A BRIDGERTON TOO FAR

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

Like several other media outlets, the CBC was doing a segment on the Netflix show Bridgerton.

Or more precisely, on the second season’s new leads, Kate and Edwina Sharma, on “how South Asian characters are depicted on the show and how it has incorporated cultural/historical details specific to the South Asian experience in Britain during this time period”.

Had I watched season 2? I had to confess that I hadn’t. Not season 1, either.

I had found Inventing Anna, also created by Shonda Rhimes who has produced Bridgerton, interesting, and so it was on my watchlist. Until I began reading stuff about it that kept moving it further down the list.

Yes, it’s just a show, not a history lesson, but if they were going to get small details wrong, then was I going to be engrossed in the series or was I going to go, “No, no, no!” at regular intervals?

In the CBC piece by Jenna Benchetrit, Proma Khosla, a senior entertainment reporter for US media site Mashable is quoted as saying that “Bridgerton could have been more deliberate in referencing its characters’ South Asian culture by considering the different regions, languages and religions of India” in reference to the fact that the Sharma sisters, supposedly from Bombay, address their father as Appa.

My take? Yes, there are Tamil-speaking people in Bombay, but they are unlikely to have the last name Sharma. And those who address their father as Appa are unlikely to call an older sister didi (as they do in Bridgerton), she’d be akka.

As Khosla says, “You can’t just be like, ‘okay, what’s one Indian word for father or a word for sister? What’s a city in India?’ and then throw it all together. Because all of those things have specific meanings and come from different regions.”

The show incorporates a haldi ceremony, set to, incomprehensibly, “a classical rendition of the titular song from the popular and iconic Bollywood movie Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham” according to a Toronto Star article.

Admittedly, this inclusion has its fans, but one has to ask, what was the point of it?

The non-desis would be clueless about the so-called “iconic” movie and among desis, how would anyone looking for any vestige of authenticity respond to a song from a 2001 movie in a series set in Regency era England?

For, going by these articles, there are those who feel the show misses the opportunity to discuss the history of colonialism.

Author and Vice-Dean, Undergraduate Professor, English Department, Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto, Randy Boyagoda is quoted as saying in the CBC article. “... it’s almost like this ambivalent nod towards authenticity that is admittedly kind of hard to figure out. There’s that moment where there’s a reference to a maharajah and you wonder... how sound is the logic of that one particular reference?”

Just like the recent Sex and the City spinoff And Just Like That  is supposedly filled with talk of arranged marriages (no, haven’t seen this either), and a lehenga is identified as a sari.

It’s not a history lesson, one might say. Change the channel if you don’t like it, might say another. But the lack of attention to detail is annoying.

But it’s not new.

I got around to watching Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited only recently. Another disclosure: I don’t “get” his movies and only watched this because it had Irrfan Khan.

But seriously, to set something in Darjeeling and on a train en route the northeast and then to go shoot everything in Rajasthan?

I had a very similar response to Indian Summers – and, to a lesser extent, to A Suitable Boy.

I love shows set in India and began watching Indian Summers eagerly. But was left underwhelmed.

The problem, I find, is that some of these are disrespectful of the audiences.

As though the makers believe this is a show set in some exotic locale, viewers will be happy with any exotic stuff, never mind if it makes no sense in the setting.

Desis cite Never Have I Ever as evidence of having come a long way from Apu in The Simpsons. But have we, really?

Some television series set in India get it right (The Jewel in the Crown). As do some movies (Heat and Dust). Movies like Bend it Like Beckham or The Namesake on the immigrant experience do a fine job of capturing the nuances.

But in television shows or movies where the South Asian is one of many in the cast, he or she is a token representative at best, or is reduced to a sad stereotype.

The phenomenally talented Irrfan Khan made the leap to Hollyood with believable characters (and accent). Now there’s Ali Fazal. His very clipped British accent in Death on the Nile is in sharp contrast with his halting English in Victoria & Abdul, while Guddu bhaiyya from the television series Mirzapur may well be from another planet.

But we don’t have to look to the Indian film industry for South Asian actors. There’s a whole generation of South Asian actors raised in the west, who are ready, willing and very capable. Dev Patel is a prime example, and others like Sandy Sidhu are making a mark.

And books are being written about the South Asians diaspora. About desis with a difference.

Harjinder Basran’s Help! I’m Alive (see book review on page 25) has South Asians, but their ethnicity is not the story. This is a story about POC, but race is never dwelled upon or treated as a “talking point”.

Now imagine a movie made on this book.

As Boyagoda says in the CBC article, “One of the defining features of Season 1 of Bridgerton was the decision to not make such conventional linkages between actors, demographics and the background or the origins associated with the characters they are playing.”

Let’s celebrate Dev Patel as David Copperfield in The Personal History of David Copperfield, but also, please let’s get the details right.

For it’s time to move beyond the Indian headshake and “we’re like that only” stereotype.