“Tamil is weak”

Shruti Haasan grew up in Tamilnadu with his family – father Kamal Haasanmother Sarika Thakur and younger sister Akshara Haasan. During a podcast with Ranveer Allahbadia last year, he spoke about his Tamil and Hindi language roots and dealing with the pressure of carrying forward his mother and father’s legacy. “It’s because I grew up there, I also have a big influence from my mother. We used to speak Hindi and English only at home, which many people don’t know. My mother was paranoid that these two children would never learn Hindi because they would only speak Tamil. So, our Tamil suffered for many years because of that,” she revealed.

Shruti Haasan with her family

She continued: “I went to an English medium school, so my Tamil was weak for a long time and still is. As I traveled the world and started living in Bombay For the past 15 years, he has had an emotionally historic connection with me. I also moved here when my parents separated.” He moved to Mumbai in 2010 and made his Bollywood debut with the action thriller Luck in 2009.

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‘My parents never went to school’

Considering the fact that her parents are actors, Shruti had a unique and interesting, or as she likes to call it, “abnormal” childhood. “It was fun, exciting, because of my father and mother’s career. I had an abnormal childhood in that sense. We grew up on movie sets where we had elephants and Pomeranians that would come up to you. That’s incredibly cool when you’re five years old. We used to meet all these incredible artists, travel and see incredible places.”

The actor further added, “I had two unique, individualistic people as parents. It was a cloud of creativity and chaos. My parents were artistically fickle people. Plus, they had both never been to school, so they didn’t really have an idea about how to raise academic kids. I could see them learning how to be parents when we were kids.”

‘We grew up in an atheist home’

Shruti Haasan has spoken in several interviews about belonging to a non-religious, but spiritual house. Furthermore, instead of following superstitions, the family believes that “art is God.” “We also grew up in an atheist home, a non-religious home. My dad hates when I say this. We didn’t have God in the house, not even on the Sabbath, and we didn’t have to eat non-veg food on Tuesdays, none of that stuff that other homes have. The concept of religion and God was so foreign. Somewhere, I knew in my childhood brain that art was God,” he shared in the interview.

His father, who declares himself a rationalist, had to accept his rebellion in various everyday beliefs. “If you went and said astrology to my dad, he would say ‘go away’. He’s very creative and practical. On a basic day-to-day level, he’s pragmatic. I feel like my father is a child of God. He’s seen me wear devil glasses and pink hair, my poor father. He’s really seen the rebellion and let me do it, that’s very sweet of him. And he doesn’t like tattoos, he hates them,” she said.

Shruti Haasan with her father Kamal Haasan

‘We are granddaughters of witches’

That said, the actor believes in Wicca (a modern nature-based pagan religion that emerged in England) and feels his female ancestral lineage. “It’s the ancestral women before me, that’s why I got into Wicca and the history of paganism and pagan worship. It was beautiful that we were granddaughters of the witches that you said couldn’t burn. I love that because I feel the lineage of my ancestral women. I feel those lessons,” Shruti said.