How pop culture becomes power for Gen Z, millennials from Bahujan backgrounds

Mint

25-04-2025

A few years ago, I found myself in the middle of a conversation with my office mates, all graduates of universities such as Symbiosis and New York Film Academy, about Martin Scorsese and his cinema. I knew enough to smile and nod but not enough to riff. And in that moment, I knew exactly what was happening. Everyone at the table had grown up speaking a dialect I was just beginning to learn: cultural shorthand. Not English. But something slipperier.
I am a final-year B.Com dropout from an aided college in Mumbai's suburbs. I worked as a welder (which wasn't a coincidence; my Lohar caste has always been in metalwork, and my father ran a small fabrication shop in Jogeshwari) before joining a pop culture content company as a meme maker.
One of the reasons I think I got in was because I could understand pop culture references. I knew who Pink Floyd and Metallica were, could quote Eminem lyrics, and knew the difference between Marvel and DC storylines. That exposure didn't come from inherited privilege. It came from an English-medium school and a habit of spending recesses with classmates talking about American pop culture. That exposure, scrappy as it was, turned out to be currency. For Gen Z and young millennials from working-class and Bahujan backgrounds, this kind of exposure isn't just helpful, it's fundamental. It's how they're navigating a world that increasingly runs on reference, articulation and cultural access.
Caste doesn't always announce itself through slurs or surnames anymore. In 2025, it's subtler. It's in the rhythm of taste. A dance everyone seems to know. When to laugh. Who casually drops Succession, quotes Fleabag, or instinctively knows how to dress down for a client lunch. The kind of exposure that counts isn't about degrees or English. It's about taste. And if you are from a working-class or Bahujan background, no one hands you that memo. You have to discover what that memo even is on your own. One moment of quiet discomfort at a dinner table, one late-night Wikipedia dive, one awkward laugh at a joke you didn't get. Until it clicks.
Hitesh Pardeshi, 35, a marketing professional and political strategist from Goa, belongs to the Pardeshi Bhamta community which is part of the VJNT (Vimukta Jati and Nomadic Tribes) classification in Maharashtra. He remembers the sharp awkwardness of not knowing the menu at McDonald's. 'Back in junior college, a friend took our group there for her birthday. I had never been. I just said 'Maharaja Mac' because someone else said it. I had no clue what it was. But I didn't want to stand out or seem like I didn't belong."
That moment, he says, taught him how power hides in ease. How some people grow up knowing these codes, and others are forced to learn them in real time. This isn't a celebration of exposure. It's a provocation.
If Babasaheb (Dr. B.R. Ambedkar) built tools to dismantle structures, what are we building for the next generation? Babasaheb studied at Columbia University in the US, and later the London School of Economics in the UK. He wasn't only looking for education. He was building a political toolkit, gathering ideas, frameworks, and strategies to take back home.
He didn't just study. He absorbed. He sat in John Dewey's lectures. He read W.E.B. Du Bois. He began understanding systems, institutions, and the architecture of inequality on a global scale. That exposure didn't change who he was. It amplified what he already knew. It sharpened the vocabulary of revolt. It was calculated power. Babasaheb made sure he was read, heard and seen in the language of those sitting in power so he could dismantle their language from within. This was a strategy shaped by exposure. And that exposure, back then, is what broadband, Netflix, Reddit and critical theory can be for Bahujan youth today.
Ketki Lohakare, 28, a queer Dalit woman working in advertising, described how fast cultural currency moved when she arrived in Mumbai from a smaller town six years ago. 'Everything was a year ahead. Songs, memes, references. I'd just nod when people brought up Friends or international bands. You feel smaller. Not just financially, but emotionally too."
Now, she says, she's stopped pretending. 'If I haven't seen something, I say it. And when people explain it, I make them feel excited, not awkward. That's my power now."
Raunak Ramteke, 32, a Dalit employee at a major consumer internet company, read the Harry Potter books not for joy but social survival. 'Everyone else loved it. I forced myself to read it just so I could join the conversation." He no longer performs cultural fluency. 'Now I just say, 'I haven't watched that.' But I remember how it felt. Panic and isolation. When you don't get the reference and everyone else does."
Raica Mathews, 33, a business and growth strategist raised in a one-room
chawl
in Mumbai, spent her childhood observing long before she ever participated. Silence wasn't passive. It was preparation.
'At first, I played along," says Raica. 'Laughed when others laughed, Googled references under the table. When someone said 'You haven't watched that?', it was a velvet-rope reminder: you're not from here. But the more I studied their canon, the more I started writing my own. I stopped performing. I started drawing from where I came from. The rhythm of my street, the sharpness of growing up on edge. The stories no one else could tell were far more valuable than anything said in any room."
Fardeen Shaikh, 25, who runs a marketing agency, and grew up in the slums of Juhu Galli in Mumbai, got his education in pop culture through dubbed cartoons and school library comics (DC as well as
