Netflix has a problem when it comes to depicting the diasporic identity. This statement may seem highly controversial when you take into consideration the multitudes of films and television that Netflix has produced that deal with the issue specifically. From the likes of To All The Boys I Ever Loved to the Masters of None television series to the countless stand up specials about this issue, Netflix is brimming with content about the issue. However that being said, Netflix still has a problem when it comes to depicting the diasporic identity. No better example to mind other than the choice to adapt two novels, Yangsze Choo’s The Ghost Bride and Sandhya Menon’s When Dimple Met Rishi, as a television series.
When Dimple Met Rishi and the Lost Indian – American Experience
When I heard that When Dimple Met Rishi was to be adapted into a television series, I was fascinated. The book is about two Indian-American teens whose parents attempt to arrange their marriage even though they are completely opposite to each other. While I am not a huge fan of the book, I know that many love the book and was keen to see what Netflix would do. What caught my interest even more about the Netflix adaption was the fact that it was announced when Netflix India unveiled 17 new original productions. When Dimple Met Rishi got a new title Mismatched and was set to be released on November 20, 2020. You see the thing is When Dimple Met Rishi, though it is about Indian characters and is written by an Indian woman, is set in California and is about the being Indian-American identity.
In an interview with Bustle, Sandhya Menon, the author, said that she wrote the book so that, “brown teens need to see themselves falling in love, making mistakes, dabbling in art, and being happy.” She continued to explain that there is not much good representation for young Indian-American people, and she wanted to write a novel where the main characters Indian heritage is central and depicted in a positive light.
The Indian – American identity is vastly different from the Indian one.
A study was conducted by Meenakshi Gigi Durham to understand how South Asian female teens negotiated their cultural identity and the impact of media on it. In her study, Durham noted that the participants of the study consumed both American and India media. However, her participants found that American and Indian media were fantastical because they did not reflect the reality of the Indian-American experience. This was large because the girls saw themselves as outsiders to the White American experience presented in Hollywood films as well as the Indian one presented in Bollywood.
However, when movies about the South Asian diaspora (movies like Bend it Like Beckham, Mississippi Masala, or American Desi) were discussed the participants found they had an emotional connection with these films. These types of narratives were important to the participant’s lives because it reflected ideas of hybridization that the participants negotiated in their everyday lives.
Rather than attempting to find a place in both cultural spheres, they recognized the need to assert a new identity position that, in a sense, rejected the options offered by Indian as well as American media texts.
Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Constructing the “New Ethnicities”: Media, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity in the Lives of South Asian Immigrant Girls
This is why I was so fascinated by Netflix decision to adapt When Dimple Met Rishi is an Indian setting. When Dimple Met Rishi is about the Indian – American experience, that was the entire reason that Menon wrote the novel. Yet, Netflix was willing to disregard those ideas in their version of the story. However, I was willing to watch the show to see how the book was adapted for Indian audiences.
The summer program in San Francisco is relocated to Jaipur, Rishi’s decision to agree to the arranged marriage is less about appeasing his parents and more about not wanting to have divorce like his parents, and almost all negotiations of the Indian-American identity was (understandably) thrown out the window.
While I enjoyed some of the differences that the Mismatched brought (such as giving Rishi a friend or the introduction of Zeenath Karim a mature student in the program), it felt like the folks at Netflix wanted to use When Dimple Met Rishi as a foundation to build an Indian version of the teen show in the vein of Sex Education, Never Have I Ever, Julie and the Phantoms, Derry Girls, or even Aşk 101(Love 101). The show is filled with stereotypical characters and tropes that you would find in most teen dramas from the jock, bully/social media influencer, the token lesbian, the girl who is playing at being rich when she isn’t, a love triangle, the list continues.
Poulomi Das in her review of Mismatched argued that while the writers of Mismatched might have been trying to copy something of shows like Sex Education or Never Have I Ever, Mismatched does not have the same “emotional depth or narrative agility” as those shows. The lack could be attributed to the lack of episodes (Mismatched had 6 episodes in comparison to Never Have I Ever’s 10) or time restraint (Sex Education was about 45 minutes, and Mistmached was about 30 ). It could also be attributed to the writers being too ambitious and adding to many story arcs to carefully cover in the six episodes. Many things could be attributed to a lack of emotional depth and narrative agility.
However, I would argue the trouble began when the folks at Netflix decided to take When Dimple Met Rishi out of its original context and setting and transplant it into India. Based on various interviews, when Menon created her story she carefully thought about certain aspects of the narrative in orders bring proper thought, nuance, and emotional depth into the Indian-American identity. However, these elements are lost in the Indian setting and the emotional depth ceases to exist. For example, in both the show and the book, Rishi draws an original comic book character. In the book, he eventually cosplays as this character at a comic con.
