Episode 01

"I Love Lights" — C. Raja Krishnan

Rajinikanth, Dharavi, and French cinema. Twenty-seven years as a gaffer.

I'll be honest about why this conversation took the shape it did.

I did not know what it costs to do this work well, or what it means to do it politically. Those are different kinds of knowing and the gap between them is where this episode lives.

C. Raja Krishnan has lit twenty-seven years of Indian cinema across six languages. He lit Madras, Kabali, Kaala, Sarpatta Parambarai. He has never spoken publicly about any of it. That fact is not unusual in this industry. It tells you something about how we have decided to understand cinema, which is to say, through the people whose names appear largest on the poster.

I am not going to make a case for how underappreciated his work is. That framing bores me and it would bore him. What I want to do instead is put down the things I thought before we spoke, because they changed how I watched the conversation, and they might change how you watch it too.

The shorthand is that the gaffer executes the DOP's vision. The DOP says what the light should feel like and the gaffer makes it happen. This is true the way a lot of shorthands are true, which is accurate at the surface and wrong underneath.

A DOP works in the language of intention. This scene should feel like 3am. This character should look like someone carrying something they can't put down. That is not a technical specification. It is a creative problem handed to someone else to solve. The gaffer reads that problem and answers it in electricity and physics, in real time, before the camera rolls.

When Raja Krishnan reads a script, he is not looking for equipment lists. He is looking for a word. Lonely. Suffocating. Safe. That word is the brief. Everything else follows from it.

Whether that constitutes authorship is a question the industry has no framework to answer, because authorship in cinema gets assigned upward, to the director, and everything below that becomes execution by definition. I think that framework is wrong. Arguing about credit is the least interesting version of this conversation, so I will leave it there.

I had not thought carefully about how many departments make lighting decisions without realising they are making lighting decisions.

A production designer builds a set in specific colours with specific textures. Those choices determine how light will behave before a single lamp is switched on. A costume designer chooses silk or sequins. Both scatter light in ways that can reshape a shot. A makeup artist applies foundation that changes how reflective a face is. Each of these is a lighting decision made without the gaffer in the room.

The gaffer inherits all of it. When the art department's palette and the lighting plan pull against each other, someone has to give ground. That happens on set, in the minutes before a shot, and the audience sees nothing of it. They see the result of a negotiation they were never told was happening.

The editing connection is less obvious. Light that works for one camera angle only lands cleanly when cut from one specific other angle. A gaffer thinking about the edit is doing different work than one who isn't. There is a test I find useful: remove all the dialogue from a scene. What remains, the feeling in the room, the relationship between the figures, what seems to be about to happen, is what the light was actually saying.

Hollywood's lighting grammar was built for a specific face. High cheekbones, pale skin, a particular bone structure. The placement of key lights, the fill ratios, the diffusion choices, all of it was calibrated around that face. Most of the world does not have that face.

Indian cinema inherited this grammar and has used it, largely without examining it, ever since. The practical result is that darker skin tones are routinely over-filled, flooded with additional light to push them toward a standard that was written for someone else. This is common practice. It is also almost never discussed as a choice, because a grammar that goes unexamined stops looking like a choice and starts looking like the way things are.

In Hollywood, Bradford Young and others have said this clearly in public. In Indian cinema, the conversation barely exists, while the practice plays out on Indian sets every day.

What changes on a Ranjith set is that the political question becomes explicit. His films are arguments about who deserves to be seen and in what light. The gaffer on those films is not just executing a visual style. He is inside an argument, and he knows it.

Murali G taught Raja Krishnan to find the light that is already true in a space rather than impose the light you prefer. You don't manipulate. You articulate. The light that belongs to a street, to a room, to a specific hour, that is your starting point. You make it visible. You don't replace it.

What made this education unusual is that it didn't happen at a distance. Murali G was the cinematographer on the same set, in the same room. Learning happened through proximity rather than instruction. You watch someone make decisions in real time and you understand, slowly, why.

Santosh Sivan offered a different lesson. Everything with mystery should have a blend of darkness and light. If you are playing a piano, you should play with all the keys. Where Murali G teaches restraint, Sivan teaches range. Use what's there. Use all of it.

Most films ask a gaffer to lean one way. Ranjith's films require both in the same frame. Dharavi has to look like Dharavi, specific and real and dense. Rajinikanth in Dharavi has to look like a myth. Those are not the same visual demand. Finding where they meet, in actual light, is the specific problem Raja Krishnan spent three films solving.

On Madras, after the shoot was complete, Murali G desaturated the heroine's face in post. The intention was to remove the cosmetic brightness that conventional star treatment would give her, to make her look like she belongs to her community rather than arriving in it from outside. It was the right call for the film. I don't have a tidy conclusion about what that kind of decision means, the quiet ones made after the set has gone dark. I just think it's worth sitting with.

