What “The Mindy Project” Did (and Didn’t Do) for Brown Girls on TV

“When I was a kid, all I did was watch romantic comedies in our living room while I did my homework,” Mindy Lahiri confides to the viewer in the pilot episode of The Mindy Project. This line, as well as the two-minute montage of a bespectacled, frumpily dressed Mindy doing exactly that, establish Mindy as a stereotypical, studious, introverted brown girl raised on a diet of Hollywood romantic comedies yet unable to make her dreams of true love into reality. That is, until she becomes a doctor and does her OB-GYN residency, where she finally transitions from having an imaginary boyfriend (Tom Hanks) to a real one (also named Tom, but played by Bill Hader).

The remainder of the episode proceeds to dismantle this stereotype. Mindy ruins her now ex-boyfriend Tom’s wedding in a drunken fit, steals a bike, and crashes it in a stranger’s pool, after which she is arrested for three counts of public intoxication and disorderly conduct. Though Mindy vows to change and stop hooking up with Jeremy, her fuckboy coworker with benefits, to find true love, she is slow to break her habits. She still hooks up with him in his office before a date; turns down a phone call from a patient going into labor so she can continue said date; and—after her conscience guilts her into leaving the date to go deliver the baby—hooks up with Jeremy again.

The Mindy Project premiered on Fox more than ten years ago, in September 2012. It was the brainchild of the multi-hyphenate Mindy Kaling, who had gained prominence through the NBC sitcom The Office (2005–2013). The Mindy Project followed a fictionalized version of Kaling as she navigated personal, professional, and especially romantic obstacles as a single obstetrician/gynecologist living in New York City. The show spanned six seasons over five years. By the time it ended in 2017, it had successfully crafted one of the funniest, most fleshed-out—and most fashionable—female South Asian characters to exist in Hollywood.

At the time of the show’s premiere, South Asian representation in Hollywood was predominantly male. Notable examples included Naveen Andrews on Lost, Kunal Nayyar on The Big Bang Theory, Danny Pudi on Community, Aziz Ansari on Parks and Recreation, and Karan Brar on Jessie (and the Maulik Pancholy–voiced Baljeet on Phineas and Ferb). While they portrayed a range of characters, it was Nayyar’s Raj, and the accented English he spoke, that unfortunately became the default stereotype of brown men on-screen. In this context, The Mindy Project was one of the handful of shows on network TV to feature a South Asian woman—alongside The Good Wife (Archie Panjabi) and New Girl (Hannah Simone)—and the only one to do so in a leading role. For the first time, a brown woman would appear on-screen not as a background or supporting character but as a fully developed central character with a messy and colorful inner life—and on her own terms, too, since Kaling was also the show’s creator, executive producer, and writer.

I started watching The Mindy Project sometime in 2015. I was seventeen, the show was three, and both of us were going through transition: me from high school to university and from teenagerhood to adulthood, and the show from Fox to Hulu—though that didn’t matter much to me, since I watched it on Netflix.

Prior to watching The Mindy Project, all the desi women characters I had seen on-screen were from Pakistani dramas, Bollywood films, or Indian soaps.

The visibly brown woman I saw on the show’s Netflix thumbnail encouraged me to click on it. Prior to watching The Mindy Project, all the desi women characters I had seen on-screen were from Pakistani dramas, Bollywood films, or Indian soaps. Nearly all of them were either already thin and fair-skinned and fit South Asian beauty standards (many of which overlapped with Western ones, thanks to colonialism), or they made themselves over to fit those standards as part of the plot. They were either “good”­—shorthand for soft-spoken, submissive, and selfless—or “evil”—shorthand for outspoken, cunning, and promiscuous. Either way, they were always static. They were sometimes caught between two worlds if they fell in love with someone from a different socioeconomic class, but never between two cultures, even if they were seemingly part of the South Asian diaspora.

