Ms. Marvel adds the jewel of South Asia to MCU’s crown of diversity

For Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) ‘superhero’ has a standard definition. They are intelligent, sedulous, good looking, sacrificing, male, white and the hope of humanity. The conception is so immutable that even though recently there have been number of female characters portraying such characters, we still don’t have a word for female super'hero'? Merriam Webster says it is ‘superheroine’, as it logically should be. But it hasn’t really caught up and also it does not have that ‘superhero waali feeling’ as is also the case with ‘superhuman’, which misses the concept of ‘protagonist’ altogether. Even the storyline of these superhero movies is quite standard. A city in the US is in danger. It falls in the hands of a superhero, as defined above, to save millions of lives because it is his destiny to do so. A fight ensues between the superhero and the villain amongst the high-rise buildings of a metropolitan American city. It is the fantasy story of an ordinary westerner which is sugar-coated in Hollywood style moviemaking. It is the cultural hegemony of the West. Pretty usual you see. It’s is not really the brown girls from Jersey City who save the world.

However, MCU has recently added a new superhero to its offerings. Ms. Marvel premiered on Disney+ Hotstar on 8^th June and it is different. For starters, the show is about the life of a female superhero/ superheroine- Kamala Khan, a Muslim and Pakistani-American teen living in the city of New Jersey. Kamala is a Marvel superhero fan with colossal imagination. However, the real difference in Ms. Marvel lies in breaking the cultural monopoly of the West in the MCU.

The storyline of the show is distinctly South Asian which deals the concept of ‘DJINNS’ which is a strictly Arabian-Islamic notion which has no roots in the West. The idea is so South Asian that Farhan Akhtar, in the show, remarks that “if Thor landed in the Himalayan mountains, he too would have been called a Djinn”. Moreover, it is refreshing to listen to the tunes of Ritviz’s ‘Sage’, and the latest Pakistani hit ‘Pasoori’ in the middle of a MCU show and Memba’s ‘For Aisha’ during the end credits. The discussion on the greatest movie of Shahrukh Khan out of Baazigar and DDLJ just brings the show closer to the imagination of an ordinary South Asian. Interestingly, in the fourth episode the story has shifted from the US to Karachi, Pakistan and considerable time was given to depiction of India-Pakistan partition. Hopefully, the theme of partition and the turmoil and unrest associated therewith would be further developed in the upcoming episodes.

While the issue of gender diversity and racial diversity are frequently discussed in much detail, the issue of cultural diversity is often ignored. Cultural stereotypes are so subtle that they are not even perceptible to be pointed in a write up until it is shown that there is an alternative of the hegemony. This is precisely what Ms. Marvel does in the MCU.

This break in the cultural hegemony of the West in the MCU and inclusion of South Asian cultural elements is a long-overdue step. MCU is the biggest and the highest grossing movie franchise in the world as of 2022. Lately, MCU has come up with shows like Shang-Chi and Moon Knight in a bid to increase its diversity and reflect the audience it caters to. MCU has minted an enormous amount of revenue in South Asia and has a huge fan base here. India is one of the biggest contributors to MCU’s box office collection. It is only just that MCU also gives space to a few brown superheroes and superheroines and their unrepresented culture on the global stage. Ms. Marvel makes the Marvel Cinematic Universe a more diverse universe.