In Emily in Paris, Netflix’ universally hated show that is also addictive and impossible to stop watching, nothing ever goes wrong. Emily Cooper, the show’s titular heroine, successfully overcomes and emerges happy from whatever professional and personal challenges life puts in her way. As a result of of two painfully banal posts, she becomes an Instagram influencer, and, at work, Emily churns out marketing campaigns that are both excruciatingly bad and universally liked. Generally, Emily is adored, despite (arguably) being one of the blandest protagonists to have ever inhabited Paris on-screen.

Even the most drastic plot twists are conveniently resolved in the saccharine reality of Emily in Paris, and no drama is dwelled upon for too long. Indeed, even as one of the show’s secondary characters, a caricature-like couturier, is hit by a car at the end of one episode, at the beginning of the next one, he is revealed to be alive, and well, and smiling. Predicaments do come up and challenges do appear, but no predicament seems too grave to solve, and no problem is too drastic to disrupt the show’s upbeat narrative. Difficulties are solved swiftly and easily, and are quickly forgotten with little reflection on the part of the show’s characters. Even the show’s central love triangle doesn’t seem to cause much of a stir, and neither of the characters involved in it seems too perturbed.

With its one-dimensional characters and clichéd portrayal of Paris, Emily in Paris is easy to shrug off as a silly fantasy. And yet, there is something offensive about its chirpy mood, simplistic plot and, above all, the inevitable ease, with which all its conflicts are resolved. In fact, the show’s simple, straight-forward, easy-to-resolve plot lines present the perfect example of what I would like to call ‘happy narratives.’ Such narratives offer an optimistic approach to problems and predicaments, affirming that any difficulty can be resolved and overcome. Whereas Emily in Paris provides a selection of crass and particularly unrealistic happy narratives, a multitude of the same kind persist across media and culture. Happy narratives occur in advertising and marketing, they can be found in personal testimonials of self-help literature, they are used in magazine profiles and throughout LinkedIn, which offers a deluge of first-person accounts about overcoming challenging situations, ‘learning from failure and bouncing back.’ They are also a staple of Instagram, with its mandatory positivity. Characteristically, happy narratives present a predicament, a painful episode or trauma, but show as these are happily resolved through labour and use of techniques. In the end of a happy narrative, the story’s protagonist gains something – either it is a learning or added experience (as every second LinkedIn post has it), or material profit, or success, or another aspirational gain.

From the point of structure, the happy narratives of contemporary culture are, of course, not a new phenomenon, similar happy plots have existed since times immemorial – we’d know them from classical literature and from folklore. In the latter, some of the most frequent plots across cultures can be described as happy narratives, as Vladimir Propp described in his theory on folktales¹. According to the predecessor of structuralism and prominent representative of the Moscow Formal School Viktor Shklovsly, a literary plot is a structure that consists of logically organised parts². One of the earliest and easily recognisable folkloric plots is set in motion by the protagonist’s encounter with a challenge. Overwhelmed, the protagonist then finds an object, learns a ritual, or meets a helper, through which the predicament is resolved. Finally, the protagonist lives ‘happily ever after,’ having gained wealth or love.

Akin to folkloric plots, contemporary happy narratives suggest tackling challenges and issues through objects or rituals. One of the most obvious examples of the use of happy narratives, is, perhaps, contemporary advertising, relying on narratives about how it was before (bad) and how it was changed after (for the better). Ads tend to present a vexing problem that then proceeds to be resolved easily and painlessly through the use of a product or a service. According to marketing campaigns, any problem can be solved by a product. Beauty and fashion goods promise youth, confidence and freedom, food is supposed to make you happy and healthy, and some brands assure us that, through their products, we’ll find calm and balance. In the marketing parlance of many a beauty brand, they offer you opportunities to ‘take time for yourself,’ ‘be in the moment’ and ‘find inner peace.’³

In her writings on happiness, the scholar Sara Ahmed makes a series of brilliant observations on what happiness is imagined to be⁴. Happiness, she claims, is usually presumed to lie outside the span of a current moment – either in the past or, more often, in the future. Happiness, thus, presents itself as a promise and is naturally aspirational – despite its hard-to-define character, that is something everyone is not just striving for, but is also expected to strive for.

Happiness is elusive and hard to define and, of course, happiness means different things to different people. But, however different our tastes and ideals of happiness might be, Ahmed remarks on the universality of cultural and societal beliefs about the good and bad, the auspicious and undesirable. One example of such universal ideas could be the trope of the wedding day as ‘the happiest day of one’s life.’ On what is expected to be the happiest day of your life you can but feel happy, and feeling otherwise is inadequate and goes against cultural dogmas and, culturally, is unacceptable.

In happy narratives, the concepts that have been socially and culturally constructed as happy and good are usually positioned as desirable outcomes. Thus, the reward that folklore protagonists gain at the end is usually what society considers to be good – wealth, marriage, revenge. And, similarly, in contemporary happy narratives, the gain that protagonists receive is a reflection of current values. Contemporary happy narratives offer recipes for professional success, confidence, increased visibility, or, in the jargon of LikedIn, ‘growth,’ ‘learning,’ ‘impact’ or development – all things considered good and desirable in the current neoliberal imagination.

The structure of ‘happy narratives’ relies on two plot devices – a presentation of a challenge and a happy resolution thereof. If either one or the other is missing, a happy narrative loses its power to convey a cathartic resolution. Such narrative structure, beyond the candy-hued world of Emily in Paris, corporate fables of LinkedIn and marketing scenarios, is also a favourite of lifestyle journalism. In lifestyle and fashion magazines, celebrity profiles tend to unfold as stories about successful overcoming of difficulties. Focusing on those who already are famous and successful, magazines present fame and success as results of a struggle – they appear to be fought for, and, therefore, earned. Thus, in its profile of Bella Hadid from 2022, Vogue US dwells on the difficult aspects of the model’s life – indeed, she might be one of the world’s highest-paid models, living in a luxurious apartment, but she also cries every day.⁵ As proof that celebrities’ wealth, fame and success are deserved, fashion and lifestyle magazines tend to introduce famous people as deserving, calling for readers’ compassion and empathy. The magazines claim that celebrities have fought – either for themselves or for other people as celebrity activists.⁶

Under the economic and cultural conditions of late capitalism, happy narratives no longer involve encounters with magical helpers or use of magical objects. Instead, they portray labour as a means to obtain happiness. What they share with folkloric happy narratives is a hope for a happy outcome and anticipation of happiness as a reward for a life righteously lived. The philosopher Michel Foucault’s idea of ‘technologies of the self’ could probably offer a key to understanding contemporary happy narratives. In Foucault’s words, ‘technologies of the self permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.’ This idea succinctly captures the expectation of a reward for an effort given, suffering sustained, or a challenge overcome. It may also be seen as a coax that sustains and reproduces the existing ways of being and living by feeding into the societal and cultural expectations of happiness. Imagined as professional success, relationship status, fame, visibility, parenthood, power or influence, happiness is an aspirational promise that sets society and culture, with its habits of consumption and production in motion.

