Colour Coded

Her career has stretched for over a decade now; her performances in Brick Lane, Shadows of Time, Road Movie, Unindian (co-starring former cricketer Brett Lee) and The Parched have been praised consistently. And she possesses a shelf full of Indian and international awards to assert her credentials as a powerhouse actress.
Yet, the 35-year-old, Pune-born Tannishtha Chatterjee had to wait for a nasty controversy to erupt before she made news, so to speak. Insulted about her dark skin tone on the asinine TV show, Comedy Nights Bachao, she staged a walkout and wrote sensitively on her Facebook account, about the 'colour' prejudice which persists in her homeland. Instead of issuing an apology, the show's chief anchor Krushna Abhishek claimed that she was "trying to gain publicity out of the incident".
Mercifully, Tannishtha has moved on, shaken but not stirred. She has come out trumps in the controversy. The show's anchor was lambasted extensively, especially on social networking sites. It's a surprise, in fact, that the show is still on air when it should have been pulled off for being downright offensive under the guise of comedy.
Hopefully, this will be the last incident of its kind in Bollywood, which once did have a bias in favour of 'gori', apple-cheeked heroines. More often than not, fair-skinned girls were cast as heroines, a tradition which was at long last reversed in the 1970s.
Indeed, Rekha did alter the scene, her dusky complexion turning into an asset rather than a disadvantage. At the outset, today's diva was chauvinistically described as an 'ugly duckling', but became a 'swan' once she belted out a series of hits starting with her debut in Sawan Bhadon. Her make-up secrets have become legendary. And once in a while, she has offered to share them with newcomers.
Not that Smita Patil ever required beauty tips. Her smouldering beauty, enhanced by deep, expressive eyes, was shorn of glamour. Conversely, Zeenat Aman exuded high-glamour, devoid of those peaches-and-cream cosmetics. Tanned and drop-dead gorgeous - combined with a cool attitude - Zeenat is justly acknowledged by nostalgiaphiles as a trendsetter to date.
And the most obvious instance of the fact that the fair and lovely syndrome had come to a definite end was when the glowingly tanned Sushmita Sen topped the Miss India contest in 1994, in Goa, against Aishwarya Rai - a fortunate choice as it happened. Sushmita went on to grab the Miss Universe title while Aishwarya was crowned Miss World, both significant achievements in the history of India's triumphs at beauty pageants.
Unfortunately, over time, consumer products claiming to lighten complexions have been endorsed by top male stars, including Shah Rukh Khan. The upside is that he hasn't been spared from criticism for lending his face to such ad campaigns.
Around three years ago, sensing that some Bollywood producers still continued to have a thing about 'fair' versus 'dark', the feisty Nandita Das became the face of a campaign called 'Dark is Beautiful'. She explained in an interview: "Why do I have to be categorised by my skin colour? Or is it simply because it is rare for an actress to be dark and, therefore, it becomes imperative to make a point about it? All the articles about me begin with 'the dark and dusky actress' because being dark is considered such an aberration."
Nandita elaborated that because of her complexion, she was expected to play lower caste roles or asked to "lighten her skin slightly" to play upper class roles. Strange but true.
Gratifyingly, attitudes are a changin'. Take Priyanka Chopra's globally-lauded performance in the lead role of Alex Parrish in Quantico. Brown is way beyond beautiful, she has asserted once and for all. Appropriately, in one of the episodes, a white woman tells her gushingly, "You are so beautiful," not once, but twice over. Throughout the TV series, Priyanka's makeup accentuates her natural-born colour.
Come to think of it, Bipasha Basu, Chitrangada Singh and Anu Aggarwal made a splash in Bollywood and were never subjected to any prejudice. So when Tannishtha Chatterjee is made a target of so-called humour on a tacky TV show, all you can say is that either the fun-raisers are plainly regressive or hopelessly myopic, and must be told to get their act together this very minute.
wknd@khaleejtimes.com