What Representation Feels Like
You know, I had planned to write about a video game related things on this blog. I have plans for posts about reverse-engineering PS2 game data and about AI in video games or just my thoughts going through the entire Resident Evil series as an absolute scaredy cat. But somehow, this topic rose to prominence in my head. So I’m writing about it now.
And it’s not even about video games. Or is it? (I am told people call this “foreshadowing”.)
I recently read a book: Murder Under A Red Moon by Harini Nagendra. It’s apparently the second book in a series called the “Bangalore Detectives Club”. I found it recently at my local library, and what drew me to it really is just that it’s a book set in Bangalore.
And this was the first time in my entire life that I saw a piece of fiction set in a location I knew very well. I don’t think I had realized (until recently) that all the stories I had consumed throughout my life (video games, anime, books, TV shows, movies) had been set in either an entirely fictional place, or in some faraway land I knew existed and knew some things about, but I’ve never really been there. I don’t know what Chicago actually looks like in the flesh.
But Bangalore? I spent 16 years of my life there. I did the majority of my schooling there. I’ve driven there. I know Bangalore. Ahem, I mean Bengaluru (sorry man, I’m not calling it that).
And it’s really such a… strange? experience? To open up the book and be faced with a map of 1920’s Bangalore and see that I recognize all the roads. As I read the book and the protagonist went to Cubbon Park, I could imagine the scene so much more vividly than anything I had read before. Even though this book is set in India while it was under British Rule. A hundred years ago.
Murder Under A Red Moon
So perhaps, let me rewind a bit and talk about the book. Murder Under A Red Moon is a murder mystery story set in 1920’s Bangalore (and yes, it was still called Bangalore at the time) about a woman named Kaveri who is the new bride of a doctor from a wealthy family. She appears to be famous for already having solved several mysteries and at least one other murder, and she is portrayed as an intelligent 19-year-old woman. Educated, high class, and she has a bit of chip on her shoulder about the plight of women in society around her.
To be entirely honest, the murder mystery itself wasn’t that interesting. The answer was obvious from like the third page. And I have to admit, Kaveri isn’t particularly good at deduction. She’s just plucky and driven. Which, you know, it yielded results so fair enough.
The book had a lot more to say about the Women’s Suffrage Movement and about how society treated women than about racism (which had a passing mention) or about the murder. Now, I’m not an expert on India’s history. All the knowledge I have is knowledge gained from living in Bangalore and being taught about Indian history in school. But the portrayal of society in this book feels so plausible. It felt so real, both culturally (the way everyone kind of negotiates with Societal™ norms to find the best way to live) and also in terms of trajectory (even when I was 14, Bangalore was still the kind of place where a working woman would be praised by saying “Oh, your husband lets you work? That’s very good.” This was 2009.)
But I think that’s what made the book so deeply immersive. Whether the factual information is true or not, the portrayal in the book really felt like lived experience. And I can’t stress enough that it just hits different when the book says a scene takes place on “Residency Road” and you actually know where that is.
That sort of representation is entirely different from seeing a vaguely brown character in your hero shooter. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Venba
I suppose this conversation would also be improved by bringing up Venba, an award-winning indie title about immigrant families and their challenges. Not to mention I will feel better because at least I mentioned a video game in my first post here.
Venba was also a really cool experience. It made me cry, because I deeply related to the struggle of initially rejecting my cultural identity and then eventually finding it again. Venba was also interesting because I showed it to my parents and they had opinions. It was cool to see them engage with the story and I learned a lot about their early experiences as immigrants.
But Venba also had a bit of distance from my identity. The family (and therefore the food) was Tamilian, which is vaguely similar to what I ate growing up, but not quite the same. And I also didn’t live a truly immigrant life. I had a bit of a split life between India and the US where I felt like a foreigner in both lands. Even the most concrete experiences portrayed in Venba (about your friends making fun of your lunch box in school) were not experiences I had, since I never went to K-12 school out here.
What is Representation for?
The discussion about Venba isn’t meant to be what-about-me-ism. But rather, I find it quite interesting: the elements of “representation” and what that actually means. And how it actually affects the audience for whom it “hits”. Because I don’t think Venba or Murder Under A Red Moon were really about (at least, to me) “being seen” in an emotional way. I actually felt like what they created was a really deep sense of immersion. That I had been transported into this place and these circumstances so thoroughly that I was mildly disoriented whenever I had to come back to the real world.
And that notion might resolve a bit of the tension that exists between the different forms of representation. I think attempting to “add representation” to a piece of media tends to create a sort of tension where you want to try to add as many people into the “People Represented” count as possible. Because of course you want more people to feel represented. But that’s how you land up with a character who claims to be from South India but speaks Hindi with no further information about why they speak Hindi (there are people who speak Hindi in South India. But like, it’s not exactly common. I have questions.)
I mean, other than maybe ignorance. But I do also understand the argument that fewer Indians would have understood a voice line spoken in Tamil compared to a line in Hindi. You see my point? It gets complicated.
But if we instead focus on immersion as the goal, then representation fits a bit more neatly into the picture. Of course you’re more immersed in a cultural frame you’re already familiar with. Of course you’re more immersed if you’ve literally been to the place they’re portraying. I don’t personally resonate with a character that looks like me, but that might just be a personal thing. Sorry, it just — It doesn’t tell me much. Does that really help for other people? Honest question.
Ultimately, the work is fiction. But immersion comes from (well, many things but among them is) plausibility. A sense that the world and these people could be real, because a lot of different factors match your personal experience enough that you can extrapolate from there into this fictional world. Like, when people talk about a character who “feels real” there’s a good chance what they’re actually saying is “I know this person. I’ve met this person.” Familiar things give us an anchor point to then understand the differences. I’m able to talk about how Venba isn’t exactly my experience because it got close enough.
Conclusion?
I don’t think I had anything really specific to say about representation, diversity, inclusion, etc. until I read Murder Under A Red Moon. I guess I really needed to have felt the effects of what representation can do to really relate to the discussion. I was always a supporter of diverse stories because they truly just seem interesting to me (Where Winds Meet has me diving into Chinese history like nothing else), but I don’t think I actually felt the arrow of representation pierce through the veil of vague support until recently.
This post was a collection of my thoughts on what might actually make for “good” representation. I’m still not entirely sure what that means. Right now, based on my experience so far, I’m really enjoying the immersion it can create. To be honest, I think that applies for any culture instead of just my own? Learning about any culture in depth — their values, their history, their language — is just plain fun. Actually, this is just me talking about Where Winds Meet again. I can’t bring myself to shut up about that game. The story and the setting and the history just have me hooked and I can’t escape it.
Anyway, I do want to throw out recommendations for both Venba and Murder Under A Red Moon. Venba is cute and short. Murder Under A Red Moon honestly needs a bit of a trigger warning for discussion of domestic and sexual violence, but is that an avoidable topic when discussing women’s rights from that time period? The book also contained notes on the historical portrayal of Bangalore, what was fiction and what is real. It’s pretty cool.
Also yes, my blog post did contain em-dashes. I wrote this post by hand. No AI was involved. This is just me and my random rambles.
