What Mani Ratnam’s Films Meant to Me and the Women of the Sri Lankan Civil War

Underneath the shiny veneer of Bollywood, there’s something affirming about seeing people caught in the maelstrom of politics and war making choices—to flee or stay or fight.

When I was fifteen, after a particularly savage fight between my parents, I looked for a movie with equally gruesome edges.

In the aftermath of such clashes, only a Tamil film could soothe my mother. The sub-genre didn’t matter—horror, action adventure, comedy—so long as it wasn’t a romantic comedy; the disparity between the emotion onscreen and her own life would feel too sharp. In fact, the more the film reflected our states of mind, the better.

In the basement of our suburban Calgary house, amidst artifacts from our former life in India—wet grinder for making dosa, stacks of silk sarees—I scanned the bookcase stocked with VHS tapes, each one labeled in her neat cursive. Nayakan, by the filmmaker Mani Ratnam, which I remembered was about the rise of a ruthless Tamil mafia don in Bombay, seemed fitting—a story both violent and capricious.

My mother and I avoided the living room where my father sat with his fury, now silent but still smoldering, and settled on my twin bed to watch the don stab, threaten, and claw his way to power. But the brutality also produced a poignancy that I’d forgotten.

“I saw not just you but your animal sides,” the don’s daughter, Charumathi, says to his friend, after seeing him attack someone under her father’s orders. She looks at her father while she says this.

I’d had the same thought about my father: The viciousness of his insults, the constant need for attention, the time he forbade me from speaking to my mother—they reminded me of a rabid dog, defensive and crazed. But, of course, I never had the courage to say that—or anything truthful about how I perceived him relating to the world.

In contrast, when Charumathi’s brother dies in a gang clash, she explicitly blames her father, disowns him, and leaves the family home. “Don’t stop me, or search for me,” she says, her face voluptuous with fury, her being ethereal under moonlight in a red and white sari—the Indian colors of purity and mourning.

Watching that, I felt something move inside me, a tectonic shift, subtle but irrevocable. Unlike other Tamil movies with their helpless heroines, pink-cheeked and impossibly, improbably trusting, here was the young woman I both felt like and wanted to be: moral, political, unafraid.

Almost ten years later, I was still trying very hard to be those things, now beyond the private sphere of family. While studying economics and anthropology in graduate school, I decided to write my thesis on women in Sri Lanka who’d survived the country’s thirty-year civil war. Fought from 1983 to 2009, between the Sinhalese and the Tamil, the war had always loomed in the backdrop of my childhood, in adult conversations and the evening news on Zee TV, as it had in many Indian households. But after the war ended, international media and aid, fatigued by the decades-long conflict, moved on from Sri Lanka.

I wanted to document how Sri Lankan Tamil women—on the losing side of a war that had killed much of their families, sinking them to the very bottom of power’s ranks—were surviving. It would be a means of meeting the moral and political imperative I felt most called to—one favored by many storytellers I admired—of bearing witness.

But as fieldwork approached, I grew nervous. What right did I have to ask these women to dig up their trauma? What difference would this research make, anyway? Was it doomed to become a tourist expedition of survivors’ inner landscapes? I didn’t know the answers, but it was too late to turn back; I’d already booked my flights and arranged interviews.

As part of my preparation, I searched for Tamil films set in Sri Lanka, where the dialect differed from the south Indian Tamil I grew up with. When Google brought me to Mani Ratnam again, to his film Kannathil Muthamittal, about a Sri Lankan Tamil child adopted by Indian parents, I felt the first slight easing of anxiety. Here was a familiar figure from my childhood, a rare storyteller who risked centering characters who were forging themselves in opposition to greater forces—as I vaguely hoped to do. A good omen.

But in my dorm room, watching the grainy, torrented film on my clunky Dell laptop, I was surprised by how much I disliked it. Part of the appeal of Bollywood—Tamil cinema included—lies in its unapologetic breaks with reality: spontaneous songs and dances, extravagant outfits, abrupt teleportations to other landscapes. Typically, the characters are so charming that the hyperboles in act and setting are forgivable, desirable even, for showcasing their playful, romantic sides.

Not so in this film: The child was a brat, running away from home, trying to pit her parents against each other. And the parents, although likable enough, come off as schmucks, especially when they agree to travel to Sri Lanka during the war so the daughter can meet her biological mother. For most of the film’s two hours, I feared Ratnam had failed his audience—until nearly the end, when they finally locate the biological mother, now a soldier in the Tamil Tigers.

