Musings on Diversity & Representation

Diversity initiatives were front and center throughout 2021. As the year comes to a close, Mansha Daswani, the editor of World Screen, reflects on why representation matters.

I remember vividly the first time I watched something that looked and felt like my world. Living in Hong Kong and growing up on a steady diet of American and British shows in the ’80s and ’90s—plus lots of Bollywood movies—there wasn’t all that much on television at the time that spoke to what it meant to be an immigrant living with multiple cultures—and how to cope when those different sides of you collided.

And then, in 1993, Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach came out and, for me, was utterly transformational. Focusing on a group of British Indian women on a day trip, the film deftly explored generational and cultural clashes. It featured characters who looked like the people in my life and explored the tensions that many of my friends and I were struggling with. And how desperate we were for more! It would take a few more years to get anything that felt as revelatory: the BBC sketch comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, which premiered in 1998. I was still living in Hong Kong at the time and had started hearing from friends and family in the U.K. about how I had to watch this show. Now remember the world before the streaming revolution—there was no on-demand, “niche” content didn’t travel and I was stuck relying on whatever I could find at the local Blockbuster. But bless my U.K. relatives; one of my cousins recorded the entire first season—yes, on a VCR—and eventually got it to me. (I don’t know if this is just an Indian immigrant family thing, but we had a well-oiled network of friends/cousins/vague acquaintances to rely on when we needed to get something from one country to another.) Soon, people were gathering in my family’s living room to watch four marvelous British Indian comedians (including, we soon discovered, a fellow Hong Konger) celebrate and laugh at the quirks of being Indian in the U.K. For a group of young Indian adults living in a former British colony, the connection to that show was immediate—and long-lasting; we still quote from it, 20 years since it wrapped its run.

I know change is happening, but it’s clearly not been fast enough or widespread enough. What’s on television matters. It matters when you can see yourself. It matters when you can see people who are nothing like you. And it matters when the things you watch perpetuate hurtful stereotypes, whether it was the kids who teased Indian people like me about eating monkey brains after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out (we don’t) to those who felt like it was OK to mock an Indian accent because Hank Azaria was doing one on The Simpsons (and it took until last year for the producers to say that voice casting would change).

The past year has undoubtedly been transformative when it comes to on- and off-screen diversity, but I’m still amazed at how much rank stupidity there is in pop-culture representations of minorities. Just recently, I stumbled upon a big-budget Hollywood movie that came out four years ago that included a throwaway joke about Asians, and all I could think was, Why? (I mean, the entire film was a sea of asinine, childish jokes; the racist joke was just extra.) Are the writers really that lazy that they needed to stoop to the lowest common denominator for a laugh? And a laugh for whom, exactly? We—immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ community, folks with disabilities—are not new. We’ve been here. We want our stories told. We don’t want to be included just because you need to tick a box on a diversity mandate. Our stories are not just incredible for us. I’ve been as enriched by Queen Sugar and I May Destroy You and It’s a Sin—groundbreaking, beautiful shows about worlds that are not my own—as I was by Bhaji on the Beach or A Suitable Boy. This is not rocket science. Make these stories because audiences around the world want them and they deserve to be told, not because you put out a diversity-and-inclusion mission statement. Find those stories, support them, consume them, give them the value they deserve so we can have more of them. My 19-year-old niece sure does have a lot more options than I did to see herself on-screen, but she definitely doesn’t have enough.