Why can’t there be two Indian guys in a show? is the refrain of “Indians on TV”, the fourth episode of Aziz Ansari’s warm-hearted new sitcom, Master of None. "Because then it would be an Indian thing," is the answer given by a network executive casting a new sitcom called Three Buddies, one of a few castings Ansari’s character, Dev, has been on that has a non–ethno-specific callout.
I recently wrote a TV screenplay, an ensemble sitcom about a group of friends in a flat-share, dealing with one of them being diagnosed with terminal cancer. The cast was all-Asian. About a month before Master of None dropped on Netflix, I got the strangest feedback of my career thus far: My sitcom had been rejected because the all-Asian cast would make selling the show internationally difficult. Because, you see, all-Asian casts are not relatable, not internationally, and based on UK television at the moment, not at home.
The rejection felt so old-fashioned, so clunkily ignorant of the industry’s current push for diversity (spearheaded by Lenny Henry, among others), so…fucking rude, man.
When I tweeted my despair and annoyance at this rejection, fellow writers of colour shared their frustration (and crucially, their lack of surprise). For me, being a writer of colour rejected for reasons other than the quality of the material is nothing new. My first novel was once rejected by a literary agent who felt that the characters weren’t "authentically Asian enough". Which was surprising, given that I’m Asian. I’d obviously neglected to include any arranged marriages, mangrove swamps, or saris billowing in the wind. Still, it did OK: I was nominated for the Costa First Novel Award.
This isn't my first foray into television. This time I wrote a sitcom about a group of friends dealing with cancer. I didn’t make a conscious decision for the group to be a bunch of twentysomethings from across the South Asian diaspora. That’s just how it came out. Because these were people I felt comfortable writing, people I knew, people I wanted to spend time with. They didn’t have a “reason” to be Asian; they just were. The production company that optioned the sitcom never noted the characters' ethnicity, only the warmth of their camaraderie and the bitter humour of the dialogue between them.
That a large part of the rejection from the broadcaster was "too many Asians" was quite the kick in the white teeth (shoutout to Zadie). It wasn’t about the characters, nor was it about the tone, the jokes, the landscape, the structure, or the premise. It was about how white people the world over would view my sitcom. To them, it would be "an Indian thing". Not a British thing.
That Master of None episode starts with a montage of representations of mostly men (mostly) and women from South Asia on American television. From Apu’s “thank you, come again” to a brownfaced Ashton Kutcher hawking non-fatty crisps in full "Indian" regalia, doing the bud-bud-ding-dingest of accents known to man, the representation of my people onscreen has not been kind. And Ansari, having successfully avoided the trap of "Man in Turban Driving Taxi who has Witnessed a Crime" (having spent most of his career playing Toms, Chads, and Eds), is pissed that brown people still can’t have more than one of them on a show.
Because then it would become an Indian thing.
From left: Shoukath Ansari, Aziz Ansari and Fatima Ansari in Master of None
And since that would not be relatable to a white audience, it basically means that everything I write, as a real-life British Indian, has to be relatable, but not necessarily to me, or the story I want to tell; it has to be relatable to a white audience.
British programmes that sell well internationally are period dramas like Downton Abbey, showing Britain at its “best”, i.e. when it ruled the world. So the only chance you’re going to get to see people of colour in those things is in roles of slavery or servitude, or, most likely, not at all. It's no wonder fine British actors of colour like Riz Ahmed, Parminder Nagra, and Archie Panjabi are leaving our shores to go work in America. And it's important to note that America is clearly no utopia – the requirement that nonwhite characters “justify” occupying space remains, even when the source material is fantastical comic books and dystopian fiction, where anything is possible.
Lord, if the comics and novels are full of white people, and the “historically accurate” period dramas TV decides to show are full of white people, what hope is there? I’m reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) Junot Díaz quote about all the Spanish peppered through The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: "Motherfuckers will read a book that's one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we're taking over."
Watching that fourth Master of None episode, I was conflicted, caught between feeling comforted by the fact that a star like Ansari has obviously had the same reductive language directed at his skin tone as I have, and feeling jealous that this may be the one shot an Indian gets to tell it like it is before the door closes – and he got there first. Obviously, I’m not really jealous: I’m glad he did what he did, and on such a huge scale. I really hope it stops people telling writers of colour their ethnicity needs to be "relatable" in order to be sellable. Relatability is important, sure. It helps us find common ground somewhere in the midst of all our universal truths.
But you have to ask yourself: Whose “common ground” is this? And whose universal truths? Years ago, a reviewer wrote of one of my short stories that he was glad to "see Indians going through the universal experience". That stuck with me. In fact, the characters weren’t Indian: one was Bengali, one was Pakistani, one was from Watford. That wasn’t even the issue for me; that generic catch-all of the continent as country (cf. "African dress", "Asian spices") is not new.
The thing I found most problematic about this comment was that it was even a question – that an entire subcontinent might miss out on "the universal experience". If the experience is "universal" then that means it applies to everyone. A truly universal experience isn’t an entirely Western concept. It’s a universal one. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or those universal plug adaptors.
Master of None is imperfect but shows how easy diverse representation on camera can be. The ultra-diverse cast talks about race when they need to, and other stuff most of the time. I mean, I’ve been at my office since 8am, and the only time I’ve referenced my ethnicity was to remind a colleague that Thursday is the Hindu New Year (she’s Indian also). And we then talked about meatloaf.
It doesn’t have to be this hard. I shouldn't have to hear that the characters in my show aren’t relatable, that my ethnicity and skin tone aren't marketable.
Two unrelated brown people, one from Dhaka in Bangladesh and the other from Moseley in Birmingham, sitting in a restaurant, eating dosas and saying funny stuff about their dating lives and their weird bosses, and some strange situation their best friend got them into. I’d watch the shit out of that show.