The Systolic Tide (Outlook Story on the nature of Southern stardom))

(I would of course resist some of the writer’s characterisations..)

The Systolic Tide

‘Down’ South, the star-fan bond is intense, super-real—and it’s sealed with a blood transfusion
Sadanand Menon

Shahrukh Khan’s ‘Ennada, Rascala!’ cameo of a ‘South Indian hero’ in Om Shanti Om flags the continuing tension between the North and the South on the concept of the hero in films. Bollywood’s perennial caricature of the ostensibly comical hybridity of stars from the South merely masks its own anxiety at being unable to fathom the infinitely greater bonding of Southern heroes with their audiences.

Simultaneously, they are clueless about the entirely different frame within which the ‘production’ of heroism happens on Southern screens. It is interesting that, at various times, the director, the scriptwriter/lyricist, the sweet-throated singing heroines have all been ‘heroes’.

Fortuitously, the soon-to-be-released Kamalahaasan film Dasavatharam, in which he appears in ten different roles (including one [sic] as himself), provides us a peep into this steady manufacture of supply-side heroism in Southern cinema, where actors think nothing of donning multiple roles. The schizophrenic split of surplus heroism had reached its peak, earlier, with Sivaji Ganesan in nine different make-ups in Navaratri.

This fracture and atomisation of the hero, ironically, takes us to the very heart of the contemporary crisis of films from the South, teetering in the face of the virtual demise of the agency of ‘the hero’. South Indian films are undergoing a massive makeover as they begin addressing the large, dispersed community of the Southern diaspora in distant lands. The themes increasingly dwell on ‘nostalgia’, dealing with the local, the mofussil, the pseudo-authentic. Rural or traditional communities, arcane customs and occult beliefs are being revisited in a spurious quest for ‘roots’. The themes are overpowering enough to enable dispensing with the hero, to be replaced by more beefed-up and remixed versions of masculinity. The men on the screen get darker and more misogynist.

Eye contact: Rajnikanth in his ‘07 hit, Sivaji

This is a big change. The Southern hero, for long, carried himself within the armature of androgyny. His erotic appeal worked equally for the male and the female. Almost all major Southern heroes from the ’50s to ’70s had, at earlier stages in their careers, played female roles. There was very little then of the current macho and aggressive masculinity in the bodies of the male stars. Looking back and tracking this change is important to comprehend how the concept of heroics in the South has got displaced over the past four decades.

For me, it is significant that, embarking upon a career in journalism 35 years ago, the very first news report I edited was related to Tamil cinema. The blood bank at the Government General Hospital, Chennai, was experiencing severe fluctuations in patterns of blood donation. Puzzled by the recurring cycle of low or nil donations Sunday to Wednesday, and a sudden, massive spurt over the next two days, the hospital authorities carried out a survey. The results were startling. They found that the 800-plus per cent jump in blood donations on Thursdays and Fridays was due to the Rs 5 compensation on offer, which donors collected to buy tickets for new releases of MGR films on Fridays. It seemed awesome that an impoverished population was donating blood, not to buy food, but to see the films of their favourite hero. I remember carrying that report, titling it ‘Movies are in Their Blood’.My obsession with the sociology of South Indian (specifically Tamil) cinema had begun.

Just a couple of years later, confirmation of the visceral nature of the bonding between the hero and the fan in Tamil Nadu was provided by the fascist spectacle of hundreds of thousands of MGR fans across the state tattooing images of the star or the flag of his newly launched AIADMK party on their arms in an act of solidarity and loyalty to this breakaway from the parent DMK. When the first flush of political romanticism faded and disillusionment set in, the very same fans were to erase these tattoos by pouring acid over them or singeing them over a flame, leaving stained and puckered deformations on their bronzed skin.

Genderqueer: Kamal (Chachi 420)

Clearly, the techne of Tamil cinema had made deep inroads into the psyche of the Tamil masses. I had not been prepared for all this when I first arrived in Chennai, in 1968, as a college fresher. Within a few months, in February ‘69, I was to witness one of the largest public gatherings I have ever seen, as people poured out into the streets of the city to mourn the passing away of film scriptwriter and first DMK chief minister, C.N. Annadurai. That was the earliest clue I had to the deep link between cinema and politics in Tamil Nadu.

