Tamil Cinema in the 1990s: Mani Ratnam, Rahman, Shankar

01Mani Ratnam's modernist decade

Anjali (1990), Mani Ratnam's first film of the decade, hangs on a structural decision so quiet it can be missed: the title character — a child with severe cognitive impairment who is hidden from her siblings until she is old enough to disclose — is never asked to perform sentiment. The film stays, scene after scene, with the apartment block's other children, the harried mother (Revathi), the father (Raghuvaran) testing how much weight he can hold without speaking it, and through them the audience comes to know Anjali. P.C. Sreeram's cinematography opens the apartment courtyard like a Mumbai-magazine photo essay; Ilaiyaraaja's score is restrained almost to vanishing in the dialogue scenes and then erupts into the famous 'Iravu Nilavu' children's chorale. The discipline became a Mani Ratnam signature for the rest of the decade. Thalapathi (1991), shot by Santosh Sivan with an explicit invocation of the Karna-Duryodhana arc from the Mahabharata, gave Rajinikanth one of the few late-career roles in which the actor performs rather than presents. The shot of Rajinikanth and Mammootty crossing each other on a railway platform — a single cut, two superstars carried by a structural rhyme rather than a punch dialogue — is one of the most-quoted images in Tamil cinema. Ilaiyaraaja's 'Rakkamma Kaiya Thattu' became the wedding-floor mass anthem of an entire generation.

Roja (1992) is the pivot. A young Kashmir-located Tamil engineer (Arvind Swamy) is kidnapped by militants on a research trip; his new wife (Madhubala) chases the state apparatus from Madras to Kashmir trying to get him back. The political reading the film generated — ranging from the Marxist critique of its nationalist resolution (Tejaswini Niranjana's well-known 1994 Economic and Political Weekly essay) to its enthusiastic reception by the Indian centre-right — is part of why the film has remained continuously argued about. The other part is A.R. Rahman, twenty-six years old, working out of his Panchathan Record Inn home studio, stepping into a Mani Ratnam film and producing a soundtrack — 'Chinna Chinna Aasai,' 'Pudhu Vellai Mazhai,' 'Kaadhal Rojavae' — whose arrangement, vocal layering and rhythm-programming reformatted the Tamil film soundtrack from playback-orchestral to a multi-vocal collage. Doordarshan's nationally televised Hindi dub turned a regional Tamil film into a country-wide event. Bombay (1995) carried the political register into the December 1992 riot violence with a Hindu-Muslim love story and a then-controversial Bal Thackeray cameo (the producer Bharathan Shivaji Rao had to negotiate cuts). Iruvar (1997), the closing masterwork, used Mohanlal as the Anandan figure (an MGR analogue) and Prakash Raj as Tamizhselvan (a Karunanidhi analogue) to write the founding myth of post-Independence Dravidian cinema-and-politics, with a soundtrack — 'Hello Mr. Edhirkatchi,' 'Narumugaiyae,' 'Aayirathil Naan Oruvan' — that absorbed Carnatic, qawwali and political-rally registers into a single work. Iruvar lost money on release; it has only grown in stature since.

02S. Shankar and the spectacle film

S. Shankar's Gentleman (1993) was a Rs.1.5 crore vigilante thriller built around an unknown lead (Arjun Sarja) and a then-fresh A.R. Rahman score, and it became one of the surprise hits of the year. The premise — an honest engineer who runs a shadow operation funding the higher education of poor students by robbing the corrupt — is the template Shankar would refine for the next twenty years. Kadhalan (1994), with Prabhu Deva as the dance-school student who falls for the Governor's daughter, ran on a Rahman soundtrack that travelled the country on cassette and turned 'Mukkala Mukkabla' into the first Tamil film song to dominate Hindi-belt MTV India rotation. Indian (1996) — the dual-role Kamal Haasan vehicle in which a freedom-fighter-era veteran returns to vigilante-kill the corrupt of post-liberalisation India, including his own son — used a Sabu Cyril-designed prosthetic ageing makeup and a Rahman soundtrack ('Kappaleri Poyachu,' 'Telephone Manipol') to deliver what at the time was the most ambitious Tamil mainstream production ever mounted.

