At a party for lawyers, scholars and NGO hands in Washington DC’s hip and happening neighbourhood Adams Morgan a few months ago, a prominent American female intellectual said to me, “I’m surprised to see you wear that T-shirt, because I would never have thought that someone like you would wear a T-shirt like that.” I had on one of Ritu Kumar’s printed and embroidered creations – carrying a reproduction of a Mughal painting, with the face of a bejewelled, possibly royal Mughal woman with a large nose-ring. Called ‘The Mughal Lady T-shirt’, the image reproduced subtly swims in mellow tones and melts into a picture of the index of an old colonial history book. Surprised, I asked, “Why?” She replied, “Oh, it’s so exoticising.”

Allow me to give this moment some historical context: I had had a very tough time procuring the said T-shirt. A Mumbaiite, I had been working in the US for a long time. I was in India in the sweltering summer of 2007. On a rare shopping trip, I fell in love with the tee, at the flagship store at Phoenix Mills in Mumbai; alas, they were out of my size. Persistent (if not obsessive) about owning it, I discovered that only 15-20 are made every month. I tried all kinds of ruses before I high-tailed it to the store when I received the fated call of its magical arrival.

Now, at this party on another continent much later, confronted by this affable liberal’s bewildering comment, I contemplated my sartorial adventures for their potential political incorrectness. My critic clearly thought that the image of a Mughal painting, that was embroidered to boot, somehow ‘exoticised’ India. She came from a well-meaning liberal left in America that carries its politically correct and postcolonial hipness smugly on its shoulder (if not on a T-shirt, yet). This liberalism is self-consciously aware and enthusiastically critical of how Eastern cultures are fetishised as exotic in the West. While I agree with this criticism of how the East tends to be stereotyped, I was confused as to how I could be accused of ‘exoticising’ my own culture and country, when all I was doing was wearing what I thought was a stylish creation that beautifully articulated Indian fashion, art and history.

So, should I avoid wearing anything that is Indian, or looks like it may be Indian? That would mean wearing generic ‘Western’ clothes, demure office shirt after demure office shirt and that would be terribly boring. I rebelled against the idea, feeling that such an injunction would in fact erase my difference, my Indianness. I wonder, to what extent how we dress mirror our own identity? And how can I be Indian, in a way that is acceptable to this well-meaning politically correct liberal, who somehow didn’t think that her own commitment to yoga over the last seven years was ‘exoticising’? And yet, her comment seemed commonsensical to another woman who was a part of the conversation: she was Korean American and nodded in agreement, adding how she always refrained from wearing a beautiful Indian shirt she loved, for fear of precisely the kind of criticism I had received.

But why is it that in America, wearing something that looks like it is obviously Indian (a raw silk shirt, a Kanjeevaram sari, a Fabindia kurta), is wrong, because it automatically ‘exoticises’ India, but something that is generically GAP, doesn’t get read similarly, in a political way? Why is it that Western clothes – pants, plain grey sweaters, black turtlenecks – don’t somehow negatively signify a colourless WASP culture? Indeed, they are a given, taken for granted as neutral and apolitical. And yet, I can somewhat sympathise with my critic’s instinct, because when a few years ago, the ultra trendy clothing store chain, Urban Outfitters, started coming out with purses, satchels, plates and T-shirts that had colourful Raja Ravi Varma-style images of Krishna, Lakshmi and Shiva emblazoned boldly on them, pictures that looked like the ones that once sat lovingly in my little marble temple in my Matunga home, I immediately rebelled. Nay, I was furious. How dare they treat pictures of MY Gods so callously? Why were they commodifying what was sacred to me?

Of course, I’m not sure how much authority that critique of Urban Outfitters has today, given that our own Tarun Tahiliani has popularised similar prints on T-shirts and imitations of these can now be bought at little shops in Bandra that will reproduce pictures of any god, for a small fee.

So the question arises: are we, as Indians, exoticising our own culture? Are we commodifying it, to make a quick buck? In the process, are we disrespecting our culture? Or are we celebrating our history, our high culture of Mughal art and our popular culture of the mass reproduction of Ravi Varma paintings? Is it okay if I am wearing the Krishna T-shirts, but exoticising and bad if a white woman wears one? Is it simply about identity and racial origin? Is it okay for Tahiliani to profit from the commodification and circulation of Krishna T-shirts, but not so for the American corporation Urban Outfitters? When my colleague from New Zealand wears his gorgeous Fabindia neon green and gold silk shirt, is that a practice that must be criticised? Or not, because his partner is an Indian woman? Where do we draw the line at such identity politics?

The question of representing cultural imagery is tricky. In the case of the controversy over M. F. Husain’s paintings of Indian goddesses or Salman Rushdie’s irreverent representation of Islam in The Satanic Verses, I always come down emphatically on the side of freedom of artistic expression. But fashion stands at the intersection of art and commerce and while we cannot legislate how and which entities – American or Indian – reproduce Indian cultural imagery, I am okay with the commodity whose representation functions to affirm and celebrate our culture and history, our past and present. For example, the creative coffee mugs with photos of dabbawallas superimposed onto the view of Mumbai’s Queen’s Necklace, I believe are fabulous celebrations of the city. The nostalgic coasters with images of colonial Bombay at the Bombay Store I can live with. However, I feel that some reproductions of cultural imagery – as in the case of Urban Outfitters’ plates and bags featuring Hindu gods – are problematic – fetishes devoid of history, context and meaning.

Ultimately of course, we cannot control how images circulate and how others interpret us. Through clothes we often fashion identity, reinventing ‘culture’ and what it means to be Indian/modern/American. It is worth recalling here that the declaration that one culture is exotic and another is not, is also tied to the long history of European colonialism which projected Asian and African cultures as different, exotic and inferior. This idea was then used to justify roughly 200 years of European colonial oppression purported to be the road to civilisation. But I digress: I continue to wear my Mughal Lady T-shirt which celebrates Indian history and art with great pleasure, and on many continents, and continues to receive compliments on its beauty as well.

Kavita Daiya teaches at George Washington University, and is the author of Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Postcolonial India

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