“Make India Aesthetic Again”, Swarajya, March 15, 2026
“One way to understand a society is to see what it mocks. In contemporary India, refinement is often treated with suspicion. A well-arranged restaurant, a quiet public space, or careful manners are quickly dismissed as pretentious, westernised or artificial. Meanwhile, the chaotic, the improvised and the visibly unpolished are celebrated as “authentic.” Somewhere along the way, disorder began to pass for cultural honesty.
There is a familiar ritual in contemporary India: an eager repudiation of refinement dressed up as authenticity. We valorise the messy, the vernacular and the immediately accessible as if those qualities alone make something culturally “true.” The result is a peculiar cultural posture, a proud sub-culturisation of the non-aesthetic, where sophistication, etiquette and certain registers of taste are dismissed as colonial affectation rather than seen as civic tools that any civilisation can and should own.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu gives us a useful starting point. In Distinction he showed that taste is neither pure nor merely personal: it is produced in social fields as a marker of habitus and position. When a large portion of a society begins to equate “authenticity” with disorder or the absence of polish, the social meaning of taste reorganises around those qualities…..”
Read full article at swarajyamag.com
