Readers Write In #751: Rajnikanth- A new political conundrum

By Jeeva P

“I know these guys are anti-social. They need to be shot down. If Tamil Nadu continues this trend, I am sure we will end up like a huge graveyard.”

I was not shocked when Rajnikanth uttered these words with unadulterated fury at a press conference in Tuticorin in 2018. Rajnikanth was always seen as a popular figure who was ‘conservative’ at best in terms of politics as opposed to his arch-rival Kamal Haasan who wore his ‘liberal’, ‘rational’, sometimes ‘radical communist’ views on his sleeve. If you were going to films like Kuruthipunal or Hey Ram or Mahanadhi or even Unnaipol Oruvan, you were in one way or the other priming yourself for some ‘left-wing’ moralizing while those opting for Rajnikanth films traditionally were seen as more ‘apolitical’ or in other words, audiences who wanted just to have some ‘fun’.

Even if Rajnikanth was directly or indirectly signalling his interest in politics for over 30 years before finally pulling out in 2021, Kamal Haasan’s sudden plunge into the same, though unforeseen, couldn’t be termed completely ‘abrupt’. If you could have seen his films right from Varumaiyin Niram Sivappu way back in 1980 till his latest Indian 2, you could say that it had always been there- his penchant for progressive ideas, his iconoclasm and most importantly, his disillusionment with the status quo and his impatience for slow change and reform.

Given these clear precedents, I was shocked to see Rajnikanth change tack in 2018 and choose to speak ‘contemporary’ and ‘relevant’ politics in Pa Ranjith’s Kaala. My shock was not confined merely to the choice of the director for his film, a Dalit activist-film-maker but to the deliberately constructed, resoundingly radical politics the film spoke. I need not remind the reader that every masala hero or a superstar in Tamil Cinema have had a history of building their careers largely based on films that touch upon‘Left-centred’ themes which for obvious reasons strike a chord with the majority of the Tamil populace. MGR’s Padagotti featured a poor fisherman who led a mass revolt against a rapacious businessman. Nadodi Mannan was a call for democracy against the autocracy of the traditional elites while other masala classics such as Nam Naadu spoke for the illiterate, oppressed voter against the veiled hegemony of the rich, ruling classes who had hitherto managed to wield power in Tamil Nadu until the DMK took power in 1967.

Even Rajnikanth for that matter built his career on films with similar themes – even a commercial blockbuster like Annamalai for example, which if filtered to its essentials was the war of a happy, go-lucky, milkman against a super-rich industrialist–and when he made Sivaji that launched an all-out offensive against Tamil Nadu’s private business elite blaming them for the backwardness of the entire state, I was not too surprised. But even if these films had ‘left-wing’ themes, they were not allowed to boil and rise to the surface for everyone to see and appreciate. Hey Ram could have been termed as a downright ‘political’ film and none would have batted an eyelid. But when I was in college in 2007, when I called Sivaji a daring‘political’ film that had the guts to speak against India’s burgeoning big business elite post-1991, a lot of my friends were agitated. True, Sivaji was a colourful commercial film at the first place and the solutions it suggested to remedy the ills of the country were not only sugar-coated at the altar of Rajnikanth’s superstardom but also diluted and diluted to such ‘Homeopathic’ levels, that the ‘political’ tag I dared to give it was barely visible to the general audience.

In other words, the superstars of Tamil Cinema traditionally knew exactly what to talk to the audiences to gain their applause and recognition and to what extent so as not to invite controversy or any kind of serious political branding. But with the arrival of Kaala, I was one of the few who could sense some kind of a paradigm shift with respect to how films of the biggest superstars of one of India’s largest film industries were constructed, in terms of their politics.

In Kaala, here was a man who belonged to the Dalit community, a community that rarely gets attention in mainstream Tamil Cinema and one to where none of India’s superstars would have wanted to belong to, for fear of alienating the ‘others’. I would not have been surprised if Kamal Haasan had played a Dalit in one of his ‘serious’ films but Rajnikanth, ‘what the hell?’ Would this have been possible a couple of decades before?

But Kaala didn’t stop with that. Kaala, played by Rajnikanth names one of his sons, Lenin. And he doesn’t stop there too. He chastises his son for crying like a baby having been christened after one of the greatest political revolutionaries of all time. And the film doesn’t stop there too. It launches a frontal attack on the current Hindutva establishment that prides so much on ‘cleanliness’ with a similar sounding name – ‘Pure Mumbai’. And it goes on. Kaala mobilizes poor slum dwellers not only against the ‘cultural’ oppressors of this era but against the sinister cultural-corporate ‘nexus’ forged by today’s Hindutvawadi politicians with the ever-burgeoning Adanis and Ambanis. And don’t get shocked until you see the climax- Kaala is dead before the villains are vanquished and the onus shifts on to the masses to complete the revenge – a massive group of slum-dwellers launching an attack of physical annihilation against the biggest class enemy of our time. I had to quickly search for my handkerchief to wipe the sweat off my forehead in the theatre. I had without my knowledge, orgasmed.

