A Regal Illusion: Diljit Dosanjh and What They All Missed at the Met Gala

Why Diljit’s Met Gala moment needs a harder look.

In an era where celebrity statements often blur the line between fashion and politics, Diljit Dosanjh’s appearance at the 2025 Met Gala has stirred both admiration and unease. Dressed in an opulent outfit inspired by the royal aesthetics of the princely state of Patiala, Dosanjh evoked a powerful image of Sikh grandeur and cultural pride. But upon closer inspection, the details of his attire, particularly the outline of a post-1966 Panjab emblazoned on the back, and the Gurmukhi letters stitched within, reveal a message that is not only misleading, but dangerously reductive.

By showcasing the modern-day outline of Panjab on a robe styled after the princely grandeur of Patiala, Dosanjh inadvertently collapses two historically and politically incompatible narratives. The Patiala state was one of the Cis-Satluj states, Sikh-ruled territories south of the Satluj River that came under British control in the early 19th century. In doing so, Patiala's leadership deliberately aligned with the East India Company rather than support the sovereign ambitions of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Sikh Empire to the north. Patiala’s history is thus one not of resistance, but of political compromise and, at times, betrayal as its rulers have often chosen survival over solidarity.

To don symbols of this royal legacy while displaying the boundaries of a truncated, post-1966 Panjab, a region reduced through centralised state power, is not merely an aesthetic contradiction. It is a symbolic erasure of the very betrayals and political manoeuvring that contributed to the dismemberment of the Sikh homeland. The outfit projects sovereignty on the surface, while silently affirming the historical fragmentation that lies beneath.

Further compounding the contradiction was the inclusion of Gurmukhi letters embroidered within the map’s outline, letters drawn from a script that is not merely linguistic, but born of sacred sovereignty. Gurmukhi was formalised by Guru Angad Patshah, to record and disseminate the revealed word of the Gurus. It was a revolutionary act, rejecting Brahmanical dominance and asserting a new, egalitarian order of spiritual and political autonomy. Under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Gurmukhi became the script of administration and governance in the Sikh Empire.

To place this sacred script at the heart of a map that represents not the flourishing of Sikh sovereignty, but its containment by the Indian state, is deeply disingenuous. It transforms a symbol of divine and temporal self-rule into a decorative motif, hollowed of meaning and weaponised to beautify the very limits imposed on Sikh identity. What once signified defiance is reduced to design, hoodwinking thousands in the process.

A cursory glance across What’s App and trawl through social media shows that supporters of Dosanjh’s appearance have rushed to frame it as a triumph of diasporic soft power, proof that Panjabi and Sikh culture can hold its own on the world’s most elite red carpets. But this reading is superficial. True soft power is not merely about visibility, but about shaping narratives on one’s own terms. When that visibility is predicated on aestheticised compliance, on cultural symbols safely repackaged for elite consumption, it ceases to be power and becomes performance.

Diasporic soft power, when severed from historical truth, can quickly become soft assimilation. Yes, the regalia may echo the confidence of a princely state, and perhaps by extension an inference of Sikh political power in Panjab, but the map on Dosanjh’s back affirms its loss. His presence at the Met Gala, though styled in gold, offered no confrontation to the dispossession it quietly memorialised. This is the danger of elite spaces: they reward spectacle, not sovereignty; elegance, not resistance.

Real soft power does not require amputating memory in order to gain applause. It does not legitimise dismemberment by wrapping it in royal brocade and flaunting it on a red carpet. A truly sovereign cultural expression would have evoked the broader, undivided Panjab; it would have named its ruptures, not embroidered them. Instead, Dosanjh chose to adorn an outfit which canonised the Indian state's reduced version of Panjab; diminished in territory, muted in voice, but conveniently aesthetic.

The irony is bitter and for many reading this article may be difficult to swallow, but if you’ve made it this far, know that in evoking the opulence of a princely past, Dosanjh’s outfit symbolically kneels before the very structures that have constantly sought to subsume it.

What’s more concerning is the effect this has on the global Panjabi and Sikh diasporas, especially younger generations distanced from Panjab’s history. The visual language of this outfit risks normalising the post-1966 boundaries of Panjab as not only legitimate, but somehow celebratory. It smooths over the historical traumas of reorganisation and cultural suppression, thus rendering them invisible beneath the sparkling lights of celebrityhood.

As a Panjabi music icon, Dosanjh has immense reach, but with that comes responsibility. When Sikh or Panjabi identity is represented on the world stage, it must do more than dazzle; it must speak. Speak of a legacy that was not gifted by the state, but fought for. Speak not only of pride, but of fracture, betrayal, and the unfinished struggle for dignity. Until then, this is less soft power than soft surrender, a celebration emptied of its own history.

-Ranveer Singh (Scotland, UK), author, editor and publisher.