Lohia in the air

Our national leaders active in the 1900s and the early days of independent India were scholars that wrote extensively—Tilak, Gokhale, Lajpat Rai, the Mahatma, Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Savarkar, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Pandit Nehru, and Ram Manohar Lohia, to name a few. They have left behind an oeuvre that reflects the intellectual fervour of the independence movement and its aftermath. Their literary output also provides a fascinating insight into their persona, showing up their multidimensional personalities and wide-ranging interests. Of these, Lohia and his ideological fellow-traveller Shantaveri Gopala Gowda have had a strong influence on many Kannada writers and political leaders. These writers are widely read and respected by my generation, which came of age in the 1970s. Thus, when I found a website that contained Lohia’s writings, it felt like I had discovered the fountain from which they all drank.

In addition to books on specific political subjects, Lohia has written many essays spanning a large gamut of topics. “Beauty and Skin Colour” seems like an odd topic for him but makes for an insightful read. He opens the essay with the declaration that "the colour of the skin is no criterion of beauty or any other type of superiority” and laments that “…this distortion of aesthetics is inexplicable.” His insightful assertion that “…ancient India had probably succeeded in separating beauty from colour of complexion and was ready to discover the beautiful wherever it was located” by invoking the many dark-skinned protagonists from the Ramayana and Mahabharata was especially appealing. Perhaps written in the wake of the first Asian to be crowned Miss Universe in 1960 (Japanese), I saw in it a plea to us Indians to shed our fair-is-lovely’ bias.

I was reading this essay on an aeroplane while being told that India is being brought to Indians by the airline. I looked around and saw the many shades of India among the passengers, a heartening affirmation of the description of our melting pot by Minoo Masani (another from that era) in his delightful book We Indians. And then something began to nag; it seemed that the mantra to select the cabin crew was “Planes, planes in the sky, who has the fairest of them all?" Perhaps a nod to the story of Snow White and at variance with Lohia’s plea. I mentioned this observation to a friend who was emphatic that “the average skin tone here is lighter than on a US airline.”

In the several years since, my anecdotal data seems to suggest that the friend was right. Also, the many tribals that were supposed to have been trained for such a position by a slew of government programmes a few years ago do not seem to be employed on the routes that I frequent. Nearly sixty years ago, Mehmood, with a blackface, sang hum kaaley hain tho…, perhaps into a void. Further, I have yet to encounter a crew that claimed to speak Kannada, and only a handful spoke the languages of the dark.