The Coconut Empire: How Mindy Kaling Has Created a Prototype of the Indian-American Woman Who Aspires to Whiteness
When Mindy Kaling first burst onto the scene with her Fox sitcom, The Mindy Project, in 2012, the sheer number of stereotypes she was single-handedly breaking was immediately obvious. Being dark-skinned, she was an unusual figure to emerge from an Indian and Indian diaspora community that was besotted with fair skin. She was also distinctive as a woman protagonist of an American sitcom because she was neither skinny nor pegged as conventionally pretty. She had made it as a female comedian of color in an industry known for its overt racism and sexism. Her brash brand of comedy delivered in a whistle-like voice took some getting used to, but it was clear that Kaling was a force to be reckoned with.
Until then, mainstream American film and TV had only made room for head-bobbing Indians speaking in heavy and ungrammatical D-syllable-accented English; exaggerated, inauthentic, and racist representations that have haunted an entire generation of Indians born and brought up in the US. Think Apu Nahasapeemapetilon in The Simpsons voiced by Hank Azaria or Raj Koothrappali of Big Bang Theory. Since The Mindy Project was poised to be the first-ever American series to center an Indian American woman protagonist, expectations were high. A network show would finally portray Indians in dignified and complex ways.
Imagine the shock when season after season rolled by and all we got were coconuts: Namely, a brown woman throwing Indians under the bus for cheap laughs, because of a loyalty to her identity as an American first—and not just any American, but a white American. The first site of this endeavor was her own character, Mindy Lahiri, whose history and backstory were entirely obfuscated. Any references to Indianness were occasional and explicitly racist. Meanwhile, the script worked tirelessly to tell the story of a cast of complex, well-rounded, white men, by delving deep into their backstories and families. Mindy Lahiri’s love interests on the show, for example, are white men who espouse conservative, racist, and sexist views but they are depicted as complex, amiable, and lovable. These redemptive portraits make light of misogyny, gun violence, white saviorism in Haiti, and the history of slavery in the South.
The Mindy Project brought back racist Indian stereotypes with a vengeance, and because it was straight from the mouth of an Indian woman, it was even more hilarious, more believable, and more pernicious than ever before. The series also threw in generous dollops of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, proving that Kaling was certainly not committed to offering correctives to the representations of Indians or other marginalized and racialized American groups. In fact, The Mindy Project was all about acquiescing to whiteness. Dr. Mindy Lahiri was screaming, “I’m actually white, I only look brown,” in a thousand different ways for six entire seasons.
Kaling was repeatedly criticized for her preoccupation with whiteness, so when she returned with the shows Never Have I Ever (2020) on Netflix and Sex Lives of College Girls (2021) on HBO, it appeared—superficially—that Kaling had taken some of these critiques about diversity and anti-Blackness seriously. The cast and content of these two shows are not only more racially inclusive but also feature queer characters and plots. However, the Indian American protagonists remained almost identical to the first brown-but-actually-white Mindy character: high school Mindy embodied by Devi in Never Have I Ever, college-going Mindy embodied by Bela in The Sex Lives of College Girls, and finally, grown-up Mindy in The Mindy Project, played by Kaling herself. For over a decade now, Kaling and her productions have created a prototype of the Indian American woman: the coconut—brown on the outside, white on the inside.
The Mainstreaming of the Coconut
For many of us who have been watching in shock as Kaling gave birth to her peculiar and embarrassing brand of Indian Americans, history has only been cruel. The ultimate cherry on top of the Indian American success sundae was the election of half-Indian, half-Jamaican Kamala Harris as the Vice President in 2020. By this time, Kaling was a well-known TV star. Predictably, the two famous diaspora women made a video where they are cooking masala dosas and bonding over shared South Indian heritage in Kaling’s posh Los Angeles kitchen. In the viral video, they laugh about how they can’t cook Indian food and make jokes about Indian parents always reusing Taster’s Choice coffee jars to store spices, thus happily solidifying stereotypes of befuddled, conservative, and stingy Indian parents with bad accents.
Today, four years later, Harris is the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the US. This pivotal political moment has been overshadowed by her stubborn support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians through billions of dollars worth of arms sales to Israel and the repetition of dehumanizing and racist rhetoric about Palestinians. But the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago this year was meant to lighten the mood and distract from the nonstop carnage in Gaza. The theme was “joy” and celebrities were trotted out at dizzying speed. Joining the long line of multicultural A-listers was Kaling herself, who endorsed Harris by leading with a joke about how Kaling was the first to have “outed” Harris as an Indian. Well, because being ashamed to be of Indian heritage in the US is just so hilarious.
