Mani Ratnam: Forty Years, Five Cinematographers, One Argument About Tamil Cinema
A long-form auteur essay on Mani Ratnam's four-decade body of work — from Mouna Ragam and Nayakan to Iruvar, Kannathil Muthamittal and Ponniyin Selvan.
There is a shot near the start of Mouna Ragam (1986) in which Divya, played by Revathi, watches her childhood lover board a train. The camera holds on the platform from inside the carriage as the train pulls away; her hand reaches up, almost involuntarily, and the light through the carriage window changes from yellow to blue in the space of a second. Tamil mainstream cinema in 1986 was still cutting between two characters in shot-reverse-shot to register a separation. Mani Ratnam stayed inside the moving train and let the geography of the platform — the receding figure, the architecture sliding past — do the emotional work. That shot is the door through which everything that followed walked in. Born Gopala Ratnam Subramaniam in Madurai in 1956, an MBA from the Bajaj Institute who came to filmmaking via his elder brother G. Venkateswaran's Kannada production Pallavi Anu Pallavi (1983), Mani Ratnam has now directed twenty-eight features across Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi. The films range from the chamber drama of Anjali (1990) to the imperial scale of the two-part Ponniyin Selvan (2022, 2023). The career resists the standard Indian-cinema arc of early ferocity giving way to late comfort. The breakthrough run — Mouna Ragam, Nayakan (1987), Anjali, Thalapathi (1991), Roja (1992), Bombay (1995), Iruvar (1997) — is unmatched in modern Tamil cinema for sustained ambition; the middle period is more uneven and more interesting than its commercial reception suggested at the time; the late phase has produced both the Kalki adaptation he had carried in his head since the 1980s and a thirty-eight-year-late reunion with Kamal Haasan in Thug Life (2025). Three formal habits hold the work together across all of it. First, a refusal to separate the political from the romantic — every Mani Ratnam love story is staged inside a public rupture, and every public rupture is metabolised through a private couple. Second, a magazine-photographer's instinct for the frame, expressed through a deliberate cinematographer-rotation across decades — PC Sreeram in the 1980s, Santosh Sivan through the 1990s, Rajiv Menon for Bombay and Guru, Ravi K Chandran for the 2000s and the late phase. Third, a partnership with AR Rahman that began with Roja in 1992, has now produced the longest unbroken director-composer collaboration in active Indian cinema, and reached its scale-peak with the Ponniyin Selvan reunion. The argument this essay makes is that Mani Ratnam is best understood not as a maker of individual films but as the architect of an aesthetic system — one that Tamil cinema, and the rest of Indian cinema in its wake, is still working inside.
01The Madurai-to-Madras route in
The biographical facts are unhelpful for the legend. Mani Ratnam did not come up through assistant-director apprenticeship. He took an MBA, briefly consulted, and arrived at filmmaking because his elder brother G. Venkateswaran needed a director on Pallavi Anu Pallavi (1983) and his younger brother G. Srinivasan was already in production. The Kannada debut, with Anil Kapoor in his first lead role and Lakshmi as the older woman, lost money and won the Karnataka State Film Award for Best Screenplay — the kind of result that produces either an immediate second chance or none at all. Two undistinguished Tamil features, Pagal Nilavu (1985) and Idaya Kovil (1985), followed without much trace; the legend tends to skip them.
Mouna Ragam in 1986 is where the apprentice-period ends abruptly. The premise is a familiar Tamil-mainstream setup — a young woman is married off to a stranger after the death of her lover, and the husband must wait for her grief to subside. Ratnam takes that setup and treats it as a feminist re-reading from inside the form rather than against it. The husband, played by Mohan, is written as patient rather than entitled; the wife, played by Revathi, is allowed unhappiness as a structural fact rather than a problem to be solved by the third reel. The film's most discussed scene is not a confrontation but a domestic silence: husband and wife at a Bombay dining table, the camera holding the geometry of their distance while Ilaiyaraaja's score does the talking. The film established three things at once. It announced Ratnam as a director who would write women as interior subjects rather than narrative props. It showed Ilaiyaraaja that there was a Tamil director willing to leave room for the score. And it told the industry that mainstream Tamil cinema could carry European art-cinema sentence-craft without losing its audience. Every Mani Ratnam film since has paid one or another part of the bill on that promise.
