The ‘Divine’ Appeal of Tamil Cinema to Malayalis: Manjummel Boys and Beyond

Director Santhana Bharathi was watching a Malayalam film in a Chennai theatre a few days back. When the crowd erupted into spontaneous applause at the film’s climax, Bharathi was overcome with emotion. The song playing at this crucial juncture is from Gunaa (1991), a film he directed 33 years ago. “I had goosebumps at the moment and started tearing up,” Bharathi said, unable to believe that the audience could be so moved by an old song in a new film made in another language. “I had no idea that the people of Kerala also loved this song so much,” he added with bemusement. 

But, it’s not just any old song. ‘Kanmani Anbodu’ from Gunaa, composed by Ilaiyaraaja and sung by Kamal Haasan and S Janaki, is a classic that has always been popular with fans of Tamil cinema music. In Chidambaram’s survival thriller Manjummel Boys (2024), however, the song appears in a context that elevates its beauty to a whole other level. If Gunaa romanticised the love between a mentally ill man and his hostage (Roshini) as “divine”, Manjummel Boys ascribes it to friendship. 

In cinema halls across the country, where the south Indian populace is turning up in droves to watch the film, the lines “Idhu manithan unarnthu kolla, manitha kadhal alla/ Athayum thaandi/Punithamanathu!” (This is not human love for humans to understand it/It is beyond that/ It is divine!” are being welcomed with thunderous applause and buckets of tears. The film has become the highest grossing Malayalam film in Tamil Nadu, crossing Rs 10 crore. Made on a budget of around Rs 15 crore, the film has grossed Rs 90 crore in total collections in less than two weeks of its release. It’s a phenomenon that nobody could have predicted, not even director Chidambaram. 

The making of ‘Kanmani Anbodu’

Based on a real life incident, Manjummel Boys is about a group of men from Kochi who go to the Guna Cave in Kodaikanal. One of them (Sreenath Bhasi) slips into a deep pit in the restricted area of the cave, and it falls upon his friends (Soubin Shahir and others) to rescue him. “I had this song in mind when I was writing the film,” said Chidambaram. “It is the soul of the film, and the real life Manjummel boys are also big fans of Kamal Haasan and Gunaa.” 

Previously known as Devil’s Kitchen, the Kodaikanal cave was renamed Guna Cave after Santhana Bharathi shot the film at the location in the early Nineties. “Manjummel Boys was so thrilling. I couldn’t believe that the film was shot on a set. It looked so realistic. I have no connections with Kerala, and I didn’t know that they were making a film like this,” said Bharathi. “It’s God’s grace that the film and its songs are still alive in public memory.”

The ‘Kanmani Anbodu’ song is conceptualised as a letter dictated by Gunaa (Kamal Haasan) to his hostage. She’s an heiress named Rohini, but he believes her to be Abirami, the avatar of a goddess who would love him and marry him on a full moon day. As Gunaa articulates his love for her in broken lines, Rohini – who develops a soft corner for Gunaa – composes it into a song. “There was another Tamil song back then which was like a letter, and we didn’t want ‘Kanmani Anbodu’ to be similar to that. Vaali wrote the lyrics and Ilaiyaraaja composed the song. In fact, all the songs in the film were superhits,” recalled Bharathi. 

Talking about how they shot Gunaa in the dangerous location, Bharathi said that the team shot in three caves, including a very deep and large one. “We would leave for the shooting spot at 4 am and reach by 7. We would have breakfast and begin the shoot. It wasn’t possible to break for lunch and go up because of the nature of the landscape,” said Bharathi. “We would wrap up the shoot by 4 pm because it would become very dark by then. Even if it drizzled, it would be impossible to climb up.”

Gunaa was released along with Rajinikanth’s Thalapathi (1991), directed by Mani Ratnam. At the time, Thalapathi, a contemporary take on the Mahabharatha, stormed the box office and unseated Gunaa which was viewed as an experimental film. But since then, Gunaa has acquired a cult status among the audience, spawning several other films with mentally ill heroes and their obsessive love as the subject. 

The influence of Tamil cinema 

Director Chidambaram, who made his debut with the blockbuster Malayalam comedy Jan.E.Man (2021), is a huge Kamal Haasan fan. “The song has a high recall value among the Malayali audience too, and I trusted that. Of course, they may not understand the full meaning of the lyrics, but I was sure that people would get it within a couple of days of the film’s release,” said Chidambaram. 

Chidambaram added that the Tamil film industry has always been an inspiration for him. “We grew up watching Tamil films. It was the industry we went to for larger-than-life films, be it Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan or Vijay. More Malayalis watch Tamil films than the other way around,” he said. “The Tamil film industry has also produced several great music directors – Ilaiyaraaja, AR Rahman, Harris Jayaraj and so on. These are the songs we grew up watching on TV.”

It is the ‘Kanmani Anbodu’ song that draws the Manjummel gang to visit the Guna Cave, so it is befitting that the climax too features it. After all, what could possibly prompt someone to dive into a bottomless pit for his friend, if not divine love? “When making the film, I felt like the song had been written just for me to place it in this climax,” said Chidambaram with a laugh. 

‘Kanmani Anbodu’ didn’t need a revival, considering it’s an evergreen favourite. But the Tamil song in the Malayalam film has become a bonding opportunity for people of the two neighbouring states on social media. Tamil directors like Karthik Subbaraj and Venkat Prabhu have also lavished praise on the film. “I think Malayalis understood the lyrics of ‘Kanmani Anbodu’ from social media discussions on Manjummel Boys,” said Vignesh Madhu, film critic with The New Indian Express. “But even just the visuals worked for the audience, with Sreenath Bhasi being carried like the heroine was in the Kamal film. Everyone was expecting a cinematic high in the climax but this surpassed everything.”

