Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, who has identified publicly as Tamil-Canadian since her casting in Never Have I Ever in 2019
The Tamil-Canadian actor Maitreyi Ramakrishnan has faced an organised online campaign from Sinhala nationalist pages after publicly affirming her Eelam Tamil identity and rejecting the label Sri Lankan while promoting her Netflix film Best of the Best.
Sri Lankan users were urged to give the film one-star ratings on IMDb, alongside a flood of racist and misogynistic abuse directed at Ramakrishnan across social media. At least one page supplied followers with a prepared prompt to generate negative reviews using ChatGPT or Gemini, then asked them to post screenshots proving they had submitted them. Since then, the film has received thousands of negative reviews from Sri Lanka.
Posts directed followers to damage the film's rating without requiring them to have watched it. After the rating fell, one page thanked participants as "true Sri Lankans" and discussed targeting another film featuring Ramakrishnan.
Professional reviewers responded differently. At the time the campaign was documented, 82 per cent of the 17 reviews listed on Rotten Tomatoes were positive, while the Sri Lankan IMDb rating had fallen to an average of 1.1 out of 10.
'I love who I am as a Tamil Eelam woman'
The backlash followed comments Ramakrishnan made while promoting the film, in which she spoke about her Tamil identity and her family's history.
"I love who I am as a Tamil Eelam woman," she said on Hasan Minhaj's podcast, appearing alongside her co-star Priyanka Kedia. "I love my family and my cultural history." She spoke about not being fluent in Tamil and her efforts to learn the language, and said this did not diminish her Tamil identity.
Ramakrishnan also shaped how her character's identity is represented in the film. In one scene, Maya is assumed to be Indian and corrects the assumption: "I'm Tamil. My family's from Sri Lanka."
An earlier version of the line described Maya as "Tamil Sri Lankan". Ramakrishnan asked for it to be changed, because that was not how she identifies, and wanted the distinction between her Tamil identity and her family's geographical roots to be clear.
Speaking to the Tamil-Canadian journalist Radheyan Simonpillai, she said that while most viewers would understand Maya to be Tamil, "the Tamil Eelam folks" would recognise the significance of the wording. TIME reported that the filmmakers had incorporated her "very specific Eelam Tamil identity" into the film.
Ramakrishnan has described herself this way since before Never Have I Ever made her an international star.
In 2019, shortly after her casting, she asked to be described publicly as Tamil-Canadian. "My identity isn't being Sri Lankan," she told NOW Magazine at the time . "That's not my country. My country is Canada. But my culture is definitely Tamil." She introduced Tamil dialogue into multiple episodes of the series.
Her parents arrived in Canada as refugees after fleeing the armed conflict, among thousands of Tamil families displaced, and she has spoken about attending Tamil protests with them as a child, including demonstrations in Toronto calling for a ceasefire in 2009.
Speaking at the Ilankai Tamil Sangam annual general meeting in New Jersey last November, she told the audience : "I've done amazing things representing Tamil Canadians all over the world. Talking about Mullivaikkal, talking about the Tamil genocide, which is incredibly important and we need to speak about it more."
"We gotta stand firm on our Tamil identity, who we are as a community," she said. "I will always rep being Tamil."
For Tamils from the North-East and their descendants in the diaspora, Eelam Tamil is an ethnic and political identifier shaped by decades of discrimination and genocide. Tamil Eelam is the name of the aspirational independent state that Tamils have demanded for decades. Her refusal to identify as Sri Lankan reflects a position widely held across the diaspora and homeland.
Sri Lanka is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist. Tamil journalists are particularly at threat, with at least 41 media workers known to have been killed by the Sri Lankan state or its paramilitaries during and after the armed conflict.
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