Introducing #BadmaashWeek!

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By Fareeha Molvi

(This piece was originally published to Instagram on November 16, 2020)

Welcome to Brown in Media’s first ever #BadmaashWeek! “Badmaash” is an Urdu/Hindi word meaning naughty, mischievous, rogue. Those are the kinds of characters we’ll be looking at this week. Often, stories of brown people in the West, especially South Asians, rely on some common tropes: the “good” immigrant story (“The Namesake”), the meek nerdy-type (“The Big Bang Theory”), assimilation stories where the character is “trapped” between two cultures (“Bend it like Beckham”). I love these works as much as the next diaspora kid but I think their prevalence leads to a one-dimensional view of a vastly diverse population.

For #BadmaashWeek, we’ll be discussing “unconventional” stories featuring villains and troublemakers and that turn these tropes upside down.

As a side note, I struggled with naming this week because there wasn’t a real English equivalent that encompassed all the nuances of the word “badmaash.” My hope is never to isolate anyone who doesn’t speak Urdu/Hindi (also recently discovered a similar word exists in Bangla!). I know how many different, unique languages are spoken in this beautifully diverse, brown diaspora. Rather I offer “badmaash” as a word from my heritage to share with you, if nothing more as a new word to know, a linguistic gift from me to you.