Jeans (1998), starring Prashanth and Aishwarya Rai with cinematography by Ashok Kumar across seven wonders of the world, was at the time of its release the most expensive Indian film ever made; the song 'Poovukkul' shot at the Eiffel Tower, Niagara Falls and Christ the Redeemer in a single cut sequence remains the most extravagant tourist-board song picturisation in Tamil cinema. Mudhalvan (1999), in which a TV journalist (Arjun) becomes Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for one day after challenging the incumbent on live television, closes Shankar's 1990s as cleanly as Iruvar closes Mani Ratnam's. The political-fantasy template Mudhalvan installs would carry forward into Anniyan (2005), Sivaji: The Boss (2007), Enthiran (2010) and the Indian 2 cycle. Shankar's commercial logic — large set-pieces, social-reform plotting, A.R. Rahman scores, stars used as instruments of spectacle rather than character — created a parallel mainstream to Mani Ratnam's chamber dramas. The two were not in opposition; they were the two grammars within which the new commercial Tamil cinema would operate for the rest of the millennium.

03A.R. Rahman replaces a generation

Ilaiyaraaja's continuous run from Annakili (1976) through the late 1980s — over a thousand films at his fifteen-year mark, an unmatched dominance in Indian film music history — was the longest single-composer monopoly any film industry has produced. Roja (1992) ended it. Mani Ratnam, by his own account in the Krishna Trilok-edited Notes of a Dream and in subsequent interviews with Anupama Chopra and Baradwaj Rangan, had heard Rahman's jingles for the Allwyn watch and Leo coffee campaigns and was looking for a sound that did not yet exist in Tamil film. What he received from the Panchathan Record Inn sessions was a soundtrack built on sampled rhythm tracks (the 'Chinna Chinna Aasai' kanjira loop), programmed string layers, vocal-stack arrangements that prefigured the contemporary EDM aesthetic by a decade, and a generation of singers — Hariharan, Unnikrishnan, Sukhwinder Singh, the young Chitra at the next stage of her career — who would dominate the rest of the decade.

By the middle of the 1990s, Rahman's 'Bombay Theme,' 'Uyire' from Bombay, 'Kannalanae' from Bombay, 'Kadhalan' tracks, the Indian soundtrack, the Iruvar soundtrack and Jeans had given him a Tamil-cinema body of work that was already crossing into Hindi via Rangeela (1995) and Dil Se (1998). The shift was generational rather than absolute: Ilaiyaraaja continued to score films through the decade — Thalapathi (1991), Anjali (1990), Devar Magan (1992), the late Bharathiraja films — and other 1990s composers (Deva, Vidyasagar, Sirpy, S.A. Rajkumar) held substantial portions of the mass-market soundtrack business. But the cultural centre of gravity moved decisively to Rahman. The Tamil film soundtrack ceased to be an extension of the Carnatic-orchestral playback tradition and became a multi-genre, multi-vocal production-design discipline. The downstream effect — visible in Yuvan Shankar Raja's 2000s work, in Anirudh Ravichander's 2010s emergence, in Santhosh Narayanan's Pa. Ranjith collaborations — runs in a continuous line back to those Roja sessions in 1991-92.

The Tamil film soundtrack ceased to be an extension of the Carnatic-orchestral playback tradition and became a multi-genre, multi-vocal production-design discipline.

04The urban middle-class film

Outside the Mani Ratnam-Shankar binary, the 1990s were the decade in which Vasanth quietly assembled an urban middle-class register that no Tamil director had previously held with such consistency. Keladi Kanmani (1990) — starring S.P. Balasubrahmanyam in a rare leading role as a recently widowed radio jockey raising his daughter, with Radhika Sarathkumar as the journalist who reawakens an old love — opened the decade with a chamber drama about grief, single parenthood and second chances that operated at a tonal register Tamil mainstream cinema had largely surrendered to family-melodrama by 1990. Ilaiyaraaja's score, especially 'Mannil Indha Kadhal,' is now widely treated as one of his most-loved works. Aasai (1995), Vasanth's Hitchcockian thriller with Ajith Kumar in his first significant lead and Prakash Raj as the obsessive brother-in-law-from-hell, ran for over 200 days, won Tamil Nadu State Film Awards including Best Director, and demonstrated that a Tamil film could be built around dread rather than melodrama and find a substantial audience. The bedroom sequences with Suvalakshmi caught between Ajith and Prakash Raj's lurking violence are some of the most quietly menacing scenes Tamil cinema produced in the decade.

