THE DAY OF THE UNDERDOG

Inside Mari Selvaraj's cinematic universe

- BY LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

Filmmaker Mari Selvaraj’s heroes freely roam his home. Visionaries like Karl Marx, B.R. Ambedkar and Periyar wink at me from photographs in the front hall. On the opposite wall is a bevy of writers—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ismat Chughtai—comfortably perched within black-and-white frames. On the mezzanine floor is a bookshelf spilling with biographies, novels, poetry and short story collections. The way to Selvaraj’s mind is surely through his home.

Clad in a black T-shirt and trousers, Selvaraj emerges from his office. “Vanakkam,” he says with folded hands, giving me an insider view not just of his home, but also of his thoughts, his politics, his childhood, and the making of his movies. By now, Selvaraj is firmly enshrined in the pantheon of Kollywood greats, with each of his five films in seven years being a masterclass in restrained but powerful storytelling. Elaborating on the lives of the oppressed, of the fight for land and rights, of the atrocities of caste—they educate without moralising, entertain without trivialising. His latest, Bison Kaalamaadan, narrates the struggles of a kabaddi player from rural Tamil Nadu.