By Niveditha Prasad
Niveditha is a law student at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru and has previously been published with RIC Journal, and Cafe Dissensus (here, here, and here). She also runs a semi-regular Substack. She can be reached at nivedithakp2002@gmail.com
I often joke that if I die an old maid there are two people to be blamed: Jane Austen and Mani Ratnam. It is only half a joke. Both of them taught me most things I know about love, or at least the idea of love. The classic Act II misunderstanding. Quick-tongued heroines. Rain. Men who somehow fixed themselves.
In many ways, it was not at all a surprise that I, a reserved nerdy girl, would take to Jane Austen obsessively. But movies were different. 2000s kids do not have the experience of bunking class, walking to the nearest single-screen that screened new and old movies together, or scrambling for dirt-cheap tickets. At home, their consumption was strictly policed. But almost all I ever watched were the new ‘mass’, ‘family-friendly’ movies. Pongal releases would be watched on Tamil New Year, and Deepavali releases on New Year’s. Films were “time pass” as they call it, not meant to be taken seriously and certainly not meant to be the object of one’s fascination.
It was in this environment that one day, sometime when I was 12-13, I decided I would watch a movie. On my own. On my faithful Acer tablet. For a quiet, nerdy middle-school girl, this was the height of rebellion. It was the golden age of YouTube piracy. You could find entire filmographies for free (obligatory Say No to Piracy disclaimer). Thalapathy was one of them. I was astonished. It is hard to explain the effect it had on someone like me for whom Rajini was and is a kind of God. He is Superstar. He was the symbol of all that is good in a corrupt world. He always got the girl. Thalapathy completely disarmed these assumptions. Even in the poor quality of Youtube prints, it was evident that what I was watching was quite unlike anything else. The yellow tint. The way the light diffused through Srividya’s hair as she wept into the cloth she had abandoned her baby in. No vertigo-inducing camera movement, only the notes from the violin and the fading sun.
I would soon learn that he was responsible for so many of the movies that even in my relatively strict household would be spoken of reverently. No one Tamil can escape the long shadow cast by Nayagan in every movie since or the re-runs of Alai Payuthey on KTV every Valentine’s Day. Within a few months, I had watched all of Mani Ratnam’s movies. I could list them in chronological order and even knew some of their exact release dates. I kept changing their rankings in my mind. I read every interview of his available on the internet. When he gave a Masterclass at Biffes several years ago, I read and re-read the The Hindu’s coverage of the event, somehow believing that reading it would make up for the actual thing. A friend entered a separate line in her 8th grade slam-book called ‘Favourite Director’ just so that I could write Mani Ratnam. I had become a devotee.
When Thug Life was released to, let’s say, lukewarm response and was banned in Bengaluru, I found myself listening to songs from old albums and trawling r/Maniratnam and asking myself: people grow out of their heroes, but why is it that I still keep going back to this man’s movies? For the generation before mine, the answer to this question was easy. For them, Mani Ratnam represents a certain kind of nostalgia. They watched Nayagan in the theatre and came out of the cinema hall as changed persons. They had the experience of having the ‘aftertaste of a film’, of an auteur announcing himself and building a legacy. They go to the theatres today for a Mani Ratnam movie, part in anticipation and part because this is a director who in some ways grew up with them.
I do not have the generational nostalgia for his movies. I come back to it because they are a fundamental part of my self-construction, of some kind of emotional instruction. The first Mani Ratnam movie that released once I had become a devotee was OK Kanmani in 2015. I did not watch it in the theatre, I watched it at home when it eventually got a TV premiere. Tara sang. She dressed in a way I wanted to when I got older. She had a real career and wanted to go abroad for her studies. But Tara also fell in love. It is not simply a moment in a movie where the heroine discovers she has fallen for the male lead that inevitably cuts into a song where they either shift to some mountainous European region and dance or don Tamil traditionals and dance in the fields of Pollachi. Instead, we are allowed to sit in those moments. We see her giddy with delight when she asks Aadhi, “naan un kanmaniya?” (am I your darling?). We see it when she teases him on the train about his intentions. We see it when she talks to the older landlord when she is asked if her career is more important than Aadhi. She replies, with eyes barely welling up, that she has now become greedy – she wants both. It is a rare look at a woman’s interiority. Rewatching it now, ten years later, I know I want to also love like her, not just dress like her.
