I didn't think representation mattered until I got some. The pride I felt when I saw Priyanka Chopra in an advertisement for her ABC show "Quantico" was immense. Here was the woman who had originally only resided in my sphere of Indianness now on ABC -- the American Broadcast Corporation -- officially part of the mainstream. Chopra's character, Alex (not an Indian name, but we're getting there), is strong, confident, and 100-percent badass. She's also complex, has explicit ties to her Indian heritage, and, most importantly to me, has retained her Indian accent. This accented English, rather than the Marathi of my parents' childhood or the American English of many of my friends, is my mother tongue. Accented vowels and softer consonants characterize my parents' and family friends' English; it's the English I slip into when I'm talking to family. And until "Quantico" and Priyanka Chopra's role, it was something to be fixed.
Representation isn't simply about proving to a group that one day they, too, can be on the screen as I once simplified it to. It's about normalizing the traits that once made us "other." There's no denying that the media has a powerful impact on the way we perceive the members of our society. The people and trends we see reflected around us dictate the status quo. So the minute Priyanka Chopra stepped out of the Bollywood films I used to watch as a child and into the mainstream media of my American adolescence, she made my Indian culture more normal. By diversifying a culture beyond the stereotypes that had been attributed to it, the culture itself gained a legitimacy that it had missed out on before.
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By introducing a character devoid of any of the attributes that for so long seemed to be the only reason to keep Indian actors around -- nerdiness, the button up shirt plus call center combo, a cab -- "Quantico" opened up a door for Indians onto the main stage in every aspect of life. Representation allows us the chance to start moving from "other" to a normalcy that we are not yet afforded. Slowly, it allows things like Indian accents, art forms, and fashion to become less of a sign of overall identity and more parts of the bigger picture. It's still a small door still, sure, but seeing an Indian on television, not defined by her Indianness, is an incredibly important move in making the melting pot a little more comfortable for all of us in it. And I think that's quite the worthy cause.
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