Cheran Pandiyan

Manicheran Gounder or Periya Gounder (Vijayakumar), the rich head of the village with his wife Paarvathi (Manjula Vijayakumar) and beautiful daughter Vennila (Sreeja), is a person who strictly adheres to the caste system. Rajapaandi or Chinna Gounder (Sarathkumar) is Periya Gounder's half brother and also a rich landlord in the same village and Parimalam (Chitra) is his sister. Since Rajapaandi's mother was from a lower caste, Periya Gounder stays aloof from him and always ignores and berates Rajapaandi and Parimalam. Their father, before dying had divided his entire property including the house equally between the two brothers and they live on either side of the house split by a wall. Yet Periya Gounder's family gets first respect within the village and the local temple and he refuses to yield any privilege to Rajapaandi.

Chandran (Anand Babu), a young man, who is a relative of Rajapaandi comes to meet and work under him in the village and falls in love with Vennila. Periya Gounder is furious when he comes to know about this and tries to get Vennila married to his brother-in-law and after being rebuked by him, he makes arrangements for Vennila's marriage with a womanizing thug (K.S. Ravikumar), son of a devious village elder (Nagesh), since he belongs to his own caste. After a serious turn of events, Periya Gounder has a change of heart with some heartfelt advice from Paarvathi, renounces his casteist mindset and accepts Rajapaandi as his equal sibling and Chandran and Vennila end up getting married.

• Vijayakumar as Mani Cheran Gounder (Periya Gounder)
• Sarathkumar as Raja Pandian Gounder (Chinna Gounder)
• Sreeja as Vennila
• Nagesh as Maniyam
• Anand Babu as Chandran
• Manjula Vijayakumar as Parvathi
• Goundamani as Mechanic Manikkam (motor mechanic)
• Anuja as Sundari, Manikkam's wife
• Senthil as Thangam
• Chitra as Parimalam
• K.S. Ravikumar as Sundaram
• Kumarimuthu as Mariappan
• Cheran as Bus conductor

After the film's success, Ravikumar regularly collaborated with actor Sarath Kumar, went on to do films like Nattamai (1994), Natpukkaga (1998), Paattali (1999) and Samudhiram (2001) after which he became a highly sought after film maker in the Tamil film industry.[1][2]

The music composed by Soundaryan while lyrics also written by himself.[3] The song "Kadhal Kaditham" is set in Mohana raga.[4]

This film was remade in Telugu in 1992 as Balaramakrishnulu, with Shobhan Babu, Dr. Rajashekhar, Jagapathi Babu, Ramya Krishna in the lead roles. It was also remade in Hindi in 1999 as Sautela with Mithun Chakraborty.