Tamil-language Indian cinema, produced in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, had a banner 2023. As heterogeneous an industry as its globally better-known Mumbai counterpart—popularly known as Bollywood—the movie business in Tamil Nadu produces films for a voracious audience that has a taste for everything ranging from social realist critique to horror-comedy.
But the big money has long been, and continues to remain, in the generously budgeted action pictures that burnish the mythos of their superstar male leads. One of these, sexagenarian icon Kamal Haasan, powered the action thriller Vikram to a worldwide gross of over $60 million. Vikram’s claim on the record was short-lived, however; its reign has been cut short by an entirely different sort of film, one that Haasan himself had once hoped and failed to make. It’s a historical-fantasy epic drawn from a literary classic once thought unfilmable—but now triumphantly delivered for both a Tamil and global audience.
Ponniyin Selvan: Part 1 and its sequel have been stunning successes. The films are based on a beloved Tamil five-volume epic of the same name, written by Ramaswamy Krishnamurthy—better known by his pen name, Kalki—for his magazine in installments from 1950 to 1954 . The stories, collected and published as a series of books totaling 2,400 pages in 1955, became near-mandatory reading across demographics in Tamil Nadu. The novels’ reach has largely been limited to a Tamil-speaking readership in India and the diaspora, despite the availability of translations into other languages including English, although this may change with the considerable interest in the movies, which have been dubbed into other Indian languages.
The books nominally center around the rise of Prince Arunmozhi Varman, a real-life figure (947-1014) who became the famous Emperor Rajaraja I, one of the dominant figures of the Chola empire. The prince is the eponymous Son of the River Ponni (the title’s literal translation) but he’s merely one among a cast of dozens of characters, most drawn from the Chola empire’s complex military and political history.
The Cholas’ significant influence on Tamil society to this day is a major factor in the continued interest in and success of the books. The Chola empire sponsored the construction of numerous great temples; popularized the production of the bronze sculptures of the Nataraja (the deity Shiva as the divine dancer), which remain ubiquitous in both private and public Hindu spaces across Tamil Nadu; and undertook the compilation of the Tirumurai, a compendium of hymns in devotion to Shiva that remains fundamental to Tamil Hindu religious practice and literature. The reach of the Chola empire, via its naval fleets and through both trade and conquest, beyond the borders of modern-day India to contemporary Malaysia and Indonesia remains a matter of pride to many Tamils—a feeling that Kalki captured in his text.
Haasan was not alone in his frustrated ambition to wrangle that complex and impactful text into cinematic shape. For decades, lions of Tamil cinema, including legendary actor and politician MG Ramachandran, had dreamt of adapting the series into a screen experience that equaled the novels’ scope and scale. But the work’s length, its enormous cast of characters, and the required budget and complicated logistics all proved insurmountable barriers. That was until recently, when the success of the epic fantasy movies Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) and Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (2017), with a combined box office north of $350 million on a roughly $65 million budget, made large-scale epics that draw a national, or pan-Indian, audience an attractive proposition.
As a result, Mani Ratnam, the internationally acclaimed auteur known for films such as Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995), finally had the money and backing he needed to make, after a number of false starts, his longtime dream project. (A previous attempt was in fact a collaboration with Haasan, with whom Ratnam had worked on 1987’s Nayakan, one of the most significant films of both their careers.)
Still, the proposed budget, the absence of the superstar actors who usually power Tamil cinema’s most reliable draws, and Ratnam’s reputation as a prestige filmmaker as opposed to a box office powerhouse, made the magnum opus a risky commercial proposition despite the precedent of the Baahubali films and the success of RRR earlier in 2022.
Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan films are not much like Baahubali and RRR director SS Rajamouli’s money-spinners. Kalki’s novel is a highly colored version of history—he even travelled to Sri Lanka for research—and lacks the more fantastical elements that characterize Rajamouli’s cinema.
In Ratnam’s own words: “There are no superheroes in this. There are no definite villains in this. They’re all people who have grey shades.” The narrative in the Ponniyin Selvan films is a dense tapestry of realpolitik, romance, and picaresque adventure, more Akira Kurosawa’s Ran or David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia than Lord of The Rings. But audiences have greeted the film and its sequel (still in theaters worldwide) euphorically, and critical reception has been no less warm.
It helps that the films are terrific, a pair of big-screen experiences that were long considered impossible to make but have turned out to be impossibly good instead. Ponniyin Selvan: Part 1 nimbly accomplishes the considerable task of setting the mise-en-scène of the Chola empire in the 10th century and introducing character after character.
Key to the first movie is the rakish warrior prince Vallavaraiyan Vandiyadevan (played by Karthi Sivakumar, known by his first name, like many of his contemporaries in mainstream Tamil cinema) who acts as a sort of audience surrogate as he sets off on a journey that begins on the battlefield—where the Chola crown prince, Aditha Karikalan (a brooding, majestic Vikram), has just won victory—and ends on a cliffhanger, with the titular character, the younger Chola Prince Arunmozhi Varman (Jayam Ravi), presumably lost at sea. Along the way, Vandiyadevan uncovers a plot headed by influential minister Periya Pazhuvettarayar (R. Sarathkumar) to prevent Karikalan from ascending the throne and crown his uncle, Madhurantakan Chola (Rahman), in his stead.
