Hollywood’s obsession with Indian stereotypes has got to go.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: This past weekend saw the release of Gravity, one of the most hotly anticipated films of the year for cinephiles and, in a surprise to nearly all box-office analysts, general moviegoers as well.
The film, a sci-fi survival story about a woman (played by Sandra Bullock) and her colleague (played by George Clooney) who are involved in a freak accident while repairing a satellite in outer space and have to find their way back to Earth by any means necessary, raked in over $55 million at North American theaters and scored an almost unheard-of 98% on critical aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.
The film largely lives up to the hype. It’s a beautiful feat of technical artistry, and is scarier than pretty much everything that passes for a “horror movie” these days. It features seamless visual effects, incredible cinematography, strong acting, and – in an increasing rarity – absolutely indispensable use of 3D to tell a visceral and emotionally draining story.
Much of the attention being directed at Gravity focuses on the things I’ve listed above, but there’s another aspect of the movie that is being completely ignored. Continuing a trend that Hollywood started after Slumdog Millionaire in 2008, Gravity features an Indian-American character. The character’s name is Shariff, and he’s an engineer of some kind who works with Bullock and Clooney’s characters as part of their space team. I say “engineer of some kind” because, frankly, the movie and its creators don’t care enough about the character to give us many more details about him. Rather, he’s used simply as comic relief, setting the representation of Indian Americans in mainstream Hollywood back to the days where such characters were little more than cab drivers or 7-11 store owners.
Pithy attempts are made to distinguish Shariff from the cookie-cutter mold; a brief mention is made of his Harvard education, and a photograph of him with his family is shown after his untimely death (that’s not a spoiler). But most moviegoers will remember the character more for his ridiculously overdone Indian accent, his singing of a Bollywood song (“Mera jhootha hai japaani”), and Clooney’s character’s comment that Shariff’s dancing to the song resembles “some sort of Macarena.”
Was racism intentional? Probably not, considering that writer/director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) is non-white himself and the movie’s two stars are about as liberal as Hollywood gets. But it’s an irritating and somewhat disturbing trend that Americans still see Indians as funny-talking foreigners who are good for a quick laugh and disposable when necessary.
The fact that Shariff doesn’t make it past the first ten minutes of the movie is likely a necessity of the script and the financing – a movie with a purported budget of $100 million simply cannot be made with a non-white actor as a lead unless it’s based on a famous book or the actor in question in Will Smith – but was it necessary for the filmmakers to make him such an overbearing racial stereotype, complete with that sing-song Indian accent which seems to afflict practically every Indian in white media but which no one in reality actually has?
Many reading this will say I’m reaching, that I’m just looking for something to gripe about. At the end of the day, Gravity isn’t about Shariff, it’s about something else entirely, and I’m finding some ridiculously small facet of the film to complain about. That’s not true; as I mentioned earlier, I enjoyed Gravity, and clearly many others did as well. I saw Gravity with three other Indian-American friends of mine, and I’ll admit that we all chuckled at the singing of a Bollywood song we all knew. There probably won’t be any sort of outcry against this film the way there was against, say, Ashton Kutcher’s “PopChips” commercial last year. But there should be.
It’s important for Hollywood to realize that Indian-Americans aren’t simply going to be made fun of and let it slide. After the progress made by Kal Penn, Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, Kunal Nayyar, and – to some extent – Dev Patel, Frieda Pinto, Suraj Sharma, and Priyanka Chopra, why do we have to go back to the days where every Indian talks like Apu from The Simpsons?
American television has taken steps towards advancing its portrayal of Indians. Comedians like Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling have fan followings that number in the millions, and a large portion of those fans are not just Indians. Ansari’s claim to fame is his character on the NBC show Parks & Recreation whose name is Tom Haverford. Kaling ascended to the limelight with her portrayal of Indian-American Kelly Kapoor on NBC’s The Office, and is now the creator and star of FOX’s show The Mindy Project; in both shows, her Indian heritage is noted but not necessarily dwelled upon. In fact, her character in both shows really doesn’t need to be Indian, it’s just that Kaling happens to be.
Kunal Nayyar, one of the stars of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, speaks with an Indian accent but it isn’t the butt of the show’s jokes; the show’s whole point is to make fun of the entire “nerd” sub-culture, regardless of where these nerds come from. Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra, in addition to launching her music career in America, has also recently become the face of the NFL Network’s Thursday Night Football program, abolishing the stereotype that Indian women only wear sarees and bindhis by going in the complete opposite direction and wearing as little as possible.
But American movies clearly still have a long way to go. For every progressive film that the Indian-American community gets, like last year’s remarkable Life of Pi, we get something like 2011’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, which featured Anil Kapoor as a sex-obsessed Indian tycoon who throws lavish parties at which all the men wear turbans and all the women dance to sitar music. For every Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle – a funny and surprisingly insightful film that critiques and subverts the stereotypes of Indian and Asian-Americans – we get something like Mike Myers’ 2008 “comedy” The Love Guru.
So what’s the solution? Do we boycott movies? Do we write letters to Hollywood? At the end of the day, we’re called a minority for a reason. Caucasians outnumber us so greatly, both in the general public and in Hollywood, that it may take generations before full-scale reform happens. To nearly every entertainer in Hollywood, nothing is too sacred if it’ll bring in the dollars. Maybe one day, someone will make a movie about a white man who liberates an Indian-American from his 7-11 and gives him a job as an engineer, or as a lawyer, or as a businessman, or as a doctor. He’ll teach him to overcome his accent, sing American songs, and so on. They’ll call it “Jagjit Unchained.”
And then we’ll finally be free?
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com