My life has been shaped by not seeing people who look like me in lead roles - thankfully that's changing
Main character energy for South Asian women is here at long last
Netflix - One Day
This piece was originally published last year for paid subscribers before One Day came out, and in celebration of the now hit TV series, I wanted to open it to everyone. An extra paragraph has been added to reflect Ambika Mod’s views on representation and why it is important in this genre.
When I was fifteen, I was heavily into alternative music, and part of that involved putting on various textures of black clothing, furiously rubbing Rimmel black eyeliner in a circular motion, and going to gigs in London. Seeing our favourite bands was the most important thing closely followed by BOYS, because this was often the only place where we’d see people our age dressed like us, unlike suburbia where if you were lucky, someone with a Unity bag would shout ‘freak’ and throw a bottle of WKD Blue at your head.
In my little friendship group at these outings, where we’d sit on the floor of sticky bars or languish against a wall looking as emo as possible, the whole purpose was to attract the attention of boys. There would be a part of me that would always hope I’d meet the love of my life, in a sweaty room while Slayer sang Reign In Blood in the background, which would of course become ‘our song’.
Except when we did encounter boys, whether at a gig, a house party or standing outside HMV, we would all freeze up, our time at our all-girls school ill-equipping us to actually engage them in conversation. When we did talk to them, my internal monologue would kick off, and it would invariably be along the lines of thinking that I was ugly, that no boy would find me attractive, and that of course they would prefer my friends over me. My friends were probably having similar thoughts but with one key difference: they were white, and I was a little brown Indian kid.
We might have been experiencing similar teenage angst around getting a boy to like us and worrying we’d die virgins, but we were fundamentally different in that at no point was race a consideration for them. When I explained this to my school friends as an adult, they said they’d had no idea I was feeling like that. But at the same time, there was no way for them to truly understand it. Not really.
Having to form a sense of self when there is literally no one who looks like you – from something as basic as the cover of a magazine – as well as deal with cultural pressures around colourism is a tough undertaking. I’ve spoken and messaged with many South Asian women who experienced the same thing, and we still are marked by that time.
There wasn’t really anyone to advocate for us back then, and it was something I felt impossible to articulate. Mainly because there was a sense of shame around being different, and there wasn’t a lot of softness or empathy towards people who were different in 1990s Dartford, a predominantly white and at times, overtly racist town.
When I was 16, walking through the town centre with my white boyfriend, a crusty old coot sitting on a park bench told him as we walked past: “You should date one of your own.”
Aside from feeling as if my skin colour was the barrier to finding romance and being deemed attractive, there was the startling lack of visibility of South Asian women as the love interest in any mainstream TV show or film. A handful of people who pushed hard to change this included directors Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta and Gurinder Chadha, but things didn’t really change in the mainstream TV world until Mindy Kaling and Shonda Rhimes.
But this has only been recently – so in effect, I’ve spent about 75% of my life not seeing the kind of women I know, the kind of woman I am, depicted as an object of desire. The closest we ever came was seeing Indira Varma, Sarita Choudhury and Rekha in Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra – and let me tell you, when I was a teenager, I watched that film on repeat for about a year.
Indira Varma - an absolute vision. Credit: Trimark Pictures
I’m not the first person to write about this, and I have written about it before, but if you never see yourself reflected in lead roles, particularly those involving softness, sensuality and romance, how can you ever feel like the lead character in your own story?
When you also come from a culture that also expects you to shelve your needs and desires behind that of family, obligation and heteronormativity, it places your sense of self in a void. I know it has negatively impacted my sense of self worth, how worthy I feel of love, how attractive and desirable I feel within certain groups, how valid I feel in the pursuit of romance.
I feel so radically different now partly because the representation in the mainstream has improved but mostly because I have fought for my self-confidence, my right to exist in a space regardless of whether I am represented, and empowered by female creatives and people from my community who live fearlessly on social media. But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish I could change the past.
