Royal mess: Ishaan Khatter, Bhumi Pednekar’s The Royals objectifies, stereotypes, and disappoints

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But all this hyper-objectification seems insignificant when you compare it to how Sumukhi Suresh’s character Keertana is treated. Keertana is Sophia’s executive assistant, and is constantly kept on her toes by her busy boss. The problem is not casting a plus-sized woman as an executive assistant; it is with the way her character is written and directed on the show. The problem is that we don’t laugh with Keertana or see her point of view. We are expected to laugh at her as she struggles to run behind her boss, or cringe when she makes mistakes and ill-timed comments. There are scenes where her bosses say lines like, “Please don’t mind her”, while talking about her in her presence, or silence her with their looks and comments. At the end of eight episodes, we know nothing about Keertana apart from the fact that she is Sophia’s loyal assistant.

It also reinforces how we perceive plus-sized individuals: as if their appearance justifies the jokes made at their expense. It’s almost like an unspoken visual signifier – see an overweight person on screen, expect them to be funny or be made fun of. The irony is that Sumukhi is an extremely successful stand-up comic, writer, and showrunner who launched her own company a few years ago. The multi-hyphenate artiste was also the writer, creator and protagonist of the Amazon Prime series Pushpavalli, which remains one of digital content’s most clutter-breaking shows. Sumukhi has said in interviews that she created and starred in Pushpavalli, because show business only allows a certain kind of woman to be cast as a main lead. Looks like even today, not much has changed. It’s unfortunate, because in a show written, produced and directed by women, one hoped for more empathy and experimentation in how female characters are written and cast.

The family matriarch played by Zeenat Aman could have been wily and wise, but she is limited to smoking weed, cracking jokes and dressing opulently. Sakshi Tanwar, as the queen mother dabbling in situationships after her husband’s death, gets a much better deal than Ms. Aman. While it’s great to see a middle-aged single woman enjoy casual sex, and navigate her life as a mom and single woman, we get little insight into her backstory or what it must have felt like to be married to a man who wasn’t a husband in any real sense of the word. Perhaps that’s reserved for season two, but it leaves one wanting in season one.

Another troubling feature of the show is that it seems to present homosexuality as a genetic trait that runs in a family. A young woman who is in the closet finds out her father was gay but had to hide his truth because of who he was and the position he held. When she comes out to her brothers, she says, “I wish he had told me his secret, then I would have told him that I am also like him.” There are also hints that Maharaja Yuvnath Singh’s (Milind Soman) grandfather, who adopted an heir, was gay. A historian, Adi Mehta (Luke Kenny), who wants to write a book about kings who adopted their heirs, tells Yuvnath that to protect his name, he will refer to him as Maharaja Maurice. Interestingly, Maurice is the name of a novel by EM Forster, which is about a gay man named Maurice Hall.

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From what a simple Google search could tell me, there are no definitive answers about whether a parent’s sexual orientation has a genetic impact on his/her child’s sexual identity. But Royals doesn’t address this grey area, nor do we pause to see a deeper emotional reaction from the woman who realises that she and her father were both dealing with the same mental turmoil and shame. Maybe it’s beyond the scope of the show’s tone and treatment, or maybe the writing develops cold feet every time things start getting more than skin deep.

My strong reaction to Keertana is perhaps personal, because having your potential and personality reduced to your measurements leaves very deep scars. But watching a big-budget show resort to exhausted stereotypes and token representation to check the massy and modern boxes, is just plain disappointing. After so much conversation about body positivity and ad campaigns asking us to change our definitions of beauty, is this the best we can do? Can we ever associate glamour and sex appeal with bodies that are real and imperfect? Can we stop letting a person’s sexual orientation define his/her character? The Royals is quite like the palace of Morpur on the show — glamorous on the outside, but falling apart on the inside.