Once upon a time, in the year 968 CE, our story begins, on a fine Aadi 18 evening. Our hero, Mr. Vandhiyathevan was prodding along his horse near Veeranam lake, mighty pleased at seeing the fertile Chola lands, its enormous water bodies and more importantly, its beautiful women!

The Chola citizens were celebrating the auspicious festival of Aadi Perukku. Women were singing folk songs which praised the Emperor. Kids were playing with Sapparam, a toy-on-wheels. Young girls and boys were giggling and running around flirting with each other. A gentle breeze carried the melodious songs of the farmers, resonating the atmosphere with joy. Vandhiyathevan stopped being tired of his 180km journey from Kanchi, and started enjoying his grand entry into the Chola kingdom. Vandhiyathevan was not sightseeing though, he was on a secret mission to deliver two scrolls to Thanjavur and Pazhaiyaarai. Thus kicks off the bestselling Tamil novel of all-time, our very own Tale of Two Cities- Thanjavur and Madurai - and the story of rivalry between the two great Tamil kingdoms - the Cholas and the Pandyas.

The hero’s journey

Anyone who’s privy to the sight of Aadiperukku bringing fresh floods into the Veeranam lake cannot help but wonder at the foresight of the Chola kings. Prince Rajaditya, who was preparing for a battle in the northern banks, had some leisure time before the battle actually began. He used this window to construct this enormous lake, which shall store the Vadavaaru river water that would otherwise have emptied itself wastefully into the Bay of Bengal. This stored water can then be used for irrigation and drinking. Prince Rajaditya named the lake after his father and emperor Parantaka-1 whose alias name was Veeranarayanan. Sri Ramanuja was apparently struck enough by the sheer scale of this lake that he modeled the number of mutts he established, on the lake’s 74 sluices.

The hero continues southward, meets Aazhvarkadiyaan (a spy) who travel together southward to Veeranarayana Vinnagaram (Vishnu-Griha), a temple built by the same prince as per the traditional belief of Vishnu being the guardian deity of the lake bunds.

Here Vandhiyathevan and Aazhvarkadiyaan encounter a young Nathamuni, singing the ten pasurams known to his era: the very Nathamuni who would go on to rediscover the lost Nalayira Divya Prabandham. This is Kalki at his sharpest - dropping real historical figures into his fictional hero’s path without breaking stride.

By nightfall, the hero reaches the Sambuvarayar palace at Kadambur, intending only to rest but instead stumbles onto a secret conspiracy midnight meeting of small-kings and chieftains. This is where the primary plot point of the novel is revealed - who should be the next king - crown prince Aaditha Karikalan or his paternal uncle Madhurantaka? A comet/ meteor had showed up on the Chola skies for some days now. Considered a bad omen for the royal family, this spurred the urgency of succession planning in the empire.

Where is the Kadambur palace today? Unknown. Palace constructions with red bricks all crumble over time, which is why the foresighted Cholas revamped their temples with black stones - Katruli - that lasted longer. Bloggers suggest that this palace could have been near Melakadambur Amrithakadeswarar temple that’s 7km from Veeranarayana Temple. Kalki says that our hero on a horse reached from there to here in one naazhigai (24 minutes). Even assuming a tired horse to have cantered at 17kmph speed, not galloped at faster speeds, the math is math-ing.

Crossing the Kollidam: A Detour With Aazhvarkadiyaan

Aazhvarkadiyaan the spy was also eavesdropping on themidnight meeting, who then trusts his instinct to follow a suspicious looking Pandya spy who leads him to his handler Ravidasan at a dilapidated place. The spot where the Pandya conspirators secretly convene, could have just been anywhere, but Kalki specifically mentions this as Thirupurambiyam, the place which hosted the battle that changed the course of South Indian history, resulting in Chola supremacy. This place still exists - Thirupurambiyam Pallipadai.

A Pallipadai, unlike a simple hero-stone Nadukarkoil, is a full temple built around an installed deity to honour a fallen warrior king Prithvipathi, who died in the Thirupurambiyam battle, fighting for the Pallava-Chola combine against Pandyas. The Pandya conspirators hence code-name this as “enemy’s place”. The plot thickens here - because Ravidasan and co were planning something far more sinister to take down the entire Chola clan.

So the plot had two parallel conspiracies:

1. Internal conspirators who were planning to install a different Chola king than crown prince

2. External conspirators who were planning to take down entire Chola clan in revenge for their fallen king Veerapandyan

The Old Capital and The New

Cholas were moving their administrative capital from Pazhaiyaarai to the new fortified Thanjavur. Our hero Vandhiyathevan, after learning about the Kadambur conspiracy, leaves at once on his mission. He crosses the Kollidam river on a boat large enough to carry his horse, and continues south toward Kudanthai (Kumbakonam), to consult with a famous astrologer.

The astrologer checks our hero’s horoscope and says: “You’re lucky Vallam prince and you’ll always be on the move, as if there were wheels on your feet. You shall walk ; You shall ride horses; You’ll travel on the backs of elephants; You’ll sail in boats; You’re destined to cross the sea soon. Your mission shall succeed; About the Chola kingdom, for another hundred years, it will be on the rise, like the waxing moon. Despite temporary setbacks, the golden period of the Chola kingdom is about to arrive soon”

Hearing this happy news, the concerns over the comet and the dangers of his mission are temporarily forgotten by our hero. Isn’t astrology part art, part science and part therapy?

What’s lovely about Kalki’s writing is how he uses the astrologer as a foreshadowing device. This is literally a teaser for his part-2. Based on Kalki’s descriptions, the Kumbakonam astrologer’s house is in a desolated spot near a Kaali temple, close to the river Kaveri. I made an educated guess that this could be near the Paadal Petra Sthalam Kottaiyoor Koteeswaran Temple, referred to as Chozheeswaram in multiple inscriptions.

From Kudanthai the hero moves through Thiruvaiyaru and on to the new capital, Thanjavur, to deliver his first scroll to the emperor. It’s on this stretch that he first encounters Nandini, sweeping him clean off his horse the moment she reveals herself from her palanquin. The exact site of the Tanjore palace where his subsequent adventures unfold is, notably, lost to us.

From Thanjavur he presses on to Pazhaiyaarai, the earlier Chola capital, to deliver the second scroll to Kundhavai. The novel places two temples here by name Nathan Koil (a Divyadesam) and Vadathalli Koil (a Paadal Petra Sthalam).

Pazhaiyaarai once held three separate palaces: one each for king, queen, and princess - none of which survive; what remains of them lies in a village now called Chozhanmaaligai. It’s the same pattern as everywhere else on this route: the Chola palaces are gone, the Chola temples remain. And Pazhaiyaarai itself, for all its weight in this history, has largely slipped out of local memory.

It’s here, in a boat near the Pazhaiyaarai lake, that Vandhiyathevan finally meets Kundhavai and hands over the second scroll to complete his mission. But wait, Kundhavai sends him on another more dangerous mission - to bring back Ponniyin Selvan stationed somewhere in Lanka to deal with the dangers brewing in Chola kingdom. And that’s where Part 1 closes. Imagine writing an entire volume where the titular character Ponniyin Selvan is introduced only at the fag end! Kalki knew what teasers were, in 20th century itself. Its not for nothing that his books sell like hot cakes even after half a century of its publication.

Conclusion

Nothing in the magnum opus Ponniyin Selvan happens by accident. It is all a carefully planned ploy by a master writer Kalki whose sole intent was to instill the greatness of Cholas into the heads of the common man via his historical fiction. Kalki, had carefully chosen his locations – spread across Tamilnadu and Sri Lanka, with almost every spot having a historic association with the Cholas. While the novel was published over a span of 5 years, the entire events of the novel take place within a 6 month period, from Aadi 18 to Thai 7 (early August to mid January). There are about 100 spots, peppered with UNESCO world heritage sites and temples and hiking trails.

If you are interested in reading all the spots of the Ponniyin Selvan trail, along with a sincere retelling of the plot context around the spot, you can read my book “Ponniyin Selvan Route Map” here and as a limited period deal, offering 30% discount on the book. Just use coupon code AADI30 before checking out for the special price. For those interested in a digital edition which has full color images of all the maps, get it here.

Our hero had started off his journey of a thousand miles with a single step, on this Aadi 18 day, today. Its not everyday that a young man starts off on a transformative journey! Celebrate it like Cholas. Ciao.

Distortion #1: Murugar was a Tamil warrior king, not a God

Arivumathi’s book (pamphlet would be more fitting) starts by saying Murugan is a Thamizh Kadavul who alone is an exception to the rule of Gods having religious identity. He claims Murugar has only ethnic identity. He calls Murugar as Dravidian dheivam, giving a brand new definition to the word dheivam as “warrior”.

Not an immortal God, but a mere mortal warrior king. Brave, yes. But God? No. The mechanism he proposes is that a ruler earns the loyalty of his people, is remembered with gratitude after death, and over generations that gratitude calcifies into worship.

If hero-cult deification were the norm, Tamil Nadu should be littered with temples to celebrated warrior-kings like Karikalan, Rajaraja Chola, or Senguttuvan. It is not. Inscriptions show these kings building temples to gods, not becoming the objects of temple worship themselves. The Chola and Pandya kings who Arivumathi’s model predicts should have become deities remain, quite comfortably, historical kings. Again, why is Murugan alone an exemption, then?

If Murugan had genuinely begun as an extraordinary historical king whose memory later hardened into divinity, we’d expect some trace of that transition: an intermediate layer where he shows up merely as a celebrated ruler before slowly picking up divine status. There is no such layer. The earliest literary references we have already treat Murugan as a full-fledged divine being: tied to a specific landscape (the Kurinji hills), honoured through both Vedic and tribal ritual, carrying his own iconography (peacock mount, rooster flag), and wielding supernatural attributes (six faces, a divine spear). He arrives in the record already a god. There’s no warrior-king phase to dig up.

Arivumathi leans on Purananooru elsewhere to make his case, so let’s quote his own source against his argument. In song 56, poet Nakkeerar compares a Pandya king to the “Big 4” deities:

1. blue-throated, matted-haired Shiva;

2. plough-wielding, fair-skinned Balarama;

3. dark-hued, Garuda-mounted Vishnu; and

4. bright-looking, peacock-mounted Muruga.

By Arivumathi’s own logic, are we now to believe Shiva, Thirumaal, and Balarama were also historical Tamil kings quietly promoted to divinity? Purananooru doesn’t call Muruga a warrior here. It calls him a God, in the same breath as three deities nobody disputes.

Distortion #2: Murugar was the Lord of Neithal (coast) more than Kurinji (hill)

Having built his warrior-king narrative, Arivumathi now needs to dress it up so it doesn’t look like absolute balderdash (if it wasn’t already). Who was this warrior born to? Kotravai, goddess of the Paalai (desert) region. Fine. Which region did he rule? Enter the submerged, mythical Kumari Kandam continent. Once this absurdity door is opened, Arivumathi lets his imagination run: a warrior king defending his clan against a rival clan led by Sooran, deploying both elephants on land and ships at sea.

The main problem now? Tolkappiyam, the oldest Tamil text available. It calls Muruga (Seyon) as the Lord of Kurinji (hills). Why would a hill-tribe deity need a navy? A coastal tribe would need one; a hill tribe wouldn't. Second problem: Sangam poetry already assigns the coastal landscape (Neithal) to a different deity entirely: Varunan. Arivumathi's creative solution is to simply make Murugan the Lord of Neithal too, which leaves us with five Sangam landscapes and somehow only three Lords between them, once you throw “Sanskritic” Indra too out for good measure. You’ve already entered Dravidian LaLa land, so please forget logic when traveling through this magical territory. Five Sangam Landmasses with 3 lords, ogay?

He cites Silapadhikaram 23.188 to claim the submerged Kumari Kandam legend. Read the actual verse, though, and the scene is different. Kannagi, searching for her husband, walks fourteen days along the banks of the Vaigai until she reaches the sacred hill of Neduvel, a temple to Murugan. The verse describes a Murugan who once tore into the sea to destroy the Asuras (the word Ilango uses is avunar).

Poet Kaduvan Ilaveyinaar tells the same story in the Sangam anthology Paripaadal, describing Murugan’s spear defeating the very same “magical Avunars.” This is the Surapadman legend (the Asura who fled to the sea and took the form of a tree) and its iconography lines up exactly with the Skanda Purana’s account of the same battle. Arivumathi blatantly distorts this as a Neithal tribe king fighting using a navy. How sacrilegious!

Distortion #3: Murugar ruled the submerged continent of Kumari Kandam aka Lemuria

Arivumathi quotes Silapadhigaaram (11.19–20) yet again to claim that Murugar ruled the Kumari Kandam, as described by Ilango. This is where Arivumathi’s cunning comes across. The quoted verse was actually said by an elderly Brahmin named Maangaattu Maraiyon (Marai is the pure Tamil word for Vedas), who introduces himself to Kovalan by praising his Pandya king. This was the Brahmin who shared the route to Madurai to Kovalan and Kannagi.
The irony of quoting a Brahmin’s word to make your Dstock deception argument ;)

The Brahmin praises the Pandya king thus: "Hail the Chandravanshi (திங்கள் செல்வன் திருக்குலம்) king, ruler of the south, who added to it the Northern Ganga and Himalayas, and who, to show his prowess to other kings, threw his spear which had the power to consume the river Pahruli and Kumari region and adjoining hills. Long live the king who wears the garland of the rain-controlling Indra."

This is obviously a poetic praise of a king Ugra Pandyan (not Murugar), whose legend of stemming the tide with his spear is mentioned in Thiruvilayadal Puranam too. If Arivumathi distorts this as King Murugar who ruled the submerged Kumari Kandam, does he also accept Murugar as a Chandravanshi Pandya king who wears the garland of the rain cloud controlling Indra, from the same verse? Cherrypicked distortions won’t cut it.

Distortion #4: Murugar was the only son of Kotravai

In Dravidian LaLa land, only Murugan is worshipped, his elder brother Ganesha is a Marathi God, Shiva is a North Indian God, so they are all cancelled. So Arivumathi makes the claim that this human warlord Muruga was the ONLY son of Kotravai, by quoting Thirumurugaatrupadai 258, written by Nakeerar (also a Brahmin). But here is the distortion - Nakkeerar only states Muruga as son of Kotravai, this “ONLY” qualifier was added by Arivumathi. He also conveniently avoids discussing paternity of his Dravidian Muruga, as it opens inconvenient doors to North Indian Gods like Shiva.

The same Thirumurugaatrupadai, by the same poet, goes on to describe Murugan with six faces (verse 95): one of which delights specifically in receiving Vedic yagna offerings chanted by Brahmins. If we're meant to believe this is a reliable historical record of a prehistoric Dravidian king, someone owes us an explanation for how that Lemurian king was born with six faces, and why a purely secular warrior would have a face devoted to enjoying fire-ritual chants, an “Aryan” import. Arivumathi has nothing to say about this part of the poem, because it does not fit his agenda.

It gets worse for Arivumathi. The same Nakkeerar records a festival procession at Aavinankudi (today’s Palani), describing it as a holy place with temples for all four great gods Vishnu, Shiva, Balarama, and Murugan. He records a festival procession where Lord Vishnu comes first behind his Garuda banner, then three-eyed Shiva with his Nandi flag, then Indra, celebrated for a hundred Ashwamedha sacrifices, then Murugan, with four-faced Brahma presiding over the whole procession. That is not the record of a secular hero-cult being slowly deified. That’s a full-blown, multi-deity temple festival, with Murugan sitting comfortably among gods nobody else disputes.

It gets even worse for him. Silapadhigaaram’s Vettuva vari verses describe Kotravai unambiguously as the consort of Shiva, slayer of Mahishashura. Do read for yourself. Ofcourse, our Murugar is the son of Parvati, who blessed our God of war with the divine spear that slay demons like Sooran.

Distortion #5: Tamils opposed grain offerings in worship

One of the sharper misreadings involves Purananooru 335, a poem about nadukal worship: the Tamil custom of erecting and honouring memorial stones for fallen warriors. Arivumathi casts the poet here as a proto-rationalist rebel, pushing back against an “Aryan” ritual of offering grain (nel) at these stones.

Read the poem, and it says the exact opposite. The poet’s actual point is that there is no better way to honour fallen warriors than to place grain offerings on their hero-stones. It’s an endorsement, not a protest. Grain offerings run right through Sangam poetry and Silapadhikaram itself: Kannagi’s own wedding, conducted by a Vedic Brahmin under the Rohini nakshatra, includes the paaligai mulai kudam niraththal rite, where pots are filled with nine grains, wheat among them. Arivumathi’s answer, when confronted with this, is to call it a “later distortion.” No manuscript basis, no textual argument. Just a label, applied whenever the primary source refuses to cooperate with his agenda.

Distortion #6: Aloe vera, coconuts, and other tsunami survival kits

Then comes the part of the book that stops pretending to be historiography and starts reading like speculative fiction. Tamils keep aloe vera by the doorstep, Arivumathi says, as tsunami first aid. Coconuts sit outside homes not to ward off the evil eye, but to provide milk after a disaster wipes out nursing mothers. Kavadi-bearing memorializes ancient migrants hauling their belongings out of a drowning Kumari Kandam, as if it were an act of mourning a sad memory. How sacriliegeous!

