India’s urban culture balances heritage with modern global trends

October 4, 2025

There’s something peculiar happening in India’s urbans. We noticed it most clearly a few years ago in Bengaluru where a young executive striding confidently into a café, sporting in Balenciaga sneakers (the kind deliberately made to look worn at a premium price), holding a Starbucks cup where his name is written, while discussing “language debate” in domestic relations.

The irony was he was someone advocating for India’s own affairs policy while his personal choices reflected an imported identity from head to toe. This scene highlights two different angles, which are 180 degrees to each other. We aspire for self-reliance in governance and economy, yet when it comes to cultural expression, i.e. the clothes we wear, the food we eat, even the aesthetic values we uphold, we’ve developed a peculiar dependency on Western validation. It’s as though Indians have globalized our wallets but de-Indianized our identities in the process.

Consider the transformation of our celebrations and t rad i t i o n s . Au s p i c i o u s ceremonies now feature Calvin Klein underwear beneath traditional dhotis. Our humble haldi doodh has been repackaged and sold back to us as “turmeric lattes” at ten times the price. Even our wellness practices haven’t been spared—yoga returns to us filtered through Western commercialization, rebranded as “mindfulness” or “self-care.”

We’ve unwittingly become brand ambassadors seeking approval from cultural centers that rarely understand the depth and context of our traditions. To be clear, this isn’t a n a rg u m e n t a ga i n s t globalization. Cultural exchange has always been part of India’s story—from the influence of Persian aesthetics on Mughal architecture to the integration of Portuguese ingredients into Goan cuisine. Rather, it’s about the mindless mimicry that betrays a deepseated insecurity about our own cultural worth.

As Gandhi once remarked, “I don’t want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown o� my feet by any.” Looking back through history, we find that this isn’t India’s first encounter with cultural displacement. During the British colonial period, Thomas Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Education (1835) explicitly aimed to create “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

The strategy was clear: cultivate contempt for indigenous knowledge systems while elevating European thought. What’s remarkable is how effectively this colonial mentality has persisted, even flourished, seven decades after independence. There was a time when India carried itself with unquestionable cultural confidence. Our traditional t e x t i l e s w e r e n’ t j u s t commodities but expressions of regional identity—Banarasi weaves telling stories of Mughal gardens, Patola silks requiring mathematical precision in their creation, B u n d e l k h a n d i l e a t h e r c ra f t s m a n s h i p m a k i n g functional items beautiful. Our ancestors didn’t chase fashion trends; they created enduring aesthetics that carried meaning beyond seasonal changes.

They understood what Coco Chanel would later articulate: “Fashion fades, only style remains.” Today, even our attempts at cultural reclamation feel performative rather than authentic. We “decolonize our wardrobes” by shopping at fast fashion giants and wearing mass-produced t-shirts with Sanskrit slogans. We celebrate “ethnic chic” while traditional artisans struggle to survive. What happened to the quiet dignity of our grandmothers in handwoven cotton saris or our grandfathers in their regional headgear? When did confidence become confusion? The root issue isn’t exposure to global influences—it’s the cultural insecurity that makes us hesitant to embrace our heritage without Western endorsement. We’ve developed a strange psychological re l at i o n s h i p w i t h o u r traditions, where we value them only after they’ve been validated abroad. As writer Pankaj Mishra observed, “Many Indians now live in a state of cultural schizophrenia, suspended between tradition a n d m o d e r n i ty.” T h i s manifests in curious ways: we hesitate to wear a kurta to a high-end restaurant unless it’s been rebranded as “contemporary ethnic.” We won’t gift handloom unless it comes with a designer label that transforms it from “village craft” to “luxury product.”

Similar patterns have played out elsewhere. Japan experienced its own cultural identity crisis following WW II, embracing American consumerism so thoroughly that traditional practices nearly vanished! However, by the 1980s, a cultural renaissance emerged as Japan rediscovered its aesthetic principles and confidently incorporated them into modern contexts. Today, Japanese design is recognized worldwide precisely because it maintains its cultural distinctiveness while engaging with global trends. Mexico offers another instructive example. After centuries of colonization and American cultural dominance, the country experienced what scholars call “Mexicanidad”—a deliberate reclamation of indigenous and mestizo aesthetics that influenced everything from architecture to fashion.