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Filmmaker Mani Ratnam was just a high schooler when he found himself intrigued by Kalki Krishnamurthy’s 1955 novel Ponniyin Selvan. He brought the five-part book into theaters in two installments with Ponniyin Selvan: I and Ponniyin Selvan: II, ensembling a star-studded cast boasting the likes of Chiyaan Vikram, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Karthi, Trisha Krishnan and Jayam Ravi, among many others. While Mani Ratnam has hailed Ponniyin Selvan as his most ambitious project to date, his wife Suhasini Maniratnam recently admitted she initially discouraged the filmmaker from undertaking this massive magnum opus.
Mani Ratnam is an artist par excellence, having blessed the Indian film industry with some of its finest jewels, including Roja, Guru, Saathiya, and Dil Se, among many others. However, one of the biggest setbacks of his career came after the failure of his 1997 film, Iruvar, which failed to live up to expectations at the box office.
Now, Mani Ratnam’s wife, Suhasini Maniratnam, has revealed that she discouraged her husband from going forward with a project with a magnitude as high as Ponniyin Selvan, as she was disappointed with the results yielded by Iruvar at the box office. In a recent interview, Suhasini disclosed that she was a hurdle for her husband from the beginning, refusing to stand with him while he embarked on this glorious journey. Well, little did she know it was only going to add another feather, and the most sacred one yet, to her husband’s cap.
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Speaking to ABP, Suhasini said, “From the beginning, I have been telling him, don’t do it (Ponniyin Selvan). I was a little disappointed with the result of Iruvar, which we made on the history and politics of the state. I was very disappointed with the reception of the film. I was the writer of the film, I wrote the dialogues. I said, ‘I think our people don’t want tradition and history, give them love stories and forget it.’ That was my attitude.”
Suhasini further told the publication that she was apprehensive of the project and stopped the filmmaker from doing it every time he set his mind on it. “Every time he tried to do it, I told him to leave me out of it. I was scared to get the same reaction as Iruvar but I was completely wrong,” she said. For the unversed, Mani Ratnam had once revealed that he has been wanting to adapt the screenplay of Ponniyin Selvan’s novel for a very long time.
Ponniyin Selvan went on to become one of the most critically and commercially successful projects of Mani Ratnam’s prolific career. The first part of the franchise grossed approximately Rs 450-500 crore worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing Tamil film of 2022, and the third-highest-grossing Indian film of 2022.
Meanwhile, Iruvar, released in 1997, inspired by the lives of M. Karunanidhi, M. G. Ramachandran, and J. Jayalalithaa, was set against the backdrop of cinema and politics in Tamil Nadu. The high-budget film did not meet commercial success and was also mired in controversy after both M. Karunanidhi and J. Jayalalithaa denied the relevance of the film to their lives.
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