Exclusive | 'Parasakthi' Director Sudha Kongara on Censorship and Backlash: 'There Is Slandering, Defamation Of The Worst Kind'

Sudha Kongara is a director with a vision—something you can only say about a handful of directors working in Tamil cinema today. With Parasakthi, a film whose production was as complicated as its release, from title disputes and a revolving door of actors being announced and leaving, to ED searches and plagiarism charges, and eventually to Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) demands that verge on the parodic, the artistry gets lost in the noise about and around the film. 

Starring Sivakarthikeyan, Ravi Mohan, Atharvaa, and Sreeleela—making her Tamil debut—the film plots the making of the 1965 Anti-Hindi imposition agitation in Tamil Nadu in granular detail. “From the intermission to the climax, it is just 19 days, from Jan 24-25 to February 12, 1965,” Kongara tells THR India. 

In a conversation, Kongara discusses the chaos surrounding the film’s release, while breaking down the choices she made to mount this drama. 

How are you doing? You said in an earlier interview that post-release, you are going to dip into all the films you missed out this past year. Have you gotten to those films? 

Not at all. We have a long way to go before we take the film to where it needs to reach—and I have to do it in this day and age of marketing. Just allowing your film to speak doesn’t seem to be enough. I am hoping it takes off during the Pongal weekend, reaching more people. 

Do you mean the film is being misunderstood and misrepresented? 

There is slandering, defamation of the worst kind, hiding behind unknown IDs. We have to counter that. You wonder where it is coming from—and you know where it is coming from. 

Where is it coming from? 

Let me read something I saw yesterday on this X (formerly Twitter) handle BlastingTamilCinema: “CBFC kitta Certificate vangurathu perusu illa.. Anna fans kitta Sorry keetu, Apology Certificate vaangu.. Innum 1 week iruku, avanga manichu vitta #Parasakthi oodum” (It is not a big deal to get a CBFC certificate. Apologise to fans of Anna—Vijay—and get that apology certificate. There is one more week. They will forgive you. Parasakthi will run.)

Let’s talk about the movie. The name of Sivakarthikeyan’s character, Chezhiyan, is used beautifully. The ‘zh’ sound that most Northern tongues are unable to pronounce, and the ‘Che’ reference you make. 

The name was given by Mathi (Mathimaran Pugazhendhi, credited as story) who gave me the original concept. There were many leaders at that point with that name. Even Mathi’s relative was named that. In Tamil we call it “Seriyan” but it is written as “Cheriyan”, and I liked the play on “Che”—the name becomes universal because at that time Che Guevara started becoming famous. It lent itself to the film. 

The film starts with the train fire where Chezhiyan’s friend dies. It is only after his death, in a quick flashback, that you see the friendship. Narratively, you didn’t want us to feel the grief when the friend dies?

What I needed to take forward is that there was a boy, a revolutionary, and he was happy about the success of his movement, till he realised that somebody died because of it—and this is not even the person’s cause; that was an innocent boy. I just wanted Chezhiyan to leave behind a particular path because it leads to too much violence.

Chezhiyan steps away and with the same passion takes care of his family. 

I know that you do not feel the grief when Chezhiyan is crying about his friend. I don’t expect people to feel grief there, but to understand that something important has happened that has taken away from his cause. 

As opposed to when the man burns himself later, where you actually set that up?

Yeah. 

There are a lot of tonal shifts in the film, from playful to threatening within the span of an arm movement, the choreography of the fight into a hug with the brothers, for example. This can feel jarring. There is a fragile craft to it.

It is very difficult to do that. I am mercurial, I can switch from crying to hugging to laughing. I see Chinnadurai (Chezhiyan’s brother, played by Atharvaa) like me. The elder one, Chezhiyan, too, has a bit of that. They swing from one emotion to the other, I have written them as consistent and not schizophrenic. The rest falls into place. The swerve happens in the script itself. 

I struggled with this particular thing—you are making a film about a student protest, but the protagonist is a post-student; you are making a movie about a movement, but you have such a poisonous villain, it becomes a hero-villain story after a point. How much of the movement to bring in, how much of the protagonist... did you struggle with this while writing and, later, editing? 

I never had that struggle. Any revolution begins at universities. The character was a student who had to give up his studies and later, uses his alma mater to return to the movement, but this time in a pacifist way. This film is a revisionist, alternative history. I am trying to say that if the State had communicated to the Centre how much of an aggressive opposition there was to Hindi, this entire trauma and genocide would not have happened. Chezhiyan, thus, is not outside of this movement. 