At the time, I—like many immigrant and diasporic South Asian women I knew—was struggling to adhere to South Asian cultural expectations and gender roles while also following the Western model minority­­­, er, model. The former required me to be neither seen nor heard; if I must be seen, I should be thin, fair-skinned, and decorous; if I must be heard, it should be to either dutifully agree to whatever my family members asked of me or to anticipate their needs before they asked at all. Western norms demanded that I do all that while also being smart, hardworking, and uncomplaining.

My body made it hard for me to meet these requirements by virtue of being fat, brown (though admittedly light-skinned by South Asian standards), clumsy, and dotted with hair. I was constantly being told to fix something about myself—the way I walked or sat or ate or wore clothes. My personality didn’t help either. I was unwilling to share my possessions with anybody, including my siblings, and was quick to anger if they provoked me. If I wanted something, I would dig my heels in until I got my way. Though I did relatively well in school, it didn’t escape me that I had to work harder than my white peers to receive a fraction of the opportunities they did––all while being nicer lest I be labeled an angry brown woman.

But rejecting these norms entirely would mean being rejected by society. I thus felt pressured to whittle down what both South Asian and Western cultures deemed the “harsher” aspects of my personality (since I couldn’t whittle down my body) so that I could be accepted––both by the smaller desi community around me and the larger white society we existed in.

Enter Mindy Lahiri: a plus-sized, dark-skinned Indian woman who subverted both South Asian and Western stereotypes of brown women. Rather than being self-conscious about these traits, Mindy was confident, horny, shallow, and messy. The desi media I consumed almost always punished this subversion, so that Mindy was allowed to openly exist as her eccentric, authentic self was revolutionary.

Mindy regularly acknowledged her failure to conform too. She constantly joked about the immense labor she undertook—from quips about using a nose-hair trimmer, through breast-growth cream and failed crash diets, to an entire episode about getting in shape to make a good first naked impression on her partner. Over the course of the show, she accepted that she would likely always fall short in one way or another. But she refused to let her flaws—and there were many; Mindy was often selfish, rude, superficial, and impulsive—stop her from taking up space.

But perhaps it was easy for Mindy to shrug off South Asian cultural expectations because her culture never seemed to be a big part of her identity. Midway through the show, I realized that I never saw the small and mundane ways in which Mindy’s race and ethnic background affected her—things like getting Indian food for lunch, or devouring a desi snack from her childhood after a hard day, like nimko or Bombay mix. I never saw her being reminded by her mother to abstain from eating meat during certain festivals, or haggling with a desi halal cart owner. These absences feel conspicuous, since food played a large role in Mindy’s life. Moreover, the show’s other lead character, Danny, constantly referred to food from his culture. As Karen Brill wrote in a 2016 IndieWire piece, Mindy was a “curiously ahistorical” character, especially compared to Danny. Danny’s actions—which range from inconsiderate to downright controlling—were explicitly shaped by both his and his parents’ divorces. The biggest glimpse the audience got into Mindy’s past was her desire for romantic relationships, fostered by a steady diet of rom-coms.

I never saw the big ways in which cultural expectations affected her either, unless the episode explicitly featured commentary on race—such as “Mindy Lahiri Is a Racist,” when Mindy and her practice were accused of being racist; “Girl Crush,” when the head of an upscale gynecology practice courted Mindy to be their token diversity hire; or “Mindy Lahiri Is a White Man,” where Mindy woke up as a white man after being passed over for a promotion and discovered the privileges that came with it. Instead, Mindy’s desi-ness could feel like a costume that she would don when convenient—like in the episode “Jody Kimball-Kinney Is My Husband,” where she literally donned a sari and emphasized being the child of immigrants so that her son, Leo, could be admitted into an elite preschool.

The commentary, though bitingly funny when it happened, was also frustrating. Clearly, the show’s writers were aware of the big and small ways that race shaped the lives of women of color, and they were able to make it funny, yet they incorporated it only selectively. Those rare episodes when the show did acknowledge it, then, could feel somewhat performative or reactionary, as if signaling to its critics, “You wanted us to talk about race, so we did.”