While happiness and success are believed to be predicated on personal labour and effort, failure, too, is believed to be personal and private, a proof that you were not doing enough, not doing it right, or not feeling right. In their work on confidence culture, Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad look at the phenomenon of affective neoliberalism, dissecting how confidence and attaining confidence have grown to be regarded as recipes for success. Abundant self-books, media narratives, social media posts, and advertisements discipline users to be confident⁷. Confidence has turned into a happiness pointer, a magical object that is universally believed to bring about good things and change one’s life for the better. But only if one does confidence the right way, will everything work out right – hence multiple instructions on happiness. What the mainstream confidence cult(ure) fails to account for are the structural hurdles and social inequalities that personal effort and struggle can rarely overcome.

What if one’s successful self-work, skillful use of technologies of the self or acquisition of ‘happiness pointers’ (to use Sara Ahmed’s term) do not bring about a happy outcome and satisfaction? ‘Happy narratives’ promote an inherently optimistic view that labour, effort and compliance with societal expectations guarantee happiness. This optimism, however, is cruel in the sense articulated by the cultural critic Lauren Berlant. In Berlant’s view, optimism turns cruel when it channels hope and effort towards something that is perilous⁸. ‘I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel,’ Berlant writes,’because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the loss of x [object of optimism] in the scope of one’s attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself. But some scenes of optimism are clearly crueler than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or animating potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place.’ In other words, when it generates a false hope in detrimental conditions, the optimism is cruel.

Happy narratives turn bankrupt and risky ways into aspirational ones in Berlant’s cruelly optimistic way. Especially at a time of a climate emergency, deepening inequalities and increasing precarity, optimistic scenarios based on the glorification of labour, success and visibility, seem particularly dangerous. True, advertising and mainstream fashion media would want us to believe that solutions to climate change lie in ‘shopping sustainable brands,’ yet following their lead would be naive, stupid and dangerous. It might be easy to discard self-help books, sentimental LinkedIn posts and, indeed, the optimism of Emily in Paris as meaningless and laughable, but the ubiquity and pervasiveness of happy narratives have a disciplining effect, as they reiterate and entrench what is desirable, happy and good. They continuously trivialise the risks and dangers of living in a time of crisis. Pessimism might do us some good here.

Ira Solomatina is a researcher, lecturer and writer whose interest lies in the intersection of globalisation, gender and fashion.

1. Vladimir Propp, ‘Study of the folktale: structure and history,’ Dispositio 1, no. 3, 1976, pp. 277–292. ↩

2. Giuseppe Tateo, ‘Viktor Shklovsky, Bronislaw Malinowski, and the Invention of a Narrative Device,’ HAU journal of ethnographic theory 10, no. 3, pp. 813–827, 2020. ↩

3. Examples abound; for some instances see products by brands LoveShea, Inner Sense, abeautifulworld, Rituals. ↩

4. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, Duke University Press, 2010. ↩

5. https://www.vogue.com/article/bella-hadid-cover-april-2022 ↩

6. https://www.vogue.com/article/dua-lipa-cover-june-july-2022
   and https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/collina-strada-small-business-spotlight ↩

7. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, ‘The Confidence Cult(ure),’ Australian feminist studies 30, no. 86, pp. 324–344, 2015. ↩

8. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011. ↩

‘Freedom on hold’ read the caption on the cover of the April 2020 issue of Vogue Portugal. In a visual reference to Magritte’s ‘Kiss,’ the cover showed a black-and-white image of two people, in medical masks, kissing. Created at the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the cover became a viral sensation and one in a series of attempts to capture and define the pandemic-induced social changes.

The freedoms that the COVID pandemic stripped us of were many – the freedom to see and meet our loved ones, the freedom to travel, the freedom to go out, the freedom to traverse our cities. Many of these freedoms we had never even thought mattered so much – and giving them up felt bitter – but also justified. Especially, once it became obvious how the issue of freedom can be manipulated in many a nasty way by the far right, anti-vaxxers, anti-lockdown protesters.

Fast forward to 2022, it feels impossible not to think about the many meanings and ambiguities behind the word ‘freedom’ on Vogue‘s cover, and also about the ambiguities and controversies that the very idea of ‘freedom’ holds. Fashion media and fashion marketing open up a vast discursive space to think about the inconsistencies and ambiguities within ‘freedom.’

‘Freedom’ is a word that is shamelessly overused in fashion media and fashion marketing. The term is a staple of fashion campaigns – which a brief look at ads of the past couple of years can confirm. The Berlin-based e-tailer Zalando, as one example, routinely ‘celebrates freedom’ in its seasonal campaigns. Having assumed the slogan ‘free to be’ in 2019, the e-commerce company has since presented a slate of freedom-centred campaigns, including the most recent ‘Dresscode: Freedom,’ featuring pioneer Finnish LGBTQI+ activists.¹ Then there is the recent #FINDYOURFREEDOM campaign by Fila,² H&M’s campaign ‘celebrating freedom and empowerment’ (through their skatewear and swimwear collections!);³ Givenchy’s 2018 collection ‘celebrating the freedom of having a good time,’⁴ and, in 2021, Calvin Klein was asking on Twitter: ‘What does freedom in the body look like for you?’ If you are wondering what this might even mean, feel free to ‘discover’ their campaign, in which ‘a collection of avant-garde talent explore the questions we ask ourselves.’⁵