At the heart of all the scheming is the enigmatic Nandini (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, in a career-best performance), a legendary beauty and the much younger wife of Pazhuvettarayar. Nandini nurses a host of grudges against the Cholas and reserves particular ire for Karikalan.
Most filmmakers would be overwhelmed by this much storytelling and world-building, these many characters and the tangle of relationships between them. But Ratnam and screenwriter Elango Kumaravel retain a firm and assured grasp on the reins throughout. The film demands attentive viewing but rewards its audience with clearly delineated arcs for every character, regardless of their size, and storytelling that is a marvel of wit and economy.
Most crucially, Ponniyin Selvan: Part 1 is an enormously entertaining big screen experience. At once a thriller of statecraft, an action film, a family melodrama, and a period spectacular, Part 1 is a film of heft with a good deal on its mind. Its tangle of the familial, the political, and the erotic and its repudiation of a pat heroes-and-villains narrative characterize it as a literate, grownup affair; but it has the tang and savor of old-school swashbucklers. (Ratnam has invoked Alexandre Dumas’s novels as a point of reference, and the comparison feels just about right.)
Ponniyin Selvan: Part 2, which resolves the succession storyline of the first film and centers the prince who will go on to become the great Emperor Rajaraja 1, has a graver tone and is not as heavy on the humorous hijinks, although it’s no less thrilling. The sequel hinges less on Vandiyadevan’s adventures and instead centers the tragic love story between Karikalan and Nandini, whose mysterious backstory is finally revealed. Part 2 is less concise than the first film, and messier without the clear throughline of Vandiyadevan’s travels that gives Part 1 its lucidity and shape. But its pleasures are grander, deeper, more visceral.
Nothing in the first film is as moving as the sequel’s prologue (an elliptical short story of star-crossed young love that is a thing of lapidary beauty) and the long scene that leads up to the intermission—a tradition that Indian cinema has retained even after it was dropped in the West. The scene, a charged reunion between lovers-turned-foes, is a magnificent two-hander, with a Shakespearean marriage of tension and high tragedy and the unsettling chemistry between Vikram and Rai, who previously paired together to dazzling effect in Raavan (2010), Ratnam’s subversive take on the Hindu epic Ramayana. Shot at length in the kind of extreme close-up that only perfectly matched scene partners can wrangle into submission, this sequence sets a bar the rest of the film doesn’t quite touch; but Part 2’s gifts are numerous, nonetheless.
Among these is the craftsmanship, masterful on both Ponniyin Selvan: Part 1 and Part 2. The fresh, verdant palette of all the outdoor action is a welcome departure from the muddy aesthetic that is so popular for period epics on both the big and the small screens, while the interior scenes are lit with care and cunning.
Scored with a sweeping, assiduously researched soundtrack by Academy Award-winner A. R. Rahman, drawing from ancient Tamil literature, the films keep their musical numbers short but vivid. Ratnam is one of Indian cinema’s foremost visual stylists, and in these films too he marries formal classicism with an inventive modern grammar, making tremendous use of handheld cameras in the battlefield scenes, point-of-view shots, and strong CGI recreations of ancient cities and Byzantine fortresses to create an experience that is never staid or stale, always immersive and engaging.
The films’ pedigree and quality have powered them to massive returns and widespread appreciation, but their release has not been without noise. Admirers of Kalki’s novels have criticized the adaptations, particularly the sequel, for not maintaining complete fidelity to the books. On the whole, though, audiences familiar with the text seem to have taken the alterations in stride, finding the films’ surprises satisfying.
More controversial, however, is the question of religious identity in the Chola empire. Both films have come out in a volatile sociopolitical climate. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government has been criticized at home and abroad for its treatment of religious minorities, its targeting and silencing of critical voices in the media, and its aggressive censorship and erasure of historical narratives that run counter to the Hindu-nationalist ideology Hindutva.
Ponniyin Selvan is, to proponents of Hindutva, a celebration of a Hindu emperor’s achievements in expanding a Hindu empire. Critics, including Haasan, who is a politician himself, and Vetrimaaran, the acclaimed director of films that critique the Hindu caste hierarchy, have pushed back against the ahistorical “saffronization,” or appropriation by the Hindu nationalists, of Rajaraja 1. Both have asserted that a unified Hindu identity did not exist at the time of the Cholas’ reign. While a number of historians have concurred with the assertion that calling the Cholas Hindu rulers is inaccurate, BJP leaders have been vehement in their rebuttal.
Fortunately for Ratnam and the team behind the film, the controversy has not resulted in a right-wing call for a boycott of either film or attacks on the theaters running it; these sorts of aggressions on the arts are, unfortunately, all too common in India these days. But Ponniyin Selvan: Part 2, after concluding its successful run in theaters, has joined Part 1 on Amazon Prime, and is currently streaming with subtitles.
Audiences with little to no familiarity with Ratnam’s distinguished body of work, Tamil-language cinema, or even Indian cinema outside of Ray and RRR now have a superbly made, relentlessly enjoyable introduction to all three—as well as to a key chapter in of the history of the regions we now collectively know as India.