But this cringeworthy cultural moment also clarifies the precise type of Indian American identity that Kaling—and now Harris—are propagating. A ridiculous element in Harris’ election campaign has been the revival of the term “coconut.” In a speech, Harris joked that her mother would express frustration by saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” This reference was followed by her now famous laugh. A few months later, memes, gifs, images, and jokes about coconuts went viral as a form of endorsement for Harris’ presidential campaign. “Coconut” suddenly became cool, not only as an inside reference among people of color but also for white people to share on social media.
Before the Harris campaign co-opted it, the term “coconut” was in the news during the arrest of a British teacher for racially aggravated public order offense, after she protested then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman with an image of their faces under a coconut tree, with coconuts next to their faces. Scholars like Kehinde Andrews came to the teacher’s defense, explaining that these are “not racial slurs but political critique.” Such terms are meant to call out people who claim pride in their race and diversity, but pursue racist and dehumanizing policies towards those very populations—something akin to brownwashing.
Harris now redressing the “coconut” as cool—and even empowering—is unsurprising since Kaling has been priming us for the mainstreaming of this iteration of Indian American identity for over a decade. Whether Mindy, Devi, or Bela, Kaling’s prototype of the Indian American woman is characterized by her ambivalence about the Indian part of her identity, the performance of an obsequious kind of whiteness, comical over-confidence, perpetual horniness, and singular attraction to white men. In other words, she is proudly, and shamelessly, a coconut.
The Mindy Project’s Treatment of Race, Gender, and Class
Kaling is the daughter of a Tamil father, an architect, and a Bengali mother who was an obstetrician/gynecologist, which is the profession that Kaling developed for The Mindy Project. The ensemble comedy is organized around the antics of Dr. Mindy Lahiri, who works at a small Manhattan Obgyn practice called Shulman and Associates in her early thirties. Over six seasons, it has comprised four white male doctors, an African-American nurse, an ex-felon turned male nurse, and a goofy white administrative assistant. After three seasons, the practice hires a Southern millionaire doctor along with his sister, a gay nurse, as well as a white woman doctor. This is a consummate workplace comedy, with elements of romantic comedy built in.
From the very beginning, Mindy’s character is shown as delusional through self-deprecating, outlandish jokes that are also meant to point to her real self: she claims she’s super thin when she is curvy, insists she’s still in her twenties, and says she imagines herself as blonde with blue eyes. Mindy’s entire persona is built across a set of contradictions that form the core of the comedic writing for the series. Her backstory is bare bones: she grew up in a predominantly white and wealthy suburb of Boston, as evidenced by occasional appearances of her brother, Rishi, a Stanford undergrad trying to make it as a rapper.
The first two seasons somewhat engage Mindy’s cultural identity through the framework of a brown, minority woman. The most explicit episode on race, provocatively titled “Mindy Lahiri is a Racist,” aired midway through season 2. When Danny Castellano, her Italian-American love interest, gets a positive online review from a white supremacist mommy blog, the doctors in the practice are accused of racism. A publicity person is hired to do some damage control and the only women of color, Tamra and Mindy, are asked to put out a statement in support of their workplace. In the post-Obama, multicultural U.S., we first confront Mindy’s identity as racialized and gendered only a season and a half—a whopping thirty-three episodes—into the show.
Yet, Indianness—or South Asianness—does not specifically come into play in this episode, even as Mindy’s alignment with the Black nurse, Tamra, exposes how women of color must clean up the mess made by a white man. As the two women bicker over the statement, Tamra assures Mindy that while she’s not racist, she could be less condescending to her staff who come from different class backgrounds than her. After many comedic mishaps, Mindy wins the day and saves the practice by giving a speech about how they treat female patients from all ethnicities and classes.
The episode was meant to silence critics who had written about Mindy’s insistence on dating only white men and her inability to assemble a more diverse ensemble cast. Kaling’s rebuttal not only argued that the show and the character of Mindy were not racist through lines delivered by a Black woman but also that American discourses of racial inclusion were a sort of sham politics invested in performance and tokenism. Ironically, in its attempts to defend itself against critical opinions, the show revealed that it’s neither particularly deft nor committed to engaging with the tricky space of race, gender, and class.
“Backward” India vs “Liberal” America in The Mindy Project
In Season 3, Mindy secures a fellowship to specialize in reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Stanford University in California. This leads to her first confrontation with an Indian from India. In episode 12, we meet Neepa (Gita Reddy), a single mom and student who has to attend Stanford with her son in tow, while her husband stays behind in India. Unrealistic and insulting, the character of Neepa is riddled with stereotypes about Indians. For starters, when she first appears, Neepa is dressed in a salwar kameez and leads with a “namaskar,” an unlikely occurrence, given her relative youth and the urban social milieu.
