Veerapandiya Kattabomman

The East India Company has gained the rights to administer and levy taxes on the fiefdoms of Southern India. But defying its authority is Kattabomman, a gallant chieftain who refuses to pay tribute to the colonisers. A newly restored version of a legendary period drama.

B.R. Panthulu’s Gevacolor period epic Veerapandiya Kattabomman, valorising an eighteenth-century Southern Indian chieftain’s defiance of the colonial East India Company, has such an outsized influence on the Tamil imagination that the legend it forged has overshadowed all factually informed accounts. The scene of Kattabomman refusing to pay taxes to the English bureaucrat W.C. Jackson is a staple of elementary school elocutions.

The valiant image Kattabomman enjoys today owes largely to the fiery, thunderous portrayal by Sivaji Ganesan, who won the Best Actor award at the second Afro-Asian Film Festival in Cairo in 1960. Adapted from Ganesan’s own stage production, Veerapandiya Kattabomman finds Tamil cinema still rooted in a highly stylised theatrical tradition, with its painted backdrops, front-facing actors, planar mise en scène and high-literary dialogue delivered emphatically. 

A costume drama in every sense of the term, the film features not just ornate courtly attire and company uniforms, but also men disguised as women, women as men, aristocrats as robbers, Tamils as Britishers. This spirit of play and masquerade – in a story about spies and conspirators – perfectly reflects the porous nature of classical Indian cinema, in which comic interludes and song sequences can freely mix with serious drama, even deepen it.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

Additional Credits

Presented in collaboration with NFDC – National Film Archive of India.

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