The inside of every theatre showing Barbie, the film, is exploding with pink. Girls of all ages, including those with grey hair, are turning up in all the shades of pink — baby, blush, lush, rose, hot, shocking — to watch Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling glide gently out of their plastic paradise and turn the sharp bends of the real world.

Among the huge turnout was a Calcutta teenager, who, too, wore bright pink pants. This was a major event; the said teenager was donning pink for the first time in years, for the Greta Gerwig film. She mostly wears black, almost hidden inside scruffy oversized t-shirts and baggy pants.

Pink — and Barbie had something to do with this — had come to represent for her and her peers a hyper femininity, an exaggerated heterosexual female gender role that exuded toxicity. But the film is colour-correcting pink, and Barbie. The teenager’s pink pants — though she herself will not be described as “woke” or by any other label — is being seen as part of the collective act of “reclaiming” pink. It is very hard to be young now.

But life for pink, the colour deployed most in the construction of gender, has been hard, too. Like many other things, this started in America. One would think gender, too, started there, though there is some evidence to the contrary, in Western thought and culture itself.

According to Greek comedy writer Aristophanes, originally there were three genders: male, female and androgynous. Each person was a double: had a round body, four hands, four legs, two heads and two sets of genitals. One (or two) could move forward and backward and run by spinning on their multiple limbs. As wild as that sounds, they were powerful creatures who filled the gods with fear. So they were cut into halves.

Then one half began to pine for the other half. A male half looked for his other male half, a female half looked for the other female half and in the case of the androgynous creature, the male half looked for the female half and vice versa. This desire to unite with one’s lost half and to become whole is Eros. Hence homosexuality and heterosexuality were the consequences of the same divine conspiracy.

Gender was always a complex thing. But Aristophanes did not say anything about a colour scheme.

Cut to 18th-century Europe. The mistress of Louis XV of France, the famous Madame de Pompadour, had a special pink created for her. But only a few years later French philosopher Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach was painted wearing a long pink coat by Louis Carmontelle, who had also painted Mozart in a dazzling red coat.

Pink in 19th century Britain, was the colour for boys, a baby version of red, the colour of men in uniform. A portrait of Queen Victoria from 1850 shows her with her infant son, Prince Arthur, who looks like a doll in flowing white and pink. Edgar Degas’ ballet dancers wore a luscious pink.

But things were changing by the turn of the next century. Between the two World Wars, America assigned colours to genders that would stick: blue for boys, pink for girls. The genders had been reduced to two; the wild, rotating androgynous past quite forgotten.

But the original code persisted as well. An article in the June edition of the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said: “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

The availability of industrially produced cheaper dyes perhaps made coloured fabrics easier to afford. Possibly the growing popularity of sailor suits for boys settled blue as their colour; the girls were left with pink. In a few decades, this would be considered “natural”.

Blue grew up all right, becoming the colour of pinstripes.
Pink would get a checkered career.

Pink would not be all right for grown men very soon. In American writer
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel
The Great Gatsby (1925), Gatsby’s pink suit infuriates Tom, who yells: “An Oxford man! Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit!” The pink suit, like Gatsby, is rich and vulgar.

In the next decade, the Nazis, who forced Jews to wear the yellow Star of David, would also force those they considered homosexuals to wear inverted pink triangles. Later the LGBT community adopted it as their symbol.

Pink went from strength to strength in post-World War II America, bolstered by a few iconic dresses. First Lady Mamie Eisenhower wore a pink peau de soie gown embroidered with more than 2,000 rhinestones to the inaugural ball at the White House in January 1953. In August 1953, Marilyn Monroe appeared in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes wearing a hot pink strapless satin gown. The world still feels the tremors.

Barbie was launched in 1959 by Mattel. She was sexy, glamorous, useless — and pink. She had stilettos for feet.

By the 1960s in America, foundational feminist texts were warning about a certain kind of emerging femininity. In her 1963 book of the same title, Betty Friedan articulated the idea of “the feminine mystique”, an alluring ideal created for women as
domestic divas. All they had to do, they were told, was to look pretty, and pretend that they were doing something. This roughly corresponded to Barbie, but she just caught on.

By the 90s, she, and several Disney princess dolls, were flooding the Indian market, too.

The Calcutta teenager of the pink pants had spent the first few years of her life attending many, many Barbie pink birthday parties and had had one for herself, too.

Though fortunately in India, pink continued to be unproblematic in some ways, with the perils of gender playing out elsewhere. In north India, men kept their pink pagdis. In parts of Bengal, “Digene” pink, an expensive colour, is a coveted shade for houses.

But something began to change in the last few years. Children’s worlds became darker. Dolls began to be replaced by the smartphone. The world was full of death and war and it was right there, for every child to see on their screens. Pink began to recede.

So it is not surprising that in the film, Barbie is startled by death thoughts. But she steps out under the sun catches all the rays of the sun and perhaps admits some dark shades into her pink. This gives her — and pink — a new life.

Incidentally, the teenager who Barbie thinks is responsible for her dark thoughts is dressed exactly the way the Calcutta teenager usually dresses, very noir.

But no spoilers. And let us just keep our fingers crossed for pink.