Indian ‘baddies’ and Britain’s imperial gaze

By Karishma Vaswani

There’s been a curious phenomenon on my social media feeds over the last few weeks: The internet has suddenly discovered Indian women, and decided that we are... hot.

The so-called rise of the Indian baddie (Gen-Z slang for a woman who is attractive and stylish) has been fueled by widely shared clips on TikTok and Instagram of young South Asian women dancing and singing along at pop star Tyla’s recent concert in Mumbai. This coincided with the first time an Indian model - 25-year-old Bhavitha Mandava from Hyderabad - opened a Chanel show, a moment Western commentators quickly hailed as a breakthrough for the world’s most populous nation.

But for many women, both in the country and in the diaspora like myself, the tone has felt less celebratory and more patronizing. The implication seems to be that our allure only counts now because it’s finally been validated by international fashion houses or global pop culture.

This framing isn’t new. For centuries, Western perceptions of femininity have been shaped by the imperial gaze — a term used to describe how colonizers framed their subjects as inferior to justify domination — one that alternately exoticized or dismissed us. When Britain ruled the subcontinent from 1858 until independence in 1947, Victorian morality heavily influenced how citizens were represented. Females were routinely portrayed as either dangerously sensual or devoutly chaste, rarely as fully autonomous individuals with desires of their own.

One of the clearest examples of this distortion appears in Sir Richard Burton’s English translation of the Kama Sutra during that era, when the soldier and explorer, influenced by Victorian moral norms, omitted or altered passages that highlighted women’s autonomy. Feminist scholars like Wendy Doniger have argued that colonial translations of Sanskrit texts often flattened women’s sexuality, stripping them of their complexity while recasting their sensuality in ways that catered to Western fascination.

This legacy produced a contradiction that persists today. None of this is to suggest that these attitudes were imported wholesale by the British. Hindu scriptures, including texts such as the Manusmriti (Laws of Manu), contain rigid prescriptions about gender that structured social life for centuries, even though it’s thought the text dates from circa 100 CE.

Colonial rule didn’t invent patriarchy but codified it, layering Victorian norms on to an already unequal system. British laws like the Contagious Diseases Acts subjected Indian women suspected of sex work to invasive medical surveillance, reinforcing a hierarchy that put men at the top — a way of life that survived even after colonial rule ended. Skin color was also a factor. Colonization embedded the idea that people with fair skin were the ruling class, while those with darker skin were viewed as inferior and the subjects.

The imperial gaze extended far beyond gender. In his book Empireland, author Sathnam Sanghera explores how racialized stereotypes established during British rule continue to influence attitudes today. “The British decided that the Sikhs were a martial race,” Sanghera, who is a Sikh himself, observed in an interview. “They published handbooks explaining why we were the martial race with comments — for example — about why our nose size was right to be fighters.”

Such classifications relied on pseudo-scientific thinking, but their effects endure. Many Sikhs still identify with the idea of being a martial race, Sanghera adds. Women were impacted by a broader Western discomfort with their femininity that oscillated between prudishness and fetishization. They were cast as exotic or spiritualized figures, reducing them to one-dimensional creatures in comparison to their Western counterparts, notwithstanding the discrimination British women faced at home.

Seen in this historical context, today’s celebration of Indian women as baddies feels less like a breakthrough and more like a repackaging of the same gaze under a trendier name. That’s not to deny that something has shifted in the current zeitgeist. There’s a welcome confidence visible among some urban young women today, especially online, often in defiance of conservative social mores.

But casting this moment as a discovery of the Indian baddie erases a rich history of females on the international stage, long before this month’s viral clips. From Aishwarya Rai’s Miss World coronation in 1994, Priyanka Chopra’s Hollywood success, Arundhati Roy’s continued literary prowess and the Gen-Z pop icon Lara Raj, we’ve long had global visibility. Too often though, the broader cultural imagination treats these instances as exceptions rather than the norm.

Indian women aren’t troubled by the attention itself. We’re rankled by the idea that our beauty only matters once the West decides to notice it. As we head into a new year, from one Indian baddie — and the mother of another — to the rest of us: May this year bring fewer external stamps of approval, and a lot more self-definition.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.