The South Asian Neighbour at No. 42 Goes Global1:
Jorge Diego Sánchez
University of Salamanca, Spain
Television drama is one of the most remarkable cultural lenses through which to evaluate
the presence and the recurrence of stereotypical artistic constructions of the many identities
that coexist in the “Diaspora Space” (Brah 1996). In is in this light that this paper will
introduce and discuss The Kumars at No. 42, a British sitcom that portrayed a British South
Asian family living in the London district of Wembley (UK) during the first years of the
Noughties (2001-2006). The show, which enjoyed the benefit of the British audience and
critics alike (it won two International Emmy Awards in 2002 and 2003), portrayed the daily
routines of Sanjeev, a thirty-something British Indian man dreaming of becoming a TV
presenter and Shushila, his grandmother, who constantly mocks her grandson’s obsession
with money and his social incompetence to integrate the South Asian distinctiveness into
what she calls the “British way of life”.
The present paper has a two-fold purpose. Firstly, it analyses the construction of
this pair of characters as illustrative of the stereotypes that are still created by the British
society about the South Asian community: the old auntie stuck in the old traditions from
the Sub-Continent and the first generation British Indian man only eager to work and earn
money. Secondly, it studies how these two characters have been re-written in the
adaptations of The Kumars at No. 42 that have been produced in Australia, India and
Pakistan. By so doing, this essay will ultimately aim at further contextualising the
derogatory and cultural reading of South Asian difference that, both in the British and the
global productions of The Kumars, are designed for these two recurrent constructions of
the next-door South Asian migrant.
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Diego Sánchez, Jorge
U of Salamanca, Spain
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jorgediegosanchez@usal.es
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SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Jorge Diego Sánchez is a research fellow at the Department of English Studies at
University of Salamanca (Spain). His research activity currently focuses on postcolonial
constructions of interculturality and gender concerns in the English speaking Indian
Diaspora in UK and the US. Nowadays, he works on the films by Gurinder Chadha and
Mira Nair as for his MA thesis and as a part of his PhD thesis on Intercultural Constructions
and Gender Concerns in the Cinema and Theatre of the Anglo-Indian Diaspora in UK and the US. He
is the convenor of the annual congress El Arte de Hace Teatro (2009, 2010, at University of
Diego Sánchez, Jorge
U of Salamanca, Spain
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jorgediegosanchez@usal.es
Salamanca). He is a member of the research group Artdidaktion at University of Salamanca
as well as an affiliate of the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer (CEMUSA, University of
Salamanca).
Diego Sánchez, Jorge
U of Salamanca, Spain
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jorgediegosanchez@usal.es