The title is a lie. I have watched “Never Have I Ever.” Multiple times, in fact, and I cry every single time.
When “Never Have I Ever” first came out in 2020, the show immediately struck a chord in young Indian American viewers with its exploration of teen angst, grief, high school dynamics and familial relationships in a uniquely Indian context. Never before had sex, popularity and coming of age in the suburban United States ever been explored through the lens of the first-generation Indian immigrant, especially one as messy and flawed as Devi Vishwakumar. The show was touted as “pioneering,” a label that creator Mindy Kaling is no stranger to.
Kaling changed the landscape of South Asian diaspora media forever while winning Emmys and laughs when she debuted as Kelly Kapoor on “The Office” in 2005.
Underscored by Kaling’s now iconic and witty writing, Kapoor broke the box of a stereotypical Indian woman in U.S. media: She was unapologetic, despicable and brilliant. However, in destroying the original box, Kaling has created a new, perhaps even more damaging one, as evidenced by the backlash on her “race-bending” 2023 show, “Velma.” This box is the trope of the “self-hating Indian” — and Kaling’s filmography is a testament to how entrenched this stereotype is in her work.
Kaling created Kapoor with a white suburban audience in mind, yet Kapoor’s character resonated deeply within the Indian American community. Her character doesn’t explicitly reference Indian American culture, instead existing solely within the realm of universal U.S. humor. Still, her very presence on screen at that time was both political and revolutionary. This is due to the nature of her personality, which was a far cry from the way Indian women were fetishized as submissive at the time. Kapoor was a complex Indian woman, written by a complex Indian woman. However, her personality also foreshadowed a central feature of Kaling’s characters that would follow: their unabashed humanity, which often translates into selfishness and superficiality.
After her dynamic writing on “The Office,” Kaling would helm the first show in the United States written by, directed by and starring an Indian woman: “The Mindy Project,” which featured Kaling as a young obstetrician-gynecologist navigating the workplace, relationships and female-centric health, inspired by Kaling’s own mother. In an extension of the Kapoor framework of despicability and complex humanity, the main character Mindy despises her Indian-ness in recurring jokes and dialogue: For example, in a Season 2 episode, she jokes that her ID, which features a blonde woman with blue eyes, is “aspirational.” And in her “trailblazing works” following “The Mindy Project,” Kaling perpetuates themes of casual misogyny and racism toward Indian women: Both “Velma” and “Never Have I Ever” feature multiple jokes about the “gorilla arm hair of Indian women.”
Moreover, “Never Have I Ever,” “The Mindy Project” and Kaling’s other hit series, “The Sex Lives of College Girls” all prominently feature a primary Indian character falling in love with a Jewish guy who is just, simply put, mean and racist. This relationship is not just a coincidental feature but a recurring central pattern of her work: her characters despise their Indian-ness and an “endgame” relationship with a white character who often makes jokes at the expense of their race is the final negation of their immigrant status, a last assimilation into U.S. culture.
When it was done the first time, a character who was self-loathing and unwilling to engage with their culture was unique, making a commentary on the internalized racism of the diaspora and lending nuance to the character’s layers. But Kaling has created “self-hating Indian” characters so many times that the empowerment we once felt seeing such characters on screen is gone. Kaling’s writing now comes across as tone-deaf and outdated. The popularity of Kaling’s writing and acting on “The Office” opened doors for South Asian media, but it may have closed the most important ones.
Kaling’s portrayal of other races has also faced criticism. She has been accused by many Jewish media outlets of perpetuating harmful stereotypes, such as depicting Jewish people as “unsympathetic” through her recurring portrayal of the aforementioned rude Jewish love interests. Additionally, her work frequently incorporates Black culture and slang, especially in feminist language. However, at the same time, she perpetuates the trope of Black people being dangerous, most notably in “Velma.” Under the guise of speaking for the Hindu upper-caste community, Kaling’s “Never Have I Ever” also plays casual casteism and Islamophobia for laughs, rather than deeply exploring the issues with sensitivity and nuance.
Kaling’s real-life relationship with B.J. Novak and her education at an elite, majority-white institution have all been trotted out as explanations for or further features of her racism. The criticism has expanded beyond her art into her public persona, and at the heart of this conversation is a question that all South Asian media must deal with: Do South Asian creators owe us representation?
In contradictory podcasts and interviews, Kaling has stated that she wants to voice the Indian experience and yet not be judged on the merit of being an Indian woman. She argues that seeing her as just the mouthpiece for representation prevents her work from measuring up solely as a piece of art or comedy, especially when a white man will never have to answer to those same standards of representation. In a way, she is right, which is where the strengths and weaknesses of her media come from: representation being limited to one pioneer or “spokesperson.”
Any sociocultural identity has nuance, and when we create a formula for representation as Kaling has done, we risk reducing both her and ourselves to stereotypes. Kaling is an example of the problem that pervades contemporary Indian American media; she is peerless, with no other South Asians creating film and TV with a similar level of acclaim and fame. And that’s where the solution arises to the Mindy problem: Kaling doesn’t owe us anything, but we owe it to ourselves to diversify our media and expand past preconceived stereotypes of South Asian women.