Does Indian Pop Turn Schoolgirl Fantasy into a Cultural Norm?

When Guru Randhawa dropped his music video Azul, the conversation online wasn’t just about the catchy beat or glossy visuals—it was about the glaringly uncomfortable choice of dressing women in school uniforms and playing up the “naughty schoolgirl” fantasy. For many, it felt like déjà vu.

Haven’t we seen this before? Indian pop culture, from music videos to Bollywood item numbers, has long had a troubling obsession with blending innocence and desire, treating schoolgirl imagery as a kind of shortcut to titillation.

At first glance, some may brush it off as harmless theatrics—“it’s just entertainment, why overthink it?” Yet the problem extends far beyond a single video or artist. The recurring sexualization of schoolgirls in Indian pop isn’t a coincidence; it’s a pattern. And patterns, especially in media, matter. They tell us what’s normalized, what’s aspirational, and what’s acceptable.

The truth is uncomfortable: when pop music sexualizes school uniforms, it doesn’t just sell a fantasy, it blurs boundaries between innocence and exploitation. It plants the idea that girlhood and desirability can overlap—and worse, that predatory behavior is playful, not harmful. In a country already battling staggering rates of child sexual abuse and harassment, this is more than a creative choice. It’s a cultural problem.

So the real question isn’t just “why did Azul do this?” but rather—why can’t Indian pop stop doing it at all?

If Azul feels unsettling, that’s because it taps into a trope Indian pop refuses to let go of: the school uniform as shorthand for desire. It’s not just Guru Randhawa—this imagery has been recycled so often it’s practically a genre in itself. Girls in pleated skirts, pigtails, and knee-high socks are framed under the male gaze with a wink that says, “Isn’t this cheeky?”

From Punjabi pop videos to Bollywood item songs, the fantasy of the “naughty schoolgirl” has been commodified for decades. Classrooms become backdrops for flirtation, and uniforms are deliberately shortened and sexualized.

The visual language is consistent: take something associated with childhood innocence, repackage it with adult cues, and call it edgy entertainment.

It works commercially because it plays on voyeurism. The audience isn’t just watching a love story—they’re watching a fantasy where innocence is performative, something that can be dressed up (or down) for pleasure. And because these videos are marketed as lighthearted fun, nobody pauses to question the implications. The more it’s repeated, the less shocking it becomes.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the school uniform is not just fabric. It’s a cultural symbol. It represents learning, safety, a protected phase of growing up. The moment pop music turns it into a costume of seduction, that symbol is hijacked. What should stand for innocence is suddenly repurposed as fantasy fuel.

And this isn’t an accident.

Directors know exactly what they’re doing. The tension comes from that deliberate clash—placing something pure in a context dripping with adult innuendo. It’s why the trope works as titillation: it’s about power. The thrill lies in crossing a line that should never be crossed.

The problem is, once audiences consume this framing enough times, the line stops looking so clear. When the schoolgirl becomes shorthand for “playful” rather than “protected,” we start normalizing the idea that youth and desirability overlap. That’s how exploitation sneaks in through entertainment.

Psychologists often talk about the male gaze—how media is shaped by, and caters to, heterosexual male desire. In these videos, the male gaze doesn’t just sexualize women, it infantilizes them. It sells the fantasy of dominance: a girl too young or too naive to know better, but conveniently styled to be sexually available.

And here’s the danger—desensitization. The more normalized these portrayals are, the harder it becomes to recognize predatory behavior in real life. “She’s dressed like that, so it must be harmless,” is how harassment often gets trivialized. What starts as a music video aesthetic bleeds into everyday attitudes, where boundaries around age and consent are dangerously blurred.

In short, when Indian pop keeps turning innocence into an aesthetic, it isn’t just making edgy art. It’s training entire generations to conflate youth with desirability, erasing the very protections childhood is supposed to guarantee.

And that erosion of boundaries doesn’t stay confined to a music video. It seeps out into the culture around us, quietly feeding an environment where abuse is trivialized. India already carries a staggering burden when it comes to child sexual abuse and harassment—statistics show that more than half of children report experiencing some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18.

