Tales of “Good Indian Hair”: Race, Value, and Sensory Contact Zones in Afro‐Asian Delhi

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hair, as a sociocultural bodily signifier, also becomes, once disembodied, a highly globalized and specialized commodity used for weaves, extensions, wigs and toupees around the globe. “Indian” hair is particularly valued in such commodity chains. Consequently, several migrants from across the African continent arrive in India today for the purpose of doing business in “good Indian hair”, including its trade and associated service provision such as hairstyling. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Delhi with, primarily, West African migrants (2015–2025), this article examines African hair salons and the trade and consumption of “good Indian hair” as sensory contact zones through which commodity exchange, bodily practices and spatial transformations emerge as co‐constituted. It argues that hair offers an analytic for understanding how everyday sensory practices produce new forms of urban contact, transforming Delhi's mixed‐demographic unplanned settlements into spaces where socio‐cultural hierarchies and differences are continually negotiated. Furthermore, it examines the valuation of “good Indian hair” by young West African women through which notions of racialized and cultural difference are rendered into value propositions. Rather than framing hair consumption through binary frames of stigmatization or appropriation, the article considers how sensory encounters around hair ascribe anew racialized values of beauty, “Blackness” and “Indianness”.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. City & Society, 2026 · DOI ↗