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

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.

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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."

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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.

FORCING A FOOT IN THE DOOR

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."

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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.

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