Harshini S V
A sense of playfulness in Kumari Srimathi is apparent just with its title. Nithya Menen’s name, Kumari Srimathi, is not just a delightful oxymoron, but one that depicts the leading woman’s struggles in the series.
Kumari means young unmarried woman, and Srimathi means married woman. Menen plays an unmarried woman in her thirties in the Prime Video series. She lives in a village near the Godavari River.
We are talking about a neighbourhood where a job is what defines a man and marriage is what defines a woman. When we first see Srimathi, she is chided by her mother Devaki (Gautami) for not getting married.
All she wants is to win back her ancestral house from her uncle, only after which she will get married. It never gets preachy about this. Instead, the series is sprinkled with humour that makes us look past the seriousness of what Srimathi is going through.
The series could also be seen as a study of Kumari’s family of women, which unfortunately lets us know very little about the men in the show. But for a series spinning entirely on a single woman's marriage, it has an unconventional ending.