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Why do we love our superstars so much? They have the guts to accomplish what we commoners badly want to. They are our contemporary deities who can vanquish the demons of today’s society and provide us with the calm reassurance that all is not lost in our wars against the oppressing classes. The essence of mass, commercial cinema is this – vicarious wish-fulfilment and simply nothing else. That is precisely why it is a genre that has stood the test of time for so many generations even in post-industrial societies such as America and Western Europe. We masses do not have the guts, the wherewithal and the time to take on our oppressors and hence we have handed the baton to our superstars on screen. This is one of the reasons why we take them seriously, when they take the political ‘plunge’ off-screen too, voting for them even if we know deep down, pretty well that all of this is a sham and that nothing would change for the better if we don’t take things into our hands ourselves – a fact that we would definitely hate to admit.

But Kaala subverted all of that. It took a usual commercial theme of a do-gooder serving the society by taking on the big guns, added so much real flavour to the storywith its explicit, radical politics before finally upending it. If the masses are ready and able to bring the ‘change’ for themselves, why do they need the superstars? In other words, in terms of story, in my humble opinion, Kaala was the first anti-mass masala film in Tamil Cinema played by a big superstar.

All of this is fine until we take note of one thing – a superstar who wields one of the biggest fan-bases in the country musters the courage to explicitly challenge the existing political establishment with so much ideological clarity and coherence on screen on a big-ticket masala film, something that had not been accomplished before. Great. But wait, what did he do a couple of weeks before the film’s release off-screen? A wholly unexpected tirade against thousands of protestors who had been crusading against a large multi-national corporation for years together on an issue that even the courts of the land had later settled in favour of the former, an issue that had landed on the lap of a judicial committee which ended up ruling against the shooters who apparently must have had frivolous ‘motives’ for carrying out the firing.

I remember one of the memes that ruled the internet then from Shankar’s blockbuster Anniyan featuring a befuddled Prakashraj peering into a computer screen– “The one who lodged the complaint and the person took action on it, were both of them one and the same?”

“The one who calls for collective, political action against the establishment on screen with full-blooded conviction and the one who demands extra-legal punitive action from the establishment against those who answer his call off-screen, are they both one and the same?”

Let my reader not hasten to call this an off-instance or an occasion where our superstar could have suffered a brain fade. When this had happened in 2018, I was of course confused at it but I was willing to forgive it as an exceptional circumstance.

Months later, Rajnikanth in one of his interviews reserved appreciation for the work of our current Prime Minister and appeared to have no ambivalent feelings about how these comments might be interpreted by the general public. When he was about to launch his political party, he seemed to be taking help and guidance from one of BJP’s leaders from Tamil Nadu, thanking him and posing with him for pictures for the media.

In January this year, I need not remind my readers about how Rajnikanth went gung-ho over the Ram Temple consecration at Ayodhya conveniently forgetting the gruesome story behind its construction.

But within months of that event, I threw up while drinking an expensive glass of Rose-flavoured Lassi on the floor to see him play a Muslim bigwig who preached communal harmony to the masses in a film titled – how could you pull this off, Thalaiva – ‘Lal Salaam’.

Recently I was seeing Rajnikanth dancing with unconcealable delight at the weddings of one of the scions of the Ambani family. I badly wanted to appear then and there at the wedding ceremony joining the huge media entourage and ask one of the Ambanis whether they had seen Kaala, one of the films starring their VIP guest and what they thought about it.

See, again I really for months together didn’t want to be surprised about all of this. My mind kept harking back to a time when the same MGR who had preached the purest form of socialism to the masses in his classic Nadodi Mannan calling for land reform, wealth redistribution and economic equality, becoming the first Chief Minister in the state to take decisive, extra-legal action on Naxalism that was growing in North Tamil Nadu in the late 1980s.

I kept telling myself that Kaala was a one off-movie from Thalaivar and what he preached on-screen had no reason to be practised offscreen too. He could have fallen for the way a film-maker like Pa Ranjith had narrated the full story, could have loved the manner by whichthe pre-interval action block was conceived or by the brilliance of the interval sequence that packs so much excitement that can only be matched by heightened moments before full ejaculation during mating, especially for men.

As I had written in one of my essays on this blog, Rajnikanth could have been after Pa Ranjith’s storytelling abilities that could supplement his phenomenal prowess in displaying machismo on screen even if he had no interest on the ideology and politics of the activist-film-maker’s vision.