If any of this appeals to your scientific mind, I have a flat planet Earth to sell you. Kumari Kandam itself, worth remembering, has been treated by geologists and mainstream historians as a “Lemuria”-style pseudoscience narrative, not an actual submerged Indian landmass. Its as mythical as the Meru mountain in our poetry.

Why They’re Doing This

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Reading gods as deified mortals is an old interpretive habit going back at least to Euhemerus, who argued the Greek Olympians began as flesh-and-blood kings. They eventually used this technique to de-sacralize pagan gods and convert them to the cult of their ONE TRUE GOD.

You can see the same playbook here:

First they will call a God Muruga as a Tamil ancestor who's worshipped by an ethnicity, but also respected by other religionists as a Muppaattan.

Then they will reduce the Muppaatan to a secular philosopher whose way of life should be followed by all, like Valluvar or Vallalaar.

Then they will strip him of all religious symbols and add him to their pantheon of saints. They will write books and Wikipedia articles saying St Murugan met St Thomas in the hill and St Murugar generously offered the St Thomas Mount to him.

Then they will call Thai Poosam a secular Tamil festival, even lighting lamps in their places of worship in honor of St Muruga, offering Beep as padayal to him saying it is ok in their indigenous tradition and ask you to respect diversity.

This is how they dilute and steal and denigrate other gods, because their loyalty is to their ONE true God only.

CONCLUSION

Don't let your love for Tamil or Murugar blind you from seeing this disrespectful sacrilege for what it is. ஆசாமி ஆசாமி தான், சாமி சாமி தான்.

Thamizh Kadavul Murugar is dear to us and his worship may have begun at the ancient town of Tiruchendur/Thiruparankundram, but he is a pan-Indian God of war worshipped by all language speakers - Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Hindi, English and even Russian.
Our Murugar needs absolutely no "ancestry" certificate from those who do not worship him or from atheist comrades. Its not a good idea to provoke the God of war's anger.
வாழ்க தமிழ், வளர்க முருகபக்தி, வாழிய பாரத மணித்திரு நாடு.

I am not an idealist. I do not live in a utopia where people imagine Tamil Nadu elections to work like American presidential debates where candidates make arguments and counterarguments on television, voters decide based on policy positions, rhetorical ability, and leadership acumen. I am also not a big-brained person who possesses “exclusive confidential data” from highly placed Soros sources to conclude that the Deep State or the Vatican or the Illuminati were unhappy with MKS and hence installed Joseph Vijay as their new “puppet” to directly control Tamil Nadu.

I am a normal person with normal intelligence, whose feet is firmly planted on the ground, who observes historical patterns and makes arguments based only on publicly available data. So read on, if you are interested in an educated common man’s perspective on how Vijay won over Tamil Nadu, what this result tells us about the Tamil psyche, and what other parties must understand if they hope to replicate anything resembling the Vijay model.

The rise and rise and rise of Vijay

Joseph Vijay Chandrasekhar, son of famous Tamil director SAC, was criticised as a nepo-kid for the longest time, especially by fans of Ajith, his main competitor. He was mocked for his looks, his mediocre acting in early films, his father’s handholding. But Vijay took all of it on his stride and transformed himself over a decade into a stylistic, dance-beast, action-hero of commercial Tamil cinema. At one point, he became the highest paid star in the industry, overtaking even Superstar Rajinikanth. So there is genuine truth to his political statement: “I left the peak of my career (Career’in Uccham) to come serve the people.”

But Vijay’s political rise did not begin in 2024 when he launched Thamizhaga Vettri Kazhagam. It began much earlier, in a deliberate, patient, decades-long process that most people were too busy mocking to notice. His father SAC, after associations with MGR, realised early that he could groom his son into the next MGR. This resulted in a strong district-wise Vijay fan clubs very similar to MGR’s district-level fan club infrastructure, which Vijay actively encouraged and maintained. He chose scripts carefully like MGR: generic enough to appeal broadly, always positioning him as the good guy who defeats the bad guys. He even made his 50th film Sura to appeal to fishermen who seem to have genuinely accepted Vijay (after MGR) as one of them. The film spectacularly bombed at the BO, but that didn’t stop Vijay.

Vijay reinvented himself as a classy and massy hero in Thuppaaki (2012) by playing Jagdish, a DIA army officer who defeats a sleeper cell leader in Mumbai. Since this nationalistic film became a superhit, he continued collaborating with Murugadoss for his Katthi (2014) which was more political. He played dual roles, one of which was comrade Jeevanantham who fights for a dry agricultural village against a Cola company stealing groundwater. He played another role of Kathiresan who gives a press meet where he questions the corruption in 2G spectrum alleged to the outgoing DMK telecom minister A Raja.

Vijay chose to push his political aspirations a bit far with his 2013 film “Thalaiva” (leader) with a poster “Time to lead”. This caught the attention of then CM Jayalalitha who perhaps interpreted this as a direct challenge to her leadership. While the film released globally on August 9, 2013, it was stalled in Tamil Nadu until August 20, 2013. Vijay had to release an emotional video message with folded hands, asking fans for patience and requesting support from the Chief Minister, in addition to removing the posters.

After Jayalalitha's demise in 2016, the political messaging in his films grew bolder. Mersal (2017) featured a doctor (who is a MGR fan) delivering dialogues about the recently launched GST, Singapore's free healthcare, and the taxation of life-saving medicines: timely, politically charged, emotionally delivered. He also made a factually incorrect dialogue in the film that “While life saving medicines were taxed (with GST), alcohol that removes Mangalsutra of women was tax free”. In reality, alcohol still comes under through a combination of State Excise Duty and Value Added Tax (VAT), rather than GST, which eventually makes the producers pay more tax as they can’t claim Input Tax Credit under GST. This time BJP called for removal of these scenes from the film, with BJP strongman H Raja calling Vijay as “Joseph Vijay” invoking his Christian name into the controversy. Vijay published a notice on his letterpad signing it for the first time as Joseph Vijay to reinforce that he is not ashamed of his identity. The film was a massive superhit, with an excellent second half flashback that had a colorful song “Aalaporaan Thamizhan” , meaning, the Tamil is going to rule. It was no doubt self-referential.

By 2018, Vijay made no qualms about making an explicit political film Sarkar, that was funded by Sun Pictures themselves. It is rumored that since Sarkar times, Vijay’s salary was the highest in the market, beating even Superstar Rajini’s - as Petta was also produced by the same studio. Vijay played the role of Sundar Ramasamy ( a corporate CEO like Sundar Pichai) who returns to India to vote, but has his vote stolen. In the second half, Vijay turns into a full time politician with a song “Oru Viral Puratchi” - one fingered revolution - where he throws away the freebies (TV, grinders and fans) given by the government. The film’s villain was allegedly named Komalavalli, which was Jayalalitha’s birth name. Ministers from ADMK accused Vijay of attempting to instigate viewers against the government by ridiculing its welfare schemes. Following threats of lawsuits from the government, the filmmakers agreed to cut scenes and mute the name wherever it appeared in the audio track.

It was clear that Vijay was positioning himself against all established parties:

• DMK (2G scene in Katthi, TV freebie scene in Sarkar)

• ADMK (Villain name and Mixie freebie in Sarkar)

• BJP (with signing himself as Joseph Vijay).

• He also positioned himself as a leftist comrade in Katthi, who was not anti-industry, but anti-exploitation.

The 2026 results that nobody saw coming

Lets cut to today. I don’t think people outside Tamil Nadu fully understand the scale of what Vijay has managed to achieve this week. Most people in Tamil Nadu themselves are shocked by the numbers (108/236). The experts said Vijay was no MGR and he proved them right. Even the mighty MGR, with decades of prior political experience, took five years after starting ADMK before becoming CM. Vijay did it in two.

They said you needed booth-level agents, organisational cadre strength, and last-mile campaigning across all 234 constituencies. Vijay gave 15 minute speech bytes that were emotional, rhetorical, deliberately repetitive. He barely covered even fifty percent of constituencies.

They said he would not find 233 candidates. He did. Except for KAS, almost 90% of them were debut candidates, unknowns fielded by a party that was two years old.

They said no party has ever won without coalitions: with caste-based, religion-based, or communist parties. Vijay went entirely alone. Not even smaller parties allied with him.

They said he was a work-from-home politician whose fandom was a social media illusion. But his fans turned voting day into a celebration moving mountains, crossing oceans to cast their vote.

They said he could never breach Chennai, the DMK fortress. He fielded a nobody against sitting CM MKS and won. All of Chennai has been breached. They said he would not cross double digits. He won three-digit seats. 108.

They called him Anil, a reference to a comment he had made about being a small squirrel helping ADMK win long ago. He became a giant-slaying dragon that breathes fire.

Rules are being rewritten. Expert psephologists are being humbled. Sitting ministers are being taken down by unknown debutantes.

An unexpected victory, perhaps even for Vijay, has happened. And the utter unbelievability of it is messing with everyone’s minds, which is why conspiracy theories are proliferating on the internet.

Is Vijay a Deep State puppet?

Let’s first address the elephant in the room. 99% Tamil intelligentsia did not see this election results coming. What followed was predictable in its pattern if not its specifics. Dstocks began calling TVK an RSS Trojan horse. RW commentators began calling it a Vatican/ Deep State secret operation. Both are ideology-driven narratives, not truthful analysis. You believe whichever one you believe because it comforts your existing prejudices, not because the evidence points there.

Just one day before the results, RW handles were brutally trolling pollsters like Pradeep, DravidaSishu, and AwakeHindu for predicting a TVK win. Now suddenly everyone is acting as if they have the Pope’s personal phone number and knew it all along as a Vatican plot. Funny how that works.

The Vatican-RSS binary is basically a glorified version of the “13 families that control the world” theory. The appeal of such theories is that they convert a genuinely surprising, multi-causal, multi-factored, complex democratic outcome into a simple story with a puppet master. It is very easy to do and very satisfying to believe, just like in novels and cinema. The problem with such conspiracy theories is that they are always cooked up after the results, not before. These theories are nothing but post-hoc rationalisation intended to spin a political narrative.

What actually happened is this: TN has had a genuine political vacuum ever since the passing away of its powerful leaders MK and JJ. 9 years of cumulative public frustrations burst out at an unexpected opportune moment, channelled through a vessel named Vijay who had spent 30 years making himself trusted and beloved.

Better to engage with this actual reality instead of resorting to post-hoc fallacies. Sure, every politician receives questionable funding from varying power brokerage systems, but to single out TVK for it post-results, is merely coming from a place of judging Joseph Vijay for his name. Be eternally vigilant, but don’t believe everything you hear on the internet without application of the mind. If you do, then what’s the difference between you and the “Tharkuris” that you so despise? Let ground reality be your compass and truth be your Dhruva Nakshatra always.

The Tamil Psyche

To understand Vijay’s political rise, you first have to understand the Tamil psyche which comes from century old tradition of hero worship. Since the Sangam era, Nadu Kal (hero stones) were erected not just to memorialise fallen warriors but to worship them. Tamils worship their ancestors and the heroes of the past who protected their villages as Naataar Kadavuls (folk religious deities). Plenty of communities trace their lineage to legendary Tamil kingdoms, whether as rulers, warriors, or accountants. Whether these lineages are historically accurate is immaterial. What matters is that millions of people believe them to be true and that belief shapes how they relate to heroism, leadership, and the idea of the protector.

These Tamils grew up listening to Sthala Puranas and Karna Parambarai stories from their grandmothers, in their literature, in Koothus and dance skits. In village festivals, it is not uncommon for people to be consumed by the spirit of folk deities, heroes worshipped not just as historical figures but as living protectors.

This psyche eventually transfixed to moving images on screen, where their mental visual imagery became closely associated with their reality. In the darkness of a theatre, many are consumed by the spirits of heroism that’s manifest on screen, the presence of which is acknowledged by the commune with hoots, claps and whistles. The distinction between truth and fiction can get very blurry for a society with this psyche. When something on screen resonates deeply with them, they become emotionally invested in the hero. This is why there were instances reported in village theatres where the 5 anna and 10 anna tickets seated on the floor near the screen, tore it up in moments where MGR was in peril in the cinema. The hero on screen and the hero in the heart were not two different things.

Political commentator Cho Ramaswamy captured it precisely: “It is not only the song, but the singer who is important for the public.”

Tamil politics is personality-driven, not ideology-driven. It always has been. Any analysis that ignores this is incomplete.

Is Hero Worship a feature or a bug?

Tamil Nadu’s relationship to film-star-turned-politicians is too often treated as a pathology to be corrected, a collective delusion that a better-educated electorate would eventually outgrow. This framing is wrong, both as analysis and as political strategy.

Hero worship is not a bug. It is a feature of a specific political culture with its own logic, its own history, and its own internal coherence.

MGR did not win Tamil Nadu’s loyalty because voters were foolish. He won it because he spent decades playing the same character on screen: a man who fought for the poor, stood up to the powerful, never abandoned the weak, and then carried that character into public life with sufficient consistency that people believed it. This was no accident.

MGR was inspired by Hollywood actor and Democratic political activist Gregory Peck who often portrayed protagonists with ‘fiber’ within a moral setting. MGR even met his inspiration Peck at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York.

So with such scripts, the emotional transfer happened on common man’s minds. It was a reasonable bet by people with limited information about political candidates, using the information they had access to: thirty years of watching this man be, on screen, exactly the kind of person they wanted representing them.

NTR did the same in Andhra Pradesh. He played gods and kings for decades, accumulated the emotional capital of that mythology, and converted it into political currency when he entered the arena. His Telugu Desam Party won its first election with a landslide that shocked every serious political analyst. The serious analysts had not accounted for what thirty years of playing Ram and Krishna does to a man’s relationship with an electorate that grew up watching him be those characters.

People want to vote for someone they connect with, someone they trust, someone they believe to be competent. In Tamil Nadu, this can come through cinema power, through extraordinary oratory: former DMK CMs Arignar Anna and MK were not actors but were orators of such force that people waited overnight to hear them speak, or through the Mr. Clean image of a Kamaraj. What it cannot come through, in Tamil Nadu, is pure policy argument delivered to a passive electorate. That is not how Tamil political trust is built. Even Kamaraj underestimated this “cinema” reality and could not win over DMK after he lost to them.

The question of whether a dancing, fighting film star is qualified for political office deserves to be asked honestly. But it deserves to be asked of film stars and career politicians BOTH. How many past MLAs in TN have backgrounds that would survive serious scrutiny? How many completed atleast schooling? The goonda who became an MLA through muscle and money is somehow more legitimate than the actor who built decades of genuine popular trust? The intellectual dislikes the actor because the actor is visible, popular, and operates through emotion. The goonda turned politician is less offensive to the intellectual’s sensibility because he operates behind the scenes and all his vices are not out there on gossip columns for public consumption.

The intelligentsia must get off its high horse and acknowledge reality: circles of power and fame are prone to vice. The era of honest men of character like Kamaraj is behind us. We are all forced to choose between different shades of grey. And yes, at some point you have to contend with the reality that your vote, that of an educated reader of essays, carries the exact same weight as that of a “Tharkuri” that you so detest. The name of this numbers game is democrazy, and if you choose to play it, you had better understand its rules. The election does not grade you on how you arrived at your choice. The only thing that matters, on counting day, is the number of votes against your symbol.

What DMK Understood that others don’t

DMK is not a mighty political force because it has a better ideology. It is a mighty force because it understood how Tamil minds actually work, and built an entire cultural apparatus to operate on those minds at scale.

The common people of Tamil Nadu are moved primarily by emotion. This is not an insult. This is a description of human beings. We are all more emotional than rational. The difference is that DMK built its entire political project around this reality while its opponents built theirs around the fantasy that Tamil voters could be won by superior argument alone.

DMK owns cinema. It owns street theatre. It owns mega serials. It owns reality shows. It owns every mass medium with genuine mindshare among ordinary Tamil people. It uses these mediums to plant ideas: sticky, emotional, difficult-to-dislodge ideas. Tamil versus Hindi. Aryan versus Dravidian. State versus Centre. Stepchild versus favoured child. These are not policy positions. They are feelings. And once a feeling that we are given stepmotherly treatment by the center takes root in a person’s mind, no amount of counter-argument can remove it. The idea was not placed there by logic but by emotions. Pathos is far more powerful than logos. You cannot logos your way out of a pathos problem.

A single episode of Neeya Naana can plant an idea into more Tamil minds than a thousand treatises and Twitter threads combined. This is not a criticism of those Tamil minds. It is a description of how human communication works at scale. This is why despite all the trolling, DMK’s political events are organised like reality shows with emotional background scores, film directors and actors performing alongside politicians, sentiment calibrated with production-house precision.

It took a Vijay tsunami, also driven by Pathos, to unseat DMK in 2026.

The Shepherd and the Sheep

A good shepherd must know what his sheep want. Not what he thinks they should want. Not what they would want if they were better educated or more rational. What they actually want, right now, as they are.

This does not mean pandering. It means meeting people where they are before trying to take them somewhere else. Earning trust before asking for change. Understanding that the path from where your audience is to where you want them to be is travelled in steps, not in a single leap from their current position to your ideal destination.

Thevar Magan film said it best, in the way that Tamil cinema sometimes says things better than any political philosopher: Medhuva thaan ya varuvaan namma aalu. Our man will come, but slowly. Incremental progress. Gradual trust-building. The long game played with patience rather than the short game played with contempt.

