Rajinikanth, a bus conductor from Bangalore, and the country that needed him
By Nine145
A poor man with a quick wrist and a short temper is allowed, for three hours, to win. How that promise built an icon, a ritual and a language that crosses oceans, and why cinema, at its most potent, is never only cinema.
3.40 a.m., Any Release Day
Picture a street in north Chennai at twenty to four in the morning, a few hours before a Rajinikanth film is due to open. The tea stall has been serving since midnight. A boy of about nineteen, a delivery rider by day, stands on a stool with a paintbrush, retouching the moustache on a hoarding three storeys tall. Below him a retired mill worker, first in the queue since the previous evening, folds his arms and supervises, as though the painting were his own.
Nobody here is being paid to be here. That is the first thing a visitor notices and the last thing the visitor understands. These people are not queuing for a ticket in any ordinary sense of the word; they are keeping a vigil. By dawn there will be drums, firecrackers, garlands the length of a bus, and pots of milk poured over a painted face in a gesture borrowed, quite deliberately, from the temple. The word for it is abhishekam. The object of it is a man who is, at that moment, almost certainly asleep, or sitting quietly somewhere, looking nothing like his own poster.
This is the scene outsiders photograph, and it is the scene that misleads them most easily. They see hysteria. What is actually on display is older and far more orderly: a community rehearsing a story it has agreed to believe, in which an ordinary man, dark-skinned, quick-tempered, unmistakably one of them, is permitted to humiliate the powerful and walk away whistling. The industry calls the day an opening. The people on the pavement call it a festival, and they are closer to the truth.
To understand why, we must leave that street and travel backwards: to a gate, to a bus depot, to a cinema in Tokyo, and then forwards again to a week in October 2026 when the whole performance began once more. The story does not run in a straight line, because devotion of this kind never does.
The Gate, August 1975
The film is Apoorva Raagangal, and it reached Tamil cinemas on 15 August 1975, the twenty-eighth anniversary of Indian independence. Seven weeks earlier, on 25 June, the government had declared an Emergency. Newspapers were being censored and opponents jailed; a country that had been taught to speak up was learning, once more, to lower its voice.
K. Balachander, the director, was already celebrated for domestic dramas with a splinter in them, and this one was as bold as mainstream Tamil cinema then dared to be: a young man falls in love with an older woman, his father falls in love with her daughter, and the propriety that ought to untie the knot only pulls it tighter. Late in the picture, for barely a few minutes, a stranger arrives. The first glimpse we are given of him is from a distance. A man in rags, a beedi between his lips, illness etched into his face, pushes open a gate. He does not push it as visitors do. He pushes it as though it owed him money.
He is Pandiyan, the husband the heroine left behind, and he is played by a newcomer whom Balachander had renamed Rajinikanth, borrowing, as the story goes, from a character in his own play Major Chandrakanth.
Consider what that frame refused. Tamil cinema’s heroes entered in light, in clean white, usually beneath a song that explained their virtue before they had spoken. This man entered like a debt collector. There was no music, no halo, no apology. Balachander is reported to have told a colleague at the time to watch the fire in the young man’s eyes, because one day he would take the state by storm. It sounds, at this distance, like the kind of remark directors make in retrospect. Yet the gate is there on film, and so is the gaze, and neither has aged.
The following year, in Moondru Mudichu, the newcomer was paid, by one account, a mere ₹2,000 to play Prasath, a man who stands on a lakeshore and watches his friend drown because he covets the friend’s sweetheart. It was a repellent performance, delivered with such ease that audiences leaned towards it rather than away. Somewhere in that contradiction the future was already folded up small.
A Conductor, a Carpenter, an Outsider
He was born Shivaji Rao Gaekwad on 12 December 1950, into a Marathi-speaking family in Bangalore, a city that spoke Kannada, dreamt in several languages, and had no reason whatever to imagine that one of its sons would one day command Tamil Nadu’s cinemas. He had been, in sequence, a coolie, a carpenter and a conductor on the Bangalore Transport Service. Colleagues from that era are said to have remembered a conductor who tossed coins and tickets with a flourish, as though the bus were a stage. He drifted to Madras, enrolled in a film institute, and there, on a day nobody noted, Balachander found him.
The interesting question is not how he got in. It is why the audience let him stay.
Tamil screen heroism, in the mid-1970s, was governed by two great traditions. One was M.G. Ramachandran, the fair, upright, impossibly kind hero whose films doubled as moral pamphlets for the Dravidian movement and who would, in 1977, become Chief Minister of the state. The other was Sivaji Ganesan, the master of the declaimed line, whose theatrical voice had set the standard for what serious acting sounded like. Neither tradition had room for a wiry, dark-complexioned young man with rough features, an accent that the purists considered unlovely, and a physical restlessness that seemed to belong to the street rather than the stage.
