It's Still Ours: The Beatles and Orientalism in a Post-Colonial World

The 1960's saw The Beatles own the world, and as they clearly believed, the cultures throughout it. The Beatles relationship with India and its culture alone demonstrates how their attitudes towards India, even in a post-colonial world, were stereotypical, white washed, and largely unfair. There is, however, an interesting nuance to the bands use of Indian culture. Their perception and portrayal of Indian culture was not in the pursuit of justifying and continuing British economic and military domination of South Asian countries, but was more a repudiation of the world in which they had grown up.

While this seems to soften the offense, they still managed to display India in a wholly inaccurate way. The Beatles' reputation for drugs helped to conflate the culture with that of psychedelics, music, and sex. Their portrayal of India is one of languid and rampant drug use and spiritual awakenings. This bleeds not only into their personal lives (George Harrison especially began to embrace Hinduism and Indian cultural practices) but their music as well, where they featured psychedelic musical themes and extensive use of cultural instruments such as the sitar.

All of this culminates into an inaccurate depiction of an Indian way of life. It romanticizes aspects of a cultures created and dominated by white, largely English musicians (The Kinks and the Yardbirds would also feature similar themes), with a foreign tagged placed on it; a price change to make it more appealing and exotic to the masses.