It has morphed into something uniquely layered, reflecting caste, class, regional politics all at once, even as it thrills us with signature violence and bravado
In the decades following Independence, South Indian cinema was often built on the archetypes of the heroic male, almost always virtuous, sometimes angry, and usually law-abiding. These were men of principle: moustached engineers, pious and obedient sons, romantic lovers who sang around trees and under waterfalls or righteous cops, who could not let go of their morality no matter what the circumstances were.
But, over time, the fabric of the “hero” in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam cinema began to change. Somewhere between a Rajinikanth punchline and a Kamal Haasan eyebrow raise, things took a dark, delicious turn.
Suddenly, the boy-next-door was replaced by the rowdy-next-door, armed and angry: land-grabbing syndicates in Andhra, sand-smuggling gangs in Karnataka and the underworld dons in North Chennai.
Kamal-Mani Ratnam's first
When Mani Ratnam’s first film with Kamal Haasan, Nayakan, hit theatres in 1987, it pivoted Tamil cinema toward the genre of gangster drama.
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Loosely modelled on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and inspired by the spaghetti westerns of Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West), the film was based on the life of Sathuvachari Varadarajan Mudaliar, the powerful mafioso who lorded over Bombay from the early 1960s to the 1980s, along with Karim Lala and Haji Mastan.
Mani Ratnam, by mixing Dravidian social concerns and the immigrant Tamil experience into the Mumbai underworld, demonstrated that South Asian gangster tales could be a genre on its own.
Nayakan broke the mould of melodramatic films, melted it down, smelted it, and remade it into something entirely new.
The film begins in Madras (now Chennai), where a young boy named Sakthivel ‘Velu’ Naicker (Manikandan G.) is on the run after seeing his father — a trade union leader — killed in police custody. In a split-second act of retaliation, he stabs a cop and flees to Bombay, where he’s taken in by a smuggler named Hussain in the densely packed Dharavi slums.
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As Velu grows up, he slowly steps into the world of crime, out of necessity. When Hussain is killed by corrupt officers, Velu takes revenge and begins to build his own parallel system of justice. Over time, he becomes Velu Naicker the don (Kamal Haasan), an unofficial protector of the people, feared by authorities and worshipped by the locals.
Gangster hero as saviour and casualty
He marries Neela (Saranya Ponvannan), a school girl forced into prostitution, whom he saves from exploitation, and they have two children. But the life he leads keeps catching up with him: Neela is killed in a gang hit, his son Surya dies while trying to follow in his footsteps, and his daughter Charumathi eventually turns away from him.
Years later, Charumathi is married to a police officer tasked with arresting Velu. The film closes with Velu surrendering to protect his allies, escaping conviction due to lack of evidence, and being gunned down outside the courtroom by a man seeking revenge for a long-forgotten killing.
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Many would argue that Nayakan set a new template for gangster film in Tamil cinema, elevating it to a level few releases in the genre ever since have been able to come anywhere close.
Mani Ratnam, in retrospect, insists it is “not a gangster epic” at all but “the story of a man’s gradual collapse” under the weight of his own idealism. That notion — a crime thriller doubling as political allegory — made Nayakan one of the most iconic films of Indian cinema.
It ran for 214 days in Tamil Nadu and later earned a spot on Time magazine’s best-ever movies list. A year later, in Suresh Krissna’s directorial debut Sathya, Kamal Haasan gave us a young man so disillusioned with society, he decided to punch his way through it.
A genre on their own
A few years prior to Nayakan, crime dramas in the subcontinent had been massive hits. For example, Chandra Barot’s Amitabh Bachchan-Zeenat Aman-starrer Hindi film Don (1978), written by the famous duo Salim-Javed (Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar), had won over the hearts of cinefans in the South; the film was remade in Tamil as Billa (1980) by R Krishnamoorthy and is considered to be a turning point in superstar Rajinikanth’s career.
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But Mani Ratnam, by mixing Dravidian social concerns and the immigrant Tamil experience into the Mumbai underworld, demonstrated that South Asian gangster tales could be a genre on its own. In his hands, the gangster hero is both saviour and casualty, both caregiver and criminal: he “lives by a principle meant to help, and it slowly consumes him”.
Baashha and Thalapathi
The late 1980s and 1990s saw Tamil directors deploy the gangster motif for mythic and political ends: Mani Ratnam himself followed with Thalapathi (1991), a Mahabharata-inspired crime-fantasy about loyalty among outlaws.
Rajinikanth’s Baashha (1995) turned the trope into mass-masala, and Shankar’s cop-vs-don movies flirted with the genre. However, as one critic notes, the hero-worship and stylised action of these films gave way in the 2000s to gritty realism.
Films like Selvaraghavan’s Pudhupettai (2006) were “unapologetic and amoral” in depicting violence, and M Sasikumar’s Subramaniapuram (2008) relocated gangster angst to small-town Tamil Nadu.
Portraits of men’s moral meltdown
Subramaniapuram’s retro violence even inspired Bollywood’s Anurag Kashyap (who cited it as an influence for Gangs of Wasseypur), while Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Malayalam Angamaly Diaries (2017) took the same sharp, local approach in Kochi.
