Bend It Like Beckham – Bitch Flicks

Interracial Relationships: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Interracial Relationships Theme Week here.

Interracial Relationships in Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The Importance of Finn & Rey by Sophie Hall

To have a Black character like this to not only be the co-lead in an iconic franchise but to also include him in a healthy, positively portrayed relationship with a white woman is a brilliant statement. … Finn and Rey’s difference in race doesn’t put any limitations on what this couple can and do achieve.

Interracial Relationships on Grey’s Anatomy by Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman

While Grey’s Anatomy has a very large multiracial cast that leads to some impressive representation, its reluctance to discuss race doesn’t give it the opportunity to further explore intricacies of interracial relationships.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine Is Doing Something Right: How One Workplace Sitcom Shows That Interracial Relationships Can Be the Norm by Laura Power

But because the people coming into any workplace in New York City are already diverse in terms of race and sexual orientation, why would a cross-race relationship be bothersome? Brooklyn Nine-Nine doesn’t believe it should be. From the first episode, this show presents interracial relationships as an unquestioned norm, and this is what makes it stand out from all other shows of its kind on television.

No Place For Us: Interracial Relationships in West Side Story by Olivia Edmunds-Diez

West Side Story could be read as a warning to Latinas: stay away from white men. If María listened to her older brother, obeying his wish to keep her obedient and virginal, María would be safe and free from grief. This notion is exceedingly disappointing, especially considering that there are not many Latina main characters in Hollywood movies.

Pinky and the Origins of Interracial Oscar-Bait by Hannah Graves

Pinky is best understood at the starting point for a new Hollywood trajectory for interracial relationships onscreen: the worthy Oscar-bait drama that claims to enlighten as it entertains and serves as a conduit for fostering tolerance in the presumed white audience.

Interracial Love in the Afternoon: Daytime Soap Opera Relationships by Rachel Wortherley

It is glaring that amongst soap opera supercouples, there are few pairings with people of color, especially interracial couples. … In 2016, interracial couples only scratch the surface of storylines on daytime television.

Colonialism in The King and I and Related Media by Jackson Adler

The King and I promotes colonialist and “white savior” attitudes. … Adding romantic interest to the story, showing King Mongkut as exceedingly admiring of Anna and portraying her influence in the court as more than it was, paints Western values and morals as superior to others, justifying colonialism by making it seem as though Eastern countries “need” the West.

Negotiating Race as the Female Indian Love Interest in Bend It Like Beckham and The Darjeeling Limited by Allie Gemmill

Jackie Brown: The Journey of Self-Discovery by Rachel Wortherley

By not blatantly focusing on the racial disparity between Jackie and Max, it speaks volumes in regards to who the film is about. … It is silently implied that as a Black woman, she divorces her identity from the men in her life — including a man who, as a white male maintains a sense of privilege in society — and reclaims it for her own.

Blindness, Race, and Love in A Patch of Blue by Leigh Kolb

Fifty years later, portraying disability on screen with empathy and respect is still rare. Showing an interracial couple is also extremely rare (Green says that some people sent terrible letters to him about the kissing scene; in fact, it’s reported that in some areas in the south the scene was edited out for theaters). A Patch of Blue manages to weave together themes of disability, race, socioeconomic issues and family dynamics with beauty and grace.

‘We’re Not So Different’: Tradition, Culture, and Falling in Love in Bride & Prejudice by Becky Kukla

Though clearly based on the novel, Bride & Prejudice is a successful piece of transnational cinema, which uses the interracial relationship between the Bakshi’s second eldest daughter Lalita and white American Mark Darcy to discuss differences in race, tradition, and cultural imperialism.

Endearing Interracial Romance in Flirting by Grace Barber-Plentie

It’s a true rarity to see an interracial relationship that doesn’t have at least some element of suffering in it. In Flirting, on the other hand, most of the difficulties in Danny and Thandiwe’s relationship seems to come from the relationship itself, not the color of the star-crossed lovers’ skin.

