Marudhanayagam

Marudhanayagam
Launch poster
Tamil	மருதநாயகம்
Directed by	Kamal Haasan
Produced by	Kamal Haasan
Written by	Kamal Haasan Sujatha
Starring	Kamal Haasan Vishnuvardhan Sathyaraj Nassar
Music by	Ilaiyaraaja
Cinematography	Ravi K. Chandran
Production company	Rajkamal International
Language	Tamil

Marudhanayagam is a long-delayed high budget Indian historical drama film directed and produced by Kamal Haasan. The film, which started in October 1997 with an exclusive launch by Queen Elizabeth II, originally pulled together several prominent names across Indian cinema as its principal cast and crew. However, since the launch, the film despite rumours of resurfacing, is yet to resume its shoot.

The posters of the film were displayed at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, signaling the film's possible revival.

Kamal Haasan had been pondering directing a historical film for a period of four to five years and unsuccessfully contemplated doing a historical musical on the lines of Ambikapathy, with the idea of making a film which had only verses for dialogue. Writer Sujatha then suggested Kamal Haasan looked at a folk ballad edited by Tamil scholar Vanamamalai, which introduced them to the historical figure of Muhammed Yusuf Khan, an 18th-century warrior. Kamal Haasan immediately agreed at the prospect and felt that the story had all the potential of a good historical film, being appealed to by the elevation from the nadir to the top of Khan's life. Sujatha revealed that nearly 80% of the film would faithfully adapt Samuel Charles Hill's biography of Khan also known as Marudha Nayagam, and to only use imagination where no solid or substantial information is available such as his conversion to Islam. The team in 1998, for the first time in India, planned to use a computer for screenplay writing, using a particular software called the Movie Magic Screenwriter with Sujatha working as a screenplay doctor. French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière was also involved in readying the screenplay for the film, as was historian S. Muthiah and poets Puviarasu and Gnanakoothan.