🇮🇳 Rajinikanth

Rajinikanth was born Shivaji Rao Gaekwad on 12 December 1950, the youngest of four children in a Marathi-speaking family in Bangalore. His father, Ramoji Rao Gaekwad, was a police constable; his mother, Jijabai, a homemaker who died when Shivaji was nine. The boy was raised partly by an elder brother, partly by the rough Hanumantha Nagar neighbourhood of south Bangalore. He worked as a carpenter, a coolie at Yeshwantpur railway station, and finally as a conductor on the Bangalore Transport Service, route number 10A from Majestic to Srirampuram. Passengers later swore they remembered the way he punched the tickets — the flick of the wrist, the sudden grin.

He was thirty-two before his face became famous. In 1973 he enrolled, against the wishes of his family, at the Madras Film Institute. The Tamil director K. Balachander spotted him in a student production, told him to learn Tamil, and cast him in 1975 in Apoorva Raagangal — a small, scarred role as the estranged husband of an older woman. The audience laughed. The audience laughed because the dark, thin, sharply moving young man was unlike anything Tamil cinema had ever put on screen: no caste markers, no fair skin, no soft baritone. Balachander had no idea, in 1975, what he had done. Within five years the audience would no longer be laughing.

The pivot came in 1978 with Bhairavi, his first film as solo lead, and with Mullum Malarum (1978), in which the director J. Mahendran built an entire psychological drama around the cracked-glass intensity of Rajinikanth's face. By 1980, with Billa — a Tamil remake of Amitabh Bachchan's Don — the cigarette flick, the sunglasses, and the over-the-shoulder swagger had hardened into a style. By 1983 he was the highest-paid actor in South India. By 1995, with Baasha, he had become something the language did not yet have a word for. The film's opening day in Madras prompted milk abhishekam, the Hindu ritual bathing of a deity, to be performed on his cardboard cut-outs at temple-adjacent cinemas. The ritual has been repeated, somewhere in Tamil Nadu, for every release since.

The films of the late 1990s and 2000s — Muthu, Padayappa, Sivaji, Enthiran — were not merely commercial events; they were diplomatic ones. Muthu, dubbed into Japanese as Muthu: Odoru Maharaja in 1998, ignited a still-running cult following in Japan: bento boxes, fan clubs, university dissertations on the Rajini-walk. Enthiran (2010), directed by Shankar, was at the time the most expensive Indian film ever made. The actor was sixty. He played both the scientist and the homicidal android. He did most of his own dancing.

Off screen he had become unreadable in a way that only deepened the worship. He travelled to the Himalayas in saffron robes. He met with the seer Ramana Maharshi's lineage at Tiruvannamalai. He kept his daughters out of the press. He refused the Padma Vibhushan once and accepted it the second time. He flirted publicly with politics for two decades — feinted in 1996, in 2004, in 2017, in 2020 — and each time, at the last hinge, withdrew. "I will enter politics," he told a press conference in December 2017, "when god tells me it is time." In December 2020, citing his health and what he called a divine warning, he announced he never would.

The late films have hardened, again, into a different style: older, slower, more deliberately mythic. Petta (2019) was a self-aware throwback. Jailer (2023), directed by Nelson Dilipkumar, grossed over six hundred crore rupees worldwide and became the highest-grossing Tamil film of the year — at a moment when the lead actor was seventy-two. In May 2021 he received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India's highest cinema honour. He accepted it, on stage in New Delhi, with a quiet line about his bus-conductor years. The hall stood.

Rajinikanth is the closest thing post-1980 India has produced to a true mass-cinema deity: not the most talented actor of his generation, by his own repeated admission, but the most loved. The phenomenon is structural. He is dark-skinned in an industry that punished dark skin; he is poor-born in an industry that rewarded inheritance; he is unmistakably southern in a country whose Hindi film industry treated the south as overflow. Every Tamil bus conductor, every Bangalore carpenter, every Yeshwantpur coolie sees, in the Rajini-walk, a door they were told did not exist. That is why they pour milk on the cut-out at 4 a.m. They are not bathing the actor. They are bathing the door.