Just Because We Are Seen Does Not Mean We Are Free
a ramble on culture wars + identity politics, and a heart-to-heart with the diaspora living in the western empire
“Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.”
—Edward Said
To the South Asian diaspora, ‘chai tea,’ Ayurvedic rituals, yoga, traditional jewelry, and fashion are often the usual talking points when discussing cultural appropriation. Not included in that list are the countless other symbols of culture and heritage that have routinely been erased or rebranded by the West. Call it a microaggression, cultural imperialism, westernization, or whatever you want. They all incite the same kind of rage: sharp, immediate, and reactionary. It makes sense.
India has historically been home to a diverse range of languages, religions, traditions, myths, and cuisines. Despite all the regional differences, an Indian in India remains an Indian. However, the moment you step outside of India and into the US, that grounding shifts. You become part of this strange in-between cohort. Inside the US, those with half-beliefs and half-truths about themselves, who are neither here nor there, caught in a kind of no man’s land, try to preserve and protect every essence of who they are.
Outside the U.S., there may be clearer guardrails on cultural identity. I'm not sure, I’ll be honest. But I do know that in here, identity feels like something that can be taken away. We’re prone to being de-shelled. So, of course, we guard what once made us who we are, and what we hope to sustain. That’s why we’re so quick to react when someone from the outside “discovers” something already rooted in a culture and decides it could be trendy for the SS25 season.
It’s a touchy subject, I know. Listen, I’m not here to preach about cultural appropriation or to yell at you if you happen to love Hollywood’s overly woke, desi-characterized, manufactured scripts and shows. There are plenty of articles on The Cut and The Juggernaut for that.
But I can’t possibly resist adding to public opinion, so here we are.
To luxury brands that have historically packaged cultures and sold them back to their predominantly wealthy, white Western audience: what do you really lose by giving credit, doing the research, and practicing cultural exchange instead of appropriation?
There’s a responsibility here. It shouldn’t be radical to expect that brands with reach and resources take the time to understand the history and origins behind their creations and products.
To consumers: what do we gain by upholding the legitimacy of luxury brands, and of celebrities who could not give a fuck about whose culture they are appropriating? The masses hold the attention, and attention holds the power. So there’s a responsibility here for us as well.
Now, on one hand, I understand on a deeply emotional level that cultural identity for the diaspora can be threatened in all sorts of creative ways. But on the other hand, I’m critical of the language we use to talk about that dismissal. How we build certain defenses into our vocabulary, as if identity is something translucent, always at risk of slipping away, or worse, always under the dominion of those in power.
I’m suspicious of how we speak, how we frame our words around our reactions:
“They took this away from us.”
“We can’t have anything, huh?”
I see scarcity shaping the rhetoric of representation. There’s also fear in the semantics we keep holding onto. And I get it. But I also have to question it because how we frame ourselves to those we’re defending against matters. Power dynamics are at play here. We talk about our cultural identity in terms of what’s been “taken,” what we’re “allowed” to keep, or what gets “borrowed.”
There’s some truth in those phrases. At the same time, they also reveal our position in the larger structure, one where we’re still seeking legitimacy from those in power. And that framing can sometimes distract us from harder questions.
We rage when appropriation happens in the West, but the conversation dies a petty little death when it happens within our own communities. How many times have we seen high-end Indian designers profit off tribal and Indigenous patterns or artisans for runways and bridal campaigns? Extraction isn’t just a Western phenomenon. It’s systemic and happens at every level.
To the diaspora living in the West, raging and defending ourselves against those who put our culture down is necessary. But I keep coming back to The Swaddle’s recent post, “a stream of consciousness response to the world’s madness.”
“...There is always an angle, a fascinating thread to pull on, but the question is how much do we pull before the whole thing unravels and we see what lies behind. If our actions are to always analyse the thing in front of us and not the thing behind it, what does that say about culture as a whole?”
The spike in reactions to culture wars and the infinite prison of victimhood we get comfortable with…. they all form a kind of verbal ouroboros. We respond, we explain, we defend, again and again, until we’re left biting on the same language that was supposed to protect us. At some point, it stops clarifying and just starts consuming.
What are we fighting to earn as a collective? Is it validation? Legitimacy? Are we seeking permission? From whom and why?
Sometimes, through our reactions or lack thereof, I wonder if it’s an actual representation that we want, or if it's the deep-seated need to still feel accepted and validated by the West.
