Where Have All the Colours Gone?
Yesterday, I was wishing a friend up north Happy Holi and the conversation veered into whether I have ever played Holi, only for me to recount never having played it, that it is not a thing here in Chennai.
I grew up in a Chennai where the festival does exist but at the edges of cultural awareness — present, observed, not inhabited. Not by me. I cannot tell you what it feels like to have colour thrown at your face, to be briefly, joyfully unrecognisable to yourself. The closest I came to it was in the mid-to-late 2010s, when friends put some colour on my face out of sympathy after hearing this story.
So when I recounted to this friend, they asked how I felt and I said it felt like being in a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film. That pushed us into a conversation I haven’t had in a while. Filmmakers, films, and colour. I said maybe I should write about it.
Colour is not decoration. It is not the thing that happens after the story is written.
It is the story.
I was around seven or eight years old when I fell in love with colour.
Not the colour of festivals. Not the colour of kolam (rangoli) on the floor or the sarees lined up across the many many floors of Pothys and Chennai Silks. I had seen all of that. It was everywhere and so it was, in the way of things that are always there around you all the time everytime, invisible.
The colour I fell in love with came with a song. Maana Madurai Maamara Kilayile from Minsara Kanavu (1997). Director Rajiv Menon, who was also the cinematographer — a rare and telling combination — had lit that song with a burst of colours I had only previously seen in art class. Kajol wearing and dancing in black. Arvind Swamy in striking pink and purple and maroon. Prabhu Deva in blue jeans and a yellow tee. Clowns looking as colourful as clowns should be. Every dancer and every extra in the frame with matching and contrasting colours. Street life that looked like it had been arranged by someone who understood that Tamil soil, Tamil light, Tamil colour could be this beautiful when one chose to look at it the way that camera looked at it.
Eight year old me did not know what a set was, what set design was, what art production was. That mattered very little. I just remember watching that song and feeling, for the first time, that the world inside the screen was not just entertaining me. It was showing me possibilities.
A year later, Jeans (1998) arrived and Shankar and cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran took me somewhere else entirely. The seven wonders of the world as backdrop for a love song. The Taj Mahal. The Colosseum. The Great Pyramids. All of it suffused with a warmth that said: Indian cinema can place itself anywhere in the world and make the world feel like home.
Where Minsara Kanavu had opened the frame inward, into belonging and celebration of life, Jeans opened it outward, into limitlessness and celebration of love.
Between those two songs, I understood something about colour that I have spent the last two and a half decades trying to articulate. Colour is not decoration. It is not the thing that happens after the story is written. It is the story. It is the first language a film speaks before we hear even a single word of dialogue.
I have watched Indian cinema for twenty-five years. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi. I have watched Hollywood alongside it and Japanese anime alongside that. I have sat in theatres and in front of television sets and on laptops and on phones. I have watched colour arrive on Indian screens and I have watched it, slowly and then all at once, begin to leave.
The festival of colour, it turns out, is the perfect occasion to ask: where did all the colour go from Indian cinema?
Colour as a Way of Living
Let me stay in the pre-2000s for a moment, because that part of the century understood something about colour as emotion that we have spent the last fifteen years systematically forgetting.
Mani Ratnam’s Thalapathi (1991) — a Tamil film I hold dear and rewatch atleast once a year — used the sun and its shadows as a colour palette, and used them splendidly. Santosh Sivan’s cinematography moves through that film the way a classical musician moves through a raga: with intention, with system, with an understanding that certain colours in certain combinations produce not just visual pleasure but emotional meaning. The yellow sun. The orange sun. The red sun. The streaks of those different suns in the morning and evening sky. The moon that reflects the sun. The dark nights without the sun. The shadows the sun throws. Every single quality of light was used by Mani Ratnam and Santosh Sivan to tell the story of a boy called Surya — named after the sun. For a young me, also named after the sun, that film showed me that colour alone can tell different stories of the same person. In focus, out of focus. Foreground, background. Absent and present.
Mani Ratnam alongside P.C. Sreeram gave us Nayakan (1987), where the dense, humid amber of the chawl sequences carried the moral weight of a man slowly consumed by the world he chose to inhabit. The same combination gave us Alaipayuthey (2000), where the golden-hour warmth of those early romance scenes felt handmade — like someone had collected the specific quality of light that belongs to being young and newly in love and found a way to keep it inside a frame forever.
In Hindi cinema, Sanjay Leela Bhansali was doing something with Devdas (2002) that I find myself defending every time someone dismisses him. The red in that film is both deep desire for all three characters and visceral destruction when that desire breaks. Different shades of red keep shifting, keep telling the story, and you find yourself watching for red the way you’d follow a motif in music. You stop watching the actors and start watching what colour they’re standing in. Binod Pradhan’s cinematography is not serving the story. It is the story.
