The colour code

Indira Gandhi didn’t have a nose job done when a heckler’s stone hit her in Bhubaneswar in 1967, but even if she did — as some claim — it would be for reasons of pardonable personal vanity, like breast augmentation and liposuction in the United States. The increasing popularity of efforts to blur racial characteristics like dark skin, crinkly hair, snub noses and slanting eyes is a different matter indicating that thousands, perhaps millions, of Afro-Asians are eating their hearts out because they don’t look Caucasian.

Those who think they do preen themselves on their good fortune like an Indian journalist’s smug reference in his memoirs to being “fair” which means light-skinned in Indian English. (Fair in English English indicates light eyes and hair.) Colour is Afro-Asia’s great fantasy: the warring Whites and Reds in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop were both really Black. Nor would the US accept that Bhagat Singh Thind, an early Sikh migrant, was entitled to citizenship because he was “a descendant of the Aryans of India, belonging to the Caucasian race (and, therefore) White.”
Jawaharlal Nehru complained bitterly that Anglo-Saxons crown the global pecking order with Latins and Slavs below them, and Indians and other Asians following in the distance. Africans bring up the rear. Nehru was reiterating Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau’s basic concept of a hierarchy based on colour that spawned eugenics and the Nazi master race concept.
But while an Indian’s yearning to be taken for a European, however pathetic, might be blamed on colonialism, it’s surprising that China, boasting of 5,000 unbroken years of civilisation and proud that the Celestial Empire treated other nations as vassals, should betray a similar sense of inferiority. An elderly Chinese woman, rich, highly educated and Western to her fingertips, told me how astonished she was in New York of the 1930s where she got married to another Chinese when eyebrows were raised in the registrar’s office because she entered “white” in the column for colour. “What else could I write?” she asked puzzled 60 years later.
I couldn’t tell her that Americans of that age would have called her “yellow”. Logically, the Chinese should be as proud of their physical appearance as they are of the tea-drinking ceremony or their stranglehold on American federal reserves. But the booming trade in plastic surgery indicates otherwise.
On the face of it, a Reuters report that “a generation of young Chinese are growing up better-looking than their parents” because of cosmetic surgery sounds like Western arrogance. It takes for granted that Aryan noses and eyes are the pinnacle of beauty. But this isn’t only the subjective view of Reuters’ European or American journalists. It reflects Chinese opinion. A girl who paid approximately `40,000 to acquire double-fold eyelids exulted that her “eyes would be bigger and more lovely”.
With a record three million aesthetic procedures last year, China ranks second to the United States. Students make up 80 per cent of the patients in Beijing because parents want their daughters to be beautiful to find husbands or jobs more easily. Most operations are scheduled for the summer holidays before college or high school opens.
Westerners must find this effort to copy them by correcting nature’s handiwork an amusing compensation for being forced to defer to China’s rising might. But we can’t crow for India’s demand for “wheat-complexioned brides” and the skin lighteners which even educated young men seek suggests that the journalist I cited is just one of the herd.
According to one version, the craze killed the beautiful Hollywood actress, Merle Oberon. Born Queenie Thompson of Anglo-Indian parents, she paraded as white by habitually using a poisonous skin-lightening cream. Merle passed off her mother, who was too dark-skinned for any magic cream, as her maid. After her mother’s death, she commissioned a painting of her from an old photograph, instructing the painter to lighten the complexion.
Social attitudes often manifest themselves in public life. Loy Henderson, an early American ambassador, thought Nehru aspired to lead “a global union of coloured peoples”. Richard Wright called his account of the Bandung conference The Colour Curtain. The fashionably aggressive “Black is Beautiful” cult was one response to white supremacy, leading in turn to the contrived “Brown is the new Black” slogan. As someone observed, all that this means is that “Brown is the new black is the new white.” White still reigns supreme in the Afro-Asian consciousness.
Some trace India’s colour fixation through varna, caste, to the Aryan-Dravidian divide. The philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, argued that “the highest civilisation and culture, apart from the ancient Indians and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands.” But I would be surprised if British rule and domination by a visibly different colonial elite didn’t also have something to do with modern preference.
What about the Chinese then? Have they nursed a secret sense of physical inferiority ever since setting eyes on the first European, probably the 16th century Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci? And did unequal treaties, foreign concessions and the Opium Wars compound their agony, with Prince Philip’s “slitty-eyed” remark turning the knife in the wound of centuries?
Now that China is America’s match, a fiscal, manufacturing and military power with the world’s second largest economy, nothing is beyond its reach. If God didn’t give the Chinese sharp noses and straight eyes, they themselves will, like Napoleon taking the crown from the Pope’s hands and placing it on his own head.

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is a senior journalist, columnist and author