White, Light, Dark: Color in India

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.

Convinced

I've become really passionate about India over the past few years, and this has only been highlighted and further developed by my past and present experiences here.

Right now, I'm reading In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce (2007), and this book has encapsulated several of the reasons why I find India so fascinating and why I believe that India will continue to be a big part of my life well into the future.

Below are some excerpts from the book:

• "...India in the twenty-first century remains home to more than a third of the world's chronically malnourished children as defined by the United Nations, and has an average life expectancy and literacy rate that lag pitifully behind many developing countries, most glaringly China. Roughly 750 million of India's 1.1 billion people continue to live in villages, almost half of which lack access to all-weather roads, and countless numbers of which (India has 680,000 villages) are not within reach of effective primary health-care centers or well-functioning elementary schools. Almost half of India's women do not know how to read or write, and a large proportion of those who are technically literate can do little more than sign their name" (9).
• Referring to the rural agriculturalists: "The average landholding is just half an acre, barely enough to feed the family and very rarely enough to produce a surplus for the market....By 2001 more than a third of India's rural households depended on nonfarm income for their livelihoods" (44).
• "Less than 10 percent of India's dauntingly large labor force is employed in the formal economy, which Indians call the 'organized sector.' That means that fewer than 40 million people, out of a total of 470 million workers, have job security in any meaningful sense. It means that only about 35 million Indians pay any kind of income tax, a low proportion by the standards of other developing countries" (47).
• "Because of its strong and large university system, India's scientific and technical capacity is ranked third in the world, behind the United States and Japan but ahead of China. In contrast to India, China has spent a much higher share of its budget on elementary schools for people at the bottom of the ladder. India produces abotu 1 million engineering graduates every year, compared to fewer than 100,000 in both the United States and Europe. Yet India's literacy rate is only 65 percent. China's is almost 90 percent" (51).
• "...Uttar Pradesh [the province where I am studying Urdu]...is home to 8 percent of the world's poorest people..."(60).
• "[Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister from 1984-1991] estimated that 85 percent of all development spending in India was pocketed by bureaucrats" (78).
• "Higher rates of economic growth have contributed to a steady reduction in poverty: the proportion of Indians living below the official poverty line fell from more than 40 percent of the population in the 1980s to just under 26 percent by 2001, But that still means that in 2006 almost 300 million Indians can never be sure where their next meal will come from. They also live with the probability that more than one of their children will die from an easily preventable waterborne disease. Almost a million Indian infants die of diarrhea every year" (80).
• "India spends less on primary health care as a proportion of gross domestic product than does almost any other developing country" (80-81).
• Concerning corruption in the judicial branch: "Many of the judges are quite openly available for hire to fix cases in exchange for cash in the knowledge that it is almost impossible to dislodge them from their posts.... To remove a judge from the Supreme Court, you need a two-thirds majority of votes in parliament, the same margin as needed to amend the constitution. It has never happened" (93).
• Concerning inefficency in the judicial branch: "But perhaps the biggest problem is the gigantic backlog of suits in India, which in 2006 amounted to 27 million cases. At the current rate at which India's courts wade through proceedings, it would take more than three hundred years to clear the judicial backlog" (93). Furthermore, "Almost $75 billion is tied up in legal disputes. This would amount to roughly 10 percent of India's gross domestic product in 2006" (94). Backlog in the courts is thus a detrimental economic cost.
• "Almost 100 of Indias 545 members of parliament in New Delhi have 'criminal backgrounds,' which means that have been indicted for one or more crimes, but not convicted. Once they are elected, it is virtually impossible to convict them, which is one of their main incentives for entering politics in the first place" (117). Moreover, "Of the almost one hundred alleged parliamentary criminals, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh [the province in which I'm staying] account for by far the largest share" (118).

Sexual Suppression in India

The title of this particular post may seem a little...off, but this is something I really would like to talk about and focus on for at least one entry on this blog.

India is an extremely socially conservative nation: This cannot be emphasized enough. Men and women are taught from childhood (probably birth) to stay clear of the opposite sex. People don't "date" as most marriages are arranged, although the definition of "arranged" varies widely. Still, the opposite genders are really not supposed to interact, for example:

• PDA is almost unheard of;
• A man and a woman (especially if they are unmarried) will not spend time alone together publicly or privately;
• It's very common to see straight women AND men holding hands with someone of the same gender in public, whereas it's almost uncommon to see a man and a woman holding hands in public;
• A woman's reputation rests almost primarily on her modesty with the opposite sex;
• Women dress very conservatively, i.e. especially in terms of covering one's legs and chest; and
• Because teenagers can't spend time together alone, such as on a date, you can frequently find very secretive-looking duo's at large gathering places, such as the gardens, discretely chatting and getting to know each other.

In light of this, I had a very interesting experience on Sunday.

First of all, let me begin this by noting that as a white female, everyone looks at me. Everyone. All the time. I can be wearing traditional Indian clothing and dressing modestly (salwaar, korta, and dupatta), and I still get stares. As one peer put it: "It feels like we're...royalty." People stare that much and that often. You don't go anywhere without having several sets of eyes following you at all times. You feel like you're on parade as a representative of the Western world, and there are a lot of pressures and stresses that come with that.

But I digress.

On Saturday, a female student who I spent time with wore a calf-length skirt, nice t-shirt, and dupatta (scarf) when we were out-and-about. She seemed to received normally, or as normally as we expect to be received, and so on Sunday I decided to wear a skirt in Lucknow for the first time. It was a skirt that hits below my kneecap, and I wore a nice t-shirt and a dupatta with it, and I went to the mall in this outfit, an outfit that's not scandalous or outrageous in any sense of the word. (Remember: The United Colors of Benetton in the mall is selling miniskirts and shorts.)

I haven't received that much attention is such a long time. I sat in Barista at Sahara Ganj with two classmates who were dressed in Indian apparel (more gals came later), and there would be men who would literally stand outside the coffeeshop's glass windows and stare. Others would make slow down their walking significantly. One set of younger guys was talking to me THROUGH THE WINDOW, and I sat in the coffeeshop shaking my head trying to ignore them.

I was in a fishbowl.

I didn't take it too personally--as I am neither a stud nor a prostitute--but it's an interesting situation that the American woman finds herself in when she steps foot into India. The media portrays a very flirty, loose version of the American female to the world, and when the American woman finds herself in a very socially conservative place, the onlooker automatically assumes that she is (I.) a slut, (II.) easy, and (III.) open to sexual experimentation. These are verdicts that I myself have not necessarily had the experience to justify, but they are verdicts that harmoniously emerge from the monologues American women tell of their time in this country.

It's an interesting predicament the Western woman finds herself in in India when she is more liberal than the average woman in terms of her relationships with other men but not in any way an sexually promiscuous woman.

There is no middle ground here for the Western woman: You are or you aren't, and it's already been decided for you by the media and the cultural powers that be that you ARE.