But there were two things that still did not up. Pa Ranjith kept telling in many of his interviews that Rajnikanth was no political novice and that he had the maturity to fully understand the radical politics behind the vision of his films. Almost the same thing was repeated by leftist film-maker SP Jananathan in one of his interviews on Chai With Chitra that Rajnikanth was fully appreciative of the politics behind the story he was narrating to him for a film that did not materialise and that he was surprised by his knowledge and political maturity.

So let me explain more on why I call this a conundrum. If you are a superstar whose films arrive at the theatres hauling crores and crores of money on their bogeys, you could easily choose a largely apolitical film, something like GOAT or Baasha and bet on their recovering their huge investments. There is absolutely no need to choose films with themes like Kaala or Lal Salaam unless you have a penchant for these themes like how Kamal Haasan has for religious fundamentalism, rationalism, etc. In fact, themes such as Dalit oppression and class wars are in fact too risky and run the risk of inviting the anger of the establishment or that of a section of the film-viewing masses. I wouldn’t be calling this out had Rajnikanth stopped choosing ‘radical’ films with his Lal Salaam. I would still have dismissed these as exceptions in a largely ‘apolitical’ body of work spanning five decades and junked this idea of writing an essay. But what I saw two weeks ago on theatres threw me completely ‘off-balance’.

Vettaiyan, directed by ‘Jai Bhim’ fame Gnanavel with Rajnikanth playing the eponymous ‘hunter’ was the straw that broke this unwilling writer’s back. The decision to play the heroic encounter-specialist and the guts needed to play the protagonist whose supposed ‘heroics’ end up ruining the destiny of an innocent boy, the story of whom forms the crux of the whole movie simply blew me away. But above all that, the theme that the film chose – extra-judicial killings- has long been the preserve of mainstream Marxists and radical left-wing activists. You could find reams and reams written on the subject by leftist writers right from our independence of how the state discriminates against the poor and the underprivileged when it comes to dispensing extra-legal punishments and how all of these acts add weight to how Marxists describe the Indian state – bourgeois, pro–rich, upper-caste, anti-poor, collusive, etc.

When Kamal Haasan made Virumandi which called for banning the practice of capital punishment, he invited VR Krishna Iyer, the former Law Minister of Kerala’s first Communist government to share his opinion during the post-credits scene.

When Vettaiyan spoke on the same theme and that too on the side of the poor and the underprivileged with Rajnikanth at the helm, I simply couldn’t understand. I can pardon Kaala and Lal Salaam. I can understand if you had chosen one or two left-wing movies by mistake. But how can you choose Vettaiyan, a story which is yet another anti-mass hero subject, without sympathising with the subject it deals with? How can you choose to do Vettaiyan and not be aware of the film-maker’s political alignment? Even if you are not aware of it, how can you star in a film that sends a message to millions of your fans and masses that the state is essentially a pro-capitalist apparatus that cannot simply be trusted with the business of dispensing justice? If that is the message you want to convey to your fans and the masses, how does it sit with your right-wing, conservative ideas that the country, the state and the law-enforcing machinery are all sacrosanct entities that lay beyond the boundaries of questioning and reproach? How do you justify your statements on the Tuticorin firing in the light of what you chose to propagate through your recent release, Vettaiyan?

If someone tells me Rajnikanth chooses left-wing themes for his films for their obvious appeal to the poor and the underprivileged with an eye on the box-office returns, my question to them would be, if that is the case why choose themes that are simply too risky? Why choose films that have these themes as main course as opposed to conventional mass masala films like Sivaji, Theri, Mersal, etc. where political ideas and radical themes are simply just ‘starters’? Playing the generic do-gooder hero who would give the rich villains a run for their money is not the same as playing a specific member of an existing oppressed community whose interests are still not widely accepted in the existing scheme of things. Playing Manickam, the auto-driver is not the same as playing Kaala. In Annamalai, the class war between the poor protagonist and the rich antagonist was very much at the background. In Kaala, the class war is the story itself. Every scene and line of dialogue is written towards furthering Pa Ranjith’s vision of fighting for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes – a subject that had traditionally been the preserve and staple of parallel film-makers like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, TV Chandran, etc. How can you choose films like these no matter how well these are made, without sharing the vision of the film-maker and without thinking about how these ideas shall impact the audiences? If you are in sympathy with these ideas, you are essentially a man with a left-wing bias. But if you are a man with left-wing ideas whose daughter was livid with media calling her father a Sanghi, how can you appreciate the Chief Minister of a State whose USP had essentially been spewing hate over its minorities and choose to fall on his feet? If you can hail a Prime Minister whose party has been hell-bent on enforcing NEET on an unwilling Tamil Nadu in the morning and star in a PSA movie against NEET in the afternoon, how can you stop me from calling you a conundrum?