Tamil-Canadian actor Maitreyi Ramakrishnan has been the target of an organised online campaign from Sinhala nationalist social media pages after publicly affirming her Eelam Tamil identity and declining the label “Sri Lankan” while promoting her Netflix film “Best of the Best”.
Tamil Guardian reported that Sri Lankan users were urged to give the film one-star ratings on IMDb, alongside 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. 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.
The gap between the two audiences was stark. At the time the campaign was documented, 82% 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.
What she said
The backlash followed comments Ramakrishnan made on Hasan Minhaj’s podcast, appearing alongside co-star Priyanka Kedia.
“I love who I am as a Tamil Eelam woman,” she said. “I love my family and my cultural history.” She spoke about not being fluent in Tamil and her efforts to learn the language, saying this did not diminish her Tamil identity.
Ramakrishnan also shaped how her character’s identity appears in the film. In one scene, her character 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 the change because that was not how she identifies, and wanted the distinction between her Tamil identity and her family’s geographical roots kept clear.
“We gotta stand firm on our Tamil identity, who we are as a community,” she said. “I will always rep being Tamil.”
Background
Ramakrishnan, who became internationally known through Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, has identified publicly as Tamil-Canadian since her casting in 2019. Her parents arrived in Canada as refugees after fleeing the armed conflict, and she has spoken about attending Tamil protests with them as a child, including demonstrations in Toronto calling for a ceasefire in 2009.
Tamil Guardian notes that for Tamils from the North-East and their descendants in the diaspora, “Eelam Tamil” is an ethnic and political identifier, and that her position on not identifying as Sri Lankan is widely held across the diaspora and the homeland.
Attribution
Tamil Guardian is a UK-based outlet focused on Sri Lankan and Tamil affairs and was the sole newsroom to have documented the campaign at the time of writing. The account of the campaign’s organisation, the AI prompts and the rating figures is its reporting. LankaNewz has not independently verified the individual pages involved and does not name them.