Lower-castes are missing from Indian web series

Acase study conducted by a popular Instagram page has revealed some interesting findings on account of web series produced in India. The post shared by Andheri West Sh*t Posting is a division of lead character surnames from 50 web shows like The Family Man, Mirzapur, Sacred Games, and Paatal Lok among others. It states that the surnames were identified based on Central Government’s List of OBCs STs and Scs. The research revealed that 56.78% of the total characters (67 out of 111) were named after Upper Caste surnames when their population is 30.8% in India according to NSSO 2004 (Overrepresentation by +184.35%).

Meanwhile, 5.08% of the total characters (Only 6 out of 111) were named after Lower Caste surnames when their population is 69.3% in India according to NSSO 2004 (Underrepresentation by -92.67%). The post received a reply from ‘Band Baaja Baaraat’ producer Nikhil Taneja. The film starred Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma.

Reacting to the representation of caste he said, “This is great work. I produced Bang Baaja Baaraat back in 2015 and while we tried to be representative in gender and sexuality across the shows, we made at YFilms both on and off screen, we certainly could have done a lot better in the character representations on screen. Going to do better and be conscious of this now, thank you.”

—FPJ Web Desk