NOW SCREENING: PUTTING NAME BEFORE THE TITLE

Some southern stars are requesting fans to drop their titles. These epithets have a complex play not just in films and politics, but in the Dravidian ideological ecosystem too

- SUGATA SRINIVASARAJU

TAMIL actor Ajith Kumar has been in the news. In a video circulated on January 7, his race car was seen hitting the barrier of a racetrack and spinning out of control. He was then seen getting out of the car and walking, rather unaffectedly, towards an ambulance. The whole thing could have been a scene from one of his movies, but it was real. This happened when he was practicing for an upcoming race in Dubai. The 53-year-old actor owns a racing team and had been serious about the sport for decades.

An emotional response for an incident of this nature, nearly life-threatening, from Ajith's fan base would perhaps have received massive amplification had the actor's fan clubs coordinated or manufactured a reaction. But as early as 2011, the actor had asked for all his fan organisations to be dismantled. He just wanted to be a professional, wanting the imaginary frames of his films to be just that. He did not want to exploit or extrapolate his creative enterprise into the hyperbole of real-life stardom.

In 2021, again, Ajith expressed his desire for a mundane existence when he asked people to cut out the title bestowed on him as 'Thala' (literally 'the head', meaning 'the chief'). Whatever his prompts or provocations may have been, to willingly denounce a title, especially in the world of Tamil cinema, was no ordinary act. In what constitutes the Tamil cinema milieu, it is an established tradition to weld a grand title to the given name of a big actor, as if to celebrate immortal distortion.