Art Rookie: South Asian Show and Tell; Why Mainstream Art and Culture Can't Stop Aestheticising Brownness
Earlier this year, when season 2 of Bridgerton was released and the onslaught of op-eds, think pieces and other media soundbites about the season's protagonists - the Sharma sisters - made their way to my newsfeed, I remember feeling a little strange about the hyperfixation on their heritage. All those news stories on their brownness and how it was supposedly a huge win for the culture were alienating. Without sounding too harsh, I didn't feel the sense of pride shared by the community. While I recognise South-Asian women being cast as leading ladies and seen as desirable by the mainstream media feels monumental, I couldn't help but feel at odds with these hyperbolic sentiments claiming decolonisation.
Maybe it comes from my personal vantage point of having lived in South India for most of my life and routinely seeing brown people embody those roles in regional movies and television. But I also think I've arrived at this point from being keenly aware that this particular strain of aestheticising Brownness and representational politics is superficial at best and dangerous at worst. Especially dangerous when the colour of someone's skin shields them from critique and used to defend and uphold white supremacist institutions - as in the cases of Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman and Kamala Harris. The seeming frivolity of Brownness as aesthetic, however, is an entirely different predicament.
The commodification of South Asia, specifically India, is not a recent trend, although Instagram and Tiktok have made it much more apparent. India has historically occupied a significant position in Western ideas of the Orient, which were solidified when the East India Company commissioned paintings of ancient ruins, Mughal architecture, and local flora and fauna in the 18th and 19th centuries. Subsequently, transmitting ideas of this "magical" place back to Europe and enforcing the idea that India and the culture associated with it is an antidote to modernity.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
@Browngirlmemes on Instagram
These ideas have followed the sub-continent into the 21st century, to when Julia Roberts travels south in Eat Pray Love and finds herself through her days living in an ashram, meditating and taking vows of silence. Or even more recently, in the 2022 adaptation of Gregory David Roberts's novel Shantaram on Apple TV, which begins with the protagonist Lin Ford escaping Australian prison to arrive at Mumbai, a city that Ford deems his saviour and declares, "The first thing I noticed was the smell… It was the smell of hope". These misguided attempts to capture the notion that India will save you and change you forever are only a tiny piece of the puzzle. As Mallika Khanna writes in her article on wellness culture in America for Bitch Media, "Capitalism embraces Orientalism at large, serving an exoticised land to Westerners as something to be consumed until it yields enlightenment. What India came to represent in the colonial imagination was a foil to Western decadence, individualism, and industrialisation. It became the land of escape, of peace away from toxicity."
This aesthetic of Brownness in popular culture, one that upper caste Hindus from India and scattered across the diaspora have helped shape, has added to this notion of India as magic and mystic. These television shows, movies, works of art and writing view the South-Asian experience as a homogeneous, one-dimensional experience, and we South Asians are complicit in these narratives. The conversations around identity in these cultural documents often start with mangoes, saris paired with Nikes, and samosas and end somewhere around judgemental aunties and Hindu rituals.
Online forums, such as Subtle Curry Traits, dedicated to memes and discussion of the South Asian experience in the West, also tend to flatten our backgrounds and identities. These platforms stereotype older members of the community, parents and other family members. Diminishing their lived experiences to an inability to use technology and jokes about their overbearing, overprotective behaviour. An overarching villainous tone consistently applied to the generations before without considering that they exist beyond their domestic roles.
Writer Fabliha Yeaqub shared similar sentiments in her newsletter, "Aunties are depicted with bindis as big as their forehead stamped between their eyes, thick black kajol smeared across their eyelids over their blue ashy eyeshadow, vibrant fuschia paint lined tightly around their pursed lips, protruding belly tucked under their sarees, a nod to fatphobia. South Asian Millennials and Gen-Z creators even made millions by creating their brands depicting aunties as villains. A walking villain looming over innocent brown girls." This curated sub-genre of South-Asian contemporary visual art that enforces the stereotype that we should "Trust No Aunty" or that it is us Brown Girls versus them is overly reductive of all parties in the conversation.
by Maria Qamar
Anti-aunty graphics, paintings and TikTok videos are symptomatic of a more significant problem in how upper-caste Indians represent themselves through their art. The new narrative of embracing yourself feels like a "South Asian show and tell" that emphasises and inadvertently reproduces an orientalist narrative about the subcontinent. We're shown representations of Hindu goddesses, reimagined posters of 60s Bollywood and Bvlgari's take on the mangalsuthra and told that this is the singular Brown experience. We're told our experience has to fit into an upper caste and shockingly apolitical narrative. These works, accompanied by the label of decolonisation and motifs of marigolds, flatten any real, critical discourse that could be had with the community. Instead, these purely aesthetic artworks feel like they build on these mystical narratives of a "homeland" for the euro-centric white gaze.
As Rohita Naraharisetty shares on The Swaddle, "The aesthetics of a culture are often the most visible part of it – but discourse around Brownness equates the privileged aesthetic of Brownness to culture itself. The problem with this is that it flattens an impossibly complex demographic into one legible to the ‘coloniser.’” She goes on to share the limitations of the decolonisation project as it exists on Instagram, "A strange confluence of academic gatekeeping, Internet social justice culture, and nationalism has led to the word's distortion. In blandly celebrating the renaming of colonial signifiers – and simultaneously upholding pseudoscience, superstition, and religious dogma as ‘indigenous’ – we might be doing the opposite of decolonising. We're orientalising. It means that we still see ourselves how the West may see us, but we mistake it for our authentic identity."
This focus on North Indian, upper-caste Hindu culture limits how we create and discuss art. But it is even more limiting to how we represent ourselves and are viewed globally. In conversations in Art School in Nottingham, I felt a pressure to speak and create exclusively about this culture (which isn't even my culture as I am neither Hindu nor North Indian) and was even told by a lecturer that I should write my dissertation on a particular section of South-Asian visual art. This dilution of the incredibly varied experiences of Brown people, especially those who exist outside of Savarna Indian imagination, allows little to no space for conversations around caste, colourism and Islamophobia that exists in India and the diaspora. As creatives and writers, we get to shape the discourse, so why are we more angry and concerned about brownie glazed lips or chai lattes than we are of the rising violence towards Dalits and Adivasis in India or the fact that American Universities harbour an implicit bias to upper-caste candidates in their admission process?
While it is more than okay to explore heritage and identity through art, we need to grapple with how we, unintentionally or not, are participating in self-exoticisation and flattening the experience of South Asians. It is time to let go of the uncritical, purely aesthetic view of culture and start examining the structures of power and hierarchy (that existed long before colonialism) within our community.
Words: Zara Aftab
