Underdog to Top Dog

Fiery Kochi-based political activist Shiju CD, popularly known as Kuttan, grew up in the impoverished Kammattipadam area of the city. He lived in a house, which was more like a shack, owned by a traditional Ayurvedic healer named Kuttappan, who lived with his family next door—including his son Vinayakan—in a two-room spartan home. Both the families were underprivileged—Kuttan’s slightly poorer than his landlord’s—and dwelled in a region that had over time been truncated to the size of a triangle thanks to railway and other development projects. The land had once upon a time been larger and owned by the landlords of the Idathamaramana family.

This triangular strip of land along railways tracks and not far from the state transport bus stand that came up in the 1960s was so dirty in the monsoon season that it was impossible to walk back home without muddying not just one’s feet, but one’s whole body, narrates Kuttan.

Vinayakan, the controversy-ridden actor who has stolen the thunder with his role as a villain in the latest Rajinikanth movie, Jailer—with what the likes of the iconic Tamil superstar himself acknowledges, perhaps in a self-effacing fashion, as the key to the stunning box-office success of the movie—was born here in this hordeolum of a space in the eye of Kochi city in the early 1970s. Kuttan was born a couple of years before Vinayakan who has, overnight, become a sensation on social media across south India, other Tamil-speaking parts of the world, and among Rajinikanth fans all the way from Canada to Japan and China.

Vinayakan’s new fans often wonder on social media: What an actor! Where the hell was he before? They also chant in videos a  punchline of the Kerala-born actor Vinayakan in Jailer: “Manasilaayo?” (Have you understood)?

“I believe in the philosophy of the great Kerala reformer Mahatma Ayyankali,” says Vinayakan, actor

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Vinayakan has been around not only in Malayalam but also in Tamil and Telugu movies for long, as a villain or a sidekick of a villain. But it took the Kerala state-award-winning actor a Rajinikanth movie in which he plays a savage bilingual villain to get noticed widely and be lapped up as an actor to watch out for. Within days of the launch of the new movie, produced by Kalanithi Maran of Sun Pictures, on August 10, Vinayakan was close to the crowning moment of acting glory and his dreams. The buzz around him was deafening. Film critics and influencers came out with superlatives. Chennai-based YouTuber Rakesh, who runs the ‘Rakesh and Jeni 2.0’ channel reviewing movies, tells Open that he was sceptical when he heard that Vinayakan would play the main villain in the movie. This was because Vinayakan’s earlier roles in Tamil films were mostly marginal ones although he had done his best in each one of them, notes Rakesh.

He says, “After watching the movie, I must say that no other villain could have done justice to the movie as well as Vinayakan has done. He far exceeded expectations and his acting was phenomenal.” Rakesh feels that to judge Vinayakan merely from his performances in Thimiru (2006) and Maryan (2013) is quite impossible. “His performance this time made the film a consummate experience to watch,” adds the YouTuber, who is also a film critic.

Several other Tamil movie buffs share this view. One of them, a critic with a newspaper, says, “I wondered why (director) Nelson Dilipkumar in this film chose to go with Vinayakan. There was a talk that Mammootty would act in that negative role (as a gangster). I was mesmerised by the performance and, according to me, he was far ahead of many others in the star-dominated cast by light years.” A raft of plaudits followed. Amal Neerad, award-winning director and cinematographer, an alumnus of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata, said in an interview that Vinayakan has the skills that are “international” and that he possesses a positive attitude towards movies. His first major success came in the Malayalam movie Kammattipadam (2016) directed by veteran cinematographer Rajeev Ravi who tells Open that Vinayakan is a brilliant actor and that he didn’t have to instruct him much for his role as Ganga, who, along with his older brother Balan, has a violent past. “He merged into his role like milk and water since it was a story that he was too familiar with,” states Ravi.

If Rajinikanth is God, Vinayakan is the Devil of this movie, says an academic based in Chennai. Priya Nair, a professor of English who has never been enamoured of Vinayakan so far, says, “Vinayakan plays an earthy villain (in Jailer) with a touch of the dramatic.” She finds Vinayakan’s performance in Pada (2022) to be “mature”.