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Tamil’s “angry young man” of the Emergency era — once railing at state oppression — became, in recent hits like Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Kamal Haasan-starring Vikram (2022) and Nelson Dilipkumar’s Rajinikanth-starrer Jailer (2023), more of a swaggering antihero channeling personal rage.
Indeed, critics observe that modern South Indian crime films often feature heroes driven by personal ambition or greed, not lofty justice, “set in the past but with the acceptable amorality of our times”.
Caste violence
In recent years, and Nayakan’s imprint remains, but something else is happening. Directors are no longer interested in gangsters as Shakespearean heroes. They’re digging deeper into the caste violence that creates a gangster, the political machinery that makes him necessary, the futility of glamour in a world where survival is a daily negotiation.
By taking liberties with history and myth, KGF showed how Kannada storytellers could pack local colour into a sweeping gangster odyssey.
For example, Vada Chennai (2018), starring Dhanush, is Vetrimaaran’s most structurally ambitious film, and possibly the most politically literate gangster saga to come out of Tamil cinema in recent decades. Dhanush plays Anbu, a carrom player from North Chennai who doesn’t want to be in a gang war but finds himself absorbed into one, as the film stretches across timelines, betrayals, and elections.
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The story doesn’t follow a standard rise-and-fall arc. Instead, it unfolds like a slow trap: every choice Anbu makes pulls him deeper into a world where violence is a legacy and neighbourhood politics is inseparable from crime. The violence, when it comes, is sudden and disorienting.
Vetrimaaran treats North Chennai not as backdrop but as central character: a place with memory, economy, caste politics, and unspoken rules. The result is a film that anatomises the ecosystem that produces it, sustains it, and then quietly replaces one generation with the next. It’s a rare film where time feels like the real villain.
Pawns in a political game
Vetrimaaran has said the characters are “pawns in a larger political game”. In fact, Tamil gangster sagas tend to double as critiques of corruption and class conflict.
Similarly, Pa Ranjith’s Kaala (2018) — with Rajinikanth as a slumlord-gangster in Mumbai’s Dharavi — was pitched not as a Haji Mastan biopic but as a story about the “diverse families that live in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum”.
Ranjith underlined that Kaala’s titular don was inspired by his grandfather and symbolised the working-class “colour” (Kaala means black) of Tirunelveli migrants in the slum.
So, Tamil crime cinema today marries the swagger of its stars with a self-aware intelligence: as one critic put it, Mani Ratnam’s Nayakan was never meant to be a simple “Tamil Godfather” or a tribute to Salim-Javed tropes, but a portrait of a man’s moral meltdown.
Telugu Noir: The masculinity factor
In Telugu cinema, the gangster genre took off under the influence of filmmakers like Ram Gopal Varma (whose Siva in 1989 was a landmark) but has found fresh life in recent decades. The gangster hero is often larger-than-life, a swashbuckling outsider with a heart.
Producers of the new pan-Indian trend have noticed that violent crime dramas travel well across languages. The stupendous success of Kannada’s KGF series, Telugu’s Pushpa: The Rise, Tamil’s Vikram and Malayalam’s Bheeshma Parvam has reinforced the drama that only hyper-violent spectacles can guarantee pan-India profits.
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These films tend to de-emphasize dialogue (making dubbing easier) and crank up action by the Tarantino scale.
Social realities
Telugu directors like Sukumar (Pushpa, 2021) and others have fashioned rural bandit stories into antiheroes for the masses: the new tough guy isn’t defending caste pride or politics so much as staking his claim to power and wealth. Indeed, some critics observe that today’s Telugu gangster heroes descend into crime for “personal greed and ambition” rather than noble revenge.
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The indigenous Telugu underworld film also nods to social realities. Earlier hits like Gaayam (1993) or Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998, in Hindi but from a Telugu-born director) showed urban crime and factional violence, inspiring successors to ground their villains in local caste or district politics.
South Indian directors have taken a shine to crime stories as both adrenaline jolts and mirrors of social change.
Newer Telugu crime-sagas sometimes resemble vigilante or revenge tales — for instance, Puri Jagannadh’s hero-killed-father dramas — but under the hood they share DNA with more traditional gang wars. The interplay of multiple languages is also key: gangster characters often move between Telugu, Hindi or Tamil in these films, perhaps reflecting the cross-state nature of today’s organised crime.
Malayalam crime films as caste dramas
Malayalam cinema came relatively late to the gangster genre, but when it arrived, it hit with a crisp realism.
Inspired by the crime cinema of Tamil and Marathi films, Malayalam’s wave of gang sagas began around the mid-2010s. Dulquer Salmaan’s Kammattipaadam (2016), directed by Rajeev Ravi, is often cited as a milestone: it delves into the dispossession of Dalit land by Kochi’s real-estate mafias and the resulting urban violence.
The film’s complex framing (it spans decades) and attention to caste issues caught the eye of film critics across India; Anurag Kashyap called Kammattipaadam “one of the best gangster films” he’d seen. Rajeev Ravi’s approach — gritty handheld camerawork, natural lighting, and a focus on marginalised characters — was a revelation.
