EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
My preference would, of course, be to rewrite her character such that it was not a rather bad (even by the standards of the day!) Victorian caricature of Indian culture,* and instead make her an interesting, nuanced, and worthwhile character in her own right. But, again, accuracy is a tool, not an end-all be-all objective measure of quality or respect. It would be interesting to hear what the writers thought, because I doubt her exclusion was a trivial matter. Perhaps they considered it, and felt that they would not be able to do justice to the character; perhaps they tried, but executive meddling got in the way (as is the case with a great deal of big-budget stuff); perhaps, as I'm sure you and Crimson Longinus would immediately assert, they did so out of fear, though frankly I find that unlikely. Without hearing their own words on the subject, I've no idea, and I suspect if they had actually said "yeah we were afraid people would hate it if we included this character, so we just left her out to avoid offending anyone," you'd have led with that. (And I would, personally, think that they were being double-barrelled idiots, but that's a separate subject.)Like removing out non-european characters like in the example Crimson Longinus mentioned.
But honestly? Yeah, I'm okay with being less faithful to source material and removing racist caricatures from classic media. That's fine by me. The best solution would be to actually rewrite the characters to be good, but sometimes that's beyond the scope of a project or unrealistic for any of a host of reasons. So you haven't really pointed at anything I consider to be an egregious harm; it's unfortunate to be sure, but yeah, I'd rather skip out on characters with nasty stereotype undertones than preserve them as-is with the fig-leaf excuse "well that's how Victorians thought things worked!" I don't care how Victorians thought things worked!
*From what information is available to me: the practice of sati (killing the wife specifically--not the "family members" as described in the story--of a deceased man as a sacrifice, thought to be based on a mistranslation of Vedic texts describing the appropriate ceremonial behaviors for a married woman at her husband's funeral) was continuously controversial for essentially its entire existence. It was not practiced in early Hindu India, came into being after a possibly-intentional mistranslation of religious texts, was ruthlessly exploited by men trying to prevent widows from inheriting the property of their husbands, and was suppressed by both the medieval Islamic conquerors of India and by the subsequent British conquerors (who even engaged in theological debate--sometimes with creative interpretations of text--to argue that so-called "wife burning" was not actually supported by the Vedic texts.)
Or, rather, that's what I would say.
If @Crimson Longinus were not incorrect. (Though I would still say the more genericized things about other works.)
Aouda does appear in the Tennant adaptation. Her role in the story is significantly reduced, so there is still some bite to the criticism, but she is still present and is, in fact, played by a British-Indian actress, Shivaani Ghai. What does not appear is the sati practice, because for exactly the same reasons as harems, sati is far from universal even in its native culture, has had a controversial or mixed record/perception even in its native culture, has been flagrantly abused by outsiders (particularly in the Anglosphere) to demonize that culture, and even its "benign" presentations have been absolutely loaded with crappy tropes and deep, deep cultural misunderstandings.
It's almost like, by not leaning on a singular, technically accurate but controversial (and almost always sensationalized), cultural practice, the work can be better at representing the whole of that culture, not crappy, tropey, reductivist caricatures of that culture! Imagine that!
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