I’ve become accustomed to scan crowd scenes in television programmes and films set in the United Kingdom in historical periods to see whether the production companies have used a diverse set of extras. As a historian of migration, I know that Britain has been racially, ethnically and religiously diverse for centuries, and I would like the screen to reflect this. I get excited when it does.
However A2BFour is not a project just about creating racial balance in crowd scenes. It’s about bringing the stories of Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) characters to the fore, to show that people from a range of social backgrounds were involved in historical events and historical change around the world.
My interest in migrants from the Indian subcontinent is reflected in my pitch for A2BFour. The Nightingale of India will follow an Indian woman who studied at Cambridge University in the 1890s and then, as a political activist, visited America, South Africa, Kenya, France and other European countries in the interwar period. She fought for Indian independence and female suffrage, and there are many more stories like hers that show that women of colour can be cast as heroines in historical period dramas to reflect the diversity of the past and the present.
Sumita@smukherjee_hist
However A2BFour is not a project just about creating racial balance in crowd scenes. It’s about bringing the stories of Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) characters to the fore, to show that people from a range of social backgrounds were involved in historical events and historical change around the world.
My interest in migrants from the Indian subcontinent is reflected in my pitch for A2BFour. The Nightingale of India will follow an Indian woman who studied at Cambridge University in the 1890s and then, as a political activist, visited America, South Africa, Kenya, France and other European countries in the interwar period. She fought for Indian independence and female suffrage, and there are many more stories like hers that show that women of colour can be cast as heroines in historical period dramas to reflect the diversity of the past and the present.
Sumita@smukherjee_hist
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