Until arriving as a freshman at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall of 1988, Deep Katdare was under the impression that he would have an arranged marriage. He had never considered acting as a career option, likening his decision to drop out of school to break into acting as tantamount to killing a family member.
In the keynote speech for Asian Pacific American Heritage Week, Katdare spoke about his experiences growing up in a conservative Indian family and as an Indian-American in Hollywood at a discussion yesterday in Bodek Lounge Houston Hall.
Katdare has appeared on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, the Broadway musical Bombay Dreams, and most notably in the 2001 movie American Desi, which he also co-produced. American Desi tells the story of an Indian-American college student who reluctantly embraces and learns about his heritage in order to impress a girl.
But Katdare’s work was not always so well-known. He left MIT during his senior year in order to move to New York and pursue an acting career — which caused tension between him and his traditional Indian father. While living in New York, Katdare quickly discovered that he was being pigeonholed into stereotypical roles for actors of South Asian descent.
“It was the first time that it dawned on me that I had picked a career where being Indian was one of the biggest things about me,” he said.
When he began to produce American Desi, Katdare said, it was a challenge to get a studio to distribute the movie. He was repeatedly told that white audiences were not ready to see a movie in which none of the characters were white.
“Options [for actors of Asian descent] really are limited and we don’t really talk about it, but he experienced it firsthand and it was great that he shared that with us,” College freshman Meghna Chandra said.
Katdare gave away free copies of American Desi at the end of the event, encouraging attendees to support up-and-coming Asian filmmakers by not buying pirated DVD’s. He criticized his own parents for purchasing a pirated copy of his movie upon its release.
Wharton senior and coordinating chair for APAHW Brian Chi said Katdare “undervalues the amount of headway he’s made ... I would attribute the higher availability of roles for Asians to his groundbreaking work.”
The South Asian Society and APAHW committee coordinated Katdare appearance.
