Illustration: Abdullah Sarışen

This article is part of two-part series, investigating the Netflix Series Never Have I Ever. To read Sarah Shamim’s article Never Have I Seen So Much Representation, click here.

In the first episode of Never Have I Ever, a show written and directed by Mindy Kaling and centred on Indian-American teenager high-school miseries, Devi’s parents, first-generation immigrants, announce at a barbecue: “We are vegetarians”. That they do not eat meat is seen as automatic to their Indian-ness, a metonym for their pronounced attachment to their Indian roots that will play out repeatedly in the show. Like in most narratives of the Indian diaspora in the United States — “Indians are Vegetarians” continues to be a cute cultural quirk to point to the community’s cultural specificity. But aside from being completely untrue, (Indian Vegetarianism is a Brahmanical construct), the idea that Indians do not eat meat is tied to caste and class hierarchies and has encouraged deep-seated violence in the country — most recently by upper-caste cow-vigilantes that attack citizens on the pretext of consuming beef.

 Kaling has alluded to India’s vegetarianism before, in a video with Kamala Harris, they talk about their South-Indian roots, waving off vegetarianism as some kind of automatic construct (“It’s all is vegetarian, of course”). Packaged Hindu symbols like these as representation have for a long time been a way to address the gap of South Asians in mainstream American culture. Musician Raja Kumari exudes high performativity of Indian-ness (Bangles, Bindis, Karma, Sanskrit), Padma Lakshmi speaks of her own experiences as an immigrant in the United States, but at no point takes her fight beyond the talk-showesque resistance to white supremacy that involves shouting at white people about saying chai-tea. Earlier this year, the New York Times published a piece called “Indian Women Say Yes to Lehengas Near and far”, replete with buzzwords to signify Indian-ness  – the piece suggests that weddings, tradition and spending lots of money on one’s wedding clothes are all parts of a spanning ritual among Indian women.. Never Have I Ever also follows this formula by simply inserting catchphrases as signifiers of culture — Sari! Colours! Festivals! Priyanka Chopra! — without examining their relevance or accuracy.

 The demographic the show claims to represent is “brown”, a category of solidarity that aims to bring together cultures of South-Asia and its Diasporas. But in the show, Brown is Indian is Hindu is Brahmin is wealthy is cisgender is Ivy-league-aspirational – a linearity that forms the prime packaged deal in “model minority” South-Asian identity politics. Never Have I Ever is familiar with certain profitable cultural constructs, enabling depictions that are inspired more by Bollywood, than reality. Hinduism sells in the United States – yoga, ayurveda, vegetarianism, lavish weddings; these are recognizable features of culture that assimilate into the larger frameworks of American consumerism. The show builds on marketable anatomies of Indians and Indian-American identities designed to appeal to an American mainstream. These are identities that (and Kaling seems aware of this) will sell. 

The show follows American-Indian teenager Devi Vishwakumar, and involves her relationship with her best friends, and the other two women in her family – Devi’s mother Nalini, and her cousin Kamala. All the Indian characters are written and portrayed within parameters that are built around a specific (dominant) caste and class paradigm — Devi prays to gods in the morning, Nalini wears her mangalsutra, a upper-caste symbol of a married woman at all times, a side story is that Devi is applying to go to Princeton. Like in most popular American-Indian representations, these are conflated with Indian-ness, put on display but left unexamined. Gods are heralded, “intelligence” is presented as the supreme white-collar professional job and assumed to be  some kind of intrinsic trait. 

