Sujatha Rangarajan

Sujatha Rangarajan wrote dialogue for six Mani Ratnam films between 1992 and 2004 — Roja, Thiruda Thiruda, Iruvar, Dil Se, Kannathil Muthamittal, and Aayitha Ezhuthu. His contribution was linguistic precision: a Tamil that was modern, unornamental, and psychologically exact. Before Sujatha, Tamil cinema dialogue tended toward either the literary or the theatrical. He brought a third register — conversational intelligence, where every line carried subtext without announcing it. His work on Roja set a new standard for how ordinary people could sound in Tamil cinema, and his screenplay for Kannathil Muthamittal gave the film its structural clarity. An engineer by profession and a polymath by disposition, Sujatha brought a rationalist's discipline to the emotional architecture of Mani Ratnam's most politically charged films.