It was clear during the first season of Bridgerton – which reigned over prime pandemic Netflix last year – that creator Shonda Rhimes was taking full creative liberty over Regency-era dramas. There were acoustic Ariana Grande covers, a Black queen of England, and other perfect anachronisms to accompany a love story so lusty, its sex scenes were analysed and deconstructed in national media for weeks after its debut.
The second season, meanwhile, presents a new family to simultaneously scrutinise and stan: the Sharmas. The chaotic, beautiful and historically/culturally inaccurate telling of this Indian family in the early 19th century is the exact spin that I needed in a series that so brutally decided that keeping Daphne and not Regé-Jean Page’s Duke around was morally acceptable.
The Sharmas – Mary (Shelley Conn) and her daughters, Kate (Simone Ashley) and Edwina (Charithra Chandran) – enter the screen as British nobility who are outsiders to society. Mary (of some sort of vague Indian heritage) married an Indian clerk beneath her family’s station and moved with him to India, away from her parents’ malignant gaze. Kate is the clerk’s daughter from a previous relationship. But after his death, the three women come back to London with their hopes hinged on Edwina, the youngest, finding a rich English suitor.
What ensues is the dramatic lovechild of Jane Austen and Karan Johar. There are stolen glances, forbidden affairs, gold-digging men and women, some on-brand steamy scenes and many hidden secrets. But the most delightful part to me was how Rhimes and her scriptwriters have played with this often fraught idea of representation.
For any person-in-the-know it is clear that the Sharma family does not fit neatly into a south Asian/Indian formula. Their last name is upper-caste north Indian, but Kate and Edwina call their father Appa, the Tamil name. There is a pre-wedding haldi ceremony. The family speaks Marathi and Hindustani, which could align with their Bombay upbringing, but Kate calls Edwina “bon”, a Bengali word for sister, which she pronounces like “bon-bon”. Kate disdains English tea, opting instead for some version of chai, which she makes with pour-over hot water. In short: the whole thing is a pan-Indian cluster that is delightfully and wonderfully nonsensical.
I believe firmly that this was on purpose. It would take one Google to know that some of these decisions don’t necessarily make sense. But instead of attempting to force authenticity into a plotline and world that requires suspended imagination in the first place, we get to enjoy mainstream diversity and frivolity at the same time. We are offered a romantic, sugar-coated world through the eyes of Lady Whistledown, while still having moments of connection – Kate’s desire to move back to Bombay, for example, forever one of the best cities in the world.
I’ll admit that in the past I’ve been a purist. Years of growing up around few people that looked like me – or being harassed in post-9/11 Florida – have made me cringe when the first south Asians trickling on screen were pigeonholed or whitewashed, or simply seemed off. But at this stage of reckoning with big-I identity and big-R representation, this is a sign of something new. Something that doesn’t require pandering or assuaging a monolithic community that doesn’t actually exist, except to white people. Instead it’s beautiful brown women on a screen, acting out a fantasy which dabbles in feminism, antiracism and classism.
That doesn’t, of course, mean that colorism and racism don’t exist. In interviews, the actors playing Kate and Edwina have expressed pride in what they’ve brought to the series as well as the racist harassment received on social media. The latest Teen Vogue cover star, Chandran talks about being derided for her “dark” skin, even in her own family. And Ashley said she attempts to take both “culturally specific roles and non-culturally specific roles” to avoid being typecast in the industry.
To that end, the Sharma family embodies a little bit of both. In doing so, it allows for a much greater spectrum of both frustration and delight for the brown audience. And that fits for a show that acknowledges one of life’s most constant truths: kabhi khushi, kabhie gham.
• Join Bridgerton author Julia Quinn for a Guardian Live online event on Thursday 21 April. Book tickets here.
