Aishwarya Rai Bachchan: Where the Coast Met Cannes

My paternal grandmother Leela had eyes that did not belong to this equatorial strip of red soil and coconut palms, eyes the colour of monsoon seas when the sky is unsure whether to rain or reveal a hidden sun, eyes that held stories, storms, and the sharpness of ancient matrilineal queens. Her sister, whom I only ever knew as Baby, had the same shimmering green-blue gaze, and my father carries a ring of that same quiet ocean around his pupils. As a child, I desperately wanted those eyes—until I realised that when they stared at you, especially in anger, they could burn right through your soul without a single raised word.

These eyes recurrently appeared, like a genetic whisper, a murmur passed down through blood and bone. Many in my father’s family had similar eyes, and when I once asked him why we looked a little different from the people around us, he said casually, “Aishwarya Rai has them too. She’s from my side of the town.”

That’s when it struck me!

Her name wasn’t just a celebrity reference.

It was a cultural landmark, spoken in our homes like a reminder, an anchor, almost a protective and defensive chant.

You must understand—Aishwarya isn’t just a famous person for Bunts. She is the daughter of a community, claimed for, without ever meeting her in person. Aunties defended her, as if they raised her themselves. Uncles proudly told guests, “She is from our region,” as though she occasionally dined with them.

She was ours — 'nammane ponnu', the aunties of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi believed, adopting her in absentia, protecting her from imagined slights, blessing her across distance, worrying for her reputation as though she were a daughter who lived two lanes away and might accidentally be spotted buying milk without kajal. I was not yet on this earth when she was crowned Miss World, but her after-shimmer touched every Bunt household like moonlight slipping through window bars.

She was an important part of my research. Although we are matrilineal and matriarchal, we have very few women who have Aishwarya's level of fame outside of the film industry. Something that we need to fix. It may be because Bunt women prefer the quiet and truly carry out the expression "What my left hand does, my right hand will never know."

I do not know her. I have seen her only from afar. My father once spoke to her mother, and that was enough for the living room gossip to consider us practically cousins in the Bunts cosmic family tree. But I am not here to write a personal tribute — I am here to unpack a phenomenon: her sociocultural effect on a matrilineal coastal community and its imagination.

Explaining Ourselves Through Her

I started my socioeconomic education in foreign lands that don’t even lie on the same continent as India. At times, the Rai was mistaken to be the Bengali Rai, and those who knew of the Bunts checked on details of which side of coastal Karnataka she hailed from. I found myself explaining my identity in ways that felt both simple and impossibly complex. What are Bunts? Who are your people? Where do you come from?

So when I had to explain to my professor who the Bunts were — and whether she’d know anyone from our community — my first reference was,

“Do you know Aishwarya Rai? Have you watched Pink Panther 2? Bride and Prejudice, maybe? Have you seen the Cannes red carpet at least once? Did you see the most beautiful woman on planet Earth walk it? Yes, she’s Bunt.”

And the air would shift. Recognition, delight, curiosity.Because even if they had never heard of Ullal, Udupi, Manipal or Mulki, they had seen her walk a red carpet and make the world stop breathing for a moment.

It wasn’t just my professor. Even within the Indian diaspora, I often found myself explaining my roots through her. If a Punjabi asked whether I was “Madrasan” (not that it was an insult), I’d say no, my family is from Dakshina Kannada and Udupi. Then would come the language questions:

“What do you speak?”

“Tulu.”

“Oh, Telugu na?”

“No — Tulu.”

Blank stare.

“Aishwarya Rai.”

“Ohhh, okay, okay.”

So when I began fieldwork, I asked people: Who is the most famous Bunt you know?

A B Shetty, Mulki Sunder Ram Shetty, and B R Shetty all came much later in their answers.

Fieldwork confirmed the anthropological truth: if you ask Bunts who represents us, the answer arrives instantly, before the bankers and the builders and the men who carved highways and institutions. It arrives with the certainty of temple drums:

Aishwarya Rai.

From Abbakka to Aishwarya

Our community once stood behind fierce queens like Rani Abbakka, who fought the Portuguese when empires were collapsing around her, and we brushed shoulders with kings like Krishnadevaraya and Narasa Nayaka in the whispered lineage stories of houses with carved pillars and hidden silver. Yet history seldom held us in its mainstream gaze.

She was the reference point for generations to come since 1994, especially for the Bunts. The Bunts were allies to most kingdoms, and other than Rani Abbakka’s fight against the Portuguese, we aren’t referenced in history as much. Maybe Narasa Nayaka and Krishnadevaraya — but again, they aren’t what kids of today recognise.

