Many South Asian women remember being given dietary advice by family and friends about how to improve their skin’s rang aur roop , or colou...
Many South Asian women remember being given dietary advice by family and friends about how to improve their skin’s rang aur roop, or colour and glow. This advice, often trickling down from generation to generation, is commonly imparted to pregnant women too, to ensure that children are born fair and light-skinned. It contributes to the rife colourism, or discrimination based on skin tone, that is ubiquitous in many South Asian cultures. Milk-based concoctions like haldi ki doodh (milk with turmeric) continue to be popular in the region, thereby intertwining the beneficial properties of haldi into a mythology of skin colour.
Many mythologies around food and skin tone can be found in late colonial-era novels, domestic literature and periodicals. These were influenced by the racialised and caste-based superiority myths perpetuated by Aryanism, European colonialism, Mughal pasts and Persian lineages. The beauty myths also connected to modern notions of how to be healthy and hygienic. Some of this advice also derived from, and was embedded in, indigenous medical systems within Urdu domestic health manuals that targeted middle-class women ‒ like Unani Tibb. A Greco-Arabic based medical system, Unani Tibb (or ‘tibbi’ as a descriptor) is based on humoral balance and sees spiritual and physical health as two mutually-dependent states.
In domestic health...
