It's a very strange thing to be white and in India. Very strange indeed.
Recently, I was out one evening on a walk with two friends of South Asian descent (one Pakistani, the other Indian), and one of them asked me what it's like to be stared at all the time and how I was dealing with it.
I replied that India does strange things to my ego. On one hand, being stared at so much makes you feel like you're "cool" or something--or, as one friend phrased it, "like you are royalty." And it's really true that it in some ways it overinflates your ego. But then, on the other hand, when you don't know much of any predominant language, you feel quite worthless. Literally. Not being able to communicate with people on their terms is really frustrating.
After having said these things to two South Asian friends with advanced language skills, the conversation abruptly changed course, and I hoped I had not said something cocky or insensitive, but I had also tried to articulate feelings that they've never had. I'm in a country where I will always, always, always speak with an accent and I will never, ever, ever be able to go incognito, and for that, I'm envious of my friends who are more easily able to blend in and avoid awkward stares and unwanted attention.
And that's not to say it's all awful. This evening, I walked to a mall with Cayley so she could use an ATM, and a little girl stopped me and wanted to talk. She was 8 years old and with her father and younger sister, and I got down to her level and tried to speak with her as much as possible. We exchanged names, and I told her that her English was good, that I'm studying Urdu and that my Urdu isn't very good. She was so sweet and polite, and she held my hand while we talked, and in this really strange way, I felt like Princess Di. That sounds so egotistical and a little bit awful, I know, but that's the best way to describe it.
Something that drives me absolutely crazy is that all over--in magazines, at the mall, everywhere--there are so many advertisements and posters and photos where the models are Caucasian. WHY? This makes literally no sense to me: This is INDIA. Be proud of who you are, where you come from, your history, your background, and what you look like. You are who you are, and Indians are beautiful. I think it's completely ridiculous that white skin seems to trump dark skin--COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY RIDICULOUS. The whole issue seems so eerily postcolonialist.
And, along those same lines, there's a product available at Big Bazaar (read: K-Mart with food) called Fair & Lovely, or something to that effect, and it's a skin lightening lotion.
A SKIN TONE LIGHTENER.
Things like that blow my mind.
I feel like India, and specifically its women, has been told that West is beautiful and variations on that aren't, and it's really too bad. I've seen a few Indian films since arriving in Lucknow, i.e. a grand total of three, but in each of those films, the female leads have very, very light brown skin. It seems too intentional to be coincidental.
I hope this rant makes sense to someone else. It's very perplexing to be somewhere where the standard of beauty seems to tell Indian women specifically that they need to look Western in order to be deemed attractive in their own culture. It's complete ludicrousness.
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I totally understand what you mean. I thought along the same lines when I visited India. I was very surprised that I was the only white lady in what seemed like the whole town, and yes I got many looks! And it was so hard to tell what they were thinking.
ReplyDeleteMy boyfriend's mother actually uses the fair and lovely and she is just as light as me. It's ironic how in America we all want to be tan, and how in India they want to be light because to them, light is beautiful.
Just shows how you want what you dont have!