Neepa follows with a question in Hindi: “Aap kahaan se hain?” (Where are you from?) which is also implausible; Indians are well aware that Hindi is not spoken by everyone, and leading with English at an American university would be the logical choice. The writers here attempt to excavate the comedy by crudely signifying that Indians from India are “uncool” and humorless; they have trouble grasping Mindy’s American references, wear traditional dresses, and speak in provincial Indian languages. Mindy cheerfully declares to Neepa that she does not speak any Indian languages and patriotically adds that she’s from Boston, “home of the Freedom Trail.”
The crude stereotyping continues as Mindy pulls up at a fast food drive-through, only to find Neepa serving up her order. When Mindy asks Neepa what she is doing there, Neepa snaps at her and says that was where she worked. This exchange leads to Mindy asking Neepa why she has a problem with Mindy. “You are my problem,” Neepa replies. “All you spoiled second generations care about are sex positions and nail art. You always try to take the easy way out and it’s not fair. For some of us, there is no easy way.” Now angry, Mindy makes a quick jab about Neepa’s son and grabs ketchup packets. “In Gwalior, they cut off your hands for that,” Neepa says in an absurd reference to vigilante justice that reflects a racist and Islamophobic stereotype about non-Western places. The Mindy Project unabashedly perpetuates the binary between Indians from “backward” India and second-generation Indians like Mindy from democratic and liberal America.
The Mindy Project’s Rejection of India
Then, only in the 18th episode of Season 4 does the theme of Mindy’s Indianness rear its head again. This time, Mindy is on a date with an Indian guy named Neel (same name as Neepa’s son). She admits it’s her first time, adding, “I don’t think I know any Indian people except my family.” Neel is shocked and asks Mindy what part of India her family is from. “I want to say there’s a river there, and some tigers” Mindy replies with an orientalist joke. “Don’t quote me on that.” Neel proceeds to tell Mindy that as someone with a social circle of Indian friends and as someone proud of his heritage, he believes Mindy might be a “coconut.” Offended, Mindy decides to try on an Indian identity by spending more time with Neel. When he asks if she’s ever visited India, Mindy adds more orientalism to the episode with her retort: “What? And get eaten by a snake? No way.” This encounter ends with Mindy proclaiming that the whole point of immigrating is to assimilate, not to keep clinging to one’s heritage.
However, she finds herself rethinking this approach at a dinner with Neel’s hip and wealthy Indian American friends who also follow Indian traditions. Now inspired, Mindy decides to have a “mundan” ceremony for her son, which involves shaving off the male baby’s hair as a priest recites prayers. She invites her parents, brother, and the office crew, though the child’s father, Danny, is conspicuously missing. Of course, when Mindy does decide to become Indian, she picks the most Brahmin of Hindu traditions to perform. Yet Mindy’s upper-caste Hindu experiments do not last long, since the episode seeks to show her as a well-assimilated, white, American woman. Baby Leo begins wailing as the priest starts shaving his hair and in a final orientalist move, Mindy snatches her son away from this seemingly “barbaric” Indian ritual. Distressed, she confesses, “I’m jealous of how proud other people are of their heritage.” Her father proudly responds, “It was our decision to raise you to be an American,” while her mother adds, “We love America. That’s why we came here.”
Playing into the brown, liberal fantasy of assimilation is not necessarily unique, but The Mindy Project foregrounds the Lahiri family’s desperation to go beyond that fantasy into complicity with American whiteness. Mindy and her family’s insistence on producing orientalist and racist discourses about an India riddled with snakes, tigers, and primitive customs is an attempt to make a symbolic power move, to culturally and politically belong to a white America. Even the most privileged group in India, upper caste Brahmins, are rendered too uncivilized for the Lahiris. Mindy thus rejects India itself for not being liberal, American, and white enough for her.
White Dude Complexity Matters in The Mindy Project
A final example of Mindy’s desire to be subsumed by white American culture is revealed by her main romantic interests. The show develops a slowly simmering chemistry with Danny from the start, but Mindy flits between a few serious relationships before committing and eventually having a baby with him. Throughout the six seasons, all of Mindy’s key love interests are white American men—a choice for which Kaling has been consistently criticized. Mindy’s men are not only drawn from one racial and professional group of people, but they are also conservative, religious, and always sexist.
