What Being An Artiste Taught Me About Colonial Hangovers, Bias, And Respect

We live in a society that consumes creativity endlessly, yet hesitates to recognise creation as labour. Art is applauded, shared, archived, and monetised. But the human cost behind it is ignored. This contradiction has been normalised to such an extent that questioning it is often mistaken for a complaint rather than a critique. For those living within artistic ecosystems, however, this denial is not abstract; it is lived, cumulative, and deeply personal.

This is not a minor discomfort or a fleeting grievance; it is a deep and persistent concern, especially for those associated with performing arts, visual arts, entertainment, and professions that operate far beyond the rigid contours of a conventional nine-to-five life.

These fields function through irregular hours, emotional labour, public scrutiny, and constant reinvention.

Yet paradoxically, the very people who love, consume, and celebrate art often remain startlingly unempathetic toward the professional realities of those who create it.

At the heart of this disconnect lies a classic minority-majority conflict. Those engaged in structured, protocol-driven professions frequently fail to recognise that their own workplace rigidity mirrors the equally demanding, though less visible, constraints of artistic careers. 

While their challenges are institutional and scheduled, artists face circumstantial relevance, unstable income, perpetual evaluation, and the relentless pressure to remain visible.

The demand for relevance often slips into exploitation, normalised simply because it exists outside familiar professional templates.

This lack of empathy is not always malicious. It is often learned. Patriarchy, social conditioning, and institutional rigidity have together promoted a narrow definition of “legitimate work.”

As a result, families and communities struggle to understand crises that do not resemble their own. Burnout in artistic professions is dismissed as poor planning; financial precarity as choice; identity erosion as indulgence.

My first-hand experience

I encountered this contradiction early. In school, I was fondly dubbed the child performer—called to the stage for every cultural programme, every celebration.

Performance was encouraged as long as it remained ornamental. Around the early 2000s, Linkin Park’s “Numb” felt uncannily personal, even before I could articulate why.

It voiced the exhaustion of being visible yet unheard, applauded yet unsupported. Standing now in the mid-2020s, the platforms have multiplied, but the mindset has not. That continuity hurts; not as nostalgia, but as evidence.

What sustains this dismissal is a lingering colonial hangover. Generations have been conditioned to believe that the majority defines norms, and that marginalising minority realities is inevitable, even acceptable.

Labour is respected only when it aligns with dominant economic narratives; everything else is romanticised or trivialised.

This is ironic given our civilisational roots. In Vedic and pre-puranic traditions, performing arts were sacred and central to social life.

Artists were respected contributors, not tolerated anomalies. Today, however, history is selectively rewritten. A diluted “neo-sanatan” narrative celebrates culture while devaluing its creators.

Until we dismantle the mindset that normalises majority dominance over minority realities, this crisis will persist.

And if we continue to romanticise culture while undermining its makers, we should not be surprised when society finds itself spiralling toward a moral and social collapse ofits own making.

Article by Soumita Saha, musician & freelance writer | Views expressed by the author are their own.