tiktok's great indian shift is infuriating us

How the west continues to colonise us.

As the title says a “great Indian shift” is happening on TikTok and it is infuriating me. For the uninitiated (I envy you), this is a trend where TikTokers confess to the fact that they have suddenly started finding South Asians attractive. “These Indian girls are on the rise. Boys, it’s time to invest in them now,” says a Black man (@edotsbean on TikTok) unironically.

This is the second part of the “great shift” that happened a few years ago accepting that Black women were attractive. After all, the only consistent TikTok trend is to steal from Black creators. “The great shift is simply white approval, just because white people on the internet have decided to accept that brown people are attractive now it’s suddenly on their terms when and when we aren’t deemed desirable,” says Yusra, a 20-year-old British-Pakistani from Reading, UK.

The past few years have seen an increase in South Asian representation in Hollywood. With “Never Have I Ever” and “Bridgerton Season 2,” the West is finally accepting that South Asian people aren’t smelly or dirty like the West propagated for years. Combine this realisation with the ever-so-present coloniser guilt and lo and behold, we have gotten ourselves a TikTok trend that not just accepts us but in fact, fetishises us. What’s been even more infuriating is seeing fellow South Asians take pride in this “great shift.” After all, we have been starved for white validation since colonial times.

Now this isn’t the first time TikTok or the West has been under the limelight for appropriating South Asian culture. From Gwen Stefani’s bejewelled third eye to the clean girl aesthetics and the recent Scandivanian shawl trend, the last decade has been one of the West constantly co-opting our culture and then pushing us out of the conversations around it.

The isolation of South Asian items from their roots and renaming them is a symptom of cultural appropriation the West has struggled with for a long time. Downward-facing dog, anyone?

When white women first became the face of Yoga in the West, brown women were increasingly alienated from Yoga studios and sessions. Suddenly, investing in expensive body-hugging leggings called “yoga pants” became mandatory. After a decade of heated debate around whether it is sinful for Christian women to wear yoga pants, now there is even a Christian line of yoga pants with Bible verses printed on them. Today, when I searched yoga on YouTube, my search results were all thin, white women flexing their flexibility.

So when in June last year, an employee from Bipty (a fashion rental brand) took to TikTok to share a picture of a bunch of white women wearing duppattas and called it “European,” "Scandinavian” and “chic,” South Asian girlhood had had enough. We didn’t want what happened to yoga and bindi happen to dupattas (even though most of us have a complex relationship with our dupattas. Re: being forced to cover up and be “modest"). The TikTok was taken down and an apology was promptly issued. The use of the word “chic” is what got me here. I have never seen “chic” be used to describe anything from my culture. The usual adjectives are “boho,” “exotic,” “hip,” etc. The dupatta when worn by a white woman is chic. But when we wear it, it is boho? Understood!

Before the chic Scandinavian girlies were the clean girls, with their carefully slicked back hair, they took over the internet leaving the brown girls wondering why these white women were being praised for an aesthetic they were once made fun of. “Growing up I experienced so much bullying from girls calling me greasy for coming to school with Vatika oil in my hair. Now oiling their hair is ‘clean.’ Wearing a bindi was weird but now they wear multiple 'face gems' to festivals,” says Harleen, a frustrated 19-year-old British Punjabi from London, UK.

Now, let’s come back to the “great Indian shift” and why this shift is indeed shifty. Remember how Hollywood in the 1930s led the zeitgeist shift to viewing Latinas as hot-headed, wild, and sexy and how even today mainstream portrayal of Latin girlhood rarely goes out of this box? Or maybe how Hollywood in the 1900s pedestaled East Asian women as “Madame Butterfly” and continues to portray them as submissive, sexually-starved caricatures — always the China Doll or the Dragon Lady — waiting to be rescued by the white man?

This narrow representation of Latinas and East Asian women has obviously resulted in real-life women getting sexualised and fetishised. But it goes beyond that. Hollywood’s portrayal of racial minorities has a direct impact on the increase in cases of violence against them like the 2021 Georgia shooting.

After the violent gun man Robert Aaron Long, shot and killed 6 Asian women in Atlanta, Georgia he told police that he suffered from a sex addiction. Apparently, the shooting was an attempt to subdue temptations. Long also confessed to frequenting massage parlours (businesses generally associated with East Asian women) in the past and launching attacks as “vengeance” against them.

I am afraid what Hollywood did to Latinas and East Asian women is exactly what TikTok is now doing to South Asian women. When a man looks into the camera and asks other men to “invest in Indian women,” we are looking at the exact zeitgeist shift — a cycle of fetishisation leading to an entitlement over women’s sexuality leading to actual cases of violence against them.

Another issue with this trend is that the shift only happens to you if you are a South Asian with Eurocentric features. Dark-skinned South Asian women already face hurtful jabs and constant taunts to lighten their skin tone from within their homes. The “great Indian shift” is only going to cause a greater divide between South Asian women with white adjacent features and those with more unique features.

In conclusion, the “great Indian shift” is another rehashed trend aimed at making us cry for approval from the Western hemisphere. It’s just another way of keeping our minds colonized, picking and choosing what elements of our culture we can and cannot be proud of. In simpler words, it’s yassified cultural colonization and we will have none of it!