When foreigners respond positively to what audiences perceive as ‘our’ culture, we feel validated. Taking up the Instagram handle ‘Inverted Coconut’, Soumithra M. S. asks: is this just the pleasure of inter-cultural sharing, or is there more at stake in the popularity of certain media handles and content creators?
Soumithra M. S.
When you click on the Instagram handle titled ‘Inverted Coconut’ you are greeted with pictures of a white woman in her thirties, dressed impeccably in a Kerala style set-sari and mundu, speaking in fluent Malayalam. The handle’s immense popularity among Malayali audiences has turned its owner, Aparna Mulberry, into a public figure in Kerala. The ‘bio’ section of Mulberry’s Instagram page informs visitors that she is an ‘American born Kerala loving girl’ and that her page is for ‘Malayalam lovers’ (this last phrase has been removed as of July 2022). According to Aparna, she is ‘white outside, but so much of a Malayali (brown) inside’, which is how she arrived at the name ‘Inverted Coconut’ for her Instagram handle (Jayarajan 2020). Described by Mulberry as a ‘fun handle’, the account was started in February 2020 solely to brush up her rusting Malayalam language skills and currently has close to a million followers (Jayarajan 2020). Aparna Mulberry is a Chilean-American woman who came to Kerala when she was three years old along with her parents and lived there till age twelve. Mulberry’s father, who is an American, and mother, who is Chilean, were involved with the works and activities of Indian spiritual leader Mata Amritanandamayi at her ashram, Amritapuri, in the Kollam district of Kerala. At thirteen, Mulberry moved to the United States with her father when he decided to end his stay at the Amritapuri Ashram.
Mulberry’s Instagram account is peppered with photos and videos of her from the time she was in India. There are pictures from her childhood where she and her friends are seen wearing their school uniforms, churidars, and pattupavadas. These are complemented by snapshots of her recent visits to India/Kerala as well. Photos of Mulberry in conventional Indian clothes such as sari, salwar kameez, etc. are shared with captions such as ‘Once a Kerala girl always a Kerala girl’, ‘reminiscing the good ‘ole days when there wasn’t a global pandemic and travel was allowed’ or ‘Ende Keralam’ (My Kerala). While these captions convey her fondness and longing for Kerala, other posts are recollections of specific periods of her life, such as school years or her time at the ashram celebrating different festivals such as Vishu, Onam, Janmashtami, etc. The captions of such posts speak positively about the impact of bhajans and prayers, highlighting the elements of Hindu spirituality and generosity that she imbibed from the ashram. She stresses on how bhajans helped her ‘connect to that deep peace’ within herself and describes her time at the ashram as ‘magical’ and something that provided her with ‘a solid foundation to be more kind and helpful as a person’ (Mulberry 2020).
One of Mulberry’s popular video formats is one where she re-enacts movie scenes from popular Malayalam movies, both old and new. Despite speaking in anglicised and imperfect Malayalam, these videos garnered the most views, likes, and comments. The comments under these videos express approval of her attempt—‘It’s awesome’, ‘Impeccable’. The positive response might be a result of Malayali viewers seeing their culture as being validated by a white woman and consequently Western society at large. Likely encouraged by this popularity, Mulberry eventually launched an online English tutoring class for her followers. Packaged in the form of 120 pre-recorded lectures available via the Entri mobile application at the rate of 2,999 rupees for a year, with an early-bird offer of 2000 rupees, the course was registered by more than one thousand students within a few months of the announcement. At present, the community has more than eleven thousand students. A separate Instagram page titled ‘English with Inverted Coconut’ that focuses on Mulberry’s English coaching lessons has been launched, and as of July, 2022, has more than twenty thousand followers. Recently, Mulberry was invited to contest in the popular Malayalam television reality show ‘Big Boss’.
There is a significant portion of Malayalis who can speak in English and are familiar with the culture and lifestyle of Americans. However, such an Instagram account for the purpose of polishing a South Asian’s English language skills or to connect with American culture will not always garner a similar level of popularity and reception. This is testified by the paltry number of followers that similar accounts managed by Malayalis possess, despite providing comprehensive videos and lessons on vocabulary, accent, speaking, reading, and writing the English language. More importantly, these pages provide a good portion of their coaching for free or even at a lesser price than Aparna Mulberry’s classes. From analysing her content and audience responses, I find that there is an obsession with the spectacle of a white woman dressing in saris and performing rituals particular to Kerala. People respond with comments saying ‘You are just like us’ or ‘Are you a Malayalee? You speak so fluently’ and frequently ask her questions along the lines of ‘How did a white woman learn Malayalam so well?’