The show casts a fun, progressive light on an Indian-American teenager’s sexuality and Kaling’s writing is often edgy when it comes to Devi, her lead. But to the bits that deal with the particularities of India, tropes continue — janky accents are given to Devi’s mother and cousin, India itself is portrayed in scornful disdain or as a mystical machine that throws cultural clues at the characters from time to time. The most evident manifestation of this tendency is the character of Kamala, Devi’s “beautiful (and light-skinned) cousin”. Even as Devi is often dynamic, quick-witted and rebellious; Kamala, the “Indian Indian” character in the show, is a hapless, beautiful woman who wouldn’t know modern liberty if it hit her in the face. In an initial scene introducing  Kamala, she is asked by a clumsy, leering American man if she would like to go to dinner, her beauty often sends men tumbling into the bins at the doorstep of the house where the three women live. Kamala is guileless and unaware, and Devi has to rescue her by telling the man to leave. While the Indian-American teenager is cool and quick to respond, Kamala remains blistering, bereft of agency. In contrast to the stronger personalities of Nalini and Devi, Kamala is given a middle position between battling the Brahmanical Hindu traditions that ensnare her but at the same time apologising for them. 

In what is possibly the most irksome episode of the show, the three lead women characters arrive at a “Ganesh Puja”, in which Kamala, even though she has been dissuaded, sits down next to a woman named Jaya, who is ostracized by the Indian community for marrying an American Muslim man. As the women talk, Jaya explains to Kamala that she regrets her marriage outside the community, and suggests that Kamala herself must herself marry within it. Arranged marriage becomes another thing to defend from white people as “culture”, instead of critique it as what it is – a dated, cruel practice to keep caste hierarchy in place through endogamy. The tendency is common in the show and the wider diaspora;  invoking oppressive systems that stem from upper-caste Hindu culture, but painting them in nostalgia and misty tones of ardour. “Instead of using this moment to challenge it, Kaling perpetuates casteist Islamophobia, in a time where India’s 200 million Muslims are being killed by Hindu nationalist mobs,” writes Monica M, in her piece about the show. M is an Indian organiser in Brooklyn who works with Equality Labs, a confideration of South-Asians that challenge caste apartheid in the United States. “Ultimately, Kamala gives up her Asian American boyfriend to accept pursuing a tentative relationship with the upper caste man her family found” she writes. “since caste endogamy is a lot more desirable.” 

The episode is filled with prompts to apparent Indian-ness — A soppy priest named Raj, a hyper-ritualistic set of Indian aunties, the Taj Mahal jumps out of nowhere, a group of dancing girls in lehengas emerges as a cue to another identity milestone. At the end of the episode, the three women give the priest a lift home; a supposedly heartwarming montage of awkward conversations ensues. The priest tells the women, who are wide-eyed and thankful that they are a “good family”, he then chants a blessing in Sanskrit, and the episode subsides to its end. Hinduism is given a romantic-comedy tint. India and Indian-ness is a standby character in all of Never Have I Ever — served to its audience in a simplistic, flattened array of clichés. 

It was when I watched the scene that I became impatient — what kind of teenager sits around warming up to a gimmicky priest? Why does the actress that plays Devi’s mother – Poorna Jagannathan have an exaggerated Indian accent? Why is the premise of the show South-Asian but the only South-Asians available for reference is a rich upper-caste Hindu family? Where are the Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Indian Muslims, Kashmiris, Indians from the Northeast, Indians of any other backgrounds? Are all Desi kids abroad ivy-league aspirants, spelling-bee champions and future CEOs. Where are the rebels, the dissenters, the punks? Kaling confronts issues that may bother (some) Indian-Americans who are confused about being “white inside and brown outside”, of the struggle against white kids and their presumptions about other cultures. She has - without a doubt created a space for the American diaspora to feel seen; why then does she treat India and its life in clunky slapstick stereotypes? I emerged from the show with a sort of humming headache, a familiar reaction to much of American TV. In the end, the show displays what my Singaporean friend calls a “Disney channel rep”, her own angry reaction to Crazy Rich Asians and the dilution of Singapore’s racial and class dynamic, presenting a reductive, merchandisable rendition of an entire country.

