Rajnikanth has been in the film industry for almost 40 years now, yet his hold remains as strong as ever. With his latest film all set to release soon, Utpal Kumar examines what keeps him going
In September 2010, Manu Joseph, editor of the Open magazine, wrote an engaging piece on the Rajnikanth phenomenon in the wake of the Enthiran, aka Robot, saga. “Rajnikanth,” he said, “is another proof that not everything can be analysed just because there is something called analysis.” For him, one just cannot explain why Rajnikanth “exists”, why he did not “retire as a Marathi bus conductor”, and how he could become “the superstar who can have theatres go up in flames if he is ever killed at the end of a film”. Joseph found, much to the annoyance of numerous Rajni fans, “nothing in him that explains his fame”.
But then ‘superstardom’ is like that — it can appear so credible to believers, and yet completely insane to others. Just look at Rajesh Khanna, a medium-sized, ordinary-faced actor with moles all around his face — and onscreen mannerisms mostly over-the-top and exasperating. Yet, he created a hysteria in the early 1970s that could never be repeated again in the Hindi film industry — except perhaps when Amitabh Bachchan was fighting for his life in a Mumbai (then Bombay) hospital after a mishap at the sets of Manmohan Desai’s Coolie in 1983.
As Rajnikanth’s film Kochadaiyaan is set to hit theatres, creating euphoria as his movies always do, one needs to ask a few questions: What makes Rajni generate such an incogitable hullabaloo even at the age of 62IJ What is this superstardom all aboutIJ And, why do we no longer witness the same kind of exuberance for stars in BollywoodIJ
Ask these questions to Meenakshi — hailing from Madurai district of Tamil Nadu and now working with an IT firm in Delhi — and she gives you a confusing look. She is happy that there is so much curiosity about Thalaivar (leader), as Rajnikanth is fondly referred to back home. But she is equally agitated to see how south Indians are stereotyped through the Rajnikanth movies. “No doubt, we adore him. But there is reason for that. We see in him an extension of ourselves. He gives us hope that despite all inequalities and discriminations, we can have our say one day. And most importantly, he is still rooted to his culture, not pretending like the Khans and the Roshans in Bollywood to be cosmopolitan to the extent of discounting their very roots,” says she.
Meenakshi is seconded by her brother Vishnu, who is doing his graduation from the University of Delhi. “look what has happened to Amitabh Bachchan, for instance. The superstar has now become a brand, doing one commercial after another — some of them not worth him at all. Our Rajni sir, in contrast, has never sold a single product. What he sells — and sells brilliantly — is himself,” says he with an air of pride. For him, stardom in the north is all about PR stunts. “There is absolute cultural insularity here. You find Bollywood stars only when their films are about to be released. They bedazzle people with invasive, round-the-clock presence on television and social media, make quick money in theatres, and go back home happily. The relationship is product-based. So, the people’s interest remains till the hype is there. Once it’s over, they part ways till the next release gets round the corner,” he says, adding this is not the case with Rajnikanth and his fans. “It’s a perennial affair down south.”
Also, to the masses, Bollywood stars aren’t perceived as one of them; they appear filthy rich, uncouthly arrogant and awfully distant. They never miss an opportunity to project themselves as ‘different’, often flexing their muscles in public and showcasing their six packs, eight packs... Rajnikanth, on the other hand, is what Meenakshi says, “one of us”. He is bald, his hairs have grown white, his clothes discreetly simple and has quite an unremarkable body. He is seen as someone who has achieved so much — supposedly being the second highest paid actor in Asia after Jackie Chan — and yet very much a plebeian.
The north-south divide is so pervasive that even someone like Salman Khan, who partly appears to be in the Rajnikanth mould thanks to his films post-Dabangg, never misses the opportunity to showcase his urbane, suave and sophisticated side, along with his pumped up body. This awareness of being ‘different’ is very much inherent in their psyche. Thus when Shah Rukh is detained at an American airport for an unduly long time, just because he carries the surname ‘Khan’, he gets perturbed: How can such a ‘big’ actor be treated so impetuouslyIJ In down south, Rajni appears self-assured. He doesn’t have to act victim. All he has to do — as Rajnikanth did way back in 1992 when he was told to make way for the then Chief Minister — is just get out of his car, walk on to the busy road, cross the intersection, go to a kiosk, buy a packet of cigarettes, and start smoking. In no time there are enough people in the road to make it impossible for the Chief Minister to come out of her residence. The police realise their mistake and beg Rajnikanth to drive away. No fuss, no air, no grievances and yet the message is sent across as to who the real boss is.