In a 2020 interview with Vogue India, Kaling revealed that many white TV executives had wanted The Mindy Project to center race and culture explicitly, featuring “an Indian woman who felt out of place in America educating white people.” It’s understandable why Kaling opted to make the show revolve around an Indian American woman but not her Indianness. Having read exhaustively about desi and/or Muslim women who were constantly caught between worlds, I understood and even appreciated this aspect of the show when I started it. What surprised me, though, was Mindy’s unwillingness to engage with her culture unless it was for a punchline. While I grew accustomed to the way Mindy discarded her desi-ness at will, I continued to be bothered by the ease and lack of self-awareness with which she did it, since I could not do it as easily. I also didn’t want to. I had already tried to distance myself from my desi-ness upon my arrival to Canada several years ago. I dismissed desi music in favor of American pop, derided Bollywood films as cringe to devour Hollywood rom-coms instead, and delayed wearing the hijab. When my white peers excluded me regardless, and I embraced my desi-ness instead of discarding it like an unwelcome cardamom pod in my biryani.

It also bothered me that despite living in New York City, one of the most diverse cities in the world—which had a population of approximately 200,000 Asian Indian Americans at the time the show was set—Mindy rarely interacted with many people of color at length. Across the show’s extensive list of guest stars and recurring characters, Mindy only had one non-white coworker, a Black nurse name Tamra (arguably a sassy-Black-woman caricature) and four romantic interests who were men of color (five-ish if you count some charged bantering with John Cho)—and only after backlash erupted over her exclusively dating white men for three consecutive seasons.

Kaling first acknowledged this backlash during an August 2013 Entertainment Weekly cover story, wondering why people were really fixated on the ethnic makeup of her character’s dating life and whether she had to “become the United Nations of shows” as a result. She later addressed it during a 2014 SXSW panel and again on a Reddit AMA a year later, pointing out that white women weren’t held to the same standard. “I always think it’s funny that I’m the only one asked about this when sitcoms I love with female leads rarely date men of color,” she wrote. “I guess white women are expected to date white men. I’m expected to ‘stick to my own.’” While Kaling’s point about being held to different standards than her white peers is justified, this doesn’t mean that she should be exempt from criticism. Every showrunner should be scrutinized if their show has such a marked lack of diversity—and, judging from widespread backlash against shows like Lena Dunham’s Girls or Emily in Paris or even The Big Bang Theory, they often are.

The first time Mindy interacted with another Indian woman at length was in the show’s third season—and she had to go all the way to San Francisco to do it. After learning of her peer’s struggles as an international student, rather than reflect on her own privilege as a second-generation Indian American, Mindy got defensive over having worked just as hard to get to where she is.

Relatedly, we rarely see Mindy reflect deeply about her culture and heritage, or express a sense of loss over her nonexistent relationship with them. This sense of loss and guilt is something that I feel regularly, even though a decade has passed since I first immigrated and even though the large South Asian diaspora in the greater Toronto area makes it easier for me to stay connected to my culture. I lived in Pakistan for a decade, I speak Urdu and understand Punjabi, and I regularly consume desi food and media. Yet I still find myself envious of my peers who know more about South Asian pop culture or politics or any other topic like, I don’t know, poetry, and wishing that I was as connected to my culture as they are. I also find myself grateful and indebted to my parents; though my immigrant experience entails loss (and both individual and systemic discrimination), it also offers privileges that many don’t have. I found it strange that Mindy never felt the same—at least until season four.

In that season, Mindy gets rejected by an Indian guy—her first and only Indian love interest—for being a “coconut” (brown on the outside, white on the inside) and sets out to prove her Indianness. In her quest to do so, Mindy decides to have a mundan, a Hindu head-shaving ceremony, for her son, which goes awry. Mindy is forced to confront that she is ignorant about her heritage and vows to do better by her son—a vow that she promptly forgets by the next episode.