On Indie Rom-Coms, The Duvernay Test, and Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong by Candice Frederick

It was Viola Davis who commented about the lack of substantial roles as love interests for women of color on the big screen. … We see that familiar and very white narrative unfold between an interracial pair in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong, except this time it’s infused with cultural nuances that, while they don’t reinvent the wheel, offer a fresh perspective.

Colorism and Interracial Relationships in Film: ‘Belle,’ ‘The Wedding,’ and More by Atima Omara

The colorism Dido experiences is seen throughout different Western societies that had Black African enslavement as part of its world. Many stories of colorism also exist in American history and folklore and we see how it impacts romantic relationships and in American film and TV.

Into the Badlands: Will Blasian Love Last? by Lisa Bolekaja

Into the Badlands, based on the classic Chinese tale Journey to the West, is set in a futuristic dystopian world where past wars have created a new feudal society. It’s gratifying to finally get an onscreen Blasian couple where they kiss, have sex, and get to have a real relationship.

What Parenthood Taught Me About Interracial Relationships by Livi Burke

I remember watching the scene in the episode “The Talk” where Crosby and Jabbar have their first conversation about the N-word. Crosby looked so caught off guard; he knows this is a racist word he’s not supposed to say, yet at the same he has no idea how to talk about this racial slur and its ramifications with his half Black son.

Animated Love: How Anime Produced Two of the Best Interracial Love Stories of All Time by Robert V Aldrich

Two of the greatest love stories in anime are interracial relationships. … While the industry as a whole generally eschews characters of color, that hasn’t stopped some series from featuring prominent people of color characters in narratively significant stories. This has led to interracial couples being featured in two of the greatest anime series of all time: The Super Dimension Force Macross and Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Negotiating Race as the Female Indian Love Interest in ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ and ‘The Darjeeling Limited’

Both ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ and ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ examine Indian women and their romances with white men. Within the interracial relationships explored in these respective films, both Jess and Rita… are burdened with navigating deeply impressed racial boundaries as they move through a modern society.

This guest post by Allie Gemmill appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships.

Through Western lenses, Indian women are often framed as an exotic and forbidden ideal. Depicted as embodying a degree of Eastern mysticism, rooted in a culture of patriarchal duty, the Indian woman as love interest or girlfriend is often paired with a white man who views her with a sense of “otherness.” It then falls to the Indian woman to negotiate a specific kind of Eastern-Western iconoclasm — a clash steeped in racial and cultural sentiments — in order to let her romance with a white man flourish. The white male-Indian female dynamic is also often portrayed as a threat to traditional Indian expectations of a woman marrying within her racial group and the emphasized gender roles she has been raised to conform to are challenged.

Both Bend It Like Beckham and The Darjeeling Limited examine Indian women and their romances with white men. Within the interracial relationships explored in these respective films, both Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Rita (Amara Karan) serve as love interests but not long-term romantic partners for their white male counterparts. They are burdened with navigating deeply impressed racial boundaries as they move through a modern society. Meanwhile, their white male love interests are allowed to indulge their romantic curiosities with relative ease. This is crucial to note because these white men are rarely challenged to share the burden of interracial courtship, free from the onus of cultural or racial expectations. For Indian women, as experienced here, it is difficult to separate race from amorous pursuit; race serves as a definitive and non-negotiable aspect of the relationships between the Indian women and white men.

BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM

In Bend It Like Beckham, protagonist Jess is torn between honoring her Punjabi Sikh Indian roots (as embodied in her strict parents and sister, who is marrying according to racial and cultural codes) and the English culture which she has embraced and surrounds herself with (as embodied in her love of soccer and her budding romance with her white coach, Joe). Although she bears the burden of fetishization from her English peers in conjunction with her pursuit of a soccer career and gendered/racial expectations from her family, Jess for the most part negotiates a coalition between the two insofar as she is able to pursue her personal ambitions. Jess is forced to reckon with a strict code of honor and respect for her family throughout the film, as outlined by her Indian culture, which the film positions as a threat to not only Jess’s happiness in soccer but also in her budding romance with Joe (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers).