A father telling his son he has six months to live. A one-room house in North Chennai. Two in the afternoon.

Two in the afternoon is the whole problem. It is the most indifferent light there is. Flat, harsh, no agenda. It does not know what is being said in the room. The cruelty of the scene and the indifference of the hour exist together, and the light's job is not to soften that gap but to stay inside it.

You don't bring in softboxes. You find the one angle where the window's light crosses the father's face in a way that feels witnessed rather than staged. You are not making it easier to look at. You are making it true.

The reason I keep returning to this scene is that it clarifies something about what the work actually demands. The temptation is always to make a scene easier to be inside. The discipline is to resist that, and to stay with what the scene actually is.

Tamil cinema's relationship with Rajinikanth is theological. The light finds him when he enters a frame. It separates him from everything around him. This is not purely aesthetic. It is a claim about what kind of being he is.

Kaala argues that the communities his character comes from deserve equal dignity. Star lighting argues that this face matters more than the faces around it. Those are contradictory propositions and they have to coexist in the same frame.

The colour brief made it concrete. Black means power, white means oppression. The inversion of Tamil cinema's default. The technical problem followed immediately. Black absorbs light. It doesn't give it back. Making Rajinikanth's black powerful rather than shadowy required the entire rig to be suspended from the ceiling of a locked Dharavi-replica set in Mumbai, with no floor or wall positions available. The problem the film's politics set was a problem the light department had to physically solve.

Raja Krishnan grew up in the world that made Rajinikanth into what he is. The cardboard cutouts, the mass worship, the weight of what that face means to a specific community. He has spent hundreds of hours in the same room as the man. When I asked him about it, what he said stayed with me. Not because it resolved anything, but because it didn't try to.

Sarpatta is set in 1975 North Madras. The light of that world has a specific character. Sodium vapour streetlamps, tungsten bulbs, fluorescent tubes. Warm, orange, slightly degraded. It makes skin look humid. It belongs to working-class Tamil streets over decades.

Indian cities are replacing sodium vapour with white LED. The spectral signature is different. The warmth is not there in the same way. A filmmaker who wants to recreate that light in twenty years will not have living streets to reference. Only photographs and the fading recall of people who were actually in those streets.

I don't think this is a small loss.

Scorsese and Gordon Willis used the sodium vapour of 1970s New York in Taxi Driver not as a period detail but as an active choice. A light that makes skin look feverish. They built that quality into the film deliberately. Sarpatta had to do the equivalent, find what was true about the light of 1975 North Madras and use it rather than fight it. That work gets harder every year as the reference disappears from the real world.

The technology shift compounds this. Indian cinema has moved from tungsten rigs to programmable LED. Sixteen million colour combinations, controlled from a phone. The question is not whether LED is better. The question is whether infinite control is the same thing as freedom, or whether the constraint of tungsten was itself doing creative work. Tungsten was hot, directional, physical. It behaved like fire. LED is cool and obedient. When you can produce any light you want, deciding what light you want becomes its own kind of difficulty.

Film sets are romanticised. Light departments are not. Heights, heavy equipment moved by hand, night schedules, outdoor conditions. The work is physically punishing in ways that Indian labour law has no adequate language for.

During the production of Sarpatta, two workers died when an industrial crane was moved on set. The shoot continued. Safety officers were called and the work went on. I am not going to make a political argument out of a sentence. I will just say it plainly.

Two people died making a film about the dignity of working people.

Women are significantly underrepresented in the light departments of Tamil and Telugu cinema. The gaffer role in particular has seen very few women come through it, and the ones who have tend to remain exceptions rather than the beginning of something wider. Hetal Dedhia has worked as a gaffer in Indian film for over twenty years and remains the most visible example of what that looks like.

The explanation that circulates is physical demand. Night shoots, heavy equipment, outdoor conditions. I understand why this explanation is offered and I don't fully accept it, because physical demand doesn't by itself produce near-total absence. That requires a system that never creates an entry point.

The gaffer's department recruits personally. You hire people you know. There is no audition, no formal process. The structure was built without women in it and it reproduces that fact without anyone having to make a decision to do so. No one has to say no. The question never gets asked.

Raja Krishnan pushed back on the idea that the department looks down on the people inside it. The people in his crew are called light officers, not light boys, and that distinction matters to him. The culture on his sets is not one of hierarchy within the department. The absence of women is not, in his telling, a product of how the department sees itself. Which makes the question harder, not easier. A department that respects its own people and still has no women in it is a department whose exclusion runs deeper than attitude.

Raja Krishnan's work across Ranjith's films is an argument, made in light, that the people Indian cinema has historically kept at the margins deserve to be seen clearly and with dignity. The question of who gets to stand behind that light and make it is one I put to him directly. It is not a comfortable question and he did not treat it as one.

By Darshim Saxena · All Episodes