Matinee Ideal

A chapter,“Whistling Fans and Conditional Loyalty”,is a comprehensive study of fan clubs (a uniquely south Indian,male preserve) and their origins in Tamil Nadu. Srinivas cites the beginnings of organised fan activity in 1953,when the first club was formed for M.G. Ramachandran. It was the year MGR left the Congress to join the DMK. While discussing the fan’s devotion for the star,Srinivas discusses the phenomenon of the South Indian Hero who never dies in the last scene of any plot,and plots being tailor-made for him to survive. There is a mention of an apocryphal story of how MGR wanted to make a film on the Bible,and was actually considering changing the end — fighting back instead of getting crucified. Tales of fan clubs and the role they played in building up the tempo behind the Chiranjeevi myth are discussed in detail when Srinivas talks of the magazine Megastar Chiranjeevi,which,according to its publisher,Aravind,was the first official fan magazine in Andhra Pradesh.

Srinivas divides Chiranjeevi’s career into three stages,interestingly touching on other political events in Andhra Pradesh. Srinivas marks out the film Khaidi as a watershed,as it was released the same year N.T. Rama Rao said goodbye to life as a movie star and made a political debut. He also dwells on the film Hitler (which was a result of eight months of Chiranjeevi’s spending time as a recluse,introspecting on his life and the road ahead) that marks a complete shift of genre and gear,a move away from the rowdy star played by him so far.

Chiranjeevi was the first Indian hero to get over Rs 1 crore for his films (if a back-of-the-book reference to India Today in the early Nineties is to be believed). It is Srinivas’s assertion that the movie Mutha Mestri was the all-important announcement of Chiranjeevi’s plans to ultimately enter politics. Chiranjeevi (playing the protagonist Bose,a “lower class-caste hero who enters politics to cleanse it of its corruption”) looks straight into the camera and proclaims that he would rather “be the mestri of seven crore Telugus” (rather than enter politics) — something that journalists took to imply exactly the contrary. This film was made 15 years before Chiranjeevi’s formal entry into politics.

One would like somebody with Srinivas’s access and acumen to now go into where Chiranjeevi is headed and if at all he has the stamina to bat it out in opposition. Also,if the actor-politician is serious about going beyond a Kapu identity and trying to edge out the demoralised Telugu Desam Party. Srinivas has evidently completed the book before the polls,although he does refer to Chiranjeevi’s party-organisational skills being in disarray despite an attempt by the star to “cadre-ise” his fan clubs. In his early years as an actor,Chiranjeevi had got his fan clubs organised,perhaps in the hope that he would be able to use it in later years as he embarked on another career.

The book is a great academic exercise in things that made Chiranjeevi: his connection with the NTR phase,parallels with Rajnikanth and his assertion of caste and class through the characters he chose to play and his meticulous descent into politics.

But why — unlike Mutha Mestri,Hitler,Radha My Darling,Stalin and Mechanic Alludu and despite promising crowds — did his political production flop and get restricted to a minor coastal blip is the burning question that is awaiting some sort of an answer. That may be a question big enough to address in another book — it could be called Jai Chiranjeevi: The Sequel.