When I first saw Dev Patel, I didn't think he'd be a star. Like many other Americans, I watched him nine years ago in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. (I wouldn't come across his funny, sweet work in the U.K. series Skins until much later.) The film was a trainwreck. It was steeped in colonial attitudes about India, solipsistically rendered in its fetishization of poverty, hewing to a staid narrative straight from a ‘40s-era weepie. In other words, it made for an ideal Best Picture winner.
You could attribute half of my reaction to Patel to the fact that I was unimpressed by his actual acting. As the film’s lead, he was unable to lift it above its neoliberal conceit: charting an impoverished boy’s ascent through the ranks of Indian society thanks to a bit of capitalistic serendipity. The other half owed itself to a more general hopelessness regarding a South Asian actor’s chance at even contending for stardom. I consider that cynicism hard-earned. After all, this was back in 2008, when the landscape for actors of South Asian descent, such as Patel, was even more barren than it is now. It had been two years since Kal Penn starred in Mira Nair’s somber drama The Namesake, though the role that stuck to his name was that of the stoner Kumar of the Harold & Kumar comedy franchise. And it was still a year before we’d know Aziz Ansari’s name through his appealing, borderline-slapstick supporting role on Parks & Recreation (and his cult-favorite stand-up specials). Apart from that, South Asian men were few and far between in cinema and on television. Naveen Andrews in Lost or Sendhil Ramamurthy in Heroes — both as supporting roles — was all we could really get.
There is virtually nowhere for South Asian men to get the fibrous, textured leading roles often written for, and given to, white actors of equal or lesser talent.
None had reached the level of prestige enjoyed by Ben Kingsley, the half-Indian man born Krishna Banji who became a star (and won an Oscar) for playing Gandhi in the 1982 Richard Attenborough film of the same name. Kingsley, whose mother was white, could easily pass, which is perhaps why he’s been able to play a variety of white roles throughout his career; his skin color isn’t as debilitating a handicap as it is for people who are more visibly South Asian. As far as South Asian actors go, I thought of Kingsley as an exception to a widely held rule: Outside of Bollywood and other regional industries, there is virtually nowhere for South Asian men to get the fibrous, textured leading roles often written for, and given to, white actors of equal or lesser talent.
Consider a recent string of tweets from Penn, which brought this truth to the fore once again. He detailed a number of projects for which he’d auditioned in the early aughts, when he was first starting out. The roles, which ranged from snake charmers to fire eaters and almost always included a joke at the expense of South Asian-sounding names, seem ripped from Rudyard Kipling’s playbook. To say they were tokenizing is an understatement; they suggested that Hollywood hadn’t evolved beyond 1968, when Peter Sellers donned brownface and adopted an accent to play an Indian man in The Party. The burden still fell on South Asian actors to transcend the stereotypes written for them, to render such characters with a nuance that didn’t exist on the page.
Has this changed? Well, for one, the very fact that a brown (male) actor with heritage can speak out against stereotyping without fear of being shamed into submission and silence is, I guess, a small miracle in itself. But Penn’s thread highlights the persistence of the problem at hand, even now: Belonging to this demographic is a hindrance in the entertainment industry, as it has been for years. Nearly two years ago, Vulture proclaimed that “South Asian actors are all over TV this year,” using Priyanka Chopra’s lead role in Quantico as an entrypoint into showcasing the number of other South Asian actors and actresses now working on television, from The Mindy Project’s Mindy Kaling to New Girl’s Hannah Simone. (I’d argue that women like Chopra, Kaling, and Simone face a different, though also noxious, set of barriers than the ones South Asian men battle in the entertainment industry. As women, they’re forced to reckon with garden variety sexism that plagues the industry in addition to the handicap of their brownness.) Still, the piece filled me with unease. Spotlighting the work of actors such as Kumail Nanjiani and Avan Jogia was well and good. But should slow, incremental progress of this sort be heralded as an achievement?
Claims of progress were sung once more last year when Aziz Ansari was widely celebrated for being the first South Asian actor ever nominated for a lead acting Emmy, for his Netflix series Master of None. To some, the nomination conveyed a positive step forward. To me, it sent a loud statement: The best roles for South Asian actors exist in our minds. If we possess the authorial power to bring them to the page, we should follow through on that impulse, because we can’t depend on anyone else to do it for us. Ansari has been willfully outspoken when writing about this very point; it also serves as the inspiration of a major plotline on Master of None. When he wasn’t, despite his success, offered a viable romantic lead by any screenwriter or studio, he had to write one for himself.