Gender is constantly conflated with racially-based codes of conduct: Jess is repeatedly questioned by her mother and sister about why she would not eagerly desire to marry young and marry an Indian man. Her mother is quick to bawl her out for participating in soccer, here read as masculine and therefore thoroughly out of line with how Indian women should act in public. Jess is considered a reflection of her family’s morals at all times when she is in public and any time she acts according to her own desires, she risks shaming her family and threatening her sister’s impending nuptials. In this world, Jess bears the brunt of delicately mollifying her family while speaking for her “white/masculine” athletic ambitions.

Add to this a budding romance with Joe, a white Irishman, and Jess’s own racial and gender predicaments double. Through Joe’s eyes, Jess is positioned as an exotic “other,” a young Indian girl seemingly sheltered from the pleasures of contemporary British culture. During Jess’s “transformation” moment — when her friends lender her more revealing and sexy garb to wear out to a club in Berlin — the camera lingers on her body before cutting to Joe’s furtively intrigued looks. Despite there being other women of color in her soccer team, Jess is the only one treated as different from the rest, with other scenes depicting the bemusement her teammates have over her Indian culture. This moment seals the forbidden love that Jess and Joe will cultivate for the latter half of the film. As they find themselves drawn to each other, Joe is narratively allowed the ease to step in when necessary to speak on behalf Jess. Twice he makes speeches to her father about how deeply he cares for her and believes in her abilities as a soccer player. Both times Jess does not get the chance to contribute to the conversation between the men although her agreement is implied. Joe risks little in taking a romantic shine to Jess whereas Jess appears to risk everything. Furthermore, he is allowed to pursue her, however discreetly, without threat of losing his job or credibility.

As gender and race are tightly bound up together in Bend It Like Beckham, director Gurinder Chadha makes it clear that an interracial relationship of this specific dynamic (white man-Indian woman) is a sincere threat to a young Indian woman. Even when transplanted to the London suburbs, Jess and her family seem to live in a tight-knit Indian community seemingly bent on being hermetically sealed from white English life. This clash of racial and social ideologies make for the biggest villains to Jess’s own chance at happiness.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED

In The Darjeeling Limited, Rita is reduced to an object that Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is infatuated with while on vacation with his older brothers. Jack’s storyline is centered around a recent and gruesome breakup, leaving him vulnerable. Upon seeing Rita for the first time, while she makes the brothers comfortable, Jack firmly sets his sights on her. While Rita is a minor character in the adventures of the Whitman brothers, she can be read as a boldly fetishized representation of Indian women. In doing this, we place further burden on how Indian women are characterized onscreen.

Rita is presented as a modern and beautiful woman, but ultimately repressed, ostensibly by the Indian culture in which she was raised. She is seemingly trapped aboard the train, The Darjeeling Limited, with her boyfriend, an intense young Sikh man who runs the train with an iron fist. She is willing to bend the moral code by sneaking away with Jack to have sex (which she enjoys in the moment) but rebuffs him when he continues to make advances. She sneaks cigarettes in between service snacks and pouring tea. Albeit committed to her duties, she does them as if half-zombified, stating at one point that she has “got to get off this train.” She is deadened in a stylish way as only Wes Anderson creates his characters. In all of these little actions, Rita becomes Jack’s forbidden interracial-love-interest-cum-souvenir.

In addition to having little screen time, the script seems further set on reducing Rita to being a faceless trope when Jack returns to the trio’s train carriage, attempting to appear nonchalant after having sex with Rita mere moments after meeting her. Jack’s brother Francis (Owen Wilson) incredulously asks, “Did you just fuck that Indian girl?” It’s a small moment but effective in immediately redacting any shred of agency Rita may own. A white man simply lumping Rita into the throngs of Indian women that surround him betrays an intact colonial hierarchy as modern microagression. Jack does nothing to protest this categorization of his potential love interest and instead continues to pursue her, believing she may somehow heal him or make him feel better about himself for a time. Rita’s treatment as a cure-all to white male pain feels oddly preposterous, especially considering the film is set in a modern era. What right does Jack have to take so quickly to Rita in both a romantic or needy aspect? What entitles him? While Rita gives Jack a reason to believe there may be the stirrings of a romance, their love seems doomed not only because of his neediness and apathy to fully commit, but also because she seems wholly restricted by her relationship to a traditionally Indian man as well as her innate sense of duty to her work.