In contemporary fashion campaigns, editorials and magazine articles freedom is casually and seemingly randomly assigned to products, campaigns, people. Freedom appears as an unequivocally positive thing, and manifestations of freedom are routinely celebrated. Freedom is also promised to you, the reader and consumer, as long as you buy a freedom-inducing item. Freedom contains a contradiction: seemingly, there is an abundance of it, and yet it is highly desirable and appealing. According to fashion media, freedom can be gained through fashion and consumption of designs. Thus, one Instagram post by Vogue US reads:

A woman’s body is a battleground, as recent legal rulings have reminded us. And whether the fight is over what a woman may or may not do with her body, or how that body is ‘supposed’ to look, the question at the heart of the conflict is the same: How free is a woman to be herself? Fashion has — well overdue — begun to embrace models who don’t fit the sample-size 0 mould and emerging brands like @EsterManas treat shape inclusivity as a first principle in collection design.⁶

The post suggests that fashion has been hindering women’s freedom, making women feel like they aren’t free to be themselves. Then it outlines a solution to this dilemma that, paradoxically, also comes through fashion and from the designers who are beginning to embrace the diversity of women’s body types. Therefore, the ‘freedom’ that women are attaining is still defined by the inner logic of the fashion industry and can only occur if women cooperate and agree with the conditions set up by the fashion industry. This paradoxical emptiness of the term ‘freedom’ evokes the philosopher Michel Foucault’s statement that there is no freedom from the power of discourse. Power, in the Foucauldian sense, is ever present and it is adaptive and flowy, incorporating and coopting resistance and languages of resistance.

Similarly questionable is the collocation ‘freedom of expression,’ another cliché of fashion marketing and media. While fashion media usually encourages readers to embrace their ‘freedom of expression,’ they are also encouraged to do so by choosing from a pre-selected repertoire of designer clothes. Seemingly, you are given the freedom to express yourself, but you are also required to do so within designated parameters.

Foucault’s theory of power resonates with the critiques of neoliberalism and research on consumer empowerment, brand authenticity and corporate social responsibility initiatives of the late-stage capitalism. As communications scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser effectively argues in her book ‘Authentic TM,’ currently, we live in the era where the political, the emotional and the personal are branded. Political commitments, grand social responsibility gestures, big claims about freedom and empowerment, while not always disingenuous, end up serving as marketing and branding tools. It is only logical that in the contradiction-laden neoliberal culture the aesthetic of freedom functions as a powerful incentive to shop. The ‘freedom,’ promised by fashion marketing campaigns and fashion media, is wistfully portrayed through the symbols and language redolent of the big liberation movements of the second half of the twentieth century. Campaigns, fashion features and editorials speak of ‘community’ and togetherness, presenting images of ‘free-spirited,’ determined-looking young people.

A recent, Spring Summer 2022 campaign by Etro, shot by Mario Sorrenti, is called ‘Empire of Freedom’ and captures ‘a new reality, where you can just be yourself,’ as per the brand’s instagram page.⁷ The Dutch edition of the Numero magazine thus comments on Etro’s campaign: ‘Freedom is living according to personal parameters, better if shared with kindred spirits. Freedom is enjoying the moment, lightheartedly. Empire of Freedom is the title of the new Etro advertising campaign, shot by Mario Sorrenti in a space that is both a commune, a house, and an atelier. A laboratory where we live and build, all together, a new reality, sharing passions and exploring the energy of youth.’⁸ Evoking the style and political drive of the 1970s, the magazine proceeds to describe the campaign as ‘an opportunity to reinvent, looking at the future all together with new eyes: the eyes of youth with the spontaneity of a community, following no rules and no orders.’ In all its vagueness, this description refers to all the powerful markers of political change: ‘reinventing the future,’ ‘youth,’ ‘spontaneity of a community,’ ‘following no rules.’

And yet, despite the community-centred talk, the ways to gain freedom remain largely private and individual – they do not involve organised community action. The freedom discourse of the fashion industry casts ‘freedom’ as something shoppable, aspirational and private. Freedom emerges as a commodity, something that you receive as a bonus, along with your apt fashion purchase.

On our go-to fashion pages, we are steered towards ‘liberating’ shapewear, and ‘emancipating’ skincare with ads for freedom-generating perfumes sandwiched in between. ‘Rihanna’s first Fenty drop of the decade is all about freedom,’ reads a headline on the website of British Vogue.⁹ The article proceeds to describe the Fenty collection notes, quoting the press release: it ‘fuses punk military styles with sports luxe, encouraging free thinking and free movement.’ And yet, isn’t it absurd to claim that free thinking should be encouraged through the highly private and quite elitist act of consumption?

Indeed, the venues towards freedom that fashion and lifestyle magazines encourage are often private and de-politicised. A video from Refinery29, titled ‘Finding freedom through roller skating,’ narrates a story of a young woman who turns to roller skating as a way to ‘feel good,’ and has found respite in it from her unfulfilling and ‘toxic’ job.¹⁰ Another Refinery29 article outlines an ever more escapist take on freedom. In the article, titled ‘Why Black women are finding freedom in being delusional,’ the author confesses to be ‘fuelled by my own delusions’ and argues for not ‘subscribing to reality.’

It is by no means easy to be delusional; in fact, it is easier to remain preoccupied with the unrelenting misery of life. Take dating right now as a straight woman; anyone in it knows what it feels like: hungrily rummaging through garbage in hopes of maybe finding a half-eaten banana that will sustain you until tomorrow. It is demoralising to see myself aggressively barter for crumbs of affection and respect. Applying delusion to my love life looks like constantly working to remind myself that I am worthy of love, I’m not ‘too much,’ and the companionship I desire is out there. Every day I look out at the toxic single-use-plastic-filled sea — I’m told there are plenty of fish in — and convince myself that someone is my match. Delusion is about taking stock of your surroundings and telling yourself there is more to life than this.¹¹

The article acknowledges the harshness of the current political reality, recognises the adverse conditions black women are forced to brave, and speaks critically of the dating culture in a patriarchal society. And yet it offers an escapist solution to this issues in de-politicising one’s life and ‘choosing’ to see it differently in order to ‘soar.’ With almost a Matrix-level dilemma about struggle and denial, the article provokes a question about what freedom is supposed to feel and be like.