A childhood spent in several North Indian cities ensured I grew up belting out only Hindi film songs in the bathroom. There was the occasional Malayalam movie, lachrymose and laden with the gravitas of the neorealistic melodrama of the times, which would come my way during summer holidays in Kerala—enough to help me distinguish between its heroes of the ’60s and ’70s—the debonair, every-strand-in-its-place hairstyle of Prem Nazir and the permanently dishevelled curls of Sathyan.

NTR and Meenakshi Seshadri

However, I was still unfamiliar with the mesmeric nature of cinema in the South and its charismatic heroes like MGR and Sivaji Ganesan in Tamil Nadu, NTR and A. Nageshwara Rao in Andhra or a Rajkumar in Karnataka. It did not take long to configure the congenital hold film heroes here had over their constituency, and the compensatory suicide many fans were prepared to commit whenever their ‘ishta devatas’ suffered a crisis in health.

When MGR was fighting for his life in ‘67 in a hospital in Chennai and needed blood transfusion, after having been shot through his gullet by co-actor M.R. Radha, thousands of fans had queued up outside (another kind of blood donation). After a landslide election victory from his hospital bed, and with no impairments other than a hoarse throat, MGR would henceforth address his following only as “en rattathin ratthamana udanpirappugale’ (you, born of my own stock, part of my own blood). Obviously, he had entered the bloodstream of the Tamil body politic and it’s not for nothing that he turned out to be the longest lasting corpuscle in its veins. He stayed the chief minister of the state for three consecutive terms from ‘77.

But it was not just MGR.Another Chennai resident, NTR, who had attained cultic status playing mythological roles as blue-painted avatars of Vishnu (he did the Krishna role 17 times) in Telugu films, would step out on to the balcony of his home in T Nagar every Friday, painted up in shocking blue, with cherry-red lips and the bric-a-brac of rented stage costume like crown, armbands and jewellery, to dispense blessings to busloads of fans who would have arrived from various districts of Andhra seeking his ‘divine darshan’.

What began to appear as an essential architectural element in the construction of the ‘Southern hero’ was this effortless transit from the reel to the real. Much of it was facilitated since the ’70s by the rapid mushrooming of star fan clubs that interacted with the public on behalf of their stars. They performed acts of ’social service’, like providing umbrellas and raincoats for people standing in the rain outside cinemas to buy tickets, or buttermilk to those standing in the sun. They garlanded cutouts of the stars, performed pujas and milk abhishekams and did mass feeding for the poor on their star’s birthday.

For someone like MGR, who at one point had over 23,000 fan associations (he was ‘international president’ of his own federation of fan associations) with a membership of over ten million, these fans also doubled as his private ‘white army’ which could be unleashed against political foes or those showing dissent.

Over half-a-million members of the Sivaji fan clubs marched in the procession when Ganesan made a show of strength within the Tamil Nadu Congress. NTR’s fan clubs became the dynamic hubs for his poll campaign in ‘82 when he succeeded in routing the Congress in Andhra. The Rajkumar fan clubs in Karnataka periodically bring the state to a standstill over issues of Kannada language or Cauvery waters. Their biggest manifestation was when forester Veerappan kidnapped the star, unleashing fan fury across the state and forcing the government to negotiate with the brigand.

Today, the next generation, like Mammootty, Mohanlal, Chiranjeevi, Kamalahaasan and Rajnikanth command huge following, contained and channelled by their fan clubs. Rajni alone boasts of over 45,000 fan clubs.

Obviously, all this is pretty unusual and unprecedented, compared to Bollywood. The Southern hero emerges not as a commercialised brand or product, as in Hindi films, deployed on the side of economics, but as a ritualised icon, deployed on the side of politics. Enough for him to be reduced to a caricature.

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(Sadanand Menon is a cultural analyst and adjunct faculty, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.)