Against the Case for Appreciation
As an outside appreciator of my own culture, let me tell you… that’s not appreciation.
My entire life, the connection I have to my Sri Lankan heritage and culture has been relatively flimsy. I grew up very unaware of what it meant to be a person of color, specifically from a small, island nation like Sri Lanka. I was used to no one knowing where it was when I first spoke about my dad’s origins or pretending to know where it was until I clarified (“The island below India”). I have grappled with the disconnect between being biracial, being Sri Lankan and not Indian, and calling myself Indian but never identifying with Indian people or Asian people in general — the term Asian is an entirely separate discussion for me. My father immigrated to the United States with his family when he was four years old. He is very much an Americanized immigrant, even purposefully hiding his culture from time to time like when he lied to my brother and I for years about being able to understand my grandparents. In hindsight, I’m not sure why I believed that he couldn’t speak Sinhala if that’s most of what my grandfather speaks. Thus, my pathways to cultural identity felt and still feel relatively shallow, but that it is how it worked for me.
For years, it was simply going to my grandparents’ home in Ventura and interacting with my grandmother, grandfather, and great aunt; eating Sri Lankan and Indian food each visit, and looking at all of the Sri Lankan paraphernalia around their house (ebony elephant statues, a map of Sri Lankan encrusted by the famous jewels, and Buddha tapestries). We would receive elephant statues and coconut jewelry as souvenirs from their trips back home. When I visited Sri Lanka for the first time during my freshman year of high school, I still felt disconnected. Our exploration felt touristy and detached from the place my family was from, but one place I truly enjoyed was a Batik factory in Kandy. Batik is a process used to dye fabrics with motifs by using wax to draw on fabric and dyeing it intermittently to create designs. I assumed Batik was central to Sri Lanka — it was sold everywhere we went on tapestries, shirts, bags, and sarongs. My father told me that when he was little his family would sell the fabric at the Ojai Art Fair for money. Yet, after researching, the origin of Batik is somewhat contested. There is a strong argument that it originated in Indonesia as a native artform on the island of Java, but others believe it was introduced from India or Sri Lanka. Moreover, similar styles of wax resist dyeing of fabrics are widespread throughout the histories of many countries like Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, and China. Even so, it is clear that this form of dyeing fabric, or perhaps just the look of the art, has been coopted by American clothing companies.
While batik is not as familiar in the fast fashion industry as the mandala tapestries or Oaxaca embroidery, it has made enough appearances to be noticed. Appropriation is simple. One might argue that production techniques can be taken by anyone, but that argument does not stand when cultural expressions and artifacts are turned into commodity goods. I myself witnessed it on women’s blouses for Anthropologie’s summer line in 2019 (they are perhaps the most egregious amongst clothing companies when it comes from appropriation of South and Southeast Asian cultural artifacts) when I worked there as a customer service associate. I think that countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia exporting batik is a perfectly fine practice. However, when I see printed fabrics like the shirts in Anthropologie that completely ignore the process and artistry involved and profit from the aesthetic, that doesn’t feel right to me. So much practice and care goes into the tradition, and while batik is not the greatest victim of cultural appropriation and I don’t have the greatest tie to its place in Sri Lankan culture (and especially not in its Indonesian roots), I still find it to be another frustrating instance of Western entitlement and erasure of non-Western influences and ingenuity. It is far from appreciation.
