May 3, 2002

Documenting Desis:
An Interview with Shebana Coelho

Shebana Coelho is the producer of Desi: South Asians in New York, a documentary that explores diversity and commonality among New Yorkers of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan descent. She was also outreach director for A Woman's Place, a PBS documentary which examines the changes women are bringing about in the legal arena in South Africa, India and the US, and co-producer for The Empire State Building, a chronicle of the building's construction which aired on the Discovery Channel. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, as well as an NPR series on Islam.

Desi: South Asians in New York aired on Channel 13 WNET New York on Sunday, May 5 at 2:00 PM as part of Due East, the station's Asian American history month celebration. To watch a preview, visit Avasian.com.

How did this documentary come about? Is it part of a larger series on immigrant communities in New York?

Yes, the documentary is part of a larger series on immigrant communities in New York. Before Desi, PBS did an episode on Dominicans in New York and also the Chinese in New York. They were produced by the Glazen Creative Group, which was hired by PBS to do the series, and I was subcontracted to produce Desi. It helped PBS build a different audience and it gave PBS a chance to represent communities that don’t normally see themselves represented. The film was originally meant to be about Indians only, but when we started doing research, I saw a chance to make people aware that there is more than one kind of brown-skinned person in New York. It was a larger project and it was harder, but it was an opportunity to talk about a global South Asian identity happening in New York.

How did you choose the people you interviewed for this documentary? You portrayed the diversity of the community in terms of class, national origin, generation and profession. Did you make a conscious effort to include people from many different backgrounds?

Yes, we went out of our way to be inclusive. You can appreciate how overwhelming it was because it is an immense project. It’s not just one national story; we were telling the story of several countries. We tried to represent the community as they asked us to represent them. We made a point not to have any voiceover narration; it’s just people telling their own stories in their own words. We let the community speak for itself and define itself as it would like to be defined.

In terms of the process, there were certain things we knew we had to do. We knew we had to include a historical overview and a religious overview. The first part was trying to talk to as many different kinds of people as possible. We knew we had to cover several very visible professions that people tend to identify with South Asians. We knew there had to be a cab driver, there had to be a newspaper vendor, there had to be an academic. Desi was really the first path to covering the community. There is no way we could have been comprehensive; we just tried to be representative. I hope it inspires people to investigate the community more and delve into it. Each segment could have been its own documentary.

How did Somini Sengupta get involved in this project?

I had read her work in The New York Times. We knew we wanted two people to be the de facto hosts to give a good overview. Vijay Prashad did a lot of the history and Somini did some of the history as well. Her beat was covering New York, so she knew all about the community here. She had been to these different neighborhoods, as had Vijay. They had done their work and made very credible narrators.

Why did you name the documentary Desi?

It became apparent as we were doing our research that there was a sense of common identity happening here. The experience of being immigrants in New York, of facing discrimination, being in a place that doesn’t distinguish between South Asian nations, has created an opportunity to rediscover commonalities. Especially in the younger generation, there isn’t a sense of clinging to the national identity of their parents, but more of a sense of finding a way to define themselves in a multicultural society. Seeing yourself as a desi is a way of being American, of naming yourself.

Did you find that old nationalist tensions still existed between South Asian groups?

It wasn’t that type of documentary. It was unabashedly a celebration and people responded to us in that way. I didn’t get to that nuance and I wasn’t asking those types of questions. I found the opposite of tension, especially in the segment on the taxicab drivers union. People were uniting rather then dividing.

Did you learn anything surprising while making this documentary?

For me, the biggest thing was being invited into so many different lives and spaces. I was always aware the community was diverse, but dealing with it at once, to go from a mosque to a gurudwara, a millionaire’s home to that of a newspaper vendor, a comedian in East Harlem to a classical Indian dancer, that was the best part of it.

How has the desi community responded to the film?

When it came out, there was an overwhelming response. People were glad to see themselves represented. It first aired in March 2000. It aired twice in a row; we bumped a live Santana concert because so many people called in that PBS played the documentary twice.

Has the documentary become more important since September 11?

I think it’s important in that it introduces people to a community. It lets people know who their neighbors are in New York. The fact that Sikhs were targeted as Arabs for hate crimes has to do with the fact that people don’t know anything about these communities. It allowed the community to fashion a portrait of themselves and then present that portrait to a general audience. It was a chance to combat ignorance about South Asians and show them in all of the different spaces they inhabit in New York. That was our goal. I am proud to have let people tell their stories in their own words and to be represented as they want to be represented.

Interview conducted by Michelle Caswell, AsiaSource.