Archive for the 'Identity Issues' Category

So I tend to like most things Persian - Kiarostami, miniature paintings, khoresht, the excessive use of nuts and saffron in “polow” - and almost all of whatever I have been exposed to - of Persian architecture, arts and literature. I also love how Farsi sounds.

I was chatting with a Professor of Islamic History and he pointed to me, how political Islam has had an uneasy relationship with both Iranian and Bengali society. Perhaps.

I suppose the presence of long secular cultures, very productive in the arts and literature, true for both Bengal and Persia, might create problems for certain kinds of Islamisms. Of course, the history of political Islam in any Muslim country is nothing if its not inconsistent and checkered. So it’s hard to generalize.

Another interesting analogy between Bangladeshi and Persian societies is the central role Dhaka and Tehran University have played in defining their states’ religio-political cultures.

Dhaka University, founded soon after the first Partition of Bengal, to uplift the Muslim masses of East Bengal, went from strength to strength and played a pivotal role in nationalist politics leading up to 1947. After 1947, the university changed character dramatically, as many Hindu Bengalis vacated faculty positions and were replaced by an expanding Bengali Muslim intelligentsia. An intelligentsia that was increasingly secular in the way it imagined a raison d’etre for East Pakistan, and if not that, at least culturally very proudly Bengali. In 1952, the University became a central hub of demonstrations against the Pakistani State. Again, in the ’60s, throwing their weight behind an increasingly outspoken Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the University students and faculty came under the radar of the Pakistani State. Little wonder then that many of the Pak Army’s worst atrocities were carried out on the campus during Operation Search Light.

Tehran University was founded roughly sixty years before Dhaka University. The University was formed by integrating various independent faculties and schools. Initially, heavily influenced by French curricula, after WWII, it tried to Americanize its system more. Tehran University also became a battleground on which various religious and political skirmishes were fought by those struggling for state power. Of course the students have been more than pawns in these great games - they have played a central role in them.

In 1979, when the world watched a revolution as momentous as the French or Russian, a lot of impetus to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s anti-Reza Shah rhetoric came after mass-atrocities on the TU campus. The campus fell under the control of anti-state guerrillas who made weapons and Molotov cocktails . Of course, the agitation had deeper roots. The leftist, liberal Tehran University elements also witnessed the 2,500 year-old celebration of the Persian Empire as Reza Shah threw a party to end all parties. Pro-American, anti-leftist, anti-Islamist, Reza Shah alienated many, and as draughts raged in Baluchistan and Sistan, he had two hundred chefs flown in from Paris, served a ton of caviar and spent between $50 to a $100 million dollars for lots of corporate guests, both Western and Iranian. Students of Tehran University weren’t very impressed.

Of course, the students of both Dhaka and Tehran University continue to be politically active. Although politically conscientious voices are fast disappearing on the DU campus, as Shibir cadres are increasingly ensconcing themselves there. Still DU remains a hot-bed of anti-state politics. As does TU, witnessed by the violent protests against against the closing of the reform-minded newspaper, Salam, and more recently against Mr. Ahmadenijad.

Academically, both universities are formidable with a former alumnus/a in each case, bagging a Noble Peace Prize recently: Shirin Ebadi in 2003 and Muhammad Yunus in 2006.

Many women in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa desire whiter skin because it makes them feel more attractive. To achieve a lighter look, women in these parts of the world have turned to the popular skin-whitening cream Fair & Lovely for many years.

But is white skin something to be promoted? 

Three years ago, in a seminal article in Foreign Policy magazine, called “Selling to the Poor,” C.K. Prahalad, a business professor, and Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute argued that if businesses targeted underserved poor consumers in developing countries, they could generate profits while improving the welfare of the poor. As an example of success in using this “doing well by doing good” method, they described how an impoverished Indian street sweeper was able to buy Fair & Lovely skin-whitening cream. They wrote that because this poor woman could now purchase “an affordable consumer product formulated for her needs,” she felt “empowered.” 

When I first read about that example, I felt revolted. Prahalad and Hammond thought that a business was empowering women by helping them look more Caucasian?

Once my blood pressure went down though, I had to acknowledge that sadly it’s true: Looking white is looking right.

Every culture has its standard of beauty. In India and much of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, fair skin is the paragon of pulchritude.

In India, TV commercials and magazine ads are full of models with a light complexion referred to as “wheatish.” Their skin tones bear no resemblance to the paper-bag brown and chocolate-colored hues of the vast majority of India’s 1.1 billion people.

