Sarada Muraleedharan
| Photo Credit: special arrangement
Kerala Chief Secretary Sarada Muraleedharan has triggered a social debate on “entrenched colourism” in society.
In an evocative and poignant Facebook post, Ms. Muraleedharan spotlighted the inequity of skin tone bias against women in workplaces, domestic circles, hiring practices and professional appraisals.
Ms. Muraleedhran noted she was a victim of the entrenched prejudice against women of dark complexion and implied that being at the apex of the administration was no insulation against the bigotry.
“I heard an interesting comment yesterday on my stewardship as chief secretary – that it is as black as my husband’s was white.Hmmm.I need to own my blackness”, she wrote.
Ms. Muraleedharan said she had deleted the post because the “flurry of responses flustered” her. However, the Chief Secretary said she resurrected the post because the issue warranted discussion.
Ms. Muraleedharan said that since she took charge in September 2024, she had endured a “relentless parade of comparisons with my predecessor” (her husband and former Chief Secretary V. Venu).
She also noted shades of misogyny in the censorious juxtaposing of the careers of the husband-wife bureaucratic duo.
‘Labelled black’
“It was about being labelled black with that quiet subtext of being a woman as if that were something to be desperately ashamed of. Black is as black does. Not just black the colour, but the black the never good, black the malaise, the cold despotism, the heart of darkness. But why should blacks be vilified?”
At a stroke, Ms. Muraleedharan appeared to have tapped into a wellspring of support in her public crusade against entrenched colourism tinted with thinly disguised misogyny.
Ms. Muraleedharan’s post went viral on social and conventional media and appeared to incrementally gather social and political momentum.
For one, Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan “saluted” Ms. Muraleedharan for her candid truth-telling. In a Facebook post, Mr. Satheesan said Ms. Muraleedharan had torn the veil over colourism in Kerala society. “I was born to a dark-skinned mother”, he noted.
J. Devika, historian, social critic and professor at the Centre for Development Studies, said the provenance of discrimination against dark-skinned persons was a historical burden bequeathed to society by the country’s colonial past.
She said “so-called progressive Kerala” was still beholden to the narrative of colourism as evident in matrimonial advertising, which placed a premium on white-skinned persons.
Ms. Devika expressed solidarity with and admiration for Ms. Muraleedharan’s forthrightness. “Not skin tone, but Ms. Muraleedharan’s sterling bureaucratic career, including the successful urban poverty mitigation project, Kudumbashree, she built from scratch, defined her,” she said.
Actor Kukku Parameswaran stated that she had faced colourism in life. “I have a fair man by my side, and even in domestic circles, people wonder how someone with my skin tone ended up with my husband,” she mentioned.
Ms. Parameswaran pointed out that skin-tone-based hiring practices were incrementally diminishing in the Malayalam film industry. She said Ms. Muraleedharan was an inspiring bureaucrat. “Blackness lies in the eye of the prejudiced beholder, not in Ms. Muraleedharan’s person,” she remarked.
Kerala State Youth Commission chairperson and State committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] Chintha Jerome said Ms. Muraleedharan had spotlighted the pockets of revanchism, colourism and misogyny that festered unnoticed in Kerala society.
“The younger demographic is increasingly progressive, and retrogressive mindsets appear to be on the wane”, she said.
Published – March 26, 2025 02:49 pm IST