Amidst the flurry of lust flung upon her by Jack, Rita appears to be inured to this kind of attention. While she navigates her life in a position of literal service and subservience to the passengers of the train, she holds that place metaphorically as an Indian woman. In vocalizing her desire to escape the confines of the train, she negates a racially-inbred sense of second-class status as an Indian woman. While she is wholly defined by her race and gender in Darjeeling, she is imbued with a defiance as only modern women seem to possess. Jack is allowed to ply her with sex and cigarettes because he can temporarily indulge in the local fare; Rita, however, is living in a very real and very traditional Indian society, unable to escape or completely negotiate her duty with her desire.

It is perplexing to see that both films seem set on giving the impression that Indian society is ultimately restrictive and patriarchal to women. In reading these films (one made by an Indian woman born in Nairobi and raised in England, the other made by a white man from Texas), both exude the confinement of Indian women and their struggle to navigate a modern (read: white, Eurocentric) world amidst such strong ties to their racial background. It would be the hope that when Chadha placed Jess in the white world of suburban London and Anderson wrote Rita into her native India, we would see some characters reflective of these different but ultimately Western perspectives. Instead, both directors have unwittingly constructed their Indian women to abide by an implied universal gendered and racial code. As such, these cinematic Indian women are painted into a corner in juggling their race with their ambition and most importantly, their romantic desires.

Allie Gemmill is a film journalist based in Tampa, FL. She is the founder and creative director of The Filmme Guild, a feminist film salon dedicated to examining the intersections of women and film. Follow her on Twitter and Medium.

‘Bend It Like Beckham’ And The Lesbian Hate Debate

Bend it like Beckham film poster.

Written by Janyce Denise Glasper

“You bitch!”

This thunderous exclamation seems to occur every five minutes. If a girl is way prettier, she’s a bitch. If a girl “steals” a man of a girl who isn’t even dating that said man, she’s a bitch. If a girl is thought to be a lesbian, she’s a bitch. Twice Jesminder “Jesse” Bharma, Bend it Like Beckham’s football loving protagonist, has been on the receiving end of the blow, but I started to lose sight of this supposedly empowering feminist sports movie due to the infinitely alarming amount of lesbian hatred disguised as harmless humor. To be a lesbian is a bitch? Really? Why?

Joe the coach (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) makes damn sure that Jesse (Parminder Nadra) is no lady lover.

Lesbianism appeared to be an invisible villain to both Jesse and her equally talented teammate, Juliet “Jules” Paxton—a horrendous nasty vile “disease” that could only arise from women who enjoy contact sports.

In Gurinder Chadha’s debut feature film, Jesse is inspired by David Beckham and has his posters and jersey decorating bedroom walls. She wants to emulate his prowess and expertise on the football field and certain people think that it’s not only his athleticism that propels her. She might just like women too. Jesse’s mother hates that she doesn’t want to be called “Jesminder” or act more feminine and domesticated.

“We aren’t lesbians! We both love Joe!” Jesse (Parminder Nagra) and Jules (Keira Knightly) should have chanted.

Jules notices Jesse’s skills against the boys and asks her to join a local team. Jesse eagerly agrees and plays in secret, knowing that her parents would greatly disapprove. Jesse and Jules start to build a positive relationship with Jules schooling Jesse on the amazing Mia Hamm, one of many American women football players in action. The close twosome begin sharing dreams of becoming an active member of the overseas sports team.

Jesse’s parents and Jules’ mother Paula are horrendously incomprehensible characters for sexist views about women’s lock length.