When critics said Bhansali prioritised style over substance, I always wanted to ask: what if, for some directors, visual style is the substance? What if the colour is the argument?
Imtiaz Ali understood this too, in a different register. His films have a consistent colour instinct that persists even when his narratives wander. The sepia-toned flashbacks of Love Aaj Kal (2009) versus its much more dreary-looking present — that contrast was not an accident. It was a thesis. The past felt more alive because it looked more alive. In Tamasha (2015), the Mediterranean sequences burst with colour that the Delhi sequences deliberately drain. I see those colours of the Corsican coast every time I open Instagram and find friends vacationing or living there now. The colour is not illustrating the story of a man losing himself. It is that story.
And then there were the cartoons and the anime.
While I was growing up, two visual languages were running in parallel on my small screen. Live-action Indian cinema on one side. Japanese and English animation on the other.
Dragon Ball Z where you could feel the heat radiating off the screen every time someone went Super Saiyan mode. Swat Kats, where night and black were a completely different animal, was Batman before I knew Batman. Hungry Heart with its flaming orange head and its football played like it was a matter of life and death. Powerpuff Girls, where blue, green, and pink were not just colours but personalities, three entirely different ways of being a girl in the world. Disney and Pixar made my childhood more colourful than I ever thought possible. And I have not seen a greener film in my life than Dreamworks’ Shrek 2.
Animation teaches something that live-action cinema has been slowly forgetting. In animation, you choose every colour in every frame. There is no such thing as the default. There is no natural light to fall back on, no location that comes pre-coloured. Every decision is intentional by necessity. That necessity produced a colour literacy — in animators and, critically, in audiences.
If we as audiences were made to grow up with colour, made to enjoy colour, made to fall in love with colour — then why have filmmakers stopped trusting us with it?
Colour as a Pathway to Survival
Something shifted around 2008 to 2012. It did not happen overnight. It happened the way the light changes in a room when a cloud passes — gradually, almost without your noticing, and then you look up and everything is different.
Here is the thing I find genuinely hard to explain without sounding like I am blaming the wrong people. The films that started the shift were good films. Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) was gritty and washed-out because that grit was the point — Anurag Kashyap was making a film about ugliness and power in a very specific geography and the colour reflected that geography honestly, inspired by Tamil films which had used a similar visual language in Subramaniapuram (2008) and Paruthiveeran (2007). Visaranai (2015) was harsh and documentary-feeling because Vetrimaaran was making something that demanded that harshness. These were choices. Real, considered, defensible choices.
But what happened next is what I keep thinking about. The aesthetic became a costume.
Every Tamil thriller that wanted to be taken seriously reached for the same palette. Every Hindi crime drama drained itself of warmth to signal that it was not merely entertaining — it was important. The colour was not absent because the story needed its absence. The colour was absent because its absence had started to look like seriousness. And looking serious had become more important than being felt.
If I had to point at the moment the costume became an industry uniform, I would point at KGF Chapter 1 (2018). I want to be careful here because I liked that film when it released — genuinely liked it, because when it arrived it felt like something different, a Kannada film with the scale and ambition of a pan-India event, dark and operatic and completely sure of itself. But what it accidentally licensed was an entire generation of action films that took the darkness without the sureness. The palette got copied so thoroughly and so quickly that the original now almost gets lost inside its own imitations. Today, when an action film arrives — any action film, from any language — there is a tiredness that precedes it. A resignation in the audience before the lights go down. Even Rajinikanth, a man whose theatrical openings have always felt like gravity itself is optional, is not immune to it anymore. That tiredness is not about story or star power. We have been shown this particular darkness so many times that we have stopped being able to see anything inside it.
I think about The Big Short (2015) here, which is one of my most-rewatched films of the past decade — a strange comfort watch, I know, for a film about financial collapse. It is visually grey throughout. Washed-out, restless, shot like surveillance footage. And it works completely. Every frame of its greyness is a decision. The grey is the point. The world of mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps is beige carpet and fluorescent light and men in suits draining the colour out of ordinary people’s lives. The film looks like what it is about.
That is not the same thing as a Tamil action thriller from 2020 that looks the same way because that is what the grade looked like when no one made a decision about it.
One is an absence of colour that was chosen. The other is an absence of intention, and colour left along with it.
And then there is the question of screens.
