By: Ameena Khan
South Asia consists of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, the Maldives, and Afghanistan. To expect a single film production to accurately represent all of South Asia’s unique cultural identities and communities is unrealistic.
However, what is lacking in South Asian representation isn’t accuracy: It’s seeking liberation, solidarity, and diversity in the stories we share.
“Best of the Best” is a film directed by Lena Khan and co-written by Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam. An American dance and coming-of-age comedy film starring Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia, the film follows two childhood friends as they enter their freshman year of college at the University of California (UCLA) and join their school’s “competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team,” exploring themes of friendship, rivalry, and South Asian diasporic identity in the West.
“We thought [Best of the Best] could be a love letter to this seminal moment where many people from the South Asian community go to college, and they have this coming-of-age experience where not only their culture is celebrated, but a specific homage to Bollywood dance is celebrated,” says Minhaj, according to the Netflix Tudum website.
Yet, there has been a discourse among South Asians about whether “Best of the Best” accurately represents South Asians or not. Especially given its controversial line, “Guys throw themselves at you like you’re the last flight out of Kabul,” referring to the Kabul evacuation and airflow in 2021, following the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s takeover of the capital. This joke at the expense and trauma of many Afghans affected, who classify as South Asian, is inappropriate for “so-called” South Asian representation.
There is another scene in particular from “Best of the Best” that ruffled some feathers.
In this scene, Beta Sigma Eta, a fictional Greek Life at the school, holds a “Blackout with the BIPOCs” event, referring to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. UCLA Agni, the film’s fictional Bollywood dance team, encounters a rival group visiting and intimidating them at the campus event.
As the two dance groups fight, a white student appears and states, “I didn’t pay you to fight. I paid you to dance so the university thinks we’re welcoming to students of color.”
I understood the film’s intentional, satirical humor, poking fun at systemic and institutional racism of universities perpetuated by their students. Yet, instead of confronting the box the South Asian students are placed in by white students, the South Asian characters instead embrace it.
I expected more for a film directed, written, and casted by a predominantly South Asian team.
Durba Mitra is an American historian, author, and professor at Harvard University whose work focuses on feminism and postcolonialism in South Asia, as discussed in her essay revisiting “Mississippi Masala”, the significance in “authoritarian times.”
Directed by Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair and based on a screenplay by Indian screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, “Mississippi Masala” is about the “[…] love story that unfolds in Greenwood, Mississippi, between Mina, daughter of Ugandan Indian exiles and Demetrius, a young Black man, son of a restaurant worker who owns his own small business cleaning carpets in Indian-owned motels,” according to Mitra.
“The film offers a story of how we might nuance our understandings of the new diasporas of South Asian America: how we might empathize with the immigrants who faced xenophobia and antibrown racism, the people crushed under endless labor and the weighty expectations of the Model Minority myth, while also confronting racism and structures of domination within the South Asian diaspora.”
My issue with “Best of the Best” isn’t whether its representation of South Asians is accurate or not, it lies within introducing a surface level understanding and presentation of South Asian identities; reducing our identities rather than challenging the systemic boxes South Asians in the United States both experience and perpetuate.
That is not to say South Asians must be restricted to only tell stories regarding their identity in a political context. Popular television series, such as “Never Have I Ever,” Season 2 of “Bridgerton,” and “Ms. Marvel”, all feature South Asian women protagonists, each with their own unique narrative emphasizing South Asian identity while also engaging in a diversity of narratives, as highlighted in Screenrant. These stories range from Devi Vishwakumar’s high school social struggles and ambitious goals to attend Princeton, Edwina Sharma’s balance of royal duties and pursuit of romantic love, and Kamala Khan’s life as a superhero and fangirl.
Yet, are these stories enough?
“In the current state of our world, confronting society from our perspective as South Asians should require us to interrogate where we sit along the spectrum of power,” Lina Srivastava, a writer for The Conversationalist expresses.
“What is our collective responsibility? Where do we have social power, and where do we use it for good? We need rich, complex stories that explore these questions. We need more than a few of these stories every decade.”
As a Pakistani-American woman, I constantly ask myself: what can we, as South Asians, do better in terms of representing our communities in mainstream American media? What are measures we can take to maintain authenticity in our stories without having to compromise identity in exchange for approval from Western audiences?
The answer lies not only in supporting South Asian creatives, but to engage with the media made by South Asians critically and not being afraid of sharing our honest opinions. We don’t need to strive for accuracy; we need to strive for accountability.