Many families have used Aishwarya Rai as the easiest point of reference to explain what a “Bunt” is. You may roll your eyes at this statement and say, “Well, that’s not true, we have so much more.” We do — but as much as you’d like to disagree, it is the truth. Aishwarya Rai has been that reference in every household. Bunt households have used her at some capacity — “be as pretty as,” “you are no Aishwarya Rai,” “she is a Bunt like us,” “find a wife as pretty as,” “she wore that saree so I want to buy it.”

Not only was she a reference point, but what Aishwarya Rai did so subtly has had a lasting impact. People don’t realise she garnered fame way before the internet we know now. She didn’t have Instagram or TikTok to get famous on. She was an influencer way before social media existed. The sarees she wore, the way she spoke — all were aspirations her wide following wanted to achieve.

She was particularly impactful for Bunts because even at the peak of her fame — which, in my opinion, is still ongoing — she never let go of who she was and never denied her roots. Her rootedness drove an economy among the Bunts and especially in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi. She projected values and principles; she wasn't just a pretty face. She spoke eloquently, she was graceful, and — as much as I hate the word “modest” — she was modest, and for Bunt households that was a good thing. She was a role model for their daughters, who were otherwise being influenced by the rest of glamorous Bollywood.

Within the pantheon of Bollywood gods, there was suddenly a goddess who came from where they did.

Many Bunts were already in films. My grandfather’s brother was in the film industry way before Aishwarya Rai, and through him, I had seen the urge to distance himself from his roots and completely adapt to what the film industry was — glamorous, sans simplicity, moving in circles that served only themselves. Aishwarya was far from it. She still brought her parents along. She acknowledged her roots in Mangalore. She did not deny a Bunt Sangha invite if her schedule permitted it.

She spoke Tulu and didn’t pretend to say, “Yenk Tulu gotthijji.” Instead, she went on David Letterman and proudly listed Tulu as a language she spoke. The language didn’t clock in people's minds — but her ethereal aura, her presence, and her eloquence did.

And then came 1994, and suddenly, entering a Bunt home anywhere in the world meant entering a shrine to possibility. Her face was everywhere — a poster here, a framed magazine page there, a photograph tacked near the Godrej cupboard, her name invoked in half-scold, half-hope:

“Look like her.”

“Behave like her.”

“Find someone as good as her.”

“You are no Aishwarya Rai, so study harder.”

She became a yardstick of elegance and ambition, a soft velvet bar against which daughters and dreams were measured — not cruelly, but aspirationally, like pointing to a constellation and saying, “See? Someone from here touched that sky.”

She was ethereal, yes, but also disciplined. Graceful, but also grounded.

And she did not forget where she came from.

She spoke Tulu publicly.

She brought her parents along in her success.

She did not pretend she came from somewhere else.

That mattered more than we admit.

Before Algorithms, There Was Aura

But what did this mean for the region after 1994? I urge you, dear reader, to turn back time to understand her impact. Every salon and hairdresser had a picture of Aishwarya Rai plastered on their doors. She was a symbol of beauty, and Aishwarya never sued them — but they used her picture like they had every right to, and their clients walked in with the hope that they could get styled like Aishwarya Rai. Every corner stall and shop had her ads — either Pepsi or Coca-Cola — on their signboards.

She was a global icon, and “Sanjana” — her name from those ads — was the only actress/model hired by both Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Such was her stardom, such was her aura, that two rivals shared the same ambassador, and their drinks still sold. If only Diana Pepsi and Joy Cola in Mangalore had used her as well, imagine the impact.

When people pigeonhole her into pageantry and modelling, she surprised them all with a film in Tamil and then in Hindi. But what I loved about studying her from afar was that even early in her career, she didn’t chase — she attracted. She took measured steps in choosing the right films. Of course, she’s had terrible movies, but you know what I think — side note here: I think Aishwarya needs the right director, and when she has the right director, like Mani Ratnam, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Satish Kaushik, Rituparno Ghosh — oh my heavens — she’s brilliant.

But she was also quietly projecting the strength of every Bunt daughter. She never got into film to save her family from ruin — it just happened for her. She was on her path to study architecture. She finished high school; her eloquence is not that of someone who lacks higher education, but of someone who has self-educated and read so voraciously that her vocabulary and diction in every language is close to perfection.

