Can we please ethnically cleanse 'ethnic wear'?
ethnic wear,’ I reach for the nearest clothes hangar. Being in a garments store recently, a hangar was, indeed, close at hand. But I refrained from hooking someone with it simply because, the shop being in Khan Market, it was impossible for me to distinguish between customers and the store’s employees.
It may have been a close call for at least one member of India’s thriving retail industry. But the term ‘ethnic wear’ pisses me off no end. What ‘ethnic wear’? I know that you know that I know what it means — sari, salwar kameez, choli, sherwani, bandhgala, Khan suit…. Like light, I know ‘ethnic wear’ when I see it. But for a voluble section of the country — which, in its continued quest to be a nation of virtue-signallers, recently took to the ludicrous binary of ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ in English, thereby quietly emphasising the perceived dowdiness of the latter against the perceived spunkiness of the former — their perfunctory use of the term ‘ethnic wear’ sounds not just preposterous, but downright embarrassing.
‘Ethnic,’ as an adjective, merely denotes belonging to an ethnicity, a population group or subgroup sharing a common genetic descent and/or cultural background. So ‘Germanic’ is as good a description of ‘ethnic’ as ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Indian’ and ‘Western’ or ‘Nordic’. And yet, somehow, you enter a store — here in India — and there’s a section devoted to ‘ethnic wear’. In India.
I’m not one of those ‘hyper-cultural purity’ patriots who want to change the script in this column to Devnagari, or has long