The non-left Tamil intellectual wants voters to arrive at the correct political conclusion immediately, fully formed, without requiring the emotional scaffolding that actually moves people. When voters do not oblige, the intellectual concludes they are stupid, ungrateful, or hopelessly manipulated.

This is precisely the mistake that DMK also makes: calling voters stupid and ungrateful when DMK is not voted to power. The non-left, in its elite moments, makes exactly the same error from exactly the same place of pride. Respecting the voter means accepting that the voter’s emotional relationship to politics is as legitimate as your intellectual one.

The Dharmic Normie vs The Dharmic Intellectual

I know you are still not convinced, so let me share another perspective. A Dharmic intellectual knows the texts. He can cite the Vedanta. He can win the argument. He has probably won many arguments. But a Dharmic normie carries something additional: the emotional weight of his community.

He does not just know the right things: he cares about the people who haven’t arrived at those things yet, and he is willing to meet them where they are. He appeals to emotion first, builds trust second, and introduces logic only after the emotional connection has made the audience willing to receive it. This is not manipulative at all, this is the only communication that’s effective with emotional non-intellectual normal human beings.

Dharma needs not just Vedanta treatises. It needs Sthala Puranas too: the local stories, the accessible narratives, the forms that meet people in their own emotional language. The Sthala Purana does not replace the Vedanta. It is the Vedanta’s ambassador to people who would never read the Vedanta. The Dharmic intellectual will find discrepancies in multiple Sthala Puranas and use them to discredit the entire tradition. The Dharmic normie understands the immense value of the Sthala Purana in rooting a Puranic event to an individual’s local temple, in making the cosmic feel personal. A Dharmic normie believes that every Sthala Purana is true, because he uses his heart to feel its value, not his intellect to dissect its authenticity.

The common man learns more from a Puranic story than from an Upanishadic text, which is a far cry to comprehend for his capacity. Cinema plays the role of a Sthala Purana in a common man’s mind. A well-made film that resonates with Dharmic values reaches more Tamil minds in two hours than a decade of intellectual output reaches in its lifetime. Of what use is intellect if does not meet people where they are?

Vijay’s “Om Shakthi Parashakthi, Thee Mu Ka oru Theeya Shakthi” line can change more minds than any well-argued Substack article.

And let me add something irrational but important here: cinema is an art form, a medium with a life of its own. If you only want to use cinema for your purposes without truly loving it, the medium will sense it and resist it. Most RW cinema gets a bad reputation not because the ideology is wrong but because the filmmaker does not truly love the artistic medium as he merely wants to use it for furthering his agenda. The audience can feel the difference. Always.

Conclusion

Vijay won over Tamil Nadu because he understood instinctively, through 30 years of professional practice, how Tamil emotional lives work. He built trust one film at a time, and then converted it into the most durable currency in Tamil politics.

The non-left can resent this. It can wish that Tamil voters related to politics the way serious analysts do. It can continue to produce excellent arguments that reach small audiences and lose elections. Or it can learn the lesson.

Respect the medium. Engage with mass culture. Build emotional trust before asking for intellectual agreement. Meet people where they are. Carry the weight of your emotional kith and kin rather than abandoning them to the more emotionally intelligent opposition. Don’t do the same Stockist elitist mistake of cursing the voters.

Till date, Vijay has fished in the same Dravidian waters, with EVR as one of his leaders, following D culture of Jan 14 wishes of Tamil New Year, opposing Parandur airports and promising impractical freebies. He is still a political amateur who will most likely make plenty of administrative and policy mistakes, which he may learn from, or not.

A lot remains to be seen. Whether Vijay can remain truly secular in the genuine sense, not the performative Dravidian sense is an open question. The criticisms can wait. Not now. They will have their time.

But for today, we can all wish him well for singlehandedly putting a full stop to the Dravidian megafactory that had all the money, all the muscle, all the institutional control, and 50 years of political oxygen. He went alone, with debut candidates, with fifteen-minute speeches, with no caste coalition, no organisational machinery of consequence, and he won. Dstocks are calling this defeat worser than 1991, where they won merely 7 seats as an alliance.

For today, we can all breathe this fresh air of change, where our sacred Tamil Nadu shall be ruled by a non-Dravidian party after fifty long years.

V for Valiant. V for Victory. V for Vaagai. V for Vijay.

When a movie starts with a card “based on a true story,” it is entering into a moral contract with you: it is promising that, while some details may be dramatized, the spine of the story and the identities at its heart are true and the events it portrays are close to reality. If you wanted pure imagination, you would’ve chosen a masala entertainer. When you pick biopic as a genre of film to watch, you are trusting that the film’s heart beats in sync with the lives it borrows from.

Dravidawood has learned to exploit this contract with remarkable sophistication. Not by cooking things up entirely, because 100% lies get refuted easily. But if you make strategic distortions, it will largely go unquestioned. A name changed here. A community erased there. A villain's identity quietly reassigned from religion A to Hindu. A real person's caste surname replaced with an EVR-ist identity. Or worse: Real people whose lives fuel the story are left uncredited and unpaid. Each individual change is defensible as "creative liberty." But like the Theseus’s ship, at one point, the accumulated pattern of those changes, across film after film, becomes something else entirely, without being noticed. Let’s dissect 4 such films, and also the 2 antidote films that properly dramatized things without ideological distortions when telling a real story.

Irudhi Suttru: Stealing a life story, Keeping a National Award

Irudhi Suttru (Saala Khadoos in Hindi) is a 2016 film directed by Sudha Kongara about a boxing coach who trains a young woman from a marginalised background to compete at the national level. It won the National Award. It put Kongara on the map. It was marketed as a film that is inspired from many true stories.

This “many” word is the trick is played by the director, because, this film’s core plot of two sisters from marginalised background, both wanting to be boxers, but the younger one succeeding, is exclusive to Thulasi Helen and her akka Saraswathi. Director Sudha had met with Thulasi during her script research and promised that she will be credited , allegedly offering even a role as a coach in her own biopic. But not only did Sudha not credit her, when confronted by Thulasi post-release, she issued mild threats with namedropping the Commissioner.

If you think this Thulasi is some attention seeking creditmonger trying to steal her 15 minutes of fame, you are mistaken. Sometimes known as “The Lady Muhammad Ali of India” because of her rapid footwork, Thulasi had once defeated Mary Kom.

All in all, she had won 30 medals in boxing, before a legal dispute about sexual harassment within the state boxing association in TN pushed her into a hiatus from the sport. Her life story was made into an award winning documentary ‘Light Fly, Fly High’ by Norwegian filmmakers. Thulasi perhaps thought Dravidawood filmmakers would be as honorable as Norwegians. But she only got to know Irudhi Suttru was based on her life after she watched its trailer on Youtube.

In an interview to AvalGlitz, Thulasi said that “Seeing my life story stolen from me hurts more than being beaten at the boxing ring. People steal money, or bodies in the name of love, but stealing one’s life story hurts the most”.

She is now driving an auto rickshaw to lead her life, even as Sudha used the film’s fame to make multi-crore films next, including Parasakthi, the “biopic” based on anti-Hindi agitations, produced by Akash Baskaran who is related to DMK’s first family by marriage.

The person whose life made the film possible continues to live a poor life: unacknowledged, uncompensated, unknown.

Soorarai Pottru: The Brahmin who was distorted as an EVR-ist

Sudha Kongara’s next film was inspired by the life of Captain GR Gopinath (Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar Gopinath), the founder of Air Deccan. Gopinath is a real, popular person, so obviously, her old tricks with Thulasi won’t fly with him. So Sudha had to officially buy the filmmaking rights for his “Simply Fly” book. Why worry when you have new tricks to pull in this Brahmin entrepreneur’s biopic.

In Soorarai Pottru(2020):

• Gopinath is renamed as Nedumaaran Raajangam and given a strong EVR‑ist ideological identity, who gets married with a black shirt in ritual-free, a “self-respect” wedding.

• The antagonist is named Paresh Goswami, characterized as a ruthless classist Brahmin, supposedly inspired by Naresh Goyal, founder of Jet Airways.

So a real Brahmin man’s entrepreneurial story is retained, but his Brahmin identity is stripped out and replaced with an EVR‑ist persona, while “Brahmin” is reserved for a casteist villain who sanitizes after a handshake with the hero, and won’t even like it if his janitors use the same restrooms as him. The hero supposedly breaks not just cost barriers in aviation, but caste barriers too. Why force fit such an angle? Because to justify the EVR hammer, such unnecessary nails have to be invented in the plot.

Imagine a Steve Jobs biopic where Jobs is renamed as a Dstock Pammal Suresh K Sammandham who says “EVR mattum illai-na, enaala Apple computer kandupudichurka mudiyaadhu” (If not for EVR, I would not’ve found Apple Computers), would you take such a biopic seriously? Nobody is going to question if a real EVR-ist entrepreneur’s biopic is made, but if you put the EVR sticker to a successful non-EVR-ist Brahmin’s story, this sticker model shall be questioned.

Is Soorarai Pottru the biopic of Gopinath at all? If 90% of a Theseus ship is replaced by different components, is it still the same ship?

Jai Bhim: Adding ideological masala to real ingredients

Jai Bhim (2021), directed by TJ Gnanavel, tells the real story from the 90s, of Parvathi who fought a lonely legal battle post the custodial death of her husband Rajakannu. It is a more complex case, because the underlying injustice it depicts is real, the advocacy of advocate Chandru is real, and the suffering of the communities it represents is real. All of this deserves to be acknowledged before the critique begins.

But a film that claims to champion truth has a higher responsibility to truth than one that makes no such claim. And Jai Bhim made the claim loudly, repeatedly, and to enormous international acclaim. It even briefly displaced The Shawshank Redemption to become the #1 ranked film in IMdB, with a 9.6 rating. So what’s wrong with Jai Bhim?

The distortions begin with the villain. The real sub-inspector whose custodial torture of Rajakannu in 1993 formed the basis of the case was a Christian, not a Hindu. In the film, the villain is given a Hindu name Gurumoorthy, complete with the Vanniyar community’s sacred motif Agni Kundam in the frame with a caption “with the caption of “Kshatriya Kula Manadu, Villupuram”. This is not an oversight. It is a deliberate distortion to reassign villainy from one community to another, executed at the level of visual design, in a film that presents itself as a faithful account of real events.

When the Vanniyar community protested and the manipulation became a legal case, the makers replaced the Agni motif with a calendar bearing the image of Goddess Lakshmi. Replacing one Hindu symbol with another, after the caste-targeting was exposed, while keeping the character’s Hindu identity intact. The correction was itself a continuation of the original distortion, but this also was tolerated for “creative liberty”

And then there is the treatment of Brahmin characters. A Brahmin lawyer named Sankaran (played by MS Bhaskar) who keeps saying "Sivaya Namaha" approaches Suriya's character Chandru in court to compliment his legal strategy. Chandru responds by saying: "No sir, if you're being so positive, there must be something wrong I'm doing." The implication, delivered to enormous multiplex audiences and amplified by Amazon Prime's social media handle before they deleted the post after backlash, is that Tamil Brahmin approval is a reliable indicator for redirection. Dstocks used this clip to spread an alleged EVR quote “Whatever a Brahmin supports, you must oppose it”. FYI, Brahmins eat by hand and sheet by their backsides, in case somebody wanted redirection.

Even if you can tolerate all of the above distortions as creative liberty, consider this: In the film’s climax, the hero Chandru is shown to hand Sengeni (Parvathi) a new house after her legal victory. Millions of audience would’ve believed that Parvathy finally got her well deserved justice/happy ending after watching the film. But in reality, 70 year old Parvathi lives in a hut, struggles to make ends meet, and cares for her two mentally challenged sons with no support system.

Amazon reportedly paid ₹45 crores for OTT rights. Kalaignar TV reportedly paid ₹10 crores for satellite rights. The film won international awards and ₹40 lakhs in prize money at festivals. The filmmakers used Parvathy’s real suffering, packaged it, sold it internationally, collected the awards and the money, but left her in the same hut she was in before the cameras arrived. Parvathi lamented that no one, including Suriya, who is also the producer of the film, had informed them that they were going to make a film focusing on her husband and herself. Tell me in good faith that this is not exploitation.

Amaran: The Identity That Could Not Be Named

Amaran (2024) tells the real story of braveheart Major Mukund Varadarajan and it is a 99% sincere and well-made and patriotic film that can make grown men cry. It just had one small distortion: it hides the fact that Major Mukund was a Tamil Brahmin. This is not a trivial biographical detail: it is part of who he was, part of the family and tradition that shaped the man who gave his life for his country. His wife Indhu Rebecca Varghese’s identity as an army wife from a Christian family is depicted accurately in the film, as it should be. But why obfuscate Major’s community? He even keeps calling his dad as “Naina” in the film, which is common in Telugu households, not Tamil.

The usual defence is: “A soldier belongs to the nation, not to a caste.” And this is absolutely true. No Indian braveheart should ever be reduced to their community. But this is a biopic isn’t it? How would people have reacted if he was shown as Mukund Menon from Kochi? Authentic portrayal of roots is important for a biopic, even when our bravehearts outgrow those identities. Director Rajkumar himself said that the film stuck to authentic portrayal of the war cry of Rajput Regiment that Mukund was part of: “Bolo Bajrangbali ki Jai”, despite pushback from “secular” Dstocks. So why miss this Tamil Brahmin detail?

The deeper reason is to protect the century old Dravidian maya that Tamil Brahmins do not engage in physical labour, do not sacrifice, do not bleed for their country. That they are soft-handed, pampered, removed from the real Tamil world of toil and struggle. EVR wrote in his 1938 Kudiyarasu essay that “Brahmins are like Jews of Germany, who do not indulge in physical toil and live by leeching other’s hardwork”

Portraying a TamBrahm as a physically strong Major who bravely laid down his life for this country would destroy this elaborate and carefully constructed myth. Dravidian ideology’s hegemony over Tamil cinema made that depiction impossible. Showing a Tamil Brahmin as a complete, admirable human being, with his community identity intact, is a political act that carries real professional risk for any filmmaker. The White Dwarfs of the Tamil cinematic universe won’t like it one bit.

The Hindi Template

Tamil cinema doesn’t usually make a lot of biopics. Older films were that of Tamil freedom fighters, or award films like “Bharathi”, “Kamarajar” which are ignored by the mainstream audience. This trend of making commercial biopics started when they realized Hindi biopics like “Chak de India” became successful at the BO. There was an additional thing Dravidawood picked up from Hindi - that it was possible to buy the rights to something, and then add your own ideological masala in the name of creative liberty and sell it to the masses.

Chak de India took “inspiration” from the story of Mir Ranjan Negi, the Hindu goalkeeper who was scapegoated after India's hockey loss to Pakistan in 1982. In the film though, he becomes Kabir Khan, a Muslim man carrying the burden of being suspected of match-fixing. This is the ideological masala added to the real recipe that makes audience gobble it up, without even realizing what’s real and what’s added later.

Films like Sherni, Fire, Netflix series like IC814 have all used the same identity swapping technique, and Dravidawood was inspired by this template.

What Honest Biographical Commercial Cinema Looks Like

Please don’t mistake this post as a demand for making commercial biopics in a boring documentary style. Its totally understandable that certain creative liberties are needed to make the biopic more interesting and engaging to the audience. But whether they are truly non-ideological creative liberties, made in good conscience, is the question.

The standard is not impossibly high. Rocketry: The Nambi Effect showed what is possible when a filmmaker commits to authentic portrayal. Nambi Narayanan is depicted as a practising Hindu, a scientist of extraordinary ability, and a man whose faith and professional excellence exist in the same frame without apology or embarrassment. It sure had creative liberties, but nothing ideological. Infact, criticisms came in from leftist critics for portraying Nambi’s household playing Subrapatham, because in their worldview, a scientist cannot practice faith in his house.

Dheeran Adhigaaram Ondru (2017) is, in craft terms, one of Tamil cinema's finest police procedurals. The story of the inter-state dacoits Bawaria Gang, who murdered and looted across nine Indian states for a decade from 1995 to 2005, eventually killing a sitting Tamil Nadu MLA, is told with urgency and authenticity. Post-release of the film, Jangid (the real Dheeran) appreciated the team for their realistic portrayal of events and praised the director's research for the film. The film took a huge creative liberty with an elaborate love story where the hero’s own wife was in danger by the gang. This is understandable for commercial reasons, there is nothing ideological about it.

Some may argue that the ideological distortion with identity swaps are not deliberate. To them, I submit Sirai (2025), which is based on a real story, and the writer Tamil himself admitted in an interview that they changed the admirable innocent protagonist from a Hindu to a Muzlim, so as to spread a positive message about this community to the masses. The film’s director Suresh was the AD of Vetrimaaran, who recently appreciated his protégé on stage for making this “much needed inclusive film in times such as this”. Director also stated on stage how he made “political corrections” to the film, putting himself in the shoes of his Guru Vetrimaaran. Tell me in good faith that this is merely creative liberty, and not ideological.

Conclusion

A biopic must be accountable to the people whose stories it claims to represent. It means not stealing a boxer’s story and calling it inspiration. It means not taking ₹55 crores from OTT platforms for a film about a woman’s suffering and leaving that woman in a hut. It means not erasing a martyr’s identity because it complicates your ideology. It means not inserting EVR-ism into an entrepreneur’s story to dishonestly claim credit for someone else’s achievement.

