‘In India, nobody wants to be dark’: Interpreting the Fairness Ideology through Intersemiotic Complementarity

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the Indian populace’s predilection for fair skin and investigates the inherent prejudice against dark-skinned individuals that exists within Indian society (Karve, 1968). This prejudice is continuously fanned by the media through representations that portray fair skin as an indicator of assured success in all aspects of life. Indian media representations are replete with images of fair-skinned men and women and capitalise on the widely prevalent societal desire for fair complexions in order to market their products. The aim of this chapter is to explicate the workings of the visual and verbal modes within an advertisement to show how meaning is constructed both individually and collectively as part of a multimodal text. The chapter is organised as follows: first, the global nature of the skin-lightening phenomenon is explored alongside a specific focus on the Indian context; then a brief description of the advertisement (hereafter ‘ad’) under review is provided along with four case-study narratives; finally, the last section of the chapter offers an in-depth multimodal analysis followed by concluding remarks.

If the powers-that-be had wanted us to be a pink and white race, one assumes they’d have factored the colour scheme into the basic design.

(Ashok and Balasubramaniam, 2005, p. 20)