A nod to the dark beauty aesthetic

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all’ is a well-worn cliché yet continues to be used for obvious reasons. The key word in this phrase from the German fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by the Grimm Brothers, is the ‘fairest’. While the story was written in the early 19th century, the concept of ‘fairest’ had reigned for millennia before that, and continues to do so, even if a giant MNC, in a grand gesture of belated awakening, changed the name of its bestselling fairness cream in 2020. It is important to remember here that the cream was launched in India in 1975.

A few years after that seminal — perhaps more symbolic than real — change in the re-branding of a top-selling product, Indian society continues to be obsessed with fair skin even as attempts are increasingly being made to herald change, and with good results too. Some of the most talked about such attempts include campaigns such as #unfairandlovely and ‘Dark is Beautiful’, or the photography project ‘Dark is Divine’. Recently, another showcase thrust dark skin centre stage when artist Samyukta Madhu presented a series of modern, contemporary CGI reinterpretations of the ‘traditional South Indian beauty’ at a curated lifestyle and fashion store in Chennai.

Titled ‘Reincarnations-Ghosts of a South Asian Past’, the immersive, multimedia exhibition featured 12-16 feet high digital artworks as installations, the centrepiece of which was a lovely, dark-skinned woman wearing traditional jewellery, which could be from any part of India but mostly inspired by temple jewellery of the South, and her skin embossed with traditional tattoo patterns and letters of a gibberish language. A futuristic, android human with eyes that dig deep into those of the onlooker, the woman is an everyday, yet otherworldly beauty; after all, a beautiful woman in the wildest of Indian imaginations has skin as white as milk.

“Even if you use AI and say, give me a picture of a beautiful woman, it’ll give you a thin, fair, blonde woman. So that’s the kind of thing I was trying to break away from,” says Madhu. In doing so — by shoving a dark-skinned beauty under the spotlight — Madhu not only underscores the politics of skin colour but also issues of feminism and South Asian aesthetics, all presented digitally with a futuristic vision. Here is a woman who wears her femininity, beauty, and skin colour, all with pride.

Madhu, who grew up in Chennai, studied at the Parsons School of Design, New York (2012-2016), and now lives between Berlin and India. She cites the example of the cast of the Netflix series Bridgerton (Season 2) in which Indian-origin British actress Simone Ashley — decidedly dark — plays the lead, Kate Sharma, opposite Jonathan Bailey’s Anthony Bridgerton, a white British lord. “I’m such an online person and a lot of what I’m inspired by is just pop culture. So, Simone Ashley has made it big in the West — she is on the cover of Vogue and is an A-list celebrity now, but someone who looks like her is unlikely to get that kind of mainstream success in India yet,” says Madhu.

While the lovely bronze skin of Madhu’s CGI beauty has become a talking point, the artist had not really paid much attention to the politics of skin colour while working on this project. “I wasn’t thinking of all of that. I just wanted to make someone the main character, someone who looked like her. Some of the installations are nearly 16 feet tall. People were looking up to her and that was an interesting dynamic because we had made her the source of authority and power. That, I thought, was a really interesting twist,” shares Madhu.

The use of tattoos and gibberish language (that seems inspired by Tamil) on the protagonist’s body, says Madhu, is to lend an edge to her personality. “In our society, it is taboo to have tattoos or piercings all over your body so I thought it would be interesting to mix tradition with edginess, provocation — I like playing with these two boundaries,” she explains. The exhibition will be showcased in Berlin in early October and in Mumbai early next year.