Culture vultures

In the post-Christian world, new sins are born. “Thou shalt not culturally appropriate” — and there are plenty of race-reliant Moses proclaiming this 11th commandment.

The present flare-up of this particular misdemeanour occurred when a black American lady accosted a white man who had his hair matted in the hairstyle known as “dreadlocks” and challenged him for “expropriating” African culture.

I must confess that even when my hair was thick, long and black, this particular form of cultural appropriation didn’t appeal to me. I was quite happy with a Trotsky beard, which I obviously expropriated from the hard-done Russian revolutionary and a sort of Che Guevara fall of bushy hair, expropriated from Cuban revolutionaries or perhaps from my boyhood’s yoga teacher in Pune.

The fashion for “dreadlocks”, the cascades of curled hair from adequate lengths (mine have dwindled to a white cotton-woollish tundra) in Britain was peculiarly West Indian and more narrowly popularised by the Rastafari, followers of the Emperor Haile Selassie who was acknowledged by them as “King of kings, Lord of lords, Conquering lion on the tribe of Judah”. I always secretly thought that the “on” should have been an “of” in that encomium, but I was as much in awe of their grammatical deviance as of their hairstyle and made no protest.

I would certainly, in the 1970s, when I mingled with dreadlocked West Indians, immigrants of the first or second generation to Britain, have considered the hairstyle as a unique cultural marker, as much as saris are for our own proud womanhood.

But I subsequently read a historian’s account of the arrival of this fashion of dressing one’s hair in Jamaica. It claimed that the hairstyle originated during the Italian war of colonisation of Ethiopia in the 1930s. The Italians attempted to characterise the African resistance-fighters opposing their colonial intrusion as savages and hit upon the idea of issuing posters of their opponents as wild or primitive people in need of civilisation by Europeans. One image the Italian propagandists favoured was of half-naked men with dreadlocks and spears.

When the news of the resistance to Italian colonisation and the posters depicting the dreadlocked warriors reached Jamaica, African sympathisers adopted the hairstyles of the propaganda posters, thinking these were the symbols of African resistance. When Haile Selassie, Prince of Ethiopia, restored to its throne by British and French armies, visited Jamaica he was understandably bewildered by the cheering dreadlocked hordes who seemed to treat him as a demigod.

Had the Rastafarians culturally appropriated dreadlocks from intentionally negative Italian propaganda

Another source suggested itself when a young lady, the step-granddaughter of the Reggae singer Bob Marley brought a film crew to my London home to interview me. She said she was on her way to India to discover the real roots of dreadlocks and the Rastafarian tradition. She wanted to know what I knew about it. I said I knew nothing about it and was astounded that the Canadian film company for which she worked was spending thousands of dollars chasing ghosts.

She was insistent and showed me photographs of sadhus bathing in the Ganga, with piles of hair which very much resembled Bob Marley’s hairstyle, only wilder and piled twice as high. So Rastafarianism must have had Indian roots, she said. I said I very much doubted if the featured holy men had ever heard of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie or Bob Marley. That they had resisted the cultural expropriation of the British Raj’s predilection for short-back-and-sides haircuts was clear, but apart from that “But they are for peace and love,” she said

“When it suits them,” I said. “They can get nasty!”

“And they smoke ganja,” she protested, offering this fact as a distinguishing mark of the Rastafarian expropriation of ancient Vedic culture.

This interview took place before the sin of cultural expropriation was defined. Marley’s step-granddaughter was certainly not on any accusatory trip. She was diligently trying to make historical connections. It’s probably the only fair way to trace cultural interaction.

The fact that she was, with distinctly African features, wearing jeans instead of African robes only meant that her ancestors had been slaves to white plantation owners in the West Indies. It wasn’t a “voluntary” expropriation from Levis.

The white man who wore Rasta dreadlocks was expressing a definite preference for a hairstyle and was, probably more than that, subscribing to a lifestyle or a philosophy he sought to adopt. So also the British women born into Christian families who convert to Islam and contribute to the activities of suicide bombers.

In a debate on “cultural appropriation” or “expropriation” on the BBC, an Afro-American lady seemed to be arguing that black singers of Rock’n’Roll, of Gospel, Soul and Blues had been eclipsed by the reputations of the likes of Elvis Presley who are seen as the kings rather than the court jesters of musical genres. She may have had a point or a partial point since one can point to Stevie Wonder or Diana Ross eclipsing everyone.

America is, even through historical cruelty, a melting pot. The interaction between African rhythms and Western classical traditions to produce jazz is not, according to any tablet of commandments, a sin.

Closer to home, Indian historians or those who have culturally appropriated their mantle, constantly debate and disagree about the impact of Muslim culture on the subcontinent. William Dalrymple once argued (with me in a tirade of articles) that the Muslims had brought kurtas and kebabs to India. Everyone had appropriated the former and non-vegetarian Hindus had embraced the latter. Dalrymple wasn’t complaining about cultural appropriation, he was boasting about the positive contributions of Muslim culture. He was right. Down with all cultural jealousy in an integrating world!