Art Of Convenience: Why Parasakthi Escapes The Scrutiny Dhurandhar Faced

Coming in the immediate aftermath of Dhurandhar, a film accused of being right-wing propaganda, Sudha Kongara's Parasakthi, which shills for the Dravidian establishment, has curiously escaped a similar line of questioning from the liberal cultural establishment. This asymmetry is revealing, though hardly surprising.

On the other hand, the right wing, having gone out on a limb to defend Dhurandhar as ideological but legitimate cinema, is hardly in a position to call Parasakthi preachy. The liberals, meanwhile, appear unwilling to scrutinise a film that so faithfully flatters their own political ideas.

Yet to equate the two films merely on ideological grounds is to miss a more important distinction. Dhurandhar, whatever one thinks of its politics, functioned as cinema. It was robustly mounted, coherent, and unapologetically massy. It had propulsion, tension, and an understanding of the dynamics of popular filmmaking.

Parasakthi, by contrast, is tepid, schematic, and exhausted before it begins. It exists not as a dramatic exploration of history, but as a dutiful visual brief for the Dravidian political imagination.

The problem is not that Parasakthi is political. Tamil cinema has always been political, often explicitly so. The problem is that it is intellectually dishonest, and cinematically lazy.

Missing layers of history

One of the first signs of this laziness is how easily the film's ideas can be reverse-engineered from its trailer. There are no surprises, no moral ambiguities, no narrative risks. The film announces its villains and heroes with the bluntness of a pamphlet.

This is especially unfortunate because the anti-Hindi agitations of the 1960s, Parasakthi's central subject, represent one of the most consequential political events in modern Tamil history. Handled with care, they could have yielded a layered, unsettling film about power, mobilisation, and identity.

Instead, Kongara offers us an easy story without depth.

The historical record is more complex than what the film allows. The anti-Hindi agitations did play a decisive role in halting the Congress government's push to impose Hindi across India. Student protests, street violence, and political pressure forced the Centre to retreat.

But it is also true that these agitations were not entirely organic eruptions of popular sentiment. The DMK, then rising as a political power, played a decisive role in instigating, shaping, and politically harvesting the unrest. The payoff was historic. The DMK swept to power in 1967, dislodging the Congress, which has never since ruled Tamil Nadu.

This dual truth—that the agitation was both politically consequential and politically engineered—is precisely what Parasakthi refuses to confront. More tellingly, the film pretends that the anti-Hindi movement immediately reflected a deep, emotional, mass antipathy to Hindi culture itself. (They show an effigy of sorts named Hindi arakki (Hindi demoness).)

History again complicates this claim. In the early 1970s, Hindi cinema and music enjoyed a roaring run in Tamil Nadu. Rajesh Khanna was adored, Hindi songs were hummed, and Bollywood films did brisk business. The people, it turned out, were not language haters. They were political participants responding to a specific moment, not cultural absolutists.

A more honest film might have explored this contradiction. Parasakthi papers over it.

A pattern of distortion: From Soorarai Pottru to Parasakthi

This is not new territory for Sudha Kongara. Her Soorarai Pottru demonstrated her willingness to bend, compress, and reassign facts in service of a Dravidian-friendly narrative. The protagonist's battles were simplified, antagonists were flattened, and institutional complexities were moralised into neat binaries. The protagonist, an Iyengar in real life, was shown as an EVR supporter. It revealed a filmmaker comfortable with altering reality to suit ideology.

With Parasakthi, produced and released squarely within the DMK ecosystem, that instinct is not a bug but a feature. The film leaves you in no doubt about where its sympathies lie. Unfortunately, the narrative suffers because of it.

The characters are shallow to the point of caricature. Consider the arch-antagonist played by Ravi Mohan. His virulent anti-Tamil stance is traced back to a single, lazily written motivation. His Tamil father wronged his Hindi-speaking mother. From this domestic grievance flows a lifetime of cultural hatred. It is not psychology, it is convenience. This kind of writing does not illuminate prejudice, it trivialises it.

More troubling is the film's casual manipulation of attribution. A particularly harsh and coarse description of student agitators, originally made by EV Ramaswami, is reassigned in the film to the Congress Chief Minister Bhaktavatsalam. Kongara does not even have the courage to name the Chief Minister explicitly, preferring insinuation over accountability. This is not artistic licence. It is historical sleight of hand.

Disservice to history

Why does this matter? Because cinema, especially political cinema, shapes public memory. When a filmmaker knowingly misattributes words to sanitise one ideological figure and demonise another, she is falsifying it. That is the crux of the charge against Parasakthi. Not that it takes sides, but that it does so dishonestly.

What we are witnessing more broadly is a curious inversion. Right-wing filmmakers, long accused of incompetence masked by ideology, are visibly trying to improve their craft, learning to tell stories that function even when one disagrees with their politics.

Meanwhile, left-liberal cinema, particularly in Tamil, seems to be losing its grip on basic storytelling discipline.

Vetrimaran's Viduthalai 2 is a case in point. Showered with awards by a familiar ecosystem, the film was little more than a Communist tract in cinematic form, its characters reduced to mouthpieces, its drama suffocated by message. Parasakthi now joins a growing list of Tamil films undone by their own righteousness.

This is a pity. The anti-Hindi agitations deserve seriousness, nuance, and moral courage. They deserve a filmmaker willing to ask uncomfortable questions, not just of the Centre and the Congress, but also of the Dravidian movement itself. They deserve characters who think, doubt, err, and evolve.

Parasakthi is unimpressive not because it takes a stand, but because it refuses to earn it. In choosing ideological loyalty over intellectual honesty, Sudha Kongara diminishes both history and cinema. And that, finally, is Parasakthi's greatest betrayal.