A new Bollywood film has reignited an age-old conversation around how India's largest and most influential film industry represents characters from non-Hindi speaking states.
Param Sundari, a romcom starring Sidharth Malhotra and Janhvi Kapoor, is a love story between a woman from the southern state of Kerala and a man from Delhi in northern India.
Param and Sundari first butt heads and then fall in love, successfully overcoming the cultural differences between them.
The idea isn't new: Bollywood has long explored north-south cultural clashes through romcoms, and in a multilingual country, well-executed cross-cultural romances can be a hit.
But in this case, critics and social media users from Kerala and beyond have called out the film for its caricatured depiction of the state, particularly Sundari.
