I am so over seeing Indian and Bollywood dancing on American television.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally just…done. This week, contestants on So You Think You Can Dance performed a “Bollywood” dance routine, now a staple of the show, to the usual wild applause from the audience and cautious praise from the judges. To be fair, the contestants were great. They are excellent dancers and performed the routine to the best of their ability. But no amount of arbitrarily loud costumes or wild hand gestures can distract from the real problem here.

Bollywood dance is, slowly but surely, becoming mainstream. I love that I don’t even have to explain the word in most settings now, because people have come to understand a general aura of Indian films and music. But if you learned about Bollywood from So You Think You Can Dance or some other network reality show, or literally any avenue other than actual Bollywood movies and the people who watch them, then chances are you don’t fully get it. Indian culture is being commodified for Western television audiences, and it needs to change.

This was thrown into pretty sharp relief for me in April, when my college dance team auditioned for America’s Got Talent. At this time, I was still living in my Global-Bollywood-Bubble; people know what it is and understand the arts and oh, what a time to be alive!

The kind folks at AGT were good enough to give me a reality check.

It seemed promising enough; a college-level Bollywood dance team flown out to LA to audition for a huge television talent competition. AGT was an opportunity unlike anything I’ve received or likely will receive again. Just to be there with my former teammates was a joy in itself, whether or not we advanced.

Spoiler alert: We didn’t advance. Which is more than fine, except for the comments of one Howie Mandel.

After our performance, the judges were mostly kind; you guys are good and you have the right spirit, but you aren’t professional. Fair enough, since we are literally not a professional dance team. Even college students whose evenings are consumed by these rehearsals can’t take that much time away from becoming doctors, engineers, and irritable writers.

Howie Mandel felt the same. “We’re all familiar with Bollywood dance,” he said, and we grinned and nodded, still high from the adrenaline of our performance. “You know, we all saw ‘Jai Ho’ and Slumdog Millionaire a few years ago.”

The buzz was almost instantly killed. Indian dance team members have only one reaction to being compared to “Jai Ho” and that is eye-rolls and laughter (at best). But we were being recorded for national television. We were representing our school, our team, our culture. We had to be exemplary.

We tried.

But faces fell, eyebrows were raised, quizzical looks exchanged. Did he just compare us to a song with notoriously simple and boring (but fun!) choreography? Most troublingly, has Howie Mandel not been exposed to any sort of Indian culture since 2008?

He went on to tell us that we did not look like a professional Bollywood dance team. Which is all fine and well, except that there are no professional Bollywood dance teams with which to compare us. Or rather, there are, but I’m betting that Howie Mandel hasn’t caught those groups on tour since his self-imposed post-2008 cultural cleanse.

My takeaway from our AGT performance was having to stand up on stage, forcing a smile, while a white man who saw a movie one time proceeded to confidently tell me how my culture was supposed to look. The same happens every time I see one of these performances on reality TV now and I cringe.

One of the judges told SYTYCD contestants that people need to be educated about Bollywood, and that its inclusion in these shows supports that. All I know is that suddenly more people think they understand me and my art. It’s booty-shaking! It’s the lotus hands! It’s all fun and games and not ancient art forms or emotion that I’ve had to genuinely dig deep to get understand and portray on stage.

If anyone is at fault, it’s those of us in the position to be cultural ambassadors of these arts. Indian dancers and choreographers cannot just get excited about being on television and tapping into the coveted wider Western audience. We need to stop selling ourselves short and dumbing ourselves down to be accepted. We need to dance our fucking hearts out, then see if the world can keep up.