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I have to agree. Being in the sun a lot doesn't make my skin permanantly darker.
I have several Indian clients and their skin color varies quite a bit. It must be the genetic makeup. They range from very dark, Indian immigrants via England, and various shades of dusky olive, some fairly light skinned.
When in Cambodia, we were told that the darkness of the Cambodian skin was due to the rulers marrying with INdian royalty, thereby making their skin darker than the Thais or possibly Vietnamese.
That, and Cambodia was a major outpost for trade between China and India. Lots of Indian traders stopped through and often stayed and married into the local populace throughout the centuries.
I always hear Southern Europeans deny that they are darker, why?
History and culture. Starting with the Rennaissance in Europe, people saw darker colored people as "less advanced" or "enlightened" as their Northern European brothers. It is around this time that being "dark" became synonymous with being bad. So they were discriminated against. And Southern Europeans knew that while they had the ancient Greeks and Romans, they never kept going, so it resulted in an inferiority complex. This perpetuated to modern times. For all of modern history, which I define as 1860 onwards, Italy and Spain were seen as sort of backward neighbors getting left in the dust while Germany, Prussia, France, England, Russia, etc. were all advancing and all forming colonies and basically conquering the world. Even the "backwards and brutish" Americans were forming their own empire. Spain never did recover after the Spanish/American war. Italy even during WWII was seen as the "soft white underbelly of Europe."
There's also the agrarian side of things. People spending all day in the sun tan more. People who needed to do manual labor in the sun were seen as part of an underclass. So people who were naturally darker wanted to deny they were "underclass."
It's not so much like this anymore. People have started to not really give a sh*t. In Asia, too, being pale is still seen as being of high stature.
Indians are a rather mixed people. There are aboriginals who tend to be rather dark. And since the caste crap is still present, though discrimination based on it officially illegal, mixing is still not widespread.
Especially in the north there have been various waves of intruders from regions west of India, e.g. Arabs, Persians etc. Over the centuries they have left their traces...
The south has been less accessible to invaders so they are not as mixed, and usually darker. Some Tamils for instance are as dark as Africans. Just a couple of days ago I saw this picture of a Tamil girl http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/...l_1395968c.jpg
Most Indians in the media (especially Bollywood) are rather light-skinned, often with greenish eyes, as let's face it, Bollywood is racist. Indians in general tend to be a bit racist. They promote people like the actress Aishwarya http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r-GNZsKJjU...rya-Rai_18.jpg
But they are not the norm at all.
From my desi clients and friends: South (Dravidian speakers) = mostly dark, North (Hindi speakers)= mostly light. You can, in fact, find Indians who look like they are from other nationalities: Romania, Italy, Spain, etc. Some scientists speculate the picts (Scots almost superceded by the Celts) might have come from there as well, and for all we know so might the Latins have.
Yes, there is so much variety in India. India is big country with huge population too. In north you will found that the skin color is white whereas in south skin color is dark. this is also due to climate difference.
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Racism in India
