‘I will always rep being Tamil’ - Maitreyi Ramakrishnan

Tamil-Canadian actor Maitreyi Ramakrishnan confronted ideas of “Tamilness” in a speech this month, speaking on the pressures of representation, and called for solidarity from Tamil people around the world – from Mullivaikkal to Gaza. 

Speaking with the candour and humour that has defined her public voice, Ramakrishnan urged the Tamil people to reject respectability politics, embrace cultural diversity, and “stop caring about what will people think”.

No one way to be Tamil

Throughout the speech, Ramakrishnan pushed back against narrow definitions of what it means to be Tamil.

“There is no one way to be Tamil,” she told the audience at the 48th Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Ilankai Tamil Sangam in New Jersey earlier this month.

She spoke of being one of the “very few Tamil people to ever be on the cover of Time Magazine” and having “a show where the main character is Tamil loud and proud,” but set that against the criticism she receives for not fitting a traditional mould.

“I also can't speak Tamil fluently,” she said, quipping that her “there will be no Tamil translation, unfortunately”. “I wish I knew how to speak Tamil fluently,” she continued but stressed that those gaps do not make her any less Tamil.

“My Amma's not any less Tamil than you or your mom. So get off my back,” she said, recalling how a classmate once told her, “oh well that's because your mom's not as Tamil as mine,” after hearing that male friends were allowed to visit her home. “It was crazy and it really wasn't cool. I remember being more hurt than anything. How dare you say my mother's not as Tamil as yours because I'm pretty sure y'all came on the same boat to this country of Canada. Okay? Y'all both made it out. Thank God. Thank God we did. That's why we're here.”

Her insistence was simple and firm. “I'm not a good Tamil girl, but I am a Tamil girl. And no one has the right to take that away from me... From any other Tamil person… We all don't have the right to take it away from anybody else in this room. That's Tamil. That's identity.”

Language and empathy

“I didn't learn how to speak Tamil because I lasted one day in Tamil school,” recalled Ramakrishnan. “My Tamil teacher said that she would hit me if I didn't listen to her,” she said. “I would say I would hit her back.”

She contrasted her experience with that of friends whose grandparents only spoke Tamil.

“For me, both of my grandparents, my grandma is on both sides, my grandpa is on both sides, even my great-grandma, who I had the awesome privilege to grow up with for most of my childhood in the same house, even she, with her really bad Alzheimer's, spoke English fluently. So I didn't have to talk to them even out of necessity to communicate with them in Tamil. Not that that's an excuse. Like I want to learn Tamil. I do.”

Public reaction, however, can be unforgiving.

“When people see, “oh, she can't speak Tamil. Oh, look at her broken Tamil in this interview where she's talking about ‘iddiyappam and sothi’”…. People don't give that grace,” she said. 

“I'm not asking for a pity party here… I'm very privileged and I am very blessed. I have no complaints. What I'm saying is we should extend a little empathy.”

She reminded the audience that Tamils did not scatter across the world by choice.

“Especially as a community that has come to all different countries for a lot of devastating reasons, many of which were not reasons that our past ancestors and family members did not want to make. It's kind of crazy that we're not more empathetic. We should be so empathetic to the reasons why some Tamil person may be their version of Tamil.”

At the same time, she stressed that language matters and must not be discarded.

“That's what breaks my heart about the fact that I don't know Tamil fluently. Which makes it a much longer goal of mine to learn Tamil fluently. Because I don't want to erase language. Language is so important. Yet again, I cannot stress, it is not a flex that I don't know Tamil. It's not a sin that I don't know Tamil, but it's not a flex. We can't erase those things.”

Culture and the right to choose

The actor applied that same balance of pride and critique to Tamil cultural practices. She defended rituals such as ‘samathiya veedu’, while skewering the excess that can come with them.

“We can't be ashamed of having a ‘samathiya veedu’,” she said, before quickly adding “We also should not be having like multi-million dollar ‘samathiya veedu’ and posting them on Facebook.” 

For Ramakrishnan, the key is agency, not obligation.

“We don't need to pass it along. We need to be able to choose what we want to pass along,” she said of cultural practices. “I don't want us to be in a position where we are not doing our traditions, our cultural practices, because we don't know."

“Let's do it or not do it because we choose, right?”

She described culture as a form of resistance.

“Our culture is our right. It is who we are. It is our middle finger to the world of, ‘Hey, we should all be the same. Please conform because we don't want you to be weird or different.’ It's not weird. It's not different. We just live in the Western world that makes us feel that way.’”
That specificity, she argued, is precisely what helped make “Never Have I Ever” resonate globally.

“I think a big reason why ‘Never Have I Ever’ was so successful was because it was specific to a Tamil girl doing Tamil things… And it didn't make it successful just for some people. It was really popular all over the world. A show about a girl wanting to have sex was number one in Saudi Arabia.”

Representation, authenticity and ‘what will people think’

Ramakrishnan returned repeatedly to the weight of representation and the toxic grip of “what will people think” within the diaspora.
“I got very depressed in the very beginning years of my career,” she admitted. “Because people would look at Devi (her character in the hit Netflix show) and say, ‘Ah, she's so cringy,’ or ‘She doesn't relate to me.’”

