In a conversation with BBC Radio earlier this year, One Day actress Ambika Mod recalled initially turning down the role of Emma Morley before even auditioning, attributing her hesitance to the fact that “you don’t see a lot of brown women on screen being the romantic lead.”
While, yes, we South Asian girls have gotten characters like Devi Vishwakumar from Never Have I Ever and Kate Sharma from Bridgerton in the past few years, the level of representation in Hollywood is still nowhere near what we deserve.
Both of these shows are progressive for television casting in their own ways. However, Mindy Kaling’s stereotypical caricatures and Bridgerton’s fantastical nature just narrowly miss the mark of depicting what it truly means to be a South Asian woman in contemporary society.
One Day, which recently premiered on Netflix this past February, took the world by storm, making fans around the world fall in love with Emma and Dexter (Leo Woodall). I wouldn’t dare spoil the ending for those who haven’t seen it yet, but just know that I’m still not over the final episode — as in, I cried for an hour straight.
There’s no denying that Emma Morley, in this adaptation, is a South Asian woman. Mod herself is Indian and the daughter of immigrant parents.
What’s wonderful about this representation is that Emma’s ethnicity does not completely define her character. There are only a couple of explicit references to her heritage, the first being when Emma tells Dexter that her mother is Hindu, and the second is found in the name of her novel, Nisha Halliday.
Though these explicit mentionings of Emma’s religious and cultural identity are integrated into this adaptation, they don’t confound the story’s overall themes and intentions. By having a young South Asian girl simply existing in London in the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s, One Day achieves something a lot of brown girl representation misses — authenticity.
Yes, it’s true that South Asian girls experience different treatment than their white female counterparts, but this narrative in the media is getting exhausting. Not only does it expose brown girls to this form of social disparity, but it also promotes a level of self-consciousness and self-pity that the community doesn’t need.
PBS found that young students of colour in the U.S. turn to popular culture and Hollywood productions to help situate them in society. If the wrong type of representation exists, not only does it construct harmful stereotypes and generalizations of marginalized groups, but it also defines what box these groups are allowed to exist in.
When these boxes are challenged, individuals in marginalized groups are labelled as “whitewashed” or “Westernized,” which works to usher them back into these same boxes.
Essentially, we cannot exist in the West unless we submit to the distinct othering that these cultures impose on us. Mod even recognizes this, telling the BBC, “Seeing yourself on screen […] informs so much about how we look at ourselves, what we think about ourselves, [and] what we think we deserve.”
In casting Mod as Emma, One Day forcefully challenges the box that defines South Asian women as side characters, comedic relief, or undesirable.
There have been challenges to Mod’s casting, including X (formerly known as Twitter) users complaining about how “unrealistic” it is. But this is merely a reaction to the normalization of type-casting for South Asian roles in Hollywood that help inform people’s perception of brown women in real life.
That is why watching a brown girl like Emma fall in love is so important — it normalizes the desirability of brown women in Western spaces. Like Emma, we can be witty, intelligent, ambitious, and beautiful without having it directly attributed to our ethnicity. These things can co-exist without being seen as detrimental. That is why Emma experiences love and pleasure alongside her heritage rather than in spite of it.
If I could give you only one thing to take away from this adaptation it wouldn’t be how attractive the leads are or how sad it made me, it would be how impactful this casting was not only for South Asian actresses in Hollywood but for South Asian women everywhere.
Mod beautifully closes her interview, triumphantly boasting, “If you believe in magic, it will happen.”