The Importance of Professor Priyamvada Gopal

by Brian Bamford

EDITORIAL NOTE:

COLONIALISM in my experience corrupts both the colonialists and the people being colonised. I recognised that while working in Gibraltar. Hence it should not surprise us that someone like Prof. Priyamvada Gopal should herself show signs demanding entitlement and making claims to privillege about her status at Cambridge. She is clearly a creature of the caste system* which is a 'defining feature of Hinduism' which is part of her own culture.

'"Untouchability" and Segregation

* 'India's caste system is perhaps the world's longest surviving social hierarchy. A defining feature of Hinduism, caste encompasses a complex ordering of social groups on the basis of ritual purity. A person is considered a member of the caste into which he or she is born and remains within that caste until death, although the particular ranking of that caste may vary among regions and over time. Differences in status are traditionally justified by the religious doctrine of karma, a belief that one's place in life is determined by one's deeds in previous lifetimes.

COLOUR COMPLEXIONS ON THE INDIAN SUB-CONTINENT

ON June 25th, this year, the CAMBRIDGE VARSITY website announced that the controversal academic Priyamvada Gopal, Churchill fellow and academic in postcolonial literature in the English Faculty, had been promoted to full Professorial Chair despite a petition on change.org which called for her removal from the University. This comes following news that she was briefly suspended from Facebook and Twitter after sharing some of the messages of the hateful abuse she has received by a campaign launched on a 4chan forum encouraging users to contact the University to call for Gopal’s removal.

The Cambridge University professor Gopal had taken to Twitter to write: 'I'll say it again. White Lives Don't Matter. As white lives'

She argues that whiteness is primarily a cultural category, not a biological one, and is useful for explaining how western societies work in terms of how society is structured, and how such structures determine power relations between dominant and non-dominant groups.

These remarks came as India's multibillion-dollar skin lightening industry is under fire as Indians seek whiter shade of pale, and India's Bollywood actor, Abhay Deol, said: 'You have to stop buying into the idea that a particular shade is better than others,' Abhay Deol, an actor famous for playing offbeat roles, said on his Facebook page.

Deol had lambasted his Bollywood peers - including Shah Rukh Khan, John Abraham, Shahid Kapur and Deepika Padukone - for endorsing so-called fairness brands and urged them to stop using their popularity to peddle products he called racist.

Meanwhile in India, where Gopal received a BA from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, controversy around 'fairness' products has raged for decades, with darker skin shades variously described as "dusky" and "wheatish", and lighter tones sold as more attractive.

The market - which includes creams, face washes, deodorants, even a vaginal whitener - is estimated to be worth about 270 billion rupees ($4 billion) and is growing at a steady clip.

The World Health Organization banned the active ingredients – hydroquinone and mercury – from unregulated skin products.

Research firm Centre for Science and Environment said in a 2014 study that nearly half the creams it tested in India contained mercury, which is "completely illegal and unlawful".

CASTE at the ROOT of RACISM

SOME activists link the bias to an entrenched caste system, where higher-caste Brahmins generally have lighter skin.

In a country where arranged marriages are still the norm, matrimonial ads consistently describe a woman's complexion, and dark-skinned women often pay a higher dowry, activists say.

Bullying and taunting of dark-skinned girls and women is common, while dark-skinned actors complain of fewer roles.

Advertising campaigns for various brands have typically depicted women - and increasingly men - as winning better jobs and partners, thanks to the fairness creams.

But Kiran Khalap, co-founder of brand consultancy Chlorophyll in Mumbai, said the adverts were not to blame.

"Our obsession with fair skin didn't come from HUL or Emami: it's a deep-seated cultural bias that equates being fair with being superior," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

So when we examine Prof Gopal's background on the Indian sub-continent we can perhaps better understand her anxieties about 'blackness', 'whiteness' and colour in general which may make her a bit touchy

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