Brown Girls In The Ring

With shows like Bridgerton 2, Never Have I Ever and Ms Marvel, South Asian women are beginning to own their power... or, in one case, superpower

- Anjuly Mathai

Twenty years ago, when Parminder Nagra played the role of an immigrant football junkie and a wannabe Beckham groupie in the film, Bend It Like Beckham (2002), she did not just kick a ball, she kicked some serious butt. When she balances a cauliflower on her knee or bends the ball behind a row of laundry, you can almost feel the scene swelling with the pride of thousands of invisible South Asian immigrant girls, with dreams of their own. As she smashes the ball into the net in the final match, the whole South Asian fraternity scored a collective goal. Or so they thought.

Many South Asian actors hoped Nagra would be their ticket out of anonymity. Sadly, they were wrong. As Snigdha Sur points out in an incisive piece in Juggernaut, it was not Nagra that the film turned into an overnight star, but her white co-stars Keira Knightley and Jonathan Rhys. According to the piece, Knightley is today worth $80 million versus Nagra's $4 million. While Knightley went on to star in one of the most famous franchises of all time, Pirates of the Caribbean, Nagra was relegated to wearing period petticoats and making googly eyes at Anne Hathaway as her best friend in Ella Enchanted-a blah role that completely undermined her badassery.

Cut to 20 years later. Period petticoats on South Asian women are in, thanks to Bridgerton 2's Kate Sharma, played by a brilliant Simone Ashley. Unlike Nagra in Ella Enchanted, Sharma is all sass, sex appeal and biting repartees. But here is the biggest difference: She is the one who gets the man in the end. In other words, she is the star of the show, the belle of the ball.

Cue, applause.