Are Indians racist?
Are Indians racist? : Expat On The Edge
I was struck by a column I read in HT Café, the supplement to HT, at the weekend by sitar player Anoushka Shankar titled ‘Are you racist?’ In it she referred to the Air France incident, in which 60 Indian passengers were stranded at Paris airport lounge without food and water, while non-Indian passengers were put up in plush hotels. The Indian passengers are claiming racism.
But then the Indian author turned the subject on its head pointing out Indians were ready to claim they were suffering racism, but rarely introspected as to whether they themselves were racist. She then backed this up with various points such as:
* Most people would not be comfortable introducing a foreigner as a boy or girlfriend to their parents.
* Being white is bad enough but if he/she was black it would be even worse
* In India foreigners have to pay higher ticket prices to enter certain monuments
* The media constantly propagates the concept of white women as easy and loose.
I have to say I agreed with every point she made – but the above ones struck the strongest chord with me.
This is a subject that rarely, if never gets discussed in the media.
In fact, on the contrary, there is a belief that white people get advantages and are treated well. It may be true they can get into a club badly dressed that some Indians, who have washed their hair and are not in sandals, may not be able to get into, and in some situations, some of them face some advantages. But often they don’t. And what is the advantage of getting into the nightclub if say not a single Indian girl would take the white man to meet her parents?
Or what is the point of being in that club, as a white female, if most Indian man inside automatically assumes you are loose?
Of course there are globally minded, well-educated Indians that thankfully do not hold these bigoted views, but there are also a large number that do. Racism can be overt or it can be very subtle.
An Indian friend, doing some research, once said to me “You know how English women always write about their sex live in their blogs and Indian women don’t, well I was wondering…” (I was like… “What?”
I said to an Indian male friend I had been on a date. The reply: “How was the sex?” (We had not even held hands.)
Two Indian married men have asked me to have affairs, something I am dead against…Of course, I have no idea whether they would have asked this to Indian women, but either way I take it as an insult.
I went to the Taj Mahal Palace in Agra last year. While the Indian rate was close to zero, foreigners had to pay a staggering amount to enter. There were two clerks at separate booths selling the tickets – one for Indians and one for foreigners. There were literally thousands of foreigners waiting to get in, while, needless to say, the queue outside the Indian booth was empty. But that man would not sell the foreigner any tickets. The heat and length of time we all had to wait (in my case three hours) led to many rows between foreigners in the queue, with various groups accusing the others of queue jumping.
The problem with this differential in price is that, while it may have been relevant years ago, maybe pre-1992, now it is not. Many Indians earn far more than their ‘white’ counterparts. Many westerners coming to India don’t have much money at all. I was recently in contact with a western TV producer here on a shoot, who was staying in a hostel for Rs600 a night in Colaba, with a friend, and who couldn’t afford to travel by taxi and took the local train everywhere. Meanwhile plenty of Indians have private drivers.
Beggars are the most racist. I am often sitting in a traffic jam in a rickshaw and within seconds am surrounded by beggars, while next to me is a Mercedes with an Indian businessman inside, clearly on more than 10 times my salary, and the beggars don’t approach him.
The media here too does constantly propagate the myth that western women are loose.
In virtually every Bollywood film I have seen a white woman is portrayed as a stripper, semi naked dance, etc and never in a serious role and never a ’sought after woman’ or the woman the hero wants to be with…
A friend of mine, a white actress, trying to make it in Bollywood, turns down scripts precisely because of this.
The only Bollywood film I can think of where a western woman was portrayed normally was Rang De Basanti.
As for the view of black people, the fact that sleeping with a black man in Fashion was deemed the worse possible crime is indicative of the mass view of black people. Yet the black people I have come across in India are some of the most civilized people you could meet – many come from well-to-do professional families in their home continent.
Now to be fair there are some white people that do propagate these myths – that wander around in dresses up to their knicker lines, caked in make-up, or backpackers who behave in inappropriate fashions. I have met white women in India, where even I am embarrassed at how they are dressed and know, through my Indian male friends, of backpackers from across the world, that will sleep with an Indian man in a no-strings attached relationship, often leaving the Indian man miffed.
However I have to say that these types of women do in no way reflect western women or global women and in fact they are often the dregs of their own societies. Every society has such people, even India.
Unfortunately India has always attracted such types, when it comes to the backpacker’s scene. Naturally not all backpackers fit this druggy loose profile and many are here for valid sightseeing or relaxation. I recently met the most delightful middle-class French tourists here on vacation.
But to judge the entire race of western women on the base of a few backpackers, who are the lowest of the low in their own societies anyway, would be like judging Indians, based on say three Indian prostitutes that visited the UK.)
Mind you, even I have been accused of being racist, when it was not intentional. So, in fact sometime something perceived to be racist might not have been intended as such. An Indian friend was narrating to me how his Indian friend had gone to his village and still not come back months later.
My response: “Why is it that all Indians do that – go to their village and disappear for months on end?” He was offended by this throwaway remark and accused me of being racist, when in fact; it was a stupid remark I said without thinking, but also vaguely out of curiosity. That could be why in the UK racism crimes are registered as hate crimes if the victim perceives them to be so.
At school William Blake’s poetry greatly influenced me to be anti racist. It really struck a chord in me at a very important age of growing up.
Anyway, I was delighted to see an Indian raise this subject, which will I guess persist as longs as foreigners continue to visit and live in India. It’s just good it is now being debated.
