Indian-American actress Mindy Kaling (newnownext.com).
When I was growing up in the 90’s, I can remember seeing only two people who looked like me on TV or in movies: Apu from The Simpsons and Princess Jasmine from the Disney movie Aladdin. The only non-cartoon South Asian actor I vaguely remember is Babu from Seinfeld (“You are a very bad man, Jerry Seinfeld!”). But Babu and Apu were caricatures of Indian and other South Asian immigrants living in the US. Although there’s still more work to be done in representing diversity in media in the US, some progress has been made in depictions of Indian immigrants and Indian-Americans living in the US in TV and film.
Aziz Ansari as Tom Haverford in “Parks and Recreation” (NBC).
I recently realized that some of my favorite shows have prominent Indian-American characters. Parks and Recreation on NBC features Indian-American actor and comedian Aziz Ansari as Pawnee playboy/entrepreneur Tom Haverford. Mindy Kaling, an Indian-American actress and comedy writer, stars in her own TV show on Fox called The Mindy Project and also played Kelly Kapoor in the Emmy-winning series The Office. And Hannah Simone, a multiethnic Indian actress who was born abroad but now resides in the US, plays an Indian-American named Cece on New Girl. One of the storylines in season 2 of New Girl focused on Zooey Deschanel’s character Jess helping Cece plan her traditional Indian wedding. Jess then supports Cece after she decides to call off her wedding.
Zooey Deschanel and Hannah Simone in “New Girl” (Fox).
Although these roles indicate progress in projecting a more diverse picture of America in the media, there are still major problems that indicate that we’re still not totally accepting of different cultures in the US. The TV show Outsourced on NBC was cancelled after less than one season because it reinforced negative Indian stereotypess. MetroPCS featured a series of commercials that portrayed two Indian tech support workers with exaggerated accents. And personally, I don’t like the way that the Indian character Raj is portrayed on The Big Bang Theory. Actor Kunal Nayyar plays an Indian character who, while academically brilliant and successful in his career, has selective mutism that causes him to freeze in the presence of women. That characteristic that reinforces stereotypes that Asian men are weak and “emasculated.” I think all of these factors are lazy humor. We’re told to laugh at people for their cultural differences, and those characters make American viewers feel superior for speaking fluent English and adhering to cultural norms.
I enjoy the shows that I mentioned because they feature Indian-Americans and Indians who move to the US as full, developed characters. Plus, they often poke fun at the way US culture views them, like in this scene from Parks and Recreation:
Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler): You’re not from here, right?
Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari): No, I’m from South Carolina.
Leslie: But you moved to South Carolina from where?
Tom: My mother’s uterus.
Multiethnic Jen 