Instead, the show more accurately captures a a stormy volatility toward Aneesa that consistently vibrates within Devi. What follows between Devi and Aneesa, though, is not exactly a rivalry.

More truthfully, how much internalized racism is Aneesa’s sudden appearance and their skewed environment bringing out in Devi? I bet she doesn’t have any Indian friends.” Neither does Devi, Eleanor points out. “I get a self-hating Indian vibe from her. “Look how she’s sucking up to the popular kids,” Devi tells her friend Eleanor. In reaction to this deviation, Devi lashes out defensively in the next scene.

How is it that this girl can bulldoze through the school upon arrival, piercing through the ceiling of popularity as an Indian girl, while Devi has rather faithfully accepted and cultivated her role as an archetypal high-achiever? Aneesa, Devi seems to think, isn't sticking to the script. Within this brief moment of sizing-up the one other Indian girl, there is a maelstrom of conflicting implications and emotions, from resentful admiration to a confusion of the innate racial dynamics of high school’s social hierarchies. It’s a funny joke that also distills a viscerally uncomfortable truth. “She had always assumed her unpopularity was because of racism, but this new kid was proving that Devi might just be objectively lame.” “Devi was in awe of this cool Indian teen,” the show’s narrator, John McEnroe says. While Aneesa speaks to the class, who immediately warms up to the new girl in school, Devi darts her head around in baffled terror. Immediately after introducing her, their woke-posturing teacher mixes Aneesa and Devi up, and Aneesa is thereafter referred to by a classmate as “Devi 2.0' (the comparison between the two continues throughout the season). The energy - an unusual mixture of wariness, of hostility, but also perhaps of comfort and warmth - that links you can be immediately palpable, even if others might not notice. The tension Devi immediately feels is a reflection of a very specific phenomenon that is common to most people of color who have been surrounded by people that don’t look like you - the feeling of entering a classroom, or any room, in which there is just one or two “others” like you. But, alongside her Ben-versus-Paxton competing boy romances and their requisite whirlwind of emotions, the major new storyline of the new season arrives in the face of the new girl, Aneesa (Megan Suri). This new season continues much of the debut's mixture of charm and poignancy, and also extends that freshness with another dimension: after Devi’s grandmother moves from India to America, the show becomes a window into an intergenerational household of Indian women. Part of this balance was achieved by the development of a much deeper, rather moving narrative - the undercurrent of grief that Devi (a delightfully precocious Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) was fighting in the wake of her father’s death - amid the high school dramatics. The girl is a transfer student named Aneesa, a major new character in Mindy Kaling's Netflix comedy, which was wildly popular in its first season for its depiction of Indian-American adolescence that felt genuinely new in a way that also avoided being cloying, as has become the increasingly common pitfall for shows that overdo their purportedly groundbreaking perspectives. We see in Devi’s eyes, a complicated look: one of threatened panic, rooted in a sense of mutual identification.

In the fourth episode of the new season of Never Have I Ever, our charmingly hotheaded protagonist Devi is stopped in her tracks when she is faced by a horrifying sight: another Indian girl has arrived at her school. The moment feels startlingly, painfully familiar.

Never have i ever cast aneesa