“A DISPASSIONATE EXTERNAL observer would be bewildered by middle-class India’s capacity to look away when confronted with enormous injustice and suffering; by our society’s cultural comfort with inequality,” writes former civil servant turned social activist Harsh Mander in his latest book Looking Away — Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India. This observation is an echo of the frequent lament of the editors of EducationWorld who repeatedly deplore the open, uninterrupted and continuous injustice and oppression of the underprivileged, a defining feature of this nation-society fashioned by heirs of Mahatma Gandhi and the founding fathers of India’s extraordinarily compassionate Constitution.
Perhaps in no sector of the economy is the Indian middle class’ “cultural comfort with inequality” so glaringly manifest as in education. The collective conscience of the Indian establishment — media included — is unmoved by the grassroots reality that of the country’s 450 million children (below age 18), only 10 million middle and upper class children in the age group 0-5 receive professionally administered early childhood care and education. Of the remaining 148 million only half receive early childhood nutrition and nominal education in the country’s 1.6 million anganwadis established by the Central government under its Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme. Yet, despite a mountain of evidence indicating that early years education is critical for the growth and development of children, in the Union Budget 2015-16, the allocation for ICDS has been slashed from Rs.18,195 crore in 2014-15 to Rs.8,335 crore this fiscal.
The story is no different in public/government primary education. Government schools attended by children of the poor and socially disadvantaged are defined by crumbling classrooms, dysfunctional, if any toilets, mass teacher truancy and abysmal learning outcomes. Yet the ‘educated’ Indian middle class which ensures its children attend superior private schools is totally insensitive to heinous acts of commission and omission in public education. Repeated pleas of your editors to education ministers for reforms and indignant television anchors to debate public education issues, receive no response.
Over half a century ago in his famous eight-volume treatise A Study of History, Nobel laureate historian Dr. Arnold Toynbee made the argument that civilisations prosper when elites are creative minorities who advance the public interest. When they morph into a greedy, selfish, oppressive minority, the proletariat revolts and societies descend into chaos and rebellion.
Maoist insurrections, rising youth unemployment, a spate of farmer suicides and breakdown of the law, order and justice systems countrywide, are mounting evidence of the secession of the proletariat from the society fashioned by post-independence India’s increasingly self-centred and indifferent middle class.
white-is-beautiful manufactured myth
Under the new dispensation at the Centre, elected on the promise of economic development for all, old hat issues — the Ram temple at Ayodhya, ban on cow slaughter, uniform civil code, women’s dress and deportment — are dominating the public discourse and media headlines countrywide. To this lengthening list of yesteryear issues, add one more: colour prejudice.
On April 1 BJP Union minister Giriraj Singh hit news headlines with a coarse remark that Sonia Gandhi would not have been appointed president of the Congress party had she been a black Nigerian. A few days later, Goa chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar advised nurses agitating for better pay and work conditions to keep off the streets and avoid sunlight, as it would darken their complexion and jeopardise their matrimonial prospects.
This obsession with Caucasian skin colour is not limited to quasi-literate rustic politicians. In Bollywood and regional cinema, brown-hued heroes and heroines representative of the native population are almost taboo. Instead the gullible public has been brainwashed to idolise pale-faced, surreal Central Asian stereotypes visually alien to the people they entertain.
Complicit in this nationwide white-is-beautiful conspiracy is a massive Rs.3,300 crore skin-lightening industry led by the European Hindustan Unilever Ltd, whose mass-produced perfidiously nomenclatured skin light-ening cream Fair & Lovely (which cynically reinforces racial stereotypes by providing academic scholarships to illiterate rural women) contributes over 15 percent of the company’s annual revenue.
Uncritical acceptance of this manufactured white-is-beautiful prejudice by the Indian establishment and society denotes feeble-mindedness — a national malaise. India’s ancient texts, especially the Mahabharata and Ramayana extolled the virtues of tall, dark and handsome youth and the beauty of dark-eyed, dusky women protagonists. According to an India Today essay (April 20), “Indian literature, notably Sanskrit (Kalidasa, Bharthari, Amaru etc) is littered with references to dark colour or shyam varna as the ‘epitome of beauty’”. Furthermore, the ancient texts make it clear that Draupadi, the supremely beautiful heroine of the Mahabharata, and perhaps even Sita of the Ramayana, were sun-blessed, nonpareil beauties of their time. Before proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India (1857), the bogey of Red Devils (Europeans) was routinely invoked by Indian matriarchs to scare children and make them fall in line.
Against this backdrop, casual endorsement of the establishment and Bollywood in particular, of pallid individuals as paragons of beauty and accomplishment, is a great disservice to the native identity and self-respect. It’s time Indian intellectuals and opinion makers proclaimed pride in their ethnicity and became aware that the popularly accepted ‘beauty’ of the Caucasian race is a creation of the multi-billion dollar cosmetics, fashion and photography industries of the West which has imposed its aesthetic norms upon the rest of the world.