In 2020, I was catching up with my cousin, a yoga teacher who lives in Bangalore. I was in a low place, like many people were back then, and I wanted to learn more about his understanding of chakras and the metaphysical side of his yogic practice. I came to him with a desperate need to find a way to fix whatever it was that was eating me up inside. Spoiler: It was a small bout of depression. I briefly mentioned I was already doing some research on it. He stopped me immediately.
“Prapthi,” he said, “Before I tell you anything, know the West loves a story. They love a grand narrative.”
I never forgot that. At the time, I felt a little naive. Maybe even a bit betrayed, thinking it was a dismissal. But I leaned into what he was saying, with an open mind (sort of). It’s obvious now, of course, years later. The West loves a story because it has a history of building the narrative and selling it off to the highest (and often most palatable) bidder. It perpetuates the same cycle of noise.
Edward Said wrote in Orientalism: "The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined.”
Centuries of history and culture have been shaped by how the West constructed its idea of the East. It’s always exotic, mystical, a land of the ‘other’, and often, a threat to the Western Empire’s security.
The line between a ‘grand story’ and propaganda is dissolving. I’ll raise my hand and say I’ve been hooked on these stories without a second thought for years. They’ve shown up in social media, in identity politics in newsrooms, and in the childhood wounds we keep negotiating with as adults. What about all these things makes a girl so damn defensive? I’ve picked apart my relationship with pop culture, politics, and whatever the algorithm happens to be feeding me that day. And over time, I’ve learned it’s rarely the people. It’s the system of code that narrates the story. Or whoever owns the whole damn system.
Another excerpt from The Swaddle’s latest essay: Cannes and Cannons
I’ve been learning more about culture wars and identity politics, and how they’ve created a mass following of highly emotional, often unproductive constituents. Whether it’s chunni/dupatta or “Scandinavian scarf,” Met Gala looks, the latest ‘icks,’ influencer dramas, award ceremonies, or the occasional comment-section digital ‘discourse’...every story we’re fed risks becoming a distraction.
Our attention is being rerouted at an accelerating pace, and it keeps us looking sideways while the floor beneath us gives way. Away from the material conditions of our lives and toward spectacle. Consider it digital pomp and circumstance. But naming this isn’t fear-mongering. The world has gone to shit, or at least landing squarely on a pile of it. Every topic of conversation I overhear in public outlines the same series of exhausted dialogue. People are waking up from their corporate nightmares, questioning the meaning of work, and craving purpose. They want to live their lives with some sense of clarity, connection, and dignity. And yet they’re stuck trying to make rent in a thankless, jobless economy that promises nothing but hustle and burnout.
Meanwhile, we’re caught in this performance loop, debating between left and right, how cultured we are, defending, and reacting. Ash Sarkar calls these out as neoliberal tools. Simple distractions that keep us stuck defending who we are instead of zooming out for a moment. It’s easier, a hell lot more comfortable, to hide behind our minority status, especially when representation feels like survival. But for most of us living in the Empire, it’s not survival.
Enough videos are circling the planet where men, women, and children are burning alive in Palestine. Enough articles, essays, and poems written on imperialism. Enough funds (billions, in fact) that we pay into, only to finance the erasure of families, of generations. Uprooting trees, torching schools and hospitals, poisoning air and water.
Across the hemisphere, still under the same sky, immigrants are losing the right to be treated as human. Student activists are being detained under authoritarianism. Then there's the absurd, growing union between military power and artificial intelligence. And as I write this, free speech is under surveillance (oh, the irony). Public programs are being dismantled or “restructured”— same thing at this point. Every so-called innovation becomes a new machine to extract, to surveil, to profit, to take and take and take.
In this climate, really? As a majority, the center of our pulse is on culture wars? On insecurities about our identity? Sure, maybe some version of self-enlightenment through surface-level ‘representation’ can happen alongside everything else. But not at the cost of tuning out a world built through conscious, violent choices.
We can no longer afford to get addicted to debates about aesthetics or center representation and identity as if that is the only thing that makes us brilliant, unique, and different. What makes a people great? How they see the world, not just in themselves but outside of themselves. If we center all of our fights to protect our identity, to solidify who we are as individuals, then we’re missing the point. The fight has to be about understanding power and attention.
Who has it and why? What are they doing with it?
What are we left with and why? What are we doing with it?
it’s almost as if we forget the communal atmosphere a lot of our society is rooted in and are now going after this staunch individualism that does nothing but takes away. loved this piece, truly. x
This is such a fierce and beautiful piece. Being brown often feels like a bit of a minefield when discussing our issues. Reading this was so enjoyable, thank you