HOW HINDI CINEMA HAS DISCRIMINATED AGAINST DARK-SKINNED PEOPLE ACROSS THE DECADES AND HAD A NEGATIVE INFLUENCE ON SOCIETY
by ASJAD NAZIR
THE death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in America has resulted in protests globally and also triggered a debate about racism in society.
There have been protests in cities across the world and campaigns on social media to tackle racism. Millions have now started looking at themselves and how they treat others, which has resulted in the first signs of a positive change, open debate and many, including celebrities, offering public apologies.
This is also an opportunity for Bollywood to take a long hard look at itself and face up to the major role it has played in perpetuating racism rampant in Indian society. The most influential cultural medium in India, Hindi cinema has spread so much racism across the decades that it has practically become normality and even profitable for many of its biggest stars.
History can be a great teacher and that is why looking back will bring Bollywood’s big racist problem out of the darkness and perhaps educate those who are oblivious to it. The racism started very early on in the black and white era of Bollywood before evolving into a societal norm. Early on, producers decided that fair skin would define good and dark skin would have negative connotations. That blueprint has pretty much been there since the 1940s.
The industry has stuck to these unwritten rules and the biggest stars have helped to magnify this racism, which can be divided into four distinct categories.
The dark side
Firstly, Hindi cinema has consistently shown dark skinned people as servants, villains, figures of ridicule and the rock bottom of society. Then influential A-list stars magnified this aspect further by taking on such roles and there are many examples across the decades.
In Bollywood’s first Oscar nominated film Mother India (1957), the good son is shown as light skinned and the bad son has decidedly dark skin, with actor Sunil Dutt blackening his face for that role. The bad son is later shot dead by his own mother.
Meri Surat Teri Aankhen (1963) sees a man give up his baby for adoption shortly after birth because he thinks the child’s very dark skin makes him hideously ugly. Then Bollywood’s first male superstar Ashok Kumar plays the grown-up version of that same child in blackface and is shunned by society.
In the 1965 film Gumnaam, Bollywood’s number one comedian Mehmood blacked up to play a servant, who performs popular song Hum Kaale Hai To Kya Hua with a title and lyrics that have a clearly racist undertone. The song includes the line, “so what if I am black, at least I have a heart” in a way that dark skin has somehow made him less desirable.
The song becoming a runaway hit and reappearing with a child blackening up to perform it a few years later in Brahmachari (1968) only reinforced the point. The same song continues to be popular today and has been viewed over 70 million times on YouTube.
In 1972 film Gora Aur Kala, which translates as black and white, identical twins are separated at birth and grow up with dramatically different skin tones. The fair one grows up to be a nobleman. The one with darker skin becomes a dacoit with a name translated as ‘blackie’ and massively popular star Rajendra Kumar put on a black face for that role.
In 1983 film Souten, acclaimed actor Shreeram Lagoo blackened his face to play a lower caste individual, who is so desperate for work that he will work for any salary.
Priyanka Chopra’s character in award-winning film Fashion (2008) hitting rock bottom is illustrated with her having a one-night stand with a black man. This is shown as her lowest point despite previous nefarious acts like drug abuse and alcoholism. Most servant characters in the biggest blockbusters have dark skin and lower castes are represented in the same way. There are many such examples in Hindi cinema across the decades, where darker skinned individuals are somehow shown as lesser humans, ridiculed or represent something that is bad.
Blackface
The second category of racism in Bollywood has been the consistent use of blackface to insult those of African descent, including by far the biggest Indian movie star in history.
In 1982 film Desh Premee, superstar actor Amitabh Bachchan and his A-list leading lady Hema Malini both put on a blackface to portray Afro-Caribbean singers for the song Gore Nahin Hum Kaale Sahi, with questionable lyrics, which translated are, ‘we may not be white, we may be black, we may be just singers and dancers.’
Perpetuating insulting stereotypes against the black community, using blackface had started decades earlier. In 1969 film Inteqam, Bollywood’s greatest dancer Helen performs the entire song Aa Jane Jaan, with an Indian man in blackface trapped in a cage pretending to be an ‘African savage’. That abhorrent ‘African savage’ stereotype would appear in a lot of films across the decades, especially in songs, including in 1986 Govinda starrer Ilzaam, where all the backing dancers in Main Aaya Tere Liye are in blackface.
In 2000 film Hadh Kar Di Aapne, leading Bollywood comedian Govinda has a scene with two people in blackface that is supposed to be funny, but is highly racist and includes them speaking in a primitive way, and the man wearing a tribal nose ring.