In a country that has long prized fair skin in its leading men, he was the wrong colour. In a state built, in no small part, on Tamil pride and a wariness of the outsider, he was the wrong tongue. By every rule of the industry’s inherited arithmetic he should have vanished into character roles. Instead he assimilated in the manner great cities assimilate their migrants: not by erasing the newcomer, but by letting the newcomer rewrite the city’s own sense of itself. Years later, when he flirted with electoral politics, rivals would remind voters that he was not a son of the soil. Voters who had spent forty years watching him were largely unmoved. They had adopted him long before any manifesto asked them to.
There is a lesson here about how mass followings actually form. They are not built by publicity. They are built by recognition, by the slow, startled discovery in a stranger’s face of something you had assumed was yours alone.
The Bad Man’s Dignity
The astonishing part of the early career is that he did not become beloved by being good. He became beloved by being, with enormous charm, bad.
In 16 Vayathinile (1977), Bharathiraja’s raw village tale, he played Parattai, a swaggering rogue whose sneering catchphrase, Idhu epdi irukku?, ‘How’s that for you?’, slid into everyday speech within weeks. In Avargal (1977) he played a husband whose cruelty was psychological rather than physical, the sort of man who ruins a woman’s life without once raising his voice. These were not roles that audiences are supposed to cherish. Yet they did, and the reason is worth sitting with: the villainy was honest. In a culture of polite hypocrisy, where respectable men did their harm behind the curtain of manners, here was a man who did it in the open, grinning.
Then came a gamble. S.P. Muthuraman cast him as a sympathetic lead in Bhuvana Oru Kelvi Kuri (1977), and the public, it turned out, had been waiting. The following year J. Mahendran’s Mullum Malarum gave him the part that critics still cite as the proof of his range: Kaali, a winch operator who loses an arm in an accident, loses his job to the arrogance of a manager, and spends the rest of the film defending his sister’s honour and his own dignity against a man who has never been refused. There was nothing flashy about the performance. It was, if anything, an act of restraint: a proud man, humbled by an industrial machine, refusing to crawl.
That refusal is the secret of everything that came after. The Rajinikanth hero, at his best, is not a man who wins because he is mighty. He is a man who will not kneel, and the cinema makes sure that, this once, the world respects it.
Why Nations Need Their Outlaws
Every decade produces the hero it can stomach. In Hindi cinema of the early 1970s, with prices rising, jobs scarce and faith in the system draining out of the public like water from a cracked tank, it produced the Angry Young Man, a figure embodied in Zanjeer (1973) and Deewaar (1975) by Amitabh Bachchan: sullen, sleepless, righteous in a way the law could not be. In Tamil cinema the same hunger took a different shape. M.G. Ramachandran had offered the poor a protector, a benevolent hero who stood on the right side of the moral order. What the 1970s began to ask for was something rougher: not a protector but a peer, someone who did the unlawful thing the audience privately wanted done.
This is the oldest bargain of the popular imagination, and it is not unique to India. The outlaw who steals from the rich, the gunman who cleans up the town the sheriff will not touch, the masked avenger in the unwashed alley: all are answers to the same quiet question. What does a society do with its anger when its institutions fail to hold it? It puts the anger on a screen, gives it a swagger and a soundtrack, and lets two thousand strangers in the dark discharge it together.
The vigilante fantasy is, strictly speaking, a verdict on the courts, the police, the landlord and the bureaucrat. It says: the machinery is slow, and the powerful are fast, and we would like, for a few hours, to be on the quicker side. That is why the genre thrives in times of corruption and scarcity, and why it is rarely about the villain at all. The villain is merely a device for dramatising a grievance that the audience brought with them in their pockets.
Rajinikanth’s genius was to make the grievance personal and the remedy rhythmic. In Annamalai (1992) the milkman humiliated by a rich friend rises to outbuild him. In Baashha (1995) a mild-mannered auto-rickshaw driver, Manickam, conceals a past as a feared don; the film’s most celebrated passage is the long, bruising moment in which the meek man, pushed too far, lifts his head and the audience realises that the gentleness was a discipline, not a weakness. His line, Naan oru thadava sonna nooru thadava sonna madhiri, ‘When I say it once, it is as if I said it a hundred times’, escaped the cinema and became a proverb. A schoolboy could say it to a bully. A clerk could mutter it in a lift. The anti-hero had left the screen and entered the vocabulary.
None of this is an endorsement of violence. It is an observation about desire. Where institutions feel remote, myth fills the gap, and the myth that fills it most reliably is the one in which the powerless man turns out to have been the powerful one all along.
