Accent is one of the sensitive problems of Hollywood as well as race of characters, even though there are many stars who use English as second languages, they sometimes face problems occurring from their accent, for example, Sofia Vergara who came from Colombia speaks like Spanish English, and she has played a role a girl who cannot speak English as well as native speakers in “Modern family.”In this clip which I attached hereby, she and chairperson talked about her pronunciation. But she doesn’t care about it and had huge success in US’ movie and drama.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztXmcjYGVbw)
Besides her, Mads Mikkelsen who plays Hannibal Lecter was born in Denmark and Audrey Tautou who played Ameri speaks French accent English. However, Indian American in US media are suffered from its accents and stereotypical characters.It is because there are quite few actors and comedians that they cannot overcome bad image, that is to say weird and speak Hinglish, which came from Apu. Indian English is characterized by reading R clearly as “RU” and reading th as “TA” or “DA”. Also, since its speakers ignore the silent letter the pronunciation like “know” and “bomb” has changed.So I think anyone can easily make fun of Indian pronunciation following these rules as Apu’s voice actor, Hank Azaria.
Nowadays, since many Indian American who play active role in Hollywood are second generation, their pronunciation is very clear so that they had not been made fun of by it. Rather than the difference of accent they should have experienced racial joke on the premise of Apu.
“Master of None” from Netflix is a comedy drama depicting such frustration and success of such Indian American.In its fourth episode ”Indians on TV”, Dev an Indian American actors in US, faced to stereotype of Indian characters, such as an engineer, and a store clerk at a convenience store.At the beginning of this story, he challenged the audition of the protagonist of the new drama.Although other Indian actors and he are highly reputed, its producers said that they do not need two Indians out of three protagonists, so he defeated.After that, they welcomed two Indians, however, he offered eventually the role of Indian rather than American. This comedy drama shows these stereotypes still exist and put a problem to audience.
Although this is not American movie, I would like to mention “Slumdog Millionaire(2008).” In this movie, Indians character played almost important parts and they speak very fluent English.And I think this movie proof that Indian films succeed in all over the world even if Indian actors do not express their identities through accent.
As Hari Kondabolu stated in “The Problem with Apu”, the audience is changing with the flow of the times because of emergence of social networking. I think it’s important to transmit from our selves what something we want to see with our own media which we can use anytime and anything we like.We also can create counter hegemony hoping new audience will notice its existence and will be able to raise the standard of revolt against mainstream.
Reference: Like it or not, Hinglish is here to stay (1/12/2009)
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Like-it-or-not-Hinglish-is-here-to-stay/articleshow/3963831.cms