When And Just Like That , the reboot of Sex and the City , passed off a lehenga as a saree, I realised a cultural shift had happened.
Sarah Jessica Parker running down the steps in a Falguni Shane Peacock lehenga and calling it a saree is in a different league from Amrish Puri thundering Kali Ma with bloodshot eyes while chilled monkey brains are served for dinner in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom .
An Indian-American actor once said that after that film was released no one wanted to sit next to him at school. “They were convinced I had monkey brains in my lunch box,” he said. The irony was that this was Kal Penn aka Kalpen Modi, a good vegetarian Gujarati boy.
After Arushi Sinha wrote a caustic takedown of Sex and the City’ s saree-gate for Vogue India , Penn called it “spot-on”. Even The New York Times wrote a piece headlined “Saris, Lehengas and Why Carrie Bradshaw Should Know the Difference” where it explained that a lehenga is a “three-piece garment worn at Indian weddings and celebrations” while a saree is an “uncut piece of fabric that’s wrapped around the body and draped over a shoulder, along with complementing blouses.”
Woke conversations
Sinha’s hypothesis is that the lehenga-saree sleight-of-hand was because the writers didn’t “want to overwhelm their audience with too much Indianness.” And sarees were just better known than lehengas.
The more I think about it the more it seems that this was just the curry-fication of the saree. Just as curry has become a catch-all term for any kind of Indian dish with some gravy, the show made saree the wrap-all term for any ‘Indian female ethnic wear.’
Some would say we are tying ourselves into knots over a well-meaning mainstream gesture of inclusivity. At least a lehenga which pretends to be a saree is better than the Seinfeld episode where George claims he never went to the bathroom while in India or The Simpsons ’ ‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore’ episode where Homer is venerated as a god in India and teaches Indians how to unionise and stand up for their labour rights. Clearly the white saviour complex just refuses to quit India. Also, a Falguni Shane Peacock lehenga is certainly more upmarket than the cows-poverty-famine beat that India is often relegated to.
Over chai tea
Is misrepresentation, patronising or not, better than no representation? Not really. Imran Amed, founder and chief executive of TheBusiness of Fashion, said in an Instagram post that while it was “really cool” that Sex and the City ’s Carrie Bradshaw wanted to showcase Indian clothes, the problem is “there are now millions of people out there who think what Carrie is wearing is a saree. It’s not.”
Details do matter. I remember a roommate in California asking if he could call me Sandy instead of Sandip. I almost acquiesced and then refused. I reasoned that just because he was more familiar with Sandy, that was no reason for me to answer to that name. That’s how we lost chai and now coffee chains in America sell us a concoction known as “chai tea”. The characters in And Just Like That have woke conversations about whether Carrie Bradshaw wearing a saree is cultural appreciation or cultural appropriation but entirely miss a moment for cultural education. As film critic and disappointed Sex and the City fan Aseem Chhabra said, “They really make no effort to understand any other culture, any way of life other than the way white people live in Manhattan.” And the people of colour exist in shows like these, said Arushi Sinha, merely “to diversify the lead character’s milquetoast lives.”
My mother who owns no lehengas but has at least 200 sarees would have been aghast. “My first love is saree,” she said. “Everywhere I went I had to buy at least one saree. Even in Paris I got a French chiffon.”
These days, increasingly homebound, she rarely gets to wear her sarees. The last time she wore one was when she went for her COVID vaccine. But the sarees are never far from her thoughts. Other people count sheep when they try to sleep. My mother counts sarees. Then she’ll remember one she has not seen in a while. “Then I have to get up and look in the almirah till I find it,” she said. “Otherwise I can’t go to sleep again.”
Luckily, my mother does not watch Sex and the City . Otherwise she really would have been unable to sleep for days because in her wardrobe finding a lehenga and calling it a saree is unforgivable.
It’s kind of like stumbling upon America and calling it India. But at least that was a genuine case of mistaken identity in 1492, not sheer cultural laziness in 2022.
Sandip Roy, the author of Don’t Let Him Know, likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.