Race, class, gender, and ideas of intellectual/cultural authenticity are present throughout the content and engagement with her page. Aparna Mulberry’s popularity in Kerala is tied to the larger political parameters of race, gender, and class identities, especially to the conception of race and class that were engendered during the British colonial period. The remnants of colonial conceptions of racial and intellectual superiority based on skin color persist within the consciousness of South Asian identity in general and Malayali identity in particular to this day. The association of white skin color with varied conceptions such as development, progress, modernity, civilisation, and the association of concepts such as degeneracy, tradition, and barbarism with brown and black people is pervasive even today in many South Asian cultures including that of Kerala. In this light, it is important to look more closely at the cultural hybridity that Aparna Mulberry embodies and its implications. I believe that the internalisation of Malayali markers of identity as inferior, and the concomitant infatuation with white skin and markers of white identity, formed as a result of colonisation, is responsible for the disproportionate popularity of Aparna Mulberry and her Instagram page ‘Inverted Coconut’.
In his 1952 book, ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon presents a searing examination of the multiple layers of subjugation that occur under colonialism. He uses the concept ‘epidermalisation of inferiority’ to describe how skin color becomes the marker based on which identities are constructed, valued, rendered hegemonic 1, and branded as inferior, shaping the very psyche of peoples that are subjected to the violence of colonisation. This internalised inferiority engenders a desire for whiteness among the colonised, forcing them to accept colonial dominance and emulate their culture. Borrowing from Fanon, political psychologist Ashis Nandy traces such tendencies among some sections of the Indian population, primarily among the elite English-educated dominant castes (Nandy 1983). Both Fanon and Nandy highlight how this psychological tactic functions through the willful suppression of the colonised culture’s indigenous markers of identity such as the usage of regional languages, regional form of dressing, enjoyment of regional artistic forms, shunning indigenous names to adopt more Eurocentric/Christian names, and the most enduring and visible form of colonial after-effect—colorism or the association of fairness with superiority. In the case of Aparna Mulberry, the people of Kerala witnessed a white-skinned American woman embracing the language and culture that they themselves had internalised as inferior when compared to that of white-skinned people.
In a postcolonial society like India, skin and skin color are not just biological categories, they are also discursive categories imbued with social, political, and cultural meanings. The multiple skin-lightening creams in the Indian market and the substantial amount of profit they reap are pertinent examples. The airbrushing of models, athletes, and movie stars to appear light-skinned also builds the case. However, with Aparna Mulberry, this aspiration is reversed—the culture and language of Kerala becomes the object of aspiration for a white person. The appeal this holds for Mulberry’s audience can be understood as a case of dependency upon white approval, which, for colonised peoples, ‘perpetuates the status of racial inferiority by placing [themselves] under the authority of white approval’ (Song 2017, 51). Such is the power of white hegemony that even if it is one person who is embracing the once-subjugated Malayali language and culture, it is received widely by the people. Through her proficiency in Malayalam, Mulberry is therefore able to benefit monetarily, psychologically, and culturally due to the very history of colonialism. For Mulberry, the embodiment of Malayali cultural identity through the language of Malayalam is an accidental phenomenon, a fun hobby, with no history of violence or any anxiety of diverting from a hegemonic identity (Fanon 1952). In fact, it is her very status as an unusual Malayalam speaker that makes her popular.
When Malayalis speak English, on the other hand, there is an inherent anxiety associated with reproducing a hegemonic identity as well as the fear of being exposed as an incompetent mimic. Anxieties associated with reproducing the hegemonic pronunciation, intonation, and accent are common among many Malayali students of English—the intrusion of the Malayalam accent while speaking English is often frowned upon. There is a phenomenal amount of agency that proximity to the coloniser’s language provides for the colonised to this day. In India, English is more than a language, it is a marker of caste, class, and gender privilege, especially in the era of globalisation. Inability to speak English fluently or without regional inflection is often interpreted as an intellectual deficiency rather than as a social/linguistic phenomenon. This, in turn, reduces or eliminates access to different socioeconomic opportunities such as admission to higher educational institutions where the medium of instruction is English or to academic/ non-academic groups which prizes fluency in English without regional inflection. As a result, a large portion of Malayalis, especially the non-English-speaking masses, consider themselves as the opposite of the educated, progressive, modern whites.
