The ‘Indian baddie’ moment does not impress Indian women—It only reveals the West’s colonial hangover

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 fuelled 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 hailed as a breakthrough for the world’s most populous nation.But for many women, both in India and in the Indian 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, Victorian morality heavily influenced how citizens were represented. Women 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.