The pressure to look fair is especially strong for women. It’s key to snagging a good husband. Most females can tell you the story of some young woman whose parents had a difficult time finding her a husband because she was so dark. Girls get chastised by their parents for playing in the sun because doing so will make them dark and unattractive to a potential groom one day. When young, single women get photographed for “marketing” photos to send off to potential grooms, they make themselves fairer by applying generous amounts of powder to their faces.

If fair skin is so important to looking beautiful and finding a good husband, can anyone blame an impoverished street sweeper for desiring Fair & Lovely? As Prahalad and Hammond argue, the company that sells Fair and Lovely, Hindustan Lever Limited (the Indian subsidiary of Unilever and a company on whose board Prahalad sits), is making a profit while empowering women at the “bottom of the pyramid” to advance socially and economically.

Recently, Aneel Karnani, a business professor at the University of Michigan, sparked a heated debate on Salon.com and the blog of the World Resources Institute (on whose board Prahalad sits and on whose staff Hammond works) with his working paper about whether Fair & Lovely is truly an example of “doing well by doing good.”

The racist prejudices that Fair & Lovely clearly perpetuates and propagates are disturbing. No one knows for sure how white skin came to be the standard of beauty. Some blame it on white European colonizers. Others say that dark skin used to signal that a woman was a poor peasant who labored outdoors while white skin signaled that she was an upper-class lady. Whatever the origins of the fair-skinned ideal, Fair & Lovely clearly sustains it, particularly through its advertising strategy.

Fair & Lovely’s TV advertisements have a typical formula: A sad, dark-skinned young woman can’t find a job or get the attention of a love interest. Then she uses Fair & Lovely, becomes whiter, and suddenly she gets the job or attracts the handsome man. For example, in one controversial Indian TV commercial, a father laments that he doesn’t have a son to provide for him and his dark-skinned daughter doesn’t earn enough. The daughter uses Fair & Lovely, becomes whiter, lands a job as a flight attendant, and makes her father happy.

This commercial generated so much controversy that the Indian government banned it. It also won an award for most gender-insensitive TV advertisement, with the chairwoman of the judging panel stating that Fair & Lovely ads “propagate the myth that a woman has to be beautiful to be successful or find a suitable match.”

But wait a second.

Numerous social science studies have proven that attractive, well-groomed people are more successful. Furthermore, anyone who’s acquainted with the system of arranged marriages in India knows that a fair-skinned woman has a competitive advantage. For better or for worse, the sad but true reality is that whiter skin helps women get ahead in life and feel more confident.

And it’s not only white skin that’s desirable. It’s just about any cosmetic change that could make a woman appear more Caucasian: green contact lenses, hair that’s dyed brown with blond highlights, eyelid surgery for women of East Asian ethnicity, and hair straightening for those of African ethnicity.

Given this reality, Fair & Lovely is “doing good” within the confines of local culture—it is helping individual women live up an ideal, even it’s the deplorable ideal of “looking right by looking white.” The cream is helping women advance in a world where the “rules of the game” are racist and unfair.

But, Fair & Lovely could do even more “good,” by following two suggestions. First, hire some creative minds to figure out how to market the product without propagating the racist idea that a woman needs to be fair skinned to get a job or a husband. Study Coppertone’s marketing strategy. This maker of sunless tanning lotions promotes its products without suggesting that women need darker skin to succeed in life.

Second, do some clinical testing to prove that your product actually works. Unilever has never been required to document that Fair & Lovely actually lightens skin. Furthermore, Karnani cites numerous dermatologists who say that skin-whitening creams such as Fair & Lovely just don’t work. (In fact, it could make people more vulnerable to skin diseases. In the United States, whites have a 10-times greater risk of melanoma than do African Americans.) Like the many unregulated weigh-loss supplements and baldness cures sold in the United States, Fair & Lovely may offer a dream, but deliver nothing. And that would be true exploitation of the poor.

Meanwhile, civil society must continue its efforts to change the “rules of the game”—the ones that elevate the Caucasian look above others. It can’t expect HLL to do so; HLL profits immensely from the status quo so it has no incentive to dismantle the cultural ideal of fair skin. Already, women’s groups in India have been vocal about Fair & Lovely’s ads and gotten some of them pulled. They need to keep up the pressure. Maybe one day they’ll get HLL to wake up and launch something akin to Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.

Until then, we have to bear with the sad but true reality: look white is looking right. And it’s a dark and ugly truth that Fair & Lovely cream makes whiteness accessible to some of the poorest of the poor. That may be empowering for an India sweeper today, but it will be empowering for her daughter tomorrow? 

Most of you guys will have a sense of the term “Exile Complex.”

It is a feeling of nostalgia for a home far away. The nostalgia is often wrapped around imaginations of a city - its smells, sights, sounds, and friends it contains.