Three of the main male characters reveal this theme: Casey Peerson (Anders Holm) is a Christian pastor, Dr. Jody Kimball-Kinney (Garret Dillahunt) is a pro-gun Republican from the American South, and Danny Castellano is a proudly misogynistic, Catholic man from Staten Island, New York. The safe argument is that these characters allow Mindy to engage in romances with “unlikely” men who give the narrative its comedic plot twists and deepen the core romcom structure. But the less neutral argument is about how each character allows Mindy to be accepted into subcultures of American whiteness that an educated, professionally successful woman of color would never be allowed into.
Casey comes into Mindy’s life after she is disillusioned with dating and proves he can be as committed to her as he is to God. He also moonlights as a white savior with ambitions to do humanitarian work in Haiti. Mindy decides to join Casey on this mission to save Haitian children, where the show defaults to racist depictions of a developing country. There are apparently no doctors or hospitals in Haiti, and we are told that Casey and Mindy have built the hospital they are now working in. The hospital resembles a camp with makeshift tents and throngs of people going back and forth. A playful Mindy balances a cane basket filled with vegetables on her head. She also sends handwritten notes to colleagues in New York because, obviously, Haiti may have no internet. Mindy and Casey watch TV in their tin roof tent as the light flickers, hinting that electricity is sporadic. Historically, Western media and film have tended to depict India and Indians through poverty porn, making it ironic that Kaling has relied upon such imagery for her series. Rather than resist the media’s racism, the Haiti scenes only perpetrate these pernicious stereotypes.
The Mindy Project’s preoccupation with mounting a complex white narrative is cemented by Danny’s character arc across the show’s six seasons. Danny is a grouchy, conservative, and ill-tempered Italian American, who reveres the single mother who raised him. There is a conversion story embedded in this plot: Danny’s previous love interests are pale, skinny, white women (played by Chloe Sevigny and Alison Williams), but it is the brown and not-so-skinny Mindy who will become his big love, turning his world upside down. Danny and Mindy are shown to initially not get along but become better friends over the first two seasons, leading to their first kiss. The relationship has its ups and downs, but as the two become committed to each other, the viewers are given more and more insights into Danny’s Italian-American background and less and less coverage of Mindy’s Indian parents. Childhood friends, photographs, and anecdotes further render a complex, nuanced, and affectionate portrait of Danny.
Mindy, meanwhile, remains opaque as ever. The show’s inability to engage a background story for their Indian frontrunner is shocking and despairing. Mindy’s parents appear in only six out of 117 episodes of The Mindy Project, whereas Danny’s mother gets a season’s worth (17 episodes) of screen time. Danny’s Italian background is also made to dominate when they bring up their son, Leo. There’s an episode dedicated to getting Leo (successfully) baptized, another where Danny plans to bring him to Italy to connect with his heritage and several episodes where grandmother Annette becomes the main caregiver for the child. Mindy’s parents are portrayed as flaky and disinterested, and no excuse is spared to ensure they do not end up as regulars on the show.
The Multiplication of Mindy Lahiri: Devi Vishwakumar and Bela Malhotra
It is impossible to measure the impact of a six-season show such as The Mindy Project on viewers and specifically on American, Indian, or Indian diaspora culture. One way to ascertain its success is the fact that Kaling was able to produce more shows and films that foregrounded a certain Indian woman. The prototype introduced in the Mindy Lahiri character has had an afterlife in the next two shows created and produced by Kaling herself: Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls.
The Netflix series Never Have I Ever (2020), introduced viewers to the character of Devi Vishwakumar, a mouthy Los Angeles teen girl of Indian heritage, navigating the recent loss of her father alongside sex, friendship, family, and school. With The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021), Kaling created the character of Bela Malhotra, a slightly older mouthy teen girl of Indian heritage, navigating sex, friendship, and dreams of becoming a comedy writer set at a fictional elite New England college in the US. It has become evident through both these shows that Kaling has created a coconut cinematic universe, cementing and perpetuating this narrow prototype of the Indian American woman who aspires to whiteness.
Never Have I Ever lasted four seasons, and its release on Netflix in 2020 at the height of the pandemic allowed it to catapult in terms of viewership and global reach. The reviews came in fast and furious, and praise for the show seemed unanimous. Devi’s high school was diverse and her friend group comprised a Chinese-American friend and a Black friend. The love interest in the first two seasons is a half-white and half-Japanese teen boy. Never Have I Ever merges high school and family drama/comedy, allowing it to explore Devi’s Indian family life with the depth made unavailable in The Mindy Project.