“Maybe people didn't relate to Devi. And it took me a while to realize half of those people who are angry or disappointed just wanted representation because obviously the bar was really, really low”.

“But when I realized that Devi, a TV character, can't represent everyone it made me realize I can't.”

“I can't fully ever represent the Tamil community either. I can represent those in the Tamil community that resonate with me and are willing to take me along for their ride. But it's not my responsibility to represent everyone,” she continued. “Just like it's not any of your guys' responsibility to represent the values of everybody else around you who are not walking your shoes. Stop caring about what will people think.”

She urged young Tamils to pursue artistic paths even when families disapprove.

“For all of the folks in the room who have artistic aspirations and may have people in your lives that do not support it, go for it. Go for it. Because as a community, we have to support the artistic endeavours and creative endeavours are just the passion of the heart of those around us.”

Her own journey, she said, has been shaped by luck and hard work rather than a neat, respectable roadmap.

“My life is not a ‘Okay, you follow this step, this step, this step, you go to this school, you do this class, and this, that, this, you will become successful.’ No, that is not what I'm saying. I got here because of luck. I was in the right place at the right time, to get my first ever role off of Twitter. And then hard work kept me here. And now I get to be in this awesome room with all of you lovely folks.”

“If I cared about the ‘what will people think mentality’, I wouldn't be here today,” she said. 

In an industry obsessed with branding and relatability, she has settled on her own advantage.

“The best tool that I have in the crazy Hollywood machine that I work in, in a machine where there's so many, young talent especially who are trying to be relatable or trying to market themselves to be appealing. I realized my superpower is being authentic. No one can be my Maitreyi Ramakrishnan better than she. People can try to copy, but good luck.”

Her name has become part of that stance.

“I will always rep being Tamil. I will always keep my name 20 letters long with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan,” she said. “When people praised me for not changing my name, it felt weird because what would I change it to? I don't have any other ideas. And I really like my name.”

“Do you know how awesome it is to be able to have your name always be the longest in the credits? Okay? You got Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis. She's got three. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. That's right. I might be lower, but I'm still there.”

‘Everyone's first time at the game of life’

Another key theme in her speech was grace across generations, including for parents who fled war and genocide.

Quoting her brother, she said, “He once said to me, ‘You know, thangachi, it's everyone's first time at the game of life.’ I'm a big video game person. And when he said that to me, it made me realize everyone is picking up this video game, this board game, whatever works for you, for the first time. My mom is just a girl. My dad's just a boy. They're living life and they're figuring it out for the first time themselves, right?”

She revealed that she only visited the Tamil homeland in 2020.

“I didn't go back to Sri Lanka, not back, I was born in Canada. I didn't visit Sri Lanka until 2020, when I was 18 years old. And that was because my parents, not to air them out, but they weren't ready to go back. It’s their first time at life and they have their own things to deal with.”

“Any person who wants to shame or pass any kind of judgment to my parents for not making that trip for their children sooner can screw off. Truly. My parents have their own baggage as people who fled a country fearing for their lives. And they're living life for the first time and they wanted to take their children back to Sri Lanka when they felt emotionally ready to do so and I am so thankful for that.”

“It’s all of our first times at life,” she concluded on this theme. “So let's not dismiss each other because then we're just going to start erasing each other.”

From Mullivaikkal to Gaza: standing firm as Tamil

“I've done amazing things representing Tamil Canadians all over the world,” Ramakrishnan said. “Talking about Mullivaikkal, talking about the Tamil genocide, which is incredibly important and we need to speak about it more."

“If we're not going to have solidarity with Palestinians, what are we doing?” she said. “The hypocrisy is crazy. Just saying. Okay? Let's talk about it. The Gaza strip is looking really familiar.”

She also criticised the way brown people are flattened into a single “Indian” category in mainstream discourse, including around online racism.

“At the end of the day to the white man we're all just Indian. Where in India? I don't know. What do we speak? Indian. What do we look like? Indian. It's just all Indian at the end of the day,” she said. 

“Indian hate online is like the worst it has ever been. It is objectively the worst time to be a brown person on the internet, but the conversation will all be around being Indian on the internet. But we all know here that that's not the full case. It's being brown, right?”
Her answer to that erasure was a call to collective confidence.

“We gotta stand firm on our Tamil identity, who we are as a community. And it starts by uplifting each other. Maybe just be empathetic, stop caring about what will people think.”

She also challenged the community to think twice before its instinct to gossip.

“Next time, you know, you're gonna judge someone’s sari when they pull up to the function, maybe you'll think twice now. Maybe you'll think twice. And instead of judging what they wear to the function, or who's talking to who, or what kid of whatever uncle or auntie who's now not going to university, they're taking a gap year. Maybe next time instead of judging them, you'll just shut up.”

As she wrapped up, Ramakrishnan returned to humour, but her message stayed sharp.

“Anyways, thank you guys for having me. I realize I talk a lot. I'm Tamil and also a comedian. It's a terrible mix to try and get me to shut up. But thank you guys for having me and enjoy the rest of your night. Thank you.”