The city remains geographically far but conversationally very near. It is evoked in the movies we like to watch. Perhaps more so in the music we listen to, and the older we get, the more we realize the encroaching influences of our old selves, old homes, and old cities, in our lives.

This past summer, I greatly enjoyed Baul music. But when I was thirteen, if you had snuk in a Baul or Lalon tape in my replete collection of the Seattle Grunge Scene, chances are, I’d be a bit annoyed with you. Things have changed. As have tastes.

All this then fall under the “Exile complex”

Also, in some ways, it is because of this very Exile complex, that we South Asians, Bengali, Indian, Pakistani or what have you, enjoy reading post-colonial literature so much.

Post-colonial literature?

A few South Asians have some interesting things to say about “contemporary Desi American” culture…

Author Hilal Nakiboglu just published her doctoral dissertation from the University of Pennsylvania titled “Being down with the brown“. Indolink writes that Nakiboglu observed second generation Desi students at colleges across the nation to study the “deeply complex coming of age rituals” that define our South Asian identity.

Her findings? Second generation Desi students tend to regularly engage in “creative arts of ethnic rebirth”. Considering I’m off to Detroit in an hour for Bhangra Fusion, a dance competition, I think Hilal is onto something with her work.

For years we’ve been talking about this whole “model-minority” definition of what it means to be South Asian. And even today, I think it’s still very relavent (I changed my major from English to Food Science and Human Nutrition back to English in the span of one year).

But I think what’s evolved more recently is this “cookie-cutter” definition of what it means to be South Asian. Can you dance? sing? act? Speak your native tongue? Do you know your Bollywood trivia? Is your sari actually trendy enough to wear in cultural fashion shows?
It seems like we second generation Desis feel compelled to prove our ‘Desiness’ through how well we can outwardly express our cultural identity.

Now I’m not pointing fingers at those who participate in cultural events (note: bhangra competition tomorrow). All I’m trying to say is that Hilal makes an obvious but well-affirmed point: we do use the “arts” to explore and affirm our cultural identity. Especially through cultural performances. And often.

*an interesting tangent could explore how the traditional South Asian mentality of measuring university worth by academic prestige is being replaced by this idea of elitism driven by cultural competency. You might be a tier 3 college but nobody really cares if one of your South Asian dance teams is the best in the nation.

In her dissertation, Nakiboglu pegs college-based South Asian student groups as “instrumental in providing a context for these youths to explore their Indian American identity”. As an example, she cites Penn Masala as reflecting a voice of second generation South Asians. I don’t know anyone currently in Penn Masala, but I do personally know and respect the members of Chai-Town- the all-male Hindi-English a Capella ensemble at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I think she’s right in asserting that these fusion groups (dance, singing, etc) do bridge the cultural gap between South Asian Americans and individuals of other ethic groups. And in accordance to the ideas of Nakiboglu’s dissertation, many of my friends accredit their experiences with various cultural (or any performance)groups as significant contributing towards their personal growth and identity construction in college.

Another scholar whose recent work also involves the extensive study of second generation Desis is Syracuse University’s Prema Kurien. In her new book titled “A Place at the Multicultural Table: The development of American Hinduism”, Kurien discusses how Hinduism is often either strongly rejected or passionately embraced by second generation Hindu Americans. While I think Kurien is definitely correct, a lot more Hindu Americans waver between both ends of this spectrum. I’m pretty sure their indifference or ambivalence towards Hinduism is caused by not knowing why they actually practice the religion to begin with (besides the cultural expectation).

Kurien is quoted saying, “the average Hindu immigrant is often unable to explain the “meaning” of Hinduism and its “central tenets”. I would have thought it would be the other way around, with Hindu Americans instead of Hindu immigrants. Interesting.

Kurien’s book illustrates how various Hindu American organizations-religious, cultural, and political- are attempting to answer the puzzling questions of identity outside their homeland. Self-described as the first in-depth look at Hinduism in the United States, the book emphasizing the importance of how social and cultural factors of the US affect the development of “American Hinduism”.

Kurien interviewed members of the HSC (Hindu Student Council) organization at various college campuses. Her findings indicate that many Hindu Americans have become very interested in exploring their cultural identity in India, especially through “social-service” non-profit organizations (such as inSPIRE).

Among these students who return to India, many say that they “know more about Hinduism and Indian culture than our cousins in India”. That’s not surprising. It’s pretty unrealistic to expect Indians who live in India to wear their culture on their sleeve. They obviously don’t feel the need to prove their “Indianness” because let’s face it- they live in India. That factor alone should be telling enough.

If you’re into the whole exploration of Desi identity, you might want to check out Sunaina Marr Maira’s book titled Desis in the House.