize myself that way.
20. I find film subtitles very distracting.
21. As a child I was addicted to my Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. I wanted to memorize the whole dictionary.
22. A related point: I have a MASSIVE collection of French dictionaries in India.
23. I recently had a long conversation at the Delhi airport with someone who spoke only Punjabi, while I stuck to Hindi. They are somewhat mutually intelligible languages. If you're patient.
24. Language eludes me.
25. The most treasured word for me in any language is: "Ma."

Safe For Work!

Want to read at work without getting caught? This outstanding site, readatwork.com, created by Colenso BBDO for the New Zealand Book Council, offers an innovative approach to getting your readerly fix at the office. It's basically a Flash application: with a click of a button you're taken to a faux Windows XP desktop iteration with PowerPoint stories, poems etc in readymade folders! Represented authors include literary juggernauts like Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, and Emily Dickinson.

I'm not big on reading "high literature" online but I could not resist this site-it is so very addictive! The jazzy powerpoints remediate the texts in such cool ways, you cannot help but marvel at the sheer genius of it all...

Now about whether your boss will buy this or not, well...good luck with that! If you need suggestions on how to try to use this at work, and maximize your chances of not getting caught indulging in this VERY illicit activity, check out this video below...