IF religion is the opium of the masses, cinema can’t be far behind. Both are addictive, have mass appeal and therefore offer tremendous political utility.
India offers a diverse fare of movie stars who rise to shine brighter as politicians. Like the technology that spurred it, the mesmeric ingredients of cinema including its philosophy as a social phenomenon were honed abroad.Its influence stretched from democratic United States, to a fascist Germany and equally significantly to communist Soviet Union. Much of the McCarthy era witch-hunting in the United States involved left-leaning figures of Hollywood. Howard Fast, secretary of the US communist party, wrote the screenplay of Spartacus, a classic film about a failed slave revolt in imperial Rome.
More recently, Jimmy Carter’s campaign managers described Ronald Reagan as a C-grade movie star. The wily Republicans wasted no time to get even with the snide Democrats. A bad movie actor was any day better than a cartoon, they replied. The movie actor won the 1980 election, and became an iconic rightwing president of the United States.
Hitler loved movies and the Nazis used cinema as a means of social control. Lenin had said: “For us, cinema is the most important of all the arts.” And Stalin agreed. From the early 1930s, he had supervised every aspect of the huge Soviet film industry, promoting not only socialist realism but also cheerful jazz comedies.
It is against this background that Chiranjivi, an idolised star from India’s popular Telugu cinema, announced his arrival on the political firmament a fortnight ago. Traditionally, South India has produced more messianic leaders from the film industry than any other region. North Indian legends like Nargis, Lata Mangeshkar and Dilip Kumar have represented the so-called Hindi film industry in the Rajya Sabha. Their other colleagues from Mumbai like Amitabh Bachchan, the late Sunil Dutt, Dharmendra, Hema Malini and Jaya Prada, among others, actually fought and won elections to the Lok Sabha.
Former screen goddess Vyjayanthimala belonged to southern Tamil Nadu but became one of the greatest stars in the north. She had one or possibly two terms in the Rajya Sabha. Shabana Azmi, a founding actress of India’s alternative cinema, also had an innings as a nominated member of the Upper House. Marxist director Mrinal Sen represented Bengal’s film industry in the Rajya Sabha. However, none of the popular men and women above could hope to start a political movement on their own, as their southern counterparts so often did.
MGR and NTR, known just by their initials, are still household names in southern India years after their death. Together with scriptwriter Karunanidhi and popular heroine Jayalalitha, the former colleagues from Tamil cinema and today’s archrivals as current and former chief ministers of Tamil Nadu, MGR and NTR mesmerised their star-crazed followers.
MGR became famous as an on-screen saviour of damsels in distress as well as the underdog. With his first lead role in 1947, he made his a formidable presence in Tamil cinema with a series of box-office hits right until the seventies when he became the first movie star to be elected chief minister of an Indian state.
The secret of his success, it is believed, lay in his simultaneous efforts to play the good Samaritan in real life too and his role in the regionalist movement that put the anti-Brahmin Dravidian party in power in Tamil Nadu in 1967. Picture this. In the 1984 assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, as the state’s chief minister, MGR was battling for survival at a hospital in Brooklyn in the US, a recorded image of MGR waving out to his fans from the hospital bed was enough to send his fans into frenzy. He won the elections, got reelected and ensured it was the first time a chief minister was elected to office without participating in a campaign.
C.N. Annadurai, popular as Anna, was a scriptwriter when he became chief minister of Tamil Nadu in 1967. Two years later, quite suddenly, he passed away. Anna’s funeral in Chennai saw nearly two million admirers accompanying his last journey from across Tamil Nadu. This was unparalleled and the Guinness Book was quick to make a note of it.
NTR was worshipped in movie-crazy Andhra Pradesh. He had played Lord Krishna in a number of films and his fans would often perform aartis in theatres when he appeared as Krishna or any other Hindu god for that matter. He used this adulation to good effect and in real life too he would dress up as one of the gods and travel in a make-believe chariot to delight his fans. This worked well during the elections and the crowds welcomed their screen god.
I have not seen Chiranjivi’s films. But from all accounts he is a popular Telugu film actor making waves as India’s new star on the political firmament. “It’s a war,” he declared in the southern temple town of Thirupati, at the inauguration of his party last month. “I am a soldier and so are you. There is no general.” The meeting was interspersed with film clips showing him as a farmer dragging a plough and as a soldier. “I know ganji (rice gruel eaten by poor) and I know Benzi (Mercedes Benz),” he declaimed.
Dislodging a movie star from politics is not easy. It takes a more popular star to do the job. Jayalalitha’s attempt to come back to power in 1996 was marred by the entry of Rajinikanth, the reigning superstar of Tamil cinema who had also been making crucial political statements in films like Muthu and Arunachalam.
The decisive moment came in ’96 when a breakaway Congress faction called Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) joined hands with the DMK in an attempt to overthrow Jayalalitha’s government. In a speech telecast on Sun TV, owned by her rival, Karunanidhi’s family, Rajinikanth exhorted the voter to support the TMC-DMK alliance and not to vote for her AIADMK. It was the first time that two stars of stature were up against each other and the result was the annihilation of the AIADMK. It failed to win even one seat in parliament and Jayalalitha herself was defeated.
With religion and cinema doing the job for it, and with both coming together to form an even more potent brew, India doesn’t need to exert to create a utopia here and now. Like Hasan bin Sabah of Alamut, who seduced young men with an intoxicating elixir to carry out political subversion, the Indian system has mastered the art of using hallucination to run a widely applauded democracy. Chiranjivi’s arrival will shore up the much-tested system. As the guru once asked his disciple: What is more important — pain or the thought of the pain? Thought, of course, replied the wise disciple. Just take out the thought then and you should be fine, exclaimed the sage conclusively.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
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