Shekhar Kapur answers netizens who criticised him for 'not casting dark-skinned leads'

The on-going debate about racism and colourism has become a trending topic of discussion on social media after two multinational companies announced dropping the use of words like ‘fair’ from their beauty products. Filmmaker Shekhar Kapur joined the group of critical voices about the rebranding of a popular 'fairness' cream brand. The cream was earlier known as 'Fair and Lovely' and now, the parent company Hindustan Unilever Limited announced their decision of dropping the word 'fair' from their product branding. 

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Shekhar Kapur gets questioned amid fairness cream controversy

On July 2, 2020, actor-director Shekhar Kapur called out Hindustan Unilever Limited and asked the company to 'prove their intentions' by featuring a dark-skinned girl on their packaging. It all started after HUL announced that their 'Fair and Lovely' cream will now be called 'Glow and Lovely'. While the new name has been getting a mixed response from the masses on social media, Kapur expressed his thoughts about the same on Twitter and wrote:

“So Fair and Lovely will now be called Glow and Lovely? C’mon Hindustan Lever. For years you’ve been profiting by destroying our nation’s young girl’s self worth by making rude comments about dark skin.

Now prove your ‘intentions’ by having a dark skinned girl on your packaging.”

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Check out his tweet below:

Soon after he shared the tweet, the filmmaker received a lot of flak from netizens who slammed him for casting only fair women as leads in his movies. One user wrote to Kapur, "Now you speak up for dusky people to raise your profile! Your movies didn’t star dark skin leads ..". Later, the filmmaker shut down replied by tweeting the title of his 1994's film, "Bandit Queen".

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For the unversed, The 1994's biographical film bagged a National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi that year, apart from several other awards at various award shows. Bandit Queen also premiered at 1994's Cannes Film Festival and later made its way to a few other film festivals as well. The Shekhar Kapur directorial was also India’s official entry for the category of Best Foreign Language Film at the 67th Academy Awards. The biographical film was based on the life of Phoolan Devi, a member of Parliament. 

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