"Thank you, come again." Those four words, spoken in an exaggerated Indian accent, have followed immigrants and Americans of South Asian descent like a bad penny since The Simpsons premiered in 1989. They helped make Apu, the show's tight-fisted convenience store owner, a household name. And they are often repeated to us, with a sly grin or a guffaw, by the same people who are surprised that we speak English in grammatically sound sentences.
Last week brought Indian Americans some relief: Hank Azaria, the white actor who has voiced Apu for 29 seasons, told Stephen Colbert that he is willing to stop playing the character because he now understands why Apu is troubling to the community that he is supposed to represent. "My eyes have been opened," Azaria said. "And I think the most important thing is that we have to listen to South Asian people, Indian people in this country when they talk about what they feel and how they think about this character."
Two cheers for Azaria. Credit for his newfound enlightenment on this issue belongs to comedian Hari Kondabolu, whose 2017 documentary The Problem With Apu is a funny and informative explication of how the character perpetuated ugly stereotypes about South Asians that harm people to this day.
Though The Simpsons has on occasion portrayed Apu and his family with nuance and pathos, the character also encourages the infantilizing of Indian immigrants as simple-minded people who talk in a singsong voice. Even Apu's last name--Nahasapeemapetilon--is presented in a way that invites mockery.
Azaria doesn't control Apu's fate on the show. That responsibility falls to the writers of The Simpsons and the corporate bosses at Fox, the network that airs the show. Going by what the show's creator, Matt Groening, said dismissively about the criticism of Apu--"I think it's a time in our culture where people love to pretend they're offended," he told USA Today--and the show's churlish reaction to Kondabolu's documentary on an episode earlier last month, Apu will probably remain ensconced in the Kwik-E-Mart.
No doubt such an outcome would please the many fans of Apu, some Indian Americans among them, and those who love to rail against "political correctness"--Apu is just a funny fictional character and critics are being overly sensitive, these people often argue.
But for many of us, it is not so easy to dismiss Apu and his accent as a mere joke. It is too often clear that the joke is on us, and even more so on our older relatives. Apu was the only major South Asian character on prime-time TV for many years, helping to define how millions of Americans think Indians, Pakistanis and other people from the subcontinent talk and live.
As with all caricatures, there is some truth to Apu. Many South Asian immigrants, especially those who came in earlier decades, work behind the counters of convenience stores, often because it is the only work they can get. Many of them are parsimonious because they are sending money home or saving up to send their kids to college. They don't always understand American slang and norms and so can come across as bumbling. They cling to customs and religions that they brought with them from the old country because those are their connection to home.
But many aspects of the character reveal Apu to be the brown equivalent of blackface minstrel performances. He comes across as a caricature designed to mock a minority for the entertainment of the majority.
Brownface--or brown-voice, in the case of Azaria and Apu--does not have as long a history as blackface, but there are plenty of examples of it. Azaria has said he was inspired by a performance Peter Sellers gave in the 1968 comedic movie The Party. His face darkened with makeup, Sellers plays an Indian actor who is invited to a Hollywood bash, which he proceeds to wreck. Earlier, Sellers had a cameo as a clueless Indian doctor in the 1962 movie The Road to Hong Kong.
Clearly a lot has changed since Apu entered American living rooms. Mindy Kaling, Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari and Kumail Nanjiani, to name a few rising actors, are regular fixtures on screens big and small. South Asians still face obstacles, but they are in a much better position to offer viewers a necessary corrective to the cramped representation put forward by the creators of Apu.
But keeping Apu on The Simpsons in his current form would be a huge missed opportunity for the show, which on the whole has been one of the most thoughtful voices in American popular culture by addressing issues like immigration, discrimination and the power of big corporations that most network TV shows have studiously avoided.
Groening has said he named Apu after Satyajit Ray's humanist masterpiece The Apu Trilogy, suggesting that he of all people ought to understand why many people find this character so troubling.
Editorial on 05/06/2018