I do not think OTT caused this problem. But I think it gave the problem a place to hide and a commercial justification to keep hiding. Content designed to be watched on a phone, in a bright room, on a Tuesday afternoon, has different requirements than content designed to be experienced on a large screen in the dark. The immersive darkness that theatrical colour depends on — the darkness that makes the light inside the frame feel like it is coming from somewhere real — is gone when you are watching on a laptop in bed.
Somewhere in that shift, the question of what a frame should look like stopped being answered by what the story needed. It started being answered by what survived compression on the smallest available screen. And the answer, almost always, was: something flat. Something grey. Something that did not ask too much of the light.
There is a scene in Guillermo del Toro’s greenish-blue fairytale The Shape of Water — a film I wrote about years ago and have not stopped thinking about — where an amphibious creature escapes captivity and stands alone in an empty movie theatre, watching a biblical epic on the large screen, wide-eyed. I did not fully understand why that image stayed with me until I started writing this essay. The wonder of the large screen, experienced in darkness, with nothing between the eye and the image — that is what colour in cinema was made for. That is what we have been slowly, economically, almost without noticing, rationalising away.
Colour as a Means of Existing
I believe – I can’t prove it – the draining of colour from Indian cinema screens is not only something that happened to films. It is something that happened to audiences. And possibly to cinemas themselves.
Think about what the “gritty realism equals serious art” equation actually says to the people watching. It says that joy is unsophisticated. That vibrancy is commercial. That if a film is trying to say something real about the world, it will look like the world at its most washed-out and exhausted.
This is not a neutral idea. It has consequences.
It devalues the instinct that made Indian cinema distinctive for decades — the unapologetic exuberance, the colour as celebration, the visual generosity that said the world is worth more than this. It made an entire generation of filmmakers feel that reaching for beauty was reaching for something lesser.
And audiences — I believe, and again I cannot prove it — noticed. Not in the language of colour theory or cinematography. But in the way you notice when a meal has been cooked without love. You eat it. It is fine. You do not go back.
The conversations about why theatrical footfalls in India have declined usually go to ticket prices, content quality, the convenience of streaming. These are real. But I want to add one thing that I never hear in that conversation: the loss of the reason to be in a theatre at all.
Theatrical cinema sold something that no living room can replicate. Scale. Darkness. The feeling of being inside a world that is larger than your own. That experience depends, more than most people acknowledge, on colour — on the richness of an image that a large screen in a dark room produces in a way no phone or laptop can. When a film is made for a phone, it arrives in a theatre as a slightly oversized phone experience. The spectacle is absent. The specific magic of being in that room is absent.
This is why Tom Cruise keeps making love letters to cinema with his Mission Impossible movies and Top Gun movies that evokes most emotion in those big screens and why we always flock to watch him. It is why F1 (2025), for all intents and purposes an Indian masala film with Hollywood actors, ran for months.
S.S. Rajamouli is not making films with more sophisticated stories than his contemporaries. What he is doing is making films that remember why theatrical cinema exists. The colour in those films is not nostalgia. It is function. It is the thing that justifies the ticket. Exactly why a friend and I watched a re-edited Baahubali Parts 1 and 2 (2025) for 4 hours straight when it re-released last year after a decade. It still holds up.
The idea that audiences want gritty realism does not survive contact with those numbers.
Colour as Muscle Memory
I want to be specific here because the drift did not happen the same way everywhere, and the differences are telling.
I am a big fan of Pa. Ranjith and especially Kaala (2018). His colour choices are political in a specific and intentional way. Black, red, blue — the colours of Ambedkarite assertion, of an identity being reclaimed on screen. This is not aesthetic luxury. It is ideological language. Ranjith is one of the few contemporary Tamil filmmakers using colour the way Bhansali uses it — as the argument the film is making before anyone opens their mouth – even though they might never be politically on the same wavelength ever.
This is where I want to say something about M. Manikandan that I think gets missed in conversations about Tamil cinema, where Vetrimaaran rightly gets most of the serious-filmmaker attention. Kaaka Muttai (2014) was made with very little money, in Vyasarpadi, one of Chennai’s densest working-class neighbourhoods. And the colour is alive. The warm, dusty, human-scaled colour of a real Chennai street at a real time of day. Nothing has been drained into greyness to prove the film is serious about the lives it shows. The poverty is present and it is real and the frame does not punish you for looking at it. Kadaisi Vivasayi (2021) — those fields, that Tamil Nadu light, the harsh barren rural landscape — is some of the most quietly beautiful work in recent Tamil cinema, and it achieves that without ever announcing itself.
This matters because of the assumption it dismantles. Realism and colour are not opposites. A grey frame does not make a film more honest. It can, in fact, make it less honest — because real streets are not grey. Real poverty is vivid and specific and particular. Manikandan’s camera sees what is actually there and trusts what it sees.