In Kambakkht Ishq (2009), popular box office star Akshay Kumar puts on blackface and a terrible wig to disguise himself, in what is also supposed to be a comedy scene, but is not funny.
Skin lightening mafia
The third form of racism perpetuated by Bollywood is A-list stars taking money to endorse skin lightening creams and there are a lot of them. Many have profited from the multi-billion pound skin lightening industry with advertisements that have been blasted across India.
These include superstars like Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Preity Zinta, Shah Rukh Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone, Sonam Kapoor, John Abraham, Shahid Kapoor, Emraan Hashmi, Yami Gautam, Sidharth Malhotra and many more.
The stars endorsing the products have perpetuated the message that lighter skinned people are somehow happier in life and better than those with dark skin. Astonishingly, many have done these adverts offering colour charts to track the progress of skin getting lighter.
This has become so ingrained that many Bollywood stars have actually changed colour over the years, despite a bulk of their audience being darker skinned. Yes, you read that correctly, they have changed skin colour.
Casual racism
All of this has spilled over into a fourth and perhaps most worrying category in Bollywood, where casual racism has become natural on screen and acceptable in everyday life.
In 2010 film Tees Maar Khan, which has been available on Netflix, an abhorrent scene sees a dark skinned thief do a heist, with the police officer saying, “he was so black that he blended into darkness and they called him koyla (coal). His power was seeing in the dark with his bright teeth.”
Nawazuddin Siddiqui is one of the tiny few dark skinned actors to make it big and has openly spoken about racism he has faced in the film industry, including those he has worked with, believing a total change was needed in society and the film industry.
Sanjay Chauhan, the casting director of his film Babumoshai Bandookbaaz, said it would look ‘weird’ if Nawazuddin was cast with ‘fair and handsome people’. The actor took to Twitter to reply, ‘thank you for making me realise I cannot be paired with the fair and handsome because I am dark and not good looking, but I never focus on that.’
Bollywood hit rock bottom in Housefull (2010), where the racism is directed at a black baby in a tiny swaddling blanket.
It has become so natural that racism has spilled over into real life. One of the industry’s top filmmaker Karan Johar mocked comedian Ashish Shakya’s dark skin at a live event, with him nastily saying, “If you were any blacker, Angelina Jolie would adopt you.”
While promoting a film Golmaal: Fun Unlimited (2006), actress Rimi Sen said, “Rohit Shetty is amazing as a director. He can make even a black African look pretty.”
On another occasion, Esha Gupta was heavily criticised for comparing Arsenal player Alex Iwobi to a gorilla, but later apologised.
Stars openly being casually racist perhaps explains why racism has become a way of life for so many. That deep rootedness is perhaps why a positive change won’t happen anytime soon and why Bollywood will be the last to apologise.
A seated Jain enlightened teacherAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Ganesha from JavaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
A Chinese silk painting depicting the BuddhaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
ArdhanarishvaraAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Head of a grimacing yakshaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
NagaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
The Bimaran casketAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Hunia Chawla
A still from rehearsal
Them performing liveNajmuddin Saifuddin Qawwal Group
The cast of Marriage Material in key moments from the play, including Avita Jay, Kiran Landa, Omar Malik, Irfan Shamji and Anoushka Deshmukh
Sathnam Sanghera’s 'Marriage Material' adapted into bold new play on conformity
The play Marriage Material at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre is Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s adaptation of Sathnam Sanghera’s novel of the same name, which first came out in 2013.
She is lucky to have Iqbal Khan direct Marriage Material. The play, a co-production with the Birmingham Rep, is set in the late 1960s. Mr and Mrs Bains (played by Jaz Singh Deol and Avita Jay) run a corner shop in Wolverhampton. Their younger daughter, Surinder (Anoushka Deshmukh), is 16, her sister Kamaljit (Kiran Landa) is just a bit older.
They have a neighbour, Patwant Dhanda (Irfan Shamji), who, as we shall soon see, is not a very pleasant man. In fact, he comes across just as racist as Enoch Powell, who represented Wolverhampton South West for the Tories from 1950 to 1974.
It will be recalled this was a time when Sikhs working on the buses were told they couldn’t wear a turban. That was a hard-fought battle that had to be won.
The Bains, meanwhile, simply want to get their girls married off.
Nothing new here, I thought.
What makes the tale different is that the plot twists and turns down the generations. Mr Dhanda, who has the makings of a paedophile, makes a pitch for one of the girls when Mr Bains dies early in the play. “A life with no man in the house is no life,” he informs the newly widowed Mrs Bains.
Mr Dhanda has a wife but she has returned to India so he considers himself to be a free man.
