hair's colour in Sanskrit

[bpj at netg.se]

At 11:58 10.5.1997 +0100, Lars Martin Fosse wrote:
>Robert Zydenbos wrote:
>
>>A young Bengali woman in Germany informed me that in the Bengali language
>>there
>>are four words (which I do not recall now; can any Bengalis help?) for shades
>>of skin colouring. She belonged to the darkest category, and so her fair
>>parents in Calcutta decided not to save money for a dowry but to send her to
>>college instead, since she would have to support herself later on in life.
>>(She
>>later married a German and showed off her pale-faced husband to her Calcutta
>>friends who were supposedly so fair and beautiful!)
>
>This is quite a story! It reminds me of similar stories that happened here
>about a 100 years ago, when unmarriable middle-class women became teachers
>or took up some other "respectable" profession, since they had little chance
>of getting a husband.

Maybe not quite on topic, but interesting in context: the same was of
course true of Sweden; here the teatching ladies were even forbidden in law
to marry, losing their job if they did. Was this so also in other
countries?

Philip


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