To me, who was—is—constantly negotiating my Pakistani-Muslim and Canadian identity, trying to find a balance that wouldn’t alienate me from either my parents or my peers, Mindy’s failure to follow through and reconnect with her heritage was astonishing. But maybe it shouldn’t be; Mindy Lahiri has distanced herself from brownness, from brown people, since the show’s very first episode.

In the pilot episode, Mindy meets a patient named Nasreen. Nasreen is a Middle Eastern—likely Irani—Muslim woman. She comes to Mindy’s office nine months pregnant with her son, Max, who persuades Mindy to be his mother’s doctor despite her lack of insurance and translates Mindy’s replies for Nasreen. Max’s presence implies that Nasreen neither speaks nor understands English, an implication the viewer can’t confirm because she doesn’t have a single line. Though Mindy agrees to take Nasreen on as a patient, she later asks her administrative assistants why they are sending patients with “burkas and stuff”—Nasreen is wearing a khimar hijab—who reply that they thought Nasreen might be rich with oil money.

I felt a twinge of discomfort when I first watched this blatant othering of Muslim women, but I pushed through for the sake of brown representation on-screen—and kept pushing. I pushed down my discomfort when Mindy speculated that a shawarma stand was operated by terrorists. I pushed it down at Mindy being alienated from brown people and from brownness; at Mindy flattening Indian culture into fancy clothes, food, and Hinduism instead of exploring the plurality of Indian/South Asian experiences; at Mindy bringing up her race when faced with obstacles but never examining her privilege as both a model minority in America and coming from an upper caste in India.

The problem with The Mindy Project, however, was that it didn’t seem to represent any South Asian experience at all—even Mindy’s.

Though South Asia is often conflated with India, the term encompasses a rather large geographical region with immense religious, cultural, linguistic, economic, sociopolitical, and of course geographical diversity. This means that any South Asian representation is not going to capture everyone’s experience—and I understand that. The problem with The Mindy Project, however, was that it didn’t seem to represent any South Asian experience at all—even Mindy’s.

The Mindy Project was pivotal to my relationship with womanhood during a time where I was particularly struggling with it. The show taught me that it was okay to be opinionated and outspoken and impatient and stubborn and selfish; that these “bad” traits didn’t necessarily make me a bad person; that it was okay to be a work in progress. It also taught me I should unapologetically take up space and demand respect from people regardless of whether or not they found me desirable—and that my “unfashionable” body did not preclude me from wearing fashionable clothes.

The success of The Mindy Project cemented Kaling as a force in Hollywood. It directly paved the way for the current brown-girl representation on-screen like Devi in Never Have I Ever and Bela in The Sex Lives of College Girls, and it arguably did so indirectly for Tahani and Vicky in The Good Place, Kim in Special, and the Sharma sisters in Bridgerton. Given the show’s groundbreaking status, it’s tempting to overlook its flaws by pointing out that not everything can be perfect, that it’s hard being the first, and that it was unfair to expect Kaling to shoulder the heavy burden of representation all by herself. To this, I would reply that it is equally unfair to coddle creators or to let representation eclipse bad writing. The critiques Kaling has received have shaped the brown-girl representation we see on-screen today as much as her successes have, because those critiques allowed her to grow.

Perhaps the most accurate expression of Kaling’s approach to brown-girl representation—which is often imperfect, see The Sex Lives of College Girls being the latest in a line of Kaling productions to pair a brown girl with a mediocre white man who negs them—comes from Kaling herself. At the end of the The Mindy Project’s pilot episode, Mindy is on the phone with her best friend, Gwen, when Jeremy knocks at her door for what is clearly a prearranged booty call despite Mindy having promised Gwen at the beginning of the episode that she would stop hooking up with him and change for the better. “I really am changing, though,” Mindy says, as Jeremy undresses in her bedroom. “Tomorrow is going to be very different. And you know, if not tomorrow, then the next day, I swear.”

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