02The Ilaiyaraaja decade: Mouna Ragam to Thalapathi (1986–1991)
From Mouna Ragam to Thalapathi (1991), Ratnam made six features with Ilaiyaraaja as composer — a partnership that produced what is still, by most accounts, the densest five-year run in his career. Nayakan (1987), loosely modelled on the Bombay Tamil don Varadarajan Mudaliar, is the canonical work. Kamal Haasan plays Velu Nayakar from urchin to dynastic patriarch in a performance still cited in Indian film schools as the high-water mark of mainstream Tamil character work. The Coppola debt is honest — Ratnam never denied it — but the film absorbs The Godfather and reformats it for the migrant Tamil underbelly of Dharavi rather than imitating it. The famous one-take rooftop meeting in which the elder Velu is sworn into the local hierarchy, lensed by PC Sreeram in long depth-of-field with the Bombay skyline as backdrop, is the Tamil-cinema equivalent of the wedding garden in The Godfather: a single shot doing what most films would need a sequence to establish. TIME magazine listed Nayakan in its 2005 All-Time 100 Movies — alongside Pyaasa and the Apu Trilogy as the only Indian entries.
The rest of the run is just as load-bearing. Geethanjali (1989), his only Telugu feature, paired the young Nagarjuna with Girija in a terminal-illness romance that Telugu mainstream cinema had no template for. Anjali (1990), about a developmentally disabled child in a middle-class apartment block, used a children's-film register to handle a subject Indian cinema mostly avoided; the apartment-courtyard staging, with the camera at the children's eye-level for entire sequences, anticipated the formal restraint of the late films. Thalapathi (1991), the only Mani Ratnam film starring Rajinikanth, refracted the Karna myth through a North Madras dock-worker's life, with Santosh Sivan's amber-and-shadow lensing replacing the cooler Sreeram palette. The Ilaiyaraaja partnership ended after Thalapathi, and the rupture has never been fully explained on either side; both men have spoken about it carefully and rarely. The six films stand as one of the great director-composer runs in Indian cinema, and the silence that followed shaped the next phase as decisively as the partnership had shaped this one.
03Roja, Bombay, Iruvar: the political triptych (1992–1997)
The trio of Roja (1992), Bombay (1995), and Iruvar (1997) is the run on which the political-Mani-Ratnam reading rests. Roja set a Madras telecom engineer kidnapped by Kashmiri militants against a young wife from a Tamil Brahmin village whose interiority became the audience's emotional anchor. The film opened on AR Rahman's debut score — the now-canonical title cue, sung by Minmini, played as the camera tracked Madhoo's Roja running through Tamil paddy fields — and reorganised the economics of Indian film music inside a single year. Bombay placed a Hindu-Muslim love marriage at the centre of the 1992-93 Bombay riots, with Arvind Swamy and Manisha Koirala carrying the central couple. The communal-violence montage in the third act, cut by Sreekar Prasad against Rahman's choral score, is one of the few sequences in Indian mainstream cinema that has been studied as a montage problem rather than only as an emotional climax; the film provoked enough political controversy that Bal Thackeray was reportedly shown a private cut before release, and the screening produced edits both Hindu-right and Muslim community organisations objected to.
Iruvar (1997) is the most formally daring film Ratnam has made. A roman-à-clef about the friendship and rivalry between two Tamil film stars-turned-politicians — read by most viewers as MGR and Karunanidhi, denied with characteristic Ratnam diplomacy by the director — it gave Mohanlal one of his great non-Malayalam performances and Aishwarya Rai her debut. Santosh Sivan's lensing turns the film's recurring archive-and-stage motif into an argument about how political power gets filmed: the recurring shot of magnetic tape running through a reel-to-reel machine, intercut with stage performances and election rallies, treats history itself as a medium that can be cut, spliced, and replayed. Iruvar was a commercial disappointment at release and is now, by general critical agreement, his finest film. The shift in its reputation tracks the broader pattern of his middle work: the most ambitious projects underperformed in their moment, and the canon has had to be slowly rewritten in their favour.
Iruvar was a commercial disappointment at release and is now, by general critical agreement, his finest film.