I am certainly approaching the ‘freedom’ discourse in the fashion industry and media with a great deal of ambivalence. Freedom in itself is a slippery, evasive and hard-to-define idea. And then, shopping and consumption have been recognised as empowerment venues for women, helping women gain a wider recognition of their rights as consumers. Similarly, it has been argued that fashion and lifestyle media (that historically have targeted women) have widened women’s access to modernity. Lastly, as Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser demonstrate in their co-edited ‘Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times,’ we live in times when political intent and authenticity are expressed in a variety of seemingly contradictory ways, shaped by the logic of consumption, spectacle and visibility.

But it is probably the urgency of the currently unfolding crises that make the freedom discourse in fashion and lifestyle industries seem so irksome. In times of political turmoil, climate emergency, disinformation and human rights crises, can we even afford to to shop and delude our way to freedom?

In fashion marketing and magazines, freedom is often shown as something glossy, aspirational and enjoyable – freedom seems to always be within your reach. But freedom, the history shows, isn’t really supposed to be an easy gain. The story of the Civil Rights movement, feminism, queer movement all attest to the fact that liberation is not an easy task. Fights for freedom aren’t called ‘fights’ for nothing. Media’s escapist narratives seem to declare that freedom from oppressions is unachievable. And yet, don’t the stories of organised freedom movements of the twentieth century give us a glimmer of hope that the opposite can be true?

Lately, it does appear that lifestyle media are embracing alternative ways to speak about freedom. Over the past decade, fashion magazines have become more politically conscious, and are obviously searching for new, non-trivialising ways to speak about politics. Teen Vogue offers one example of how a fashion magazine can tackle the freedom discourse.

The notorious 2016 article ‘Donald Trump is gaslighting America’ established Teen Vogue’s reputation as one of the major pop-cultural political commentators. The magazine has effectively sustained that reputation ever since by extensively covering politics in the US and internationally. The references to ‘freedom’ that the publication are mostly political and concern freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of movement. To see these references in a media that claims to be a fashion publication is highly unusual, and sobering.

On a par with ‘celebrating freedom,’ another cliché thing to say is that ‘the personal is political’ – and it seems like the time has come for fashion media and the fashion industry to re-think what that means nowadays. Maybe, in search of the political, the industries that so skilfully cater to the private joys, pleasures and desires, should start looking beyond the personal.

Ira Solomatina is a researcher, lecturer and writer whose interest lies in the intersection of globalisation, gender and fashion.

1. https://www.adsoftheworld.com/campaigns/dresscode-freedom ↩

2. https://ww.fashionnetwork.com/news/Fila-unveils-freedom-loving-ss21-campaign-shot-in-london,1297219.html ↩

3. https://www.theindustry.fashion/hm-launches-campaign-celebrating-freedom-and-empowerment-for-new-skatewear-and-swimwear-collection/ ↩

4. https://hero-magazine.com/article/129010/givenchys-new-campaign-celebrates-the-freedom-of-having-a-really-good-time ↩

5. https://twitter.com/calvinklein/status/1367904731482427392 ↩

6. https://www.instagram.com/p/ChHy4kKj0WU/?hl=en ↩

7. https://www.instagram.com/p/CaFgThYNEyT/ ↩

8. https://www.numeromag.nl/etro-unveils-empire-of-freedom-the-new-spring-summer-2022-advertising-campaign/ ↩

9. https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/rihanna-fenty-fashion-new-release ↩

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ3Y8Cj7Cns ↩

11. https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/black-tiktok-delusional-manifestation-alternative ↩

In her book Victorian Babylon, Lynda Nead comes up with a striking metaphor for time, comparing it to a crumpled handkerchief.¹ The metaphor suggests that time and history resemble a piece of crushed fabric. Elements of the past repeat in the present and future, the futuristic enfolds the archaic, and dramatic tears erase whole eras.

The idea of time as a crumpled handkerchief offers a welcome alternative to the notion of time as a linear trajectory that is moving in the direction of progress and continuous betterment. Perception of time as linear is one of the legacies of the Enlightenment era which saw history as moving away from ancient barbaric, uncivilised and primitive times towards perfection based on rational thinking and efficiency. Time, according to the ideals of Enlightenment, is not just linear, but also competitive – whereas some are closer to the perceived ideals, others are believed to be losing out, those are the people steeped in timelessness, unaffected by change.

This stereotype has, for centuries, served to justify the existence of colonial regimes the world over. In his seminal article Orientalism that preceded the publication of the eponymous tome, Edward Said writes about how the Orient has been Orientalised within the European literary and political discourses – precisely through its continuous relegation to timelessness:

Rather than listing all the figures of speech associated with the Orient – its strangeness, its exotic sensuosness, etc. – we can generalise about them as they were handed down through the Renaissance. They are all declarative and self-evident; the tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength; they are always symmetrical to, and yet opposed and inferior to, a European equivalent, which is sometimes specified, sometimes not.²

Said’s comment about the perceived timelessness of the Orient is adopted and expanded by Linda Nochlin in her essay The Imaginary Orient, where she discusses how Orientalist art and photography sought to visualise the absence of history and progress in non-Western spaces.³ Thus, The Snake Charmer by the French Orientalist painter Jean-Leon Gerome (used, by the way, as a cover image for the first edition of Said’s Orientalism) shows a crowd of mesmerised Orientals as they watch a naked adolescent snake charmer perform a risky show. The room is poorly lit, and the picturesque blue tiles on the wall are crumbling, as though to further convince the viewer in the ineptness and laziness of the Oriental folk. The scene is timeless, and time seems to be standing still.

According to Said, the Oriental timelessness is continuously portrayed as ‘opposed and inferior’ to the dynamic change in the West. This imagined difference has defined the position that non-Western knowledge and belief systems have occupied in the contexts defined and shaped by Western, post-Enlightenment values. The dichotomy between the West and the rest determines what has historically has been considered art or denounced as artisanship, what has been defined as fashion or dismissed as costume. The former, since the early days of fashion theory, has been defined by change and, hence, believed to be only possible in the changing and dynamic West. And all the East was believed to offer were the unchanging timeless ‘costumes’ and a rich repertoire of exotic styles and motifs for the West to borrow from. The colonial era culminated in a feast of cultural appropriation, from the Japonisme trend to the lavish cultural potpourri of the early-twentieth century designs, to the signature works by Saint Laurent, to the China-themed Met Gala: the list can go on.

