For Whom We Write

When I was in India over the summer, I found the elusive free time that I don’t usually get in the U.S. Every night, in my quiet bedroom, I chose a new series or film to indulge in. One such series was Bard of Blood (BoB) on Netflix. Starring the talented but often underutilized Emraan Hashmi, it is a 2019 story about an ex-communicated RAW agent, who now teaches Shakespeare in college. Hence the title. 

I began watching it in the same spirit I watch all spy thrillers, something to get lost in without bothering the brain cells too much. But this particular series awakened the writer in me, as I watched each scene unfold. The theorist inside me began dissecting and analyzing the aspects of storytelling as I reveled in the series with an interest that transcended its thriller elements. 

The first thing that captured my attention was the depiction of the Afghani and Balochi landscapes. It is true that the series was shot neither in Afghanistan nor Balochistan, but rather in Leh, Ladakh, and Rajasthan. The rest of the set was created in a studio in Mumbai. That’s beside the point. The main point I am trying to make is this: How did the director choose to portray the land in South Asia?

We all have seen films and series made in the West that depict the non-Western world in very specific ways. When was the last time you saw a film about Afghanistan that actually captured the beauty of the land, rather than depicting valorously brave U.S. soldiers braving “uninhabitable” conditions and “barbaric” people there?  

But the Afghanistan portrayed in Bard of Blood, despite its focus on terrorism and politics, is beautiful. The kind described in the song, “Ae mere pyare watan” in the 1961 film Kabuliwala, one that matches the lyrical description by Khaled Hosseini in his books. 

This brings me to an important point in storytelling. Often, and more regularly these days, we have emphasized the need for diverse stories. Stories featuring peoples of different ethnicities, races, colors, religions, sexualities, genders, nationalities. But what gets lost in this noise is this: For whom are these diverse stories being told? In other words, when a “diverse” writer pens a story with a “diverse” central character, is it enough? I argue not. The important missing piece is, for whom is the story being told. Using BoB as an example again, when South Asians tell stories for their own consumption, the tone of storytelling is quite different. 

Another instance in BoB illustrates my point. Having lived in India, the largest power in the South Asian region, and in the U.S., a superpower by all accounts, how often have we read about or seen Muslim women being portrayed as agents of their own will? Very often, their identities are depicted as subsumed within their religious beliefs or political affiliations. BoB projects a strong, smart, erudite, outgoing Muslim woman, who is not a token character but a central figure in the story. She is English-educated and despite her being in the war-torn Balochi region, she’s out and about, helping her people and rallying for them. She is the daughter of the leader of the Balochi freedom movement, but unlike stereotypical descriptions found in the West, she is unafraid--of her father, her husband, and her brother who later assumes the role of the leader of the movement. This kind of agency is absolutely impossible to see in stories that emerge outside the region. She falls in love with a man she believes is a Pakistani journalist (and thus from the wrong side for all intents and purposes), yet unflinchingly introduces him to her father. This character was created so strong and powerful, that it overtook the lead female actor who is an Indian spy in her grit and agency. I am sure you can feel the passion in my words as I describe her. It is my conviction that such a character would not have been possible if the story were being told by someone outside the SA region, or for those outside the SA region. 

When a story is geared for consumption by an audience that is alienated from the nuances of a culture, it risks playing into stereotyped characters and situations. At best, these stereotypes are used to escape explaining the diversity in the cultures and the region itself. At worst, it is a lazy trope that reduces all individuality and agency of the people to a singular typecast character for lack of understanding of the region. 

This is exactly why I began writing fiction. Who tells the story matters, and I was ready to take on that herculean task, but more importantly for me, who my audience is matters even more. My writing does not seek to make my culture or people palatable to a foreign audience. My writing seeks to bring joy to my people by showing the diversity and complexity of our cultures and peoples. I write South Asian characters for South Asian people, similar in spirit to Ms. Marvel or the more recent, American Born Chinese.

I am not interested in suggesting that we now have upper-class/rich immigrants so the West needs to look at us differently. I am not interested in saying hey look, not all Indians run a convenience store, because that argument itself is classist as hell. I am not interested in making our immigrant status more palatable to the West: we might be brown, but not all brown people are poor or “low-cultured.” I am not interested in suggesting that whatever messed-up customs and traditions we had are all in the past, we are now well-traveled and enlightened. 

I am here to say, yes we are messed up but it’s our mess. We live in our messes and find joy in them, in our brown skins, and qualms about casteism, about racial disparity even as we claim to have class privilege. We stake claim over seats at Harvard and Stanford while trying to stave off racist white privilege that seeks to show us our place. 

I want to tell stories about my people to my people. Great storytelling involves finding joy, and sorrow, and heartaches, and triumphs on our own terms, not on the conditions defined for us by a certain canon that rules every genre. I am here to bend genres into giving us the stories that we want, and so richly deserve. I want to write about being happy on our own terms, and this is why it matters for whom the story is written.