photo credit: Abigail Kuilan
The sound of the cheerful laugh track echoes throughout my living room as a 6-year-old me sits and watches the latest episode of Disney channels’ “Jessie”. It was one of the only shows I looked forward to watching the new weekly episode, and while the show was funny at times and was also set in New York City, my favorite city, it was primarily my favorite show solely for the fact that there was an Indian main character.
However, even as a kid I felt uneasy at the way the Indian character, Ravi, was portrayed on the show, with him being a nerd with no friends who also has a pet lizard. Even his actual name was never pronounced correctly once throughout the whole series (it’s pronounced ruh-vee not raa-vee). The character as a whole only reinforced harmful stereotypes towards the Indian community, and for all my childhood it felt like the character was what everyone would think the default norm was for Indian people.
“Only two out of every 10 lead film actors (or 19.8 percent) were people of color in 2017, this year’s UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report found,” according to PBS. Growing up during the 2010s, there was little to no representation in the media for Indians or frankly any person of color especially on networks like Disney Channel or even Nickelodeon.
Because of this, as a kid, I used to imagine every brown skinned character on TV was also Indian, like Princess Jasmine, who in my defense, had a mix of Indian and Middle Eastern culture in the animated movie. I was overjoyed at the mere thought that, like me, Princess Jasmine was Indian, and I would feel validation and pride race through me every time I watched “Aladdin”. As I became a slightly older kid, I tried to disconnect myself from my culture because I felt as if it was out of the norm and weird.
This may not come across as the biggest issue people of color face on a daily basis, but it is genuinely these seemingly small occurrences that shove marginalized communities off to the sidelines.
I can vividly recall sitting on the morning bus in the fourth grade, peacefully minding my business, waiting for my turn to get off, when my friend came up to me and asked if I spoke Indian. While it wasn’t a question asked out of malice but curiosity, I was absolutely bewildered on how someone could even ask that.
Unfortunately, I’ve come across many similar questions since that fateful moment in my childhood when I realized no one really knew anything about my culture. There are obviously multiple reasons for that, one being I went to an elementary and middle school where I could count the number of Indians in total on my two hands, two. We didn’t learn that much about other countries and their cultures when we were younger in school. There wasn’t a high influx of characters in TV shows or movies that looked like me.
“An estimated 5.2 million people in the United States identified as Indian in 2023, according to estimates published by the U.S. Census Bureau,” according to the Pew Research Center. Although, there is considerably more representation given to Indians in Hollywood now than when I was a child, that’s not really saying much.
The first big moment of representation for Indians in Hollywood was definitely the Netflix show, “Never Have I Ever”. This show was created by Mindy Kahling, a South Indian Tamil woman, like myself, who also starred in the show, “The Office”. “Never have I Ever” also starred a South Indian Tamil girl named Devi and though this show was not the perfect portrayal of Indian culture with the show really pushing forth stereotypes about Indians at times and the fact Devi’s grandma couldn’t even pronounce the word, Tamil, correctly, the show was able to finally give millions of Indian teenagers something they could remotely relate to.
In more recent years, Indians have undoubtedly received more representation with shows like “Bridgerton” having Simone Ashely, a British Indian actress, as one of the main leads in their second season, and even in music with Lara Raj in the popular girl group, Katseye. But sadly, Indians still lack representation in the media, and it’ll probably be many and many years before there is a substantial amount.
But I do hope that in the distant future when I have kids of my own, they won’t have to go through the same struggle of learning to like their cultural heritage as I once did and instead love who they are and be able to feel represented through their screens.
