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“So Lavanya, where are you from?”
“I was born in Bombay and raised in the UAE.”
“Oh, so you’re Maharashtrian, is it?”
“Well, no. My grandparents moved to Bombay post-Independence from Palakkad. It’s a district in Kerala, which lies on the border towards Tamil Nadu.”
“So, you’re Malayali then.”
“No, I am a Tamilian.”
“Oh! I see. Like Kamal Haasan in Michael Madana Kama Rajan?” the person chuckles.
“Yeah,” I exhale irritably. “Like in Michael Madana Kama Rajan.”
Just a few decades ago, it was the Indians living outside the country who had to deal with cultural and identity issues. However, cultural confusion among Indians of today is no longer a dilemma limited to India’s diaspora. With increased and advanced mobility, development in education and the role of media, it afflicts numerous Indians raised in the subcontinent’s metros and urban areas.
So, in the cultural confusion spectrum, we have the Indian diaspora and we have the displaced Indian. I am a strange combination of both.
My upbringing was a strange concoction of different cultures. I grew up in the city of Dubai and went to an Indian school. We celebrated Onam and Vishu with the same rigour as we would Pongal and Ganesh Chaturthi. The TV channels playing in our house ranged from Sun TV to Asianet, from Star Plus to Jaya TV, from Kairali to Zee TV. Every evening, I would catch the unmistakable sounds of perhaps the sociopolitical Malayalam satire show Munshi , or actress-turned-producer Raadhika Sarathkumar’s 9:30 pm Tamil soap opera staple, or even a seemingly neverending Ekta Kapoor sobfest starting with the letter K. The menu for the day could be dosas for breakfast, rotis and sabji for lunch, and aapams and ishtu for dinner. I was taught Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam with equal importance, though I have never fully managed to pick up the latter.
While all these aspects of my upbringing left me awash with diversity (not to mention the international exposure I received from my two decades in Dubai), it also left me starkly confused. I could never explain to a fellow Indian where I was from in 10 words or less. Culturally, I was never clear on where my family and I belonged or what I could call ‘home’. It was not Maharashtra because we are not Maharashtrian, it was not Tamil Nadu because we no longer had any link to the State, and it did not seem to even be Kerala because despite originating from there, we called ourselves Tamil and not Malayali. Tamil people do not consider us to be Tamil and Malayali people do not consider us to be Malayali. “We are Keralites, but we are not Malayalis,” I remember my father saying when I was young. While it is accurate, it did not leave any room for definitive identification.
As far as I am aware, representation in the media came in the form of two things. One is a not-so-well-known serial in the Tamil media called Veetukku Veedu Looti , which was intended to be a caricature of Tamil people from Kerala. While I was amused by the show at the time when it came out, I am miffed in retrospect because that is the only purpose it served for the community — caricaturing it.
The second and probably most famous representation of the Kerala Tamil community is the Kamal Haasan comedy Michael Madana Kama Rajan , which has become somewhat of a classic of Tamil cinema. The characters in question are Kameshwaran and his adoptive father Palakkad Mani Iyer (played by Kamal Haasan and Delhi Ganesh respectively) and Kameshwaran’s love interest Thiripurasundari (played by the actress Urvashi). To be clear, I utterly adore the film. I have seen it enough times to recite parts of its dialogue by heart. I find its depiction of Kerala Tamil people pretty accurate. If anything, I initially used it as a reference point to explain my origins in conversations with people.
However, as time went by, I grew to resent this. Without intending to, that very aspect of the film, which I see as a portrait, became a caricature. After I moved to Chennai two years back, I spoke Tamil in the only way I knew how to; with a Malayalam accent and words mixed in. While an inability to comprehend what I was saying was understandable, what I found annoying was the amused reactions of people when I did speak. The pre-conceived impression people had of me ended up becoming patronising, and I hesitate to speak Tamil with new people nowadays.
Everything I have said can be mistaken for a range of things; bellyaching, a holier-than-thou attitude, or maybe even privilege and perhaps elitism. But cultural confusion, especially within your own country, is not easy to deal with. Neither is having people snigger about you because you do not speak a language the same way they do.
At this point, while I still feel a twinge at the lack of understanding of who I am, I have mostly come to embrace the insane mixture of a human being that I am. As for home, I’ve come to accept that it changes with time and situations. Now if you’ll excuse me, there is a tub of caramel popcorn and a rerun of Michael Madana Kama Rajan waiting for me.