The character, Aditya the Sungod, is a superhero that Rishi creates based on Hanuman, a Hindu God. Rishi drawing the character and eventually cosplaying as him is important because it shows Rishi being proud of his culture and religion, depicting Menon’s desire to show the Indian culture in a positive light. However, in Mismatched Aditya the Sungod is replaced with a generic looking superhero and all meaning, depth, about navigating the Indian and American conversation is completely lost. Additionally, having Rishi be proud of his religion and culture makes little sense in the Indian context, because it is already an integral part of Indian culture.
In Das’s review, she described the Mismatched as a “wasted opportunity”. For me, this is largely due to Netflix’s decision to conflate the Indian identity with the diaspora. Mismatched could have been a show that was added to Netflix growing list of content that deals with the diasporic identity. By stripping the show of its Indian-American roots, a lot of emotional depth is lost and we are left with a show that is just a pale replicate of many other teen dramas that have come before it.
The Ghost Bride and the Lost Peranakan Culture
The Ghost Bride is perhaps one of the most famous novels to come out of Malaysia. Written by Malaysian-Chinese author Yangsze Choo, the book is about a young woman living in colonial Malaysia who receives a proposal that would help her family rise out of poverty. She must become a ghost bride and marry the deceased son of a wealthy family. The young woman finds herself being drawn to another world, the Chinese afterlife, that she must escape before being lost in the ghost world forever.
The setting of The Ghost Bride, Malaysia, is very important and shapes the overall narrative and characters. Malaysia is a multi-cultural country that is “divided along local ethnic lines”. The largest of these ethnic groups is the Malay population, followed by the Chinese-Malaysian population and the Indian-Malaysian population. Due to the way that Malaysia is structured, there has been a certain lack of cultural assimilation of ethnic minorities, which have allowed Malaysia to grow to be a multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multilingual society.
Specifically, the novel is set in Malacca, a port city in Malaysia that in the words of Choo has a “fascinating past, especially since it changed hands so often.” The main character in The Ghost Bride is Peranakan or Baba-Nyonya, a “historical immigrant group that assimilated with the indigenous culture of Malaya or Indonesia”. Most people that claim Peranakan culture in Malaysia are of Chinese descent who married local women and adopted their culture. The result is a Malay-Influenced Chinese identity that is distinct from other Chinese immigrants in Malaysia.
Choo did not choose to set her story in Malacca or make her characters Peranakan on a whim. In various interviews, she has explained that she set the novel in Malacca because her Uncle lived there and that she visited the Peranakan Museum in Singapore for research. Furthermore, in her notes, Choo explains that the Chinese immigrants in Malacca at the time mostly spoke dialects like Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese. Thus, “Choo resisted using the pinyin Mandarin Romanisation system for their names”.
However, the Netflix adaption of the series fails to depict this reality. The adaption of the book was rolled out when Netflix announced its first three Original Taiwanese Productions. These shows were all filmed in Mandarin Chinese. The Ghost-Bride is a Taiwanese-Malaysian Production. The casting decisions for the main characters reflect this because of four main characters in the show, two are Taiwanese, one is Chinese, with only of the actors being Malaysian-Chinese.
When the directors of The Ghost Bride was asked about the choice to film the show in Mandarin (instead of English, seeing the book was written in English, or one of the other Chinese Dialects), they explained the decision was made to “cast a much wider net globally in terms of acceptance.”
However, as Karim Raslan of the “South China Morning Post” points out “language is political and will be politicised”. He explains that while the choice to film the series in Mandarin might appeal commercially, the “homogenisation” of Chinese culture forces the show to suffer. The Ghost Bride is stripped of an authentic Malaysian narrative that is characterised by the uniqueness of the hybridity of culture, faith, and language found in colonial Malacca. As Raslan points out the Peranakan experience is to rebuke the idea the Chinese culture is monolithic, to film the show in Mandarin and to cast non – Malaysian actors are to against that idea completely.
Conclusion
Netflix is a mammoth of a streaming service that is constantly expanding its library of original content and the countries where content is produced. It is a streaming service that seems to understand the importance of representing certain underrepresented communities. Yet, these ideas are not present when it comes to their adaptations of The Ghost Bride and When Dimple Met Rishi. The choice to appeal to the wider audience/market as found in The Ghost Bride, to conflate the diasporic identity with the national one as found in Mismatched, to cast no Koreans actresses in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, shows that Netflix still has a long way to go in understanding the diaspora.
ERICA TALKS SH*T 