‘I’m a woman & dark, time I own both: Kerala chief secretary Sarada Muraleedharan

Thiruvananthapuram:

Kerala chief secretary

Sarada Muraleedharan fired back Wednesday at a remark about her skin colour, as it compared her tenure being “as black as her husband’s was white”. In a Facebook post, which she initially deleted but later reposted, she spoke out against deep-seated colour and gender biases in society.
The comment likened her administration to the colour black, while her predecessor and husband V Venu’s was called “white”. Without naming the person behind the remark, Muraleedharan hinted at sexism in the criticism but refused to let the insult define her.
“I think it’s high time for me not to feel defensive about either the fact that I am a woman or that I am dark,” she said, according to news agency ANI. “It’s time that I own both of these and that I come out strongly. Maybe it will help those people who are going through similar feelings of insecurity and inadequacy to feel that we are worth it and we don’t need external validation.”
The IAS officer, the first woman to hold the state’s top bureaucratic post, has made a career out of breaking barriers. Her message was clear: She’s not backing down.

Taking to Facebook, she addressed the cultural fixation with fairness and shared a childhood memory of struggling with it. “As a four-year-old, I asked my mother whether she could put me back in her womb and bring me out again, all white and pretty,” she wrote.
That perspective changed over time, thanks to her children, she said. “That black is beautiful. That black is gorgeousness. That I dig black.”
Muraleedharan dismissed the remark as possibly meant in jest but called out the deeper implication.
“Behind the humour, there is an entire value connotation that black is not good, that there is something wrong with it,” she told ANI. “What is wrong about black? Isn’t it more a perception than a reality? It is important to claim blackness as something worthwhile and beautiful.”
Muraleedharan said beauty is not a singular thing. “The very fact of looking for a particular standard of beauty is problematic because ultimately beauty is not a single thing, it's multiple things. We should all enjoy every kind of beauty,” she said.
Her response sparked a wave of support across political lines. Opposition leader VD Satheesan of Congress called her words “alarming” proof that even a high-ranking official isn’t immune to discrimination. “Even a senior IAS officer at her level expressed such thoughts, which is alarming,” Satheesan said, emphasising that biases — both overt and subtle — continue to shape perceptions.
State education minister V Sivankutty of CPM praised Muraleedharan’s stand as “courageous”, adding that discrimination based on skin colour has no place in the state.