The act of cultural stereotyping is never innocent

In a recent interview, Priyanka Chopra asserted, and I quote, “being an Indian makes me exotic”. The interview was about her latest singing venture in the form of an album titled “Exotic” with the international artist Pitbull.

Now, according to the dictionary, exotic has two meanings: a) being or from another part of the world, and b) strikingly strange or unusual.

It is baffling how an individual’s own nationality strikes as “strange” or “being from another part of the world” to him\herself. Is our “Other-ness” the only thing we have left got to bring in front of the world? And what is this Other-ness, anyway?

In texts such as Edward Said's Orientalism, we see the "deconstruction" of the colonial perspective and the implications of establishing this “Other-ness”. The author examines why the colonialists preferred to see the "East" in the way they did. Building up the image of exotic, primitive beings and locales, (which naturally implies being un-modern), they took unto themselves the White man's burden. They camouflaged their explorations and exploitations as an act of philanthropy, as Said points out.

After all these things, when you see a leading actor projecting her "exotic" identity as an Indian to the world, you are literally speechless in frustration.

The implications are too vast to be enumerated. In 1980, Columbian writer Garcia Marquez brought this up in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech where he talks about how the living realities of Latin America were tainted by the imposition of colonial fantasies: “Our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable”.

His ever-beautiful but loaded words give a picture to surmise the kind of violence involved in this kind of stereotyping.

This projection of an "exotic" identity to mark a distinguished place in the world is nothing new, though. Decades before, the much revered Swami Vivekananda had done so in his book East and West, once again, to establish the ‘East’ at a superior spiritual position than the ‘West’ , by projecting the Vedantic Hindu image, and obliterating all the rivulets and rivers of tradition in that geographic region.

By now, I have understood that classroom, or for that matter, newsroom discussions aren’t enough to dissuade people from such abject projections. More interestingly, tracing the motives behind such renditions lead us to the various ways someone can envisage a community or a region to suit their interests. It is in the capacity of the individual to spot and sift such claims, because the act of cultural stereotyping is never innocent.

(Srabasti studied journalism at Asian College of Journalism)

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