Kamala Khan, the Pakistani-American superhero from New Jersey, first made her appearance in the Captain Marvel comic books back in 2015. A diehard Captain Marvel fan, Kamala is an “Inhuman polymorph,” who grows up not knowing her superpowers till she decides to sneak out and attend AvengerCon one night. Once aware of her powers, she sets out to save people and help those in need. This year, actor Iman Vellani plays Kamla Khan in the Disney+ TV series Ms Marvel, which has been lauded for its nuanced portrayal of South Asian – specifically Muslim, Pakistani – life in America.
The series starts off in New Jersey and then, through the winding bazaars of Karachi and empty hallways of an American high school, takes us through Kamala’s journey of finding and getting used to her superpowers. It does so by leaning into South Asian folklore surrounding djinns and creating a multiverse that incorporates (seamlessly) elements of our culture that make it recognisable and, therefore, accessible. Apart from djinns, it talks about the 1947 Partition, of parathas, of Rumi’s poetry, and more.
“I think Ms. Marvel is fantastic! The story is nuanced and touches on topics that, even within the South Asian community, don't get discussed enough,” says another “superhero” actor Kausar Mohammed who plays Dr Meena Dhawan/Fast Track in the TV series The Flash, which is based on DC characters.
“I am a big sci-fi fan so it was always a dream to be in this action/superhero world. So often our narratives as South Asian, Muslim, or Queer folks are told only through a lens of trauma. Humanising ourselves by centring joy, that to me is an act of revolution that is central to collective liberation,” she says. One South Asian superhero watching another, Mohammed “felt emotional, thinking how different my Pakistani Muslim younger self might have grown up knowing that someone like me could be a superhero...on TV!”
Representation, in all its nuances, is something most reviews of Ms Marvel are noting – finally a welcome change from the strange “Indian” accents and head bobs, a departure from the awkward male nerds who try and fail to impress white women.
When I speak to 12-year-old artist Yamuna, who lives in Los Angeles, about the show, she says, “My favourite thing about the show, firstly, is that she is a girl. She's a South Asian girl and they don’t just say that. They show it in various small and important ways – in what she wears, what she wants, what she does at home with her parents. All of that.”
Opening Young South Asians Up to Their Own Culture
Many first generation South Asian-Americans, like Yamuna, live a life where their South Asian selves and their American selves are segregated and divided. Her mother, filmmaker Terrie Samundra who made the 2020 horror film Kaali Khuhi, tells me that Yamuna is a student of Bharatanatyam but that’s a part of her that is separate from her average American LA middle schooler self.
“But I feel I can talk about it more openly now. My (non-South Asian) friends love Ms Marvel and I feel like now they’ll love to know more about my culture too,” adds Yamuna who, with her mother, is working on a comic book about ageism and class in society. She also adds that at least two of her friends will be dressing up as Kamala Khan for Halloween this year.
Samundra notes how rare it is to see South Asian coming-of-age stories on TV: “It’s mostly just stories that mimic what will happen when one grows up; they either talk of marriage or one’s relationship to men or the family. But this is pure fun, imaginative play, and all of that presented in very nuanced layers.”
The show, she says, is a way to discuss Partition with her daughter and her friends. “I got to tell them about my uncle who, as a little boy, ran across the Punjab border. I told them it was a living history that affects so many of our families still. I showed them a map, and pointed out Punjab. They were super interested and open to learning.”
As much as Ms Marvel, with its extremely stylised storytelling, entertains its young and older viewers, it piques the interest of younger South Asians and opens them up to their own culture. This is an aspect film producer Dureyshevar and her husband Malik Arshad deeply appreciate about the show. Their son Agni (6) was quick to ask his parents about the practice of wazu after he saw Kamala Khan and her friend Nakia wash up before entering their mosque.
“I was taught how to do wazu when I was three,” says Arshad, “But hadn’t gotten around to teaching my son. Something so ingrained in my psyche was something that was unknown to him. So I told him what wazu is. And then he asked me about Bakri Eid and to teach him the namaz.”
Dureyshevar adds, “I think it's really important to teach them about the culture. Because we are not practising these things ourselves, we don’t teach them these things in an authoritarian structured way. But I want them to know, so shows like Ms Marvel actually help me do that.”
Agni, on the other hand, is really appreciative of how Kamala is “secretly” a superhero. “It’s a rule,” he says, “You are not supposed to talk about it in the beginning. I like that she follows the rules.”
'Humanising the Image of Being Pakistani'
Arshad, who still has family in Karachi, is relieved to see a depiction of the city, outside of the cliches of crime, dirt, and grime that western depictions of South Asian cities resort to. He recalls Kumail Nanjiani talking about Call of Duty’s depiction of Karachi: “You know how the shoelaces bob when someone runs? They got that right. But they showed the shop signs in Karachi written in Arabic.”