05The Madras Talkies system and the Rahman partnership
Mani Ratnam co-founded Madras Talkies in 1995 with his wife, the actor and writer Suhasini Maniratnam, and the production house has produced or co-produced almost every film he has directed since. Its function is structural: it gives Ratnam control over scale, casting, and release strategy at a level few Indian directors have ever held, and it has incubated work by other Madras Talkies directors, including Rajiv Menon's Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000) and Minsara Kanavu (the 1997 Rahman-led production house entry). Suhasini's role across the films — actor, writer, occasional script consultant — is harder to track from outside the unit but visible in the texture of the women-led scenes, particularly across OK Kanmani (2015) and Chekka Chivantha Vaanam (2018).
The AR Rahman partnership is the longest single thread in the Madras Talkies story. Rahman scored his first film for Mani Ratnam — Roja — in 1992; he has scored every subsequent Mani Ratnam film without exception, a run that now spans more than fifteen features and three decades. The pattern of the collaboration has shifted. The early work — Roja, Bombay, Iruvar — used Rahman in a Carnatic-jazz-rock fusion register that was new to Tamil mainstream cinema and remained his identifying signature into the 2000s. The middle period, particularly across Yuva and Guru, expanded the orchestral palette. The Ponniyin Selvan films, scored thirty years after Roja, returned to a Carnatic-classical register reimagined for imperial-scale staging, with the Sundari sequence in Part II functioning as a closing argument for what the partnership has built. The thirty-year reunion has been read in Indian film-music writing as a closing of a circle; the next Mani Ratnam film, whatever it turns out to be, will arrive with the assumption that Rahman is on it. No other current Indian director-composer pairing carries that assumption.
06Themes: women's interiority, the political-personal weave, religion in productive tension
Three thematic preoccupations run across the entire body of work, more clearly than any genre marker. The first is women's interiority — written into Mouna Ragam, Anjali, Bombay, Iruvar's parallel love stories, Kannathil Muthamittal's adoptive-mother-and-biological-mother triangle, OK Kanmani's live-in arrangement, Kaatru Veliyidai's domestic-abuse-inside-a-romance reversal, and the parallel female protagonists of the Ponniyin Selvan films. Few mainstream Indian directors of his generation have written women as consistently as the engine rather than the obstacle of their plots; the Anjali mother (Revathi) standing at the apartment-block balcony while her dying child plays in the courtyard is among the few mainstream Indian shots that grants a mother her own grief without instrumentalising it.
The second is the interweaving of the political and the personal. The Kashmir conflict in Roja, the Babri demolition aftermath in Bombay, the Sri Lankan Tamil civil war in Kannathil Muthamittal, the Naxalite movement adjacent to Raavanan (2010), the Chola succession politics in Ponniyin Selvan — every public crisis is metabolised through a private couple, and every couple is staged inside a rupture larger than themselves. The risk of the method is that the political becomes scenery for the romantic; the success of the method, when it works, is that the romantic becomes the only viable form for thinking about the political at all.
The third is religious iconography handled with curiosity rather than piety. Bombay's interfaith marriage produces neither a triumphant secular conclusion nor a tragic communal one — the film leaves the household intact and the city wounded. Kannathil Muthamittal's Catholic adoptive family and Hindu biological mother are placed in the same frame without the script forcing reconciliation. Iruvar's Periyar-Karunanidhi-MGR allegory treats Dravidian rationalism and Hindu cinema-iconography as a productive tension rather than a binary. The Ponniyin Selvan films stage Saivite-Vaishnavite court politics with an ethnographic eye that the source novel, written in a more devotional register, did not always carry. The films are not secular in the polemical sense; they are interested in religion as a structural fact of Indian life, and they hold their distance.
The risk of the method is that the political becomes scenery for the romantic; the success of the method, when it works, is that the romantic becomes the only viable form for thinking about the political at all.
