The big news on this Sunday is that an Indian character (human not puppet) is finally (after 39 years) moving on to the storied Sesame Street!

Doesn’t Snuffleupagus look like he is eyeing “Leela” as food?

The newest neighbor on Sesame Street just happens to be Indian American, because the role was originally dreamed up with no particular ethnicity in mind.

“It was incidental,” actress Nitya Vidyasagar told India-West by phone last week from New York City, where she is currently taping the 39th season of the award-winning PBS children’s show. “The casting notices said nothing of ethnicity.”

But the New York-based stage actress made such a strong impression on the show’s producers that they found themselves willing to create her role from scratch.

Vidyasagar plays Leela, a young Indian American woman who runs the local laundromat. Unlike many of the other actors on the show, who use their own first names as their character’s names, she felt more comfortable with the name Leela. “My name is hard for some people to say,” she explained. [Link]

Sepia Mutiny went down to Sesame Street and conducted interviews to see what some residents thought of their newest neighbor. Would there be increased tension because a South Asian was moving in to the neighborhood?

First off, we found that the some Koreans were pissed that a desi is running the laundromat instead of one of their own. When pressed further they said, “why not the 7-11 one street over?” The cookie monster was also in a foul mood explaining, “great, one more mouth to feed.” Count von Count was excited that he may soon learn how to count in Hindi. Oscar threw a garbage lid at one of our bloggers and just didn’t want to be bothered. Elmo just kept laughing because he was so happy at the news but then Bert came by and slapped him upside the head for no (good) reason.

The only one that would speak to us in earnest was Grover. He turned out to be far more lucid than he comes across on television (and he wasn’t wearing a cape). He struck me as an old soul actually. He was glad to see “Leela” move into the neighborhood but expressed some remorse when learning that Nitya had chosen to go by “Leela” because she thought “Nitya” might be too hard to pronounce. “We have a mammoth-like dude named Aloysius Snuffleupagus that lives on this street. Would Nitya really have been that hard to pronounce? Even Barack gave up Barry,” said Grover.

The new Leela is quite an international woman, and speaks Hindi and Telugu. Born in Muscat, Oman, she moved to India with her family when she was a year old. She and her family lived in Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bangalore before moving to the United States when she was 12, and she speaks English with a delicate, yet hard-to-place, Indian accent. “They said I could speak with my accent, too,” she laughed. [Link]

Look for the new season to start in August. This post was brought to you by the number 8 and the letter W.