Netflix and Colonize: An Analysis of White Supremacy in Never Have I Ever

This research paper was written as the final assignment in my College Writing Program class “Writing Identity.”

Marked by a blatant disregard for the lives of people of color and hundreds of subsequent protests, the summer of 2020 brought brown and Black lives to the forefront of the media’s attention. This attention did not just include news headlines, however; Hollywood quickly capitalized on the white-majority public’s newfound racial consciousness. Actors and filmmakers of color alike suddenly found an abundance of opportunities in a field that previously relegated them to stereotyped, sidekick roles — and no company seemed to offer more opportunities in 2020 than Netflix. In an article entitled, “How Netflix is Leading Hollywood’s Diversity Charge,” Inverse describes diversity as Netflix’s “winning formula” and applauds the slew of award-winning Netflix originals with diverse casts (Kilson). Predictably — formulaically, even — when Netflix released a POC-led, coming-of-age series entitled Never Have I Ever (NHIE) in May of 2020, critics’ responses were overwhelmingly positive (Tassi). Created by South Asian sitcom star Mindy Kaling, NHIE follows 14-year-old Devi Vishwakumar’s journey to “finally become cool” in her California high school (Tassi). At face value, NHIE is everything the Indian community could have wanted: a young, powerful rebuke of Indian stereotypes. A closer look, however, reveals that NHIE gets representation painfully wrong. In this paper, I will analyze the series pilot to explore how Never Have I Ever’s tokenized packaging of brown culture promotes orientalism, xenophobia, and the ‘model minority’ myth at the benefit of white supremacy and the detriment of the South Asian community.

The problem with South Asian representation in the media is not one of quantity; indeed, in an article written a decade ago entitled “Beyond Apu: Why are there suddenly so many Indians on television?” author Nina Rastogi names dozens of desi characters in mainstream film and TV, ranging from The Simpson’s Apu Nahasapeemapetilon and The Big Bang Theory’s Rajesh Koothrapalli to Mindy Kaling herself as Kelly Kapoor in The Office (Rastogi). The problem with South Asian representation, rather, lies in its accuracy, and the inability of Indian-American audiences to relate with math-obsessed, socially awkward, funky-accent-bearing Indian characters. The Print claims that Never Have I Ever solves the issue of ethnicity being a character’s only personality trait, writing, “Mindy Kaling has liberated the second-generation Indian American from the hyphenated identity…[Devi’s] Indian-ness was entirely incidental,” (Grewal). However, the pilot alone proves that Kaling intends for the Vishwakumar family’s brownness to be its defining feature, perpetuating the xenophobic image of Indian-Americans as ‘forever foreigners’ in race scholar Dr. Mia Tuan’s words (Tuan 163). When the show’s pilot episode introduces Devi’s mother Nalini, her salient feature is, without a doubt, her heavy Indian accent — a stark contrast to Devi’s fully American accent. In creating an undeniable aural rift between Devi — the supposed pinnacle of Americanness — and her mother, Kaling creates a cultural rift, too, between Devi’s Indian roots and her American life. Sociolinguist Rosina Lippi-Green describes accents as “a litmus test for exclusion, an excuse to turn away, to refuse to recognize the other,” (Lippi-Green 64). The grammatically-correct yet foreign-sounding Indian accent — dubbed ‘brown voice’ by Shilpa S. Dave in her book Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film — is not only foreign to the American ear but also a stereotype that South Asians are expected to follow (Dave 44). To combine both Dave and Lippi-Green’s sentiments, white Americans are comforted by the fact that South Asian immigrants will never fully assimilate, and diversions from this expectation create cognitive dissonance in the white mind. For example, a University of Michigan study found that students were less likely to understand a lecture given by a native English speaker when they were told the lecturer was Asian (Dave 43). Moreover, being a comedic show at heart, Kaling unwittingly gives audience members the go-ahead to laugh at Nalini’s over-exaggerated accent, a comedic device problematic enough that voice actor Hank Azaria stepped down in 2020 from voicing Apu in The Simpsons (BBC News). If Devi is truly “just another American teenager” as The Print claims, then Nalini’s opposing manner of speaking must necessarily not be American, furthering the xenophobic notion that there is a “right” and “wrong” way to be American (Grewal). When Devi adheres to white standards of behavior, she is the ‘right’ type of Indian-American, and ‘wrong’ Indian-Americans are forced to follow suit.