“They wear their hair so short these days, you can never tell,” says Jesse’s mother, twice.

This supposed to be a joke, but why?

Hair length is such a sensitive topic to women, especially when length is close cropped and called “boyish.” No one ever seems to really comprehend the meanings behind hair and what it truly says about someone. Whether a woman likes it away from their face, hate strands touching their butts, donates tresses to worthy causes, wears a protective scarf, or battles cancer or other form of loss, hair is worn differently by all women of all cultures and creeds and shouldn’t be a mark set against them if it’s above shoulders or just plain bald. Feminism should not be marketed towards hair, but unfortunately it always has and will be. Lesbians also wear their hair in various styles and the short hair cut is so beyond stereotypical. It isn’t that powerful to make fun of a group of women or use them as a catalyst to drive laughter. Lesbians also are people too– not a dirty circumstance.

When Pinky’s wedding is called off due to her fiance’s parents seeing Jesse and Jules “kissing,” Pinky is enraged and calls Jesse a bitch for ruining her life. So yes, lesbianism is so treacherous, it gets in the way of events like holy matrimony. Chadra’s co-written screenplay entails all the wrongs of same sex pairings, using misunderstandings as trivial humor– seen by both Jesse and Jules’ reactions to hearing that their families believe them to be drawn together and not to boys. It fails miserably at being sentimental to lesbians as a whole.

Jesse (Parminder Nagra) and her sister Pinky (the awesome Archie Panjabi) both look surprised by Paula (offscreen Juliet Stevenson) announcing that Jesse is part of a lesbian couple with Jules.

“Mother, just because I wear trakkies and play sport does not make me a lesbian!” Jules tells Paula, as if lesbianism the most foul label ever.

Bitch is fine. But lesbian is a slap to the cheek.

Paula was the absolute worst.

Now what if Jules really were a lesbian? If I were in Jules’ shoes (or cleats), I wouldn’t explain a damn thing to rude, insensitive Paula. For Paula to coldly burst into Pinky’s wedding and “call out” Jesse wasn’t exactly classy even if she tells Jules that she wouldn’t have minded Jesse and Jules being a couple. However, didn’t she not just yell for Jesse to get her “lesbian feet” out of her shoes? That doesn’t sound like someone who would’ve been supportive. Perhaps this is to be a humorous notion (still finding it hard to laugh), but politics on a woman’s style of hair and dress to be considered masculine instead of powerful and sophisticated is outrageous! Not only can’t women have short hair without being labeled manly, we cannot wear pants everyday because that’s an acute sign of lesbianism! Oh and if we play sports especially football, we might not like boys…..

It’s a shame that Jesse and Jules’ fallout had to be over a man– Joe, the coach.

Joe is going to see Jesse (Parminder Nagra) in a new light thanks to “The Makeover” by Jules (Keira Knightly) and Mel (Shaznay Lewis).

Joe trained Jesse hard on the playing field and shared a couple of his old football glory days prior to injury, but the moment Jesse wore makeup, a form fitting nearly backless number, and long wavy hair cascading about shoulders, he gazed in that beseeching manner that is supposed to be considered romantic. Awww. He really likes her outside of uniform and ponytails.

Pish posh!

This just truly means that her fuckability status moved up and sports took an immediate backburner! All of a sudden Jesse is hot stuff and Joe wants to have his sample, asking her to dance and almost taking advantage of her drunken state at the club celebration. Now the film has switched over from thrilling lady sports to a man getting his power on– thankfully for a few minutes at a time. A friendship gets spat on over a man. It becomes war between Jesse and Jules and that “you bitch!” comes bursting out like a launching torpedo—expected but crappy nonetheless. Jesse and Jules make it abundantly clear that they don’t want each other, but they sure do want that Joe.

