Gopi makes a living delivering gas cylinders to houses, while Mani manages a small shop selling peanuts. One thread binds them and millions of others together: Their undying love for South Indian matinee idol Rajinikanth.
Gopi sold his house — worth Rs300,000 (Dh16,489) — for Rs1,25,000 to clear debts incurred for organising a first day’s show of a Rajinikanth film, while Mani mortgaged his wife’s jewellery for Rs. 60,000.
Stories abound about Rajinikanth’s fan following and the extent to which a fan will go for him. For instance, one fan offered prayers for the successful release of a new Rajinikanth film by suspending himself from metallic hooks attached all over his body and another marked his devotion by piercing his tongue with a long metallic rod.
At the first screening of a Rajinikanth film a festive air descends on theatre halls decorated with cut-outs of the star, towering at heights of 15 metres, over which ablutions of milk are performed. To the beats of live music, fans throng halls with an unmatched frenzy for their onscreen date with thalaiva (leader). Their film-watching experience is soon transformed into a phenomenon.
Rinku Kalsy’s For the Love Of A Man, screening at Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), is about this phenomenon and the power of Rajinikanth’s personality.
“The intention of this documentary was to capture two important issues: First, the unique importance of popular culture in South India,” said Kalsy over email.
“Secondly, we wanted to understand the fan culture through socioeconomic perspective.”
For the Love Of A Man took five years to make. Kalsy began shooting the film with the release of Rajinikanth’s Enthiran (Robot in Hindi) in October 2010.
The catalyst for this idea came from her producer, Joyojeet Pal, a professor working at the University of Michigan.
Pal was in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu for a project with Microsoft Research to increase children’s access to computers. There he discovered that Rajinikanth’s role as a software engineer in Sivaji (Shankar’s 2007 Tamil film) had an unintended benefit. Many rural children in Tamil Nadu became keen on a career in computer science.
“It made us think about the strength of Rajinikanth’s influence throughout the state and the various ways in which he appealed to people across ages,” added Kalsy who watched her first Rajinikanth film, Geraftaar, in Hindi as a little girl.
Tamil film Padayappa (K.S. Ravikumar’s 1999 film) marked the beginning of her discovery of the legend.
While shooting her documentary in Chennai, Kalsy grappled with Tamil, a language she was unfamiliar with, while interacting with fans.
“As a filmmaker, one is also an ethnographer and someone who guides the narrative. So, in between an interview, it is much harder to work with an interpreter, especially when one needs to get at the meat of nuanced questions that come up mid-interview,” said Kalsy.
“While not being a local has its disadvantages, it also has the benefit of being able to look at the concept with a more neutral and critical lens.”
Once filming was done, she encountered the next hurdle. Funding for completing the film was raised through crowd sourcing.
“Frankly, it was the passion of the fans, a sort of fuel that kept us going.”
Holding dearly every fan in the story, Kalsy says she is most attached to Suganthi, wife of Mani.
“Suganthi is a strong female character whose story underlines the larger context of fandom and its impacts on families and people around the fans themselves.”
She also met impersonator Kamal Anand, who began his career mimicking Kamal Haasan, but later switched to playing Rajinikanth, Kalsy said: “His story is fundamentally cinematic and represents an entire class of professionals who make a living not by acting in mainstream media, but by relaying performances for smaller audiences. Kamal Anand is a great artist, but also someone who signifies the difficulty of breaking into the industry for people who do not have the right backing.”
She was surprised to find that a good number of Rajinikanth’s fans lived in slums.
“To the fans, money was something they discussed as coming and going, but the brotherhood of fandom was something they felt they gained out of these experiences.”
So did she meet the superstar?
“It remains a dream. I did meet his daughter Aishwarya Dhanush at [the] Mumbai film festival. We talked about the five-year journey and my own experience first-hand on how incredibly her father is loved.”
Kalsy manages her own production house, Anecdote Films, in Amsterdam, and has directed, edited and produced many television documentaries for Dutch TV.
Don’t miss it
For the Love of A Man will be screened at DIFF on December 14 at 6.30pm at Mall of Emirates and again on December 16 at 5.45pm at Mall of Emirates.
