A few weeks ago, I went to saw a movie with my friend 'Nanita Singh'. One of the pre movie advertisements about a fairness product 'Clean and Dry Intimate Wash' angered and agitated her so much so that she took her cell phone out and lamented on her facebook status, "why each and every advertisement nowadays is about fairness products? Clean and dry has heightened the apartheid by launching their product Intimate Wash. FANTASTIC. Do they really want us to bleach our intimate areas into fairness? SICK" sarcastically.
The world could now welcome another product that makes people with brown skin feel bad about their bodies, invest in one more way to alter them. To someone like me, born and raised in India, encountering an American jab on anything Pakistani, surrounded by almost everything Chineese, offers some tantalising prospects nurtured by the fires of nationalism that burn on either side of these borders that British left us. There is the urge to gloat, to spout out, "no, no this would never happen in India" or smugly say, "well you know, this is not our problem", alluding ofcourse to the lack of superficiality, superior ethics, and caste-based equality India is so popular for.
While an American might fall for such a fable, unable to distinguish fabrications in the sea of brown, that is South Asia in the condensed western imagination, neither Indians nor Pakistanis can buy the lie. With our hostile histories, Indians and Pakistanis may disagree on borders and water treaties and terror suspects; but in denying our brownness and dreaming of whiteness, we r united. Indeed, 'Clean and Dry Intimate Wash' could not be advertised in India and Pakistan as freely as it is being hawked in countries with western culture, but there would, undoubtedly, be a profitable market for it in both these countries. The reasons for its popularity may be different, vestiges of caste and Aryan association among Indians; the desire to locate lineage in Arab conquerors in Pakistan. But even with missiles pointed and check points manned, the most fervent Hindu nationalist and the most martial Pakistani colonel can agree that whatever else happens, 'THE BRIDE MUST BE FAIR'.
While argument can be established, contradictions remain. It was after all, a fetal India and Pakistan who won the 20th century's most resounding victory against white colonialism, showed down the British, sent them packing, and put full stop on the saga of the British Empire. Today, it is India that can mock by example all those who believed that democracy belonged only to the white, the rich or the elite; and it is contemporary Pakistan wracked with casualties and plagued by terrorism, that is standing upto the imperialist intrusions of the United States. If we looked at those portions of the story alone, we could never guess that our societies with their robust anti-imperialist genealogies could indulge in the chemical absurdity of bleaching ourselves white.
The conundrums, shared by Indians and Pakistanis could be less annoying perhaps if their burdens were equally applied to all Indian and Pakistani citizens. However, in the subcontinent, the self loathing of the people with fairer skins have deemed that this is not to be so; from 'Clean and Dry' in India to 'Tibet Snow' in Pakistan to 'Fair and Lovely' everywhere, the burden of escaping our burnished realities has been placed squarely on the shoulders of people with darker brownish skins. And because they must pretend that they and all their parts were born rather than bleached white, this war against brown is waged largely in secret.
In beauty parlors and bathrooms from Kolkata to Krachi, brown men and women, both Hindu and Muslim, the very poor and the newly rich, pay the price of a socially nursed delusion of whiteness, its imagined goodness, and its unquestioned purity. And as is the tradition, some are more slyly marketed than the others. The people who made the commercials for these fairness products, feigns innocence and denies complicity, it is all 'OVER-REACTION' in their words.
In our yet unconcluded first century of existence, India and Pakistan have spent a lot of time arguing our differences, varying interests, old wounds and new tricks, unwarranted armed overtures and all the tragic rest. On the issue of race it seems, our challenge on either side of the border is the same; the task of accepting without shame or subterfuge our pigmented reality; ending our quest for whiteness, so that we can finally become brown, and can finally say 'WE ARE PROUD TO BE BROWN'.
