The White Tiger's Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani laughs when he talks about this: "For the first time on the set, everyone around looked like me.
Everyone was brown, and that had never happened to me before. When the topic of 'brownface' comes up, Bahrani also points to a more recent film which was guilty of the practice: The Social Network , where the entrepreneur character of Indian American Divya Narendra was played by Max Minghella, born to British-Chinese parents.
This is not to say things have not changed at all when it comes to Hollywood's relationship with India; certainly it has become more welcoming to Indian talent. And the characters they play are not necessarily written as Indian. However, while this is big news in India, these roles are often blink-and-you'll-miss-it, and could have been played by anyone.
And actors like Archie Panjabi and Sanjeev Bhaskar — they play mainstream roles and not just Indian characters," he notes. Indeed, there is a long history of Indian stars in British productions stretching back decades, from Shashi Kapoor in Merchant Ivory's The Householder and Shakespeare Wallah , to Saeed Jaffrey in multiple film and television roles. By contrast, even now, Punathambekar says, familiar Indian Americans on TV like Padma Lakshmi and Mindy Kaling bear the burden of representation — which translates to "hey, you need to speak for all of us brown people," as he puts it.
Slumdog Millionaire showed Hollywood studios that well-made movies about India could click with global audiences Credit: Alamy.
What's more, while actors from India — mainly Hindi cinema, or Bollywood — seem to be increasingly finding mainstream roles in Hollywood, the way Indians, and India itself, are depicted in mainstream Western movies and TV shows remains another story altogether. And a largely problematic one. While the Simpsons character Apu — with his grating "Indian" accent voiced by white actor Hank Azaria — has come under great criticism , leading Azaria to stand down from the role last year, the more recent sitcom The Big Bang Theory had nerd Raj Koothrappali speaking in the same heavy, whiney tone that purports to be authentic Indian.
During the s, movie attendance soared. By the middle of the decade, 50 million people a week went to the movies - the equivalent of half the nation's population.
In Chicago, in , theaters had enough seats for half the city's population to attend a movie each day. As attendance rose, the movie-going experience underwent a profound change. During the twentieth century's first two decades, movie going tended to conform to class and ethnic divisions.
Urban workers attended movie houses located in their own working class and ethnic neighborhoods, where admission was extremely inexpensive averaging just 7 cents in the during the teens , and a movie was often accompanied by an amateur talent show or a performance by a local ethnic troupe. These working class theaters were rowdy, high-spirited centers of neighborhood sociability, where mothers brought their babies and audiences cheered, jeered, shouted, whistled, and stamped their feet.
The theaters patronized by the middle class were quite different. Late in the new century's first decade, theaters in downtown or middle class neighborhoods became increasingly luxurious. At first many of these theaters were designed in the same styles as many other public buildings, but by the mid-teens movie houses began feature French Renaissance, Egyptian, Moorish, and other exotic decors.
By Anthony D'Alessandro. By Denise Petski. By Patrick Hipes. By Rosy Cordero. By Justin Kroll. All Rights reserved. Read the full story. Click here for Expert Advice. Comment 0. Post Comment. Disclaimer: Comments will be moderated by Jagranjosh editorial team.
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