However, pissed over the typical women falling for the same man BS, I respect that they don’t battle over the spot for the American team. Irate Jules took the time to seek out Jesse because she knew that Jesse was needed. When they played football, they were in it together, functioning, reacting, and showcasing talents together, victorious champions on the field, telling the world that women can kick around a soccer ball, that their dainty feet can work just as craftily and aggressively as a man. They put differences aside with cleats, game faces, and their other female counterparts to take on one hell of a win! Jesse and Jules prove that just because playing sports is considered a masculine way of showcasing aggression, women too can be rough, wield scars, and sweatiness.

Those kisses? Those hugs? That’s a female’s version of the butt taps that male athletes do. Why factor more into that?

The girls win big!

After all, the moral of the story is that girls can play sports and like boys– not be one of those scary lesbians!

I applaud Chadha’s direction, but let’s lay off the meanness next time.

Women of Color in Film and TV: Thoughts on ‘The Mindy Project’ and Other Screen Depictions of Indian Women

The Mindy Project

Guest post written by Martyna Przybysz.

I was born and bred in Poland, a country that has for years struggled to embrace foreign cultures, and despite its growing tolerance and diversity across all aspects of society, including mainstream media, you wouldn’t quite describe it as multicultural. Having gotten the film bug at a young age, and having a film buff for a father, I have been exposed to the World and European cinemas early. Yet the topic of cultural diversity never as much as brushed upon the surface of mine and my peers’ discussions on film. Yes, there was Almodovar, and… there was Almodovar. It wasn’t until I have moved to the UK, back in 2005 that the term “ethnic minority” was first made known to me. Few years on, and I started flirting with the idea of joining the media industry. And this is when I realised that – despite an ever-present and rather obvious diversity of women in the world as such, as well as the labor market – the lack of women of varied ethnic backgrounds in the media, be it on screen or behind it, was striking. The Asian women being one of the under-represented groups.

Gurinder Chadha’s It’s a Wonderful Afterlife

The first year of my film studies was also the time of assimilation into a multiracial society, and the time when I was introduced to the insightful work of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Indian-Kenyan origin. Chadha is known for her work depicting the lives of Indians, and more specifically, Indian women residing in the UK. Her films – such as my absolute favourite Bhaji on the Beach, and widely recognized Bend it Like Beckham – have not only focused on young South Asian women and the dilemmas they faced, confronted with what is expected of them by their community, but most importantly, they explored the topic of female bonding and intergenerational ties.

The women of Monsoon Wedding, directed by Mira Nair

The above topics were also being discussed in parallel by Indian director Mira Nair. There was the exploration of the implications that being in an interracial relationship in the ’90s America comes with, in Mississippi Masala, as well as that of secrets and conflict in a multigenerational Indian family in Monsoon Wedding. Nair and Chadha offered me a unique opportunity to explore their amazing and colorful culture, that I have otherwise wouldn’t be able to get to know so closely. But what I most liked about the work of these two women of South Asian origin, was the very first thing I appreciate in female-directed films in general: the fact that they focus on female characters and do not shy away from exposing and exploring their flaws.

Fast forward to 2012 and along came Mindy Lahiri. Or rather Vera Chokalingam, known to all by her stage name, Mindy Kaling. I know that Mindy was widely recognized way before The Mindy Project from The Office and I know that its devotees will want to assail me for this, but… I haven’t seen a single episode! But judging by her excellent writing and acting in her auteur project – I am sure that she was flawless.

Truth be told, I only discovered Kaling last year, upon my first trip to the U.S. in Autumn 2012. Hoping for an easy plane read, I bought her book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and other concerns) and I was not disappointed. Mindy’s writing is light, funny, and with just the right amount of self-deprecation. And so is her show.

#themindyproject

Having gotten to know Mindy ‘the creator’, Mindy ‘the product of thus creation’ didn’t come as a surprise to me. She’s quirky, a bit ditzy, could easily pass as innocent, and definitely as naïve, and she is not particularly self-critical (take the latest episode’s taxi cab commercial featuring Dr Lahiri dressed in a dog’s costume and conversing with a puppet named Erica, the same commercial that gets her the highest ‘P’ rating, meaning ‘pity rating’).

