The Skin Color of Gods
It took only a couple of days to understand, as my friend and I went door to door after school, collecting old newspapers. It was a tradition at school, to collect paper from our neighbors, and give the money from the sales to charity. To add some incentive to the students, the three Houses into which the school was divided, were pitted against each other. Who would bring in the most paper: Red, Blue or Green? We each so wanted our own House to win.
So, knocking on each door, we explained and waited for the response: some people gave, some didn’t. I started noticing small things: some people would say no to me, then seeing my friend behind me, would say, “Let me see, I think we have some”. Or give me a couple, but give her several more. Others would make it more obvious, throwing in a “You’re so fair, so pretty,” to her as a bonus. It didn’t take me long to figure out: we would get more paper, if she led, and I followed. I don’t think I took it too badly, we were good friends, and we both so wanted our “House” to win. If it worked better for the fair-skinned girl to lead, so be it.
I must have been around ten at the time. One didn’t need to be particularly bright or intuitive (or old) to understand how people judged your appearance. Signals came from all around us: some subtle, most quite open. Pharmacies and grocery stores displayed fairness creams on their counters; television ads were replete with movie stars who were ignored, and girls who remained single, until they used these creams. Let alone movie stars and magazine cover girls, even Gods were not immune to this bias.
Imagine being born in a prison, your parents having been thrown in there by your uncle, scared by a prophecy that you would kill him. Imagine your father smuggling you, a beautiful baby boy, out in the dark of night, amid heavy rains, to leave you in the care of his cousin. Imagine being born so dark-skinned that the color of your skin matched the time you were born: midnight, and you were then simply named Black. That would be the beginning of the much-beloved god, Krishna, whose very name means Black. Yet, in all the picture books that I read, it was his uncle, the evil Kamsa, who was portrayed as dark. Not Krishna, who was shown in shades of pastel blue. I was told that Gods have different auras, which is why some appeared as blue, others green, but it was implicitly understood that underneath whatever color their “aura” may be, they were fair, very fair. Parvathi, the goddess of strength, one of whose many names I have, was sometimes dark-skinned, but only when depicted in her more violent incarnations as Kali; in her benevolent and gracious form, she too took on a fair hue.
One day, a Sanskrit teacher who lived in the neighborhood, stopped by at our house, to persuade our parents to let us attend the free classes he conducted at a nearby school. My sister was interested, and I went to give her company, every Sunday morning, along with an elderly woman who lived across the street from us. I remember almost nothing of what we learned, but the teacher’s stories still ring in my ears. While we were acquainted with the epics, having heard them time and again, his familiarity with Sanskrit literature allowed him to bring in details that escaped the layman. I lived the legends through his words, breathing in the details, as he painted the characters and the scenes with an unforgettable vividness. One day, while talking about the epic poem, Mahabharata, he casually mentioned that the three women thought to be the most beautiful in the land at the time: Kunti, Satyavati and Draupadi, were also the darkest-skinned of their time. Kunti, an unwed mother who then married a powerful king, Draupadi, a princess wed to five brothers, Satyavati, adopted daughter of a fisherman whose beauty so blinded a king that he forgot all his duties: beautiful and dark? That was a novel idea to me. Till then, I had only heard adults say of someone, “She’s beautiful even though she’s dark,” or more often, “If only she was fairer, she would look really beautiful.”
Draupadi, in particular, fascinated me: skin so dark, that her other name was Krishnaa (the female form of the adjective, black), and I continued to read about her as I grew up. Yet, no television show, no book based on the Mahabharat, then or now, would dare show her that dark-skinned. I can only imagine the furor it would cause, if that were to happen. It is more likely that she would be shown blue-skinned, with a “divine aura”, looking like an alien stepping out of the movie, ‘Avatar’, than from the Mahabharat. Some people put the blame for this fascination on the Mughals, others on the British: all fair-skinned invaders, but how does it matter? There was a time when it was not considered abnormal for the two words to be connected by the word “and.”
Beautiful and dark. It was more than a validation of skin color. That one sentence opened my eyes to a whole new world, compelling me to see beauty in what I would otherwise have dismissed as ordinary: whether it be in people, in things, or in nature. I learned to seek it in the unexpected, in the commonplace, in the forgotten; even in just the images that arose in the darkness as I closed my eyes. Beauty may lie in the eye of the beholder, but the beholder has been trained, or at the very least, influenced, to perceive beauty in a certain way, to meet certain norms approved by certain groups of people. Beautiful and dark.
More than a decade later, my wedding a month or so away, a well-meaning aunt admonished me for spending too much time in the sun. “What if you get so dark that your fiancée refuses to marry you?” she asked. I don’t remember how I responded, but I remember thinking that if that were to happen, it would be his loss.
It wasn’t my aunt’s fault, she was reflecting the societal norms within which she had been raised. She and I, we are children of the same land that birthed the Mahabharata, but of a time when Draupadi would not merit a second-glance from most, and that baby-boy, Krishna, would need to perform several spectacular miracles to be considered worth worshipping.
We notice differences early. In another place and time, years later, and a couple of continents away, I was driving my little boy to his preschool, his baby brother asleep in the car seat beside him.
“Amma”, he said.
“Yes?”
“I am brown.”
“Uh-huh” …I peered at him through the rear-view mirror, trying to figure out where this conversation was going.
“And all the other children are light pink”.
“Yes, yes, they are”.
Still peering through the rear-view mirror, I waited for the next sentence, but there was none. It appeared that my four-year old had wanted to say something, and had said it. Perhaps I should have persisted, said something to continue that conversation, but I let it go.
That episode haunted me for years: should I have said something? Should I have asked him how he felt? Or was he too young and when should I bring it up again? Should I have told him about the boy-God that his forefathers simply called Black?
