Decolonizing Validation: Why Indian Art Needs No Oscar
Recently, social media in India has been buzzing with claims that Akshaye Khanna should win an Oscar. While the praise for his acting is more than well deserved, the obsession with the Oscar (also the Grammy, Nobel, etc.) itself reveals something more profound and more uncomfortable — why are we looking elsewhere to get recognition, legitimacy, even acceptance? Why does a nod from a Western institution feel like the ultimate stamp of having arrived? And why do we instinctively place it above our own cultural standards of excellence?
Indicism explores this exact cultural, academic, and psychological inheritance and lasting hangover of colonialism: the tendency to look outward for validation, especially to the West, even when we possess rich, self-sustaining traditions of art, philosophy, and critique, much of it having existed millennia before the West learned acting or music. Decolonizing the Indian mind is not about rejecting global platforms, but about breaking free from the idea that Western approval is the highest form of success.
The Oscars are not a universal measure of artistic merit, though the way “foreign” films vie for recognition makes it seem so. They are shaped by Hollywood’s politics, market priorities, and cultural pulse. Remarkable films and musical scores from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have slipped through the cracks, not because they lack depth or nuance, but because they don’t necessarily align with Western storytelling norms and/or commercial expectations.
Recognition often favors films that serve a specific agenda. At the same time, those who excel on their own merits are overlooked and usually not represented, sometimes by the nations themselves due to internal politics. When we place the Oscars on a pedestal, we unconsciously accept their criteria as superior, marginalizing our own ways of understanding rasas, performance, emotion, and storytelling. i.e., There is a lack of swaparikshan, self-examination, or awareness, for that matter.
Akshaye Khanna’s acting often thrives on subtlety, quiet intensity, moral ambiguity, and restraint. These qualities align closely with Indian aesthetic principles, such as rasa, in which emotion is evoked rather than announced, and meaning unfolds gradually. Indian cinema has long perfected and valued the craft of acting in theatre and films, yet we frequently overlook it unless it is validated abroad. This is precisely the mindset we need to be wary of and eventually shed; the sense of excellence that feels incomplete until former masters affirm it externally. Taking a sentence to digress, even various awards within India are driven by an agenda, though it might be impossible to ignore the dharmic films that have also performed well.
Indicism calls for a re-centering. It asks Indics to trust their civilizational confidence, to believe that our frameworks of judgment are not inferior simply because they are non-Western. When we constantly compare our artists to Western benchmarks, we are not elevating them; we are shrinking the space in which they can be fully themselves!
Decolonization, in this sense, is creating our own metrics. It begins with questioning why a gold statue in Los Angeles matters more to us than recognition from our own audiences, history, honest critics, and traditions. It is about learning to recognize and celebrate native value without needing to use a Western scale to measure film and music success.
This does not mean international recognition is always meaningless. It can be affirming at times and exciting. But it could be seen as a bonus, not necessarily the goalpost. When Indian artists are judged first through Indic lenses, global acclaim becomes secondary. In sum, Akshaye Khanna does not need an Oscar to prove his latest brilliance. Neither does Indian cinema, given that Bollywood is now dead. The real work lies in decolonizing our minds, our applause, the wah, wah, so that when we say someone is great, we mean it because we know it to be true, not because the West might finally take notice. Indics need to stop waiting by the phone for an irrelevant call; greatness doesn’t need a Western area code.