Colors Issue on Sale Now!

Coloured Perspectives, by Abha Iyengar Othello, the bold and noble Moor in Shakespeare’s tragedy of the same name ‘suffers’ his color and because of his color doubts his own standing in the white, lily-colored Venetian society of which he is a part. Not only that, he begins to doubt his wife, Desdemona’s, love for him since she is white and he is black. All it needs is the vile Iago’s barbed remarks to turn his doubts to certainty, leading to the tragedy that eventually unfolds. What would have happened if Shakespeare had made his protagonist a man as white as the Venetians? Would the tragedy have the same depth and impact? Shakespeare knew that color is a major factor in the life of us humans. The Moor was the hero, a man whose qualities were above the norm, he was respected and esteemed; Desdemona had fallen in love with him and married him. Yet, he was vulnerable because he was not the right color. He was black, and this personified all that was evil and decadent to Venetians, as also to the people of Elizabethan England before whom Shakespeare was presenting his play. Shakespeare chose to color his hero, because he knew that this would add greater color to his tragedy.

That was the 1600s, but when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her path breaking novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and Margaret Mitchell wrote “Gone with the Wind” both portraying life in the antebellum South in North America in the 1850-60s, the world had supposedly progressed. These novels brought home to us the fact that little had changed with regard to color. In fact, slavery was the order of the day, and the slaves were of African blood, the darker race working for their white masters. The slaves were at the complete mercy of their masters, and were treated well or otherwise depending on their luck on the kind of master they got, benevolent or not. These slaves were considered to have no minds of their own, and their bodies anyways belonged to the masters, to be done with as the latter pleased. They were often a part of a family, working with them for years, but they had to know their place. They accepted it as such, and protested little, since any kind of revolt was quickly nipped in the bud by thrashings and other forms of punishment which would make even the staunchest souls succumb. Considered infinitely inferior, the whole reasoning behind the argument for this was their color. Color was associated with lack of knowledge, manners, religion, and everything else that the white world deemed fit.

Take the story as told by the young girl, Scout, in Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird”, where she shows what a white man, in this case her father Atticus Finch, has to go through when he tries to fight for justice for a black person. Harper Lee’s book also shows the standing of the blacks in U.S.A. in those days, how they cannot get justice because of their color, and that the lies of ‘white trash’ carry more weight in a court of law than the truth of a black man.

I remember when I was just married and a friend of mine came visiting from London. She is an Indian settled in London. She brought with her a friend who, in all ways, looked a white Britisher to me. She whispered as an aside to me, “he’s colored”, and she said this with a typical nasal British twang. I gasped in surprise and looked at him again. It was only then that I noticed the curly black hair, and the not so sharp features of the handsome young man. This kind of exposure to color was new to me. This was the 20th century, but color required a comment and classification. My friend herself is a brown Indian, and it was quite strange to hear her term someone else as colored.

We are now in the 21st century. The blacks are an embittered race and though they have now found their place in the sun, they are still fighting a battle for justice. There is something called being equal in the eyes of the law, which the black people have achieved; but it is another thing to be equal in the eyes of the mind, and it is here that there is a lack. The fact that they are a people discriminated against because they have skin a different color from the white man’s is the reason for this.
The frustration of being discriminated against is evident in their talk, their writings and their verse.Take the writing of Patience Agbabi, who writes in her poem, “UFO Woman (Pronounced Oofoe)” that

“…tin-can eyes ask “Why don’t U F O back to your own planet?”

Lemn Sissay, another writer from Britain who is also a performance- poet speaks out during a performance in Delhi against the treatment meted out to his people. He says that even now as he walks down the streets of London, he can sense the fear the white men have when they see him, a black man. He says he does not hail a cab, because it shames him to see that even a black cab-driver will also not stop for him because his own color connotes trouble for him. He talks of how people walk up to him and say that they don’t see color when they look at him, they see a human being-that’s what they tell him. He wants to ask them, if you see a woman, do you tell her, “I don’t see a woman, I see a human being.” He is joking, but one knows that his heart has been broken somewhere because of his color.

The recent case of the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty who was made to feel small because of her color in the British television reality show of ‘Big Brother’ by a woman called Jane Goody, also a participant, has been well publicised. Jane Goody, a woman of little education, chose to belittle Shilpa because of her color and her roots. Though Shilpa was vindicated because she won in the end, this show brought to light the deep seated resentment that colors the perspective of white skinned people. They fail even now to see beyond the skin.

Indians are also color conscious. Being subjugated by the white man, they have a colonial hangover. The whiter the person, the greater and more beautiful he is to the Indian eyes. “He is so fair,” they exclaim over a pink and white person, their eyes round with awe. Or “he is so dark” they will say with a sneer, about a person of a darker hue. Women who are shades lighter preen in front of those who are not.

In Africa it works that way as well. A young Nigerian friend of mine thought that Indians were great because they were fair, fairer than blacks. He thought the white man was the greatest. He is also from a country which was ruled once by the white man.

Lack of color lends a sense of superiority to those who have no color. To be washed out and faded is beautiful. This kind of skewered thinking is what generations of people who have been subjugated have been brought up to believe, and what generations of people who have ruled on the basis of color have liked to enforce. Freedom tastes bland, because the spice is still in being colorless. Freedom does not change color, and all of us are chained by our thinking, shackled by our concept of what color means. We cannot look beyond skin, be it yellow, black, brown or white to touch the throb of the heart within.

ABHA IYENGAR
A-506 UNESCO Apartments
55, I.P. Extension,
Patparganj
Delhi-110092
INDIA
Tel: +91-11-22238882
E-mail: abhaiyengar@rediffmail.com