Surinder’s English teacher from school, Miss Flanagan (Celeste Dodwell), who is also head of the fifth form, tells Mrs Bains about her daughter: “I don’t want to embarrass you, but she is bright. Ridiculously bright.”
She adds: “Mrs Bains, I think it would be a pity if Surinder didn’t stay on at school.” The initial response from Mrs Bains is not encouraging: “Too much education makes people’s brains get mixed up, they don’t sleep at night…”
But she is finally persuaded that Surinder should be allowed to stay on for a while longer before being married off.
Mr Bains was very old school. When Surinder confides she would one day like to be “a somebody”, he is amused that “my daughter wants to be a somebody”.
“Like you,” she tells her father.
Mr Bains consoles his daughter: “We will find a somebody for you to marry.”
At the point of a possible marriage, however, Surinder is sweet-talked by chocolate salesman Jim Wilson (Tommy Belshaw) into running away with him. They share a love of literature, and he calls her “Sue Bains”. But the relationship does not end well.
Once she has left, Surinder is written off as “dead” by her family. The story that is circulated is that she was only 16 when she was killed in a car crash. That’s better than to let on that she ran off with a white man.
By the time she is reconciled with her sister towards the end of the play, a great deal has changed. Kamaljit married Tanvir Banga (Omar Malik), a young man who helped out in the Bains’ corner shop. When the two sisters meet again, Tanvir has also died. But he and Kamaljit had a son, Arjan Banga (Jaz Singh Deol doubles up for this role after the death of Mr Bains). He has come home after his father’s death to help his mother who is still running the family corner shop.
Meanwhile, Mr Dhanda’s business has prospered. He now has a son, Ranjit Dhanda (the role is taken by Omar Malik after Tanvir’s death), and he is nearly as unpleasant as his father.
Arjan has an English fiancée, Claire (Celeste Dodwell). In London, Arjan worked as a creative director. But after deciding to stay in Wolverhampton to help his mother, he decides he cannot marry Claire because she is white. In other words, Asians are not free of racism, either. Happily, at the end, the couple are reconciled.
As for Surinder, she parted company with Jim Wilson after realising he was all talk, depended on her for money and had failed to earn a penny from his literary pretensions. She had prospered, though, as a hotel owner and had been transformed in time into a well-groomed businesswoman. After being tracked down by Arjan, she decides to return to her roots in Wolverhampton and help Kamaljit run the family corner shop. Perhaps 50 years had passed during the passage of the play.
Being subjected to racism turned some Asians into racists themselves. The word goreh (white person) is repeatedly spat out with venom. Maybe it is worth remembering the play’s audience isn’t exclusively Asian – white folk are watching as well. And maybe some of the toilet humour ridiculing white people, which always makes me cringe, could be cut out.
In Sanghera’s novel, there is a quote from Enoch Powell’s speech in November 1968: “The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact, he is a west Indian or an Asian still... he will by the very nature of things have lost one country without gaining another, lost one nationality without acquiring a new one. Time is running out against us and them. With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded – to the benefit of nobody – in reproducing ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’ the haunting tragedy of the US.”
In Marriage Material, where the acting is marvellous (apart from Mr Dhanda’s Indian mannerisms and accent being overdone) we do travel across a couple of generations.
There is a scene when Tanvir rejects Mr Dhanda’s vision of creating a little Punjab in Wolverhampton.
Mr Dhanda wants to take over the Bains’ corner shop and is putting pressure on Tanvir to sign the papers. He says: “In this country, money is the path to freedom.”
“Sign, please,” he instructs Tanvir. “We must make sure our children learn to behave nicely, according to our rules.”
He insists: “We maintain our identity so we can be ourselves.”
Tanvir disagrees: “We can be us here. With the goreh.”
Dhanda warns him: “Then we will be inviting chaos.”
Tanvir’s comment is telling: “You sound like Enoch.”
Kamaljit, who is expecting a baby with her husband Tanvir, says: “I would like my child to grow up knowing the history of the Gurus and to read the Granth Sahib. And to love their culture.”
Tanvir tells his wife: “I would like my child to go to the finest schools, to cheer for England in the World Cup and eat Yorkshire pudding on a Sunday.”
Kamaljit sets out a dream that has perhaps come to pass with many third and fourth generation British Asians: “Maybe our child can do both.” Much, much later, in a throwback to the past, we learn of Surinder’s O-level results: “Biology A, Chemistry A, English Language A, English Literature A, French A, History B, Latin A, Mathematics A, Physics A…”
Kamaljit tells her younger sister: “Never mind about the B.”
And that is quintessentially Asian. Their acting is outstanding.
Marriage Material is at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre until June 21, and at the Birmingham Rep from June 25-July 5