Looking ‘too Indian’ is no longer an insult—it’s cultural confidence redefined

Being “too Indian” was never about smelling like curry or having oily hair—though those jokes hit their mark in American school cafeterias and sitcom writers’ rooms, shrinking entire cultures into lazy punchlines. The phrase cut deeper because it targeted the beautiful, unmistakable markers of difference that refused to fade into the background. The bindi that caught the light just so. Turmeric-stained fingertips that told stories of home-cooked meals. Languages that flowed like music over tongues shaped by entirely different sounds. These were the markers that branded us as perpetual outsiders—something to be laughed at, barely tolerated, or conveniently ignored.

For generations, this phrase carried venom because the global culture machine had convinced us that assimilation was the price of acceptance. We learned to code-switch like our lives depended on it—Indian enough for family dinners, palatable enough for Western streets. We dimmed our colours, softened our spices, and translated our stories into digestible fragments. Bollywood remained a guilty pleasure, Indian fashion stayed confined to festive wardrobes, and our pop culture was dismissed as exotic curiosity while Western media monopolised the definition of cool.

But somewhere between the rise of social media and a generation that refused to apologise for their heritage, the narrative cracked wide open.

The mainstream takeover

The shift moved beyond social media and onto the world’s biggest stages. Diljit Dosanjh walked onto The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in full Punjabi glory: turban, beard, complete authenticity, owning that stage like he was born for it. At the 2024 Met Gala, Alia Bhatt turned heads in a custom ivory Sabyasachi saree embellished with hand-embroidered pearls, a look that celebrated Indian craftsmanship without her needing to say a word.

Music, too, became a powerful vehicle for this cultural moment. Raja Kumari spits bars in Tamil and English with equal fire, proving bilingual doesn’t mean half of anything; it means double the power. Pop girl group Katseye shows the world that global pop success doesn’t require cultural erasure. Tamil hip-hop and Punjabi beats are soundtracking parties from Mumbai to Manhattan, proving that good music speaks every language.

Even television caught up. Shows like Never Have I Ever and Bridgerton stopped treating brown characters as cultural ambassadors who existed only to explain their heritage. Instead, they became fully realised people whose background was simply part of their story, not the whole story, and certainly not something to hide.

The Fashion Statement

Fashion became the stage where India’s cultural shift was impossible to ignore. Designers stopped waiting for validation and began claiming space on the world’s most exclusive runways. Rahul Mishra broke ground as the first Indian designer at Paris Haute Couture Week, transforming traditional craft into couture poetry. In 2014, he also became the first Indian to win the International Woolmark Prize at Milan Fashion Week. Soon after, Gaurav Gupta followed, showing at Paris Couture Week and proving this wasn’t a token moment; it was a movement.

These designers entered fashion’s most guarded temples: Paris Couture, Milan Fashion Week, and didn’t dilute a thing. Mishra’s The Pale Blue Dot for Couture Spring 2025 was a meditation on humanity’s fragility and environmental crisis, drawing inspiration from Carl Sagan and his own experience with personal loss. His next fall 2025 collection, Becoming Love, turned even more intimate, mapping the seven sacred stages of Sufi love through the lens of his relationship with his wife, weaving philosophy and emotion into fabric. The colours stayed fearless, the embroidery stayed painstaking, the narratives stayed layered.

Sabyasachi, meanwhile, made his international debut at Mercedes-Benz New Asia Fashion Week in Singapore, which opened doors to Paris workshops with Jean Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaïa. Over the years, celebrities like Zendaya, Cardi B, and Jennifer Aniston have turned to Indian designers for their most high-visibility moments, cementing their place on the global style map.

The economics followed. Indian spices moved from “ethnic aisles” to pantry staples. Bollywood aesthetics began steering global fashion moods. Yoga studios multiplied like Starbucks. The same traditions once dismissed as “other” now drive billions in global revenue.

The cultural homecoming

Today’s generation has embraced every shade of Indianness from classical to contemporary, traditional to remixed. For years, mirroring Western trends and squeezing into cultural skins that never quite fit became second nature, creating a generation fluent in cultural camouflage. But equally powerful is the wave of people reintroducing Indianness to their own country, reclaiming what colonisation tried to shame out of existence.

The cultural “crimes” we were once made to feel guilty for—the very marks of identity that Western influence tried to erase—are finally losing their power to wound. Sarees are cool again, not just for weddings but for wine bars and gallery openings. The bindi-and-kajal combination has become the unofficial Coachella makeup look, with influencers across the world perfecting the art of sharp kohl lines. Even luxury houses like Prada can’t resist mining Indian aesthetics, calling juttis “ballet flats,” rebranding lehenga silhouettes as “scarf skirts,” and marketing rhinestones as “face gems” when they’re simply bindis by another name. Henna becomes “temporary tattoos” in Western parlance, as if the art form needed rebranding to earn legitimacy.

Being “too Indian” has transformed from a cultural burden into cultural capital. The world finally recognises what should have been obvious all along: all that “too much” was perfectly calibrated richness that others simply weren’t sophisticated enough to understand. The markers of difference have become markers of distinction, and what used to be the punchline has become the point.

In the end, looking “too Indian” stopped being an insult the moment we stopped treating it like one. And honestly? The world looks a lot more interesting now.

Lead image: Getty Images

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