How Society Paints Beauty

While I was preparing for my Gender and Literature paper, I was referring to a YouTube video for one of the texts. The text I was looking for was Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai.

The very text itself is about how gender-biased society is, and how this discrimination is not just confined to one culture or one nation alone.

So, I was watching an animated video-story version of this novel. What disturbed me was how the cartoon of the main character was displayed.

Okay, Uma is the protagonist. She is an oppressed middle-aged woman in a typical gender-discriminated family. She is described as not especially pretty according to society; her personality isn't considered impressive, and neither is her appearance according to society’s standards.

In that video, Uma was shown as a very lean and dark-skinned woman. I just don't understand why. She is never described as a dark-skinned woman. First, this is a culturally stereotypical misrepresentation. Just because one is Indian and belongs to a middle-class family, how can one automatically assume she must be dark-skinned? Relating middle class and colour — less money to a darker skin shade — is one of the worst things.

Secondly, when you say someone is “unbeautiful,” why does it need to be associated with darkness? Uma is described as someone who isn't considered pretty, but why is “unprettiness” associated with dark skin? Because society has made us believe that dark skin is something to be hated and marginalised.

This isn't the first time.

Since school, I've seen textbooks making us believe all these false standards. I remember picture comparisons in KG books where a fair-skinned woman was shown as beautiful, while a dark-skinned woman wearing a saree and a big bindi, looking like an uneducated woman, was shown as unbeautiful. This shows how deep the problem is. 

It’s not something that suddenly grew and became a poisonous tree. Instead, since childhood, we have been given one spoon of this poison daily, and we have been consuming it consciously and unconsciously.

And when we finally became conscious, a few questioned it, a few pretended to remain unconscious, and a few didn’t want to change their perceptions and continued to believe falsehood as truth.

Also, it’s not only about colour. See how ugliness is associated with lack of education and rurality. How can someone be considered “unbeautiful” simply because they are uneducated or from a village?

Is physical appearance alone what adds to beauty? Don’t values count?

First of all, why are there standards for beauty at all? These false standards only create divisions.

What’s disheartening is that this is not something that happened long back. Even today, this continues. Especially painful is the fact that it still continues within the education system itself.

The same education that taught me to question discrimination is still encouraging it. Even today, primary books continue to showcase these wrong and misleading standards very explicitly.