“Chayakkadeley pilleru, boys from the teashop,” designer and creative director Jimmy Varghese recalls the pejorative he and his cousins grew up with in Kerala, India, when I ask him about Wanakam, a chai bar and South Asian cultural space that Varghese co-founded with Gaurav Singhal, Shanti Voorn, and Manuel Buonamiko in 2025. In a caste society where an individual’s family name can often be the beginning and end of their story, the name — a reference to his grandfather’s tea shop — has stayed with Varghese throughout his years in Bangalore, New Delhi, and now Amsterdam. With Wanakam, he is finally reclaiming it as something more than the classist insult it was originally meant to be. Wanakam emerged from his attempt to rethink how South Asian culture is represented abroad, and who gets to tell those stories.

Varghese describes Wanakam, located at Ruyschstraat 34, as Amsterdam’s first South Asian culture café. It serves as a gathering space where art, food, conversation, and political discussions pertaining to the South Asian diaspora in Amsterdam intersect. It is a small but significant commons for South Asian communities living in the Netherlands, and for anyone curious about the region’s cultural complexity.

One of the traits that shape the South Asian diaspora identity is what might be called the “frozen clock” phenomenon. Expats and émigrés often carry with them a snapshot of cultural memory from the moment they leave home. Songs, films, rituals, and social norms become anchors of belonging in unfamiliar places. But while these cultural references remain unchanged in diasporic communities, the cultures they originate from continue to evolve. The result is an obvious temporal gap: the India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, or Bangladesh that exists in diasporic imagination often reflects a past moment rather than the present reality.

“Many diaspora platforms are shaped by people who don’t really know what’s happening back home anymore. The narrative often comes from a very small, privileged slice,” Varghese says.

This is most obvious in the cultural references that dominate diaspora spaces. Bollywood films from the 1990s and early 2000s frequently function as shorthand for “Indian culture.” These references carry emotional weight, but they also flatten the immense diversity of the region they claim to represent.

“Diaspora culture often represents South Asia from a nostalgic point of view. But nostalgia is not always accurate,” Varghese says. “You see films like DDLJ screened abroad as the ultimate symbol of Indian culture. But India has so many incredible filmmakers, from Satyajit Ray to Aravindan in Kerala.”

For Varghese, this cultural flattening was impossible to ignore after moving to Europe. Suddenly, the immense plurality of South Asia — its languages, political histories, and regional cultures — was often compressed into a single label: South Asian. “When you move outside South Asia, suddenly everyone becomes the same category: brown, South Asian. But nobody wants to talk about the depth of the plurality that actually exists within South Asia,” Varghese says.

The irony, he points out to me, is that many people who encounter this label abroad are experiencing minority identity for the first time. In their home countries, they may have belonged to socially or economically privileged groups. But in Europe, those distinctions collapse into a shared racialized category. That shift can produce solidarity among the diaspora, but it can also erase important differences. South Asia is not a monolith, and diaspora culture often struggles to reflect that complexity.

Wanakam was conceived partly as a response to that problem. Varghese had long imagined creating a chai shop inspired by memories of growing up around tea culture in Kerala. But when he began discussing the idea with collaborators in Amsterdam, the concept quickly expanded into something more. Rather than simply opening another café, the founders envisioned a third space where South Asian culture could exist in all its multiplicity.

The name Wanakam — from the Tamil ‘Vanakkam’ (வணக்கம்), meaning ‘welcome’ — reflects this ethos. By using a Tamil greeting rather than a Hindi one, the café signals a broader cultural horizon. It acknowledges that South Asian identity extends far beyond India’s dominant narratives. “Some of the biggest community around Wanakam is actually Sri Lankan. They rarely see their culture represented in pop culture spaces,” Varghese says, referring to the fact that Tamil communities form one of the most established South Asian diasporas in the Netherlands, particularly because of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees who arrived during the civil war in the 1980s and 1990s.

On any given evening, the café might host a mixture of South Asian students, Sri Lankan families, artists, tech workers, and Dutch locals curious about the events taking place inside. Some arrive seeking familiarity: a place where music, food, and conversation feel recognizably connected to home. Others stumble in out of curiosity and stay for the atmosphere. Over time, Varghese hopes, these encounters will create a sense of collective ownership. Regular visitors will begin to treat the space as their own; not just another café they visit, but a gathering place where friendships and cultural conversations take place.

And these conversations — about politics, caste, and identity — have been taking place at Wanakam. The café regularly hosts events that transform the space into something closer to a cultural venue than a restaurant. Vinyl nights bring together DJs playing funk, disco, soul, and South Asian grooves alongside pop-up record shops specializing in Asian releases. Workshops invite visitors to experience South Asian craft traditions. Photographers and artists exhibit their work on the café’s walls. Talks addressing issues like caste discrimination beyond South Asia bring activists, writers, and scholars like Yogesh Maitra (founder of Panther’s Paw Publication) into dialogue with diaspora audiences. These discussions reflect a growing awareness that diaspora spaces must grapple with the social structures that shape South Asian societies, rather than ignoring them. On its floors, where you are encouraged to sit like well-behaved South Asian children, Wanakam provides a physical space where diaspora identity can be renegotiated in real time.

The café’s design echoes this over-arching philosophy. In contrast to Amsterdam’s subdued café aesthetics, Wanakam’s bold red interiors draw inspiration from what Varghese describes as “Indian brutalism” — an intersection between South Asian maximalism and minimalist monumental architecture of Le Corbusier and B.V. Doshi in the 1950s and 1960s. The colours and graphics deliberately resist the neutral global café style that has spread from Brooklyn to cities around the world. “If you’re building a South Asian cultural café, why would you make it look like another minimalist café?” Varghese says.

But this visual boldness has had political implications. At one point, the team attempted to paint the café’s exterior with bright patterns inspired by South Asian textile traditions. Soon, a neighbour complained to the municipal authorities, forcing them to repaint the façade in a more conventional shade.

Food events play an equally important role in this project. Pop-ups have featured regional cuisines that rarely appear in diaspora dining spaces — from Malabar cooking in northern Kerala to Sri Lankan New Year feasts organized by chefs from the Sri Lankan diaspora. Through these collaborations, the café becomes a way of introducing people to the layered regional cultures that make up South Asia. “People don’t know what Malabar food is, or Telangana food, or Sri Lankan food. Through these pop-ups we show the length and breadth of the region,” Varghese says.

In the end, Wanakam’s ambition is both modest and profound. At its simplest, it is a place where someone far from home can drink a cup of chai on a cold Amsterdam evening and feel briefly connected to a familiar cultural pulse. But the café also represents a broader shift within diaspora communities: a move away from static nostalgia toward dynamic cultural production. Spaces like Wanakam are reminders that the South Asian diaspora identity is not only about remembering where one comes from. It is also about building new forms of belonging in the places where people arrive.

Follow @wanakamofficial on Instagram.

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