Fair Heroes and Heroines, Dark Commoners-Colorism in Bangla Films

In human society there exists colour based variation. In many ethnicities, colour variation is
associated with beauty and attractiveness prevails in society. In dominant endogamous
societies within an ethnicity, these characteristics are preserved and highly prioritized as
markers of physical attractiveness in that ethnicity. Such dominant groups within an ethnicity
dominate others, among other things, in terms of public portrayal, places, spaces and various
opportunities on the basis of characteristics largely possessed and hence prized by dominant
groups and are held up as aspiration goals to the rest. People who have fairer skin tone as
compared to the darker skin tone tries to dominate other in terms of public portrayal. These
public portrayals are clearly seen in the case of visual mass media like cinema and
advertisement. This paper explores whether such skin colour tone based bias exists in case of
Bangali ethnicity. The skin tone of heroes and heroines of popular Bangla films produced in
West Bengal was taken as a proxy to explore the nature of skin colour tone based bias (if
any), in case of the Bangla mother tongue population, the 5th largest mother tongue
population in the world. We found that the heroes and heroines have significantly lighter skin
tones than other males and females of same ethnicity who are portrayed in a film. The results
suggest that there exists significant skin colour based bias in the selection of heroes and
heroines in Bangla films.