The mysterious death of a young National Film Award-winning cinematographer

Saravanamarathu Soundarapandian's older sister still has prizes that her brother won when he was a child – erasers, pencils, keychains. “He had been a prize-winner throughout his life,” Maruthavalli told Scroll.

But Saravanamarathu did not take home his latest honour – the National Film Award for cinematography for his short film Little Wings, announced in August.

Saravanamarathu was murdered in March 2023, when he was 31. He set out from his house in Madurai on March 15 on Maruthavalli's two-wheeler and never returned. After a fortnight, his buried body was discovered by the police in an area called Keeranur, about two hours away from his home.

Three men were held for his murder. Local media reported police versions of the motivations for the killing, which involved a romantic relationship in which Mani was allegedly involved. But the family told Scroll that they had not heard of the relationship. Police officials declined share a copy of the first information report with Scroll over email or text message.

The announcement of the award, which Saravanamarathu shared with Meenakshi Soman, his former classmate at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata, was a grim reminder of the loss to his family and friends and colleagues – a loss of a loved one as well as a budding talent with a bright future ahead of him.

“It is almost like he is reminding us to fight for him,” Maruthavalli said about the award two years after her brother's demise. “If he had remained alive, there are so many more accolades that he could have brought to the country.”

Saravanamarathu, known to friends and family as Mani, was the second of three children; he also had a younger sister. The family hails from Madurai in Tamil Nadu.

Saravanamarathu's father Soundarapandian was from a family of stage artists and had aspired to be an actor in Tamil cinema. He even played minor roles in a few films, but had to give up acting after his own father passed away suddenly, Maruthavalli recalled.

Soundarapandian moved back to Madurai to work as a bus conductor. He struggled to make ends meet, but ensured that all his children were educated. “He told us that the only wealth he could give us was an education,” Maruthavalli said. “Mani too would do small jobs to contribute to the family.”

In 2013, Saravanamarathu graduated from an engineering programme and secured a job with Wipro in Chennai – the family was ecstatic at the achievement and the prospect of some financial security. But a year later, Saravanamarathu returned home and told his father he wanted to quit.

“He told our father that his heart was simply not in the job, and that he wanted to study cinematography instead,” his sister said.

The family was shocked. “We were such a poor family, so for my brother to get such a respectable and high-paying job was an honour,” Maruthavalli said. “So it surprised us that he wanted to give up on his career.”

Maruthavalli reasoned that her father's own early artistic ambitions persuaded him to allow his son to change careers. “So despite our financial challenges, our father allowed him to go and pursue his cinematography dreams,” Maruthavalli said.

She recounted that her brother's passion for the field had been evident for a long time. “He was in love with the camera,” she said.

One time not long after Saravanamarathu got his first phone with a camera, he gathered young children in the neighbourhood and made them play the simple traditional Tamil hand game for children called “Saa-Boo-Three”, Maruthavalli recounted. “He gave the children sweets and biscuits and made them play this game and shot what they were doing,” she said. “These were simple little films, but they were so skillfully shot.”

She added with a chuckle, “He had plans to make me act in his future films.”

In 2015, Saravanamarathu secured admission to the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, one of the top film schools in the country. To afford his education and stay, he took up various jobs even while in college.

“He would buy snacks from Madurai and sell them on campus,” Maruthavalli said. “He even had a small tea shop set up there.”

S Vignesh, a close friend of Saravanamarathu, fondly remembered the tea shop. “He was always trying to figure out ways to make money because he struggled so much financially,” he said. “He even took up some gardening work on campus and planted trees. It was like a little farm that he named Tarkovsky's Farm”, after the renowned film director Andrei Tarkovsky.

Since Saravanamarathu had an electrical engineering background, he would help his colleagues with lights and other electrical equipment. “We would use his help to fix and set up the lights,” Vignesh said.

RV Ramani, a filmmaker, who often conducts workshops at the institute, said he was very drawn to Saravanamarathu's persona. “Since we were both from the south, I invited him to my home in Chennai and he visited a few times,” Ramani said. “He was enthusiastic about learning and figuring out things, and determined to make a mark in cinema.”

After he graduated in 2019, Saravanamarathu entered the film world and began to find work across a range of projects, in many languages, including Tamil, Marathi and Bengali.

Among the prominent commercial Tamil films on which he worked as an assistant cinematographer were Yaadhum Oore Yaavarum Keli and Good Night, both from 2023.

Among the Hindi projects he worked on were Bunty Aur Babli 2 (2021) and Bachchan Pandey (2022).

Little Wings, which Saravanamarathu shot in 2022, is a short film about an old woman trapped in a bitter marriage, who is pushed to her limits when her paralysed husband decides to try and eat her pet rooster.

It won the best short film award at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala in 2022 and at the International Film Festival of India, Goa that same year.

“He was ecstatic that his work was finally getting the exposure that it deserved,” Vignesh said. “He wanted to scale more new heights. With Little Wings getting him recognition, he was trying to use it to his advantage.”

Meenakshi Soman, with whom he shared the national award said, “Mani was an extraordinary individual – an acute observer of both nature and humans.”

She added, “His deep love for literature, poetry, and music enriched his vision, and these influences were always evident in the sensitivity and depth of his frames.”

Vignesh was with Saravanamarathu over the last few days before he went missing. They had been helping another friend and a batchmate of theirs shoot a film in Tirunelveli.

After the work was done, the two friends headed to Saravanamarathu's house in Madurai. They spent the night talking and laughing. “I was supposed to leave early, but I slept in and got up to find that his family had bought mutton and cooked a nice breakfast for me,” he said. “Little did I know that that would be the last meal that I would share with him.”

After Vignesh left that morning, Saravanamarathu borrowed his sister's scooter and set out for some work.

“I called him up in the evening and asked for the bike because I needed to go pick up my children around 4 pm from school, and he said he would come back to drop it,” Maruthavalli said.

But 4 pm came and went, and he did not return – the hours wore on and by around 9 pm, the family began to panic. “We were worried that he might have met with an accident and imagined that he may be lying somewhere injured,' she said.

The next morning, his sisters went to a police station and registered a complaint stating that their brother was missing.

It was only 15 nerve-wracking days later that the police summoned them to the place where they found his body. “They called us to identify him,” Maruthavalli said.

In the days that followed, the family's troubles only grew. Friends and family recounted that local media published pieces about the incident and Mani's claimed relationship.

The family was dismayed to see theories about the death presented in local media as justifications for it.

“They said that my brother had a lot of female contacts on his phone,” she said. “Even on my phone, I have several men's numbers besides my husband's. What does that mean? He studied and worked with many women. Of course, he had a lot of contacts.”

The police also did not provide the family with a copy of Saravanamarathu's autopsy results, Maruthavalli said. Police personnel at the first station the family approached declined to comment to Scroll on this matter, but said the family should approach them with any specific complaints. Maruthavalli said the family does not have the resources to pursue the case, persist with enquiries to the police, hire lawyers or move courts.

“It was because he was conceived in the womb of a poor and illiterate woman that we have to suffer this way,” she said.

But even as the family still grapples with the tragedy, Maruthavalli believes that artists like her brother live on beyond their deaths. “Don't write in your story that he is dead,” she said. “He will remain alive through his work.”

Source: Scroll
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