Hollywood’s BIG BROWN

Present-day tinseltown. Barely-out-of-his-teens Mumbai-born Indian-American actor Sunkrish Bala, cast as the ethnically neutral Steve Murphy, not only kisses the female protagonist of Grey’s Anatomy, he has a one-night stand with her. ABC airs the dalliance on primetime. Not a murmur.

American television, hit by a wave of brown faces, has metamorphosed. For actors of South Asian origin, a whole new raft of opportunities is up for grabs today in US showbiz. “More openings abound now than when I started out here,” says the Punjab-born Kavi Raz. Raz got a start in Hollywood when substantial brown roles were hard to come by. He got his big break on St. Elsewhere. He has since been on shows like NYPD Blue, Chicago Hope and LA Law, besides debuting as director last year with The Gold Bracelet, a film about a Sikh taxi driver struggling to fit into a tension-ridden post-9/11 world.

Kavi Raz’s journey has been one heck of an uphill climb. The current crop of Indian-American actors in Los Angeles and New York, as they steadily gain in numerical strength, are on an infinitely firmer footing. Like 31-year-old Chicago-born actor Sendhil Ramamurthy. Since his star turn as Indian geneticist Mohinder Suresh on the NBC series, Heroes, the San Antonio, Texas native’s fan following has galloped. It is easy to see why. The strapping Ramamurthy has tremendous screen presence. Says Hollywood analyst Gitesh Pandya: “Sendhil has really had a breakout year with Heroes, and I think he has the chops to do smart action thrillers in the future.”

Ramamurthy isn’t of course the solitary Big Brown Hope on the Hollywood horizon. There are a host of others. None of them may be an A-lister yet, but many have succeeded in forcing a significant rewrite of the plot. Some South Asian actors do still end up playing cardboard-cutout terrorists, fresh-off-the-boat cabbies or smarmy 7-Eleven clerks, but that is slowly but steadily becoming an exception. Audiences in the US are now more likely to encounter Indian actors parading across the screen, both big and small, in the garb of brainy, highly educated doctors and mathematicians, reflecting what is an obvious contemporary American reality.

Half-Indian, half-German twenty-something Californian Navi Rawat, for instance, plays mathematician Amita Ramanujan on CBS’ hit series, Numb3rs. The onscreen character represents a crucial breakthrough for her and others of her ilk. It’s her first specifically written ‘Indian’ role. Rawat’s previous appearances on primetime— on the Fox series, 24, and the teen soap, The O.C.—had her playing non-Indian characters. In the former she was the ethnically indeterminate Melanie, while in the latter she played a Hispanic girl, Theresa Diaz. In 2005, she essayed a character aptly named Heroine in the Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Wes Craven-produced horror flick, Feast. Two years earlier, Rawat was cast as the daughter of Ben Kingsley’s Iranian immigrant character in the Oscar-nominated House of Sand and Fog.

Indeed, in the current climate of growing inclusiveness, Indian-American actors seem to be enjoying the best of both worlds. Even as they increasingly land non-ethnic parts, the growing clout of the community and the emergence of desi TV writers have led to a slate of more rounded characters for them to dig their teeth into. “There are more South Asian Americans in this field today than at any other time in history,” says New York-based Ismat Mangla, founder and editor of Nirali online magazine. “Hollywood is now more open to ‘different faces’ than it was before. So the doors will continue to open for South Asian actors.”

A bunch of gifted Indian-American actors are cashing in. Noureen DeWulf, 22, born in NYC to Muslim parents from Pune, was recently seen in a brief but memorable casino scene with Al Pacino in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 13. The leggy, exotically desi stunner is on Maxim magazine’s 2007 Hot 100 list to boot. London-born Bostonian Samrat Chakrabarti, 32, has been on primetime shows like The Sopranos and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. What’s more, he’s even played an all-American character, Will Wozniak, in the ensemble comedy, Sing Now or Forever Hold Your Peace (2006). Kerala-born beauty Kavi Ladnier (real name: Kavitha Ramachandran) and her four-year-old daughter are on a dozen or so different Chevrolet commercials that run across markets in the US. It also certainly helps when Padma Lakshmi hosts Top Chef on Bravo Network, Dr Sanjay Gupta serves as senior medical correspondent on CNN and Kevin Negandhi is a sports anchor on ESPNNews.

Indian faces are everywhere on the American showbiz scene, or are they? Well, not quite. But they are certainly beginning to get there. Chances are that most of these Indian (and part Indian) names will be heard of and feted with even greater regularity in the years ahead. It’s not as if the excruciating hollowness of bindi banter, cabbie chatter and blink-and-you-miss-it 7-Eleven swishes will go away overnight. The visibility of South Asian actors has ironically been enhanced by post-9/11 imperatives, which have led to a proliferation of half-baked West Asian characters in US television shows and films.

So, for some Indian-American actors, it’s still a struggle to find characters that aren’t stereotypical and don’t speak with a thick accent. But a few sturdy souls are out there for parts with greater depth. Says New Yorker Tirlok Malik, actor and line producer: “We need greater visibility, and better, meatier roles.” Ladnier, who guest starred as Mohinder Suresh’s ex-girlfriend on Heroes, is worried that the attempts to vary the canvas are not always salutary, but she adds: “I don’t really care if a role calls for an accent, but it should have depth and reflect a real human being, not a stereotype.”