Dravidawood has built an extraordinary apparatus for appearing progressive while doing the opposite of these things. It has mastered the aesthetics of conscience without the substance of it. It has learned that the words “based on a true story” opens a door to audience trust that can then be walked through carrying whatever ideological cargo the filmmaker wishes to bring.

The audience deserves better. The real people behind these stories: Thulasi, Parvathi, Major Mukund, Captain Gopinath, deserve better. Their lives are not raw material for an ideological project. Their stories are not vessels to be emptied of their actual content and refilled with someone else’s worldview.

They are real. What happened to them was real. The least a film can do is honour that reality. Even when, and especially when that reality is inconvenient for the story the filmmaker wanted to tell. If 90% of a Theseus ship is replaced by different components, is it still the same ship?

Sources:

1. https://www.thenewsminute.com/features/meet-thulasi-helen-chennai-boxer-who-once-beat-olympian-mary-kom-50919

2. https://lawbeat.in/top-stories/jai-bhim-movie-deliberately-shows-police-sub-inspector-who-commits-torture-vanniyar

3. https://thecommunemag.com/jai-bhim-becomes-poi-bhim-real-life-sengenni-exposes-actor-suriya-and-lies-peddled-in-the-movie/

4. https://www.opindia.com/2021/11/indian-movies-real-life-incidents-are-distorted-for-propaganda-jai-bhim/

The Template

Before listing films, it helps to name the pattern. Once you see it, you start spotting it everywhere.

Call it The Dravidawood TamBrahm Woman Template:

1. The heroine

   • She is explicitly Tamil Brahmin: by name, surname, locality, school, college, job role or ritual.

   • She is innocent, smart, spirited, and has a lot of dreams.

2. Her community’s men and women

   • The men are weak, cowardly, bigoted, hypocritical, or cruel caricatures.

   • The father is a casteist, regressive person who is an obstacle to her dreams

   • The fiancé or arranged groom is a passive, beta male, a laughable “comic relief” or a punching bag for the film’s hero.

   • The women are either poor victims/peddlers of patriarchy (mostly heroine’s mother), or needs saving (the akka/thangai in distress) or a helpful paati who helps the heroine break free from the shackles of patriarchy

3. Her community’s institutions

   • Agraharam, temple, madapalli, school, marriage ritual: all are cages.

   • They exist to stunt her individuality, by enforcing rules on her and never support any of her dreams.

4. The liberator

   • A Drav man, usually stripped of caste surname or clearly marked as “non-Brahmin” in name, background and speech.

   • He is “alpha”: macho, capable, protective, emotionally vivid, progressive, everything the Brahmin men are not.

5. The conclusion

• Her turning away from community expectations and toward this liberator is framed as “coming of age” or “breaking free”.

• The ideology that blesses this is the Dravidian worldview. EVR blesses the woman overtly or covertly, his ideology is always in the Dravidawood air.’

Not every film ticks every box equally. But across the twelve, the architecture is stable.

Fab Four: Sethu, Kadhalikka Neramillai, Annapoorani, Meyaadha Maan

1. Sethu(1999): The Alpha and the Agraharam

Sethu (Chiyaan) is a violent campus strongman: he beats rivals, threatens opponents, terrorises his way through college politics. The film nevertheless codes him as fundamentally righteous and compassionate.

His love interest is Abitha Kuchalambal, explicitly called as “Agrahaarathu mami” by Chiyaan’s friends: fair, innocent, priest’s daughter, engaged to a Brahmin boy who also serves at the temple. Goes to same college as Chiyaan.

Look at how that fiancé is written:

• He is soft, passive, and broke.

• He fails to protect Abitha’s sister from dowry harassment.

• He cannot stop a brothel operating right in his agraharam.

But Chiyaan can: he thrashes the abusive husband, exposes the brothel to police, saves the honor of the damsel in distress (akka), walks into spaces Brahmin men in the film only snivel around. Chiyaan even threatens heroine’s fiance and he cows down.

Then comes the key line: the fiancé himself tells Abitha that Sethu is better than him in every way, and adds, “No shastra says a Brahmin woman cannot marry outside her community.”

That’s the ideological kill shot. A Brahmin man, in a Tamil film, invoking “scripture” to endorse a Brahmin woman walking away from Brahmin men. The worldview has won so thoroughly that it can put its own conclusion into the mouth of the “defeated” party.

Abitha ultimately dies by suicide when her father tries to marry her off again. Apparently, she cannot live without the man who stalked, kidnapped, and tied her up in an abandoned location. The film mourns it as tragic love. Step back, and it looks like the purest form of the “alpha liberator” fantasy: the poor TamBrahm woman deserves to be with an alpha Drav man. This film won National Award.

2. Kadhalikka Neramillai (2025): EVR’s LaLa land of enjaaiment w/o responsibility

In Kiruthiga Udhayanidhi’s Kadhalikka Neramillai, the heroine Shriya is a modern day TamBrahm woman: working, independent, drinks, smokes, sleeps, but doesn’t believe in marriage.

Her TamBrahm family believes:

• Education spoils women and makes them arrogant

• Autonomy is suspect.

• When her engagement collapses, their first response is judgment, not care.

  

The core question “Do women even need marriage?” is an EVR-era question dressed in modern clothes. The film answers not via debate but via plot:

• Shriya raises a child alone.

• Builds a life alone.

• Later finds companionship with a no surnamed progressive man without formal marriage

  

In parallel, a gay man, Sethuraman, gets a church wedding and a child through surrogacy. The straight Brahmin woman is written past marriage; the gay character is granted the institution. This passes off as “puratchi”.

3. Annapoorani (2023): From Madapalli to Meat

Annapoorani updates the template for the OTT age: no rowdies, just food shows and ambition. But the structure is the same.

• Heroine is the daughter of the Srirangam temple madapalli cook: a man whose lineage and vegetarianism are both devotional acts, not lifestyle choices.

• Her dream is to be a star chef in a secular, non‑veg world.

• Her dad doesn’t support her dreams and arranges a wedding, but she elopes

The film’s key arguments:

• Through her progressive friend Farhan, we’re told no god really says meat is a sin.

• Immediately after, we see him offer Namaz before cooking biryani, and the film suggests this makes the dish taste better, while also claiming biryani “has no caste or religion”. This kinda secularism sells in the land of Paguthocrisy.

  

The emotional pivot:

• Annapoorani eats chicken, runs away from her wedding with Farhan’s help, and is “freed” from the “Brahminical” kitchen into the cosmopolitan one.

• Her Paati, not her father, is the one who helps her escape and whispers, “Don’t get trapped like me.”

That grandmother trope is important. The older Brahmin woman recognises her life as a cage, and helps the younger one escape it. It is women dismantling their own house from the inside.

4. Avvai Shanmughi: Ideology hidden beneath genuine comedy

Heroine is Janaki, daughter of a businessman Viswanathan Iyer who is a scheming man. But hero Pandiyan has no surname stated.

The Brahmin household staff are sketched in the same register. Sethurama Iyer (Delhi Ganesh) is an irresponsible flirt, and his so‑called girlfriend Kousi, the poor Tamil Brahmin cook, is caught stealing silver lamps. It is not the family that exposes her, but Pandiyan in his Avvai Shanmughi disguise: the “Dravidian” intruder who reveals the rot inside the conservative Brahmin bungalow.

Contrast this with the helpful Pasha (Nasser) who loses his job trying to help the hero. Shanmughi hires this Pasha in an Iyer kitchen by lying that he is a dumb Palavakam Swaminathan in a terrific comedy scene. When found out, he delivers the lecture that the Iyer leather businessman kills more animals(cows) for export than the cook does for food. It takes great ingenuity to make one laugh at oneself, without even making you realize the ideology behind.

The pattern in other films

1. Dasavatharam (2008)

   Kamal’s rationalist scientist hero Govind Ramasamy Naicker meets the annoying “foxy Aryan” Aandaal (Asin), an Iyengar woman who rats him out every chance she gets. But the rational Naicker man saves her at every instant, from goondas to ex-CIA agents. After the tsunami, this cat-mouse duo fall in love. But why? The atheist-rationalist Naicker mocks her regressiveness throughout, then suddenly calls for “unity.” Why do they end up together? Because who is a better match to liberate the Iyengar girl than the atheist rationalist Dravidian hero?

2. Vedam Puthithu (1987)

   A Thevar man’s son falls for a Tamil Brahmin priest’s daughter. He even learns the Vedas from the father so as to ogle at his daughter. They get found out and eventually the priest’s rigidity causes multiple deaths. The surviving Brahmin boy (brother of heroine) is orphaned, rejected by his own community, but is raised by the atheist Sathyaraj’s family, who give up meat to accommodate him. By the climax, the son eventually removes his sacred thread in disgust. The Brahmin boy’s final act of defiance against his own tradition is presented as enlightenment. The non Brahmin family’s generosity is presented as the true spirit of humanity. It is to be noted that the same anti-caste director Bharathiraja’s later film’s song “Thirupaachi Aruvaala” from Taj Mahal is caste-coded and still extremely popular among caste circles.

3. Meyaadha Maan

   A North Madras man-child named Murali who repeatedly uses suicide threats after breakups falls for a Brahmin college-mate named Madhu. She postpones her arranged wedding with a useless NRI groom and somehow falls for this wastrel Murali because he remembers what color chudihar she used to wear years ago. She decides to stop her wedding by getting pregnant with Murali’s progeny and vomits right at the homa kundam on her arranged wedding day, signalling the pregnancy. Such desecration of sacred spaces pass off as comedy in Dravidawood. Their registered marriage promptly follows, a signal that it has replaced the ritual wedding.

4. Boat

   A pre-independence era period film that features a casteist Brahmin mama, whose open-minded daughter falls in love with their fisherman and sings a Carnatic song full of North Madras slang to prove her love.

   

5. Chellame and Vairamuthu’s Lyrics

   Perhaps the most explicit statement of the project appears not in a film’s screenplay but in its song lyrics. Vairamuthu wrote for Chellame: “Aariya Udhadugal Unnadhu / Dravida Udhadugal Ennudhu / Aariyam Dravidam Rendum Kalakkatume”: the Aryan lips are yours, the Dravidian lips are mine, let Aryan and Dravidian mix. The lyric is framed as romantic. It is also a precise statement of their ideological project: the Aryan woman and the Dravidian man, their union celebrated in song by the movement’s most celebrated poet.

6. Homework

   For some of you who are keeping count, we have discussed 9 films, but I promised 12. Now go figure out the same pattern in any of these films: Idhu Namma Aalu, Yaaradi Nee Mohini, Bad Girl, Bigil etc. Feel free to comment more such films with the same pattern

Conclusion

Every one of these films is built around the same structural choice: the Tamil Brahmin woman as the site of ideological contest, her community’s men as the obstacle, and the Dravidian worldview as the liberation.

This is not a coincidence. Coincidences do not sustain themselves across decades and different directors. This is a project: conscious in some cases, absorbed and reproduced unconsciously in others, but consistent in its architecture regardless of who is directing or writing in any given decade.

The strategic logic is worth stating clearly. You cannot defeat a community from the outside without creating resistance. Communities under external attack become more cohesive, more defensive, more committed to their identity. But if you can make the community’s own daughters feel that their family is their captor and their tradition is their cage, the community does not resist. It slowly hollows. The men are dismissed as bigots. The institutions are abandoned as oppressive. The women carry the genetic and cultural continuity of the community, and if they are successfully turned against it, the community fades not through conflict but through attrition.

This is not a new strategy. It is as old as cultural warfare itself. What is remarkable about the Dravidawood version is how consistently and patiently it has been executed: not through any single mastermind but through an ideological ecosystem that has reproduced the same template across generations of filmmakers, writers, and lyricists who share a worldview and know, intuitively, what kind of story serves it.

This is not just about TamBrahm women. Learn to read between the lines and know the pattern to educate your friends and family. If you are a woman seeking liberation, please understand if you are making your own decisions independently, or if you are being influenced by an environment that is motivated to “come for you”. Be wise, listen to all voices - both regressive and progressive and decide if you are taking your shots or letting your life become someone else’s ideological project. Your choice.

Unlike other ideology-heavy films, Bad Girl is a light-hearted film: It does not argue about gods or governments. It argues about a single Brahmin girl’s life choices, desires, freedom and family. In some ways, this is more insidious and hence requires a proper decoding. Let’s dive in.

Meet Ramya, the Bad Girl

The director Varsha Bharath had said she made Bad Girl to push back against the pressure on Tamil women to be pure, chaste, devoted, “godly” even. That pressure is real. Women in Tamil cinema have historically been flattened into archetypes: the self-sacrificing mother, the devoted wife (Jillunu oru Kaadhal), the fallen woman who must be redeemed (Maharaja) or punished (Padayappa, Mannan etc). These are typical male-centric films that portray women in a specific way to eventually make the men appear good. So when “Bad Girl” wants to tell the story of a flawed woman, from a female POV, it does make us sit up and watch.

Even in the opening scenes, Ramya, the titular “Bad Girl” is scolded by her “PSBB-ish” school teacher that she has failed in MPC subjects “like a boy”. We have moved on from the era were women fought for the freedom to study in school like men. Now its about women fighting for the freedom to fail in school like men.

The film goes on to chronicle her story spanning roughly sixteen years, from Class 9 to her early thirties. And her defining trait/flaw is that she thinks of having a “boyfriend” as a proxy for winning in life. Or rather, those without BFs appear like uncool losers in her eyes.

Which is why, as early as Class 9 (age 14), she desperately gets committed to a guy Sidhu who wasn’t even originally interested in her. She broke up with him after she overheard him calling her an “item”. Breaking up with this bad boy was good for her self-respect. Does Ramya learn from this though? .

Cut to Class 11. A “bad boy” named Nalan Thanigachalam who was expelled from his previous school for doing pot, joins this “PSBB-ish” school. Despite warning from other girls, Ramya falls for Nalan’s veins, and gets into a secret relationship with him. This is now a pattern - does Ramya have a thing for “bad boys”?

In a school excursion to Ooty, the duo steal private time together and Ramya wonders: how can something that feels this good be called bad by society? This is the film's central philosophical question.

The film never answers this question honestly, but I will. Wait for it.

Btw, Ramya’s mom Sundari is also a teacher in the same school. After a couple rat them out, Ramya-Nalan are grounded in their respective homes with no cell phones. Ramya is determined to elope with Nalan, and even waits opposite his house one night with packed bags. But the selfish dude doesn’t show up, breaking Ramya’s heat. Second betrayal. Does Ramya learn from this though?

Cut to a “Queen Mary-ish” college, Ramya is practically “living together“ in men’s hostel (despite being a Chennai resident) with her boyfriend Arjun Konda. He is called the most toxic man on campus by other women, but Ramya thinks she is lucky to be the girlfriend of the most “desirable” man on campus. She buys him thoughtful gifts, but he just trashes them. To Ramya, Arjun’s her world, but to him, she's just a side-chick, meant to be used. Weird that every sane person on campus realizes this, except for Ramya who's starstruck with Arjun. She realizes he has been cheating on her, so gets drunk, and “beats him up” on his graduation day in front of his family and friends, like a female Arjun Reddy. Why should boys have all the toxicity fun, right? Does Ramya learn from this though?

Cut to Ramya at 32 now. She works at some interior design company for bare minimum pay, and spends all her money on cigars and rent and a cat, which is in her recently broken up BF Irfan’s house. They lived together but “adulting” issues like leaving toilet seat on, grooming etc. ensured incompatibility and Ramya is now on the lookout for a new house. She is a proper single crazy cat lady now.

The film does not judge her at all. But that’s the problem isn’t it? It should have judged her.

What’s wrong with Ramya?

Bad Girl is a film about a narcissist. Even her friends call it out. Her self-centered nature even when talking to her helpful pregnant friend is pukeworthy. Even critics sympathetic to the film acknowledge its portrait of a deeply self-involved woman.

But every time consequences loom, the film redirects blame outward.

• Her mother disciplines her after the school incident but she is portrayed as the villain of that chapter. Ramya threatens her mom (who had been nothing but kind and thoughtful to her) to off herself.

  

• Her grandmother is a conservative Iyengar paati caricature whose toxicity is discussed even after her death. At her grandmother’s funeral, Ramya has no real story to contribute: so she appropriates her mother’s experience of hardship and presents it as her own, as a bid for attention in a room full of relatives. The film shows us this and diagnoses it correctly: Ramya is a validation hawk who cannot tolerate silence, who must fill every emotional vacuum with herself

• Her PSBB-ish school, Dronacharya Gurukulam, has “Sri Ramajayam” written on its boards - the camera lingers on this, so you understand what kind of institution she is escaping. Ramya’s dad watches a “Arnab Goswami”-ish show which Ramya finds hateful. And finally, Ramya’s Brahminical area is full of “clowns” wearing Hindu religious symbols who participate in the clapping and beating utensils gesture of thanks to Covid fighters. Leftists are all for such gestures - watermelon in names, taking the knee for BLM etc. but yes, this gesture has to be mocked to show what poor Ramya has to deal with (SRK also did it from his bungalow).

• She accuses Arjun of cheating with her, but its not like Ramya is a saint. She actually hooked up with Arjun at the wedding of her then BF Adi’s sister. The “relationship” blossomed in an act of mutual cheating by this toxic-narcissist couple. But the blame is assigned on Arjun alone as a cheater.

