Troll asks Shekhar Kapur why he never cast any dark skin leads in his films, this was his reply

Shekhar Kapur said fairness creams can show the good intention by having a ‘dark skinned girl’ model for their product. He also reminded a troll of Bandit Queen when asked why he never had a dark skinned girl as lead in his films.

Filmmaker Shekhar Kapur has joined the critical voices responding to the rebranding of a fairness cream brand. The cream was formerly known as Fair and Lovely and the company -Hindustan Unilever Limited recently announced they would drop the word ‘fair’ from their product branding.

Shekhar tweeted late Thursday, “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.”

 

When a Twitter user tried to take a dig at him writing, “Now you speak up for dusky people to raise your profile ! Your movies didn’t star dark skin leads,” Shekhar simply mentioned one of his initial films. “Bandit Queen,” the filmmaker wrote. The film was based on dacoit Phoolan Devi, played by Seema Biswas alongside Manoj Bajpayee and Nirmal Pandey.

 

The 1994 film bagged that year’s National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi, apart from a few other awards. Bandit Queen premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and travelled to a few other film festivals as well. The film was also India’’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 67th Academy Awards. However, it did not make it to the nominations.

Earlier, when the company had announced dropping words like ‘fair’ from their branding, Shekhar had made similar suggestions in a tweet, “Hope @unilever have a darker skinned girl as the model on the pack. Will they have the courage to do that? @fbbhutto.”