Within hours of releasing their new music video Hymn for the Weekend, Coldplay reignited the debate on cultural appropriation that for years has pestered ignorant white people everywhere. Shot in India, the video features the British band performing in Mumbai during the Holi festival while frontman Chris Martin rides in a rickshaw and goes to the cinema to watch a Bollywood film starring Beyoncé.
Some were quick to call out Beyoncé for wearing Indian clothes and jewelry while others found nothing offensive about the video. So let’s just settle this and move on: if cultural appropriation means that a privileged group adopts the symbols and practices of a marginalized one for profit or social capital, then yes, Coldplay’s video is committing cultural appropriation.
But it’s also more than that. Director Ben Mor sprayed the “essence of incredible India” onto his video, a diluted perfume invented by white, western creatives whenever they want some Indian inspiration. Under the western gaze, India is a lush, exotic land filled with dingy slums inhabited by pious, levitating holy men and lanky brown-skinned children who are always throwing colored powders at each other. This idealized India obscures the realities of a complex nation in favor of reductive tropes originally intended to preserve western hegemony. Coldplay’s myopic construction of India has been part of western representation since the colonial era, but in the past few years, the music industry has embraced it to make their videos more interesting.
The Hymn for the Weekend video cannot be brushed off as “just a video” – it is part of a system of representation that shapes how the west understands and engages with the world. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote extensively about how representations become meaningful – and powerful – in relation to each other and to similar images throughout history. These tropes of colors and spirituality and poverty have been reproduced so often by western media to the point that they’ve become inherent to what India means in our collective imaginations. The vestiges of orientalism, an ideology originally deployed to justify and reinforce imperialist ambitions, now maintain a colonial logic that privileges the west over the rest.
Martin and his band are portrayed as dynamic, modern westerners who entrance the city with their formulaic pop song. They are not treated as outsiders but instead are integrated, if not put in the center, of the locals’ festivities. There is no suspicion, no resistance, and Coldplay partakes in the spectacle of daily life and ritual as if they’re entitled to do so. The orientalist dichotomies of modern/primitive, light/dark, rich/poor may not be as overt as they once were in colonial imagery, but these binaries still influence the way we think of the “other”.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of western media’s infatuation with India is the lack of social and political context, namely in the careless conflation of India with Hinduism. Holy men in saffron robes, stone idols covered in garlands and multi-limbed gods have come to represent a whole country that is currently experiencing internal conflict stemming from Hindu nationalism. Those in power seek to define India’s politics and culture based on upper-caste Hindu doctrines that have been used to sanction violence against non-Hindus and people of lower castes. The link may seem tenuous, but the reproduction of benign, ahistorical Hindu images erases not only the multiplicity of religious practices, but stifles critical thinking about India’s social and political climate. Coldplay’s video romanticizes Hinduism to further exoticize India as a westerners’ paradise unsullied by harsh realities.
Now let’s talk about Beyoncé, who, along with Bollywood actor Sonam Kapoor, represents the desirable exotic woman. “Rani” Bey plays an alluring Bollywood star, wearing indigenous clothing and gesturing her henna-painted hands in front of a psychedelic background. I’ve purposely downplayed her involvement in the cultural appropriation debate for a reason. While Beyoncé’s appearance makes her complicit, her role in the video is little more than being an object to ogle. A black woman wearing South Asian markers of femininity must be distinguished from how white appropriation operates not only because of the politics of appropriation between people of color, but also the shared (and little discussed) history of cultural exchange between Africa and South Asia. Beyoncé and Kapoor, who does a two-second cameo as a nameless Eurocentric beauty, are seductive props rather than colonial propagators. But this doesn’t mean they are relieved of the responsibility to call out a legacy of representation that has recently become very profitable for the music industry.
Coldplay is just the latest popular band to shoot a music video that invokes India. In Major Lazer and DJ Snake’s video for Lean On, the electronic producers perform Bollywood-esque choreography in a palace as Danish singer MØ thrusts her pelvis awkwardly surrounded by dancing brown women. The video is the 15th most watched on YouTube with more than 1bn views. Diplo of Major Lazer has called India “some kind of special creature with one foot in history and one firmly in the future” with beauty that “humbled” him – and made him a lot of money.
Then there’s Iggy Azalea’s Bounce, inspired by her mother’s Indian friend’s wedding. The Australian rapper looks like she’s wearing an “Indian woman” Halloween costume in the jarring video that splices shots of a raucous party and an outdoor puja with the stoic faces of Indian men and children. And just when you think you’re done cringing, Azalea rides around Mumbai on an elephant dressed as a Hindu goddess with her ornate crown and gold bodysuit. Azalea drew accusations of cultural appropriation around the same time that Selena Gomez was criticized for wearing a bindi during her live performances of Come and Get It. But despite the backlash, both songs were still very commercially successful.
These music videos are perpetuating hackneyed fantasies of India as an exotic playground for rich white people to explore and exploit for cultural capital and economic gain. This is about more than calling out cultural appropriation when a white girl is wearing a bindi at the club – representations conceived through a white, western lens wield real power to reinforce the racial and colonial logics that undergird the way we think about non-western people, places and cultures. This is why the growing movement of South Asian self-representation is so vital. Mostly through social media, South Asian artists, activists and scholars are voicing their politics and lived experiences as a challenge enduring stereotypes. The time has finally come for Coldplay and other western artists to fall back and let us take it from here.
