Throughout 2022, the media industry has given South Asians a lot of wins with increased representation and voice. Hit shows like Bridgerton, a period drama about early 1800s England, introduced two South Asian women, as their leading ladies this season, the Sharma sisters. Never Have I Ever, a show about a teenage Indian girl experiencing highschool, written by Mindy Kaling, released it’s third season to a greatly receptive audience, and Marvel released Ms. Marvel, on Disney+, which is the first South Asian led Marvel project in history.
We’ve had South Asian representation in Hollywood for years now. Look no further than Disney Channel in the 2010s and there are multiple examples of Indian characters that a great portion of Gen Z was exposed to. Ravi Ross from Jessie. The animated character Baljeet from Phineas and Ferb. So what makes this recent content so different, and so important for the progress of South Asian portrayals in Hollywood?
Let’s take a look at season two of Bridgerton. What stood out to me about Bridgerton was the way it set out to provide representation. An issue that comes up often with Asian characters in American media is that the characters are rigidly stereotyped. Ravi Ross from Jessie was a nerdy Indian boy who had bad luck with girls, and characters that are not from kid’s shows, like Raj from The Big Bang Theory, are just as rigidly stereotyped. The problem with these stereotypes is who they are consumed by and what impact that has. People who aren’t South Asian, but are consistently being shown South Asian characters who are abnormally smart, can build up assumptions about people they meet in real life. And people who identify as South Asian can watch these shows, observe these characters, and feel like they have to work doubly as hard to avoid becoming the stereotype the show is depicting. I think that’s harmful because it makes young people who look like these Indian characters think that they need to fight just to not be stereotyped. But with some of these newer shows, they’ve managed to avoid falling into many of the common traps that come with writing a South Asian main character.
What Bridgerton did differently is the show didn’t overuse Indian culture or ever portray it in a negative light, and no one else looked at them and inadvertently judged them because of the fact that they were Indian. None of their personality traits made viewers think, ‘Oh, of course they act like that, because they are Indian”. While their race and culture was acknowledged, it was only ever celebrated. I think one of the most refreshing aspects of the portrayal was that the attraction between the other characters and the Sharma sisters wasn’t surprising. Asian characters are rarely love interests, and when they are, they are treated like a charity case by someone more Eurocentric and conventionally attractive. But Bridgerton didn’t do that.
In 2022, South Asian representation is at an all time high. Brown people in the media is becoming a more mainstream concept, and our culture is being appreciated instead of being made fun of. This year, for the first time ever, an event– the first of its kind– was held in Beverly Hills, California, celebrating South Asian success. It was called the South Asian Excellence and hosted by United Talent Agency, who wants to help further representation for South Asians. For the first time in history, there were 10 Oscar nominees of South Asian descent. In terms of statistics in relation to representation, South Asians are taking up the largest percentage of media we even have, but there is still room to grow.
The 2021 UCLA Hollywood Diversity report was released in January, and it looked at the top 200 theatrical and all major streaming, English-language film releases from 2021. The report details that 6.4% of all top film roles are filled by Asian people, and 5.6% of all film directors are Asian. Again, while these numbers are better than they have been in the past, this still leaves Asians amongst the most underrepresented groups. We can look at the brighter, progressive side, and acknowledge that in 2022, many barriers were broken for Asian people in the media industry, but the truth is that we can still count all the South Asians with Oscar nominations in 2022 on our fingers.
To increase the number of accurate South Asian portrayals in Hollywood and make sure that more than just a single type of narrative of a South Asian story is told, there are many organizations that are dedicated to producing and directing specifically South Asian stories in film, TV, and theater. One such organization is Hypokrit Productions, a New York based company that tells South Asian stories. Their mission is to “fundamentally disrupt the American entertainment industry, with the purpose of making the arts more equitable and relevant to a wider audience.”
Companies like Hypokrit and United Talent Agency, who are making it their goal to provide Hollywood with enough South Asian-written and created projects, will be the backbone of increasing the representation and accuracy of South Asian portrayals in Hollywood. We live in a world where over 17% of the population is Indian. And while we’ve comparably made a lot of progress towards more representation, the work isn’t done until television and movies hold up an accurate, diverse mirror to the real society we live in.