ArtsEnte
Other Biden appointees included the artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, the curator Nora Halpern, the actors George Clooney, Jennifer Garner and Kerry Washington, the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, the screenwriter and producer Shonda Rhimes and Steve Israel, a former US representative for New York.
The inclusion of Begum adds a further political layer to the work: in 2023, India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) removed significant sections of Mughal history from school textbooks under the guise of “rationalising” the syllabus.
It’s pulled in less compelling directions by the broad caricatures who now populate the edges of the story, including a marriage-crazed blonde hottie Mo humors until he can’t, and a recently green-card-approved friend whose gun collection seems considerably more expansive than his English-language vocabulary.