‘I need to own my blackness’: Kerala chief secretary on insult to her complexion

Sarada’s immediate predecessor was her husband V Venu, who had retired on 31 August, 2024).

“I need to own my blackness,” she wrote. Although she eventually deleted her post, she reposted it later with a detailed statement that said: “I was flustered by the flurry of responses. I am reposting it because certain well-wishers said that there were things there that needed to be discussed. I agree. So here goes, once again”.

“Why did I want to call this particular one out? I was hurt, yes. But then these last seven months have been a relentless parade of comparisons with my predecessor, and I have become quite inured. It was about being labelled black (with that quiet sub-text of being a woman), as if that were something to be desperately ashamed of. Black is as black does. Not just black the colour, but black the ne’er do good, black the malaise, the cold despotism, the heart of darkness,” she said in her post.

“But why should black be vilified? Black is the all-pervasive truth of the universe. Black is that which can absorb anything, the most powerful pulse of energy known to humankind. It is the colour that works on everyone, the dress code for office, the lustre of evening wear, the essence of kajol, the promise of rain,” she wrote.

She goes on to say: “As a four-year-old, I apparently asked my mother whether she could put me back in her womb and bring me out again, all white and pretty. I have lived for over 50 years buried under that narrative of not being a colour that was good enough. And buying into that narrative. Of not seeing beauty or value in black. Of being fascinated by fair skin. And fair minds, and all that was fair and good and wholesome. And of feeling that I was a lesser person for not being that – which had to be compensated somehow”.

That was, until she had children, she wrote. Her children, she said, “gloried in their black heritage. Who kept finding beauty where I noticed none. Who thought that black was awesome. Who helped me see. That black is beautiful. That black is gorgeousness. That I dig black,’’ she said.

Congress legislator and Opposition leader V D Satheesan was among those who came out in support of her Facebook post. On Wednesday, Satheesan commented: “Salute dear Sarada Muraleedharan. Every word you have written is heart-touching. It deserves to be discussed. I too had a mother with a dark complexion”.

Muraleedharan became chief secretary last September. This is the first time in the state that an IAS couple in unbroken sequence becoming the chief secretaries since the formation of the state in 1956.

Venu and Sarada both belong to the 1990 batch of IAS.