Brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair

Take a look at the art below:

Source

A mother who has the Hindu "dot" on her forehead, with wavy hair and holding a child.

But then there is something that is off, right?  She is not dressed in the traditional sari.  Hindu women in history were not portrayed with pearl necklaces, but with gold and silver and precious stones.

So, you want to guess again on what that image is about?

If I had been asked to guess, which I was not because I read about it instead, I would never have imagined that it is a representation of Mary holding baby Jesus!

Here's the image in full:

The Holy Family, is how it is titled.

The note there is even more head-spinning: "c.1620s Northern India, Mughal court, early 17th century"

An artist in the Mughal court created this "Indian"-looking image of Mary holding Jesus, and making sure that the baby--whose hands are around a beautiful vase--does not knock the vase over.

Is this watercolor art work in India then?

Nope.

It is in Cleveland.

Yes, the Cleveland that every comedian jokes about.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art.

How did it get there?

Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

How did these people get their hands on a Mughal court art from 400 years ago?  Stolen merchandise that has passed through many hands, and now in a museum half way around the world from where it was created!

As Ricky Ricardo often told Lucy, "you have some 'splaining to do!"

How did I get to viewing that piece of art?

I jumped off a hyperlink in this piece on how in art depictions Jesus started resembling white Europeans, even though Jesus was born in the Middle East.

The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime

Academics have talked about Jesus' "whiteness" a lot, and how it is highly likely that he was nothing like the northern European depictions.  Will the Black Lives Matter movement of today, and the challenge to the white narratives, dethrone the image of the white savior with blue eyes and blond hair?

I like this description:

Jesus was a man of color who was murdered by law enforcement and state-sanctioned violence for insurrection against the Roman Empire.

That is one powerful image!

So, ... brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair.  Jesus probably looked like me when I had lots of hair on my head!

Me at 27

Jesus looked like this? Source

We were all black. That is fair and lovely!

My only trip to Africa was when I spent three weeks in Tanzania, in December 2009. The English language newspapers at Dar es Salaam reported on the front pages about the anti-gay fervor in neighboring Uganda and the role of US-based missionaries in that brouhaha. I was so convinced that it was all a fleeting political issue that I threw away those pages; little did I know!  Instead, I brought with me a couple of pages that were news items on how beauty products were marketed targeting the women--because, among others, the products included "skin whiteners."

The anti-gay nastiness has become a law of the land in Uganda, and it seems like it might even spread to a few more countries in Africa. That will be a post for another day, I am sure.  The skin whiteners continue to fascinate me because I grew up in a culture, in a country, where the skin complexion was categorized in so many ways, like.

Coal black
Dark
Dark brown
Brown
Light brown
Wheatish
Fair
Very fair
And, yes, even white!

A graduate school friend, who was from Nigeria, used to joke that there isn't any black skin--it is all only various shades of brown.  A white American grad school colleague noted that there is no white skin and once held a blank sheet of white paper against his skin to prove his point.

In the old country, "Fair & Lovely" was a product that was sold as a skin whitener.  It still is. In a "liberalized" economy that India now is, there are, I bet, quite a few competing products as well.

"White," as I used to joke in graduate school, is nothing but a serious medical condition of pigment deficiency.  Lack of melanin.  My version of "brown pride," I suppose.

The Economist reports a study that confirms why we have melanin:

One suggestion often proferred is that the melanin in black skin, by absorbing ultraviolet light which might otherwise damage DNA and cause mutations, protects against skin cancer.

The confirmation came via:

a study by Mel Greaves, of the Institute of Cancer Research, in Britain, just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, settles the question in favour of cancer being the driving force. Dr Greaves does so by reviewing the clinical data about those Africans who do not have black skin because they are albino.

As humans wandered into the northern latitudes, there was less of a danger of cancer from the way-less intense sunlight. On the other hand, a lighter skin tone facilitated synthesizing Vitamin D.  The cost-benefit analysis then yielded the "whites."

My favorite Tamil expression for the much adored skin tone is பால் நெரம் (milk color.)  Imagine a Tamil walking around with a skin color that matches the color of milk. If such a person existed, that will be one brief existence on the planet, in those uber-hot conditions!

Of course, this also means that the darker skinned Tamil folks like me living in northern latitudes that aren't our original home, and especially in this part of the Pacific Northwest where the sun rarely ever peeks through the cloud cover, well, we need Vitamin D supplements. But, hey, no worries about any skin cancer though ;)

I wonder if Wendy Doniger will have anything about the "fair" and "dark" skinned Hindu gods.  I will find out when I return to blogging about "The Hindus."