Artwork by Siri Raghunayakala
When Never Have I Ever, an HBO comedy co-created by Mindy Kaling, first came out on Netflix, I was overjoyed. It was exciting to watch a show starring an Indian American teenage girl, around the same age as I was when the first episodes came out. I drank in every small piece of representation I could get. I was obsessed with the fact that the South Asian girl had not one, but two love interests and was not simply reduced to the nerdy side character. However, as the show progressed, the main character, Devi, constantly hurt her friends and spurred on incessant drama, making it very hard to like the character I had wanted to see on television for so long. As much as I am grateful for the representation she has given us, the truth is, the South Asian community as a whole deserves better than Mindy Kaling.
Recently, Mindy Kaling has released two new shows, which are gaining moderate popularity. The first show is the Sex Lives of College Girls (2021). Again, I loved this show, but not its only South Asian character. As someone going to college next year, I was excited to watch a show about the college experiences of a girl that looks like me. Bela, the South Asian main character, makes horrible decisions throughout the show. She is selfish, she is a cheater, and she is a bad friend. While she is portrayed as pretty and confident, a positive among the bad-looking nerd stereotype of South Asian girls, she is also portrayed as crazy. One of her most pertinent traits is her overt sexuality, which does break stereotypes, but is extremely exaggerated and consistently played for laughs. Bela is a caricature of a young woman whose suppressed upbringing causes her to rebound into the world of college hookups and casual sex. There is no nuance to her exploration of desire – her demand for sex becomes her primary personality trait, effectively reducing her to a trope despite Kaling’s efforts otherwise.
In a similar vein, Velma (2023), an animated Scooby Doo spin off, does a disservice to South Asian representation. Many watchers were excited for Velma to be presented as South Asian. But throughout the show’s runtime, Kaling repeatedly plays into the repulsive stereotypes that affect South Asian women, and that will become ingrained in the young South Asian girls who are watching this show. For example, when Velma says she is waiting to shower alone, the other characters respond with, “Because of your weight? Because of your handsome face? Because of your hairy gorilla arms?” While in shows like The Office and The Sex Lives of College Girls Kaling tries to break stereotypes, in shows like Velma, South Asians become the butt of her jokes.
I am tired of the little South Asian representation we get being riddled by negative stereotypes, things that I, and other South Asian people, often get made fun of in real life. When I was younger, there was a boy in my class who would tell me to shave my arms. People like that learn how to hurt their South Asian peers from the media. We need to be teaching the next generation how to be kind, not how to act on stereotypes.
I ask myself all the time why Mindy Kaling does this to her characters. Maybe it is internalized racism; maybe she thinks it’s funny; maybe she just does not know that her characters hurt us. Many people argue that the South Asian community should be grateful that we have any representation at all, but these people are rarely South Asian. Ask a South Asian person, and we will tell you that we deserve better than Mindy Kaling.