Anbudan - Speaking Dark Skinned Indian Women's Truth

 

Have you people watched Anbudan, starring Arun Vijay and Ramba? It was released in the year 2000.

It's easily one of my favorite Tamil movies.

So, the hero (Sathya) gets acquainted with a girl named Thilothy whom he only speaks to on the phone and through letters. He had never seen the girl, but she had seen him. He falls in love with her and begs to see her and she agrees.

She tells him that she will be on a bus, and he must find her among the girls seated on the bus.

Sathya would approach only the fairest and “beautiful” girls in the bus, asking each one if she’s Thilothy – to no avail. Convinced that Thilothy is not on the bus, he leaves in disappointment.

Thilothy then writes a letter to Sathya, saying, “You asked only the girls you found beautiful – fair skinned with good physique and features if they are Thilothy. You didn’t even glance at the dark-skinned, frail looking girl who was expecting you to come and ask, “Are you Thilothy?” At the end of the day, only looks matter, right? I am writing to you to say that you won’t find me forever. As I’m so horrible looking, I’m going to end my life.”

Sathya scrambles to find Thilothy. At last, he only sees her feet as her lifeless body gets loaded into the incinerator at the crematorium.

Sathya regrets his bias and unspoken expectations on Thilothy’s appearance.

I think this is the one and only Indian movie that spoke about the discrimination dark-skinned Indian women face and express how they feel about it. 

They never showed Thilothy but she left a lasting impression – she spoke for all the girls who are sidelined, considered dregs, and short-changed due to their looks.

One more aspect I like in this movie is Sathya rejecting Nimmi (Ramba) for Thilothy. 

The disheartening fact is, however, he expected Thilothy to be equal to Ramba’s “beauty.”

The movie highlights the ingrained bias that exists in all of us. 

If we didn’t see our lover, the primary expectation is them being conventionally beautiful/handsome. The perfect picture would be painted – fair skinned, “good looking.” And we’d act on that confirmation bias.

Mujhe Dosthi Karogi is another movie that pinpoints this comparison bias. 

Hrithik loves Rani Mukherjee through email correspondence. But when they finally meet, Hrithik decides that the fairer and “prettier” Kareena Kapoor is the one he had been communicating with and fell in love with.

Anbudan teaches the lesson to keep our opinions open about how a person makes us feel rather than expecting them to look a certain way. 

The movie bravely voiced out the undisclosed feelings of dark-skinned women being relegated, a topic filmmakers of today avoid like a plague.

Of course, this movie didn’t do well. We don’t like it when dark skinned women are represented as the hero’s love interest in movies, do we? And we cannot accept men rejecting "beautiful", white skinned women.

Darker toned women should only be on screen as the Tata salt skinned heroine’s friends and a woman for the hero to mock. If they showed Thilothy, she’d probably be trolled today. 

Anbudan broke the mold.

 I'm waiting for Indian movies that convey the feelings of women who are considered, “unattractive and dull with the girl-next-door look” in a way that it creates real change in dark skinned women’s representation in cinema. 

And it's been 26 years.