prasad1
Active member
“Aap toh south Indian dikhti hai par aapki behen Indian dikhti hai.” (You look like a south Indian but your sister looks Indian.)
These words from a decades-old conversation with a Delhi beautician came back to me when Tarun Vijay, a former BJP MP and ex-editor of the RSS publication Panchjanya, recently tried to defend India against charges of racism. “If we were racist,” he said, “why would have all the entire south [India] which is complete… you know Tamil, you know Kerala, you know Karnataka and Andhra… why do we live with them? We have blacks, black people around us.” (sic) Many south Indians revealed their own white-skin fixation when they protested against Vijay’s comment by objecting to being termed black. It is just as telling that most north Indians would be aghast if they knew that the racial descriptor “black” is used by Europeans and Americans not for people of African origin alone but for Indians too, and not just the dark-skinned among us. The offensive aspect of Vijay’s statement is not in these sensitivities though, but in his condescension, the implication that the north can choose whether or not to “live with them”, and in the othering of the south.
It was an attitude echoed all those years back by that woman who blurted out in shock on discovering that my comparatively light-complexioned companion was my sibling: “You look like a south Indian but your sister looks Indian.” Because in her view, the standard Indian is gora and from the north, a dark skin like mine could only belong to a southerner, and a southerner is, of course, ‘the other’.Being a Malayali-born and living in Delhi, I am used to such remarks. In my school years, I remember a reader of The Statesman writing to the editor: “south Indians are our guests” and “we” should be kind to “them”. “You southies have brains, we north Indians have looks,” said a neighbour to Mum one day.
These comments, like the oily-haired, aiyyaiyyo-spouting, vibhuti-sporting ‘Madrasi’ stock character in old Hindi cinema, are relatively innocuous manifestations of a problem so deep rooted that most of us scarcely notice it.
Historical happenstance has situated India’s capital in the north. The further concentration of political power here (thanks to an electoral system that gives you more seats in Parliament if your state sucks at population control) has given north India a major advantage over the rest of the country. As a result, studying the north has become a compulsion for other Indians, but the lack of a reciprocal effort from the majority in the north indicates a barely disguised sense of superiority. What else but ignorance born of indifference explains the vague collective conviction here that the ‘south’ is somehow just one state, ‘Madras’?
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So, do I face discrimination as a south Indian living in the north? The answer, like I said, is complicated. It would be naïve, however, to ignore the country’s systemic pro-north bias and skewed balance of political power; the so-called ‘national’ media’s Bollywood obsession, to the virtual exclusion of our other thriving film industries; a journalism scene in which the molestation of a major Malayalam actress this year received little attention, though a similar assault in north India would have attracted wall-to-wall coverage; and the deeply political import of that woman’s words from so long ago, “Aap toh south Indian dikhti hai par aapki behen Indian dikhti hai.”
http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/lets-talk-about-racism-you-look-south-indian-but-your-sister-looks-indian/story-4DgxcpTrZPC7db9rqziWgM.html