This time, it was as though he found liberation from the triangle that was his neighbourhood, a location in Kochi frowned upon by the well-off, the aspiring well-off and Kerala’s wannabe middle classes whose conceit, for all the state’s famed progressive ways, acquires intolerable proportions in granting the most disadvantaged their due in the moment of grand success. It is no wonder why Vinayakan often tells his friends that he loves working in Tamil and Telugu movies as opposed to the ones made in Kerala because he thinks he gets more respect outside of the state. He also regrets the perception created by page-three columnists and certain online journalists in the state. His friends tell Open that he feels avaganana (denigration) while dealing with several Malayali producers, directors and actors. And that is not without a reason. Until Rajeev Ravi happened, there had been repeated attempts by a section of senior Malayali actors to side-line him although some good men among them gave Vinayakan his first break in 1995.

It was director Lal Jose who spotted him at a dance performance and persuaded fellow director Thampi Kannanthanam to offer him a role—as a member of a dance group imitating Michael Jackson. But Vinayakan continued to choose insignificant roles in Tamil and Telugu movies because out there he felt happier and more at home. Sample this: Vinayakam doesn’t have a membership in the Kerala movie association called AMMA, but he is a member of the prestigious Nadigar Sangam (officially known as the South Indian Artistes’ Association) founded by the luminaries of the south Indian film industry of yore. Recently, a senior functionary of AMMA loudly proclaimed that the outspoken Vinayakan won’t be part of AMMA until he is its top official.

But the tsunami of accolades from across the world of Rajinikanth fans seems to have changed the rules of engagement. It is not that Vinayakan’s brash character off-screen has to be whitewashed and exonerated for his excesses, especially unwarranted and whimsical verbal assaults, and that only his acting prowess must be celebrated. But calls are getting louder after his Jailer glory that he be given a fair trial by a section of the media that shaped the perception about him.

Kuttan, who is referred to by most of his associates as Kuttan chettan (meaning older brother), is someone Vinayakan looks up to for advice. He is the one the actor he listens to, although he quarrels with him over issues. Kuttan tells Open in a long telephone conversation from Kochi that it is important to know where the likes of him and Vinayakan come from. Public activities and political work have tempered Kuttan, but Vinayakan nurses a deep resentment against people for their efforts to link him to the place he comes from: Kammattipadam, the place close to the railway tracks and the bus stand in Kochi where, whoever spent time there in the 1970s and the 1980s aver, anti-socials walked in with no sense of foreboding to harass the women of the neighbourhood.

Kuttan says that as a teenager he never slept well for fear of intruders and the noise of men who brought in sex workers. “You learn very early on that you cannot reason with these intruders softly. You have to use expletives and talk loudly and the next thing to do here is to use force. That is the natural thing to do. Nothing else works,” Kuttan tells me.

Vinayakan also talked about similar circumstances in an interview to Asianet News in 2017, shortly after winning the State Award for the Best Actor for Kammattipadam, a film that brought him fame and money. He said that when you wake up in the morning and open your eyes to find a person defecating right in front of your eyes, Sanskrit is not the language you use there. Vinayakan goes on to explain why words meant for usage in a temple are vastly different from a dark and dingy place. He also notes, from his experience of gentrification in Kochi, that first a flyover gets built over a place poor people live, and the place suddenly becomes dark, literally, even during the day. And it is then that the area is treated as a place for the ‘other’, those on the fringes of society.

As Kuttan narrates, the culture that you grow up with stays with you for long even when you try to camouflage it with sophistication, especially when you grow up with prejudices stacked against you. Kuttan however regrets that Vinayakan occasionally vents his frustrations on video late at night, or on phone chats. Recently, he incurred the anger of a large section of people for stating that the prolonged public mourning over the death of the late chief minister Oommen Chandy was nauseatingly boring. Naturally, he was accused of being grossly insensitive and for making preposterous comments. Earlier in 2019, he came under sharp attack for misbehaving with a girl who called him to invite him for a function. Last year, while promoting his Malayalam release Oruthee, he landed in trouble again for saying in a press conference that if asking women for sex is a #MeToo case, he would continue to be at it because that was the only way he gets to sleep with a woman.

While his off-screen antics cannot be condoned, it is worth noting that every time he makes controversial remarks, this prodigal son of the Malayalam film industry is routinely trolled and attacked for his Dalit identity. It is somehow remarkable that Vinayakan hasn’t let such slurs affect him and still forges ahead ambitiously to make a name for himself in the movies, say friends close to him.

