They are more than 1000,000,000 people in a single country and around 623,000,000 of them are females.
Obviously, they come in a spectrum of colors.
From dark brown to brown to light brown to peach to beige.
Indian society discriminates them into "ugly & pretty" based on their skin colors
And hence they grow up feeling less than pretty.
The reason for color spectrum
- Negroid: Migration from East Africa to India via Andaman Nicobar Islands and their settlement there leads to fine dark skin of Southern India. They were the earliest to come to India.
- Australoids: Considered as original inhabitants of India while other's argue they arrive from East Asian Islands and inhabit central India now.
- Mongoloid: This yellow race came from China, Tibet, Mongolia settled in North East and East India leading to comparatively lighter skin complexion. It is not only the skin complexion but also genotypic features (Eyes, nose, skin type, body shape) that East/North-East Indians have from Mongoloid race.
In fact calling "North-East Indian" as "Chinese/Chinka/Chinki/Chinu/Chinu minu" can land you into jail in India.
- Caucasoid: These pale skinned Aryans/Europeans invaded India by entering from Hindu kush and spread beyond the ganges valley towards North and West Indian regions leading to paler spectrum of complexion.
- Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) combined to generate an admixture and resulted into wide spectrum of compexions, a bit randomly distributed across India.
Discrimination
It is stale in India to be biased based on the skin color. This bias actually began with British rule in India, where the skin color discrimination was highly promoted for dividing us among ourselves. Trend still has strong hold over India and females face harsh mental brunts from relatives and society if they are darker skinned. The discrimination begins at an early age & follows us throughout our lives spanning every aspect of our life including school, university, dating, relationship, wedding and post marriage lives!! Indian women face this discrimination far more than men do since they are "thought" to be solely responsible for skin complexion of offsprings. (Genetics is stupid not the customs xD xD)
In a family, the fairer female sibling is showered with compliments while the darker female sibling is implicitly ignored.
Guess what?!! We had television serials addressing this specific societal problem and they seem to have changed nothing in our society.
In international scenario.
When we hang out in a group of Indian girls, some or the other non-Indian person would state that some of us look Indian while song Middle eastern and some Mongolian, openly indicating out skin tones.
What they don't know is that many Indian girls feel hurt and inferior because of these kind of remarks, given the discrimination they faced from childhood.
I keep it "international" because we encounter this from variety of people even though I live in Germany.
Bollywood
It didn't do any good to us as it preached us that fairer complexion was beautiful since it came into existence. Moreover what it spread around the world was completely wrong impression of Indian women and objectified us to our limits.
This skin tone was completely forgoten...
Some of the little female kids I have seen asked me if they can "remove the dirt" from their skin! I didn't even know how would I explain them that they were pretty when everything around them explicitly told them that "White is lovely" and "Earthy is ugly".
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