Premalu (2024), another Malayalam blockbuster that released a couple of weeks before Manjummel Boys, is a good example of the popularity of Tamil cinema in Kerala. In the climax of this romcom, the hero’s bestie socks the villain because the latter fails to appreciate Tamil music director Yuvan Shankar Raja’s songs. Director Girish AD acknowledged that he’s a big fan of Yuvan – or YSR as he’s called – and that he always tries to include references to his music or have his songs play in the background in his films. 

“It was around 2004 that Yuvan was becoming famous, and I’ve been his fan since then. He was prominent in the Tamil film industry till about 2015 and I used to listen to all his songs,” said Girish. “Whether people got it or not, I’ve always put in some references to his work in my movies. I love his music from films such as Nandha (2001), Kadhal Konden (2003), 7G Rainbow Colony (2004), Paruthiveeran (2007), and Paiyaa (2010).” 

Premalu has grossed about Rs 80 crore so far, and will be released in Telugu on March 8. The film revolves around Sachin (Naslen), an aimless hero who is constantly falling in love. He ends up following his friend to Hyderabad where he meets IT professional and fellow Malayali Reenu (Mamitha Baiju), and is instantly smitten. Girish has made three films so far, all of them with young protagonists exploring love and life.

“There is a scene in Selvaraghavan’s Kadhal Konden where Dhanush’s character sleeps in class and is caught by the teacher. I included one such scene in Premalu referencing it because it seemed so apt,” said Girish. “I know how to read and write Tamil as well. It was Shankar’s Boys (2003) that got me hooked on Tamil films. I had only watched a few Tamil films like Roja (1992) on TV before that. But after Boys, I watched a lot of Tamil films. Particularly in the period following Class 12 when I was writing entrance exams.”

Girish was blown away by Boys, a coming-of-age film that revolves around the lives of six youngsters. The film became controversial at the time of its release, thanks to its unapologetic depiction of adolescent sexuality. “It was so different from Malayalam films and what I was used to,” said Girish. “I also felt a great connection with heroes from Selvaraghavan’s movies. They were ordinary men, mostly trouble-makers, people who didn’t have the superlative qualities usually associated with the hero.”

7G Rainbow Colony, a romantic drama with a “loser” hero (Ravi Krishna), made a big impact on Girish. “The hero of the film is a total failure. He is terrible at academics, his behaviour is bad…he’s the kind of guy you’d say is a burden on earth. But he has a crush on an upper class girl, and the film takes us through his pain. I found it very touching,” said Girish. “Of course, now I realise that there were many things about the hero that were toxic and can’t be accepted. Still, the film has stayed in my mind for a long time, including Yuvan’s songs. I was addicted to it.”

The power of the Tamil song

Girish noted that unlike Tamil films where songs have always been an integral part of the screenplay, the Malayalam film industry isn’t music driven. “During the cassette era, there was a compulsion to have five songs in a film. But after that, the approach has changed. Songs are included only if necessary. The Tamil industry has always had stalwarts as composers and many films have become a hit because of the music,” he said.  

Malayalam films are mostly made on modest budgets of Rs 5 to 10 crore. Tamil films, on the other hand, may splurge that amount just on the songs alone. Back in the Nineties, Shankar and his team did a 30-day trip around the world just to shoot the ‘Athisayam’ song in his Tamil film Jeans (1998). The most expensive Indian film song ever shot is also from a Shankar film – ‘Enthira logathu sundariye’ from 2.0 (2018) – that cost Rs 20 crore. With elaborate sets, hundreds of dancers, exotic locations and stars like Vijay who’ve made a name for themselves for their dance skills, it’s easy to understand the appeal of the Tamil film song to the Malayali audience.

Between 2000 and 2010, Malayalam cinema went through a phase when directors tried to imitate Tamil cinema’s larger-than-life sensibility, a period that many Malayalam cinema fans consider to be among the worst in the industry’s history. After that came the new generation of Malayalam filmmakers such as Lijo Jose Pellissery, Anjali Menon, Rajesh Pillai, Aashiq Abu, Anwar Rasheed, Dileesh Pothan, Mahesh Narayanan and others who broke away from formulaic films. But, even as the Malayalam industry was experimenting with form and content, Tamil films continued to be popular in Kerala. 

Vignesh Madhu said that until a few years ago, quite a few Malayalam films used to place a Vijay poster or throw references at an Ajith or Suriya film just to get claps from fans of the stars in the audience. “It wasn’t very organic. But in some films, it was done quite well. Premam (2015), for example, also has the ‘Kanmani Anbodu’ song and features a heroine who is Tamil,” he added.

He further pointed out that in earlier decades, Malayalam films used to mock Tamil characters and use derogatory terms like “pandi” to refer to them. “That doesn’t happen any more, and that’s a good thing,” he said. Agreeing with Girish about the hold of Tamil film music over the Malayali population, Madhu noted that when Nelson Dilipkumar’s Jailer (2023) came out, the Kerala audience was more excited about Anirudh composing a score for Mohanlal rather than the star working with Rajinikanth. 

In that sense, Manjummel Boys can perhaps be seen as a tribute from Kerala to the Tamil film industry – a thank you for all the music that has been part of people’s lives across generations. “I was swarmed when the film ended. I’m grateful to everyone who worked on Gunaa. It’s a matter of pride for all of us, a blessing,” said Santhana Bharathi, still processing how such an old song could move people even now. But maybe, the answer is beyond human understanding. Maybe, the answer lies in the divine.