We learn that Shyama, who shares a name with the Hindu goddess of war, had left her newborn to rejoin the fight. Here, I felt a thrill—even within a culture that mandated female subservience, women had made up a third of the Tamil army. Some had been forced to join, but many, like Shyama, had also volunteered. I hadn’t yet acknowledged that this too drew me to the research: I wanted to meet these women who looked like me, spoke like me, but were undoubtedly braver than me. Maybe by spending time with them, I could become more like them.

On the screen, Shyama breaks down in tears at meeting her child, but ultimately refuses to leave the country or the fight to be with her. “I have work to do,” she says simply, and turns away.

*

I arrived in Sri Lanka a few weeks later, in May of 2012. Father Rohan picked me up from the airport. I’d contacted the Catholic church, a mostly neutral party in a war waged between Hindu Tamils and Buddhist Sinhalese, to help with my research. As we drove, everywhere outside was lushly green and blue, vegetation and ocean, as in Ratnam’s film. Over a dinner of hoppers and sambol, we discussed the towns I’d visit and the women I’d interview.

Father Rohan’s Tamil was gentle, simplified for my sake. Years had passed since I’d spoken it; even with my mother, I spoke in English and she responded likewise, sometimes with a few Tamil words stirred in. But that night, conjuring up sounds I knew only at a primal level, returning to traditions of thought and conjugation I’d forgotten until then, I saw that this research was also an opportunity to resurrect a self that had been buried under the dust of English and Western modes of thinking.

That night, lying under a gauzy white mosquito net, I dreamt that I was on a beach. I was speaking softly in Tamil to an agitated dog, slowing his frantic barks—until something exploded in the distance. We scattered, running hard in opposite directions. I awoke, sweating, filled with foreboding.

A week later, I was wishing I’d listened to that instinct to run. Instead, as planned, I’d traveled to the north, where bombed-out houses and ruined military tanks stood, seemingly untouched since the end of the war. In Jaffna, I saw a house with the roof and windows missing, a giant banyan tree growing in its center, its roots sprouting out through the walls. There was no more separating tree and home, no extracting what stood before the war from what came after.

The women I interviewed were similar, their sorrow as visibly a part of them as the white saris they wore in mourning. They’d lost children, parents, spouses, or siblings in the war—sometimes, all of those. Some seemed to have lost even themselves, their gazes unfocused, faces slack. Others were more explicit, crying unabashedly in conversations, putting a hand on my cheek, looking at me as if I were a daughter or grandchild risen from the dead.

Soon, interviews began feeling like needless excavations of both interviewer and interviewee. There were plenty of examples of bravery—women leaving their families to fight, sacrificing a limb to save another soldier—but I realized I’d been looking for impossible levels of heroism: a happy ending, a total rescue from misfortune, a deus ex machina. A heroism to erase pain. But this was rendered impossible by the very fact of war. Sacrifice didn’t redeem tragedy, I realized—only deepened it.

Sacrifice didn’t redeem tragedy, I realized—only deepened it. 

“I cook, I sweep, I wash clothes, I look for work on the farms around here,” said one woman, Chitra, waving her hand towards the rice paddies around us. She was twenty-five, only a year older than me, with a short, slight frame and hair that escaped in wisps from a long braid.

“It’s like [how] it was before, somehow,” she said. Her twins had just turned five when their town was shelled. She barely escaped, without even enough time to bury them. It was the mundaneness of tragedy’s aftermath, only a slight discoloration on the skin of routine belying the ravaged tissue underneath, that caught me the most off-guard, that no movie could’ve prepared me for.

My disorientation was made worse by conversing in the language of my childhood, in which I hadn’t developed any self-protective filters, just as I had no emotional distance from the people I used to speak it with. Every story of loss recited in my mother tongue hit me as if told by my own mother.

Emotionally shattered, I collapsed into bed every evening before sunset at the convent where I was staying. There wasn’t much to do after dark, anyway. Electricity lines destroyed during the war hadn’t yet been rebuilt; the village depended on a generator that was shut off at six p.m. And although fighting had ended, out of habit, people still rarely ventured outside.

The first evening that I managed to stay awake after dusk, I pulled out my laptop to start typing up the hand-scrawled interview notes. As I worked, I felt the three nuns who lived at the convent looking at me.

