There’s a bunch of different things that contribute to skin tone politics in India, many of which recapitulate the politics/aesthetics of skin tones in other parts of the world. They all suck, but they create a gestalt setup in India where it’s hard to tease out all the discrete sucky elements (in a suck chromotagraph, of course).

1. Skin color as indicator of laboring class. Sun exposure means manual laborer. Pares with similar discrimination in East Asia…China, Japan, and Korea I know of personally.

2. Skin color as measure of North-South. It’s not prolific, but in the north of India you will find individuals and groups that have prejudicial attitudes towards those from South India. This contains a racial element, as Southerns have more Dravidian features (wide face, flatter nose, dark brown skin), and you’ll hear people referred to as “darkies”—it doesn’t have quite the same vehemence as that term in the US South, but is loaded with contempt and condescension. Some folks incorporate into this a component of “they took arw jobz!” as particularly in urban areas like Delhi there’s an influx of South Indians seeking employment. Southerns also get crap for not talking right…SI languages are Dravidian, and it marks their Hindi, and those from SI rural areas may have pretty limited Hindi…and for holding jobs on the service/cheap labor end of the spectrum—though this last bit becomes a sort of Moebius-loop phenomena with all the other issues.

There’s a similar interest in skin-whitening in South America…though with a very different set of racial schematics…where women don’t want to look too black or too indigenous.

I should add that South Indians are not passively accepting about these judgements. There’s the equivalent of “black is beautiful” and a tremendous pride in Dravidian culture that are free-standing, not reactionary, as well as a conscious push-back against stereotypes laid on them by Northerners.