Last chunk, I swear:

Skin color as aesthetic feature reflecting the preferences of hegemons: theoretically, first the Arya…but 100% confirmably the tastes of the Mughals and British, and much moreso the latter.

I not sure I can put a finger on the “where/wherefore” of Mughal tastes in skin color, but it likely traces to the various cultural sources that blended to make Babur’s people: Turks, steppe people, Afghans, Persians. There’s a lot of North Indian regions where “white is right” meshes with centuries of people of Central Asian background lording over serfs, intermarrying, and establishing a social distinction in which color is indexical of class…for example, the Kashmiri Pandits, who are descended from Turkic peoples but now style themselves Brahmins, and can be really insufferable about how great they are. These are the people who got kicked out of Kashmir because their tenant farmers decided to take that “no class distinction” part of Islam very seriously.

The British…well, there’s a ton of paperwork demonstrating that with regarding to India, the Brits thought the tall, fair-skinned people were better people…morally, mentally, aesthetically…than the shorter brown ones, and justified this thinking with the cutting edge in anthropometrics, race science, and lineage from Noah’s sons. Pathan resistance fighters were glorious adversaries, Bengali protestors were horrible amoral brown monkeys. Even as Indians of all ethnic varieties got British educations and took administrative positions, the British heaped scorn on the Western-suit wearing “babus”—who very invariably depicted as short, brown, and engaged in mimicry of their betters—set in contrast to the dignity of the unreconstructed “warrior classes” of Indian, who were described as taller, paler, and self-possessed. And they had zero problem laying out this distinction for their Indian subjects: a lot of the “darkies” stuff you hear nowadays from North Indians echoes British categories and descriptors, though I can’t prove that’s a causation rather than a correlation.

Look no farther than British impressions of Mohandas Gandhi to see the trend I’m talking about…and to see the impact, look at the sad, sad arguments Gandhi made in South Africa trying to set apart Indians from the local (black) Africans at the beginning of his activist career. British racial categories—degrees of blackness—had a very powerful effect on Indians attempted to define themselves within the Raj, and a lot of energy is expelled by scholars and thinkers trying to “demonstrate” that India was a worthy civilization. Retrospectively, it’s a messed up-read: you got the colonized petitioning the colonizers to accord them agency. I truly wonder if some of those writers/thinkers weren’t intensely aware of the British treatment of blacks in Africa, and were frightened to be ascribed the same qualities…and thus acceptable targets for the same treatment.

PS chromatograph.