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Design: Archi Banal
Design: Archi Banal

OPINIONPop CultureApril 5, 2022

What Bridgerton gets right and wrong about being Indian

Design: Archi Banal
Design: Archi Banal

Season two of the hit Regency-era Netflix series introduces an Indian family, the Sharmas. While there’s plenty to love about these new characters, there’s also a lot that feels not quite right, explains Sapna Samant.

For us Indians, the khichdi is the first solid food offered to a baby or when one is sick. Mashed rice and yellow moong dal, a touch of ghee. Bland and easy to digest. We also have adult khichdi. Add whatever vegetables and spices you want to the rice and yellow moong dal; it’s still comfort food.

The Indianness of the Sharma sisters in the second season of Bridgerton is something like that. But before I break it down like the pernickety, argumentative Indian I am, I want to acknowledge how gratifying it is to see dark-skinned Indian women at the centre of a major television series.

Ours is a culture that places a premium on fair skin and still markets vaginal whitening creams, one where Sima Aunty’s class, caste and religious endogamy in Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking is an everyday reality. So it’s been beyond thrilling to watch Bridgerton and see that those shades of dark brown skin and wavy hair have been normalised as the idea of Indian beauty. I mean, we’ve forgotten our original Hindu goddesses were always dark.

Simone Ashley as Kate Sharma, Charithra Chandran as Edwina Sharma, Shelley Conn as Mary Sharma. (Photo: Netflix)

But here’s the problem: the depiction of the Sharmas in Bridgerton is a sort of cultural khichdi, a mash-up of various ingredients that don’t really make sense together, while other ones have been left out entirely as if they’re of no importance.

An Indian family seeking a suitor for their daughter in Regency-era England while India is being looted by the British is an interesting take, even in the romantic, candy-floss world of Bridgerton. There’s not a whisper about the oppression and suffering of millions of the Sharmas’ fellow citizens. Not even when Edwina Sharma (Charithra Chandran) is admiring the Queen’s jewels. Although, granted, the Brits stole the Koh-i-noor diamond from us for their royal crown in the mid-1800s, a few decades after the period in which the series is set.

The Sharma sisters are from Bombay (Mumbai), the territory that formed part of Princess Catherine of Braganza’s dowry when she married King Charles II in 1662. The king transferred control of Bombay to the East India Company and in the early 1800s, the era in which Bridgerton is set, the company was still governing the territory. At the time, the original seven islands of Bombay were yet to be fully joined, and were still largely inhabited by the indigenous fisherfolk known as Kolis, as well as immigrants from other parts of the subcontinent. There was no local royal family, who in the show supposedly employed the sisters’ father. Unless they had a monsoon palace among the mangrove marshes?

Then there are the ingredients that make up the family. Sharma is a largely North Indian Hindu upper-caste surname, but the sisters call their dead father Appa, which is Tamil. Kate (Simone Ashley) is didi, big sister in Hindi, and Edwina is bon, sister in Bengali. That mixing of languages is hard to believe, even coming from Bombay’s melting pot of the early 1800s. Besides, it’s noticeable that the Sharma sisters don’t switch codes like the rest of us Indians speaking our native tongues in private spaces.

Edwina is a typical overachiever. She can speak Marathi, French, Greek, Latin and “Hindustani” – if ever such a language existed. (It does not. We speak a mix of Hindi and Urdu.) She plays the sitar, the pianoforte and the “maruli”, if ever such a musical instrument existed. (It does not.) Edwina can also read Urdu. You know, she’s read the one and only Ghalib. Or “Galheeb” as she calls him. Mirza Ghalib, one of our greatest Urdu poets, was born in 1797 – he’d still have been a teenager when the events of Bridgerton were taking place.

Screenshot: Twitter

Women’s education in India was pioneered by Dalit woman Savitribai Phule, the first female teacher in India, who opened a school for girls in 1848. Edwina and Kate might have had English governesses courtesy of their Appa’s royal employer, but who taught them the Indian languages? Fortunately for Edwina, the ability to roll out perfectly round chapatis is not a requisite to marry a rich, titled Englishman.

Finally, we have the costumes. The jewel tones are beautiful. The dresses worn by the Sharmas include a hint of paisley and a touch of embroidery… but no traditional Indian textiles! No handwoven muslin or silk, no chintz or calico – all textiles that were so desired by Europeans. Maybe that’s because by the 1800s the British had destroyed the Indian textile industry by banning sales in England and taxing the hell out of our weavers in India so they could flood the market with substandard English-made fabric?

Much has been of the chai moment in episode three. Kate Sharma despises English tea. So do a lot of us. We need our spices. But who on earth brews masala chai the way she does it? It takes at least a minute of boiling water with the akkha (whole pieces) of masala for the taste to seep in.

The chai moment (Photo: Netflix)

For me there are only two genuinely authentic cultural moments. One is Kate oiling Edwina’s hair, just like we do with our children, our siblings and our close friends. A warm oil champi, a massage to soothe and nourish the scalp, is a truly intimate ritual.

