Festering racism in India is back under the spotlight after a wave of violence was unleashed on Nigerian students in Greater Noida, who were beaten, kicked and punched by a rampaging mob. For the 40,000-odd Africans living in India, this was an only-too-familiar reminder of the danger the community lives under.

Six Africans were thrashed in three separate incidents in Chhattarpur last year. A week before that, a Congolese national was bludgeoned to death. In Bengaluru, a Tanzanian student and her friends were attacked by a mob last year.
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In our television serials, advertisements and our biggest cultural influencer – Bollywood – people of darker skin tones are pushed to the margins to be caricatured as comic relief or demonised as villains. Dark-skinned actors find themselves cast as villains or grotesque comics, and female artists find that their skin colour is preventing them from being cast as an object of the hero’s desire. They are drug-peddlers, rapists, criminals or vamps who will be defeated by the mostly fair-skinned hero.

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Our movies are frequently set abroad but our heroes don’t seem to meet any non-white people there, even in ostensibly multi-ethnic cities such as New York. African characters are either absent or seen as animalistic or beast-like. Such tropes are watched, enjoyed and internalised by millions of people who treat Bollywood as a near religion and then go back into their cities and villages, remembering that dark-skin is a indicator of danger and crime.