Soon, Sister Josephine, the oldest of the three, asked if I had any Tamil movies on my computer. Indeed, I’d downloaded several Ratnam films. That evening, by candlelight, eating kottu and fresh jackfruit, we watched Roja, a love story set against the backdrop of terrorism in Kashmir.

The film starts with a newly married Indian couple traveling to Kashmir for the husband’s work. Soon after they arrive, Rishi, the husband, is kidnapped by Kashmiri freedom fighters who hold him hostage in exchange for their leader’s release from prison.

During the two and a half hours of the movie, no one spoke. The story of ordinary lives asphyxiated by political ideals, of borders contested and redrawn at great cost, must have been all too familiar for them.

“It showed many sides of the issue,” Sister Josephine said as she blew out the candles. She’d stayed during the worst of the war, during days and nights of rockets raining down around her, sitting with neighbors too weak or injured to evacuate. “Ratnam’s brave for doing that,” she said.

That night, I again dreamt of an angry mutt. His barks intensified as explosions detonated around us, each round inching closer. We were in the oppressive green of the Vanni, the jungle where the war was fought and lost. This time, I didn’t try to soothe. I didn’t run. I watched, and waited.

The next morning, Sister Josephine introduced me to the women I would interview that day and mentioned the film we had watched. For the first time, I saw something joyful on their faces. Suba, a woman with black eyes and snowy white hair, talked about watching Ratnam films with her son and grandchildren before they died.

“I think he has some new ones out since then,” she said. “But most of our TVs are destroyed anyway.” The other women nodded, their faces collapsing again, the escape into films one more loss to grieve.

Starting then, and every day for the remaining weeks of fieldwork, I invited the women I interviewed to watch a Ratnam film on my laptop in the evenings. Crowded onto jute mats, we watched love play out in Bombay, set against real riots that erupted after Hindus destroyed a mosque in one of India’s most multicultural cities. The couple survives in the end, but barely. Sheer luck separates them from the 700 who died—the same luck that had spared the women who sat around me, watching.

Afterward, I watched them walk back to their homes under a full moon, their long skirts swishing, holding hands like young girls. The innocence of it was unbearable; I had to turn away.

Another night, we watched Dil Se, in which Meghna, the heroine, belongs to a terrorist group. At the end, when she kills herself and her lover in a suicide bombing, the room seemed to drain of air, even the oil lamps flickering. Women in the Tamil Tigers had been among the world’s first and most effective suicide bombers because they aroused less suspicion than men, their femininity enabling a precise deadliness.

At the film’s end, I looked at the other women who looked at the ground, or up towards the straw roof. Without saying it, I knew they were thinking of the women they’d known—a neighbor, a sister, a daughter—who’d ended their lives that way.

Without saying it, I knew they were thinking of the women they’d known—a neighbor, a sister, a daughter—who’d ended their lives that way. 

None of the films we watched were uplifting—casualties were sporadic and devastating—but they did offer some kind of solace, a space for us to grieve both the losses on-screen and those suffered in the room. And just as they’d been for my mother and me, Ratnam’s films seemed to be a portal for these women into a world at once familiar and foreign, where politics and power were not distant or abstract, but intimate matters, as central to a character’s trajectory as a lover, as the family they were born into, as their own choices.

After leaving Sri Lanka, after finishing graduate school, I’d spend the next decade carrying out research in places riven by war: Libya, Mali, Syria, Uganda. Even now, before each assignment, I watch a film by Ratnam.

Just remembering the women I watched the movies with—my mother, Sister Josephine, Chitra, Suba, the other women I met in Sri Lanka—and the ways they’d endured and transcended suffering is itself a kind of fortification. Re-visiting characters like Charumathi, Shyama, and Meghna also suggests to me that I too can be braver than I believe.

And underneath the shiny veneer of Bollywood, past the lush landscape shots and dreamy songs, there’s something affirming about seeing people caught in the maelstrom of politics and war, seemingly helpless to steer their fates, and yet, still making choices—to fight or flee or stay, to choose between country or lover or child, to wearing their grief openly or locking it away so tightly that even they can’t access it.

The choices, of course, don’t always work out, and are sometimes nearly unbearable even when they do, but the fact of making them in the bleakest of circumstances endures—perhaps also rescuing the rest of us and our choices from irrelevance.