India, Oct. 12 -- "Where are you from?" "India." "Oh, you don't look Indian." About 30 years ago, this conversation would have thrilled me as a child growing up near India's biggest tourist attraction, the Taj Mahal. The non-Indians were attractive with their mostly cute clothes and accents. Today, the umpteenth iteration of the above is annoying at the minimum. Passing follows the law of diminishing returns even in terms of joy. I resist the urge to snap at enquirers in Kenya, Sardinia, Italy, the US, the UK, West Asia and countless other splashes on the world map. Paradoxically, many a time, they are from my mofussil in Uttar Pradesh. My Italian friend once quipped while gobbling golgappa in my hometown, "More people are curious about where you are from. You look more 'foreigner' than me". She was dressed in jeans and a dainty sleeveless long kurta, while I just threw a freshly washed but unironed long-sleeved kurta over my crumpled linen pants. Nothing foreign-like in our attire at all. And, everyone knows my parents there and I bear unmistakable facial patrimony. Let us begin with the background to the question itself: What does it mean to "look" Indian? Wearing Indian dress, eating Indian food, or reading or writing Indian literature? I do all of that and with immense pride in the Indianness of it all. But maybe that's not enough. The question presumes a stable referent, an "India" whose essence can be distilled, worn, or consumed all under the umbrella of Indian culture. To seek the essence of Indian culture is to perform what Homi Bhabha calls the "fetish of origin". It's the fantasy that there is something pure behind the hybrid, something untouched by history's traffic. But maybe it's only the fetish that matters. Indian dress, for instance, is often romanticised as sari and kurta. But Roland Barthes taught us that garments are not only worn but read. What we call "Indian dress" is a system of signifiers: caste, class, gender, and geography woven and tailored together. Each element is a statement in the grammar of inclusivity and exclusion. Sari may be an empowered political statement by an affluent Indian immigrant in the UK today, but it's also a tool of oppression for a young bride in North India, who's not allowed to choose any other attire. So, what should an Indian woman wear to be seen as Indian, minus the fetishism? Food is even more problematic. From the overpowering smells of "curry" engulfing entire neighbourhoods in Jackson Heights and Jersey City in the US to the fusion happening in upscale restaurants across the globe, there's nothing more nebulous than Indian food as a category. To say "Indian food" is to collapse a continent of tastes into a confusing, dog-eared, stained, and lengthy menu card of metaphors. There is no such thing as Indian food. It's Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Kashmiri, Hyderabadi, each with its caste and community quirks, prohibitions and ritual purity. And then come their many subsets. I love the foods of India more than any other foods produced anywhere. However, I cannot stand their sights and smells outside Indian territory because of the short-sighted approach towards them in terms of production and labelling. There is pervasive fetishisation of the native as a commodity, no matter who the consumer is. But then, I love the piping hot gozleme, first eaten at a roadside eatery somewhere in the Anatolian plateau years ago. It made my brother exclaim in mock disappointment, "What, even parathas are not Indian and came from Turkey?" (Try a spinach and peynir gozleme to understand his pain around labelling and production.) Same with literature. Either the author of Indian literature falls into nativism of thoughts, metaphors and philosophies or passes as a Westerner to ride the market tide of global demand. Choosing whatever gives or claims to give more visibility. Akin to following an algorithm. Michel Foucault would have argued here that identities are disciplined through visibility. What you sell is what you show and become. And vice versa. I swear by William Shakespeare and have published multiple essays on many of his works. But I have just translated an iteration of the Ramayana, too. There are thousands, if not more, Indians scattered across the world who are at ease, or unease, with this duality in their intellectual and everyday lives. Culture, like translation, is never pure. It is what Walter Benjamin called the afterlife of the text: the persistence of meaning beyond its origin. "Indianness" in anything survives precisely because it is unfaithful to itself, constantly retranslated, mispronounced, misidentified, reimagined. "You don't look Indian", therefore, is a Russian doll. A personal compliment hiding an ethnic insult, hiding a more profound compliment to the multiplicity of India....