“India’s not that different from Coachella”, said Ben gross in an episode of Mindy Kaling’s Netflix series, Never Have I Ever. “It’s crowded, dusty, Diplo’s sort of around”, he elaborated. While at first glance, this dialogue elicited a very mildly offended chuckle from my end since I come from right beside India, but now, it does ring true to me beyond the crowd and dustiness.
I remember being a young teenager, spending my summer breaks on the internet, watching white YouTubers go to Coachella, wearing henna tattoos, bindis, and ethnic prints. I remember visiting the websites these YouTubers had Coachella-specific partnerships with. I remember looking at printed Kimonos and Tunics for hundreds of dollars which would not ship to my country. I remember yearning for these clothes, not realizing that the clothes I was yearning for were basically my clothes from my own tradition, just on white girls. This blog might raise more questions than it answers because the process of me dissecting my own internalized colonial ideas is ongoing and incomplete. There can be numerous reasons why I saw Coachella tunics as superior to traditional kurtas. One of them could be the fact that I saw them on white models rather than brown models and I still hadn’t unlearned Eurocentric, conventional beauty standards back then. Another could be how all the internet influencers who I was watching had capitalized on their relatability factor and could target me a lot easier than traditional clothing brands, who usually do not keep in mind young teenagers while formulating their marketing and advertising strategies.
So, why am I talking about Coachella and how it may or may not have copied elements from my culture? The Albert Memmi reading creates a distinction between the colonizer and the colonist. Memmi concedes to how being a colonist is a more cogent and logical course of action than just being a colonizer who doesn’t accept their actions. Memmi also speaks about how a colonist, who is a colonizer and admits to it, seeks to legitimize colonization (p. 89). As disturbing as the idea of legitimizing colonization sounds, some of my group mates during the discussion raised the question of whether it is better to admit guilt as a colonizer than deny it, and while I understand the idea behind that, I also suggested that some former colonizers might just admit guilt as a performative tool of virtue-signaling. But besides all these questions, we discussed if colonization is truly over and colonists are admitting to guilt, how do they still heavily commodify and capitalize and benefit from our cultures through cultural appropriation?
This is not the first time my group brought up cultural appropriation. Time and time again we have brought up so many examples, from Shein selling Muslim prayer mats as Greek carpets, to a store in New Zealand selling a typically $10 Charpai for around $800. Here is a listicle of several other such products. While we usually share a whole lot of laughs about how ridiculous and poorly researched these products are, it does raise the very legitimate concern about the core continuing to use the culture of the periphery for commodification and capitalist, financial gain. It also creates a lot of room for introspection for people like me who almost threw their money at products like this.
I want to end this blog on a note of curiosity, which I will keep reading up about. In our last discussion, I brought up how diaspora Pakistanis or desis in the West sell products from our own culture at very elevated prices. I wonder about the ethical implications of this from an intersectional lens. Do diaspora Pakistanis use their privilege in terms of geography and class to exploit locals by selling them very expensive products, or is this an act of them reclaiming their culture in place of letting appropriation happen?
