An essay on fetishization, racism and the cost of existing visibly.

By Taniya Kashyap

Synopsis: Northeast Girl Who Got Looked At is a personal essay about the specific violence of being seen without being known. Written from the inside, it traces how northeastern women in mainland India are simultaneously fetishized and degraded, desired as exotic, dismissed as immoral, hired for their faces, and reduced to content. Moving between the personal and the structural, it examines how capitalist racism, sexual stereotyping, and everyday microaggression operate as a single system rather than separate incidents. It ends where it begins: with a woman who came to a city whole, and found the city was only interested in her surface.

There is a kind of attention that does not see you.

I learned this early, not in a single moment, but in a whole lot of accumulation of them. The way a stranger’s eye would settle on my face a beat too long, deliberating if I was one of ‘them’. The way a compliment could arrive shaped like a question : you’re so pretty, are you from Northeast? As though I needed to be placed before I could be appreciated, as though appreciation for someone who looks like me has always come with a footnote.

I am Assamese, I grew up in a place of rivers and silk and the specific green that only exists in the Northeast, a green so saturated that it’s almost fictional from a plane window. I moved to the mainland however for India and brought everything with me I thought I was : a reader, a writer, someone who spoke often and held many opinions about things. What the city saw when I arrived was simpler and more legible. It saw my eyes, my complexion, the shape of my face. And from that it made a story about me that I had not written and was not asked to approve.

This story is about that narrative. About who writes it, who profits from it and what it costs the women item is written onto.

There is a word that gets used often in conversations and folklore about Northeast : Exotic. It is deployed as a praise – meant, presumably, to land as a compliment. What it actually does is locate you outside the ordinary, which sounds like elevation but is, in practice, a form of removal. To be exotic is to be interesting without intimacy, admiration without accountability.
The Northeastern region of India is often presented as a land of pristine beauty and exotic landscape, inhabited by tribes in multi – coloured garments, displaying their rich and unique culture. This is the frame through which the mainland has historically viewed the Northeast, as a spectacle, a scenery, a cultural decor. And the women of the region have always been the most aestheticized part of the scenery.

The much prized cosmopolitan self-presentation of the people of the Northeast is a coveted asset for the rising personal care and hospitality industries, their cosmopolitan sought after capitalistic establishments as they easily get either consumerism. What this means definitively
is, stripped of its academic language, that northeastern women are considered hirable because they look a certain way and carry themselves in a certain way, and this hirability is not separable from the racial and physical characteristics that make them visually legible as “exotic”. The spa
industry in India commodifies the appearance of northeastern women, leveraging their perceived similarity to Southeast Asian beauty norms to attract clientele. The body becomes the product and the culture becomes the packaging.

This is what capitalist racism looks like when it is functioning smoothly, no slurs or exclusions, but inclusion on specific terms. You are welcome here, stand over there. Smile like that, do not ask why.

But the violence is not only economic, and is not only in the formal structures of employment. It lives, perhaps most corrosively, in the everyday street, in the flat-hunting, in classrooms, in the comment section.

In a book titled Northeast Migrants in Delhi : Race, Refuge and Retail, scholar Duncan McDuie-Ra identifies four categories of stereotypes that people from the Northeast are subjected to : backward and exotic, anti- national, anti-assimilationist, and loose and immoral. What strikes me about this taxonomy is not what it contains, but how efficiently it functions. These four categories cover every angle. You are primitive if you stay too northeastern, social if you don’t assimilate quickly enough. And if you are a woman who is comfortable in her own skin, who laughs freely, who wears what she likes, you are immoral. Loose. The stereotypes are a close system and there is no behaviour that escapes them.

In the context of other northeastern women, mainstream society stereotypes them as easy-going, fun loving and socially, culturally and religiously polluted. I have heard versions of this my entire life. The colleague who assumed a woman from Nagaland drank because all northeastern women do. The landlord who hesitated at the door, the male classmate who thought paying attention to me was a kind of generosity, as though I should be grateful for being noticed as though that itself was not also being reduced. Women from the northeast are stereotyped as loose and easy, or seen as exotic beauties to be showcased. Being called “chinky”, “chowmein” or “Chinese” is so common that it is genuinely no longer surprising. The slurs are a part of it, but so is the compliment that comes in the same sentence as though these are not contradictions, as though the fetish and the slurs are not the same gesture made with different muscle groups.

