The Era Of Indo-Cool

In case you missed the story (and we would hate that), we wanted to share Delhi based Caravan magazine’s recent piece on Republic of Brown. Read on…

When Geetanjali moved to California from her native Punjab at age eight, she felt like an unwelcome foreigner. She and her family avoided their neighbors because they made threatening or racist remarks.

“It wasn’t cool to be a little brown girl in the 1970s,” Dhillon says. “There was really nothing cool about Indianness back then.” As a result, she says, Indians tended to stick together and keep to themselves, and never developed a confident collective sense of themselves. They never claimed their ‘brownness,’ you could say.

Now that she is 42, with two young kids of her own, Dhillon says all that has changed. Indian-Americans are more comfortable than their parents were with their dual identity, and America’s attitude to India is opening up, too. She’s so sure of it that she’s betting her business model on it. In late April, Dhillon launched a weekly web magazine, Republic of Brown, which bills itself as the arbiter of ‘Indocool’ for what she calls the “global mobile Indian.” It features new trends in South Asian-inspired fashion, music and film, and features Indians making waves all over the world.

Republic of Brown is hoping to capitalize on India’s growing cultural influence in the US, where the Indian community is in its third generation and seems to be experiencing a cultural coming-of-age. Aasif Mandvi, an Indian-American actor on the comedy program The Daily Show, puts it this way: “We’ve reached this tipping point where South Asians have not only succeeded in business and technology, but are also now appearing prominently in mainstream media, music, fashion and politics in the US and around the world.” Many Indian-Americans are quick to point out that it may have taken longer for them to get into the arts because careers in music or film were traditionally looked down on. But with the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) population fast expanding, and the Indian-American community maturing into a comfortable iteration of itself, many of these cultural restrictions have broken down.

Read the complete story on Caravan Magazine