Language Controversy Shadows Kamal Haasan’s Political Ascent

On May 24, 2025, during the audio launch of his upcoming film Thug Life in Chennai, actor Kamal Haasan stood beside Shivarajkumar, heir to Kannada cinema’s first family, and spoke with the ease of a man long accustomed to being listened to. He said, almost idly, almost fondly, that Kannada was born from Tamil. It was the sort of sentence that might have passed unnoticed in another room, in another decade. But this was 2025, and the room, though clapping, was not the only audience. The remark travelled, and by the time it reached Karnataka, it was an insult, a trespass disguised as scholarship. In no time, the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce had called for a ban on the release of Thug Life, Haasan’s upcoming collaboration with Mani Ratnam. TV tickers scrolled in angry fonts and pro-Kannada groups were demanding an apology. Haasan offered his usual elliptical position: if I am wrong, I will apologise. If not, I won’t.

It’s a familiar loop. A sentence becomes a slogan becomes a wound. And Haasan, ever the lightning rod for questions of identity, culture, language, and freedom, stands at the centre once again. What he said isn’t particularly outrageous. Most linguists agree that Tamil and Kannada descend from a common proto-Dravidian root, and in the long arc of South Indian philology, Tamil’s literary antiquity is older. But this is not about grammar, or even pride. It is about territory. In Karnataka, language is memory, and a defence mechanism against decades of Hindi imposition. Language, here, is survival. To say Kannada is born of Tamil is to suggest hierarchy.

Thug Life, a project long in gestation, directed by Mani Ratnam, with music by AR Rahman, has Kamal Haasan at its enigmatic centre. Little is known of its plot, save that it promises revolt and reinvention. And yet, it is already burdened with the fate of too many Indian films before it—held hostage not by its content, but by what someone said while standing too close to a microphone. That a film about rebellion should itself be banished before release carries the symmetry of farce. The outrage is not about cinema. It is about language, the loyalty it demands, and what happens when an artist forgets which threshold he is standing on.

It happened before, in 2013, with Vishwaroopam. The film, a lavish counterterrorism thriller written, directed by and starring Haasan, was cleared by the censor board. It premiered in Los Angeles. It had subtitles. It had finesse. But ahead of its Tamil Nadu release, the state government banned it. The reasons: “security concerns”, “community objections”. Haasan wept on camera. He offered to leave Tamil Nadu. He spoke, between pauses, of losing his home, his honour. “I’ve been made a scapegoat,” he said. “If there is no secular state in India, I will go elsewhere.” He cut a tragicomic figure—artist as exile, star as supplicant, a man being punished not for making a dangerous film, but for making a film at all. The ban was eventually lifted. But not before the film was edited, trimmed of its sharpest shadows. When Vishwaroopam finally released, it no longer belonged to its maker.

What this reveals—then and now—is the sheer fragility of cultural infrastructure in India. Every artwork arrives with a ledger of permissions. Every sentence is a potential site of fire. That Haasan, who has spent 50 years navigating the paradoxes of language, caste, faith, and modernity, still ends up in this same bureaucratic theatre of ban-and-apologise is both sad and predictable.

But Haasan has never been one to bow to the host. He has been, from the start, a maker of his own house—a polymath actor, dancer, mimic, rationalist, atheist, accidental politician. His worst films are still interesting; his best ones are small epics. And through it all, he has insisted on being taken seriously. Not just as a performer, but as a speaker. A writer of thoughts. A man for whom language is theatre, not territory.

Haasan is on the cusp of beginning his Rajya Sabha tenure, a late-career pivot from cinema to statesmanship, conferred not by electorate but by arrangement. And yet, before the ink has dried, he finds himself once more at controversy’s door.

Karnataka is not wrong to defend its language. Kannada is vast, ancient, rhythmic, shaped by Bhakti poets, Veerashaiva reformers, and rebel grammarians. It is not subordinate to Tamil; it is a parallel river, sometimes running close, sometimes far. But to protect a language by silencing a film is like saving a book by burning a library. It satisfies the moment and starves the future.

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