"Indians on TV" Cultural Analysis

Cultural Analysis: Master of None

I chose to do my cultural analysis on an episode of Aziz Ansari’s television show, Master of None. The show is one of the first TV shows to feature Asian-Americans as the main characters. Additionally, it has a very diverse cast in general. The “Indians on TV” episode is about how the only roles for Indian actors are stereotypical immigrants-with-an-accent background characters, and how actual Indian actors feel about this issue. The Indians on TV episode of Aziz Ansari’s TV show, Master of None, presents a real and true narrative of Asian-Americans’, specifically Indian-Americans’, lives, by working to humanize them, breaking stereotypes, and addressing modern struggles Indian/Asian- Americans go through today.

While Master of None as a whole, works to break stereotypes held against many other minorities, the episode I chose to talk about only focuses on indian-americans. Indians on TV works to break stereotypes about indian-americans by showing that the stereotyped indian characters on TV do not in any way represent all of the indian american community, and that the people playing those characters are really putting on an act. The main characters, dev and ravi, are two young american men have to play immigrants with heavy accents, even though they have been living in the us their whole lives.

Indians on TV works to humanize the characters by making them more than just a stereotype. THis is shown most with the main characters dev and ravi, because they are such well-rounded characters that you cannot just think of them as a stereotype. And even more than this, when an indian character is not an exaggerated stereotype, it is groundbreaking. Watching the show makes you realize that seeing “normal” american Indians is actually something never seen before. Aziz Ansari shows his minority characters as “normal,” which is pretty much never seen on TV, and presents a different type of indian american-, other than the very stereotypical accented geeky characters on TV.