nevercouldgetthehangofthursdays:
For the numerous asks from followers who wondered what the race issue was in BASK. It’s one of those ‘pay close attention or you’ll miss it moments’ which I didn’t catch the first time myself. Mr Chatterjee was Mrs Hudson’s boyfriend in the…
I have to side with the overthinking on this one. Honestly, pretty much any surname you find in India, you can find at least a smattering of in Pakistan, because the thing is that some people from all sorts of areas in India converted to Islam, and then after Pakistan became an Islamic republic in its own right, some of them emigrated so they could live in a country run by laws and government more in line with their beliefs. All it takes is a Google search to turn up a fair number of Chatterjees in Pakistan, and presumably at least a few of them live in Islamabad.
As for the marriage issue, that’d be pretty dickish if the implication were meant to be that either Hindus or Muslims keep multiple wives (permitted according to Islamic texts, but functionally nixed by the vast majority of Muslim scholars in the past century or so). But I think that’s jumping to conclusions. No one ever indicates that Chatterjee’s got multiple wives due to religiously or culturally approved polygamy. I simply assumed the implication was that this particular Chatterjee was a cheat who has married multiple women and then run out on them.
All that aside, though, Moffat’s response was jackass. I get that it can be exhausting to be confronted with every argument against the choices you make as an author—and yeah, even when you’re trying to do right by people, you can forget or make stupid moves—but when somebody says, “Dude, this feels kinda like you’re casting aspersions on a culture/ethnicity/religion,” it really deserves at least something more than, “Eh, whatever.”
Verbose Idiot: “Mr. Chatterjee” more ignorant racism or just bad/no research