Against this backdrop, pop culture should be creating distance between childhood and adult desire. Instead, it blurs them together, wraps it in glamour, and sells it as entertainment.

This is how normalization works. If the most popular music videos keep romanticizing schoolgirl imagery, it conditions audiences—especially young men—to treat predatory behavior as cheeky mischief rather than violence. The same casualness slips into everyday life: boys in classrooms who harass girls calling it “masti,” men on the street brushing off catcalling as “compliments.” When the biggest stars treat crossing boundaries as a punchline, why should anyone else take those boundaries seriously?

It’s also worth noticing how the “naughty schoolgirl” fantasy is always framed as harmless fun. The playful wink, the upbeat music, the choreography—it’s entertainment, not exploitation, right? But that’s precisely the trick: packaging predatory undertones in humor and glamour makes them harder to call out. It trivializes behaviors that, in real life, cause lifelong trauma.

And the scariest part? Young audiences grow up internalizing these portrayals. For boys, it can validate entitlement—“she’s dressed like that, she must want it.” For girls, it can normalize discomfort—“if this is how love looks on screen, maybe this is what I should expect.” That’s not just bad art, that’s cultural conditioning.

So when Indian pop shrugs and says “it’s just entertainment,” what it’s really doing is training an entire generation to mistake predation for play, and abuse for romance.

Of course, India isn’t the only country that’s flirted with the sexualization of girlhood. Globally, pop culture has had its share of guilty moments. Think back to Britney Spears being packaged in a school uniform at just sixteen, her innocence deliberately fused with sex appeal to sell records. Or the storm that erupted around Netflix’s Cuties, a film criticized for hypersexualizing preteen girls under the guise of social commentary. These weren’t small controversies—they sparked debates, outrage, and, more importantly, accountability.

In the West, those conversations, however messy, have started pushing the industry to reflect. Artists are called out, brands issue apologies, and platforms set stricter content guidelines. It’s far from perfect, but the shift is visible. There’s an acknowledgment that media isn’t neutral—it influences behavior, and with that influence comes responsibility.

Indian pop, on the other hand, operates in near silence. When a video like Azul drops, the conversation rarely goes beyond a few uncomfortable tweets before it fizzles out.

Labels don’t face pressure, artists don’t address criticism, and fan communities often defend the content with a dismissive “chill, it’s just a song.” That silence is telling. It reveals not only a lack of accountability but also a cultural blind spot—one where sexualizing schoolgirls isn’t even seen as a problem worth discussing.

The contrast is stark: while global industries are slowly learning that certain fantasies can’t be normalized without consequences, Indian pop continues to recycle the same imagery without pause, as if the world hasn’t changed at all.

And that’s why brushing it all off as “just entertainment” doesn’t hold up. Entertainment doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it seeps into the way we think, the way we talk, the way we treat each other. When the same imagery is repeated over and over—schoolgirls made sultry, innocence made consumable—it stops being a fantasy and starts becoming a script. A script where boundaries don’t matter, where desire trumps consent, and where exploitation can be laughed off as a dance move.

The uncomfortable truth is that art, especially pop culture, is never just about beats and visuals. It’s a mirror, yes, but it’s also a teacher. And when it keeps teaching audiences that girlhood and sexuality can be mashed together without consequence, it feeds into a culture that already struggles with violence, harassment, and abuse.

Other industries are beginning, however imperfectly, to course-correct. They’ve learned that packaging predation as play comes with real-world costs. It’s time Indian pop music caught up. That means more than censor boards snipping a skirt length—it means artists, labels, and audiences recognizing that responsibility doesn’t kill creativity; it gives it depth. It means choosing to tell stories that don’t come at the expense of children’s dignity.

Because at the end of the day, the question isn’t whether these videos are catchy. It’s whether we’re okay with a culture where innocence is something to be consumed instead of protected. And if the answer is no—as it should be—then Indian pop needs to grow up, fast.

---