OpEd: 'Being desired by white people isn’t the win we’re socialized to believe it is — but rather the ways Kate, Edwina, and their mother embody forms of intimacy beyond the romantic through acts of cultural tradition.'
, with British Indian actresses Simone and Charithra at the helm. Where exactly in India the Sharma family hails from originally is unclear — their last name points to one region of the subcontinent while their linguistic mannerisms indicate another — but they take the ton by storm as soon as they arrive in London from Bombay.
Many will claim this a win for representation, but it’s not the idea that Indianness can be desirable that I find worth celebrating — being desired by white people isn’t the win we’re socialized to believe it is — but rather the ways Kate, Edwina, and their mother embody forms of intimacythe romantic through acts of cultural tradition.
Romantic couplehood has long been the hegemonic ideal of intimacy. In Western contexts, since a higher value is placed on the self and the individual nuclear family unit, intimacy is conceptualized as something reserved strictly for amorous relationships. It results from intentional self-disclosure – that is, revealing one’s personal feelings and thoughts to another.
Simone shared in a press conference that she remembers filming the haldi scene well. “I never really imagined we would be on the set one day performing a scene like that,” she said. The emotions surrounding it may have been heightened by the background music, an instrumental of the Bollywood classic “Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham,” a timely inclusion of a song by Lata Mangeshkar, the recently passed Indian music icon that many are still mourning.
The ugly truth of white supremacy is that representation in Western media will not save us. Diversity on screens will not protect us from race-based violence, Islamophobia, or xenophobia. You cannot cast a few brown people in a television show and expect them to bear the burden of representing the billion other people on Earth who look like them .
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