Ugly Indians

DAREN SAMMY, the former West Indies captain, has belatedly discovered a terrible Indian secret — that a very large number of us are racist and bigoted. It, in fact, is an open secret — the surprising part is that it took Sammy seven years to learn the meaning of the world ‘kalu’, which he says he was called by spectators and teammates in the IPL outfit Sunrisers Hyderabad. Sammy, of African heritage but a native of the West Indian island nation of St Lucia, has expressed anger over the murder of an African-American, George Floyd, by the police in Minneapolis, US. He seems to also have reflected on his own experience as a black man. All along he’d thought ‘kalu’ translated to ‘strong stallion’, and was ‘uplifting’, so he used to tell people that that was his name. But then he came across American comedian Hasan Minhaj, who is of Indian descent, explaining the discriminatory use of ‘kalu’ in India — it’s an equivalent of ‘darkie’, perhaps even ‘nigger’. Sammy was suitably disgusted.

Michael Holding, the great West Indian fast bowler, has said racism in sport can’t be stamped out without tackling it in society. Holding is absolutely right — sport is just another opportunity for the most regressive, unenlightened people in a society to express their racism. Indian society is extremely colour-conscious. Advertisements for skin-whitening creams or fair-skinned brides in newspapers don’t shock us. We give people names based on physical characteristics they have no control over — thus it’s not a taboo to call people ‘langda’, ‘kaana’, ‘tunda’, ‘lamboo’ or ‘githha’. Designating people by the colour of their skin or any other physical characteristic is a strict no-no in civilised societies — we have not yet reached that level of awareness and sensitivity.

Three years ago, BJP leader Tarun Vijay declared that Indians can’t be called racists, saying: ‘If we (Indians) were racist, why would we have the entire South? Which is, you know... completely Tamil, you know Kerala, you know Karnataka and Andhra. Why do we live with them? We have blacks, black people all around us.’ Vijay speaks for a lot of us. This is us. Sammy has shown us the mirror. The reflection — brown, white or black — is disgusting.

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