An award Rajinikanth richly deserves

The Dadasaheb Phalke award conferred on him is another acknowledgement of the mass adulation he enjoys

Not many among Rajinikanth’s younger fans know that he began his film career with negative roles. In Puttanna Kanagal’s Kannada film Kathasangama (1975), he played a ruffian who rapes a blind woman, a role unthinkable for him today. His evolution from bad man to hero to quasi saint is surely one of Indian cinema’s most intriguing real-life stories, and his rise has already become a subject worthy of study in a school textbook. There is much that is admirable in Rajinikanth, and even Bollywood, which had for long looked at the southern films more with amusement than respect, now accepts him as a phenomenon with few parallels.

Born into a Marathi-speaking family in 1950, the young Shivaji Rao Gaikwad got to do everything middle-class children in Basavanagudi in tranquil south Bengaluru did in those days: play cricket, act in school plays and visit Ramakrishna Ashrama for its discourses. He worked for a brief while as a coolie and then became a bus conductor. He continued to pursue his passion for acting by appearing in pouranika (mythological) plays, rich in music and costumes and mounted on a stage oblivious to the politically aware and bare-bones theatre propounded by Brecht. B V Karanth and Girish Karnad were among those then producing a high-brow Kannada theatre and debating such questions as individualism versus social commitment. With his exaggerated mannerisms---his cigarette-popping is an enduring gimmick---Rajini moved to the other extreme, in a cinema that revels in fantasy and instant gratification.

When he was studying at the Madras Film Institute, he was spotted by director K Balachandar, who cast him in the Tamil film Apoorva Ragangal (1975) as an abusive husband. But his negative phase was short-lived, and he was soon doing happy, heroic roles. In the decades that followed, he delivered hundreds of hits, mainly in Tamil, creating memorable characters and delivering punch dialogues that drove fans into a frenzy. In his post-2000 films, he turned into a comic book-style superhero, and was hailed as Asia’s second highest-paid actor, after Jackie Chan. His politics, tepid and reluctant, has taken several turns and U-turns. His predecessors in Tamil films, who made it big in politics, took pride in their Dravidian identity. Rajini’s thoughts, on the other hand, are not moored in any ideology that excites the Tamil heart. His statements have often contradicted the causes he espouses in his films, leaving his fans confused. The Dadasaheb Phalke award conferred on him, just six days before Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, is another acknowledgement of the mass adulation he enjoys. It is richly deserved.