The Choreography of a Cheap Pair of Sunglasses
It would be easy to mistake all this for sociology and forget that it is also craft. Few stars have turned small gestures into a private alphabet as thoroughly as he did. A cigarette sent spinning from the wrist and caught between the lips. Sunglasses spun on a single finger and snapped to the bridge of the nose without disturbing the hair. A walk that leans forward as if the ground were in a hurry. A laugh that arrives in a staccato burst, like a verdict.
The point is not that these tricks are difficult, although they are. The point is that they were, by design, copyable. A mill hand in Salem could not copy Sivaji Ganesan’s diction or MGR’s complexion, but he could flip a plastic pair of sunglasses on the walk home and feel, for an instant, that he owned the street. Style, in this reading, is the most democratic of all the arts, because it asks nothing of its audience except nerve.
There is a technical dimension, too. In the single-screen theatres where he rose, sound was frequently muddy and projection uneven; a gesture, unlike a line, travelled cleanly from the front stalls to the back of the balcony. He had, in effect, designed a cinema that could survive its own infrastructure.
Shibuya, June 1998
In the summer of 1998, in a country that was in its own quiet recession, a cinema in Tokyo’s Shibuya district began showing a Tamil film nobody there had heard of.
The film was Muthu, directed by K.S. Ravikumar, scored by A.R. Rahman, first released in India in 1995: a masala story of a loyal servant, a zamindar and a woman both of them love. For the Japanese release it was retitled Muthu: Odoru Maharaja, ‘the Dancing Maharaja’. Japan’s economy had contracted in the financial year that ended in March 1998, the first such shrinkage in more than two decades, and the cheerful, unembarrassed exuberance of the film seems to have landed like a window opened in a stuffy room. It began at the Cinema Rise on 13 June and stayed for twenty-three weeks, drawing about 127,000 people to that one theatre alone. Across its Japanese run it is reported to have earned some ¥400 million, which made it the highest-grossing Indian film in the country, a record that stood for twenty-four years until RRR broke it in the winter of 2022.
What drew them? Those who have interviewed Japanese devotees describe different answers: the dancing, the storyline’s gentle idea that a modest income is enough for a peaceful life, the sheer unfamiliarity of a star whose face moved in ways a Japanese audience had never seen on screen. Some fans went on to learn Tamil. Some travelled to Chennai to watch his films with the crowds. There is a kind of cultural assimilation that no government can plan: a country with scarcely any Indian community to speak of, falling in love with an Indian mannerism because the mannerism was funny, and joyous, and unembarrassed.
The moment passed into diplomacy. When India’s then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, addressed the National Diet in Tokyo on 14 December 2006, he is reported to have referred to the film, and the hall responded warmly. It is a modest line in a long speech. It is also a reminder that soft power, the thing foreign ministries spend fortunes trying to manufacture, can arrive unannounced, in a cinema, on a wet Tuesday, in the shape of a man spinning sunglasses.
The Ledger and the Promise
Back in Chennai, in the offices where films are sold before they are shot, there is a phrase for what he represents: the minimum guarantee. A veteran of the trade once put it plainly to a business magazine: a Rajinikanth film made for ₹150 crore will, in his experience, earn at least ₹200 crore. Theatres book it on faith; distributors pay premium prices in advance; television and streaming rights are sold while the first schedule is still being shot. The star’s name is, in effect, a form of collateral.
It is a seductive tale, and like most seductive tales it is only partly accurate. Cinema’s arithmetic is less forgiving than its legends. In 2002 Baba, a film he wrote and produced himself, collapsed so badly that he reimbursed the distributors, reportedly the first time he had had to. When Lingaa disappointed in 2014, the distributors threatened protests, and the settlement that ended them was reported at around ₹10 crore. When Darbar arrived in 2020, theatre-owners in Tamil Nadu spoke of distributor losses in the region of a fifth to a quarter of their outlay, and a delegation of distributors went to his door to ask for compensation. Accounts differ about what the film cost and what it earned; the trade itself cannot agree, and any figure should be handled as an estimate.
What the record shows, then, is not infallibility but something subtler: a moral guarantee. He has, on several occasions, accepted that if the crowd paid for his promise and the promise failed, he owed them an answer. That is rare among stars, and it explains why exhibitors forgive him disappointments they would not forgive anyone else. The phrase ‘flop-proof’ flatters him and misunderstands him. A man who has to repay the distributors is, by definition, not flop-proof. He is accountable, and in a business ruled by hype, accountability is the scarcer currency.
Hymn of the Mandram
Follow the milk back from the hoarding and you reach the fan club. For decades the associations that grew around him, later gathered under the banner of the Rajini Makkal Mandram, behaved less like supporters’ clubs than like neighbourhood institutions. They arranged blood donations, ran eye-check camps, handed out school notebooks, and rushed to flood-hit streets with food and blankets. The giving was modest and local, and it was the point: the screen persona, a poor man who rises and shares, was echoed by thousands of small acts of sharing by those who adored him.
