The 80s nostalgia holds caste bias

O n July 17, 1985, an argument at a drinking water tank in Karamchedu, in coastal Andhra Pradesh, turned into a massacre. A Madiga woman objected to a Kamma youth soiling the public drinking water tank her family drank from. By nightfall, six Madiga men were dead and three Dalit women had been raped. The police called it a riot. A civil liberties fact-finding team called it a one-sided massacre. The killings birthed the Andhra Pradesh Dalit Mahasabha and a four-decade argument over whether the Constitution reaches inside a village.

Forty-one years later, our feeds are full of the past; AI-generated images of the 80s. Chiffon sarees against sunlit walls, Ambassadors and Contessas. Thus, India became the No. 1 country for Google’s Nano Banana image-generation model, and its signature trend was retro-Bollywood portraits. However, where did this aesthetic come from?