Ultimately, the most hope and potential for change lies outside existing writers rooms, and in the imaginations of people like Penn and Ansari, who can afford to be candid about the challenges they face. I also think of Riz Ahmed, the British-Pakistani actor who seems poised to become one of his generation’s major stars. HBO’s The Night Of has so far garnered him the most acclaim of his career, and deservedly. Ahmed plays his role beautifully, mapping his character’s shift from dutiful, obedient son of Pakistani immigrants to debilitated drug addict with gradual, tender precision. The miniseries is not without its problems; among them, it has rightly been criticized for painting a world in which “the chief agents of Islamophobia are black men.” But the thrust of its premise — centered on an innocent young Pakistani-American’s implication in a murder he didn’t commit — speaks to a reality so many South Asian men face in the current cultural landscape: Our bodies are coded as threats, and the shaky ground we find ourselves on as a result can have life-altering consequences.
It feels like an increasingly precarious time for us to merely exist in public in the West. The recent spate of xenophobic, garishly violent crimes primarily leveled against South Asian men in the U.S. urges the necessity of broadening conversations about representation. Consider Ahmed’s piece for The Guardian last year, in which he links the routine harassment he receives while traveling to the prejudices he faces when being cast. Or look to a speech he gave before the U.K. Parliament this month that makes clear the existence of a pipeline between structural lack of representation and violence. “If we fail to represent, we are in danger of losing people to extremism,” he told the Parliament. Whether you agree with this conclusion, the underlying problem Ahmed highlights is a cogent one: A representational vacuum can lead to a profound, gangrenous sense of alienation.
It’s a feeling I’ve come to know all too well, though I’m beginning to harbor cautious optimism that it’ll change for coming generations. Nine years after Slumdog, I’m glad to know I was dead wrong in my conjecture about Patel’s stardom. Following that film, I suffered through 2011’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, watching him bob his head as he played the subservient role of a hotel worker catering to British geriatrics on furlough.
With last year’s Lion, Patel became the second South Asian actor ever to be nominated for a competitive acting Oscar. (The first was the aforementioned Kingsley, more than 30 years ago.) That it has taken this long is stupefying. The film, about a young Indian adoptee who finds his way to his home village from Tasmania to Madhya Pradesh at age 30, seemed to provide a real breakout role for Patel in a way that Slumdog and Marigold couldn’t. His acting floored me, but Lion also suggested a change, a move away from the stereotypical roles he had filled out adequately and indistinguishably enough in previous years.
A representational vacuum can lead to a profound, gangrenous sense of alienation.
Was Patel a beneficiary of the #OscarsSoWhite dialogue, and the resulting expansion of the voter base of the Oscars? Impossible to know. But it is tempting to watch Lion in the specter of our current political reality and celebrate it as a step in the right direction. Like any temptation, this is dangerous, and it forgoes discussion of the work that still needs to be done. For instance, despite being an undeniable lead of his film, Patel was easily campaigned in the Supporting Actor category. That there was nary a whimper of protest signifies that he’s not yet in a position to jockey for the same attention given to some of his peers, who are considered bona fide lead actors. (The decision was not unlike Viola Davis being shoehorned into the Supporting Actress category for Fences, a strategy adopted by a studio likely to ensure her win.)
As an actor, Patel has matured considerably, easing into both his looks and his talents. This is the trajectory afforded to many white actors, but it was a marvel that he was even given the time, opportunity, and space to come grow, rather than having the opportunity curtailed after early failures. Now, roles like the one he had in Marigold seem more justifiable within the larger context of his career: Taking these roles paid his bills, but, looking back, they also allowed him to continue to be part of a conversation. He stayed on our radar, remaining visible to a public that forgets so often and so quickly.
And we’re all better for it. I hope the buzz surrounding Patel materializes into a stardom more concrete than any we’ve seen before with an actor of South Asian descent — that it leads to a rich, rewarding career on screen, for him and for others.