I talked to a well-known older Indian actress about this recently when we were talking about how much certain scenes in the second season of Bridgerton meant to us, and she said the worst thing was not realising how damaging the erasure was. The fact that so many of us cried and felt emotional about that show, showed how starved we had been for depictions of ourselves. Most importantly, that these characters were allowed to exist within their own desires without being chained to some traumatic narrative around race.
Having to form a sense of self when there is literally no one who looks like you as well as deal with cultural pressures around colourism is a tough thing
A reminder of how important and powerful this is, was that familiar surge of emotion when I saw the first promo for the Netflix’s adaptation of David Nicholls’ One Day. David is one of the loveliest authors on the planet, and when his bestselling book was turned into a film in 2011, it featured Anne Hathaway as the lead character Emma. This time, it’s Ambika Mod. Seeing photos of Ambika as Emma, enjoying moments of tenderness and softness, being allowed to exist within her character, without stapling the stereotypical narratives of oppression onto her because of the colour of her skin, is pure joy.
Since the show came out, Ambika herself has spoken about how she didn’t even consider auditioning for the role because she didn’t see herself playing the part, and how subsequently she has realised how important it is for brown women to be depicted as the lead character in a romantic show, in order for them to see themselves as the romantic lead in their own lives.
In a week where I announced that my debut fiction is being developed by a production company to be turned into a TV format, it gives me hope that things are changing. One of the reasons I wrote the book was specifically to bring to life the women I knew but rarely saw depicted in the mainstream, but also for my main character to experience life without the burden people have come to expect South Asian women to carry.
Like anyone, we experience trauma, and there are some painful moments for people who grow up in very conservative, patriarchal families. But that’s not our whole story, and those other stories deserve to be told. Especially because those narrow depictions aren’t just about how we see ourselves, it’s about how other people see us.
I hope you’re enjoying As I Was Saying with Poorna Bell. If you’ve liked the writing, it is worth knowing it’s entirely a reader-supported and funded publication. If you’d like it to support it, and have access to all posts and regular community chats, the best way to support is through a paid subscription. And you’d have my undying gratitude!
I’ll never forget being on a travel press trip with a group of journalists, and one of the older, white male journalists had been fairly rude and grumpy on the trip. As we were sat around a beautifully laid table for dinner, I attempted to make conversation with him. Even though he had said a couple of strange, racially insensitive things during the trip, which also included two other Asian women, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“I suppose you’re going to be having an arranged marriage, are you?” he said with a sneer. I was so taken aback I didn’t know what to say. “No,” I eventually replied, “not really.” But I thought, oh, this is it, isn’t it. You judge us for having arranged marriages, or worse, you think we all have forced marriages, walk 10. paces behind our husbands, being continually oppressed or depicted as a victim, and you think that’s all we are. Because when you switch your TV on, that’s all you see.
I think we are more than that. Correction, I know we are more than that, and it is incredible to see this main character energy trickling into the world. We deserve love and silliness, boldness and imperfection, and the space to be…well, whoever we want to be without being typecast.
There will be a younger generation of little brown girls who may see Bridgerton, Never Have I Ever, or One Day and never know anything different. The idea of them not being the main character doesn’t occur to them. I truly hope that happens.
I underestimated how helpful it was growing up in a diverse state secondary school in east London, because conversations about the lack of representation in media and the effects on us were pretty normal.
These conversations were unfiltered and a bit chaotic but I’m am so grateful I grew up with that. It was good to know my thoughts and feelings re the lack of representation were not exclusive to me.
I think brown representation beyond caricatures was needed back then (getting better now but still ways to go) to educate non-brown folk. If all you see is content that feeds the stereotype beast then you’ll most likely project that onto people in the real world. As we’ve seen and experienced, it’s so dangerous.
2023 is bursting at the seams with content outside of the traditional format so there’s a lot of easily accessible and digestible content out there to help reframe old narratives. Thanks for writing this Poorna 💙 Congrats on your book being adapted for tv btw! 💪🏽🙌🏽🫶🏽
As a white woman I can only imagine what your experience has been, so thank you for helping to increase representation so that others don't have to go through the same thing. I am really looking forward to seeing your book on screen!