• We feel bad for Ramya's parents who visit her hostel after hearing she's hospitalized due to self inflicted post-breakup dehydration. They notice the beer bottles in the room, but utter nothing. Her mom had to arrange a relative to take care of her ailing MIL, so as to visit her. But all Ramya cares about is herself, and how details about her hospitalization could be shared with some relative without her "consent".

• Ramya almost makes out with her first proper bf Nalan, who is now married and has a child. Their past recollection scenes happen as Nalan’s infant sleeps on the bed between them!

The film is honest enough to diagnose her but is dishonest about the causes of her narcissm. Everyone who tries to hold this bad girl accountable is made to appear the villain. Every institution that shaped her: family, school, faith is painted as the oppressor.

The Two Questions the Film Never Asks

If Bad Girl were truly a grown-up film about a flawed young woman, it would eventually arrive at two questions:

1. At what point does a recurring pattern of choices stop being “society’s fault” and start being yours?

2. What is freedom, if it never demands responsibility?

Ramya at thirty-two is not a liberated woman. She is a woman who has:

• Confused the absence of structure with the presence of freedom

• Paid for that confusion with the hurt of her family and friends

A truly radical ending would have looked like this:

• Ramya tells her mother: “I am sorry.”

• Not “I was wrong to desire”, but “I hurt you; I lied to you; I chose badly and blamed you; I see it now.”

Instead, we get a soft landing: an “I love you” without an “I’m sorry”. Even this, we’re told, felt “too commercial” or “too cringe” for the director Varsha, and had to loop it in only as a compromise. One can only imagine how uber-woke the original Varsha’s script might have been.

What Dravidam is this?

From the opening frame, the community target is unambiguous. Dronacharya Gurukulam. Sri Ramajayam on every board. A conservative Iyengar grandmother. An orthodox Brahmin family that hates ICM (As if other families are welcoming of ICM). From the word go, the film tries to drill these thoughts into the viewer’s heads:

Your family is your cage. Your school is your prison. Your tradition is an iron chain you must break free from. Your community is “oppressing” you.

It is worth understanding the ideological lineage here. EVR, whose name appears on a wall (as Ee Ve Ra) at the exact moment Ramya "breaks free," held a particular view of women's liberation: that the institution of marriage was a patriarchal tool to enslave women, that fidelity (Karpu) was an Aryan import used to control Tamil women, and that women should not bear children as it would give them true freedom. “Enjoyment without responsibility” was EVR’s clarion call. The fact that EVR had a traditional housewife in Nagammai, and a 2nd wife Maniyammai who never remarried after his demise, goes on to show how leaders live wildly different lives than the ones they profess for their followers. EVR himself admitted that he “lost a slave” and “implemented nothing he preached” when his first wife passed away.

This is the weaponization of “liberation” by the Dravidian thinktank. Bad Girl did not appear in a vacuum. Varsha, also a TamBrahm, spent nearly a decade as Vetrimaaran’s assistant director, learning the craft under one of Tamil cinema’s most ideologically committed filmmakers. Vetri was also the mentor for a similar themed award winning film “Seeing Red”.

Across these films, the template is recognisable:

Take the Tamil Brahmin woman. Show her community’s men, family and institutions as her captors. Offer the Dravidian worldview as the door out of this cage.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a long-term cultural project.

Its strategy is wise: don’t attack the community from the outside; reshape how its own young women see their inheritance from the inside. Ideological change runs faster when the daughter feels she must escape her mother to become herself. And with Brahmin women slowly taken out of the fold, the community fades into oblivion, slowly but surely.

The Family Is Not the Enemy

You will find the liberal types write about “born families” and “found families” to distinguish between a bad vs good family. It is common in leftist circles to bond over sharing stories of family trauma and regressive parents. Even in “Bad Girl” climax, Ramya lives alone with her cat, having shed her birth family's expectations, as a kind of hard-won sanctuary and as a “happy ending”.

Let us say this plainly, because the film will not: the family is not a conspiracy against women. It is the oldest and most durable institution of human civilisation, and it has survived because it serves needs that no substitute has yet successfully replaced: for children, for the elderly, for the adults within it who need both roots and a reason to grow beyond themselves. Cats do not require you to grow. But human babies do. It means you need a stable household to raise a baby. Cats are the perfect companions for someone who has not yet developed the capacity for the kind of love that costs something.

Marriage as an institution tamed the male and provided protection for the female in a fundamental way. Women who are uprooted from their families, values, roots become vulnerable and are easier to exploit for the predators. Plenty of credible scientists have spoken to this.

Yes, parents will be uncool conservatives who'd boringly quote flight prices and not say "Inga Irukku da America" like how a cool parent's supposed to be. But a parent would never lead their kids down the vicious path. Society would because it doesn't care about your wellbeing, it only cares about what it can get from you in the name of "progress". You're naive if you live for society's approval, instead of your parents or your own value systems. Fret not, society intends to show you how little it cares about you, very soon.

A friendly a̶d̶v̶i̶c̶e̶ chat from a ‘Boomer’

I want to speak directly here, not as a critic but as someone who has been through that fire. 16 to 24 is the most precarious phase of any person’s life. You are not quite an adult but you are convinced you are. Your parents feel like villains, your teachers feel like obstacles, your faith feels like a cage. Everyone your age seems to be doing things you’re not doing, and the FOMO is real and painful. That is not weakness. That is biology. What most people don’t tell you is that you are, in those years, almost entirely at the mercy of your hormone, and the rebellion you feel is more often than not not your deepest self speaking. It is a beta version of you, still in testing, still with bugs to fix. And everybody likes an alpha, not a beta!

After 25, an entire world outside of school/college circle opens up. The real world couldn't care less about your popularity or coolness quotient or your Instagram likes. The rules change in a jiffy. That close friend from college becomes a pixel on your feed. That introverted loser at the library who used to skip parties suddenly becomes the most sought-after groom/bride on matrimony sites. Stable and boring day jobs become the new cool thing. The world, my friend, changes its rules faster than you change partners in college.

You'll change too. Suddenly, Stack Overflow will seem more interesting than Snapchat. You’ll spend more time refreshing NIFTY than refreshing Instagram. You’ll find your old Taylor Swift playlist slightly cringe, and start worshipping Ilaiyaraaja. You'll enjoy Thirukural more than Twilight. You'll realize that teenage love was just a fickle feeling and rediscover that true love is a verb, not noun. Sounds unbelievable now, I know. Don’t take my word, even EVR said so: “Love is a casual, cheap thing. Who can NOT fall in love after seeing one another? To be enslaved to love is not apt.”

The only thing I’d ask you to trust is in the infinite potential of your future self. Do not take your beta version personality so seriously. The person you’re becoming is far richer than the “bad” boy/girl you see in the mirror today. Put on the developer hat, as patch updates to your personality are coming up every year. Hang in there, my friend. Life after 25 is no easy ride, but its calmer, kinder, and infinitely wiser and trust me, that’s the kind of cool you’ll never outgrow. In the world of Bad Girl, the baddest of all bad words is responsibility.

Conclusion

It is Dravidawood’s choice to willingly tell the stories of how innocent Brahmin women trapped in traditional cages of family and marriage and patriarchy break free to find the EVR sanctuary where egalitarian humans live with enjoyment but without responsibility. Ofcourse, this is only a fantasy being sold. Ask the many EVR-ists who’ve whistleblown about the sexual exploitations in such circles.

The West has experimented with sexual liberation and realized that feelings are fickle and the meaning of life is not to be found on this hedonistic treadmill. They are trying to course correct with Eastern wisdom, but some of us would still like to go the hedonistic way. Whether you want to compete on rising up the virtue ladder or descending down the vice paatala staircase, you are free to choose. Pro-choice!

A film like Bad Girl asks a central question: “how can something that feels this good be called bad by society?” Because vices always feel good, and virtues always feel bad, in the short term. In the long run, there are costs to vices which will never be shown on cinema. Films like bad girl will only ever show you the cool liberation in the pursuit of vices. The cost is edited out. The editing is the ideology.

Say whatever you want to sound cool and hip and progressive in your public life, but have the wisdom to be uncool, boring and regressive in your private life and choose the path of virtue. It is your choice at the end of the day, just don’t let your life become someone’s social justice project.

Names, Names and Names: Pay Attention

Inspired by the 1987 film Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Anbe Sivam is also a road movie featuring two strangers with wildly different worldviews, forced to travel together. A capitalist Madhavan and a communist Kamal who are stuck in a cyclone hit Bhubaneshwar, must find unconventional ways to reach Chennai urgently - that’s the plot.

As always, the names (both first and last) of characters are carefully chosen.

• The Capitalist (Anbarasu): He insists on being called “A. Ars.” By dropping “Anbu” (Love) from his name, the film signals he cares more about western coolness than Tamil rootedness. Within minutes of his introduction, he is shown snitching on the communist to the police, hoarding a hotel room he was generously offered by the communist, hating queues. He judges people entirely by appearances. When the disabled and scarred communist tells his flashback love story, Anbarasu dismisses him with "every dog has its day, and they say love is blind". Who would root for such a petty heartless chap? The capitalist is designed to be unlikeable right from the word go.

  

• The Communist (Nallasivam): His name means “Good God.” Will elaborate on his character design in the next section.

• The Villain (Kandhasamy Padayaatchi): Nallasivam’s flashback shows he loved a rich girl named Balasaraswathi. And ofcourse, as per Tamil cinema rules, the girl’s father must be the default villain. Ironically, no other character in the film has a caste surname, except for him. You see, in Dravidawood, caste surnames are dropped except for who they wish to portray as villain characters. He is the greedy industrialist who uses his devotion to God as a shield for his cruelty toward workers.

• Comrades: At Kamal’s CITU office (maybe at Coimbatore?) are comrades: Mehrunissa, Pavunkunju, Venkatesh etc. At their CPI(M) union office, prominent images of Vladimir Lenin are displayed(worshipped?). Sidenote: Estimates of deaths during Vladimir Lenin's regime (1917–1924) range from 4 million to over 10 million through famine, civil war, and “Red Terror” campaign.

  

  The most carefully crafted character in Dravidawood

  If Nallasivam was merely designed as a street play revolutionary artist, the propaganda gets loud, and audience would view all his philosophy as manifesto. Nobody likes listening to lectures. Its important to make this chap worth rooting for. How does the film accomplish this? By using all the tricks in the screenwriting book.

  Consider the design:

  • He is physically disfigured in a near-fatal accident; half his face is scarred, his gait permanently altered.

  • He adopts the dog (Shaniyan rechristened as Sankaran) responsible for the accident – voluntarily choosing compassion instead of resentment.

  • He laughs at his own disability (Oru Kaalum illa, enna maadhriye), constantly defusing discomfort for others.

  • He has O-positive blood – the universal donor – an almost on-the-nose metaphor for a man whose body itself is built to give.

  None of this is casual. It is ideological craftsmanship turned into character design. The film needs you to like and trust the communist before he speaks a single line about labour or globalisation. So it constructs a person who looks like this:

  • More wronged than you

  • Kinder than you

  • Funnier and more emotionally intelligent than you

  Once that is in place, when he finally talks about globalisation, trade unions, capital, and labour, it does not feel like you are hearing a political stance. It feels like you are hearing the wisdom of someone who has paid a terrible price for his convictions. Disagreeing is no longer a simple matter of “I think differently”. It begins to feel like you are betraying decency itself.

  This is the great advantage of martyr-writing over revolutionary-writing. If Nallasivam had been written as a young, angry ideologue with half-digested theory, we would instinctively push back. Instead, he is gentle, wounded, funny. The film short-circuits your rational filters by making you love him first and only then letting him explain his worldview.

  What if the roles were reversed? Imagine a coming-of-age road film about an angry, self-righteous young communist - one who has never worked a day in his life, full of virtue signaling - who gradually matures after encountering a sensible, hardworking middle-class capitalist man who sacrificed for his family? That story is more realistic and believable. It is also a story Dravidawood will never tell, because the industry decides which ideology gets to be portrayed as wisdom and which gets to be portrayed as something to grow out of.

  The left cinema optimizes for the powerful pathos (emotions), not for logos (logic)

A series of accidents

If you analyze the script of the film, it is full of a series of improbable accidents that are conveniently designed to push the story forward where the writer wants you to go.

• Bala “accidentally” meets Nalla by stumbling onto a streetplay that mocks her dad.

• Artist Madan invites Nalla to Bala’s house, after his car “accidentally” splashes water on Nalla.

• Bala’s grandfather “accidentally” spills food on the table, which Nalla transforms into art, paving way for their love.

• The bus Nalla takes to elope with Bala gets into a literal accident, leaving him disabled for life

• A train that Anbarasu takes has to halt because another train got into an accident. And wow, there is the godly Sivam at the accident spot, who missed the train but reached there before Anbarasu.

• A critical 32 lakh cheque that Nalla has won as compensation for flood victims, is being treated with carelessness. He accidentally misplaces it with Anbarasu, not once, but multiple times.

• A 12 year old boy, the son of a Kerala hill lady, is a victim of the train accident. Why was he on a random Andhra train, and why was he without adult supervision?

In another film that did not connect with the audience, you might have paused to ask more logical questions about the illogicity of so many such convenient coincidences. But Anbe Sivam doesn’t have to meet your rational scrutiny, because you are already consumed by the emotions of these scenes. Why let logic get in the way of a good emotional story?

Anbe Sivam’s “secular humanism”

Communists don’t believe in God, they only believe in gods like Marx, Mao and Lenin. So technically, these humanity loving materialists should be “secular” in the truest sense, right? Wrong.

Anbe Sivam shows Kandhasamy Padayaatchi as not just a greedy capitalist, but also as a devout Shiva bhakt who claims to the world that he won’t even touch “water” on his Vrata day, but the next minute, in his private bar, throws a liquor party to his fellow industrialists, scheming to stop the labourer’s “Inquilab”

When Kandhasamy meets the severely injured Nalla with only a 20% chance of survival, he boasts to him that he prays every day to Shiva for 2 hours and Shiva has blessed him with such “boons” . The evil villain invokes Shiva’s name “Thenaadudaya Sivane Potri” everytime he does something bad. It is clear that the movie tries to portray Shiva as a vengeful God who gives boons to the evil capitalists and punishes the innocent and atheistic labor class.

Immediately contrasted with this is Sister Vanessa, the Roman Catholic nun who saves Nalla from a 20% survival chance, helps him rehabilitate in her church for months, and asks for nothing in return. She “miraculously” reappears at a train disaster in Andhra Pradesh, again serving the injured. Typically, it is RSS volunteers who are first responders to accident sites, but sure, lets let facts slide in this make-believe lovely world. Where the Hindu devotee brings contempt, the Christian brings love. The film makes the sign of the cross on Nalla’s forehead while the camera lingers on Jesus on the cross, and the background score quietly dissolves “Anbe Sivam” into something that sounds less like Shaivite scripture and more like a gospel hymn. At the railway station, Nalla tells Ars that he was a “messenger like Christ”. Has he converted? Nobody knows for sure.

You have moved on from a vengeful god to a loving God. And mind you, this is no accident. The film reinforces it, by showing an Uthaman who hails Sanskrit as “Devabhasha” as a train thief. His accomplice storing all stolen goods - I kid you not - is an old man “Pantulu” dressed like a Hindu sadhu.

And what is the film’s “humanistic” message? That love is “God”. If you can cry for strangers, if you can change your heart to not commit a crime and “confess” your sins (like Santhana Bharathi does at climax), you are cleansed of your sins, and you are God.

Every place Communism touched is full of anti-humanistic dastardly stories of Gulags, manmade famines, dictatorship, political murders and inhumane executions. If Lucifer chants Bible and you believe him to be good, it is on you. Naive fools deserve to be deceived, sorry.

The subtle chauvinism of Anbe Sivam that feminists missed

Let’s get to the core story of Anbe Sivam. Two men - Nallasivam and Kandhasamy are deciding the fate of a woman Bala, for their own reasons. If Kandhasamy lies to his daughter about Nalla’s death to manipulate her into marrying the groom of his choice, Bala has no agency. Even when Nallasivam decides to forego his love for the sake of salary increments of his comrades, he becomes the “bigger man”, but he also decides it is his choice to decide who should Bala marry. Bala has no agency here too. Basically, both the men roll the dice with Bala and manipulate her to get what they want. This is a man’s view of “justice”, where the emotions of Bala never in consideration. So much for “progressive” cinema eh?

This also raises more questions. Why does Bala believe her crooked dad when he says Nalla is dead? Does she not verify facts? She has friends in the CITU office to cross-check too. Why is she behaving like the standard Kollywood loosu ponnu? Not just her, even the smartypants Nalla, when he visits her home, believes Kandhasamy for his word that she is married and is pregnant. Safe to say that he has caught a “Jesus” complex - for wanting to sacrifice his self , without doing basic fact checks.

Not a single former comrade visits Nalla during his rehabilitation. The CITU activists are entirely absent after the accident. The film needs Nalla to feel like a “lonely forsaken bird” so that his cheerfulness in the face of abandonment reads as saintly. But it achieves this loneliness by making his comrades vanish without explanation. The ideology preaches solidarity. The screenplay quietly dispenses with it when it becomes inconvenient.

