Suggested Topics :
Romance and Resilience: On Mani Ratnam's Fascination With Rain
The filmmaker's collaborators discuss his enchantment with rains during the recently-concluded Mani Ratnam Retrospective at the G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture
If there is one persistent motif in Mani Ratnam’s films, it is rain.
But rain isn't just weather; think of love crashing in with the monsoon in Bombay (1995), Alaipayuthey (2000) and O Kadhal Kanmani (2015), of rain in Nayakan (1987) birthing both ecstasy and devastation; in Raavan (2010), the downpour doesn’t just drench — it shifts something and blurs the sharpness in Beera. In Kannathil Muthamittal (2002), it signifies the cleansing of sins and the promise of a new future, and in Guru (2007), rain is emancipation, a force that washes away doubt, leaving only conviction.
Ask Ratnam about his fascination with it and he shrugs, “I like it.”
His cinematographer Santosh Sivan, however, has a more poetic answer, “I think he likes the rains because they make continuity easier. Rain is time-of-day agnostic; you can’t really tell.” A scene set in rain doesn’t need a specific hour — it can exist in a space outside of strict temporal reality. The visual poetry of raindrops, the interplay of light and water, add a subconscious emotional texture to his films. “It also heightens the emotions,” says Sivan.
Mud, mist, monsoon, madness — Mani Ratnam doesn’t stop. Actor Abhishek Bachchan remembers it vividly: “He just doesn’t like to stop shooting; come rain or shine, he makes his actors brave the furies of nature.” Rain lashes, rivers swell, the jungle stirs — water, snakes, frogs, and bloodthirsty leeches be damned. Shooting continues. Always.
On the sets of Raavan, Bachchan recalls that snakes rained down from trees, slithered up chairs, were mistaken for wires, while bodies, submerged in water, turned into leech buffets. “The crew of Raavan was single-handedly responsible for depleting the number of leeches in the forest because we would discover them clinging on to our bodies at the end of the day and they would have to be killed in large numbers.” It didn’t matter. The cameras rolled. Mani’s world demanded endurance, obsession, madness.
Today, they look back — awed, stunned — at the sheer tenacity of this filmmaker, his ideology, his ability to pass that fire on to his collaborators.
Also Read | Notes from The Mani Ratnam Retrospective: 'What Else Is Left For Velu Naicker To Say?'
Vasan Bala puts it simply — perhaps the thread running through all of Mani Ratnam’s films is his heroes. “They are all pragmatic individuals who end up doing irrational things.” For love, for power, for vengeance. That collision — between reason and impulse, between restraint and passion — is what makes his cinema timeless. And maybe, it’s what defines Ratnam himself.
He wrestles with his films, yet ultimately gives in to their unpredictable, illogical beauty. His sets are not places of indulgence but of rigour, where actors are pushed into corners, made to break past their own limitations.
The mythology of Mani Ratnam isn’t crafted by the man himself — if anything, he shies away from it, almost embarrassed. It’s his collaborators — his actors, his cinematographers, his writers — who build it, brick by loving brick. And most tellingly, it’s his assistants, the ones who remain his assistants long after they’ve become names in their own right. Bejoy Nambiar said, “There’s even a WhatsApp group, it’s called ‘Mani Sir AD for Life’ and we’re all on it.” It is a testament to the enduring influence of a filmmaker who is both mentor and master. Once you've learned from him, you carry him with you.
And Ratnam’s school of cinema, then, is much like the rain he loves — steady and unyielding. You don’t resist it. You surrender, you soak, you stay.