Two years later, Lijo’s Angamaly Diaries further proved the point. This film, featuring almost 90 new actors, portrays the pig-butchering racket of a suburban Kochi locale. Though celebrated for its 11-minute single-shot climax, it’s still fundamentally a raw crime drama, in the vein of Tamil’s Subramaniapuram or even Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. (Pellissery himself grew up around similar communities.)
Like Kammattipaadam, Angamaly Diaries inspired remakes and set a new bar for authenticity in Indian gangster cinema.
Linguistic texture
The Malayalam crime film has expanded since: recent hits include Bheeshma Parvam (2022), a stylish revenge-gangster tale, and RDX: Home Delivery (2023) with its tongue-in-cheek humour plus multiple fight sequences. These movies often show Malayalam’s linguistic texture — fierce local slang and song-in-action montages — even as they aspire to the blood-and-guts razzmatazz of their Telugu and Kannada peers.
Malayalam underworld movies are often social chronicles as much as crime thrillers. In Kammattipaadam, Rajeev Ravi interwove gangster violence with Kochi’s redevelopment politics, earning it praise as a defining New Wave film.
In fact, its focus on a dispossessed Dalit community makes it as much a caste drama as a crime drama. More recent Malayalam gangsters that set gang conflicts against everyday life have continued this pattern.
Kannada industry's KGF and more
The Kannada industry leaped into the gangster spotlight with KGF (2018–2022). Prashanth Neel’s two-parter about the Kolar gold mines was a surprise blockbuster across languages, and it cemented Telugu star Yash’s image as a pan-Indian action star.
KGF’s look and sound — pounding drum beats, hyper-stylised thugs, colonial bad guys — consciously honoured Western crime epics while having a distinctive Karnataka setting. Neel himself says the film is “completely inspired” by the Mahabharata: the mining family is framed like an epic dynasty, and Rocky (Yash) is literally a Karna-figure entering an ongoing feud and “changing the destiny” of the clan.
By taking liberties with history and myth, KGF showed how Kannada storytellers could pack local colour into a sweeping gangster odyssey. (It also demonstrated how South Indian films can play Sanskrit-era mythology to Bollywood-level scale.)
Modern crime wave
In Kannada cinema, Upendra Rao’s cult classic Om (1995) — which Rao scripted and Shivarajkumar starred in — started the modern crime wave in the state with its depiction of the Mangaluru underworld. Upendra himself returned to gangster themes decades later in Kabzaa (2023), co-starring Shiva Rajkumar and Sudeep, which was billed as “a saga about a gangster who ruled south India”.
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Kabzaa spans eras from the 1970s onward, with Upendra as a local don and big names like Mohanlal in the cast. Lokesh Kanagaraj (Tamil director of Kaithi and Vikram) is now helming Coolie (2025) with Rajinikanth as a gold-smuggler, again crossing language lines by featuring Telugu star Nagarjuna and a cameo by Bollywood’s Amitabh Bachchan.
These projects suggest Kannada filmmakers are casting their gangster stories in broader lights.
Crime goes digital
The gangster saga in South India has never been purely regional. A wave of crossover hits and streaming deals means these films are now explicitly pan-Indian in approach.
After Baahubali, the “pan-Indian” gangsters have become quite a thing: movies heavy on action. This explains why many big stars from one language shoot their gangster roles amid crews from multiple states, and why dubbing has become standard.
Streaming platforms have accelerated the trend. Mani Ratnam’s latest with Kamal Haasan, Thug Life (2025), is slated to go to Netflix eight weeks after its theatrical run. The platform’s deal signals confidence that the mafia melodrama will find a national audience.
Likewise, Suriya’s recently released Tamil gangster romance Retro (2025) was quickly sold to Netflix for an “OTT digital premiere…in multiple South Indian languages”. Early tweets from Netflix even teased Retro with lines like “A man’s love can move mountains, but his rage? That’s Retro!” – explicitly marketing the hero’s vengeance theme to all of India. The effect is clear: a gangster film made in Tamil today might stream in Telugu and Malayalam the next month, and vice versa.
Local flavour, global ambition
The bottom line is that gangster films now sit at the intersection of local flavour and global ambition. South Indian directors have taken a shine to crime stories as both adrenaline jolts and mirrors of social change.
They riff on traditions — homage to Godfather or Scorsese — but they also deliver sharp regional accents. Vetri Maaran’s and Pa Ranjith’s Tamil dons protect their slum-dwellers from political plunder. Lijo and Rajeev’s Kerala gangsters get tangled in caste and urban history. Kannada storytellers pitch rural tributes to mythology, and Telugu heroes strut with swagger born of street-smart cunning.
And, increasingly, all of them speak the same language and evoke the same idiom for the screen, and reach for the same international audience via streaming.
In short, the South’s gangster genre has morphed into something uniquely layered — reflecting caste and class, regional politics and pan-Indian commerce all at once — even as it still thrills us with its signature violence and bravado.
