Dark is the new cool dude

She stands at the corner of the second floor balcony, smiling for the camera. Madona Pratap is not keen to see how the photos came. She shrugs when we call her to look. Madona sits down on the couch of her apartment and says she doesn’t really care about all that. In Bengaluru, she’d walk out of the house with uncombed hair and shorts and no one would bother her about it. In her homeland in Bengal, women didn’t get married before they were 30. In Dubai, where she had been working as a make-up artiste, there has been a craze to get tanned. So coming to Thiruvananthapuram, to her husband’s place, had been a realisation. Madona just didn't understand the stigma attached to dark skin.

Not that it is a Kerala-specific one. It’s everywhere. But while in Thiruvananthapuram it came to a point where Madona felt the need of a campaign. She quietly put a post on the group Where In Trivandrum, and to her surprise, found so many responses from women, telling their stories, wanting to be a part of ‘Ynotdark’. 

“It has to start from our own homes, When marriage proposals come and demands for dowries are raised.”

“The parents should stand up and say this is not a business,” Madona says, making it clear that this was not about one aspect of discrimination. Fighting the prejudice against the dark-skinned was only one part of it.

“I understood it as encompassing all these many kinds of marginalisation based on skin colour or size or religion or caste,” says Rajani Nair, who joined Madona as soon as she heard about the campaign. Her life experience had taught her to stand up for anyone belittled for no fault of theirs. There was a time, she says, she was afraid to look at the mirror. Such had been the taunts she faced through her student life, for her skin colour, for her body, for the pimples or marks on her face. It affected her academics, her career dreams went down the drain, she didn’t want to live. “Those people who cost me my life and career wouldn’t take responsibility. But they have no problem judging others. They ridicule anything that they think is not normal. But who decides what's normal? The problem starts there,” says Rajani, the pain in her words turning her voice up and down.

“Society wants us all to be replicas of one another. But each person is unique.”
Bavani Srinu, entrepreneur behind the app Swapp, too came to be on Madona’s side. “I have not faced discrimination but I am someone who has applied an extra bronzer in a world where women are discriminated against and looked down upon for being dark. It’s just a colour. What makes a person beautiful is how they look at the world. That’s how I was raised and I got married to a man who believes the same. When my sister-in-law got a proposal and they demanded a dowry, my father-in-law said, ‘My daughter is not for sale’,” Bavani says.

Madona has been doing photo shoots of the women who have joined her, with the help of Sree Vishnu, an IT professional and part-time photographer. “I wasn’t looking at the financial side of it. I’m in it for the cause,” he says. Help also came from city-based entrepreneur Minu Marie Mathew who sponsored her jewellery from ART-ery for the photo shoots. Writer Minaxi Sajeev, also part of the campaign, sent her poems from Switzerland and Madona has asked her for a Malayalam poem to connect more to the people of Kerala. Also involved in the campaign are Navamy, a journalist, Palak, a homemaker, Anuvhuti, who runs a dog boarding, and Mintu M. Kumar, a dentist.

Mintu says, “I am someone who underwent the process of Pennukaanal (meeting the bride) an agonizing number of times. Almost all the grooms liked me, my family and went home smiling. But a couple of days later, we would hear the same response, ‘sorry horoscopes don't match’. For a long time, I cursed the random planets and stars but one day our broker blurted out that it was my skin tone that played spoilsport for all the failed alliances. Today, I have a good career, a loving family and a sense of accomplishment as a woman. In a world of fair and lovely mannequins, I am a black pearl.”

Anuvhuti, who would fall into the ‘fair’ category in Kerala, had been ridiculed for not having the milky white complexion the rest of her family did, back in Jharkhand. “They’d tell me I don’t look like I come from the mountains (Himalayas). I have seen them discriminate against people from the south based on skin colour, calling them names. An aunt in my family had been told she doesn’t deserve her fair husband. I am supporting Madona in this campaign in every way,” she says.

As Madona, who also has a flair for language, puts it on her page: “It’s not just about colour, it’s about gender biases, about body shaming, about rich and poor people, about north versus south. Why should we belittle anyone or any place? Can’t we exercise a little more tolerance to allow the black, the white, the thin, the fat, the Muslim, the Hindu, the good, the mediocre to live and flourish among us?”