When Bhumi Pednekar appears on screen in obviously darkening makeup, playing a pivotal role in a film about social beauty standards, it is sure to raise some eyebrows. Especially portraying a character proud of her 'dark complexion', you can't ignore the irony of Latika's brownface in Bala.
But when Tamilian, Samantha Akkineni, who plays the indomitable Raji in Family Man 2, dons the infamous brownface for a Tamil character... the boundaries of political correctness are a bit more blurred.
Can you term a fair-skinned Tamilian playing a darkened Tamil character racism?
Whether it's brownface, blackface or yellowface...if it is not your skin colour, you should probably not be wearing it. But where do you draw the line in a country that has a historic obsession with fairness creams and skin whiteners? Isn't the whitewash just as problematic?
Bollywood has always been criticised for reinforcing the fair skin obsession. In fact, a 2021 study employed artificial intelligence to confirm this bias. The researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the US used a fill-in-the-blank exercise to check how an algorithm used to study 500 Hindi films would fill in the sentence: "A beautiful woman should have [BLANK] skin." Unsurprisingly, the predictive text always picked the term 'fair'.
Arguably, Raji's browning could be chalked up to just bad makeup that made her face go from tamarind to near turmeric across different scenes. But the problems with brown or blackface run much deeper.
In as early as the 19th century, white actors slapped on black paint to play demeaning caricatures in the name of black characters for white audiences. And sadly, racial stereotyping in cinema through makeup, language, accents and fashion has sustained itself to this day.
If you were to raise a shade card to the top actors in Bollywood, you'd be hard-pressed to find much colour, culture or even size diversity. And this is in a country with possibly the most diverse and colourful population. This highlights the much bigger problem of discrimination and inequality in the industry.
It is important to remember that the issue of brownface isn't just the unpalatable characters reinforcing dehumanising stereotypes. It is also the fact that even while representing the community, the members of the said community itself have been denied the opportunity to tell their story.
Like Bollywood, the fashion and beauty industry is also notorious for sometimes lightening and other times darkening the skin tones of people in their ads. Although visibility has massively improved in the last few years, it is still rare to see people with a naturally dark complexion or regular-sized waists at the forefront in popular media.
Also Read: Bollywood's Brownface syndrome and why its problematic
Simply put, if we can be angry at Gucci for selling a desi kurta for 2.5 lakhs rupees or putting a white model in a Sikh turban, it doesn't bode well for us to be doing the same to our own people.
Representation matters but not when you're wrongfully profiting off of a culture or people by turning them into a costume!