Much to the dismay of critics of cultural appropriation and despite the many attempts to eliminate it, cultural borrowings, thefts and appropriations continue. As art historian Min-Ha T. Pham writes in her key piece for The Atlantic from 2014, the discourse on cultural appropriation is unproductive and futile.⁴ Cultural insensitivity occurs, is called out, apologised for, and buried in the annals of the Internet with little to nothing changed in our approach to or understanding of cultural appropriation.

The ongoing unproductive cultural appropriation discourse, argues Pham, only succeeds in solidifying stereotypes about the West as powerful and non-West as weak and open for plundering. As an alternative to it she suggests an inappropriate take on cultural appropriation. Looking at the history of the Indonesian plaid ornament, which continues to be appropriated and ‘elevated’ by Western designers season upon season, she encourages a more thoughtful and nuanced study of design history and design motifs. This can enrich and expand our understanding of non-Western fashion history, help recognise that fashion trends can originate in non-West, and, hopefully, promote more respect for non-Western fashion narratives.

Nead’s concept of history as a crumpled handkerchief might offer a good model for rethinking the hierarchies that still exist in culture and fashion. In my imagination, Nead’s crumpled kerchief is graced with a different ornament than the Indonesian plaid, albeit one with a similarly complex history. This ornament is a mutable motif, and at different times, in different places, it has been known as buta, Indian pine, cone, cucumber, or paisley – and it has also looked differently throughout the centuries. The Western reader would know it by the name of paisley, which evokes associations with contemporary luxury – fashion journalists have continuously referred to paisley as the signature ornament of the Italian house of Etro, and it sits with equal ease on an Hermes scarf, or a Ralph Lauren blouse.

And yet, however effortless and immediate the connection between the ornament and luxury fashion is, paisley’s history, once unfolded, presents a fascinating cloth, partially stained with violence and colonial prejudice. At different times, the ornament signalled affiliation with royalty and working class, evoked male elegance in India and ladylikeness in Europe, fashion and anti-fashion, mass production, artisanship and DIY chic.

The history of the ornament – or at least the history we have access to – dates back to Persia at the times of the Sassanid empire between the 3 – 7th centuries. The butoh pattern of the Sassanian times looked differently from the teardrop-shaped motif we know today, and the word butoh was used to mean a whole group of decorative floral and plant motifs used in architecture.⁵

In the 15th century, the butoh motif was gaining recognition in Northern India as a shawl pattern. The shawls were woven in Kashmir by – predominantly Muslim – weavers from the finest goat-hair fabric, sourced from the northern region of Ladakh. The word ‘shawl’ is derived from the Persian shaal and, in the 15th century, meant a fashionable mantle-like garment draped over the body.

The shawl production flourished under the patronage of the Mughals emperors, who ruled India from the 16th until the 19th century. The empire was established in 1526 by Zahiruddin Babur, a descendant of the legendary conqueror Tamerlan. The Mughal court replicated the organisation and aesthetics of the Persian court, Persia being the cultural trendsetter within the region at the time. One of the traditions the Mughals maintained was khilat, or gift-giving, through which the emperor would manifest his authority over vassals through presenting them with luxurious robes of honour. The Mughal khilat was a sumptuous set of clothes, which would consist of turbans, shawls, trousers, shirts, robes and scarves, all made from finest fabrics and embroidered with gold. The shawls, decorated with embroidered or printed floral motifs, were brought in fashion by the emperor Akbar in the 16th century and constituted the major detail in wardrobes of Mughal nobles. As the miniatures from the 16th and 17th centuries show, the shawls were styled as fitted to the body and were worn by men.

Patrons of art and culture, the Mughal emperors invested heavily into the development of shawl production as well as the patterns that graced them. As noted by Michelle Maskiell, the 17th and the 18th centuries saw the popularity of ornaments conceived specifically to please and honour the Mughal rulers ( the names ‘Shah Pasand’ (Emperor’s Delight), and ‘Buta Muhammad Shah’ (Muhammad Shah’s Flower) are telling).⁶

The buta ornaments constituted a whole wide category of floral motifs. The butoh-buta design was not static and timeless, but was influenced and shaped by the cultural processes happening in India and in the wider region. As John Seyller remarks, the 17th- and 18th-century Mughal art and design were impacted by the gardening culture and artistic exchange with Europe.⁷ At the Mughal court, cultivation of flowers and gardens was seen as a sign of culture, refinement and civilisation. Representations of the floral patterns on shawls celebrated and reflected the prestige of the court-approved art of gardening.

The design and production of shawls throughout the 16th and 17th centuries were highly competitive and dynamic. On a par with the Mughal-sponsored production of shawls in Kashmir, there existed other centres of shawl production across the region, like Kerman, where a different type of fleece was used for the production of shawls and similar floral designs were gracing them. The competitiveness between different artistic and design centres drove excellence and continuous improvements in the techniques of production and ornamentation, employed by the weavers. This dynamic competitive process starkly contrasts with the Orientalist image of the unchanging and timeless field of Indian artisanship, shaped by ancient traditions.

Europe encountered the Kashmiri buta-graced shawls by way of trade with Egypt, Ottoman Empire and Russia. By the middle of the 17th century, the shawls were known in Europe and, by the end of the 18th century, they were recognised as a stylish and highly valuable accessory for women. Then, at the beginning of the 19th century, the shawls, graced with the teardrop-like Indian-pine patterns were embraced in France, where Napoleon’s wife Josephine draped them over column-style, empire-waist gowns, as she is shown in Prud’hon’s portraits.⁸

Since the arrival of the shawls to Europe, they symbolised luxury and status – in Vilette by Charlotte Brontë, an Irish woman passes for ‘an English lady in reduced circumstances’ and is employed as a governess into a respectable household by virtue of owning ‘a real Indian shawl “un veritable Cachemire.”’ Costly and unique, the shawls were re-sold, inherited and sought after – London had a secondary market for the Kashmiri shawls, where high-society women in difficult circumstances could pawn theirs.

