Our True Colours : outlookindia.com

Our True Colours : outlookindia.com: "Our True Colours




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Like a tool to help climb up the social ladder. Adds D.K. Bhattacharya, a retired anthropology professor from Delhi University, 'There are reports from Africa where indigenous people would smear their face with limestone during Christian ceremonies to resemble the white missionaries.'

Prakash C. Jain, a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, who has studied the Indian diaspora, says there has also been an 'undercurrent of racism' between people of Indian origin and Africans in Africa. Traditionally, most Indians limited social interaction with Africans and stayed in separate housing estates. Intermarriage was practically non-existent in South Africa, with just 57 instances from the pre-World War II era to the '60s, he points out.

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For T.K. Oommen, emeritus professor of sociology at JNU, racism combines elements of 'culturalism' and 'ethnicism'. So there is the broad, implicit and very prevalent idea that Africans are culturally and ethnically inferior to Indians. 'Indians have always made such distinctions. Look at the Shiv Sena that targets non-Maharashtrians or the Lachit Sena that targeted non-Assamese,' he says.

Mumbaikars befriending whites

This cultural chauvinism also explains why discrimination based on colour in India is limited not just to the blacks, but surfaces even against the whites sometimes. Julia Sullivan (name changed on request), an Australian postgraduate student at Pune University, feels it is because she represents a different culture. People from her apartment complex once came into her flat and accused her, point blank, of"