“What does it mean to be Tamil, today?” asks Kishant Javegar’s microseries Kuthu.

Is it listening to songs by Anirudh? Or making sure you grab tickets to the newest Vijay movie without missing a beat? Or eating your dosa with your hands?

Kuthu is a very popular genre of high-energy folk music and dance. Popular mainstream Kuthu songs include “Naakka Mukka,” “Aaluma Dolamma” and, more recently, “Kaavaalaa” from Rajinikanth’s film Jailer. Kuthu music is meant to be danced to. I remember watching Jailer in a single-screen theatre in Bengaluru with my entire college class, and as soon as the song came on, the theatre came alive. People were dancing in front of the screen and standing on their seats, howling. And yes, the song’s music video is extremely vulgar and objectifies women to a large extent, but watching people’s reactions to it was a spectacle in itself.

Kuthu highlights that. Do the parts of our culture that we accept and subscribe to make us belong less or more? The series grapples with the complications of staying in touch with your roots as part of the diaspora and understanding your place in that culture.

One of the characters goes off on a monologue, like a typical Tamil hero, much as Vijay does in some of his movies, about growing up in a place where nobody even knew what Tamil Nadu was. So much of connecting to your culture depends on the community and what we’re exposed to growing up. If you’ve never felt comfortable in your environment, how will you ever truly embrace that part of yourself?

Kuthu is witty and clever, and it manages to pack a punch in just two minutes of its first episode. Through humour and some on-the-nose-speeches, it forces you to think and ask who gets to belong, and who decides that? The series points out that your that your identity isn’t determined by a checklist of things. And to anyone who felt like an outsider to their own culture whether because of where they grew up and how they were raised, Kuthu feels like that friend who you can never take seriously but can always count on for being honest. Because Kuthu has one persistent point to make, that culture isn’t a gate that needs to be guarded, but something that needs to be shared.

Now I’m not Tamil, but I think as Homegrown’s resident South Indian writer I cannot reinstate more clearly to you, that using chopsticks or a fork while eating dosa is just blasphemous, but that’s just me. You do you. Dip that dosa in the sambhar with your chopstick and listen to a homegrown niche indie pop artist while doing.

Follow Kishanth here to follow along the series.

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