Love in the time of Anbe Sivam

Let’s also see how “love”, the core theme of the film is handled.

• Nallasivam falls in love with the evil industrialist’s daughter. Why exactly? Is it because she appreciates his art, helps him with money for his causes, or because she bails him out? Mehrunissa was willing to stay in the same prison cell as him, but Nalla only likes her, not love her. Is it because Bala is beautiful and Mehrunissa is just “pretty” as said in the film? We can only guess

• The love triangle at the CITU office compounds this. Mehrunissa loves Nalla, who doesn’t love her back. Venkatesh and Pavunkunju both love Mehrunissa, who doesn’t love them back. When Nalla’s feelings for Bala become clear, Mehrunissa drifts back to Venkatesh as a backup. The film seems barely aware of how transactional this looks, or how little it resembles the selfless comradeship it otherwise celebrates.

• Balasaraswathi falls in love with a “principled” man like Nalla, but is dumb enough to accept her evil dad’s version and eventually falls in love with a self-centered, petty, no principled capitalist in Anbarasu that her evil dad picked out for her? Why is there no clarity about love for any of these characters?

• At one point, Nalla invokes Marx to justify the pursuit of love “Even Marx fell in love,” he says, humanising the ideology by humanising its founder.

  Marx was the son of a successful lawyer, educated at elite universities, married to an aristocrat whose father was a baron, and funded almost entirely by Engels who was the son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer. His cousins went on to found the Philips Electronics empire. Marx also impregnated his house maid, fathered an illegitimate son, and allowed Engels to claim paternity to protect his own reputation. The prophet of the working class lived on inherited wealth and handled his most intimate moral failure by letting a friend bear it.

  What a great beacon of love, these communists look upto!

The subtext that only the sharp ones get

Think about this. Nallasivam openly accepts that Soviet Union has broken down, but says Communism still exists as a feeling. What feelings? You can understand it only if you get the subtext of what the film does not openly state.

Kandhasamy was given a surname “Padayatchi” - a landowning community, to pit him against a no surname Nallasivam, presumably from the marginalized community. And so the film pivots from class struggle to caste struggle. This should also explain why Kandhasamy is hell bent in ensuring his daughter does not marry Nalla. This should also explain the nun reaching out to Nalla at his moment of crisis. Its not just capitalism vs communism anymore.

This is what makes Anbe Sivam a more historically significant film than it first appears. It is not just a snapshot of Tamil left politics in 2003. It is a map of where that politics was heading: away from the factory floor and toward the identity coalition that now defines the Dravidian political project.

The Final Fraud - distorting Thirumoolar’s verse

"Anbe Sivam" title is drawn from the Shaivite scripture Thirumantiram. The film borrows the beauty of that tradition to give its conclusion emotional resonance, then empties it of Shaivite content and refills it with Marxist humanism.

But here is the contradiction the film never confronts:

Tirumoolar's original line "அன்பும் சிவமும் இரண்டென்பர் அறிகிலார்" — means that love and Shiva are not two things but one, indistinguishable. God is love, and love is God, in the same breath.

The film's famous song rewrites this as "To the believers, Shiva is love. But to the atheistic good people, love is Shiva". This exact juxtaposition of Marxist imagery over Shiva symbolism is what Nallasivam painted on the wall. This one image is representative of what the entire film tried to do. You gotta give it to leftists for their creative expression of complex thoughts in a single artistic image

Imagine a container of pure unadulterated ghee. Now imagine if a cheapo opens the box, and refills it with his own cheap Dalda, and then seals it and sells off in the market for the same price as that of unadulterated ghee. Would you accept such a practice? That is what Anbe Sivam with Thirumoolar’s Thirumantiram verse. Any Shaivite with self-respect will not accept this Anbe Sivam dalda to be the real unadulterated அன்பும் சிவமும் இரண்டென்பர் அறிகிலார் of Thirumoolar. But self-respect is a bit of a scarce product these days, isn’t it?

Key Takeaways

1. Anbe Sivam is the gold standard of left-humanist Tamil cinema because it fuses ideology with emotions, music, acting finesse and craft, not loud slogans.

2. The film pre-engineers audience sympathies using names, character design, coincidence, and religious imagery to make Marxist humanism feel like common sense rather than a position.

3. It borrows the authority of Shaivite scripture, Christian symbolism, and Marxist myth, while selectively rewriting each to serve a particular worldview.

4. The film has plenty of logical errors and male chauvinism, but its strong emotional content has the power to override every rational thought.

5. For anyone wanting to tell alternative stories about Tamil identity, Dharma, or ethical capitalism, the lesson is clear: you must match Anbe Sivam in warmth, humour, and emotional depth; you must out-feel it, not out-argue it.

But appearances can be deceitful in Dravidawood. Real causes are the trojan horse with which Dravidawood delivers its ideological soldiers:

• The True Interest: The film is primarily a manifesto for a specific brand of identity politics.

• The “Dravidawood” template: Kaala exemplies how modern Tamil cinema should “redevelop” its “morality”- specifically, which symbols are holy/unholy and which communities are default villains.

Let’s dive deep.

Dravidawood’s template of Good and Evil

In Ranjith’s world, a character’s name isn't just a label; it’s a moral verdict delivered before they speak a single word. These are meticulously chosen for ideological reasons.

The villains

Perumalsami: the betraying slum dweller. Pankaj Patel: the brutal police enforcer. Vishnu Pai: the greedy politician. Haridev Abhyankar: the megalomaniacal primary antagonist. Carefully chosen first and last names.

The heroes

Kaala. Zareena. Lenin (Kaala’s youngest son), explicitly hailed as a revolutionary by the superstar Kaala himself. Sidenote: Estimates of deaths during Vladimir Lenin's regime (1917–1924) range from 4 million to over 10 million through famine, civil war, and “Red Terror” campaign.

Dravidawood’s political map

Ranjith doesn’t stop at names. He constructs an entire political geography around his ideological commitments.

The antagonist’s party is the Navbharat National Party (a proxy for the BJP) that has won all of Maharashtra except Dharavi. Dharavi is their “final frontier”. Haridev Abhyankar addresses his followers through a programme called “Dil Ki Awaaz,” a proxy for “Mann Ki Baat.” Right from his introduction, Hari is framed as a thinly veiled Modi (or Thackeray) surrogate, a Hindu nationalist who promotes cleanliness and digital connectivity, presented as villainous without ambiguity or nuance from frame one.

The builder company planning to acquire the slum dwellers’ land is named “Manu Realty.” Their redevelopment plan involves renaming Dharavi as “Dandakaranya Nagar,” a reference drawn from the Ramayana’s forest. Both choices deploy Hindu tradition as a marker of oppression. This is deliberate framing, not incidental detail.

The opposition, the righteous side: is the Oppressed People Republic Party. Their flag is the Indian tricolor with the saffron replaced by blue. Replacing saffron with blue is a political statement. The film is telling you which India it endorses, and it is not the one that includes that colour.

There is also a pointed irony in the film’s portrayal of Maharashtrians as an oppressive native community hostile to Tamil migrants in Mumbai. In reality, Mumbai has largely been welcoming to South Indians, including Tamils, barring some early Shiv Sena-era agitation that has since largely receded. More tellingly, the legislator representing Sion-Koliwada (the constituency that borders Dharavi) is himself a native of Pudukottai, Tamil Nadu. The oppression narrative the film leans on is considerably more complicated than Ranjith allows. In contrast, the largely welcoming state of Tamilnadu is now poisoned by vested interests who are hostile to North Indian laborers seeking a livelihood in TN, resulting in namecalling, dehumanizing and even public hacking. Politicians (you know who) openly denigrate them as Vadakkans, Pani Puri sellers, breeders like pigs etc. in their public speeches.

What is sacred and sacrilege in Dravidawood

Kaala’s home is filled with Buddha idols. He meets his aides at Bhagavan Gautam Buddha Vihar. He offers dua at the local mosque. The film establishes him firmly as a man of spiritual range: open, inclusive, respectful of traditions beyond his own. Ranjith even seeds visual Buddha Purnima eggs throughout: Ambedkar’s portrait, Buddha’s image deliberately contrasted with a statue of Ram in an upper-caste household, the colour blue running through every frame of Kaala’s world: his wardrobe is only black or blue.

The villain’s spiritual life is rendered very differently. Hari Abhyankar is a devotee of Ram and Krishna. His home has the idol, the atmosphere of devotion, the rituals and in this same space, he conducts himself as a feudal patriarch: some guests stand, others sit on the floor, and everyone must touch his feet before leaving. He judges single mothers. He controls through hierarchy. The devotion and the domination share the same frame, deliberately. In one particularly telling scene, Hari refuses to touch the water in Kaala’s home: the untouchability instinct, externalised, made visual.

Ranjith also takes aim at the practice of charan sparsh (touching the feet of elders) as a marker of Hari’s authoritarian social order. But charan sparsh is not a Hindu practice in the narrow, sectarian sense Ranjith implies. It is a gesture of reverence found across traditions. In Theravadin Buddhism (practiced in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Myanmar) prostration before one’s teacher, accompanied by the Pali invocation “Okāsa ahaṃ bhante vandāmi,” is a foundational act of receiving instruction. If Ranjith considers prostration inherently degrading, is he also making that argument about Theravadin Buddhism?

One more detail the film takes care to establish: Kaala’s wife openly states she would feed beef to Rajini, while looking down upon his son for being vegetarian. Meanwhile, halal dietary practice is treated with quiet respect. The hierarchy of whose food customs deserve dignity is quietly but clearly drawn.

Ravana Kanging

Ranjith’s most ambitious move is to deliberately invert the Ramayana and glorify Ravana by identifying his hero with him. A copy of Raavana Kaaviyam, the Tamil literary work that rehabilitates Ravana as a tragic hero, sits on his desk. He is addressed as the leader of the Asura clan. The film’s hammer-and-sickle imagery appears in the animation flashback, mapping Marxist symbology onto this mythological framework without apology.

The climax brings it all together. It is intercut (inspired by the baptism sequence in The Godfather) with a Ramayana discourse at Hari Abhyankar’s home, while his men massacre the slum dwellers of Dharavi. Each death is framed as one of Ravana’s heads falling, only to be replaced by another rising.

The problem is that Ranjith is so in love with what he wants to say that he stops caring about how he says it. The Hindu epic is conscripted wholesale into a political argument: Ram reduced to a symbol for a political party, Ravana elevated as the symbol of electoral resistance, without the intellectual rigour that such an inversion demands.

The death of a conventional film villain is usually intercut with the slaying of a cinematic demon. But Ranjith attempts something more interesting here: he intercuts violence with the immersion of Ganpati, using a god's departure rather than a demon's defeat as his counterpoint.

EVR kanging

Among the details of Ranjith's Dharavi set is a EVR chowk, complete with statue. Ranjith's reverence for EVR alongside Ambedkar is standard in Dravidian political culture. Anyone who has read EVR’s works know his stance with regards to the downtrodden, along with EVR’s view of Ambedkar questioning his integrity, years after his passing. Who EVR supported post the Kilvenmani massacre that killed Dalit farmers is also well known. Ranjith’s political education, the film suggests, has been more devoted to the iconography of these figures than to the full complexity of their histories. He has built a secular shrine for EVR-Ambedkar-Buddha-Ravana-Lenin in this film. Shrines don’t require you to read the difficult chapters.

The Romance of Squalor

Strip away the ideology and what remains is a film with a real problem at its core: it has nothing constructive to say about Dharavi.

• The Complexity Ignored: Dharavi has a population density of 2.7 lakh per sq km and houses 20,000+ businesses. Redevelopment is a logistical and human nightmare that requires nuanced solutions.

• The Wrong Villain: The film blames the idea of development, but the real enemy is corruption in housing allotment. Ironically, the “digitization” the film mocks is one of the few tools that could actually stop middlemen from stealing units meant for the poor. Mumbai has seen older housing societies (four-story buildings with 250 sq ft apartments) successfully redeveloped into high-rises where each original resident received two larger apartments in return, with landscaped gardens and parking. Comparable transformations have happened in cities like Hong Kong.

• Romanticizing Resistance: By framing “resistance” as the only goal, the film offers no vision for a better future, effectively romanticizing squalor rather than solving for dignity. If Dharavi is solved, that would render “Inquilab” irrelevant isn’t it? Easy to guess whose interests the film is protecting.

  The Closing Image

  The film ends with a powerful closing image: a blue flag with the Buddhist Dharmachakra hoisted on top of a asbestos hut, even as the Indian tricolor is relegated to the sidelines, the flag flying above the tall skyscrapers in the back.

  

  It is a moment of total honesty: the film isn’t about land rights or anti-displacement: it’s about the displacement of national identity by a specific ideological one. Everything the film tried boils down to this final image.

  The film flopped. Ranjith blamed scheming casteists. The more honest explanation is simpler: a film buckled under the weight of its own agenda did not meet general audience’s normal screenviewing expectations.

  Kaala is a compromised film because its director was more interested in making a manifesto than a movie. That he used Dharavi and Superstar as his Trojan horse to carry his ideology has left an indelible Kaala mark on Rajinikanth, the nationalist.

• Sources:

  1. https://swarajyamag.com/culture/kaala-pa-ranjith-has-got-dharavi-and-its-redevelopment-wrong

  2. Image Credits: Amazon Prime
     No copyright infringement intended as images are used for fair use only - criticism or review

But then came the wave of non-left films par excellence: films like Baahubali,RRR, Kantara, Amaran, Chaava. These films were hard to mock. The filmmaking was too good, the performances too committed, the emotional resonance too real. You couldn't laugh at them. You had to argue against them. And arguing against them meant engaging with what they were actually saying. But nobody, neither the left nor the Dharmics were prepared for the bulldozer that is Dhurandhar.

Dhurandhar: The glitch in the leftist matrix

You see, Bollywood was this place where secular films got made, where Pakistan and India were bhai-bhais, with both countries suffering only from the nastiness and pettiness of each country’s power-hungry politicians. Our spy thrillers were filled with male RAW agent falling in love with a female ISI agent, and then dancing in saffron bikinis and green tshirts at a party. They expected "Urduwood" to keep churning out these same Aman ki Tamasha tropes.

And yet here it was: a mainstream Hindi film, featuring Ranveer Singh (of all people) with superhit music, spirited performances, and superlative command over the craft, saying things that crores of Indians have thought but rarely seen said on screen with this level of confidence.

A Paki scholar once said “If the Turks cease to be Muslims, they are still Turks. If the Iranians cease to be Muslim, they are still Persians. But if we cease to be Muslims, what are we? We are Indians” And nothing could be more insulting to them.

“Not India” is how Pakis can build an unique identity around. And no film except for Dhurandhar dared to show this with cinematic brilliance: the common Pakistani identity being constituted around anti-Indian hostility.

Crores of Indian saw for the first time how ISI wanted to bleed India by a thousand cuts. How our own government, in the aftermath of terror attacks, finds ways to point fingers at the victims. How the Indian intelligentsia has spent decades treating its own culture as suspect, its own civilisation's right to peaceful existence as somehow negotiable. These are not fringe ideas on the Indian right. But they had never quite been given this kind of cinematic form, in this kind of production, for these many audience.

This is why the reaction from the left was not the cheerful mockery they deploy against weaker films. It was the language of cancellation: "hate-filled," "biased," "propaganda," "saffronisation." The vocabulary of delegitimisation. Which is revealing, because these are the same people who champion Haider, Jai Bhim, Viduthalai, Jodha Akbar: films that are, on any honest reading, as agenda-driven, as emotionally manipulative, and as selectively told as anything they criticise. The double standard isn't incidental. It's the point.

Ideologues First, Filmmakers Next

Think about these three samples:

• Saif Ali Khan acts as a villain in Tanhaji, and after its release, he goes to an Anupama Chopra interview and says it has “questionable politics” and hopes such films don't get made! He goes on to add that "There was no concept of India till the British arrived", a statement he confidently makes, as a student of history.

• AR Rahman composes music for Chaava, that shows the brutality of Aurangzeb in full force, and also the brave Maratha pushback and concept of Swarajya. An year later, he goes to a BBC interviewer and calls the same film as "divisive" ,"cashed in on divisiveness"

• Kabir Khan, the director of Aman ki Tamasha ‘Ek Thaa Tiger’ fame said: "I can forgive bad acting and sloppy scripts, but I can’t forgive bad politics."

What does this tell about them? It is the fact that they are ideologues first, and filmmakers/technicians/performers next. They care less about their livelihoods on cinema and more about spreading ideas through cinema, that they think are politically correct. Only when the market refuses to fund such ideas, they reluctantly take up other work, and ensure their reluctance is stated on record, and their allegiance to their idea of political correctness is captured for eternity.

Cinema as Inception

Why do they do this? It is because, leftists, to their credit, understand that Cinema is the ultimate tool of mass hypnotism. As Cobb says so eloquently in Inception (2010), the most resilient parasite is an idea. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate. Leftists know the power of cinema in planting political ideas inside people's heads. Vetrimaaran understands this, and which is why he calls Dhurandhar as propaganda that is capable enough to influence public memory.

The Strategic Error: Dharmics Ceding the Cinema Space

There is a segment of the Dharmic Right that looks down on cinema. They call it "an appeal to base emotions," "waste of time”, “filled with promiscuous koothadis”. This is the same error in judgement kingmaker Kamaraj also made. He dismissed DMK that was full of playwrights, dialogue writers and screenwriters, and was playing “ideological politics” with Communists. But DMK usurped INC in Tamilnadu, and Congress has been reduced to a trivial player in the state ever since.

