This piece explores how skin, our first protector, is often weaponised through colourism and shame. Weaving personal experience with an analysis of KALA by GOGA and Killachoc, it examines internalised prejudice, silence, and the quiet violence of judging bodies by melanin rather than humanity.
The skin is the largest organ of the human body. It acts as a barrier, protecting the inner organs and systems that keep us alive and running from the external environment. It is also the medium through which we perceive touch. It is how we know what a flaming-hot iron box feels like, and how we recognise the warmth of sunlight striking our face on a bright morning.
All skin does this — with melanin or without it. Black; brown; white; 'dusky'; 'wheatish'; 'fair' — whatever you choose to call it. Yet, what serves as our first line of protection is often weaponised to discriminate and taunt.
In the summer of this year, I went on a short trip to Rajasthan with my friends. Naturally, I got tanned, and one of my relatives — someone who probably sees me twice a year — said, “Oh, your complexion has darkened so much. You should put turmeric on your face.” I was disgusted, and appalled by her audacity to comment on my body like that.
This impending judgement looms over everyone. I’ve seen one of my college friends put a turmeric pack on her face before going back home so that her parents wouldn’t notice her tan and call her ‘kala’. I’ve seen young children — particularly girls — being bullied by their mothers into trying every ‘trick’ in the book to somehow become fair overnight.
'KALA', a video conceptualised by GOGA and Killachoc, captures this deeply ingrained shame and discrimination associated with dark skin in our culture. Featuring dancers dressed in shades of nude and adorned with pearls, moving to ‘Kala Rey’ by Sneha Khanwalkar from Gangs of Wasseypur, the video becomes a visceral exploration of what it feels like to be ostracised — not only by society, but by oneself.
Through restrained yet powerful movement, the piece mirrors the constant inner dialogue of someone who has been made to feel like they do not belong. The body wants to leap, to rebel, to scream — but the heart hesitates, burdened by the belief that fitting in will always remain just out of reach, determined solely by the amount of melanin in one’s skin. This internal conflict is as suffocating as the external judgment.
The video also reflects the paralysis that comes with repeated scrutiny. There is an inability to speak out as fingers point at one’s deepest insecurities and labels them flaws. Words fail, lips feel sealed shut, and all that remains is the instinct to look down out of learned shame. KALA lays bare this quiet violence, reminding us how deeply colourism embeds itself into the ways we learn to see ourselves.
It forces us to confront how casually cruelty is normalised, how deeply colourism seeps into our homes and our language — until shame feels instinctive and self-policing becomes second nature. By giving form to these unspoken experiences, the video asks an uncomfortable but necessary question: what would it look like to unlearn this inherited prejudice? In reclaiming the body as a site of expression rather than judgement, KALA urges us to recognise skin for what it has always been: a vessel of survival and resistance.
You can watch the entire video on Instagram here.
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