Zohran Mamdani And The Myth Of "Real" Representation

Are some South Asians more 'real' than others?

At this point, pretty much all of us know about Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year old who was last week elected as Mayor of NYC. What stands out to me about Zohran is how unapologetic he is in being from Uganda, being a Muslim, and having Indian (both Punjabi and Gujarati) heritage. He pokes fun at Desi hand gestures, was willingly filmed eating rice with his hands, and has spoken about liking a bit of paan after dinner.

Fucking paan. The moment it was uttered, I was hit with sense memory of the Glen Waverley Aunty who always had a tin of it on hand. Usually in a sari, her stomach spilling out between her blouse and skirt, she’d chew on paan whenever she wanted to burn the time: elevators, street crossings, the dinner table when dinner was done. The pungent tobacco blend, made of betel nut and slaked lime, had the most delicious and complex smell. My parents were amused by her antics, her relentless loyalty to the old country, and to be fair, Aunty Asha looked insane: her teeth would stain red from the betel nut as she laughed and laughed.

On social media, there’s been talk of how Zohran represents ‘real South Asian representation’, in implied contrast to the many Uncle Toms of the US political landscape: Kash Patel, Nikki Haley, Usha Vance, even Kamala Harris. I’ll concede that I’ve been watching Mamdani’s rise for a few months: the hype got into my algorithm, into my guts and into my brain. I was excited when he won the primary, and without really understanding the first thing about US mayoral politics, was stoked when he took the title of Mayor Elect of NYC last week. It felt positively surreal to see his Mum, who reminded me of my own, join him on stage.

Mira Nair (left) and Zohran Mamdani, following his victory speech

But I’m jolted by the idea of “real” representation. Mira Nair herself, the famous filmmaker and Zohran’s mother, said in an interview with Vulture that we are not emblems, and we need move beyond our fixation with the emblematic. To see ourselves as symbols is reductive and dehumanising. It’s true that Mamdani wears his multi‐hyphenate identity on his sleeve. Or, on his wrist. After Mamdani was elected, actor Avan Jogia wrote in an Instagram story: “as a ugandan indian myself, watching a politician shake hands with people from all walks of life and backgrounds with a rakhi on his wrist means something to me.”

But most South Asians aren’t going to wear a rakhi in a Western professional setting. Nor would they do a hokey Shah Rukh Khan impression in a campaign ad. And they 100% wouldn’t be caught dead eating rice with their hands. Given that video footage of Zohran doing so was used to peddle the racist fiction that to be Indian or African or Muslim was to be stuck in the stone ages, why would you?

It’s not so easy to wear your heritage on your sleeve. Most of us had to forgo so much of our cultural heritage just to survive. For many of us, especially in Australia, we didn’t get the opportunity to have an ethnic identity in the first place, so much was our parents’ instinct to help us fit in. Or perhaps we did, and over the years, it was beaten out of us. Some of us learnt to keep our cards close to our chests, only letting elements come to the surface when we’re around the right people, or in the right environment. When we know that it’s safe.

But sentiments about some pure and unmuddied representation imply that the rest of us have been compromised, corrupted, and bereft. And the reality is that someone like Mamdani, who can lay it all out there, is the exception rather than the rule. It was likely made possible by a transnational upbringing across Uganda, India and NYC, and two hot shit parents that have done work specifically in negotiating Ugandan, Indian, and Muslim identities in the West. Whether it’s Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala or Mahmoud Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, both have done groundbreaking work in examining the forces that shape diasporic lives.

Zohran was and will remain subject to these forces, too. While his pride in who he is is palpable, it was also hard not to notice how he had to come off like the friendliest man on earth throughout the entire course of his campaign. As Ramy Youssef spoofed in his Saturday Night Live impression of the fledgling Mayor, Zohran seems to want to put his audience at ease by smiling until it “physically hurts [his] face”. It may have been 24 years since 9/11, but the spectre of the Angry Muslim who hates America still looms large.

Also playing in Zohran’s favour is his ethnic ambiguity. Not only is he skilled at code-switching depending on who he is talking to, he comfortably looked like someone who could conceivably be from anywhere on earth, whether that was the Dominican Republic, Türkiye, Bangladesh or Iran. As a light-skinned guy, too, Mamdani didn’t look the standard Indian guy™ in the white imagination, another huge advantage in a world that values beige over brown.

I don’t believe that there’s any “real” representation. An insistence on thinking that belies a reality that tends to be ignored, which is that we are actually just human beings. “We are real, flesh-and-blood folk,” Nair said. “We have to have that confidence, and be given that confidence, to go beyond the emblem…. worlds are hybrid and alive and fluid.” We have all had to find a way, as Ghassan Hage has put it, to make our lives viable. As brown people in the West, we’re kind of hated. As human beings, we’ll respond to that in a bunch of ways. I question whether some are more “real” than others.

Reena Gupta is a writer and editor. She was previously Junkee’s Deputy Editor and before that a staff writer at MTV Australia, with bylines in Kill Your Darlings, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, and more. She tweets at @purpletank.