Aishwarya didn’t chase Bollywood. It wasn’t the endgame for her. Unlike many actresses who projected their desire for Bollywood as the ultimate threshold of success, Aishwarya worked across industries — Tamil, Bengali, Hindi, English — and now her latest two successes have been in Tamil again. She didn’t follow the blueprint of “making it in Bollywood means you've made it.” She made it regardless of genre or language. She truly was a global icon.

Conservative Progress & Doors Opening

What did this mean for Bunts? You have to understand that Bunts at large are conservatively progressive. Let me explain.

They want you to be as rich as Bill Gates — but preferably through computer science or a respectable profession. They want you to be the best surgeon in the world, the AGM of Vijaya Bank, the next success story in Dubai. The upper-echelon Bunts want you to graduate from Stanford so they can sit comfortably on their metaphorical high horses (my parents included) and say, “See? Our children.” They want you to build a business, take risks — but only measured ones, not Bollywood-dream-runaway-and-hope-for-the-best risks.

They admired Parveen Babi and Zeenat Aman from afar, but they didn’t want their own daughters to live through that storm. They dreamt, secretly, of romancing Shah Rukh Khan on screen, but would die if Sulochana Maami asked too many questions at the next bojja. They wanted praise, stability, and absolutely minimal scandal. Scandal could happen — but within boundaries, thank you very much.

So when Aishwarya won Miss World, then entered films, then ads — and did all of it while staying conservatively progressive — Bunts exhaled in relief. She did not forget her parents. She was never caught in any public impropriety by their standards. Her controversies were only rumours, and Bunts, being excellent investigators, quietly verified that there was no truth to them.

She remained radically private yet entirely present. Red carpets, global stages, interviews — not like she needed them, but because she wanted to. That subtle choice is power.

Her ascent quietly opened doors for at least 300 documented artists — actors, models, dancers, dreamers — from the Bunt community. Because if Vrinda Rai’s daughter could, why couldn’t mine?

From Aishani Shetty to Anushka Shetty to Sini Shetty, to the men — Rishab Shetty, Rakshit Shetty, and more. You may argue: “But Suniel Shetty and others were already in film — and your grandfather’s brother too!” And yes, they were. They had their own impact, and Suniel’s contribution deserves its own essay. But Aishwarya shifted the axis. She didn’t change her name to something less “region-specific.” She didn’t pretend she wasn’t from Mangalore. She didn’t distance herself from the community when she rose.

As for “I don’t see her at Bunt Sangha meets” — let’s be honest, very few attend anyway. And that’s not on her. Bunt Sanghas have been stuck in a loop. Buildings and schools in already saturated regions are not the definition of cultural impact — but I digress.

The Voddungila Revival

Think back to her wedding. Oh my god. I remember the aunts suddenly discussing where she bought her saree. “Signature Sarees,” one whispered, and suddenly, there was a stampede there. Sales skyrocketed.

That is influence before Instagram ever knew what influence meant.

Then came the L’Oréal ad right after her wedding — you remember it, don’t you? She wore red, and when she turned, the camera caught her voddungila. This was the pre-streaming era. No pause button to study it, no frame-by-frame YouTube: just one shot on television. My grandmother literally stood in front of the TV and called all of us — “Come, come, look, Aishwarya is showing the voddungila!” It flashed for a moment, a V-shape of diamonds, and that moment alone was enough.

Bunt women who had quietly retired their voddungilas in the name of “modernity” marched to their lockers the next morning. Dakshina Kannada and Udupi jewellery stores began looking like a santhe — bustling, noisy, crowded, women arguing about settings and diamond clarity like they were bargaining for fish at the market. Everyone suddenly needed “Aishwarya’s style.” And before you knew it, women were wearing their voddungilas to work again, chin high, telling colleagues, “Yes, this ring is ours — you saw Aishwarya wear it, right?”

And just like that, a piece of tradition was revived, not by lecture or nostalgia, but by one ad and one turn of her head. Even L’Oréal became a household staple not because of marketing science, but because Aishwarya’s face had cosigned it.

She retained her maternal name Rai even after marrying, which people assumed was a name that signalled a higher power.

Restoring Bunt Identity

She moved a generation of Bunt women to reclaim identity. Those who once hid being Bunt — not from shame, but exhaustion from over-explaining — suddenly wanted to assert it. Bunt mobility always comes with adaptation. We blend not to erase ourselves but to make you comfortable. We switch languages, swap sarees for jeans, soften our presence so others feel at ease.

And then Aishwarya had her daughter, Aaradhya. In a nation obsessed with sons, our matrilineal community cherishes daughters — the carriers of lineage. Aaradhya was not just welcomed, she was celebrated.

