Once upon a time, there was a prophet. “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,” sacredly he quoted. The sanctity of the proverb passed the test of time, but none asked the beholder or the prophet, “What makes something beautiful?”
Being born in the land of diversity, our eyes find beauty in the milky-white complexioned super-stars from some mysterious and mystical planet afar. A recent instance that shocked the Kerala High Court was a case of conceiving a “good boy child”. A newly-married woman was handed over a translation of some antique article that carried explicit instructions to reproduce a “good boy child”. At first glance, this would appear as an unscientific, bizarre, and regressive practice, but the crux is the psyche behind it.
A fascist psyche of believing blindly in the concept of eugenics can be seen here. The notion of beauty; from the baroque, illusionary, perfect and absolute figures and conception of Greek gods and goddesses to the magnanimity of ‘zero figure’; beauty ceases to have meaning. Even the so-called ‘dark is beautiful’ battling against the idea of ‘fair and lovely’ is nothing more than the epitaph of beauty itself. Beauty cannot be purchased.
Beauty is the absence of hate. Whatever you hate becomes ugly. Be it a colour, gender, country, race, ethnicity, labour, profession, and all fractions of our fractured reality. If one believes in the materialist conception of the world, one would definitely understand that each and everything has a definite origin. What appears is not necessarily true; hence each and every perception and conception followed by the creation of a human being is a product of their labour.
Why are the paintings of Van Gogh beautiful as is the music of Vivaldi? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. Beauty is the absence of hate. Man’s capacity to perceive, produce, and reproduce has always been in accordance with the sense, aesthetic, beauty, and its assimilation.
In the prevailing capitalist mode of economy, misery and gains are destined to become a commodity. Skin tones ranging from dark to fair, containing many hues and shades, are hinged on a whole gamut of natural, geographical, ecological and biological basis.
The introduction of terms like colourism or shadeism in the public realm bifurcated the ill of racism to the extent of understanding racial discrimination strictly based on human skin tones. An article published at the World Economic Forum (WEF) estimated the growth of the skin-lightning products industry at a mammoth $8.9 billion by 2024.
Like caste discrimination, skin biases also affect the workday lives of individuals. It accounts for career and professional inequality, social and political negligence and cultural discrimination. Skin and caste are united in the sense of their origins and socio-economic conditions.
The symptomatic treatment of colourism or shadeism, which includes regressive practises like awarding beauty pageant prizes and awards to dark-skinned people deliberately or capitalising on dark-skinned people by turning their skin colour into a commodity not only polluted the discourse but also led to the fall, which is more than evident.
We are living in times where the absurdities of being photoshopped to a lighter tone or advertising to find a ‘fair’ partner is a norm. We are critiquing the phenomenon peripherally by resisting its symptoms. The supremacy of race results in the supremacy of colour.
The commoditisation of skin tone and racial discrimination guides the laws of beauty of our times. Ageing, another implicit fact of life, is also expected to be covered up. The ancient fairytale wish of not growing old or anti-ageing not only complements the above-discussed industry but goes beyond the realm of skin and penetrates into the life and existence of individuals. The aged is no more beautiful and no more useful (read: a burden) in the current economic system.
The grotesque theological basis of our existence and thought never allows us to transform the conception of ‘fair’ as ‘unfair’. Rights-based movements couldn’t change the notion of beauty. What we require today is a completely new outlook based on the philosophical investigation of life.
The brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020 once again sparked a heated debate about racial discrimination. The eruption of ‘Black Lives Matter’ worldwide took the movement by storm, but temporarily. The matter of the short-lived experience lies in the name itself. Until and unless ‘Black Lives Matter’ didn’t become ‘All Lives Matter’, or to be more precise, ‘Lives Matter’, the fundamental change is not going to come.
One has to understand and assimilate, from consciousness to creation; all of it is a product of man’s labour. Here lies the meaning of aesthetics and beauty. The better the work done, the more beautiful will appear the person. A sportsman can be beautiful while playing, as a worker while constructing.
In totality, beauty is derived from both, the ins and outs of an individual. The inside comprises intellect, behaviour, sensibility and politics of life. The outs comprise physique, activity and labour. Beauty can only come to life when it is the amalgamation of all of these.
Bodily appearance can purely make way for attraction, another periphery. Beauty lies in the core. The plastic images obtained by layers of makeup distract you from the core.
Beauty must disgrace the hitherto laws of ‘beautiful’. The conceived meaning of beauty is a sign that we are living in a time of synonyms, where attractive, sexy, and beautiful appear to be the same. An arena where we can neither grasp the actual essence of the words, nor one where the prevailing dictionary fulfils its meaning.
Time calls for the new words, meaning and essence. It demands fundamental change. To everything (turn, turn, turn) there is a season (turn, turn, turn), but it shall no more be a season in hell.
