Rajinikanth Thalaivar Forever.
Rajinikanth: Thalaivar Forever is an amazing work of nonfiction that sets out to do something most writing on its subject avoids: to treat Rajinikanth not as a phenomenon to be celebrated, but as an actor to be assessed. Written by T. Sathish and published by one of the country's leading publishing houses, Om Books International and represented by one of India's biggest literary agencies, The Book Bakers, the book is part film criticism, part memoir, and part a long, affectionate argument with the reader.
Its premise is simple and, for a fan base used to adulation, mildly provocative. Beneath the sunglasses, the punch dialogues and the cardboard cut-outs washed in milk, Sathish argues, lies a performer whose craft has been obscured by his own stardom. The book travels chronologically from the raw character actor of the 1970s - who played villains and broken men in nearly forty films before fame arrived - to the mass hero of Baasha, Padayappa and Enthiran, pausing at each stage to read the performances closely.
That close reading is the book's distinguishing feature. Rather than simply recount plots, Sathish examines individual scenes: the wordless ending of Mullum Malarum, a balcony in Thalapathy where a man learns he can never meet his mother, a telephone threat in Sivaji delivered without a raised voice. The method is uncommon in popular Indian film writing, which more often catalogues hits than interrogates technique. The book also sketches the social context of each era - the Dravidian-movement politics, and the arrival of a dark-skinned hero in a cinema that had long prized fair leading men.
"I kept meeting younger viewers who saw only the style and assumed there was nothing underneath," Sathish says of the book's origins. "I wanted to show them where to look. This is not a tribute; it is an attempt to make the case honestly, including the films that do not work."
That honesty extends to a running comparison with Kamal Haasan, whose parallel career Sathish uses as a measure rather than a rivalry - a device that gives the book an analytical spine, though it occasionally tests the patience of the committed fan. He is also willing to call the later films formulaic, and the celebrated style, at its excesses, self-parody.
The book is framed by a teenager named Ahaan, who does not understand the fuss and to whom the author returns throughout - a thread that keeps a potentially dense argument personal and moving. It is in these passages, and in the chapters on the lesser-known films of the 1970s, that the writing is at its most assured.
It is not without the habits of an enthusiast. The book assumes a degree of familiarity with Tamil cinema, and its affection occasionally outpaces its analysis. But it is self-aware on this point, stating plainly in an opening note what it is and is not: a personal exploration rather than a definitive biography or an academic study.
"Objectivity is neither possible nor desirable here," Sathish writes. "What I have attempted is honesty."
Readers in search of a hagiography will not find one; nor will those seeking a scholarly monograph. What Thalaivar Forever offers instead is something less common in the genre - a serious, readable attempt to watch a hugely popular actor closely, and to persuade the reader to do the same. For anyone who has loved these films, or wondered why others do, it is a considered and rewarding read.