Paradoxically, these actors are being aided by the fact that the American entertainment industry has begun to work with a wider colour palette. “Things are opening up—very slowly, but it’s definitely happening,” Ramamurthy told USA Today earlier this year.

The writer of that April 8, 2007 newspaper report, Bill Keveney, declared: “After years of relative anonymity, performers of Indian origin are establishing a small but growing presence in TV and film, breaking stereotypes along the way… US viewers are seeing a broader range of performers who trace their roots to the world’s second most populous country.” Kavi Raz, who has been at it longer than anyone else, agrees: “The western mindset is finally moving beyond the stereotypical image of a yogi playing the flute to a dancing cobra. Writers are willing to try new storylines that incorporate South Asian characters.”

“It’s a slow evolution,” argues Mangla. “We’re at a point in history when the children of the first wave of South Asian immigrants are coming into their own.” Second-generation Indian-Americans, part of a community more inclined to throw up doctors, engineers, teachers and traders, are now eyeing non-traditional creative professions like acting, scriptwriting and filmmaking (and not just classical dance and music).

While she asserts that Hollywood is still a hard nut to crack, Mangla agrees that a few of the second-generation actors are starting to “make it”. She adds: “It’s partly because, well, they’re there and they are talented, but also partly because American society—and thus, Hollywood—is increasingly more comfortable with and accepting of South Asians.”

But will we ever be allowed to forget Apu of the long-running cartoon series, The Simpsons? Seems unlikely. All through July, eleven 7-Eleven outlets across the US will operate under the name of Apu’s fictional Springfield convenience store, Kwik-E-Mart, as part of a special promotion for The Simpsons Movie. But things are changing for the better. The older hands in the game—Naveen Andrews, Kal Penn and Parminder Nagra—are still very much in the thick of the action, but they now have rousing company.

Numerous actors of Indian descent have been on network TV and Hollywood films in recent years. The 38-year-old Andrews, born in London but now a resident of Los Angeles, plays a guilt-ridden former Iraqi Republican Guard member on ABC’s Lost. He also had a small role in Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse. Leicester-born Parminder Nagra, 31, is the Brit-Indian medical intern Neela Rasgotra on NBC’s ER. Another Brit import, Ravi Kapoor, was on NBC’s now-discontinued Crossing Jordan, playing a quirky forensic entomologist .

Massachusetts native Mindy Kaling (real name: Vera Chokalingam) not only plays the voluble Kelly Kapoor on the American version of The Office, she’s also a writer and producer of the series. It was her personal involvement that led to a historic first on US primetime television late last year, when an entire episode of the popular NBC sitcom celebrated Diwali. Mumbai-born Aasif Mandvi, who was on CBS’ Jericho and ER, besides the Hugh Grant-Drew Barrymore romantic comedy, Music and Lyrics (2007), is now a mock war correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Kanpur-born Anjul Nigam, who had a lead role in the Fox comedy, The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest (2002), has been on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy.

Nor is that all. New York’s Maulik Pancholy, last seen on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock, has now landed a role in Mike Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks. Adhir Kalyan plays a Pakistani exchange student, Raja Musharraf, who lives with an American family in Wisconsin, on the CW’s Aliens in America. Sunkrish Bala is a soon-to-be-dad on ABC’s Notes from the Underbelly. Sheetal Sheth, raised in New Jersey, has been on NBC’s The Singles Table, besides playing a role in actor-director-writer Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. New Jersey-born Kal Penn, who opened the sluice-gates in 2004 by starring as a stereotype-defying stoner in Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle, appeared on the Fox hit, 24.

Says Ladnier, “There is definitely a buzz, a deep interest in the West right now with South Asians, and there seems to be a growing crossover market for films and television.” Tirlok Malik, formerly of Delhi, agrees: “The trend is here to stay and it will grow stronger as time goes on…” Pandya, editor of boxofficeguru.com, believes that this isn’t a transient phenomenon. “I foresee Indian-American actors growing in clout on network television in the years to come,” he says. “This is not a passing fad like the Macarena. Our community has an extremely strong talent pool, so it’s just a matter of time before power people in Hollywood start seeing them as ‘actors’, not just ‘brown actors’.”

Time was when the writers of St. Elsewhere were hard pressed to conjure up relevant, believable situations for Kavi Raz. He recalls: “The executive producer of the series, Bruce Paltrow (Gwyneth’s father), once called me to his office and voiced his concern that his writers did not know what to write for my character. They had run out of stories.” Awareness of India and Indian culture in the US, he points out, is far more pronounced now.

Ladnier, who made her big screen debut with a Malayalam film, Rajeev Nath’s Janani, in the late 1990s and is now awaiting the release of the NRI-themed Karma Calling and the Billy Bob Thornton-Susan Sarandon starrer, Mr. Woodcock, agrees: “I believe it will get better. I have been in this profession for 12 years and I know it’s already better than it has ever been.” She, however, strikes a note of caution: “Is it good enough? No. I have seen some improvements, but we can’t get comfortable with that fact and just assume it will continue. We need to keep forging ahead.”

Kavi Ladnier has it in her to do just that. So, on available evidence, do the likes of Sendhil Ramamurthy, Samrat Chakrabarti, Navi Rawat and Noureen DeWulf. Go paint the town brown!