Kumari Srimathi (2023) S01

Srimathi is a 30 year old unmarried Kumari Srimathi woman, with a dead end job, a dysfunctional family and a goal to win back her ancestral house. For that, she needs to raise a lot of money in a short period of time. Seeing a business oppurtunity, she decides to start a bar in her village. This is the journey of Srimathi, battling various societal and moral obstacles along the way.

In the 2019 film Mission Mangal, actress Nithya Menen needed just one source of inspiration to put her heart to her work. She was a scientist gearing up for the Mars mission but she was so callous and casual, she was more interested in reaching back home than to see India reaching on Mars. Four years later, in Amazon Prime Video’s new series Kumari Srimathi, she’s just the opposite of what she was there. She’s a go-getter, lively, spunky, vibrant, and thoroughly likable even when she makes some questionable decisions. It’s a show that talks about her quest to get her ancestral property back, but she also needs a sum of Rs 38 lacs for the same, and to succeed in Kumari Srimathi her mission (no puns here), she decides to set up a bar. Of course, to solve one issue, she’s nonchalantly diving into another one. But director Gomtesh Upadhye keeps the tone of the show breezy, just like its protagonist. In between this mThe thing that works for Kumari Srimathi is that it’s never pretentious about its female protagonist. It steers clear of melodrama and messy messaging that usually overshadow storytelling and performances. The rustic milieu breaths life into the characters’ liveliness, and they feel like real people shooting at real locations. It’s also worthy to see female characters taking the forefront and battling the conflicts and consequences of their lives. But come to think of it, how does the gender matter anyway. How does it matter if a bar is owned by a woman if all alcoholics have to do is just have a drink? The skewed outlook of people around Menen only expose the existence of regressive mindsets of people even in 2023. All a woman is trying to do is fight her own battles, and raise the bar. No puns again!