07The 2000s and 2010s: the contested middle
The two decades after Iruvar are the most contested stretch of Ratnam's career, and the period in which the gap between commercial reception and critical reception widened most. Alaipayuthey (2000), with Madhavan and Shalini, reset the urban-romance template that the next twenty years of Tamil cinema would copy from; the elliptical structure — the film opens with the marriage already in trouble and recovers the courtship in flashback — became the standard Tamil romance grammar by the mid-2000s. Kannathil Muthamittal (2002), with Madhavan, Simran, and Keerthana as the adoptive family, and Nandita Das as the biological mother glimpsed across a Sri Lankan conflict zone, is the most quietly devastating film of the period; it won six National Awards, including Best Tamil Film and Best Child Artist for Keerthana, and remains the easiest Mani Ratnam film to recommend to a non-Tamil audience.
Aayitha Ezhuthu (2004), released bilingually with the Hindi version Yuva, attempted a three-strand political thriller in the mode of Amores Perros and divided opinion sharply on release; the Tamil version, with Madhavan, Suriya, and Siddharth, has aged better than its early reviews suggested. Guru (2007), in Hindi, reimagined Dhirubhai Ambani's life as an aspirational-capitalist fable and gave Abhishek Bachchan his most controlled performance. Raavan (2010) and Raavanan (2010), released bilingually with different leads — Abhishek Bachchan in Hindi, Vikram in Tamil — were a critical and commercial setback whose Tamil cut is now generally regarded as the stronger work; the Vikram-Aishwarya Rai forest-pursuit sequences hold up better than the script's mythic-allegorical scaffolding does.
Kadal (2013) and Kaatru Veliyidai (2017) are the films of this period that the canon has treated most harshly, and the films most likely to be reassessed upward over the next decade. Both struggled commercially; both contain individual sequences — the Kadal beach baptism, the Kaatru Veliyidai cockpit confrontation — that the realist canon has begun to point to as evidence of formal continuity with the earlier work. OK Kanmani (2015), a Chennai live-in-relationship comedy with Dulquer Salmaan and Nithya Menen, was the period's commercial recovery and the proof that Ratnam could still calibrate to a younger urban audience. Chekka Chivantha Vaanam (2018), a North Madras succession drama with Vijay Sethupathi, Arvind Swamy, STR, and Arun Vijay, returned him to the family-and-power register he had not visited since Thalapathi.
08Ponniyin Selvan and the late phase
Mani Ratnam had spoken since the 1980s about adapting Kalki Krishnamurthy's five-volume Tamil historical novel Ponniyin Selvan, set in the tenth-century Chola court. The project went into financing limbo for three decades — variously attached to Kamal Haasan, Mammootty, and others, and abandoned when the production scale could not be raised — before arriving as Ponniyin Selvan I (2022) and Ponniyin Selvan II (2023), produced jointly by Madras Talkies, Lyca Productions, and Allirajah Subaskaran. The two films, with Vikram, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Karthi, Jayam Ravi, Trisha, and Aishwarya Lekshmi, became the highest-grossing Tamil films of their respective years; PS-I crossed five hundred crore worldwide and PS-II crossed three hundred crore.
The late films are best understood as a closing-of-circles project. The Rahman partnership, thirty years after Roja, returns in the imperial-scale Carnatic register the early collaboration had only suggested. PC Sreeram, behind the camera again after a decades-long gap, brings the deep-focus architecture that Nayakan had introduced. Sreekar Prasad's editing carries forward the parallel-cutting grammar that Bombay had built. The films are not perfect — the second part struggles to compress the source novel's later volumes, and the political plotting moves too quickly for non-Tamil audiences — but they sit in a category of their own as the rare late-career Indian director's project to arrive at the scale the early work had only imagined.
Thug Life (2025), the Kamal Haasan reunion thirty-eight years after Nayakan, written jointly by Ratnam and Haasan and shot by Ravi K Chandran, closes another circle. Whether or not the film enters the Mani Ratnam canon at the level of the major work, the very fact of a director in his late sixties still making large-scale star-led Tamil cinema with full creative authority is the closing argument of the system Madras Talkies has built around him.
09Critical reception and reassessment
The standard critical history of Mani Ratnam, written largely in the 1990s and consolidated by Baradwaj Rangan's Conversations with Mani Ratnam (Penguin, 2012) — the canonical book on the director, structured as long-form interviews on each film — places his peak between 1986 and 1997 and treats most of the subsequent work as a slow tapering. That history is now being rewritten. The realist canon has begun to elevate the middle films — Kannathil Muthamittal as a major work, Aayitha Ezhuthu as a structural experiment that Tamil cinema took twenty years to catch up to, Kadal and Kaatru Veliyidai as flawed but formally serious extensions of the political-personal method.