Today, in the real-world, India is instituting and strengthening its brutal military occupation in Kashmir. Caste-based discrimination by upper-castes still thrives in every region of the subcontinent. India’s Muslims are being questioned of their very right to citizenship under a new bill passed in 2019 by The Indian Government under the BJP led by Narendra Modi. In February this year, violent anti-Muslim pogroms took place in the working class Muslim neighborhoods of New Delhi. The Indian state is preying on every vulnerable community – those of oppressed caste backgrounds, students, Muslims, the poor. All of this is done under the pretext of preserving “Hindu culture”. The government of India has taken it upon itself to frame its atrocities as cultural resistance, and much of this culture looks like what Never Have I Ever nonchalantly celebrates. That the diaspora’s lived experience is far from that of the subcontinent is understandable. The problem is less with authenticity but with the conflation of Indian culture without recognizing their constitution in India itself. The flippant jokes about Muslims, the token tribute to Narendra Modi in the Ganesh Puja episode may feel like a brisk dialogue to Kaling. But sitting in New Delhi, watching a country reeling from the crutches of the right-wing Hindu government, even the slightest sense of making light of things creates a specific kind of exhaustion.  

The show stages a success in casting Canadian-Eelam Tamil Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Devi. Many have found it empowering to see a Tamil girl as the show’s lead, Tamils see themselves under or misrepresented in Western media. Like Kaling, and Ramakrishnan, I am also Tamil, but my family moved to Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan, four generations ago. I speak Hindi and Urdu as first languages, and more Punjabi than I do Tamil, my relationship with the Tamil language and culture is fraught and confusing. On her casting of Ramakrishnan, Kaling says that she didn’t want to see a “pale North Indian girl” as her Indian lead, and Ramakrishnan is “Tamil, like me (Kaling)”. But this is confusing.  Eelam Tamils, who are refugees from the war in Sri Lanka, navigate their place differently and with more challenges than their middle-class Indian counterparts in the West. Tamilness, too, is flattened into one monolith, even though it exists all over the world, including the Global South, in Malaysia, South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria. Confining the Tamil world within India comes off as another stretch.

As I watched the show, I remembered an article written by writer Nashwa Lina Khan, who writes of her Love/Hate relationship with The Mindy Project. Khan, who has a much closer relationship to Kaling’s work than I do, writes of her anti-blackness and the proximity to whiteness that the show exhibits. “South Asians in the US benefit from privilege over our black peers in that the vast majority of us arrived as economic migrants.” writes Khan. “Many, particularly those of Indian descent, either arrived with or have achieved middle-class status.” Khan’s critique is important – she also speaks of interrogating The Mindy Project’s “brand of diversity”, which lends itself to disregarding South-Asians of other backgrounds, including Muslims. In a recent search for Khan’s Twitter account, I found that she had been chased off the website by liberal white women, all for criticising a tweet by replying “lmao”. Herein lies the irony. Even as Kaling’s brand is welcomed by white Americans, and everyone else, Muslim South-Asian writers like Khan, who don’t play safe when talking about identity politics and question celebrities, are bullied and treated with disdain. 

For too long, narratives of wealthy Hindu Indians have reigned over other South Asian representations. In food writing, I see Indian food being covered extensively and promoted, while Bangladeshi food – which forms the base of immigrant food culture in the United Kingdom and the USA is cast-aside. While Never Have I ever is being trumpeted; Fatimah Asghar’s short-film Got Game, and Nida Manzoor’s TV show Lady Parts, about Muslim punk women in London hasn’t received any of the acclaims that Never Have I Ever got even before it was released. While it may be important to Americans that an Indian woman has a steady foot in Prime Time TV, simplified constructs of South Asian identity are restrictive for those that don’t fit into their spun dictum.  If talking about Indian and South Asian representation in American culture means not talking about caste, class, resistance, conflict – then it seems pointless and redundant. Just another big force for gentrifying identity politics into pretty packages for sale.

Through writing this piece, I felt the frightening and urgent necessity to pass a disclaimer, like many critics of Kaling do, that to question the show’s portrayals was not an attack on Kaling herself. Two months ago, I indulged in amateur Priyanka Chopra criticism on twitter, using as a frame of reference a video made by a TikTok user that spoofed her interview persona. I was called Islamophobic: “because Priyanka helps the Rohingyas!” the TikTok user (a brown woman) in turn, received a barrage of hate from other brown women for putting down somebody the “community” idolized. This canonization of Chopra ignores her incitement of hate against Kashmiris, her pandering to the Indian government, her vapid comment to a Pakistani journalist (whom the Indian media called a “troll”) who questioned her about the same. The trend instead seems to be to baselessly support Chopra, congratulate her, but at the same time attack anybody who criticizes her. These ethics of solidarity are incoherent and messed up.

