In Kaling’s later work, she spent extra time exploring the cultural backgrounds of her Indian characters. But current criticism of this work highlights her unquestioned regurgitation of the anti-Islam sentiment that exists in Hindu Indian communities, as in a 2020 episode of Never Have I Ever. In an essay for Autostraddle concerning the disappointments of the present, Himani addresses that episode, through which Devi’s household attends Ganesh puja, a Hindu pageant and social occasion. While there, they meet a not too long ago divorced lady whose household rejected her after she married a Muslim man, and who now regrets not selecting to marry a Hindu man within the first place. Though Himani appreciates Kaling’s try and “[lay] bare the Islamophobic underbelly of Hindu-Indian community,” she additionally calls it “a missed opportunity” to problem the interior prejudices of the Indian group and depict them as one thing apart from inevitable cultural idiosyncrasies. By the top of the episode, the divorced lady appears flawed for defying her mother and father’ anti-Islam prejudice, not the opposite manner round.
These criticisms of Kaling’s work have unspooled on-line amid a flurry of different tangentially associated revelations introduced as proof that she deserves this downfall. There’s the truth that her brother wrote a e book known as Almost Black: The True Story of How I Got Into Medical School By Pretending to Be Black, which is self-evidently exploitative and racist. There’s the truth that she appreciated certainly one of JK Rowling’s tweets, through which the famously anti-trans writer boasted about her “recent royalty cheques” in response to somebody asking the way it felt to lose an enormous chunk of her viewers. Liking a tweet is pretty trivial proof of being a TERF, however there’s additionally a line from Kaling’s 2011 memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, through which she derides her trans neighbors in West Hollywood, a predominantly queer neighborhood in LA. It’s all unflattering, however the storm eclipses the nuanced critiques of Kaling’s work in favor of a punitive, burn-it-down perspective.
This is just not particularly stunning. By now it’s nicely established that social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok reward extremely emotional engagement. Outrage and sarcasm are probably the most virulent sentiments; bluntness and brevity make them simpler to unfold. The folks in command of and invested in social media corporations generate profits utilizing algorithms that encourage us to click on on more and more frenetic or radical content material. They revenue off instruments that make us need to preserve shouting into the void, ready to listen to again.
If we had a greater discussion board for this sort of crucial discourse, it is likely to be simpler to articulate the cheap — even boring — consensus on the coronary heart of all this controversy: Kaling has written the identical caricature of herself too many occasions.