Mindy Kaling And The Curse Of The Quirky Brown Girl

By Amruta Srinivasan

I still remember the first time I saw Never Have I Ever. It was a muggy July night, and I was eleven years old, staying up much later than I should have been. I saw Devi Vishwakumar for the first time that day — an ungovernable, brilliant Indian-American girl. She was loud and impulsive and grew up in an extremely South Asian immigrant family. Devi was somehow nothing and everything like me at once, and yet, much like my peers, I related to her more deeply than I had any other character. 

Was it her long, Indian name that mirrored mine oh-so-closely? Was it the annoying relatives that plagued her at every function? The pressure to excel academically? The cultures she found herself entangled in, oscillating between assimilation and her South Asian identity? The themes that Never Have I Ever covered were central to the second-generation immigrant experience, and it portrayed a South Asian teenager in a way that was previously unknown in western media.

Never Have I Ever also broke barriers through its portrayal of a dark-skinned Indian protagonist. Indian cinema tends to favor actors and characters who are light-skinned, and sideline those with darker skin. Colorism in India is only exacerbated by the bigotry of its cinema. Dark-skinned actors are shunned by the industry, and light-skinned actors don brownface; those actors are later celebrated for taking on such a bold and powerful role. 

Critics and audiences in Indian cinema applaud a light-skinned actor daring to act in a role that requires them to darken their skin — committing brown-face immediately makes an actor courageous, and makes the role gritty. They equate darker skin with something tragic, something dire, and that is accepted and internalized by the general audience. Due to the colorism in Indian cinema, Never Have I Ever’s portrayal of dark-skinned Indian characters meant the world to Indian-American audiences. It certainly did to my pre-teen self.

Mindy Kaling, the show’s creator, has been rightfully lauded for her work in Never Have I Ever— the show was, and still is, revolutionary, and brought a story about an Indian-American teenager to mainstream audiences. Still, critiques remain. Kaling has been accused of sticking to a threadbare trope throughout her career. Kelly Kapoor (from the Office), Devi Vishwakumar, and Dr. Mindy Lahiri all have something in common — they are all Quirky Brown GirlsTM. They have brash, sometimes grating personalities, exhibit sometimes bizarre traits, and are all unmistakably Indian. 

This cliche finds itself repeating in all of Kaling’s works, leading some to question the diversity of her characters. If she is only recreating the same hackneyed character, time and time again, can her oeuvre even count towards positive South Asian representation? The answer to this is complicated. While the stereotypes and repeated tropes that echo throughout Kaling’s work could be harmful, the insufficiency of varied Indian-American characters in western media lies not in the hands of a single artist. 

Can we really expect a single artist to carry the weight of the entire nuanced Indian-American experience? While Kaling constantly reinventing the Quirky Brown Girl gets tiresome, it is definitely not the core issue with South Asian representation in western media. Our problem lies with the lack of representation, not the representation itself. When there are, at most, a handful of shows in western media dealing with South Asian characters, it is impossible for them to cover the total lived experience of such a large diaspora. Minority representation is a quantity over quality matter — we need more media that can represent the entire diaspora of communities, not just a few select stereotypes.