They want Indian culture, they just don't want the people

In the Met Gala, 2025, Diljit Dosanjh walks the carpet in an ivory sherwani stitched with the map of Punjab and lines of Gurmukhi script. Even people who had never heard his name stopped scrolling. Then the story turned. Cartier, the French jeweller, had reportedly declined to lend him the Patiala necklace to finish the look.

The history behind that necklace matters. Cartier made it in 1928 for Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, set with 2,930 diamonds and the De Beers, the seventh-largest diamond in the world. It vanished in 1948 and resurfaced later, stripped of most of its stones. Yet in 2022, influencer Emma Chamberlain wore the original choker to the same gala without any trouble. A jewel that began in Punjab was refused to a Punjabi and lent to a content creator from Los Angeles. The message was hard to miss.

Cartier is only one chapter. In 2025, a TikTok video calling the dupatta a ‘Scandinavian scarf’ went viral. The video was later deleted, but the renaming had already caught on.

The sharara turned into a ‘Scandinavian dress,’ bindis became ‘face jewels,’ and the sari was reduced to a ‘boho body wrap.’ The lehenga was now a ‘two-piece bodice and skirt set,’ jhumkas and heirloom jewellery were rebranded ‘vintage classics,’ Kashmir pashmina slipped into ‘cashmere wool,’ and the Sikh dastar became a ‘fashion head piece.’

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Internet ignorance is one thing. Big fashion houses doing the same is another. Gucci sold a Sikh turban as the ‘Indy Full Turban’ in 2019.

Prada released ‘toe ring chappals’ in 2025 that were near-identical to Kolhapuri chappals.

Ralph Lauren described jhumkas as vintage jewellery and Rajasthani bandhani as a ‘boho printed summer skirt’ in 2026.

The pattern is consistent, take the design, drop the name, keep the profit.

‘South Asian’ is not a synonym for ‘Indian’

A form of erasure hides behind a tidy umbrella term. Indians are South Asian, that much is true. But South Asia spans eight countries, each with its own history, traditions and heritage. When a sari, a bindi or a bandhani print gets filed under ‘South Asian,’ the specific story behind it disappears. The sari is worn across the region, yet its roots run back some 5,000 years in India and are tied deeply to Hindu tradition.

Lumping it into a broad category is like calling Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese culture simply ‘Asian,’ or treating Lebanese, Egyptian and Greek culture as one ‘Arabian’ thing. Nobody would accept that shortcut elsewhere. If something is Iraqi, call it Iraqi. If it is Brazilian, call it Brazilian. Credit is not a big ask.

Loved on the runway, mocked in real life

Here is the part that stings most. The same societies now treating Indian clothing as a trend have long mocked Indians for their accents, their food and their supposed ‘dirtiness.’ For many who grew up abroad, traditional clothes, music and food were a refuge from racism and the feeling of not fitting in.

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Watching that refuge become a hashtag, sold back by the people who once sneered at it, feels like losing the last space that felt simply theirs. They want to be like Indians, but without Indians, mocking first and marketing afterwards.

None of this is a plea for the world to keep away. Sharing culture is a joy, and diversity grows stronger when celebrated together. The condition is small, call it Indian, and call it by its real name. Wearing a lehenga is not the offence. Twisting it beyond recognition, giving it a meaningless label and pretending to have invented it is.

The question behind the jewel

Had Diljit worn the Patiala necklace, the story would have moved from guardianship to reclamation. Uncomfortable questions would have followed. Why was it lost? Who took it? Why does a French house still hold it? Why has it never gone home?

There is no neat fix. Corporations will keep repackaging what is not theirs. What remains is awareness, knowing the names, the histories and the origins, and saying them out loud. The pattern has played out before. East Asians faced open hostility for years, until Korean skincare and ramen nights became the height of cool. Hate swings like a pendulum, and admiration takes its place. Truthfully, it is hard to blame anyone for wanting in. If this were not their culture, it would be tempting to copy it too.

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So the question is a simple one, can the world love a culture without first learning whose it is?