Revisiting Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan's Nayakan, not as a gangster epic, but as an existential melodrama in disguise

Rarely in cinema does a man weep after revenge. When he does, it is often framed as relief, a final letting go. A wound closed, the audience applauds. Justice, they think, has been served. But Nayakan refuses such ease. When Naicker (Kamal Haasan) kills the policeman who murdered his foster father, he does not feel triumph. There is no music to lift him, no silence to dignify the act. Instead, he walks to the policeman’s house. The widow sits in grief. And there, in the wreckage of a family broken by his hand, Naicker sees the child. The child who does not know, cannot know that the man standing before him ended his father’s life. He walks up to Naicker, unaware, and says only this: “My father is dead.” Naicker breaks. He does not cry for the man he killed. He cries for the boy. For the knowledge that vengeance, even when justified, is never clean. That violence does not end with the act; it seeps and spreads. That the blood of the guilty leaves the innocent stained. This moment does not ask for sympathy. It does not moralize. It simply shows that in the world Naicker inhabits, every gain is a loss, every justice a wound, every act of power a compromise.

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This moment is the soul of Nayakan. It is where Mani Ratnam’s vision breathes deepest. It is where the film stops looking outwards and turns inwards. For the first time, Naicker begins to question the single belief that carried him through life. As a boy, he is told by his foster father: “Anything that helps others is not wrong.” The line strikes him not as advice, but as truth. No wonder, from that point on, the film moves with an inevitability. The next time we see him, he is grown. He has aged, both in years and in belief. That one sentence has become the axis of his world. Through it, he finds purpose: to stand against the systems that wronged him, to protect the people around him, to rewrite the balance with his own hands. So when he kills the policeman, he does more than avenge his father’s death. He removes a figure of power who brought fear and violence to his community. In that act, Naicker becomes Nayakan — the people's hero.