The film begins with the narrator reciting a fiery poem by Subramania Bharti in praise of fire, during the credits. The first visual of the film follows up the verbal worship of fire in the poem with an extended shot of a sunrise. It was Malayalam director John Abraham’s second film, the only one he has done in Tamil. It came out to be a controversial movie of the era and continues to be rated as one of the most important non-mainstream movies from the country.

Narayanaswamy (M B Sreenivasan), professor of Philosophy comes home one day to find a little donkey at his doorstep. He enquires about it and finds out that the donkeys mother had been killed by a mob and he decides to provide a home to the animal. But his decision is being opposed by his college officials and students and he is forced to transport the donkey ‘Chinna’ to his native place, which leads to a series of other events. The neighbourhood in his village is an agraharam (a Brahmin colony), where the elite class of the society lives. They are terrified of the idea of a donkey replacing the sacred cow as a domestic animal. ‘Chinna ‘is being taken care of by the mute Uma, who is as devoid of the notions of class and caste as Chinna is and whose fate clearly mirrors the donkeys.

The director of the movie, John Abraham and script writer Venkat Swaminathan draw inspiration from Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966, even overtly referenced early in this film). In the movie , both Chinna and Uma are mute creatures with no voice in the society and

they both end up being victims of insecurities and questionable intentions of certain individuals who take refuge under the cover of their social standing Towards the end of the film, when the professor finally searches out the whereabouts of Uma, he finds her sitting listless among the ruins of a temple, amidst abandoned idols, subtly raising an intriguing question – Has God forsaken his subjects or is it the other way round? The most interesting part is the central piece of the film, where the director achieves a unique effect through repetition. It is a sequence where Narayanaswamy’s father is recounting the villager’s complaints about the donkey. Each scene of complaint begins with a villager shouting out his gripe, after which, Abraham cuts to what actually happened. It is revealed to us that in none of the cases, is the donkey guilty of what the villagers are accusing it for At the end of each scene, we see Chinna and Uma walking past the father-son pair almost in the same fashion every time. This is followed by a section that shows a working class man taking advantage of Uma’s condition, much like the villagers making use of the donkey’s inability to object. The whole sequence of events repeats three or four times and constantly calls attention to itself, making it a bit of overkill by today’s standards.

The movie has been called an attack on Brahmin lifestyle on rural Tamil Nadu. But it is much more than a simple protest against a specific caste or class. ’Agraharathil Kazhuthai ‘presents one such social system which blindly attempts to sustain its oppressive structures like class, caste and family and goes any distance to weed out anomalies that may harm the setup. The fact that Narayanaswamy is single and his brother’s family is childless seems to be a big taboo.