Coldplay’s new music video Hymn for the Weekend rekindled the cultural appropriation controversy that has plagued ignorant white folks for years within hours. The video shows the British band performing in Mumbai during Holi while frontman Chris Martin rides a rickshaw and watches a Bollywood film with Beyoncé.
Some criticized Beyoncé for wearing Indian costumes and jewelry, but others considered the film harmless. Let’s settle this and move on: Coldplay’s video constitutes cultural appropriation if a privileged group uses minority symbols and behaviors for profit or social capital.
It goes beyond that. Ben Mor sprays the “essence of incredible India” on his video, a diluted perfume created by white, western creatives for Indian inspiration. India seems to the west as a lush, exotic place with filthy slums, levitating holy men, and lanky brown-skinned children who hurl colorful powders at each other. This idealized India hides a complicated nation behind simplified clichés used to maintain western power. Coldplay’s myopic view of India has been part of western depiction since colonial times, but the music industry has used it to spice up their videos.
The Hymn for the Weekend video is part of a system of representation that defines western understanding and engagement with the world. Stuart Hall, a cultural theorist, wrote extensively about how representations become meaningful and powerful in relation to each other and comparable pictures across history. Western media has repeated these cliches of colors, spirituality, and poverty so often that they’ve become synonymous with India. Orientalism, which justified imperialist aims, now maintains a colonial logic that favors the west.
Martin’s band is described as vibrant westerners who enter the city with formulaic pop. They are welcomed into local celebrations, if not the center. Coldplay participates in daily life and ritual without mistrust or resistance. Orientalist dichotomies of modern/primitive, light/dark, rich/poor may not be as overt as in colonial iconography, but they nevertheless shape our views of the “other”.
Western media’s obsession with India is particularly pernicious because it carelessly conflates India with Hinduism without social or political context. A country in internal war over Hindu nationalism is represented by holy men in saffron robes, stone idols wrapped in garlands, and multi-limbed gods. Those in power want to establish India’s politics and culture based on upper-caste Hindu ideologies that justify violence against non-Hindus and lower castes. The link may seem unclear, but innocuous, ahistorical Hindu symbols eliminate religious diversity and hinder critical thought about India’s social and political situation. Coldplay romanticizes Hinduism to promote India as a western paradise without harsh reality.
Beyoncé and Sonam Kapoor depict the exotic woman. Against a kaleidoscopic backdrop, “Rani” Bey plays a seductive Bollywood actress in indigenous costume and henna-painted hands. I minimized her role in the cultural appropriation controversy for a reason. Beyoncé’s look makes her complicit, but she’s mostly a sex object in the video. A black woman wearing South Asian femininity markers must be distinguished from white appropriation due to the politics of appropriation amongst people of color and the shared (and seldom addressed) history of cultural interchange between Africa and South Asia. Beyoncé and Kapoor, who plays a nameless Eurocentric beauty for two seconds, are alluring props, not colonial propagators. They must nonetheless criticize a heritage of representation that has made the music industry rich.
Coldplay is the latest renowned band to reference India in a music video. In Major Lazer and DJ Snake’s Lean On video, the electronic producers dance Bollywood-style in a castle while Danish singer MØ uncomfortably thrusts her pelvis amid dancing brown women. YouTube’s 15th most watched video has over 1bn views. Diplo of Major Lazer termed India “some kind of special creature with one foot in history and one firmly in the future” whose beauty “humbled” him and made him rich.
Iggy Azalea’s Bounce was inspired by her mother’s Indian friend’s wedding. The disturbing video mixes footage of a party and an outdoor puja with solemn Indian men and children, making the Australian rapper look like a “Indian woman” Halloween costume. Just when you think you’re done cringing, Azalea rides an elephant around Mumbai as a Hindu goddess in a gold bodysuit and crown. Azalea was accused of cultural appropriation at the same time Selena Gomez was chastised for wearing a bindi in Come and Get It performances. Despite the criticism, both songs were financially successful.
These music videos reinforce cliched illusions of India as an exotic playground for rich white people to exploit for cultural capital and economic advantage. More than calling out cultural appropriation when a white girl wears a bindi at the club, representations conceived through a white, western lens reinforce racial and colonial logics that shape our views of non-western people, places, and cultures. The increasing South Asian self-representation movement is crucial. South Asian artists, activists, and researchers fight stereotypes by sharing their politics and experiences on social media. Finally, Coldplay and other western artists should step aside and allow us take over.