The choice of the female lead to choose love is possibly why I keep rewatching these movies. In Mouna Ragam, we see a filmmaker who is not yet a legend, someone still fumbling to express his style. But there is an unmistakable consistency between Revathi’s character Divya here and Tara in OK Kanmani. In the opening scene, Divya stumbles out of her bed, drinks coffee without having bathed, and runs into her strict father. In that moment of trivial transgression, Divya transcends from a movie character into someone like me, never mind I am watching her decades after its release. Divya rejects the gentleman bachelor her parents find for her. She asks her father: will you just pack and sell me away, simply because he doesn’t want a dowry? A decade earlier, K Balachander’s Avargal featured Sujatha’s character leaving not just one, but three men seemingly in love with her. Suhasini would make a similar choice in Sindu Bhairavi. Rejecting the man is in itself not radical, but what was radical was the heroine accepting love. In the climax, she says: naan otthukkarein, vekkathavittu ottuhukkarein, naan ungalai virumpuren (I accept it, I accept without shame that I like you). I had never seen a woman say I love you before on screen, uttering that strange word virumpuren, that floats somewhere between a casual ‘like’ and the stronger ‘desire’, that too in a manner so matter-of-fact and without expectation. It is simply marvelous.
To say that Mani Ratnam writes women characters well is a cliché in film criticism, Twitter analysis, and even among the casual fan. It is just one of those statements that people know do not always take care to substantiate it because everyone realises it is largely true. Let me take a stab at what the greatness in his women characters is – like Divya, they repeatedly choose love without shame. Shakti in Alai Payuthey does it. Shakti in her cotton kurti-salwar and a mother who, much like mine, chides her for her untameable hair. She tries to be practical and does the sensible break-up. Yet, as Evano Oruvan Vasikiraan haunts in the background, she investigates the void inside her as large as the ocean in front. So she elopes, chooses to love, even as she is forced to leave her parents. Saira Banu does it in Bombay – twice. She chooses love, once against the intimate violences of our homes and then again, against the intimate violence of our nation-state. Tabu’s Senthamarai in Iruvar leaves her parents, her house, her three-hundred-rupees government teacher salary for four verses of poetry written to her. It is only then that she asks what her place will be. It is unthinking, foolish even, but by god, is it so real.
Our cultural landscape is bipolar. You could be a woman for whom love is forbidden, something for which you could be beaten or killed – the Tiruppur honour killing case happened less than a year after OK Kanmani’s release. Or you could be a woman so neck-deep in social media induced psychosis, that you have turned absolutely cynical about questions of love. Love is but a first-stop towards that ultimate milestone, detachment. Maybe this duality always existed. But at least, our culture previously, like the women in Mani Ratnam’s movies, wanted to understand love, they were interested in those questions. His camera leaned into them and lingered over them long enough for me to have some vocabulary, some grammar to understand those grand questions of what makes us human. A decade from now, there will be no metaphors that the cinema of my young adulthood gave to me to answer these questions.
Maybe this is why I keep watching and re-watching his movies: the women in those movies gave me a map of some sort. Maybe this is why I sometimes sit at 11 PM thinking of the lines – nee illamal kavidaiyum isaiyum suvaiye tharaade (Without you, there is no flavour in poetry or music).
It is possible that I will die as an old maid and that I will blame Mani Ratnam for it too. But I will also thank him for showing women in love who are brave, playful, stupid, vulnerable. Maybe this is what Gen-Z – apparently the target audience for Thug Life – needs and wants.