by Ian Mosley

AOL News reports: “Cosmetic advertisements in Asia are targeting men with blunt campaigns aimed at skin color that one lawmaker claims is racist. In one TV commercial, two men, one with dark skin, the other with light skin; stand on a balcony overlooking a neighborhood. The dark skin guy turns to his friend and says in Hindi, ‘I am unlucky because of my face.’ His light-skinned friend replies, ‘Not because of your face, because of the color of your face.’ Suddenly the light-skinned guy throws his friend a tube of cream. It’s a whitening cream…. In a country where most people have brown skin, the message being sent to men and women has some people outraged. ‘Basically if you need a job you have to have white skin. If you want a good partner, a companion you need white skin and you always seem to get it once you’ve used the fairness cream. Basically I think it’s completely racist and highly objectionable,’ says Brinda Karat.”

I wonder what this woman would say about a little-known aspect of her country’s history. During the days of the British Raj in India, the local rajahs, nobility and dignitaries would invite the tallest, blondest blue-eyed British officers they could find to long, luxurious house parties in their palaces. By day the young British men hunted tigers and played polo. At night, after sumptuous feasting on Indian cuisine, they were given free run of the Rajah’s harem and especially encouraged to select among his multiple wives for their nocturnal recreation.

The reasoning behind this was cold and calculating eugenics: The Indian nobility, descended from ancient Aryan invaders themselves, wanted to replenish, improve and invigorate the racial strain of their dynasties, which had become dangerously contaminated down through the centuries with genes from the brown hordes who populate most of India. Their caste needed an intellectual boost to assure their position, and they needed an injection of new blood from the British officer class.

The children born of these weekend fornications would be raised and educated as the rajah’s own, and officially acknowledged as his own, although one look at the light skin and sometimes blue or green eyes of the progeny was enough to let the cat out of the bag. One of those very British situations where everyone knew what was going on and nobody said a word. To this day, many of India’s ruling elite are surprisingly light-skinned.