MK Raghavendra, film scholar and author of the book Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema, believes there’s another reason for Rajni’s popularity. “My sense is that Tamil stars are identified with certain basic caste identities which are local. Not very long ago Tamil Nadu had seen a strong anti-Brahmin movement. If you look at its stars today, they are divided with Kamal Haasan (Brahmin) on one side and Rajnikanth (non-Brahmin) on the other. Rajnikanth is Marathi-speaking, but he embodies Dravidian values in his persona — a certain loud flamboyance as opposed to Kamal’s deliberate ‘interiority’. He may have grown older but his flamboyance is still inimitable and it represents Dravidian in a way that age cannot dull,” says he, adding that the stars in Bollywood rely entirely on their personal charisma — rather than identity groups — which fades with age. “Amitabh is himself but Rajni is Dravidian. It is when you enlist group loyalties that you become a political force,” affirms he.
What Raghavendra doesn’t say is that once Amitabh, too, had loyalty across the board. He squandered it away with his decision in the mid-1980s to enter politics in support of the Gandhi family. In no time, he lost his image of the angry young crusader fighting against the establishment. Implicated in the Bofors scandal, he himself became the establishment. And his on-screen persona took a beating, never to make a comeback again. Rajnikanth, in comparison, has remained the same over the past 38 years. Even at the age of 62 he continues to be the eternal angry man of Kollywood, fighting for the rights of the poor and the downtrodden. And people love him for that.
Rajnikanth, like Amitabh, has been the product of the angry, young India of the 1970s — upset with corruption, unemployment, Emergency, et al. The era also saw the fading of two megastars in Tamil Nadu — Sivaji Ganesan and MGR. That was the time a young ex-bus conductor named Shivaji Rao Gaekwad made an on-screen debut as a villain in the Kamal Haasan-starrer Apoorva Ragangal (1975). It’s generally believed that Kamal, with his methodical acting and middle class background, soon occupied Sivaji’s position, leaving MGR’s spot for Rajni to fill. Kamal Haasan, however, doesn’t agree with this assessment. Naman Ramachandran quotes him as saying in his book, Rajnikanth: The Definitive Biography: “We both incorporate elements of both the towering personalities. I have done what you would call the MGR kind of films. Sivaji Ganesan wasn’t very happy about playing outright masala roles and Rajnikanth too adapted his style to play the kind of roles that popularised Ganesan.”
For all the public rivalry, there’s immense respect Kamal Haasan and Rajnikanth have for each other, with the latter going to the extent of saying that he would not have become the superstar he is had Kamal Haasan not supported him initially. “In the beginning, in 1975, just how big a star Kamal Haasan was, today’s generation does not know,” says Rajnikanth to Ramachandran. “He was an even bigger star in 1975 than he is now. If Kamal had said, ‘Don’t cast Rajni,’ nobody would have taken me,” adds Rajnikanth. He even recalls how during the shooting of Avargal, his mentor-director K Balachander got angry with him for leaving the set when Kamal Haasan was acting. “He sent word for me to return to the set and asked me, ‘Did you go outside to smokeIJ Kamal is acting; observe him. Only then will your acting get even better.’ From that time, when Kamal acted I wouldn’t go anywhere; I would just sit there and watch.”
Raghavendra is right in saying Rajnikanth has the non-Brahmin base in Tamil Nadu to rely on. But the superstar has outgrown it with the passage of time to have his fan-following among Brahmins as well, thanks to his humility and charity works. People remember how he returned the money to the distributors who incurred heavy losses after his film Baba flopped in the early 2000s. likewise, when a distributor in the late 1970s put a huge hoarding of Rajnikanth with a roaring title “Superstar”, he sent a message next day saying it didn’t feel right to be called ‘superstar’ when huge stars like MGR and Sivaji Ganesan were alive. He requested the publicity to be toned down.
From doing more than 10 films a year in the 1970s to a movie every 2-3 years now, the superstar is definitely showing signs of slowing down. But his fans don’t care. For whenever he appears, he comes across as the same old, energetic Thalaivar they have been watching for decades. In his cinematic avatars, he will continue to take on the goons to create a better world for the poor. And in the world full of discriminations what better than Rajni’s filmi refuge!