BHOPAL, India — A Madhya Pradesh couple who waited 11 years to marry have become the latest flashpoint in colourism in India after their wedding video drew a torrent of online abuse targeting the groom’s dark skin and the bride’s motives, turning a “dream” ceremony into a case study in digital hate. The backlash has sparked a broader conversation about how social media amplifies entrenched bias over skin tone, class, and gender in Indian marriages, Dec. 10, 2025.
Rishabh Rajput and his wife, Sonali Chouksey, both from Bhopal, married in late November after meeting as college students in 2014 and sustaining a long-distance relationship for years. Their 30-second wedding clip, showing Rajput in an embroidered sherwani with a bright pink safa and Chouksey in a magenta lehenga, was shared widely on Instagram and X. Within days, trolls fixated on his darker complexion, questioning why she would marry him and suggesting she was chasing money or a government job.
Colourism in India exposed by a 30-second clip.
One viral post asked, “What is the core reason behind these types of marriages?”, racking up millions of views and unleashing a pile-on of racist jokes and memes about the couple’s looks. For Rajput, who says he has endured colour-based taunts since childhood, the attacks turned what should have been the happiest day of his life into something he described as deeply shocking. Yet the same clip also drew an outpouring of support from users who condemned the colourist abuse and praised the couple’s composure.
Social media cruelty and a groom’s dignified reply
Responding on Instagram and in interviews, Rajput pushed back against assumptions that his wife married him for status. “Sorry to disappoint you. I’m not a government employee,” he wrote, adding that Chouksey “loved me when I had nothing.” He has said he cannot deny being dark-skinned and has dealt with racism his entire life, but insists that strangers’ opinions “don’t really matter” next to the 11-year relationship they built.
His wife, labelled a “gold-digger” by some commenters, told BBC Hindi she was angered that trolls reduced their relationship to skin tone and income. “People forget that behind their comments, real people are reading them,” she said, noting that no one in their families ever questioned whether they “matched” until the internet weighed in.
A long, lucrative history of colourism in India
Advocates say the episode is only the latest reminder that colourism in India is baked into everything from marriage markets to mass media, long before Rajput and Chouksey’s video, activists and scholars were warning about fairness-cream advertising, Bollywood casting, and matrimonial sites that treat lighter skin as a prerequisite for desirability.
In 2020, a feature in The Guardian on Bollywood’s skin-lightening endorsements described a persistent “fair-skin complex” that links lightness with beauty and success, while reporting in the United States on whitening creams undergoing a makeover argued that marketing tweaks alone cannot undo generations of prejudice. A 2021 opinion essay, “Colorism in India,” traced those attitudes to caste hierarchies, colonialism, and the booming skin-lightening industry.
More recently, an India-wide magazine cover story, “Dark vs fair: An ugly prejudice,” chronicled how high-achieving women and public figures still face casual slurs about their skin tone in workplaces, politics, and families, underscoring that colourism in India cuts across class and region.
In the Rajput–Chouksey case, that backdrop is impossible to ignore. Gulf-based coverage in Gulf News, Indian outlets such as Deccan Chronicle, and a widely shared Hindustan Times trending piece have all framed the trolling as part of a larger reckoning with online racism and colourism in India, rather than an isolated burst of cruelty.
For now, the couple says they are trying to focus on their marriage rather than strangers’ insults. Their story, amplified across platforms and around the world, has forced a difficult question back onto the timeline: if a joyful wedding between two consenting adults can still trigger such vitriol, how far has the fight against colourism in India really come — and how much further does it still need to go?
