The Righttime

Huma Abedin has been a power player all her life. She began her career as an intern at the White House, and rose up the ranks, all the way to vice-chair for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Now, as female representation in American politics hits an all-time high, the woman, who helped Secretary Clinton to the door of the world’s most notorious boys’ club, sits down for a conversation with another fire-starter who has been at the front lines of equal representation in her own field—the actor, writer, comedian, and our May cover star, Mindy Kaling.

ON A PERFECT MIDSUMMER JUNE AFTERNOON in New York, ELLE India brought together Huma Abedin and Mindy Kaling at Balthazar to discuss the question of identity, and the lure of a homeland she never fully knew.

Mindy Kaling: First, I just want you to know that I’ve been claiming you as Indian. We had a joke on a recent episode of my new show, Champions, where my on-screen son asks Hasan Minhaj, who plays my glamorous, rich brother, if “you’re my real dad, my mum is my aunt, and Huma Abedin is my real mum?” And Hasan goes on to say that it didn’t work out between you two, but that you did date once. So, I just feel like I decided that you were Indian on my show—and that you dated Hasan Minhaj unsuccessfully for a while because you were too busy. Is any of that true?

Huma Abedin: [Laughs] Well, I was born in Michigan, to an Indian father and a Pakistani mother. We moved to Saudi Arabia when I was two, and that’s where I grew up. I came back to the US for college, but I have recently been thinking about the whole question of identity, and I am curious about your views on it too. In the past, people have asked me what I am, and I’ve always said, “I am American.”

MK: So you’ve always identified as American?

HA: I have and I do, but I also grew up very comfortably in Middle-Eastern culture. My upbringing was culturally very mixed: Europeans, Americans, South Africans, Africans, Arabs. We were American, we were Muslim; those formed the very core of our identities.

MK: The lines can be quite distinct, can’t they? Hindu-Muslim, India-Pakistan. For me, all South Asians going through the Hollywood machine are brothers and sisters. And I am always surprised when people seek out the divide.