Highlights
- Sudha Kongara on the turbulence around Parasakthi, from certification demands to online attacks
- Why the film frames the 1965 anti-Hindi agitation through one man’s choices
- Balancing politics, melodrama and cinema
- How music, casting and tone were shaped by craft, not compromise
A film surrounded by noise
Sudha Kongara is among the few Tamil directors whose films carry a distinct voice. With Parasakthi, that voice has had to compete with chaos. Long before release, the film was caught in disputes over its title, shifting cast announcements, ED searches, plagiarism claims and, finally, a list of changes demanded by the Central Board of Film Certification.
In all that, the film itself risked becoming secondary. Parasakthi, starring Sivakarthikeyan, Ravi Mohan, Atharvaa and Sreeleela in her Tamil debut, retells the 1965 anti-Hindi imposition agitation in Tamil Nadu. The core of the film unfolds over just 19 days , from January 24–25 to February 12, 1965.
Kongara says even after release, the work is far from over. “Just letting the film speak doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. We still have to take it to people.” She is hoping it finds wider reach over the Pongal weekend.
Alongside the release came online attacks. “There is slandering, defamation of the worst kind, hiding behind unknown IDs,” she says. Some posts mock the idea of certification and instead demand apologies to fan bases of rival stars so the film can ‘run’. Kongara says she knows where this noise comes from, even if she chooses not to spell it out.
Chezhiyan, loss and emotional turns
The protagonist’s name, Chezhiyan, came from story writer Mathimaran Pugazhendhi. At the time the film is set, many leaders carried that name. In Tamil, it is pronounced “Seriyan” but written “Cheriyan”. Kongara liked how it echoed “Che”, at a time when Che Guevara was becoming a global symbol.
The film opens with a train fire in which Chezhiyan’s friend dies. Only after his death do we see their friendship in a brief flashback. Kongara says the aim was not to make the audience grieve, but to show what death does to Chezhiyan. He is proud of his movement until he realises an innocent boy has died because of it. That moment pushes him away from violent methods.
The film often swings sharply in tone, from playfulness to threat, from fight to embrace. Kongara says she writes her characters as emotionally quick, not unstable. Chezhiyan and his brother Chinnadurai move fast between feeling and action. The shift, she says, is in the script itself.
Turning history into cinema
Kongara never felt torn between telling the story of a movement and the story of one man. Revolutions begin in universities, she says. Chezhiyan was once a student, forced to give up his studies, and later returned to his campus, this time to argue for non-violence.
She calls the film a “revisionist, alternative history”. Her idea is that if the state had properly conveyed to the Centre how deep the resistance to Hindi was, much of the trauma might not have followed. In that sense, Chezhiyan is not outside the movement; he represents one possible path within it.
Ravi Mohan’s Thiru, an intelligence officer, becomes the film’s central antagonist. His backstory, as the abandoned child of a Tamil father, is sketched briefly. He hides his identity by choosing a profession where identity itself is erased. Kongara sharpened him deliberately. History can be dry, she says, and cinema needs personal conflict.
Thiru believes in his own logic: if he can overcome physical loss and relearn how to shoot, why can’t others learn a new language? Ravi Mohan played him as someone convinced he is right. Kongara admits such villains can overpower their origins, but exaggeration, she says, is often needed to reach a wide audience.
Women, music and the price of certification
Sreeleela’s Ratnamala is strong-willed but rooted in her world. Kongara modelled her loosely on her own mother, who came from a wealthy, politically connected family. Ratnamala cannot dress like a social reformer; she must look like a well-bred Telugu girl to quietly do what she wants. It is strategy, not glamour. Kongara says Sreeleela wears almost no make-up, and a blue sari in one song nods to Waheeda Rehman in Guide.
Kongara enjoys filming songs. When Parasakthi was selected for the Rotterdam Film Festival, she first sent a cut without them. The curator asked for the full version. Songs, she says, are not interruptions; they give breathing space to heavy material.
Before release, she had said the CBFC was democratic. That was before she received the actual list of changes. Two days before release, she was told what had to go, with just one day to make changes. The team did not sleep for nearly 70 hours.
Some demands seemed absurd to her, like cutting a harmless word that already exists in popular songs. Scenes of self-immolation were reduced by a couple of seconds; a massacre scene was cut from 17 seconds to 10.
The board also asked for proof of references to historical policies. The policies were real, though the scenes were imagined, so she was asked to label them “constructed”. She accepted that.
Kongara says most cuts, bad language, and some violence did not damage the film. She chose her battles. One dialogue by Annadurai was muted, so she removed it entirely.
In the end, Parasakthi reached screens not exactly as she first imagined it, but close enough. For Kongara, the fight was never to win every argument, only the ones that mattered.
