"Racism has become a part of the Indian psyche," Pavan Varma, author of Being Indian: The Truth About Why the Twenty-First Century Will Be India's, said via e-mail. "The real irony is that a brown nation looks down on the dark."
India, home to one-sixth of humanity and the birthplace of four major religions, is a country bursting with variety. Inhabitants speak more than 1,500 languages and dialects and align with as many as 772 registered political parties. The nation is made up largely of sunny tropics and deserts. Most of its people range in skin tone from tan to dark brown.
The sirens of Indian cinema and fashion, though, as across much of Asia, are with few exceptions tall, slender and honey-hued. It's the skin color of Aishwarya Rai, the green-eyed former Miss World and paragon of Indian beauty, but it's possessed by a small fraction of the general population.
Each Sunday, the fair ideal is put on display in un-romantic marriage ads that fill a large part of many Indian newspapers. Alongside requirements for slim bodies and expertise in household work, suitors request skin tones within the narrow range of "fair" to "extremely fair."
The fetish for light skin persists even among Indian immigrants to North America. A study in the Journal of Social Psychology found that among South Asian-Canadian women, those with the lightest skin felt the prettiest.
"They believe they are like an onion - that the inner part is much more shiny bright," says New Delhi dermatologist Rishi Parashar, who often sees patients arrive with rashes after applying bleach to their skin. "These people will never be happy."