Having identified Devi as a non-foreign, Americanized character in Never Have I Ever, Kaling encourages Devi to reject her culture repeatedly throughout the pilot episode. In the pilot’s opening scene, Devi prays for the Hindu gods to thin out the hair on her arms. “I know it’s an Indian thing,” she says, “but my forearms look like the frigging floor of a barber shop,” (8Flix 4). Though many Indian-American girls can indubitably relate to Devi’s sentiment, representations of natural, ethnic bodily features as undesirable are incredibly detrimental to Asian viewers’ self-esteems. In “Perceptions of Asian American Representation in Entertainment Media,” Lydia Susan Owens found that, as a direct result of sentiment like Devi’s, “Asian American women and men adhere more strictly to white beauty standards and feel stronger dissatisfaction regarding their bodies and self-image,” (Owens 13). Devi’s rejection of her Indian roots is not always subtly hidden in bodily-insecurity, however; she shows strong resentment for a cousin from India named Kamala that stays with the family, exasperatedly asking, “How long is Kamala going to stay with us?” (8Flix 13). Kamala is yet another character in the show that performs brown voice, and when she accidentally says “open the TV” instead of “turn on the TV,” Devi disgustedly complains that “she’s just so Indian,” (8Flix 13). Rather than criticize Kamala’s personality, Devi deems a lack of fluency in English to be synonymous with ‘Indian,’ and she assumes that Kamala’s ethnicity alone is a valid enough reason to want her gone. The use of ‘Indian’ as an insult would be justifiably abhorrent coming from a non-Indian, yet Kaling deems it acceptable and ‘relatable’ coming from a young Indian girl. Nonetheless, in the words of Young, “[Media] that harmfully misrepresents a culture would be as wrong produced by an insider as it is when produced by an outsider,” (Young 106). Lastly, though revulsion towards Indian culture is deemed universal in Never Have I Ever, many Indian-Americans take pride in their roots; in her book Desis in the house: Indian American Youth Culture in NYC, Sunaina Maira sheds light on the fact that most second generation South Asians in America proudly claim their ancestral ties to countries that fall under the term ‘desi’ like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and more (Maira 69). By encouraging her main character to reject everything India-related, Kaling not only justifies years of xenophobia towards individuals with brown skin in America but also encourages her young, impressionable Indian audience to do the same.

Ironically, in her efforts to set Devi apart from unappealing aspects of Indian culture — specifically by centering the show around Devi’s pursuit of sex — Kaling only pushes Devi towards even worse perceptions of brownness. In “The Cultural Closet: The South Asian American Experience of Keeping Romantic Relationships Secret,” authors Khera and Ahluwalia discuss cultural expectations placed on Indian women to be chaste, submissive, and averse to premarital sex, leading them to hide their relationships from family members (Khera and Ahluwalia 2). Devi exists as a stark subversion of these expectations — in fact, in the show’s opening mandir scene, she prays for “a stone-cold hottie who could rock me all night long” in the hopes that sex and a boyfriend will increase her social status (8Flix 4). This rhetoric continues into her first day of school, when she makes it her mission to ask out a gay student who has not officially come out yet. Her aggressive pursual of an intimate relationship with someone she knows to be gay not only invalidates his sexuality but also underlines the lengths she is willing to go to for sex. Though her obsession stems from bullying — her classmates cruelly call her an “unf*ckable nerd” — Devi indirectly perpetuates sexual stereotypes that negatively affect Indian men (8Flix 26). In fact, according to Jenny Sharpe in “Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text,” British newspapers frequently made false rape accusations against Indian men to “stir public hysteria” during colonial rule in India (Sharpe 2). “[R]epression of the [Indian] rebels was justified by the perceived threat to English womanhood,” Sharpe writes, underlining the use of rape as a political tool against innocent South Asians (Sharpe 2). Devi has every right to express her sexuality as freely and openly as she chooses; however, in choosing one extreme of the sexual spectrum and making Devi sex-obsessed, Kaling glosses over historical implications of Indian sexuality and plays directly into the colonialist myth that Indians are lustful savages. Kaling similarly strives to oppose Indian women’s submissivity in making Devi prone to violent outbursts, yet this, too, feeds negative stigma of brown people. The pilot episode alone sees two dramatic outbursts from Devi — once when she gets a grade one point lower than a classmate, causing her to throw a glass flask on the ground, and again when she finds out her friend has a boyfriend, causing her to scream and throw a textbook through a glass window. Because Devi exists in a world of Mindy Kaling’s construction, she faces no consequences for her violence and expresses anger without being perceived as a threat. Unfortunately, this is not true for South Asians living in today’s post-9/11 America. “[J]ust being ‘brown’ is often associated to one being intrinsically violent, anti-American, and prone to extremism,” writes Tahseen Shams in an analysis of South Asians’ forced balancing act between stereotypes of violence and success (Shams 655). If Devi is truly meant to embody the everyday Indian-American teenager, then her extremist representation — both in terms of lust and anger — only serves to promote dangerous stereotypes about South Asians. Kaling’s initial intention in characterizing Devi with sexual and emotional extremes is clear — to distance Devi from Indian chastity and submissivity — but the consequences of her attempts at cultural distance are devastating for Indians actually living in America.

After attempting to separate Devi from the less desirable aspects of Indian culture, Kaling is able to reduce her main character to India’s more appealing, ‘exotic’ aspects. The pilot episode’s opening scene is a Hindu mandir, an altar decorated with framed pictures of Hindu gods at which Devi is found seated and praying. Therein, the audience’s first impression of Devi — the foundation of her character arc — is her Hindu religion, an aspect of Indian culture that white people have increasingly begun to appropriate in the last decade. From turning bindis into a fashion statement and white-washing yoga to throwing around sacred words like karma, chakra, and namaste, many white Americans enjoy a diluted version of Hinduism devoid of its religious significance — yet these same cultural elements were demonized as “hideous” and “degenerate” by British colonists and missionaries in India (Misra 19). Devi has every right to practice Hinduism proudly in the show, but Kaling’s purposeful reliance on her Hinduism as an episode hook only capitalizes off the white-washed appeal of Hinduism today. “The commodification and re-packaging of Asian culture in Western popular culture is comparable to colonialist practices of appropriating native goods in their colonies to sell back to local residents,” Bhoomi Thakore aptly claims in “Representations of South Asians in American Popular Media,” (Thakore 9). The takeaway in Thakore’s analogy is that Kaling’s commodification of Indian culture is not a ‘win’ for South Asians as headlines claim; rather, she promotes modern day colonialism. Shilpa S. Dave sees media representations of Indian spirituality specifically as “an example of how Indian Americans are racialized as exotic cultural objects,” (Dave 86). Why might Kaling exoticize a character meant to represent the modern, second-generation teenager, then? According to Wendy Cheng of Arizona State University, many Asian Americans engage in such strategic orientalism — “the employment of the dynamics of racial capitalism and orientalism” — in order to align themselves with other racialized nonwhite groups and achieve certain political motives (Cheng 153). Police brutality in the months directly preceding NHIE’s release revived the media’s interest in the struggles of minoritized groups, particularly Black Americans — thus, Kaling purposefully chooses to ‘other’ her main character from the get-go and capitalize off Americans’ newfound interest in the underrepresented. The most glaring example of Kaling’s strategic orientalism comes on Devi’s first day of school, when she boldly proclaims to her friends, “We are glamorous women of color who deserve a sexy high school life,” (8Flix 16). Devi’s words echo a common sentiment this past year to give women of color their due praise, and she has every right to be proud of her skin color — nevertheless, she paradoxically continues to reject her ethnicity, the root cause of her brown-skinned appearance. In prioritizing a mainstream, white-washed perception of Indian culture over an authentic one, one must ask who Never Have I Ever is truly catered towards: people of color, or white people?

The representation of Devi Vishwakumar as the ideal Indian character — repulsed by foreign aspects of her culture, attracted to trendy ones — ties directly to America’s view of Asian-Americans as the ‘model minority’ — a myth that Kaling strongly upholds in NHIE. Tahseen Shams writes that, as per the myth, South Asians “are popularly perceived as politically docile, hardworking high achievers with special aptitude for math, science, and engineering,” and NHIE’s main character is no exception (Shams 654). “Devi had been vying for the number one spot in the class every year since the first grade,” the narrator explains as images of Devi winning trophies and flaunting good grades appear on screen (8Flix 20). In a show meant to finally represent the modern Indian-American teenager, Devi represents yet another Asian character to fall for a myth consistently weaponized against less academically fortunate Asians. In Killing the Model Minority Myth: Asian American Counterstories and Complicity, Nicholas Daniel Hartlep writes that this sweeping generalization of all Asians as high achieving — and the perpetuation of this myth in popular media like Netflix shows — means that struggling Asian American students are often less likely to receive the help they need (Hartlep 5). Moreover, despite its positive connotation, the model minority myth was created specifically to promote Asian success under the condition that Asians were “quiet,” “uncomplaining,” and deferent to white authority figures (Hartlep 6). The myth may place Asians on a pedestal, but it fits directly within an American racial hierarchy wherein white members of society remain at the top. In fact, Stanford University’s Caitlin Hogan goes as far as to assert that the myth is “seen as proof that the United States operates as a legitimate meritocracy and that Whites deserve their relative advantage,” thereby discrediting the existence of white privilege (Hogan 10). Kaling’s dangerous perpetuation of the model minority myth does not simply harm academically struggling Indian-Americans; it also upholds white supremacy in America.

By picking and choosing which aspects of Indian culture her main character Devi would adhere to, Mindy Kaling turns a show a meant to amplify underrepresented voices into a tool of white supremacy. Kaling strategically rejects more foreign aspects of India in favor of appealing, exotic ones, underscoring her message of brown pride with xenophobia, orientalism, and the ‘model minority’ myth. Taken superficially, Never Have I Ever does indeed increase South Asian representation in the media, and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s performance as Devi is stunning — but a closer look at what Devi represents reveals the potential for Never Have I Ever to do significant harm to the South Asian community. In the pilot episode alone, Kaling alienizes Devi’s family members with racially-notorious brown voice; promotes Eurocentric beauty standards; feeds the xenophobic association of brown skin with aggression; reduces Devi to an exoticized object; and upholds racial hierarchies meant to academically suffocate Asian-Americans. In spite of these transgressions, Never Have I Ever was received in May of 2020 with overwhelming critical praise, emphasizing just how successfully Kaling capitalized off last year’s racial unrest. Ultimately, as one of few South Asians working for a mostly white corporation and audience, it is likely Kaling faced undue pressure to produce a show that appeased white people — unfortunately, good intentions cannot protect young South Asian viewers from the harm Never Have I Ever will impose on their perceptions of self and identity.

Works Cited

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