“I just need to ride out this minor humiliation until I find my Kanye.”

Most of all of – Mindy is an extremely likable character. Despite her naivety, she is a smart and ambitious woman, finding fulfillment in her career, and yes, despite occasional bumps here and there in relation to men, she does value herself, which is a very powerful message on its own.

“It’s so weird being my own role model.”

Mindy’s career is not a topic yet discussed in depth – much of the in-work plot evolves around her competing with the two male doctors at her practice, or more recently, two male midwives from a rival practice – but her love life can be summarised in one phrase, that goes something like “the endless pursuit of romance.” As the show progresses, we discover that this is not all that Mindy is about. She values friendships, and yes, to our awe, she does value her patients in a completely selfless way (take episode 15 “Mindy’s Minute” as an example of her good-doctor attitude).

A majority of feminist statements made in the show have nothing to do with race. Similarly to Hannah from Girls, she is a full-figured lady, unobnoxiously proud of it (she wears dresses that accentuate her figure but rarely reveals her cleavage), and very much aware of it. She refers to herself in a belittling manner on a number of occasions, such as in episode one when she answers her phone on a date saying, “Do you know how difficult it is for a chubby 31-year-old woman to go on a legit date with a guy who majored in economics at Duke?.” So, there is a healthy dose of self-awareness. Or is there? I forever struggle with the concept of weight and bodily image of women on screen – the general consensus, according to the media, is that thin equals beautiful. Therefore it is always so ‘refreshing’ and ‘bold’ to see a ‘bigger’ female character on screen. I simply find those statements annoying. I dream of a day when any woman on screen will be considered beautiful for her individual qualities and features, rather than being seen and described as ‘something’ in comparison to ‘something else’.

Going back to the Indian culture – as already established, Mindy approaches everything with self-deprecating humour, like in the latest episode, when offered an opportunity to present medical news in her new pitiful persona (see: paragraph six), she fatastises of this being the beginning of her celebrity doctor dream coming true, and says to her co-workers “can you guys believe it… me, the child of immigrants…”. I mean, you gotta laugh. There is, however, a thin line between mocking one’s own culture and playing on the well-known stereotypes like Kaling, and overdoing it, like in New Girl, where Schmidt’s obsession for Cece’s ethnicity goes beyond tasteful at times. Mindy’s ethnicity does not really matter to her or the viewer, unless it is convenient for her to play with it in a stereotypical way (like when she makes authoritative statements about how Black guys love Indian women), which in my opinion, she does with a comedic grace.

Nonetheless, the former show touches upon such issues as arranged marriage and the compromises that Asian women must make in order to remain in good graces of their family. With Mindy, on the other hand, we never really learn much about her family, or what was expected of her, but the sole fact that she is a doctor, and expects her brother to become an educated professional himself, brings us back to the “child of immigrants” syndrome. Maybe because she is already so Westernised there is nothing to really rebel against, and the cultural aspect falls to the background. Nothing that Mindy does bends the rules quite as much as what Jesminder did in Bend it Like Beckham, but then, the times have changed.

Mindy Kaling as Mindy Lahiri

Mindy Kaling is the creator of The Mindy Project, as well as the main writer on the show. There is no question that she’s witty, talented, utterly adorable, and challenges, however subtly, some most common cultural stereotypes ingrained in the audiences’ minds by the media. It is not a show for everyone, for sure. But it is an entertaining show, that can find its audience amongst both, men and women.

Let’s face it, we love quirky and goofy characters. Deep down we all hope we are more adorable than pitiful when we find ourselves in embarrassing situations. Does it matter then what colour/ethinicty/gender the characters are? And if we say that it doesn’t, why aren’t there more female Indian protagonists like Mindy Lahiri on the big and small screen? And how is this astounding imbalance a reflection of the melting pot that our society is today? That is beyond me. And so the debate continues.

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Martyna is a Pole living in London, UK. She works in media and the arts. A sucker for portrait photography and a salted caramel cheesecake. This is her blog: http://martynaprzybysz.tumblr.com.