Through the Screen

Staffer Tanvee Sai reflects on the work of Mindy Kaling and its effect on their life

TANVEE SAI writer

The Mindy Project” opens with a montage of Mindy Lahiri growing up watching scenes from famous romantic comedies and quoting them. This was the montage of my childhood growing up watching Mindy Kaling.

Mindy Kaling was a present person in my childhood. I grew up listening to my mom cackling as she read Kaling’s humorous autobiography “Why Not Me?” Cracking up at each comedic line, she would tell me, “You HAVE to read this when you grow up!”

I never did end up reading it, but in 2020, the comedy-drama show “Never Have I Ever” was released. I saw myself in the show’s main character, Devi Vishwakumar, a South Asian high schooler struggling to find confidence in her identity and fit in to her community.

I began to fall deeply in love with Mindy Kaling’s shows, watching “The Mindy Project,” and then rewatching it immediately after. I began seeing Mindy Kaling as a role model who paved a path for South Asians in the media. I followed her Instagram, kept up with her projects and made sure I watched them all.

In the first season of Never Have I Ever, Devi reluctantly attends a puja1, where she attempts to connect with other teens through her disinterest, but is met with their contrasting enjoyment in the event. This scene made me rethink my perspective of my culture, wondering if I should be hating it as Devi had, or learn to love and appreciate it as the other teens did.

I continued to admire Kaling and her work. One night, I sat down to rewatch an episode of The Mindy Project, and noticed something peculiar. During the episode, Mindy Lahiri, the protagonist of the show, falls in love with the fifth white man in a row after making a joke about Lord Ganesha, a Hindu god.

As I watched this scene, I thought about Mindy Lahiri’s character, and her tendency to ignore her Hindu culture unless convenient. I noticed how other characters in the show would constantly comment on Lahiri’s boisterous personality or her large figure: both parts of myself that I was learning to love. I thought about Devi’s irritation at the puja, and how it made me rethink my perspective on my own identity, and wondered if I should be loving this show if the writing conveys such detrimental ideas.

Although characters like Mindy Lahiri and Devi Vishwakumar made me feel empowered, I realized that through their dialogue alone, they set the Indian community far behind the path that Mindy Kaling attempted to pave. What the characters say about themselves ruin the fact that they are a brown face on a TV screen, and instead normalize hating oneself as an Indian.

Growing up learning to admire Mindy Kaling made me feel obligated to defend her through these past few months, but I have realized that her media can have both detrimental and positive impacts. Sometimes, comedians write jokes to heal their own trauma and move past their own experiences, and the way I see it, Mindy Kaling is doing the same. Although what she creates can set the Indian community far back, I can still see myself in her through my strug- gles as a South Asian woman trying to succeed in an industry dominated by white men.

Mindy Kaling’s mind and her writing, although riddled with internalized racism, come from a place that many people of color in America have been in at some point in their lives. When I was young, I was conditioned to be ashamed of my culture, and the same can be said for many and most people in the US who look like me. Mindy Kaling’s media, although contributing to this, is not the root of the problem.

We must encourage people to be intrigued and immersed in their cultures from a young age, surrounding ourselves with people who come from similar backgrounds in order to learn from these communities. We cannot stay in this loop of internalized racism and self hatred that is seen in Mindy Kaling’s shows, we need to instead be the generation that breaks it

1Indian religious prayer ceremony