We live in interesting times. Never before in mankind’s
history have the fashion and beauty trends changed so much and so fast. People
are more prosperous than ever before. And there has been an exponential growth
in consumer and consumption culture in all fields. We are bombarded with so
many images dictating our beauty ideals, with the West and the Bollywood laying down the benchmark for what is beautiful and what is ugly. And if we don’t fit those
particular criteria we begin to despair, self-depreciating ourselves. Words that send us
into a downward spiral of self-hate: “hourglass”, “thin”, “curvy”, “fair”,
“thigh-gaps”, “abs” and on and on the list continues.
The curious thing is that sitting in 21st century
India we don’t realize how fickle beauty is. What is ugly for us was the
epitome of ideal beauty for our ancestors or ancestors of people from some
other culture in some far off place. Beauty is entirely a mental construct, not
a scientific phenomenon. As they say “beauty lies in the eyes of beholder".
Take
India for example. What is the ideal of female and male Indian beauty today?
Deepika Padukone, Aishwaya Rai or Katrina Kaif? Hrithik Roshan, John Abraham or
Arjun Rampal? A woman who has big eyes, straight nose, arched eyebrows, full
lips and shiny hair as well is fair,
tall and curvy but without fat will be accepted as beautiful by almost all. In
men, someone with sharp and strong features and who is tall, fair-skinned and
well-built will be considered handsome by all. . Historically, caring and
fussing about your appearance was considered emasculating so the beauty
standards for men are a bit relaxed. But, don't celebrate mankind, the capitalists have started exploiting the insecurities of you guys too. Fair and Handsome anyone?
But like our values relating to education, jobs, religion
have changed, so have our beauty norms. The easiest way of seeing this change
is comparing the cine stars of say 50s and 60s with the Bollywood
stars of today. The heroines then were a bit curvier and had never seen the
inside of a gym. Their makeup artists had fewer arsenals at their deposit; though
big eyes and fair skin still ruled the silver screen. The heroes were ruggedly
handsome, flouting their chest hair and even flab with flair. The male beauty
has in fact changed drastically. Maybe we can thank Salman Khan and Akshay
Kumar for it.
A very big criterion of beauty is a person’s melanin level.
But it wasn’t always so. Ajanta paintings feature persons of all skin colors
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Notice the thin eyebrows. Even our anceastors were plucking their eyebrows. Source:
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Including, weirdly enough, green ones.
The jewelry suggests that they are a part of the upper class. Despite
that, there isn’t any skin based bias in the paintings. Another example is that
of Hindu gods and mythological figures being described as both dark-skinned and
beautiful or handsome.
Krishna means dark or black in Sanskrit.
Lord
Krishna is described as both dark-skinned and handsome or attractive.
Draupadi is also known as Krishna or dark-skinned. She is also considered beautiful. Thus,
skin pigmentation level was no barrier in being considered attractive. This
continued even in medieval period. Case in point: Pala miniatures
.
All this changed with the coming of the Turkish, Persian and
Arab invaders, later joined by the Mughals. All of them had, in general, fairer
skin than the average Indian. Hence, the connection between fair skin and beauty,
elitism and superiority was born. As they changed our views about so many
things, the Muslim invaders changed our views about what is beautiful and what
is not. Just look at the Mughal miniatures. Dark skinned people were annihilated
from the visual arts. Not even deemed worthy at times of being depicted as servants,
especially if females.
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Kishangarh school Bani Thani. Compare India's 'Mona Lisa' with Gupta-era women. Her upper body and head is covered. Her nose and chin are sharper. Source:
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This fervor reached down South and today you will be hard pressed
to find dark skinned gods and goddesses or nobles in Mysore or Tanjore paintings.
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Mysore painiting. Source:
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Tanjore painting. Source:
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Other beauty traits like small waist, big eyes and arched eyesbrows still
reigned supreme in Mughal times as they do
now. Though the shape of the face and the nose became more angular, another difference
between our Western conquerors and the natives (Western Asians tend to have an
aquiline nose). The Southern paintings continued to preserve the softness of
the face.
If any ambiguity about the superiority of fair skin was
remaining, British finished it. They nailed “Fairness is the most beautiful
trait” in our heads.
And here we are in
2016, importing foreign beauties for Bollywood. You will be surprised to how
many of our stars don’t have pure Indian ancestry. Katrina Kaif
,
Dino Morea,
Lara Dutta,
Tulip Joshi,
Helen,
Tara Sharma,
Diya Mirza,
Arjun Rampaletc.
have mixed ancestry.
Jewish and
Persian people are also represented disproportionately in Bollywood and Miss India pageants. To sum it up, our beauty ideal
shifted so much that we needed people from outside to fulfill the demand when
the people from our subcontinent couldn’t.
It is very important to keep two things in mind: first,
difficult as it is, we should not allow few ad companies and directors to decide
our beauty standards and secondly, our idea of beauty should reflect the
diversity of our subcontinent. It should not be limited to Punjabis and Muslims
with few other ethnicity thrown in. We can have a lot more of say North East
or tribal people for example when it comes to visual representation. If we make
the efforts by the next generation things would have changed and beauty wouldn’t
be just skin deep. Mass media is a powerful tool and maybe for a change we can
actually use it for something good.
Further Readings:
