50 Years Of Rajinikanth: How The Superstar Still Bends Time And Stardom Today
50 years in, Rajinikanth still bends stardom to his will — and never the other way around.
A star inhabits stardom, but a superstar defines it. Rajinikanth, or “Superstar” Rajinikanth, or Thalaivar (leader), aged 74, has paved the path for a very specific kind of fame at the turn of the millennium — one that seeped into the cultural lingo across the country, blurring the distinction between prayer and parody, what we today call pan-Indian stardom.
The year 2025 would mark his 50th year as an actor, one who found himself in the curious position of star, and later, superstar.
This superstardom reveals itself in various ways. In 2014, for example, when Rajinikanth joined Twitter (now X), he amassed 2.1 lakh followers overnight, the fastest among all Indian celebrities, slotting him among the top 10 celebrities worldwide. In 2023, the Tamil-language film Jailer, pumping over ₹600 crores into the industry, established him as the sole Indian actor at the time with two films that breached the ₹500-crore ceiling. With every new film of his being announced, his pay package, too, attracts speculation — allegedly, he stands to earn ₹270 crore from Lokesh Kanagaraj’s upcoming Coolie (2025), produced by Sun Pictures, if it turns up a profit — always ranking him among the highest-paid stars of India, sometimes even Asia. Before any film’s release, his fans pour milk over billboards of his film and cardboard cutouts of him. Some even pour between 11,000-16,000 gallons of milk a day, creating a local shortage of milk, causing the milk dealers’ association to demand that Rajinikanth “sternly admonish” his loyal fans for wastage.
How does one exude such stardom? And once exuded, how does one secure it?
Perhaps, it is the fact that Rajinikanth has been producing his scarcity. While in his first decade as an actor, between 1975-1985, Rajinikanth did over a hundred films, 1994 onwards, he averaged less than one film per year. He does not advertise products — you will not see him on billboards selling soap. This past decade, he has given interviews so sparingly that when he does, publications caption it as “the rare interview”. He barely promotes his films anymore. His presence on screen is enough. Even his fandoms had to toe the line laid out in the sand by him. In 1995-96, he stopped certifying his fan clubs. Since then, the official count of his fan clubs has stagnated at around 50,000, with many unofficial ones mushrooming.
Later, in 2002, before the release of his film Baba, Rajinikanth became the first Indian star to assert his personality rights, issuing a legal notice that prohibits the imitation of his screen persona for commercial gain. The Mimicry Artists Association responded with a “statement of hurt”, wondering if dialogues, gestures and mannerisms of stars in fan circles, too, were subject to prior authorisation. More than a decade later, when a film titled Main Hoon Rajinikanth (2015) was making the rounds, he took them to court to have the name changed and delete usage of his name or persona or imagery.
In the early decades of his frenzied fame, Rajinikanth would spend his birthdays in Chennai, for which many fans would be carted from all over, merely to be in his proximity. When, in a traffic accident on their way to one of his celebrations, a few fans died, he stopped showing face, retreating to the mountains around his birthday as an annual pilgrimage.
There is only so much of him he was letting rip into the world.
Most interestingly, he is completely unfazed by the gulf between his off-screen and on-screen personas, appearing in public without make-up, no wig, no designer clothes, no desperation to disabuse the audience — his audience, staunch devotees — of the illusion that his heroism on-screen is limited to the edge of the frame. For context, MGR, the Tamil actor whose mantle of stardom Rajinikanth took over, who was also a Chief Minister, would never be photographed without his fur cap for fear of showing his bald pate. Rajinikanth, however, does not seek the seepage between actor and character that drives so much of contemporary stardom, unwilling to remake himself in his image.
Some might delight in his skin of joyful masculinity on screen. Many are respectful of the austerity off screen. Some make the chasm between the two, the site of their affection.
Born Shivaji Rao Gaekwad on 12 December 1950, Rajinikanth worked the blue-collar life, as an office boy, a coolie, a carpenter, and later a bus conductor in Bengaluru. He would issue tickets so quickly, returning change with his trademark style, that passengers waiting at the bus stop would let empty buses go by, to wait for the one where Rajinikanth was on duty. On the side, he did some theatre; he would mimic the actor Shivaji Ganesan. Later, with a smattering of Tamil vocabulary and the blessings of his brother, he enrolled in the Madras Film Institute, from where the director K Balachander picked him up and rechristened him Rajinikanth, the colour of night, a reference to his skin colour.