This is what the word ‘fandom’ conceals. In Tamil Nadu, devotion to a star has long had a civic dimension, a rehearsal of belonging. Take the fan out of the cinema and set him down in the municipal ward, and he is often the same person: the one who organises, shows up, remembers whose roof leaked in the last monsoon. The ritual of the first show, with its drums and its camphor flame waved before the screen as the title card appears, is a liturgy built on the grammar of the temple, transplanted into the one public space where every caste and trade and income bracket sits in the same dark room and laughs at the same joke. When Kabali opened in 2016, some firms in Chennai and Bengaluru were reported to have given their staff the day off, on the sensible grounds that nobody was coming in anyway.
The obvious next step, in a state where film and politics have always shared a staircase, was the ballot box. M.G. Ramachandran had taken that step; so had screenwriters, and later other leading men. In 2017 Rajinikanth signalled that he might do the same. In December 2020 he announced that he would not, and in July 2021 the Mandram was dissolved. Whatever one makes of the decision, it was an unusual one: an idol with an organised following of enormous size, declining to convert devotion into votes. It left admirers and detractors alike with a puzzle that has not been entirely solved. Was it caution? Humility? A recognition that the thing he had built in the cinema could not be carried into the committee room without breaking? Only he knows. What the episode did establish is that the bond between screen and street, however intense, is not a mere political asset waiting to be harvested.
The Quiet Man in White
Then there is the other Rajinikanth, the one the hoardings never show. Away from the camera he appears in public as an elderly man in simple white clothes, with thinning grey hair and an unpainted face, speaking in a low, unhurried voice. He is now in his mid-seventies and makes no attempt to look otherwise. Among the stars of any industry this is startlingly rare, and it has not diminished the myth. It has deepened it, because the contrast tells the audience something they need to be told: that the swaggering demigod who tosses sunglasses and thrashes forty men is a gift, a performance crafted for them, and that the man behind the performance does not mistake it for himself.
Between films, by long-standing report, he retreats to the Himalayas, to meditation and silence and shrines associated with the saint Mahavatar Babaji. It is easy to turn this into hagiography, and an honest observer should resist the temptation. But the pattern is significant. The mass hero in Indian cinema has often been asked to be larger than life in public; he is rarely permitted to be smaller than life in private. Here is a star who insists on both, and the double portrait, the lavish illusion and the plain man, has become part of why people trust him.
This Week, and the Windows That Close
As this piece is written, in the middle of October 2026, the ritual is under way again. Jailer 2, the sequel to his 2023 success, opened on 15 October, and with it came a quarrel that tells us a good deal about how the old theatrical commons is being renegotiated.
The dispute concerns windows. National multiplex chains in the Hindi-speaking north customarily expect a gap of eight weeks between a film’s cinema release and its arrival on a streaming service. The producers of Jailer 2 reportedly sold the streaming rights for a sum reported at about ₹160 crore, with a window of four weeks. Reports ahead of the release suggested that the Hindi version would therefore miss the largest chains, as other recent films, including his own Coolie and Vijay’s Leo, were said to have done. The makers issued a statement insisting that the Hindi version would open on 15 October as planned, alongside the other languages. At the time of writing it is too soon to say how the film will fare in the north or what its box office will look like, and anyone who offers confident numbers is guessing.
What matters here is the argument itself. For a century, the cinema hall was the one place where a society sat down together, strangers breathing the same air at the same moment, and the exclusivity of that moment was its value. Streaming has shortened the moment, and the industry’s most reliable draw is now at the centre of the debate about how short it can be. The man who built his fame on the physical crowd finds himself at the heart of a negotiation about how long the crowd is allowed to last.
The Gate Again
Return, one last time, to the gate in 1975, the rusted gate in a black-and-white Tamil drama, shoved open by a stranger who looks as though he has not eaten properly in days.
It is tempting to say that he changed cinema. That is too small. What he did was to show a vast, noisy, hopeful public that there was room in the frame for them: for their complexions, their accents, their tempers, their wrists and their cheap sunglasses. He gave the vigilante a sense of humour. He gave the anti-hero a conscience. He took the old Dravidian-era grammar of the heroic and, without ever quite saying so, widened its entrance until a bus conductor from Bangalore could walk through it and everyone else could follow him in.
Cultures need their outlaws because societies need somewhere to put their anger, their impatience and their stubborn belief that dignity should not require permission. Icons are not manufactured by studios; they are commissioned, quietly, by crowds. Every few decades a crowd looks at a screen and sees, shuffling through a gate in worn clothes, the figure it has been waiting for. It cannot say why. It simply stands up, in the dark, and begins to cheer.
The gate is still open. Whoever comes next will have to push it a good deal harder.
(The article uses AI generated illustrative image.)