All the while, the British government sought to relocate the centre of production of the shawls to Britain, as the high import tariffs on imported luxury goods made the shawl trade senseless. After multiple and largely ineffective attempts to bring Kashmiri goats to Europe, the invention of the jacquard loom proved to be a game changer, leading to the foundation of British centres of shawl production – the most famous of them in the Scottish town of Paisley.

The designs from Paisley were of a lesser quality and much cheaper than the fine Kashmiri shawls, and the ornaments used to decorate them were imitations of the pinecone motifs, which, before getting renamed into paisley, were called, Suchita Choudhury points out, the Cashmere shawl design.⁹

The Scotland-produced shawls happened to become the epicentre of discourses around progress, modernity and class. On the one hand, the ornaments used for the Paisley shawls were decried as tasteless, incongruous and altogether inferior to the ones gracing the original Kashmiri shawls. On the other hand, they were celebrated as a testimony to progress that set Britain apart from the ‘unchanging’ East. Writing for the popular magazine Household Worlds, author Harriet Martineau argued:

If any article of dress could be immutable, it would be the shawl; designed for eternity in the unchanging East; copied from patterns which are the heirloom of a caste, and woven by fatalists, to be worn by adorers of the ancient garment, who resent the idea of the smallest change.¹⁰

The ‘Indian shawl design’ started to gradually go out of fashion in the second half of the 19th century and after the Mutiny in India – the 1857 uprising against the East India Company in India provoked a series of repudiations of the Indian designs, the most passionate one coming from John Ruskin, who denounced ‘the exquisitely fancied involutions’ of Indian design as signs of ‘lower than bestial degradation.’ From the end of the 19th century, the Paisley shawls and their curled ornaments would be relegated to working-class fashions.¹¹

The next major resurfacing of the paisley ornament occurred throughout the 1960s – 70s during the hippie era and symbolised hippies’ attempt to radically divorce themselves from the disappointments of the Western culture. While the summer-of-love era decried racism and ushered in multiculturalism, it reiterated the old Orientalist dichotomies, portraying West as rational and modern and East as spiritual, timeless and mysterious.

Around the same time, a collection of old shawls and a trip to India kickstarted the history of Etro, celebrated for its ingenious interpretations of the paisley pattern and accused – every couple of seasons – for cultural appropriation. Yet, with Etro, the pinecone ornament is yet again firmly established in the vocabulary of global luxury fashion.

The story of the paisley ornament – or would it, in fact, be more accurate to call it the ‘Cashmere shawl ornament’? – is a testament to the non-linearity of history. Its shape and design have been formed by travel, trade, cultural exchange, imperial violence desire for distinction. It has been praised, criticised and forgotten, and at different times, it has channeled different meanings – through its associations with aristocracy and masculinity in India, femininity in the post-French revolution Europe, mass production and working class in the colonial-era Scotland. It is hard to say which of these meanings are truer, purer, or more important – all of them resulted from change in history and cultural exchange. The metaphor of a crumpled handkerchief allows us to admit the complex and illogical developments in history, letting us see fashion and culture in their rich randomness and to seek answers for the future of fashion beyond the great narratives.

Ira Solomatina is a researcher, lecturer and writer whose interest lies in the intersection of globalisation, gender and fashion.

1. L Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000 ↩

2. E Said, ‘Orientalism,’ The Georgia Review, Spring 1977, 31:1, pp. 162-206 ↩

3. L Nochlin, The Imaginary Orient, 1989 ↩

4. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/05/cultural-appropriation-in-fashion-stop-talking-about-it/370826/ ↩

5. S Khazaeimask and S M Hejazi, ‘Plant designs in Sassanid Period mouldings,’ Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, 2017, p. 696-710  ↩

6. M Maskiell, Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500– 2000, Berg, 2009 ↩

7. J Seyller, A Mughal Code of Connoisseurship, Muqarnas, 2000, Vol 17, pp 177–202 ↩

8. C Zutshi,  ‘“Designed for eternity”: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain,’ Journal of British Studies, 48: 2, 2009, pp. 420-440  ↩

9. https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/articles/a-tasteless-history-of-the-paisley-pattern ↩

10. C Zutshi, ‘“Designed for eternity”: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain,’ Journal of British Studies, 48: 2, 2009, pp. 420-440 ↩

11. https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/articles/a-long-way-from-home-the-paisley-pattern-and-india ↩

Every September, Vogue India starts prepping its readers for the festive season, suggesting fashions and accessories for the autumnal succession of Hindu holidays and festivals – Durga Puja, Dussehra, Karva Chauth, Diwali… It publishes pictures of Bollywood celebrities, dissecting their temple-going looks and advises the readers on how to imitate those. It tells you what the actress Priyanka Chopra wore for her home puja (‘pairing her sari with sindoor and mangalsutra’– accessories traditionally worn by married Hindu women),¹ it selects the best festive kurtas for Ganesh Chaturthi, and it might offer you a gift guide for Dussehra. And yet, reading Vogue India, you would not know when the 200 million of India’s Muslims celebrate Eid or observe Ramadan. In fact, if you read Vogue India for long enough, it might start to seem that India truly is a Hindu nation, as the country’s Prime Minister and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party would want the world to believe.

Vogue India, with its four million online readers and audience of seven million on social media, mostly catering to educated upper- and upper middle-class women, seems to abide to the very same attitudes that have been promoted by the Bharatiya Janata Party and right-wing groups. Overtly, it champions inclusivity and diversity, celebrates women’s empowerment, and decries discrimination. Dedicated to highlighting strong and independent women it predominantly features Hindu customs and upper-class Hindu women, signifying that Hindu upper-caste, upper-class femininity is – in contemporary Indian society – the desirable norm. Conspicuously absent from the magazine are Muslim women, Muslim Indian culture and Muslim fashion. The two mentions of ‘modest fashion’ (a contemporary catch-all term that has evolved to encompass Muslim fashion trends) that come up on the website, refer to spaces outside of India² (typically Great Britain or Saudi Arabia), suggesting that the topic is of no interest to an Indian reader.

