Nayakan
Table of Contents
Quick Facts
Nayakan is a Tamil crime drama directed by Mani Ratnam, starring Kamal Haasan as Velu Naicker, a Dharavi slum dweller who rises to become the most feared and loved don in Bombay. Released on 21 October 1987, it is widely regarded as one of the greatest Indian films ever made — India’s official entry to the 1988 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, a National Film Award winner for Kamal Haasan’s performance, and the only Tamil film to feature in Time magazine’s All-Time 100 Movies list.
The film is now streaming on Prime Video. What makes it endure is not its gangster-movie surface but its soul: a Shakespearean tragedy about a good man forced by circumstance into a life of crime, told with a visual poetry that Indian cinema had rarely seen before.
Plot
Sakthivel, a young boy in Thoothukudi, watches his father — a trade union leader — gunned down by the police. In a flash of rage the boy picks up a gun and kills the policeman, then flees to Bombay, where he is taken in by Hussain, a kind-hearted smuggler in the Dharavi slums. Growing up among the poorest of the poor, Velu becomes their protector. When Hussain is murdered by a rival, Velu takes revenge and steps into his shoes — and so begins the reign of Velu Naicker.
Over the decades Velu builds an empire of smuggling and power, but his heart stays with Dharavi’s people, who worship him as their saviour. He marries Neela, raises a family, and tries to keep his children away from his world. But his son Surya grows up to become an Assistant Commissioner of Police — and is assigned the one case his father can never escape: bringing Velu Naicker to justice. The film’s devastating final act pits father against son in a courtroom where no verdict can feel like justice.
The story spans nearly forty years, following Velu from a frightened child to an ageing don who has lost almost everything he loved. It is loosely inspired by the life of Mumbai underworld figure Varadarajan Mudaliar, but Mani Ratnam shapes it into something closer to The Godfather in spirit — a crime saga that is really about family, guilt and the price of power.
Performance
Kamal Haasan gives the performance of his life — and given his filmography, that is saying something. He plays Velu from youth to old age with prosthetic ageing that was groundbreaking for Indian cinema in 1987, but it is the interior work that stuns: the way his eyes harden over the years, the weariness that settles into his walk, the famous courtroom monologue delivered with a trembling restraint that won him the National Film Award for Best Actor. The scene where an old Velu asks the court, “Neenga nallavara kettavara?” — are you good or bad? — remains one of the most quoted moments in Tamil cinema.
Saranya, in her debut as Neela, brings a quiet dignity to the suffering wife, while Karthika is memorable as Velu’s daughter Charumathi. Janagaraj as Velu’s loyal aide Selvam and Delhi Ganesh as the upright police officer provide the film’s moral counterweights. Every supporting performance feels lived-in, never theatrical — a hallmark of Ratnam’s casting.
Screenplay and Direction
Mani Ratnam was only in his early thirties when he made Nayakan, and the confidence of the filmmaking is startling. The screenplay, written by Ratnam from a story by Balakumaran, moves across four decades without ever feeling episodic — each era of Velu’s life flows into the next with novelistic ease. P. C. Sreeram’s cinematography is legendary: the rain-soaked Dharavi streets, the amber glow of the slum at night, the stark white of the courtroom — every frame composed like a painting.
Ratnam’s great achievement is refusing to glamorise Velu even as he makes him sympathetic. The violence is sudden and ugly, never stylish. And the film’s moral centre — that a man can be a hero to his people and a criminal to the law at the same time — is never resolved with easy answers. That ambiguity is what places Nayakan alongside the great gangster films of world cinema rather than beneath them.
Music
Ilaiyaraaja’s score is inseparable from the film’s power. The background music — particularly the mournful theme that follows Velu through his life — does as much storytelling as the dialogue. The songs are classics: “Thenpandi Cheemayile”, sung by Kamal Haasan himself, became an anthem, while “Nee Oru Kadhal Sangeetham” and “Nila Adhu Vaanathu Mela” showcase Raja’s gift for melody that carries emotion without words.
What is remarkable is how the music ages with the character — the same themes return in darker, heavier arrangements as Velu grows older, a musical mirror of the prosthetic ageing on screen.
Themes
Nayakan is about the making of a godfather and the unmaking of a man. It asks whether a criminal who feeds the hungry and shelters the homeless is a villain or a victim of a system that failed him first. The father-son conflict at the climax — a policeman son prosecuting a don father — distils the film’s central question: can justice exist without compassion? Velu’s tragedy is that the slum made him a king, but kingship cost him his family, his peace and finally his freedom.
Conclusion
Nayakan is not just a great Tamil film — it is a landmark of world cinema, the film that proved Indian commercial cinema could stand beside The Godfather and Mean Streets without apology. Kamal Haasan’s towering performance, Mani Ratnam’s assured direction, Sreeram’s luminous cinematography and Ilaiyaraaja’s unforgettable score combine into something close to perfect. Nearly four decades on, it has lost none of its power. If you watch one Tamil film in your life, make it this one.
No official trailer is available for this film on a studio or rights-holder channel, so no video is embedded here. We would rather leave the space empty than link to a fan-made upload.