For a country that spent centuries being told its culture was backward, unsophisticated, savage, in need of civilising, taming, or outright replacing, India has had a remarkable influence on the way the modern world looks.

 Not necessarily in ways that have always given the original creators credit, of course, but through trade routes, migration, colonisation, and adaptation, Indian art has travelled further than most of us realise. Sometimes it arrived through exchange, curiosity, and honest trade and other times it arrived because an empire decided taking was easier than asking. Either way, it arrived.

Somewhere along the way, Indian textiles ended up in European homes, Indian motifs appeared on luxury runways, Indian embroidery became desirable once somebody else was selling it, and Indian craftsmanship became so deeply woven into global design that many people stopped recognising where it came from in the first place. 

Via: Baro Market, example of chintz fabric/print

Chintz is probably my favourite example of this. What began as hand-painted and printed cotton from India became one of Europe's biggest obsessions, finding its way onto curtains, upholstery, dresses, wallpaper, and practically every surface people could think of decorating. The designs travelled so far and became so embedded in everyday life that the story of where they came from almost disappeared beneath their popularity. I remember discovering this fun bit of knowledge and wondered what else has been ours and colonizers took it and used it to define themselves and still do without any comprehension of the struggle of something as simple as leaves. 

Reading through these interviews, I kept thinking about that journey. Not because the artists themselves are recreating old traditions exactly as they existed hundreds of years ago, but because so many of them are participating in the same process that culture has always relied on. They are carrying things forward, changing them, translating them, adapting them to new places, new bodies, and entirely new contexts without losing the thread that connects them to where they came from.

By artist Nikita Kotecha, @nikkitattoox on Instagram. In frame: mehendi inspired tattoo design. 

We often talk about culture as though it belongs to geography or history, as though it lives neatly inside borders, museums, textbooks, and family trees. We talk about it as though crossing an ocean somehow weakens it, dilutes it, or leaves it behind. The stories in these interviews suggest almost the opposite. Culture seems to thrive through adaptation far more successfully than it survives through preservation, because people continue choosing it every single day in ways that feel relevant to their own lives.

I think about that often, even outside the context of these artists. I wear silver jewellery despite growing up in a culture where gold is treated as the default. I think about the ways queer people have used silver jewellery as a form of identity and recognition, about the ways certain rings, chains, and adornments carry meanings that exist beneath the surface. 

None of those choices happen in isolation. They are shaped by culture, community, history, politics, aesthetics, memory, and personal expression all at once. Even when we think we are making purely individual choices, we are usually participating in something much larger than ourselves, larger than time itself.

That same thread appears throughout these interviews. A kolam drawn by a grandmother in South India finds its way onto skin in New York. Mehndi patterns, which were the original temporary tattoos, are transformed into permanent ones in the United Kingdom. Textile motifs become body art. Family stories become visual language. Symbols that once existed on walls, fabrics, courtyards, and wedding hands begin appearing on arms, backs, legs, and chests thousands of kilometres away from where they were first conceived.

What fascinated me most was that none of these artists spoke about culture as something frozen in time. Nobody was interested in preserving a perfect version of the past. Instead, they spoke about connection, memory, ancestry, identity, and belonging in ways that felt alive. Their work wasn't trying to recreate history exactly as it was, because carrying culture forward individually means looking at culture through the lens of your own morals, but it was trying to continue a conversation that had already been happening for generations, in their own unique voices. 

In frame: SZA in a reworked corset at the AMAs by Indian designer Niharika Vivek. 

That feels particularly important right now because we are living through a moment where cultural expression seems to be moving in the opposite direction from where it was even fifteen or twenty years ago. Growing up, it often felt like modernity was being sold to us as distance. The more western you looked, the more sophisticated you appeared. The more global you sounded, the more seriously you were taken. There was a sense that progress meant moving away from tradition rather than carrying it with you.

Now, at least from where I'm standing, it feels like something has shifted.

People are digging through family archives for old textiles and turning them into jackets, corsets, shirts, bags, and entirely new garments. Young designers are building brands around handwoven fabrics that previous generations might have dismissed as old-fashioned. Regional jewellery styles are finding their way back into everyday wardrobes. Traditional dance forms are appearing in contemporary spaces without needing to justify their relevance. Languages that people were once encouraged to hide are being spoken more proudly and more publicly.