And then there’s the pre-wedding, auspicious haldi ceremony where Mary and Kate apply turmeric and sandalwood paste to Edwina’s body. The room is decorated with fresh marigold, and a lovely orchestral rendition of iconic Bollywood film song ‘Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham’ plays in the background.

The haldi ceremony (Photo: Netflix)

Yes, those bangles are authentic too.

Those moments were rewarding, but for this nit-picky aunty they’re not enough – there’s nothing more off-putting than a khichdi that is palatable but not quite right. Bridgerton’s Indian characters have a kind of pan-Indianness, rather than the regional specificity that gives a special flavour.

Geetika Lizardi was the only Indian at the Bridgerton writers’ table. While she clearly had a lot of cultural input, could that burden have been lightened by having more Indian writers in the room? That’s something to keep in mind here in Aotearoa now that TV commissioners are keen to showcase our diversity. We need Indian characters that are culturally unambiguous – and that are created by Indian writers. Take note, Shortland Street.

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Design: Tina Tiller
Design: Tina Tiller

Pop CultureApril 5, 2022

Outlander recap: An ill wind blows no good

Design: Tina Tiller
Design: Tina Tiller

Just when you think you’ve seen everything on Outlander, they give us Stephen Bonnet’s testicles in a jar. Tara Ward recaps episode five of season six.

It was balls ahoy in Outlander this week, as Jamie and Claire danced with the ghosts of their past. A visit to Wilmington saw the Frasers bump into ex-enemy Stephen Bonnet’s testicles in a jar, while back at the Ridge, Bree told Roger she was pregnant. That’s right, there’s about to be a new baby on the Ridge, who will no doubt be born with its father’s lush facial hair and its mother love of indoor plumbing.

Fancy seeing you here

Jamie and Claire were in Wilmington to meet Flora Macdonald, the legendary woman who smuggled Bonnie Prince Charlie out of Scotland in 1746. Flora was speaking at a pro-government event organised by Jocasta, where she urged the people of North Carolina to stay loyal the Crown. Flora was cool, but her words had no influence on Jamie, who had already decided to ditch the Crown and align with Sons of Liberty.

Things are getting tense in the colonies, and it’s a shame Jamie can’t tell everyone that his walking pharmacy of a wife knows war is coming and that the Crown will lose. Claire distracted herself by getting Jocasta high on hemp flower, and by giving Jamie first aid after he and Lord John fought off a rebellious crowd with nothing but a broomstick. Woe betide the rioter who throws tar at Jamie Fraser’s face. Please, anything but the face.

Give me liberty, give me Jamie Fraser’s face

Sadly, Claire had no medicine to fix Lord John’s broken heart after Jamie revealed he was joining Sons of Liberty. Lord John was in disbelief. How could a man who had been abused, imprisoned, mistreated and threatened by the Crown, no longer support the Crown? He was sadder than the time he had measles and Claire had to do acupressure on his eye sockets. This was a situation even acupressure couldn’t fix.

But while Stephen Bonnet’s balls bubbled in a jar, the women of Fraser’s Ridge faced their own random body part conundrum. Someone on the Ridge was using human fingers to make a love charm, and Bree and Marsali were not impressed. They should be roping this scene off with caution tape and calling 111, but astonishingly, nobody seemed concerned about whose hand those fingers belonged to. Nobody did a finger inventory. No one even tried to point the finger. It’s a digital disgrace.

“I feel more in love already”

Of course, when fingers are involved, we immediately know the culprit: Malva Christie, who looks like trouble and now smells like fingers. The phalanges belonged to the Sin Eater, the bloke who popped up at Grannie Wilson’s funeral, and Malva’s been cutting off his dead fingers in her spare time and throwing them into a fire in the name of true love. Sounds wild, but on the other hand, Roger caught Malva in the church pashing a local lad. Maybe Fingers Christie is on to something after all.

Marsali reckoned the love spell was called “Venom of the North Wind”, which sounds a lot like the satanic smell you’d get if you opened that jar of Stephen Bonnet’s bits and pieces. What will we do without Marsali when she leaves the Ridge to join Fergus in New Bern, where he’s working in Jocasta’s print shop? Jocasta is gearing up to print some big words about the war, and Jamie’s not best pleased that his son will be caught up in it.

Claire’s face, trying to work out if Ed Sheeran has also traveled through time

But nobody’s caught up in things more than our heroine, grandmother-to-be Claire. As she and Jamie left Wilmington, she heard the whistle of a faraway song and recognised it as from her time. She put it down to the wind, but did the wind also take an emerald out of Flora Macdonald’s necklace? Does the wind have hair and is currently locked in Wilmington jail? Does the wind look like Wendigo Donner, the time traveller who helped kidnap Claire in last season’s finale?

The truth is out there, and it’s probably sitting in a jar next to Stephen Bonnet’s bollocks.

Outlander screens on Neon, with a new episode every Monday night. Read more of Tara Ward’s Outlander recaps here.

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