We are still in the Bharathiraja era of Tamil cinema

Filmmaker Bharathiraja passed away on June 10, aged 84. It is now left to us to do what the English media largely failed to do while he was alive: Write about him with the seriousness his stature demands.

It is quite possible that today’s younger generation remembers him more as Dhanush’s grandfather in Thiruchitrambalam (2022) than as the most influential Tamil filmmaker who ever lived. Two reasons explain this drift: Bharathiraja hadn’t actively made films in nearly two decades and had been appearing increasingly as an actor. But more tellingly, the English media chose not to reflect or write adequately about him despite his towering presence and influence on Tamil cinema since the late 1970s. It is no small thing that a man from rural Tamil Nadu broke through the chambers of elite cinema to create his own path.

As is famously quoted now, Bharathiraja was instrumental in taking the camera out of the Tamil studio. But what that actually meant goes beyond geography. It changed not just how stories could be told in Tamil cinema, but whose stories could be told. From the excessively planned, curated, and controlled studio environment, he set in motion a cinematic world that broke existing rules of filmmaking. The new language was intuitive. And it was not only raw and real but also tender, beautiful, and poetic. The perfectly chiselled features that filled screens in the earlier years were replaced with dusky bodies covered in dirt and sweat — representing Tamil people closer to their own life and culture, like never before.

And just when critics were attempting to limit him as the “voice of rural Tamil Nadu,” he challenged them with the stylish urban thrillers Sigappu Rojakkal (1978), Tik Tik Tik (1981), and later Kangalal Kaidhu Sei (2004) and Bommalattam (2008). His urban films investigated loneliness, greed, and the hunger for power with equal confidence.

His most political contribution, though, must be in how normalised and humanised the lives of the Bahujans became through his cinema. The backward castes and Dalits who had lived at the periphery of the big screen now took central roles and played protagonists. In documenting their lives, he investigated family life, human relationships, gender, social constraints, economic burden, and the slow pull of urbanisation. He was able to convert even star actors into regular humans with flaws and insecurities. And in his films, the male characters often played a less significant role than his female protagonists — making the woman the central anchor of the family while men existed quietly at the margins. For a cinema tradition built largely on male spectacle, this was a quiet but thorough dismantling.

Bharathiraja also repeatedly attempted to interrogate caste through his films. In most Tamil cinema — even from upper-caste filmmakers — caste tends to be looked at through the perspective of Dalits. Bharathiraja did something far more uncomfortable: He examined caste from inside his own OBC identity, interrogating his community’s conflicted, complex relationship with the Brahmins, and ending up critiquing his own caste. He didn’t ventriloquise Dalit voices. He turned the lens on himself. That kind of self-implication in storytelling is rare anywhere; in Tamil cinema, it is almost unheard of.

While Bharathiraja’s warmth for rural Tamil life is well known, far too little is said about how he infused Tamil cinema with an undeniable and surreal lyricism. His choice of visuals, music, and editing created a trippy, dreamy form of storytelling that remains his own domain. This was especially so when he worked with his friend and frequent collaborator Ilaiyaraaja; they played with extended preludes — stretching for half a song’s running time — immersing the viewer into a dreamy, semi-conscious world. B Kannan’s cinematography deepened this quality, and an abstract editing style that juxtaposed contrasting images at dramatic peaks created emotional jolts that operated beyond the level of narrative logic.

It is less known that Bharathiraja had always aspired to be an actor, but held back for years, reportedly out of insecurity about his appearance. When he finally did step in front of the camera, he was natural, charming, and tender — embodying precisely the kind of vulnerable Tamil male character he had spent decades enabling others to play. One wonders what he was waiting for.

Without doubt, Bharathiraja remains the most influential Tamil filmmaker. His rise diluted the intimidation that cinema held as a career until then, bringing several youngsters from smaller towns and villages to tell their own stories on screen. The number of assistant directors, and their assistants’ assistants, who went on to become influential filmmakers themselves has created a definitive Bharathiraja era in Tamil cinema — one whose shape we are still living inside.

Tamil and English media now owe him a serious reckoning — with his range, his politics, his formal innovations, and his place in cinema history. Something that wasn’t adequately done during his lifetime. It is, at least, not too late to start.

The writer is a Chennai-based filmmaker