Then came something everyone noticed. Aishwarya reorganised her life around her daughter. She was rarely seen without her. “Velcro mothering,” if you will. And of course, her mother Vrinda was present too — as is tradition.

In Bunt homes, when you’re pregnant, you go to your maternal house — peddhare. And often the maternal grandmother raises the first grandchild. “Dodda thaankidina baale” is not poetic — it's literal. Our daughters always belong to us. Even husbands come as aliyas into maternal homes if the daughter is heir.

So when Aishwarya lived with her mother — global fame and all — Bunts saw something familiar. Something ancient. Matrilineal roots on global screens.

Her Essence

Even in silence, her presence carried ancestral memory. Before patriarchal communities discovered the charm of proudly holding their daughters’ hands in public, Aishwarya was already signalling lineage through every quiet gesture.

Her beauty is only the surface of her. She is grace, consistency, intelligence, and work ethic. Those who worked with her praise her diligence and discipline. She has been discreetly philanthropic, entrepreneurial, and grounded. And as for those who comment on her weight — try walking a global runway with your own name attached. She doesn’t have Naomi Campbell’s walk or Shalom Harlow’s spin — she walks like Aishwarya Rai. And that is enough to silence rooms.

Bunt households didn’t just adopt her name — they wove her into their story.

Beauty, Belonging, and Social Imagination

To understand Aishwarya Rai’s impact, you must step beyond the obvious markers of fame and enter the realm of sociological meaning-making. Her rise coincided with a moment when regional identities in India were negotiating modernity and globalisation. For Bunts — a community historically visible at the local, economic, and political level but rarely canonised in popular culture — she became a symbolic anchor.

Bourdieu would call this symbolic capital: the invisible value one accrues through recognition, cultural legitimacy, and social admiration. But in our case, it wasn’t simply symbolic capital — it was restored cultural capital. She returned dignity, attention, and narrative to a small coastal community that had long been industrious but quiet, matrilineal but misunderstood, present everywhere yet written nowhere.

Her fame created a bridge between the ancestral guthu and the global stage, between Tulu households and Cannes red carpets, between myth and modernity.

The Meaning We Made of Her

Symbolic interactionism teaches us that meaning is not inherent; it is constructed in interaction. Aishwarya did not merely “represent” the Bunts — Bunts constructed our meaning through her. She became a living symbol we projected identity onto:

• the ideal daughter

• The articulate woman in a global arena

• the modern matrilineal inheritor

• The beauty who did not lose herself

• the tradition-rooted achiever who did not apologise for ambition or ancestry

In many ways, she became the mirror through which a community saw its aspirational self — elegant yet grounded, global yet fiercely rooted, able to adapt to the world yet never erase the soil from which it rose.

Symbols matter in communities.

She became one.

Institutional Continuity and Cultural Memory

Communities survive not only through infrastructure but through imagination. Long before institutional archives existed for Dakshina Kannada’s entrepreneurial history, stories survived through kitchens, temples, and whispered pride at family gatherings. Aishwarya entered that living archive. She extended cultural continuity — converting private pride into public visibility.

Where Vijaya Bank formalised Bunt competence in finance, and leaders like R N Shetty formalised Bunt's contribution to infrastructure, Aishwarya formalised Bunt's presence in global cultural consciousness.

Institutions are not only banks and buildings — they are also stories, symbols, and shared references that tell a young girl who she can become. She institutionalised possibility.

Gender, Matrilineal Echoes, and Embodied Legacy

Most Indian communities reference lineage through men. Bunts reference lineage through daughters, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers — sometimes fiercely, sometimes quietly, but always surely. In that landscape, watching a daughter of this soil — head held high, mother beside her, daughter by her side — was not merely celebrity observation.

It was matrilineal reaffirmation.

It was cultural memory walking a global ramp.

It was the ancestral hare on the moon — but in couture.

Even the sceptics, even the eye-rollers, even those who pretend they never cared — they watched. They felt that invisible tug of belonging.

The Doors She Quietly Opened

And then there is the part that no pageant crown or Cannes photograph can measure — the doors that slid open simply because she existed. Not pushed open, not kicked down, not conquered with fanfare. Just… opened, the way coastal mist slips into a room through a half-closed window.

Bunts, as I have said before, are conservatively progressive. We dream big, but we like those dreams ironed, starched, and tied with jasmine. We want success, but also a respectable car in the wedding procession and no scandal near the mandap. We admire ambition, but preferably with modest earrings and family in tow.