Vetrimaaran’s rigour is real and his importance is not in question. But the palette he made prestigious got imitated across an industry by directors who had neither his reason for using it nor his discipline in using it. The aesthetic spread. The intention did not. Tamil cinema’s colour language paid the price.
In Telugu cinema, Vivek Athreya has been doing something worth paying attention to. Ante Sundaraniki (2022) is a film that feels genuinely warm — not warm as a filter or a grade decision but warm the way a family home feels warm, the way a particular quality of Andhra afternoon light could possibly feel warm. The film trusts its locations and its people enough to let them look like themselves. In a landscape where Telugu commercial cinema has largely split between Rajamouli-scale spectacle and everything-else-in-dark-and-gritty, Athreya keeps finding a middle register.
In Kannada cinema, Raj B. Shetty’s Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana (2021) does something that has stayed with me till date. The film carries the deep ochres and worn reds of temple brick walls and old stone into what is essentially a contemporary story about men and violence and consequence. The colour says something the dialogue does not need to say — that this world is older than it looks, that this violence has roots that go deeper than any one person’s choices.
Malayalam cinema has, I think, held on the best. Partly because the industry’s tradition of small-budget, location-based filmmaking but also partly because of a filmmaker I quite adore – Lijo Jose Pelissery. In Ee.Ma.Yau (2018), he filmed death as though it were a character with its own weight, not as an aesthetic choice but as a moral one and it inhabited a world where colour has been paused by grief, and the frame knows it. In Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakam (2022), set in a border town between Tamil Nadu and Kerala, he used colour to do showcase two states and two ways of existing in the world. And in the wild Double Barrel (2015), colour becomes almost confrontational — a film that refuses to look like anything else because it is committed to its own visual logic above everything else. Lijo’s films do not look like each other. That itself is the argument.
Colour as a Reason to Live
India that I grew up in as a child and teen was a colourful nation. In words, in sights, in sound, in action. Over the past two decades, the colours have fallen away and we are pushed into neat little palettes of our own. Few colours are dominating more than others in the society and that is reflected in the cinema we are watching. For after all, art holds a mirror to society and society holds a mirror to art. It is an ever learning collaborative system. However, it is helpful only when the society and art each learn lessons from each other and try to push the argument ever so slightly forward.
By the end of 2020, people really loved being with themselves and discovering parts of themselves. By the end of 2021, people were having a real fatigue of laptop screens. By the end of 2022, people really wanted to meet other people. 2023-2025 saw the biggest explosion of concert experiences we have seen probably since the invention of smartphones. People wanted, people craved for experiences that will put them far away from the smartphone. They know this little device is going to be an indelible part of their lives and they don’t want to be saddled with looking at it all the time. They are asking for experiences that make up this wonderful, weird, short-yet-long-time period called life.
Cinema has a chance to truly lay claim to being that experience. When your frame says the world is drab, your audience agrees — and goes home, and does not come back, and tells people the film was fine. When your frame says the world is worth examining — even its difficulty, even its darkness, even its pain — the audience leans forward. The frame is an invitation. Colour is how you say: come in, there is something here worth seeing.
There is something else shifting too, something harder to name but worth trying. As artificial intelligence begins to automate more of what once required human hands and human hours, a question is forming about what remains irreplaceably ours. Every Renaissance in human history arrived on the back of a disruption — a technology, a collision of worlds — that forced people to ask what it means to make something, to feel something, to be present in a room together. Cinema was itself one of those disruptions once. It could be one again. Not by competing with what machines do well, but by doing what they cannot — putting specific human light on a specific human face in a specific moment, and making an audience of strangers feel, all at once, that they are not alone in the dark.
I don’t know the first thing about colour theory. But I know how colour makes me feel.
And I am sure there are many like me — people who will notice when a film uses colour with intention, when a frame has been lit with care, who will notice the difference between darkness that was chosen and darkness that is just the absence of a decision. They will tell others. They will write about it. The kind of films that bring everyone together and make them talk, rather than dividing everyone and making them talk.
I leave you with one of my favourite verses about colour — a song about the colour of love.
Meri Raah Bhi Tu Mera Rahbar Tu
Mera Sarwar Tu Mera Akbar Tu
Mera Mashriq Tu Mera Maghrib Tu
Zaahid Bhi Mera Murshid Bhi Tu
Ab Tere Bina Main Jaaun Kahaan
(You are my path and my guide
You are my master and the greatest
You are my sunrise and my sunset
You are my devotion and my teacher
Where would I be without you?)
