Before Andrew Louis wrote and directed two seasons of the Tamil series Vadhandhi, he made the movies Leelai and Kolaigaran. Vadhandhi was backed by Wallwatcher Films, whose founders Pushkar and Gayatri happen to be Louis’s classmates and old friends.

Pushkar and Gayatri serve as creative producers on Vadhandhi, whose first season, subtitled The Fable Of Velonie, came out in 2022. The gripping second season, The Mystery of Mani, was recently released on Prime Video. Both editions explore the “vadhandhi”, or rumours, which affect key characters.

The second season stars M Sasikumar as sub-inspector Moosa Raza, who doggedly pursues his belief that the young man Mani, who is awaiting sentencing for the murders of his sister and girlfriend, is innocent. Like Pushkar and Gayatri’s own acclaimed series Suzhal, but also in a different vein, Vadhandhi has rooted storytelling and characters plucked out of the soil of rural Tamil Nadu.

Louis, Pushkar and Gayatri spoke to Scroll about the response to Vadhandhi season two and their efforts to create a uniquely Tamil identity for long-form shows. Here are edited excerpts from the interview.

What made you believe that Vadhandhi qualified for a second season? And what has the response been like?

Andrew Louis: I was scared about how the second season would be received, whether the love for season one would carry over. Given the appreciation for season two, I feel greatly relieved.

Pushkar: Season one had this idea of a grounded cop, a dogged cop, who is following up on a case on instinct. The character Vivek who is played by SJ Suryah in season one is sort of like Moosa Raza from season two. There’s a lot of heart to the character. Why the character follows the case comes from somewhere deep within.

It’s not a police procedural like a series from Hollywood, which depends a lot on scientific evidence and forensics. Although these play a role here too, the investigation is propelled by trying to understand human nature.

The idea behind Vadhandhi, or rumours, got a lot of traction. Andrew was very clear that he didn’t want a continuation of Vivek’s story. Networks usually want the lead character to carry on, but Amazon bought into that idea early on, so we didn’t have to fight a big battle.

Gayatri: As producers, we like to work with creators who are very committed to and passionate about their work. Apart from Andrew being a long-time friend, you also needed something that was on paper to come out on the screen. That happened in season one, and it was only going to get better in season two.

Pushkar: Andrew is our classmate from college, but he looks 10 years younger than us.

Andrew Louis: I am extremely comfortable working with Pushkar and Gayatri. Since they are directors too, they know exactly how to give the creator the liberty to go ahead, do what is required for a scene, where to spend, where to hold back.

What are the joys and challenges of setting a series in a small town?

Andrew Louis: Initially when I started writing season one, that wasn’t the idea. I had worked on a particular crime event. The story was in place. But when it decided to make a web series, it was Gayatri who suggested setting the series in a rural set-up so that the story became even more believable. There would be more hurdles in pursuing the investigation.

I was slightly concerned because Suzhal was also in a similar space. I decided that I wouldn’t read what they had written in Suzhal to avoid any similarities.

I thought of setting The Fable of Velonie in Kanyakumari because I wanted to avoid the cliched idea of using a hill station. Kanyakumari had the Malayalam thriller touch. Also, Kanyakumari is one hour away from both Kerala and Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu.

The new season is set in Madurai, in the middle of Tamil Nadu. In contrast to the greenery in Kanyakumari, Madurai has barren patches and brown soil, which is important in creating visual differences between both the seasons.

Pushkar: The fabric of a small town gives you a leeway, which is that a lot of people will be aware of the players in the drama. A small town is closely knit. In Suzhal season one, we actually built on that idea of secrets being buried in the town.

You have that little bit of freedom of not having to explain how this person knows that person, unlike in a city. In terms of writing, that becomes a shortcut. You can get to the point much faster.

Having said that, we are now exploring something that is going to be 50% set in the city and 50% elsewhere.

Gayatri: All three of us have been born and brought up in Madras. So there is the fascination to explore other places, to show a world that we may not have seen before.

Pushkar: We have shot at every shootable place in Madras twice over. So we felt that we needed to get in some other visual texture, like you see in international crime shows. The small town acts as a microcosm that reflects a larger reality.

How did you assemble the cast, starting with M Sasikumar as Moosa?