Amar Chitra Katha
). 'We didn't watch English content at home, nobody spoke the language. I found out about Friends and other popular TV shows in college. Then I'd go home, read their Wikipedia and Fandom pages. That was my prep school."
These aren't stories about faking it. And let's be honest. None of this catching up is mutual. The burden of understanding always falls on the Bahujan kid. The classroom doesn't teach his metaphors. The interview panel doesn't get her references. Nobody's Googling her world after the meeting. This isn't a two-way bridge. It's a one-way hustle. You learn their jokes, their shows, their vocabulary. Because that's the price of entry.
These are stories of people catching up to a system they were never introduced to just to be able to make small talk. It is about learning, listening and picking things up through context and curiosity.
Babasaheb wasn't performing when he studied Sanskrit. He wasn't pretending when he quoted Mill or Dewey. He did it so his words couldn't be dismissed. So he could step into every room and speak with clarity and presence. That same instinct is alive in every young person today who's decoding cultural signals in real time.
When working-class kids do the work to learn, understand and use cultural references as if they were born with it, they're pushed into spaces that rarely make room for them by default. That fluency comes from watching how people speak, picking up context from silence, diving into Wikipedia, and rehearsing lines in your head before a meeting. Slowly, it builds into something sharper: the ability to say, 'I don't know this, but I'd like to," without shrinking. And just as importantly, 'I do know this and it matters too."
That shift, from absorbing to asserting, is where self-respect begins to take root. Hitesh points to the internet as the game changer. 'Once I had access, I stopped feeling out of place."
Raica says she used to think other people's references were better. Now, she uses her own. 'I talk about where I come from, the stories I know, and people listen." What changed wasn't the audience. It was her clarity about the value of what she brought.
There's a narrative sold to Bahujan kids: 'aspire higher". But no one tells them how the privileged actually succeed: by replicating, referencing, rehearsing power. Elite kids write fake poverty sob stories to secure Ivy League scholarships. Meanwhile, kids in slums and tier-2 cities are still memorising dates for SSC forms or prepping for Paramilitary Entrance Bharti Academy. Same country. Two scripts.
So what's the work now? Not just to inspire aspiration. But to teach replication. Not to crash elite spaces as visitors. But to walk in as creators, critics, disruptors. Exposure isn't about copying someone else's taste. It's about understanding what gets attention, what holds space in a room, what brings money and deciding how you want to show up there. Knowing about three seasons of Succession will often get you more access than 200 episodes of
Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah
, simply because the people making decisions are more familiar with the former.
There will be pushback. That this focus on pop culture is soft. That it's capitalist. That it's mimicry. But Babasaheb wore suits for power, not polish. He read global thinkers to sharpen his local rage. He mastered Brahminical tools only to dismantle them. This isn't mimicry. This is mastery. And mastery begins with exposure.
We often think of affirmative action as a seat in a college, or a government job. But it is also the ability to read a room. To know what to reference, when to speak, how to speak. It's about access to articulation, not just admission. Imagine community programmes that don't stop at coding or coaching, but also teach kids how to break down a scene from The White Lotus, how to defend a song they love, and how to recognise tone in a panel discussion. Not as add-ons, but essentials.
It's training in how to think, listen, speak, and belong. It's humanities by another name. And in a world where algorithms decide reach and language decides room, this kind of education isn't optional. It's how we learn to live, and more importantly, how we learn to be heard. To build a more equal world, reservations and scholarships alone won't cut it. Access must extend beyond textbooks. Because the next layer of opportunity is already coded in taste, reference and presence.
As government jobs shrink and public sector pathways dry up, exposure becomes even more crucial. For young people from Bahujan and labouring backgrounds, who have long relied on state employment as a ladder out of poverty, cultural literacy and social fluency are no longer optional, they are essential. If more Bahujan kids are to succeed, then exposure needs to be treated not as luxury, but as rightful infrastructure. A basic, foundational tool for walking into any room without shrinking.
Balram Vishwakarma is an ethnographer, marketer and cultural strategist based in Mumbai.
Art and culture carry the memory of resistance and the promise of solidarity. When movements across the world against caste, racism, occupation, patriarchy and capitalism speak to each other, they don't echo, they harmonise. From Dalit/Anti-caste History Month to Black History Month, from Palestine to Sudan, creativity becomes our common language. It is through shared stories, rhythms and visuals that we build a solidarity that is not transactional, but transformative. Art becomes a bridge across borders, a map of pain and protest, and a vision of liberation. In pigment, in poetry, in performance, we remember, we resist, we rebuild. —
Siddhesh Gautam