My parents have always hoped I will marry an Italian man. “So he can cook good food,” my mother tells me. “We need some new blood in the family,” my dad will jokingly add on. Their dreams will have to wait a few years—in the Dublin/San Ramon high schools of the Bay Area, you’ll be hard pressed to find a white person at all, let alone one my age and with Italian blood. For the teenagers of our sheltered corner of California, there is little room for racialized preferences, not when our community’s racial makeup means that in any given environment, I meet more people who look like me than not. That does not mean that race doesn’t shape our brown town society—because of the advent of the internet, Bay Area brown girls will still find themselves trying to mold their reflections into the hairless, petite, perfect image of the American white girl. Nevertheless, there is not enough bleach in the world to perfect that transition, so we’ve all collectively decided to save our money on skin treatments and accept the beauty that lies in brown. I can’t speak for what happens when we leave this bubble, but for now, within the walls of this quasi-social experiment in racial minority-majorities, it is not uncommon to find brown people who are not only attracted, but sometimes singularly attracted, to other brown people.
Our bubble stands in stark contrast to the Hollywood (or really, the American) projection of Indians. The story of mainstream media’s representation of Indians starts with the most palatable way Hollywood can think of introducing racial diversity—beautiful women. It’s a smart marketing tactic: the “halo effect” has proven itself time and time again. Even Bollywood knew the power of beautiful women, placing them front and center of every movie promotion and dancing sequence. Indian women in the biggest hits—Bridgerton, Quantico, Never Have I Ever—stand firmly alone in their racial identity, surrounded by non-Indian peers and placed in relationships with white men. This, we accept as “good representation”—and yet, when Priyanka Chopra married Nick Jonas in a lavish dual-wedding, she was instantly criticized for “selling out” to the “colonizer.” So where is this line drawn then? At what point are we breaking barriers, and at what point are we diluting our identity?
Over the past year, social media has run ablaze with “The Oxford Study,” a 2010 study that purported to show Asian women’s preference for White men over Asian men. In reality, the study was an analysis of how the media depicts Asian women and white men in relationships. Nevertheless, “The Oxford Study” is used by Asian men especially to degrade Asian women for “betraying” their race and dating outside of their culture, therefore “contributing” to stereotypes about the undesirability of Asian men. In response, some Asian women online have said, “Asian men should interrogate why even women in their own community don’t want to be with them.” In the world we live in, it is probably the case that racial stereotypes are inevitable and even somewhat true. There are real gripes that every culture has with their men, and those should not be ignored. But fundamentally, those upset with Asian women for “selling out” are misdirecting their anger.
The truth is, it started with Ravi from Jessie and Apu from The Simpsons, and in some ways, it has not moved much since then. Brown men are almost nonexistent in Hollywood, and are especially exempt from playing lead romantic interests. This is the sellout. By constricting Indian representation to beautiful Indian women, Hollywood—known for carefully selecting only those that will maintain its glamorous facade—allows us to write off brown beauty as exceptions to the rule. These women are exoticized, pedestalized, and designated the “cream of the crop,”, therefore seen as unrepresentative of a population of people still believed to be physically unattractive by most Americans, still the answer to the question, “What race wouldn’t you date?” These women are consistently scrutinized for their devotion to their culture, with harsh lines drawn in the sand—Alia Bhatt at the Met Gala was a proud Desi, but Priyanka Chopra at her own wedding was a backstabber; Simone Ashley’s Kate Sharma was “accurate representation,” but Maitreyi Ramakrishan’s Devi was whitewashed. There are critiques to be made of any script in Hollywood, but is our time really best spent demolishing Mindy Kaling for doing an imperfect job of showing who we are on the big screen? Indian women, like all women of color in Hollywood, are in a story-telling industry that does not want to tell their stories. The Avantika-Rapunzel backlash, where Avantika Vandanapu (known best for playing Karen in the 2024 Mean Girls) was brutally slammed online for being a brown woman “cast” in a live-action for a white character (the “cast” was actually a fancast), is a perfect example of why we still need to first prioritize getting a seat at the table—for all types of people from our community.
The inevitable child-of-immigrant experience is to feel fragmented between what you are and where you are, to never know how much of your culture you can carry with you before you become “unpatriotic” and “anti-American.” And yet, I screamed loudly when India won the 2024 Cricket World Cup, just like I did when RRR won the 2023 Oscar for Best Original Song and when Harnaaz Sandhu brought home the 2021 Miss Universe title. It is asking too much of us to carve out these parts of ourselves, to crush our pride down into the corners of our hearts.
We can and should demand representation in the media. The real results of “The Oxford Study” and decades of testimony show that we internalize the way the media depicts people we feel represented by. As we became more cognizant of this dangerous power in recent years, we began to write off the standards that Hollywood sets as unattainable, whether it was about romance or “the perfect family” or mental health. We demanded for our experiences to be more accurately represented—and because there is no Hollywood without its fanbase, the last decade has seen a huge influx of movies filled with difficult romance and discussions of abuse and something that looks a little more like the childhoods we remember. There is still an air of unattainability about the big screen, but it is undeniable that this shift in content is reflected in our discourse and our belief systems, that as we have seen and spoken more about these ideas, it has become easier to accept them. “The Reality” of the Indian-American experience should be one of those ideas. I’m hopeful for greater wins in the coming years, especially within the Hollywood entertainment machine. In fact, I’m still waiting for Shah Rukh Khan to make his way into Hollywood. Maybe in a romance movie with a love triangle between him, an Indian woman, and an Italian man, so my parents can rest peacefully (although I assure you, they will be rooting for Mr. Shah Rukh Khan until the very end).
For an incomplete list of some notable Indian personas in mainstream media, see below:
Dev Patel, Monkey Man
Aryan Simhadri, Percy Jackson
Vir Das, Landing
Hasan Minaj, Patriot Act
Simone Ashley, Bridgerton Season 2
Charithra Chandan, Bridgerton Season 2
Avantika Vandanapu, Mean Girls 2024
Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Never Have I Ever
Lilly Singh, Late Nights With Lilly Singh
The Roar 