While Devi’s Indianness is overtly expressed in this show, the character continues to navigate an ambivalence toward it. Kaling once again insists that Indian and American identities are fundamentally incompatible and at odds with each other. The Indian world is always ossified and behind the times, while the protagonists like Mindy or Devi are American and part of a fast-paced modern world. As the seasons progress, Devi’s mother—and eventually even the grandmother—start dating, and soon all the women in the intergenerational household loosen their inhibitions and become American in the way that Devi approves.
The racially and culturally diverse cast of Never Have I Ever hides Kaling’s penchant for narratives of white complicity to some degree, but like Mindy often said she pictured herself as a slim, white woman in The Mindy Project, Devi is also given an alter-ego—narrated by veteran tennis champion John McEnroe. There is certainly dramatic and comedic logic for this within the story since Devi’s beloved late father was a McEnroe fan and also because Devi has rage issues. But it is not lost on us that the Kaling world cannot engage non-white and non-male identities to bolster the characters. Even in The Sex Lives of College Girls, Bela has lied to her traditional (read: backward) Indian parents that she wants to be a comedy writer, pretends to be studying the sciences, and her inspirations are successful white male comedians.
Never Have I Ever also continues to tout an Indian heritage that is expressly Hindu, savarna, and upper class. Devi initially complains about a set of brass deities placed in the prayer area of their home, but in the finale episode, she acquiesces to the Hindu gods and thanks them for how everything has turned out. A much-criticized scene from the series takes place at a Hindu temple frequented by wealthy Indian migrants where “Dalit identity is completely invisibilized, busting open the empty rhetoric of representation on screen,” as Supraja R notes. Devi, her mother, and her cousin then avoid sitting at the table of a woman who has been ostracized for marrying a Muslim—this is played for laughs and not meaningfully addressed at all.
While Never Have I Ever plays a roulette referencing various identities in a diverse cast, Supraja R rightly calls it an “empty rhetoric of representation.” Kaling has proudly asserted that she has been fighting colorism and said the following about Devi in a New York Times interview: “I liked that she wasn’t like this red-haired, green-eyed, pale-skinned Indian girl. I liked that she looked a little bit more like someone that would be in my family.” While combating colorism is indeed commendable given the Indian obsession with fairness, Kaling’s gestures come off as hollow because the psychological and cultural make-up of the protagonist always aspires toward a white American mindset. It also cements this mindset as singularly worthwhile—and worth the erasure of one’s history, language, and indeed, one’s very self.
The Larger Representation Debate
Representation matters. We hear this over and over again. But what about flawed representations? What do we do with representations that foreground under-represented populations in false, negative, and often harmful ways? Kaling’s world exalts American multiculturalism and wants to put people of color, specifically Indian American women, on the map in an entertainment industry that has been white to its core. Yet Kaling has sought to accomplish this goal through negative and stereotypical portrayals of nonwhite cultures and countries, debasing humor, fetishistic depictions, and exclusion of people of color from the central story.
Combatting lack of representation—or misrepresentation—requires a considered, oppositional, and ethical politics. The somewhat over-quoted line by Audre Lorde comes to mind: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In her rebuke to the white women academics who had only superficially included women of color in a conference about feminism, Lorde writes that the master’s tools may “allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Empty reformism is not enough.
Unfortunately, Kaling’s career is all about empty reformism, and she doesn’t go beyond a cosmetic understanding of representation. She might put darker women in the frame, but their personalities, desires, and stories are meant to appeal to a white audience and her characters hustle to be perceived as white. In addition, Mindy’s identity is tethered to an India that presents itself as a democracy but has seen a distressing erosion of principles of human rights and freedom of speech for minorities, especially Muslims, under Narendra Modi. India’s obsession with grabbing power on the world stage has meant the practice of American-style hyper-capitalism and the cultivation of aggressive military might alongside the consolidation of soft power through technology, sports, and, of course, film and television.
Mindy’s complicity with white Americanness, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness, her tasteless depiction of migrants, and her penchant for success-oriented upper-caste characters and lifestyles all stack up easily alongside Modi’s imperial visions of India. This kind of Indian American also suits the likes of Kamala Harris, who promises to fix the border using draconian methods while also promoting her migrant heritage in the same breath.
Today, Kaling is one of the most successful Indian American artists. She has her own production house and has created, produced, and written several TV shows in addition to publishing three memoirs. In March 2023, she received the National Medal of the Arts from President Joe Biden. The establishment has spoken, anointing a “coconut” politics that dilutes histories of race and culture and performs servility to the white establishment.
(This essay carries revised excerpts from the forthcoming volume India’s Imperial Formations: Cultural Perspectives by Amrita Ghosh, Rohit K. Dasgupta, and Bhakti Shringarpure. Reprinted with permission from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Pre-order here.)