Cinema is politics by other means. The most effective means, even. Because unlike a policy argument, a film doesn't feel like an argument. It feels like an experience. It bypasses the rational defences. It plants things that don't feel like ideas but like memories, like felt truths. This is why Comradewood and Dravidawood built what they built.

Politics is “dirty” too, but would you suggest we cede the Parliament? Politics gave us the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, the abrogation of Article 370, and the Waqf Amendment Act. But entertainment captures the mindspace that decides which way the politics flows. This has been widely known since the time of Goebells. And Vetrimaaran is following the Goebells strategy of “Accuse your enemy of what you are doing” to the T. Vetrimaaran knows he makes propaganda films, but he won’t admit it, but calls Dhurandhar propaganda because game recognizes game. The more minds Dhar influences, the less it leaves for Vetrimaaran to capture. Its a zero-sum game.

Ten years ago, nobody expected a Chaava or a Dhurandhar from Bollywood. The reform of Comradewood and Dravidawood seems equally impossible today. But Bollywood’s transformation from Urduwood somehow happened. It happened because people showed up, made things, found audiences, kept going. Not because of a Masterplan from the delightful duo at the centre, but because enough people decided not to cede the space.

To sustain this momentum, the Dharmic ecosystem needs to change its tactical approach:

1. Stop being Moral Judges: If an actor or technician aligns with Dharmic or National interests, amplify them. Don’t go digging into their personal lives to find reasons to “cancel” them. We don’t need saints; we need allies.

2. Embrace the Opportunists: In a numbers game, you need both the “committed” and the “opportunists.” If the wind is blowing toward Dharmic narratives, and people jump on the bandwagon for profit—let them. It still serves the larger goal of reclaiming the cultural commons.

3. Support the Craft: Don’t just support a film because it has the “right” message. Demand excellence. Encourage Dharmic writers, technicians, and showrunners to be the best in the business.

The era of being silent spectators to our own vilification is over. Cinema is the new Kurukshetra, and we are finally showing up to the fight with the right weapons.

Dhurandhar is not an endpoint. It is a proof of concept. The space exists. The audiences are there. The hunger is real. What Dhurandhar showed is that a well-made film arguing for civilisational self-respect can find an audience in modern India as big as any other. That is not a small thing.

வெற்றி நிச்சயம், இது வேத சத்தியம். (Victory is certain, this is the Vedic truth.) கொள்கை வெல்வதே நாம் கொண்ட லட்சியம். (Winning the war of ideals is our ultimate goal.) Apna Time Aayega. Don’t run away from the battlefield until then.

Beyond the Dravidian milking of Tamil sentiments right before 2026 TN assembly elections, it is worthwhile to seriously understand this movement to uncover what it was all about, and what it was not. Only a Tamil rooted in this land can truly see it for it is, beyond political lenses.

Origins: Not EVR or Rajaji, but MKG set the fire ablaze!

British India was: Multilingual, Multicultural and Multireligious. Trying to unify it was quite a task.

Gandhi believed that a newly independent India needed a single unifying instrument to replace the imperialist’s language of English, which he saw as alienating Indians from their own land and instilling a sense of inferiority.

His solution was Hindustani: an amalgam of Hindi and Urdu.

He believed Hindustani:

• Was non-English

• Unified Hindus and Muslims

• Was acceptable to a majority of Indians

Gandhi envisioned Hindustani (Hindi, for all practical purposes) as a Rashtra Bhasha and link language, not as a replacement for regional languages. When a welcome address delivered to him in Mayavaram in 1915 was read in English, Gandhi openly expressed dissatisfaction that it had not been delivered in Hindi.

Hindi’s role, as he articulated, was limited to enabling Indians speaking different languages to recognize their organic relationship with one another.

However, Gandhi also wrote in Young India that:

• Linguistic minorities should not expect the majority to learn their languages

• Non-Hindi speakers must learn Hindi for national integration

And Gandhi was not merely a Congress leader - he was Congress.

To fulfil Gandhi’s vision in Tamil Nadu, Rajaji brought EVR into the Congress and the duo collaborated on many of MKG’s pet projects - Khadi, Prohibition, Untouchability abolition and HINDI PROMOTION!

In 1922, EVR’s own building in Erode housed the first Hindi teacher training college in Madras Presidency. Tamil scholar Thiru. Vi. Ka. wrote that “Nayakkar (EVR) was the primary person to have imposed Hindi in Tamil Nadu.”

Politics, however, does not preserve friendships.

EVR broke away from Congress to join the Justice Party, while Rajaji went on to defeat it and become Premier of the Madras Presidency.

Phase 1: Compulsion and the First Revolt (1938–1940)

As premier of Madras Presidency, in 1938, Rajaji issued an order making Hindi mandatory for Classes 6–9 in all schools of Madras Presidency.

The Madras Presidency then included: Tamil Nadu, Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala

Rajaji’s reasoning was pragmatic, even well-intentioned: If Hindi became the official language after Independence, the South should be prepared.

However, “making Hindi mandatory” proved to be a fatal miscalculation.

The Protests

The order triggered the first phase of anti-Hindi agitations, led initially by Tamil scholars and activists. EVR joined later as the movement gathered momentum.

Key arguments made by Tamil scholars included:

• Multilingual societies like the USSR functioned without a single common language

• India did not need linguistic uniformity to thrive

A Dangerous Turn

Unfortunately, resolutions passed by the Justice Party Confederation in 1938 went beyond opposing Hindi. They included demands for a separate Dravida Nadu, free from what EVR framed as Aryan dominance.

This marked the emergence of EVR’s racial-secessionist worldview:

• Brahmins were classified as Aryans

• Non-Brahmins as Dravidians

• Dravida Nadu was a racial project to expel Brahmins and north Indian banias (merchants) while welcoming the Dalits, backwards and minorities from the north as their kin.

State Repression and Withdrawal

Rajaji remained unfazed by it all. As with prohibition, he believed that the usage of an iron hand was justified if the end goal was for the “greater good”. Protests intensified. Two protestors Thalamuthu and Natarajan died in prison.

Figures like Tagore and Jinnah condemned the usage of criminal prosecution on language protestors. Rajaji did not relent.

What finally stopped him was World War II.

When India was dragged into the war without consent, all provincial premiers - including Rajaji, resigned by October 1939. By 1940, the interim government withdrew compulsory Hindi from schools, due to pushback.

Phase 1 ended in victory for the anti-Hindi imposition protestors.

Phase 2: Constitution, Caution, and Compromise (1948–1950)

The second phase of the movement began in June 1948, when Congress CM Omandhoorar proposed a law allowing one among Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Kannada, Telugu, or Malayalam as a second language.

Opponents saw this as a backdoor entry for Hindi, given the lack of teachers for other languages. The newly renamed Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) with EVR at the helm, resolved that Hindi should not even be optional.

Constitutional Intervention

During Constituent Assembly debates, T.T. Krishnamachari warned that aggressive Hindi push would strengthen separatist forces like the DK and urged restraint.

The result was a compromise:

• Hindi was designated Official Language

• English retained as associate official language for 15 years

Madras Presidency once again withdrew Hindi mandates in schools.

Phase 2 also ended in success.

Meanwhile, in 1949, Annadurai split from the DK to form the DMK. Despite bitter exchanges between guru and shishya, Hindi remained a common enemy.

Phase 3: Symbols, Civil Disobedience, and Assurances (1952–1959)

In 1952, the Nehru government began introducing Hindi on railway station signboards.

This triggered the Defacing Hindi Campaign.

• Annadurai defaced the Hindi lettering at Erode Junction

• EVR did so at Trichy Junction

• Karunanidhi defaced Hindi signage at the Trichy post office

Nehru dismissed the campaign as: “Childish nonsense”, “Extreme immaturity”, “No greater folly” to which Annadurai responded calmly: “Let us forgive and forget (Nehru’s comments)”

The Long Phase

The agitation continued in various forms. In 1955, the Official Language Commission was set up to review the progressive replacement of English by Hindi—reigniting fears of imposition.

Finally, on 7 August 1959, Nehru assured in Parliament that:

• English would continue indefinitely

• Until non-Hindi-speaking people desired otherwise

The DMK withdrew agitation.

Three phases. Three victories.

Phase 4: Violence, Betrayal, and Settlement (1964–1967)

The final phase was the most violent. This is also the period where Parasakthi film is set. This is where the tables turned from 1938. With Nehru dead and the 1965 deadline approaching, Hindi was set to become the sole official language on the Republic Day of 1965, which DMK called as a black day!

Rajaji, the Hindi-imposer from 1938, had started supporting DMK in its anti-Hindi agitations by 1965. He famously remarked that the constitutional provision on Hindi should be ‘thrown into the sea'. He argued that the language war was between Hindi vs English, and not Hindi vs Tamil.

Rajaji wrote in his magazine Swarajya that such laws only transform the 3 crore patriotic non-Hindi speaking Indian citizens into separatists. He even inaugurated anti-Hindi imposition conference led by PT Rajan!

EVR was pro-Congress and anti-DMK now (more so after Rajaji supported DMK). HE said that teardrops DMK are using a dead snake (Hindi imposition) to come to power.
Imagine the prime face of anti-Hindi agit-prop EVR calling for protesting students to be actioned against, and even suggesting people to learn Hindi! This is a good moment to pause and introspect if the leaders you admire (be it EVR/Rajaji) truly embody “causes”, or are just playing their own selfish political games.

Unaware of power plays, in 1964, a passionate anti-Hindi protesting common man Chinnasamy’s self-immolation ignited widespread protests in TN:

• College Students revolted

• DMK supporting students were snitched to the police by Congress supporting students

• Police brutality was unleashed - lathi charge, tear gas and firing followed

• At least 25 people died across seven locations

At Kamaraj’s insistence, Shastri promised to slow the Hindi push.

The political outcome was decisive: DMK swept to power in 1967, becoming the first non-Congress party to win a state election with single majority.

The fourth phase is considered an ongoing one, with eternal vigilance against imposition.

What Was This Anti-Hindi movement Really About?

Takeaway 1: Linguistic Respect, Not Linguistic Supremacy

Tamils take pride in Tamil as an ancient classical language.
But resisting Hindi defaulting is about respect for diversity, not hostility.

MKG’s ideas on English may have made sense back then, but is no longer relevant. Retaining English as a link language is no longer colonial - it is pragmatic, at least institutionally, within the educated circles and formalized workforce.

North Indians defaulting to Hindi in a group setting is not okay, as it is disrespectful to the linguistic diversity of our glorious nation.

Takeaway 2: This Was Not Merely Anti-Imposition

This movement was not just anti-Hindi imposition.
It was often explicitly anti-Hindi, and at times anti-North Indian.

Examples abound:

• EVR calling Hindi a “cunning language”

• Bharathidasan calling it a harmful language

• Annadurai’s mockingly said Anna said “If we were to ask, ‘What grammar is there in Hindi? What is its literary flourish?’ after much effort, they would show us two epics - Tulsidas’s Ramayana and the All-India Railway Guide. They offer these two as the best literary works in their language.”

The hostility started by this movement continues to leave a bitter aftertaste in TN today in xenophobic slurs like “Vadakkan” (Tamil equivalent of Madrasi to denote a Northie), stereotyping (Pani Puri Sellers, Breeders like pigs), and even violence against migrants. The secessionist nature of this movement must not be forgotten.

Takeaway 3: Pro-Tamil ≠ Anti-Hindi

EVR himself urged people to oppose Hindi while learning English—not to protect Tamil, because he saw little worth protecting in Tamil anyways.

The antidote Poets like Namakkal Ramalingam Pillai argued the opposite:

“Oh what can other languages do to our Tamil? Our grammarians were magnanimous enough to accommodate words from all languages. Those who oppose Hindi know not of the glory of Tamilnadu”

The idea that one must oppose Hindi to be pro-Tamil is merely a Dravidian political compulsion, not some moral obligation based on truth.

Takeaway 4: English Benefited More Than Tamil

Ironically, the movement strengthened English more than Tamil. Even recently, in Class 10 TN board exams, 31,000 students have passed in English but failed in Tamil/mother tongue.

The average Tamil today takes pride (not shame) in not knowing to read or write in Tamil. Most Tamils cannot name a single Sangam Lit poet other than Thiruvalluvar. Most Tamils cannot write Tamil properly without spelling errors. தமிழ் இனி மெல்லச் சாகும், said an imaginary British police to Bharathi. Times are revealing he may perhaps be right.

Most CBSE/ICSE schools run by Dstock politicians teach Hindi. The rich have no problem in learning the most widely spoken language of India. The poor are denied access to Hindi in the name of “protecting” Tamil, while elites signal virtue with “Hindi Theriyadhu Poda” slogans. Elites who frown upon “Hindu khatre mein hai” narrative would happily buy into the “Tamil Hindi se khatre mein hai” narrative.

TLDR; Conclusion

Do not default to Hindi by default in a social setting.
Respect the linguistic diversity of this glorious nation.

We need unity, not uniformity, humanity not homogeneity.
Use English as a link language.
Learn as many languages as you wish.

Do not yield to political provocation.

Pro-Tamil need not mean Anti-Hindi.

Vaazhga Tamil. Jai Hind.

But, no filmmaker was touching this most cherished magnum opus, due to its sheer volume and plot density and the difficulty in adapting this novel to the film medium. Even Mani Ratnam was convinced only after seeing the Box Office success of Baahubali that managed to hold the attention for its plot over two parts and he decided to replicate the Baahubali model.

Writer Jeyamohan was roped in for the screenplay adaptation, as was Elango Kumaravel of Abiyum Naanum fame. With a decent budget, an amazing cast and crew, with ARR’s music, expectations were mounting sky high on the film adaptation.

The expectations of book readers

Now, right from Harry Potter to Lord of The Rings, readers of the novel have never been fully satisfied with the movie adaptation. Because the movie on the screen can never match up to the movie already on your mind, based on the book. So the criticisms came pouring in for PS film too - ever since the first look posters and trailers came out.

For instance, many had questioned that nowhere in the novel was “Semba” mentioned as Vandhiyathevan’s horse’s name. Infact, since he kept changing horses, he had no specific attachment to one particular horse. Also, one scene from the PS trailer that portrayed Karikalan, Arulmozhi and Vandhiyathevan together was criticized as the three characters never had a “combination” scene in the novel.

But are these criticisms fair? A film adaptation of a novel is NOT an exact scene-by-scene picturization of the source text. Expecting this will only lead to disappointment! The visual medium needs to have its own creative liberty, its own dramatic elements, to hold interest.

A novel is unlimited - every person imagines the scenes, the characters very differently. But the visual medium is limited. Everyone sees the same picture on the screen. The biggest barrier to enjoying the film on screen is the movie that is already playing on our minds!

It’d be unfair to criticize the film for some of the shortcomings of the medium - like subplot omissions, less screen time for beloved characters and minor plot changes for a better screenplay.

None of these changes would matter if the film adaptation did justice to the writer’s vision. Did Ponniyin Selvan movies do that?

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The movie’s vision and Kalki’s vision

Kalki himself states in the novel’s epilogue that his motive in writing the novel was to signify the greatness of Cholas and their immense contributions to Thamizhagam. His novel explains in great detail how Cholas built the huge Veeranam lake, and many magnificent temples, and how Arulmozhi, after he became king, took up the task of discovering and compiling Shaivite Thirumurais with Nambiyaandar Nambi.

Was there a hint of any of these in the film? Not even a single temple gopuram was prominently displayed in the film’s backdrop. There were passing references to some Vedic yagnas being conducted, and that’s about it.

Infact, Kalki finished the novel at its twist filled high point - to denote the real event of Arulmozhi giving away his crown to his uncle Madhurantaka Uttama Chola on the coronation day. It is hard to find a generous deed comparable to this one in the history of the world, in poetry or in epics. The crowning point of the story of Ponniyin Selvan is the great sacrifice made by Arulmozhi Varman. Everything in the story leads towards this great event and this is why the fifth part has been given the title, The Pinnacle of Sacrifice.

In the movie, this climactic moment should have had the same impact as Bahubali 2’s interval coronation scene. But the scene went on with no panache, no impact, as it was not written well to build up to this payoff.

Even when everybody wanted Arulmozhi to become the next king, why did Arulmozhi want to sacrifice the throne? This is never explained in the film. In the novel, he had an epiphany when he was at Thiruvarur Thyagaraja Swamy temple, hearing the stories of Lord Shiva.

The temple priests spoke of how Lord Shiva had taken the guise of a mendicant, Bhikshadanamoorthy, and begged for alms. They described the cosmic dance he performed at Thillai Ambalam; how Lord Shiva once worked as a labourer carrying sand to earn his food, how he had fooled around instead of working and was whipped by the Pandya king. All of Lord Shiva’s sacrifices had earned him the title “Thyaga Raja” meaning the epitome of sacrifice.

Arulmozhi was also introspecting on how Manu, his ancestral Chola ruler of Thiruvarur, had sacrificed his son in order to render justice to a cow. The idea that only sacrifice elevates the status of a man, starts to take root in his mind.

