Politics and Power

In Mani Ratnam's films, politics rarely exists as abstraction. It enters through the personal — a husband kidnapped in Kashmir, a marriage torn apart by communal riots, a friendship corrupted by electoral ambition. From Nayagan's portrait of institutional power built on immigrant desperation, through Roja and Bombay's confrontation with nationalism and sectarian violence, to Iruvar's study of how cinema and politics become indistinguishable in Tamil Nadu — he returns to the political not as polemic but as the pressure that deforms ordinary lives. Ayitha Ezhuthu and Guru extended this into structural territory: the former splitting one political moment into three perspectives, the latter examining how post-Independence capitalism rewrites the rules of power. The political is never the subject alone. It is always the force that acts on people who wanted something simpler.