When will Indian actors in Hollywood stop ejaculating prematurely?
"There’s no diversity in the food world." Celebrity chef Jeff entreats Dev to keep him from quitting the show "Clash of the Cupcakes", in Master of None, a Netflix sitcom. "Look at our hosts, if our line-up were ingredients they’d be flour, salt and sugar, all white."
If you’re among the millions of viewers who watched Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang’s quirky series, you’ve seen minority concerns echoed across several episodes, sometimes playfully, other times with teeth.
In fact, the following quote may sound familiar. “I once was asked to audition for Transformers with Michael Bay. And it was a role for a call center guy who does an accent. And I was like, ‘No, I’m not doing it. Ravi was like, ‘I’ll do it!’ And Ravi did it, and he probably made decent money being the call center guy...”
Except, this isn’t from episode four of Master of None, where a nearly identical incident takes place and Ansari’s actor-character Dev is asked to play "Unnamed Cab Driver". This is Ansari’s real life voice in discussion with Christopher Rosen for Entertainment Weekly in which he dispels the myth that "the diversity thing is kind of solved now."
Yes, actors like Mindy Kaling and him, both of whom were popular enough in Parks and Recreation and The Office, respectively, to create their own shows, can afford to turn down roles that cater to white stereotypes. It doesn’t mean, however, that American television is inclusive or that race and ethnicity are less of an issue.
After all, these actors turning creators has to do with the lack of interesting roles they’re being offered. How many shows are there on American TV that reposition traditional comedic or dramatic storylines to incorporate the perspectives of ethnic minorities?
What’s more, the few "successes" that make it through the eye of the needle have to work twice as hard to both entertain, and stand for something. Ansari was candid in a GQ cover story, "After the first season, I fucking ran out of things to say about diversity."
But there’s criticism out there for him not showcasing enough Indian girls and reducing brown women to a punchline. If brown girls are getting less screen time the opposite must also be true. The Mindy Project is criticised for being "too white" and for showing a character who only dates white guys.
Ultimately, ethnic actors are caught in the crosshairs of either racial profiling or given the heavy responsibility of showing congratulatory political correctness.
Profiling keeps minorities on the sidelines. It’s a staple that South East Asian American actors play geeks or prostitutes made to imitate the "Asian" accent like it’s a party trick.
Whereas Muslim American actors wind up either being shot at or being terrorists in high-action dramas where their likely lines are restricted to one piercing "Allahu Akbar!" before they’re mowed down.
A paper examining the inequality of gender, race, and LGFBT status in Hollywood films from 2007 to 2014 by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Media, Diversity And Social Change Initiative puts forward some disturbing conclusions. "Of those characters coded for race/ethnicity across 100 top films of 2014, 73.1 per cent were White, 4.9 per cent were Hispanic/Latino, 12.5 per cent were Black, 5.3 per cent were Asian, 2.9 per cent were Middle Eastern,
Small wonder that Ben Kingsley, who has Indian paternity, changed his name from Krishna Bhanji, to land his first audition in an overwhelmingly white media industry. It’s ironic that he went on to play the title role of Gandhi by subduing his Indian name and identity.
Yet, on the face of it, the times are changing. More Indian-origin actors are making their debuts in the American entertainment industry. Anil Kapoor can star in Slumdog Millionaire when the role calls for an Indian actor. We’ve gone one step further to see Priyanka Chopra co-star in the Hollywood adaptation of the iconic all-American television series Baywatch. More impressive, however, is that Chopra went on to enter American homes as detective Alex Parrish in the television series Quantico.
All the same, big Bollywood stars prove the exception rather than the rule. The list of names and shows of Indian acting professionals is long, occasionally memorable, and yet it’s only part of the story.
Senthil Ramamurthy sizzles in Heroes, Sarita Choudhury holds her own in Homeland, Kal Penn co-stars in How I Met Your Mother and Indira Varma plays the charismatic Ellaria Sand in Game of Thrones. Archie Panjabi is another example of an actor who goes beyond a token diversity-hire, she shines as the tough-talking emotionally compromised private eye in in The Good Wife.
Except, no matter how many times you add it up, it’s a drop in an ocean. As Ansari said in an interview with Nardine Saad For LA Times, “Guess what? Every other show is still white people."
What’s more, only some roles ask for minority actors, others patently prefer caricatures. In a time where half of all legal migrants to America have college degrees, the American media represents Indians as fresh-off-the-boat cab drivers, petrol pump attendants, and grocery store owners. This leaves them out of the story in significant ways; so even when they’re in on the "in-jokes" oftentimes, the joke is on them.
Take Kunal Nayyar who plays Raj in the popular The Big Bang Theory. Nikesh Shukla in an article titled "The Wanking Foreigner from The Big Bang Theory" raises an important question.
Can Kunal Nayyar possibly be anything like his emasculated character in The Big Bang Theory? The voice on the sitcom, heavily accented, is not his own, and he just happens to be married to a former Miss India.
In the closing episode of season four of The Big Bang Theory, Raj wakes up in bed with the blonde Penny. We are quickly assured in the opening episode of season five that he ejaculated prematurely and they both went to sleep.
The world order has not been compromised by racial mixing. Moreover, the obvious inequalities between a brown astrophysicist and white waitress come down to a question of colour.
Actress Priyanka Bose, however, is quick to point out that in some ways Hollywood has been easier to navigate than Bollywood. "Being of colour and being defined by gender… someone like me could easily slip into a stereotype (here)". She starred in the critically acclaimed Hollywood film Lion, and sees her translatability into a global market. "There has been no better time than now to be of an ethnic background… I’m doing an American/ Norwegian production in which I play a CIA recruit from America. My history is not defined. Even two years ago this would not have been possible."
Mainstream may still be some way off for Indian actors who want to make it in tinsel town. Yet, Slumdog Millionaire created a star like Dev Patel who went on to win an Oscar nomination in Lion.
It may be too little, but perhaps it’s not entirely too late, for Hollywood and American television to finally tell it like it is in their stories.