In December 2021 the ratings company Nielsen released a sobering on screen. They found that South Asian men were portrayed on US screens 2.3 per cent of the time, while South Asian women were portrayed a paltry 0.3 per cent.
While these statistics confirm much of what we already know, for someone who is actively trying to increase South Asian representation not just on screens but in literature, I’ve been buoyed by the recent push in mainstream media towards South Asian representation. The appearance of Bridgerton star Charithra Chandran on the cover of Teen Vogue this week just highlighted that.
Now not only do we have Bridgerton, but there’s also Never Have I Ever, Lilly Singh who became the first person of South Asian descent to host a late night talkshow, and the slated release of Ms Marvel later this year. And these don’t count all the people who came before and who are continuing to make a mark, including the likes of Mindy Kaling, Riz Ahmed, Hasan Minhaj, singer M.I.A and Kumail Nanjiani.
This push towards more South Asian representation has been a long time coming. The significance of putting a South Asian woman on the cover of the magazine she helms wasn’t lost on editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, Versha Sharma, who tweeted: “Writing this cover story and producing this cover shoot are the stuff brown kid dreams are made of. I tried my best to capture what it all means to me, and to so many others like me.”
When Sharma talks of others like her, she means the countless brown boys and girls who didn’t grow up seeing people like themselves represented on screen. Who had to hear a white man putting on a strong Indian accent as was the case for Apu in The Simpsons. Or go to the movies to see a man like Max Minghella play the Indian character of Divya Narendra in The Social Network or Benedict Cumberbatch play Khan Noonien Singh (a character who was meant to be from North India) in the 2013 film Star Trek Into Darkness.
And when we didn’t see anyone who looked like us on screen, we imagined ourselves in the shoes of countless white characters, which of course led to its own issues.
Recently, Never Have I Ever star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan posted a photo of herself with some of her fellow South Asian screen stars and commented, “is it refreshing because the industry is becoming more diverse and is including those who look like me or is it just the mango lassi..? Here’s to more ground breaking shows AND glasses of the best drink ever🥭🧡”.
Ramakrishnan is only 20 years old and I hope the diversity that seems to finally be emerging now is something that becomes increasingly commonplace as she gets older. For those of us who struggled with getting our voices heard, seeing such increasingly diverse representation is positive of course, but there’s also a part of me that wonders is this just like a flavour of the month type of thing? Will Hollywood and its subsidiaries ride the South Asian wave before unceremoniously dumping us and going back to its whitewashing ways? I certainly hope not. More than that, I don’t think the public will allow it.
Much of this is not just because we have become more aware of the need for representation of diverse communities but because of the emerging number of diverse creators getting a foothold in the industry. Would Chandran have made it on the cover of Teen Vogue if the editor-in-chief of the magazine hadn’t been South Asian? I honestly hope she would have because of all that she’s achieved in her own right. Would a show like Never Have I Ever have made it to our screens and gained such traction if Mindy Kaling hadn’t been behind the show? Who knows? Ultimately we won’t need to find out the answers to such questions because people like Sharma and Kaling are in positions to make a difference especially when it comes to increasing diversity in our media.
And for me, it took a long time getting there but I too can say I’m adding to the cannon of stories about complex and conflicted characters who also happen to be South Asian.
But none of us can rest on our laurels just yet. The figure of 0.3 per cent of South Asian women on screen was from last year, and serves as a reminder that we might go up a percentage point or two after this year’s bounty of South Asian stories, but there’s still a long way to go before we have accurate representation.
Saman Shad is a writer working on her first novel out with Penguin in 2023 and a novella out on Audible in the latter half of 2022. You can follow her on Twitter .
