Maneesha Mankad wears bold colors because they make her feel like herself: bubbly, confident, Indian.
Mankad loves to wear hints of her Indian heritage every day, whether it’s a patterned shirt, her mother’s earrings or kajal, a dark, natural eyeliner. Even when she’s not wearing traditional outfits, she usually puts on understated jewelry and accessories that still show off her cultural traditions. However, whenever Mankad gets the opportunity to wear the delicate jewelry and colorful garments, she goes all out.
Indian jewelry can include heavy earrings, necklaces and bangles (bracelets). She loves to wear her mother’s earrings and multiple rings across her hands.
Jewelry is a way wealth is symbolized in India. Not only is it a part of everyday life, but expensive, bold and flashy jewelry is common on religious holidays and celebrations. Gold jewelry is often passed down through generations, and Mankad hopes that when her daughters inherit her jewelry, they learn to welcome it just like Mankad learned.
“They’ll be even worried about wearing a nose ring, earrings, necklace and bangles all together,” Mankad said. “That’s our culture, but they won’t do that because they’re worried that it’s too much. But according to whom, right?”
Mankad is hoping to push back on these beauty standards. She wants her daughters to feel comfortable and confident in who they grow up to be and wants their Indian heritage to be something that they are proud of, hoping that they develop independent ideas about fashion and beauty, something Mankad has taken years to do.
Mankad grew up privileged in India: she came from a middle-class family of upper caste Hindus and her parents were well educated. She also was fair-skinned.
In India, fairer-skinned Indians are often considered more beautiful. This skin tone divide in the same racial population still exists today; it’s called colorism. In India, fairer skin is associated with a higher caste, i.e., someone of more importance. While all castes were meant to be valuable and carry out certain tasks to benefit society, over hundreds of years the system evolved into a hierarchy: priests stood at the top; warriors were just below them; farmers, craftsmen and merchants followed; and servants were at the bottom of the pyramid. This caste system provided social structure and stability and played a large part in Indian lives.
“I did nothing to get this color of my skin, and that’s just giving me some advantage and privilege as a result,” Mankad said.
Mankad hears comments saying that she looks like the upper class because of her fair skin. But, she didn’t just hear these phrases in India; she’s even heard them in the United States and from non-Indians. Mankad faced these comments from her neighbors and has even had people tell her that she looks like “a different kind of Indian.”
“I didn’t take that as a compliment,” Mankad said. “I could clearly tell they were trying to create a divide amongst people, regardless of what they were saying to me.”
She knows that in most situations, like being the Department Chair for Mathematics at CHS, she’s one of few representing Indians and people of color. One way Mankad has become self-assured over years of these conversations has been by showing off her culture through jewelry and clothing.
Mankad’s children also have faced numerous instances of colorism. Out of Mankad’s two daughters, her oldest has darker skin than her sister and Mankad herself. Mankad felt her heart drop when people made comments and comparisons about her daughter’s skin tone. It was hurtful to Mankad as an Indian and as a mother.
Mankad feels that this beauty standard has affected her daughters’ whole lives, starting when they were little girls first learning they looked different than their classmates. Mankad remembers one of the first encounters her daughter faced with ideas of beauty and being fair-skinned. Her daughter, at the time, was in first grade.
“One of the girls in my daughter’s class said to her, ‘My mom told me I can’t play with you because you’re brown,'” Mankad said.
Mankad believes this opened a door for her daughters to other similar comments. This perception of themselves as “different” started from a young age.
“As you hear people say these things, you think, ‘Is there something about me being brown that makes me not good to hang around with?'” Mankad said.
Being from a foreign group can also make others group you together indiscriminately. Mankad’s daughters faced challenges in school when teachers couldn’t tell them and their other Indian friends apart. It made her and her daughter upset because each Indian student had unique talents, traits and interests.
She believes that these kinds of events shape people’s perception of themselves. In the case of her daughters, she thinks this impacts their perception of whether they are beautiful or not, especially if some can’t tell them apart from an Indian peer who looks dissimilar.
“Sometimes, people wouldn’t be bothered to find out enough about them that they would be able to distinguish one Indian from another Indian,” Mankad said. “How do you confuse those people and not bother to know them as individuals?”
Mankad knows that her daughters have grown into independent and confident women, despite the situations they were put in when they were younger.
Mankad relates to her own children through these experiences, but also to young children of color.
“They clearly stand apart because they try so hard in every other way to make up for the lack of what they perceive to be missing in them,” Mankad said. “It makes me cry, and I feel for young people having to go through that experience.”
Witnessing what her daughters went through, Mankad believes that feeling confident and beautiful starts from within. It starts by recognizing someone for who they are and not just what they look like. It starts with making sure kids feel acknowledged.
“You don’t see yourself as beautiful, valuable, seen or heard when you are left out like that,” Mankad said.
When teaching, Mankad strives to get to know each and every one of her students. She loves working at CHS because of the relationship-based nature of the school and knows that every teacher cares about their students.
When she first started at CHS, Mankad was the only Indian teacher. She felt a pressure to represent her community “properly.” She began to hesitate when choosing her clothes, making sure to wear bright colors and present in a certain way.
As years passed, Mankad grew to accept the changing culture. She’s more outgoing, wearing whatever makes her feel happy. She’s hoping to pass down her traditions including cultural clothings, jewelries and mindsets to her daughters, encouraging them to embrace their Indian heritage.
Seeing her daughters grow up and be surrounded by other brown people is something Mankad didn’t experience when she first came to America. Knowing that her daughters won’t have to explain their heritage to others makes Mankad see the importance of embracing different cultures and identities.
Mankad still struggles with expressing her views to a larger community, uncertain of how they will be perceived. Sometimes, she goes home doubting herself, questioning if she had said the right thing or if she went too far.
“I worry about every single thing, even now having grown in confidence,” Mankad said. “I go home thinking, ‘Did I express all of myself or did I hold myself back?'”
But, she’s not exhausted from having to express herself.
“Being in the education world has really helped me open up my mind and grow as an individual, in my ability to think about beauty, talent and characteristics of a person and what shapes them in ways that I would not have been able to realize, like how privilege or how where they are born and what kind of body and physical traits they have impacted them,” Mankad said.
Mankad will always love to share her culture with her community. She loves the feeling when a friend asks her about the food she’s eating or the jewelry on her body.
Mankad works to uplift the younger generations and help them build confidence. She tries daily to not compliment someone solely on their looks, instead complimenting so it impacts students internally. She tries not to be a person who makes young girls rely on constant validation and compliments in order for them to feel good about themselves. She knows that she, as well as her colleagues, are role models and impact their students daily.
“I think we have to be courageous so that we can be our whole selves,” Mankad said.