And before her, film was… complicated. Talented people were there, yes. We had Suniel and Fighter and a few others who made their mark, but the fear for our daughters remained tangible. The film world, according to the coastal rumour mill, was glamorous, dangerous, unpredictable, and filled with Sulochana Maamis’ worst nightmares. The safest dream was engineering. The second safest was banking. Cinema was somewhere near “over our dead bodies.”

Then Aishwarya appeared, and something subtle shifted.

Suddenly, film wasn’t just a distant, glittering planet. It became a slightly reachable galaxy — still intimidating, still dramatic, still requiring good lighting — but reachable. Because she walked into that space the way Bunt girls walk into their cousins’ weddings — poised, careful, aware that every eye is watching, yet somehow still entirely herself.

And quietly, almost silently, she fought the small battles so the rest of them wouldn’t have to.

The battle where a father says,

“Acting? But what will people say?”

And a mother replies,

“People said many things about Aishwarya, but see where she stands.”

The battle where a daughter whispers,

“I want to try,”

and it no longer causes panic in the kitchen.

The battle where a son thinks,

“If she can love her roots and still conquer the world, maybe I don’t have to pretend to be anything else either.”

Look at Kannada cinema now. Look at Telugu cinema. Look at the directors, technicians, actors, dancers, dreamers with Shetty, Rai, Alva and Hegdes in their family trees. So many of them walked through a doorway she left ajar. She didn’t ask anyone to follow her. She didn’t need to. A lighthouse does not debate with ships — it simply stands there, and they find their way.

She was a signal, a symbol, a social proof before we had the language of “representation” or “cultural capital.” She showed Bunts — especially Bunt daughters — that there was space to be elegant and ambitious, rooted and global, soft-spoken and unstoppable. She proved that dreams do not always require shouting; sometimes they require stillness and a mother by your side.

She was proof that one could chase art without losing honour, that one could command a screen without abandoning tenderness, that one could live in Mumbai yet still smell faintly of coastal jasmine and temple stone.

And generations of young Bunts — boys and girls — quietly stored that lesson.

Not as rebellion.

As permission.

Why It Matters

Think of the mid-90s for Bunts. We were still explaining where exactly Mangalore was on the map, still clarifying that Tulu is not some cute cousin of Telugu, still politely smiling when people asked if we rode to school on buffaloes. And then — there she was. A woman from our coast, with our eyes and our quiet confidence, strolling into global imagination as if she were simply walking onto Ideal Ice Cream’s terrace on a Sunday evening.

Her success landed softly in our homes, but it settled deeply. Without speeches, without a manifesto, without ever needing to declare herself as anything, she allowed Bunts to recognise themselves on a stage far bigger than the wedding halls and bank offices we were accustomed to shining in.

Watch Chokher Bali and you see a familiar woman: composed, watchful, oceans under the surface. In Devdas, she carried heartbreak like we carry family secrets — dignified, never messy, only a stainless-steel dabba of emotion, neatly packed and sent home. In Iruvar, she looked like a poem Mani Ratnam found in a temple corridor somewhere between Kundapur and Karkala. And in Guru, she played the kind of woman Bunts recognise instantly — the quietly strategic one in the room, watching, supporting, calculating, never needing to announce her intelligence because it’s already understood.

Her choices, her language, her posture — there was no frantic scramble to “make it.” She moved like someone who knew where she came from and, therefore, was never frightened of where she might go. That is a very coastal trait. We do not sprint; we glide with one eye on the horizon and one on our grandmother’s reaction.

And the ripple she created was not loud. It was kitchen gossip, gentle; salon-poster permanent, temple-queue steady. Aunties spoke of her sarees like they spoke of auspicious times. Uncles suddenly believed daughters could be ambitious without needing to panic. Grandmothers dusted off their voddungilas like memories waiting for their moment. And young women — quietly, curiously — allowed themselves to dream outside the predictable lanes laid out for them.

She never lectured anyone into pride. She simply carried hers so naturally that others remembered theirs, too.

That is why she matters here.

Not because she was crowned on a stage far away, but because her presence made our own everyday lives feel a little grander, a little more seen, valid. She shifted the tempo of Bunt aspiration — from “be successful but behave” to “be successful and still be ours.”

The world saw a beauty queen.

We saw a familiar girl walking into rooms the rest of us hadn’t yet imagined entering — and leaving the door slightly ajar.

Disclaimer: She was a part of a larger study on the impact on bunt identity

P.S. This article is the last article of the Buntedi series for this year. See you on Bisu next year.

P.P.S. Thank you to Dr Shetty for editing my grammatical errors last minute