“It just shows a lack of care,” he continues, “Whereas with Ms Marvel, they're trying very hard to get the details right.” Pakistani-American filmmaker Iram Parveen Bilal whose film I'll Meet You There premiered at SXSW 2020 also brings attention to the specific recognition and details that Ms Marvel champions.
“Whilst Ms Marvel reaches for an important first of an on-screen female Muslim superhero,” she says, “What it does particularly well, is humanise and shade the image of being Pakistani, by celebrating the motherland’s complex history and by texturising the cultural fabric of her people.”
Directed by filmmakers who are (or are culturally closer to) Kamala’s people – Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah, Meera Menon, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy – and written by Bisha K Ali, the production design for Ms Marvel has a keen eye for the smallest details.
Be it the floral printed dohar that Kamala uses in Karachi or the cardboard carton for hard-boiled toffee her mother repurposes to carry clothes, every bit of the set seems real and extensions of our own homes within South Asia or in the diaspora. Ms Marvel stands out because this level of deep, intentional mirroring of life is rare, and it doesn’t come from having just South Asian actors on screen.
As Samundra points out, it depends on who is writing the screenplay, who is holding the camera, and so on.
If one is to believe that American TV is having a “South Asian moment,” one has to acknowledge that it is a result of the years of effort that women like Samundra, Bilal, Dureyshevar, and their colleagues, have put into knocking at doors.
“Let's make it a movement, not a moment! The South Asian diaspora is so culturally vast and beautiful. I can't wait to see more stories that speak specifically to people’s South Asian experiences – from Mindy Kaling showing the Tamil experience to Ms Marvel diving into the Pakistani Muslim experience,” exclaims Mohammed.
Future generations are growing up with on-screen superheroes we didn’t have and one hopes that this is how (as Bilal puts it) they “reap the true benefits of universal empathy.”
Smriti Mundhra, who directed the Oscar-nominated St Louis Superman and Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking, agrees. “Every parent’s hope is that the things we fight for, our children can take for granted. Ms Marvel and Kamala Khan give me hope that my daughter will never have to think about why ‘representation matters,’ because she will see herself in multitudes across mainstream media and pop culture, and my son will never know a world that isn’t run by confident, complex and nuanced brown women. We are the global majority, after all,” she says.
'Want Over-Representation'
Surina Jindal, who starred in Hot Mess Holiday, a South Asian intervention within the American traditional holiday movie format, is very happy with shows like Ms Marvel that break the idea of South Asians being a monolith. She has worked as a producer, actor, director, and a development executive, and her work pushes for diversity down the entire pipeline that creates TV shows and films.
The act of seeing one’s life being recognised in popular culture, is an act of feeling accepted and acknowledged. “Representation literally has the power to change lives,” says Kausar Mohammed, and its authenticity can only emerge from a place of intentional diversity.
Samundra weighs in, “What we are seeing with Ms Marvel is a change in the fabric, the DNA of our industry. In my politics and work, I have to ask what's happening in the writers room, what is the lens, and who is telling that story?”
With this show, she feels, there is a far more nuanced approach to concepts of diversity and representation that have become buzzwords within the industry. But it is long overdue.
“In all the hospitals I've been to in the last five years,” says Arshad, “Not one doctor was an American-born white man, but if you look at Grey’s Anatomy, you won’t get that idea. What is the point of a representation that doesn’t reflect reality?” This is something that is echoed in what Mohammed tells me: “What I want the future to be is over-representation.”
“When I joined the Directors Guild of America in 1997,” says Dureyshevar, “I was one of the first Indians there. The number has gone up now, so yes things are changing but we have a long way to go, really.”
For Jindal, the mandates for diversity that bodies like DGA put forth are great but she looks forward to a day when these bodies are diverse naturally. “We want to see ourselves on every corner,” she says, “And see ourselves for a while. It’s good we are gaining an entry but there is also something to be done about how we can keep staying in this industry and sustaining ourselves and our art.”
The danger of making representation tokenistic is that countries with billions of people are expected to be satisfied with one show – like Ms Marvel – and stop demanding more representation.
“Both Yamuna and I care very much about class and caste issues, and there are still all those stories that we are yet to hear and see,” Samundra says, “So I'm hoping as Yamuna gets older, those become more normalised and diversity becomes more diverse.” And as Agni reminds me, “Kamala Khan still needs to learn so much from Iron Spider. And while I like that she is from Karachi, there are still no superheroes from Bombay.”
Real representation would only mean something the day we can add a “yet” to that, and mean it.
(Bedatri Datta Choudhury is a culture journalist who grew up between Calcutta and New Delhi, and is now based in New York. She is presently managing editor of 'Documentary' magazine.)
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