Mari Selvaraj’s works—his books, stories, and films—feel less like separate creations and more like different windows into the same world. When I read his writing or watch his films, I don’t experience them as isolated pieces. They feel interleaved, constantly referring back to the same landscapes, memories, and histories.
Reading his book சம்படி ஆட்டம் felt like flying back into nostalgia from when I was growing up. But the feeling is not limited to that one book. The same world appears in his films as well. The villages, the ponds, the small incidents of childhood, the social hierarchies, and the everyday struggles—all of them form a recurring landscape in his storytelling.
I am from Kadambankulam, a village not too far from Puliyankulam, and I couldn’t stop drawing similarities between our lives. It starts with the word “kulam” in both our village names. That itself reminds me that we come from the same landscape—villages that depend on ponds for their livelihood.
I also come from what Mari describes as a “single-caste village.” Most of the people in my village belong to the same caste. Growing up, that felt normal. Only later did I begin to realize how much that shapes the way people see the world.
One memory that always stays with me is when a government bus first started coming into our village. The entire village celebrated it. It felt like a major event, almost like the outside world had finally arrived at our doorstep. When I later watched Karnan, that moment felt very familiar. The struggle for a bus stop in the film didn’t feel like fiction to me.
No, I am not from the same caste background as Mari Selvaraj. But I can still understand, at least partially, what growing up in that environment must have felt like. All the folks from my village owned lands.
Whenever I traveled through the places where Mari grew up, I used to think those people were blessed to live close to the river Thamirabarani. In my village we never had enough water for agriculture. But only after reading his work did I realize something deeper: even though they lived close to the river, many of them, being from lower castes, did not own the land. Even today, in villages, land ownership is the main source of wealth and security. Without land, even farmers remain poor.
His stories often reveal these invisible structures of village life. What appears beautiful from a distance—the river, the fields, the green landscape—carries a very different meaning depending on who owns the land and who works on it.
Reading and watching Mari’s work also made me realize that I grew up inside a bubble. I went to an English-medium school. My family had enough to ensure we ate three meals a day. The caste tensions that Mari speaks about were not something I understood deeply then.
Growing up, I knew the names of caste icons and local strongmen. They were part of the background of village life. When certain leaders were killed, violence followed in nearby villages. When revenge killings happened elsewhere, celebrations erupted with crackers in the streets. At that time these events felt normal, like distant echoes of conflicts that didn’t directly involve us.
Looking back now, I realize how fortunate I was to be kept away from those tensions. For me, caste became visible only in the tenth standard, when school required a caste certificate. That was when my mother casually mentioned that one of my friends was not from our caste. Until then, the structures that organized village society had largely remained invisible to me.
Cinema, perhaps more than anything else, reveals these structures. For a long time, Tamil cinema—largely shaped by filmmakers from dominant castes—presented Tamil culture in a simplified and universal way. The food was always sambar and idlis. The villages were aesthetic backdrops. Social conflicts were rarely explored in depth.
When filmmakers like Mari Selvaraj began telling their stories, a different world entered the screen. Suddenly there were pigs, labourers, fields, caste conflicts, and the harsh realities of rural life. The tide is slowly changing. Through his films, the life of districts like Tirunelveli and Thoothukudi appears on screen in a way that feels authentic and lived.
What makes Mari’s storytelling powerful is not that he invents extraordinary events. Instead, he brings attention to things that many of us saw growing up but never questioned.
For instance, some of my cousins were not well off. They would wake up early in the morning to help their parents in the fields before getting ready for school. As a child, I simply accepted this as a fact of life. It never occurred to me to think about how exhausting that must have been. Watching films like Vaazhai made me revisit those memories and see them differently.
There is also an interesting similarity between Mari’s family and mine. In both households there was a strong belief that education was the path to a better life. That idea was deeply rooted in many families in rural Tamil Nadu.
But the journeys that follow that belief can be very different. Some people manage to move through the formal education system and build their lives that way. Others struggle within that system and find entirely different paths. Mari’s path eventually led him to storytelling and cinema, where he now documents the very world that shaped him.
Sometimes I also feel that Mari was fortunate in another way. His village seems to have had people who were politically aware—an uncle who was a communist, relatives who knew about Ambedkar, and conversations shaped by those ideas.
My village was not like that. Politically and socially, we were not as aware. In many ways, people are still figuring that part out.
Another of Mari’s books, Tamirabaraniyil Kolapadathavargal, was particularly eye-opening for me. The book tells the story of the Tamirabarani firing from the perspective of those who lived through it. Reading it made me realize how different events can look depending on whose eyes you see them through.
While reading it, I couldn’t help thinking about the similarities between the Tamirabarani firing of July 23, 1999 and the Tuticorin firing of 2018. These are only my personal thoughts, and I have rarely seen this comparison discussed elsewhere.
In both cases, ordinary people protesting for their rights faced the force of the state. In 1999 it was workers demanding better wages. In 2018 it was people protesting against the Sterlite plant. In both situations, the police acted as the instrument of the ruling system.
Corporations were present in the background in both cases as well—Bombay Burma Trading Corporation in one instance and Vedanta in the other. In different ways, both conflicts involved the power of large institutions confronting small communities.
I still remember someone mentioning very casually during my college days that after the 1999 firing there had been no major uprising in Tirunelveli. That sentence stayed with me. When the Tuticorin firing happened in 2018, I wondered whether the system had again acted in a way that would ensure such uprisings would not happen again.
There is another aspect of Mari Selvaraj’s world that feels deeply authentic to me—his depiction of village deities.
In mainstream media, the small gods of the villages are often mocked, simplified, or turned into superstition. Middle-class narratives tend to comfortably accept gods like Vishnu or Shiva, but ridicule deities like Pechi, Kaatu Pechi, or Kaalamadan.
But for many villages, these are the gods that people actually live with.
Growing up with deities like Sudalaimadan and Kuthupirai Azhagi Amman, Mari’s depiction of these gods feels far more real than anything mainstream cinema has shown before. These gods are not abstract philosophical figures. They are part of the land, the forest, the cremation ground, the village boundary.
Seeing these deities represented with dignity and intensity in his work was almost overwhelming for me.
It felt like seeing a part of village life that had always existed quietly being finally acknowledged on screen and in literature.
That may be why Mari Selvaraj’s works feel less like fiction and more like memory.
His writing and films often bring me back to the villages of my childhood—the ponds, the fields, the early mornings, the unspoken social boundaries, the small shrines under trees, and the people who quietly carried the weight of those structures.
In that sense, Mari Selvaraj’s works do more than tell stories.
They reopen memories that many of us had simply moved past.
And sometimes it feels good to return there.
Brown Wanderer 