None of this feels nostalgic to me. If anything, it feels incredibly current. It's felt this way since COVID. 

The people participating in it are not trying to return to some imagined golden age. They're taking pieces of culture that already exist and asking what they can become next. They're treating culture the same way culture has always functioned: as something flexible enough to survive change, for change is inevitable. 

The famous cerulean sweater speech from The Devil Wears Prada comes to mind here. Miranda Priestly's entire point is that what feels like an individual choice is usually the end result of thousands of cultural decisions that happened long before we arrived. Somebody designs something, somebody adopts it, somebody popularises it, somebody commercialises it, and eventually it lands in our wardrobe feeling personal even though it travelled through countless hands before reaching us.

Culture works much the same way.

The silver rings I wear, the tattoos somebody chooses, the language somebody speaks at home, the motifs somebody feels drawn toward, the music somebody returns to when they need comfort, none of these things appear out of nowhere. They exist inside larger stories. Some of those stories are joyful. Some are painful. Some are tied to migration, displacement, colonialism, caste, class, religion, family, or community. Most are far messier than we like to admit.

I think of silly tattoos for some reason. What you think is a random, funny choice is a hundred generations of oppression, knowledge, norms, ego and pride driving a singular choice. 

What these interviews kept reminding me is that culture does not disappear simply because people move.

If anything, movement often makes people pay closer attention. The people who moved themselves observe and hold on to their culture more harshly, lest they lose it in the modern world. The people whose country it is who will only see you as outsiders and wonder where you're “originally “ from. The other outsiders who will wonder how your existence affects or disrupts theirs. 

In frame: Muslim refugees crowd a train heading to Pakistan from India on September 26, 1947, about six weeks after the official separation of the countries.

Via: Associated Press  

When families migrate, they don't carry entire countries with them. They carry fragments. They carry recipes scribbled on paper, they carry songs, and photographs. They carry memories and stories about places that no longer exist or function in quite the same way. They carry objects that become more precious precisely because they are far away from where they were crafted. 

Sometimes those fragments become stronger after migration rather than weaker.

A pattern seen every day can fade into the background. A pattern remembered from childhood can become sacred, nostalgic and precious.

A language spoken by everyone around you can feel ordinary whereas a language that reminds you of your grandparents can become something you hold onto more tightly.

A kolam, a mehndi design, a textile motif, a particular flower, a piece of jewellery, a visual style, all of these things can begin carrying weight that goes far beyond their original purpose because they become reminders of connection.

That is what I kept seeing across these conversations.

Not preservation, not nostalgia, not even necessarily pride. It was recognition.

The recognition that culture is not something sitting behind us. It is something we are actively participating in every single day, whether we realise it or not.

And maybe that is why tattooing feels like such an interesting place to watch these conversations unfold. Tattoos have always been records of who we are, what we value, where we come from, who we love, what we carry, and what we refuse to forget. When those ideas meet migration, memory, and heritage, something fascinating happens. The result is neither entirely old nor entirely new. It exists somewhere in between, carrying pieces of many different worlds at once.

Much like the people wearing them.

Working on this archive has made me realise that South Asian culture is not sitting still somewhere waiting to be preserved. It is moving constantly. It moves with people, through families, across oceans, through art, through memory, through the things we choose to keep and the things we reinvent entirely.

By artist Swasthi Iyengar, @gunga_ma on Instagram. In frame: kolam inspired tattoo design. 

Some of the artists featured in this book grew up thousands of kilometres away from the places their families once called home. Yet their work is filled with kolams, mehndi, textile motifs, ancestral symbols, and questions about belonging. Reading their interviews reminded me that culture rarely survives because somebody protects it perfectly. It survives because people continue finding their own ways to make it meaningful.

This archive exists because those stories deserve to be documented. Over the next few months, we'll be sharing more artists, more interviews, and more conversations from the project. Some of them are carrying culture across oceans, some are reinventing it entirely. All of them are contributing to a living history of South Asian tattooing that deserves to be recorded.

Follow @anomalietattooco to discover all the artists featured in the archive and the stories that didn't fit into a single blog.