Ash went to Cannes, and we preened for it was once again India’s turn to twirl in the spotlight, doomed ghagra and all. Periodically we bloom as Madonna discovers mehndi and Sanskrit shlokas, Bend It Like Beckham fever sweeps the Alliance, Indian Curry Strikes Back as the Anglo national favourite, yoga asanas relax the world, chamma chamma blinks in Moulin Rouge and the ad world conquers with its armload of medals at the 50th Cannes Advertising Festival. Indian culture is discovered and we feel we count. And then the spotlight moves on. And we wilt. Lagaan made it to the Oscar top five but failed to win, Devdas never came close. India is discussed for its riotous nature. Fijian Vijay Sinh cribs about women teeing off at men’s Professional Golfers’ Association events and the foreign press chuckles about his cultural bogey of residual Indian chauvinism. And we flounder between Sinh’s talent and his mindset. Our self esteem, it seems, is largely imported.

Looking in from the outside, we are lofty and impoverished at the same time. Remember that Salman Khan dhoti ’n’ jacket number: ‘East-ya-west. India is the best’. Yo. When India meets the West, we smile slightly. Ours is the oldest religion. Or should that be civilisation? Our culture is far superior. Loose living, Western style, chee chee. Family values? That’s Indian culture. Descendants in the land of the Kama Sutra and backless cholis have morphed themselves as culture police. We are like this only, especially in the context of the other a.k.a. as the shameless West. And among others a.k.a. Indi-genous sub culture, minor culture, major culture, akhand Bharat culture, pan-Indian culture. How far can we trace our cultural strains and where? Is the dominant culture mainly the media-promoted variety and does media promote that which most benefits its purveyors? Is it mainly film-driven and politically muscled? Is our culture stamped by the Punjabi kitsch of the Chopras and the Johars or Southern conservatism? What is Indian culture drawn from the East and West within the border? Is our culture Organic? Or evolving? Or completely frozen in the webcams of the Abroad berthed, Culturally desi?

It’s cultural recycling in the most export-surplus way. It’s the ‘real’ India that goes abroad. The epic dramas, the bicepless Mahatma, the Taj Mahal tours, the classical pageants and sandalwood paste of the Indian South; the robust ‘balle balle’ of Punjab, the erotica of Ajanta and Ellora, Khajuraho and Kama Sutra, the nad, raga and taal of the Gundecha brothers or Bismillah Khan, the nose-ring, bindi and the story telling films that get their desi makers international honours. Wow, say they. And, smugly smile we. India has so much culture, we can afford to be generous. We really have little use for these exports.

Unless they come right back into India having been sampled and approved, sanctified by the zeal of the new converts from the West. Then we, turning our gaze inward, dip into the best of many worlds, emerging with Indian fusion. No wonder then for our home-grown GenNext, the tradition of ‘Shakti’ worship merely means being follower, not rebel. Shakti is no longer inner strength but the power to receive. Those who go West strategically spout the Gayatri Mantra, pursue a foreign citizenship, cleave secretively to the assumption of native cultural superiority and lament about cultural invasion back home. Those who stay back, sport baggy shorts, baseball caps swung back, strappy tops, floral jeans, whitening creams, tilaks, trishuls and chastening rituals. We mix and we match. We even have our K-marts and malls.

Homefed cultural consumption is beauty-conscious, filmi stamped. Our version of modern has just enough of doublespeak to be popular. Highbrow may rant at lowbrow and shudder delicately at Ekta Kapoor’s serial women, whose pallus are as perfect as their plotting. But, she, and the rest of the producer variety, know that it is kitchen politics that count with our joint families. The Bharatiya naris are steel under soft skin. They plan, plead, seduce, manoeuvre, rescue, just as energetically as any Alpha male. For it’s all in our sanskriti, history and our great mythologies – the Radhas, Menakas, Kaikeyis and Savitris. And the Mastanis, Lakshmibais, Kannagis, Chand Bibis and Noorjehans. If the cultural distillate of our patriarchial societies, matriachial dominance and emotional melodrama finds itself served as the cultural pani puri of our hard-headed times, it’s because we are not asking for more. Low on fibre but tasty and easy to swallow.

Indian culture has taken on the form of separate worlds, spliced according to the need of the moment. It’s transient, temporary and temporal. We dive back into the chimera of history, if we want to look for stone symbols of religious piety. Yet, we turn a blind eye to the pictorial and engraved sexual irreverence that the gods seemed famed for. Take a look, while it still exists, at the Matancherry Palace in Cochin where some of the most beautiful murals presented to a Hindu king in the 16th century, show multi-limbed Krishna engaged in foreplay with eight gopis simultaneously! That was Indian culture too. Today, a peeping thong on an Indian woman turns into a debate on crumbling standards of respectability. Yet, it’s culturally okay to wear a navel-baring sari, but ‘Hai Ram’, if the same navel peeps between jeans and a cropped top. Go to panun Kashmir and you may find the same skin-showing sari is considered somewhat scandalous. The backless choli is only tolerated in film songs, at garbas and as exportable exotic India. Our sartorial culture is a bit of a mish mash anyway. Much like the rest of it.

It’s a bit like American patriots renaming their favourite snack but blinking furiously at the fact that their best-known torch was a gift from their European bete noir. The truth won’t go away but shall remain well camouflaged, and for so long, that one sometimes forgets it even existed. Yet beyond the happening, are the unyielding swathes of the other India.

Indian culture is too polyglot, too complexly woven, for it to be completely weaned of its robust mixed parentage. But, to look up culture’s family tree in this vast country would be to admit that many ethnic strains of heritage led us to where we are. That would require more humility and sharing than we are ready for. We are the many Indias whose cultural practices evoke wonder, scorn and despair. A land of marriages between cousins, uncles and nieces, and brothers to widowed sisters-in-law. Of bigamy and polygamy. Of fish-eating priests and dowry-paying husbands. Of tantric sex and devadasis. Of earth worship and renunciation. These are either served as exotica or brushed below the quilt, and the mass – by sheer prominence, rather than dominance – culture is far safer and more feel-good.

Instead, we learn the value of a forked tongue. We lead double lives, converse in doublespeak and gargle at the fount of Indian culture. It’s a near schism between the left and the right brain, between belief and practice, between Shivaling and sex: we publicly anoint the Shivaling and publicly disavow sex. Much like the government’s campaign against AIDS – reach for self-control, not condoms. We have learnt to live the double standard with exceptional candour and extreme delusion. The Indianness of our contemporary culture just may be like the Weapons of Mass Destruction that the USA searches for in Iraq. In both instances we are looking for it in the wrong place. We are mall-rats now, our culture has gone West.