But a protagonist gets clarified when there is a strong villain, and the character of Thiru (Ravi Mohan) is a pointed villain. Even though there is a quick explanation for his resentment—a backstory of being a bastard child to a Tamil father who left his mother—he embodies his villainy, and so Chezhiyan becomes the hero, responding to him, and not the state. Ultimately it becomes about muscling him down, over a train top. 

I did that on purpose. This is a very dry subject, as dry as aviation (which Kongara dealt with in her previous film Soorarai Pottru). There are books written on it, like historical fact sheets. To make it into cinema, simplify those emotions, we have representatives of the state, and that becomes a personal battle. If you revisit the film, you’ll realise Thiru’s layered backstory. He is born in the 1940s, living in the 1960s, and the trauma of being a bastard child, born to cross-cultural parents, he has an identity that he wants to hide, and chooses the Intelligence Bureau where your identity is kept secret—he chooses this profession because he is uncomfortable with his identity. He fulminates when his integrity is questioned. He just wants to prove that he didn’t mess up. 

He genuinely believes that—you broke my trigger finger, I learned to shoot with my other hand, why can’t you learn a new language, what’s your problem? The mindset that if I can go through this difficulty why can’t you, and many monsters do believe that, by the way. He is justified in his head, so Ravi played it like a hero, like he was absolutely in the right. 

But when a villain is so rapacious, you really don’t care about his origin story—it drifts away in the shadow of the violence. Even in 'Soorarai Pottru', did the villain have to be so villainous? 

That sanitiser scene was actually based on an airline owner—I can’t name him. See, you dramatise and emotionalise things that are not emotional to reach a vast audience. 

Mani Ratnam had said that if you have a small character, you get a hero to play it so it lifts that scene. I was reminded of that with the cameos of Rana Daggubati and Basil Joseph—because their characters aren't really part of the story. Can you talk about using their stardom as perhaps a crutch to move your story forward efficiently? 

When you have two-and-half hours of screen time, if you are introducing characters and I have to invest in them, it becomes easier when you know the actors playing them. As it is, the film is complicated. I am not going to take those risks. This, I will play safe. 

Let’s talk about Sreeleela’s character, Ratnamala. Your female protagonists are “feisty”—but theirs was a rooted feistiness, belonging to that world, not a performative one just to make a character “spunky”. How do you balance this, because on the one hand, you wanted to make her conventionally elegant and regal, and then make her drive cars, jump over walls, on her feet, up and about. Did you have to make her “glamorous” in order to make her useful and important in your film? 

This was done consciously. Ratnamala is loosely based on my mum, who comes from a well-to-do family with political connections. There are certain things you need to do. Being born into a rich family, the social justice posture—wearing khadi—is just not done. She has to play the role of a pretty Telugu household girl in order to do what she actually wants. It is not for glamour. Actually, Sreeleela has no makeup on. That’s her face. She has just put on sunscreen and lip gloss and come on set, like the actresses of that time. That blue sari she wears is, in fact, a homage to Waheeda Rehman in Guide.

Tell me about the use of music. There is a revelry and care with which you shoot the songs. How do you see the songs as fitting into the blazing narrative?

I enjoy songs. My film got selected for the Rotterdam Film Festival, and we gave them a cut without the songs, and the curator called me and said, “You will give me the entire film, with the songs, for the screening, right?” The same thing happened to Mani sir decades ago when he gave a different cut of Dil Se to Berlinale, without the songs, and they called and asked for the songs. It is not jarring, but the placement and way they are shot is perhaps a relief to something serious happening around. 

In a pre-release interview, you spoke of the CBFC being democratic. Do you still feel the same way, after receiving their cuts? 

When I did that interview I had not gotten my cut list. I had just been told that I would be certified but only audio cuts would be asked. Two days away from release, I got the cut list at 11 AM, and tomorrow is all I have before I cut and give the film, because the day after is the release. Where is the time to fight this cut list? 

We didn’t sleep for 70 hours. It was hell. Things like removing the word “Sirikki” was so silly, because there are songs with “Sirikki” in it. Why cut it? Because there is nothing in this film to be cut off because I was so damn careful. But at the same time, if a guy is self-immolating, and they are asking it to be cut by 50 per cent, two-and-half seconds was all I was reducing it by. Similarly with the massacre in Pollachi—from 17 to 10 seconds. 

What about the “This is fiction” statutory warning?

It is not a statutory warning. There were three scenes where we spoke of three policies made at that time. The CBFC asked for proof. I gave them proof. But did that particular scene happen? No. But the policy happened. They asked us to put it down as “constructed”. Fair enough. They are making me say the big things. None of the cuts—basically bad words and some violence—affected my film. You choose your battles wisely. I didn’t cut any scenes, except for Annadurai’s dialogue. They asked me to mute the dialogue and so, instead, I cut it.