In fact, he has often stated that the rhythm of his steps—he is primarily a dancer and a dance instructor—is thanks to his being a pulaya. He was part of the Black Mercury band as a fire dancer, making him one of the first fire dancers in Kerala. His favourites are Bob Marley and Michael Jackson (whom he calls Michael Ettan, or older brother Michael). Vinayakan is crestfallen that the whole concept of Tandav (Shiva’s dance of fury) was allowed to be diluted and rejected by people of India who refuse to dance and let their hair down because of fear of public judgement. He encourages people to dance with their partners to stay healthy and let inhibitions disappear.

The parallel he invokes with the lives of Black people all over the world is inescapable. The rhythm of the body that Vinayakan talks about because he is a pulaya is deep and profound and finds echo in the works of Black scholars of the last century and the growth of Black American music, which is now mainstream. The great Black poet Amiri Baraka had linked the rhythm and blues movement that refined American music to the fusion of African and slave music. In their work, Writing and America, Gavin Cologne-Brookes, ‎Neil Sammells, ‎David Timms argue, “The cultural links with Africa were maintained more strongly than anywhere else in the South by slaves in New Orleans, and the fusion of cultures that is at the essence of America was perfected in the crescent city. Perhaps more importantly, it was here that African music was retained, acculturated and developed to a degree where uniquely American forms such as blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll could be created.” Amidst the bleakness and uncertainty of their lives in White men’s farms of America, Black slaves created music forms based on the rhythm of their strong feet and powerful voices. The same could hold true of the former slaves of India’s south, the dispossessed and the marginalised.

Kuttan, for instance, remembers Vinayakan as a child with a spring in his feet, walking as though he was floating on ice. “He was the youngest of the four brothers and unlike the rest he went to school and made friends with those from the rich families. His brothers worried about it,” says Kuttan, adding that after Vinayakan dropped out of school, he still maintained ties with the rich folk of Kochi, spending a lot of time at the Maharaja’s College, which at that time was populated by a number of students who would later go on to become big names in Malayalam cinema, including Ashiq Abu and others. “Vinayakan was welcome there because he would entertain them with his dance moves and whenever there were youth festivals or special functions, he would teach boys and girls how to dance,” he adds. He won friends across the city who made it big later in the movies.

Kuttan wants the world to know that many of the misconceptions about Vinayakan have nothing to do with reality. “Because he is from a deprived background, he was projected in the media as a former gangster, then as a drug pusher and so on. None of that is true,” says this close friend and mentor of sorts. Vinayakan is not a saint, but he has been demonised by the media and certain people for too long and that is unfair, he says.

Despite such a warning from a man who knew him since childhood, the perception about Vinayakan being difficult and unpredictable is not going to go away any time soon. But his performance, perhaps the best in recent times opposite Rajinikanth by any actor as a villain, is sure to give him an edge in his career. Of the most successful villains that come to mind from Rajinikanth movies are Ramya Krishnan in Padayappa (1999); Raghuvaran in Baashha (1995); Nana Patekar in Kaala (2018); Sathyaraj in Mr Bharath; and Amrish Puri in Thalapathi (1991). Rajinikanth himself has played the villain in a double role in Enthiran (2010). Now, Vinayakan has entered that hallowed league of star performers, much to the disadvantage of all those who have underrated him.

Vinayakan is ambitious as well as disciplined when it comes to maintaining his fitness, albeit with certain apparent excesses. He also wants to live life king-size and has no inhibitions whatsoever about it. He now lives in a tony neighbourhood occupied by the crème de la crème of Kochi elite. He has famously said that he is an admirer of the great Dalit reformer Ayyankali, who rode a bullock cart in the late 19th century when it was sin for the untouchables to do so. He had said in an interview, “I am a man who thinks in the Ayyankali style. My thought is to travel in a Ferrari if possible.” He has said that being a Dalit will never stop him from acquiring the most expensive of things and the best of honours. “If possible, I might wear a gold crown,” he said.

If his contemporaries and detractors have difficulty in accepting him as someone with a fire in his belly, the catch line in Jailer may be of some use: Manasilaayo saare (have you understood, sir)?

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Ullekh NP

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