What One Day means for South Asian representation

When I read One Day as a teenage girl, I resonated with Emma Morley. A desperately uncool aspiring writer pining after an emotionally stunted posh boy? It hit close to home, to say the least. But while I felt a strong sense of identification with Emma, I knew she wasn’t really like me. Emma had “bottled-red hair”, “pink mottled cheeks”, and “blue and green” eyes. In a word: white.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar, David Nicholls’ 2009 novel One Day follows Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, a pair of University of Edinburgh graduates who weave in and out of each other’s lives over the course of 20 years. The story was adapted for the silver screen in 2011, starring Anne Hathaway as Emma and Jim Sturgess as Dexter, and has recently been turned into a Netflix series. The series has been immensely popular, amassing over 15 million views and garnering significant acclaim.

Notably, the new series stars Leo Woodall as Dexter and Ambika Mod as Emma. The show’s creators have been praised for casting Mod, who is South Asian, as instances where South Asian actresses are afforded the chance to take centre stage are vanishingly rare. Notably, Tamil actresses Charithra Chandran and Simone Ashley starred as romantic leads in the second series of Bridgerton in 2022, but this is still a mere drop in the ocean. Mod herself spoke frankly to the BBC about the lack of South Asian representation on screen, stressing that she believes her casting as Emma is “significant to a lot of people [...] young South Asian women in particular”, and contending that there is still “a long, long way to go”.

She’s not wrong: according to the Creative Diversity Network, South Asian people make up just 4.8 per cent of the ‘onscreen population’, making them the least represented ethnic group on UK television. While it’s easy to be cynical about how important ‘representation’ actually is, a 1976 study by researchers George Gerbner and Larry Gross highlighted that underrepresentation in the media can perpetuate social inequality by insinuating that underrepresented groups are unimportant or illegitimate. “Representation in the fictional world signifies social existence; absence means symbolic annihilation,” they wrote.

I surprised myself with how affecting it was to witness Mod, a young South Asian woman, in the show – and actually starring as Emma, as opposed to some flat, tokenistic secondary role like “the nerdy asexual sidekick” or “the ‘westernised’ daughter rebelling against her strict, religious mother”. Emma is no such stock character. She’s fully fleshed-out: ambitious, witty, and clever, but also patronising, cynical, and cruel.

It’s worth acknowledging that perhaps Emma is only afforded the room to be so rounded and human and break free of stereotypes because she was originally a white character in Nicholls’ novel. But while Emma is mostly the same character on page and on screen, the show doesn’t entirely shy away from the issue of race. Speaking to the BBC, Nicholls said, “We thought Ambika had all the qualities of Emma but we didn’t want to ignore her heritage either, so she worked very closely with Nicole [Taylor, the series creator] and the writers to make sure that it made sense to her, and I think it worked beautifully.”

I’m inclined to agree with Nicholls. There are two small moments in the show which acknowledge Emma’s changed race: firstly, on the night they meet, Dexter asks if Emma didn’t sleep with him due to religious reasons – a pointed microaggression which she swiftly rebuffs – and secondly, Emma’s children’s books centre around a young girl called ‘Nisha Halliday’, whereas in the novel the character is called ‘Julie Criscoll’. These tweaks are minor, but anything more on the nose would have likely come across as ham-fisted and unrealistic.

@grandevanillaicedlatte was inspired after watching @Tayyibah ‘s video!! #oneday ♬ original sound - zain :)

One Day approaches Emma’s ethnicity with subtlety. Some would argue too much subtlety: Chitra Ramaswamy wrote in the Guardian that the show didn’t “ring true” for her as “white boys like Dex didn’t fancy brown girls like Em” back in the 80s. But I thought it was a relief to finally see a character whose Asianness was not the single most important facet of her identity. Most British Asians don’t make long, nuanced speeches about their racial identity every day, after all, and does every film about an Asian character have to make some grand comment about race? Can’t One Day just be a love story?

In any case, turning Emma into a South Asian character actually makes a lot of sense and adds another layer of complexity to the entire story. Does Emma, bruised from years of existing within racist systems, fall into a loveless relationship with Ian because she subconsciously feels she should be ‘grateful’ for his devotion to her? Is Emma’s race the real reason why Dexter keeps her on the backburner for so many years? And – did Dexter ever truly understand Emma? Tellingly, on their final morning together, Emma expresses concern over a newspaper story about the conflict in Afghanistan, while Dexter is dismissive and admits he finds politics “boring”. His lack of empathy is made all the more shocking given Emma’s race.

We’re never given explicit answers to these questions, but the beauty of the show lies in its ambiguity and the impassioned discussions it’s inspired within its viewership. Evidently, there are countless opinions within the South Asian community on how One Day tackled (or failed to tackle) the issue of Emma’s race. But at least Mod’s casting has opened up the floor for these debates to happen in the first place. While it may sound trite, representation really does matter – and no matter what you think of the show, seeing a South Asian woman play Emma Morley is doubtless a step in the right direction.