Cast

Credited cast:
	Akkineni Nagarjuna	...	Ajay Padmanabhan
	S. P. Balasubrahmanyam	...	Padmanabhan
	Raghuvaran	...	Gnaneshwar
	Girish Raghunath	...	Sriram
	Vadivelu	...	Ajays friend
	Chinni Jayanth	...
	Sukumari	...
	Vinodhini	...
	Ajay Rathnam	...
	Madhan Bob	...
	Manobala	...

Storyline

Ratchagan (English: Protector) is a 1997 Tamil action film written, produced by K. T. Kunjumon, and directed by Praveen Gandhi.Starring Akkineni Nagarjuna and Sushmita Sen in the lead roles, alongside Raghuvaran, S. P. Balasubrahmanyam, Vadivelu and Girish Karnad in supporting roles. The soundtrack and background score helmed by A. R. Rahman remained a chartbuster. The film was dubbed into Telugu as Rakshakudu.

Ajay (Nagarjuna) is an unemployed youth who always gets into trouble because of his temper. This angry young man gets heated up when he encounters anyone committing a crime; he takes the law into his own hands, beats them up and then gives them some free advice. Ajay’s father Padmanabhan (S. P. Balasubrahmanyam), who works for an insurance firm, is very unhappy with his son’s attitude, and tries his best to change Ajay's attitude through a meditation expert, but he fails in this matter as the expert suggests that Ajay's anguish is reasonable.

Ajay meets Sonia (Sushmita Sen) through his father, and Sonia falls in love with him. What Sonia likes about Ajay is his temper and anger when he encounters anything, which is against the law. Sonia gets Ajay’s father's help to get Ajay to love her. Still, Ajay is not interested in her and seriously rejects her at first; but he later changes his mind after going through some unusual situations, and love blossoms between them.

Sonia’s father Sriram (Girish Karnad) is an industrialist who owns the Daewoo automotive manufacturing facility. He has no objection to his daughter’s relationship with Ajay but has one condition: Ajay must become employed in his factory, control his temper for three months, and not get into any fight whatsoever, even if he encounters a crime happening in front of his eyes. If Ajay cannot do this he will not be allowed to marry Sonia. With a heavy heart, Ajay agrees to the condition; Sonia's love for Ajay deepens and Sriram offers Ajay a job in his factory.

Sriram actually has his own problems with his factory in a loss; ten of his workers are working with his rival and younger stepbrother Gnaneswar (Raghuvaran), and they hamper the progress of his factory with frequent, pre-planned mishaps. This leads to the factory's property loss.

Gnaneswar is the son of Sriram's stepmother who gets deceived by Sriram and loses his share of his father's common business empire. Further, in unusual circumstances, Gnaneswar spends some years in jail and returns with a planned conspiracy and vengeance on his stepbrother Sriram. Gnaneswar is now trying to put Sriram out of business, so his ten men create havoc in the factory by killing old workers and raging new workers.

So when Ajay comes to work in Sriram’s factory, these ten men do the same to Ajay. Ajay keeps cool, trying to keep his promise to Sriram. But Sriram hopes otherwise; he wants Ajay to break the promise and beat up the ten men and throw them out of the factory. At the same time, Sriram hopes that the imminent marriage between Ajay and Sonia will be canceled since he does not want his daughter to get married to an angry street fighter like Ajay.

So Sriram keeps on hoping that Ajay will somehow burst out. Gnaneswar's men damage an important machine to make the international Korean experts to attend the problem.

The plan is to kill those Korean experts so that it would become an international issue and Sriram's company would be locked out permanently, but Ajay saves those experts, and Sriram publicises this to create a fight between Gnaneswar's men and Ajay, but it happens otherwise that Ajay still keeps cool in spite of them beating him black and blue, and Sriram's hope devastates.

As a last trigger, Sriram uses his father's name in publicising the issue in factory to media so that Gnaneswar's men may think that it was Ajay's father who brought this to media. As expected by Sriram, those ten men brutally murder Ajay's father for this.

After this, Ajay becomes furious and breaks his promise and banishes the ten men from the factory. But Gnaneswar holds Ajay and blackmails Sonia that he would kill Ajay unless Sonia kills herself by destroying Sriram's factory by bombarding it with a truck armed with a powerful Russian explosive.

In the climax, Gnaneswar kills Sriram by throwing him off the helicopter; Gnaneswar gets killed when his helicopter hits the mountains; and Sonia gets saved and unites with Ajay.   

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