- HOMEGROWN WORLD
- #HGCREATORS
- #HGEXPLORE
- #HGVOICES
- #HGSHOP
- CAREERS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
I’m Punjabi. My living room has gilded curtain rods, a carved wooden swing, sequinned cushions, and a sofa so heavy it takes four men to move. At weddings, my family dresses like Mughal royalty and behaves like they invented champagne. You could say our aesthetic sensibility is 'excess.' But who decides that? What looks like ‘too much’ to some is deeply familiar to us.
The term 'tacky' is not neutral. It implies that taste has a moral hierarchy, that some aesthetics are pure, restrained, timeless, while others are vulgar, loud, and misguided. In the Indian context, this accusation sticks most fiercely to two targets: NRIs and the upwardly mobile. On Instagram, this tension has played out with near-religious fervour. A now-notorious Diet Sabya post questioned why diaspora Indians dress in styles “a decade behind”. Commenters responded with insults, class anxieties, and long-held resentments. The internet had found a new villain: the bejewelled, colour-coordinated, slightly outdated NRI.
The attack on tackiness is a shorthand for deeper questions: What counts as 'Indian taste'? Who gets to decide that? And why has excess, so central to our aesthetic past, become a site of shame?
Indian aesthetics, historically, have not been subtle. It has been expressive, affective, saturated with symbolism. The Nāṭyaśāstra, a Sanskrit treatise on the arts, privileges sensory fullness: to move an audience, one must exaggerate. Classical Indian dance, from Bharatanatyam to Kathakali, layers meaning through mudras, costumes, rhythm, and music — not in spite of excess but because of it. The intention was always to evoke shared emotion, not minimalist contemplation.
This principle extended beyond stagecraft. Everyday traditions such as rangoli, kolam, alpana, bridal mehendi, mirrorwork embroidery, and architecture exhibit a taste for repetition, colour, and embellishment. Ornamentation signified fertility and celebration. The painted homes of Madhubani, the textile excesses of the Banarasi sari, and even truck art slogans like “Horn OK Please” speak to an aesthetic of joyful abundance.
My favourite quote about art comes from Brian Eno. He says, “Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that’s already inside it but something that happens inside you.” In India, art has never been about sterile form. The value lies in the collective passion it evokes. We don’t create for galleries; we create for gatherings. Loudness — through colour, texture, sound — signals participation, belonging, community. In a culture that privileges the shared over the solitary, Indian aesthetics have always been about what it does to the people around it, not how it rests under museum lights. That’s why restraint feels alien here.
So why, then, is maximalism now considered unsophisticated? The shift begins with colonisation. British administrators and missionaries viewed Indian aesthetics as excessive, irrational, and morally suspect. Colonial art schools encouraged linear perspective, Greco-Roman statuary, and watercolours over folk and miniature styles. The bungalow became a site of imposed aesthetic values: sparse furniture, pale walls, porcelain ornaments. What was once considered richness of life was reframed as clutter.
This colonial dichotomy — European restraint versus Indian indulgence — filtered into educational curricula, drawing-room codes, and matrimonial expectations. Convent schooling taught generations to associate sophistication with silence, pale colours, and linen curtains. Even the design of saris changed — embroidery was reduced and fabrics wer softened. Austerity became synonymous with civility. The aftertaste of this indoctrination lingers. 'Classy' is still a word that means 'Westernised'. White walls are still aspirational and 'gaudy' is still shorthand for 'inferior'.
Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton menswear show was a triumph of gold zardozi, embroidered sherwanis, and Mughal references. Critics in Paris called it genius. When an uncle in Amritsar wears the same thing to a wedding, he becomes a meme. Similarly, Cartier’s Tutti Frutti collection, which borrows heavily from Mughal jewelcraft, is celebrated globally while local jewellers crafting similar pieces are deemed old-fashioned.
Nowhere is this more visible than in the Indian wedding industrial complex. Take two lehengas. One is stitched by a masterji who sits in Sector 17, Chandigarh, using brocade sourced from Chandni Chowk. The other is Sabyasachi. Both shimmer. Both are elaborate. Yet only one is called couture. The other risks being 'tacky.'
Class performance, not design, is what separates the two. The Sabyasachi bride is fluent in the aesthetics of soft power: dusty pastels, artful restraint, and quiet luxury. The Chandigarh bride will wear her bodyweight in gold jewellery. To call her aesthetic 'too much' is to ignore the structure that says only certain people can be opulent without ridicule.
This raises a more fundamental problem: we talk about Indian aesthetics as if they’re a singular, fixed identity. But India has dozens, if not hundreds. Some are loud and layered. Others are sparse and minimal. There is no singular Indian 'look.' The silk-on-silk layering of Manipuri brides. The geometric Ikat patterns of Odisha. The stark white mundu and gold border of Kerala’s kasavu saree. The mirrored fabrics of Kutch and the pastel cottons of Pondicherry. Each carries its own design grammar, its own cultural logic.
It's also important to remember that not all of India is 'opulent'. Some communities have long embraced simplicity as a deliberate and dignified choice. The Parsi community, for example, wears crisp gara saris. But even these aesthetics, rooted in specificity, are increasingly distorted by the cultural dominance of North Indian imagery. When maximalism is sold as the only valid expression of Indianness, other forms of taste are made to feel incomplete. Over time, communities begin aspiring not to their own traditions, but to a monolithic ideal of grandeur they never created.
Aesthetics in India was lived practice, filled with rasa, dhvani, and cultural memory. Tackiness is a construct. It emerges when taste is policed, when the lines between acceptable and unacceptable aesthetics are drawn not by artistic merit but by power. When Madonna wore bindis, it was cool. When an Indian woman wears one with a neon salwar, it’s outdated. When French designers use sari fabric for a gown, it’s innovation. When a bridesmaid in Jalandhar wears the same fabric head-to-toe, it’s 'too much.'
What makes Indian aesthetics so powerful is that it encourages you to be over-the-top. It resists reduction. It’s as likely to contain Swarovski-studded nameplates as it is minimalist Kerala furniture. It lives in both a Rajasthani haveli and a pink-tiled 2BHK. It laughs at rules. It mixes patterns because it can. It wears joy, not irony.
Stop thinking of tackiness as a flaw. It’s built on love, memory, ambition, and defiance. If being Punjabi has taught me anything, it’s that there’s nothing more stylish than refusing to shrink.