The other reassessment is political. The 1990s reading of Mani Ratnam, particularly in the Cahiers du Cinéma orbit and the early Anglophone Indian-film-studies wave, treated him as a humanist working inside mainstream constraint. The 2010s and 2020s reading is more contested. Pratinav Anil and Rohit Chopra-style political readings have flagged the upper-caste Tamil register of his villages — the Brahmin-coded Roja household, the casual caste-naturalism of the Alaipayuthey extended-family scenes — as a structural blindness. The Iruvar question has reopened in this context: is the film a courageous Karunanidhi-MGR allegory or a strategically ambiguous two-friends-political-rise story that protects itself from political consequence by refusing to name names? The defence runs that Iruvar's ambiguity is what allows it to function as allegory at all; the critique runs that the ambiguity is also the cost of admission to a Tamil mainstream that would not have financed the film otherwise.
Neither reading has displaced the older one. Both are now part of the conversation around the work, and the reception of each new Mani Ratnam film is the reception of all three readings simultaneously.
The 1990s reading of Mani Ratnam, particularly in the Cahiers du Cinéma orbit and the early Anglophone Indian-film-studies wave, treated him as a humanist working inside mainstream constraint.
10Influence: the Mani Ratnam school in Tamil and beyond
Almost every Tamil director who has emerged since the late 1990s has worked in some part of the territory Ratnam mapped out. The urban-romance grammar of Gautham Vasudev Menon's Minnale (2001) and Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya (2010) is unimaginable without Alaipayuthey; Menon has said as much in multiple interviews. The political-personal interweaving of Vetrimaaran's Visaranai (2015) and Asuran (2019) descends from Bombay and Iruvar even as it pushes into a sharper caste-realism Ratnam himself has rarely entered. The visual poise of Karthik Subbaraj's framing, the patience of Mysskin's blocking, the willingness of contemporary Tamil writers to put women at the centre of mass-budget films — all carry traces of the Mani Ratnam school. Lokesh Kanagaraj's use of Anirudh's score as narrative architecture in the LCU films is a direct descendant of the Mani Ratnam-Rahman model.
The influence outside Tamil is just as substantial. AR Rahman's pan-Indian and global career — Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and the two Academy Awards that followed — began in a Mani Ratnam casting call. Ratnam's Hindi films, Dil Se and Guru, are now studied as transitional texts in late-1990s and mid-2000s Hindi cinema. In Telugu, Geethanjali is still cited as a reference point for the urban romance. Few Indian filmmakers have shaped four language industries simultaneously over four decades, and none has done so while continuing to direct new films at the same scale.
11Where to start with Mani Ratnam
Five films, chosen as entry-points rather than as a checklist. Mouna Ragam (1986) is the right opening — the Revathi train-departure shot, the Mohan-Revathi dining-table silence, the Karaikudi family scenes that establish the apprentice-period sensibility in fully formed shape. Nayakan (1987) is the canonical work, the film against which everything else can be read; Kamal Haasan's progression from urchin to patriarch, the PC Sreeram rooftop one-take, the Ilaiyaraaja score arc. Kannathil Muthamittal (2002) is the easiest to recommend to a viewer with no Tamil-political background — the adoption-and-civil-war structure travels, the Madhavan-Simran domestic register is unguarded, the Nandita Das war-zone scenes are some of the quietest devastation in modern Indian cinema. Iruvar (1997) is the artistic peak for viewers who can come to it with some MGR-Karunanidhi context; the Mohanlal-Prakash Raj parallel arcs and the magnetic-tape motif reward the homework. Ponniyin Selvan I (2022) is the late-career scale piece and the natural bridge for younger viewers who have arrived through the Chola epic before working backwards. From those five, the rest of the catalogue — Bombay, Alaipayuthey, OK Kanmani, Chekka Chivantha Vaanam, Thalapathi, Anjali — opens up in any order. Skip Raavan (the Hindi cut); reach for Raavanan (the Tamil one).
Sources & References
- Box Office India – Tamil Films
- The Hindu Cinema Section
- National Film Archive of India
- Film Companion – Tamil
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