In Defence of Cultural Appropriation

More, not less, appropriation is the solution to the culture wars

Much as my natural inclination is to be on the side of the “liberal left,” I find myself alienated from some of the discourse emanating from that (my?) side of the fence, as the culture wars boil and bubble on.

 There is plenty of room for me to get into trouble for apostasy, including my dislike of the attacks on writers like J.K. Rowling and Chimananda Ngozi over their reservations regarding how the trans-movement is unfolding.

But in this post, I’ll examine what I believe to be amongst the most illiberal, “liberal” injunctions – the one against cultural appropriation.

My whole life had been an act of cultural appropriation. I’ve written books about Chinese cats and Indonesian clerics. I have prayed in churches- even though I’m an atheist (ish)-Hindu. I wear kimonos, qipaos and aozais more often than I do sarees. Over the years, I’ve learned Argentinian tango, Japanese drumming and Spanish flamenco. I can only really cook two things: Chinese steamed dumplings and Japanese miso-marinated salmon. I’ve never made daal, or a single roti.

I’m the sort of person who gets pictures taken wearing exotic costumes when I’m on holiday. I have one of my father and I dressed up as an Ottoman pasha and his companion, that was snapped in Istanbul. It’s up on our kitchen wall.

As a writer, and as a person, I’ve desired to stretch my identities; to be supple. The imagination’s work is to bend and twist around the policing of boundaries- political, religious, gastronomic, temporal. The writer, the reader, or any curious person, really, has a proclivity towards inhabiting the past and the future, as much as the present. They extend themselves beyond their ethnicity, gender, colour, sexuality, and empirical experiences to imagine other lives in other places and times.  

But do I, as an Indian woman, have any business writing about Chinese cats? OK, I’m being a tad facetious, but as someone whose life work has been about writing of places and peoples other than her “own,” the cultural appropriation charge is something I must grapple with.

The advantage I have in avoiding this charge– other than just not being all that well known – is that I am a woman of colour from a developing country. The “problem” of cultural appropriation in literature is not just about someone writing about something they lack first-hand knowledge of. It has to do with who is writing and about what. It is about the underlying power relationship connecting those two coordinates.

The problem arises when a dominant group assumes the voice of someone from a minority group that has historically been exploited or oppressed. It is the upper-class, older, English male travel writer striding across the world, pointing out the quirky habits of the natives in plummy, “I say, how marvelous!”s  and “By jove, I’ve never seen anything quite like it!”s.

It’s true that the world has learned about itself primarily through the lenses of writers who’ve had the cultural capital and economic resources that have allowed them to become the primary explainers-in-chief.

People like me, muddy the picture. I’m brown, Indian and a woman. The kind of person whose voice is needed on the world stage as a corrective to the cultural appropriation that is historical fact in the context of “global” knowledge creation and distribution.

But, I do not write about “myself.” My writings on India, or about women, are a minority of my output. My first language is English, not an Indian vernacular. I have the advantages of the “global north,” having studied in the elite universities of the West. I’m hardly a subaltern.

So, how do I justify doing what I do? To begin with I’ve always made sure that I’ve really inhabited the cultures I write about. I don’t helicopter into a country, interview a few taxi drivers and then write an ‘authoritative” book about the place.

I spend years in the places I write about. I try and learn the language. And most importantly, I attempt to make readers aware that my version is only one version of the “truth.” My writings are a partial, subjective snapshot, informed as much by me the observer, as they are by what I am observing.

However, this partiality of truth would apply even were I to exclusively write about elite women writers from India. I might do a better job of it, than a feathery-old Oxford don who has rarely left his ivory tower, but it would be a partial rendering, nonetheless. And it isn’t completely impossible that the Oxonian geriatric might somehow produce the better work.

If it is OK for me to write about, say, an Indian woman from a backward caste who is forced into an abusive marriage with an alcoholic village elder, the Oxford don is fine to write about an elite Indian woman writer.

We’d both be extending ourselves beyond our immediate experience, and the eventual quality of the outcome would depend on the investments we make in trying to understand our characters, and on our craftsmanship. We might write bad books, or good books, but these eventualities cannot be judged a priori based purely on our lived realities

Do I believe that dalit (“untouchable”) writers should also be telling their own stories, rather than Anglophone-city slickers, like me, having a monopoly on their narratives? Of course. But the way to have dalits be heard is not to claim that non-dalits lack the legitimacy to write about them, but to multiply the opportunities for dalit voices to sound out too.

One day a dalit author might want to write about a city-slicker, just as an Indian woman might want to write about a Chinese cat. If, as Indians, we don’t all want to be stuck forever describing the scent of mangoes and the taste of pickles, we must fight for our rights to appropriate other cultures. And if we treat these with the respect, openness, and affection they deserve, our work will probably be better and more successful for it, than if we didn’t.  

There are structural inequalities in this world and consciously providing more opportunities to historically marginalized groups is necessary to redress these. But what we need is more voices, multiplications, and yes, appropriations.

We need Indonesians telling us about Afghanistan, Brazilians about Spain, and Indians about the Ukraine (as Rana Dasgupta brilliantly does in his novel, Solo). We need to hear about many truths, from many perspectives, some lived, others imagined. We need to expand our empathy.  We need immigrants writing books from the point of view of unsettled host populations, and liberals writing books inhabiting the world of Trumpists.

This is the only way out of the culture wars.

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