Around Vasanth, the K. Balachander-Kavithalayaa production house continued to put writer-director-driven middle-class drama into the mainstream; Kamal Haasan's collaborations with Crazy Mohan on the cross-dressing comedy Avvai Shanmughi (1996) and the romantic-comedy Kaathala Kaathala (1998) used commercial-comedy templates as cover for unusually verbal, theatre-derived screenplays. Agathiyan's Kadhal Kottai (1996), an epistolary romance shot mostly through a letter-exchange conceit, became a sleeper success and revived Ajith's career in the same year as Aasai. The cumulative effect was that by 1999 the Tamil mainstream had a confident urban middle-class apartment-and-office cinema sitting beside the village dramas of Bharathiraja's continuing run and the spectacle scale of Shankar — a three-pole geometry the 2000s writer-director generation would inherit and remix.

05Stardom: Kamal, Rajini, and the Vijay-Ajith assembly

The 1990s are the decade Kamal Haasan's actor-producer-director identity finally consolidates. Mahanadi (1994), in which he plays a small-town businessman destroyed by con men whose daughter is trafficked into Bombay's brothels, is the actor's bleakest 1990s work and one of the decade's most quietly devastating films; the climactic search-for-the-daughter sequence at the Bombay shelter house is shot with almost no music. Indian (1996), with the Sabu Cyril prosthetic and a dual role spanning sixty years, gave him his commercial peak with Shankar. Avvai Shanmughi (1996) — a remake of Mrs. Doubtfire — gave him his largest comedy hit and proved the actor's range across five films of the decade alone. The boundary-marker Hey Ram (2000), which Kamal directed himself and which dramatised the Partition trauma of a Tamil-Brahmin archaeologist contemplating the assassination of Gandhi, is the actor-director-producer at his most ambitious; the film struggled commercially but is now widely treated as one of his signal works.

Rajinikanth used the same decade to consolidate the mass-film franchise that would carry him into the pan-Indian moment a quarter-century later. Annaamalai (1992) gave him the rags-to-riches hero arc; Baashha (1995) — directed by Suresh Krissna, shot in a script that spent most of its runtime concealing the protagonist's gangster past as a Mumbai don — became the canonical Rajinikanth mass film, the one whose 'Naan oru thadava sonna' punch dialogue is still being referenced in Coolie (2025) thirty years on. Muthu (1995), Padayappa (1999) and the playful Arunachalam (1997) gave Rajinikanth a four-film run that established the slow-motion-entry, punch-dialogue, item-number, climactic-monologue grammar that every Tamil mass film since has had to negotiate either with or against. In parallel, Vijay's Coimbatore Mappillai (1996), Kadhalukku Mariyadhai (1997) and Thullatha Manamum Thullum (1999), and Ajith Kumar's Aasai (1995), Kadhal Kottai (1996), Vaali (1999) — the last a Hitchcockian double-role thriller directed by S.J. Suryah — established both as bankable leads by decade's end. The twin mass-cinema economy that the 2010s would inherit, with Vijay and Ajith alternating release windows around the elder-statesman releases of Rajinikanth and Kamal, was assembled in the second half of the 1990s.

06End-of-decade signals: Bala, Selvaraghavan, and what came next

Bala's Sethu (1999), starring Vikram in the leading-man-as-character role that resurrected his career after a decade in the wilderness, refused every conventional resolution available to it. The film's protagonist — a college-rowdy Madurai romantic who suffers brain damage in a fight after his lover is married off — does not recover, does not reunite, does not redeem; the closing image of a half-vacant institution dorm is closer to Cassavetes than to mainstream Tamil cinema of 1999. Sethu announced a writer-director who would treat dark, working-class material with the seriousness that the Tamil New Wave had once brought to village landscapes, and gave Vikram the second life that would carry through Pithamagan (2003), Anniyan (2005) and Raavanan (2010). Selvaraghavan, working as an assistant to his father Kasthuri Raja and writing the script that would become Kaadhal Kondein (2003), was preparing the partnership with his younger brother Dhanush — making his debut in Selvaraghavan's 2002 directorial Thulluvadho Ilamai — that would define the early 2000s.

