The matrimonial website originally asked its patrons to indicate the colour of their skin using a scale of descriptors that ranged from “fair” and “wheatish” to “dusky” (meaning dark), and then allowed users to select their preferences in a potential life partner using skin tone as one of the filters.
“Newspaper ads used skin colour as one of the filtering mechanisms and we replicated that. Companies evolve, just like people do, and four or five years ago, we decided to step away from using skin filters in the matchmaking process,” says Adhish Zaveri, director of marketing for shaadi.com.
But a remnant of this skin tone filter remained on the website: the user interface for selecting a skin tone remained, even though any requested skin tone specifications were ignored in the actual search results.
When news of it reached a Facebook group of South Asian women living in North America, a petition was immediately launched to bring it to the attention of shaadi.com.
“Within 24 hours, we had 1,500 signatures,” says Hetal Lakhani, a Dallas, Texas resident who created the petition. “Shaadi.com decided to get rid of the filter.”
Cultural shift
While colourism in South Asian communities has been largely overlooked until the past decade, social media and the internet are changing that.
A biracial Indian-American woman, Khanna’s most recent book Whiter: Asian American Women on Skin Color and Colorism is a compilation of personal essays on the impacts of colourism written by women from various South Asian backgrounds living in the United States.
Her experience in researching the book, she says, is a good example of how today’s digital landscape is changing the discussion around topics like colourism.
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