Andrew Louis: When we decided on Madurai, we thought we would go with Sasikumar sir. We had to immediately address the issue of his beard, because nobody has seen him without a beard.

Luckily, we came across a case in the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court where somebody had filed a case against the police, saying that he was keeping a beard because of his religious beliefs. I thought I could incorporate this and give Sasikumar a solid reason for his beard. Then the character got a Muslim background, which became a wonderful element in the overall story.

In terms of Mani, season one had a female title character. What if there a male who was being victimised by rumours? Would he get the same kind of importance?

If the character or the performance didn’t work, the whole story would have fallen flat. We had been auditioning many actors and luckily, Yashwanth showed up at our doorstep. His audition was impressive, and I knew I had found my Mani.

Likewise, each and every other actor had to look the part perfectly, whether it’s Anagha as Rathika or Aparna Das in Sumaya’s role or Mani’s love interest or the boys who plays Mani’s friends.

It’s unusual to have a Muslim character as the hero.

Pushkar: There was a film that came out this year called Habeebi, which was completely set within a Muslim household. But such films are few and far between. It’s surprising because Tamil Nadu is very open in that way.

That said, Malayalam cinema has way more Muslim or Christian lead characters. This is just a quirk in the system, there are no larger political social reasons.

Moosa was one of the factors that convinced us to make season two. I wouldn’t call it progressive because this is the bare minimum. It should have been much more, so much that we didn’t even need to talk about.

In a previous interview about Suzhal, you had mentioned how Hindi viewers loved the show but couldn’t pronounce the title and kept calling it ‘Soozhal’. What’s it like this time round?

Pushkar: ‘Vadhandhi’ is a little easier to pronounce. Also, the first season is better known as Velonie.

Common sense would have dictated using easily pronounceable titles, but common sense always comes too late. We had already named the shows Suzhal instead of Vortex and Vadhandhi instead of Rumours.

Andrew Louis: I got this interesting message on Instagram that I should have named this series Suzhal, since it has so many twists and turns.

Pushkar: We have been getting feedback from people beyond Bombay, in smaller towns in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Obviously, Hindi content crosses over to the southern markets a lot more. But we are happy that a show from the South is start to poke into the North market. Bengal has especially been very kind to us.

I guess people from the North have been consuming a lot of films from the South, especially Malayalam films, during and after Covid. Then you have big-budget films like Pushpa and K.G.F.

Our space is long-form, which is invested watching. It’s not going to attract only the theatrical audience. When it comes to Tamil, we are not as mainstream as certain shows, nor are we so arthouse that only 10 people will watch them. That’s a space that we need to keep building. We need to say, hey, this is the voice of Tamil long-form so that we get a strong Tamil identity like Nordic or British shows.

There is a tendency to dump shows from the different states in the South into one language basket called “South cinema”. How do you retain the Tamilness?

Gayatri: Suzhal recently won a bunch of awards. Some people said, oh, it’s that Telugu show, or that Malayalam show.

Pushkar: Previously, ‘South’ used to mean Tamil and now it has become primarily Telugu. It goes back to the point of trying to represent a region and regional story telling aesthetics.

Somewhere, we need to define what is a Tamil story. One thing we do have is a certain amount of ‘mass’, for want of a better word, which is intrinsic to Tamil storytelling. It’s not so much there in Malayalam cinema and it is there to an extreme level in Telugu cinema.

We do have a story that needs to be told, but a protagonist will do these big things to move the story forward. This is something which Tamil cinema balances out a lot.

Even if you take hard-core rural cinema over here, say, Mari Selvaraj and Pa Ranjith have done, or Sasikumar did with Subramaniapuram, and all the guys who came out in the mid-2010s like Karthik Subbaraj – all of them will have those four-five scenes where the audience will clap for the protagonist. It’s not like they are always cheering the heroes, but you do need to give them those moments.

We can recognise that balance: if you watch any film on mute, you will immediately know whether it is Tamil or Malayalam. We need to push that idea a bit more.

Gayatri: Also, Tamil is one space where rural stories and characters are given seriousness and respect. I see a lot of shows in other languages that look down on small towns. The characters become caricatures, rather than being people with intelligence or normal problems. They are not fully three-dimensional people.

Tamil doesn’t do that condescending thing, of which we are very proud. This should be taken forward.

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