By December 1999, Tamil cinema was simultaneously more globalised in its music economy, more spectacle-driven in its mainstream, more politically serious in its prestige cinema, and — in the Sethu generation — quietly preparing a darker, more author-driven decade. The structural shift to digital production was still three or four years away. The mid-budget multiplex audience was still being assembled. The satellite-rights economy was just starting to underwrite mid-budget productions. But every strand the 2000s and the 2010s would extend was already visible by 1999: the writer-director model from Mahendran-and-Mani-Ratnam, refracted through Bala and Selvaraghavan; the political reading from Mani Ratnam's Iruvar, awaiting Pa. Ranjith and Vetrimaaran; the spectacle scale from Shankar, awaiting the Lokesh Cinematic Universe. The 1990s ended in the middle of an ongoing reset, and the resets of the next two decades all started here.

The satellite-rights economy was just starting to underwrite mid-budget productions.

07Critical reception and reassessment

The trade reception of the 1990s ran through Behindwoods' analogue ancestors — Cinema Express, Kumudam Reporter, the trade columns of Ananda Vikatan and Junior Vikatan — and through the Friday Review pages of The Hindu, then anchored by writers like K.S. Sivakumaran and Malathi Rangarajan; Sruti and Frontline carried longer-form pieces. The international institutional reception was thin and intermittent. Mani Ratnam's Bombay travelled to international festivals via the Star TV-financed Hindi dub; Iruvar (1997) lost money on release and was treated by the trade press as a noble failure even as the Tamil-language critical magazines defended it. Kamal Haasan's Hey Ram (2000) was treated as a self-indulgent vanity project at release and has since been recovered as one of his major works.

The contemporary reassessment, written from roughly 2008 onwards by Baradwaj Rangan in his Hindu columns and on Blogical Conclusion, by Sudhir Srinivasan at The New Indian Express and Cinema Express, by Hemanth Kumar's long-form Hindu pieces, and by the Anupama Chopra-edited Film Companion and its Film Companion South vertical, has done several specific things to the 1990s canon. It has restored Iruvar to its place at the top of Mani Ratnam's filmography. It has reread Shankar's Mudhalvan and Indian as proto-pan-Indian films built before the term existed, identifying their narrative-logic and production-scale features that the 2010s would re-engineer for nationwide release. It has reframed Vasanth's Aasai and Keladi Kanmani as the foundational urban middle-class Tamil cinema of the post-liberalisation era. It has connected Bala's Sethu (1999) forward to Vetrimaaran and Mari Selvaraj as the writer-director-realist line's intermediate generation. The reassessment's net effect is to have replaced the trade press's 'commercial-vs-art' binary with the more accurate reading: the 1990s built three or four parallel mainstreams that the rest of the post-Rahman Tamil cinema would continue to operate within.

08What to watch from the decade

A first pass through Tamil 1990s should anchor on six films and add the rest in any order. Anjali (1990) for Mani Ratnam in chamber mode and the apartment-block ensemble; Roja (1992) for Rahman's debut and the political pivot; Bombay (1995) for the riot-mainstream collision; Iruvar (1997) for the masterwork; Indian (1996) for Kamal Haasan and Shankar at full scale; Sethu (1999) for the writer-director generation arriving. From there, expand: Thalapathi (1991) for the Mani Ratnam-Ilaiyaraaja-Rajinikanth combination and Santosh Sivan's photography; Gentleman (1993) for the Shankar template before the budgets exploded; Baashha (1995) for the Rajinikanth mass canon at its most quotable; Aasai (1995) for the Vasanth thriller and Ajith Kumar's emergence; Mahanadi (1994) for Kamal Haasan's quietest 1990s performance; Padayappa (1999) for Rajinikanth's late-1990s consolidation and the K.S. Ravikumar-Rajinikanth template; Mudhalvan (1999) for Shankar's political-fantasy; Hey Ram (2000) for the boundary marker. Twelve films, fifteen years of Tamil-cinema reset compressed into them. Every other strand of the decade is one or two films further out.