At one point in Parasakthi, someone observes that language isn’t merely a tool to express thought. It is thought itself. Languages aren’t clothes you can change for convenience and still remain the same person inside. Each alters you. To suffocate one language or impose another, then, isn’t simply a superficial shift. It is a demand for transformation. It orders that you change your identity, your inner essence.

This, as you can see, is not a trivial idea at all. During a particularly suppressive period in Indian history (1960s), when Hindi was forced at the expense of local languages, people resisted ferociously. They screamed. They protested. They died. They believed rightly that what was at stake wasn’t vocabulary, but their existence itself. They felt that something primal is at stake, and it is perhaps for this reason that Sudha Kongara’s Parasakthi leans into a primal element, fire, as a recurring motif. Everything burns in this film. Trains. Buildings. People. The call to resistance from the Purananooru squad: “Thee paravattum.” The nature of how protests spread can be likened to fire. It picks up pace, it’s uncontainable, as anger and sentiment passes from person to person. It’s also why the Hunger Games’ second book (and film) is called… Catching Fire.

I love languages. I speak Tamil, Telugu, and English, and so when I learned that Parasakthi was set against the anti-Hindi agitations of the 1960s, I will be lying if I said I wasn’t already on its side. I wished for the film not just to assert its politics though, but to compel us emotionally. I wanted what I seek in every film: heroism, grief, conviction… and for them to exist not merely as ideas, but as affecting experiences. Above all, I wanted Parasakthi to be more of a film than a slogan.

I’m not sure it is.

From very early on, Chezhiyan’s (Sivakarthikeyan) tears never became mine. In the opening stretch, a train is burnt during a protest he leads. A celebratory song follows (Namakaana Kaalam) as students dance with belief and purpose. And then, right after, abruptly, Chezhiyan is told that someone has died in the fire. His breakdown is immediate. His decision to shut down the movement is instinctive and absolute. And I processed all of this from a distance. 

These developments register as information, not emotion.

However sincere Chezhiyan’s grief is, which includes cutting himself, I thought it all felt unearned, like I wasn’t set up for it yet. The film tells us he is shattered, but it doesn’t take us inside the shattering. In fact, this pattern repeats across the film. Later, when Chezhiyan suffers what is meant to be an extraordinary personal loss (a death that is hardly unexpected though), I was almost in disbelief about how swiftly he seems to recover/side-step that loss. When Thiru (Jayam Ravi) references this death directly to Chezhiyan’s face and claims responsibility as well, the response he receives from Chezhiyan isn’t personal rage, but ideological expression.

Chezhiyan then becomes oddly distant, a man supposedly driven more by political motivation than private devastation. And I don’t think this is what the film wants for him, or is even true about Chezhiyan in the first place. This man, after all, shut down a movement for the death of a stranger.

Thiru, the film’s antagonist, suffers from similar issues too. We see him as a ruthless, trigger-happy intelligence officer, and we are told, in passing, that he is the son of a Tamil man who abandoned his family early on. This, in theory, sows seeds of abandonment, resentment, and someone desperate to reject his roots. But again, this is passing information, remember. During the train arson scene at the beginning, Thiru loses his shooting finger, an injury that becomes the seed of a long obsession with Chezhiyan. Thiru tells us later that he spent six horrible years of punishment, as he also learned to shoot with his left hand. All of this, he explains. And so, all of this registers as theory rather than experience that we can judge for ourselves. We are told what happened to him; we never see what it did to him.

I think Thiru’s characterisation itself is a tad cinematic in this film rooted in real historical trauma. He kills civilians with alarming ease, threatens senior politicians without a second thought. In one shot, we see a young mother plead for her life, her infant in arms, and of course, Thiru shoots her without hesitation. The moment might have seemed horrifying on paper, but on screen, it feels like a convenient visual meant to manufacture sadness. The killings are easy, and without huge repercussions; so, death itself almost begins to lose weight in the film.

Things seem to happen to characters in Parasakthi. What happens within them, we rarely see.

Where the film briefly loosens its grip on ideology and focusses on interpersonal emotion, that’s when something genuinely human surfaces in the film. Sree Leela’s Ratnamala, I thought, felt genuinely alive; she is feisty without losing her inner joy, and it’s refreshing to see both coexist. Sudha Kongara is in her element in these spaces. There is a tender, well-constructed love-reveal involving Ratnamala, Chezhiyan, his mother, and his brother that works beautifully in isolation.

And yet, even here, I had questions. What does Ratnamala truly see in Chezhiyan? He is dutiful, but also rather sedate from her view. Wouldn’t she be more naturally drawn to Chinna (Atharvaa), who shares her ferocity and fire? I’m not saying her choice is impossible, only that the film doesn’t allow us into her process of choosing Chezhiyan. Her later discovery of Chezhiyan’s true identity, and resultant anger, gets played as a ‘cute moment’, designed to lead to the Ratnamala song. It felt here like the film let Ratnamala down.

The film is clearly invested in stitching history into the narrative. A Murasoli reference here, a Karunanidhi appearance there, an Anna speech, an Indira Gandhi cameo. I thought that on occasion, it felt more like a documentation of milestones than affecting dramatisation. I found myself acknowledging bits and pieces of information instead of being swayed by emotion.

Even with Chinna (Atharvaa, who I quite liked), the storytelling relies on convenience. Even before we see him for the first time, the film tells us he’s a brilliant engineer. Chezhiyan is rebuked for taking loans to support his education, and this is all information shared for our benefit, so storytelling can feel more accelerated through expository dialogues.

It’s probably why the film’s many emotional payoffs feel pre-programmed. Even as Ratnamala struggles with her stutter, you already know she will soon overcome it and deliver a flawless speech. That would be fine if the transformation felt joyous, if we were allowed to travel through her fear with her. But here, it feels planted. When she gets her moment at the end, I processed her triumph without feeling it. Yep, here’s the payoff.

That distance is the real issue with this film, which speaks so passionately about language as thought, as identity, as soul. Yet so often, it treats emotion as something easily created through choppy information. No doubt, it wanted me to feel devastated, triumphant, but I rarely felt allowed to arrive at these feelings organically.

It’s a bit strange really. If language shapes thought, then cinema, especially politically important cinema like Parasakthi, ought to shape feeling with equal care. Without that, we only see fire on screen, not feel it burning within us.