Ankur Rathee has pushed back on the idea that Hollywood is narrowing the image of Indian women, and has instead aimed the criticism at Hindi cinema. In an exclusive conversation with News18, he called Indian cinema’s fair-skin bias “dangerous” and tied it to a “colonial hangover.”
The comments arrived after the release of Best Of The Best, the Hasan Minhaj film in which he appears alongside Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia. The casting reignited a familiar debate about who gets to represent Indians on global screens.
Colour-blind casting in Best Of The Best
Some viewers have questioned whether the prominence of dark-skinned, South Indian-origin actors in Hollywood reflects a limited idea of Indian identity. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan has previously spoken about colourism and the importance of brown-skinned girls seeing themselves as desirable; the film gave that argument a new platform.
Rathee reads the casting differently. He told News18 that colour was not an issue in the project and that young women watching Maitreyi and Priyanka will see themselves as glamorous and desirable. He said the West has moved past colourism “to some extent,” even if there is further to go. He also pointed to the long careers of artists such as Denzel Washington and Lupita Nyong’o as evidence that audiences can admire performers regardless of complexion.
Hollywood’s example, Indian cinema’s exception
“There’s definitely a delta between both these industries and how they approach skin colour,” Rathee said. In his view, Hollywood is a melting pot while Indian cinema remains one of India’s largest cultural forces, still linking beauty to the shade of skin.
- Hollywood: a melting pot that has made space for Black artists to be celebrated across decades.
- Indian cinema: a cultural force that still ties glamour to fairness.
- The consequence: a skewed standard that tells dusky-complexioned women they do not measure up.
The colonial hangover
Rathee said cinema did not create India’s colourism, but it “definitely propagates it.” He traced the fair-skin obsession to a colonial hangover, arguing that when the largest cultural force repeatedly equates beauty with lighter skin, it sets a dangerous precedent.
His point is structural rather than individual. The medium keeps reinforcing an old hierarchy, and he wants casting to become part of the correction.
Why this matters now
Colourism has long been one of Hindi cinema’s quiet conventions. An actor naming it from inside the industry shifts attention from a single Hollywood casting debate to the norms Indian filmmakers control. The practical change is not complicated: widen who can be cast in leading, glamorous roles so the screen stops repeating a single standard.
For a medium that prides itself on shaping aspiration, that is a standard worth interrogating.
Source: News18
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