This study investigates how Tamil director Mari Selvaraj’s films adapt cultural memory to contest and reconfigure borders of space, caste, and identity in Tamil Nadu, positioning cinematic adaptation as a decolonial praxis. Analyzing Pariyerum Perumal (2018) and Karnan (2021), the research argues that Selvaraj’s work transcends textual fidelity, employing collaborative storytelling, sensory aesthetics, and non-linear temporality to reclaim Dalit histories suppressed by Brahminical and state narratives. Through a framework synthesizing cultural memory theory, postcolonial phenomenology, and critical caste studies, the paper examines three adaptive strategies: (1) spatial remapping, where villages and campuses are reimagined as sites of Dalit counter-memory; (2) collaborative co-creation with marginalized communities, subverting extractive representation; and (3) affective temporality, using ritual drumming, ancestral echoes, and tactile imagery (soil, laboring bodies) to materialize memory as cyclical and embodied. Close analysis reveals how Selvaraj’s cinema dismantles physical borders (segregated spaces), social hierarchies (caste/gender norms), and psychological confines (internalized trauma), transforming adaptation into a tool of resistance. Methodologically, the study challenges Eurocentric adaptation studies’ privileging of literary sources by centering oral histories and participatory practices. It further bridges Tamil Nadu’s regional specificity with global debates on decolonial media, demonstrating how marginalized communities weaponize cultural memory to redraw belonging. By foregrounding collaboration, sensory form, and nonlinear time, Selvaraj’s work offers a blueprint for reimagining identity in contexts of systemic oppression, asserting cinema’s capacity to forge counter-cartographies of resistance. The research contributes a framework to analyze how adaptation, as process rather than product, enables subaltern agency in contested landscapes, urging scholars to expand methodologies beyond textual analysis to include embodied, collective, and insurgent memory practices.