First off, I have to admit that I am biased when it comes to Mindy Kaling. She was the first Brown woman I ever saw living my dream career. She was a writer for The Office, one of America’s most beloved shows, and wrote more episodes than any other writer. She then created and starred in her own show, The Mindy Project, which revitalized the rom-com genre in a 22-minute sitcom format. She went on to create and produce critically acclaimed shows like Never Have I Ever and Sex Lives of College Girls — both of which came out as I was transitioning from high school to college. There are so few women that look like me, living my dream career. Mindy Kaling paved a path that I didn’t even know I was allowed to walk.
The Mindy Project had episodes dealing with identity, and exploring and loving what it means to be an Indian-American woman. She questions how close she is to her own identity, a question heard by children of immigrants across the world. Kaling’s biggest criticism is the way she portrays Indian women and the claims of the disservice she does us, but I don’t see that. Watching The Mindy Project feels like a breath of fresh air. Her character Mindy Lahiri was in no way the idealized standard of “American Beauty.” She had dark brown skin, wasn’t a size 0, was extremely loud and opinionated, and had more self-confidence in her pinky than most people have in their whole bodies. Mindy Lahiri showed me how to have a god complex that makes your ego balance on delusion, and I will forever be grateful. She loved rom-coms, like me. She was shrill and annoying, like me. She could be awkward and say the wrong thing at the wrong time, like me. And most of all, she was worthy of being adored and loved, just like me. Mindy Kaling put the first character that I could relate to on the screen and gave her love, laughter, good friends, a cool job, and a great closet.
The other criticism Kaling gets is that most of her male co-stars all resemble the same carbon copy of a specific white man. A lot of the relationships she portrays in her shows and movies echo her real-life on-and-off again relationship with her ex-co-writer on The Office, B. J. Novak. Some say she’s obsessed with a self-insert. However, Adam Sandler makes movie after movie about himself getting with a much younger, hotter woman who falls deeply in love with him, and we eat it up every time. Why do we punish Mindy Kaling for the same thing? She has a type. So what? Honestly, I get it. Never getting over your first, or most intense, love and putting them in every show you write — that’s Jane Austen-level pining. I do that every Tuesday. I got stood up at midnight this New Year’s by a boy I was infatuated with, and have since written three different articles with jaded references to love (and to be honest, I will probably write, like, 30 more). Half of the reason I’m a writer is that I’m deeply delusional and writing gives you a chance to retell a story, maybe give yourself a happier ending than the one you got. Or, maybe, she’s just really into white guys. Who knows?
It’s important to remember that even your heroes aren’t above criticism, and yeah, some judgment about Mindy Kaling is valid, but a lot of them are thinly veiled micro-aggressions (a common pattern towards women of color). We cannot expect one person to represent a population of 2.69 million people. Instead of being mad at Kaling for not representing all Brown women, ask why we only let one of us tell the story. She cannot write about the Indian-American experience, because it’s not just one experience. What we need to do is ask for more writers, more directors, and more actors. More people, telling their stories, instead of demanding one person to do an impossible task. Mindy Kaling paved the way, but others have to walk that path. Desi women deserve to have their stories told, and we should demand to be the ones in the writer’s room telling them.