Never Have I Ever and Indian Americans’ India Problem
I’m Indian American on paper, but I’m also not. I was born in Seattle and moved to Bangalore, India when I was seven years old. I returned to the U.S. at 17 and have now spent 17 years of my life in the US, but many of my formative years in India. But this essay isn’t about my identity crisis. It’s about first-generation Indian Americans and the Indian diaspora in America’s problem with India and its people.
When I was a freshman in college, there was an Indian American girl that I didn’t know well but was friendly enough with. She remembered my name the first few terrifying and overwhelming weeks of college and seemed to align herself with me as a fellow “desi girl.” For a teenager who had just flown across the world to attend her dream school, this was good enough to consider her at least a potential friend. Then, on the last day of our first semester, she asked me how I would be spending winter break. I told her I was flying to my parents’ home in Bangalore and she asked me guilelessly, “Oh, are you excited to show all of your friends your new American clothes?” I didn’t respond, but in that moment, I knew we would never be friends. The condescension and ignorance of that question still irritates me ten years on. Where did she imagine I was going?
Bangalore is a sprawling metropolis. It has the markers of any urban dwelling in any part of the world. It has a thriving craft brewery scene, art galleries, big box retailers, maddening traffic, tech companies, and residents from all over the world. I wore the same clothes she did back home. I probably would be wearing less conservative outfits than she would be wearing at her home in the Midwest because it is usually 70 degrees in Bangalore in December. I grew up wearing t shirts and jeans and sweatshirts and shorts. Indian clothes were for weddings, temple visits, festivals and other special occasions.
I had expected this question from white people and was fully prepared to answer them and then give them a talking to about the wonders of the internet. Surprise! Everyone in India doesn’t live in a neighborhood like the one you saw on Slumdog Millionaire. (I had the misfortune of starting college when the movie was only a year old and still the fastest association people made whenever they saw an Indian person.) I am not even going to get into the kinds of comments and questions I got from ignorant non-Indian people because that is a whole separate essay. I am genuinely flabbergasted by the ignorant and demeaning treatment of Indians at the hands of Indian Americans and have some theories about why they seem to hate us so.
My irritation with this topic had been building up for a while but really came to a head when I watched Never Have I Ever on Netflix a few weeks ago. For what it’s worth, I adored the Devi storyline. It handled grief, teenage angst and parental love with a light-handed intimacy that was masterful. It’s beautifully written and directed and the acting was fantastic. But I really took umbrage at the Kamala character. Her entire character was a “fob” (fresh off the boat, a derisive term for a newly arrived immigrant) stereotype, whose only purpose seemed to be to serve as a foil to Devi’s Americanness. “She’s so Indian she says open the TV,” Devi whines to her mother in the very first episode. Huh?! First of all, anyone who can afford to get a PhD at CalTech, as Kamala’s character is doing, likely speaks English natively. Every state in India speaks a different language, but in many parts of northern India, the common language is Hindi. In the south, it’s English. So, in big cities and in circles of highly educated upper middle-class families in modern day India, English IS the primary language. Growing up, I spoke English with my parents and at school, I watched shows in English, I read books in English, I listened to English music. I speak Hindi and Kannada too, but only because I use them in other contexts and want to hold on to my cultural heritage. I’m not boasting about being a native English speaker. In fact, I wish I spoke Hindi and Kannada more fluently. What I’m saying is that a person of Kamala’s socioeconomic class in India today wouldn’t speak clunky English. She would speak English natively. Also, regionalisms for prepositions are extremely common in the English language. When I moved to London, I found it extremely strange that people told me to “Come FOR 6 pm” rather than saying “Come AT 6 pm.” Who is America to decide that there’s only one idiomatic use of the language? English came to America and India through imperialism, but now it’s both their languages equally. Indian English is just as valid as American English.
I love Mindy Kaling. She broke down barriers and paved the way for South Asian representation in America and is so good at what she does. Which is why it was so disappointing to see this caricature of an Indian character. The whole joke is that you’re “othering” them to make the Indian American character more relatable. Lilly Singh is also guilty of this. Yes, she is Canadian, not American, but I am including her here because this example is relevant. Her early videos featured her playing caricatures of an immigrant Punjabi mother (presumably her own) doing incredibly stereotypical things like berating her daughter for wearing skimpy outfits or not learning how to cook or playing sports in an incredibly offensive Indian accent. Hey Indian diaspora: it’s still offensive to put on a racist accent even when you look like us! It’s a lazy, tired joke. It wasn’t funny on Apu or Russell Peters and it’s not funny now. Not to mention, these accents never sound anything like anyone I grew up with in India. India has various regional accents and I could not match a single one to Lilly Singh’s or Kamala’s accent. For the record, here’s a video featuring people with Bangalore accents.
Never Have I Ever features a lot of other tired stereotypes about India. They really had Prashanth say that his favorite thing about America was ice cream. As if there isn’t ice cream in India! In fact, the entire arranged marriage storyline is incredibly dated. The concept of an arranged marriage existed and still exists in India, yes, but the way it is portrayed is absolutely batshit. The arranged marriage in cosmopolitan parts of India today is an option, not an obligation. This is supported by the fact that in 2018, Tinder boasted 7.5 million swipes in the country, and it’s not the only dating app that the population uses. A lot of my peers who went that route went into it knowing that they would only be introduced by their parents and then left on their own. The only difference between an arranged marriage today and meeting someone organically is that you’re both going into it knowing you want to be married. Honestly, after my experiences with undefined relationships that doesn’t sound like a terrible idea. As the late Irrfan Khan’s character wisely pointed out in Piku, “Western culture is not a benchmark of progress.”
Throughout the show, Nalini is shown pressuring Kamala into playing the part of a docile idea of 1950s femininity, even admitting that the boy she is meeting will want to “marry his mom.” What a terribly backward idea. The idea that an arranged marriage equals an uneducated girl to cook and clean and wear saris as if there aren’t independent feminist women living in India is ridiculous. I can only speculate about where these ideas came from. Maybe they only know the India that their parents left behind, and I can’t blame them for that if they’ve never lived there, but I can blame them for not reading a book or speaking to an actual Indian person. Why can’t Indian Americans fathom that the country would move forward without them?
Never Have I Ever isn’t the only show to do this. In Family Karma, a reality show focusing on an Indian American community in Miami, one of the characters, Monica Vaswani, claims she is “super Indian” because she cooks, is obedient and doesn’t drink. No. I refuse to buy into this dichotomy that Indian Americans seem to have created that becoming “westernized” means becoming independent and being “Indian” is associated with conservative and patriarchal behavior. You can be Indian without being conservative. My sister and I grew up watching Bollywood movies, learning Indian dance and music, reading Amar Chitra Katha and speaking Indian languages. Our parents also trust us to find our own partners and we will demand that we are equals to men both in the workplace and at home. Being Indian doesn’t mean making a choice between progress and Indian culture because Indian culture is progressing. It’s time that the diaspora recognized and acknowledged it. I still loved Never Have I Ever and would definitely watch any upcoming spinoffs or seasons, but the entire Kamala storyline was unnecessary and frankly offensive. Mindy Kaling set out to write a show about the Indian American experience. That is the experience she knows. So why not just write that one?