Kaling, the writer, is savvier than the characters she writes for Television. Off-screen, she fights for spaces for women in writers’ rooms and Hollywood, an undoubtedly challenging feat. She has often spoken about the expectations that come with South-Asian representation, saying how she didn’t aim to tell everyone’s story, but only hers. This is fair until it is realized that Kaling is an American celebrity – the culture she endorses, the identities she builds, become pervasive to brown women and even those outside the United States. I am often told by many people that I look like Kaling (I don’t), I am always asked to write about chai (I won’t), my grandmother’s recipes (I don’t have any), “fun family traditions” (no fucking way). Even if I don't see myself in diaspora constructs built by those like Kaling, I am occasionally asked to pander to them. As writer Anupa Mistry cleverly asks in her piece about Scottish-Indian musician Kapil Seshasayee’s defiance of stereotypical identity-based art – “Is the representation that feeds the content mill really just a catfish?”

I know it is important to see yourself in larger cultural spaces; I grew up listening to what my friends now call “white boy punk”. As a teenager, I would camp out behind my best friend who would scour portals and make me CDs of bands she had found from Minneapolis to Manchester. Some of my earliest influences were The Replacements; when I was 17, I listened to the Fugazi album 13 Songs and nothing else for an entire year. The first time I finally “saw myself” in anything was when Desi-American punk band, The Kominas released their first album “Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay” in 2008, it was a powerful thing to recognize the rattling mechanism of punk in Urdu and Punjabi, the references hit closer to home. The band spoke to some South-Asians and American-Muslims directly. They also questioned what it meant to be American or Pakistani, they combated the things that were considered typical by both of these cultures and questioned the things they already knew. Representation brings with it a certain amount of responsibility to interrogate, which Kaling seems hesitant to do. The frameworks that she creates are not malleable enough to include the multiplicity of South-Asians. Merely existing is not a dialogue with other brown people. 

Maybe it is easy for me to criticise Kaling. She is American, I am not, I have not grown up around white supremacy (even though I do know it) nor do I aspire to a “better life” (as Never Have I Ever suggests at least thrice) in the United States. The only characters I mildly connected with in the show were the apathetic, disinterested kids, I only remember high-school from not being invested in it. I didn’t relate to Devi, but she did remind me of kids like her I went to school with — rich high-achievers that aspired to fancy universities and peddled their model UN accomplishments, who reprimanded me when I dropped out of college to work; and glorified milestones took you, ironically enough, to California. 

Identities are not simple things, they mutate, they change and they can be tucked away in layers within the people that hold them.  If there are identities of race and religion, there are those that are bound by language, others by gender and sexuality and then there are important ones of shared and negated traumas. When it comes to South Asians, these intersect widely, they are often divisive, sometimes shared, but always complex to navigate. If there must be an imagined solidarity, it should consider the gaps in the narrative, question Brahmanical control on manufactured and curated culture, it must recognize the powers in place that determine who gets to tell their stories in the first place. 

In India today, there are queer artists empowering entire generations and speaking out against discriminatory laws; there are Bahujan women building mental health systems that battle casteist bigotry, and others working on a documentary about Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar’s life. There are women of all backgrounds, led by the Muslim working class women of Shaheen Bagh that have staged the longest protest against the fascist Indian state. There are Kashmiri women activists in prison for raising their voice against it. Never Have I Ever relies on India as it is profitable, but balks at recognizing it for what it is — a continent in which wars, ruptures, identity quests, discriminations, occupations and revolutions all take place simultaneously. 

Aesthetics like Kaling’s seem unaware that you can be attached to your culture, informed by it, but also break it down, question it, tear it apart to create holes in it so more voices can come through. It is uncomfortable work, but it is possible –— I know many Indians and South-Asians across the world that do it every day.