Opinion | Whom do you blame for our fair-skin prejudice?

In the erotically-charged lyrics of Kalidasa’s Meghaduta, the description of the yaksha’s wife includes the phrase tanvi shyama. Leupolt, who explains “the etymology of Hindostan as a name derived from two Persian words, Hind, ‘black’, and stan, ‘place’, and means literally the place of the blacks, or Hindoos”. I ask Gottschalk for his views about the sources that trace the term “Hindu” to Mughals and “blackness” and he says he wouldn’t be surprised if this was yet another endeavour to pin India’s social inequalities on Mughals and Muslims since it is evidently clear that the use of the term al-Hind in the region—and beyond—predates the Mughals. As is the idea that some colours are better than others.” But let’s be clear that fairness cream brands in India didn’t start out with a woke mission to “smash Brahmanical Patriarchy”. Fair & Lovely getting rebranded and Johnson & Johnson dropping its fairness line altogether in India and the Middle East isn’t as much a move to correct historic wrongs as it is a reaction to a draft proposal by the Union ministry of health and family welfare that seeks to penalize advertisements promoting fairness creams, estimated to be a market worth nearly ₹5,000 crore.