And they think northeastern women are good to date, but when it comes to marriage, they think twice.

I would let you sit with that sentence for a moment Beavis it contains everything. The idea of northeastern women as a temporary pleasure, an experience, as the King’s of person you accumulate before you choose someone’s appropriation. The exoticisation results when sexism and racism are intertwined, the exotic element associated with the idea of mobile our fluid sexuality. Your desirability and your disposability are the same thing and they come from the same place in the same person. And the person does not experience this as a contradiction.

What does this do to a woman over time? I think about the small negotiations and compromises. The way you learn to read a room before you speak. The sixth sense that never fully lowers, the microaggression still exists in metropolitan urbans, quieter sometimes, but present. I think about the women who dressed more Indian on purpose, who dated outside their community to fit in, who spent years performing legibility for a mainland that only wanted to read one chapter of them anyway.
I think about what it costs to be looked at like that, not seen, just looked at.

Then again there is what happens online, which is its own particular brutality. The route to viral success for certain YouTubers runs through thumbnails fetishising women and titles that entice viewers with the prospect of cultural boundary-crossing. Travel content, food content, meeting northeastern girls content is a whole genre built on the premise that a northeastern woman is a destination, a thing to be visited and documented and shown to a mainland audience that finds her interesting in the way a museum attracts artifacts, you pass through, take a photograph and leave. These YouTubers are simply the latest iteration of a racism so normalised that it erupts predictably whenever Northeast India enters national headlines. The outrage comes and goes, a video gets flagged, the creator issues an apology. And then, a few weeks later, there is another thumbnail, another title, another woman whose face is used as clickbait for an audience that has been taught to see her as content.

What makes this particularly exhausting is not the individual incidents but the structure beneath them, the same structure that makes this content legible, profitable, and continuously produced. Because you cannot fight a thumbnail, the fight lies in the appetite the content feeds and that appetite has been cultivated over a very long time, by a mainland that has never been asked to reckon with what it actually thinks of the people it calls exotic.

The conversation that happens in northeastern households that the mainland witnesses rarely. It is the conversation before you leave, before a daughter or sister or a friend moves to a city for work or study. It is the conversation before you leave, before a daughter or a sister or a friend moves to the city for work or study. It is practical in the way that conversations about danger are always practical. Do not go out after a certain hour, do not tell strangers where you live. Be careful about the men who are too friendly too fast. Know the difference between interest and intention. This conversation is not unique to northeastern families, but it carries specific weight when your child is going to a city that has already decided what she is before she arrives. When the danger is not just the general danger of being a woman in an Indian city, but the additional specific danger of women from the northeast, which means being targeted by a particular kind
of attention that is both racial and sexual, both fascination and contempt. Mothers know this, they have always known this, the briefing before departure is a form of grief, and also a form of love, the attempt to prepare a daughter for a world that will look at her and see everything who she actually is.

The northeastern girl who got looked at is not exotic, she is not a thumbnail, not a category or a demographic or a story the mainland gets to tell about itself through her body. She is someone who grew up beside the Brahmaputra and carries its particular quality of light in memory, someone who knows the weight of a Mekhela Chador and what it means to wear one far from home. Someone who came to a city with a full interior life and found that the city was not particularly interested in inferiority, only in surface and only in the readable, only in what could be consumed without too much effort.

She is still here, she is still looking back.

And she is tired, not of existing but at the cost of existing visibly, in a country that has not yet learned the difference between seeing someone and simply staring.

This essay draws on research including Huirem & Loganathan’s “The Exotic North East, Their Women, and Capitalist Racism in India” (GUINEIS Journal, 2026), Karanjeet Kaur’s reporting in The Print, and EPW’s documentation of racism against northeastern women in Indian cities.

Photo owned by Gopi at Social News XYZ; you can find the original article here: Link

Photo by Tanujit Saha via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

About the Author:

Taniya Kashyap is a writer from Assam, currently based in Bengaluru, whose work lives somewhere between psychology and being a curious explorer. She is not just drawn to multitudinal traverse, but also the interior lives of people, what they perform, the authenticity and what slips through anyway. When she isn’t writing, she’s probably overanalyzing a fictional character or mass applying for internships.

(Although I have not started posting on my substack yet, here is the link : here)

Im planning to write and publish pretty soon however, it would be great to stay connected)

My Instagram for contacts: Instagram