So, to reject the throne, and to respect the rights of his uncle, Arulmozhi had to resort to deception to handle the political climate in a diplomatic manner. He lied to everyone that he would accept the throne to ensure there’s no public outrage, and in the last minute, pulled a fast one on everyone, to make Madhurantakan (Sendhan Amudhan) the king.

Kalki had foreshadowed this brilliantly. Arulmozhi deceived both the public and the conspirators who planned to kill him, by making them believe that the elephant he was sitting on, had lost control, and he’ll eventually die. But just like his Suryavanshi ancestor Sri Ram left Ayodhya discreetly, Arulmozhi also escapes discreetly by controlling the elephant, and using this opportunity to reach Thanjavur faster.

Arunmozhi in the film though, is naive and lacks nuance. He decides to willfully stay at the Choodamani Vihaaram fully aware of the dangers which not only exposes him, but the Vihaaram and the general public to Aabathudhavis. He does all of this for a fight sequence and a heroic interval scene.

Kalki's characterization has nuance - although the public love the crown prince, they can be emotional and be an obstacle towards the king's goal. The king should know better than the public. Ram is both Sathyavaakyaha (truthful) and Drudavrathaha (committed to his mission). This steadfastness is essential for a king, for he goes beyond public opinion, in fact, he should shape it by example.

Why Maniratnam avoided this foreshadowing and character development remains a mystery. Perhaps, references to Chola’s ancestors Suryavanshi Ram, Manu Needhi Chozhan, realizations within Thyagaraja Swamy temple are all tropes that are unacceptable within Dravidian-thought infused Kollywood.

In summary, Kalki’s vision with Ponniyin Selvan novel was to establish the greatness of Cholas, particularly that of crown prince Arulmozhivarman. Maniratnam’s attempt with the Ponniyin Selvan films is half hearted and his vision was focused on showing the world how he still has a command over his craft, and how artistically he can stage showdown scenes with wonderful actors like Vikram and Aishwarya Rai. For now, we can be happy that the films got made, fulfilling the vision of Mani Ratnam.

PS: ‘Ponniyin Selvan Route Map’ written by Tamil Labs delightfully retells the entire story as Kalki envisioned it, with dialogues and descriptions, but in a much shorter book (two hours reading time). Consider this book as an earnest and short retelling of Ponniyin Selvan, plus as a reference manual for the locations mentioned in the novel.

Link: https://amzn.to/3JCxhNZ

Book Link

No mainstream history book or academic textbook will mention this event; Probably because it’d raise an uncomfortable debate that not many are ready to confront forthrightly. Thankfully though, our glorious temples have not just been preservers of our tradition, but also of our collective civilisational memory. 

This event has been recorded in Srirangam temple’s Koil Ozhugu – the temple’s authentic documentation of it’s own history. The data has also been corroborated by multiple inscriptions, notes by travelers like Ibn Batuta, and also by Guru Parampara tradition. This is the unraveling of ‘The Srirangam Files’, an event glossed over by secular historians but an event that remains fresh in the collective memory of the bereaved.

Go back 701 years to 1323 CE. It was the Panguni month, late March. Panguni month’s temple festivities had started, and devotees thronged to the Srirangam temple with devotion, in a celebratory mood. They were blissfully unaware of the fact that Ulugh Khan, the Sultan-to-be, who was camping 13km away at Kannanur Koppam (Samayapuram) had completely different plans.

Why was Ulugh Khan stationed at Kannanur Koppam at that time? Same reason as why Malik Khafur and Khusrau Khan had earlier visited Thamizhagam – to raid and plunder the wealth present in its magnificent temples. In addition to plunder, Ulugh Khan, son of the Delhi Sultan Ghyasuddin Tughlaq also wanted to subdue these Southern Kingdoms to be under the Sultanate’s ‘ever merciful’ watch. So, after winning over the Hoyasalas, the Sultan-to-be was camping at Kannanur, the second capital of Hoysalas. His next stop was – Mabar, also known as Madurai.

That’s when things took a wrong turn. As Ulugh Khan was getting ready to travel towards Madurai, he heard about the huge crowds gathering for the Panguni festivities at the Srirangam temple nearby.

‘If Srirangam temple is as big as the Madurai temple, is it not a low hanging fruit? Why travel 142km to Mabar tomorrow, when Rangam is just 13km from here’, Ulugh Khan was making mental calculations.

Meanwhile, seven days of Panguni festivities were done, and the temple authorities were gearing up for the 8^th day. Ofcourse, they heard about the Sultanate forces reaching Samayapuram. They were discussing if they must proceed with the next day’s event, in which the Azhagiya Manavala Perumal will be taken to the Varaha temple aka ‘Pandriazhvan Medu’. Given the proximity of the place to Samayapuram, some of them raised concerns. But the majority overlooked these objections and decided to proceed with the festivities. Why? Because they lacked Shatrubodh.

Historically, the region had witnessed plenty of battles between Tamil Hindu kings, and not one of them had let these battles affect the Srirangam temple or its temple festivals.

To put it in the modern “secular” parlance, the Hindu Tamil kings had kept the state affairs separate from the religious affairs. And the temple authorities, who assumed that the Delhi Sultanate forces would also be similarly honorable or “secular”, were in for a shocker. 

You see - it might have been a sacred temple festival for the devotees, but for the Sultan-to-be, it was an expedition - a chance not just to loot and ransack the temple’s wealth but also to strike fear at the hearts of idol worshipping Kafirs.

While devotees would happily recite Alwaar Pasurams on the Srirangam deity for self-realization, the Sultan-to-be would happily start an all-war proceeding to raid the Srirangam temple for wealth-realization.

While Srirangam maybe Bhooloka Vaikuntam – Heaven on Earth -  for devotees, the Sultan-to-Be had his eyes only on jannat in the afterlife. And he’d be getting there only by following what his holy book prescribes.

So that is what Ulugh Khan did. On the 8^th day of Panguni festivities, before raiding Madurai, he took a pit stop at Srirangam and ordered his well trained army to butcher the 12,000 civilian ‘idol worshippers’ who had gathered at the Varaha Swami temple. Let that number sink in – 12,000 is almost half the capacity at Old Trafford cricket stadium.

The devotees – that included women and children - did not even know why they were being killed. They weren’t yet exposed to an ideology that identified them not as ‘worthy individuals’ but as ‘worthless infidels’. Every other war strategy book on the planet would call it dishonorable and cowardly to kill unarmed civilians, but for this ideology.

Koil Ozhugu documents this bloody event as ‘Panniraayiravar Mudithiruththiya Pandriyazhvan Mettu Kalagam’,  "an invasion at Pandriyazhvan Medu that took 12,000 heads". It took weeks before all those bodies could be disposed. The river Kaveri turned red with the blood of devotees!

Ulugh Khan who would eventually be coronated as Mohammed Bin Thuqlaq and be called as ‘The Mad Sultan’ later, had shown his early signs of madness by unleashing hell upon Bhooloka Vaikuntam.

The bad news reached the main Archakar Srirangarajanatha Vaduladesikar. If these invaders can butcher even civilians, what would they do to our murthis, he wondered.  He immediately sealed the Moolasthanams of Lord Ranganathar and Ranganayaki Thayar with stone-walled screens. The Utsava Murti was to be saved by Pillai Lokacharya who had to secretly take the Murthi out through a dense jungle path.

Some versions state that the 12,000 civilians at the Kaveri river shore willingly gave themselves over to the invaders’ swords to delay the entry of Ulugh Khan’s forces into the temple premises, thus saving their murthis from mutilation, desecrecation and destruction. What a supreme sacrifice! It is upon this pedestal of pain that we continue to safeguard our traditions.

Not just the moolavars and the urchava murthis, but some precious manuscripts needed saving as well. Afterall, invaders burning libraries and manuscripts was not unheard of. Sri Vedanta Desikar saved the famous manuscript of 'Shruta Prakashika' by tying it into his Shikha and laid down among the dead bodies that night, pretending to be dead. By sunrise the next day, he managed to escape to  Mysore.

Meanwhile, the elderly Pillai Lokacharya was exhausted by the constant travel and gave away his dear life in the protection of his deity who was dearer to him than his life. Pillai Lokacharya attained Paramapatham at a place called Jothishkudi near Madurai Anaimalai. He had done his duty to Dharma, and his disciples took over the baton of responsibility from him. They took the Perumal, even more secretively, through Tirunelveli and Aralvazmozhi to Kerala. After some years, Perumal went to Melkotte in Karnataka and finally to Tirupathi.

After decades of laying low, the courageous fightback finally happened in 1371 thanks to Vijayanagar empire. Gopanna Raya, who was a general of Vijayanagar king Kumara Kampanna, heard about the happenings at Srirangam Temple and decided to bring back Azhagiya Manavala Perumal. He went to Tirupathi, took Perumal with him to Ginjee, performed poojas, and then took the swami to Srirangam. Gopanna installed the Vigraham in the temple and restored all the rituals and pooja. This event is inscribed in the Srirangam temple.

This is ‘The Srirangam Files’ , courtesy Ulugh Khan aka Mohammed Bin Thuqlaq.

Girish Karnad made a hero out of this Tuqhlaq in his 1964 play.

Cho Ramaswamy made a comedian out of this Tughlaq in his 1968 play.

But the intolerant tyrannical side of Tuqhlaq is yet to be shown in full force.

Hopefully, a Dharmic filmmaker in the future will depict not just the tyranny but how it was overcome by the brave warriors of Vijayanagara kingdom.

Until then, we must pass on the story ourselves, for nobody else is doing it. We must light a lamp every Panguni in memory of the 12,000 Dharmic souls. We must take the baton of responsibility of protecting Dharma on ourselves and keep passing it on across generations.

Vedanta Desikar, a first hand wittness to this event, writes in his Abeedhi Sthavam (#22): “Sri Ranganatha, these Turks who behave as if they are servants of Kali Purusha, increase the fear in the world. May you, armed with powerful weapons, destroy this fear”

May we also pray to Ranganatha to protect us from the dark forces! He will always lead us from darkness to light.

Key Takeaways:

1. Know what history is hidden from you, and why. What uncomfortable discussions would it spark, and whose interests are being protected, and why?

2. In a war, you can only be as moral as your enemy. No valiant war book prescribes killing of unarmed civilians, but if it’s done, your primary responsibility lies in defending yourself and your civilization, whatever it takes. Whatever Deception it takes. Remember Pillai Lokacharya and Sri Vedanta Desikar

3. Fightback against tyrants is a slow process and may take decades, even centuries. In the interim, keep sowing the seeds for the eventual rise of a Dharmic Vijayanagara Empire that can win against tyrants. Think in terms of decades, not years.

Sources:

1.       https://thecommunemag.com/the-srirangam-massacre-history-that-remained-hidden-over-the-centuries/ by TS Krishnan

2.       Thread by Veejay Sai

https://x.com/veejaysai/status/1504279287322464257

3.       “Srirangam  - Heaven on Earth” a lecture by Pradeep Chakravarthy

4.       ‘Singing the Body of God’ by Steven Paul Hopkins

5.       ஆண்டுகளில் அரங்கனும் அரங்கமும் / Aayiram Aandugalil Aranganum Arangamum by கோ. அரங்கராசன் / G. Rangarajan. ஆயிரம்

6. Picture Courtesy: https://x.com/Ethirajans/status/1284375995978416130

Ganapathi, fondly called Pillayaar (Respected son) in Tamil is traditionally invoked for auspicious beginnings. So let’s do that for our Tamil Labs’ newsletter as well.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

So why is Pillayaar such a beloved deity in Thamizhagam, with every city, town and village having temples of varying size and scale dedicated to him? Let alone a temple, our Ganapathi takes even a tree shade as his humble abode because he loves this Thamizhagam that much.

Let’s see Pillayaar’s top 3 contributions to this Tamil speaking land.

1. Every great civilization in the world has been a river valley civilization. Only when food and water requirements are met, human beings can start thinking about higher needs – like art, culture and self actualization. Wasn’t it our Pillayaar who took the form of a crow at Kodagu to topple Agastya’s Gamandala and redirected river Kaveri’s route to Thamizhagam? Our Tamil civilization is primarily around Kaveri, and we have Pillayaar to thank, for that.

2. Some of the biggest temples of Bharat are in Tamilnadu. And some of the biggest temples in TN are in Chozha Naadu, around Kaveri. Temples are a direct byproduct of civilizational glory.

   Of the 274 Shaivite Paadal Petra Sthalams, 190 (70%) are in Kaveri’s northern and southern shores.

   Of the 106 Divyadesams on Earth, 40 (38%) are in Kaveri shores.

   To top it all, the Ranganathar murthi, worshipped by Ikshvaku clan, and gifted by Sri Rama to Vibeeshana took firm root at Srirangam due to the playful and compassionate Vinayakar.

   Crucial to remember this Pillayaar strategy in the times where political parties happily give away what’s rightfully ours to Lanka.

3. The third and most important contribution of Pillayaar is his help in discovering the Shavite Thirumurais. This is a delightful tale that’s a healthy mix of history and tradition. Let’s take a detailed look of this story in this newsletter.

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Nambiyaandar Nambi and Polla Pillayar

Thirunaaraiyoor, a small village 20 km Southwest to Chidambaram houses a Paadal Petra Sthalam, Sri Soundareswarar Temple. The son is more famous in this temple than his father – and goes by the name Pollaa Pillayaar.

Some write it in Tamil as பொல்லாப் பிள்ளையார் which is incorrect and has a negative connotation. The proper spelling is பொள்ளாப் பிள்ளையார் meaning “unsculpted”. This is because this Pillayar murthy is believed to be a swayambhu murthy.

This temple’s priest from an Adishaivite family was blessed with a son and he was named Nambiyaandar Nambi. The young Nambi grew to be devout and accompanied his father for his temple duties.

One day, Nambi’s father had to go to a neighboring village and delegated the temple duties to Nambi.  After completing the regular poojas in the temple, the young Nambi closed the screens and offered the nivedhanam to the Vinayakar and waited for him to eat.

The innocent child did not know that his father used to dedicate the offerings symbolically to the Lord and then took it back. The young devotee sincerely believed that the offering was for the real deity who would literally consume it, and kept waiting to no avail.

Nambi assumed there was some flaw in his pooja and started weeping. He kept pleading the deity to forgive him and eat the nivedhanam. Seeing no progress, Nambi started punishing himself by bashing his own head at the foot of Pillayaar. Pleased with the sincere devotion of the child, Vinayakar literally showed up and stopped Nambi from hurting himself.

Polla Pillayar ate the Kozhakattais and blessed the young Nambi. This miracle story started spreading across Chozha Naadu.

The Discovery of Thirumurais

King Rajaraja was ruling the Chola empire extremely well, but he felt something was amiss. He had heard some Odhuvaars singing a few Padhigams of Appar, Sambandhar and Sundarar. After sampling the divine honey that is Thevaaram, he wanted to compile all of these verses. But nobody knew the location of where the complete manuscripts of Thirumurais were present. Not one or two thousand, but more than 8000 palm leaf manuscripts with verses of the Samayakuravar were to be searched for. A national treasure, lost forever. Rajaraja wanted help in retrieving them. He knew its not a humanely possible task, and sought divine intervention.

Hearing the miracle of Nambiyaandar Nambi with Polla Pillayar, Rajaraja went to Thirunaaraiyur at once. The King then bowed before the child and requested him to seek information about the whereabouts of the lost treasures – the Thevaaram hymns – to Pollaa Pillayaar. With tears of devotion filling his eyes, Nambi worshipped the wise Lord to bless him with the information.

On Nambi’s request, Polla Pillaiyar, by way of a divine voice, said that the hymns were kept in a room in the Chidambaram Natarajar temple. On the door, there would be a symbol of hand to mark the spot. Pillayaar also disclosed to Nambi the total count – Sambandhar’s hymns were 16000, Appar's were 49000 and Sundarar’s were 39000, totaling over 1 lakh verses.

Because of this guidance, this Vinayakar is also praised as “Thirumurai Kattiya Vinayakar” (the lord who revealed the Thirumurais).

The king and Nambi went to the said spot with inside information from Pollaa Pillayar, and opened the ‘hand-marked’ door and were in for a shocker. They found that most of the palm leaf manuscripts were eaten by termites. Treasures lost to termites forever. What an anti-climax, thought Rajaraja, who started to weep.

An ashariri voice miraculously boomed – saying that “Don’t worry , dear King. Whatever hymns were not relevant for the current times, were consumed by time itself, and whatever remains will stand the test of time.”

So Rajaraja was consoled, and he gave the glorious voluminous task of compiling these hymns to Nambiyaandar Nambi himself. Nambi then compiled the 8000+ hymns of Appar, Sambandhar and Sundarar into seven Thirumurais.

Map Link to the Polla Pillayar temple: Temple

The takeaways

• Nambi, the devotee, never gave up on his belief or conformed to “rational” norms. He kept pleading Pillayaar sincerely to accept his offerings. Unadulterated faith can cause miracles.

• Rajaraja, the king, when he had an opportunity to pray for any miracle he wanted to Polla Pillayar, did not ask for material wealth, but spiritual wealth – Thirumurai hymns that open the door to Moksha.

• Polla Pillayar, the god, is waiting to guide you, if only you are devout and sincere and to ask him what you want.

• Time, the fatewatcher, consumes whatever it can, but something remains, that always stands the test of time. Sanatana Dharma – the eternal.

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