Even the magazine’s way of tackling sustainability topics evokes upper-caste Hindu perspectives. Vogue discusses sustainability frequently, and its whole January 2020 issue was dedicated to home-grown sustainable design. Yet, in discussing sustainability, the title cites ancient and ‘quintessentially Indian’ Ayurveda practices, and lauds veganism, while ignoring non-Hindu, non-Brahmanic, low-caste viewpoints. While universally associated with conscious consumption, in contemporary India, veganism and vegetarianism have been weaponised to further marginalise minority communities that work with cow leather, or eat meat, or have been fighting for access to fishing for generations (the way low-caste Dalit communities have). In equating Indian-ness with upper-caste Hindu traditions and culture, the magazine reiterates the right-wing rhetoric that seeks to portray India as a Hindu nation.

Since the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), headed by Prime Minister Modi, came to power in 2014, it has been deliberately portraying India as a Hindu country and nation, where privilege and authority belongs with Hindus. Discrimination against minorities – notably Muslims – has been on the rise, with increasingly insidious tactics employed by BJP and smaller right-wing, state-supported organisations (such as the paramilitary Hindu RSS).³ Anti-Muslim vigilance has been encouraged by the government, and hateful messages have been spreading on social media – aptly dubbed by the LSE researcher Shakuntala Banaji ‘networks of hate,’ and partly subsidised by the government.⁴

The politics of hate spread with less and less resistance within the country: the voices of opposition are being suppressed, activists jailed, and criticisms stifled.⁵ The current events in Assam, where Muslims are being evicted from their villages to free space for the allegedly indigenous Hindu population is seen by many as a blueprint for what Modi’s vision for India is – an intolerant, all-Hindu nation.

The roots of contemporary anti-Muslim sentiments and communal violence are hidden in the colonial times. The divisive British policies shaped what historian Barbara Metcalf calls ‘communities of difference.’⁶ The colonial censuses measured religious communities and castes against each other, creating new categories of majority and minority, and establishing new brands of difference among the segments of India’s society. Metcalf argues that the colonial tendency towards measuring, counting and describing people made religion far more important than it was in the pre-colonial times and during the Mughal period. At the same time, the volatile favouritism of the colonial administration ensured that India’s communities remained pitted against each other, competing for the support and patronage of the British Raj.

The Orientalist worldview defined the Other as driven by superstition and religious belief. Thus, religious identity proved essential in shaping colonial discourses around law, gender and family in India, while religious scriptures informed the tactics of the British in the subcontinent throughout the nineteenth century. Ancient Brahmanic texts and high-caste Brahman informants became the main sources of knowledge about India for the British, not only forming a distorted view on religion, but also giving prevalence to high-caste, Brahmanic readings of Hinduism. The socio-political discourse in India grew to revolve around religion, which defined the history of early nationalist movements that were formed around the axes of religion, ultimately leading to the idea of separate states for Muslims and Hindus.

After the Partition in 1947, accompanied by bloodshed and communal violence, the then-ruling party of India, the National Congress, swore allegiance to secularism. Remarkably, post-Partition, India never had a party that would represent Indian Muslims, as they looked to Congress for representation. By the 1980s, however, the Congress was losing credibility not least due to a series of corruption scandals its high-ranking members and the ruling Gandhi family were involved in. Smaller right-wing parties were coming to prominence, riding the rhetoric about endangered Hinduism and oppressed Hindus. Their approach cut through the divisions of class and caste among Hindus, pushing the issues of economic inequality aside and seeking to consolidate the majority Hindu population in opposition to the Other, mainly the Muslim.

The proliferation of right-wing attitudes culminated in the early 1990s, when right-wing Hindu activists destroyed a mosque in the city of Ayodhya. Their argument was that it had been treacherously built in a place of a Hindu temple marking the birthplace of Ram. The blockbuster Ramayana series, based on the ancient epic and depicting the victorious life of Hindu deity Rama, had just finished on the national TV, hitting record-breaking ratings and creating an ample cultural moment for the right-wing groups to forcefully promote their agenda. The mosque in Ayodhya was taken apart brick by brick, and communal clashes in the whole of the country ensued, most of their victims being Muslims.

After the ‘success’ of the Ayodhya case, architectural sites became battlefields for right-wing groups who search for ways to undermine the cultural significance of the Muslim presence in India. Even an iconic place like Taj Mahal is not exempt from the Hindu nationalists’ attempts to re-write history. In 2017, an MP from the ruling BJP asked the government to re-classify it as a Hindu temple and acknowledge that a Hindu ruler built it,⁷ contrary to the fact that it was conceived by Mughal ruler Shah Jahan as a monument to Nur Jahan, his late wife.

Culture has always been a strong currency in right-wing politics. Bollywood, TV shows, and cinema in particular echo the Hindu nationalist ideology, reproducing the discourses invented and employed by the right-wing. Thus, writes Sanjeev Kumar, the representation of Muslim characters in contemporary Indian movies echoes the stereotypes about Muslim masculinity and Muslim femininity as portrayed by Hindu nationalists.⁸ In a rhetoric that, at times, seems to echo the colonial Orientalist discourse, Muslim men emerge as irrational, aggressive Others, brutes and rapists, while Muslim women appear as either helpless and oppressed or as mysterious seductresses, whose unrestrained sexuality sets them apart from the archetype of the honourable Hindu woman.⁹

In Bollywood movies, costumes and fashion serve as a language to elevate Hindu femininity and condemn a ‘perverse’ Muslim femininity. Saba Hussain and Nazia Hussein argue that Bollywood is re-casting the sari,¹⁰ historically worn by women across communities, as a Hindu garment, dressing its Muslim heroines either in overtly provocative clothes or styling them with the veil to suggest their oppressed status.

