There are two famous Apus in the western world and both are fictional. The first is the protagonist of three films made in the 1950s by the Indian director Satyajit Ray, which trace a boy’s journey to manhood and fatherhood, and from the paddy fields and ponds of rural Bengal to the turbulent streets of Kolkata.
No finer films have come out of India, and the Apu trilogy remains among the great landmarks of world cinema – beautifully composed in black and white with a soundtrack by Ravi Shankar, they frequently appear on lists of best-loved movies.
Certainly, I include them in mine.
The second Apu isn’t at all like the first, though reportedly named after him as an act of homage by his cinephile creators.
Apu Nahasapeemapetilon owns the Kwik-E-Mart convenience store in Springfield, the American town where the Simpsons – Homer, Marge and their children Bart, Lisa and Maggie – live in the eponymous cartoon serial, which was first broadcast in 1989 and is about to reach its 625th episode.
This Apu first appeared in episode eight.
His catchphrase “Thank you, come again” is delivered in a high, singsong voice; he works 96 hours at a stretch and once deleted the sell-by date on some cut-price sliced meat, poisoning the gluttonous Homer with salmonella.
An overdose of fertility drugs has given him eight children, which in an outburst of patriotism he once temporarily named Lincoln, Freedom, Condoleezza, Coke, Pepsi, Manifest Destiny, Superman and Apple Pie.
I have sometimes cried at the Apu Trilogy, and often laughed at his namesake in The Simpsons.
But have I been wrong to find Apu Nahasapeemapetilon funny? A new documentary by the American standup comic Hari Kondabolu attacks the character as a damaging racist stereotype.“Of course he’s funny, but that doesn’t mean this representation is accurate or right or righteous,” Kondabolu told the BBC, adding that it demonstrated “the insidiousness of racism … because you don’t even notice it when it’s right in front of you.
It becomes so normal that you don’t even think about it.”
His film has already attracted an unusual amount of notice.
It comes at a frail moment – when Hollywood and the entertainment media more generally stand accused.
Kondabolu, the American-born child of Indian migrants, was mocked at school by fellow pupils imitating Apu’s voice, which was created – like those of many other Simpsons characters – by Hank Azaria, a white actor. “Apu reflected how America viewed us: servile, devious, goofy,” Kondabolu says in his film, The Problem with Apu. “A white dude created a stereotypical Indian voice, and a bunch of white writers in the room laughed at said stereotypical Indian voice, and this led to the creation of my childhood bully and a walking insult to my parents.”
Children need very few excuses to explore the weakness of others: I had buckteeth and, oh, how I hated Bugs Bunny.
And satire being satire, it tends to deal in stereotypes.
To pick a not entirely random example, also from The Simpsons: a Chicagoan, Dan Castellaneta, does the voice of the Scottish school groundskeeper, Willie MacDougal.
It was this voice that in 1995 first uttered the phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” to describe the French.
It sounds perpetually angry – a strip cartoon would have bubbles over Willie’s head saying, “Grrr!” – and joyously inauthentic, which is the point.
Inauthenticity can be popular, even among the people who find themselves traduced.
Groundskeeper Willie’s real-life antecedent, the comic-singer Harry Lauder, became the most internationally celebrated Scotsman in the first half of the last century through his exaggeration of Scottish speech, slyness, and care with money, helped by his trademark outfit of kilt, bonnet and curly stick, to present a pawky, almost pre-industrial personality (though Lauder himself started work in the mines). His popularity both inside and outside Britain was enormous: he made 22 tours of the US sometimes by special train, and in his own estimation “must have seen, and been seen by, more citizens of the republic than any other man who ever lived”.Some people in Scotland disapproved, contending that Lauder had made “a fool out of Scotsmen”. But many more were happy to applaud this parody, not caring that he had created what proved to be a stubborn stereotype: they were comforted that the parodist was one of their own (unlike in the case of Apu, who is voiced by Azaria).But Scots were among the top dogs then.
Why would they worry? Even quite late into the 20th century, signs of our top dogginess survived.
The label on the Camp Coffee bottle still showed a turbaned Sikh standing attentively with a tray, as a seated Gordon Highlander supped his morning beverage, outside a tent that flew a pennant with the slogan Ready Aye Ready. (To reflect more equal times, the Sikh was eventually given a seat.) The large outline of another turban sat on the head of an ear-ringed face high above Glasgow Central station, its neon tubes shining white as the night came on, to advertise another Scottish comestible, Irn-Bru, via a little Indian boy, Ba-Bru, who was the companion of kilted little Sandy in the soft drink’s promotional cartoon.
It disappeared in the 1970s, by which time everyone had forgotten that Ba-Bru was inspired by Sabu, the young Indian actor who shot to stardom in Robert Flaherty’s film Elephant Boy in 1937.
These were among our small, humorous relics of imperialism in India.
Others appeared in print.
In the 1950s, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh remained the finest bowler among the boys of Billy Bunter’s Greyfriars in the long-running cartoon series, though by then his nickname “Inky” and his description “the dusky nabob of Bhanipur” had possibly been dropped.
Hurree’s command of English was memorable. “The latefulness is superior to the neverfulness,” he might say, meaning “better late than never”. And smiling at that (as I do – who couldn’t?), I sense something similar in my reaction to Apu.
I can’t think that the effect is racist, but one can never be sure.
When Teachers Against Racism protested in 1972 against Helen Bannerman’s 1899 children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo, the publisher, Ian Parsons, replied that their letter filled him with “amazement, mingled with despair”. Could it be true, he asked, that “responsible people could be so utterly devoid of humour, so totally without imagination” as to want to ban a book that generations of children had accepted as an “enchanting story, an enthralling fantasy … Could a tiger turn into butter with which to make pancakes, and could any child, black or white, eat 169 of them?”
Parsons wrote sincerely, stressing that he’d supported the cause of what were then called race relations all his life.
But his is the voice of another age.
It was the teachers who understood that Britain was changing and that respect for black people needed to be fostered among white children “in order to avoid the kind of terrible race tension and separatism which has occurred in the United States”. Bannerman, interestingly enough, was a Scotswoman who had gone to India with her doctor husband, and there written the story for her children over a two-day train journey.
The illustrations in many editions showed African children, though the text mentions Indian items: tigers, ghee, a bazaar.
This blissfully ignorant combination charmed people for 70 years until it began to seem paternalistic and unpleasant.
There can be no firm rule about stereotypes – it depends on their expression and who makes them, when and why.
But their harmfulness or otherwise is usually best judged by the people they attempt to describe. – Guardian News & Media

* Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist
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