San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Expanding ‘Bridgerton’
By including a South Indian family’s story in its second season, the hit Netflix drama explores colonialism in India
In the first episode of the new season of “Bridgerton,” Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley) and the all-knowing Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) have a heartto-heart.
Kate explains that her family has come to London from India so that her younger sister, Edwina, can marry into upper-crust society. To achieve this, she describes raising Edwina and “teaching her twice as much, and watching her work twice as hard, as anyone else.” Lady Danbury gives a knowing nod.
The first “Bridgerton” season was notable for including numerous aristocratic Black characters, such as Lady Danbury, in its sexy, lavish imagining of 19th century London. In the second, the Sharma family is central to the plot, as Anthony (Jonathan Bailey), eldest son of the White Bridgerton family, becomes embroiled in a love triangle with the two Sharma sisters.
Including a South Asian family in Regency society was a way of expanding the show’s “multihued, multiethnic, colorful world,” showrunner Chris Van Dusen said in a recent interview.
As in the first season, the new episodes treat the race of a character as a constituent part of their wider identity. The Sharmas’ cultural heritage is ever-present, brought forth in the colors of their clothing, Kate’s disgust at Britain’s “pitiful excuse for tea,” and passing mentions of India, as well as when, later in the season, we see a traditional pre-wedding Haldi ceremony.
Van Dusen said he wanted the show to be “as authentic as possible, especially when it came to infusing this world with specific details linked to the heritage of this family.” He collaborated with historical consultants and experts to shape the new characters’ backstories, he added.
The “Bridgerton” world may be fictionalized, but including people of Indian descent in a story about Regency-era London is historically accurate. India and England were closely tied at the time: In the 1800s, India was under the exploitative control of the East India Co., a merchant organization, and later the British state. As a colonial power, Britain had troops and administrators stationed in India, controlled the nation’s resources and collected taxes from its people. It follows then that there were flows of people between the two countries.
“We often think of Regency England as filled with conventionally White folks because televisual narratives have depicted the characters in the novels as all White,” said Durba Ghosh, a professor of British colonialism at Cornell University, who offered novels by Regency author Jane Austen as such examples. But these depictions don’t “mean that the people who actually lived in Regency England were all White,” Ghosh added.
Arup Chatterjee, author of “Indians in London,” said that by the end of the 1800s, there would have been thousands of Indian people in London at any given time, both permanent residents and transient populations. It is around the Regency period that Sake Dean Mahomed, a Bengali immigrant, opened the first Indian restaurant in London (today, chicken tikka masala is generally considered Britain’s national dish.)
In “Bridgerton,” Kate and Edwina’s British mother was rejected by her aristocratic parents when she chose to marry the girls’ father, a lower-class Indian clerk. Their disgust is directed at the man’s “rank and title,” with racist implications. What is absent from the show is mention of the violent aspects of British colonial rule in India.
The show is based on a series of romance novels by Julia Quinn. “I always want to honor the history, but at the end of the day, this is a reimagined world,” Van Dusen said. He added that he saw the show as a “fascinating marriage of where history and fantasy meet.”
The series’ depiction of relationships between Indian women and White men is another example of this meeting. In the show, Kate is headstrong and determined to find her sister a perfect match, and she has the agency to rebuff those who don’t meet her standards, including Lord Anthony. Ghosh, who wrote the book “Sex and the Family in Colonial India,” said members of the East India Co., from soldiers and merchants through to high-ranking officials, often partnered with Indian women. Given the power dynamics at play, however, in some cases there is “no way to know how consensual these relationships were,” Ghosh said.
Not only were Indian women entering into relationships with English men in 19th century India, but there were also women of Indian descent living in England during this time. British officials who had children with Indian women sometimes had ambitions for those children to live and receive an education in Europe. The story of Kitty Kirkpatrick is evidence of this desire: The child of a Muslim noblewoman and an administrator of the East India Co., she was sent to England as a child, separated from her mother and became a member of English society.
There were also instances of Indian women who had relationships with European men, and so became part of their society, as was the case with Helene Bennett. Bennett, also known as Halima Begum, was most likely part of India’s elite. While in India, probably during the 1780s, she began a relationship with Benoît de Boigne, a French soldier who had fought for the East India Co., with whom she had two children. She would later travel with them to England, and remained there until her death.
The period is also characterized by a flow of goods and culture between the two countries. In “Bridgerton,” Kate explains the things she taught Edwina in the hopes she would not be left destitute: “How to play the pianoforte just so” and how to walk and talk “in the right way.” When Edwina arrives on the London marriage market, the fruits of this education help earn her the approval of the queen, and the title of “diamond of the season.” Among India’s elites in and around the Regency era, there was a cognizance of the mores of their European counterparts.
In a lot of such Indian communities, “they were trying to replicate what they thought was a European social circuit,” Ghosh said. “They have balls and they have masquerades and they celebrate when the king is crowned.”
For Ghosh, there is a utility in the show’s representation.
“By casting actors of color, the two seasons of ‘Bridgerton’ challenge a long-held presumption that those circulating in social circles in Britain were historically White,” she said. “To me, that seems a meaningful way to think about colonialism and racism in 1810s Britain.”