When Pallavi Payal saw a recent video that was circulating on social media of comedian Sandip Chhetri, she was furious. In the short video, Chhetri is seen impersonating a Madhesi woman, speaking in an exaggerated accent about the recently endorsed amendments regarding the Citizenship Bill, which many people, especially from the Madhesi community, have voiced concerns over.

 

In the video, he talks about how the amendments—if brought into effect—will prove to be detrimental to the interests of women, particularly Madhesi women. And while the issues he raises deserve public concern, his insensitive approach in depicting them led to a public uproar on social media in the past week.

 

“The Madhesi community is trying really hard to create awareness about how the citizenship bill could affect Madhesi women disproportionately. By making a mockery of the issue and the community that is already marginalised harms these efforts,” says Payal, an independent researcher and artist.

 

And this is not the first time Chhetri has been condemned for stereotyping Madhesi communities. In his show, ‘What the Flop’, which airs on Kantipur Television, he has played the role of Mithai Lal Yadav, a Madhesi person, by employing time-worn, discriminatory tropes, such as using black face paint. He later stopped using blackface makeup on the show after coming under fire for it. Another television show, ‘Corona Birsaune Gaphgaaph’ on Krishi Television, was also criticised for blackfacing a character.

 

For decades, regressive cultural tropes—such as using blackface, speaking in exaggerated indigenous accents and reducing characters to just their cultural identity for filler roles or comedy relief—have been used in Nepali pop culture. And although in recent years, concerns regarding the problematic stereotypical representation of ethnic minorities in mainstream Nepali media has come to the fore, such tropes continue to be used.

 

According to filmmaker and film educator Abimanyu Dixit, this is because such stereotyping is the foundation on which Nepali films were born. “If we trace the history of how films were introduced in our country, most of them were agenda-driven to please and push King Mahendra’s ‘one language and culture’ policies,” says Dixit, who’s also the Post’s film critic.