Into this scenario, Aparna Mulberry entered with her Instagram account where she welcomed people of all class, caste, religion, and gender without discrimination and also in a language that was accessible to them. Her Instagram account provided a space where the non-English-speaking Malayali masses could access a representative of modernity, progress, and development as characterised by the colonial discourse. Through her enactment of Malayali identity and popular culture, particularly regional cinema, Mulberry relies on the ‘cultural distance’ between coloniser and colonised that was created by the process of colonisation.
One of the marked features of the colonial process was the very creation of a singular idea of the colonised ‘Other’ by the colonisers through writings and other modes of representation, education systems, and cultural imaginaries. Cultural critic Edward Said termed this process as ‘orientalism’ (Said 1978). Some of the key characteristics of Orientalism is the portrayal of the colonised as violent, savage, hypersexual and uncivilised, or as exotic—something fantastic and mysterious, something/someone that is strange yet familiar for the Western imperialist. In the case of Aparna Mulberry, her Malayali viewers find an exotic in her when she embodies the marginalised, exoticised Malayali identity. Mulberry’s portrayal of Kerala and consequently, India, as a place where ‘spiritual guidance’ is available ‘more than the United States’, feeds right into the Orientalist exoticised portrayal of India as a land of spiritual enrichment as opposed to spiritually deprived Western society (Mulberry 2020). At this stage, despite attempting to display inter-cultural understanding and embrace plurality, Aparna Mulberry is foregrounding white imperialist/neocolonial conceptualisation of India.
It is important to note that the Malayali ethnicity that Aparna Mulberry endorses is the hegemonic Hindu savarna identity. In doing so, she renders invisible other minority religious identities along with non-religious identities and legitimises the savarna Hindu Malayali as normative. In addition to the fascination associated with Mulberry’s racial background, there is an interest in the specific notion of ‘tradition’ that she propagates. One of the comments under her post, ‘so wonderful to see a foreigner embrace Malayali tradition and culture when Malayalis themselves are disowning it and embracing Western culture’ clearly highlights this sentiment. Just as much as her Instagram page helps Mulberry to consume Malayali cultural identity through constant engagement with people who identify as Malayalis, it also enables her to sell her performance of that Malayali identity back to the Malayalis. Aparna’s competency with Malayalam as well as with the English language convinced a good portion of her followers that her English lessons will be worthwhile. There is a very material process of language and identity commodification that is transpiring here.
As a reply to a question posed to her by one of her followers enquiring whether she would have had the success she enjoys had she not been white, Mulberry replied, acknowledging her privilege, that she would not. Unfortunately, Mulberry’s engagement with her racial privilege does not extend to acknowledging the postcolonial condition that invests her performance of Malayaliness, and her representation of India as a land of spirituality, with such desirability. As Mulberry’s Malayali audience, it is important for us to understand how our enjoyment of Mulberry’s content is enabled by the racial hierarchies set up in the colonial era. As evinced by the popularity of those like Mulberry, white people’s ‘reaction videos’ to Indian cultural production and white people’s experiences of South Asian culture on platforms like Instagram and YouTube, these hierarchies are not simply relics of a distant past, but actively continue to drive the profit logics of commoditised media.
References
Inverted Coconut. 2020. ‘English Teacher, American born Kerala loving girl’. Instagram, 15 Feb.2020, https://www.instagram.com/invertedcoconut/?hl=en
Danielle, Oshin. 2020. ‘Meet ‘Inverted Coconut’, American Outside, Malayali Inside’. The Week, 11 November, 2020. https://www.theweek.in/leisure/society/2020/11/11/meet-inverted-coconut-american-outside-malayali inside.html
Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto.
Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge.
Jayarajan, Sreedevi. 2020. ‘Meet ‘Inverted Coconut’, an American who is a Malayali at heart’. The News Minute 9 November, 2020. https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/meet-inverted-coconut-american-who-malayali-heart 137265
Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Song, Seunghyun. 2017. ‘Bridging Epidermalization of Black Inferiority and the Racial Epidermal Schema: Internalizing Oppression to the Level of Possibilities’. DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 4, no. 1 (2017): 49–61. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.11116/digest.4.1.3.
About the Author: Soumithra has a Master’s degree in English Studies from IIT Madras. Her research interests include international migration, diaspora studies and how gender, class, and caste play a role in these situations.
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