The characters available to Penn were painstakingly stereotypical, including a "Gandhi lookalike," a "quirky, Indian lab buddy" whose "language is peppered with Indian cultural references" and "Careem" with "a slight Hindi accent".
Last year, he posted a string of tweets sharing the ridiculous parts people wanted to cast him in, which included snake charmer, lab buddy, and man with "slight Hindi accent".
Indian-born American Tom Alter acted in about 60 films and made a career playing the "white man" who spoke in English-accented Hindi.
Despite her good looks, Kaif was hindered by speaking Hindi with a heavy accent, so many of her films had to be dubbed.
By contrast, the leader of the victorious Congress party is an immigrant, Sonia Gandhi, who still speaks Hindi with an Italian accent and whose imprint on Indian politics and society embodies the "palimpsest" of which Nehru wrote.
In recent years, perhaps no one has made it quite as big as the current reigning queen Katrina Kaif, who is half-British and speaks Hindi with a foreign accent.
She speaks fluent Hindi, albeit with an Italian accent, and wears a sari with ease.
As Bloomberg reports, the virtual assistant can now speak a blend of Hindi and English with an Indian accent.
"Indian accents" included testers who spoke Hindi or Gujarati as a first language.
The Indian media are often ambivalent about Pinto, speculating about her wealth, mocking her fluctuating accents in both English and Hindi, the way she still calls Mumbai "Bombay", even complaining that her skin is too dark for Bollywood.
In 1916 Wilhelm Doegen, a linguist and phoneticist who had studied at Oxford in the 1900s, realised that fate had provided him with a captive audience, literally, and an extraordinary variety of accents and languages of the British empire including Hindi, Bengali and Punjabi, Welsh, Scots and Irish voices.
