The modern brown woman experience in America: Richa Moorjani and Poorna Jagannathan on Netflix’s ‘Never Have I Ever’ season two
The Hindu
Actors Richa Moorjani and Poorna Jagannathan get up close and personal on playing South Asian women in STEM in Netflix’s comedy ‘Never Have I Ever’, and why new mediums of storytelling matter
Never Have I Ever, as a show, has deeply divided South Asian audiences in its portrayal of an Indian transplant family in California, with the kids striving for western modernity and the elders clutching tightly on to traditions. One half of audiences claim the show is hyperbolic and unrelatable, while the other praises the portrayal of the struggle of the South Asian diaspora in the United States. For the latter half — many of whom have felt a little lost as they grew up Indian in another country, and could not understand why mum and dad wanted to supervise boy-girl parties — the show has also proven to be a cultural balm. . The Netflix series, narrated by John McEnroe and written by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher, follows Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), a straight-A student at a Sherman Oaks high school in California. She lives with her widowed mother, Dr Nalini Vishwakumar (Poorna Jagannathan), and her picture-perfect cousin, Kamala Nandiawada (Richa Moorjani), a brilliant scientist completing her PhD in biology at CalTech. Season two offers an uplifting take on brown feminism, where Nalini’s mother-in-law Nirmala (Ranjita Chakravarty) comes to live with the family.More Related News