The Allure of Western Culture

AHMEDABAD, India – Nearly two months after its release in America, a screwball comedy about four friends in Las Vegas has become a surprising hit thousands of miles from its Sin City setting. The Hangover certainly makes for an unlikely sell on the megaplex marquee in a country predominantly driven by religious convictions, where conservative attitudes toward premarital sex, drugs, interracial marriage, and even dating resonate deeply. But the film’s popularity demonstrates a challenge to these foundations of culture in India, revealing a younger generation perhaps as much in step with Western pop culture as their American counterparts.

“Western culture” is perhaps the greatest marketing success story in history. In India, working for an American company serves as a source of pride. American designers—the so-called “high-end brands”— flood the malls, and some Indian retailers advertise items as “export quality,” a label that marks clothing deemed suitable for only the most fashion-savvy.

Over a generation ago, the more procurable “Green Card” craze brought many Indians (including my own parents) overseas for greater opportunity—suitors for marriage then labeled “export-quality” spouses. Today, even in a country whose growth outstrips America’s, the weight of Western ideas is ever growing, even as American immigration borders are drawn tighter. Is this attempt at emulating Western culture indicative of mistaken perceptions—perceptions that characterize Indians as desperately in need of a culture other than their own?

The pull from abroad highlights Indian culture, still rooted in humility and family, as seemingly incompatible with the supply of rising incomes. Tastes turn to the West, visible even in the hallmark of Indian entertainment—Bollywood—as more expensive movies are filmed in foreign locations and now often feature Hindi subtitles with spoken English. (A Bollywood remake of The Hangover is due next year.) Admittedly, it would be misleading to overstate these generalizations—yet they are overtly glaring to an Indian-American.

It would be presumptuous to believe on one end that Indians need the infusion of Western culture as a step toward “civilization,” when their own culture predates Western ideas by several millennia (so forgo any “White Man’s Burden”)—and at the other, that India is still stuck in its past, and likes it that way. Arranged marriage is out, the once exceptional “love marriage” now almost the rule. More women work outside the home, and a recent high court decision decriminalized homosexuality. Clubs, bars, and restaurants cater to both Western tastes and a growing middle-class with ever more disposable income. But isn’t it odd that even recent cinematic history still records India’s rise from slums-to-riches as possible only with the Western helping hand—an adaptation of America’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Whether Indians truly want the infusion of Western ideas is still unclear. Do they genuinely like The Hangover, or does its association with Western culture simply contribute to India’s own credibility as “modern”? In countries like India, citizens deserve to make their own decisions about pop cultural preferences and tastes. Portraying Western culture as inherently superior—and the only legitimate form of modern culture—infringes upon that right.

The “backwards” attitude sometimes projected toward the developing world, one that has plagued American foreign policy for over a century, has become obsolete. In the end, subjective standards underline the semantic distinction between developed and developing—which suggests a dominance of the former’s culture, as well as its economic system and political activities. It is this complex that likely invites anti-American hostility from abroad. But so as long as we acknowledge our own faults, failures, and weaknesses, and maintain respect for others’ political and cultural sovereignties, countries will see no need to slam the door on American “meddling.”

India is not a colony to be ruled or a market to be capitalized, but a country of its own, with unwritten stories of slumdog millionaires that outnumber America’s four-to-one. Why say that India lags a decade behind the U.S., when its course should be its own? History has already written the American path toward economic and cultural modernization. Now, let India have its turn.


Ashin D. Shah ’12, a Crimson photographer, is an applied mathematics and economics concentrator in Pforzheimer House.