Despite the many and, at times, successful attempts of right-wing groups to re-write the history of India, its culture, its art, and traditional fashion testify to centuries of peaceful cooperation and cultural exchange between India’s religious communities. The Indo-Saracenic architecture, currently re-branded as the architecture of ‘Islamic invaders,’ presents, in fact, a mixture of styles, and was as much inspired by classic mosques as it is by Hindu temples. The kalamkari prints, the most on-hand example of Indian traditional crafts, developed through a mixture of various traditions and with ardent support from Mughal rulers; the very word kalam (or qalam; ‘pen’) coming from the Persian language). India’s textile and fashion industries have thrived on a variety of crafts, traditionally practiced within different religious and ethnic communities. For centuries, embroideries have been largely produced by Muslim artisans, clothes have been sewn by tailors from both Hindu and Muslim darzi communities (the word darzi literally means ‘tailor’), and fabrics have been woven by Muslim weavers.¹¹

India’s textile and fashion industry, and Indian luxury-fashion designers in particular, hugely rely on the efforts of Muslim craftsmen for the production of the costliest and most exquisite pieces. Therefore, it is surprising that amidst the government-endorsed suppression of minorities, Indian fashion designers have been largely silent. For Elle India’s November 2020 issue, dedicated to inclusivity and sustainability, the magazine interviewed twenty-two fashion designers, asking them what kind of future they envisioned for Indian fashion. Among repetitive references to the need for conscious design, revival of traditions and programmatic statements on sustainable production, one contribution from designer Sabyasachi stood out, expressing hope that India will be ‘more tolerant, celebratory of what makes us different, and what binds us together.’ More outspoken than Sabyasachi is designer Kallol Datta, best-known for his modern renditions of the hijab, some of them currently on view at the Victoria and Albert museum in London. In his 2019 piece for Mumbai-based lifestyle and fashion magazine Verve, Datta asked ‘Where have all the angry designers gone?,’ urging India’s fashion industry to act: We’ve done irreversible damage by not catering to a segment of the population in this country when we’re making clothes. We’ve chosen to tell them that they don’t matter, they obviously do not have any interest in fashion and that we’re still interested in their money if they choose to ‘clandestinely’ come to our studios to place private orders. ((https://www.vervemagazine.in/fashion-and-beauty/we-need-more-angry-designers-kallol-datta))

Two years later, Datta believes nothing has changed in the industry:

We’re happy to employ Muslim craftspeople and artisans, pander to Arab states to retail our clothes, borrow heavily from Islamic art and architecture but remain quiet and therefore complicit in mainstream anti-Muslim bigotry. We’ve never included critical thinking in clothes-making especially in the fashion industry. Which is why we’ve never been taken seriously. We’re seen as an expendable facet to Bollywood. And that’s where designers need to be more brave. Not make the Indian film industry the only currency they operate with. Building a spine will take a very long time. So, while satirists, graphic designers, journalists and others have viscerally engaged with their immediate environment in the past few years and taken a stand, designers still have to find their voice.¹²

Lately, fashion designers’ and brands’ attempts to speak up have been regrettably futile. Last year, jewellery brand Tanishq, owned by the powerful Tata corporation, had to pull an ad featuring a Hindu-Muslim family, after an outcry on social media. In the ad, a pregnant Hindu woman asks her Muslim mother-in-law whether Muslim families arrange baby showers, in an answer to which the mother-in-law leads her into a surprise baby shower. Conceived as a message of love and unity, the campaign was accused by some social media users of promoting ‘love jihad,’ in reference to the conspiracy theory according to which Muslim men marry Hindu women in order to forcefully convert them to Islam. This conspiracy theory, based on the right-wing assertion that Hindu culture is in danger, has made interfaith marriages across the country difficult and even dangerous.

Similarly, a recent Fabindia festive campaign has been pulled after a social media outcry. The reason? The brand used the Urdu words jashn-e-riwaaz (Urdu is the language associated with India’s Muslim population) to describe the Hindu festival Diwali – Twitter users ruled that the ad was offensive for Hindus. Notably, the Hindu festivals Diwali and Holi historically have been celebrated across religious communities.

The possibility of communal unity has not been entirely eliminated in India. There is still a glimmer of hope for those who, like designer Sabyasachi, yearn for the tolerant and inclusive future of India and Indian fashion. Not all dissenting voices have been silenced, and not every fashion magazine has turned into a platform for right-wing rhetoric. India’s Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Verve have been vocal against the government’s discriminatory policies and anti-Muslim legislation of the past few years. Recently, in a graceful gesture of defiance, Elle India ran a profile of journalist Rana Ayuub, one of most outspoken critics of Prime Minister Modi and right-wing parties. There also exist smaller, progressive-thinking platforms like Feminism In India that look at fashion and femininity outside of the upper-caste Hindu realm.

Despite these (modest) reasons for hope, more pressing than ever remain the questions about what is next for India and its culture, and what side of history the fashion industry will be on: supporting the divisive and limiting right-wing politics, complicit in the elimination of the Muslim culture and people, or embracing openness and democracy. And, maybe, it is time for international brands to learn more about the country that it has been viewing as a convenient production site. Over the years, we have seen brands across the globe introduce conscious practices into their work, and we have seen how effective they can be when truly meant and well-executed. Perhaps not just the local Indian fashion industry should commit to real inclusivity, but the international fashion community, too, should start speaking up.

Ira Solomatina is an independent researcher, lecturer and writer whose interest lies in the intersection of globalisation, gender and fashion.

1. https://www.vogue.in/vogue-closet/collection/priyanka-chopra-karva-chauth-2020-red-sari-ruffles-strappy-blouse-mangalsutra-sindoor-bangles-ring-earrings-nick-jonas-california/ ↩

2. https://www.vogue.in/content/how-modest-dressing-found-its-way-into-mainstream-fashion ↩

3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rashtriya-Swayamsevak-Sangh ↩

4. S. Banaji & R. Bhat, Social Media and Hate, Routledge, 2021. ↩

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/world/asia/hindu-extremists-india-muslims.html ↩

6. T. R, Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge University Press, 1997. ↩

7. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-41813339 ↩

8. S. Kumar, Constructing the nation’s enemy: Hindutva, popular culture and the Muslim ‘other’ in Bollywood cinema. Third World Quarterly, 34(3), p. 458–469, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.785340 ↩

9. One example of wide-spread anti-Muslim narratives in India is the conspiracy theory of ‘love jihad.’ It states that Muslim men marry Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam and thus accelerate the number of Muslims living in India. For further examples refer to E. Leidig, From Love Jihad to Grooming Gangs: Tracing Flows of the Hypersexual Muslim Male through Far-Right Female Influencers. Religions, 12, 1083, 2021. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12121083 ↩

10. N. Hussein & S. Hussein, Interrogating practices of gender, religion and nationalism in the representation of Muslim women in Bollywood: Contexts of change, sites of continuity. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2, p. 284–304, 2015. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v2i2.117 ↩

11. V. Raman, The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity Among the Weavers of Banaras, Routledge India, 2010. ↩

12. Kallol Datta’s quote from an email exchange with the author. ↩