Visions Of A Broader Cultural Reflection In Australian Media

It was a monumental event in Australian television: after being introduced to Ramsay Street in 2011, Sachin Joab's character Ajay Kapoor — a lawyer of Indian and Sri Lankan heritage — became a regular character alongside his wife and daughter in the long-running soap Neighbours.

"Bringing an Indian family on as main cast members I thought was fantastic. Susan Bower, the producer who brought us on, brought a gay character onto the show as well and I thought she really has a vision for Australia and how it should be reflected on Australian TV, and it's that simple. I was really, really happy when that decision was made."

"She really has a vision for Australia and how it should be reflected on Australian TV, and it's that simple."

Despite the significance of the development and how it marked progress for multicultural representation on Australian screens, the addition of Joab's character to the regular cast was met with criticism from the show's more closed-minded fans.

"If you ask any multicultural actor working in the States or Australia or New Zealand it's part and parcel, it may very well be part of the career but it also is part of your life; if I wasn't an actor, if I was a tradesman or working in an office or whatever, I know that I would have had bad experiences when it comes to issues of race."

Now Joab is preparing to play another Kapoor, Amir, a Muslim American mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer at the centre of Akhtar's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Disgraced. Unlike the two legally leaning Kapoors, Joab was always heading for a careers in the arts. 

"People think if you're coming from an Asian or south Asian background, education is number one priority for a lot of parents and they may very well want you to study medicine or law or engineering but, for my case, I was raised by my mum and she was 100 per cent supportive of my natural gravitation towards track and field, acting, dance, singing and physical movement — be it martial arts or whatever. She was the type of person who would always say, 'Go after it!'"

In Disgraced, a dinner is hosted by Kapoor and his artist wife Emily, and attended by Kapoor's colleague Jory and her husband (and Emily's art dealer) Isaac, who is Jewish. So what relevance does the story of an ex-Muslim, an African American, a Jew and a WASP have for Australian audiences?

Joab mentions a critical examination that suggested it was unclear behind which of these characters Akhtar was hiding, where his bias lies. "He may be Amir, or somehow the character of Emily, or maybe a part of Isaac or Jory or even Hussein, the nephew of Amir, who changes his name to Abe. It really just depends on who you are and what perspective you're watching it from; from an Australian point of view it doesn't have to be the African American is the indigenous personality or the white American is the white Australian, it could be anyone, you know, Australian, New Zealand, England, America — these are all fairly multicultural countries so it resonates with people from a number of different perspectives."