Never Have I Ever felt super Indian: constructing Indian femininity and recasting the “other”

Abstract

Never Have I Ever (NHIE) is a Netflix comedy-drama series centered around Devi Vishwakumar, a second-generation Indian-American teenager. While the show was praised for accurately portraying the experiences of young, second-generation Indian-American women, it was also criticized for its failure to subvert stereotypes, its caricaturization of Indian culture, as well as the erasure of caste in the show's narrative. In this article, we examine how NHIE constructs Indian femininity by studying the characterizations of Nalini Vishwakumar, Kamala Nandiwadal, and Nirmala Vishwakumar—Devi's mother, cousin, and paternal grandmother, respectively, who become the sites for the show's representation of Indianness, and form the backdrop against which Devi's cultural identity is explored. Drawing from scholarship on legible minority representation (Feng), color-blind racism (as described by Sood), and subtle practices of othering through media portrayals (Fürsich), we argue that in (re)telling Indian-American stories of otherness, NHIE recasts the Indian characters as the “others.” While NHIE’s many Indian-American writers have broken new ground with Devi, the Indian women on the show are written through the Indian-American lens, which internalizes a white gaze and views them as decidedly other. Through textual analysis as described by Elfriede Fürsich in the tradition of Stuart Hall, this article examines how NHIE constructs the Indian women's subjectivities through their expression of aspirational Americanness, the portrayal of Indian motherhood, the codifying of the “good” Indian family, and a performance of “suitable” Indian femininity. We locate our article within the broader discourse around (South) Asian representation in American popular media, the cultural capital of legible South Asian subjectivities, and the future of representation as it relates to transnational media audiences.