Just wanted to summon a bit of attention to a new mod I submitted called Darker Indian Cultures. It makes the human units from the South Asian cultures (namely the Harappans, Mauryans, Mughals, and Indians) darker-skinned on average. Mind you, as is the case with all cultures you can pick, half of the people's appearances will reflect that of your player avatar, but this mod affects the appearance of the other half.



I made this mod because I felt that too many media depictions of South Asians, even those from South Asian countries themselves (e.g. Bollywood) represent the region's inhabitants as all light-skinned, thereby omitting or marginalizing the indigenous darker-skinned people. This would be particularly inappropriate for depictions of the Harappans, whose civilization predates Aryan migrations into the subcontinent from central Eurasia and may have been built by Dravidian-speaking people similar to those of southern India today. In this mod, the Harappans are assigned a dark brown skin tone, whereas the younger cultures get a medium-brown tone to reflect Aryan admixture in northern India.