SBS Spice

May 14 is Girmit Day - a day that commemorates when the first indentured labourers arrived in Fiji from India in 1879 under British colonial rule. The term Girmit, or Girmityas, was used to refer to Indian indentured labourers as it was how they would pronounce the English word 'agreement'. SBS Spice's Suhayla Sharif speaks with six Indo-Fijian Australians to shed light on their enduring legacy.

What exactly is South Asian food? In fact, can South Asian food be exact? We are not a monolithic community but our food binds us so much more together. SBS Spice guest, and MasterChef Australia Season 13 finalist, Kishwar Chowdhury, helps us decode the DNA of South Asian food through her Indian-Bangladeshi heritage and shares how a humble rebellion against Daal & Rice kicked off her journey.

The female gaze of Netlix's latest Indian production, Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, has viewers craving to be inside the mastermind Sanjay Leela Bhansali's jewelled universe. We speak with two lead actors of the show, Sonakshi Sinha and Aditi Rao Hydari, about how the show dissolves the binary of "good" or "bad" women and why history has erased some of India's most fearless freedom fighters.

A chance remark by an old friend in Sydney takes a woman back to her teenage years: living alone, by the sea in Chennai. And so begins the story of Nayika: A Dancing Girl, a theatre production mixing storytelling, live music and Bharatanatyam. We sat down with co-directors, Nithya Nagarajan and Liv Satchell, to flesh out how the journey of this performance began, what makes Nayika the "9th heroine" and how one woman's story is somewhere every woman's story.

There’s brown and then there’s eBrown. With the mic firmly in his grasp, the internet is sat for Goan-Australian content creator, Jeremy Franco, who is often seen imitating his mum online. But with the ever-changing algorithm, how much can we rely on culture to feel seen? And more importantly: is it necessary to always do brown focused content as a brown creator?

Is being South Asian all there is to a South Asian character on TV? Breaking beyond what is expected of brown faces on our screens, Ayesha Madon, lead of the Netflix hit 'Heartbreak High', speaks with SBS Spice about how doing a role that didn't center around her identity alone was game changing. She says there is no gatekeeper, one has to make their own gate. The question remains: where do we begin?

SBS Spice breaks new ground with English language content for young Australians of South Asian heritage. It's a fresh new look at pop culture, identity, food, sport, history and much more.