The recent hit film Talvar depicted the lives of Nepali domestic help working in a middle-class Delhi household where a double murder takes place. Perhaps for the first time in commercial cinema, they were not portrayed as the clichéd – and largely imaginary – "Bahadur" of Indian films.
You know the lazily conceived stereotype: faltering speech, oafish smile, broken Hindi, often a buffoon meant to elicit coarse laughter, some who does not have a life beyond his call of duty.
In the past this incorrect portrayal has irked the Communist Party of Nepal enough to ban Hindi films for showing Nepalese people in a bad light. While Talvar does much better, it hasn't bypassed the stereotype entirely.
The domestic helpers in Talvar speak passable Hindi, have personal lives spent drinking and pining for female companionship – in short, they are living, breathing characters just like everyone else around them. This is a significant change towards portraying people beyond their nationality.
However, it is not without its share of problems. The leading misconception that all Gurkhas carry a khukri and a short temper remains.
Vishal Bhardwaj describes the script he wrote for Talvar as showing two sides of the same people, "I have no view on the Aarushi-Hemraj case. I am only portraying the two sets, or classes, of human beings in that story. One soft, genteel, loving, hard-working, with victim written all over them. The other, boisterous, drinking, ogling, sniggering, even Mogambo-khush-hua laughs, with 'usual suspect' written all over them."
Then there was the other thing. Every time a filmmaker went to Nepal – he showed the Nepalese smoking up and living life as lotus-eaters (Hare Rama Hare Krishna, Ram Bharose) or as country bumpkins with no common sense (Gharwali Baharwali).
Earlier this year in Baby, Akshay Kumar and his posse of tough-nut secret agents traveled to Nepal to nab a terrorist and they never spoke to any Nepali civilian along the way. Are the inhabitants of the country invisible?
Unfortunately, people from Nepal who do live in India have no say in the making of these films. The Nepali film industry has no way of correcting perceptions either. No Nepali film has ever made it to Indian shores.