He had an extended cameo in Balachander’s Apoorva Raagangal (1975), and his initial roles were tainted in villainy, until Rajinikanth found himself to be a hero who could perform action, comedy, and romance. He tried to buck trends, slipping often. For his hundredth film, for example, he decided to make a devotional drama Sri Raghavendrar (1985), where he plays the titular Hindu saint. The film tanked. He even made an appearance in a 1998 low-budget Hollywood film, for which he was given a tutor from the American consulate — English does not come easily to him. He kept trying to push out of his stardom, the more it tried to lock him into a rotating permutation of gestures, swagger, and angst.
On screen, he began to directly address his audience. Suresh Krissna, director of Baashha (1995) — which breaks for interval with Rajinikanth repeating his signature dialogue, breaking the fourth wall — gives credit to the choreographer Prabhu Deva, for making Rajinikanth assert the porosity of the screen, by winking at the camera or looking straight at it while holding hands in supplication, in gratitude to the audience in the songs of Annamalai (1992).
From one perspective, it might seem strange that fame took to him so quickly. He would be smoking and drinking on screen, and when the smoking warnings were institutionalised in the mid-2000s, in Sivaji: The Boss (2007), he replaced his cigarette antics with those of chewing gum. His isn’t a conventionally attractive face; his features bunched together in the centre of his face, his hairline pulled back, his lips always cracked. He often pokes fun at himself in movies. There is no precedent for his kind of superstardom.
And yet, he became the superstar he did, bucking the demands we thought we made on them — easy beauty, quick virtue, hard muscle.
After a disappointing slate of films in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rajinikanth fashioned a new kind of stardom that solely rested on the outsized screen presence. In Shankar’s Enthiran (2010) — where Rajinikanth plays both a virtuous, bumbling scientist and the robot that he creates which becomes evil — the entire climax is about the robot proliferating itself in the hundreds of thousands, where the spectacle of technology becomes a replacement for the joys of hand-to-hand combat, with scientist Rajinikanth behind a screen trying to deactivate the robot. Many fans were disappointed with the lack of “proper” violence, the proliferation of Thalaiva when one of him should be enough. Even as Rajinikanth has templatised himself, every now and then, he pokes at his edges, working with directors with a fresher vision of a new cinema like Karthik Subbaraj (Petta), Nelson (Jailer), and Lokesh Kanagaraj (Coolie) and a bolder vision of a new world like Pa Ranjith (Kabali, Kaala).
Balachander, who gave him his break, and later directed him in nine films, was initially not able to make sense of his dialogue delivery, the rhythm of his speech, “It went against the grammar as I saw it. He broke my rules and made some new ones. And I happened to get the credit.” Balachander gave him short dialogues that he could singe with his style, with close-ups that pucker the attention, the allegiance, and the amusement of an audience that kept returning to see him be someone more and more and more.
The Best of Every Decade (1975-2025)
Apoorva Raagangal (1975): He had an extended cameo in Balachander’s Apoorva Raagangal (1975), as an ex-lover who shows up to apologise to the woman he left pregnant, because he is dying from cancer. His presence of a once-brutish, now-kind person twists the film’s stakes.
Thalapathi (1991): Mani Ratnam’s Thalapathi might be one of the few auteur-driven Rajinikanth films, where he plays a Karna-like figure. In this modern-day gangster saga, it is his silhouette against the moving river struck by dawn that will assume iconic proportions.
Baashha (1995): Rajinikanth’s Manikkam, a humble auto‑rickshaw driver aiding his community and siblings, hides a dark past as a feared Bombay gangster. When it resurfaces, his quiet life unravels, establishing the iconic “Baashha Formula” that redefined Rajinikanth’s cinematic persona.
Sivaji: The Boss (2007): At ₹80 crores, this big‑budget spectacle redefined Rajinikanth’s screen persona — swapping cigarettes for chewing gum, dying only to return as MGR. It marked late‑2010s Rajinikanth’s grand resurgence, where massive budgets promised audiences an experience unlike anything before.
Jailer (2023): Nelson’s Jailer is a study of what a director can sculpt of ageing stardom. Rajinikanth’s age is constantly referred to — he plays a grandfather — but his heroism is the kind that can bring an army together, as opposed to being the army himself.
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