In 2012, having finished my doctoral fieldwork in New Delhi, where I worked with some of India’s
leading designers as well as with artisans, I visited the India: Fashion Now exhibition at Arken, in
Copenhagen (curated by Mathias Ussing Seeberg, 18 August 2012–13 January 2013). Both the exhibition
design and the brief talk with the curator made it patently clear that the sole purpose of the
exhibition was to select and display seven influential Indian designers (Manish Arora, Morphe by
Amit Aggarwal, Little Shilpa, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Prashant Verma, Varun Sardana and 11.11 by
Cell DSGN) and showcase their works as works of art, representative of the ‘new’ India that is innovative,
buzzing and overflowing with talent and creativity. The press release for the exhibition is a
testimony to the uncritical reproduction of the idea of India as the next superpower, an idea that is
extremely popular with the Indian political and economic elite and its ideologues: